Into the Beautiful North

by Luis Alberto Urrea

  “Cervantes,” Nayeli said. “Pepe.”

  “You come all the way from Sinaloa?” the cop asked.

  “Excuse?” Nayeli asked.

  “¿Viniste desde Sinaloa?”

  “Sí.”

  He whistled.

  “That’s a long trip.”

  He got on Mary-Jo’s phone and made several calls. Mary-Jo smiled at Nayeli. “I love Mexico,” she said. “It’s such a fascinating country!”

  “Yes,” Nayeli managed to say.

  Mary-Jo patted her arm.

  “Mexicanos,” she said in accented Spanish, “son nuestros hermanos. En Kankakee—todos son bienvenidos.” She beamed. So did Nayeli.

  The cop dialed around for half an hour, jotting notes. He finally hung up the phone. Looked at his notebook.

  “There’s a gentleman,” he said, “on the north end, around the corner from Donna’s. Might be our man.”

  “Donna’s is our pink building,” Mary-Jo said. “It’s quite a sight.”

  “Yes, I saw. Pepto-Bismol!”

  The librarian and the cop burst out laughing.

  He jotted down the address on a sticky note.

  “Got a car?”

  “No.”

  “Oh,” Mary-Jo said. “I never went for lunch. Why don’t I take her myself.”

  “Are you sure? I can take her.”

  “No, no. I’ll be glad to do it.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “No, that’s all right.”

  They were actually arguing about doing something nice for Nayeli. She loved KANKAKEE, ILLINOIS. It was the strangest place she had ever been.

  It’s not far,” Mary-Jo said as they got into her car. “Just take a minute.”

  They pulled out of the lot and turned up the hill and beat it through the yellow light at the intersection.

  “Our town,” Mary-Jo said, “has seen some hard times. But it’s a wonderful place. We’re bringing it back.”

  They drove through the northern end of town, past the bathtub Jesus, to a small street near Donna’s pink emporium.

  “This is the street,” Mary-Jo said. She slowed to make the turn, stopped at the stop sign.

  “Is OK. I walk from here.”

  “Oh no, dear. I couldn’t just drop you off.”

  “Yes, please. I must go. Sola. Yes? Is my father. Ha pasado mucho tiempo, y usted sabe que es difícil para mi.”

  Mary-Jo looked at her. She nodded. She gave Nayeli a small hug.

  “Good luck,” she said.

  Nayeli got out.

  “Gracias,” she said, unable to say more.

  Miss Mary-Jo waved her fingers and grinned and spun a quick U-turn and drove back into town. Nayeli stood and watched her go. She had the address in her hand. She breathed deeply and turned and started to walk.

  She squinted at the doors of the little houses. Some of the people here had statues of geese in their yards, and they had dressed these geese in long skirts and bonnets, or in overalls. Nayeli didn’t understand what the goose thing was all about. She apparently missed the address, too, because she ended up at a dead end. A barrier ran between two cottonwoods, and beyond it, a little green tractor sliced the mud of a field into curls of deep chocolate, as if God’s own birthday cake were on the platter. Beyond the field, old highway 57 carried its endless stream of big trucks. Maybe she’d have a big black chocolate cake with her father when they celebrated.

  She turned back and started walking the other way, watching for the number.

  Was he there? Did he share a house with other men? Was he well? Surely he would laugh when he saw her. He would hurry to her and lift her in the air and spin around like he did when she was small. He would smell of Old Spice and his whiskers would prickle her face and she would cry, ¡Papá!

  What would she tell him? Where would she begin? With Irma’s election? With Yul Brynner? She laughed out loud. ¡Ay, Tía Irma! Yul Brynner! She put her hand over her mouth—she didn’t want people thinking she was a madwoman. She snorted.

  The trip, the Border Patrol, the dump… it had all been worth it. Just to take her father home. Just to see her mother’s face. She bounced on her sore feet.

  She passed the cross street and walked on. A big new pickup stopped behind her at the cross and made a left turn. She could hear the music beating from the cab as it drove up behind her then passed slowly. Some accordion banda music. Crazy norteño cowboy music.

