Losing Clementine (8 page)

We each ordered combo plates and orange juice. The juice came right away in old-fashioned fountain glasses with straws. Richard wasn't talking much, and when he did, I felt like a visiting relative he hadn't seen in several years. (“Hey, look at that. A lady cabdriver. Don't see that too often, do you?”) We had officially entered the postsex twilight zone, where everything was off and potentially dangerous. It was a relief when silence settled in to stay.

I watched a middle-aged married couple divide their food. She gave him her beans. He passed her extra tortillas.

“We never got there.”

“What?” I looked over at Richard, who was looking at the same couple I was. “We never got where?”

“Never mind.”

Our food came. My breakfast was ham, tortilla, eggs, salsa, and bacon piled one on top of the other with a side of beans and tripe. The tripe had the texture of a fibrous vegetable combined with the undeniable flavor of meat. I left it on the plate.

“What are we doing today?” Richard asked.

I picked up a crumbled piece of bacon with my fingers and ate it.

“I have some medicine to buy.”

“Where are we going to get it?”

The orange juice had bits of pulp bigger than normal. It gave me the odd feeling of needing to chew what I sucked up through the straw.

“I'd rather go alone.”

He put his hand on my knee under the table. I'd put on shorts that morning, and his hand was hot on my bare skin. I wondered for a moment if he had a fever.

“Would you stop trying to do everything by yourself?”

My heartbeat started to pick up, and my skin felt cold and damp. What would I say? Yes, Richard, just step around that dog food while I ask about some large animal tranquilizers?

“Just this part,” I said. And the part where I jam a needle into my vein while lying in the bathtub, you know, in case of fluids.

“I want to come with you.”

“You are here with me.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Let's have
carnitas
for lunch.”

“We're eating breakfast right now.”

“It's never too early to plan.”

After we paid the bill, we made our way out to the street to flag down a cab, which was turning out to be easier to do here than in New York, and offered another five-dollar bill to be taken across town to Avenida Revolucion.

The heart of Tijuana sits in a bowl surrounded by hillside neighborhoods packed so tight there is not one bit of ground to be spotted between the houses. At sea level, we zipped around the traffic circles, which replaced every major intersection, and past billboard after billboard mostly advertising mobile phones.

The air felt twenty degrees hotter than when we left the hotel. Even the sky looked bleached and faded from too much UV exposure. I scooted away from the window, a futile exercise trapped in the front seat. There was no air-conditioning, and I felt my spleen start to melt. There wasn't enough sunscreen in all of Mexico. I put a thumb against my delicate forearm skin and pulled away, inspecting how quickly the white spot turned back to pink. Was I burning or just getting heat stroke?

We passed a sushi restaurant, a disco shaped like a cave, and a BMW dealership. When we stopped at a light, street vendors walked between the cars with armloads of candy, flowers, newspapers, bottled water, and sunshades. School-aged kids braved the intersection to break-dance for coins. I was considering purchasing a sunshade when the light turned green again. We turned, and the neighborhood got less affluent. An auto repair shop made out of corrugated metal had a mural of a bikini-clad woman painted on the side. It was surrounded by a fence topped with razor wire and, every so many yards, a cross. Lust, self-protection, and, when all else failed, prayer. I could appreciate that.

The taxi pulled over on the south end of Revolucion. “This okay?” our driver asked in English.

It was. We climbed out and started down.

The veterinary shop I'd read about was two blocks off the avenue on the northern end. Somewhere between where we were and where I needed to go, I had to find someplace to stash Richard.

The avenue was nothing like what we'd enjoyed the night before. Quickly the stores on either side of the street became nothing but trinket shops, strip clubs, and tequila pushers. On every block stood a donkey painted in black-and-white zebra stripes. Its owner stood ready to hoist a tourist onto the beast's back and plop a sombrero adorned with the word
Tijuana!
and pom-pom fringe on his or her head. Now and again, the keeper would toss a corncob onto the ground for the animal to chew and would try to wave us over.

Store clerks ran out to us as we passed. “Come inside,” they demanded in English, “just for the hell of it.”

We shook our heads and kept going.

Old men with nut-brown skin approached us with silver necklaces that would turn your neck green. They pushed them toward our chests.

No, no, no.

A few feet later another man holding the same necklaces.

No again.

The strip club bouncers took their turn. The barmaids. Hostesses at restaurants. “Mexican food!” one of the women in a waitress uniform shouted at us, trying to shove menus into our hands.

I stopped looking at faces or scanning the storefronts for fear of attracting more attention. I heard myself saying no, no, no, no, thank you, no, on a loop. I was developing tunnel vision.

At the end of the avenue, mariachi bands in full dress stood on the corner, perhaps half a dozen of them, waiting to be picked up by a passing car to play a party. On the opposite street corner, women in high heels and skirts not made for the hour waited for passing cars and parties, too. To the left and down a couple of blocks was the Cathedral of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Its spires stood tall over the city, watching. The hookers paid it no mind. To the right, somewhere down there, was the store I needed.

I nudged Richard and pointed at the church. “I'll meet you in there.”

“Where are you going?”

“I'm not doing this again.”

“Clementine.”

I had been pushed passed sympathy already.

“You can wait for me at the church or you can go back to the hotel, but you're not coming with me.”

“That is ridiculous.”

“If you try,” I said, “I will scream bloody fucking murder, and everyone will look, and it will be a scene, because we're white.”

“Are you actually trying to use racism to your advantage?”

“If I have to.”

