The Mexican Year

Five freaking years, man. That’s how long I’ve been tattooing myself into this country. I’ve driven from the Rio Grande to the Guatemalan border and back again, ridden buses from the Gulf of Mexico to the Sea of Cortez, hitchhiked across the Yucatan peninsula. I know there are freak hailstorms in the Barranca del Cobre — Copper Canyon — because I experienced one. I backpacked amidst the revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries of Zapatista territory. I found out for myself that 30,000 of Mexico City’s 100,000 streets aren’t even named. Cite a place in Mexico and I’ve either been there or come close.

Except for the coastal resorts. I’m a coastal resort virgin. All the places that tourists usually go — Acapulco, Cancun, Puerto Vallerta, Zihuatenejo, Mazatlan — are the places I avoid. If I wanted to see beaches covered with Americans who belong in sweats instead of swimwear, I would’ve stayed in Los Angeles.

I still can’t get my head around it — to most Americans, this is Mexico. A beachy strip of easy living. Bikinis and Corona Light with lemon wedges and ever-attentive brown people who speak your language so you don’t have to speak theirs. Screw the rest of the country and its amazing cultures and a fascinating heritage that stretches all the way back to Olmec temples that rise out of the jungle. And yeah, screw the poverty and pollution and violence too. This is a walk-in commercial or postcard, paradise just the way you always imagined it, and packaged into tidy consumerist –

“Omigod, Nick! Isn’t this view just incredible?” Nooshin whispers into my cindered shoulder, embracing me from behind.

I flinch in pain. “Oh shit. That hurts.”

Her skinny arms fall away. “Sorry! I knew we should’ve put more sunblock on you. You don’t tan, you just…combust.” I hear her bare feet slap across the concrete balcony and back into the condo, then return. “Here, let me put on more lotion.”

The aloe balm is cool and tingly on my angry skin. I close my eyes to the view, enjoying Nooshin’s gentle touch, but Mazatlan lingers on my retinas — a line of massive chalky hotels crowding against the beach, the so-called Golden Zone that dwindles into the colonial architecture of Old Mazatlan, a peninsula of clay-tiled roofs that spike into the shimmering bay.

“Are you done digging out?” she asks, a reference to my inbox, clogged with a backlog of email during our internet exile in Chirbampo.

“Yeah. It wasn’t that bad, really. Mostly spam. And students still bitching about their grades from last quarter. Delete delete delete. What about you?”

“Mmmm,” Nooshin says, a verbal shrug.

“I overheard you talking to Nasrin.” When she doesn’t respond, I sharpen the observation. “Talking, then fighting. I can always tell. You switch to Farsi.”

She joins me at the railing, a rail-thin girl in a faded bandeau bikini, her long hair whipping in the breeze. Six stories down is the speedboat at our disposal, elevated above the opal waters in a lift. Her dark gaze seems to linger on the plunge.

“Hey,” I say after a while. “What’s the matter?”

“I wasn’t talking to my sister. I was talking to Saman.”

Maybe a heartbeat passes. Maybe the sun finishes drowning in the Pacific and circuits back to the same point in the sky. “Say what?”

“And my mother-in-law,” Nooshin adds quietly. “That’s why I switched to Farsi. She doesn’t speak English.”

“What the hell were you calling them for?”

“I don’t know. I guess I was hoping that maybe, just maybe, they’d…” She sags in misery, her bony joints going all wrong. “It was stupid. They hate me now. My mother-in-law even wants me to die. She says the only way to cleanse both families’ honor is with my blood.”

Mazatlan suddenly feels about 50 degrees colder. “Whoa. Let me get this straight. She was, like, threatening you?”

“I guess so. She told me I’m guilty of zena, which means adultery, fornication, debauchery.” Nooshin smiles miserably. “I like doing all those things with you. I never want to stop. But the traditional punishment for zena is for your own family to kill you, and if they don’t then your husband’s family does. An honor killing. Ghairat-kushi.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” I gasp. But the epithet is all wrong. It’s not Christianity I should be cursing, it’s whatever whacked-out Dark Ages variant of Islam that her in-laws practice.

