A Good Country

by Laleh Khadivi

  Whatever we get here, it’s gonna be twice that down south.

  Rez said it like it was his talk, from the center of himself, not from the magazines and movies he pored over every night when he was supposed to be studying. It would be great. He knew it. Because of the Pacific shelf. Because of the curve of the land eastward and in. The waves would be higher by at least a foot and the rides would be longer by a minute. Rez didn’t say any of this to Kelly, but Rez knew it and kept quiet like someone who knows more, knows so much he doesn’t have to say.

  Kelly stared out over the pool and Rez watched the idea occur to him.

  Yeah. Baja would be sweet. I mean, anyone who stays here this weekend is a chump. We’d have to get a car. And a few more boards. And get out of school.

  Don’t stress, man. I’ve got it all figured out.

  Kelly laughed at Rez and took the bong back into his lap.

  Oh, do you? Mr. Strictest Parents in America? How are you going to figure it all out?

  I got it.

  I bet. Kelly lit the darkly packed ash and inhaled whatever was left.

  I bet you do, he repeated, exhaled.

  Baja. Man, sweet. I should have thought of it.

  But you didn’t, Rez told himself. I did and now we are going and it will be my trip and the stories that come will be because of me. He took the bong from Kelly.

  Yeah, bro, you would have thought of it eventually. It’s so obvious.

  By Friday they had a truck. Double cab, air-conditioning, a few inches above factory, a little tree air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror. Freddy, one of Matthews’s older brothers, a senior who’d dropped surfing to join the varsity football team, charged them twenty dollars a day. For the driver’s license with the picture of a red-haired, wide-shouldered, freckled jock that looked just like Peter Matthews but was named Fredrick Matthews, Rez agreed to take his SAT test for him. At first Freddy didn’t believe him, didn’t think it was possible, but Rez insisted, told him about the math whiz Arash who’d taken the test for Kelly’s older brother and no one ever found out and now Paul was a sophomore at MIT. They wrote up an informal contract on the back of Rez’s biology study sheet and the license was theirs. For the few days before the trip they practiced calling Peter Freddy but then realized they all called him Matthews anyway and so it didn’t matter.

  They stocked the truck as they saw fit. Eight boards, five wet suits, two tents, a cooler full of beer and cold cuts and vodka ice cubes Kelly’s sister had made them and no other food. No one brought a toothbrush and no one brought a pillow or soap. Their phones were full of music and a half pound of grass sat in the glove compartment next to a cake of board wax and gas station sunglasses. Rez thought to bring sunblock because he could hear his mother’s voice in his head—You are turning into a Pakistani—but he liked the new dark of his skin. More important his light brown hair was turning gold and something in his heart jumped every time he saw himself in the mirror.

  They left with the calm hearts of good liars. Rez forged a flyer on school stationery about a mandatory, last-minute field trip to Pyramid Lake. He went to the office of Mrs. Bonau and asked if she could find Mr. Francis’s yearbook picture for a retirement card the class was making, and when she left her desk to look, Rez took what he wanted of the stationery and a few envelopes and a stamp of the principal’s signature he thought might be useful later, if only for a good trade. The heart of prestigious Laguna Prep, all of it at his disposal. The courage was all of him, all through him, and before she came in he gathered himself on the right side of her office and pretended to stare out the window, staring instead at his reflection in the glass of the tall windowpanes, the orange skin and copper hair, the dumb visage of a bored lion.

  He chose chemistry because it was his best subject and he wrote out the information in the most succinct and forward manner possible.

  Unscheduled Field Trip Opportunity for Select Advanced Students.

  A three-day trip to Pyramid Lake to study the effects of unprecedented rainfall on the phytoplankton and pH levels of the lake.

  Extra credit awarded to those students who turn in a photo essay on the trip, complete with tables of measurements and synopsis of ecological conditions and hazards.

  Johnson cracked up when he saw it.

  Dude. I have a D in chem. My parents are not going to believe some shit about select students.

  So Rez wrote a separate flyer for each apostle, according to his needs. Johnson got one from the English teacher and Kelly got one from Coach Sterns about a special orienteering trip for eleventh graders who had excelled in survivalist skills. Matthews didn’t need one because his parents had six sons and never noticed if he was around or not. Rez sometimes thought What if I had five brothers? What if I was part of some huge American clan? at Matthews’s house, as Rez ate food their cook Blanca made or slept in the pool house the housekeeper kept clean, or laid out on the lawn cut by Amado, the silent old gardener with arms covered in faded tattoos of big-breasted women and fighting cocks. Six sons and rich. No parents. No sisters. No back home that is not here.

  Everyone went for it. Rez’s mother stayed up late Thursday washing his sleeping bag and sewing the hole in the raincoat he hadn’t used since eighth grade. He pretended he needed his father’s signature and took the letter to him after dinner on the night before they left. His father read the letter and let out a laugh.

  The pH of a lake, as affected by rain? What is this?

  It’s a field trip, Dad. For the advanced chem students.

  Yes, but you and I both know that lake is polluted with runoff. The pH will never be accurate. Here we are spending all this money for the best private school in Orange County and this is the smartest field trip they can come up with?

