Into the Beautiful North (2 page)

Chapter Two

H
ere came Nayeli, late for work again, dancing through town on her way to the Fallen Hand. She didn’t mean to dance—it was just that everywhere she went, she swung and swayed, and it was all she could do to keep herself from running. She had been the star forward of the Tres Camarones girls’ soccer team for four years, and even though she’d been out of high school for a year, she was still in shape. Her dark legs were hard with muscle and she still wore her tiny school uniform skirt, so everybody could admire them. Besides, clothes didn’t grow on trees.

Nayeli was dreaming of leaving town again. She wanted to see anything, everything. Wanted to go where lights changed color, where airplanes lumbered overhead and the walls of great buildings were covered in television screens like in that Bill Murray Japanese movie they’d seen at the Cine Pedro Infante the week before. She wanted shimmering lines of traffic in city rain. She was eager to see a concert, ride a train, wear fancy clothes, and sip exotic coffees on a snowy boulevard. She had seen elevators in a thousand movies, and she longed to ride one, though not on the roof of one like Jackie Chan.

Sometimes, she dreamed of going to the United States—“Los Yunaites,” as the people of the town called them—to find her father, who had left and never come back. He traded his family for a job, and then he stopped writing or sending money. She didn’t like to think about him. People kidded her that she never stopped smiling, and it made her look flirty, but thinking about him made the smile fade. She walked faster.

Nayeli was coming from Aunt Irma’s campaign headquarters, located in the stifling kitchen of Irma’s house on Avenida Francisco Madero. Irma, sick and tired of the ancient mayor of Tres Camarones (“That smelly old man!” she often complained), was making history by running to replace him in the next election. It would be a first: Irma García Cervantes, the first female Municipal President of Tres Camarones. It had an excellent ring to it. She had leadership experience—Aunt Irma was Sinaloa’s retired Lady Bowling Champion—and she was used to celebrity and the heat of the public’s attentions. If political power was not her destiny, she reasoned, it could only mean the Good Virgin herself had dictated that Mexico should continue its slide into chaos and ruin.

One of Nayeli’s main tasks was to write with fat sidewalk chalk, “¡Aunt Irma for President!” on walls all around Tres Camarones. As campaign manager, she earned twenty pesos a week, proving that Aunt Irma, too, had that affliction detested by Sinaloans yet epidemic in proportion. They called it “el codo duro”: the hard elbow, or the unbending elbow—unbending when it came time to spend money.

Twenty pesos! You couldn’t even afford corn tortillas anymore on twenty pesos. The Americans were buying up all the maize for fuel, and none of the rancheros could afford to use it for food. What did come down to the people was too expensive to purchase. So Nayeli danced on down the street to her second job, serving tacos and soft drinks at La Mano Caída.

Let’s eat,” the cop said. They had gotten restless, waiting for the damned Americano surfos to show up. They had a brick of pot in the trunk of their car, and the clock was ticking. He tapped on the bar.

Tacho, the Fallen Hand’s taco master, glowered.

“What you got?” the cop asked.

Tacho was tired of the thugs. They glared too much for his taste.

“Food,” he said.

The narco smiled.

“You’re kind of mouthy for a queer.”

Tacho shrugged.

“He’s a queer?” the cop said.

“He’s wearing eye makeup,” said Scarface.

“I thought he was one of those emo kids you hear about.” The cop shrugged.

“Emo sucks,” Scarface muttered.

“I like Diddy,” the cop reminded him.

Tacho had just about had it, but suddenly, Nayeli burst through the doors.

“You’re late!” Tacho scolded.

“I’m sorry, Tachito mi amor,” she called, automatically falling into her flirting banter with him. “Tachito machito mi angelito.”

The gunmen snorted:
Little Tacho, my little macho, my little angel
. That was too rich. They nudged each other.

“You’re macho, eh?” the cop said. “A macho angel.”

They giggled.

“¿Eres joto?” the narco asked Tacho, because if this hot little girl was talking to him like that, he might not be a queer after all.

Tacho made eyes at Nayeli. She hurried to tie on a white apron. She saw the silver glint of the narco’s .45 peeking out from behind his jacket.

“Take a table,” Tacho said. “No need for gentlemen like yourselves to sit at the bar.”

He smiled at them—it looked as if he were getting a tooth pulled, but anything to get them across the room from him. He didn’t want to have them near enough to smell their tacky cologne. One of them was wearing Old Spice!

They sat at one of Tacho’s quaking little tin Carta Blanca tables.

“What do you recommend?” the cop asked Nayeli.

