The Mexican Year

“Mucous plug!”

I glance over at Nooshin, a mess of bare mosquito-bitten limbs folded into the passenger seat of the truck. Past her is the spiky emerald blur of sugarcane fields, which blanket the coast of Veracruz. In her new sunglasses is the shimmering reflection of the Gulf of Mexico. “What did you say?” I ask warily.

“Mucous plug,” she repeats brightly, waving her copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting. “Isn’t that so weird? I have a mucous plug in my cervix!”

“That’s what I thought you said.”

Nooshin reaches over to tap the other pregnancy book, the Mexican one, adrift on the seat between us. “This book probably told me I have a mucous plug too, but…well, you know.” Bony shoulders rise and fall beneath her loose tanktop straps, a resigned shrug. “I can’t read Spanish very well. In one eye, out the other.”

“Enchufe mucoso,” I offer.

“Really?”

“Yeah. That’s the literal translation, anyway. Enchufe is plug and mucoso is mucous.”

“Enchufe mucoso,” she repeats thoughtfully, as if groping for a mnemonic. Then she goes back to her reading. Sunbeams play across the long inky cascade of her hair, across the softcover book molded to her thin thighs. She turns the pages with a delicate hand. The other is splayed across her poochy stomach, feeling the baby.

I seethe with a helpless rage. Nooshin shouldn’t have to read a goddamn book to find out what’s happening to her. She should have a female support network — her mom, her sister Nasrin, her female relatives who’ve had kids. Instead she’s hurtling down a Mexican highway in the direction of the equator, owner of half a suitcase and a mostly-empty bank account, utterly alone.

Well, except for me. And I don’t know jack shit about having a baby either.

My cellphone lights up with a familiar number. Professor Emeritus Hercules Gutierrez, my dissertation advisor — and where the Korea Textile maquiladora archive is concerned, my boss. I’ve been avoiding Hercules since Guanajuato, four weeks and 400 miles ago. Letting his calls go to voicemail. Ignoring my email inbox. Pretending he doesn’t exist.

Nooshin knows who’s calling without looking up from her book. “You’re going to have to talk to him sooner or later.”

“And I pick later. After I finish the last chapter of my dissertation. I’m going to email Hercules the whole thing, and the zip file of the archive. Then I’ll talk to him.”

“That way he won’t kill you?”

“How could he?” I grin jauntily, projecting a confidence I don’t feel. “Not only is the maquiladora archive digitized, but I’ll have the first draft of my dissertation. You know what a big fucking deal that is? It’s only been three months. Academics take longer to wipe their asses. Me, I did my fieldwork and wrote my dissertation. I’m like…the fucking Marines, that’s what I’m like. I do more in three months than most grad students do in three years.”

She flips pages, not saying anything.

“What?” I ask.

“I wish you weren’t rushing to finish it. You didn’t rush your introduction, and it reads great.”

Nooshin doesn’t have to finish the accusation — the rest of your dissertation reads like shit. Not even an accusation, really. A statement of fact. But all my ambitions to write a praiseworthy doctoral dissertation have vanished in the rearview mirror. I knocked up my research assistant, for chrissake. The equivalent of pissing on the University of California’s academic code of conduct. It’s about academic survival now, not academic greatness.

“Nick, you silly. Don’t look at me like that.” She smiles down into the pregnancy book. “You should keep your eyes on the road.”

The narrow coastal highway is a deathtrap of buzzing cars and overloaded sugarcane trucks and buses with luggage stacked on top, but I keep getting distracted by Nooshin. She’s beautiful in a whole new way. A pregnant dazzle who almost slipped away from me. My heart flutters with a potent mix of desire and panic. I’m never losing her again.

Nooshin’s face snaps forward. “Um, hey?” she says warningly. Then hoarse with alarm: “Nick, look out!”

Bad news when I refocus on the road — we’re an accident about to happen. The Explorer is bearing down on the rear of a lumbering six-axle truck, its high wooden-stake sides bulging with sugarcane. Clouds of diesel exhaust and a wall of spiky sugarcane stems are rushing at us.

