Mystery Girl: A Novel (27 page)

I stared at the black cloth, as if trying to pierce it with my mind. I stared so hard that I almost convinced myself I saw it move just slightly in the faint, jumping flame light, as though lifted by a breath. I held my own breath and put out a shaky hand to peel the veil back: there was only a plastic form, a kind of white mask holding the veil in place. I felt a hand on my arm and assumed it was Nic.

“It’s just a mask,” I whispered over my shoulder.

“Sí, señor.”
The voice was male and not friendly, and the hand on my shoulder was strong. “Her real face was destroyed in the accident. This is just for the funeral.”

He was a big guy in his thirties maybe, in a black suit, white shirt, and thin tie. The uncles stood in the doorway, no longer smiling. One cradled a shotgun casually in his crossed arms. The hand tightened. “Now that you’ve mocked our grief,” the man said, “I think you had better come out back and explain yourself.”

70

“MY NAME IS RAMÓN
. I am the cousin of Maria.” I’d been led out to the backyard, a walled garden with a few trees, some plants growing tomatoes, red peppers, and cukes, or maybe zucchinis. Hens burbled in a coop. A big dog slept peacefully on the end of a thick chain. Over an open grill, women turned slices of steak and cactus. Flames hissed and jumped at the grease. Nic stood with them, nodding and
smiling, but when she looked over at me her eyes were wide and anxious. I sat on a plastic chair across a table from Ramón, with the two uncles standing above us.

“You said you were friends from Los Angeles,” he was saying. “OK. Friends are nice but they don’t come to Tepic for a funeral. I want to know what you are doing here.” He leaned in close to me and fixed his eyes on mine. “Did you really know my cousin?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I took another breath but couldn’t think of anything more to say. “That’s what I wanted to check. I’m sorry.”

He took a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his pocket and shook one out, then offered the pack to me. I declined. He lit up with a Zippo and snapped it shut. “Explain.”

“I’ll try. I’m not sure I can. Your cousin was living under the name Mona Naught, in a hospital in California. We don’t know how exactly, but she was at the center of some kind of mystery. This girl”—I nodded toward Nic—“was hired unknowingly to impersonate her. I was also tricked, into witnessing her suicide.”

“And you now question this?”

“Perhaps. I was really just following the clues. I don’t know what they mean but they led here.”

“And you think she was murdered.”

I said “Maybe,” but I nodded yes.

Ramón nodded with me. “I have suspicions too. When out of nowhere, the Americans tell us that my cousin, who was missing for so many years, was found dead, we contacted the Mexican government. They say she crossed back into Mexico years ago.”

“That’s all they have?”

“That’s it. They’re sending the documents. But my question for you is, if she really came back, why didn’t she tell us? Where has she been all this time? And how did she end up dead up north?”

“That’s what I’m here to find out.”

Ramón patted my arm, in a manner half threatening, half friendly. “You and me both. She was my cousin. We grew up together.
If someone killed her, then it’s my job to see justice done.” He put his lighter in his inside jacket pocket and I saw the gun he wore under his arm.

“Are you a cop?” I asked. “A detective?”

“No,” he said, dropping his cigarette between his feet and grinding it into the sand with a metal-tipped cowboy toe. “I’m a taxi driver. You?”

I shook my head. “Novelist.”

71

WE ATE. DESPITE THE VAGUE
(or not-so-vague, given that several of our coeaters were armed and that a refusal to devour and effusively praise the cooking might be the last straw) sense of menace, we were hungry, and the food was delicious: tender, slightly charred slices of steak topped with wedges of thick, white cheese, grilled cactus, and whole scallions, scooped up in a fresh tortilla. I scarfed it down. Perhaps fear, like the country air, had sharpened my appetite, my appreciation for life and its fleeting pleasures, like consuming other once living things.

It was with my wife (my ex?) that I had first eaten food like this, real Mexican food, at her favorite places all around the East Side and over in Boyle Heights, dollar taco stands and trucks that specialized in just one thing (pork carnitas, shrimp in a chilled red soup), ladies who made tamales in their home kitchens (meat or cheese with chilies, glued into the corn paste and steamed inside a leaf) and old school family-run restaurants, like La Serenada de Garibaldi, where the subtle and sophisticated dishes (the zucchini blossoms and frothed egg around the burnt pepper and cheese of a chile releno, shark soup in tomatillo sauce, the twenty-something ingredients, hand-ground in a stone mortar, that go into a basic mole) were
served under the imperious hawk eyes of the boss lady, who sat at a back table, doing the books over hot chocolate and pan dulce, and occasionally calling over a waitress to excoriate.

