Tuesday morning and the toll highway that cuts east toward Tecate is lit with cold breezy sunshine. It’s only 50 degrees Fahrenheit and however much in Celsius, which is why I’m nothing but goosebumps beneath my zip-front hoodie and long-sleeved t-shirt. Maybe I shouldn’t have worn a denim miniskirt and my new strappy sandals with the fat wedge heels, but this afternoon it’s supposed to be 75 degrees.

In the meantime Nick is making heat blast out of the Explorer’s vents. When that doesn’t silence my chattering teeth, he reaches across the cab, sliding a warm palm briskly across my bare thighs. Eventually I stop shivering, but he doesn’t take his hand away. It slides further, to the inside of my left thigh. The touch is sexy and possessive and reassuring, all at once. I feel very happily his. Saman never…well, that’s a long list.

“You know, I don’t think I was having very good sex in my marriage. It was nothing like, um…” I blush a little and lower my voice. “Making love with you. It feels so wonderful I don’t want to stop. I just want to keep going, forever and ever.” Even now my body is still fizzling and pleasantly sore.

Nick grins into the windshield. “We had to stop. We used up all the condoms again.”

“That whole box you got?”

“Yep.”

“Wow.” I remember how the box was blue-and-white with the Trojan logo on it. A slogan from sex ed pops into my head — you sleep with everyone your partner has slept with.

Nick seems like the kind of man who’s had lots of sex partners. How handsome he is, that effortless confidence, all the girls who seem to rain from his sky — especially here in Mexico. I don’t know much about how people hook up, but I’m guessing he could’ve been with 50 or even a hundred girls if he wanted. Or…ugh, hundreds plural!

I try to make my question casual. “Just out of curiosity, how many girls have you been with?”

“Intercourse, right? Not just fooling around?”

“Um, right. Intercourse.”

“Six,” he says.

“Six,” I echo in limp surprise.

“My high school girlfriend, four chicks when I was an undergrad, and Phoebe in grad school.” He glances over at me and gives my thigh a gentle squeeze. “You’re my lucky number seven.”

“I sorta thought that you’d…” My voice trails off. Maybe it’s insulting to tell a guy you expected him to have been with lots of girls. I study Nick’s sunburned profile, feeling curious and a little perturbed. He reminds me of one of those Escher prints, the optical illusion kind that changes while staying the same, depending on how you look at it. And there’s always the off chance that he’s lying to me. I’d need a polygraph to tell.

Around us the twin ribbons of concrete are rising higher into the mountains. The highway is almost deserted. We see shiny-new pickup trucks and the occasional luxury sedan, but that’s about it. Nick explains that the autopista de cuota — toll highway — is the perfect metaphor for the “new” Mexico. Most Mexicans can’t afford to pay the tolls, so they’re forced to use the old decrepit free highways. The new transportation infrastructure is reserved for the privileged and wealthy, corporations willing to pay for their trucks to travel more quickly, and tourists like us.

“Are those hiking trails?” I ask, noticing all the spidery footpaths that wind into the hilly underbrush.

“Kinda. But we wouldn’t want to try them,” he laughs. “Those are made by mojados looking for an easier place to cross the border than Tijuana. So they walk out here, sometimes by themselves, sometimes guided by a coyote, a smuggler. Lots of bad shit goes down in these hills.”

“The border fence in our neighborhood doesn’t seem very intimidating,” I point out. “It’s all rusty and peeled-back in places. There’s even holes in the chainlink underneath.”

“The trick isn’t getting past the border fence. The trick is getting past La Migra behind the border fence. You’ve seen what it’s like in our neighborhood. There’s giant light towers and humvees roaring around and searchlight helicopters with infrared detectors. I’m surprised anybody makes it.”

I’m thinking of all the dirt-poor Mexicans who filter through our street and alley at dusk, pooling against the border fence, their lives carried in plastic bags. “Maybe it’s impossible for them to make it across, but they still try.”

“You’d try too, if you came from the places they do. You’ll understand when you see more of Mexico.” He squeezes my thigh again. “Speaking of which, it looks like we’re here.”

The town of Tecate fills a modest boulder-strewn valley. Cinderblock homes crawl up the sides like they’re trying to escape. The red steel smokestacks of the famous Tecate brewery lie at the bottom, filling up the valley with a yellowish haze. Off the highway, the main drag is a dusty mile of struggling businesses with dirt-streaked facades. I watch a procession of parked vehicles stream past my window, many with Tecate brewery stickers on their back windows and bumpers. Wan and unsmiling faces flash on the sidewalk.

“Could be worse,” Nick sighs, as if he was groping for something positive to say. And failed.

I don’t know what I’m expecting our destination to be, but the tiny ranch on top of the hill isn’t it. The house is two stories of aluminum siding, with a big satellite dish set in the concrete of an adjoining patio. A new black Suburban is parked on the far side. Further back, a few horses roam in a wire-fenced field dotted with rocks.

A friendly-looking mutt comes bouncing up, filling the cool air with barks. Nick unwraps his hand from my thigh and slides out his door. He kneels down to pet the dog, simultaneously calling out, “Yo! Estamos aqui!”

“Dude!” someone exclaims in perfect English.

I get out of the truck and discover Nick doing some kind of street handshake with a teenager. He’s tall — although not as tall as me in these sandals — and wears a San Antonio Spurs sweatshirt over baggy jeans and Nikes.

“Are you — ?” I start to say, extending my hand in confusion.

“Nah, I’m Tommy. His nephew.” The kid turns our handshake into a slap of palms. “Juan’s out back.”

