Xochitl took over the wheel sometime in the night.
I stayed awake as long as I could, waiting for Wendy to call back.
Now Xochitl’s shaking my shoulder, freaking out. “What’s happening, T?”
I open my eyes to an Arizona sunrise. And Sally steaming. Or smoking. Xochitl doesn’t know which. Whatever it is, it’s coming out bigger and faster than anything we’ve seen.
“Pull over, Xoch.”
She exits the freeway onto a frontage road and just keeps driving. “What do I do, T?”
“Stop the car, Xoch. Stop the car!”
She doesn’t stop until there’s a Mount St. Helens plume coming from Sally’s front end.
Xochitl looks at Manny.
Then at me.
I tell her I don’t know what to do.
So she shakes him. “Manny?” She slaps his face a little. “Manny, the car.”
He comes to.
“I need you to check it, Manny.”
He shakes his head. Stumbles out. Looks up. Squints. Scratches his head as he watches billowing smoke darken the Sonoran Desert sky. He scratches his belly. Yawns.
There is no fix for Sally.
We call Tío Ed. He asks Xochitl where we are. He tells us to stay put. He’ll call us right back.
We pass around our last swigs of water. Haul our stuff out. Make a pile down the road from the car.
Tío Ed calls and says he contacted the Tres Estrellas de Oro bus company. The driver will be watching for us to flag him down out on the freeway. That bus goes across I-10 to El Paso, Texas. Tío Ed will pick us up at a stop in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
We’ve got an hour till the bus, and the hike to the freeway will only take a few minutes.
There’s time to kill.
Manny walks up to me. He’s holding Sally’s tire iron. He points to the car. “You’re going to need this.” He says it like last night never happened. Like he never punched me. Like he never talked like we were all in Iraq.
He hands me the tire iron and I know exactly what he’s thinking. “Seriously, Man?”
There are horrible grinding sounds as Manny twists the tailpipe till it pops off the muffler. He offers that to Xochitl.
“Nah, Manny,” she says. “It’s Sally.”
He bends down. Picks up a football-size rock. “You’re gonna feel better,” he says.
He walks to Sally. Nods at us to follow.
We surround that old car.
Manny lifts the rock to the sky, real slow, stretching his body, high as he can.
We do the same.
Heels off the ground, rock even higher, he says, “One … two … all together … three!”
A current screams through hands into bodies as we shatter glass, blast dents into doors. Meet metal with metal.
We dance and howl, swinging, pounding, exploding a storm of thunder and hail, the saguaro cactuses our only witnesses, we burn in that Arizona sun, putting an end to the life of one worthless car, the whole time wishing we could put an end to so much crap we got no way of fixing.
* * *
When we’ve finished our business, my brother and sister laugh as they struggle, bent over, to catch their breath.
“See?” Manny says.
“Yeah,” she says. “I needed that.”
I watch them pick up bags and start the walk to the freeway. Sun-drunk. Starving. Laughing. After everything we’ve been through.