Into the Beautiful North(66)
“That’s deep, Matt. Deep shit.”
Long pause.
“This here is some deep shit,” he said, waggling the bong at her. She beamed. Good ol’ Carla. She could still get the righteous bud. She still had what it took, even if her teeth were starting to fall out.
Matt staggered over to her kitchenette and peered out her tiny window at his mom’s duplex across the alley.
“I gotta admit, though, I’m totally swooping on that chick.”
“Which chick?”
“The cute one.”
“Huh,” said Carla.
She had to hit the bong with her lighter again. Fumed up and coughed and wrinkled her nose and got her smoke on.
“I can’t even tell ’em apart,” she confided.
They were dancing in there. Alex the Brujo had come up from work and was frying up meat and beans. Tacho had some kind of disco radio blaring. Atómiko wasn’t into that. He was happy the maricón was free from jail and all—but disco dancing? He shook his head. He sat on the front porch and smoked a cigarette, nursing a tepid Tecate. The sky was overcast. Atómiko could see the faintly pastel lights of the city glowing in the bellies of the clouds. He wondered if his jefito and jefita could see clouds in Heaven. They were long gone, of course. It hurt him to think he sometimes could not recall his mother’s voice. What did it sound like? Sometimes, he caught a tiny wisp of her laughter in his memory. He shook his head to clear it. He drained the beer and tossed the can on the lawn. He took up his staff and prodded the dead grass.
He liked the United States. Like the gringos said: So far, so good. The air was cool and clear up here. The cars looked good. The women were nothing but fine! He could get into some of these ten-foot-tall American women! ?Ay, caray!
But he was missing his little hut beside the dump. He’d made it himself. Wooden pallets for floors. Wooden garage doors for two of the walls. He’d managed to cobble together some sheets of plywood and a classroom blackboard for the third wall. Most of the fourth wall was a chicken wire fence he’d attached cardboard to with little wire ties. He covered the fence with plastic bags that he insulated with newspaper duct-taped to the inside. That cabrón was tight—waterproof and snug. He’d cleverly hung a faux Persian rug off the top for a door. Inside, he had a fine plastic jug for water, a small stove fashioned out of a heater—the chimney was hammered cans. He had old magazines in there—death rags and a few moisture-swollen porno beauties—his favorite a hilarious black-and-white bondage magazine from the 1950s. For a bed, he had stuffed a cardboard shipping box with wadded papers and laid a slightly soiled Boy Scout sleeping bag over it. Un pleeping bek, he called it. Two rough wool blankets kept him warm enough—when it turned cold, he wore all his clothes and laid a few plastic bags over the lot, and if he didn’t want to be comfortable, he could get in the bag or even under it. Warmth outweighed a soft bed any day.
The roof of his shack was slats, bits of pallets, and tar paper that he’d bought with the money he’d earned recycling bottles. One hundred fifty pounds of glass got him one US dollar. Copper usually paid much better, and aluminum was about the same as the glass. What did he care? It was all work, and all money! A dollar for glass was as good as a dollar for Pepsi cans. It bought the same tortilla. It bought the same beer.
Like everybody else in the dompe, he had burned old mattresses and collected their inner springs and frames. They made fences, and Atómiko had a sweet fence that ran from the back of his hut to about twenty feet in front of it. To come in off the street, you had to unbind barbed wire holding his gate shut. He often nursed abandoned dump puppies back to health, so there were usually guard dogs loyal to Atómiko in the yard. Nobody was going to mess with him.
He lay back on the duplex’s cement slab of a porch. Felt the heat of the day radiate into his back.
“What can I say?” he muttered aloud. “It’s a good life.”
Chava Chavarín had the night off. It was a rare treat for him, to actually have somewhere to go where he could forget his sorrows. The girls had invited him to meet their friend, recently released from the clutches of the migra.
They delighted him. He realized there was no one in Los Yunaites who could transport him so easily to Tres Camarones, the Camarones that throbbed in his mind every night, the old world that would not let him sleep, that would not allow him to read a book or watch a movie. Every hamburger tasted like cardboard to him when he thought of the red chile–soaked shrimp of his homeland! His tidy little apartment in Kensington felt like a tomb when he recalled the narrow cobbled alleys of his boyhood! Those alleys hung with red blossoms and wooden gates! Those alleys that ran with floods every June—where chickens and car tires and tree branches and girdles sped down the flood to the river! In Camarones, he had never been cold—not once! In Camarones, he had been a fire on two legs, he had been a human waltz and a walking tango, he had brought music and cologne into the plazuela on each humid mysterious love-scented Saturday night! Talking to Nayeli brought it all back, rich and sweet.
He steered his sensible little used car along the slow lane, thinking of his fat-bottomed Irma! How her ankle-high white socks had inflamed his passion! How they had danced to “Begin the Beguine” at the Club de Leones New Year’s Eve Ball! He in a pearl dinner jacket with a small black rose pinned to his chest, and she in a puffy skirt resplendent with tiny white polka dots and her feet in saddle shoes!