“How I left Saman, what I’m doing here with you…it’s incredibly humiliating to a traditional Persian man, and probably worse for his family.” A teardrop vanishes in freefall, then another. “I just want it to be over already.” She gouges at her eyes with a fist.

I hover uselessly, not knowing what the hell to do. Crush her against my chest and never let her go? Find words to suture her ripped-open scars? Finally I settle on something in between, smoothing a palm across her back, polishing the knobby bumps of her vertebrae.

“Nooshin, listen to me. I’m not going to let anything happen to you. You’ll always be safe with me. But you have to promise not to contact your husband or in-laws anymore. Promise?” I hook a finger around the back of her bikini top, tugging it to get her attention. “No more phone calls, no emails, nothing. You promise?” I tug harder. “And in return, I’ll stop being such an asshole about a quickie divorce. I never realized how fucked-up the whole situation is with his family. Holding out for a settlement just isn’t worth it. So hey, you can be single again by the time we get back to Tijuana. How does that sound?”

“That sounds pretty wonderful.” Nooshin tilts her head and looks up at me pleadingly. “You won’t leave me, will you? Because of my husband and getting divorced and how both families hate me?”

I bend down to kiss her forehead, where those tiny ghostly scars are brighter in the tanned skin. “No way. You’re stuck with me.”

“Am I? Stuck with you?”

“Well, that depends.” My kisses drift lower, down the bridge of her nose, to the eyelid closed over her crooked wandering orb. “Do you want to be stuck with me?”

The delicate contours of her face shift beneath my kisses. She twists, brushing her lips against mine. “I think I could get used to it.”

We start making out in the dying afternoon, her still bent over the railing, me leaning down beside her. The kissing is a desperate thing, as if we’re trying to immolate our guilt. I hook the rest of my fingers around the back of her bandeau-style top, popping open the clasp all rico suave, and feel nothing but satiny –

“Nick! Grab it! Quick!” Nooshin shouts, ducking away. She holds one arm across her bare chest and frantically reaches for her bikini top with the other.

But it’s too late. The scrap of fabric catches in the breeze and slips through the railing, spiraling lazily in the air as it drifts downward, smaller and smaller, until it finally disappears into the palm trees that fringe the cove below.

I’m in my usual position in the truck, folded into the passenger seat with one bare foot curled underneath me, lolling in the sunshine that glares through the dusty windshield. Sinaloa is streaming past, an endless series of desolate pueblos separated by maize plots cut out from riotous jungle. The radio is playing a bootleg tape I bought in a no-name town where we stopped for lunch. It turns out to be Los Tucanes de Tijuana, a so-called narcoband, and their album “Mis Tres Animales” — My Three Animals. Nick had to explain that’s Mexican slang for marijuana, heroin, and cocaine.

“Look! Over there! Another one!”

I follow the muscular line of his pointing arm. Tucked into the mouth of a ravine is a guardhouse and cyclone-fenced gate, the entrance to yet another drug lord’s compound. A swarthy man in a straw cowboy hat and a huge glinty beltbuckle is patrolling the fence, openly carrying an AK-47. I know it’s an AK-47 because I’ve seen several of them today, a different silhouette than the M-16s carried by Mexican soldiers and paramilitary police. I’ve also seen several of those machine guns today, at security checkpoints on the road.

“Whoever lives there, they must be bigtime,” Nick is saying. “You see how the driveway is all wide and straight and shit? That’s so it can double as a landing strip for small planes.”

“They fly drugs in and out of there?” I ask in surprise. The driveway only looks good for cars and crash-landings.

“Well, probably not drugs. Nowadays narcotraffickers mostly drop their drugs in the Sea of Cortez and retrieve them by boat. But that dude and his organization rate airplanes for travel.”

