Into the Beautiful North(34)

It was his second staff. The first had splintered when a tractor drove over it. This one was a wrist-thick six-foot length of bamboo. It had taken him years to find it. It was pliant but firm. He had discovered tubes of epoxy glue in the dump, and he’d carefully filled the hollow center of the shaft with it, allowing it to harden. But that wasn’t all he’d done. He’d inserted the knob from a broken-off Hurst power shifter into the end of the staff, and after the epoxy had glued it in place, he had carefully and fastidiously wrapped copper wires in overlapping patterns to bolster the bamboo around the stick shift. At the other end of the staff, he had poured in marbles and ball bearings before the last epoxy drooled in. He capped the open end with a hammered can lid, superglue, and more of his elaborate copper wire work. In the middle, he had wrapped the smooth bamboo with friction tape. All things found in the endless bounty of the garbage dump. It was a thing of beauty, his staff. Frankly, it was a bit heavy for dump work, but it was also lethal. Nobody ever messed with Atómiko—not when he was carrying his weapon.

He looked down upon this mysterious dark girl and scratched his whiskers.

“Hurt me, girlie!” he called. “I want to be wounded by you!”

She made a dismissive sound and walked farther from him.

Atómiko watched her. She was short, just like he liked them. He could see the muscles in her legs. And she smiled even when she frowned. He was a fool for that. That right there made him crazy.

He put his foot down, spun the staff once like a great baton, and inserted it under the sash at his back. He put his hands on his hips and called: “I am Atómiko!”

He hopped down off his mound and paced along behind her.

“Who are you?” he demanded.

“None of your business.”

“Ooh. Saucy.”

She walked three rows away from him.

“Go away,” she said.

“Never.”

“I’m busy.”

“I am here to serve you.”

“Oh, please.” She had heard better lines than that.

Atómiko was the kind of man given to visions and illuminations. Since they’d closed the dump, he had wondered what the Buddha had in store for him. Would he follow the trash to Tecate? Hell, no—he wasn’t some country boy. He was a city dog! Perhaps he could mine the old garbage, like the old-timers who were now digging in the sides of the hill. But the trash mafia that the owners had hired to police the slopes would beat the miners if they caught them. Atómiko had entered into several fights already, defending the peasants from the hired guns. But, nah—climbing in stinking dark holes wasn’t for him. He was in need of a quest.

“You’re not from here,” he noted.

“No.”

“Where, then?”

“You’re so rude,” she snapped.

“I’m ugly, too,” he said. He scratched his whiskers. She could hear his nails scritching in them. God! “So?”

“I’ m—we’re from Sinaloa.”

“We?” he said.

“They’re asleep right now,” she said. “But they’ll hear me if I call, so don’t do anything funny.”

He said, “I am Atómiko, esa! I don’t do anything funny!”

She thought that was funny.

“We came from a place,” she said, “that is under threat.”

“What kind of threat?”

“Narcos,” she said. “Bandidos.”

It sounded dramatic. Silly. She blushed.

“So,” she continued, “we came seeking soldiers.”

He stood taller and smiled. He pounded his own chest.

“I am a sergeant in the Mexican army! Well, I was, until I ran away.”

“Wonderful,” she said. “You ran away.” She shook her head and moved away from him again.

“I am a great warrior.”

“Shoo,” she said. “Go on your way.”

People in the dump had no money for cocaine or pot or pills. But they were fools for tweak. The lost young ones smoked cheap meth as fast as they could get it. These hopeless ice zombies were so racked with chemical poisons and dry rot that they didn’t even have shacks—they tipped sheets of plywood against headstones in the boneyard and slept and twitched right there in the dirt. It was the curse of the dump—a shocking thing that the self-respecting trash pickers rejected out of hand. These terrible tweakers stole everything, even the meager cans of orange juice and broken toys the garbage miners managed to dig out of the black hill. They never made it all the way to the top, so they never saw the view. Besides, they were too skinny and broken to battle the mafiosos up there. So they stuck to the graves and the sad wire burners, and they shuffled out to the streets and mugged women coming home from work in the dark.

Two of the ice zombies watched Nayeli as she walked away from Atómiko. She had clearly said something severe to him, and he’d waved his hand at her in anger and turned his back. Now she was coming down the hill toward the big tires and the mud bog.

They could jump her fast, they thought. They could get her on the ground before she cried out. She looked good, looked like she had a watch, at least. The meth made them crazy for sex when they were fired up, but now they were in the gray dregs, their teeth hurt, their guts churned, and all they wanted was money for more smoke. They could steal her shoes.