  The truck was a fat-bottom Dodge, electric blue. It had four wheels in back, and a bright silver toolbox in the bed. Twin aerials waved in the air. On one, the US flag, and on the other, the Mexican flag. Nayeli laughed again: in the darkened back window of the cab, there was a white cartoon of a bad boy peeing.

  The big truck banged up into a driveway and shut down. The music snapped off. The door opened and a pudgy woman in yellow stretch pants crawled out of the passenger’s side. She reached into the back—there were more seats back there. She unbuckled a toddler from a car seat and hefted him onto her hip. Nayeli could hear her voice but not what she was saying. She hurried, hoping to ask her if she knew Papá.

  The driver got out on his side. He slammed the door and came around to the woman’s side. He wore a straw cowboy hat and boots and tight jeans. Nayeli stopped where she was.

  Don Pepe.

  “¿Papá?” she murmured.

  He had gotten fatter. His butt was round and his belly hung over his big belt buckle. He threw his arm around the woman and hugged her, turned her toward the house. He unlocked the door as Nayeli stared. He took off his hat and laughed at something the woman said and accepted a kiss on the mouth from her and smacked her bottom as she yelped and skipped inside. He briefly scanned the neighborhood—his eyes passed right over Nayeli—before stepping inside and slamming the door.

  The street was silent. Not many birds at all, and the ones that were there weren’t singing, just making desolate little cheeping noises. She could hear the tractor, of course. She could hear the engine of the big pickup truck ticking as it cooled.

  And then, all she could hear was the sound of her soles and her breathing as she sprinted away.

  Nayeli ran to the end of the block, to the barrier that ended the street. She jumped over it and ran out into the plowed field. The man on the tractor ignored her, as if he saw women in the rows every day. She shook, she gasped, she shouted as loud as she could.

  “FATHER!” she wailed.

  Over and over.

  There were no words to begin to describe what she felt.

  After an hour, she stepped back over the barrier. She walked down the street. She turned up Don Pepe’s driveway. She could hear the baby inside, crying. She reached into her back pocket, withdrew the postcard. She smoothed it carefully. She tucked it under his windshield wiper. Nayeli walked away.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  The van was dead. They abandoned it in the parking lot. Miss Mary-Jo drove them to the Trailways station.

  They pulled out of the lot and drove south, across the river.

  “You would have never found the station,” said Mary-Jo.

  “Gracias,” Nayeli replied.

  A sign promised: TUESDAYS TACO NIGHT.

  They beheld a small trailer park. A building offered smoked fish. They drove toward the Economy Inn.

  “What are you going to tell your mother?” Mary-Jo asked. “About your dad?”

  “Nothing. He was gone.”

  WELCOME TO YOUR HOME ON THE ROAD.

  “I am so sorry,” Mary-Jo said.

  SCHLITZ. THE CAPTAIN’S PUB. BUDWEISER.

  “Here we are.”

  She followed them into the lobby. It doubled as the bus station.

  Three men turned and stared. Ancient paneling. Cement steps. The smell of old men and old smoke and old breath.

  “How do,” the man at the counter said.

  “Two,” said Mary-Jo.

  “Right. Where to?”

  “Where are you going?” she asked.
r />   “San Diego.”

  “Right-o.”

  They paid for the tickets.

  On the television, CNN was showing a bleached and jumpy film of scores of Mexicans jumping over a fence and racing into Arizona. The three of them stood there, transfixed. The ticket seller turned and blushed. He snapped off the TV. He smiled at them in embarrassment. His teeth were brown and yellow.

  Nayeli loved him.

  The man said, “Sorry.”

  Tacho was studying the big route map on the wall. Their bus went right on down through Saint Louis. KC.

  “Please,” he said. “Not again.”

  The bus was coming. It rolled their way from the highway, made a sharp left into the lot. Pebbles and dirt clods crunched under its heavy tires. It groaned and hissed. The door opened. The driver got down, shook a leg, nodded to them.

