Into the Beautiful North (18 page)

Norte

Chapter Eighteen

M
orning.

Tijuana street toughs with nothing better to do entertained themselves by jeering at deportees as they came back to Mexico, tired and dirty and downtrodden. Old hands among the returnees knew the border game and faded away and vanished among the tough guys and headed back to the fences. But the fresh meat, the crying ones, the hunched and scuttling guilty-looking ones, they were the source of sport and derision.

The barracudas could smell helplessness on them, and the bad guys laughed and flicked cigarettes and called insults and offered to relieve the women of any sexual tension they might be feeling. It was better than TV, better than drinking in the cantina, to watch the weeping and broken stumble and look about themselves, lost. Anything could happen. Who would know? Do-gooders? Missionaries? The Red Cross? Everyone was tired of these wanderers—everyone who mattered, anyway.

These men said dreadful things, and boys joined in because that is what boys do. Some of the women had lost track of their children and come back sobbing and frantic, and if they hoped for help or compassion back in border zone Tijuana, they were mistaken. The street toughs merely pointed and laughed.

Beyond the few nasty bastards at the fences, there were worse men waiting—coyotes selling the immediate return. Bottom-feeders. How much could a deportee pay? Chances were, not much. But they found ways. After all, they had nowhere to go—this homecoming reminded them that they had no home. Nobody but Nayeli’s gang was on a quest to protect and repopulate their villages. They were there for food, to send money home. These invaders, so infamous on American talk radio, were hopeless and frantic with starving compulsion. So they would make whatever desperate deals their guides suggested, or they would borrow money or dig hidden rolls of cash from their own orifices and gamble their last stores to try again. And the agents of despair were there for them, offering an immediate return. They didn’t care where the money or the promises or the barter of the bodies came from. It could all be washed off. All they offered was the simple promise: I can take you back, back to Libertad—or beyond, east into the mountain or desert wasteland, where the legendary fence merely stopped. There was nothing out there but a few traffic barriers and fires and rattlesnakes and cowboys. And among these hustlers, there milled taxi drivers heading nowhere. On some days, a pimp might try to recruit a young woman or a boy with promises of quick money, short service, and protection, mostly lies.

The good people of Tijuana went about their business, looking away from the returnees, hurrying on into their days. Most citizens of Tijuana had never seen a pimp and wouldn’t give him the time of day if they did. Outside the borderlands, Mexicans seemed to believe that every young man in Tijuana was a hustler or a coyote, but most of the citizens of Tijuana had never seen a coyote and wouldn’t know one if they saw him. They didn’t think about the border—they had no time for it. The border was an abstraction to them at best. Many citizens of Tijuana crossed it every day to shop for a better cut of meat in San Ysidro, or to buy polyester underwear and stretch pants in the secondhand shops and factory outlet stores. Hundred of women walked through the Immigration turn-stiles and boarded the red trolleys that fed them into the hills and valleys of San Diego, where they vacuumed and dusted and wiped out toilets and cooked grilled-cheese sandwiches in the homes of other women who could afford to hire people to do their household chores for them.

And many hundreds of others never went to San Diego at all, never even really looked across the river. They did not have time for returnees. They didn’t like all these newcomers who crowded their streets and brought dirt and panic into Tijuana. They suspected all crimes were inspired by these people. All drugs came with them. Old people remembered a day when you could leave your doors unlocked in Tijuana. When you knew all of your neighbors, and everyone kept an eye out for one another. Not now, not with these tides of aliens pouring in from everywhere. So Nayeli and Yolo and Vampi came into the hard sun, crying and wiping their noses, dirtier than they had ever been, afraid and lonesome and homesick, and nobody cared at all.

They walked in a huddle, hugging one another, holding hands.

“¿Taxi?” a chubby man called. “¿Centro?”

They shook their heads.

“Mamacita,” a laughing smoking boy cooed. “Come here.”

They walked on—Indian women in clothes like Doña Araceli’s sold trinkets and chewing gum and held out dark brown palms, making small mewling begging sounds. Big, hearty Americanos in madras shorts and straw hats and baseball caps and bowling shirts jostled them and marched on, laughing like they always laughed, owning the earth and secure in their mastery. Nayeli wanted what they had, but she did not know what that was. Loudness. No cares at all. Nothing slowed the Americans, nothing made them silent. Americans did not cower. When cholos insulted them, they walked through the clouds of anger and hatred as if deaf, as if they didn’t have time to hear such foolishness, and if they did hear it, they raised a middle finger or laughed or said something tart and marched, marched, marched into the laughing world. There were so many Americans in Tijuana that she didn’t understand what the border was supposed to be. People in the holding pens had told her that it was the same in el otro lado, that there were so many Mexicans milling around San Ysidro and Chula Vista that it looked like Mazatlán. There were more Mexicans in Los Angeles than there were in Culiacán. She spun in a circle and saw nothing but barbed wire and guards. The whole border was the same dirt scrub dust stinking desert blankness. With helicopters.

