torn open their bellies and plucked out their eyes.
“Ojos! Hijos! Huesos! Lobos!” they bark. They come at us with bloody jaws and those stolen eyes resting like pearls on their tongues. “How many of us have been blinded because of you? To prove that the order to kill you has been carried out! Mocosos! You live while we’re left to be kicked and to struggle for scraps, run off and run over! Jau! Jau! Jau!”
Coyote has the Nova in gear now and he’s swerving through the grove trying to get us back to the road.
They’re snapping at the kids in the rear bumper, barking their names like some wild Chichimec gang: Brokerib! Pinchback! Swell-foot! Droptooth!
Little Cuauhtemoc huddles himself around the radio, comforted by the sizzling static and the stone in his mouth shaped like a human heart.
Oh, now it’s rush hour, golden hour, and all the Cadillacs chauffeuring our mothers to the suburban Seven Cities Mall are backed up for a glittering mile, and we are here in the Nova making time with some fine-ass white boys and girls on the service road, passing more public storage units and strip malls, legal services and sandwich shops and blood-testing agencies and nail salons, like a never-ending, ever-repeating commercial for what we call El Norte. Ice cream, Coyote! Starbucks! Party rentals! Outback! Two for one tattoos and piercings!
He must not hear us.
You don’t believe us?
Okay, so suppose it’s just more underdeveloped Sonora sand and cactus out there, squalid shelters rigged out of cinder blocks, sticks, and plastic, and we’re tired of playing I Spy and License Plate Loteria. And the sun hurts our eyes because we lost our hats, and Coyote says there’s no extra money to buy us any. So there’s a young man on horseback, a tejano prince in a tall white hat, Coyote. And he doesn’t squint, Coyote. So he’s handsome. He’s got a million MySpace friends — mostly gay men and twelve-year-old girls — and a great big contract with Televisa. He will be our president. Si se puede! And there’s a woman in a maid’s uniform who loves him, and who doesn’t know yet that she’s pregnant, and she’s crossing the highway to dust the furniture and vacuum the floors and wash the sheets and towels and sex toys at the Yanqui-owned time-shares overlooking El Mar Vermijo. Each air-conditioned unit has tinted windows, according to the brochure, so you have no idea what those sunburned gringos are up to, do you? And the maid lady, Coyote: she’s wearing cheap sunglasses and a thong that she borrowed from her nasty prima who’s home doing her nails and getting fucked like a goat by the maid lady’s infected boyfriend who’s trying to watch the Toluca match and keeps asking: “Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?”
So, hey, Coyote: we’re getting a little cranky. Are we there yet?
Gol! Gol! Gol! Gol! Gooooool!
Francisco, the Goat-Boy of Ameca, rides round and round in our hubcap stroking the bloody left ear he sliced off Bofo’s bald head, a trophy of that championship season in Guadalajara. Cisco’s parents clean the lab where he’ll be studied in Portland. That’s what Coyote says. “CHI–VAS,” Cisco shouts every time we hit a hole. “CHI–VAS! CAM-PE-ON!”
And the girl we call La Sirena. She won’t say where she’s from. She swims so many laps around the radiator she grows flippers and a tail. She’s going to boil and turn red. When the cap blows she’ll be riding those flaming plumes of gas, oil, brake fluid, and transmission fluid right into downtown Nogales. La Princesa! La Reina! La Gloria! Wouldn’t you like to see? She will have her own apocalyptic cult. Nuestra Senora de la Nova. She is carrying the furious daughter of God.
Coyote’s friend Conejo is waiting outside the bus station: all las Flechas Amarillas cocked and aimed south at Celaya, Palenque, Pachuco, Queretaro, Merida, Patzcuaro, Potosi, Tollan, Veracruz, Aztlan.
We’re going to Gringolandia! Adios! Adios, pendejos, adios! Vaya bien!
Coyote whistles and Conejo gets in, his jeans and work boots crusted with plaster from building walls on the Heights for los ricos.
