Sam yanked the vodka bottle from my grip, took a drink, and changed the subject. “So, what’s up with you and Rosita?”
“I think we’re good,” I said after a minute. Rosita and I hadn’t talked too much since that last conversation in the attic. “I think it’s okay. It’ll be okay, assuming we don’t get blown up.”
The more I thought about it, the more stupid it felt to be worried about something like my relationship when we were facing literal genocide. But I was suddenly reminded of something. I remembered one of my last conversations with Grandma Yolanda right before she’d died.
We’d all known that she was sick and that she wouldn’t last long. This was just a few years after my mother had died. Grandpa Lewis hadn’t left her side. I was eight years old, and she called me into the room.
“Ollie, honey, I can’t do it, so you need to do it for me. Go into the kitchen. Get two mixing bowls, the jar of cinnamon with the redribbon, the salt, a bucket of flour, and the seasoning jar with the black ribbon. Get it all ready for me.”
“What are you doing?” Grandpa Lewis asked.
Grandma Yolanda started to sit up in her bed. She barely had the strength to move. “We need to make buñuelos. You’ll have to bring me to the kitchen.”
“Are you out of your gourd?” my grandfather had asked. “You can’t.”
My grandmother would make the simple cinnamon-and-sugar-slathered fried-dough treats every year around Christmas. People would come from all around, and she’d make them fresh as they arrived. She’d be ready with a steaming plate before they were even off their quads. People would come from as far as Burnt Ends to visit us.
“You can’t,” Grandpa Lewis repeated. “Now is not the time.”
Grandma smiled, revealing a mouth with just a few yellow teeth. “No, my beautiful, grouchy husband,” she said. “Now is the perfect time. Buñuelos make people happy, and that makes me happy. That is my happiness, don’t you understand? The closer we are to the end, the more we need to embrace our happiness. Now, Ollie, do what I say.”
I’d run off to find Roger waiting for me in the kitchen, and he helped me figure out all the ingredients. He also called Lulu in, and at the time, I didn’t realize what he was doing. He was stalling, using the moment to teach us where everything was in the kitchen. We prepared all the ingredients except the oil, organizing them all in a row.
Grandma never made it to the kitchen that day. Or ever again.
The very next day, Roger, Lulu, and I spent the majority of the afternoon making the cinnamon treats as people came from all over to pay their respects.
Lulu, who had been six then, claimed she couldn’t really remember Grandma Yolanda other than a few flashes here and there, though she remembered making the buñuelos that day. She remembered the scents of cinnamon and butter and the people lined up one after another and telling her how good of a girl she was as they took plates.
For Lulu, the memory was a happy one, and that, I realized, hadbeen the whole point. Even in the end, Grandma Yolanda had done her best to make sure we were okay.
The closer we are to the end, the more we need to embrace our happiness.
My reverie was interrupted by a shout. “Hey, hey, watch out,” someone called from the front of the barn. This was followed by an angry squeal from Cindy the world’s fattest pig.
I turned to see a man I didn’t know trip and fall over Cindy, scattering a pile of just-printed plastic parts across the floor. The pieces were to be chaff releasers for the new missile defense. I didn’t know how exactly they worked, but they would be wound up like children’s toys before they were installed in the back of point defense missiles. The winding mechanism would get activated and would release a constant but rationed stream of what was basically burning glitter designed to confuse heat-seeking missiles. The newly printed devices scattered, chattering away on the ground, clicking loudly like someone had dropped a tray of windup toys.
Betty Sue the chicken let out a loud cluck and rocketed out of the room, moving toward the clicking devices. She picked one up with her beak and started angrily smashing it against the barn floor.
But it wasn’t just Betty Sue. It was all the chickens. They swarmed into the barn from outside, flooding over the devices, and then they started to savagely peck at them as they clucked angrily. In seconds, the scrum of chickens had destroyed the small plastic devices.
“What the hell?” the man called as he picked himself up. “Get away! Damnit, now I have to reprint these.”
Cindy snorted indignantly.
“They’re clicker trained,” I said, watching with fascination. “He trained them to zero in on something that clicks.”
“Well, that’s a useless trick,” Axel said.
Tito grunted in agreement and put his guitar down.
“We’d be pissed if we paid someone to watch that,” Axel added.
“I told you they were magic,” Sam said, standing. He took another swig of vodka. “Great job, Betty Sue!” He sounded ridiculously proud.
I laughed. We all laughed, all pretending that in just a few short hours we wouldn’t be fighting for our lives.
The Rhythm Mafia Tapes. Scene eighteen.
