HOLLYWOOD—Night. A bitterly cold wind howled through the canyon, where the travelers crouched together in a narrow space between rocks, welcoming the scant warmth their bodies radiated. Bone tired after trudging across a parched moonscape all day, fleeing the sounds of helicopters and sirens, and avoiding rattlesnakes, the pause was not unwelcome. Their guide was a grizzled, foul smelling man. His eyes were bright as the stars in the desert night, and his skin as dark, from many such journeys under the drumbeat of the merciless Arizona sun. The man had seemed unsure about several forks in the arid no-man’s-land. The travelers shot each other glances full of unexpressed misgivings: their silent looks masked mutinous stirrings. The guide did get one place right, and that was a rusty water tank dotted by bullet holes. It had been stocked by jugs of precious water. They reached it when the sun was at its zenith, and they gulped it down thirstily. But the elderly man’s wife, Doña Rosa, wouldn’t touch a drop, and pushed it away. Her breathing was labored, and her face seemed to be pulling away from her lips. The old man tried to pour water into her mouth. Most of it dribbled down the sides of her face and was instantly reclaimed by the bone-dry desert.

Now at night, the old man, Don Ignacio, tried to start a fire, twirling a stick in a piece of cactus wood between his leathery palms. “It’s a waste of time,” said the kid in the group. He was 14 at most.

Here was the spot, by a rock shaped like a hawk’s beak that had been designated by the coyote, the people smuggler, to await contact. They were six yesterday when they set out at dawn from Nogales; now they were five. Thirsty. Starving. Exhausted. The water they guzzled gratefully belonged to some prehistoric past when it was hot as hell (now it was cold as hell), and before Doña Rosa had crumpled in the sands. On hands and knees, Don Ignacio had clung to her inert chest and wailed.

“You must come,” the guide barked. “Or there will be two of you here for the vultures.”

None of them had had a crumb since the greasy tortillas, smeared with a tasteless yellow substance at the coyote’s house in Nogales. Showing off his mastery of American culinary culture, the kid proudly pointed out that it was in fact Velveeta.

Scrunched together in the canyon, a lady from Mexico City and the kid blabbed about nothing but food, scrumptious holiday food. “Posole the garbanzo-bean broth, it’s delicious when you sprinkle a little grated cheese on top. Mmm’m,” they all smacked their lips. “Tamales, pork and chicken and sweet tamales, too, that melt in your mouth. We always had them at Mama’s for the holidays.” “Chicken in mole sauce,” Ignacio said, spinning the fire stick ever more fiercely. “My wife used to stay up all night and grind the chocolate and add banana and all kinds of special ingredients. My wife, mi mujer…” His voice trailed off.

“And the punch, with sugar cane and walnuts floating on top…” said the woman.

“A curse on you for talking about food. My stomach is growling,” snapped a sad-eyed woman. “You Mexicans talk about your food as if it’s God’s gift to cuisine. We Salvadorans have pupusas with meat and pupusas with melted cheese and squash blossoms. We also have music and more dances than Mexico ever dreamed of.”

Sad-eyed Candelaria looked down at her shoes, their seams split after the long journey. Her feet were blistered and bleeding. The lady from Mexico continued, “For the holidays, the warm punch with walnuts floating on top and pieces of sugar cane you can chew and squeeze out the juice. And buñuelos, sprinkled with powdered sugar…”

“Shut up,” Candelaria said.

“You better learn to get along,” said the guide. “Where you’re going, all you from Mexico and El Salvador will be thrown together like scorpions in a basket.”

Silence fell. After what seemed an eternity, a pair of headlights winked on the horizon as a vehicle threaded its way over the barren hillside. It could be the Migra; it could be their ride—who knows—either way they were soon going to be on their way to the land of Velveeta and money.

(to be continued)

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Grady
Hollywood humorist Grady grew up in the heart of Steinbeck Country on the Central California coast. More Bombeck than Steinbeck, Grady Miller has been compared to T.C. Boyle, Joel Stein, and Voltaire. He briefly attended Columbia University in New York and came to Los Angeles to study filmmaking, but discovered literature instead, in T.C. Boyle’s fiction writing workshop at USC. In addition to A Very Grady Christmas, he has written the humorous diet book, Lighten Up Now: The Grady Diet and the popular humor collection, Late Bloomer (both on Amazon) and its follow-up, Later Bloomer: Tales from Darkest Hollywood. (https://amzn.to/3bGBLB8) His humor column, Miller Time, appears weekly in The Canyon News (www.canyon-news.com)