Mexico - 10. Chapter 10 of 16

Somehow, we missed Navolato. It was off a side road, somewhere to the west. Even before we started to look for the turn, I think it was too late. Just after six, we passed a small sign saying San Francisco. I noticed the time on my dashboard clock. Mark searched the map, then laughed, saying, “Christ, are we in the wrong place.”
“Why?”
“There must be a dozen San Franciscos.”
“All in this area?”
“No, in the index. I’ll bet it’s the Mexican Springfield.”
“Well, which one is this one?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t show up on the map.”
Maybe because it was tiny. I drove in and immediately was at its center. I pulled over.
“Here?” Mark asked. There were no other cars.
“There doesn’t seem to be anywhere else.”
The town had only one street. Short. Narrow. No cross streets. The buildings were all adobe, and mainly one story high. They had shuttered windows and heavy doors that looked like they’d been closed for years. There were hardly any people.
“You’d think there’d be signs,” I said, getting out of the car.
“Lock it?” Mark asked.
“Nah.”
“Probably everyone knows where things are,” he went on. “That explains the signs.”
“What about tourists?”
“You see any?”
He was right. We were the only people on our side of the street. On the other side, a young girl approached. There wasn’t really a sidewalk. Just a point where the road stopped. Then there was dirt.
I called to the girl. Smiled at her. She was maybe fifteen. “Excuse,” I said, “¿Está un hotel aquí?”
The girl smiled back. “Lo siento,” she replied, so softly I could barely hear it. Then, quickly, “No hablo Inglés.” And she hurried on.
“¿Está un restaurante?” I called after her.
She shook her head.
Mark tried. “¿Donde está un hotel, por favor?”
“No hablo Inglés,” she called over her shoulder.
“That was Español!” Mark insisted. He turned to me. “¿No?”
We laughed.
“She’s probably been taught not to speak to strangers.”
“She was pretty,” he said.
“Yeah, but she’d get us both arrested.”
At that moment, a middle-aged man walked by.
“Excuse...” I began.
The man ignored us.
“Excuse...” I tried again.
“Probably taught not to speak to Anglos,” Mark cracked.
“Excuse,” I called after the man. “¿Está un hotel aquí?”
The man disappeared behind a closed door.
Mark looked at me. I shrugged, grinning.
We walked down the increasingly charming street and stopped by a pair of heavily carved doors. The walls of the building were the usual stucco. There were no windows
“Could be a church,” Mark suggested.
“Might be.”
He tried the door. It opened. He looked at me. I shrugged again, and we went in.
It was a church. Which for some reason, we found very funny. Maybe fulfilling our guess. But the place also made us both uncomfortable.
“We shouldn’t be in here,” Mark said.
“When was the last time you were?”
“In a church?”
“Yeah.”
“For the right reason?”
I nodded.
“A long time ago. But I’ve gone to a lot of them for weddings.”
I’d been to church at Easter. With Chris. But that was before. There seemed no point in going after.
We quietly left, but not before looking around. The church was one long room, a story-and-a-half high. No pews. No windows. Mainly an altar at the far end, lit by a few electric lights. There was Jesus, a couple of other statues, and on the walls, the Stations of the Cross.
Mark left a few coins as he passed a shelf of lit candles.
“Superstitious,” he admitted.
Outside, we’d almost reached the end of the street. Suddenly, Mark knocked at a door.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Trying for help.”
“You will get us arrested.”
“Nah, people are friendly."
They probably are. But in this case, no one was home. Mark walked to the next door and knocked. We waited. He knocked again.
Nada.
He leap-frogged me. At the next building, he peeked through a broken shutter.
“That’s another law we’re breaking,” I warned.
“I’m just looking.”
“Have you ever heard about Mexican jails?”
“Rumors.”
“I don’t want to find out.”
“At least, we’d have someone to talk to.”
Abruptly, the door of the building opened. An old man appeared.
“Vamos!” he shouted.
“Sorry,” I told him immediately. “Excuse.” I tried to look contrite.
“We’re sorry,” Mark corrected, politely including himself.
“We’re not trying to cause trouble,” I went on. “No problemas. “We’re just looking for a place to stay.”
“¿Está un hotel aquí?” Mark asked.
“¿Donde está un hotel?” I added.
If the old man understood, he didn’t let on. “Vamos! Ladrones! Robars!” he shouted.
