The Cowboy Bible and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

world (at Ticketmaster), one of the young Country Bible’s better features was her attachment to tradition. Since she herself was a product of the Tetra Pak generation, she was determined to pay tribute to the Old School. That was, in fact, our heroine’s specialty: to conduct herself in the old ways.
    We didn’t understand why she felt indebted to the Old Guard. It didn’t really come naturally. Even her parents, on a few drunken occasions (with national or imported brews), considered baptizing her Moderna Tenenbaum. They also considered Poliforma Multiforme, but in the end settled on The Country Bible, in honor of the sociodelic breakfast.
    The Country Bible descended from a long line of fried-chicken vendors. Most recently, her grandfather, father, and siblings wore the obligatory apron at Henry’s Chicken. Since her dreams of travel were in check, she decided to place them alongside her aspirations to piracy and began to go to school.
    The line that divides the client from the employer does not make them different from one another. The person who clerks at a record store, the guy who polarizes the windshield, and the server at the chicken stand are all spineless simpletons, incapable of rebelling.
    Here’s the lowdown on The Country Bible: One of the reasons she stepped out from behind the counter was that her family, from the moment fast food came to the civilized world, had always been employed at Henry’s Chicken. Not a single relative, not even her grandfather, who, according to family lore, had been the most prosperous in their lineage, had ever managed to own one of the chain stores. Not one sad little franchise had ever come within reach of any of them.
    So began the militancy, the dissidence of The Country Bible. I don’t think anybody indoctrinated her, or even invited her; she made her own decision to join the Communist Youth, with the same enthusiasm an adolescent has when they join a rock band. Influenced by what was trendy, she adopted the look of a typical UNAM student. When she wasn’t working, and in order to complete her militant presentation, she dove into required readings every time she bit down on an apple. She transformed herself into an encyclopedia of Latin American folklore. She furnished her room with Willem de Kooning posters and built a piracy laboratory, equipped with a tower that could burn twelve records at once and was also multifunctional: It could photocopy covers and had an inscription device to make copies of the text.
    As a practitioner of piracy, The Country Bible tried to live covertly, like an infiltrator. She swung between the cool underground flavor of the marmalade of torture so that she could dedicate herself fully to the proletarian struggle, to her top spot serving breaded potatoes at the chicken joint. She stayed at Henry’s Chicken because she didn’t want to turn her back on tradition. But her revolutionary attitude began to cause her typical teenage problems.
    The first sign of trouble came at work. Anxiety is expressed in three basic ways: random laughter, sweaty palms, and involuntary and inevitably absurd behavior. One boring afternoon at the chicken joint, The Country Bible was afflicted by the third kind. It was one of those days merchants call slow. At four in the afternoon, as a distraction, and with the wisdom of an indelible marker, she wrote nicknames for all the employees, manager included, on the workers’ punch cards.
    The general discontent was over the top. The names themselves didn’t bother the employees; it was that they didn’t understand them. If only she’d written sly stuff like The Booger, The Flying Chimijuil, or The Pincher, then they would have tolerated it. Instead she designated the workers with names beloved to her leftist soul: Cienfuegos, John Lennon, Heberto Castillo, Lenin. Ever since The Country Bible had begun to express herself through protest songs, everybody said that she was distancing herself from the streets of the