Chasing the Cantaloupe Man by Donley Watt

I paid too much to stay the night in a bad motel in Nuevo Casas Grandes and woke grateful for morning, for I knew the cure for a bad Mexican night is a good Mexican breakfast. And the night had been bad, crossing the border at Agua Prieta late afternoon, dodging the potholes across the Sonoran and then the Chihuahuan deserts to Janos, pulling into Nuevo Casas Grandes after the last restaurant on the highway had closed.

The room at Las Fuentes reeked of disinfectant, and the pillow, a plastic bag filled with stale cubes of foam, crunched with my every move. The air conditioner, stuck loosely in the wall, worked only on “fan,” a small square of dirty duct tape stuck across the low and hi cool buttons. The fan rattled and mightily roared. Something, a leaf, or perhaps a desiccated rat’s tail, had caught in the blower and flapped and fluttered all night. In my half-sleep I was a young boy furiously pedaling my bike while the spokes of the rear wheel fought against the square of cardboard I had clothes-pinned to a fender brace. But the fan did pull the dry Chihuahuan desert night air through the room and by the cool hours of early morning brought some relief.

At first light I found the motel office empty, and the television on. I glanced up to find  Daffy Duck in black and white speaking Spanish. To my surprise—and regret—I understood most of it.  The coffee pot sat dry and cold, so I cruised the little town with my pickup windows rolled down.

I had been through Nuevo Casas Grandes more than once before and remembered a small cafe on a side street, a place where on another trip into Mexico a few years back I had found coffee and breakfast. A woman worked the kitchen, and a man I took to be her husband smoked and read a day-old periodico.  They acted as if a gringo customer was not out of the ordinary and welcome, and that pleased me. I recalled the cafe first of all as clean and bright, and second for its breakfast, two golden high-yolked eggs smothered with pico de gallo, the onions and tomatoes roughly chopped and tossed with a sprinkling of cilantro, and thin rounds of fresh serrano peppers. I sat at the counter and watched the woman hand-pat corn tortillas, thick and moist, and grill them on a blackened comal. They held the flavor of corn, fresh off the cob. Tortillas you could taste, would remember.

This morning it took only a few minutes to zigzag the downtown streets, but the cafe had disappeared. Or I had become completely disoriented.  Disappointed, I picked up the highway south, hungry, but mostly regretting that I had no coffee, and headed for Buenaventura, an hour or so away.

A sack beside me held emergency rations and I stuck one hand in deep and felt around: a jar of dry roasted peanuts, a package of honey-something granola bars, a bag of lemon drops. I would wait. I knew that an early lunch could be had in three or so hours, before I reached Cuauhtemoc, the next sizeable city.  There, along a straight stretch of road with modern farms and houses and enormous barns on either side, I would pass through miles of rubios country, Mennonite communities that had coexisted prosperously in that part of Mexico for decades. There, in every store and market, I would find cheese, a half-dozen varieties both fresh and aged, sold by blond women and their daughters who spoke Spanish to me, but whispered in an undecipherable foreign old-country tongue when I wandered away.

Each dairy along the highway made its own cheeses. Some, similar to queso fresco and traditional farmers’ cheeses, crumbled when sliced, while others had the smooth consistency of Gouda. The Mennonites do not dye their cheeses, and use unpasteurized raw milk straight from their Guernsey or Holstein herds, but I had faith in the cleanliness of the cheese makers, and many times had sampled my way through that soft, very un-Mexican country. If I could keep myself from the granola bars until I got there I would pick up a box of saltines and an apple, and with a couple of kinds of cheese make a tasty lunch.

At Buenaventure I turned back to the west, away from the direction that led eventually to the city of Chihuahua. A small zocalo marks the spot where the road splits east and west, the zocalo laid out as a small rectangular plaza with the main road running along one side and a few unremarkable office buildings and stores enclosing the others. Unremarkable for the most part, but on one corner I spotted a bakery, “Lulu’s” written in lavish blue script across the display window. I stopped.

The bakery was small, but crammed with pastries of all kinds. On this day a special cake held center stage, a dozen or more of them on a table in the center of the room. The cakes swirled with patterns and flowers, topped with small childlike, thumb-sized dolls, in anticipation of the Day of the Children, which was upcoming later in the week.

In Mexico nothing outside the cities and large towns’ “super mercados” is packaged or kept behind the counter. Lulu’s was no exception. I took a round metal tray from a stack–it was very much like an extra-large pizza pan– and grabbed a pair of tongs. I moved from biscuits to cookies to empanadas to cupcakes, and used the tongs to load my tray, operating on the pure impulse of hunger. The woman behind the counter, Lulu, I suppose, watched with a friendly, but bemused expression.

In a few minutes I slid the heaping tray across to her and she filled a white paper sack, handling the tongs as if she were a time and motion expert. She tallied the prices out loud as she went. All too quick for me to follow, But the total was ridiculously low. “Café?” I asked, without much hope. She shrugged with a smile and shook her head.

