Into the Beautiful North(4)

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.

“I’ve been here an hour!” Scarface complained.

Tacho shrugged.

“You know how Americans are,” he said. “Always late. On their own time.”

Scarface kicked back his chair and grabbed his gun. He held it down by his side, as if deciding whether Tacho and Nayeli needed shooting. “If the surfos show up, tell them next time we see them, they each get a bullet in the head. Understand? I don’t like to be kept waiting.”

“Sí, se?or,” Nayeli replied.

The bad men strode out and got back into their car. Scarface pulled a fresh cinnamon toothpick out of his breast pocket. He took off the cellophane wrapper, dropped it on the floor, and popped the toothpick in his mouth. It waggled up and down. “Nice town,” he said. “No cops.”

He adjusted his lapels.

“No men, did you notice?”

He smiled.

“A vato like me could make a real killing here.”

He wiped his sunglasses on his shirt and put them back on.

“Watch yourselves,” he called out the window.

They drove away without paying.





Chapter Three



As the bandidos prowled the town and its outskirts, Tacho and Nayeli went about their day. Mopping the cement floor, sweeping the sidewalk in front, slicing limes, and peeling mangos. But mostly, they did what Mexicans in every small town in Mexico did: they circled their own history.

Nayeli was thinking about the missionaries. Well, she was thinking about one of them. The one saint—Missionary Matt.

All of Nayeli’s notorious girlfriends loved Missionary Matt. He was the first blond boy any of them had ever seen in person. They could claim that the vapid white-boy handsomeness of El Brad Pitt or El Estip McQueen at the cinema didn’t move them, but up close, it was a different story. A real live blue-eyed white boy was their own romantic freak show. Matt’s nose peeled. They had never seen a peeling nose. It was precious.

Matt sneaked away from his pastoral duties every night and crept into the Cine Pedro Infante. Nayeli’s girlfriends were not the only ones who sat in restless groups all around him, tittering over his slightest jest. Even mothers and aunties tittered, “?Ay, Mateo!” whenever he said anything.

That boy was movie crazy.

Matt had endeared himself to the many girls in town by writing their names phonetically on four-by-six-inch cards. When he left, he left behind a hundred broken hearts as he distributed these well-thumbed cards to his sweethearts as farewell gifts, with his address and phone number written on the back of each.

The card was the closest thing to a love letter Nayeli had ever received. She pulled it out for inspection, the ink a little diffuse from her sweat. It read:

nah /YELL/ ee



Beneath this, it said:

Love, Matt!



Then an address and a phone number that started with an 858 prefix.

Love, Nayeli thought. She knew enough English to know that. Love. Was it love-love? Like, LOVE? Or was it just love, like mi-amigo-Mateo-love, like I love my sister or my puppy or peanut butter cups love?

“Hello?” Tacho said. “Work? Like, sometime today?”

“Oh, you,” she said dreamily.

Tacho raised his hands and seemed to beseech the universe.

Nayeli kept Missionary Matt’s card tucked in her kneesock along with the sole, tattered postcard her father had sent her from a place called KANKAKEE, ILLINOIS. It showed a wild turkey gazing with deep paranoia out of a row of cornstalks. Before he’d fled to KANKAKEE, Don Pepe had been the only police officer in Tres Camarones. Mostly, he directed traffic and inspected the rare car wreck on the eastern road. Nayeli’s father had been gone three years. When it really got hot, and she was sweaty enough to threaten the ink altogether, she reluctantly tucked the two cards into her mirror at home.

She wandered out on the sidewalk and swept listlessly. The scant heavy river breeze stirred her tiny skirt. Boys used to whistle at Nayeli when she went by, but she’d been noticing a silence in the streets. Perhaps nineteen was already too old. Everything was changing for her. There was nowhere for a champion futbolista to go if she was a girl. And it was out of the question for her to head off to Culiacán or somewhere else expensive to attend the university. Her mother took in laundry—but, really, all the old women of Tres Camarones took in laundry. It would take many more dirty and lazy people to sustain the home laundry industry. Fortunately, Nayeli and her mother received some assistance from the formidable Tía Irma—the future Municipal President. Tía Irma’s pro bowling winnings had been sufficiently vast that she had actually invested most of her money, and she was further comfortably attended to by monthly retirement checks from her hard years at the canneries. The checks were modest, but she didn’t need much more than Domino cigarettes, the occasional bottle of rum, and a steady diet of Tacho’s tacos and tortas.

It was Tía Irma, known to the notorious girlfriends as La Osa—the She-Bear—who had pushed Nayeli into fútbol. And it was both Irma and Don Pepe who had enrolled Nayeli in Dr. Matsuo Grey’s martial arts dojo when the other girls were taking dance lessons for the various pageants and balls at the Club de Leones. Karate, Tía Irma insisted, was good for the legs. Power on the field. But Nayeli was not fooled. To La Osa, life and love were war, and she expected Nayeli to win as many battles as possible.