“¿Por favor, un hotel?” Mark coaxed.
“Mestizos!” the old guy shouted. “Monos! Bueys!” Then he slammed the door.
For a moment, Mark and I just stood there. Then we looked at each other.
“Well, we learned some new words,” he said, laughing.
“Yeah, but I we’d need a ship to use them.”
“You think this town has drug problems?”
“I remember learning that the real sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was a lack of hospitality.”
“Gotta be drug paranoia. Like what happened to you at the border.”
“They sure in hell don’t like strangers.”
We might have wandered further, but there wasn’t anywhere to go. We were looking at fields. We crossed to the other side of the street.
“This place is pretty,” Mark observed.
“Guess they want to keep it that way.”
We knocked at one more house. The old guy had kind of put us off. This house had welcoming, open shutters, though its windows were heavily curtained. Again, we got no answer.
“They’re probably all calling each other. With warnings.”
“Maybe on cell phones,” I suggested.
“I don’t know about that. I don’t even see TV antennas.”
It’s hard to make fun of poor people, and neither of us meant it. We just wanted a place to stay.
“I don’t think this is a town at all,” Mark offered. “And it may not be the one called San Francisco. It might just be a group of houses, like the ones we’ve passed before, at crossroads. For all we know, it’s private property.”
I glanced around. “It looks like a town.”
“Maybe it once was. But what do we know now?”
Mainly one thing -- that we were back at my car. Also, the sky was getting dark.
“You don’t want to hear this,” I casually told Mark. “But I was also warned not to drive here after dark.”
“Why not?”
“Animals. Everywhere. Not wild ones -- farm animals, unfenced. They keep running into cars.”
“They cause a lot of accidents?”
“Mexico, in the morning, is dead animals lying all over the roads.”
Mark considered this. He glanced at the sky. “Where does that leave us?”
I looked around. “Let’s check the map.”
But since we really didn’t know where we were, the map wasn’t that helpful. I knew exactly how far we’d driven that day. But since it wasn’t all forward, with our circle to the beach, I didn’t know where we’d taken the wrong turn.
“That’s west,” Mark said. He pointed toward the setting sun. In a really pretty sky. Which we took a moment to appreciate. “If we just keep driving that way, we’ll hit the highway.”
Except we were on a north-south road. And I felt a whole lot better exploring when I had hours of daylight ahead.
“We could stay here,” I finally suggested.
He looked at me. “Till morning?”
“We have plenty of food -- though it’s mainly snacks. We can stay parked right here. We’ll be fine.”
He looked at the street. Looked at the car. Then returned to me. “I thought you said...”
I laughed. “These people won’t even talk to us. But I’m sure they’re not dangerous. They just want to be left alone.”
Mark hesitated. “Where will we sleep?”
I’d bet anything he’d suddenly remembered I was gay. I laughed again.
“You take the mattress. I’ll use the sleeping bag, outside.”
“I’ll take the sleeping bag,” he insisted.
“There might be animals. And snakes.”
I was joking. I’d backpacked a lot, and animals had never bothered me.
“Snakes would be bad enough,” he replied. He pointed to the car. “Isn’t there some way I could sleep in the front seat?”
“You’d be crippled by morning.”
He studied me. I wasn’t going to say, I’ll keep my hands off you. I promise. I wasn’t gonna give him that.
We decided to postpone the decision. But we also decided we didn’t want to sit in the middle of town. That might be really rude. We got into the car, drove maybe a mile opposite the direction we came, and pulled over in a gully near a large tree.
I got out the sleeping bag, shook out the remaining sand, and spread the bag where the dirt seemed the flattest.
“Can we light a fire?” Mark asked.
It wasn’t cold. We’d only put on our shirts when we got to town, and we didn’t need to cook anything.
“I suppose.”
“No, I mean, can we? Do you think it’s legal? Would that get the police here faster than anything else?”
“Why wouldn’t it be legal? This isn’t a rest area.” I was remembering other signs.
“But it’s a desert. Things burn. There are laws.”
I didn’t know that. Even when Ohio had a drought, you could always light fires.
“I’ve got a couple of candles,” I said. “I bought them for reading.”
“Still an open flame.”
