Into the Beautiful North

by Luis Alberto Urrea

  Don Porfirio had worked the trash at the Fausto Gonzalez dump, while Doña Araceli dressed as a “María,” one of the indigenous alms-seekers, and walked the long streets of the city looking for coins. Don Porfirio used to say, “At least in Tijuana they have garbage,” because even the dumps of their homeland were barren and picked clean. But then the city of Tijuana closed down the Fausto dump, started trucking the trash to Tecate, and three hundred garbage-picking families had to find new ways to survive. Some followed the trash to Tecate. Some crossed into the US. Most struggled along like he did. Don Porfirio washed windshields. He didn’t beg—begging was for women, children, and the infirm. No, even if it was for two dollars a day, swiping a filthy rag on American windshields, breathing in exhaust fumes on the borderline, a man worked.

  Don Porfirio and Doña Araceli were on their way home to the dompe. They met at the fruit market and counted out their money. Not great: four American dollars. They bought some cheese, stale sweet rolls, and three potatoes. They saved enough to take the bus back to their small house in Fausto. Baptist missionaries had built their home out of old garage doors smuggled in from San Diego.

  It was Doña Araceli who saw the bedraggled group sitting on a folded rice bag made of burlap. They were so exhausted and filthy that nobody even yelled at them to get out of the way, and trucks pulled around them in the crowded lot. She pointed them out to Porfirio, and he laughed. He didn’t often see mestizos like these so beaten down.

  “They look worse than we do, vieja!” he said.

  She liked it when he called her “old woman.” In turn, she liked to call him “gordo,” though he was anything but fat. He would like to be fat. That would be nice. He would like to weigh three hundred pounds when he died, so it would take ten cabrones to carry his coffin.

  They ambled over to Nayeli’s group.

  “Are you all right?” Araceli asked.

  They looked up at her.

  “Indians,” said Tacho.

  “Yes,” said Porfirio.

  “We are in some trouble, I think,” said Nayeli. “But I’ll get us out of it.”

  Don Porfirio looked around, wiped his brow, sighed.

  “How?” he said.

  The four friends looked at one another and shrugged.

  “I want to go home,” Vampi told Don Porfirio.

  He nodded.

  Araceli said, “You are far from home?”

  Vampi nodded.

  “You are going over there?”

  Araceli nodded to the north.

  Vampi nodded again.

  “Are you?” Yolo asked.

  Porfirio laughed.

  “Me? Over there?” He waved his hand before his chest.

  “That’s not for us,” said Araceli.

  “We lost our things,” Nayeli said. She didn’t know why she was talking to these strangers, but they seemed kind. And she was tired. And she wanted to go home, too. She didn’t dare spend the rest of their money on hotels. Not yet.

  Porfirio and Araceli spoke softly in their own tongue. It was a melodic sound, full of vowels. Their hands moved slowly in the air as they spoke.

  “It will be night soon,” Araceli said.

  “Yes,” said Porfirio.

  “You do not want to be here at night.”

  “No, you don’t!” he agreed.

  “We are going home.”

  “Home for the night,” he said.

  “You should come home with us,” she said.

  “Why not,” he said.

  “It is humble.”

  “It is.” He nodded.

  “But God has been good to us.”

  “Amen,” he said.

  Nayeli looked in their battered dark faces. Porfirio had two yellow teeth in front. Araceli wore a bright red-and-yellow shirt. She extended her hand.

  “Come,” she said. “We will give you a bed tonight.”

  Nayeli let herself be pulled up. She didn’t know if she should trust them or not, but she didn’t know what else to do—she could think of no options. As soon as she was up, the others rose slowly. They stood in a loose bunch, looking at their feet.

  Don Porfirio said to Tacho, “I like your hair.”