Nick has been telling me stories about Sinaloa, the brutal and bloody heartland of the Mexican drug trade. Like how Sinaloa is home to the patron saint of narcotraficantes, Jesus Malverde, a legendary Robin Hood figure who was hanged in Culiacan in 1909. And how the U.S. government actually stoked the drug trade here by subsidizing the growth of poppies back in World War II, when morphine was needed for wounded soldiers. And how the most infamous drug shootout of all time took place in Guamuchil in 1976, a high noon bloodbath that claimed the lives of drug smuggler Lamberto Quintero and his gang — but not before they’d killed half a battalion of Mexican army troops.

There are also stories that make my nerves jangle with the terror of it all. Like the long-standing practice of revenge killings — wives decapitated with machetes or chainsaws, children thrown from bridges, relatives machine-gunned. I’m also horrified by the demise of drug lord Amado Carrillo Fuentes, who died on an operating table while undergoing radical plastic surgery, his ill-fated attempt to gain a brand new face and lose 80 pounds by liposuction.

Nick doesn’t seem even slightly bothered that we’re traveling through an armed countryside of hostile camps, listening to narcocorridos that extol honor and guns and cocaine, chatting about the slaughter of innocents. He keeps turning to me with eyes like glacial lakes, relaxed behind the steering wheel, cracking jokes about this and that. Even at checkpoints, when soldiers scowl at our Iowa license plates and make him open up the back. I try not to notice the way they poke through our luggage and camping gear with M-16 barrels.

In keeping with Nick’s policy of never letting the gas tank get very empty, we stop at a Pemex station on the outskirts of a town called the 25th of January. A name full of calendrical mystery, but I’m more impressed by the Pemex. It’s a brand spanking new minimart — in jarring contrast to all the other Pemexes we’ve encountered, which were old and falling apart and had smelly gutted restrooms. This is a place I can safely pee!

He’s wandering the aisles when I emerge from the women’s bathroom. His hand flaps at the wrist, waving me over. “Hey. Tampons. You better stock up.”

I clatter across the concrete floor in my wedgie sandals, tilting my head quizzically, searching his face.

Nick misreads my look and shrugs. “I noticed you were out. They’re hard to find, you know. Most Mexican women still use pads.”

“Nah, that’s not what I was thinking.” I try to rewind the last couple months in my head. Usually I get my periods so regularly that I don’t pay much attention to their timing. But my cycle has been messed up ever since Saman took my birth control pills away. “I can’t remember if I got my period last month. Do you know if I did?”

He’s bent over a tray of wind-up toys, playing with their mechanisms. They beep and rattle and lurch for him. “What did you say?”

“Did I get my period last month?”

“Isn’t this one cute?” In his hand is a fuzzy bus shooting out sparks. “There’s enough dry tinder around to burn down the fucking country, and Pemex is selling toys that spark.”

I snatch the toy away from him and throw it back on the tray. “Did. I. Get. My. Period. Last. Month.”

“Why are you asking me?”

“Because I can’t remember!” Annoyed now, I cross my arms in front of my board-flat chest. “I think I missed it. In fact I’m pretty sure.”

“Makes sense to me. You were so dehydrated in Chirbampo you were passing out.” Nick flashes that blinding smile at me, the one that makes me puddle into affection. Then he palms my boy-butt and squeezes a cheek through my jeanshorts. “Besides, you got no junk in your trunk, girl. Your bodyfat percentage is, like, zilch. I used to have this girlfriend who ran marathons and she missed periods all the time, her bodyfat percentage got so low.”

“You mean, um…I’m blanking on the word. That medical term for when you miss periods.”

His hand falls away. “Damn. I can’t remember it either. This is going to bug me all day now.” He pinches his brow in concentration.

“Amenorrhea!” I say triumphantly.

“Yeah! That’s it. Amenorrhea.”

“Except…” A dull panic is tugging at my crooked eye. “I’ve never had that before. I always get my period.”

“You’ve never almost died of Montezuma’s Revenge before, either.” Nick nods at the shelf, where the reassuring soft blues and pinks of tampon boxes are stacked between cold remedies and toothpaste. “Get what you need and let’s vamanos.”

