A place to get fresh fruit and vegetables and, presumably, milk, at least. Miss Universe Alice was well stocked with many items and the fridge—a fairly large one for an RV—was loaded with lots of good food and drink. Anneliese even had some of the fixings in it for several Apfelstrudels, Wiener Schnitzels, a Hungarian style Gulasch, a Fiaker Gulasch and Wiener Backhendl (fantastic Viennese fried chicken).

A Fiaker is a horse-drawn carriage. Fiakergulasch has an egg in it and is so named because it supposedly is a favorite of the Fiaker drivers. This reminds Pérez of the horse-drawn victorias of Viña del Mar. A favorite thing for tourists, but Pérez thinks of them in relation to Louie who, though only 10 when she first tried it, would flag one down, get her younger sisters Lisa, Laura, Linda and (later) Cynthia in, and take them for a ride. Not very expensive and great fun. The four Ls and Baby C. Oh, see Baby C cry if she doesn't get to go along.

Very well. Dr. Pérez realizes that you might be upset with him if he doesn't give the recipe for Backhendl, so here goes:

                          Zutaten (Ingredients)

                1 Huhn (hen); max. 900 g. (32 oz.)
                Mehl, griffiges (flour, several pinches)
                3 Eier (eggs)
                Semmelbrösel (fine bread crumbs)
                1/2 kg (1 lb.) Backfett (Schweineschmalz) baking grease (lard)
                Petersilie (parsley)
                1 Zitrone (lemon)

                       Zubereitung (Preparation)

With hens up to 32 oz. the skin may be left on. Above that, the hen should be skinned. Remove the backbone and breastbone and cut hens into pieces according to weight: little hens in 4, larger ones in 8. Carefully cut the thighs off at the joint. Wash thoroughly and let dry. Salt lightly. Roll the pieces in flour. Dip them in the lightly salted beaten eggs and then roll them in the Semmeln crumbs. Though lard is best for taste, shortening may be used. It is important to brown the pieces all over in an adequate amount of lard or shortening during the first half of cooking time. Cook at a moderate temperature, though toward the end of a total 20 minutes, the temperature may be raised somewhat. Place the pieces on paper towels to drain. Place in oven pre-heated to approx. 90º. In the meantime, place the parsley briefly in the hot grease until it begins to lose its green color. Salt it lightly, let it dry. Place on serving dishes along with lemon wedges and portions of hen. (O.K., we always say chicken, not hen, in English.)

After a snack, Anneliese and Eduardo went out to reconnoiter. The first thing that caught their eye was all the rockhound vendors and their displays. Rocks from all over the desert, but mainly (it stands to reason), chunks of raw quartzite and finished articles—an astonishing variety of colors, shapes and products.

More than one million visitors converge on Quartzsite annually, most in RVs. During January and February, some 2,000 vendors of rocks, gems, minerals, fossils and everything else imaginable create one of the world's largest open air flea markets. It appeared to A & E that Jan. & Feb. had overstepped their stay.

They had just begun to admire a few of the items on sale when something sailing through the air caught their eye. Incredible! Was that a lawn mower? It looked and sounded like it was buzzing the crowds. What kind of magic was that? They pressed forward through the throngs and came upon the First Quartzsite Model Airplane Show.

Yes, that dang thing looked just like a sleek custom lawn mower doing crazy, high velocity acrobatics in the sky. It's creator had dubbed it "The World Famous Flying Lawn Mower." Entranced, A & E watched a biplane, "The Dogpatch Mail," take off and thrill the crowd too. One after another, a series of amazing planes, each as inventive as all get out, took off, showed off, and landed. There was a fairly stiff breeze and it was a wonder to see how the controllers controlled them so miraculously. Not a single crash. Sometimes there were as many as six in the air at once—the "Blunder Birds," as Eduardo recalls. Some show! Absolutely free. No admission charge. They could be seen doing their stuff from a couple of hundred feet away, in any case.

As they strolled back toward the Chamber of Commerce mobile home and beyond, Æ came across the "Amazing Two-Headed Albino Raccoon" tent and other carnival-like curiosities. While gawking at such, they looked up to see a Canadian goose flying high against the wind just beyond the Albino Raccoon tent. It surprised them that some character wasn't blasting away at it with a shotgun, it looked so real. Moving closer, they could see that the goose was a kind of kite, so realistic that all that was missing was the honk. E wanted to purchase one immediately to set up back home on top of the cabin. A said, "Maybe." Day-old husbands know what that means. Well, maybe she was afraid some trigger-happy nut would blaze away at it with a Browning double-barreled shotgun and blast the cabin's beautiful big windows to smithereens.

