The Virgin’s Guide to Mexico

By Eric B. Martin

One

She has never been inside a bus station before. Until a month ago, she didn’t know Austin had a bus station, or where to find it, or who or what the hell went on there. Her mom would be disgusted—although what does she really know about her cold and mute deceitful mom—to see her common little girl lined up behind two crusty senior citizens, a family chopping it up in Spanish, and the pale woman with an ass the size of Arkansas. So that’s who. Ugly runaways and old folks and Mexicans and asses sized for Arkansas.

At the counter she pays cash money for the ticket, keeping her eyes dead and mouth straight so as to be forgettable. It’s one of her inadvertent talents. She is famously forgotten far and wide, all over town, even in her own home. True, that home is stupid big, with more rooms than the three of them know what to do with: dad’s leather office; mom’s white pink woody study; a disgusting mirrored master bedroom with dueling walk in closets and bathrooms plural, his and hers; the guest room where no guests ever room; vast zones for living and cooking and wash; the basement cave of daddy’s billiards where satellite TV projects large size, two four seven, three six five.

Her room is on the ground floor, in a lone finger of the house that hooks off toward the garden. This suits everyone just fine. The walls are painted peach, no joke, but the walls are barely visible because the place is lousy with books—childhood treasures, Euro classics, Beats, Plath, Huxley, Exley, bubble covered jet trash. Her room is never really neat, but this time she has left it more than slobby, condemned The Maid Also Known As Esperanza to hours to make things right. The plan started out clean and clandestine but then every piece of clothes she owned came to audition for the ark. T shirts, cargos, sweatshirts, jeans. Shoes: needs an elephant boy and sherpas for her shoes. Photo albums. Last year’s high school yearbook. A box of old letters from middle school, round handed notes folded into triangles, Hey Alma, do you still like Charlie V?!? until she sat bedazzled on the wall to wall, choking on the stale past crumbling through her hands. Enough. Enough with books in pretty lettered spines that stare like doe eyed toddlers please don’t leave me here behind. Don’t listen. Don’t be an ass.

It took hours. Hour after hour in that totally messed up room, shopping her personal mall for what’s right to bring along. This is where the killer imagination comes in. Close both eyes. Simulate a future. A girl in flight. A girl alone, hunting Earth’s most gigantic city for the only man who can tell her what she needs to know. Is there running? Clubbing? Formal dining? Her mother might be shocked at the list of leftbehinds, but Alma thinks she did okay. Time, that little bully, will tell.

The bus is not full. There’s a seat number on her ticket, but mysteriously the senior citizens have decided to annex her rightful place. She mentions this to them, quietlike, standing in the aisle with impatients bunched in tow, but the old couple shake their heads and wag their index fingers back and forth like synched uptempo metronomes. Impatients sigh and shift and stamp behind her. She must tell the old finger wags again, in Spanish now, and silently scratches words on the chalkboard in her head:

creo que usted está en mi asiento

Crap it’s slow up there, every word sold separately, although there’s this feeling—like a deep low bass thump getting louder, hard to tell, she thinks it’s getting louder—ever since she started to study her mom’s native tongue, in secret, just one year ago. There is Spanish in her somewhere and it’s trying to get out, but before it can the old wags strike her mute, shaking their ancient heads with vigor as their fingers hit allegro. Silenced, she presses her lips together and drops sullen to an empty seat, where she leans her forehead against the tinted window and mumbles to herself. Creo que old people suck.

They stop in San Antonio, at another backdoor bus station in a rude hole part of town. More Mexicans get on. This might still be America but not on this bus. Autobuses del Norte. Gotta be tough to find someone who drops south off the map on an Autobús del Norte. American buses must be more organized: surveillance, records, questions about who and where and what on earth she’s doing. The Mexican bus, on the other hand, could give a fuck. No one asks her nothing.

Fresh bodies press onboard. Outside she can see enormous packages tied up in twine, dead bodies and crates of dynamite loaded into the cargo bays while the empty seats fill up. See now it’s stressed out now with all these people coming on. Old people suck, they suck, they really really suck because there’s going to be a problem—they’re in her seat, she’s in someone’s seat, not even ninety miles from home. But there’s no problem. The vacant spots are filled without debate. Unlike her freakish mom, real Mexicans don’t fret or fuss or panic, not in their natural habitat, see how the free range untamed Mexican rolls with punches, makes do, adapts? Outside, back in Texas, all cargo is dispatched and the driver bumps hands and fists with his main man at the counter, leaping theatrically aboard, hissing the doors closed and the AC up high. They slip out through San Antonio’s quiet Friday morning streets, find the highway, and get gone.