  Rez stood beside the recliner, mesmerized. His father spoke playfully, a light and gentle teasing. Since the last fight there had been the usual seriousness, nothing better, nothing more, and here he was now, joking with Rez as if he too knew the permission-slip joke, the lie of the whole thing. Rez felt the blood go cold in his body and waited for the other side of his father to make himself known, but his father only took the pen and paper and scribbled his name on the line.

  Yes, yes. Go. There will be teachers, by law there have to be, eight to one I think, and it will be miserable and wet but you might have a chance to sit next to a girl around a campfire … I know why your eyes are dancing. Not for pH, I can promise you that!

  Rez stood beside his father and smiled. His father smiled back.

  Don’t think I don’t know … I was a young man once too.

  Rez took the paper and walked away. A young man. A girl by a fire.

  They reached San Diego by noon with half a tank of gas and less than twenty miles to the border. They stopped at two In-N-Out drive-throughs and got so full on fries and milk shakes and double cheeseburgers Animal Style they had to smoke again just to stay high. They decided not to stop after Ensenada until they got to the most perfect Mexican beach.

  Until the Mexican Pacific licks our toes! Rez shouted like a moron, and this made everyone laugh so hard they didn’t notice they were stuck, sweating in bumper-to-bumper border traffic, waiting to be waved across. The high wore off during their wait and they sat quietly and listened to Nas’s Illmatic—Then writing in my book of rhymes / All the words past the margin—and mouthed the stories about drugs and women and guns and pride and watched the people in the cars next to them, stock-still, heads erect, silent and glassed off. At the first sign announcing the border checkpoint Matthews suggested they hide the weed and they passed the bag around and spoke in serious and knowing tones.

  Too big for the glove compartment.

  For sure. Under the backseat?

  Spare-wheel spot?

  Naw, they always look there.

  Rez finally opened the toolbox at his feet. Inside Freddy had organized the top shelf with paper clips and scissors and small pincers to hold roaches too tiny to smoke with your fingers. U
nderneath, in the storage area, rolling papers, a small bong, lighters, a few empty baggies, and small shreds. All of it useless in car repair.

  Dude. Perfect.

  Rez put the weed with the bong and tucked the whole thing under his seat. At the border they sat up straight and kept responsible, distracted faces as they drove past an empty kiosk with a wooden arm that lifted and lowered automatically; like that, they were in Mexico.

  6

  Highway 1 continued down and they recognized it and followed the signs. Matthews drove slow down the small, blasted streets of Tijuana. No one said anything about it but they heard Freddy’s voice: Don’t even fucking think of stopping in TJ. Don’t do it. My truck will get jacked and the cops will arrest you and then ass-fuck you in a Mexican jail. I don’t care about your ass. Bring this truck back exactly as I gave it to you. So they drove on, past the taco vendors and bars that would let them in without IDs and small dark doorways guarded by women, young and old, in spandex skirts and no one said a thing about stopping.

  Five minutes out of America and it’s like another planet.

  Matthews talked to himself. He drove with uncharacteristic tenderness, as if the road were lined with babies, and it made Rez nervous. This was not the Mexican surf trip he’d planned, the city felt like some sort of trap, and he wanted Matthews to drive faster, to get out of town and back to the beach, where everything would look like the magazine pictures of perfect beaches with perfect surf. Kelly pulled his Game Boy out of his bag.

  A new planet for sure. A shittier planet.

  Kelly pressed buttons, flicked his fingers madly, and small gunshot noises came out of the device. None of them had been to Mexico before and as a rule it would be Kelly to hate it first, to call it names and pretend it was a stupid waste of time. Rez wanted to check his phone and see how long until they were out of the city, at the beaches, surfing, but the battery had died and all they could do was crawl south through the unending town and watch the beggars and old ladies and young fathers move about their afternoon.

  Rez looked out the window. It was hard to see at first, the plastic of his sunglasses covered in fingerprints, and the high he’d been working on since Dana Point had blown up in his head like a balloon, but he tried to keep focus as Tijuana slid past him like an ancient circus. Planets. It wasn’t another planet at all, it was this planet, the same planet as San Diego and Laguna Beach and Los Angeles, just more fucked-up. Hydrochloric acid, he thought. Not another planet, just a city sprinkled in hydrochloric acid. In middle school he’d done a report on it in chemistry, drawn to the total anarchy of its composition and the way nothing withstood it, not bone or rock or lead, and now here was a place where everything seemed in some state of decomposition or decay. Up around them on the hillsides tiny shacks clustered together, their paint peeling off and colorful chunks of concrete crumbling into the streets. The sidewalks were chipped and the roads full of potholes. Rez watched a group of girls in school uniforms and white shoes walk into the dark mouth of an old church and he wondered how they stayed so clean. They passed stall after stall of tourist crap, each with a thousand skull statues in a thousand colors, a thousand skeletons drinking a thousand bottles of Corona from their bony hands. The skeletons freaked him out. The way everything looked poor and dirty freaked him out. Nothing at home was so dirty or so poor. Even their maid, Ysenia, lived in a nice apartment compared to this. She had a balcony with flowers that smelled like bananas, and when Rez’s mother gave him the check to drop off, he’d always wait a few seconds outside her door just to breathe in the jasmine. Then he’d press the bell and a girl, a few years younger than he was, would answer, take the check, and close the door without a word or a smile.

