Into the Beautiful North

by Luis Alberto Urrea

  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.

  Tacho called, “Somebody milk that cow! It’s starting to moo!”

  “Oh, my God!” Yolo said.

  They buried their faces in their pillows, laughing.

  Just when they thought they were falling asleep, one of them would say, “Moo!” and it would start again.

  The men came for them at about three in the morning.

  Nayeli heard the whispers first and came awake immediately. The faulty latch on their door began to rattle. She held her breath, thinking it might just be ambient sound or perhaps the remnants of some dream. She squinted at the door, and she saw the knob turning back and forth. Then, a bolt of fear when the latch popped and the door cracked open. She stiffened in the bed. The door swung open slowly, reaching the end of the chain. Hisses. A low man’s voice.

  She shook Tacho. He snorted. She punched his arm. He buried his head under his pillow.

  She looked around for a weapon. There was a small chair by the bed—she could club them with it when they broke in. She rose silently and stared. An arm was trying to reach into the room, the hand scrabbling like a spider, reaching around for the thin chain to get it off the hook. Nayeli squinted: a yellow sleeve. That bastard! The man from the taco stand.

  “Almost,” the yellow man was saying to his associates. She could see their shadows through the window shade, backlit by the neon and streetlights.

  She stood in the center of the room, in her panties and her T-shirt, watching the hand clutch at the chain.

  Her girls were deep asleep in their bed. Tachito was snoring. Nayeli stretched. She shook out her arms and raised each leg once. She rotated her neck and felt it pop. She grabbed Tacho’s pepper spray can from the bedside table and positioned herself in front of the door.

  The yellow man’s hand grabbed the chain and began to work it free.

  “Got it,” he said.

  Nayeli kicked the door closed on his arm. He screamed. She held the door against his wrist and threw her weight against it three times. He yelled curses. She grabbed his little finger and bent it back until it snapped. He made a terrible sound of shock and agony. But he let go of the chain. She pulled the door toward her and leaned into the gap and fired the pepper spray directly into his eyes. She slammed the door on his bloody arm again.

  He jumped and howled and thumped against the wood as if he were being killed. His partners ran away and thundered down the stairs like bison. Tacho was beside her now, yelling, “Kill the bastards! Kill them!” Yolo and Vampi were yowling like air raid sirens. Nayeli fired another round into the yellow man’s face and released the door. He fell on his back and writhed. She stepped out and stomped him once.

  “Oh, my,” Tacho noted. “Right in the balls.”

  “You,” Nayeli growled, “stay away from me and my friends or I will kill you.”

  The man was trying to crawl to the steps.

  Tacho kicked him in the ass.

  “Dog!” he said.

  They slammed their door and fastened the chain again and locked the worthless latch and braced the chair beneath the knob. The girls stared at Nayeli with awe. Tacho was so jazzed that he couldn’t stop dancing and talking. Nayeli sat on the bed and shook.

  She trembled until morning came and they went back to the street.

  Chapter Twelve

  I want to go home,” Vampi said.

  “All I ever wanted was a boyfriend,” Yolo complained. “A nice little house, a quiet li
fe.”

  “Me, too,” said Tacho.

  “I wanted Missionary Matt,” said Yolo.

  “Me, too,” Tacho said.

  “But Nayeli got him.”

  “¡Cabrona!” Tacho cried.

  Nayeli kept walking. It was morning. Tijuana was silent. The sun was buttery, and doves cooed all around them. Dry palm trees made soft oceanic sounds in the breeze. Where was the Sodom of last night? They trudged between small yellow houses with falling fences. Little dogs wagged their tails. Alley cats swirled between their legs. Nayeli led them north, toward the Tijuana River.

  An old woman in a small yard poured water from a coffee can onto clumps of geraniums.

  “Buenos días,” she said.

  “Good morning,” said Nayeli.

  “Good morning, señora,” said Tacho.

  “Nice flowers,” Yolo said.

  “¡Adios!” Vampi called.

  They came to a big street, and across it stood a rusting wall of metal. It rose high on a bluff and seemed to run forever. It was covered in bright paint—an American flag, coffins full of skeletons, words, poems, a white dove. They stared at it, reading the graffiti.

  “Somebody doesn’t like George Bush,” Tacho noted.

  “They don’t like Calderón, either,” Nayeli said.

