Into the Beautiful North

by Luis Alberto Urrea

  “Nationality?” she said.

  “Mexican, of course!” Rigo replied.

  He handed over both passports, flaring them out like a small hand of cards.

  She plucked them out of his hand and bent down to the window.

  “You’re Rigoberto?” she said.

  “Correct.”

  “And you?”

  Tacho ignored her.

  “You!” she repeated.

  Rigoberto smacked his arm.

  “¡Oye, cabrón!” he scolded.

  Tacho turned to her.

  “What!” he said.

  Rigoberto turned to her and blushed deeply.

  “Please forgive Wilivaldo,” he said. “We’re having a bit of a spat.”

  “A spat.”

  “I thought a weekend of shopping, a nice stay in a hotel… You know. I am trying to bring love back into the relationship.”

  She had a look on her face that almost made Tacho laugh.

  “Love.”

  “If not love,” Rigoberto confided softly, “sex.”

  She stared at him, her face a complete blank.

  “I am hoping what they say about hotel sex is true!”

  She handed him the passports and said, “You two have a real nice day,” and backed into her booth.

  Rigo put up his window and sped into California as they laughed and turned the stereo up very loud.

  Tacho had never seen such a huge freeway. It was so clean. No dogs or donkeys anywhere. No trash. He smiled when they passed a white Border Patrol truck and the agent inside didn’t even look at them.

  “You will like it here,” Rigo said. “Los Yunaites is our kind of place.”

  They parked in the Gaslamp Quarter downtown, and Rigo took him to Croce’s for some jambalaya and corn bread. They sipped Heinekens and ate in peace. Tacho was trying to make the moment last, so he wouldn’t have to face the inevitable farewell. Rigo understood. He knew Tacho had to get on with it, though. It wasn’t like they’d gotten engaged to be married. He checked his watch. He slid his cell phone across the table and nodded.

  Tacho took the phone and called Aunt Irma. She had gotten Matt’s phone number from Nayeli’s mom. “Tell them not to go anywhere until I talk to them,” she ordered.

  Tacho punched in Matt’s number.

  A gruff male voice answered.

  “¿Qué onda?” it said.

  “Uh… Matt?” asked Tacho.

  “He gone out, ese. Bye.”

  “No! Wait!” Tacho shouted. “Is Nayeli there?”

  “Nayeli? Who jou think Matt go out with, pendejo?”

  “Oh.”

  “Hey, is this the maricón?”

  “Oh, no,” Tacho said. “Not you.”

  “I am Atómiko.”

  “God hates me after all,” Tacho replied.

  Rigoberto dropped Tacho off at the visitors’ center on Mission Bay. He wasn’t into teary good-byes or big kisses. They slugged each other on the arms, and they pushed each other a couple of times, and they threw a wide back-slapping abrazo. They could have been celebrating a football win.

  Rigoberto leaped into the BMW and jauntily sped to the freeway ramp. Tacho strutted around happily, in case Rigo was watching in the mirror. When the big black land-shark had vanished in the traffic, Tacho sat on a bench and held his head in his hands. He wasn’t going to cry. He wasn’t a teenage girl; he wasn’t Vampi or anything. Damn! He wiped his eyes. He walked down to the water, then he walked back.

  He called Matt’s house on the pay phone.

  The girls erupted in screams and bellows and shrieks and sobs.

  Tacho had to smile.

  In about fifteen minutes, a battered old pickup truck pulled into the lot. A terrifying Aztec covered in devil tattoos got out and glared at him. His T-shirt bore a dreadful occult symbol and the inscrutable words FIELDS OF THE NEPHILIM. Whatever that was, it couldn’t be good.

  Tacho wasn’t sure what was going on. Was he going to get bashed? Oh, shit. He wasn’t as good a fighter as Nayeli.

  The heavy-metal monster slouched toward him. The girls had given El Brujo a password. He didn’t understand it, but they said Tacho would. They said to find a boy with blond spikes. Mostly, it was old ladies and moms with strollers. Just this one guy.

  El Brujo walked up to Tacho’s bench.

  He looked around, not making eye contact. He crossed his arms.