Out back means a corner of the patio I couldn’t see at first. Juan Angel Santelana rises from a lounge chair and tucks his cellular phone into the back pocket of his chinos. He’s a trim light-skinned Mexican with an unremarkable face. No scars, no distinguishing features — not even his mustache, which is just like countless other mexicanos wear. With that smooth skin he could be anywhere between 30 and 50 years of age. He welcomes Nick like a prodigal son, embracing him warmly.

I wait patiently while Nick makes introductory smalltalk in Spanish with him. It’s obvious they go way back, and I hear Tecate griped about a lot. Finally Nick steps back with a wave of his hand and switches to English. “And this is Nooshin, the research assistant I was telling you about. She’s the one who’s actually digitizing the archive. Nooshin, this is Juan.”

“A pleasure,” he says with a slight accent, and we shake hands. He runs plain brown eyes up my towering height and smiles. “I don’t think I’ve ever met such a tall woman before.”

I aim a look at Nick. A look that screams these stupid wedgie sandals add four inches to my height! But he just grins in that cocky teasing way of his.

Juan is staring at my crooked wandering eye, which is probably looking at the horse corral instead of him. I toss my hair, a practiced movement that screens the right side of my face behind a veil of bangs. The gesture stirs him into politeness. “I don’t have much to offer in the way of hospitality, but I do have Bud. In cans, not bottles.”

Nick drapes an arm around his shoulders and laughs. “This is what I get for befriending the best goddamn Budweiser distributor in Mexico? El Rey de las Cervezas in cans! Jesus fucking Christ.”

I play with the dog until they emerge from the house with cans of beer. Four of them. The math baffles me — until Juan sticks fingers in his mouth and whistles, summoning Tommy from wherever he disappeared. He tosses his nephew a can of beer overhand like a football quarterback. I’m noticing the early elevation of the sun, which is barely a hazy disc in all this smog. It’s only 10:07 according to the oversized digits on my runner’s watch.

Juan is shaking his head as Tommy runs back inside the house. “My brother sent Tomas — Tommy — to stay with me. I’m supposed to be teaching him some business skills, how to conduct himself.” He sighs, the tip of a vast frustration. “He grew up in San Antonio and he doesn’t even speak Spanish. Can you believe it?”

Nick hands me a can of beer. “A friend once told me you’re born with the skin, not the Spanish.”

Juan looks doubtful about that. “All Tommy wants to do is play, uh… That box thing. The video game.”

“Xbox?” Nick asks cheerfully.

Together the three of us stand at the patio railing and look down on Tecate, spilling away from us in a gritty vista. Juan cracks open his Bud and downs about half of it in a single gulp. “Tell me Nooshin, what do you think of this place? Do you like Tecate?”

“I think the plaza is nice,” I say, fixating on the emerald square in a valley of asphalt and concrete blocks and boulders larger than houses.

“What about you, Nick?”

Predictably, he can’t be pinned down with a fork. “Oh, I don’t know. It’s like small towns anywhere, I suppose.”

Juan’s profile is grim. “As Mencken put it, the small town is why small and petty are synonyms. Even in Spanish.”

“When the hell did you start reading Mencken?” asks Nick, chuckling in surprise. I notice he hasn’t opened his can of beer.

“Mencken was required reading at UNAM back when I was an undergraduate. I learned more about the United States from reading Mencken than I did from living in El Paso.” Juan turns his bland face back to me. “How did you start working for this loco?”

“Well…” I murmur, feeling gravity pull my gaze downward. The Budweiser can in my hands is unfamiliar. Not just because I don’t really drink. The design and logo are the same, but all the wording is in Spanish.

“We met on Avenida Revolucion,” Nick jumps in. “She was doing the turismo thing, walking around and gawking at shit. I gave her a ride back to her sister’s place in San Diego. And now she’s working for me.”

Standing next to his hip, I smile faintly in remembrance. Meeting him seems like yesterday. Meeting him seems like a century ago.

“La Revo,” Juan nods, using the local nickname for Avenida Revolucion. Then irritation ripples across his plain features. “That’s a terrible market for us. All you Americans want is Corona when you cross the border.”

Nick raises his arms, don’t-shoot-me style. “I was drinking Bud the day I met her.”

“Verdad?” — for real? — he bursts out laughing, and slaps Nick on the back.

At first I think the gesture is congratulatory, but then I realize he’s being sympathetic. Suddenly one aspect of their friendship makes sense — Juan gulping the beer he can’t stand to taste, Nick not even bothering to open his can, their introductory banter in Spanish about Tecate the beer, not the town, as I’d mistakenly surmised. Neither of them like Bud. Not even the Budweiser distributor.

“Seriously dude,” Nick is saying to him, “what’s your family’s strategy here? Why are you guys buying property way out here?”

Juan waves his half-empty can in the direction of Tijuana. “It’s my grandfather’s idea. He wants to own land near the border crossings, preferably cheap land zoned for redevelopment. That’s why we bought Korea Textile and a couple other small maquiladoras.”

“That part makes sense. Tijuana will keep booming until the apocalypse. I’m asking about Tecate. Why buy anything here?”

“It’s a long-term play. The way Tijuana is growing, the city will reach here eventually. Then Tecate will become a suburb and the third border crossing with San Diego. Land prices will go through the roof. So we’re buying some parcels out by the rail line.” He drains the rest of his can and flings it into the bushes. “Some working vacation this is turning out to be. I just want to close on these properties and get the hell back to Chihuahua.”

Nick’s breath is a hot whisper in my ear. “Juan’s family is from Chihuahua City, the capital of the state of Chihuahua.” Then he taps his unopened can against my stomach until I take it, leaving me with two beers I won’t drink. His smile is the brightest thing I’ve seen in Tecate. “Who’s ready to take a look at the soon-to-be-world-famous Juan Angel Santelana Archive?”