Into the Beautiful North(74)

“It means what it means.”

“?Ay!”



Matt had laid out his road atlas on the kitchen table at the duplex.

“You can’t go up I-5,” he told them. “The Border Patrol checkpoint will nab you for sure.”

“Ay, Mateo,” Yolo marveled—he was so wise! She rubbed his arm. When her hand rose to his shoulder, he laid his cheek against it.

Yolo’s face announced: I win!

Nayeli sneered.

“Kankakee—man, that’s pretty far,” Matt said.

Angel and El Brujo were outside, tuning up the minivan, putting in fresh oil, adding coolant to the radiator.

“But you go up Fifteen. See here? You’ve gotta go to Vegas.”

“Vegas!” Carla crowed from the couch. “Oh, for sure!”

“Right?” said Matt.

“’S awesome!” she enthused.

“After Vegas, you keep heading north, dude—the Virgin Gorge is awesome. Then watch for Saint George, Utah. All right?”

Tacho was taking notes.

“It’s totally easy. Up past Saint George, you hit I-70 east. Bro—just keep on truckin’.”

“Truckin’,” Tacho said.

“Tee-ruckin’!” Carla chirped.

Tee-ruckin’? Tacho mouthed to Nayeli.

“Trip out,” Carla said.

“Trip,” said Tacho. Of course it was a trip. What did they think it was?

“Es un viaje,” Nayeli said to him. “Like opium.”

Tacho looked at the map again.

“Oh,” he said. “That kind of trip.”

“Totally,” Carla added.

I-70: they’d ride that sucker all the way across the Colorado Rockies and the Midwest plains to Illinois. But they had to promise, swear to God, they’d zoom up to Estes Park in Colorado and check out Rocky Mountain National Park.

“What’s there?” Nayeli asked.

Carla got up and stretched—Nayeli could hear her back popping.

“Mountains,” she said.

“God’s country,” Matt promised.

When Tacho and Nayeli pulled out the next morning, everybody was still asleep.





Chapter Twenty-seven



The morning light was red. Interstate 15. Only the two of them in all that distance.

Their drive to Las Vegas through the American desert was vividly dull. Dead gas stations. Outposts of I-Don’ t-Want-to-Live-Here sat in ruin beside the road. Border Patrol trucks puttered ignored around the off-ramps as Mexicans in wasted cars passed them in reeking oil smoke. The dense brown cloud of Los Angeles exhalations felt its way out across abandoned drive-ins and peeling ice cream stands. White men in pickups with ear-flapping big dogs in the back. Old trailers faded to white. Industrial buildings and dying palm trees, alkaline flats and military bases. Vast blacktop lots of abandoned RVs, the pale boxes arrayed like iron cows in a feed lot. Small triangular flags in vivid plastic colors rattled in the endless wind. And rocks, rocks piled upon rocks, whole hillsides of nothing but rocks.

Brown birds lined up on telephone wires like beads on a cheap Tijuana necklace.

Nayeli had Matt’s old Spanish-English dictionary. Ba?era/bathtub, she studied. Barbecho/fallow land. The Spanish word was new to her, she was embarrassed to admit. She gestured out the window and proclaimed, “Barbecho.”

The air conditioner cut their engine power till they climbed at a crawl, so they sweltered on the way up hills and punched it back on when they dropped. The minivan rattled and groaned on the grades—both up and down. On the radio, they heard many angry Americans with loud voices saying Mexicans were unwanted, and immigrants carried disease and harbored terrorists. English only, the AM shouters boomed; English was the official language of America.

“What did he say?” asked Nayeli.

“Nada,” said Tacho.

On the next station, a woman doctor thought her caller should dress in skimpy black lace to seduce her husband instead of the hairdresser she had a secret crush on.

“What?” said Nayeli.

Tacho shrugged, hit the radio buttons.

Country music. Talk radio. El Rushbo. JEE-sus.



Country music. Sports talk. Hannity. JEE-sus.



Country music. Norte?o. News talk. JEE-sus.



Tacho turned off the radio.

Nayeli observed the land in its splendor.

7-Eleven. Subway. Motel 6.



7-Eleven. 24 Hr Adult Superstore. 65 MPH.



7-Eleven. 29 Palms. Carl’s Jr.



70 MPH. Super 8. 7-Eleven.



Numerology reigned in Los Yunaites.



The desert,” Nayeli said after an hour of silent staring, “is so harsh.”

Tacho shrugged with one shoulder. He was shrugging a lot lately. He was thinking about Tijuana, about Rigoberto’s magic teapot.

“The deserts of Mexico,” he boasted, “are more brutal.”

She stared out her window. She thought she could see a concrete dinosaur in the distance. Bikers screamed around them and flew down the road, laughing skulls on their backs. Crows bent to flattened animal carcasses in the road. They seemed to be bowing to the tatters of rabbit fur, the skunk tails. The midday’s light was white.