Into the Beautiful North(83)

“You guys got rodeos down there?”

“How about bars?”

“What kind of work? Is there work for a meat cutter?”

“I’ll drive the bus!”

“You mean you’ll ride a donkey!”

They were all laughing now, jostling and slapping one another’s backs.

“What can you do, pendejo?”

“I don’t know how to do a goddamned thing. Why do you think I came to Los Yunaites?”

“?Ay, buey!”

The people at the front desk were on the phone, checking with management. Men were streaming in, flooding the hotel, clotting its passageways, crowding its corners.

“Slow down, muchachos!” Atómiko said. “Slow down!” He held his staff up as if to guide them through a dangerous cleft in the rocks. “Calma,” he said. “Soldiers and cops. Soldiers and cops. Everybody else can go home.”

He went back through the doors. Behind him, their voices rumbled and hummed.

He grabbed a blueberry muffin and sniffed it. “What’s this blue shit?” he muttered to El Brujo. He peeled off the paper and looked at La Osa.

“Auntie,” he said, “the revolution has begun.”





Chapter Thirty-two



They didn’t know the history of the plains and prairies, and they didn’t care. The world looked to them like a great roll of butcher paper unfurled on a table. The land here was so vast and so empty that a bomb could have exploded and there wouldn’t have been any echo. Gas stations had canopies two stories high. Trucks wobbled and grunted in the wind, their miniature puffs of diesel smoke rushing north. Nayeli felt as if they had stopped moving at all, that they were floating and that the ground had started to roll, passing under them as they stood still.

Unknown to them, a Mexican wind had blown up from Durango and it battered them now as it rushed to Canada; Sinaloan rain pattered on Nayeli’s window, smearing the taste of Tres Camarones down the glass in long worms as they sped.

“I don’t like the sound of this engine,” Tacho managed to say.

It was hard to talk. They felt tiny and exhausted. Nayeli started to say something, but her mouth didn’t want to open. She couldn’t stop fretting about her father. Other thoughts were crowded out of her mind.

The road from Kanorado to the Brewster exit was only about forty miles, but it felt like a thousand. Nayeli was feeling that old slide in her belly, that heavy, slow alarm. And she was bloated, crampy.

They passed Mingo. Signs appeared: SIX-LEGGED CALF.

COW WITH TWO HEADS.

6,000-POUND PRAIRIE DOG.

“?Qué es un prairie dog?” Tacho asked.

Nayeli worked her dictionary.

“Not in here,” she said. “A dog? Of la pradera?”

He drove.

“But six thousand pounds?” he said.

She felt the bite of a fresh cramp.

“Tachito?” she said. “Papito?”

“Yes?”

“I need to stop, Tachito.”

“Stop for what?”

“I have my little problem coming.”

She patted her abdomen.

“Ah. That.” He shook his head. “Again.”

“Don’t be mean to me. I’m delicate.”

“I’m not mean, girl. And you’re as delicate as a brick.”

She looked out the window.

“Maybe sometimes I want to be delicate, Tacho.”

He looked sideways at her. He reached over and squeezed her hand.

BULL WITH SIX LEGS, OAKLEY, KANSAS!

“Let’s stop at the gas station, my sweet little apple pie,” he crooned. Oddly, he was too embarrassed to make a joke. “They’ll have… it. You know.”

She smiled.

“Gracias,” she said.

In the gas station’s food mart, he discovered Corn Nuts while she took her purchases to the bathroom. He bought four bags of Corn Nuts and a violently pink-and-purple glob of pureed ice called a Slushee. He was overjoyed to be alive.

“Where is,” he asked the silent woman behind the counter, “giant pradera dog?”

“What.”

“Six-thousand-pound dog of the pradera.”

“What dog.”

“Please? The sign say six thousand pounds of dog. Of the pradera!”

The woman said, “Oh. The big giant prairie dog.” She leaned forward. “It’s a lie. It’s made of cement.”

Tacho stood there slurping his Slushee. Suddenly he put it down.

“Ay,” he said. “My head!”

“Brain freeze,” a trucker explained.

The woman nodded.

“Honey, you got brain freeze.”

“It’s the Slushee, pardner.” The trucker nodded.

“?Ay!”

Tacho went out to the minivan and massaged his forehead.

Nayeli jumped in and said, “Just in time.”

She was baffled when he announced, “It is all a cruel illusion.”

Still, he drove down to the Prairie Dog Village. Old cars were parked in the lot, so he figured it was a popular stop. When he stopped, he noticed grass growing around their tires. They were derelicts.

“Interesting,” Nayeli said.