  They mounted the ancient Chevrolet bus painted two-toned, in blue and white. The driver had hung baubles from the ceiling—he had brocade strung along the top of the windshield, and saints and skulls dangled from the loops of yarn. Nayeli insisted on paying the fare for Porfirio and Araceli. They let the doña sit, and the rest of them stood as the bus snorted through downtown and out the road toward Ensenada. Araceli held her bag on her lap. They made their way along crumbling dirt cliffs, and Nayeli looked up arroyos at paper-and-scrap shacks growing like toadstools in all the gulleys. They approached an army battalion’s base, and the bus mounted the periférico, the peripheral highway that cut around Tijuana from east to west. They drove a couple of miles until they came to a big flea market set up on the left side of the road. The signs said: SEGUNDA. The bus went down a ramp to the right and made a sharp left turn at some abandoned maquiladora warehouses, passing under the periférico through a tunnel covered with political signs: PRI, PAN, PRD. It began a slow trudge up a rough street that was mostly dirt and rocks.

  At the top of the long rise, Don Porfirio said, “Here.”

  The bus pulled over, and they hopped down on a slope of tan soil pocked with bits of glass and can lids. Five dogs danced and gamboled around them. Tattered paper kites rattled in the phone lines. Down the slope, car tires, car wrecks, and shacks crowded the arroyo. Nayeli could hear children yelling and playing.

  “This way,” said Porfirio, and walked across the dirt street and up a hill.

  They were too tired to be afraid or worried as they followed him. Araceli walked beside Nayeli, patting her back softly. The soil turned gray, then black. “We will fry potatoes,” Araceli said.

  Nayeli smelled smoke, and a tart, ugly stink.

  She saw gulls in great clouds above them, circling, whirling, so many gulls they looked like fog, like some strange tatters of white clouds blown by a hurricane rolling up the coast of Nayarit.

  They topped the rise, and Nayeli ran into the backs of her girls. They were standing there staring. She peeked around Yolo’s back and opened her mouth but said nothing.

  Tacho looked at her, and for once she thought she saw real awe in his face.

  “Home,” Don Porfirio said.

  Before them, a malodorous volcano of garbage rose two hundred feet or more. It was dark gray, ashen, black, and it was covered in flecks of white paper as if small snowdrifts were on its slopes. Gulls swirled and shrieked, and packs of feral dogs trotted downslope. The black mountain was stark. A road cut across its face, and far above, they could see and hear orange tractors moving soil over the trash. The sky above the hill was gray and heavy with clouds. Occasionally, smoke broke from the slope and curled away, blue and thin, in the wind. It made Nayeli feel cold.

  “From up there,” Don Porfirio said, pointing, “you can see America.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Huddled at the foot of the hill, dark brown men bent to small fires. They were burning electrical wires—the acrid chemical stink of the smoke wafted across to the friends. The men melted the plastic sheaths off the wires and sold the copper strands to the recyclers. Nayeli saw them poking at the small fires with sticks and small poles, hunched, cavemen in a wasteland. The sky peeled back for a moment, and a weak ray of sunset spilled over the scene like the diseased eye of some forgetful god—the light bearing with it cold in place of heat.

  A gust of wind came from the ocean. They were astounded to see a bright vista of the Pacific to their right. Copper sun fell upon the water. The wind had shattered the clouds there and spilled rainfalls of illumination. Fat oil tankers lounged in the glow, and beyond, islands could be seen on the horizon. It looked warm.

  “Is that Hawaii?” Vampi asked, but they all told her not to be an idiot.

  The ocean breeze lif
ted white plastic bags from the slopes of the black hill. They rose like ghosts. It was quite beautiful. The bags floated silently in waves, soaring and falling, and drifting, too—pale balloons full of unwanted wind. They drifted off the slopes and settled slowly upon the foreground, a dry empty crescent of graves and rough holes in the ashen soil. All before them, a crude cemetery sprawled. Uphill, to the east, a squat crematorium waited in a fenced enclosure. Its chimney was not spewing smoke, and its door hung open, but the chain-link gate was sealed with a great combination lock. Sweeping past them, at the foot of the garbage volcano, were graves. Some were cement slabs. Some were bare mounds of trash and pebbles. Nayeli saw many handmade crosses—blue wood, red and white wood. A rusted tractor sat at the edge of the boneyard, a backhoe. Its rear claw was raised and frozen in place, caked with old, hard mud. It was posed like a huge scorpion, forgotten there. Before it, seven open holes.

  To the west, set against the vista of the sea and the islands, was a low hill covered in a hundred small plots. Cribs and playpens stood guard over these rectangles. Some cribs were painted. Wild mustard and dandelions sprouted among them.

