Mexicali is a long historical novel about the borderlands between California, Arizona, Texas, and northern Mexico; about family inheritance; and about whether a violent, evasive, self-inventing man can ever be understood truthfully by his descendants. Its central figure is Odd Slade, a drifter, gambler, opportunist, gunrunner, border entrepreneur, father, coward, survivor, and sometime rescuer. The novel is framed by Odd’s descendant, T. S. Slade, who lives on the family land near Mt. Signal, California, land first acquired through Odd’s fortunes. T. S. is divorced, stalled, and obsessed with archives. After the death of his grandmother Grace, Odd’s daughter, he inherits Odd’s rosewood desk and finds hidden inside it a reliquary containing a dried human heart. The label reads: “Soldadera. Corazon. Sonora 1915.” The whole novel becomes an attempt to explain how that heart came into Odd Slade’s possession and what his life cost other people.
The story begins in 1904, when Odd meets Sarah in Juarez. She is barefoot, carrying her shoes, singing “Sweet Adeline,” and being escorted by a wealthy Spanish rancher’s son. Odd, poor but charming, joins her song and talks his way into her evening. Sarah comes from a respectable El Paso family ruined by her father’s debts and hypocrisy. She is beautiful, rebellious, and tired of being treated as shameful no matter what she does. Odd is a Texas drifter recently run out of Dallas after being accused of fathering a child. They fall into a fast, reckless love.
Odd wins a dry goods business and house in Cordoba, Texas, in a poker game, and Sarah agrees to leave with him only if they marry. They elope. But romance quickly becomes hunger, debt, and drudgery. Sarah becomes pregnant and gives birth not to one child but to triplets. Two survive: Grace, quiet and watchful, and Solon, loud and difficult. The third, Adeline, is stillborn or dies almost immediately. Odd buries her under a sycamore tree. Sarah sinks into grief, speaking to the dead child and walking at night to the grave. Odd, terrified of fatherhood and debt, decides to take work at the American-owned Cananea copper mines in Sonora, promising that he will send money home.
