Into the Beautiful North(35)

The zombies rose in front of her and behind her, ragged and stinking. They put their hands out to block her escape. She looked back and forth at them. Nayeli planted her feet. She feinted to the right, but the tall tweaker in front of her smiled and blocked her. His teeth were black.

Thinking it would be impressive, the zombie said, “How about a kiss?”

Atómiko’s staff whistled slightly as it came down. The noise the shifter knob made connecting with the tweaker’s head was truly shocking, and Nayeli flinched. The addict dropped like a wet towel. Atómiko leaped behind Nayeli and spun the staff slowly in both hands. The other tweaker stared at the propeller, hypnotized. Atómiko moved slowly in a circle, and the ice zombie tried to back away.

“Oh no, my son,” Atómiko said. “There is no escape from Atómiko!”

Nayeli was noticing that Atómiko needed to announce his idiotic name at every opportunity.

He grabbed the staff in both hands and made three lunges, swinging the bamboo savagely with each forward stomp of his foot. The tweaker, whipped, battered, and flipped over in three seconds. Both his shoulders were smashed, and his head was cracked open. Flat on his back, he saw the gulls double and triple before he passed out.

Atómiko spun around to face Nayeli and whirled the staff and caught it under his arm, holding it extended before him. He looked all around them and grinned, then inserted his weapon back in his sash, where it rose at a jaunty angle above his shoulder.

“I am Atómiko,” he said.

“How do you do,” Nayeli replied.



I like the maricón,” Atómiko said.

Tacho said, “Thank God for small blessings.”

Atómiko punched him on the shoulder. They were great friends, in his opinion. Tacho looked at him for an extended moment.

“Ow,” he said.

They were sitting around, enjoying the sun, on benches Don Porfirio had hammered together out of scrap wood. Tacho was putting gel in Porfirio’s hair and working it up into spikes. Porfirio, still buzzing from last night, sipped more rum from his jar, only he had put milk and sugar in it. Tacho held up a mirror, and Porfirio laughed at his own hair.

Nayeli said, “I didn’t need you to save me.”

Atómiko sneered.

“I did my duty,” he said. “I defended you.”

She shook her head. He had followed her through the alleys of the little workers’ village. He’d stood aside as she called Aunt Irma, collect, from a battered pay phone on a crooked pole outside a small bodega that gave up the smell of fried pork rinds and sheets of beef jerky. As the phone rang, Atómiko cast evil glares at passersby, holding his pole before him in a threatening manner.

The phone rang and rang.

Tía Irma was apparently out, running the town or working the counter at the Fallen Hand.

Nayeli could imagine the sound of the phone, echoing in the empty house. She had heard it a hundred times before. She could see the table, the chairs, the yellow walls, the old refrigerator. It almost made her swoon. She could smell Irma’s house. She could see the insane tom turkey strutting in the courtyard, inflated and threatening the phone, rattling his feathers as he made mindless noises in his throat.

“Miss?” the operator said. “No one is answering.”

“Let it ring.”

Three more rings.

“Miss?”

“Wait.”

Five more rings.

“Really, miss.”

Three more rings.

The operator cut her off.

Nayeli had tears in her eyes.

“Don’t be sad,” Atómiko said. “I am here.”





Chapter Fifteen



Vampi was with Do?a Araceli, watering the roses. Yolo was sitting with Don Porfirio, and she took a sip of his rum-and-milk cocktail and liked it. Nayeli was trying to ignore Atómiko as Tacho told him their story. At certain cardinal points of the epic, the intensely irritating Warrior of the Garbage Dump snapped his fingers and exulted some hipster phrase like “Orale” or “Chido” or “?No chingues, guey!”

Eventually, he stopped Tacho to clarify the narrative: “Wait. You’re going across illegally to collect vatos to take home?”

“Correct.”

“You’re collecting men.”

“Seven men.”

“And you’ll smuggle them out of the Yunaites.”

“Yes.”

“Back to Mexico.”

“Exactly.”

“But you have to sneak.”

“Sí.”

“Because it’s illegal to transport illegals.”

“Correct.”

“Even if they’re going south.”

“Right.”

“Holy Christ, I love this story!”

It was his kind of yarn: a quest. He slapped hands with Yolo, who kept sipping the rum milk shake and was feeling warm toward everyone. He was thinking: ?Ronin!

Yolo, growing impatient with all this talk, said, “I don’t know why you don’t simply recruit seven of these men right here, and let’s go home.”

“Recruit me!” said Porfirio. He and Yolo took swigs from the jar. “I want to go!”