I veer slightly left, hastily checking for traffic in the oncoming lane. There’s a gap disappearing into the grille of an oncoming semi. Moment of decision. Gun it around the sugarcane truck, or stomp on the brakes and wait for a safer opportunity?

I’ve been shooting gaps like this in Mexican traffic for five years, so it’s reflex to put the pedal to the metal — except this time the Explorer clanks and shudders and goes nowhere fast. The dying gasps of an engine with 140,000 very hard miles on it.

An air horn blares in staccato panic. The driver of the oncoming semi, frantically warning me off. He has too much momentum to stop in time. Too much momentum to do anything but hit us head-on. The Explorer’s clanking and shuddering and going-nowhere-fast V-8 will be slammed right through our bodies and onto the highway behind us.

Now the pedal I’m stomping is for the brakes. The brake pads are squealing like tortured ferrets, and the steering wheel is violent in my hands, and the Explorer is almost fishtailing, first toward the ditch, then back toward the center line. Beneath my bootheel I can feel the antilock mechanism pumping madly.

Our dangerous momentum bleeds into sedate tailgating. The smell of diesel fumes and burning rubber and freshly-cut sugarcane fills the cab. After a few heartbeats the semi whooshes past in the oncoming lane, air horn still blaring. A local radio station is pouring annoyance through the speakers — classic Menudo, for chrissake — but I discover I can’t turn off the stereo. I’m so stiff with panic that my hands are claws welded to the steering wheel.

Nooshin is readjusting her seatbelt across her swelling tummy, fitting our kid into the angle made by the lap and shoulder straps. “See what happens when you rush?” she says with mild reproach, and goes back to her book.

Rrrrr-knock, rrrr-knock, rrrr-knock…

The hood is up and I’m bent over a hot shuddering engine, trying to diagnose the loss of power that’s suddenly afflicting the Explorer. It’s sluggish and unresponsive when I step on the gas — even when I flatten the pedal to the metal. Not good. Last thing I need is a truck that dies on a dirt track in the Mexican rainforest.

Next to me there’s an alcoholic gust. “The timing is off. It’s missing on a cylinder. Maybe two,” the bus driver slurs. The latest tequila bottle wrapped in his fist isn’t empty yet, but it’s getting there fast. He points with the neck. “I don’t like the looks of that belt, either.”

I hadn’t noticed the belt, actually. It’s stretching like black licorice in the heat. “I’ll just adjust the tension pulley. No biggie.”

He grunts in approval, a minor problem solved. Then he takes another swig of tequila, contemplating the misfiring engine. “You ever think about replacing this thing? Getting a used engine and dropping it in?”

“I think about it more all the time.”

“Yeah, well. That’s good. Just baby it until then, you know?”

Don’t ask me how you’re supposed to baby anything on these treacherous jungle roads. I’d rather fix the timing. Now. I back out from underneath the hood and glance around at the whitewashed buildings, boiling in heatwaves. “I suppose there’s no garage in this village.”

“There’s no cars in this village!” the bus driver guffaws.

No shit. The streets are empty — except for parked burros, and dogs loping with tongues hanging out, and women sweeping in front of their homes with straw brooms. And like a scene from a spaghetti Western, a small figure approaching at a trot, materializing out of the heatwaves.

The little Indian kid’s huaraches skid to a halt in the dirt. “Senores!” he announces respectfully, not even breathless — not even sweating — in the pulverizing heat. Then he emits a stream of babble, staring up at me with earnest almond eyes.

The bus driver has to do the talking, since he knows Nahuatl and that’s all the kid speaks. There’s a couple minutes of back-and-forth — punctuated with slugs from the tequila bottle, surprise surprise. Eventually the bus driver wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. “Your girlfriend went south by herself.”

All that conversation in Nahuatl for six words in Spanish. I don’t know whether to be grateful or suspicious. “What’s south of here?”

“Pujal. It’s a tourist trap.” He condemns the place blearily, as if the tequila and triple-digit heat and inevitable dehydration are finally getting to him.

“What kind of tourist trap?”

“Oh, you know. The usual crap in the Huasteca. Supposedly Pujal has the very best whitewater, and the very best cliff walls for rockclimbing, and the very best everything else.” The bus driver guffaws again. “Whatever keeps the gringos coming.”