In Laredo, the bus veers away from the US border booths to drop her at a makeshift station near the high fenced bank of the Rio Grande. Only a few of them get off here; this line is bound for Nuevo Laredo and then the city of Monterrey, four hours deep in Mexico. She’s never been to Monterrey, or Nuevo Laredo, or even Laredo for that matter. She’s never been to squat, and that’s part of the point.

The station is even more disappointing than it first appears. First the serial killers’ bathroom and second no locker for her bag. The vintage AC system doesn’t stand a chance against the midday August heat. Hotter than a June bride in a feather bed, her daddy would say, probably is saying right now as he steps between the glass steel building of the office park to the big red SUV waiting in God’s only square of shade. Whatchu won eat? he’s drawling super Texan jovial to a chummy sales rep or VP Branding or vertical partner opportunity. They got Friday ribs at TJs and lasagna at the Giovanni’s. Salads, yeah, caesar taco chicken green, they got it all, salad probably wouldn’t kill me neither, sure I’m watching my weight too, you know, just from comfortably afar. Blah blah blah. The big mouth bully. Everyone’s best buddy in the world until their world ain’t what he wants.

She drags her bag over to the counter, leans there heavily on her elbows to look friendly and short. At 5’9” she would tower over the dwarf in demi uniform who ignores her while he decodes a computer print out like it’s a declaration of war. When he finally looks up he glances at her tits but finding little there hunts around until he spots her hair. Her hair is not so bad.

Do you have lockers?

Lokoust?

Lock ers. She points to her bag, turns an imaginary key in the air.

He watches her and sniffs and smiles as if she’s just unlatched a chastity belt. Low curs. He shakes his head. No, we don’t have it.

¿Sabes dónde? There’s the beat.

No sé decirte.

Every Wednesday night for one year, down at the community college, Alma has been cramming this language into her brain, where she built a sturdy grammar cabinet and filled the right drawers up with words: verbs here, nouns there, feminine, masculine, pluperfect, subjunctive, por and para, ser and estar. She’s always been an extraordinary student, of everything, as long as it takes place in a classroom, but the trick with language, she read somewhere, was to get the basics and the structure and then go fall in love. Madrid. Buenos Aires. The gap year, the Brits called it. Don’t go straight to college. Explore your holy cow. What a great plan except here she is packing stolen credit cards and chatting up some perv who works for Autobuses del Norte. Not quite strolling down Las Ramblas, is it?

¿Lo dejo con tigo? she tells the guy, pointing at the bag.

Sí, cómo no. His voice rises in mild interest.

Sólo una hora. She glances at the schedule on the wall. Voy. En el bus. A las cuatro.

Está bien. He puts his lips together tight and pouts with certainty.

She keeps her small black backpack of essentials—the goodie bag—and leaves the rest with him, hoisting the duffel to the countertop while he watches without a hint of help. She’s brought too much stuff, this she knows already, maybe he knows it too. He pats the duffel twice with both hands and swings it out of view.

A las cuatro, she says again. Gracias.

De que.

She sits down on one of the benches to examine her map. Nixon High School looks far. North Jarvis Street starts somewhere nearby, although she doesn’t know where the five hundred block might be.

That’s probably not a good idea, someone says to her.

Above her looms the frontside of pale Arkansas, packed into dark blue jeans and a whore red T shirt, shiny, tucked. Cheap black boots, well shined, unscuffed. The woman’s voice is country, she could really be from Arkansas from how she looks and sounds. Or Missouri.

What’s not.

Your bag.

It’s not safe?

Is it ever? says Arkansas, snorting like a wild horse and turning her attention to the parking lot outside where someone useful has arrived. She nods. Just a word of the wise. Her boots click martial along the floor as she departs. Climbs into a jacked up Tundra and disappears.

Alma sneaks a look at the counter where the guy is watching her. Is he a bad man? She heads back to look for signs of scumbag, unfurling her spine like a fist and expanding to her full height. More Godzilla than girl like that but that’s the way things are. He waits for this strange tall teenager to come, curious what such teens might say.

The street Jarvis? she says in Spanish.

He squints into the glare of question. That way, he says, tossing a pigeon into the air. Right here, close.

Is it safe? She watches his face.

On this side? he says. Of course, Laredo’s very safe. The other side, well, be careful, no? Lots of rateros. She doesn’t know the word, but from the look on his face she can see what he means.