  He said: “Yul Brynner.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Poor Matt Johnston. He had never heard such shrieking, seen so many girlie tears. You’d have thought some freaking movie star had arrived in the duplex. Or the Queen of England. Ha! The Queen! He rubbed his gut. They actually butted him out of the way to get at the dude. And who wore spikes in their hair anymore? What was up with that?

  He was stretched out on Carla’s rattan couch.

  “They run you out?” she said.

  “There’s too many of ’em,” he replied. “Like, where was I gonna sleep, right? There’s three chicks and two dudes in there! Where’s ol’ Matt going to crash?”

  He toked deeply out of the Phish bong she had set on the wooden spool table.

  “Baked goods,” she said.

  They snorked and horked as they laughed.

  “Jes’ like Grandma used to make!”

  Matt answered his own question: “Ol’ Matt’s gonna sleep with Carla.”

  She glommed on to the bong and baked for a full minute.

  “You. Know. It. Babe,” she choked.

  “I mean, dude!” He gestured to the heavens. “Illegal aliens!”

  “Whoa.”

  “Am I right?”

  “Build a fence.”

  “Right?” He reached out. “Pass it, man! Don’t hog it! Damn.”

  Gurgle-gurgle-gurgle.

  The smoke filled the house with a blue haze. It smelled like a fire in a rope factory. Carla held up a pink stuffed pig and made it dance on the table. This reduced her to snorts of hilarity. Matt’s puzzled face only made her laugh harder.

  “Whatever, Carla,” he said. “I’m spilling my guts here.”

  “You Grinch,” she scolded.

  He apparently didn’t hear her. “Fly Like an Eagle” was cranking on her lil’ bookshelf stereo.

  “I oughta call the freakin’ Border Patrol on ’em!”

  He laughed. She laughed.

  “Oh, wow!” she noted.

  “The trouble with illegals,” Matt announced, “is that they get in and settle like they own the place. Then, like, you never get rid of ’em.”

  “Like, Spanish an’ shit.”

  “You got that right.” He nodded. “Red, white, and blue, right? These colors, uh, don’t… run.”

  Pause.

  “That’s deep, Matt. Deep shit.”

  Long pause.

  “This here is some deep shit,” he said, waggling the bong at her. She beamed. Good ol’ Carla. She could still get the righteous bud. She still had what it took, even if her teeth were starting to fall out.

  Matt staggered over to her kitchenette and peered out her tiny window at his mom’s duplex across the alley.

  “I gotta admit, though, I’m totally swooping on that chick.”

  “Which chick?”

  “The cute one.”

  “Huh,” said Carla.

  She had to hit the bong with her lighter again. Fumed up and coughed and wrinkled her nose and got her smoke on.

  “I can’t even tell ’em apart,” she confided.

  They were dancing in there. Alex the Brujo had come up from work and was frying up meat and beans. Tacho had some kind of disco radio blaring. Atómiko wasn’t into that. He was happy the maricón was free from jail and all—but disco dancing? He shook his head. He sat on the front porch and smoked a cigarette, nursing a tepid Tecate. The sky was overcast. Atómiko could see the faintly pastel lights of the city glowing in the bellies of the clouds. He wondered if his jefito and jefita could see clouds in Heaven. They were
long gone, of course. It hurt him to think he sometimes could not recall his mother’s voice. What did it sound like? Sometimes, he caught a tiny wisp of her laughter in his memory. He shook his head to clear it. He drained the beer and tossed the can on the lawn. He took up his staff and prodded the dead grass.

  He liked the United States. Like the gringos said: So far, so good. The air was cool and clear up here. The cars looked good. The women were nothing but fine! He could get into some of these ten-foot-tall American women! ¡Ay, caray!

  But he was missing his little hut beside the dump. He’d made it himself. Wooden pallets for floors. Wooden garage doors for two of the walls. He’d managed to cobble together some sheets of plywood and a classroom blackboard for the third wall. Most of the fourth wall was a chicken wire fence he’d attached cardboard to with little wire ties. He covered the fence with plastic bags that he insulated with newspaper duct-taped to the inside. That cabrón was tight—waterproof and snug. He’d cleverly hung a faux Persian rug off the top for a door. Inside, he had a fine plastic jug for water, a small stove fashioned out of a heater—the chimney was hammered cans. He had old magazines in there—death rags and a few moisture-swollen porno beauties—his favorite a hilarious black-and-white bondage magazine from the 1950s. For a bed, he had stuffed a cardboard shipping box with wadded papers and laid a slightly soiled Boy Scout sleeping bag over it. Un pleeping bek, he called it. Two rough wool blankets kept him warm enough—when it turned cold, he wore all his clothes and laid a few plastic bags over the lot, and if he didn’t want to be comfortable, he could get in the bag or even under it. Warmth outweighed a soft bed any day.

