Grand tales and great escapes

Gonzalez & Daughter Trucking Co.

A Road Novel With Literary License

Maria Amparo Escandon

Three Rivers Press: 292 pp.,

$12.95 paper

*

Professor Joaquin Gonzalez, in pink tights and a feathered hat, was playing Bassanio in a rehearsal of “The Merchant of Venice” at a Mexico City university when suddenly all hell broke loose. It was 1968; the government had just launched a brutal crackdown on student and worker demonstrations then consuming the city. In the ensuing chaos an army captain crashed into Gonzalez and accidentally shot himself. Panicked, el profesor hid in a bathroom, mortified that a copy of “In Cold Blood” with his name on the cover had slipped from his backpack to the floor by the dying captain. “He might as well have left his picture and address, too.”

From such a setup a novelist could turn in almost any direction. Maria Amparo Escandon, author of the well-received “Esperanza’s Box of Saints,” has turned it into a somewhat sloppy but entirely enjoyable opera bouffe full of improbable incidents and slapstick dialogue.

In “Gonzalez & Daughter Trucking Co.,” Joaquin, believing that death squads wanted to toss him to the sharks from a plane, sneaks across the Texas border at Brownsville in the back of a truck. He quickly falls in lust with its tattooed driver, Virginia Ryder, and soon after, in love. They become a trucker couple, but Virginia is killed in a freak accident when their only child, Libertad, is 2. The former literature professor raises her on the road, stopping at bookstores to buy books in Spanish and English that they read to each other, then toss out the window, “leaving the highways scattered with knowledge.” Shakespeare, Cervantes, Carver, Hemingway. (“One Hundred Years of Solitude” hit the pavement in North Florida.) “If I could string together all the lines of text I’ve read on the road,” Libertad says, “I’d be able to tie a bow of words around the world.”

That’s the story Libertad tells some years later to her weekly Library Club at the Mexicali Penal Institution for Women, where she is imprisoned for the most unlikely deaths of passengers on a bus along Mexico’s Highway 2. The novel has abundant black humor that comes across as a sly wink from the author, cutting through uneven levels of narration. Along the way, Libertad’s dad gives himself a series of monikers: Pantaleon, Juvenil, Valentin, El Hippie, Romeo, Inocencio, Macbeth, Atticus, Holden and more and more literary handles. He bestows aliases to his daughter over the years as well, among them Plutarca, Fermina and Gervasia -- but she “just went by Mudflap Girl.”

Mudflap Girl tells of growing up in the cab of her dad’s semi, secretly yearning for the simple joys of grounded domesticity. She wants to dance merengue and salsa, live in a neighborhood with quinceaneras and marry a hard-working guy “with eyes the color of molasses.” She wants “a yappy little dog called Peterbilt.” She gets her first grown-up undergarments at 14 from a bra salesman her father helps on the road. The next year, her dad buys her a forged trucker’s license that says she is 21. But Joaquin turns into an overprotective macho dad, alarmed when his hijita falls for a hunquito.

Back at the prison, Libertad enraptures her Wednesday audience -- the warden listens too -- much as Garrison Keillor does on Saturdays. “She understood the value of suspense, having learned this storytelling skill by watching Mexican soap operas at truck stops.” And when two inmate friends are released, she has them pose as Mexican police and beat her dad to exorcise his entrenched fear of retribution for the death of the army captain many years earlier. Never has the vicious clubbing of a defenseless man been so funny.

The mildly organized plot is secondary in this character-driven novel. Escandon has created such a sympathetic and attractive personality in Libertad that I found myself rooting for Mudflap Girl throughout the contrivance that surrounds her.

*

Tom Miller is the author of numerous books, including “The Panama Hat Trail,” “On the Border” and “Jack Ruby’s Kitchen Sink.”