“Tacho’s fried-oyster tortas are legendary,” she replied.

“Sounds good.”

She turned away.

He grabbed her hand and pulled her back.

“You,” he said. “You’re under arrest.”

She felt a pure cold bolt of panic.

“Excuse me?”

“You’re under suspicion”—he sneered—“of stealing my heart.”

He let her go and sent her back across the room on a gale of laughter. Her face was burning. Tacho whispered to her, “Viejo feo.” Ugly old man. It was one of his favorite insults.

“Good one,” the narco was saying.

They kept laughing, wiping their eyes.

“Hey!” he called. “Girl! Bring us some drinks!”

Tacho sighed. “It’s going to be one of those days,” he said.

Nayeli fished two beers out of the vat of ice at the end of the bar.

The men scared her. She tried to think about other things when she was tense or afraid, better days, before things had turned so sad, before everyone had become so poor.

She opened the beer bottles, served them, and rushed back to the end of the bar while Tacho started frying up the oysters.

The narco pulled his big pistol out of the shoulder holster and laid it on the table. He held open his jacket and flapped his arm a little. He turned his head and eyed Nayeli. He patted the gun and smiled at her.

“Está caliente, la chaparra,” he noted.

The cop glanced over at her to see how hot the shortie really was. They studied her legendary legs. Her bright white teeth against the deep cinnamon brown of her skin made her smile radiate like moonlight on water.

“A little dark,” he said. “But she’ll do.”

He winked at her and sipped his icy beer.

Nobody was quite sure if Tres Camarones was in Sinaloa or Nayarit, since the state line wavered in and out of the mangrove swamps and lagoons thereabouts. There was no major highway going through; there was no local police station, no hotel or tourist trap. No harbor, no television or radio station, no police station, no supermarket. The high school was in Villaunión, a long sweaty bus trip away. The church was small and full of fruit bats. Of course, there was a small Carta Blanca beer distributor, but come to think of it, the office had shut down when the men went north to find work. It was easier to float a boat down the tributaries of the Baluarte River than it was to drive the dirt road spur that angled southwest off the highway to Rosario. At any rate, nobody had ever worried about maps—on the official Pemex highway guides, Tres Camarones didn’t even exist.

The American boys who started it all by making a peeved chibacall to their Mazatlán connection, seeking a key of gold bud, were on spring break from some college in California. They had wandered down the coast, looking for good surfing and party spots, and they’d made the error of picking the sugar-white beaches outside Tres Camarones for their camp. The locals could have told them—but didn’ t—that the picturesque beaches belied a brutal drop-off, and the waves hammered against a nearly vertical wall of underwater mud. Other hazards abounded. The nearest popular beach was called Caimanero because big alligators lurked in the foul freshwater swamps behind the shore—not a spot for frolic. Portuguese man-of-wars floated onto the beaches all summer, killing everything they could sting. There was a spoiling porpoise carcass on the sand to bear testimony to their powers. The safest salt water in that whole region was in the shallow turquoise lagoons where the women went crabbing with floating straw baskets full of scrabbling
jaibas,
the big crabs taking their last little sea cruise before landing in the cooking pot. But you couldn’t surf a tranquil lagoon.

It wasn’t like the people hadn’t seen Americanos. Tres Camarones had been beset by tides of missionaries from Southern California. But the Jesús Es Mi Fiel Amigo Sunday School and the End Times Templo Evangélico had finally closed down for lack of converts. The “youth center” went back to being a muffler shop that was also closed because its owner had gone to Florida to pick oranges. For a short while, an ashram run by a Wisconsin woman named Chrystal, who was in constant channeling-contact with the Venusian UFO-naut P’taak, rose north of town. Several local workers had made good wages working on Chrystal’s pink cement pyramid on her leased forty acres of scrub and pecan trees. But the local water cut short P’taak’s mission to the world, and Chrystal rushed back to Sheboygan with typhoid and amebic dysentery. After Chrystal’s personal rapture, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, known as Los Testigos de Jeová, were forced to leave town when the heroic local bowling champion, Aunt Irma, unleashed her devilish tongue upon them and christened them Los Testículos de Jeová. The Witnesses, deeply offended, packed up their Spanish editions of
The Watchtower
and abandoned the heathens to their grisly fate.

Scarface tossed aside his napkin. The lime juice and Cholula sauce were better when you sucked them off your fingers. The table was a wasteland of empty plates. He stood.

“Where are these pinches gringos!” he shouted.

The state cop checked his watch, put down his beer bottle, and turned to glare at Tacho as if the proprietor were the surfers’ secretary.

“We are busy men,” he warned.