Rateros are like goddamn bastards? She is showing off, now, her best gutter Spanish.

He laughs. More or less. Where did you learn that?

But she shakes her head. That conversation doesn’t interest her. The point is, bucko, are you a bad man? Do you empathize with others? She’s looking for the truth but all she sees is that wide nose with mixed blood firing through his capillaries. One of his ancestors was raped by some dumbfuck savage from Extremadura who clubbed an Indian girl from Cuaultla. She feels for him, with roots like that, but he better not do her wrong. We all got roots. Screw Arkansas. She says thanks and see ya later and leaves the duffel there with him.

Outside the heat is funny. He he ha ha ho. She sweats promptly as she walks, the thin straps of her bag cutting damp canals into her shoulders and back. She’s wearing tan shorts and a light blue tank top, new sneakers and white peds, her long hair tied back in a high ponytail. She’s in disguise, in other words, dressed like her mom might dream her up, some normal J. Gap Lands Crew girl—but ugly—out for a little stroll. The streets are dead, at first, like something killed them. There was once a lively little downtown here but something beat it senseless. This ground beneath her feet’s flipflopped from Mexico to Texas to plain ol’ USA, as feisty locals gave gringo’s dream the finger and started their own damn city, planted a thriving Mex Jeckel United Hyde spleening smuggled cattle, weapons, booze, drugs, cars, casinos, migrants, maquiladoras. She knows all about it. She reads. The border has a long proud legacy of all fucked up.

If she were her mother, this is one excuse she’d use. To grow up here, on both sides of the dotted line? Transplanted, fatherless, orphaned, alone? No wonder she’s some frozen bitch. But Mom won’t even tell this story. She’ll talk about the cute paperboy on the Tex Mex bridge she crossed each day for school who called out made up headlines BEAUTY CAUSES TEN CAR CRASH! She’ll mention the hole they lived in if Alma won’t tidy up her room. But just try to connect the dots and she’ll be very clear: Mexico has nothing to do with it. Look at the woman. The Arabian calves, the tiger thighs, arms of cabled steel. Our lady of the triathlon. No one’s ever seen anything like it. Her teeth light the darkness and disintegrate men’s stitches. Skin like Swedish chocolate, black eyes and hair as the pit of the soul. There’s no accent, no stories, no Spanish. It’s like nothing but Texas ever happened.

Alma knows better.

The address on North Jarvis Street is farther than she would like it to be, but she strides on through the blaring heat, flapping her arms lightly to cool her smooth shaved pits in the breeze. North Jarvis isn’t shy for traffic. There are tinted chromy pick ups, yupped out Lexi, pimp convertibles, bland sedans, meticulously rusted pieces of crap. There’s even a public city bus that lumbers by, headed for the airport, or so the placard says. Holy shit, she thinks, watching the big beast gun a yellow light. Her mom rode that bus or its older cousin, twenty something years ago. Back when she was a Mexican hoofing it cross the border and then out to Nixon High School, full speed ahead.

A real live Mexican. Now that must have been something.

Recognizing the house is out of the question. Her mom has never described it and no pictures of the place seem to have survived. She’s looked. She’s turned all her parents’ sanctums inside out and found horrible things: thin leather ties, self improvement books, stacks of Playboy magazines, hemorrhoid cream, huge credit card receipts, pamphlets on vasectomy, a cheap manila twist top vibrator. She’s found old address books and diplomas, expired library cards and a Bible in Spanish. She’s found that her mother who doesn’t speak Spanish speaks Spanish, that her mother who doesn’t have family has family, that her mother with no legacy’s got legacy. But in all these searches she’s never seen a picture of the first American house her mother lived in. The house of Elma Watkins, where all these lies and transformations must have first begun.

From the outside, 532B North Jarvis doesn’t look like it could transform much of anything. The front face needs a paint job, needs some straightening and uncrumbling, needs a little love. When there’s a gap in the traffic, she takes two quick pictures with her daddy’s digital, filling the frame to close perfection from the far side of the street. Then she crosses, mounts the front stairs, and knocks on the blue door twice.

Yeah?

Hi. Hello?

Yeah?

Yeah. Um. You don’t know me, but my mom used to live here? I was kind of maybe hoping I could come in and see the place.

Huh?

My mom, she says, shouting over belly laughs from failed mufflers passing by. She used to live here. A long time ago.

Yeah?

Yeah. I’m putting together an album, you know, of her past? She’s in a coma, they don’t know, you know. I just thought if I could take a couple pictures.

