The new mayor’s real secretary announces my arrival in a loud contralto, shouting from the anteroom through the smoked-glass door leading to the interior office. An awkward silence settles over us. Her pen hovers above paperwork, twitching. I shift from one hiking boot to the other. Neither of us acknowledge the grunting and furniture squeaks on the other side of the door. Eventually she tries again. “Senor! Nick Roberts is here to see you!”

“Momentito!” — just a moment! — a ragged voice gasps from inside his office. A girl’s voice.

The real secretary goes back to her paperwork, instantly zen in her cocoon of bureaucracy. I wander over to Maria’s chair — she doesn’t even rate a desk — where glossy fashion magazines are draped over the arms, an upholstery of dreams. I glance through them. Idly, just the way she does. I wonder if that glitzy runway world seems as far away to her as it does to me.

When the office door opens, it’s not Maria who emerges. It’s some other girl, more Nooshin’s age, with pneumatic boobs and one of those mexicana bleachjobs that’s supposed to result in blonde but turned out orange. She teeters out of the office on high-heeled mules, adjusting her miniskirt. Beneath its dangerously high hem is hose that mats her silky leghair. “The mayor will see you now,” she informs me, carefully avoiding eye contact.

Inside, the new mayor looks like he lost a fight with a firehose. His guayabera is soaked with sweat, turning transparent enough for me to see the dark carpet of hair that covers his chest and belly. He mops at his pudgy face with a towel. I’m relieved when he forgets to shake my hand.

“I came to thank you for all your hospitality,” I tell him, “and to say goodbye.”

He smiles indulgently. “There’s no need to thank me. I’m your loyal servant, senor.” Just a line of beneficent bullshit. We both know he’s the senor here, not me. Then his gaze abruptly drops to the general vicinity of my crotch.

I look down. One of Maria’s magazines is still in my hand, where I’d forgotten all about it. “You fired her,” I sigh, tossing her dreams into the mayoral garbage can.

“I needed someone more skilled.” As if realizing how that sounds, the fat man quickly adds, “Maria is only good at turning heads. Isidora, she can type. She even knows computers. Computers!”

“Computers,” I echo limply.

His beady eyes are glassing over with visions of a pueblo suddenly catapulted from the 19th century into the 21st. “Computers, and the internet, and, and…!” He covers his lack of knowledge by spreading the towel across the seat of his desk chair and collapsing into it.

I sit down across from him, noticing the plastic desktop protector is sweat-streaked. At least I hope that’s sweat. Holy yuck. “Sounds like things are going to change in Chirbampo.”

“Things are changing in Chirbampo,” the new mayor corrects me. “I never speak ill of the dead, but I will say this — Juan wasn’t ambitious. He just liked getting his picture in the paper.” Bratwurst-sized fingers move in the shape of cross at the mention of the dead former mayor’s name. “Me, I’m going to put Chirbampo back on the map!”

His itinerary has been splashed all over the town’s newspaper. First he’s going to Mexico City to lobby the federal government for more aid, including a sit-down with the prosecutor responsible for pressing charges against Senor Reyes. Then he’s flying to America to meet with the Chirbampo diaspora in southern California and Chicago, rallying their support to raise money for civic works projects in their Mexican hometown. Maybe he’ll return with a dismissal of all charges against Senor Reyes and plenty of new funding. Probably he won’t. The odds are stacked against you when you’re mayor of a bumfuck nowhere town that’s been dying for 100 years, the gradual strangulation of played-out silver veins.

“I hear you’re headed for Mazatlan,” he’s saying.

Him and everybody else. Chirbampo is a pueblo of gossips. “Yeah, that’s right. Don Fidel is setting us up with a friend of his who has a condo on the beach. My girlfr–uh, my wife, she can finish recuperating there.”

“You’ll get to see lots of other Americans in Mazatalan. Especially this time of year.”

“I can’t wait,” I say through gritted teeth.

The new mayor’s desk chair — actually a rocker — shrieks against the floor as he turns. In profile he becomes porcine, those multiple chins rippling into his torso. Through the window is a view of the crumbling plaza, the cupping hands of rock, the sliver of sky above towering peaks. “You’ll miss this place,” he predicts. “Chirbampo, it grows on you.”

Not if you’re me. I’ll always remember Chirbampo as a place where everything seemed to go right until suddenly it didn’t. Maybe I had plenty of great sex with Nooshin, but I can barely recall our lazy couplings now. Ditto for any other happiness we found here, like our hilarious dinner of “shrimp” Veracruz. It’s all tainted with the stress of her sickly collapse, with the hatred gushing into my ear as I talked to her family, with the guilt of dragging her to Chirbampo in the first place. And worst of all, the tax records of the Korea Textile maquiladora weren’t here to digitize. Bad memories, worse mojo.