Into the Beautiful North Read Free

the beaches all summer, killing everything they could sting. There was a spoiling porpoise carcass on the sand to bear testimony to their powers. The safest salt water in that whole region was in the shallow turquoise lagoons where the women went crabbing with floating straw baskets full of scrabbling jaibas, the big crabs taking their last little sea cruise before landing in the cooking pot. But you couldn’t surf a tranquil lagoon.
    It wasn’t like the people hadn’t seen Americanos. Tres Camarones had been beset by tides of missionaries from Southern California. But the Jesús Es Mi Fiel Amigo Sunday School and the End Times Templo Evangélico had finally closed down for lack of converts. The “youth center” went back to being a muffler shop that was also closed because its owner had gone to Florida to pick oranges. For a short while, an ashram run by a Wisconsin woman named Chrystal, who was in constant channeling-contact with the Venusian UFO-naut P’taak, rose north of town. Several local workers had made good wages working on Chrystal’s pink cement pyramid on her leased forty acres of scrub and pecan trees. But the local water cut short P’taak’s mission to the world, and Chrystal rushed back to Sheboygan with typhoid and amebic dysentery. After Chrystal’s personal rapture, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, known as Los Testigos de Jeová, were forced to leave town when the heroic local bowling champion, Aunt Irma, unleashed her devilish tongue upon them and christened them Los Testículos de Jeová. The Witnesses, deeply offended, packed up their Spanish editions of The Watchtower and abandoned the heathens to their grisly fate.

    Scarface tossed aside his napkin. The lime juice and Cholula sauce were better when you sucked them off your fingers. The table was a wasteland of empty plates. He stood.
    “Where are these pinches gringos!” he shouted.
    The state cop checked his watch, put down his beer bottle, and turned to glare at Tacho as if the proprietor were the surfers’ secretary.
    “We are busy men,” he warned.
    “I’ve been here an hour!” Scarface complained.
    Tacho shrugged.
    “You know how Americans are,” he said. “Always late. On their own time.”
    Scarface kicked back his chair and grabbed his gun. He held it down by his side, as if deciding whether Tacho and Nayeli needed shooting. “If the surfos show up, tell them next time we see them, they each get a bullet in the head. Understand? I don’t like to be kept waiting.”
    “Sí, señor,” Nayeli replied.
    The bad men strode out and got back into their car. Scarface pulled a fresh cinnamon toothpick out of his breast pocket. He took off the cellophane wrapper, dropped it on the floor, and popped the toothpick in his mouth. It waggled up and down. “Nice town,” he said. “No cops.”
    He adjusted his lapels.
    “No men, did you notice?”
    He smiled.
    “A vato like me could make a real killing here.”
    He wiped his sunglasses on his shirt and put them back on.
    “Watch yourselves,” he called out the window.
    They drove away without paying.

Chapter Three

    A s the bandidos prowled the town and its outskirts, Tacho and Nayeli went about their day. Mopping the cement floor, sweeping the sidewalk in front, slicing limes, and peeling mangos. But mostly, they did what Mexicans in every small town in Mexico did: they circled their own history.
    Nayeli was thinking about the missionaries. Well, she was thinking about one of them. The one saint—Missionary Matt.
    All of Nayeli’s notorious girlfriends loved Missionary Matt. He was the first blond boy any of them had ever seen in person. They could claim that the vapid white-boy handsomeness of El Brad Pitt or El Estip McQueen at the cinema didn’t move them, but up close, it was a different story. A real live blue-eyed white boy was their own romantic freak show. Matt’s nose peeled. They had never seen a peeling nose. It was precious.
    Matt sneaked away from his pastoral