By now you're expecting it, so E will come through for you. Smithereens is derived from Irish smidirin, meaning "small bits and pieces." Isn't that great? Sound and meaning seem to match up perfectly. Smithereens must somehow be connected with the bow-wow theory. And you remember the posited correlation between narrow air passages and small size, right? Smithereeeeeens. Really small. Easy to see this. "To hear, too," says Ed.

Perhaps Ed has carried the idea that "small is beautiful" too far. He has typed Æ above to indicate both togetherness and endearment as the two walked tightly arm in arm. A is definitely O.K. E is a bit much of a stretch, as everyone will agree.

They have arrived back at their motor home, so Dr. Eduardo Alberto Pérez Salazar turns from describing Quartzsite to What Next?

"Well, where's an old shirt and my Levis?"

"An old shirt and your blue jeans [as they are typically called in Spanish—blu zhins, <i> as in kilo] are where they are supposed to be. Hanging in the closet by the bathroom."

"Olrai! Here I go! I'll jump intuh muh jeans uhn with uh comb, uh comb, uh fine tooth comb, fruhm thuh bottum tuh thuh top, fruhm thuh top tuh thuh...! (uh = ) Ed is trying to do a little dance routine within the narrow confines of the motor home.

"Oh, no! You're not going to believe this, Anneliese! The day before yesterday must have been my day to be dumb! The top. The top! The air conditioners. Perfect places to hide a GPS device. It wouldn't have taken more than maybe fifteen minutes to find it. ¡Qué barbaridad! ¡Qué chabón! What a stupid thing! What a dumbhead! "I know you don't like me to use Lunfardo but for Lunfardo, chabón is a very mild word for what I've been."

Lots of Lunfardo expressions have been integrated into Argentine speech, to the extent that no one even thinks of them as having originated primarily from the lowclass speech of immigrants and the underworld of Buenos Aires. Without a second thought everybody says macanudo (great, terrific, excellent) and ¡Qué macana! (How stupid, What baloney, What an idiotic lie), etc. A lot of low-lifes use Lunfardo's many really nasty, vulgar expressions, too.

A few of the better examples:

acamalar - to take, carry off
atorrante - loafer, bum, lazy, shiftless (At the beginning of the 1900s, many large concrete culverts were imported from Spain's A. Torrante Company. At locations where they were left lying, drifters took them over as shelters and a new word was born.)
balurdo - stupid
belín - nothing (may imply el miembro viril—the virile "member")
biyuya - money
bulebú; - high class (from French voulez vous)
cucuza - head
chanta - a jerk, a jughead....
che - vocative, used to address someone with whom you are on familiar terms (pal, chum)
falluto - false, hypocrite, promise-breaker....
gil - stupid, a sucker
guita - money
morfar - to eat
pavura - fear
pibe - boy kid
piba - girl kid
pituco - well-dressed, fancy (rich kid)
salame - dimwit
testún - obstinate
vento - money
¡Vía! - Get outa here!
waterclos - toilet (from British water closet)
yantar - eat
yetatore - person who brings bad luck (from dialectical Italian gettatore)
yum-yum (pronounced zhoom-zhoom)- chewing gum
vesre - a kind of Pig-Latin (igpayatinlay) which reverses syllables (vesre is from revés, which means backwards).

Some examples of vesre:

loco (crazy) - colo
marido (husband) - dorima
botón (button) - tombo (the nasal becomes m before b)
abajo (below) - ajoba (first syllable can remain intact)
conmigo (with me) - congomi
trabajo (work) - jotraba (last syllable first)
cuarenta (forty) - tacuaren
vigilante (policeman) - telangivi
uruguayo (Uruguayan) - yoruga (a little fancy switching)

Pérez stops here. The great linguist's head is swimming.

Pérez had briefly entertained the idea of employing Lunfardo as a secret code language, in much the same way that Navaho was employed in World War II. But Lunfardo dictionaries are widely available now, too many people know it well—or passably well—and too many words have joined the mainstream language to make it a viable vehicle for this purpose.

Suddenly:

"Don't get your shirt off, Eduart! Have a look through this one-way window. You've never seen the guy who's snooping around out there before, but it's Plumpi! I think we'd better get out of here! He could shoot darts in us, overpower us, inject us with something... Who knows what!"

"But you said he was too far away to get a good look at him!

"You were asking about details. His shirt collar, his tie! That's him! That's Beefy! Plumpi!"