Meanwhile the kid is rubbernecking between us, tracking an exchange that’s as incomprehensible to him as Nahuatl is to me. His humble face pools with expectation when we fall silent. He says something I can’t interpret, but can still understand. Greed is a universal language.

When we arrived in this pueblo, I handed out dollar bills to all the kids, promising a follow-up tenspot to the first one who could tell me where Nooshin went. Talk about incentivization — the American greenbacks are nothing to me, but a small fortune to an impoverished Indian family eking out a life in the rainforest. Now I’ve got my compass heading. It’s time to pay out.

The kid stares at the $10 bill as if it might scald his fingers. Then he raises his almond gaze in an almost plaintive look of disbelief. I nod reassuringly. Yes, this miraculous amount of money is truly yours. He gives a shriek of relieved delight and sprints into the heatwaves, dwindling into a blurry silhouette, then nothing at all.

“That’s my bus, right down there…”

I follow the line of the bus driver’s pointing arm. There’s a jagged gap in the walls of lush emerald jungle pressing against the road. A muddy swath of destruction leads downward. Trees are knocked out of the way, undergrowth flattened. At the bottom of a ravine is the converted schoolbus, its rainbow colors dirty with mud and leaves. The bus is miraculously upright.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” I gasp in English.

“Que?” — what? — he asks uncomprehendingly.

I ease my Ford Explorer to a halt, wary of the still-muddy road, and switch back to Spanish. “How the hell does a bus crash into a ravine and nobody gets hurt?”

“This is nothing,” the bus driver yawns. “When I first started driving, 10, maybe 12 years ago, I went over a cliff.”

I wait for the punchline, but there isn’t one. He’s a reclining figure in the passenger seat, not wearing his seatbelt, a half-empty bottle of tequila in his lap. Any more relaxed and he’d be comatose.

“Anybody get hurt that time?” I ask.

“Yep,” he nods.

We sink into silence — or as much silence as you get in a rainforest with the windows down. Invisible monkeys are howling. Birds dart through the thick foliage, exploding into histrionics. Overhead the canopy rustles in a distant wind.

I’m imagining Nooshin and a busload of Indian peasants, staring out rain-lashed windows as the world suddenly tilts and accelerates, the bus hurtling down down down through bone-jarring impacts, trees snapping like twigs, the screams of —

“You think my bus can be winched back up?”

I glance over at the bus driver. His inkspot eyes are roaming beneath a brow of sweaty ringlets, gauging the physics of weight and angle and leverage. The cruel physics. There’s no way in hell that bus will ever see this road again, and I tell him so.

“You’re probably right.” He tips the tequila bottle against his bushy mustache and holds it there for several swigs. The perfect que sera, sera gesture.

I’m noticing the footprints in the drying mud. They rise from the bus and pool in the road around us, then recede in the direction we came from — west, back toward the Manzanares Mesa. All of the footprints except a single set. Those long strides aim east. “That was her, huh?” I don’t have to specify the pronoun.

The bus driver nods. “I tried to talk her out of it, but she said she wasn’t going back.” He waves the tequila bottle in the direction of the rising sun. “Tlacoteotalpan is the next pueblo that way.”

“Tlaco…teo…what?”

“Tlacoteotalpan. It’s a long drive. An even longer walk.”

“How far?” I ask, stricken.

“A couple dozen kilometers.”

OH. MY. GOD. Suddenly I’m on the verge of tears, picturing Nooshin half-drowned in the deluge, wading even more deeply into the jungle, refusing to return to the same village that I can still see in my truck’s rearview mirror. She must hate me to death.

“I talk Nahuatl,” the bus driver is saying. “That’s all they talk in Tlacoteotalpan, far as I know. I don’t think there’s anybody left who talks Spanish. Does your girlfriend talk Nahuatl?”

“No,” I mutter, babying the Explorer back into gear. The engine sounds like a rockslide gathering momentum.

