"That's ridiculous," she said. "The only reason boys didn't ask you out was because they thought you were too good for them. You were so smart, why would you want to run with a Grace boy? That's what they thought."
The meeting in the living room was beginning to break up. We lowered our voices automatically.
"No," I said solemnly. "It was the shoes. It's a known fact. The day I left Grace I bought a pair of gladiator sandals and my sex life picked right up."
Emelina eventually remembered a letter for me she'd been carrying around a while. She'd stuck it in the diaper bag when she picked up the mail, and then forgotten it, so it suffered more in its last hundred yards of delivery than it had in its previous fifteen hundred miles. Of course, it was from Hallie.
I went home to read it, like a rat scurrying back to its hole with some edible prize. I settled into the living-room chair, polished my glasses, and scowled at the postmark: Chiapas, near Mexico's southern border, only days after she left. That was a disappointment, anything could have happened since then. I slit it open.
Codi dear,
I've been driving the way you're supposed to here, like a bat out of hell, the wrong way out of hell whenever that's possible. I'm getting the hang of outlawry. You'd be proud. I burned up the road till around La Cruz and then slowed down enough to enjoy the banana trees going by in a blur. The tropics are such a gaudy joke: people have to live with every other kind of poverty, but a fortune in flowers, growing out of every nook and cranny of anything. If you could just build an economy on flowers. I stayed in a house that had vanilla orchids growing out of the glutters and a banana tree coming up under the kitchen sink. I swear. There were some kind of little animals too, like mongooses. You would know what they are. I'm happy to be in a jungle again. You know me, I'm always cheered by the sight of houseplants growing wild and fifty feet tall. I keep thinking about 626-BUGS and all those sad ladies trying to grow zebrinas in an arid climate.
I wanted to take the coast highway as far as Nayarit, where it gets rugged, but I paid the price for that little adventure. (Doc Homer would say: I paid a dollar for my shiny dime.) I broke, not bent but flat out busted an axle in Tuxpan and spent two days waiting around while a man with a Fanta delivery truck and time on his hands brought in a new one from Guadalajara. The only hotel was a two-story pension with live band (euphemism) on weekends. I spent the time mostly sitting on my balcony watching pelicans dive-bomb the sea, and remembering our trip to San Blas. Remember those pelicans? If you'd been there, in Tuxpan, it would have been fun. I couldn't bring myself to do anything productive-there were people I could have talked to about crops and the refugee scene, but instead I spent one whole morning watching a man walk up the beach selling shrimp door to door, He had a pole over his shoulders, with the bucket of shrimp hung on one side and on the other side a plastic jug of water. Every time he sold a kilo of shrimp he'd pour out that much water and drink it, to balance the load. I watched him all the way down the bay and thought, I want to be like that. Not like the man selling shrimp. Like his machine. To give myself over to utility, with no waste.
But I was useless, lying around those two days. Saving my strength for what's ahead, I guess. I get more jumpy as I move south, like a compass needle or something. Saw an awful lot of dead cropland in the interior, and I know it will be worse in Nicaragua. War brings out the worst in production agriculture.
Tomorrow I cross the border, but it's hard to say where the border is, because this whole part of Chiapas where I am now is camps of Guatemalans. This whole livelong day I drove horrible mountain roads in the rain and saw refugee camps, one after another like a dream. They say the Guatemalan army is on a new scorched-earth campaign, so people come running across the border with the clothes on their backs