I laughed. “Jesus... these rules…”
In the end, we sat on the open sleeping bag, leaning back against my car, watching the sun go down. When it did, things got a little cooler but not much. I switched to jeans, and I knew I had a sweater stashed somewhere. Mark didn’t bother changing.
“You’re not cold?” I asked.
“Almost never.”
“Amazing.”
We ate. Fruit. Cheese. Unsliced bread we broke off with our fingers. We had a couple of cans of warm Coke, and a couple of old granola bars. It was fine.
“How long were you and Chris together?” Mark asked, after we’d talked about less personal things for a while. I’d already told him, but that was before we’d been drinking. I told him again.
He considered.
“If you count it right, Anne and I were together for three years. If you start when we met on the internship. But we only lived together for two years in LA.” He hesitated, then added, “I hate LA. Anne loves it. It’s all so familiar to her. And I don’t need a place as isolated as where I grew up. But there’s got to be something in between...”
“I’ve never lived in a city,” I told him. “I don’t count Dayton, and you can’t count Cedar Falls. Ann Arbor’s a college town. Detroit doesn’t exist anymore. To me, cities are places like LA. and Chicago. New York... Washington...”
“San Francisco?”
“I told you -- I’ve never seen it.
“It’s almost a suburb.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Where do you want to live?” he went on.
I had to laugh. “I don’t have a lot of choice. I’ll spend the rest of my life in college towns. Unless I start doing statistics for the government…”
“University towns?”
“If I’m lucky.”
“I don’t know where I want to go.”
He said that quietly, and I remembered him saying “I don’t know what I want” the day before.
“You can pretty well go anywhere, can’t you?”
“There are four billion lawyers in the U.S.”
“Oh, come on. There aren’t that many people.” But I knew what he meant.
“And I can’t remember why I wanted to be a lawyer. Except to make money. It wasn’t to do good work. I’m not that naive.”
He seemed uncomfortable, talking about this.
“Though it did seem like the job might keep me busy. But I don’t like it now. And I don’t like the people. I’m not even sure I believe in the system. And I don’t want to do what Anne suggested -- teach other suckers to become lawyers.”
“I’ve always liked teaching.”
“Not me. I got through law school on study groups, not going to classes. Teaching has to be the most repetitive work in the world.”
Getting into an argument with a good-looking straight guy at the edge of an empty field wasn’t my idea of how I wanted to spend the night. And every time I tried to explain why I loved teaching, I came off as an idealist anyway. Sometimes, just a jerk. So I let it go.
“What do you want to do instead of law?” I asked.
He laughed. “You could hold a gun to my head, and I couldn’t tell you that.”
“Business?”
“Sucks.”
“Something creative?”
“No money in it.”
“What does that leave?”
“Very little. I told you -- I’m so fucked. I should have listened to my guidance counselor in tenth grade.”
“What did he say? Or she? Mine was a woman.”
“It’s not what anyone said. And mine was a guy. I never took anyone’s advice. I picked law for the money. Figured that would balance everything else. Now I don’t see that happening.”
“What does Anne say?”
“She thinks I’ll grow out of it. When she has her doubts about law, she just does some pro bono work and feels all good again. I see millions of starving, dying people, and I wonder why I’m sweating to make some rich guy richer. Or worse…” and he stormed through this before I could object “...to get a mess of well-deserved cash for some screwed-over poor folks who only go out and blow it on booze and cigarettes and lottery tickets.”
I waited for that to pass. “I liked you better when you were drunk,” I half-joked.
“I liked me better, too,” he said, laughing. “But I’m not a big drinker, no matter what you saw last night. And I don’t trust drugs because I stupidly overrate my brain. So right now, I think that taking a few months off to dig up dead civilizations is a wonderful idea. When I first heard you say it, I thought, My god, why didn’t I think of this before? It’s like running away to join the circus.”
I considered for a moment. “I don’t think archeologists feel that way. I’m sure it’s all like law to them.”
Mark laughed, and I began to like him again. It was mostly a matter of keeping him away from the serious stuff. But how long can a person live that way?
“How long have you liked math?” he asked me next.
“Since I was good at it,” I quickly answered. “And I’ve always been fairly good. The puzzles fascinate me... And I love the logic... the abstractions…”
And I knew how boring I was about to get, so I quickly cut myself off.
Mark was quiet, I guessed thinking. I couldn’t really see him. We’d lost all the light, though I could still see darker and lighter portions of the sky. And stars.