Back in the truck I continued east, crossing the Santa Maria River. The mountains rose ahead so I decided to try the pastries while still on a stretch of straight road. Disappointing. The cupcakes crumbled dryly into my lap, and needed more sugar for my taste. Ditto for the cookies. Flour must be inexpensive, I figured, and butter and eggs and sugar more pricey. I know my pastries, know my butter and sugar and eggs, know too well what they can do. But Buenaventure is a tiny agricultural town and Lulu’s customers will buy what they can afford and no more. Lulu did quite well, I conceded, given her resources and the resources of her daily clientele. And maybe less rich, less moist in pastries was an acquired taste. Dipped in coffee they might not be bad at all. Certainly superior to the Bimbo brand, Twinkie-imitation products that are trucked from huge plants in the cities to small tiendas all over Mexico.

A few miles east of Buenaventure the road narrowed and began to climb sharply and I found myself navigating a series of switchbacks that would lead up and over the Sierra la Catarina and then on down to the town of Zaragosa in the next valley. It was still early and I expected little traffic, had, in fact, chosen this route to avoid the trucks that move so aggressively from El Paso to and from points south. I had taken this route a couple of years before, knew it to be narrow and winding, with many CURVA PELIGROSA signs, but with a little luck I could be back down to a straight and slightly wider road in an hour or so.

Around the next corner, almost before I realized it, I came upon a pickup truck, a mid-sixties vintage Chevrolet, its bed loaded with cantaloupes. A band of red and blue fringe dangled across the interior length of the truck’s windshield, whipping in the wind from the open windows. The name, MIGUEL, took up the width of the tailgate, boldly written in fancy script.

Miguel spotted me early on; I could see his eyes move from the road ahead then back to the rearview mirror, but there were no pull-offs, and I stayed back a decent distance, so not to crowd him on the mountainous road. He appeared to be young, drove with one hand on the wheel while propping his other arm out the open window, and gave no inclination to ease to the right or slow and let me pass. And once, when I had a short window of opportunity before me on a rare level stretch of road, he gave the old truck all it had and with a plume of black smoke and a roar from a holey muffler he left me in his dust. My Ford Ranger is fairly new, but with four cylinders underpowered for this terrain, and even if he had slowed, I hardly had the guts to pass him on one of the short straightaways that ended so abruptly in blind curves. So we struggled on for a few miles.

By the way Miguel drove, the way he kept his eye on me in his outside mirror, I could guess his intentions, almost hear him say, “No way a rich gringo will pass me.” Despite my best attempt to maintain a gentle and kind attitude, I could feel my deep-seated, almost tribal response, “We’ll see, we’ll see.”

So the chase was on. He left me on downhill stretches, taking curves without touching his brakes, it seemed, although soon, as his heavy load pushed him down that mountain, I could smell the truck’s brakes hot and smoking, and I concluded that he did have brakes, but no brake lights.

On long climbs, by aggressively gearing down, I could catch him once more and sense his frustration as I crept closer to his bumper than I would have normally dared. To the left a drop-off with no guardrails and a descanso, three grey wooden crosses with faded plastic flowers, wedged into a pile of rocks. Then at the crest of the hill once more he took control and sped down, dodging potholes and on around a bend where he disappeared. Somewhere ahead of me the blat-blat-blat of the Chevy echoed off the rocky slopes, until the road turned up and I could slowly pull in behind him again.

Through it all the melons pyramided in the back of his truck miraculously held in place. The cantaloupes for the most part were small, splotchy with sunburned spots and misshapen. But I could smell them, their unmistakable freshness, their ripeness, in the same way that last fall I had driven through apple country on another trip into Mexico and been almost overcome by the sweetness of the harvest.

Back home in Tucson during the past month I had tried to find a flavorful cantaloupe. Safeway had some beauties, extra-large with uniform coloration and nicely patterned webs all around. They embodied perfection, as if they had never touched a sandy field nor seen the sun.

Perfection, except for their flavor. When cut, the cantaloupe color was right, a uniform golden, but the flesh was hard and I could hardly scoop it out with a spoon. The flavor wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t. Bred for a world market, they were thick-skinned, picked green and shipped–the mantra of American agri-business.

I remembered a time as a boy, back in east Texas where I grew up. It was summertime, like now, and I had gone with my dad out to a farmer’s house. I must have been about twelve, for I remember being embarrassed when my dad didn’t step up onto the front porch and knock, but stood out front in the swept yard “helloing” the house until the farmer finally heard him and joined us in the bright sun.