  “Folks!” he said. “Be right with you. Got to point Percy at the porcelain.” He winked and strode into the lobby.

  The wind was blowing.

  Nayeli hugged Mary-Jo.

  “Adios,” she whispered.

  The driver came back, took their tickets, and climbed aboard. Tacho flew up the steps and vanished into the bus. Nayeli followed. Mary-Jo stood in the cold wind, waving farewell.

  The door closed. The bus burped and shuddered and rolled out of the lot. It turned right as the rain started to fall again. Mary-Jo ran to her car. When she looked back, the bus had vanished around the bend.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Calexico.

  Arnie Davis was back from San Diego, and his new uniform was roasting him. He was an agent, still, this week of yet another word-salad agency, the—what was it this time? The Customs and Border Enforcement, or the CBP or was it CPB? Whatevs, dawg. The government keeping itself busy.

  He pulled his steaming shirt away from his chest. Not for the first time, he wondered why, if the guys invariably had to patrol in hot places, did the government give them forest green outfits?

  Arnie didn’t know what was worse, the Tijuana border canyons or this brutal stretch of I-8. Looking into tourists’ cars at the roadblock. Boarding random buses, hunting for wets. Cripes. His knee was aching.

  Definitely about time to cash in those chips and get to the Rockies and do some fishing.

  He waved cars through. He grimaced. A Trailways bus was coming. He checked his forms, clicked the computer screen.

  “Time to roust the good travelers, Bob,” he said. His partner nodded. Why open your mouth to speak and lose more moisture to the burning air? He waved his hand, silently inviting Arnie to step right up and check that bus while he faded back into the shade and waited for a coed in a convertible to come along.

  Arnie planted himself on the shoulder of the slow lane. Cones were set out, shunting traffic over. It was all pro forma. Dull as a factory job making left-handed widgets nine hours a day.

  He flapped his hand up and down. The bus pulled over. He climbed aboard.

  “Routine check,” he told the riders. “How you doing?” to the driver.

  “I’m good,” the driver responded.

  Arnie nodded to the college kid in the first row. A fat Mexican woman in the third row already had her green card out and held up. He took it and scanned it. “Ma’am,” he said, handing it back.

  Everybody on the bus needed a shower.

  And then he got to the last row and beheld Nayeli and Tacho.

  He stopped dead and stared.

  “No way,” he said.

  “Is he calling you a buey?” Tacho whispered.

  Nayeli looked up. She was too spent to smile. She was done.

  “Hola,” she said.

  Arnie leaned on the seat back in front of her.

  “What was your name?”

  “Nayeli.”

  He shook his head.

  “I’ll be darned,” he said. “Hey,” he said to Tacho.

  “Hey,” Tacho said.

  “You’re Nayeli’s Al Qaeda friend.”

  Tacho nodded. He weakly put out his wrists, awaiting the handcuffs.

  Arnie looked around at all the heads studiously looking out the windows yet watching the events in the back of the bus.

  “Small world, isn’t it,” said Arnie to Nayeli.

  “We are in God’s hands,” she replied.

  These kids were so bedraggled it was almost funny.

  “OK,” Arnie said.

  He crooked his finger at them.

  “Vámonos,” he said.

  Embarrassed, they trudged down the aisle, being stared at by the other travelers. The driver got their little bags out for them. He didn’t make eye contact. They stood and watched the bus drive away.

  Arnie opened his truck’s rear gate.

  “In,” he said.

  They climbed in.

  He slammed it.

  “Bob,” he called over to the booth. “Two clients. Taking ’em in.”

  Bob nodded.

  “Groovy,” he said. He flashed Arnie a peace sign. Those migra agents. They were comical.

  Arnie pulled onto the freeway. Turned up the AC.

  “You OK back there?” he called.

  “Sí.”

  He watched Nayeli in the rearview.

  “Where’s that smile of yours?” he said.

  “Gone.”

  He drove a little farther.

  “Weren’t you looking for your father?” he said.

  “Sí.”

  “What happened?”

  “I found him.”

  “Oh.”

  The radio squawked.

  “Not so good, huh?”

