The Nirvana Blues Read Online Free PDF Page A

grave-digging Vigil brothers, Anselmo and Roberto, dropped dead. Ruined beyond repair, these impoverished Chicanos sold out and slunk from the valley—dismayed, defeated, destroyed.
    Two VISTAs and Chamisaville’s last Chicano farmer, Eloy Irribarren, slit open Daisy’s belly. They discovered that her stomach was completely engorged with, and perforated by, an enormous metallic ball resembling a porcupine or a medieval mace. Jaws agape, the volunteers stared at this lethal weapon, then apologized profusely. “Win a few, lose a few,” they grinned sickly … and began talking about forming cricket-raising cooperatives with an idea toward exporting the little critters to Indonesia, where apparently they were considered a great delicacy.
    But before that could happen, the VISTA program was disbanded for want of floundering Chicano farmers to eradicate.
    Eloy Irribarren gathered old tires from the dump and burned his beloved cow. “And the greasy smoke, in an inky cloak, went streaking down the sky.”
    Other unforeseeable complications continued to run rampant. Tipped into insanity by Eloy’s unsuccessful investment in the stomach-magnet program, and not wishing to be a further burden on her loving husband, Teresita Irribarren stole the last two hundred dollars from their sugar jug, and ran away from their tiny house, moving into the shabby Dynamite Shrine Motor Court to die. Eloy was frantic. He searched far and wide for Teresita, but never thought to check out so unlikely a haven as the deteriorating motel.
    On her first day in exile, Teresita wandered up to the post office where she had received a letter from a famous Texas department store, pushing its Christmas sales, suggesting that she buy his-and-hers airplanes, a six-thousand-dollar mouse ranch, or music lessons with a world-renowned pianist at four grand for each half-hour shot. Unbalanced by these offers, Teresita wandered downtown to the courthouse and threatened to turn Judge Michael Cooper into a toad. Then she trudged back to the motor court and mail-ordered a single pair of pliers to pull her last tooth. Four days later she received a letter from the mail-order house asking why she wanted ten thousand pliers. Timidly approaching a lawyer, Lafe Stryzpk, Teresita asked him to explain that she only needed a single pair, which he did. A week passed, then Teresita received twenty large reinforced cardboard boxes containing ten thousand pliers. Baffled, she explained to the postmaster, Cal Spooner, that there had been a terrible mistake. In no mood for excuses, having severely sprained his back that morning lugging the boxes in off the rear dock, Cal screamed at her, saying the boxes could only go back to the mail-order house if Teresita paid the return postage, a cool three hundred dollars. Weeping, the puzzled old woman limped over to Irving Newkirk’s pawnshop and unloaded her wedding ring for the required amount. But on her way back to the post office, a teen-age hoodlum snatched her purse, slugged her in the face with it, knocking out that remaining tooth, and fled. At the post office, Teresita tried to explain that chain of events to Cal Spooner. He growled, dialed the county sheriff, Eddie Semmelweis, and said, “You better come quick, Edward, I got a real lulu on my hands.” Eddie started for the post office, but on his way he heard shots ring out in Irving Newkirk’s cafe, home of Chamisaville’s 110-Percent Pure-Beef Horsemeat-burger. Slamming on the brakes, Eddie swerved into the café parking lot just as two men waving guns sprinted out the door looking backward as they fired at somebody inside. They galloped smack into Eddie’s cruiser, which was still going about forty in a braking fishtail. Eddie jumped out, crossed himself, and ran inside, where the cook, Morty Gimbell, who had signed on with Irving during one of the emergency ambulance service’s perennial collapses from lack of county