  “The new revolution,” Yolo announced, “will be the war of the media!”

  They cast jaundiced eyes upon her.

  “Don’t start with your Zapatista crap because, right now, I am not in any mood!” Tacho scolded.

  “Who’s Calderón?” Vampi asked.

  They stared at her, aghast.

  “Calderón, Verónica?” said Nayeli. “Your president?”

  Vampi said, “Oh. I didn’t see the news.”

  Looks were traded.

  Vampi stared at a melancholy skull that seemed to be weeping naked bodies out of its eye sockets.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said.

  Tacho made a rude noise with his lips.

  “¡Ahora tú vas a empezar con tus babosadas!” He moved down the street. “Parece que ando con una bola de pendejas. Ay, sí. Todo el día con chingaderas. Pos, ¡estoy harto con esta mierda! ¿Me oyeron? HARTO. Hasta la chingada. Hasta la madre. Con esta MIERDA.”

  All the girlfriends noted that Tacho was venting his profound disquiet over their recent spate of bad luck and trouble.

  “Wow,” Yolo said. “What’s his problem?”

  “Look at Mister Snotty,” said Vampi.

  An ice cream man walked toward them, tinkling his little bell as he pushed his cart down the street.

  “Early for ice cream,” Nayeli said.

  “It is never early for ice cream, amiga,” the man replied.

  Tacho was steaming, with his arms crossed and his spikes drooping.

  “Your boyfriend needs some breakfast,” the ice cream man noted.

  “He’s in a bad mood.”

  “I see that. He has a bad haircut, too. If you don’t mind my saying it.”

  Nayeli made a command decision—her troops needed a morale boost.

  “Four paletas, please,” she said.

  The ice cream man opened the lid, and the Camarones crew looked for their favorite flavors. Even Tacho slunk over and angrily grabbed a strawberry bar and gobbled it in big bites.

  “What is that?” Nayeli asked, gesturing at the barrier with her frozen treat.

  “Are you kidding?” the man asked.

  She shook her head.

  “Where are you from?” he asked.

  “Sinaloa.”

  “Ah.”

  He nodded.

  “That,” he said, “is the legendary border fence.”

  Everyone stared up at it.

  The man dropped his lid and accepted Nayeli’s coins.

  “Ugly, don’t you think?” he said, and walked on, tinkling, tinkling, tinkling.

  They went east along the fence. They picked that direction because west veered sharply uphill, and they were tired. East was flat.

  It was already hot from the sun. The fence smelled like rust. Yolo ran her hand along the metal. Her fingers came away tainted orange.

  They got to the barbed-wire edges of the fence.

  “It stops!” Tacho noted.

  They climbed up a steep bank and found themselves on the edge of a concrete flood control channel. Kids sat in groups and watched the other side. Masses of cars were already twinkling in the border lines at the international crossing. Below them, the Tijuana River was a narrow green smear of water. Clumps of grass and weeds rose from islands of deposited sewage and runoff mud. Nayeli saw a tattered pair of corduroy pants and one running shoe in the muck. They filled her with dread.

  They could see a huge American freeway ahead, and beyond it, dead hills covered in rough trails. Boxcars stood on tracks along the base of these mounds, and a red trolley moved away from the borderline like a model train. All over the hills, they glimpsed white vehicles. They were close enough to the US to see burger joints and discount shopping strips.

  Yolo said, “The Mexican border is the only major border on earth where huge cities sit across the fences from each other. It’s true! Look on a map. All the countries in the world keep their big cities far from the border. Not here.”

  “She’s so smart,” Vampi said.

  “San Diego and Tijuana. ¿Qué no? Look at a map. El Paso and Juárez. Brownsville and… whatever. And Nuevo Laredo, too.”

  “She got all A’s,” Nayeli said.

  “Show-off,” Tacho said.

  “That’s why it’s such a big problem. Nowhere to hide. Capitalism has to do its work in the light, instead of in the shadows.”

  “Thank you, Fidel Castro,” said Tacho.

  “I’m not wrong,” Yolo replied.

  On the opposite slope of the channel, Nayeli saw a Border Patrol SUV. The agent was standing outside his truck in his green uniform. He was watching her. She nudged Tacho and pointed. The Border Patrol agent raised his hand and waved at her with a cutesy fingers-only gesture. She waved back.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Tacho said.

  “Really!” scolded Yolo.

