Cloudburst: An Anthology of Hispanic Canadian Short Stories

A Brief Account of the New World

Pablo Salinas 219 A Brief Account of the New World (Saulo vs. Schwarzenegger) Every time I’ve gone back to Salt Lake City, the trip has been another escape, sometimes from hunger and need, and other times due to debts of blood, like the escape from Almería, on the Mediterranean. It was a night in May, during the Feast of San Indalecio, the same night I pursued Dolores as she ran naked through the Plaza de Toros. Her father, a turtle smuggler, had sworn he would bury me alive in the desert, so as not to sully the Rambla de Tabernas. It was at the very door of the San José parish church, at the end of the procession. I was walking towards the wine fair when I felt an unbearable heat in my chest. “Blood, blood!” shouted one of the devotees. When I turned around to look where the scream was coming from, I felt faint and fell under one of the tractors that pulled along the flatbeds in the procession. Two guys tried to lift me up, but I knew it wasn’t to take me to the hospital, so I scurried off through the musicians and, beneath a shower of camera flashes, was able to break away from the crowd. I’d earned a deep knife slash to my shoulder and lost my share in the turtle business, but I was free once again. Before leaving the city, I managed to send a photo of Dolores to the newspapers. To this day I still remember her innocent face on the front page, playing with a full collection of loggerhead turtles (which somehow made me forget that other face of hers the day I found her in my bed with a cousin of hers who was oddly nicknamed “Salty”). After throwing a few postcards of the Virgin of the Sea into the Mediterranean, I decided to leave the Old World and returntomydearoldSaltLakeShitty.Thecitywasnolongerthe same, however, and I found it impossible to continue working counterfeiting social security cards. The competition had ruined everything. The Mexicans controlled all the transactions now. Days after I arrived, I was given a first warning. Inside a Brazilian restaurant right on Trolley Square, some charitable waiter (perhaps a former client) tossed a bolo brigadeiro Cloudburst 220 between my legs before making me leave through the kitchen. Near the table someone was smashing my camera and spitting on the chocolate cake. I had to keep running. Onceagain,necessityhadmeboardacarrottruck,thistime headed for Sun Valley. I was finally as far as I could be from myself, hundreds of kilometres farther north, in a territory called “I-the-whore.” I had reached a tiny toy village at the foot of a mountain where bears still fed on tourists every once in a while. There, after recovering my natural weight as a result of having vomited repeatedly through the slats of the truck and all over the crates of carrots, I quickly found work making ski passes. The Sun Valley Company still paid nineteenthcentury wages, but for the majority of newcomers it was our first legal job in a long time. Days later, as I was playing cards in the dorm for the resort employees, a Filipino nicknamed Chavacano informed me that the Mormon managers required us to get our hair cut military style. “And how can you afford going to a barber shop?” I asked. “Keetchn cotting gratis ne Beauty Salon,” he answered, in an odd Mindanao dialect. Without giving it a second thought, I quickly produced a cook ID. All the J’s and R’s in my last name helped make the dishwasher position fit perfectly beside my photo and a salad dressing stain. I’d been a highly skilful potato peeler for an entire summer in the Ogden prison kitchen a few summers back. Once at the beauty salon, my strategy for going unnoticed started teetering. The hairdresser seemed to have been created to torment latter-day saints and devils. It would be redundant to try to explain my struggle to hide the folds that suddenly formed on the front of my pants in worship of a beauty that contrasted with her swift manoeuvring of a gallery of sharppointed instruments. Utterly at her mercy, her shears began a fierce dance over the innumerable scars and promontories hidden under my hair. Pablo Salinas 221 As she washed me down with Tibetan shampoo and...