“It’s a robot,” Nayeli reminded him.
Rivers. Waterfalls. They walked around Bear Lake. It was cold—there was nobody there. On the far side, under the peak of a bizarre boxy mountain, white flakes began to wobble out of the clouds.
“Where did these feathers come from?” Tacho asked.
Nayeli let out a cry: “Tacho! It’s snow!”
He said, “No, it isn’t.”
But it was.
They licked it out of the air, ran and screamed and jumped.
Nayeli had never heard the world go so silent. Jays and magpies and camp robber birds muttered fretfully. She could hear the soft swish as the snow landed on the ground. Tacho had flakes on his long eyelashes. Nayeli took them off his eyes with her lips. They held hands as they walked back to the minivan.
As they drove down the mountains, she pulled the fisherman’s hood up over her face and pretended to nap so Tacho wouldn’t see her crying again.
They plunged. They hit the flats. Denver—scary and confused: they didn’t know if they were seeing roller coasters or factories. The minivan’s engine started to make a faint clacking sound. Out into yellow and brown lands. Into the lonely wind. Across the emptiness of the high plains. To a courtyard motel on the Kansas border. The men in the next room pounded on the wall if they talked too loud or laughed. Nayeli found a praying mantis outside their door, studying the moths coming to the light. They were afraid of the neighbors, so they whispered and decided not to turn on the television.
In the morning, they were blinded by wind. Grit stung their eyes. They swerved and rocked as Tacho tried to navigate the buffeting gusts. A semi trailer rig had blown over on a cloverleaf onto I-70. It lay on its side. No one was visible for miles.
They pulled off for gas at a place called Kanorado. Nayeli kept the fisherman’s hood up, but the wind sliced through her clothes like scissors. A state trooper pulled up to the pumps just as a siren on a pole started to howl. “Come on!” he shouted. “Tornado warning!” They trotted into the small food shop behind him and everybody hunkered down and drank burned coffee.
“She’s blowin’ up a whistler,” somebody said.
The cop said, “Driving somewhere?”
“KANKAKEE, ILLINOIS,” Nayeli explained.
“Huh, how ’bout that.” The cup turned to the woman who worked in the shop. “Vicki—how ’bout that? A working American can’t afford to gas up his rig, but the illegals can just drive cross-country all they want.”
When nothing tornadic happened, they paid for their gas and drove away.
Chapter Thirty-one
It was 9:00 AM.
In Conference Room 1A of the Bahia Hotel, the “Pelican Room,” Tía Irma’s tribunal sat at the wide folding banquet table. The hotel workers—two guys from Tamaulipas who had entered the United States just south of Ajo, Arizona, on a cloudy night in 1998—set white paper tablecloths on the tribunal’s table, and they brought La Osa plastic pitchers of water and a cauldron of coffee. Atómiko could have just attached his mouth to the spigot, he guzzled so much of it.
“Oye, Tía,” he said. “Can’t you order some doughnuts? Maybe some pastry? Damn! Don’t be cheap!”
To everyone’s astonishment, she had the Tamaulipas boys bring in a tray of pastries and muffins. Atómiko nearly gagged when he bit into a bran muffin.
“Bird food!” he yowled.
However, when he discovered the exotic sublimity of cheese-filled Danish, he fell silent.
Irma herself sat at the center of the table, a yellow legal pad before her and an array of Bahia Hotel complimentary pens fanned out precisely on the cloth. To her right, the gleaming and suave Chava Chavarí n—now Deputy Mayor of Tres Camarones, Sinaloa. He had gotten a shave at a barbershop, and his skin was tight and shiny. To her left, Yoloxochitl. On the other side of Chava, La Vampi slumped in her seat and played with her hair. She was distracted—Atómiko and El Brujo were the tribunal’s security guards, and every time Vampi caught El Brujo’s eye, she giggled and blushed. She wore a short skirt and brazenly flashed her panties at him. He scowled and shook his head.
Atómiko did not notice. He was licking frosting off his fingers so his mighty staff did not get sticky.
In the corner, like bad boys in a sixth-grade class, Matt and Angel sat on folding chairs. Matt got himself a cup of coffee and wondered how Nayeli was doing on her trip. Good old Nayeli. Yolo, exercising her frightening Mexican woman’s psychic love powers, turned and glared at him.
“Whoa, dude,” Matt whispered to Angel. “She knows what I’m thinking.”
“Stop thinking,” Angel advised.
Chava had put ads in several newspapers. Atómiko and the boys had spread the news at taco shops and barrio stores. Nobody knew what would happen.
Hipólito, one of the Tamaulipas boys, peeked into the room.
“Applicants,” he said.
“Send them in,” Tía Irma proclaimed.
Chava felt a thrill. This was a moment for the history books! He nudged her knee under the table with his own. Irma smiled.
A small line of nervous men straggled in. Five, six, ten. Some had hats. Atómiko pointed at them with his staff and growled. They pulled off their caps. Grinned sheepishly.
Twelve. The door opened again. Thirteen. It was getting crowded in the Pelican Room.
“We seek seven!” Irma intoned. “Soldiers or policemen!”
The men murmured yes and sí.
“We have three. Of you standing before me, I can only take four more.”
The door opened. Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen.
Hipólito looked in and shook his head.
“What is it?” Irma called.
“Men.” He shrugged.
“How many men?”
He looked out.
“Many.”
Irma signaled Atómiko.
“Yeah, boss!” he said and marched out to the lobby.
A line of men snaked out the door. The people at the front desk were perturbed.
“Brother,” one of the men said, “take us back to Mexico.”
“Please,” said another.
The voices rose.
“It is too hard. We want to go home.”
“We just need jobs.”
“Can they promise us jobs?”
“Maybe a house?”
“Are there girls?”
“I want a wife. Are there women I can marry?”
“Can I bring my family?”
“I want to move my mamá from Durango. Will they let me bring her?”
“Ask the boss-lady inside, muchachos,” Atómiko announced. “She’s the chingona here!”
“I hear they got fishing down there. Is that right?”
“I miss dancing in the street, man! I miss bullfights!”
“Did you ever do fireworks on independence day?”
Some of them started laughing.
“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 pe
eled 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.
“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 beh
eld 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.”
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.