The door opens. He looks about two or three years younger than her, fourteen maybe, short, with straight dark hair flopped out spiky over his eyes. Got his uni on: black DisdainD T shirt, baggie jeans, white high tops. She knows which lunch table this kid sits at. Behind him, three huge chords are rocking out at optimum distortion levels. The stereo is pissed and screaming.

Whut? He squints through her into the unwelcome light, trying to figure her out, but Alma has no lunch table. He doesn’t know that though. He doesn’t know the geeks don’t want her because she’s too rough and the Goths don’t want her cause she’s too soft. She’s too good for the Mexicans and too shitty for everyone else except the few she’s known since preschool. He doesn’t know about the soft shale sediment that lies beneath her toughest talk, the layers of baby bawling at recitals and dances and on the softball field or the time when she got her first B, the time she time she time.

My mom’s in a coma.

Oh.

She was shot. In the neck.

He blinks.

It was a robbery at a convenience store.

He frowns guiltily and skips his glance along the ground as if she’s saying it’s his fault. Shit, he says.

She grew up here, long time ago. Can I come in, take a couple pictures? For the album.

Yeh. Sure. He shrugs and lets her in.

It’s a tiny house, a one story job that goes straight back. From the front hall she can see the small backyard through the combo dine/live/TV room and past the kitchen. The other two rooms—bed, bed—are off to the side. The place smells like old canned soup and marijuana. No one else is home.

She follows him down the hallway. The whole house is carpeted except for the kitchen. Dark blue carpet, dirty and old. Linoleum worth carbon dating with a big sweet stove cum center griddle they probably don’t make anymore. The kid likes the kitchen best too, she can tell, plops himself down on a stool by the door. He watches her looking around.

Your basic shithole, huh. He fishes a lighter and green ceramic pipe out of his pocket, clamps them together as a package, and offers them her way.

No thanks.

He glances at the plastic clock on the wall, and she does too: three and change. This information seems to please him. He lights up and takes a huge ambitious hit, showing off his young suction before pushing an expert cloud into the room. He sneaks a look at her, expecting wild applause.

How long y’all lived here?

I been here all day. He has outdone himself this time, launched himself into a loose orbit around planet Zortna. I cut, he says.

Yeah?

Yeah, fuck it. The music stops suddenly. They can hear the car sounds outside.

You go to Nixon?

He nods.

My mom went there. She lived in this house, and she went to Nixon.

Which room?

I don’t know. She takes the letter out in case this is his way of saying bullshit. He leans forward and together they read the beautiful handwriting on the yellowed envelope:

Hermelinda Montes Figueroa

Casa Elma Watkins

Jarvis 532 “B”

Laredo, Texas 78043

EE.UU.

Mom’s a trip, huh. He takes the letter from her and flicks the blank space where the return address should be. Bet she stayed in the front room.

Think so.

Noisy as fuck. S’my room. Me and my mom. Old bag’s back there.

She’s taken the camera out now, and backs herself into a corner of the kitchen to take a picture best she can. She takes another one from the other direction. The kid figures prominently in both of them, leaning forward off the stool and tilting his head and splaying his ruddy fingers in surf’s up position.

I’m gonna go take a few more, okay.

Yeah, he says, laughing. Yeah yeah yeah.

She gets the dining room, the hallway. She gets the front bedroom with its old school bunk beds, its humid sour boy mess. The thick shades of all four windows are fully drawn so that no natural light interferes. Her camera flashes once and then again. The curtains open and the bunk beds disappear. A couch slides in from nowhere with two old lady chairs and a little scratched up coffee table and a writing desk in the corner. Her mother is sixteen years old sitting skirted on the couch with her knees together while Alma’s pseudo namesake Elma Watkins pours ice tea for two in the other room. Sugar, sweetie? she says to the orphan who curls up on the couch each night and stacks her carefully folded clothes there in the corner, kept invisible from guests with a concealing quilt. Not that there are many guests. Mostly there’s just Elma and mother, one spinster history teacher and a fate gored straight A student who were not meant to live together for a day or a week or two whole years but what else was there to do.

I slept on a couch, her mother told her once, one rare occasion when Alma was ten.

On a couch?

Yes. All my clothes fit in two little piles.

After everyone died?

A red couch. They were in Alma’s bedroom, her mother brushing Alma’s hair as if she might find something.

You were lonely.

I was looking for you, her mother said, smiling with all her teeth. Face wiped clean of memory and grief.

Hey, like, which convenience store? The kid’s standing in the doorway now, watching her be in his room.

