Bury This

The gringos that year were crazier than usual. Feuds, demandas, stealing each other's garbage. We watched them, trying to keep our faces blank and solicitous, inscrutably Mexican. Trying not to bust up laughing.

I worked on the garbage truck that year, rounding up high-class basura in La Cachora and Las Brisas: scotch bottles, half-chewed T-bones, empty oyster tins, collected poodle shit, reams of first-draft poetry. It wasn't hard work, once you got used to the smell. The secret is to wait until the gringos leave their house, then drive by and act disappointed they're not there to give you their garbage. We would drive by at two in the morning, three in the afternoon... Sometimes they would hide their cars, pretending to be gone, and when they ran out with their garbage we'd have to pretend the truck was full.

But then that woman, the rich gringa, found us in town, sitting around the empty truck telling stories, and she gave us a thousand pesos to round up all the old newspapers in town. "But these newspapers aren't old," I said, looking at the front page. "Just do it," she said, and you don't argue with a thousand pesos.

Then she made us pick up all the dog cojones that the vet had snipped off. Messy work, but we did it. Some of those cojones, I swear they were too big to be from a dog, but I didn't say anything.

I knew she'd gone completely loca when she paid us to collect all the town secrets and take them to the dump. Gossip, rumors, skeletons in closets, you name it--everything had to go. "It'll be better this way," she said, reading my confused expression. "We'll start fresh. Be honest with each other."

"But what will you have to talk about?" I asked.

Her jaw was set with grim determination. "Better to say nothing, than to talk about our secrets. There. You missed one."

I bent down, picked up an old grudge from '87, threw it on the truck. "Okay, let's go."

The truck was so full of town secrets the bed was riding on the tires all the way to the dump, the rich gringa following in her BMW. But the dump was closed, so we drove the truck to Playa Las Palmas, drove it right onto the beach. Then we all got out and started digging.

The rich gringa got out of her car. "What are you doing?" she demanded.

"This is where we bury our secretos," I explained. "We can throw yours in on top of ours."

And sure enough, as all the guys dug up wet sand with their bare hands, a great stench rose from the pit we'd uncovered. Looking in, she saw the bodies of missionaries stacked beneath PRI officials, and conquistadors beneath the missionaries, and beneath them all, the Indians.

"Tell me about these two," she said.

I shook my head. "It's a secret."

She looked sharply at me.

"Okay," I said, "the Indians used to bang rocks against oysters. For variety, sometimes they banged oysters against rocks. This guy here, he was really good at it, so he always had plenty to eat. But she," I said, pointing to the other body, "she couldn't open an oyster to save her life. So she said to him, 'Open my oyster,' but he wouldn't. She begged him. No dice, he said. She went crazy with hunger, picked up the biggest goddamn oyster she could find, and rammed its sharp edge into the middle of his forehead. He went down, the oyster still in his head. With a big rock she drove it further into his brain. The oyster split open, revealing the most beautiful pearl... And that pearl, it was an idea in his head, and the idea was he would strangle her, so he reached out and grabbed her neck and choked the life out of her, even as he was dying."

The rich gringa listened, looking down at the two bodies still intertwined in their death grip. "They look like lovers," she said. Suddenly her face brightened. She looked around.

"I'm going to buy this place," she announced. "I'm going to call it Lover's Beach. We'll bury all our secrets here, and put a golf course on top of it. And in the brochure we'll tell the story about these two lovers, which is where the name comes from." She looked at me. "Tell me the story of these two lovers."

"I just did. They weren't lovers. They killed each other."

Her expression was far off and dreamy. "Tell me the story about the lovers," she repeated. Her smile had yawned wide open, like an opened oyster shell; a viscous, bubbly line of drool hung from her lower lip.

"Can I tell you a secret?" I said.

Abruptly she closed her mouth, clapped her hands over her ears. "No secrets!" she screamed. "¡Cállate!"

"I want to tell you something," I said. "You need to understand this."

Hands still over her ears, she began to sing childishly. "La la la la la."

"The secret is this," I pressed on:

"Esta vida, no es tan fácil, ni suave. This life is difficult, and full of pain, and very soon, mira, very soon it is over."

But the rich gringa wasn't listening, so I took my secret and threw it on the pile with all the others.