Into the Beautiful North(31)

“Yes,” said Porfirio.

“We are in some trouble, I think,” said Nayeli. “But I’ll get us out of it.”

Don Porfirio looked around, wiped his brow, sighed.

“How?” he said.

The four friends looked at one another and shrugged.

“I want to go home,” Vampi told Don Porfirio.

He nodded.

Araceli said, “You are far from home?”

Vampi nodded.

“You are going over there?”

Araceli nodded to the north.

Vampi nodded again.

“Are you?” Yolo asked.

Porfirio laughed.

“Me? Over there?” He waved his hand before his chest.

“That’s not for us,” said Araceli.

“We lost our things,” Nayeli said. She didn’t know why she was talking to these strangers, but they seemed kind. And she was tired. And she wanted to go home, too. She didn’t dare spend the rest of their money on hotels. Not yet.

Porfirio and Araceli spoke softly in their own tongue. It was a melodic sound, full of vowels. Their hands moved slowly in the air as they spoke.

“It will be night soon,” Araceli said.

“Yes,” said Porfirio.

“You do not want to be here at night.”

“No, you don’t!” he agreed.

“We are going home.”

“Home for the night,” he said.

“You should come home with us,” she said.

“Why not,” he said.

“It is humble.”

“It is.” He nodded.

“But God has been good to us.”

“Amen,” he said.

Nayeli looked in their battered dark faces. Porfirio had two yellow teeth in front. Araceli wore a bright red-and-yellow shirt. She extended her hand.

“Come,” she said. “We will give you a bed tonight.”

Nayeli let herself be pulled up. She didn’t know if she should trust them or not, but she didn’t know what else to do—she could think of no options. As soon as she was up, the others rose slowly. They stood in a loose bunch, looking at their feet.

Don Porfirio said to Tacho, “I like your hair.”



They mounted the ancient Chevrolet bus painted two-toned, in blue and white. The driver had hung baubles from the ceiling—he had brocade strung along the top of the windshield, and saints and skulls dangled from the loops of yarn. Nayeli insisted on paying the fare for Porfirio and Araceli. They let the do?a sit, and the rest of them stood as the bus snorted through downtown and out the road toward Ensenada. Araceli held her bag on her lap. They made their way along crumbling dirt cliffs, and Nayeli looked up arroyos at paper-and-scrap shacks growing like toadstools in all the gulleys. They approached an army battalion’s base, and the bus mounted the periférico, the peripheral highway that cut around Tijuana from east to west. They drove a couple of miles until they came to a big flea market set up on the left side of the road. The signs said: SEGUNDA. The bus went down a ramp to the right and made a sharp left turn at some abandoned maquiladora warehouses, passing under the periférico through a tunnel covered with political signs: PRI, PAN, PRD. It began a slow trudge up a rough street that was mostly dirt and rocks.

At the top of the long rise, Don Porfirio said, “Here.”

The bus pulled over, and they hopped down on a slope of tan soil pocked with bits of glass and can lids. Five dogs danced and gamboled around them. Tattered paper kites rattled in the phone lines. Down the slope, car tires, car wrecks, and shacks crowded the arroyo. Nayeli could hear children yelling and playing.

“This way,” said Porfirio, and walked across the dirt street and up a hill.

They were too tired to be afraid or worried as they followed him. Araceli walked beside Nayeli, patting her back softly. The soil turned gray, then black. “We will fry potatoes,” Araceli said.

Nayeli smelled smoke, and a tart, ugly stink.

She saw gulls in great clouds above them, circling, whirling, so many gulls they looked like fog, like some strange tatters of white clouds blown by a hurricane rolling up the coast of Nayarit.

They topped the rise, and Nayeli ran into the backs of her girls. They were standing there staring. She peeked around Yolo’s back and opened her mouth but said nothing.

Tacho looked at her, and for once she thought she saw real awe in his face.

“Home,” Don Porfirio said.

Before them, a malodorous volcano of garbage rose two hundred feet or more. It was dark gray, ashen, black, and it was covered in flecks of white paper as if small snowdrifts were on its slopes. Gulls swirled and shrieked, and packs of feral dogs trotted downslope. The black mountain was stark. A road cut across its face, and far above, they could see and hear orange tractors moving soil over the trash. The sky above the hill was gray and heavy with clouds. Occasionally, smoke broke from the slope and curled away, blue and thin, in the wind. It made Nayeli feel cold.

“From up there,” Don Porfirio said, pointing, “you can see America.”





Chapter Thirteen



Huddled at the foot of the hill, dark brown men bent to small fires. They were burning electrical wires—the acrid chemical stink of the smoke wafted across to the friends. The men melted the plastic sheaths off the wires and sold the copper strands to the recyclers. Nayeli saw them poking at the small fires with sticks and small poles, hunched, cavemen in a wasteland. The sky peeled back for a moment, and a weak ray of sunset spilled over the scene like the diseased eye of some forgetful god—the light bearing with it cold in place of heat.