  The roof of his shack was slats, bits of pallets, and tar paper that he’d bought with the money he’d earned recycling bottles. One hundred fifty pounds of glass got him one US dollar. Copper usually paid much better, and aluminum was about the same as the glass. What did he care? It was all work, and all money! A dollar for glass was as good as a dollar for Pepsi cans. It bought the same tortilla. It bought the same beer.

  Like everybody else in the dompe, he had burned old mattresses and collected their inner springs and frames. They made fences, and Atómiko had a sweet fence that ran from the back of his hut to about twenty feet in front of it. To come in off the street, you had to unbind barbed wire holding his gate shut. He often nursed abandoned dump puppies back to health, so there were usually guard dogs loyal to Atómiko in the yard. Nobody was going to mess with him.

  He lay back on the duplex’s cement slab of a porch. Felt the heat of the day radiate into his back.

  “What can I say?” he muttered aloud. “It’s a good life.”

  Chava Chavarín had the night off. It was a rare treat for him, to actually have somewhere to go where he could forget his sorrows. The girls had invited him to meet their friend, recently released from the clutches of the migra.

  They delighted him. He realized there was no one in Los Yunaites who could transport him so easily to Tres Camarones, the Camarones that throbbed in his mind every night, the old world that would not let him sleep, that would not allow him to read a book or watch a movie. Every hamburger tasted like cardboard to him when he thought of the red chile–soaked shrimp of his home-land! His tidy little apartment in Kensington felt like a tomb when he recalled the narrow cobbled alleys of his boyhood! Those alleys hung with red blossoms and wooden gates! Those alleys that ran with floods every June—where chickens and car tires and tree branches and girdles sped down the flood to the river! In Camarones, he had never been cold—not once! In Camarones, he had been a fire on two legs, he had been a human waltz and a walking tango, he had brought music and cologne into the plazuela on each humid mysterious love-scented Saturday night! Talking to Nayeli brought it all back, rich and sweet.

  He steered his sensible little used car along the slow lane, thinking of his fat-bottomed Irma! How her ankle-high white socks had inflamed his passion! How they had danced to “Begin the Beguine” at the Club de Leones New Year’s Eve Ball! He in a pearl dinner jacket with a small black rose pinned to his chest, and she in a puffy skirt resplendent with tiny white polka dots and her feet in saddle shoes!

  Who could understand such things? The grace and magic of such things? The unbearable erotic promise of those small ankle socks! He was ashamed to acknowledge that in his lonely room, he gave in to sexual urges remembering the socks coming off Irma’s paper-white feet! Who in Los Yunaites could know the secret these Tres Camarones warrior girls knew deep in their bones? The smile of Nayeli! The toss of Yolo’s hair! The hand gestures of Vampi! They were all like occult rites that transported him back to the holy years of his youth! To the lost religion of Mexican womanhood!

  He veered into the passing lane and cut off a small Toyota truck. The driver honked and sped past, making rude gestures. Chava Chavarín was blind to him. He was seeing the river, the movie theater, the whitewashed tree trunks, and the bobbing Christmas lights of his sacred homeland. He was fretting, too. Worried that now, in his ruined state, along with his long-standing shame, his Irma would look upon him with revulsion… or worse, pity.

  As if driving itself, the car left the freeway and started up the hill, an ascension.

  ¿Qué onda, guey?” Atómiko shouted when Chava Chavarín walked up to the door.

  Inside, Chava said to Nayeli, “That boy keeps calling me a buffalo.”

