Into the Beautiful North (30 page)

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

T
acho 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?”

“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.

They were not amused by Fruita. Nayeli kept trying to pronounce it in Spanish:
Frooweetah!
Parachute failed to intrigue them. The Book Cliffs, the Roan Cliffs, and mighty Battlement Mesa tried to amaze them, but Tacho and Nayeli were blind with shock and embarrassment. The land itself seemed to rebuke them. Every car that passed, they were sure, was dense with curses and accusations.

Wisely, Tacho pulled off at Rifle for Eskimo Pies and a visit to the trading post. Nayeli, caught up in patriotic guilt, bought a silver plastic rendering of the twin towers and mounted it on the dashboard. She attached an American flag decal to the windshield. Tacho bought a T-shirt with a picture of armed Apache warriors on it. It said: homeland security since 1492. It never crossed his mind that Geronimo and his warriors would have killed him in a second.