I fill my arms with Tampax Satin Teens, if I’m translating the label correctly, and clatter after Nick. He’s cherrypicking snacks off the shelves he passes, jerky and churritos and sunflower seeds, and predicting that we won’t stop again until Mazatlan, a tourist paradise that seems so misplaced amidst Sinaloa’s narcotraficantes and machine guns and drugs.

Our descent from the craggy chain of peaks known as Los Frailes — The Friars — is a harrowing rollercoaster of elevation losses and gains and more losses, pretzel switchbacks, curves sans guardrails and avec little memorial crosses, traffic lumbering around blind corners, rockfalls across the pavement. The emerald coastline far below is spectacular if vertigo-inducing, and above us the ruggedly scenic mountainside is leaking talus, even boulders. My stomach sinks into the gas pedal when the road soars across a wide chasm on a one-lane bridge missing chunks of concrete.

In the passenger seat Nooshin pushes the radio’s seek button with a chipped pink fingernail, chasing signals that fade in and out like stars in a cloudy darkness. The station callsigns are unfamiliar to us, but their formats are instantly recognizable — saccharine Top 40 crap, cryin’-in-beer ranchero, Mexican oldies. The aural landscape of Sinaloa.

Just looking at her my heart leaps a little, and not only because it’s Russian roulette to take my eyes off the road. Nooshin is coiled into the seatbelt, a bare foot tucked underneath her, sparking with frisson. Her rolled-up jeanshorts make her coltish legs seem even longer, and her high-necked tanktop is the color of unchurned butter, setting off the darker caramel tones of her arms and throat. But best of all, the inky waterfall of her hair is pinned back in a banana clip, revealing —

“Nick!” she shrieks, pointing at a car-sized boulder dead ahead.

I veer into the oncoming lane and back again. The boulder vanishes around a corner behind us. “I love it when you wear your hair up. You’re so fucking beautiful.”

Nooshin blushes into her lap. Half-hidden under batting eyelashes, the movement of her dark eyes reminds me of skittish animals slipping through the underbrush — then suddenly veering apart in flight. “I can keep one eye on you and one eye on the road,” she laughs, making fun of herself.

Some of my favorite memories are just like this — riding in the truck with her, enjoying the back-and-forth. Walking and talking on long rambles into Canyon Sin Nombre, or down Avenida Revolucion in Tijuana, or across the timeless blocks of Chirbampo. Mumbling into each other’s soft breathing as we fall asleep. And all the hours we spent on the phone, back when we were just friends separated by four states and one marriage.

I never expected to totally love talking with Nooshin. Yeah, I’ll fess up — I was a grad student snob, convinced I’d be bored by any chick who didn’t have multiple degrees and couldn’t understand the death march that is the Ph.D. process. After all, I had four years of proof with Phoebe, who bored me whenever I wasn’t staring at her tits. If a globe-trotting lawyer couldn’t hold my attention, how could a housewife with a high school education? But conversations with Nooshin are fascinating. There’s something about her brave resilience, the way she’s brainy but grounded, her compassionate take on life, that trademark Nooshball goofiness. And I could go on, but why? There’s just something about her, period.

A thumping noise echoes through the Explorer. The wedgie sandals I bought her in Tijuana, knocking around on the floormats where she kicked them off. She struggles against the seatbelt, reaching down to hook fingers into their straps, then tosses them into the folded-down backseat with our luggage and camping equipment.

“You know a funny thing about Chirbampo?” Nooshin says, settling into her seat again. “Everyone told us we’re the first Americans who’d visited there in a decade — but half the town has immigrated to America and become naturalized citizens, so when their relatives come back to visit it’s the same difference, you know? Except the locals don’t see their relatives that way. As Americans, I mean. They still think of their relatives as Mexicans.”

“That’s how they persist familial and cultural ties. Persistence by insistence. Otherwise their American relatives might redefine their identities and stop sending money back to Mexico.”

