Into the Beautiful North (19 page)

“Ay, Tía,” she said. “It has taken us forever.”

“It’s only been a week!” Irma said.

“A week?”

“Six days, actually. Are you in San Diego yet? Have you seen Chava?”

“Chava?” Nayeli said.

“Chava Chavarín,” Aunt Irma snapped. “Don’t tell me you forgot to call Chava Chavarín! He was the finest bowler I ever saw.”

Nayeli sniffled. How could it have been only a week? Surely they had been on the road for weeks. Nayeli tried to remember anything Aunt Irma might have said in the past about Chavarín.

“Where do I begin?” Nayeli said.

“Tell me everything.”

“Everything? Well…”

It all poured out. The whole long story of the bus and the dump and the crossing and the migra. Irma interrupted often.

“Chavarín?”

“No Chavarín.”

“He didn’t help you? That bastard! Or”—a tone of dread and disbelief seeped into La Osa’s hectoring voice—“is he, uh, dead?”

“No, Tía. I don’t think so.”

A tiny gasp of relief.

“Is it possible—did he—did he not… remember me?”

“No, Tía. Nothing like that. There was no Chavarín. He is not here.”

“That is absolutely incorrect,” Irma insisted.

“I’m sorry.”

“He cannot be gone. He married a damned—a gringa. They live in Colonia Independencia.”

“No.”

Silence.

“He went across,” Irma decided. “Call him when you get across.”

“Is this why we’re here?” Nayeli asked. “To find Chavarín?”

“Don’t be silly. Goddamnit.”

Then:

“You were saying you are involved with a criminal named Atomic?”

Nayeli thought:
A change of gears
.

And:

“Did you also say Tacho is a terrorist?”

There was far too much to explain, so Nayeli forged ahead:

“We are going back across,” she said. “I don’t know how, but we will try again. People here go back over and over, and so will we. I have Mateo’s phone number.”

“Mateo who?”

“The missionary.”

“Jesus Christ, you’re calling the Christian.”

“Yes. What else can I do?”

“That simp.”

“Yes, Tía.”

Irma sighed.

“All right. Fine. Good. Keep the project rolling.”

“We will go to him for help.”

“You are there to collect Mexicans,” Irma reminded her. “Don’t fall in love with that missionary!”

“I won’t.”

“And don’t screw him, either. If you give him the milk for free, why would he buy the cow?”

“¡Tía!”

“Don’t bring me any damned American surfers. And don’t bring me any American babies. Bring me Mexicans.”

“That’s what I wanted to tell you,” Nayeli said. “I… I think I want to go get my father.”

Uncharacteristic silence from La Osa.

“To Kankakee,” Nayeli continued. “I want my father to come home.”

Irma sighed.

“Well,” she said. She knew there were one hundred things to tell her black-eyed girl, but to what avail? Nayeli was listening to her own heart. She was going to do what she was going to do.

“Very well,” La Osa finally said. “Good luck. Bring that good-for-nothing father back if you have to. I will kick his ass when he comes home.”

Wino said, “The gay boy—they thought he was a terrorist?” He whistled. “They’ll send him to Guantánamo.” He and Atómiko shook their heads. “That’s rough.”

“At least he gets to see Cuba,” Atómiko said.

“No, thanks.”

They looked like two ancient crows to Nayeli, all ruffled and hunch shouldered, looking at the ground and smoking. The door opened behind them, and the girls came out, rubbing their eyes and trying to wrestle their hair into shape with their fingers.

Atómiko looked at Yolo and growled in the back of his throat.

“What are you looking at?” she said.

“I’m looking at you.”

“I thought you loved Nayeli.”

“She will not have me.”

Yolo shrugged him off and turned away as Nayeli reported on her telephone call. All three girls agreed that Mateo’s house was a fine destination. Mostly because it was the only place they could imagine finding safe haven in Los Yunaites. But they did not want to cross the border again. No way.

The two men stood listening, and Atómiko nudged Wino, who cleared his throat to get their attention.

“Listen,” he said. “I feel bad you got caught. My socio here has been making me feel bad. So I’m going to do you a favor. It’s my first favor ever. So you’d better appreciate it.”

“He is Wino!” Atómiko announced, showing that he had diversified his usual train of thought.

“I’m going to take you to the hole.”

“The hole?” Nayeli said.

“The hole, esa. That’s what I said.” Wino nodded. “The hole. I had to call in some favors, you understand. This is big-money stuff, going to the hole. Homeboy says you’ll pay me one day, when you get money.”

“The hole?”

“Trust me,” Wino said, which made all three girls doubt him. “You’ll see,” he insisted. “It’s guaranteed.”

Atómiko held out his staff and tapped Nayeli with it.

“Guaranteed,” he repeated.

“Just remember one thing,” Wino said. “You will forget you ever saw the hole. ¿Comprenden? Once you go through it, you were never there.” He sucked down the last of his cig. He studied the cherry at the tip. “Most people? They stumble into the hole? They don’t live to see another day.”