While the men talked the three of us and a couple of hounds wandered slowly into the field that had been planted almost up to the yard. Watermelons lay everywhere, nestled heavy in the blow-sand. Glistening, solid green ones and long zigzagged striped ones and pale green round ones that hid their yellow hearts. The farmer hitched the knees of his overalls and knelt beside a melon, thumped it a couple of times and moved on. When he found one he liked he simply lifted the melon waist high and dropped it, cracking it open. Then with his pocketknife he carved out only the heart of the melon and offered a dripping piece to me and another to my dad. We moved on, working our way around bull nettles and patches of grass burrs to two or three more melons, different varieties, each one hot and sweet and bursting with flavor. We ate only the heart of each and left the broken halves in the field to the bees and yellow jackets, the squirrels and raccoons. The best melons I have ever tasted, and that pretty well ruined me for the supermarket variety of today.

Still I tailed Miguel’s pickup of melons as we crept over the mountain pass and entered a sweeping straightaway that led into the valley. There, Miguel caught my eye in his rearview mirror. He gave me a little wave and he and his load of cantaloupes left me behind. I didn’t even try to keep up.

When the road finally leveled off and Zaragosa came in sight, I spotted the Chevy truck ahead, parked off the road on an open patch of gravel. I slowed and pulled in behind the sagging truck, not too close. Miguel had propped the truck’s hood open with a stick. He sloshed a milk bottle of water towards the radiator, then jumped back from a surge of steam and smoke. He saw me and grinned, as if to ask, “What took you so long?”  

I eased out of the truck, and hobbled around to loosen up. I wandered over to check his load of cantaloupes. Some were a little overripe, a few had been bruised in handling. But they all passed my sniff test. This would be breakfast. “How much?” I asked in my best Spanish.

“For all?” he responded, his eyes lighting up.

“For one. Or maybe two.”

Miguel laughed and moved his hands across in front of his body as if I had slid safely into home plate just ahead of the ball. “For nothing,” he said. “I have many. You can see.”

I offered him five pesos, at that time about sixty cents, but he wouldn’t take my money. Miguel picked out two nice melons and handed them to me. “These are good,” he said. “From my father’s own land.”

I lowered the tailgate of my pickup and pulled out my pocket knife. The cantaloupe cut smooth and quiet. I raked the seeds out of one half, scattering them across the gravel, and dug in.

The meat was firm without being hard, infused with an indescribable sweetness. I felt as if I could stay there for the morning and put away half of his truckload. What a Californian would pay for one of these, I thought.

I cut the other half in wedges and offered one to Miguel. He put his hand to his stomach. “Muchas melóns,” he said. He motioned west, toward Zaragosa. “If I sell them all for a good price in Zaragosa, maybe I will find a hamburguesa there.” He shrugged and slid into his truck.  “But if not, I always have my mama’s beans and tortillas.”  In a moment he fired up the truck and with a roar he was gone.

I sat there on the tailgate of my truck and finished both melons. I remembered a time near Uruapan, way south in Michoacan, the heart of avocado country, peeling an avocado picked fresh from a tree with this same knife, with this same pleasure. And I remembered another time sampling six varieties of bananas at a roadside stand as I neared Puerto Angel on a drive from Oaxaca City to the coast. Six kinds. I couldn’t get over it. Just picked that morning, not green, but ripe from the trees.

Then I thought of the markets scattered all over Mexico, where each stall holds colorful, carefully stacked pyramids and baskets of fresh produce of all kinds. But where now, more and more, each of these stalls also holds a tiny television set, where the women (mostly) who run the stalls watch whatever beams their way from Mexico City or Monterrey or Guadalajara, bringing something into the air of the markets that contaminates the atmosphere, makes me uneasy. Something foreign, alien to the places, television with pitches for dried milk and canned fruit-like juices and boxes of sugared, colorful cereals, for processed meats and sliced Bimbo bread.

I remembered those apples I had eaten last fall south of Saltillo, and being concerned about another sort of contamination. The apples weren’t red delicious, but smaller, rounder, picked ripe that morning from a roadside orchard, bursting with all that unforgettable flavor. But I carefully peeled those apples, worrying about pesticides and the lax Mexican laws, about the way chemical companies all over the globe see Mexico as just another unprotected market for sprays that our own country has banned,

How many truckloads of cantaloupes did Miguel haul from his father’s field each year? Three or maybe four? And when his father no longer works his field, when farming has “progressed” into agri-business, what then? Will Miguel be content to work the small field each year? Probably not, and perhaps he shouldn’t. But where will vine-ripened cantaloupes, those varieties unsuitable for long distant shipping be found? And selfishly I wondered, where will I find them?

I slammed the tailgate of my truck, wiped the knife on my jeans and in a panic pulled back on the empty highway and raced towards Zaragosa. There, I turned off the main road and eased up and down each dusty street, searching for Miguel and his pickup, hoping to find it still heavy with melons. I glanced back at the bed of my own truck. Empty. If I could find Miguel and his cantaloupes, I would buy them all.

Donley Watt lives in Santa Fe, NM. His collection of short stories, Can You Get There from Here?, won the Texas Institute of Letters’ prize for best first book of fiction. Since then he has had four more book-length works of fiction published, along with many other stories and essays.