“Yeah! Bi-nationalism, right? I remember when you were trying to explain that concept to me, back when…” Her smile is a brief glimmering thing. “Back when I was in Kansas City, with Saman. Anyway, it’s starting to make sense now.”

I muscle the truck through a series of hairpin curves, then relax as the asphalt unrolls into a steep but straight drop through the remaining foothills. “The funny thing I’ll remember about Chirbampo — I prayed to God. Like, when you were unconscious. I was promising all this shit about renouncing my atheism, anything the big guy wanted, as long as you were okay.”

Nooshin is covering her mouth — her laughter — with a hand. “Really? You were going to lie to God like that? For me?”

“Can you quit making fun of the situation? I’m being serious here.”

“I know you are,” she says, composing herself. Momentarily. “But omigod, that’s just so you, Nick! Lying to get what you want, even to God!”

“It wasn’t a lie, for chrissake. It was…an insurance policy.”

“Then pull off at the next Catholic church. We can go to mass together.” When I don’t laugh with her, a scrawny arm reaches across the front seat to my right thigh. Her squeeze is still weak, barely felt through my jeans. “I hope you’re not really an atheist, because then we can be together for all eternity.”

A fucking eject! eject! eject! moment if there ever was one. A girl I’ve known for less than four months — some Iranian dude’s WIFE — wants to be with me for all eternity. I fully expect to freak out in a way that would make for a legendary YouTube video.

But nothing happens. Hurtling toward the palm-draped backside of the coastline, I discover I’m weirdly okay with the eternity thing. Getting a hard-on for it, even. Nooshin’s palm is still resting on my upper thigh, close enough to stir me into erection. She glances away shyly, a beauty in profile — a profile I first pictured on a pharaoh’s tomb, back when she caught my eye on Avenida Revolucion.

Admitting to myself that I’m in love, stupendously utterly crazy in love, this is the only thought that fills my head:

Always grab the beguiling girl who can hold up her end of a witty and wide-ranging conversation. Life is a long, long walk together. If you’re lucky.

“Well, at least leaving Chirbampo is easier than leaving my husband.”

My words startle Nick. He’s standing over me protectively, a wine glass in one hand, deflecting the steady stream of well-wishers who crash into us like surf, saying goodbye during the fiesta that transforms Don Fidel’s house into a wonderland of guttering candles and fragrant shadowy foliage and echoing mariachi-band music. Beneath his newly-shaven head, Nick’s angular face pools with tension. In the candlelight he has animal eyes.

“That was a joke,” I sigh, looking up at him apologetically.

“How are you holding up?” he asks.

I’m perched on one of the ancient wooden chairs that flank the massive dining table, knees pulled up to my chin, one bare foot covering the other. In front of me is a formal dinner, the kind with too much silverware for the place settings and a couple different kinds of glasses — water glass, wineglass, and a shotglass for tequila and mezcal. I’ve barely touched the same food that everyone else is devouring. Some kind of calimari appetizer, a plantain-wrapped grilled hanger steak, chocolate-drizzled flan. Delicious when I think about it, but my appetite went somewhere far away and isn’t back yet.

His scrutiny becomes too much to bear. I glance down at my toenails, where the cotton candy polish is chipping. “I’m doing okay.”

“We’ll leave just as soon as — ”

He doesn’t get a chance to finish the sentence. Don Fidel returns in jovial grandeur, a stooped figure shuffling around in a smoking jacket and cravat. I still see him as Yoda, if Yoda was Mexican and liver-spotted and spoke thickly-accented English. “Isidora, I want you to meet Senor and Senora Roberts.”

Mr. and Mrs. Roberts. The introduction makes me blush, even though I’ve already heard it a dozen times tonight. I fan at my bangs, brushing them across the right side of my face, and force a smile.

Isidora is the mayor’s new secretary. From my sitting perspective she’s mostly a jutting shelf of cleavage. She has to tilt a little to see me over her boobs, which are almost exploding the buttons off her sweater. A look flashes across her face, the pitying look that busty girls give a flattie like me. Meanwhile I’m giving her a look of my own, the omigod you’re wearing sheer hose over hairy legs look. Very hairy legs. She could braid that stuff, I swear.

