Into the Beautiful North Read online

  “Did you hear a duck quack?” he said.

  There was thump on the bedroom wall.

  “Yolo threw a shoe,” Matt noted.

  “The world,” Atómiko proclaimed, moved to alcoholic profundity, “is lost! Not just you, Mateo. Look at it, vato. Look! At the ice caps! At the pinchis Arabs! Look at, uh, the border and shit like that!”

  Matt could not drink any more. He put the bottle down and gave up trying to find the cap in the dark.

  “Grf,” he said.

  “Me?” Atómiko continued. “I was a soldier! That’s right! I was in the Mexican army! I was a sergeant! But so what—everybody in the Mexican army is a sergeant! My real name is Kiko. My mother call me that. But that was me! Soldier! How you think I became a warrior! You think I can’t kill everybody? I can kill everybody! I can kill the pinchis Mongols right now! I’ll go over there and do it!” He struggled symbolically to rise from the couch, then lay back down. “In a minute,” he said.

  “So how’d you end up in the garbage dump?” Matt asked.

  “I got caught stealing a chicken.”

  This struck them both as hilarious.

  After a while, Atómiko said, “Is not big deal. Everybody in the Mexican army steals chickens! But I was illegal in San Ysidro.”

  “Wow.”

  “Mexicano army don’t like that!”

  “Yeah. No.”

  “You steal chickens?”

  “Not so much.”

  “The Mexican army, they teach us English. Why I speak so good? Army! And they no pay in pesos, Mateo! They pay in gringo dollars!”

  “The Mexican army pays in dollars?” Matt managed to say, though his lips were completely numb.

  “Hell, yes. In Tijuana is all English and dollars. They know where everybody’s going when they get out!”

  “I’m going to sleep.”

  “Me, too.”

  “But first, I’m going to think about Yolo in that T-shirt.”

  “Me, too.”

  They chuckled and sputtered themselves to sleep.

  The girls crept around in the morning, doing their laundry in Ma Johnston’s little washer-dryer in the alcove by the back door. Nayeli and Yolo wore Matt’s T-shirts and nothing else. They were quiet because they couldn’t bear the boys looking under their hems. Vampi had found Ma Johnston’s tatty bathrobe. She was a sight—goth eyed and raven haired in an unraveling quilted puce wrap. The dryer banged and rattled, but it didn’t wake the guys. The girls nudged one another and laughed: Atómiko slept like he’d been shot in the head, and he had his right hand stuffed into his boxers. Matt was a lump on the floor. He had his head buried under his pillow. One-fourth of his bum-cleavage protruded whitely from his blue checkered boxers.

  The girls were dressed and drinking instant coffee before the guys even moved.

  Atómiko snorted, sat up and glared at them, rubbed his shaved head. He rose like a zombie and kicked Matt. “Pancakes,” he said. He staggered toward the bathroom, scratching his ass. He stood peeing with the door open. Nayeli went over and shut it. She shook her head. “What a pig,” she muttered.

  Matt sat up.

  His blond hair stood up all over his head. His eyes were puffy. He smiled like sunrise. Nayeli wanted to kiss him and climb under his blankets with him.

  “Good morning, beautiful,” he said.

  She thrilled.

  “Hi, gorgeous,” he said to Yolo, who still acted angry with him over last night but secretly smiled. Nayeli studied this stratagem. How did she do that? How did she scowl and smile at the same time? How did she know what angle worked best when she glanced sideways like that? Nayeli’s face just broke into her crazy smile and made her look like a clown.

  “Buenos dias, you goddess,” he said to Vampi.

  Vampi didn’t waste time worrying about how to deal with Matt. She walked over and plopped down beside him and pulled the covers over herself. She looked up at him and smiled.

  “Hello, handsome,” she said.

  Damn, Nayeli thought. Just like a puppy!

  Atómiko yelled from the bathroom: “Pancakes!”

  ¿Qué son pancakes?” Vampi asked.

  They were in the minivan, tooling down the street.

  “Son jo-keks,” Yolo said.

  “¿ Jo-keks? ¿Qué es eso?”

  They passed the Von’s market where Ma used to shop, and the library where she got her books, and they swung around a wide bend and were delighted to see the sweep of Mission Bay before them. It looked like Mazatlán.

  Atómiko said, “¡Los jo-keks son panquéquis!”

  “¡Qué!”

  Nayeli said, “It’s like a tortilla, Vampi.”

  Matt was laughing.

  “You put syrup on them. Butter. You know?”

  “No.”

  “They put blueberries in them. Or chocolate chips.”

  “Blueberries and syrup on a tortilla? Guácala. I will have huevos rancheros.”

  They pulled into the little strip mall at the bottom of the hill. There was the Jack in the Box they’d eaten at ten hours ago.

  “I been there,” Atómiko said.

  “You’re a local,” Matt said. “Leave your pole here, though.”

  They walked into the American Eagle diner. It was full of fat and happy Americans. Old duffers with white baseball caps cracked wise with the waitresses. The waitresses had stiffly sprayed hair-dos and frilly skirts. Paintings of rampant stags and soaring eagles graced the walls. The Camarones crew goggled. It was still 1965 in the restaurant, but they didn’t know that.

