“Don’t whine,” he said, and threatened us with an umbrella. Everybody got one kernel, except Julio, who got none. That’s when we noticed that the elotero was a corpse.
“Someone stabbed me.” He sounded apologetic.
“No, I didn’t!” a voice objected.
He had a kind face, the elotero, and he led us over a hill to a pile of old silver coins topped by a turd. A sad- looking devil was sitting on a stone, trying to straighten three hairs.
“Diablito, is that yours?” we asked, pointing to the turd or the silver, depending on how you looked at it. He gave us three guesses.
Coyote craps at the PEMEX, and we find an empty peanut shell and the body of a princess beside a dry riverbed. Embedded in the soil are immense architectural forms carved with images of jaguars and frogs, lizards and fire. There are rotted clubs and sharp stones like little warriors. There are feathered masks with thick lips and empty eyes watching the sun, and there are images of fanged creatures that we don’t know. That we don’t want to know. The scene reminds us of the RV we saw outside of Tecuala, turned over in a ditch and on fire, all those bloody Chichimecs dancing around it, and the debris trail of DVDs and underwear and swimsuits stretching like a ragged quetzal plume for a half mile up the road.
“I’m frightened, Coyote,” we say. He flicks us with his tail.
The dead princess is like paper. She is curling at the edges and brown. Someone has drawn pictures all over her, like a map, like a journey home. We cannot read them. “Help me, Coyote,” we say, pointing, but he leads us back to the Nova and doesn’t say a word for one hour.
Still, we are not certain where or when this idea of our parents originated. People you have never seen waiting to feed and clothe you? The perro taught us what was edible. The gato how to hunt small things. The ardilla to conserve. The vaca to digest. The burro to take blows. We learned to construct our shelters from the aranas, and the mono taught us to stay light, just out of reach. The tecolote taught us to stay alert all night long.
But then one day we woke up all wet thinking of San Diego, Tucson, Denver, Chicago, San Antonio, Atlanta. We woke up waiting on Coyote without knowing we were waiting, watching for the dust of his Nova that would be coming down the dirt track from the cuota. We felt a little sick. A burning in our stomach. Our sinuses, too. Our eyes were itchy. The man we call Tio gave us a black pill, but it didn’t help.
“You’ll be gone soon,” he said. We had never seen him smile like that.
And then the animals wouldn’t speak to us anymore. They looked away. They stood dumb in filthy boots and their unpainted wooden masks. They sulked at the edge of the field of stones. They turned the corner when we waved. We cursed their sorry asses. We finally found them at the edge of town, by the dry well, sitting together in a closed circle, drinking tequila and telling dirty jokes. In the mercado, their pale organs had been washed and laid out on a table.
Later, touching the little white feet of the plaster Virgin, we had a vision of the small wet opening between her legs. There was blood and hair and something else. A kind of worm. Who was going to tell us?
The phone rang and the woman we call Tia said: “Es tu Mama. Es tu America.”
A green bird circles the speeding Nova three times screeching warnings about our stepsisters. There’s poison in the pipian! There’s arsenic in the tamales! There’s mercury in the crab soup! There’s DDT in the huitlacoche! Then it snatches Adelita out of the glove box for its trouble.
At the edge of Hermosillo, everybody’s looking for a ride north. Before the door of the cantina shuts, we peek in at a nude woman in the highest red heels holding a board painted with the number 8 above her head. Two pretty, cumin-scented boys are standing around by the broken car wash with their shirts off, showing their thin, hairless chests to truck drivers who spit, pat their macho hair, tug their belts, pretend not to look. The boys’ stiff penises are like industrial tools straining against their loose-fitting jeans. Their oiled cockscombs shine silver in the moonlight.
“What is it, Coyote?” we ask, but he guides us away.
Twins. Like twin cities. Sister cities. And when they turn, their identical tattoos read: Queremos Enganarte. What does it mean, we want to know.
Back in the Nova, we are hot and uncomfortable, feeling just too big for our nests, our bodies like chopped pork sweating in the sauce-pan. We feel coated in a thick fluid.
“Touch me,” someone says, before Coyote guns the motor. Then we all shudder and then we are asleep.
The girl in the headlamp tastes roses. Seeds in her mouth. She drools out a trail of hornless flowers and pearls that fly off into the desert. She is incomprehensible and stupid and will marry well to a bastard. That’s what Coyote says.
“Shut up!” shouts her stepsister in the other headlamp, black snakes slipping soundlessly from the tips of her syllables, encircling her snugly, sucking and shucking.
We stop for the night at an abandoned hacienda, the engine of the Nova ticking and tocking in the dark. Thorny vines reach over the walls, pick the shadow’s pocket. The blue agaves are suffering. The avocado tree wants a word with her brother in the carburetor.
“I gave my fruits to la madre, La Morenita,” she says. “What else could I do?”
We can’t sleep in the haunted dormitory. “Stay out of the cellar,” Coyote says, but then he’s snoring, so where else? We find a goat in a closet with the centuries-old reposados. A devil on a three-legged stool insists the goat’s a princess, his ransom, his goddaughter, his bride-to-be.
“Pre-ci-o-so!” the devil says, showing his little gold teeth and their ivory fillings.
In the ballroom, scarred films flicker on the wall: plum-suited charros singing from horseback to the grazing herds and a hunchback burning the corpses of emaciated campesinos. The projectionist curled over his womanly machine sings along as he fondles its knobs. In matters of love, one never gets what one wants.
Out on the patio, beside a shattered staircase, a blackbird lies pierced by long shards of the broken glass. One wing’s almost off and his breast is sheared open.
The delicate bones! The Pedro Infante face! The fluttering little heart!
This is the film version of our parents’ romance.
His amante has a madwoman’s hair, dirty little virgin feet. The lap of her nightgown holds a heart-shaped bloodstain. Her three stepsisters hang by their necks from the porch beams. One redhead, one blonde, and one brunette. So peaceful, like beloved sleepers. Now we can forgive them.
“I heard them whispering,” our mother says, grabbing a pigeon and cutting its throat, draining the blood into a little clay pitcher. There are hundreds more gathering to gossip, perching on the hanging girls, in the trees, on the roof, waddling and pecking around the dry fountain. The empty halls echo with their coos and scratching nails. The sound effect is amplified to emphasize her dementia.
“It’s the only cure for his curse,” she says, cutting open another bird, spattering the fractured tiles with black constellations. Pure cinema! “What they said, yes, that’s what they said, what they said.” Our mother looks at us. No fool after all. She is an international star. “The only way you can ever be born,” she says as the camera slowly zooms in. She looks away, a defiant tear in her eye. We are in love.
“Mama,” we sing, “your cantarito is only one-quarter full, so we’ll join in your slaughter just until we get bored.” But we work fast. Maybe carelessly. Is it our fault some of the slower kids get in the way?
We wander into the kitchen where beans are bubbling on the stove. A steaming pozole and the moon making fresh tortillas. It has a big ass and smells like canela. “Ay, ninos,” it sighs, wiping its hands on its apron. “You’re so late! You need to eat. But where is Yolanda? Where is Areli? What’s happened to Pancho and Enrique?” The truth is not pretty. We are so hungry, but then the sun bursts in wearing stained underpants and throws a brick at us. A watermelon. A mango. A boot. We swear: that was for nothing. Ask the blackbird in the avocado tree, the mad amante hanging herself from the Milky Way.
That pack of dogs snuck up on us. They came up out of a culvert in the dark, quiet and with no eyes in their heads to reflect the moonlight. Before we could roll up the windows they’d carried off Cruz, Rosario, and Virgilio,
