Into the Beautiful North(61)
Yolo smiled.
“Once upon a time. God, Nayeli—he almost had a heart attack when I mentioned her name.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
They grinned at each other.
“Let’s go see him,” Nayeli said.
“Let’s.”
They turned to the guys.
“Mateo?” they sang in their sweetest voices. “Are you busy?”
Chapter Twenty-three
Salvador “Chava” Chavarín owned the first clear bowling ball in Sinaloa.
It was pale orange, and it could have been a jewel. Nobody could roll the ball like Chava. He released the ball like a dancer, his arm rising and cutting across his face and holding there as his slim hips seemed to steer the ball to yet another strike. Oh yes, Chava Chavarín was Irma’s guru. She followed him to the lanes in Mazatlán, Acaponeta, and Los Mochis. When he had a bowling shirt stitched Americano-style, she saved up her money and sent away for real American shirts from Los Angeles. His shirt had orange piping on a blue-and-white two-tone placket with his name over his heart. Hers was silver and black and featured a lurid 15,000-thread stitching of a ball smashing pins against a white inset.
It was Chava who introduced Irma to the cinema. When she was a girl, she was a tomboy—she was always busy swimming in the river, or crabbing, or climbing the mango and date trees to get fruit. Things like music and movies didn’t catch her eye at all. Until she saw Chava squiring puff-skirted young ladies to the movies. He was exquisite! His mustache was a thin line of inexpressible suggestiveness over his sharp yet tender upper lip! He smoked cigarettes in holders that jutted from his mouth like an old-time Yanqui president’s—he had FDR in mind. He saved every cent he earned and spent it on finery—his bowling winnings making him increasingly dapper. And since he lived with his mother, he had money to burn, plus she kept his clothes washed and ironed. He even wore a white dinner jacket! He carried a flask of rum and a silver cigarette case, and he tapped his cigarettes on the case three times—?sas! ?sas! ?sas!—before he inserted them in the holder. He lit the ladies’ smokes with a gold Zippo that appeared with a Fred Astaire flick of the hand that revealed a faux Cartier watch, glittering with paste diamonds, on his wrist. He was always laughing, and everybody in town called him “That Chava!” As in, “Oh, that Chava—he’s too much!”
Sometimes, when he walked down the street, he was so deep into his own rhythm that he snapped his fingers and shuffled a tiny sideways dance, keeping the beat.
Irma, feeling fat and awkward, slunk into the cinema and watched Chava more than the movies. She writhed with envy, the way he put his arm around whatever tramp he was escorting. He would cool them both with a paper fan on a stick, the fans (distributed by the beer dealer) featuring blurry black-and-white photographs of great stars like Lola Beltrán. It was so gallant.
Of course, in those days, nobody dared kiss in public. But was there any doubt, when Chava got his fan going, that he was going to reap great kisses from his various concubines? Everyone assumed he was a devil with the lights out. It made Irma feverish just thinking about it.
Her moment of glory came in a rush, in a twelve-lane bowling alley with a layer of cigar smoke hovering two feet below the ceiling and the sound of a brass band punching the tuba and trumpet cacophony as sweat poured down her back.
It was on the epochal night of the mixed men’s and women’s state bowling finals in Culiacán. Chava had gone down in flames to an upstart from El Rosario. There was no catching the blond bomber, Beto Murray, damn him! So Chava nursed his disgrace and was free to sit in the Camarones section, among the women who had gathered to cheer Irma. And she was magnificent. Just the hot sensation of his stare burning—finally—into her rump sent her hurtling down the lane. His gaze tingled her bottom and lifted her onto her tiptoes. Her throws were devastating. The pins seemed to shatter into toothpicks as she scored strike after strike after strike. Magnificent Irma! Chava rose. He cheered. He shouted. When she won, he leaped over the rail between them and lifted her off the floor in a wild embrace. Irma had not believed a man could lift her: it was disconcerting yet thrilling.
They made love for the first time in Chava’s car, pulled off the road in a huge bean field. Cicadas bombed the car, and worried Brahman bulls sniffed the windows. He was Irma’s first, and only. Frankly, it didn’t feel all that great, and it left a mess. Chava, stylish even with his white skivvies around his ankles, produced a silk hankie and cleaned Irma with it, an act of tenderness she would never forget. But more than the feeling of Chava’s hands carefully blotting her with the cool silk, Irma would always remember the hazy half-moon out the back window. Ever after, when she saw the full moon wane, she grew melancholy. If she’d had any musical gifts, she would have sung ballads to the sky.
Chava ran a small shrimp boat out of the estuaries. In the off-season, he fished for tuna and flounder and occasionally drove a truck. It was on a long-haul mango and banana run that he lost his head and broke Irma’s heart. He drove the ancient Dodge stake bed to Tijuana. He’d been to Tijuana before. What touring bowler hadn’t? But he startled them all by not returning. Perhaps they should have seen it as a harbinger of their future migratory fate. That Chava was always ahead of the curve. There it was, 1963, and he was already gone north.