"Well, that settles that! No doubt about a GPS now! Let's just stay cool. A GPS can be quite accurate but it looks like he's checking out other RVs near us too. Good thing we disguised Miss Universe Alice the best we could! I'm going to sneak outside and quietly and quickly disconnect the hookups. You drive and I'll keep a sharp lookout out the rear window. When I say the word, take off straight ahead and head for the freeway. You know how crowded the traffic gets up there, but just bull the motor home through! Given its size and its powerful engine, nobody'll really challenge it. Move out right in front of the others, like you mean it! Before Plumpi can determine precisely what he's zeroing in on, we'll be outa here! O.K., here I go. He won't be able to see me from this side! I'll be right back, so when I say the word...."

All the above was spoken in tense, hushed whispers. Pérez did the aforementioned and then....

"The word!"

Anneliese surged forward in that big lumbering vehicle like an elephant after a peanut. At the approach to the freeway, three lanes of traffic converged—left, right, straight ahead. Luckily, traffic directly ahead was slack enough so that, moving heavily and steadily on, Anneliese was able to bull past vehicles about to enter from right and left.

"Eduart! Eduart! ¡¡¡Chabón!!! You didn't tell me which way!"

"Cross over and then to the left! To the left! Toward Phoenix!"

Anneliese made it onto the overpass, across it, and to the left with only a dozen smoldering white-hot honks assailing her imperturbability. As she zoomed down the on-ramp, pedal to the metal, and made her move to merge with freeway traffic, Miss Universe Alice started vibrating, shaking and swaying like Pascal's slender reed in a serious nor'easterner. A massively elegant, gorgeous, luminescently shiny, purple-nosed Peterbilt semi was barreling past at 85 miles per hour, coming within a centimeter of side-swiping them.

L'homme n'est qu' un roseau, le plus faible de la nature; mais c'est un roseau pensant. "Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed," Blaise Pascal wrote in one of his Pensées.

Anneliese was thinking, all right! She was thinking they were goners! As she edged over a few centimeters more, a second semi buffeted them, blasting on its lordly horns like the Titanic triumphantly blaring its intention to amaze the world with its maiden voyage.

"You've sunk us now! We're done for!" Anneliese gurgled and gasped as semis continued to thunder past like a never-ending container-loaded freight train.

"There, there, we're fine. You were wonderful, Anneliese. No wonder I always want you to drive. You were so composed. A model of composure. How do you do that?"

"Sure, yeah, sure! I was composing our epitaph when that second one thundered by. But I got us out of there, mon cher (my dear)." With fingers spread, Anneliese brushed the flat of her right hand across her left shoulder twice—perhaps thrice—in the Latin gesture of "How about that? Hey, look at me!" Her visage sent a concomitant satisfied signal.

"Quick! Turn off! Now! Get on 95! We've got to head north!"

Anneliese just barely had time to take the turnoff to Hwy. 95 in the direction of Parker and Las Vegas.

"O.K., mon cher! It's back to chabón for you! If you would pay as much attention to where we're going as I do to my driving, we'd eventually get back home some day!"

"Verzeihung, honey! Sorry! I've been a sorry example of a backseat driver. You know how I am. Thinking about two or three things at once and not getting one of  them straight. I was concentrating on the GPS. Maybe I can get at it from inside the RV, from the bottom of the air conditioners—both of them—removing the registers. Probably only need a screwdriver, but I've got plenty of tools stowed away. Unless you want me to climb out a window and get on top. That would create the setting for a super scary, hairy, wild chase scene, with me hanging on up there trading shots with my Glock.

"Forget it, tool man. You'd better stay glued to the back window, keeping a sharp lookout for Plumpi. We can't be sure what kind of car he's driving, so use your binoculars to.... Forget it! You don't know what he looks like! Just watch for any suspicious vehicle. You know all the tricks of trailing someone without their catching on, so retroengineer it. I don't suppose he'd be driving that Taurus, but it's possible. He can't know that I spotted him back by the ravine."

"Right as always. Sos un águila (an eagle). You are so sharp! Looking at the map, I see we have the choice of staying on 95 through Parker and Needles, then on to Henderson on I-515 and straight into Vegas—or else we could continue on 95 at Parker and drive on through Lake Havasu City to I-40, on I-40 to Kingman and then angle off on 93, which would take us all the way to Vegas on a four-lane highway. There's a lot more freeway if we go on I-40. The other way, on narrower, less traveled roads, we could get caught out in the desert with no one around."