  He enjoyed a brief dance with Nayeli—he kept her at a decent arm’s length—and he was surprised that he also enjoyed El Brujo’s cooking. Tacho seemed like a pleasant young man. All in all, it was a fine evening for Chava, and he was sad to realize he had so few nice evenings—if he wasn’t working, he went alone to the movies at the Ken theater or he read books in a booth at the Golden Dragon restaurant; he was partial to the poems of Ali Chumacero. Sometimes, he bought flowers for his apartment. Little Nayeli and her silly friends made him understand how alone he was.

  In a break from the music and eating, Chava pulled Nayeli aside.

  “There is something I want to show you,” he said.

  “¿Sí?”

  He nodded.

  “I know a young man—a boy, really. He’s a good boy. He works as a migrant harvester. Lives in a camp. I don’t know, but I think, perhaps…” He smiled self-consciously. “He could handle your bandidos. He was in the Mexican navy, you see. I believe he knows judo.”

  “We have a navy?” she said.

  “Yes, we do. I think we have one ship.”

  They laughed.

  “If you don’t mind my saying so,” Chava continued, “he might be a little more suited to your needs than myself or… the Wizard.”

  Nayeli glanced in the kitchen. El Brujo was showing the devil’s horns to Vampi with both hands. She jumped into his arms. His left wrist had 666 tattooed on it.

  “I am old, and probably not even wise. But Angel is young, strong, and a good boy.”

  “I would love to meet him.”

  “Tomorrow?” Chava asked. “I can come for you.”

  “Yes, sir,” Nayeli said. “I would like that.”

  “You won’t be sorry,” he said.

  Atómiko walked by.

  “Famous last words,” he said.

  The Battle of Camp Guadalupe started simply enough. Chava Chavarín knocked on Matt’s door at eight the next morning. Nayeli was ready for him, freshly showered, perfumed, brushed out, wearing Carla’s Depeche Mode T-shirt. She wore Tacho’s tiny purse over her shoulder. She gave Chava his morning abrazo and delighted him with a chaste kiss on the cheek. Oh, paragon of Mexican girlhood! Oh, product of good breeding and traditional manners!

  “Ready?” he said.

  “Ready,” she replied.

  They stepped off the porch.

  “Wait a minute!” called Tacho.

  “Oh?” said Chava.

  “Tacho wants to come, if you don’t mind,” Nayeli explained.

  “Oh! Not at all!”

  Tacho came out in tight white jeans and checkerboard Vans sl
ip-ons from the Rigo Boutique.

  Chava was going to say, That’s quite an outfit for going to a migrant camp but held his tongue. These kids did things their own way.

  They had started toward the car when the heinous croak of Atómiko arrested them midstride: “Hey, guey! You ain’t going without me!”

  Chava cast a slightly irritated look at Nayeli. Gentlemanly yet firm. She shrugged and hit him with that hopeless smile of hers.

  “You’re bringing the stick?” Chava complained.

  “La mera neta, socio,” proclaimed the Grand Cholo.

  “What did this fellow say?” Chava asked.

  “He said yes,” Tacho translated.

  They got into the car.

  “Hey, Grandpa,” Atómiko said. “Buy us some pancakes.”

  Chava was driving north. “You don’t want to go too far north,” he said. “The Border Patrol has checkpoints on the freeway. We’d most certainly be stopped. I would go to jail!” This seemed to amaze him; he hadn’t thought about it before.

  Nayeli turned in her seat and traded looks with Tacho. Atómiko was snoring.

  “I met Angel,” Chava continued, “when my car broke down. I was on the side of the road, and this old van jammed with men came along. When they stopped and the doors opened, I thought I was going to be robbed. But out jumped this young fellow from Michoacán. I hate to admit to you that I am not very good at automobiles. Repairs?” He shrugged. “But young Angel had my car running in a few minutes, and he would not let me pay him. He has come to visit me at the bowling alley. I arrange with the counter girls to slip him free meals.” He tapped Nayeli’s knee. “He’s handsome, too.”

  From the backseat, Tacho piped up: “Oh, good!”

  Chava looked at him in the rearview mirror with a bemused half-smile on his face.

  They were in Del Mar, on the far side of La Jolla. The ocean was insanely blue—Nayeli thought she could see porpoises in the surf, cruising north. Surfers rode the sultry little waves toward shore. Hang gliders like giant multicolored kites drifted in the sky.