My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (77 page)
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Authors: KATE BERNHEIMER
BOOK: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
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“Where are the others?” we ask.
Coyote touches our ears. “What others, periquitos? There’s always only been you. You two. The two of you.” He looks around. He smiles. “They paid for two.”
We suckle the girl’s dark, fat nipples, her milk picante, ashy, thick as the sludge of Tía’s latrine. We bite. We tug. We tear. We have to try so hard, the girl’s coaxing fingers in our hair. She digs in her nails until our scalps bleed. Coyote gets it all on video. She sighs as we sniff her almeja. We crawl up into the uterus and have never slept so well. We sprout feathers and short hair. There is something else curled up in one corner.
The stars are out when we return covered in blood. We have the taste of flesh in our mouths. We just want to dance beside the flaming maguey, let our arms and legs rotate free like the severed, spouting limbs of holy martyrs. We stomp the earth. One bare foot touches a rock. All our blood and sugar runs from our ears, mouths, eyes, assholes. The shit, chocolate, tears, and salt. Watch your fingers! We bite! It’s been a long day. Pretty soon, we’re over it. It passes.
It’s dark.
Coyote licks us clean and puts us to bed while Conejo and a devil play cards for all the diablitos in Hell. As he wins, Conejo eats the diablitos, crushes their strong little bones between his rotten molars, throws the shells on the ground. But the devil keeps gambling. He plays two deer, a frog, and death. Conejo plays a rooster. Coyote packs beeswax in our ears and covers our aching eyes with dried pasillas.
“It works,” we hear the devil say. “I’ve tried it. My wife, too.”
We’ve been in line for hours and hours, the Nova crawling through the last chance tianguis. Conejo is buying gifts in American dollars: blankets and T-shirts, stinking herbal remedies, shot glasses, ashtrays, and Aztec sun stones carved from Tehuacán coprolites. We huddle, maize seeds in a matchbox. We pray they don’t search us, or ask if Coyote’s our daddy, or what school we go to. We are suffocating and sick, double-wrapped in plastic bubble wrap. Coyote is practicing calm responses, but that chingada Conejo can’t stop giggling.
“We were visiting,” Coyote will say.
“Our tiny little mothers,” Conejo will say. “Pobrecitas!”
“Please step out of the car,” the armed agent will say.
It’s the Padres ahead one nothing in the bottom of the fifth.
We take a chance for a glance. Through the line of cars we can see to the other side. We see the yellow welcome sign beside América’s freeway: Our Papá stumbling drunk on his way home, our Mamá running from La Migra dragging our Américan-born sister Conejita behind by one hand, her feet just leaving the ground.
It’s all true, querida! All true!
She is flying! They can fly! Niños fly in Gringolandia!
And now we are too too too, out of the Nova, over Coyote and Conejo spread-eagled on hot concrete, we are flying as if through a windshield, through glass, through steel, through the smoke and haze, the choke and maize, the toke and craze, the Coke and phrasebook, we’re flying. It’s the way the chicken flies to the pot. Which came first: the fire or the flame? We are flying: feathered and boned to you, querida Mamá, naked and new, Papá, sin entrails y contrails, la raza limpia, raza pirata. Oscuro? How do you say? Deportesation? No. It’s the way ESPN flies to Fox. Satellite eyes. You’re beautiful. Something small on a wind crossing over. But before we forget.
Adipose. Otiose. Adidas. A radio. Game over.
“Coyote Takes Us Home” began with the image of a beat-up 1970 Chevy Nova packed with contraband children heading north toward the U.S.-Mexico border. I had heard, or thought I had, about U.S. Customs and Border Patrol stopping a car with immigrant kids hidden in the side panels. I can’t find that story now, but there are plenty of others like it: Andres’s parents leave him behind with relatives when they head north to find work in America. Lupe’s parents will send for her sometime later, when they can afford it. Gabriel and his twin brother stow away on a train, or a relative hands Carlos off to a professional smuggler, a Coyote. Their parents are waiting in Phoenix. Maybe they’re forced to pay an additional two thousand dollars to get Carla to Pennsylvania from Arizona. Maybe the operation gets busted in Las Vegas and Julia is deported to a shelter back in Mexico. They’ve got to start over. These kids are from Honduras. Those are from El Salvador. Jorge shows up. Or maybe he disappears somewhere between San Diego and Chicago. “The history of Mexico,” Octavio Paz writes, “is the history of a man seeking his parentage, his origins.”That search gets a bit more complicated once you move next door. “Coyote” explores the confusion of personal and cultural history inherent to sub rosa immigration. What do these kids carry with them on the ride? What should matter to them if they’re leaving anyway? What is the true name of the place where they’re going? The story is obsessed with trash. Much of this detritus comes from folktales told to Howard True Wheeler and published in 1943 by The American Folklore Society as
Tales from Jalisco, Mexico.