We weren’t facing each other, just looking out into huge, dark fields. There weren’t even lights in the distance.
He finally said, “I keep thinking the smarter you are, the happier. And the more educated, the freer. At least you become more liberal, like you.”
We laughed at that.
“But driving all the way to Guaymas, Anne’s very intelligent, very well educated parents, talked all about a house we’d just looked at -- that was supposedly perfect for us. And it would be perfect for our kids, and perfect for our careers, and perfect for all the new friends we’d make.”
He stopped for a moment.
“The sad thing is,” he went on, “I really like some of it... A lot of it, honestly. Like golf. I learned to play as part of business. But I really… like… to… play.”
“Become a Pro.”
“I’m not that good,” he admitted. “And I hate competition. I mostly like being out there… with my clubs... in the morning, when there aren’t a lot of people around… just solving problems... I’m good at Solitaire, too.”
I joked with him. “Sounds like you should be a monk.”
“Nah, I like sex too much.”
So did I, and I wished to hell Chris were there. But I’d been taught, long before, that you don’t waste wishes on anything short of world peace. And if I was going to wish for Chris, it would be something more permanent.
At that moment, something called in the desert.
“What do coyotes sound like?” Mark asked.
“How would I know? I’m from Ohia.”
And we laughed.
“The thing about Stanford,” he soon went on, “is I’m good at tests. That’s why school was so easy.”
“I’ll bet you’re not bad at law.”
“I’m okay... As I said, I like solving things. I just don’t like the consequences.”
“Then let Anne support you. Stay home and raise the kids.”
“I couldn’t do that.”
“Why not?”
When he didn’t answer, I said, “My dentist just quit to open a pizza shop. She was sick of all the new dental regulations. But in and around that, she managed to raise three sons.”
“Kids aren’t for me. I kept working to make Anne understand that.”
“Know what I like best about women dentists?” I asked, trying to distract him.
He couldn’t answer.
“Small hands.”
And we laughed at that together. Then for a time, we watched the sky.
“You really want to have kids?” he asked.
“Right now?” I cracked.
He didn’t say anything, and I think the image was too strong. I’d let myself slip.
“I’d like kids,” I hurried on. “I want to raise them in a nice liberal town. Then take them into cities to show them things you can only learn there. Then come home.”
“Safe?”
I agreed. “Chris is a really great guy. He’d be a great father. He will be. I may just not be there to share it.”
“When did you know you were gay?”
I hated that question. I had an easy answer and a hard one.
“I can’t remember,” I told him. That was the hard answer. “Everyone has these coming out stories. Everyone has their epiphanies. Not me. I wasn’t a tormented kid. I always had great friends. And you saw me last night -- I’m not afraid of women... I don’t dislike them. I’ve slept with a few.”
“Really?”
“Did you think I was faking last night?
He laughed. “I wasn’t really thinking about you.”
That was funny because I was thinking a lot about Mark.
“Yeah, I can see that,” I admitted. “You had a lot to drink.”
“Even if I was sober, I wouldn’t have been thinking about much more than Anne. How much I’ve let her down.”
“Oh, come on. You’re what? Twenty-five? She’s twenty-five? You’ll both get over it.”
As I’d get over Chris. If I had to.
“Yeah,” Mark allowed.
“There are bigger things to beat yourself up for.”
He said nothing to that. Then:
“But I keep wondering if… well, when I figure it out… figure out what I want... if I won’t just come back full circle... And if I stay with Anne, now… and stay with law, and have kids, and do everything I’m expected to... if I won’t end up just as happy.”
“At least, you’re ending up happy...”
“Yeah, well, I’m too bright to be miserable...”
And then I laughed. Not because it was funny. Or he was. Or I was. But because I had no answers for Mark. And he wasn’t about to find any that night in a Mexican field.
He seemed to know that, too. We were just two guys who didn’t know each other very well, who were shooting the shit like a couple of high school freshmen. Slightly confused. Somewhat idealistic. And on my part, completely horny.
“I wonder what time it is?” I asked.
“I could get my watch.”
“Nah, I could look in the car as easily.”
“You tired?”
“Not in the least. That’s why I wondered about the time. How soon I can sleep.”
“I usually stay up late,” he offered.
“I go online.”
“Where?”
