Into the Beautiful North(85)

She kept up a stream of heroic and uplifting chatter, but all he did was moan. Tacho didn’t believe any of it. He didn’t believe her father was even in Kankakee. They were fools, on a fool’s errand. They had been fools to ever leave Tres Camarones. And they had joined all the other unwanted fools hiding in the long shadows of the United States. He had thought he was going to Beverly Hills, and here he was in Cow Pie Pradera. Turdy-Birdies, he thought.

Neoga. Mattoon. What kinds of names were these? Arcola.

He roused himself to say: “?Arcola? Me arde la cola.”

She laughed. “?Ay, Tacho!”

He had told her his ass was burning.

Champaign. Rantoul. Freight rail lines ran along their left side the whole way. The sidetracked train cars looked to Nayeli like washed-up boats on the edge of a sea. Abandoned semitrailers stood at angles on the edges and berms of vast dead farms. The dark fields ran away from them until they vanished in the violent skies knotting up and relentlessly stalking toward them from Iowa and Nebraska.

Paxton. Onarga. Chebanse.

“?Chingado!” Tacho cried. “?Ya, pues! Where is this Kankakee, for God’s sake? I’m through!”

“Soon, Tachito. You’re doing great. Soon, you’ll see.”

And suddenly, they were crossing the Kankakee River.

“Look!” she yelled. “I told you! I told you! It’s beautiful!”

“The Baluarte River back home,” he sniffed, “is better than this.”

Nayeli’s father was near—she could feel him. He would be shocked to see her. He might be angry. But she knew him—knew his good heart. He would be so moved by her brave journey to find him, to save her home. His features would soften and his face would break into a smile, and he would embrace her.

Beyond the river, they saw the KANKAKEE turnoff on the right.

Tacho took in the sight in a swoon of fever. His ears burned. His eyes felt like two coals in his skull. He didn’t trust what he was seeing. He didn’t trust that he wasn’t dreaming. He stopped at a stop sign and stared at the building in front of them.

“Is that there or not?” he muttered.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s a sign from heaven.”

A statue of a huge hand on the roof of the building clutched a globe and held it up to the sky.

“We have been in God’s hand the whole time.” Nayeli smiled.

To Tacho, it looked like the poster for a monster movie at the Cine Pedro Infante.

He turned left.

“Get ready, morra,” he said. “You’re going to get what you asked for.”

“I am ready!” she replied.

The minivan thumped as if Tacho were running over a hundred rabbits. They stared out the windows at sad East Kankakee. Old buildings and old motels. They saw an amazing little Victorian shed that had been some kind of ice cream parlor in its heyday and had now been turned into a Mexican taco stand. El Gallito.

“Menudo,” Nayeli noted.

Tacho bit back on his rising bile.

They passed a carnicería.

“Meat!” she exclaimed, like an insane tour guide of trivial destinations. “And they sell fruit and vegetables. In Spanish! Kankakee has Mexicans! You see?”

“Oh, shut up,” Tacho heard himself saying.

Suddenly, they were in a nice downtown. Red brick and a steely bright building. And out the other side. Strip malls. Gas stations. A building as pink as Tacho’s Pepto. Farther out, they saw an upended bathtub half-buried in a yard and spray-painted silver. A statue of Jesus stood inside it, blessing the dog poo in the yard.

“Tijuana, USA,” Tacho said.

They managed a U-turn, and they banged back through the nice part of town and limped to a motel near the meat market as the engine seemed to come undone and fall apart—great billows of acrid steam cloaked them completely from sight.

“Nayeli,” Tacho said, “you have killed me.”



They were in room 17, on the ground floor. The speeding Iowa rainstorm overtook them there and unzipped the sky. Great crashes of thunder shook the loose glass in the windows. The wind was ancient and cold. Tacho was so embarrassed by his diarrhea that he forced Nayeli to stand outside the motel room when he went to the toilet. She wore the fisherman’s Steamboat sweatshirt and clutched herself, watching the muddy water run down the motel’s drive and flood the street. Black men ran down the opposite sidewalk, grimly holding newspapers over their heads. Cars threw up fans of brown water, made desolate hissing noises on the wet blacktop. She could see houses behind the meat market. An orange plastic child’s wagon lay on its side in the mud. She shivered.

When Tacho came off the toilet, he fell into bed and slept. He was hot—she wet a washcloth and put it on his forehead. He belched the odor of rotten eggs. She cracked the door to let in fresh storm air.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I let you down.”

“No, you didn’t!” she said. “Tachito! Here we are!”

“But I don’t think… I think I need to stay in bed.”

“That’s all right. I should go find him alone.”

“Really? You’re not mad?”

But he was asleep again before she could reassure him.



In the lobby, she broke one of Tacho’s bills and used the change to buy him a 7 Up from the machine. She bought herself a Dr Pepper and some peanut butter crackers. Not much of a supper, but better than nothing. The rain was still pelting the street. The girl behind the desk took a few minutes out of her Sudoku fix and explained to Nayeli that she could make long-distance phone calls from her room. “Dial nine first,” she said.