We lurch into motion messily, slipping and sliding down the road. The driving is treacherous, which I find strangely reassuring. This is just like spring on the farm back in Iowa, when the ground thaws and the fields turn into quagmire. My father’s driving lessons are still with me, like rusty nails pounded into my skull. Keep a firm hand on the wheel. Stay in the low gears. Don’t spin out. And his other lessons come flooding back too, the bitter lessons about failure and punishment. When I bogged the tractor or slid into the ditch, my father let me have it — with words, usually, although sometimes he used a belt or even fists. Over the years his angry prediction became a chant, the rumbling background noise of my life: “You’ll never amount to nothing!”

Until I met Nooshin I didn’t have anything to live for, only against. Now I’m going to be the father, and the new life she’s carrying will be my son or daughter. Time to break the chain of harms propelling me. I won’t abuse my kid as my father abused me, and my grandfather abused him. I swear it.

That helpful lard-ass back in Guanajuato wasn’t shitting me — the Manzanares Mesa is filled with a whole lot of nothing much. I’m glazed with boredom, staring out the windshield at a vista of altiplano scrubland. The road is an ugly gravel slash through the agave and brittlebush. It follows an intermittent chain of runty hills, a geological fault line riven with natural springs, the only reliable source of water in this near-desert. Every once in a while a ranch appears, a cluster of whitewashed mud-brick buildings with corrugated aluminum roofs that glint in the sun. They always look vibrant until you get up close, when the whitewash is revealed to be graying and roofs are caving in and open doorways gape into ruin. Their barbed wire corrals are empty, fencing in brown grass. If there’s a windmill, it’s still as a picture.

Eventually a small town appears on the horizon. I can see Quonset huts from this distance, each one a telltale bubble of reflective glare. Between them is the heatwave shimmer of pavement. The pueblo draws closer with excruciating slowness, even though I’m driving as fast as I dare — not very, since my truck is threatening to rattle apart on this washboard of a road. I notice the vista compressing a little, top and bottom. My eyelids are sagging from a bad case of highway hypnosis. I drink more coffee, crank the music louder. What the hell am I listening to, anyway? Some French neo-rap group, I guess.

Hard to believe that’s only Tanquian up ahead. After Tanquian — the so-called “Gateway to the Manzanares Mesa” — there are still three more pueblos and god knows how many more hours before I finally get to Ahorcada, where Nooshin has blown like a tumbleweed.

“Nooshin,” I whisper plaintively. The word is a razor blade in my mouth.

I imagine her emitting some possibility of forgiveness — for that greedy impregnating interlude in the shower, for dragging her deeper into Mexico, for staring mutely at her instead of promising “I’ll never leave you”. Her embrace will be soft and fierce, and I’ll say all the right things, and we’ll laugh about this awkward distance years from now. She won’t become a world I gained and lost.

Tanquian is the only crossroads on the Manzanares Mesa, an intersection of ruts in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. There isn’t much to the town. Mud-brick shacks crowd together, including one hung with a crucifix — the local church, I presume — and another ringed with plastic playground equipment, which is probably the only school on the mesa. A newly-painted Pemex station sits in a lake of asphalt. Quonset huts are lined up with doors open, totally empty.

I pull into the Pemex station and tank up my truck, watching the old-fashioned pump spin. Shadows turn lazily on the asphalt around me. Their outlines are the shape of vultures, circling high in the cobalt sky. The dials slow, then stop.

The interior of the Pemex station could use a new paintjob too. The walls are mottled and peeling, and scratched by racks of expired foodstuffs. Insect carcasses accumulate on strips of flypaper that hang from the ceiling. A fan beats the tired air.

The attendant is an old used-up scarecrow of a man dressed in layered sweaters. His attention is fixed on a portable black-and-white TV behind the counter. A Mexican talking head is interspersed with file footage of the aftermath of a gun battle. Shotgun blasts and bullet holes have shredded the interior of a small house, peppering walls and tearing up furniture. Sheet-covered bodies are scattered around like laundry in a tornado. In a hallway are bodies that fit under towels. Children caught in the crossfire.

“Another narcotraficante shootout, huh?” I say in Spanish, settling my elbows on the counter.