It’s a stoned riddle that takes her a second to puzzle out. Oh. No, you know what? I lied about that. My mom’s not in a coma.

No?

Might as well be sometimes but not physically technically at least.

Yeah, huh.

She did live here though. Couch and chairs and skirted knees are fading into the crumpled monuments of dirty clothes. She needs to ask him but she’s not sure how. I just wanted to see it, she says. Sometimes you wonder where they come from.

It’s a shithole, huh.

She shrugs. I’m going to Mexico City.

Yeah, right on. That’s where she’s from, huh?

D’you just say? Somehow the kid’s still holding the envelope in his hand, how could she forget, but now she reaches out to yank it hers. You read this?

He shakes his head. I just remember, the old bag used to talk about her Mexican. He’s walking down the hall now and she follows him into the other bedroom. The kid flicks on the light and what she sees is not the quilted bed or wicker chair or antique dresser with forged iron hardware but a picture of her mother hanging on the wall.

The girl in the photo is so soft and sad and beautiful that Alma about falls down. Must have been around Alma’s age except a different species. Simple white dress, long hair pushed back under a thin headband. Alma stands with both hands propped against the plaster, staring at her young mother in this constellation of frames. Her mother stares back. Can I tell you something? her mother asks.

And that’s mine, the kid says, stabbing at a ferret faced teenage mother holding a newborn in her arms. There’s me. Man your mom was hot. What’s your name?

Ashley. She starts laughing. She lifts the picture and pinches it between her fingers, hard.

You’re lying right?

Yeah, I’m always lying. I’m a big fucking liar.

That’s cool. I don’t give a shit. She’s not really your mom.

I know. Except she really is. They look at the picture together. Is there, like, anything else? Any other. Stuff.

The kid almost smiles. You can ask old Watt yourself. He glances at the clock radio by the bedstand and she shoves the picture in her bag. Should be here soon, he says, worry bunched up above his nose.

She. She must be old as dirt.

You think? He’s in the hallway now, pulling out the bottom drawer of a massive file cabinet, old rollers rumbling like thunder coming in. Shit in here somewhere. He yanks an accordion file the color of dried blood. Check this crazy out.

The file bulges with old mail, and junior pulls it out until: same envelopes, same script. A few of them have little doodles on them, carefully drawn little birds and pigs. She reaches but he jerks the letters away from her, out of reach.

What’s it worth to you.

A sob shoots up her esophagus but she gags it back. There’s a penknife in her goodie bag. She could stab him in the throat. She starts to say something—what do you want?—but she can hear her voice squeak up already. This kid wrings her grandfather in his grubby little hands. Abuelo. For the first time it occurs to her that she might really find him.

Twenty bucks, she whispers, fumbling with her bag. You see, I gotta. My mother’s only. She can’t even talk right.

Your mother’s only what? He smirks at her, waiting for her latest lie. He waves the letters like a Japanese fan.

Listen. You ever wonder. She twirls her hair with nerves but makes herself stop. Why life’s so fucking angry? She’s about to say your father but she thinks better of it. You’ve seen my mom, she says, so why am I like this? You know? She waits for something smartass but he doesn’t say a thing. Do I look like, I dunno, some fucked up looking family? Do I hate all this bullshit here because I should be down there? You know what I’m saying? All the lies they tell us?

For a thin moment she spots his brain pit of compassion but then he dances back from her, waving the letters around. You’re the liar, he says. Panties all on fire.

She sighs. Twenty bucks, okay?

Twenty? He shoves the missives halfway down the front of his pants and looks her up and down. You want these letters? He waggles his hips. The letters dance.

What, she says. She tries to work some spit into her mouth. What, what, what, you want to see my pussy, what? He reddens and her too but she grabs the letters and throws the twenty rolling through the air.

No hey listen, the kid says as he lets go, ashamed ashamed ashamed. No hey I won’t tell anyone, okay? He keeps nodding, as if to that invisible beat. I was just playing. Mexico City. Maybe, like, I should come with you.

She says nothing and slips by him to the front door, pulling it open and drawing the hot air in behind. He doesn’t move, statued in the dark pupil of the ruined room. She pulls the door closed.

Her long legs reach out into fairytale steps as she makes the house disappear behind her, shoving the letters and the picture in her bag. She’s not scared, not that she knows of, but for the first time since she left home she feels her heart cough and chatter.

Excerpt from THE VIRGIN’S GUIDE TO MEXICO by Eric B. Martin. Copyright © 2007. Permission granted by MacAdam/Cage Publishing.