Read Online Keys of Babylon by Robert Minhinnick - Free Book Online Page A

mean. You know you can’t chew steak. And I can’t afford fillet. But you can eat this. Try a mouthful.
    She tucks a napkin under his chin and offers the spoon. The old man stares. Then he takes the food and chews. Soon he looks ready for another taste.
    You see. It’s good. We know it as nopalitos . Little bits of meat. And onion. And tomatillos . And jalapenos . And cilantro , Larry. Fresh cilantro. I’ve heard it called Mexican parsley round here. And garlic. And, guess what, Larry. Cactus. That’s right. Pieces of prickly pear. Ever eaten prickly pear before? That’s why they call this nopalitos . All this food grows wild here, all over the Sunset lot. Over every hillside. Be a shame if we couldn’t do anything with it.
    Now that’s right, she encourages. Take another mouthful. And another. You see, it’s not too hot. It just tastes. It has a taste, Larry. That’s why God gives us taste buds. Such a clever God. But don’t tell the others about this. They’ll all be wanting some. Hey. You’re eating cactus, Larry. Oh boy, you’re eating cactus.
    If Larry can eat, she reckons, he can listen. He’s not been shaved and already shows a silver stubble. There’s cactus juice on his chin.
    Yes, Maria thinks. He looks better like this. He seems a real man today. Is a real man. The whiskers have sexed him up a little. Larry’s not the neutered cat any more. Not the coiffeured corpse. Yet he hasn’t spoken.
    Try the pepper now, smiles Maria. I grew it in my window box. Don’t worry, I scraped all the seeds out. And saved them.
    A trucker took me to the Paradise Valley, she says. He was hauling lavatory pans, I remember that. I sat up front and he gave me a Hershey bar. Welcome to the US of A. Then another ride got me to Phoenix. Big, bad Phoenix. Belly of the beast. With all those swimming pools. You ever have a swimming pool, Larry? Hey, three cheers for swimming pools. All those cleaning jobs they create.
    The lavatory guy dropped me near the Greyhound station and, you bet, there were others like me there too. Oh yes. I washed in the Greyhound toilets and talked to the cleaners. Everyone spoke Mexican. But there were Indians too. And these people who’d come all the way up from Chiapas. And some from Guatemala, riding on top of freight trains. Little brown people. Like dolls. Hair cut straight across their foreheads, wearing serapes as if they were back in their villages. Their language was strange. Couldn’t read or write they said. But they could work. So where was the work? Let us at it was their attitude.
    And at once I started to feel better. Because all these other people had done what we’d done. Me, Juan, Juanita. I had kept thinking we were unique. But others had come further. Puerto Penasco? they laughed. That’s just down the road.
    But what surprised me was that Americans were so good. People are good, Larry. Or they want to be. The truck driver who took me to the station even had a sticker in his cab that read ‘The US is full up’. But he said I looked like I could use a ride. He knew, Larry. He knew.
    And that was years ago and it’s still not full. When I tried my luck in Flagstaff I lived in the forest. There’s nobody there. When you’ve been in the Altar you might be scared of the forest. It’s a different kind of loneliness. A different silence.
    Maria pours him a glass of water.
    In the desert we thought we’d never see people again. We slept one night at an abandoned mine. It was still the eight of us then. Juanita was afraid to sleep in the mine entrance; she said there might be dead people. I went in and found part of an old book. It was Robinson Crusoe . We’d never read it but we knew what it was about. Juan said there was a movie, Robinson Crusoe on Mars , that was filmed in the desert. Just over the border, he said, in California. We’d go to see it in Hollywood, Juan promised