  “Hi, doll!” a waitress whose bosom proclaimed Velma! said to Matt. “Haven’t seen you for a while.”

  “You know,” Matt said. “My mom and all.”

  “Hey—we were so sorry to hear about that. It was real sad.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Five?” she said.

  “Yup.”

  She snagged five plastic-covered menus out of a slot in the counter and whisked them to a corner booth.

  “Booth all right?”

  “Great, thanks.”

  “Who’s your friends?” she said as they sat.

  “They’re old friends from the mission field.”

  “Oh! Missionaries!”

  It was too hard to explain, so Matt just smiled up at her.

  “Mexicans?”

  Matt nodded.

  “Welcome to the United States,” Velma! shouted at them as if they were deaf.

  Everyone smiled warmly, wondering if she was mad at them.

  “You’ll have to meet El Brujo. He’s around here someplace.”

  Vampi looked up: El Brujo? There was someone here named the Wizard?

  “Get you some coffee?” Velma! asked.

  Everyone nodded.

  “Please,” Matt said.

  “Five coffees. Coming right up, doll.”

  They stared out the big window at the spotless USA. People lined up across the street for five-dollar gas. No dogs anywhere. Skateboarders zoomed by on their way downhill.

  El Brujo appeared, carrying five waters. Vampi turned and froze. He wore an apron. He was as short as she was. His black hair was pulled back and hung in a heavy ponytail. She saw a dragon in the swirl of ink on his arms. But his T-shirt, his T-shirt! Nayeli nudged Yolo. They stared at the man as he put the glasses down, then went to retrieve five silverwear setups from his cart. The shirt was black, THE 69 EYES in red across the chest.

  “Oh, no,” Yolo said.

  “Vampi,” warned Nayeli.

  But Vampi was deaf to them. Vampi was turned in her seat. Vampi’s mouth hung open.

  El Brujo put down the napkin-wrapped forks and knives and glanced at Vampi. At the apartment, she had done her eyes in fresh death makeup. He smiled a little at her. He looked like an Aztec warrior.

  “Soy una vampira,” she whispered.

  El Brujo did a double take.

  “¡Ah, cabrón!” he said.

  The other girls were out of pr
actice. They didn’t remember how fast Mexican romances moved. By that evening, El Brujo had arrived at Matt’s duplex and swept Vampi off on a date. He drove a ’71 Chevy pickup that had a Héroes del Silencio decal in the back window. The girls were stunned and jealous. “Just like that?” they kept saying. “Just like that?”

  “We didn’t come here to get boyfriends!” Nayeli said.

  “We are not here to go on dates,” Yolo agreed.

  “We’re on a mission!”

  “We can’t fool around with boys—we came to save Tres Camarones!”

  Matt came into the kitchen.

  “Hola, Mateo,” Nayeli cooed.

  “¡Ay, Matt!” sang Yolo.

  “How are you?” Nayeli asked in English. Fou va jou?

  “Matt!” Yolo cried.

  He looked at them and smiled and got some water and went back out to watch wrestling with Atómiko.

  “Vampi,” Nayeli said, “is out of control.”

  “She’d better get her priorities right,” Yolo agreed.

  They sat in the pickup truck on Mount Soledad. The lights of San Diego were scattered before them. Rivers of high beams and tail-lights beneath them on I-5. The bizarre hair-thin beacon of a laser kept shooting over the mountain, some sort of urban art project. In the distance, the icy-looking white spires of a Mormon temple. And above them, the shining white cross Vampi had first seen when she’d jumped out of the smuggler’s truck. Had it been yesterday? Was that all? Every day seemed a week long to her. She watched the lights of a jet as it descended in the distance.

  “It’s magic, isn’t it,” El Brujo said.

  “It’s the prettiest thing I ever saw,” she replied.

  “You must not have looked in the mirror this morning,” he said.

  Oh, Brujo!

  Lovers were parked all around them. Music and smoke snaked out of cracked, foggy windows. El Brujo—his real name was Alejandro, but everybody called him Alex—kept the radio tuned to the Mighty 690, and he sang along softly when a good song came on. Vampi sat beside him with her fingers laced through his, rubbing his knuckles with her thumb. She looked at his ferocious profile, his luxuriant hair—he had let it down for her. His hoop earring made him look like a pirate. Sometimes, she was thinking, you just know. Did he know, too?

  “People don’t believe it because of the way I look,” he said, “but I don’t take drugs, and I don’t drink.”

  “Me, neither.”

  “I don’t smoke.”

  “Me, neither!”

  He leaned over and smelled her hair.

  “You are my drug, Vampira.”

  “Oh, Alex!”

  She furiously buffed his knuckles with her thumb.

  “This hill,” he said, “this is where all the rich bastards live.”

  “Oh?”

  “Part of the hill fell down, on the other side. It swallowed a bunch of their mansions.” He smiled. “God reminded them to be humble.”

  Vampi sighed. She scooted closer and put her head on his shoulder.

