Into the Beautiful North(32)
A gust of wind came from the ocean. They were astounded to see a bright vista of the Pacific to their right. Copper sun fell upon the water. The wind had shattered the clouds there and spilled rainfalls of illumination. Fat oil tankers lounged in the glow, and beyond, islands could be seen on the horizon. It looked warm.
“Is that Hawaii?” Vampi asked, but they all told her not to be an idiot.
The ocean breeze lifted white plastic bags from the slopes of the black hill. They rose like ghosts. It was quite beautiful. The bags floated silently in waves, soaring and falling, and drifting, too—pale balloons full of unwanted wind. They drifted off the slopes and settled slowly upon the foreground, a dry empty crescent of graves and rough holes in the ashen soil. All before them, a crude cemetery sprawled. Uphill, to the east, a squat crematorium waited in a fenced enclosure. Its chimney was not spewing smoke, and its door hung open, but the chain-link gate was sealed with a great combination lock. Sweeping past them, at the foot of the garbage volcano, were graves. Some were cement slabs. Some were bare mounds of trash and pebbles. Nayeli saw many handmade crosses—blue wood, red and white wood. A rusted tractor sat at the edge of the boneyard, a backhoe. Its rear claw was raised and frozen in place, caked with old, hard mud. It was posed like a huge scorpion, forgotten there. Before it, seven open holes.
To the west, set against the vista of the sea and the islands, was a low hill covered in a hundred small plots. Cribs and playpens stood guard over these rectangles. Some cribs were painted. Wild mustard and dandelions sprouted among them.
“The children,” Tacho said.
And he was right. As they moved down the slope, following Do?a Araceli, they saw names painted on the baby furniture. Old glass jars with wax flowers. A doll propped against a baby’s crib, all of it muddy and collapsing in the ashes. Huge truck tires lay at the foot of the children’s hill. Collapsed graves festered in the mud, small crosses tumbled. The smell of human feces rose from the centers of the tires.
Beside this long, sad place, there were many houses. Porfirio stood in the doorway of a square blue shack and waved at them. “Come!” he was calling. “Welcome!”
The four friends reached out for one another as they walked, and they held one another’s hands.
Life is good!” Don Porfirio hollered.
Tacho had made the mistake of walking down to the bodega of the barrio to buy eggs, and he spied a bottle of rum and bought it as a gift. Now Don Porfirio guzzled rum from a peanut butter jar and danced in place, raising dust from the floor of the shack. The girls sat on an ancient bunk bed jammed in a corner—salvaged, though they didn’t know it, from the trash. On the other side of the bare room, Porfirio and Araceli’s sagging bed. The shack smelled of smoke and spoiled lard. Tacho sat on a wooden kitchen chair as Porfirio danced. Nayeli wondered if he was doing a Mixtec dance or an alcoholic shuffle. She did not know.
Araceli had a stove, set halfway between the bunk beds and the other bed. It was really the shell of a stove, and Araceli was stuffing paper wads into the oven and lighting them. Fire came out of the burner holes on top. She fed twigs in, then a few chunks of two-by-four, and slammed the oven door closed. She put a big pan on a burner and amazed the friends by lifting a hinged flap in the wooden wall so the smoke could go outside. She fastened the wooden shutter to a hook screwed into the wall.
“I invented that!” Porfirio shouted. “I am a genius!”
“Bravo,” Tacho said. He sipped some rum from a plastic Ham-burglar cup.
The girls just stared. They were appalled by the filth. They were scared of the dump and the dirt. Yolo could almost see tides of lice awakening and creeping toward her. Her scalp crawled with imagined vermin. She began picking at herself, sure that little creatures with many legs were piercing her scalp and depositing disease in her flesh.
Do?a Araceli sliced her potatoes with a huge knife. They sizzled in the melting lard. Nayeli’s stomach growled as soon as the heady odor hit her. Vampi moaned. Araceli deftly diced an onion and dropped it in with the thin slices of potato. She poked at it with her knife. When this part of their supper was done, she slid it onto a cracked plate and immediately broke Tacho’s half-dozen eggs into the skillet and fried them. The girls had never smelled anything so delicious in their lives.
Porfirio stopped dancing long enough to pull a small table in from the yard and set plates all around.
“Six plates,” he noted. “It is a feast. God is great! Isn’t God great, vieja?” he called to Araceli.
“God is great,” she replied, putting a little food on each plate. Porfirio followed her, placing two stale rolls on each plate.
He produced a huge can of jalape?o peppers.
“Missionaries!” he crowed. “God loves chile!”
He handed each of them a fork.
“Let us pray,” he said.
They gathered at the table and held hands. Porfirio was listing to port. Nayeli thought he’d fall over. But he smiled and tipped back his head and said, “Thank you, God!”
Two tears rolled down his face.
“Amen!”
Tacho sat, then noticed that none of the rest of them had chairs, so he stood back up. They stood eating together, and when the main meal was gone, they wiped the grease off the plates with pieces of sweet roll. Porfirio laughed all the way through the meal, patting Tacho’s spiky hair.
“Do my hair like that!” he kept repeating.