Into the Beautiful North(91)

“Sí.”

He watched Nayeli in the rearview.

“Where’s that smile of yours?” he said.

“Gone.”

He drove a little farther.

“Weren’t you looking for your father?” he said.

“Sí.”

“What happened?”

“I found him.”

“Oh.”

The radio squawked.

“Not so good, huh?”

“Not so good.”

Arnie pulled over. Put on his emergency blinkers.

“You told me a crazy story, I remember. You were going to smuggle wets back into Mex. Isn’t that right?”

They both nodded.

“I don’t see anybody,” he said.

“In San Diego,” Nayeli explained. “Twenty-seven.”

“Bullshit!”

“Is true,” Tacho said.

“No!”

Nayeli was so tired.

“Twenty-seven men waiting for me in San Diego. We go back to Sinaloa.”

Arnie laughed.

He sat there looking out at the desert.

“You thirsty?” he asked.

“Oh, yes.”

He got his thermal jug. He stepped out, slammed the door. Walked around. Opened the rear gate.

“Don’t try anything stupid,” he said.

He handed them the jug. They gulped the cold water.

“Gracias,” they said.

Arnie sat in the open gate, one foot on the ground.

“Run this story by me one more time.”

Nayeli started with Don Pepe. The bandidos. The election. The journey. (She left out the tunnel from her story.) He kept shaking his head.

Finally, he said, “You’re not lying, are you?”

“No.”

“Is she lying to me?”

Tacho said, “No.”

It was the darnedest thing Arnie had ever heard.

He hung his head and thought for a few minutes.

He sighed. Rubbed his face. They were never going to make it through the gauntlet. They’d be caught and reprocessed.

F-you money, he thought.

What could they do to him?

“I like you kids,” he said. “I really do.”

He slammed the gate shut. Went back to his seat, radioed in to the station. Tacho and Nayeli didn’t understand the English or the migra codes. He eased back onto the freeway, pulled a U-turn, and drove them in the opposite direction. He got off the road and took them to a small house in a subdivision of Yuma.

He cooked them some eggs and tortillas.

Then, when night fell, he put them back in his truck, and he drove them west, never stopping until they hit San Diego.





Epilogue





The bad men had parked their trucks at the major corners of the village. Black Cherokees and Tahoes with dark windows. They simply sat, idling, throbbing with music. Grandmothers kept their daughters in their houses. Irma, home from the Yunaites, had to send Chava and Garcí a-García to Mazatlán for their own protection from the bandidos. But she promised the women of Tres Camarones that change would soon come.

Sensei Grey taught two new judo classes to those women who were sick of waiting for men to come.

The pigs and the donkeys spent their nights engineering daring escapes from their pens. Dogs and chickens refused to let the mornings be silent. Huge coconut crabs wandered into town from the estuaries and climbed the coconut palms to snip the cocos free. They dropped to the ground and split with a sound like a single horse’s hoof on a cobble. The big crabs squatted over the brilliant white meat inside the broken shells and fed themselves with both claws, looking smug.

A Cherokee sat dark as night in front of La Mano Caída, but the morning rose in spite of it, and the day ignored it. Mockingbirds insulted crows from every phone line, and hummingbirds were indistinguishable from the immense black bees that trundled down from the slopes of El Yauco to plunder the red hibiscus and trumpet vines. The skiffs with bundles covered in blue tarps had begun to come ashore; sullen men who spared no friendly word to the women or the children loaded and unloaded flatbed trucks.

The day grew hot almost immediately.

Women were already making tortillas at the market. Women set out stacks of hard cheese and bowls of dripping-wet cheese. Women with blue tin pots came in from the outskirts to sell their fresh milk. Other women stood in line to buy two eggs, three potatoes, a bolillo roll or two, a small jar of marmalade. They remained silent. They kept their heads bowed. The only music came from the black SUVs.

Crazy Pepino was at work early. He rode his bike into the square as the sun rose every day. He swept the front steps of the Cine Pedro Infante. He cleaned the glass door with a squeegee. They were showing Taras Bulba and The King and I later that night. The window of a Tahoe rolled down, and a lit cigarette flew out and pinged off his head. Laughter.

When he was done with the theater, he rode his bike to La Mano Caída. It was locked tight. Pepino swept the porch. Checked the locks. Checked the windows.

When he was done, looking to make sure nobody was watching, he sneaked past the Cherokee with its gunmen in the street, and he swung around the side and climbed the building. He used the rainspout and the old water tank to get halfway up. From there, he could grab the roof and boost himself. He did this every morning, without fail.