  “Besides,” he continued, “they’ll hire a bunch of Mexicans to fix it for them.”

  She raised his knuckles to her lips and rubbed them against her mouth.

  “We’ll live up here one day,” he added.

  She felt a jolt.

  “We will?”

  She fell upon his chest.

  He was quiet for a moment.

  “Probably not,” he admitted.

  “But we can make it magic wherever we are… right?”

  She was speaking into his collarbone. She wanted to nibble it.

  He put his arm around her.

  “I must have done something right,” he said. “For you to come into my life.”

  And he won her heart forever, in that instant, for he broke into song. His voice was deep, a rich baritone. And he sang it! He sang: “ ‘Just like a gothic girl, lost in the darken world.’ ”

  Vampi started to cry.

  Alex knew!

  He knew.

  He had come north from León, Guanajuato. He was a guitarist for a darkwave metal band in Mexico known as Cuernos de Hielo. But there was no money in Guanajuato for a darkwave band. And Alex’s family was hurting—his dad had retired, and his mom was caring for him with little money. So Alex had sought his fortune in Los Yunaites. Wasn’t that where all the big metal bands came from? Black Sabbath, for example. No, wait—Sabbath was from England. Cradle of Filth, maybe? England again. He gestured at his shirt, but Vampi just smiled sweetly. The 69 Eyes were from Helsinki, maybe, some pagan, Viking nosferatu place.

  “I think they worship Odin,” she noted.

  To his astonishment, Alex found out that there was not much market for an undocumented Aztec death shredder without a guitar and without any English at all. He thought anybody could become a rock star in the USA. He thought you got on MTV and got rich. He thought he’d be opening for Motley Crüe on a world tour. He didn’t think you hid from authorities and felt the Americans’ eyes pass right through you in the supermarket. If nobody could even see him, how was he going to get famous?

  It took him a year or two to admit that he never would get famous. He might never play in a band again. He fell into the slums in Logan Heights, southeast of the city, then worked his way up to a Taco Bell in Pacific Beach. He shared an apartment with five other chavalos from Chiapas and Guerrero. They were gardeners. They ate lunch at the pancake house one day and saw the cardboard sign in the window seeking busboys. They told Alex, and he found himself in the happy family of Velma! and her duffers.

  He’d been at the pancake house now for six years. His dad was dead. (“May he rest in peace,” Vampi said—Alex turned and looked into her eyes and kissed her savagely, unable to contain himself.) He had some money put away, but he was afraid to go to the funeral, so he’d sent it all to his mom via La Western Union.

  “Now what?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I’ve got this truck. I guess I’ll work six more years.”

  She nuzzled him. He smiled down at her. This sweet-smelling girl. She was so soft, so warm. She was better than a million bucks, right there in his truck. Alex hadn’t been with a woman in—well, it had been a long time. He wasn’t sure what to do.

  “Are you my girl?” he asked.

  “Is it crazy?” she said. “Is it too soon?”

  “You might as well ask the moon,” he said. “You might as well ask the stars.”

  In Vampi’s opinion, Alex spoke in song lyrics.

  The La Jolla laser came back on and shot a vivid emerald beam over their heads.

  It seemed like a sign.

  Everything seemed like a sign to Vampi.

  “My real name is Verónica,” she confessed.

  She climbed into his lap and kissed his mouth. She sat on the horn and startled all the lovers—the honk echoed down the hill. She grabbed two handfuls of hair and gazed into his eyes.

  “You could come back home with me,” she said.

  And she told him her story.

  Matt and Yolo looked in the phone book.

  “S. Chavarín,” he called out.

  “S.,” Yolo said. “Must stand for Salvador, you think?” Jou teen?

  “Sí,” Nayeli said. “Salvador-Chava. That must be him.”

  “La Osa’s boyfriend,” said Yolo.

  “No! You think so?”

  “Yeah.”

  Matt and Atómiko didn’t know what the fuss was all about.

  “You do it,” Nayeli said.

  Yolo smiled nervously and punched the numbers. It rang three times; she scrunched her nose at Nayeli. A man answered.

  “Hello?”

  “¿Señor Chavarín?” Yolo asked.

  “Yes?”

  “We are from Tres Camarones,” she said.

  “¿Qué?”

  “Tres Camarones. We have come from there, and we represent Irma García Cervantes.”

  “Dios mío.”

  “She is the Mayor of Camarone
s,” Yolo reported.

  He gasped.

  “Mayor? Irma?”

  “She asked us to call you.”

  He said: “I have to sit down.”

  Don Chava worked the night shift at the Hillcrest Bowl. He didn’t want them to go there. Yolo could hear the tone in his voice. She thought it was embarrassment. What was there to be embarrassed about? She herself worked in the Camarones bowling alley. She promised to call him in the morning. She hung up.

  “What’s he like?” Nayeli asked.

  “Sad,” Yolo replied. “Old. Nice.”

  She twisted the phone cord around her fingers.

  “He told me where he works. But he doesn’t want us to come.”

  Nayeli said, “Do you really think he’s Aunt Irma’s boyfriend?”

  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!”