'Tis the Season

A Christmas Story

“Does anybody here sell beer or do they just lock it up?” The woman who asks me this has just hiked down the narrow road scraped through the rocky desert from Baja California’s Route 1 to Marcelino’s nameless bar built on a nameless beach of driftwood, construction scraps, and corrugated aluminum. She asks this looking at dusty crates of one-liter beer …