Aldama. It should be a swear word. I can’t think of a better way to pay homage to this altiplano shithole. Coal is everywhere. Piling up in empty lots and ditches. Streaking down the sides of buildings. Coating the roads in glinty dust. The puddles probably shine black when it rains, and there’s an acrid taint to the air. Old-timers I’ve met swear you can get black lung disease without ever working in the mines, either kind — the big commercial operations or the tiny hand-worked pocitos.

The new city center is informal, taking the mantle of primacy without asking, a strip of buildings that grow like mushrooms along the highway. This is the old city center. A district of decomposing structures, walls buckling into dangerous angles, many of the windows broken. Hard to believe this used to be the elite address in Aldama, a place of wealth and refinement. Mining executives with Scottish and German surnames. Abogados in three-piece suits who carried briefcases full of contracts. Managers who kept the mines humming day and night. But that was a long time ago.

Now it’s dinnertime and the crumbling central plaza is deserted except for a young girl. She looks about 14, but her green lycra skirt barely covers her ass and her stockings only reach to mid-thigh. The palm of one hand is pressed against her cheek in surprise, as if she doesn’t want to believe she’s here. Then a middle-aged man emerges from a sidestreet and clatters up to her in cowboy boots and says something. Haltingly, she follows him along the pavement. Her fingers keep slipping behind to tug down her skirt, but it’s useless. The man hails a coal-streaked taxi and she climbs tentatively in. By now her hand covers half her face.

Standing on the far side of the plaza is the municipal building, huge and half-ruined and serving several needs at once — city hall, district court, maintenance garage. Four policemen gaze stonily from the front steps, passing a bottle of tequila. A mongrel is chained in the open garage door, doing the actual guarding of the municipal vehicles parked inside.

I’m supposed to be meeting with the assistant city attorney. He promised to answer my questions about the missing tax records of the Korea Textile maquiladora archive. In exchange for a hefty contribution to his children’s private education fund. We agreed to rendezvous for dinner. In Mexico that can mean anything from 5:00 to tomorrow.

I glance at my cellphone again. It still lies there uselessly, an open clamshell on the passenger side of the truck, reporting NO SIGNAL on its display. Nearby a skeletal phone booth rises from a plaza corner, its plexiglass blown out. I trot over to make my calls, first to my sister, then to check on Nooshin.

Wendy answers on the third ring, sounding as chilly and exhausted as February in Des Moines. “Yeah?” she sighs, creaking around on the floorboards of the old shambling Victorian she shares with her longtime boyfriend. “Who is it?”

“Hey sis. It’s me. How you doing?”

“Nick? Nick! I thought you were in Mexico. I wasn’t expecting to hear from you until later in the year. More like Thanksgiving or Christmas or something.”

“I am in Mexico,” I say, and decide not to tell her where. Aldama is depressing enough without having to describe it to somebody else.

“You’re too late. I already took care of everything.”

“Say what?”

“Didn’t Brian call you on Sunday?” Wendy asks, invoking our big brother.

“Uh, maybe. I got a call from some Iowa number I didn’t recognize. There was no voicemail, so I never bothered calling back.”

Cruel laughter fills my ear. “That was probably him. He got busted for solicitation in Winnishiek County.”

“Solicitation,” I echo numbly.

“Yeah. And on the Sabbath, even. Mom and Dad are so pissed they kicked him out of the farmhouse. He’s staying in a motel now.”

“What did Brian want when he called?”

“Money. He had to pay a fine and get his pickup out of impound.” More cruel laughter. “Serves him right. That’s what I say. Did you know he was buying it from hookers?”

All my memories of Brian are flooding back, each one more tortured than the last. A gentle giant who taught me how to ride a bike, bait a panfish hook, lay down a straight and steady weld. An unattractive dork who only rated mistreatment from the girls, especially Kimmie Krenzel, the center of his sad mooning universe. A codependent who never wanted to escape the poisonous orbit of my parents, accumulating psychosomatic illnesses while he waits to inherit the farm.

“Look, Wendy. I gotta ask you something.” I rock my weight back and forth in the phone booth. “Something really personal.”

“Okay,” she says warily. Our family isn’t big on the personal, let alone the really personal.

“Remember when you had that abortion? It didn’t change anything between you and Glenn, right? I mean, you guys are still together. So things must be cool. Huh?”

I hear a lighter flare in the background, then several puffs. That’s how she keeps her elfin figure. A steady diet of Virginia Slims. “Nah. It didn’t really change anything between us. We’re still good.” She exhales tiredly. “Why? You get a girlfriend pregnant?”

“Maybe,” I admit, but I’m not really thinking about Nooshin at the moment. I’m thinking about Wendy’s tired exhalation. “There’s something you left out. What else did you want to say?”

“Well…” The floorboards creak steadily. She’s pacing now, trying to organize the thoughts in her Prozac-dulled head. “It just kind of…clarified things, I guess.”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe it’s different for other couples, but for us…it was like, if we don’t want a kid now, then we don’t want kids at all. That’s just not who we are together. We’re just…us. Me and him. You know what I’m saying?”

“Nah. You lost me.” I’m polishing the bald spot on my head.

“I don’t know if I can put it any better than that.” There’s a pause in my ear as the creaking stops, then the hiss of a beanbag chair — maybe the same one she had in her bedroom on the farm. You can take the kids out of the parsimonious Roberts family, but you can’t take the parsimonious Roberts family out of the kids. “Well, okay. Let me try to put it another way. Hmmm.”

“Yeah?” I prod.

“I think it’s like this. Getting pregnant, it brings up the whole kids thing, right? Just kind of forces you to deal with it. Are we going to have a kid now? Which is like, are we going to have kids ever? So if you decide not to have a kid now, that’s what you decide for the whole relationship. Because really, if you want kids, then why put it off? Why not just go for it, and marriage too, and…”

Except I’m not listening to her anymore. I have company outside the phone booth. A ragged wino reaching through the empty sides at me — with a rusty pig-sticker of a knife. I’m being robbed in broad daylight in the central plaza of Aldama, right in front of the municipal building that houses the city hall and district court and maintenance garage, with four drunken cops looking on. Only in Mexico, man.