“¿Taxi?”

“No, gracias.”

The girls were despondent. Nayeli did not know what to do now. How would she keep her troops going? Had they lost Tacho forever? She could not imagine how she would find him again. How could they go ahead without him?

She looked up.

Standing at the end of the cracked and upthrust sidewalk, leaning on the staff, one foot planted against the opposite knee, red bandanna now gone, and shaved head gleaming in the sun, was the Warrior.

“I am Atómiko,” he called.

He leads them through the hot streets, his pole over his right shoulder. Nobody looks at him. They have seen men with poles before. They have seen stranger things than him. And the girls follow in a cluster. Nobody looks at them, either. They have seen men with poles leading groups of women. They have seen everything.

He stops at a food stand carved out of the side of a white-and-blue building with cursive writing in red slanting over the opening that promises
SEAFOOD! SHRIMP! OYSTERS! FRESH WATERS!
By
waters
, of course, they mean fruit juices and rice water and hibiscus tea. Atómiko knows the girls are dehydrated. He plants his staff and points at the counter and says, “Buy juice.”

Nayeli is so relieved to see any friendly face, even his jackal’s countenance, she meekly goes to the counter and digs out money and buys them tall glasses of iced fruit juice. She can’t believe how delicious it is. They gulp like people lost in the desert. Atómiko sips at a glass of agua de Jamaica, red as blood and tart. He thinks he would rather be drinking Mexican beer, the best beer in the world. Yolo guzzles tamarind juice, Vampi drinks horchata sweet rice water, and Nayeli is chewing chunks of strawberries floating in her glass.

Atómiko points down the street with his staff, and they follow. He leads them to a small motor court. A motel, white with blue trim. Three cars are parked in its sloping blacktop lot. A Mixtec woman sweeps the sidewalk in front of the rooms. A sputtering neon sign sizzles orange against the morning light. The cardboard sign taped in the window lists a reasonable price for rooms. Atómiko points, scratches his chest, and grunts.

“Sí,” Nayeli says.

“Two rooms,” says the Warrior.

She complies. She doesn’t care. She can end up with no money at all. She just wants to bathe. To sleep.

The girls share room 101. They cry out, they weep, they fall on the beds, they fight for the shower and the toilet. They turn on the air-conditioning. Atómiko has the key to 102.

“I am next door,” he says.

He belches.

He says, “Wash your panties.”

He slams the door.

In a minute, they hear the television in his room turned up very loud, and strange thwacking sounds and thumps. Shouts. They listen. Finally, Nayeli smiles.

She says: “He is practicing.”

They slept till five o’clock, the girls scattered across the two beds like dolls, insensate and snoring in their exhaustion. Their panties and blouses dried in the bathroom, hung over the shower rod. All their socks drooped from the edges of the sink and the top of the toilet tank. Vampi’s nose whistled in three distinct notes as she breathed, descending in pitch as each exhalation waned.

Nayeli was the first to awaken. She lay there for a while, listening to Vampi snuffle. She still had the tiny purse that Tacho had given her. She picked it up off the floor and dug out her KANKAKEE postcard. She read her father’s message again. “Everything Passes.” A better day would come.

She slipped it back into the purse and pulled out her Missionary Matt card. She looked at his phone number on the back. She sat up and saw Yolo, propped against her headboard. She was holding her own Missionary Matt card. They stared at each other.

“He used to call you Yo-Yo,” Nayeli noted.

“Call him,” Yolo said.

“Yes.”

“What do you think he is like now?”

“He is rich.”

“I think he’s a movie actor.”

“He is a famous surfer and rock star.”

“I hope he’s not married.”

“Me, too.”

Nayeli got up to put on her clothes so she could go find a phone. Her shirt and her underwear were damp, but she pulled them on anyway and quietly opened the door. That irritating Atómiko stood there talking to Wino. Wino was smoking, and he looked up at her and ducked his head. “¿Qué hubo?” he muttered.

Nayeli stepped outside.

“How did you get him to come?” she asked Atómiko.

“I have powers,” he said.

“Yes,” she replied. “We noticed the other night that you could fly.”

“Oh?” said Wino. “¿La mera neta? This vato can fly?”

There was a pay phone on the wall outside the motel office. Somebody had written “Octavio Slept With My Wife” on the metal. Nayeli punched O and got another polite Tijuana operator and placed her collect call to Tres Camarones.

It rang twice, and Aunt Irma grabbed it off the hook.

“What the hell do you want?” she barked.

“Collect call for Doña Irma García Cervantes from Nayeli.”

“Yes, yes, of course. Hurry up—I don’t have all day.”

The phone clicked and clacked a few times, and Nayeli could barely speak, her throat was so tight.

“¿Tía?” she said.

Aunt Irma was yelling at the turkey: “General! Leave that chicken alone, you mindless idiot!”

“¿Tía?” Nayeli repeated.

“My girl!” Irma cried. “How goes the epic journey?”

Nayeli started to cry.