Into the Beautiful North(9)
Irma stood. She smacked the sand off her legs.
“I have one word for the men,” she said as she stomped away. “Traitors!”
Nobody wanted to go home after their day at the beach, so they gathered at Tía Irma’s house on the corner of 22 de Diciembre and Madero streets to watch her color television. La Osa set the TV in the window, facing the street, and the guests all hauled chairs out onto the cobbles so they could feel the breeze. They watched a telenovela featuring savage love among hacienda owners in Brazil. Then they watched a telenovela that featured savage love among cattle ranchers in Durango. It grew dark. Cicadas knocked themselves senseless against the television screen. Bats twirled above them like leaves flying in a windstorm. Passersby called, “?Adios!” and all the watchers politely called back, “?Adios!”
When a car came down the street, they all rose and moved their chairs up onto the curb so the car could pass. They didn’t notice that one of the cars was the big narco LTD. “?Adios!” they called, then moved their chairs back into the narrow street. Nayeli watched everybody on the curb. She looked very carefully. And she realized Tacho was right. There was nobody left in town but women, old men, and little children.
Adios.
Chapter Five
Although the Mexican government didn’t seem to know where Tres Camarones was, its citizens knew in their hearts that they were Sinaloans. They listened to Sinaloan radio from XEHW in Rosario; they did their shopping in Villaunión; and when they went to the big city, as Irma and the girlfriends had done this morning, it was the long jaunt by dirt track and two-lane highway to Mazatlán.
Irma had maneuvered her apocalyptic 1959 Cadillac through the murky verdure surrounding Tres Camarones and hit the main road by 9:00 AM. The notorious girlfriends had snored and snuffled in the big backseat as she drove. Vampi had not been allowed to wear black clothes or black makeup, so she had miserably reported to Irma’s house clad in an orange jumper. “?Así se viste una se?orita!” La Osa had enthused, brusquely turning her back and forth, and grabbing her chin to inspect her freshly scrubbed face. She approved: that was the way young ladies dressed.
“You’re not even half ugly,” she had added.
They’d cut through the great green lowlands—white birds exploded from the fields. The highway to the Durango mountains whipped by, and Irma had told them for the hundredth time that there were waterfalls up there, and one day, when she wasn’t so busy, she’d drive them up there for some roasted goat. They’d love the waterfalls—very fresh and chilly. “I went there once,” she intoned, “with Chava Chavarín!”
“Who?” Vampi said.
The girlfriends no longer listened to these empty promises. They nodded off to the relentless hum and rattle of the Caddie.
Irma barely saw the oldest cowboy in Mexico trotting along the road on his ancient pony. He lifted his hat to her. She waved with one finger.
Irma lit a cigarette, jabbed on the radio, and heard Agustín Lara. Ah, real music! Not this idiotic ass-twitching noise the girlfriends listened to. Or worse, that norte?o crap with the accordions, rube music for cocaine smugglers. La Osa tipped down the rearview mirror and checked her teeth for lipstick and tobacco shreds. She watched the girlfriends leaning against each other’s shoulders, sleeping with their mouths open.
“My black-eyed girls,” she said.
Tía Irma turned to the vegetable seller in his booth and said, “What the hell is happening to these beans!”
“Excuse me?” he said, pausing in his inventory, holding the stub of a pencil above the wilting pink pages of an order pad. “There is something happening to my beans?”
“How dare you charge so much for beans!”
“Charge?” he said. He looked at the hand-lettered tag he’d magic-markered onto a fragment of manila folder two days ago. “No,” he said, “this is the rate.”
“?Es una infamia!” she said. “?Es un robo!”
“No, no, se?ora,” he said—not knowing he’d just made her even angrier because she’d never been married and didn’t intend to have the slave’s moniker of “Mrs.” applied to her under any circumstances. “This is the correct price.”
“First, tortillas,” she complained. “Now this. What’s next, water? Will you charge us for water? Ha! What are the poor people supposed to eat?”
He looked at her with wide eyes and shrugged.
“The poor?” he said. The poor did not shop at the fruit market—they sold lizards and birds and corn husk dolls on the highway. They ate armadillos. He didn’t have time for the poor.
Beyond the fruit market rose the green Mazatlán hills and the white cliffs of the gringo tourist hotels. They could hear joyous voices and splashing from the hotel pools. They could smell the salt of the sea among the odors of cut sugarcane and fish and crushed mangos and oranges. Music and radios and trumpets and whistling and laughter and shouts and truck engines and some idiot’s “La Cucaracha” car horn. Seagulls fighting over pieces of bread. Oyster shells.
“Forget the poor!” Irma shouted. “What about the good working people of Mexico!”
“Go, Tía,” Nayeli said.