Graffiti on a pink stucco wall: CAPTAIN BEEFHEART SLEPT HERE.
“¿Qué es eso?” Nayeli asked.
“It is a mystery,” Tacho muttered.
He was bored with the USA.
No, the giant thermometer did not impress Tacho. He had to admit, though, the running fat man on the Bun Boy sign was pretty funny. Matt had told them to stop at the Mad Greek’s for the best milk shakes in California. Nayeli had a date shake, Tacho eggnog. Matt had told him it would taste like rompope, but it did not taste like rompope. Maybe if you poured four or five shots of rum into it.
Ma Johnston’s minivan offered more than enough room for just the two of them, but Nayeli had plans to fill the extra space. She would, she still believed, not only find her father in far KANKAKEE, but convince him to return to Tres Camarones, and they’d need the room for his luggage, maybe some of his smaller furniture. A color television would be nice. And though Tacho had his doubts about the project, she was his girl. What could he do? Just drive. Drive. Drive some more. Then, when he got tired, relieve that by driving for a spell.
And there would always be driving to do. One thing was obvious: Los Yunaites was much too big. He was crossing a distance the size of a small Central American country just to get to pinchi Las Vegas!
No wonder Americans seemed crazy to everybody else—they were utterly alone in the vastness of this ridiculously immense land. They all skittered about, alighting and flying off again like frantic butterflies. Looking for—what? What were they looking for? What was in Las Vegas? And, really, what was the big deal? Why couldn’t they just sleep at the Bun Boy? But no! Matt had insisted they plow through to Las Vegas. First off, what a joke! The place was called Vegas? “Fertile plains”? Nothing outside but dead lizards and black highways glittering with a million busted beer bottles!
Nayeli had been moody ever since Yolo rode the pony at Matt’s. Tacho sighed. Not easy to strike up a conversation with Miss Heartbreak. He tossed his milk shake into the trash. She daintily got out, minced to the barrel, and gently dropped her half-full cup into the garbage can. He hated it when she played the girlie-girl. And now she was watching her weight, too. She got back in without a word, and he got back on the road.
It was already late afternoon. Tacho was amazed and delighted to see an RV ahead, pulled off the side of the road and going up in flames. Massive billows of black smoke roiled above the burning machine. A small group of Americans stood about forty feet away and stared intently. They seemed to believe a revelation was at hand. Tacho passed them slowly, gawking like all Mexicans are compelled to do when a catastrophe ruins someone else’s day more than their own. Nayeli seemed to be reciting a prayer. Tacho felt guilty that he wasn’t more spiritual, but he still craned his neck to see.
They flowed into some crazy glittering Nevada border town that seemed to have a roller coaster going over the highway. Parched sand.
“Nevada?” Nayeli said. “They call this place snowy?”
They laughed.
Tacho said, “Maybe it melted.”
TONITE! GALLAGHER!
Casinos.
LOO$E $LOT$!
The largest building looked like some kind of big boat.
BONNIE AND CLYDE’S DEATH CAR!
“We saw that movie,” Nayeli said.
She noted a prison on the desert slope above the electric town.
“How odd it must be,” she said, “to lie in your bunk and stare across the miles of sand at all the free people having fun.”
“Yeah. Like the people in Tijuana looking over the fence.”
Tacho: Zapatista provocateur!
They stopped for gas and paid with Chava Chavarín’s gas card. It was a family project, no doubt about it.
It rained for about an hour as they headed deeper into the desert. As dark fell, they saw the vast, flat hardpan on either side turning purple with a thin layer of water running to either horizon. They could have been on the causeway at Guaymas that they’d crossed on the Tres Estrellas bus heading north.
The evening light was violet.
And then —
LAS VEGAS.
Nayeli would always remember it like this. In capital letters. It exploded out of the dark plain, a twisted nest of neon and lightning. Black pyramids shooting beams at the moon. “There’s your bright lights, girl,” Tacho said. At first, she couldn’t stop laughing. It was as absurd as her childhood fantasies of dream cities—it only lacked flying carpets and gassy airships. Baffling, winding streets through glitter canyons were interrupted by whole blocks with ceilings of light. She pointed at an eye-aching electric sign that cried céline dion!
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 Va
mpi 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?”
“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, señora,” 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, señora,” 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.
The food came quickly. Nayeli’s #3 was chiles rellenos and beans. Tacho’s machaca was watery, the eggs undercooked. The chef came out, wiping his hands on a white towel.
“OK, amigos?”
“Yes,” said Nayeli. “Gracias.”
“Muy sabroso,” Tacho lied to be polite.
“Speak English,” the chef corrected.
“OK,” Tacho replied. “Buddy.”
He smiled to himself: this was a comedic masterpiece, in his opinion.
“Vacation?” the chef asked.
“Not really,” replied Nayeli.
“Not really? What, then?”
r /> “Work?” Nayeli offered. Not sure of what she was saying, wishing she had brought the dictionary with her.
The chef put down the towel.
“Work,” he said.
He turned his bloodshot eyes to his wife.
“Work,” he repeated.
“We came from Sinaloa,” Tacho offered, exhausting his English for the day. It sounded like: Gwee kayne fronng Sinaloa.
“Came? How?”
Nayeli, thinking she was among paisanos, thinking she was part of a great story and an adventure, made the mistake of winking at the chef.
“You know.”
“I know? What do I know?”
She tipped her head charmingly.
“We… came… across.”
The chef glared at her.
“You’re illegals.”
“Pues…” Tacho started to say, but the chef cut him off.
“No!” he said. “No, not here. You get out.”
“¿Perdón?” Nayeli asked.
“Wha —?” said Tacho.
“You get out of here. Illegals. What about the rest of us? What about us, cabrones? I came here LEGALLY! You hear that, LEGAL. You criminals come in here, make me look bad? I’m sorry, but you have to leave. Get out!”
He was trembling with rage. He waved his hands.
His wife called, “You better go now.”
“It’s hard enough!” he was shouting. “I kill myself! And you! You! Get out!”
They hung their heads and rushed out the door, their faces burning with shame. They ran as fast as they could to the van and slammed the doors and locked them and trembled inside and both of them cried because they were so lost and confused. The river never slowed.