God damn it’s hot.
Conejo strums his guitar. Conejo says, “Let’s get the kids some ice cream.”
Coyote drives the car.
“Let’s get the kids some ice cream,” Conejo says and Coyote says okay.
“Ay, que rica!” Sometimes Conejo will lose his head.
They have a thousand flavors. Las viejitas hand out cups of elote, aguacate, mango, mole, cerveza, sensemilla, cacahuate, nopal, chicharron, chorizo, lengua, frijol, and there’re tents all around selling sopes and tacos — al pastor, bistec, flor de calabaza, gusano, hormiga, chapulin — Cantinflas masks, huaraches, guayaberas, Chiapas amber, Chivas wallets, bikinis, Zapata marionettes, popguns, tops, Jaguares keychains, piggy banks, balloons, Oaxacan silver, chickens, roosters, goats. We don’t keep our hands to ourselves until they get chopped off and tossed into the cazuela.
Borrachos!
A procession of staggering Yaquis circles the square with a pig wearing a crown of cactus thorns and a Patriots “Undefeated!” T-shirt. Father Pelotas, waving a feather and a valve from the uncorrupted heart of San Caloca, conjures a bloody little Jesus to scourge them. “Infiels!” Jesus shouts. “Nihilistas! Apostatas!” He snaps his whip against those bent Indian backs. He hopped out of a perfect little cloud. Every good dog barks fanatically.
And then one thing leads to another. The thirteenth apostle slips out of a mural and sneaks off to a motel with Concepcion. Osvaldo and Elvira get sucked into an infernal sphincter. Jaime is forced to enlist with the garrison.
The concheros’ rattling chalchihuites start the ritual lucha between La Morenita and La Malinche. Our Lady clobbers the other with a chair. She’s bloody. She breaks a nail. She cracks a rib. She gets her ass beat with a cornstalk. That one’s got some cojones. Juan Diego and Cortes tag in, slapping, pulling hair, gouging eyes. The loser will be shaved.
Later, we’re cruising the Heights with Morenita cuddling her bloody little Jesus in the Nova’s backseat, tickling his beard, teasing him with his whip, the tip of it just beyond his delicate grasping fingers with their trimmed nails. He squeals and she nurses him, nurses us all with her Extremaduran rompope until we’re laid out — all except Coyote, whose shell eyes are glowing at us in the rearview mirror — drunk and happy on her magnificent jiggling lap, the map light of her countenance guiding our dreams toward board games and bunk beds. Let there be bicycles. Golden, slick banana seats and temperate, green summer.
“You won’t come to my house?” Morenita asks. Her breath stinks. We see one black curling hair on her chin.
These bright, vacant streets, lamplit and sober. Conejo sings a narco-corrido that gives everyone the creeps. A private security guard in a bulletproof vest raises his atlatl. He says, “Get the fuck out.”
“No tocar,” Conejo sings. “No tocar, no tocar, no tocar. Ay, que barbaro.”
Something smells like Fabuloso. Walls of bougainvillea that protect the beautiful sleeping families.
Conejo says: There was this kid who loved the Dodgers, see. Chavez Ravine, Fernandomania, all that shit. He had this friend who worked in them new fortress-condos in Tijuana, you know? High-rise! And they snuck past security and got up on the roof and ran him up the flagpole and he was up there. Way up. Up above the clouds! Just so he could see all the way to Los Angeles.
“Jose!” they started calling at him. “Jose! Jose! Jose!”
They got so worried. Someone’s going to kill them.
Si, le oigo! Jose calls down. Like a little angel, eh, kids? Fucking Angel Jose, huh?
And, you know, these kids call back:
“Jose, Jose… Jose can you see?”
… a la lu-u-u-uz de la aurora? Jose is singing.
Lo que tanto aclamamos la noche al caer?
Ay ja ja! And Coyote punches Conejo right in the mouth.
That broke his last good tooth. Conejo sucks a lime.
