The Lord of Opium

Matt set about finding jobs for the remaining paisanos. Most of the opium was uprooted, and soon alfalfa, corn, tomatoes, wheat, and chilies took the place of the old fields. The population of Opium, minus the men who had gone home, was very small compared to that of other countries. Most of the land would be left untouched.

María, of course, was in her element. She gathered the ex-eejit children into small houses and, with Sor Artemesia’s help, hired women from Aztlán and the United States to be surrogate mothers for them. None of the children, as far as they could tell, had any family left. Those who were musical were given lessons by Mr. Ortega and the newly freed choirmaster.

*  *  *

Eusebio wasn’t interested in giving lessons. Chacho said that his father awoke that memorable night when the Scorpion Star fell, turned on the light, and inspected the rows and rows of guitars propped against the walls. “Who left these here?” he demanded. “They should be in proper cases and not lying around where mice can get at them.”

Chacho sat up, utterly amazed. “You made them, Father.”

“Me? Pah! I don’t remember doing it. And who are you?”

For a moment Chacho was speechless. “I’m your son,” he managed to say.

“Nonsense! Mi hijo is only so high, not a hulking teenager like you. Where’s Mr. Ortega?” By now the light had awakened the piano teacher, who stumbled out of bed and tried to explain the situation. It took a while for Eusebio to realize that his friend was deaf.

“What a pity! What a pity!” the guitar maker exclaimed. “And you such a great pianist. Are you ill, mi compadre? You look so old. It must be the dry desert air.”

“I advise you not to look into a mirror,” retorted Mr. Ortega. Gradually, he and Chacho told Eusebio what had happened. Chacho said he was worried about his father’s reaction, but Eusebio was far more interested to learn that he could write music here and not be concerned with finding work. He lived for music, just as it seemed Chacho would live for art.

He was hugely impressed with his son’s artistic ability. “Runs in the family,” he bragged. “All of us Orozcos are born with either a paintbrush or a guitar pick in our hands.”

*  *  *

Ton-Ton was a problem. He admired music and art from a distance, but he had little talent in those areas. Most of what sent Chacho into transports of joy passed over Ton-Ton’s head. María drafted him to teach the ex-eejit children. “They can learn so much from you,” she enthused. “You can show them gears and screwdrivers and those little round things you use to feed wires into boxes.”

“Grommets,” said Ton-Ton.

“Yes! Such a cute name!” But when she found him threatening to beat the stuffing out of a five-year-old who had rearranged Ton-Ton’s computer parts, she was outraged.

“It’s a j-joke,” he explained when she pulled the howling boy away. “Fidelito and Listen aren’t scared of me. Kids, uh, break stuff if you don’t w-watch them all the time.”

“You can’t threaten them,” she cried.

“W-why not, if it works?” he argued. And so the experiment with Ton-Ton as teacher was over.

Matt tried to involve him in farming, but years of toiling under the hot sun at the plankton factory had killed the interest. Medicine and astronomy, two other possibilities, were too “brainy,” according to Ton-Ton. Yet Matt knew that nothing was wrong with the older boy’s brain. He simply approached problems in a different way.

It was finally Daft Donald who came up with the solution. He thinks with his hands, wrote the bodyguard on his yellow pad of paper. And so he introduced Ton-Ton to the inner workings of Hitler’s car. The boy was enchanted. From there they went on to Celia’s freezer, to Dr. Kim’s electron microscope at the hospital, to the irrigation system at the mushroom house, and to many other delights.

“The secret of successful education,” the Mushroom Master said wisely as Ton-Ton moled around the fungus gardens with pipes, “is finding out how a particular person learns.”

*  *  *

Matt fulfilled his promise to take Listen to the oasis. He worried that she would destroy the quiet nature of the place, but she seemed awestruck by it. “We won’t tell the others,” she said. “They don’t need a secret world, but we do. Those sure are some funny-looking rocks.”

Matt looked up at the range he’d climbed to escape Opium. “That’s how I got to Aztlán. There’s a ridge of mountains where you can see all the opium farms at once.”

“I don’t mean those,” the little girl said impatiently. “I mean these.”