Into the Beautiful North(77)

“Quién sabe,” he replied. “George Clooney?” He was enjoying pumping gas. It was so butch. He wore a black tank top, and he felt that his muscles looked chiseled this morning. “Didn’t he kill a dragon or something?”

Nayeli looked it up: dragón/dragon.

“We are more alike than we think,” she lectured.

Utah.

Beside a cemetery, a sign that read taxidermy. Nayeli translated it with Matt’s dictionary. They laughed for twenty miles.

They drove toward a crumbled vista of landscape. The horizon made it look as if the ground were rising before them. They were on the port side of the Markagunt Plateau but didn’t know what it was. They passed Washington, Leeds, Cedar City. They were soon into strange place names: Enoch, Parowan, Paragonah. “They sound like Star Wars planets,” Tacho noted. The Sevier Plateau loomed in the distance. They had never seen such big trucks—eighteen-wheelers pulled double and triple trailers. They hit Beaver. “What is a beaver?” Tacho asked. Nayeli worked her dictionary.

“Es un castor,” she explained.

“?Un castor? ?Un castor? Out here? In this desert?” Tacho was lodging complaints with the cosmos.

Thirty or so miles north of the legendary Beaver, they came upon the I-70 turnoff. Salina, Utah, had dire warnings: last services for seventy miles. And: last gas here! Tacho said it in Spanish to the attendant: Sal-EE-nah. And the attendant corrected him: Sal-EYE-nah.

“This is America, bud,” he offered wisely.

They filled up. They ate ham sandwiches. Tacho tried a Mountain Dew and spit it out. Nayeli took the moral high road and drank orange juice—her every sip scolding Tacho with health. They plunged over the end of the Wasatch Plateau, dropped into the heat, surged across the bottom end of Castle Valley, over the San Rafael Swell, along the flank of the San Rafael Desert.

Ahead, nothing but sun.



Rolling in for more gas and relief from the seemingly endless emptiness of the freeway, they made a tactical error in Green River. The Green itself flowed silently east of town, cutting jade and cool between junkyards and old buildings. Nayeli gawked at a yellow raft full of red, muscular Americans as it made its stately way toward Moab, the craft passing under I-70 and then consumed by sparkles and reeds and short bluffs in the light. The air was so dry the inside of her nose stung.

Nobody laughed in the gas station. It made her nervous. She had been noticing that America was a country where everybody was a comedian. The Americanos had this way of saying sardonic or even outrageous things to one another, and they tipped their heads or raised an eyebrow and great rolling chortles overtook the crowd. She had seen strangers in lines yell some absurd phrase at other strangers, and the grannies in their vivid Mickey Mouse shirts would shriek in delight and men would guffaw and adjust their beanie caps. But in Green River, she saw stringy men in faded shorts; she saw dusty 4WD trucks and Jeeps. Crows. But no laughter. The station attendant just looked at them and said nothing. ZZ Top coming out of the radio, falling flat on the dry soil.

They made their way to a Mexican restaurant. They were so nostalgic and homesick that the thought of chorizo or chilaquiles or tacos made them swoon. They banged in through the door and were greatly relieved to smell Mexican steam. Frijoles and garlic and tomatillos and rice. Onions and chicken and lime and salsa.

“We’re home!” Nayeli said to Tacho.

They took a seat, and the cook, a Mexican man peering out from the kitchen, called, “Welcome, amigos!”

“Hola,” said Nayeli.

“Buenas tardes,” Tacho called.

The waitress came to their table with two menus and two glasses of water.

“Ay, gracias, se?ora,” Nayeli sighed.

The woman looked at her and walked away. Nayeli assumed, correctly, that she was the chef’s wife. She returned in a moment with a plastic basket of tortilla chips and a plastic bowl of salsa.

“Gracias, se?ora,” she said.

The woman said, “We speak English here.”

Nayeli blinked at her. She watched her go to the kitchen and talk to the chef. He looked at them over the serving counter.

“?Qué dijo?” asked Tacho, gobbling chips and salsa like a starving prisoner.

“She told me to speak English.”

“Vieja fea,” Tacho said.

The woman returned.

“Can I take your order?”

“Number three, please,” Nayeli enunciated in her best English.

“Red chile or green chile?”

“Red?”

“And you?”

Tacho leaned back in his seat.

“Pos, se me antoja pura machaca. Con frijoles caseros.”

The woman didn’t seem amused by his insolent tone.

She wrote on her pad. Walked away.

Tacho called: “Una Coca, por favor.”

She brought a can of Coke and put it down with a straw.

“Where are you from, por favor?” Nayeli asked.

“Colorado,” she replied.

“But… qué es la palabra… original?”

“Colorado.”

They all looked at one another.

“My folks come from Durango,” she finally said. “My husband’s from Chihuahua.”

Nayeli launched one of her famous smiles at the chef—he nodded at her and grinned back.