He flicked his cigarette away, and it bounced across the parking lot, unleashing showers of burning sparks.

“Bang, bang,” he said.

The cigarette butt smoked in the street.

Chapter Nineteen

T
hey were out beyond the Tijuana airport. Fences and walls and the usual border boneyard vistas. They pulled up at a scruffy cluster of gas stations and bodegas and auto shops and warehouses. The building where they parked had a tin man welded together out of mufflers in front. His hat was a steel funnel. The sign above the closed door said mofles. It all stank of burning taco meat and dogs, spilled car oil and exhaust, trash fire smoke.

“What’s a mofle?” Yolo asked. She was always the scholar. She liked words. But she had never really heard Spanglish before.

“A mofle is a mofle, damn,” said Wino. “It’s, like—what do you call the pinchi thing in back of your car?”

“Silenciador,” Atómiko said.

“A muffler!” Yolo said.

“What the hell have I been telling you?” Wino snapped.

Vampi got out of the car and pointed at the tin man.

“He’so cute!” she cried.

Nayeli was tense. The girls apparently hadn’t taken note of the isolated nature of this nasty little clot of ruin. They could be on their way to being raped and killed. They could be kidnapped and forced into sexual slavery. They could be filmed being killed; she had seen stories about that in
¡Alarma!

A Tijuana cop in a bulletproof vest stood on the corner, a matte black assault rifle pointing at the ground; his bottomless shades turned their way, and he regarded them coolly, then turned away.

She was jittery and angry—angry at the day and the border and the very buildings where they stood. But it was the presence of Atómiko that calmed her. She did not like him, but she did not believe he would allow them to be harmed. She looked at him. He had abandoned his campaign to woo Yolo and turned his attentions to Vampi. He was actually wiggling his eyebrows at her. Nayeli stifled a laugh.

She made a fleeting sign of the cross and muttered, “Ave María purísima.”

“Come on,” said Wino.

He banged on the steel-shuttered door of the muffler shop, and it clanged and rolled up. Smoke and rocanrol billowed out.

“Let’s go,” said a kid inside.

Wino hunched over and went in, so the girls followed. Atómiko held his staff across his chest and stooped through. The door slammed back down behind them.

Black Glocks in belts, small machine guns in hands.

“This is them, huh?” said a man in a running suit.

“That’s it,” said Wino.

“Who am I talking to?” the man asked.

“Excuse me?” said Nayeli.

“Who am I talking to?” the man repeated. He pointed at Atómiko. “You?”

Atómiko shook his head.

“Her,” he said.

The man turned to Nayeli.

“You! You’re the boss?” He smiled, not warmly. “This short girl?” He barked out one laugh. “All right.” He took her arm and led her to the back of the room—it was much bigger than it looked from the outside. “You were never here,” he said. “You don’t know anything about this shop. Right?”

“Right.”

“The vato with the pole led you across. Not us.”

“Yes.”

“We will not help you again. We do this only once. All right?”

“All right.”

She was confused and was answering the way she thought he wanted her to answer.

Wino gestured with his chin.

“Mota,” he said.

“¿Marijuana?” Vampi cried.

Bales lined the walls.

The boys in the mofle shop stared at her.

“Big-time!” Wino said.

“¿Coca?” Atómiko asked.

The man in the running suit said, “I knew a curious monkey that got his nose cut off.”

Atómiko shrugged.

“I was asking for a Coca-Cola,” he lied.

Wino sneered.

The man in the running suit said, “If Wino wasn’t my nephew, you’d be lying out in the street right now. We move product in the hole, not bodies!”

He threw back a trapdoor. He reached into the shadows and flicked on a light switch.

“Welcome,” he said.

Wino winked and started down the ladder.

The girls recognized it at once. They had seen this in the Cine Pedro Infante, during one of Garcí a-García’s endless Steve McQueen film festivals. It was the dirt tunnel from
The Great Escape;
it was strung with electric lights on drooping power lines, and the floor was flat and well trampled.

Atómiko whistled.

“Sweet!” he said. “I could make a million dollars with a tunnel like this!”

The man in the running suit came down behind them and said, “That’s all? A million?”

He laughed.

“It runs for over half a mile. Right across the border. Right under the noses of the migra. It comes up in a curtain-and-drapery-stitching company on the other side. The workers in there don’t even know. When night comes, my associates will slide two big sewing machines out of the way and open the door.”

Nayeli had never heard of such a thing. Vampi and Yolo had eyes as big as doughnuts. This was truly a thing of awe.

“What if you’re caught?” Nayeli asked. “What if they’re found out?”

“We have a burglar alarm.” The man in the running suit laughed. “And we blow the tunnel on this end and drive away.”

Atómiko whistled again.

“But, you know,” the man said, “it’s a lot of money. ¿Me entiendes? There’s people who know about us over there. God willing, our little donations are enough for them to protect us.”

He wore a gold crucifix on a chain.

“… God willing,” Nayeli said, sounding skeptical.

