Into the Beautiful North(76)
Hundreds of fun-seekers wandered in the night, grimly hilarious. When they stopped at a red light, a man came by and handed Nayeli a flyer with color pictures of writhing naked women and an 800 phone number. She showed it to Tacho.
“Viejas feas,” he opined.
They parked behind a giant sphinx and were shoved along the street with their heads rotating and their mouths open. A plaster Elvis stood on a sidewalk: chubby women in glittering clothes clutched it as their husbands in plaid shorts and golf hats snapped pictures. Nayeli took Tacho’s hand. Down the street from Elvis, a white gorilla statue, apropos of nothing they could see. Tacho bought a cardboard camera and made Nayeli take pictures of him being carried off like Fay Wray. They skipped. They ran. They stumbled through glass doors and into caverns of billions of ringing bells and tolling electric bongs. Old ladies bent to the one-armed bandits. Coins dropping everywhere, ka-link, ka-link, ka-link, into cardboard buckets.
They found out how to get coins, and they immediately lost seventy-five dollars.
Tacho—inflamed with slots fever something awful—peeled open his money belt. Nayeli almost fell over when she discovered his hidden stash. He marched her to a change-making cage and placed a stack of quarters in her hand. She won thirty-five dollars on a Slingo game. He fed quarters into a machine until he caught a break: three cherries! Bong bong bong! Lights flashed! Coins fell out of the machine!
“I won! I won!” he shouted. “I won fifty dollars!”
“For which,” Nayeli reminded him, “you paid a hundred and twenty-five.”
“I’m on a streak.”
“Let’s go.”
“But I’m hot right now.”
“Vámonos.”
Out! Into the street! Into a bizarre little curio shop that sold cactus planters in the shape of clowns with droopy trousers, and the cactuses thrust up rudely from their open flies. Tacho was astonished to see they also sold small wind-up mechanical penises on feet that hopped around on the table. “Popping Peckers,” the sign said.
“Don’t worry,” Tacho advised Nayeli. “The real ones are bigger than that. Though they don’t have wind-up keys….”
Nayeli dragged him out.
“We could get one for Yolo,” Tacho suggested.
She did not find it funny.
They retrieved their minivan and wandered around until they found the tawdry little plasterboard-walled motel Matt had reserved for them on the wrong side of the freeway. Even here, slot machines blinked in the forlorn corners of the lobby. They signed in as Shakira and Ricky Martin. The spangled woman behind the counter didn’t get the joke. Cardboard holders beside the front desk were stacked with flyers and pamphlets, the colorful headlines of which read, in progression: FREE!! FREE!!!FREE!!!!FREE!!!!!
In the all-you-can-eat diner next door, short, chunky Mexican men and downtrodden Vegas retirees slumped over their plates of mashed potatoes drowned in gray gravy. Straw cowboy hats and big gimme caps were greatly in evidence. Nobody talked. After supper, up in their room, they opened the curtains and stared at the insanity for a while, then collapsed into their beds. The cable television featured a Latino news program with disturbing videos of gang violence, seminaked women, and burning human bodies. Tacho switched around until he found an American show featuring a vampire detective. He reminded himself to tell Vampi about it.
Nayeli pulled the blankets up to her chin.
She said, “Tacho? Are we ever going back home?”
He was quiet. He turned off the TV with the remote. He lay back.
“I don’t know,” he confessed.
When Nayeli fell asleep, he sneaked down to the lobby and pulled the handle on a slot for an hour, but he didn’t win anything.
The morning sun was a vicious ocherous blast. They bought cheap sunglasses and could not believe that in the light of day the electric wonderland of the night before was just a big pile of ghastly cement and cracked sidewalks. Fortified with McDonald’s coffee and hot cinnamon rolls, they left Las Vegas, headed northeast, buzzed by snarling jet fighters on strafing runs, bombed by strung-out long-haul truckers on their way to Denver or Salt Lake. As soon as you escaped the island of neon and cement, the whole world was charred ruins, hoodoos and spires, dust devils and drooping power lines. Shreds of truck tires like fat black lizards. Smears of fur and brown blood upon the blacktop. Quivering heat waves suggesting spills of mercury on the distant horizon. They crashed into tumbleweeds, puzzled over signs that said HIGH WINDS MAY EXIST and later, EAGLES ON ROADWAY. Thinking about Tía Irma in San Diego. Speeding on to greater America.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Tacho found a station on FM playing oldies. Donovan sang, “First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.” Nayeli understood every word of the song. She loved it. It reminded her of the strange Zen sayings of Sensei Grey back home. She found herself missing his dojo, missing the smell of the morning, the iguanas, and crazy little Pepino and his rusty bike.
“I miss mangos,” she said.
“I miss hair gel,” Tacho replied. “Do you have any?”
She shook her head and ignored him.
Mountains loomed beyond Saint George, the golf courses below insanely verdant in the violent desert morning. Nayeli bought chocolate doughnuts at the gas station. She asked Tacho, “?Quién es Saint George?”