But what truly won my heart, was what I tasted again that night, with armed men and sleeping dogs around me, mouth numbed by peppers, cooled by rice milk horchata, gobbling down what tasted like my last supper: the deep allegiance to those primal, celestial tastes, hot and sweet. So, so hot and so, so sweet. Lala put chile on oranges, melon, cucumbers, corn, eggs. She put chile on sugar, buying a baggy of chopped cane from a pushcart and shaking it full of hot sauce before digging in, the burn of the first bite followed by the soothing juice of the cane leaking onto your tongue. And don’t forget, these people discovered chocolate. What contribution can a supposedly glorious European civilization offer to match that achievement? And coffee! Therein lies the ancient potency of Mexican food. Chocolate, chile, sugar, coffee: these are flavors we can feel as well taste, that enter us like drugs, through the nervous system, delivering pleasure and pain.

Ramón let us know we were expected at the funeral in the morning, after which we’d get down to crime solving. I tried to squirm out of it, but he was clear: we were now honored guests and we’d do as we were told. Mourning, then vengeance. He pushed back his plate and lit a Marlboro. “But first, tonight, we drink.”

72

WE DRANK. THEY TOOK US
to a place on the edge of town, more like a hut than a proper bar: just a concrete slab floor with a drain in the center and a roof of corrugated tin and thatch, with a couple of tarps lifting lightly in the breeze. There were cinder block walls on two sides, one of which had a long bar, and the rest was open. You could smell
the fields out beyond the gravel parking lot, the moisture and the vegetation. A jukebox played sad Mexican cowboy tunes, and some beer posters featuring gigantic breasts and icy bottles, both beaded with sweat, provided the decor. It was empty except for a few old men nuzzling beers and staring at the TV and some truck drivers in caps laughing and playing dice at the bar. A dude with a long, droopy mustache and a big cowboy hat called for a beer, then lit a cigar and sat to read
Alarma
in a corner. No gringos and no women besides Nic. Shots of tequila and a round of Dos Equis arrived. We toasted.

“To Maria,” Ramón said.

“Que descanse en paz,”
Nic said and all the men muttered their agreement and clinked her glass and we drank. It tasted like burning piss. I forced myself to gag it down, gasping and wheezing. The others laughed.

“Wrong pipe,” I said, pretending to laugh along while I wiped my tears. “Can I get a water?” Coffee and Donuts pushed across a beer.

“Thanks,” I said and took a small sip. More shots arrived. These were from the bartender, in sympathy for our bereavement, and we toasted his health. The truckers saluted us too. One was fat, in a jean jacket and with a chain wallet. The other was tall and boney in tight jeans, a leather vest, and a lot of fake gold. This time I was careful to throw my head way back and fire the alcohol straight down my gullet. It still killed, but I held it together and it poisoned my stomach instead of my tongue. The cold beer helped, but I really wanted a Coke.

“El coco?” I asked. “Coca-Cola?” as more shots landed in the puddle at the center of our table. No one seemed to hear me over the music. Someone saluted something and we drank. Nic looked flushed and her voice sounded thicker.

“I like it here. It’s like we’re in that movie.”

“What movie?” My voice sounded weird too, but I wasn’t sure if the problem was my tongue or my ears.

“You know, the one where they have to get to Mexico.”

“That’s almost half of all movies.”

“No!” She yelled a bit too loud and smacked my arm a bit too hard. “The couple. Ali McDraw and Steven Queens.”

“The Getaway.”

“Yes!” She grabbed my wrist. “I fucking love that movie. She has this great jacket and then he shoots that guy. Doesn’t it feel just like this? Who made that movie?”

“Sam Peckinpah.”

“See, I knowed you’d knewed.” She sneered. “You fucking nerd.”

“But the movie’s not in Mexico,” I said. “They just cross the border at the end. Mostly it’s Texas.”

“I thought they crashed into the river and drowned at the end? Or you think they did but he lives?”

“You mean
Convoy?
” Ramón broke in suddenly. The blind uncle nodded in agreement.

