Into the Beautiful North(84)

“Lures!” Tacho realized. “They use empty cars to fool tourists!”

“Like it’s a really busy place,” Nayeli noted, trying to crack a Corn Nut with her teeth.

“Maybe they eat people who come inside,” Tacho said.

“Oh, boy. I can’t wait.”

They walked in. The shop was chock-full of mementos and gewgaws. A man sat at the far end of the room. He smiled at them, waved, and took up a stick.

“Wanna hear the rattlesnakes?” he asked.

“Excuse?” said Nayeli.

He reached over to his right and banged on a big wooden box. Sizzling rattles rose from its mesh top.

“Fifty rattlesnakes in there!” the man confided.

Tacho crept to the box and looked in.

“Guáu,” he offered.

The man said, “Hey. You know what the cows do for fun on Saturday night?”

“Excuse?” It was Tacho’s turn.

“I say cows, son. What do cows do on Saturday night. For fun.”

Tacho shrugged.

“They go to the moo-vies!” the man shouted. He laughed and sipped some coffee from a chipped mug. “Good one, right?”

“Right!”

Nayeli was amazed to discover that one shelf of souvenirs featured shellacked chunks of horse feces with little google eyes stuck on them. They stood on wire legs with plastic feet. Some of them were playing golf with wire clubs; one strummed a guitar. The handmade sign said: ORIGINAL “TURDY-BIRDIES.”

Tacho pulled back onto the freeway and rolled into the brown glare of the flat horizon.



Quinter, Voda, Ogallah, Hays. They were weeping with boredom and despair. Grain elevators looked like 170-story science fiction towers from ten miles away. Salina.

“Otra vez Salina,” Tacho complained. “Weren’t we just in Salina?”

Before them, a vast smear of smoke. Not smoke. Birds. Aloft. Suddenly, as one, they turned, vanishing in the air like the louvers of God’s own opening window blinds. Appeared. Vanished. Appeared. Swept away to stubbled fields.

They clattered to a stop in Topeka. They felt like they had sandpaper in their shorts, old glue in their mouths. They rented a room in a motel run by a Punjabi family. They signed in as Mr. P. Villa and Mrs. S. Hayek. They avoided the eyes of strangers. They sat next to a black family at an early showing of a three-dollar movie about a woman named Madea. They walked back to the motel, and Tacho went next door to buy a sack of tacos. Nayeli found crumpled soiled tissues under her bed.

“Another day in paradise,” Tacho said.

They passed through Kansas City, crossed the state line, and were alarmed to find themselves in Kansas City. Tacho thought he’d driven in a circle.



They shot out the far side and banged along, heading east. Missouri, at least, offered some hills.

The car’s engine was now whining as well as clanging. Tacho felt queasy. “This trip,” Tacho said. “Forgive me, but it’s torture.”

“I’m sorry.”

Nayeli felt weepy.

Oh, spare me the waterworks, Tacho thought, surreptitiously wiping a tear from his own eye. They were far from anything they knew. They were far from any world they could understand. They were naked. You did this to me.

They came in view of Saint Louis. The arch terrified them. It looked like an alien force, a terrible metal presence looming over the panicked mortals.

Tacho stared at it as they approached.

Finally, he said, “Wow. Look at the size of that arch. That must be McDonald’s World Headquarters.”



He had to stop for the Mississippi. They walked around the base of the arch, frightened of it as if it were a giant robot from a bad monster movie. Rangers in their Smokey Bear hats looked like Border Patrol agents. Families ate funnel cakes. “Fat churros?” Nayeli asked.

They stood at the edge of the Mississippi and beheld its deceptively slow-looking brown water, the scaly old boat across the river, the stained cement walls of the banks, the grinding train on the far side. A single duck muscled futilely against the current, gave up with a squawk, turned around, and shot downstream.

Tacho felt sharp pinpricks in his gut, said nothing. But he told Nayeli, when she bent down to a drinking fountain, “Don’t drink the water.”

He could already tell he was in for a bout of Washington’s Revenge.

Pepto-Bismol, 7 Up, Subway sandwiches, and yogurt in a motel somewhere near Vandalia, Illinois. The Subway guy had alarmed Tacho by confiding in him, “We got black UFOs down here a mile wide.”

“Tomorrow’s the day,” Tacho told Nayeli as they went to bed.

He threw up his sandwich at midnight.





Chapter Thirty-three



Tacho had a fever by the time they got to 57 North. His fingers felt like sausages, and his head felt swollen. He shivered. He stopped at gas station toilets and rest areas and was amazed he still had anything left in him. Ma Johnston’s minivan, too, was sick. It screeched, banged, and clacked as they drove. When he shut off the engine, it fumed. And when he went to start it again, it coughed and groaned. “I wish you had a license,” he said.

“Almost there, Tachito,” Nayeli cooed. “Almost there. I’ll put you in bed as soon as we get there. Don’t worry. My father will take care of everything.”