Into the Beautiful North (29 page)

Yolo’s face announced:
I win!

Nayeli sneered.

“Kankakee—man, that’s pretty far,” Matt said.

Angel and El Brujo were outside, tuning up the minivan, putting in fresh oil, adding coolant to the radiator.

“But you go up Fifteen. See here? You’ve gotta go to Vegas.”

“Vegas!” Carla crowed from the couch. “Oh, for sure!”

“Right?” said Matt.

“’S awesome!” she enthused.

“After Vegas, you keep heading north, dude—the Virgin Gorge is awesome. Then watch for Saint George, Utah. All right?”

Tacho was taking notes.

“It’s totally easy. Up past Saint George, you hit I-70 east. Bro—just keep on truckin’.”

“Truckin’,” Tacho said.

“Tee-ruckin’!” Carla chirped.

Tee-ruckin’?
Tacho mouthed to Nayeli.

“Trip out,” Carla said.

“Trip,” said Tacho. Of course it was a trip. What did they think it was?

“Es un viaje,” Nayeli said to him. “Like opium.”

Tacho looked at the map again.

“Oh,” he said. “That kind of trip.”

“Totally,” Carla added.

I-70: they’d ride that sucker all the way across the Colorado Rockies and the Midwest plains to Illinois. But they had to promise, swear to God, they’d zoom up to Estes Park in Colorado and check out Rocky Mountain National Park.

“What’s there?” Nayeli asked.

Carla got up and stretched—Nayeli could hear her back popping.

“Mountains,” she said.

“God’s country,” Matt promised.

When Tacho and Nayeli pulled out the next morning, everybody was still asleep.

Chapter Twenty-seven

T
he morning light was red. Interstate 15. Only the two of them in all that distance.

Their drive to Las Vegas through the American desert was vividly dull. Dead gas stations. Outposts of I-Don’ t-Want-to-Live-Here sat in ruin beside the road. Border Patrol trucks puttered ignored around the off-ramps as Mexicans in wasted cars passed them in reeking oil smoke. The dense brown cloud of Los Angeles exhalations felt its way out across abandoned drive-ins and peeling ice cream stands. White men in pickups with ear-flapping big dogs in the back. Old trailers faded to white. Industrial buildings and dying palm trees, alkaline flats and military bases. Vast blacktop lots of abandoned RVs, the pale boxes arrayed like iron cows in a feed lot. Small triangular flags in vivid plastic colors rattled in the endless wind. And rocks, rocks piled upon rocks, whole hillsides of nothing but rocks.

Brown birds lined up on telephone wires like beads on a cheap Tijuana necklace.

Nayeli had Matt’s old Spanish-English dictionary.
Bañera/bathtub,
she studied.
Barbecho/fallow land.
The Spanish word was new to her, she was embarrassed to admit. She gestured out the window and proclaimed, “Barbecho.”

The air conditioner cut their engine power till they climbed at a crawl, so they sweltered on the way up hills and punched it back on when they dropped. The minivan rattled and groaned on the grades—both up and down. On the radio, they heard many angry Americans with loud voices saying Mexicans were unwanted, and immigrants carried disease and harbored terrorists. English only, the AM shouters boomed; English was the official language of America.

“What did he say?” asked Nayeli.

“Nada,” said Tacho.

On the next station, a woman doctor thought her caller should dress in skimpy black lace to seduce her husband instead of the hairdresser she had a secret crush on.

“What?” said Nayeli.

Tacho shrugged, hit the radio buttons.

Country music. Talk radio. El Rushbo. JEE-sus.

Country music. Sports talk. Hannity. JEE-sus.

Country music. Norteño. News talk. JEE-sus.

Tacho turned off the radio.

Nayeli observed the land in its splendor.

7-Eleven. Subway. Motel 6.

7-Eleven. 24 Hr Adult Superstore. 65 MPH.

7-Eleven. 29 Palms. Carl’s Jr.

70 MPH. Super 8. 7-Eleven.

Numerology reigned in Los Yunaites.

The desert,” Nayeli said after an hour of silent staring, “is so harsh.”

Tacho shrugged with one shoulder. He was shrugging a lot lately. He was thinking about Tijuana, about Rigoberto’s magic teapot.

“The deserts of Mexico,” he boasted, “are more brutal.”

She stared out her window. She thought she could see a concrete dinosaur in the distance. Bikers screamed around them and flew down the road, laughing skulls on their backs. Crows bent to flattened animal carcasses in the road. They seemed to be bowing to the tatters of rabbit fur, the skunk tails. The midday’s light was white.

Matt had told them to get off the road at Baker, California. They’d find it, he promised, right before they crossed into Nevada and really began their cross-country jaunt. They’d know it, he said with a laugh, by the World’s Biggest Thermometer. “Don’t worry,” he told them. “There’s a sign if you don’t see the actual thermometer.”

Tacho could not comprehend what was so funny about it. He hadn’t been in the United States long enough to have seen the Jolly Green Giant statues, the jackalopes, or the giant Indian arrows sticking out of the sides of highways. He did not know that Matt was proud of the World’s Biggest Thermometer in a way that equaled patriotism. Who could have understood that, say, a cement statute of Babe the Blue Ox with a garden hose running through his penis so he peed a constant stream outside a roadside diner was sacredly American? In Mexico, such things would have been shot to pieces, or stolen, or a family of beggars would have moved into the hollow centers of these attractions and made room for their pigs as well. He pulled off the road at Baker.

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 Vampi about it.