I like the collection’s subtle correspondences to Mexican history. Some tales featuring coyotes and rabbits seem to have pre-Colombian roots, while the variants on stories familiar from Perrault and the Brothers Grimm may have drifted over in the long wake of Cortés. A third group of stories, like the Virgin of Guadalupe, reveals mixed parentage. Their dark sense of humor and travesties of religious authority seem familiar to me, the most Mexican. The laughing peasants have my father’s sense of humor, and his mother’s. She came to America from Tequila, Jalisco, in 1924. He was born in Texas. I grew up in Sacramento, California. So, for me, “Coyote” is also a sort of ticket home.—MM
KIM ADDONIZIO
Ever After
THE LOFT WHERE THE DWARVES LIVED HAD A VIEW OF THE CITY AND hardwood floors and skylights, but it was overpriced, and too small now that there were seven of them. It was a fifth-floor walkup, one soaring, track-lighted room. At the far end was the platform where Doc, Sneezy, Sleepy, and Bashful slept side by side on futons. Beneath them, Happy and Dopey shared a double bed. Grumpy, who pretty much stayed to himself, kept his nylon sleeping bag in a corner during the day and unrolled it at night on the floor between the couch and the coffee table. The kitchen was two facing zinc counters, a built-in range and microwave, and a steel refrigerator, all hidden behind a long bamboo partition that Doc had bought and Sneezy had painted a color called Cherry Jubilee. The kitchen and bathroom were the only places any sort of privacy was possible. To make the rent they all pooled their money from their jobs at the restaurant, except for Dopey, who didn’t have a job unless you counted selling drugs when he wasn’t running them up his arm; and Grumpy, who panhandled every day for spare change and never came up with more than a few wrinkled dollar bills when the first of the month rolled around. Sometimes the rest of them talked about kicking out Dopey and Grumpy, but no one quite had the heart. Besides, the Book said there were seven when she arrived, seven disciples of the goddess who would come with the sacred apple and transform them. How, exactly, they would be transformed was a mystery that would be revealed when she got there. In the meantime, it was their job to wait.
“When she comes, she’ll make us big,” said Sneezy. He had the comics section of the Sunday paper, and an egg of Silly Putty, and was flattening a doughy oval onto a panel of Calvin and Hobbes.
“Oh, bullshit,” said Grumpy. “It’s about
inner
transformation, man. That’s the whole point. Materialism is a trap. Identifying with your body is a trap. All this shit”—Grumpy swept his arm to indicate not just their loft but the tall downtown buildings beyond the windows, and maybe more—“is an illusion. Maya. Samsara.” He shook out the last Marlboro from a pack, crumpled the pack, and tried a hook shot into a wicker wastebasket by the window, but missed. He looked around. “Matches? Lighter? Who’s going for more cigs?”
inner
transformation, man. That’s the whole point. Materialism is a trap. Identifying with your body is a trap. All this shit”—Grumpy swept his arm to indicate not just their loft but the tall downtown buildings beyond the windows, and maybe more—“is an illusion. Maya. Samsara.” He shook out the last Marlboro from a pack, crumpled the pack, and tried a hook shot into a wicker wastebasket by the window, but missed. He looked around. “Matches? Lighter? Who’s going for more cigs?”
“She will,” insisted Sneezy. “She’ll make us six feet if we want to be.”
“She can’t change genetics, you dope,” Grumpy said.
At the word
dope,
Dopey’s head jerked up for an instant. He was nodding on the couch at the opposite end from Grumpy, a lit cigarette ready to fall from his hand. The couch had a few burn holes already. One of these days, Doc thought, he’s going to set the fucking place on fire, and then where will we be? How will she ever find us? He got up from the floor, where he’d been doing yoga stretches, and slid the cigarette from Dopey’s stained fingers. He ground it out in an ashtray on the table, in the blue ceramic water of a moat that circled a ceramic castle. From the castle’s tiny windows, a little incense smoke—sandalwood—drifted out.
dope,
Dopey’s head jerked up for an instant. He was nodding on the couch at the opposite end from Grumpy, a lit cigarette ready to fall from his hand. The couch had a few burn holes already. One of these days, Doc thought, he’s going to set the fucking place on fire, and then where will we be? How will she ever find us? He got up from the floor, where he’d been doing yoga stretches, and slid the cigarette from Dopey’s stained fingers. He ground it out in an ashtray on the table, in the blue ceramic water of a moat that circled a ceramic castle. From the castle’s tiny windows, a little incense smoke—sandalwood—drifted out.