  “Not so good.”

  Arnie pulled over. Put on his emergency blinkers.

  “You told me a crazy story, I remember. You were going to smuggle wets back into Mex. Isn’t that right?”

  They both nodded.

  “I don’t see anybody,” he said.

  “In San Diego,” Nayeli explained. “Twenty-seven.”

  “Bullshit!”

  “Is true,” Tacho said.

  “No!”

  Nayeli was so tired.

  “Twenty-seven men waiting for me in San Diego. We go back to Sinaloa.”

  Arnie laughed.

  He sat there looking out at the desert.

  “You thirsty?” he asked.

  “Oh, yes.”

  He got his thermal jug. He stepped out, slammed the door. Walked around. Opened the rear gate.

  “Don’t try anything stupid,” he said.

  He handed them the jug. They gulped the cold water.

  “Gracias,” they said.

  Arnie sat in the open gate, one foot on the ground.

  “Run this story by me one more time.”

  Nayeli started with Don Pepe. The bandidos. The election. The journey. (She left out the tunnel from her story.)

  He kept shaking his head.

  Finally, he said, “You’re not lying, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Is she lying to me?”

  Tacho said, “No.”

  It was the darnedest thing Arnie had ever heard.

  He hung his head and thought for a few minutes.

  He sighed. Rubbed his face. They were never going to make it through the gauntlet. They’d be caught and reprocessed.

  F-you money, he thought.

  What could they do to him?

  “I like you kids,” he said. “I really do.”

  He slammed the gate shut. Went back to his seat, radioed in to the station. Tacho and Nayeli didn’t understand the English or the migra codes. He eased back onto the freeway, pulled a U-turn, and drove them in the opposite direction. He got off the road and took them to a small house in a subdivision of Yuma.

  He cooked them some eggs and tortillas.

  Then, when night fell, he put them back in his truck, and he drove them west, never stopping until they hit San Diego.

  Epilogue

  The bad men had parked their trucks at the major corners
of the village. Black Cherokees and Tahoes with dark windows. They simply sat, idling, throbbing with music. Grandmothers kept their daughters in their houses. Irma, home from the Yunaites, had to send Chava and Garcí a-García to Mazatlán for their own protection from the bandidos. But she promised the women of Tres Camarones that change would soon come.

  Sensei Grey taught two new judo classes to those women who were sick of waiting for men to come.

  The pigs and the donkeys spent their nights engineering daring escapes from their pens. Dogs and chickens refused to let the mornings be silent. Huge coconut crabs wandered into town from the estuaries and climbed the coconut palms to snip the cocos free. They dropped to the ground and split with a sound like a single horse’s hoof on a cobble. The big crabs squatted over the brilliant white meat inside the broken shells and fed themselves with both claws, looking smug.

  A Cherokee sat dark as night in front of La Mano Caída, but the morning rose in spite of it, and the day ignored it. Mockingbirds insulted crows from every phone line, and hummingbirds were indistinguishable from the immense black bees that trundled down from the slopes of El Yauco to plunder the red hibiscus and trumpet vines. The skiffs with bundles covered in blue tarps had begun to come ashore; sullen men who spared no friendly word to the women or the children loaded and unloaded flatbed trucks.

  The day grew hot almost immediately.

  Women were already making tortillas at the market. Women set out stacks of hard cheese and bowls of dripping-wet cheese. Women with blue tin pots came in from the outskirts to sell their fresh milk. Other women stood in line to buy two eggs, three potatoes, a bolillo roll or two, a small jar of marmalade. They remained silent. They kept their heads bowed. The only music came from the black SUVs.

  Crazy Pepino was at work early. He rode his bike into the square as the sun rose every day. He swept the front steps of the Cine Pedro Infante. He cleaned the glass door with a squeegee. They were showing Taras Bulba and The King and I later that night. The window of a Tahoe rolled down, and a lit cigarette flew out and pinged off his head. Laughter.

  When he was done with the theater, he rode his bike to La Mano Caída. It was locked tight. Pepino swept the porch. Checked the locks. Checked the windows.