“They gunned down a policeman and his entire family. 11 lives snuffed out, and for what? Even the Colombians don’t kill a man’s family. And during Semana Santa, the holiest week of the year. Right before Easter! What kind of animals are we becoming in this country?” The attendant’s voice is an emphysema croak. Then he turns my direction and his rheumy eyes widen. “Hey. You’re an American.”

“Yep,” I say, reaching into a cargo pants pocket for my wallet. “Pump #2. 335 pesos.” I count out the multicolored bills.

“You need change?”

“Nope.”

“Then just leave it on the counter,” he tells me, and raises a gnarled hand in demonstration. “I’m useless because of the goddamn arthritis. Reuben? Reuben!”

A teenage mechanic bangs in from the back garage, smoking and sweat-plastered and wiping greasy hands on his sweatshirt. He scoops up the money and punches open the cash register. “What’s the score?” the kid half-asks, half-complains in between drags on his cigarette.

“How can you think about soccer at a time like this? The drug cartels are killing entire families now!” The old man turns to me and wags his chin deploringly. “The country is running with blood, and all this asshole cares about is soccer!”

Reuben acts like he didn’t hear the insult. He finishes separating the different peso denominations into their tray compartments — then slams the cash register shut, violently enough to make the attendant startle.

I brandish a polaroid of Nooshin, flashing it back and forth between them. “You guys see this American girl come through here a couple days ago?”

“Yesterday,” the old-timer croaks, staring at the TV. Pools of blood are neutered into spilled oil on its black-and-white screen. “She took a map.”

“One of these?” I ask, grabbing a trifold map of Mexico from a dusty rack. It’s superficial and outdated. Only the major highways and roads are depicted, and several new tollways and bypasses are missing. I put the map back. “Yesterday? You said you saw her yesterday?”

“Beg pardon?”

“You said you saw her — ”

“What?”

“He asked if you saw her yesterday!” Reuben interjects with an irritated face, his voice raised.

Now it’s the attendant’s turn to grimace in irritation. His eyes disappear into angry creases. “That’s what I already told him!” He swivels back to me. “She got off the bus to Guanajuato and waited for the other bus. The one that goes east into the Huasteca.”

“East into the Huasteca,” I echo dully.

“That’s what I said! But there was a big thunderstorm over the mountains. A trucker came through here earlier, said the road washed out.” His emphysema croak is distinctly jealous. If only the Manzanares Mesa got rain like that.

The kid is staring past my shoulder. “You got 4-wheel drive on that thing, right?” It takes me a moment to realize he’s talking about the Explorer. When I nod, he says, “You can probably make it.”

That speculation outrages the elderly attendant. “Don’t tell him that! If he wants to go into the Huasteca, he should detour around on paved roads, Highway 13 — ”

“Highway 113,” Reuben snarks, correcting him. “But with 4-wheel drive — ”

“4-wheel drive? I don’t care if he’s got 100-wheel drive! If there’s no road — ”

The door slam shuts behind me, silencing them in mid-argument. I escape into the hot angry day. My heart feels misplaced, either in my throat or sunk into an ankle. East into the Huasteca…

Back in the Explorer I stare at my road atlas of Mexico, a single question looping through my head — where the hell does Nooshin think she’s going? South and she’s back in Guanajuato with me. West is the direction of Tijuana and America. North is where she came from, the dead end trail that culminates in La Ceja. But she’s heading east, across a mostly-empty swath of map, aiming for the Gulf of Mexico.

And not the touristy part of the Gulf, like Cancun or Cozumel. The Huasteca is a tropical region of dirt-poor Mexican Indian villages. Keep going east and she’ll hit the selva — rainforest — that shadows the coastline in spinach green. Nooshin amidst malaria and poisonous snakes and a million different kinds of parasites. With only a mostly-empty backpack. Not much money. Alone.

Well, not exactly alone. My gaze wanders across the cab to the passenger seat, her usual station. A paperback lies in her place, glossy with newness. The English-language version of What To Expect When You’re Expecting. We purchased it from Amazon.com because they ship to Mexico, but the book arrived after our scene in the plaza of the Museo de las Momias, after she fled. Add a pregnancy to the very short list of things Nooshin is taking into the rainforest.

