My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (75 page)

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Authors: KATE BERNHEIMER

BOOK: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
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Coyote Takes Us Home
THE TWINS STOWED BENEATH THE SPARE TIRE TELL US A STORY ABOUT a small, square jardín in deep Jalisco with neatly trimmed laurel trees and a cast-iron bandstand where Porfirio Díaz once stood and scratched his balls. Where Pancho Villa farted. Where Lázaro Cárdenas spat. Where Vicente Fox picked his teeth. This was the exact spot where Subcomandante Marcos, Tía Chila’s big-balled, black Chihuahua, peed and peed and peed and then mounted little diaperless Natividad. People came running. Nobody had seen a hybrid baby since before the war, since Juan el Oso, whose mother was taken to Acapulco by a circus bear from León.
The twins were waiting on the curb, they say, watching the procession of the bloody martyr, when Coyote finally came out of the cantina. The silver scorpion on his belt buckle clacked its claws and made seven blind sisters dance.
“Will you take us?” the twins asked.
Coyote sniffed the air and measured the moon between his thumb and his forefinger. It was more than half full and the twins had had a strange delivery. But Coyote wasn’t concerned. He led them across the bridge and down through the park to the dry creek bed where we were all asleep in the Nova among the stained herons, busted appliances, tires, maricóns, and used condoms. A woman was weeping on a television.
“Move over, little ones,” Coyote whispered. “Make room, periquitos.”
A few leaves fall for no reason in this story. And even now we hear the band playing, just as the twins say it is: the trumpets and clarinets spiraling like crazy rockets, exploding into pink sparks above the crowd. This all happened at a time of balloons and marionettes, they say. Is that the engine or the tuba? The transmission or the snare drum? Dust and stones become asphalt. A desert appears at blue sunrise. Some rocks, a red-flowering nopal, a thin horse, a goat.
It’s fine, we say. That sounds like a beginning. We can believe in that. Éste era and we’re gone.
 
In the morning we see some kids throwing rocks at a woman’s head by the side of the road. They ride off on their bikes when we pull over.
“I met a man at a disco,” the head tells us. The head of this woman tells us this man was a rich mestizo’s son, and how she danced a polka with him and lost one of her shabby little huaraches. How he tracked her down and mashed her toes into a plastic slipper he found somewhere and declared he’d marry her. How he shot twins up inside her that night, and how when they were born her stepsisters sold them to some blue-eyed gringos from New Haven. The husband took his revenge by burying her up to her neck.
“Those bitches are drinking champagne up in Polanco now! But they’ll be back for me,” she says. “They’ll be back, my little ones, my little white children.” One of those rocks must’ve knocked something loose. We throw a few more while Coyote trots up the road to hike his leg on a spot where a woman buried the devil caught in a bottle.
“Mis gringitas!” the head cries. “Bring money!”
Pow!
 
We hear our parents are dragging long sacks through fields of broad-leafed bitter greens that we don’t recognize. They are working in an orchard of small gnarled trees, where children are cultivated with the help of bees. Our parents pluck them heavy from the branches, pinch them off their slender green stems, and redeem bushels of those kids for chits that mean food and cable television. The tractors start up and carry them to Chicago. Our parents work in a factory assembling little pink babies covered in feathers. They’re waiting for us, our parents, stone-faced. They’re laying out our shorts and T-shirts on a firm bunk bed, our parents. Our work clothes.
 
Coyote says: They found some devils in Arizona, in the desert, mingled in with the bloated corpses of those mojados from Guatemala and Nicaragua and Mexico. They were looking for work, too. It’s not so easy for them either these days, you know.
 
Coyote says: Those boys, Corrín Corrán, Tirín Tirán, Oyín Oyán, Pedín Pedán, Comín Comán, they got themselves locked inside a grain car in Matamoros. Then they sat trapped in a rail yard in Iowa for four months. When they were found, there wasn’t much left.
 
It’s like Coyote is trying to trap us with his stories. It’s like listening to him read the dictionary. “You can’t trust just nobody,” he says. We hate the frown of his jade driving mask, the deep stare of its shell eyes. If you look too long, you feel heavy. You feel old. So we let him talk, but we don’t listen and we definitely don’t keep still. We watch his words tumble out the open windows, turn to vultures on the road picking over something’s small carcass. “What did you say, Coyote?” we ask. “What was that? What?” until he gets pissed off and stomps harder on the gas, making the Nova buck and fishtail. Anyway, he has hair in his ears.
 
The boy in the headrest has a sister carved from coral, and the iron girl beneath the backseat was a present to an old man from three blond sissies, lottery winners from Juárez.
Coyote told us to wait in the Nova, but we were hungry. Through the window of her house we could see the Witch of Guamúchil, her tits pounding together like two wet cheeses, Coyote’s teeth clamped to the loose flesh of her withers, his pink skinny prick pumping in and out of her hairy rump. Once we threw some water on two dogs fucking. The girl from Tizapán killed a family pig by shoving a lit candle in its ass. As we crossed the highway, Pilar, Carlos, and Miguel were turned to paper by the touch of a southbound RV. They blew into the Sierra Madres. Adiós, muchachitos!
We were in a graveyard, watching our step. When the dead speak, it’s like walking through a spider’s web.
“Who’s there?” they kept asking, but we couldn’t remember our names. There was a lot of dog shit around.
“Don’t marry a woman who can’t keep a secret,” one of them said.
“Don’t keep idle sticks in the house,” said another.
“Don’t shelter orphan children,” called out a third. We wrote it all down with a stick and some sand, like nothing we’d need on the other side.
We found the elotero sitting under a tree, eating the last of his ears of corn. “But we’re hungry,” we said.
“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 arañas, 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 Tío 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 Tía said: “Es tu Mamá. Es tu América.”
 
A green bird circles the speeding Nova three times screeching warnings about our stepsisters. There’s poison in the pipián! 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 Engañarte. 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.

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