“She’s not an alien from outer space who’s going to perform weird experiments,” Doc said. He hunted through the newspaper for the Food section.
“Where is she from, then?” Sneezy said. Sneezy was a sixteen-year-old runaway, the youngest of them. From the sweet credulousness of his expression, you’d never know what terrible things he had endured. He’d been beaten, scarred between his shoulder blades with boiling water, forced into sex with his mother by his own father. Sneezy liked to ask the obvious questions for the sake of receiving the familiar, predictable answers.
“She’s from the castle,” Doc said. “She’s the fairest in the land. She will come with the sacred apple and all will be changed.” This much the Book said.
Once upon a time,
it said. But when was that, exactly? Doc wondered. They’d been here for more than six years already. Or he had, anyway. Ever since he’d found the Book in a Dumpster—the covers ripped away, most of its pages stained and torn—where he’d been looking for food a nearby restaurant always threw out. He’d been on the streets, addicted to cheap wine, not giving a shit about anything or anyone. He’d slept on cardboard in doorways, with a Buck knife under the rolled poncho he used for a pillow, had stolen children’s shoes from outside the Moon Bounce at the park. He had humiliated himself performing drunken jigs in the bank plaza for change tossed into a baseball cap. The Book had changed all that. It had shown him there was a purpose to his life. To gather the others, to come to this place and make it ready. He had quit drinking and found a job, at the very restaurant whose Dumpster he used to scrounge through. He had gathered his brethren, one by one, as they drifted into the city from other places, broke and down on their luck, headed for the streets and shelters. They had become his staff—two dishwashers, a busboy, and a fry cook. The restaurant’s name was Oz, and the owner had been willing to hire dwarf after dwarf and present them as ersatz munchkins. There had been a feature article in the
Weekly
, and write-ups in some food magazines, which had drawn a lot of business. The dwarves were mentioned in the guidebooks, so there were often tourists from Canada and Denmark and Japan, who brought their cameras to record the enchanting moment the dwarves trooped from the kitchen with a candle-lit torte to stand around a table and sing happy birthday. They used fake high voices, as though they’d been sucking on helium.
Once upon a time,
it said. But when was that, exactly? Doc wondered. They’d been here for more than six years already. Or he had, anyway. Ever since he’d found the Book in a Dumpster—the covers ripped away, most of its pages stained and torn—where he’d been looking for food a nearby restaurant always threw out. He’d been on the streets, addicted to cheap wine, not giving a shit about anything or anyone. He’d slept on cardboard in doorways, with a Buck knife under the rolled poncho he used for a pillow, had stolen children’s shoes from outside the Moon Bounce at the park. He had humiliated himself performing drunken jigs in the bank plaza for change tossed into a baseball cap. The Book had changed all that. It had shown him there was a purpose to his life. To gather the others, to come to this place and make it ready. He had quit drinking and found a job, at the very restaurant whose Dumpster he used to scrounge through. He had gathered his brethren, one by one, as they drifted into the city from other places, broke and down on their luck, headed for the streets and shelters. They had become his staff—two dishwashers, a busboy, and a fry cook. The restaurant’s name was Oz, and the owner had been willing to hire dwarf after dwarf and present them as ersatz munchkins. There had been a feature article in the
Weekly
, and write-ups in some food magazines, which had drawn a lot of business. The dwarves were mentioned in the guidebooks, so there were often tourists from Canada and Denmark and Japan, who brought their cameras to record the enchanting moment the dwarves trooped from the kitchen with a candle-lit torte to stand around a table and sing happy birthday. They used fake high voices, as though they’d been sucking on helium.
“Why is the apple sacred?” Sneezy said dreamily. He had abandoned the comics and now had a few Magic cards spread out on the floor and was picking them up one by one, studying them.
“Because she will die of the apple and be resurrected,” Doc said. He glanced at one of Sneezy’s cards:
Capashen Unicorn
. An armored unicorn raced through a glittery field, a white-robed rider on its back. Underneath, Doc read,
Capashen riders were stern and humorless even before their ancestral home was reduced to rubble.
Capashen Unicorn
. An armored unicorn raced through a glittery field, a white-robed rider on its back. Underneath, Doc read,
Capashen riders were stern and humorless even before their ancestral home was reduced to rubble.
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