The Universe Publicist
Excerpt from the novel WMD MACHETE
The Aztecs believe some of their dead people
go underneath the Northern Deserts to Mictlan, where the Death God Mictlantecuhtli
dwells. For four years, they follow this skull-faced God through eight
levels of hell, until they arrived at the ninth, and disappear forever.
Mexico's world-famous Copper Canyon train does not leave from the Mexican
border town of Ojinaga. We wandered around all day and rested in the bus
station to get on a predawn bus toward Chihuahua, Chihuahua. In the day's
first light, this strange desert resembled a curved bone decorated with
the silhouettes of Yucca plants, Mesquite and Huisatche trees that drip
with giant pea pods, and the strange Ocotillo plant whose stalks grow
in shaky lines that radiate like comic book grenade explosions. I make
a few sketches.
In the seat beside me, Italian Joanna from
New Jersey slept slumped, her garlic-blonde hair stuck on the greasy bus
window. We met thirty-six hours ago- and again I feet alone. I think of
my home, a Michigan of rain and mud, where leaves turn colors and whimper
to the ground in drifts of shattered rainbows, a fluorescent agony that
announces winter's sterile death. Suicide on two College semesters of
Spanish. Dead Boy.
Later that afternoon, we walk the hilltop
streets within Chihuahua, a sprawl that hugs the skirts of statuesque
desert mountains framed by these sunny, narrow cobblestone canyons that
divide the whitewashed walls of long colonial buildings. People stare
at us. A Gringo married to a Mexican woman invites us to dinner, and says
they own a disco, and that people stare at us because they don't often
see shorts on either men or women.
Dawn lights our way as we march, backpacks
bouncing, through clouds of our own breath to get on an ancient train
filled with wood church pews as seats. The train rumbles across the desert,
stops alongside a dust colored bedraggled porch in the middle of a desert
that shimmers like a beaten silver plate. A few Mexicans board, with their
burlap bundles: chickens dangled head-down, bird cages with endangered
species, steel enameled buckets with a dishrag cloth to cover hot tamales
for sale, couple of hog-tied goats, a calf, and a crate of young pigs
get shoved into the corners to bleat once in a while.
Three men, who shake the dust out of their
sombreros and sit down in the pew in front of us, stink like cow manure.
One turns and drapes a dusty arm over into our booth and says something.
His two compadres laugh like parrots with tongues made of parched red
earth. He pokes his stubby callous fingers at Joanna's chest, then at
me, makes a gesture and again his comrades put their hands over their
mouths and snicker, spittle bubbles out between dirty chapped lips over
yellowed teeth. Wants to learn English says he, and for the next hundred
miles he slurs and smiles with drool, speaks slurred Spanish with his
thick stuck between his teeth, and tries to touch Joanna with a fingertip
of tenderness, to punctuate another droop-lidded leer.
He burps, stands up, and sways down the aisle,
pew by pew, to find the bathroom. The wind roars through the open windows
as the train clatters across Chihuahua.
Across the aisle from us, three stoic matrons
sit silent and proud- Mexican women, outlined in silver by morning's horizontal
sunlight. Each wears a knit black shawl, a "rebozo," across
her head, which she clasps with one tight fist at the collarbone to hold
it in place. The nearest leans across the aisle to tap me on the thigh.
"Bad Man" she says, in English, and shakes her finger back and
forth, No.
Big help.
The cowboy swims back up the aisle, falls
into his seat, and again turns to charm Joanna with a wide, kerosene-perfumed
gold-tooth smile. The woman looks stern and speaks to the cowboy. He glares
at her, his chin jutted toward her in challenge, then staccatos words
that make her cross herself.
He turns to us again, arm dangled, his finger
idles up and down Joanna's thigh.
I sit up in my seat and take a deep breath
to puff myself up and stare him in the eye. I pull his sleeve up and push
his arm into his booth, and poker-faced, slow and careful, say in English
"I am a Universe publicist, and I am of no wealth paid."
Joanna looks at me with these huge round eyes,
mouth open. I look at her without expression. The man looks at Joanna
and then at me, and then he and his two compadres look at each other.
His friends pull him around to face forward.
He did not turn around anymore.
Joanna tugged on my sleeve and whispered,
"What did you say to him?"
I pulled out my wallet and extract a business
card to give her. "My stepfather laughed when he gave me this- a
going-away present. A street person gave it to him. He passed it on to
me."
The little business card read: 'Myron F. Thorstein.
I Am A Universe Publicist, and I Am Of No Wealth Paid.'
A creative nonfiction memoir by author Mark Plimsoll
22,000 people died for his sin,
the night he went to bed in Guatemala,
and woke up in Guatepeor.
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