The narcotraffickers have a saying: “You can’t hide in Mexico, you can only be hidden.” That’s because Mexico isn’t a country, it’s a multitude of small towns and extended families. Blood is thicker than water, villages never forget their own, and gossip — not futbol — is the national pastime. Towns and families must agree to stop talking about the fugitive, or their inevitable gossip will give him away. The same rule applies to foreigners too, especially somebody like Nooshin. To Mexicans she’s a circus freak without a circus. No matter where she goes, she attracts scrutiny and wags tongues. And thank god.

This is how the gossip game works:

An elderly and superstitious woman bumps into Nooshin in an empty plaza somewhere, interprets her as a bad omen, makes the sign of the cross, and scuttles away. Later she gabs about the encounter to a friend of hers, who mentions it to her son in Guanajuato, who happens to be dating a girl whose sister is a tour guide and received that bulletin about Nooshin’s disappearance. And that’s how I find out that “una gringa muy MUY alta y esta en los huesos y con el mal ojo” — a very VERY tall American girl who’s just skin-and-bones and has the Evil Eye — passed through Ahorcada.

“Ahorcada? Never heard of it.” I blink at the mismatched couple standing in the hotel room’s doorway. The son is wider than tall, a doughy-faced Indian who never met a meal he didn’t like. His girlfriend is frail and knock-kneed, with delicate mestiza features. They’re blinking back at me — and today’s growing collection of empty Tecate cans, kicked into a corner. In a gust of brewery-breath I ask them, “Where the hell is Ahorcada?”

“Thataway.” The son’s porcine face is even piggier in profile. He’s waving a flabby arm in the general direction of Canada. “Ahorcada is thataway.”

I grab my backpack and root around for a map. “Show me.”

“Not until we get the reward,” says his girlfriend. Her dark eyes are shining with dollar signs.

“Reward? What reward? There’s no reward!” I unfold the map and hold it out for their inspection. “Now please, show me.”

The son begins to reach out a hand, bulbous and rough like a seal’s flipper –

She slaps it away. “American money. 50 dollars. Right now.”

“Not a chance,” I tell her, and make grateful noises as I begin to shut the door. I can find Ahorcada on my own.

“Wait. Let me show you.” The son’s flipper-hand reaches out to the map again. His bratwurst-sized finger isn’t very good for pointing, but he indicates a gray dotted line that leads away from Guanajuato, then trails off into nowhere. “The second-to-last pueblo on this road,” he announces, tapping the map. “I grew up there.”

My eyes are roaming the map for any kind of detail — crossed picks that indicate a mine, plane silhouettes for an airport, blue lumps for a lake. But there’s nothing except that gray dotted line and its unnamed white circles, the map’s smallest population unit. 1,000 souls and less. “What’s in Ahorcada?” I finally ask.

“Stupid assholes like you!” his girlfriend bursts out. At first I think she’s referring to me, but she’s not. The eyes that were shining with dollar signs are shooting daggers at him. “We could’ve gotten money for this!”

“There’s nothing much in Ahorcada,” the son shrugs placidly, as if he’s deaf to his girlfriend. His fleshy shoulders keep jiggling after the shrug ends. “It’s up on the Manzanares Mesa. There’s a whole lot of nothing much up there.”

I surprise him by thrusting a couple $20 bills at them, which his girlfriend claws out of my hand. Then I begin folding the map with excited movements, my heart somersaulting in joy. Nooshin isn’t lost to me anymore. She’s synonymous with an foreboding destination — Ahorcada, which means “hanged woman” in Spanish — and I’m coming to get her.

Kneeling to stuff the map into my backpack, I’m struck by the weirdness of it. Why the hell was Nooshin going to Ahorcada? The answer is a big fat duh — she wasn’t. She took the first bus she found, a local one that just happened to be transiting nowhere.

A rotund shadow looms over me. “Are you her husband? Boyfriend? Something like that?”

I’ve already forgotten the son and his girlfriend are still standing in the doorway. I consider them warily, knowing that whatever I say will ripple across the map we’ve just been looking at. Gossip is the national pastime in Mexico, after all. “Husband, boyfriend, something like that,” I agree evasively.