"All right, Eduardo Alberto, I take back Chabón. I didn't mean it. I was just caught up in the frustration of a scary moment. Let's take I-40. I'm wondering about the other tipo (guy) with Plumpi. Do you suppose there are two pursuit vehicles?"

Eduardo makes that inimitable gesture meaning, "You've got me!" Right hand cupped (if you're right-handed), placed at the Adam's apple, then brought up to the chin as the fingers are splayed outward and then flung forward. At the same time the eyes must bulge a bit, the lips pressed together and forced upward into a sort of scowl... Inimitable. Hard to describe. You have to see it. You just love it! It's Ed's favorite gesture, right up there with the one little kids use—the equivalent of sticking out your tongue.

It starts out about about the same, with the hand cupped, but it goes to the tip of the chin and starts clawing away under it. The head is tilted, the eyes squinched up, the nose, too, the lips pressed together, forced upward almost to the nose, the chin thrusted forward. Ed has seen little bicultural kids do this one while sticking their tongue out at the same time. Just in fun, of course. Anglo gestures are so few and tame compared with the Latin repertoires....

If you are a lefty, proceed as above but employ the trait shared by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, Cole Porter, Ken Griffey, Jr., Alexander the Great, Henry Ford, Pablo Picasso, Ronald Reagan, George Bush—the list gets too long—Joan of Arc, Jessamyn West, Carol Burnett......... This could go on and on. Almost makes you wish you were part of this select, gauche, sinister community.

For those righties who don't already know: gauche means awkward, tactless, lacking in social grace. From the French for left-hand, left-side, etc. Old French, crooked, warped. Sinister: wicked, evil, dishonest, in a dark, mysterious, threatening way. From Latin sinister, left-hand. Hmmm. Could Plumpi be left-handed? Snow? Sinister and wicked fit.... Dohd be dub, chabón! You'd better learn to watch it, Ed! Laura, the only lefty among the children, loves to punch him on the arm and accepts no such thoughts, even in jest. She does the most beautiful calligraphy. With her left hand! Most remarkable!

"Tum tee tum." Not pensively. Pure boredom. Nothing was happening. For all of Pérez's peering out the back window. Like waiting for the proverbial watched pot that refuses to boil. Just normal traffic, apparently, and not much of it. Very possibly, Plumpi was just hanging back. He had them on his radar screen, so to speak, and was just awaiting a favorable moment.

They had left Lake Havasu City about 20 miles behind. Still on 95, a narrow, less-traveled road. Ed is still at the window in back. Liese is almost observing the speed limit, her eyes catching everything ahead.

Suddenly:

Anneliese swerves slightly to the left and accelerates. A crashing, smashing sound follows. Anneliese doesn't slow down. To the contrary, she speeds up! Eduardo is thrown against the side wall. No harm done. Not a dent, not a scratch to mar it anywhere. Ed, half-stunned, half-wedged against the bed, struggles upright and rushes forward.

"What was that all about? What hit you?"

"Nothing hit me. Ask me what I hit."

"Well...... A deer? A crate that fell off a truck?"

"I had just come around that last curve a short stretch when I caught sight of a Ford Taurus off to the right of the road. Blocking the way were two construction barriers. I immediately swerved to the left, where there was a little more space, and smacked the barrier on that side, knocking it aside. If that dastardly Plumpi made me dent or scratch up Miss Universe Alice, he's in deep.... trouble!

"Plumpi and that chanta with him must have got ahead of us when we made a 'pit stop' at Lake Havasu City, Eduart. Just because we wanted to stretch our legs a bit! These bozos are more persistent than we gave them credit for. They must have headed out looking for some way to stop us, saw the barricades at the side of the road and set 'em up to set us up. Those Schweinehunde! [dirty dogs]."

"I say head straight for Vegas as fast as we can, Anneliese. Nothing but freeways ahead, with plenty of traffic and little opportunity for them to stop us. There are plenty of RV parks, so we'll zoom into one, I'll find that blasted GPS im Handumdrehung and then we'll lose ourselves somewhere among the throngs that throng there."

"D'accord! With you on that, Eduart!"

"Why don't you keep the cruise set right where it's at: ten mph above the speed limit. The highway patrol won't stop us for that. Most of the other vehicles on the road 're passing us, of course, especially, the trucks, but that's a good speed to hold to.

"So away we go.... 'Over hill, over dale, ever on the upward trail, as those caissons go rolling along.'" (Caisson: a two-wheeled wagon for transporting ammunition)