I find a dark nook by the edge of town, a bunker between houses, with a view of empty chaparral beyond, and settle against a wall to spin some thoughts. One house window has a curtain that waves in the breeze. As soon as their fucken dog quiets down, Taylor 's body gets wrapped in the curtain like a Goddess, her tones flash milky through the lace bunched between her legs. Then she's in the dirt with me. Her hair is wild on the first day of our escape together; we lick and play into an anesthetic sleep, just conscious of life collapsing around us in grainy pieces.

I wake late next morning, Thursday, and find myself in a strange place, sixteen days after the moment that ripped my life in two. I know I have to find money to carry on. I could try Taylor, but first I need to be sure she didn't squeal on me to fucken Leona Dunt. I also have to call home and straighten things out, but Mom's phone will probably be bugged, and anyway, on thirty American cents I ain't calling fucken nobody. I pick up my backpack, and lope to the highway out of town – Monterrey is one of the places it heads to. I'm glad to move on. I mean, Reynosa may have ended up having an Astrodome, or a petting zoo or something, but between you and me, I fucken doubt it.

Dirty trucks tilt down the highway, with all kinds of extra lights and antennas, like mobile cathedrals or something. I follow them on foot for now. I just want to be alone with my waves. I shuffle, then lope, then limp all day long until my shadow starts to reach for the far coast, and blobs of cactus grow mushy with evening light. I come to a bend in the road that dips downhill, and I get a feeling it's like the borderline to my future. Up ahead is night, but behind me there's color in the sky. It brings a shiver, but a senior thought says: leave the future to Mexican Fate.

As the sky unfurls a drape of stars, important omens arrive. A truck idles past with four million hood ornaments, lit up like JC Penney's Christmas tree, and painted with sayings everywhere. It doesn't snag my attention until it's past me, and I see the mud-flaps at the back. Painted on each one is a lazy road that snakes between a beach and a grove of palm trees. My beach. Before I can scan the palm trees for panties, the truck pulls onto the wrong side of the road, and coasts downhill toward lights burning in some shambly buildings at the roadside. I guess that's a Mexican turn signal, just moving your vehicle onto the wrong side of the road. Learning: when you see traffic splattered over the front of a Mexican truck, you know it was fucken indicating. I run after it down the hill.

'El alacrán, el alacrán, el alacrán te va picar…' Music twangs out of a bar next to a gas station. The truck parks by the bar, and I watch the driver climb down from the cab. He's smaller than me, with a bunch of growth on his face, and a hefty mustache. He takes off his hat to slide into the roadhouse, cool and straight, like he's wearing guns. Then, when he's nearly inside, he gives his balls a squeeze. A little boy jumps from the truck behind him. I shuffle into the building without touching my balls. Nobody seems to mind. Inside, the air's tinged with muddy cooking oil from an alien kitchen. The driver stands at a rough wooden bar, and looks around at some tin tables where a couple of other dudes sit hunched over their beers. The bartender is Mexican-looking, except that he's white with red hair – go fucken figure.

The kid scampers to a table near a wall-mounted TV. Everybody else checks me out as I move to the bar with an idea in my head. A cold beer turns up for the truck driver. I pull a music disc out of my pack, point to it, then to the beer. The bartender frowns, looks the disc over, then thumps a cold bottle down in front of me. He hands the disc to the driver; they both nod. I know I should eat before I drink, but how do you say 'Milk and fucken cookies' in Mexican? After a minute, the men motion for my pack, and gently rummage through the discs. Their eyes also make the inevitable pilgrimage to the New Jacks on my feet. Finally, whenever a beer turns up for the truck driver, the bartender automatically looks at me. I nod, and a new beer shows up. My credit's established. I introduce myself. The truck driver flashes some gold through his lips, and raises his bottle.

'Sa-lud! he says.

Don't fucken ask me when the first tequila arrived. Suddenly, later in life, glass-clear skies swim through the open side of the bar, with stars like droplets on a spider's web, and I find myself smoking sweet, oval-shaped cigarettes called Delicados, apparently from my own pack. I'm loaded off my ass. These guys' mustaches are up where their hair should be, and huge fucken caves are howling underneath, full of gold and tonsils, just look at them, singing their hearts out. Other folk join in, one of them even kneels. The whole night is snatches of humdinger, me and the boys, yelling, laughing, playing bullfights, pretending to be iguanas – I swear you'd load your drawers if you saw this one guy, Antonio, being a fucken iguana. Dudes hug and bawl around me, they become my fathers, my brothers, my sons, in a surge of careless passion that makes back home seem like a fucken Jacuzzi that somebody forgot to switch on.

It must be the same oxygen in the air, the same gravitational suck as back home, but here it's all heated up and spun around until nothing, good or bad, matters more than anything else. I mean, home is fucken crawling with Mexicans, but you don't get any of this vibe where I come from. Take Lally; what difference is there in his genes that he ended up so fucken twisted? His ole man probably did iguana impersonations, in his day. Nah, Lally caught the back-home bug. The wanting bug.

Thoughts travel with me to the urinal, which I find is piled high with spent green limes, like they use in their drinks down here. I don't say it deodorizes a hundred percent, like you'd probably need them on the floor, and up the walls, but there's definitely a lemon-fresh effect, to boost up your thoughts. As I spray the limes, I realize there's a kind of immune system back home, to knock off your edges, wash out the feral genes, package you up with your knife. Like, forgive me if it's a crime to even say it, but remember my attorney, ole Abdini? They don't seem to have washed many of his genes out. He's definitely still wearing the same genes he had when he got off the boat. Know why? Because they're make-a-fast-buck genes. Our favorite kind.

Down here, in another space and time, I spend a night among partners with correctly calibrated Mexican genes.

An aneurysm wakes me Friday morning. I'm curled up on the floor behind a table. A brick in my head smashes into the back of my eyes when I look around. I give up, and try to focus instead on a rough, lumpy-looking wooden cross on the wall above my head. My Nikes hang from it.

'Mira que te esta esperando Ledesma,' says the truck driver from the bar.

'Cual Ledesma cabrón,' says the bartender.

'Que le des mamones al nabo, buey.'

The driver drops a big ole load. You hear him spit on the floor. I sit up, and spy the boys at the bar straining to focus on the TV. I turn to the screen just as Lally's image is replaced by my school photo. Machine-gun bursts of Spanish rattle over the top. The boys don't seem concerned.

'¿Que le ves al güero?' says the barman.

'Si el güero eres tu, pendejo.'

'Ni madres.'

'Me cae – tas mas güero que la chingada, tu.'

I know 'chinga' is the fuck word, I learned that at school. There must be a few ways to spin it, but 'chinga' is definitely the mothership of local cussing. Don't even ask me the rest of it. The bartender picks up three shot glasses, wiping each one with the tail of his shirt, and lines them up on the bar. I watch my picture shrink into a corner of the TV screen, while a map of Texas assembles underneath. Photos of strangers scatter across it. Glowing red dots appear, like throbbing pain sites on an aspirin commercial. Places I must've been sighted. Lubbock, Tyler, Austin, San Antonio.