The Tequila Worm Read Online Free PDF Page A

off a ceramic bowl. I smelled the chilies and pork in the
pozole
Doña Virginia had cooked for her parents. There was a cup of hot chocolate and a plate full of sparkling
pan de polvo
cookies for Luis.
His
favorite treat.
    I also noticed a red wooden top, a small stuffed bear, a bottle of tequila, and a cigar, as well as a glass of water, a cross made from lime peel, and a salt shaker on the altar.
    Walking home, I asked Mama about the altar and the things I had seen there. She said that Doña Virginia’s son Luis and her parents were coming to visit for just one day. The lime cross was to direct them home, the salt to purify them, and the water for them to drink along their way. And once they got home, they would feast on their favorite foods and drinks.
    When we got home, I found Papa at the kitchen table reading
Don Quixote.
Lucy was fast asleep.
    “Ah, mi’ja, show me your Halloween candy,” he said, smiling. I went and got the bags from under my bed.
    “Why do you have two bags?”
    “One has the stuff I got around here; the other has the candy bars and quarters from the other side of town.”
    The next thing I knew I was back in the car, but this time with Papa. “I’m taking you to the
cemetery
to show you something magical about
this side
.”
    The cemetery was strangely aglow with lit candles and sprinkled with orange marigolds. I felt fear, not magic.
    “Papa, I don’t want to get out of the car.”
    “Look,” he said.
    In the cemetery, people were talking, dancing, and playing guitars and singing to the tombs and eating from plates piled high with tamales and other foods. Had some of these people come out of their graves? Maybe Doña Virginia’s son Luis and her parents were now over at her house visiting. I thought about the sugar skull she’d made for me—the one with my name on it.
    Papa smiled at me and started the car.
    “I wish we lived on the other side of town,” I said, looking out the window at the darkness.
    “Why, mi’ja?”
    “Because they live in nice houses, and they’re warm.”
    “Ah, but there’s warmth on this side too.”
    “But . . . it’s really cold at home, and most of the houses around us are falling apart.”
    “Yes, but we have our music, our foods, our traditions. And the warm hearts of our families. Remember how the
comadres
all got together and found a way to cure Lucy, and with just an old broom? And it was something those rich doctors couldn’t do.”
    Sometimes I thought Papa was from another world, especially when he talked like this.
    “Don’t worry, mi’ja,” he said as he stopped the car in front of the house. “You’ll see what I’m talking about as you get older.”
    I walked into our cold house, nodding and shivering.

TaCO HeaD

    Mama used to pack two bean tacos for my school lunch each day. Every morning she’d get up at five to make a fresh batch of flour
masa
. She’d roll out and cook one tortilla at a time until she had a big stack of them, nice and hot, and then she’d fill each with beans that she’d fried in bacon grease and flavored with chopped onion in her huge cast-iron skillet.
    And each morning I would sit at the kitchen table and say, “Mama, can I please have some lunch money too, or a sandwich instead?” But the reply was always the same: “Why, mi’ja? You already have these delicious bean tacos to eat.”
    It wasn’t that the tacos weren’t good; it was that some kids called all Mexican Americans beaners, so the last thing I needed was to stand out like a big stupid sign. All the other kids either bought their lunch at the cafeteria or took nice white sandwiches.
    I started going to the very end of the cafeteria, to turn my back and gobble up my tacos.
    Then I started eating each taco by first putting it in a bag.
    It would take me all of five minutes to eat, and then I’d go outside to the playground. I was
always
the first one there, often the only one for quite a while. But I didn’t mind, except on really