Into the Beautiful North(27)

Nayeli went into a botica and bought Vampi some pads. She had a hairbrush, four toothbrushes, and a tube of toothpaste in her shoulder bag. Tacho apologized for his vanity and bought hair gel. He worked on his spikes as they stood there, pressed to a wall. His little radio hung from his belt loop by its strap.

“Call Aunt Irma,” Yolo said.

“And tell her what?” said Nayeli.

“I want to go home!” Vampi cried.

“We will go home,” Nayeli said. “When we have completed our mission.”

“This was all a big mistake,” Vampi said.

“I think we have failed,” Yolo added.

“No,” Nayeli replied. “We haven’t even started.”

I am going to Kankakee, she thought. There was no way this mess was going to work, she decided. Not without Don Pepe.

The other girls gasped and slumped and threw their hands around.

Tacho said, “Ladies, ladies. We have to get off the street. That’s first. There is no Chavarín. All right. Then we have to use our own initiative. Am I right, m’ija?”

Nayeli nodded.

“We’ll get eaten alive if we spend the night out here.”

Happy tourists went by in colorful gangs, but among them were hustlers and sailors and marines and street kids and police and dogs. Men made kissing sounds at them—they couldn’t tell if the kisses were come-ons to the girls or mockery of Tacho. One slim boy in a black T-shirt paused and hissed: “Want to cross? Los Angeles? Safe?” He frightened them. They turned their faces from him until he walked away.

“We’ll find a hotel,” Tacho said. “Things will look better in the morning.”

They didn’t know which way to walk to find a hotel. They mistakenly thought that if they walked north—toward the US border—things would be of a better quality. They got off the main drag and headed down feeder streets and dark sidewalks in front of third-run movie theaters. Nayeli moved fast. She thought speed would keep them out of trouble. Some cementeros came out of an alley—tattered street kids fried on glue and reeking of chemicals. They tugged at Nayeli’s shirt and shoved Tacho and one grabbed at Vampi’s breast before they faded into the dark like a pack of hunting cats, the only thing left behind them, their laughter. Nobody noticed they’d stolen Tacho’s radio.

Shaken, Nayeli stopped at a taco cart on a corner ripe with smashed fruit rinds and peanut shells. The cook stood in a cloud of beef and charcoal smoke, his radio bobbing on a wire by his head, rocking to the distorted cumbia music. Two guys in cowboy boots ate tripe tacos in the glow of a streetlight on a crooked pole. The cook and the men looked Nayeli over, then took in the delicious sight of Yolo and Vampi. Tacho had slipped his pepper spray out of his sock and had it in his pocket with one hand wrapped around it and his finger on the nozzle.

“You lost?” the taco chef asked.

“Yes,” Nayeli replied.

The three men looked at one another and smiled.

“You don’t want to be lost down here, prieta.”

Nayeli was taken aback by that. Nobody had ever called her “dark-faced girl” in her life. Maybe morena—brown girl. That was almost romantic. But prieta was considered rude in Tres Camarones.

“Can you direct us to a hotel?” she asked.

One of the men laughed out loud.

“I’ll give you fifty pesos,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“I’ll give you fifty pesos each, and I’ll even pay for the room.”

The other man, who wore a bright yellow sport jacket, said, “No seas guey” to him. “These fine young ladies aren’t hookers.”

“We just need to get off the street,” Tacho said.

“Oh?” the man replied. He finished his taco and wiped his fingers on a napkin. “Come here,” he said.

He led them into the red-light district.

“It ain’t pretty, but it’s cheap,” he said, directing them to Hotel Guadalajara, a small cement-block hotel beside the scariest bar they had ever seen.

“Don’t go in there,” the man said, pointing at the bar.

“Don’t worry,” Nayeli said.

They got a room with two beds on the second floor. The stairs were on the outside, and there was a walkway that ran the length of the floor. A woman asked Tacho if he wanted to get his rocks off for cheap, right there on the steps where it was dark, then called him a queer when he shook his head.

“I smell marijuana,” Vampi said.

“That’s a shocker,” Tacho replied.

The door was cheap plywood, and the lock wouldn’t latch properly. Tacho put the chain on the door. The room had a cement floor with no rug. The beds were narrow and stiff as cardboard boxes. They could hear the endless thump of Kid Rock songs coming from next door; shrieks and laughs; a breaking bottle. The room would never be dark, so much street light came in the one window that they could have read magazines, even with their lights out.

They had two towels in the bathroom. Vampi went first, and she stayed in the shower too long, and there was no hot water for the rest of them. Tacho yelled curses. Then he cursed again when he had to dry himself on the wet towels and get back in the same dirty clothes. They looked like street urchins. But their hair was clean.

Yolo and Vampi snuffled and cried in their bed. Tacho kept his back turned to Nayeli in theirs. She found him inscrutable. She lay on her back, listening to the insanity next door. Then feet passed outside their room, and the voices of a woman and a man. It was the same woman from before—Tacho’s girlfriend. Nayeli started to hear sounds she recognized immediately, though she had not heard them before. The man was actually grunting. She scrunched her eyes, as if that would shut out the walkway copulation. The man let out a long moan.