  “The children,” Tacho said.

  And he was right. As they moved down the slope, following Doña Araceli, they saw names painted on the baby furniture. Old glass jars with wax flowers. A doll propped against a baby’s crib, all of it muddy and collapsing in the ashes. Huge truck tires lay at the foot of the children’s hill. Collapsed graves festered in the mud, small crosses tumbled. The smell of human feces rose from the centers of the tires.

  Beside this long, sad place, there were many houses. Porfirio stood in the doorway of a square blue shack and waved at them. “Come!” he was calling. “Welcome!”

  The four friends reached out for one another as they walked, and they held one another’s hands.

  Life is good!” Don Porfirio hollered.

  Tacho had made the mistake of walking down to the bodega of the barrio to buy eggs, and he spied a bottle of rum and bought it as a gift. Now Don Porfirio guzzled rum from a peanut butter jar and danced in place, raising dust from the floor of the shack. The girls sat on an ancient bunk bed jammed in a corner—salvaged, though they didn’t know it, from the trash. On the other side of the bare room, Porfirio and Araceli’s sagging bed. The shack smelled of smoke and spoiled lard. Tacho sat on a wooden kitchen chair as Porfirio danced. Nayeli wondered if he was doing a Mixtec dance or an alcoholic shuffle. She did not know.

  Araceli had a stove, set halfway between the bunk beds and the other bed. It was really the shell of a stove, and Araceli was stuffing paper wads into the oven and lighting them. Fire came out of the burner holes on top. She fed twigs in, then a few chunks of two-by-four, and slammed the oven door closed. She put a big pan on a burner and amazed the friends by lifting a hinged flap in the wooden wall so the smoke could go outside. She fastened the wooden shutter to a hook screwed into the wall.

  “I invented that!” Porfirio shouted. “I am a genius!”

  “Bravo,” Tacho said. He sipped some rum from a plastic Ham-burglar cup.

  The girls just stared. They were appalled by the filth. They were scared of the dump and the dirt. Yolo could almost see tides of lice awakening and creeping toward her. Her scalp crawled with imagined vermin. She began picking at herself, sure that little creatures with many legs were piercing her scalp and depositing disease in her flesh.

  Doña Araceli sliced her potatoes with a huge knife. They sizzled in the melting lard. Nayeli’s stomach growled as soon as the heady odor hit her. Vampi moaned. Araceli deftly diced an onion and dropped it in with the thin slices of potato. She poked at it with her knife. When this part of their supper was done, she slid it onto a cracked plate and immediately broke Tacho’s half-dozen eggs into the skillet and fried them. The girls had never smelled anything so delicious in their lives.

  Porfirio stopped dancing long enough to pull a small table in from the yard and set plates all around.

  “Six plates,” he noted. “It is a feast. God is great! Isn’t God great, vieja?” he called to Araceli.

  “God is great,” she replied, putting a little food on each plate. Porfirio followed her, placing two stale rolls on each plate.

  He produced a huge can of jalapeño peppers.

  “Missionaries!” he crowed. “God loves chile!”

  He handed each of them a fork.

  “Let us pray,” he said.

  They gathered at the table and held hands. Porfirio was listing to port. Nayeli thought he’d fall over. But he smiled and tipped back his head and said, “Thank you, God!”

  Two tears rolled down his face.

  “Amen!”

  Tacho sat, then noticed that none of the rest of them had chairs, so he stood back up. They stood eating together, and when the main meal was gone, they wiped the grease off the plates with pieces of sweet roll. Porfirio laughed all the way through the meal, patting Tacho’s spiky hair.

  “Do my hair like that!” he kept repeating.

  They all laughed.

  After a while, a baby pig wandered in, followed by a yellow duckling. Porfirio tossed them bits of his rolls. He laughed again when the animals vanished under his bed for a good night’s sleep.

  The outhouse was noxious, and nobody wanted to use it.

  It was very hard to get comfortable on the narrow mattresses of the bunk beds, and Tacho gallantly insisted on sleeping at the foot of the bed, on a folded blanket. It broke Nayeli’s heart to see him lying in the dirt, but he was so rummed up he fell asleep quickly. He snored, but so did Porfirio and Araceli. They had hung a blanket between the two halves of the room to give the friends some privacy. Everyone slept in their clothes.

