Every garbage picker worth his salt had a staff of some sort. Most of them just had broom handles with a nail or two in the end. They had no vision. No pride. You had to have something to move the trash and fish for goodies; you had to kill the rats and chase off the dogs. For most of them, any pole would do. But not for Atómiko. He was a ronin—his staff was his pride and his weapon. It was an extension of himself. And there it was, beside him in the dawn light. Gripped in his right fist and forming a fulcrum upon which he leaned, like a Masai warrior (National Geographic special, Tijuana’s Channel 12), with his right foot propped against his left knee.
It was his second staff. The first had splintered when a tractor drove over it. This one was a wrist-thick six-foot length of bamboo. It had taken him years to find it. It was pliant but firm. He had discovered tubes of epoxy glue in the dump, and he’d carefully filled the hollow center of the shaft with it, allowing it to harden. But that wasn’t all he’d done. He’d inserted the knob from a broken-off Hurst power shifter into the end of the staff, and after the epoxy had glued it in place, he had carefully and fastidiously wrapped copper wires in overlapping patterns to bolster the bamboo around the stick shift. At the other end of the staff, he had poured in marbles and ball bearings before the last epoxy drooled in. He capped the open end with a hammered can lid, superglue, and more of his elaborate copper wire work. In the middle, he had wrapped the smooth bamboo with friction tape. All things found in the endless bounty of the garbage dump. It was a thing of beauty, his staff. Frankly, it was a bit heavy for dump work, but it was also lethal. Nobody ever messed with Atómiko—not when he was carrying his weapon.
He looked down upon this mysterious dark girl and scratched his whiskers.
“Hurt me, girlie!” he called. “I want to be wounded by you!”
She made a dismissive sound and walked farther from him.
Atómiko watched her. She was short, just like he liked them. He could see the muscles in her legs. And she smiled even when she frowned. He was a fool for that. That right there made him crazy.
He put his foot down, spun the staff once like a great baton, and inserted it under the sash at his back. He put his hands on his hips and called:
“I am Atómiko!”
He hopped down off his mound and paced along behind her.
“Who are you?” he demanded.
“None of your business.”
“Ooh. Saucy.”
She walked three rows away from him.
“Go away,” she said.
“Never.”
“I’m busy.”
“I am here to serve you.”
“Oh, please.” She had heard better lines than that.
Atómiko was the kind of man given to visions and illuminations. Since they’d closed the dump, he had wondered what the Buddha had in store for him. Would he follow the trash to Tecate? Hell, no—he wasn’t some country boy. He was a city dog! Perhaps he could mine the old garbage, like the old-timers who were now digging in the sides of the hill. But the trash mafia that the owners had hired to police the slopes would beat the miners if they caught them. Atómiko had entered into several fights already, defending the peasants from the hired guns. But, nah—climbing in stinking dark holes wasn’t for him. He was in need of a quest.
“You’re not from here,” he noted.
“No.”
“Where, then?”
“You’re so rude,” she snapped.
“I’m ugly, too,” he said. He scratched his whiskers. She could hear his nails scritching in them. God! “So?”
“I’ m—we’re from Sinaloa.”
“We?” he said.
“They’re asleep right now,” she said. “But they’ll hear me if I call, so don’t do anything funny.”
He said, “I am Atómiko, esa! I don’t do anything funny!”
She thought that was funny.
“We came from a place,” she said, “that is under threat.”
“What kind of threat?”
“Narcos,” she said. “Bandidos.”
It sounded dramatic. Silly. She blushed.
“So,” she continued, “we came seeking soldiers.”
He stood taller and smiled. He pounded his own chest.
“I am a sergeant in the Mexican army! Well, I was, until I ran away.”
“Wonderful,” she said. “You ran away.” She shook her head and moved away from him again.
“I am a great warrior.”
“Shoo,” she said. “Go on your way.”
People in the dump had no money for cocaine or pot or pills. But they were fools for tweak. The lost young ones smoked cheap meth as fast as they could get it. These hopeless ice zombies were so racked with chemical poisons and dry rot that they didn’t even have shacks—they tipped sheets of plywood against headstones in the boneyard and slept and twitched right there in the dirt. It was the curse of the dump—a shocking thing that the self-respecting trash pickers rejected out of hand. These terrible tweakers stole everything, even the meager cans of orange juice and broken toys the garbage miners managed to dig out of the black hill. They never made it all the way to the top, so they never saw the view. Besides, they were too skinny and broken to battle the mafiosos up there. So they stuck to the graves and the sad wire burners, and they shuffled out to the streets and mugged women coming home from work in the dark.
Two of the ice zombies watched Nayeli as she walked away from Atómiko. She had clearly said something severe to him, and he’d waved his hand at her in anger and turned his back. Now she was coming down the hill toward the big tires and the mud bog.
They could jump her fast, they thought. They could get her on the ground before she cried out. She looked good, looked like she had a watch, at least. The meth made them crazy for sex when they were fired up, but now they were in the gray dregs, their teeth hurt, their guts churned, and all they wanted was money for more smoke. They could steal her shoes.