  But Nayeli couldn’t help it—she started to smile at the agent.

  He lifted a pair of binoculars and looked at her. She could see his mouth under the lenses. He was smiling back.

  She pointed at herself and pointed to the USA.

  He shook his head.

  She put her hands before her face as if in prayer and pantomimed begging.

  He laughed loud enough that they could hear his voice.

  Then he shook his head again and got into his truck.

  “He wants to date you,” Vampi said.

  “If we follow the fence west,” Tacho suggested, “won’t it run into the ocean?”

  “Are we going to the beach?” Vampi asked.

  “Don’t be dumb,” Tacho said. “The ocean—like, the fence stops here. Won’t it stop there? We could swim around it and walk up the beach into Los Yunaites.”

  The poor boys sitting on the slope started to laugh.

  They spoke in a bizarre code that took several moments to decipher:

  “Nel, socio, la frontera ’sta gacha, guey, hasta las playas, guey, orale, pos la onda es que la wall esta se avienta al agua, guey! Me entiendes, yes or no? Tienes que echarte, vato! Swim, loco! Swimeando pero la wall no se acaba!” The one talking had tattoos and a fedora. He rose and dusted off his butt. “Ahi te wacho, homeboy!” He rocked and rolled on down the road.

  “What,” Tacho asked the universe, “in the hell,” he raised his hands in entreaty to the Almighty, “did that boy say?”

  “¡Agarra la onda, guey!” Vampi suddenly spouted. “Don’t you speak cholo, vato? ¡La mera neta! I speakin’ the cholo! ¡Bien de aquellas, de aquellitas! Rifamos, ¿sí o no?”

  Tacho let out a small cry of despair.

  “He said,” Vampi explained, reverting to a human dialect, “that the wall extends into the sea. You
can’t swim around it.”

  “Oh.”

  “Ahi te wacho.”

  “Whatever.”

  Tacho raised his hand to his brow as if looking a great distance and turned in a small circle.

  “So this is the border,” he said. “I don’t get it.”

  They trudged, lost. Vampi and Tacho had never walked so far in their lives. Even Nayeli and Yolo, the soccer stars, were tired. They kept veering north, as if there would be some magical gap in the fences. As if there would be some way into the USA that nobody had ever tried, or that the Border Patrol had overlooked. They made their way into the Río de Tijuana corridor, an area of nicer hotels, shopping malls, nightclubs with volcanos that erupted all night on their dance floors. They saw an IMAX theater in the shape of a white sphere.

  “The Death Star,” announced Jedi Master Yolo.

  They finally collapsed in the hot shade of the city fruit market. It was a warren of sheds and shops, and the smell of cooking, fruit, rot, diesel, fish, onions, and cigarette smoke filled the air. It reminded Nayeli of Aunt Irma’s trips to the Mazatlán market. She looked into the glass cases holding stacked Mexican candies and saw the same drunk bees staggering around, wiped out by the same fermented sugar.

  Yolo found a small chapel in the parking lot dedicated to some local saint. She dragged Tacho in there to pray and light candles. Vampi somehow latched onto a gringo missionary group that was buying beans and potatoes for an orphanage run. She followed them around, trying to make small talk with the blond boys in her strange pidgin English.

  One of the burly men working the fruit trucks stopped beside Nayeli.

  “Tired?” he said.

  She glowered at him. After last night, she was not about to talk to strange men.

  He smiled.

  He handed her a mango.

  “It gets better,” he said, and walked down the line of trucks. She watched him shoulder a hundred-pound bag of rice and stagger away.

  The mango rained juice down her front, but she didn’t care. She ate it with her eyes closed. It tasted like home.

  The beggars were having a bad day. Doña Araceli was dressed the way the mestizos expected her to dress—in indigenous clothing. She was a Mixtec Indian, one of the main tribal groups working the Tijuana area. She and her husband, Porfirio, had come north—not to cross the line, but to earn money in Tijuana. They didn’t know that it was the most visited tourist city on earth, but they did know there was a great flow of money to be had if you worked hard. The worst insult they could think of was: That man doesn’t want to work. Work was everything to them, even though they had no work left to do. Their small farm plot in Michoacán had died out in a drought, and their two cattle had been sold, then their one pig, and finally their ten chickens. They left their plot of land to Porfirio’s parents and rode freight trains to the border, looking for a new life.