“Lots of places. I hunt around. Always find something interesting.”
“I slip into porn too easily,” he admitted. “Especially if Anne’s asleep. I’m usually up way after her. But I’m safer reading next to her in bed.”
“Is that why you walk? When you can’t fall asleep?”
“Sometimes.”
I wondered what scared him about porn. It was just pictures -- naked guys, in my case. I rarely looked at videos. It wasn’t action that got me. It was faces and bodies.
“What’s wrong with porn?” I asked.
He answered immediately: “Too many possibilities.”
He sounded like Chris. And I wondered how many women Mark had slept with.
“You explore a lot?” I joked.
“Oh, yeah.”
“And don’t want to stop?”
And then he was completely open with me. “No, Anne and I are good together. We’re good with sex. It’s a lot of fun. But, online…there’s just…so much stuff...”
In my mind, I had Mark sprawled in front of me. On his bed in the hotel.
“Want to walk to town?” I asked quickly. “I’d say out there…” I pointed toward the fields “…but town’s probably safer.”
He stood. “Yeah. I’m tired of sitting.”
So we walked. Without talking too much. For a while, we tried figuring out some of the constellations. I knew a couple. He knew a few. We walked into town and out in the other direction. Then we turned back.
The town was pretty dark. There were four or five lights, but not on the street. Bare bulbs hanging on the fronts of scattered buildings. And there was light shining through some of the shutters. But not too many. So a lot of the buildings we’d knocked at may have been empty. There might not be a lot of people. There certainly wasn’t a hotel or restaurant.
Heading back to the car, Mark stopped at the church. When the door was still unlocked, he said, “I just need to go in for a minute. You mind?”
“Go on.”
He didn’t say alone, but I got that impression. And he didn’t entirely close the door behind him, but that didn’t matter. I wouldn’t interrupt him.
I stood in front of the church, leaning against the wall, thinking about Chris. I wanted to talk with him. Wanted to know what he was doing. It wasn’t a matter of who he was with. You can’t cheat on someone you’ve already broken off with. And it wasn’t a question of him starting a new relationship. That wasn’t what he was after.
“What do you want?” I’d asked.
“Just to mess around for a while... Carefully.”
Carefully was always there. Throughout my life. But I knew he wasn’t talking about that. He meant emotionally. He wasn’t going to get himself hurt. Or hurt anyone else. He’d made that clear in those long conversations.
But I didn’t want to analyze our relationship. I just wanted it to go on. In a way, I didn’t know any other way to live.
The easy answer when people asked me when I knew I was gay was ninth grade. I saw a movie that was so clearly about me, it made me uncomfortable. But it also made me question things I hadn’t bothered with. I knew about homosexuals. I knew about homosexuality. At least, I knew about fags and queers and dykes and cocksucking, which seemed about the same thing. But when I saw the movie, I realized how much more there was. And what I’d been thinking. At least, that’s what I told everyone else. So that was my fake epiphany.
Mark stayed in the church longer than I expected, and he was smiling when he came out. I caught that in the edge of a light. We walked back to the car and shook out the sleeping bag again. Then he said, “I really think we should share the mattress tonight. I know you’re a nice guy. I completely trust you. And if I keep my head at one end, and yours is at the other…”
I’d be in the perfect position to suck your toes, I thought. But since he’d either been barefoot or in sandals all day, his feet didn’t offer much temptation.
“You’re sure about this?” I asked.
“Yeah. To be honest, I’d worry too much if you were sleeping outside. I know I couldn’t do it, and I wouldn’t feel right, making you.”
“I’ve camped without tents before.”
“No.”
So maybe ten minutes later, we were stretched beside each other in the dark. I’d left on my jeans. Mark kept on his shorts. The sleeping bag was under us, but I knew we could always use it for a blanket if we got cold.
“If I snore...” he began.
“You won’t,” I said, remembering him that morning. “You’re the quietest sleeper I’ve ever seen.”
Which made it seem like I’d known too many. Or that I was paying too much attention to him.
“I only snore if I sleep on my back,” I pushed on. “And there won’t be room for that tonight.”
“If you really can’t sleep,” he insisted, “wake me up. I’ll try the front seat.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Great.”
And to make things less personal, we turned in opposite directions. A moment later, he asked:
“You really think we’ll be all right?”
“Absolutely,” I said, lightly.