The muscles in his neck and face were tight, but he shook his head and turned his back on me, headed to the left. I turned, too, and went right. I had gotten the directions from a newspaper article, which had been none too discreet about describing just how scofflaws were obtaining and smuggling deadly poisons across our precious border.

I crossed the avenue without looking back at the hawkers and pushers and strippers and zebra-painted donkeys. Within a block, I was out of the tourist zone, back in the rest of the city. I passed a gas station, a two-story shop selling terra-cotta, and a street that seemed to house nothing but dental offices, most with signs in English offering oral surgeries for a fraction of the northern price. There were cheap clothing stores and botanicas, just like in L.A., selling their mixture of Catholicism and voodoo.

The farther away from the avenue I got, the more normal and poorer the neighborhood got. I went one block, two blocks, three blocks farther than I'd expected. I stopped and swiveled my neck. Something close by smelled like a sewer. This couldn't be right. Maybe I had passed it. Maybe it had closed. Maybe the newspaper had obfuscated more than I thought. I kept going like a gambler throwing dollars on the table to win back those already beyond his reach.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Yes.

To my right, just one shop up, was a sign across a small storefront. Most of it was beyond my meager Spanish, but I recognized
veterinaria,
and in case I didn't, above it were painted two large fighting cocks in a face-off. My relief at seeing those two birds—an abomination to PETA supporters everywhere—was like three martinis on an empty stomach.

I stepped under the fighting cocks and into the store. Sunlight penetrated only the first six feet, and beyond that no artificial light illuminated the merchandise, what little of it there was. Advertisements for pet food were pasted in the window and had been for some time. The red inks had faded, leaving nothing but the blues and yellows, which made the human and golden retriever look a washed-out green.

A woman sat in the back of the shop on a plastic chair with a young boy. I smiled at them, and they stared at me. I had planned to subtly browse the wares undetected before getting up my nerve and approaching the register to inquire about things kept “in back.” So much for subtle, but still I went through the motions.

As in all the shops I'd passed, goods on the shelves were slim. No twenty-seven kinds of toothpaste to choose from. No six varieties of food to suit the aging small dog, the aging large dog, the aging large dog with a weight control problem. There was one doghouse of questionable quality and a wall displaying a sprinkling of leashes and collars, a few sizes, a few colors. If those were too fancy for you, there were three spools of metal chain—small, medium, and attack-dog size—that you could buy by the meter. Above that was a lone, empty birdcage. Either it was for sale or its occupant had died. It wasn't clear. The rest of the small space was taken up by an L-shaped counter with a glass front. Behind it were old-fashioned wooden shelves that reminded me of a small-town candy shop or perhaps an apothecary.

I feigned interest in a small blue collar. It was a difficult ruse to keep up. Everything was dusty, and I didn't see anything to bring home to Chuckles. I gave up and walked toward the register. Inside the glass display case were two bright orange castles for decorating a tropical fish tank. No fish or fish flakes or aquariums or plastic plants or turquoise tank gravel to go with them. They looked sad in their forced frivolity.

The woman left the young boy to play with his toy car and joined me on the other side of the counter. “Can I help you?” she asked in English.

I had written down what I needed and pulled the piece of paper out of my pocket. I unfolded and smoothed it out. The paper felt thinner from the heat and sweat of my body. I was lucky the ink had not smudged.

“Do you have this?” I asked and pushed it toward her.

She turned it around, squinted at it, and nodded.

The shelves behind her had the same barren, postholiday-rush look. She walked the length, reading labels, and when she got to the end, I began to worry she had run out.

She had not. She bent down and picked a clear glass bottle off the bottom shelf, double-checked it against the paper, and brought it to me for my inspection. I, too, double-checked the name and the dosage against the paper. The label matched. I nodded, and she moved over to the register to ring it up.

Forty-five dollars.

I paid in cash, and she put my purchase in a purple plastic shopping sack.

When I stepped out of the shop, I was blinded by the sunlight and a case of nerves. No problem to buy it here. Contraband back home. I clutched the bag in my hand and hurried back the way I had come.

Richard was standing outside the church with his arms crossed over his chest. His nose had turned pink from the sun, and his mouth was drawn tight across his face. Behind him the doors of the church were open, but yellow tape blocked them off. I looked over his shoulder to the inside. Construction men were knelt down over the terrazzo floor working. At the end of the nave watching over them was Our Lady of Guadalupe herself, aglow in her rainbow aura. I liked seeing her there. Women were so rarely in charge in these sorts of places.

“So you didn't get to go in, huh?”

It wasn't so much a question as a statement of the obvious, and Richard ignored it.

“Did you get what you came for?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Fine.”

Half an hour of silence later, we found a restaurant with a sign that featured a cartoony pig eating a less cartoony pig. Inside they served us
carnitas
by the pound with freshly made tortillas and salsa. We ate and ordered tequila. The food and the booze thawed Richard. He looked at the purple plastic bag I carried but didn't ask about it.

When we left the restaurant, he took my hand, and we walked that way until we found a market. It was permanent but not much more than a series of lean-tos. There were
moles
and red and green chili powders mounded up in clay bowls, bins of every dried and fresh pepper known to Mexico, pinole, tamarind pods, tomatillos, plantains, brown cane sugar dried into cones, tubs of rock salt, and all kinds of nuts, both plain and covered with chili powder. Cheese was displayed in boxes with mesh sides for air circulation, and dried fruits of all colors filled glass bins like candy at a five-and-dime. Men stood in the aisles cleaning the spines off cactus pads, and above them hung piñatas in the shape of Mickey Mouse and SpongeBob SquarePants.