I extend a hand toward her limply, not bothering to brace for air-kisses. I’m finally getting used to the complicated politics of Mexican greetings. She’s appearing on the mayor’s behalf, since he left for Mexico City yesterday, and doesn’t have the same social status that he does. Consequently she only shakes my hand, a more formal and respectful gesture than besos on each cheek.

A torrent of conversation breaks out in Spanish, too fast for me to comprehend. Then Nick is saying “I’ll be right back…” and following Don Fidel and Isidora into a hallway leading deeper into the centuries-old casa.

For a while I’m left alone in the dining room, watching the candles gutter and drown in their wax. Uniformed maids flit through the murk, bussing the table and circulating with bottles of wine and sangria and tequila. The mariachi band playing out in the courtyard takes a break, then starts playing again. Occasionally a dinner guest passes by, nodding kindly. They don’t speak English, and in this condition I don’t speak Spanish.

The chair next to me screeches on the tile. I glance over and discover Maria making herself comfortable. “Buenas noches” — good night — she greets me, lighting up and exhaling a gust of cigarette smoke. She’s almost unrecognizable without her trademark outfit of a man’s dress shirt and dangerously short miniskirt. Now she wears a pullover sweatshirt and jeans, just like half the other muchachitas in Chirbampo.

“Buenas noches,” I reply. It takes me a while to translate my question into Spanish — what are you doing here? Her presence could be taken as an insult to the mayor, since Isidora was invited and she definitely wasn’t.

Maria shrugs nonchalantly. Her lips pucker into an exaggerated air-kiss and an almost-perfect smoke ring appears, drifting for a moment, then quickly dissolving. “I need a…” she starts to say in halting English. “Transporte? To Mazatlan? I have sister there.”

“Like, a ride?” I blink tiredly at her. “Is that what you’re talking about?”

“Si! A ride to Mazatlan. With you and your husband. Is okay?”

“No. Not okay.” The words are a steely jolt from the darkness behind us. Nick returns to his station at my seatback, sloshing wine around in his glass, staring ice daggers at Maria.

“Que tal?” — what’s up? — she says breezily, but not looking at him.

An awkward silence envelops the table. The tension between them is so thick I feel like can’t breathe this air, it’s congealing in my lungs, I –

“Vete ya!” — get outta here — he mutters, just like shooing a dog.

“Nick!” I gasp.

He pointedly ignores me, staying focused on the teenager and her smoke rings. Maria lingers defiantly, even yawning once, and for a moment I’m afraid — terrified, even — of what will happen if she keeps provoking Nick like this. But she doesn’t let it come to conflict. Her chair squeaks back from the table and she slinks off, trailing a ghostly wisp of cigarette smoke behind her.

As if feeling the weight of my gaze on her back, Maria pauses in the hallway and glances over her shoulder. We make eye contact, a strange sparking thing, and her face briefly turns poignant — then becomes utterly expressionless again. She raises a palm in goodbye and disappears into the lush shadows of the courtyard.

I feel a pang somewhere between the bumps on my chest. “Why, Nick? All she wanted was a ride to Mazatlan.”

His voice is a dismissive snarl. “I don’t trust her, that’s why. And neither should you.”

No words come out when I try to say something in reproach. All I can do is ball my hands into tiny ineffectual fists.

Nick collapses into the chair next to me — the chair where Maria was sitting — and sighs heavily. “Look, I know you think I’m being cruel, and I’m too tired to explain myself, and I don’t want to fight about this. So can we just drop it? Please?”

My illness and exhaustion and resentment are welling into sudden hot tears. “But…you…” My thoughts won’t settle.

Gently, he reaches into my lap and uncurls my fists. “Hey. Nooshin. Shhhhh,” he whispers, taking my hand. Teardrops leak into our twined fingers. Then I respond to his tug, rising to my bare feet and slipping into my sandals, and follow him to the guest bedroom where we’re spending our last night in Chirbampo.

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.