  Yolo took the top bunk and refused to share it, so Vampi lay across Nayeli, on the bottom, whimpering and muttering in her sleep, sticking her foot in Nayeli’s back, laying her arm over her neck. No wonder Yolo was sick of sharing a bed with the Vampire.

  At dawn, Nayeli rose and slipped her shoes on and stepped outside.

  The dump was still. The light was the color of a winter ocean, and a thin pall of smoke lay over the village. Chickens clucked softly around her. She could hear snoring coming from the shacks on either side. Suddenly, a rooster down the block let loose his call. Pigs snorted and fretted.

  The yard was a small patch of gray soil. Doña Araceli had planted roses. Nayeli was startled by them. The fence was apparently made of bedsprings, tied together. The pig next door shoved its snout into the fence and wiggled its nostrils, trying to catch a whiff of Nayeli. All along the fence, rosebushes bloomed. Red roses, pink roses, yellow.

  She stepped out into the dirt alley. A dog with peeling fur stood and wagged its tail at her. She waved her hand at it to try to make it back off. It trotted to her and put its filthy head against her leg.

  Nayeli backed away from the dog and wandered down the alley to the edge of the cemetery. She was startled to see smoke rising from one of the graves. The crosses and painted furniture were stark in the morning light. Etched like charcoal drawings. Somewhere, a radio was playing—she recognized the song. Dave Matthews. She always liked that rola, the one where he asked the woman to crash into him, though now it seemed like the loneliest thing she’d ever heard.

  It shook her, this place. It was awful. Tragic. Yet… yet it moved her. The sorrow she felt. It was profound. It was moving, somehow. The sorrow of the terrible abandoned garbage dump and the sad graves and the lonesome shacks made her feel something so far inside herself that she could not define it or place it. She was so disturbed that it gave her the strangest comfort, as though something she had suspected about life all along was being confirmed, and the sorrow she felt in her bed at night was reflected by this soil.

  She stepped toward the graves. She had to touch them. She had to see the names painted on the crosses. She smiled. She was acting like Vampi—Nayeli, the Goth.

  There was no one in sight as she passed among the graves. She picked a few blue flowers fr
om the weeds and put them on the mounds. She picked trash off the cement slab of Uvaldo Borrego. She straightened the tilted cross of María Zepeda and braced it with stones.

  She stood among the graves and looked back at the huts and shacks of the village. If she squinted, it almost seemed rustic—a sweet little town painted in all the Mexican primary colors. Somewhere, Tacho had found a store. She wondered if there might be a telephone there. She had Irma’s number memorized. And she had Matt’s card in her pocket. Should she call?

  She heard a voice behind her say, “Psst!”

  She glanced.

  An awful young man was standing on a garbage mound above her. She turned her back on him.

  “¡Oye, morra!”

  She moved away and stood by a fresh grave.

  Nayeli had just about had it with badly behaved border men.

  “¿No me oyes?” he called. “I’m talking to you.”

  “No,” she said. “I hear you. I am just not listening to you.”

  He stared down at her.

  “Your mistake, sweetheart,” he said.

  Chapter Fourteen

  There he stood, surveying his realm, the warrior Atómiko. King of the Hill. Baddest of the trash pickers. The master of the dompe, known by all, feared by many. He wore baggy suit trousers cinched tight at his narrow waist, a sleeveless white undershirt. His tattoos were exposed: Zapata on his right biceps, the yin-yang symbol on his left shoulder. Ever since he’d seen the movie Yojimbo on San Diego public television when he was stationed at the Mexican army’s dismal Seventh Battalion down the periférico, he knew he was a warrior. He’d formed a judo club in the barracks. He’d declared himself a samurai. And that’s what he was—his head was shaved and his brow was covered with an Apache red bandanna folded tight and tied just above his brows. His mustache drooped at the corners of his mouth, and his chin whiskers were getting thick, hiding the smallpox scars on his cheeks. Across his chest, a tight sash made from curtains he’d found before the dump was closed down. And beside him, his long samurai sword. Well, it was a staff. But it was noble and powerful in his hands.