“Sí, está Convoy!”

“You’re right,” I said. “Peckinpah made that too. During the time when he referred to himself as a whore.”

“Cristo Cristo Fersoon,” Coffee and Donuts put in.

“Sí,”
I said, “Kris Kristofferson.”

“Ten-four, good buddy,” he declared.

“For me,” Ramón said, “the best of Peckinpah is
The Wild Bunch.
”

“Sí.”
Blind Uncle nodded emphatically. “
La pandilla salvaje.
”

“Sí, Mapache,”
Coffee and Donuts added.

“You guys like
The Wild Bunch?
” I asked. “I thought maybe you’d think it was too harsh a view of Mexico and from a white guy too.”

“We don’t like gringos so much,” Ramón agreed, “but we love Westerns. And you know that Mapache is acted by Emilio Fernández, a Mexican star?”

“I know,” I said. “Here’s another thing. He posed for the Oscar statue.”

“Fernández?”

“Yes. That’s him, naked.”

“All those blancos,” Nic said, “kissing his Mexican ass on live TV.”

Ramón reported this news excitedly to the others. We joyfully toasted the fact that, for lo these many years, American superstars had in fact been worshipping a golden Mexican idol. The truckers seemed to be snickering at us, but a sense of goodwill pervaded our part of the room, so I forgot to worry.

We agreed that despite, or maybe because of, Peckinpah’s macho, drunken, Romantic-nihilist vision of Mexico as a kind of combination heaven and hell where his characters went to live out their destinies, there was no denying that Peckinpah knew and loved the country. He was crude, bombastic, even insulting, but he got so many small details right, and this we know is how artists—who can have no truck with politeness or even fairness—show their love. We all adored Leone too, of course, who set his most openly political epic in Zapata’s day,
A Fistful of Dynamite,
a.k.a.
Duck, You Sucker,
a.k.a.
Once Upon a Time in the Revolution,
though in his case the love was purely symbolic: the Italian film was shot in Spain with white actors. I tried to bring up Buñuel, who, exiled from Franco’s Spain, ended up living in Mexico for decades and turning out dozens of pictures, including the classic harrowing tale of barrio kids,
Los Olvidados,
but Ramón and the uncles didn’t know him: he never made Westerns and this was, after all, the West.

“What about
Touch of Evil,
the Orson Welles movie?” I asked. “Do you know it?”

“Of course,” Ramón said. “I saw it on TV as a kid and again at a rerun house.” He shrugged. “You know it’s ridiculous. Charlton Heston as Mexican police.”

“Yes. Though maybe not any more than as Moses or Michelangelo.”

“And the other Mexicans, the gangsters, are cartoons.”

“True.”

“And his Mexico is not even Mexico.”

“No. You’re right,” I said. “It’s Venice Beach in LA.”

Ramón shrugged. “But what can you do with a genius?”

“Right. It’s a masterpiece.”

“
Sí.
To Orson!” We toasted and the others joined in, the uncles and Nic equally oblivious of why they were drinking.

“I have a toast,” Nic announced with drunken braggadocio. She lifted a sloppy shot. “To Mona Naught, may she rest in peace.”

“To Mona!” Everyone drank.

“Who?” Ramón asked with a grimace after he swallowed.

“It’s the name your cousin was using,” I said.

“And me, too,” Nic put in.

“OK, to you too,” Ramón called, lifting another glass.

“
Si,
to you,
señorita.
” We all drank. I sat back heavily, and took some deep breaths, determined to sit the next round out. My head seemed sealed in bubble wrap, my eyes and ears were blurred, and my lips had a hard time feeling each other. My thoughts also seemed to land softly from far above, like individually wrapped packages I had to open one by one.

“To my wife!” I yelled, surprising everyone, even myself. They all looked. I didn’t even have a glass in my hand. Coffee and Donuts pushed one across. Everyone hoisted a shot.

“To your wife, wherever she is,” Nic said.

“To your wife, whatever her name is,” Ramón added.

“May she rest in peace,” I said, and I drank. There was a moment of silence.

“Ay cabrón,”
Nic said, “I’ve got to piss so bad.” I winced but no one else seemed to care. She rose unsteadily, leaning on Coffee and Donut’s shoulder for support, and wandered toward the restroom. Laughing and drunk themselves, the truckers swiveled on their stools to watch her.