The zombies rose in front of her and behind her, ragged and stinking. They put their hands out to block her escape. She looked back and forth at them. Nayeli planted her feet. She feinted to the right, but the tall tweaker in front of her smiled and blocked her. His teeth were black.
Thinking it would be impressive, the zombie said, “How about a kiss?”
Atómiko’s staff whistled slightly as it came down. The noise the shifter knob made connecting with the tweaker’s head was truly shocking, and Nayeli flinched. The addict dropped like a wet towel. Atómiko leaped behind Nayeli and spun the staff slowly in both hands. The other tweaker stared at the propeller, hypnotized. Atómiko moved slowly in a circle, and the ice zombie tried to back away.
“Oh no, my son,” Atómiko said. “There is no escape from Atómiko!”
Nayeli was noticing that Atómiko needed to announce his idiotic name at every opportunity.
He grabbed the staff in both hands and made three lunges, swinging the bamboo savagely with each forward stomp of his foot. The tweaker, whipped, battered, and flipped over in three seconds. Both his shoulders were smashed, and his head was cracked open. Flat on his back, he saw the gulls double and triple before he passed out.
Atómiko spun around to face Nayeli and whirled the staff and caught it under his arm, holding it extended before him. He looked all around them and grinned, then inserted his weapon back in his sash, where it rose at a jaunty angle above his shoulder.
“I am Atómiko,” he said.
“How do you do,” Nayeli replied.
I like the maricón,” Atómiko said.
Tacho said, “Thank God for small blessings.”
Atómiko punched him on the shoulder. They were great friends, in his opinion. Tacho looked at him for an extended moment.
“Ow,” he said.
They were sitting around, enjoying the sun, on benches Don Porfirio had hammered together out of scrap wood. Tacho was putting gel in Porfirio’s hair and working it up into spikes. Porfirio, still buzzing from last night, sipped mo
re rum from his jar, only he had put milk and sugar in it. Tacho held up a mirror, and Porfirio laughed at his own hair.
Nayeli said, “I didn’t need you to save me.”
Atómiko sneered.
“I did my duty,” he said. “I defended you.”
She shook her head. He had followed her through the alleys of the little workers’ village. He’d stood aside as she called Aunt Irma, collect, from a battered pay phone on a crooked pole outside a small bodega that gave up the smell of fried pork rinds and sheets of beef jerky. As the phone rang, Atómiko cast evil glares at passersby, holding his pole before him in a threatening manner.
The phone rang and rang.
Tía Irma was apparently out, running the town or working the counter at the Fallen Hand.
Nayeli could imagine the sound of the phone, echoing in the empty house. She had heard it a hundred times before. She could see the table, the chairs, the yellow walls, the old refrigerator. It almost made her swoon. She could smell Irma’s house. She could see the insane tom turkey strutting in the courtyard, inflated and threatening the phone, rattling his feathers as he made mindless noises in his throat.
“Miss?” the operator said. “No one is answering.”
“Let it ring.”
Three more rings.
“Miss?”
“Wait.”
Five more rings.
“Really, miss.”
Three more rings.
The operator cut her off.
Nayeli had tears in her eyes.
“Don’t be sad,” Atómiko said. “I am here.”
Chapter Fifteen
Vampi was with Doña Araceli, watering the roses. Yolo was sitting with Don Porfirio, and she took a sip of his rum-and-milk cocktail and liked it. Nayeli was trying to ignore Atómiko as Tacho told him their story. At certain cardinal points of the epic, the intensely irritating Warrior of the Garbage Dump snapped his fingers and exulted some hipster phrase like “Orale” or “Chido” or “¡No chingues, guey!”
Eventually, he stopped Tacho to clarify the narrative: “Wait. You’re going across illegally to collect vatos to take home?”
“Correct.”
“You’re collecting men.”
“Seven men.”
“And you’ll smuggle them out of the Yunaites.”
“Yes.”
“Back to Mexico.”
“Exactly.”
“But you have to sneak.”
“Sí.”
“Because it’s illegal to transport illegals.”
“Correct.”
“Even if they’re going south.”
“Right.”
“Holy Christ, I love this story!”
It was his kind of yarn: a quest. He slapped hands with Yolo, who kept sipping the rum milk shake and was feeling warm toward everyone. He was thinking: ¡Ronin!
Yolo, growing impatient with all this talk, said, “I don’t know why you don’t simply recruit seven of these men right here, and let’s go home.”
“Recruit me!” said Porfirio. He and Yolo took swigs from the jar. “I want to go!”
Vampi cried, “Take Atómiko!”
Tacho said, “I’m going north. I want to see Hollywood, and that’s that.”
“We have a mission,” Nayeli reminded them.
Atómiko patted his belly like the Buddha and smiled upon his poor, benighted children.
“Get seven of these muchachos right here,” Yolo advised. “Get on the bus. Go home.”
“No fuss!” Vampi said.
“No Border Patrol.”