  At an intersection Rez watched a man piss between two parked cars and thought about saying something so they could all laugh together but let it go, his stomach turning at the sight of someone’s dick in public. America is a good place, he heard his father’s voice say. A good good place. The shadow was in the car, the long shape of his father sat between him and Johnson, taking up the space with a cool resolve. We cannot complain. Look at this mess. His father raised his hand into the air and circled it around. They don’t even have a war here and still they can’t keep it clean like we keep our cities and children and grown men clean.

  Who was thinking these thoughts? Rez looked at Johnson staring out the window, his bony shoulders turned away. Was it the weed? The car was quiet and Rez looked at the boys around them and considered they might simply be miniature versions of their fathers, nothing more. Johnson turned.

  What?

  Nothing.

  Rez sat up and tried not to get nauseous from the drive and the sweat and the thoughts. He didn’t want to come undone in this place that was coming undone around him. He leaned forward and punched Matthews in the shoulder.

  Dude. Whose grandma are you? Do you want to get wet today? Drive faster!

  Matthews said nothing, simply lifted a single finger off the steering wheel and pointed in front of them where a man pushed himself down the middle lane of the highway in a wheelchair. Kelly laughed.

  Everyone but Kelly stared out the window as Matthews drove carefully around him. The man was skinny. Rez counted seven veins popping out from the man’s neck. His head was covered in long white hair but his face was soft and brown and had no certain age to it. He wore sunglasses and a Chicago Bulls jersey and faced forward as his arms pumped up and down to move the chair down the road, two long denim pant legs dragging behind like streamers.

  Totally pathetic.

  Kelly scoffed and Rez sat back and closed his eyes like he was also bored by Mexico and pretended to sleep when really what he wanted was to stop seeing so he would stop thinking so he could stop the sound of his dad’s voice and the nausea, just for a little while. Johnson grunted and laughed.

  Yeah. That dude should get a fucking room already.

  The meanness of the words shocked Rez. Johnson was not nice like Matthews but he wasn’t an ass like Kelly and Rez opened his eyes to see Kelly’s wide white palm in the air.

  High five to that.

  The first beach outside Tijuana was a dump. The sand covered in trash and the tiny breaks onshore gray and churning, and Rez felt his heart drop. He convinced them not to stop until K55, the first famous spot, and no one objected and they drove by the ocean for a long time and said nothing. Men and women and children walked together or alone, few in bathing suits, most with enormous plastic cases that looked like luggage or laundry. No one swam. No one lay out. It was a long fifty-five kilometers after an already-long drive and even though James Johnson kept pulling himself up from the seat every half hour to show how much ass sweat he was sitting in, they kept going, each of them waiting for the same sign—a beautiful beach—before they could stop.

  A few hours and the sun dropped on their right and the cities turned to small villages that turned to road stops with taco stands, gas stations, and stores that sold garden pots and ceramic birds in cheery colors. The beaches emptied of people and garbage and started to look a little more like California beaches, a little more like the beaches in the magazines Rez had studied before they left. At the sight of the familiar landscape Kelly turned the AC off and Johnson rolled down the windows and Matthews started to drive fast again so when they heard the siren and saw the Nissan SUV, they thought it was for speeding and started yelling. Matthews told everyone to shut up; his brother had given him tips on how to handle this.

  Mexican tax time. It’s cool. I got it.

  The police were exactly like the police from home. Rez tried to find something different about him, but it was all there, the aviators, the uniform, the forearms, the hair, all just like an American cop, maybe a few shades darker. Matthews’s voice came steady and willing like it was when he bullshitted in class or talked to a girl he liked.

  Yes, officer. Can I help you?

  The policeman cocked his head.

  Perdón?

  Matthews tried to keep
his cool but there were no more words between them for so long that everyone got nervous. The policeman took off his glasses.

  Otra vez por favor.

  We didn’t do anything. I was just driving … Matthews gestured to the car full of them and their eight surfboards and block of weed and wallets full of money.

  Sí. Por supesto.

  The policeman pointed to the rolling papers on the dashboard. Matthews shook his head.

  Wait. Please wait. Here.

  He reached into the back pocket of his shorts and opened the wallet with the crisp bills he’d taken from the ATM this morning. He offered three of his dozen twenties.

  The cop stared at the money and then into the car and for a moment Rez could see them as the cop did—four rich kids in a nice truck, young, clueless—and when the cop gave a little smile, Rez felt ashamed. The cop spoke now, this time in near-perfect English.

  You were speeding. Fifteen over the limit. Your car smells of hierba and here I don’t need a warrant to search. Rich kids, boards, suits, nice trucks, they sometimes have trouble on this side of the border. You should be careful. For your convenience, a more substantial payment, and the ticket will be overlooked.

  Matthews took another three twenties from the fold and the cop placed the bills in his breast pocket and backed from the car until his hand was on the front of the hood.