The man smiled.

“God loves us all,” he said.

The girls looked at one another; Vampi was smiling sweetly, and Yolo was very serious. Nayeli set her jaw, hoping she looked fierce.

“Go,” the man said. “It’s straight. You can’t get lost.”

“Are there bats?” Vampi asked.

He laughed.

“No, no bats. Go.”

“Rats?”

“No! No rats! There’s nothing there but dirt. Go!”

“¡Adios!” Wino said. “Good luck!”

They had to duck their heads as they entered the hole, but it was fairly comfortable. Nobody had to crawl. It was well lit, and hard to believe. Nayeli imagined the Border Patrol trucks driving above her head as she walked. Their feet raised dust as they shuffled: she sneezed.

Wino’s voice came down the tunnel behind them: “Send me a postcard,” he called.

“He turned out to be a good boy,” Yolo said.

Nayeli had to concede the point.

“He treated us well.”

The Warrior, bringing up the rear, reminded them: “But he is not me.”

Vampi said, “Thank God!” and the girls laughed at him.

They saw one vast brown spider in the hole, but the rest of the walk was a dullness of dirt walls and wooden support beams.

“I could use some of that cocaine,” Atómiko noted.

The girls had never known a real drug user, and they regarded him with new eyes. He was so gangster. The mota-heads in Camarones kept their marijuana to themselves.

They got to the end of the tunnel, and there it was, another ladder. Three small boxes stood in the tunnel, and the girls sat on them. Atómiko squatted in his baboon fashion.

“Hey, look at that!” said Vampi.

A clamshell was stuck in the tan soil of the tunnel wall.

“That came from Noah’s flood,” Atómiko said.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Yolo scolded.

They argued about evolution for a few minutes, then fell into a sullen silence.

“Now what?” Yolo said.

“We wait,” Nayeli replied.

After a long time, Vampi said, “I’m bored.”

Yolo stretched.

Nayeli said, “I want to go to Kankakee.”

“Ah,” said Yolo. “Your father.”

“Where is it?” asked Vampi.

“It’s around Chicago someplace,” Nayeli said.

“What about us?” Vampi asked.

“We,” said Yolo, “will visit Mateo.”

Atómiko amazed them by starting to snore.

They heard loud scraping above them, and the roof popped open and a gruff male voice said, “Hurry up.”

They came up into a storeroom full of carpet rolls and tables covered with bolts of material. The two sewing machines that covered the opening were slid aside on rollers, and the rug pulled up and laid over so the trapdoor could open. The room was muffled, insulated by all the curtains and rugs. The man pointed to an open door.

“In the garage,” he said.

They shuffled into the garage and found a delivery van standing there with its back door open. They were startled to see, through the one small window in the garage’s side door, that it was dark outside.

“In,” the man said.

They climbed up.

They made themselves comfortable among rolls of carpet. He reached up, grabbed a leather strap, and slid the door down with a loud crash. They were thrown into darkness. The girls reached for one another. Atómiko clutched his staff firmly, though it didn’t seem likely that he could break the van’s cargo doors open with it. They heard the door latch click into place. The driver got in the front—the springs squeaked. He started the engine. They heard an electric door opener lift the garage’s big door, and they rolled. Down the slope of the driveway, then settling onto a smooth flat street. They made several turns, fell over when he stopped at red lights. They could hear traffic sounds from outside. He was listening to Mexican radio in the cab. Suddenly, they could feel acceleration, and they were on a freeway. They drove and drove, and they merged to the right and swooped.

None of them could tell how long they’d been driving when the van rolled down a ramp and made an abrupt stop. The driver honked his horn, shouted something rude, made a left turn and a right turn, drove for a few minutes, and made another, more abrupt, right. They heard gravel crunching. He stopped but left the engine running. The door latch rattled and the door shot up. Cold night air rushed in.

“Out,” he said.

They jumped down from the back of the van, and before they could say anything to the driver, he was back in the cab and driving out of the big dirt lot.

They stood in the darkness, looking around. They could see, at a distance, a lit Spanish mission on a hillside on their right. Before them, a wall of oleanders and scraggly trees, and on the other side of that, rushing traffic. If they craned to the left, they could see some hills. One of them had a lit cross on the top. Behind them, they sensed a void—it was pitch-black and smelly. But that seemed to be the way out of the lot, so they walked in that direction. A street cut across their path; they turned right, toward the hill with the cross and away from the old church on the other hill. San Diego seemed to be offering them lit beacons, each one promising that Jesus was watching over them.

They came to a small low bridge, and as they crossed it, they saw the turgid dark water of a slough beneath them, and they smelled the heavy odor of old seawater. On their left, they saw an expanse of lawn and water—they were walking along a great bay. It was lit by streetlamps on tall poles. When Vampi saw a playground across the street, she ran to it and jumped on the swings and started to push herself back and forth. Yolo and Nayeli felt old and serious—far too old to play on swings. But Atómiko surprised them by joining Vampi. He actually put down his staff so he could swing.