“No border.”
“No money spent,” Yolo said. “We can go home and give them back their money!”
Porfirio tipped the jar at her and gulped some more rum-milk.
Doña Araceli appeared and pried the jar from his hand and took it away.
“Hey!” he said, but he couldn’t focus on her.
Atómiko cleared his throat.
“No,” he said.
He shook his head.
“No, you can’t do it that way.”
“Do what? Which way?” Nayeli said.
Tacho said, “I know where he’s going. Listen to him.”
“You can’t recruit vatos from the dompe,” Atómiko said. “It’s not what you set out to do. You have to accomplish your quest. To el norte. Besides, these warriors are not worthy.”
“What is this,” Yolo complained, “a fairy tale? Y tú, ¿Qué eres? King Arthur?”
He smiled at her.
“I am Atómiko,” he reminded her.
“As if we haven’t heard that,” she said.
“Look—these men here, they came from there!” The Warrior pointed south with his staff. “They came from the lands you left! And they ran out of steam right here. You need the men who made it through the border. You need the warriors who have passed their challenge. Men worthy of the honor.”
The girls had not heard this kind of talk outside the movies, and it was kind of stirring.
“We, here, have our lives,” Atómiko said. “Some of us failed to make it across; some of us just wanted to pick the trash. Some of us, like me, were born right here! But this is home. We have houses and families, ¿Qué no, Porfirio?”
“Right!” Porfirio yelled.
Atómiko swung his staff north.
“The warriors are before you,” he intoned.
Everyone stared at him: he liked it that way.
“You must go across the line to retrieve them.”
Yolo shook her head and looked bored.
Tacho nodded at Nayeli.
“We have to go,” he said. “Besides, there will be men there who miss Mexico.”
Nayeli looked into all their faces.
“Still…” Atómiko drawled.
He poked at the gray soil with his shifter knob.
“You need a man like me,” he said. “On your journey.”
“They would run you out of Tres Camarones on a rail,” Nayeli replied.
“I don’t care about your stupid town! I live on the border, esa! This is where it’s all happening! Did I say I wanted to go to your sad little town? What I said was, you need a man like me on your mission.”
Nayeli laughed dismissively.
“I can get you across,” he said.
“You?” Nayeli scoffed.
He drew himself as tall as he could, tightened his sash, and ruined the noble pose by scratching his whiskers again.
“Sure,” he said.
“Have you ever been across?” she asked.
“Me? Why would I go across?”
“Oh, yes—your life is so elegant here,” she said. “Why would you leave?”
Atómiko turned to Tacho and said, “My life? What is wrong with my life?”
“Nada,” Tacho said. He gave Nayeli one of his Looks, that Tacho eyebrow and tip of the chin. It said: M’ija, you’re being rude.
“In fact, pinchi Nayeli”—Atómiko sniffed—“I used to go to the other side all the time. Me and my soldiers used to run across the fence and buy soda at McDonald’s.” He spit. “So there.”
“Wait —illegal-alien soldiers?” Nayeli said.
He shrugged.
“Until we got caught,” he muttered.
He planted the end of his staff in the soil and looked implacable and, in his own opinion, formidable. “You want to go or not?”
Nayeli crossed her arms.
Tacho said, “Yes. I want to go.”
“Orale pues,” Atómiko said. “We boys are going. What about you girls? You have cojones or what?”
Yolo said, “Where did this creature come from?”
“I want to go after my father,” Nayeli said.
“There you go!” Atómiko enthused.
He stepped out of Porfirio and Araceli’s small yard. He looked back toward the bulk of the village, and he put his fingers to his lips and whistled louder than anyone Nayeli had ever heard. She opened her mouth in shock. He was whis
tling a ditty, what people in Los Yunaites might have recognized as “shave-and-a-haircut.” But, of course, there was no such phrase in Mexico. That same rhythm was bad-boy code for the ultimate obscenity, “chinga tu madre.” No self-respecting gentleman in Tres Camarones would whistle that in front of three fine young ladies!
Before she could comment, a decrepit and slouching white Olds 88 crept out of an alley and made its rough way over the rocks and broken glass. Its muffler was gone, and it made a loud glubba-glubba noise as it came, leaking curtains of blue fumes. It eased to a halt and seemed to list a little farther to the left. A driver as ugly as Atómiko leaped out. His hair was slicked back with oil, and he had a mustache that looked like he’d stolen it from a pimp downtown.
“Was he just sitting there, waiting to hear from you?” Nayeli said.
“I have powers,” Atómiko boasted. “I summon the wind and the stars.”
“You are such a loser,” she said.
The new cholo snapped his fingers and pointed at Nayali. In badly accented English, he barked, “Jou! Show me jou papers!”
He and Atómiko knocked knuckles and laughed.
The cholo turned to Tacho.
“¿Tiene papeles?” he demanded. “Jou wetback?”
Again, gales of laughter from these rude idiots.
Nayeli walked away from them.
“Loca,” the driver said. “You need me.”
“That’s like saying I need cancer.”