ChupaCarter and the Screaming Sombrero

CHAPTER 1

“Hold up!” I lowered the junky old metal detector and turned to Ernie in surprise. “Are you talking about the El Dorado?”
Ernie looked at me like I’d sat on his last Twinkie. “Uh, hello? Earth to Jorge! What do you think I’ve been talking about this whole time?”
“Honestly? I have no idea,” I confessed. “I sort of tune you out when you start babbling about Star Trek or ancient history.”
The three of us—that’s me, Ernie, and Liza—were prowling around the outskirts of Ernie’s parents’ sprawling fifteen-acre ranch, on the hunt for hidden treasure.
But so far, we’d done an awful lot of hunting and very little finding.
A few yards away, Liza, who was passing a cracked, not-so-magical metal-detecting wand over a clump of deer grass, grinned at me like,You’re too much, Jorge.
“I’m not kidding,” I said, wiping sweat off my face. “History makes me sleepy. I mean, you’ve seen what happens in Mrs. Green’s class when she starts talking about the Industrial Revolution. It knocks me right out!”
“Well, he’s not lying,” she told Ernie. “I’ve had to poke him awake five classes in a row now.”
“That was YOU?!” I shouted. “Liza, how could you do that? I’m a growing boy! You could throw my entire sleep cycle out of whack!”
Sighing, Liza showed me the bottoms of her eyeballs, then turned her attention back to the patch of scraggly grass. “If you want to count sheep in class,” she said with a hint of annoyance, “then I suggest you join thekindergartners after lunch . . .”
“I already tried that!” I admitted. “But Mrs. Herrera told me I was too big for the blankets they hand out!”
“I sincerely hope you’re joking, Jorge.”
I wasn’t. But she didn’t need to know that.
Behind us, the fiery face of a blazing New Mexican sun was glaring down from above the pointy peaks of pine trees. Squinting against the glare, I turned back to Ernie, who was busy hunting for a mythical city of gold underneath a tiny clump of red-and-white mushroom caps.
“Anyway, let me get this straight,” I said. “You were actually expecting to find El Dorado five minutes from your house?”
Not that it would’ve surprised me much with my boy Ernie. Over the last couple of weeks, the kid had becometotally obsessed with that silly legend. I mean, it was getting almost as bad as his Star Trek obsession, and that was saying something.
Ernie sighed. “If you’d paid attention to anything I’ve been saying, Jorge, then you would know that all the most reliable source material places El Dorado somewherein southwest New Mexico. So why not in my backyard?”
“Why not mine?” I countered.
He shrugged like he couldn’t think of a good reason. “Why not? You want to check yours next?”
“No, Ernie! I don’t! Because we’re not going to find El Dorado in anybody’s backyard! And especially not with these flea market metal detectors that you bought on eBay for a buck each!” I shook mine and a shiny plastic piece came loose and clunked to the ground. “See what I mean?”
“You know, I always just assumed El Dorado was somewhere in South America,” said Liza, brushing sweat from her eyes.
Indiana Ernie shook his head. “Nah, that’s just one of the many false stories. I’ve also heard Mexico and Guatemala, and I even saw a documentary last week that claimed it was on some tiny island in the Caribbean—St. George’s Caye, I think.” Ernie shrugged. “That’s the thing with these überfamous legends—different versions pop up all over the place, and the locals usually end up putting their own spin on them. So yeah, there are El Dorado stories all over Central and South America, and they’re all a bit different.”
“But if it’s like that, then how do you know which is the authentic one?” I asked.
“Usually, the oldest story is the most authentic.”
“Which, in the case of El Dorado,” said Liza, “would be the story of the Spanish explorer Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, who led an unsuccessful expedition through New Mexico, searching for the seven cities of gold.”
Surprised, I turned to Liza. “Hey, how did you know that?” Honestly? I would never have guessed there was any room left for fairy tales in that scientific-fact-filled brain of hers.
“Because I was listening three minutes ago when Ernie was talking about it, Jorge!”
 “Oh.”
“Actually, Francisco’s story isn’t the oldest,” said Ernie. “That’s what I was trying to get to beforesomeone rudely interrupted me.”
He shot me a real meaningful look, but I shrugged it off.
Then—as was quickly becoming an every- minute-of-every-day type of thing with E-dog— he started talking about El Dorado again. Only this time, I actually paid attention.
Here’s the short version:
Jorge’s El Dorado Power Points
1)   About five months ago, a team of archaeologists unearthed an ancient Aztecan burial site somewhere in central Mexico near the Popocatépetl volcano.
2)   In one of the tombs, they discovered a sarcophagus that belonged to an Aztecan priest and contained dozens of jade tablets that explained the meanings of previously unknown Aztecan symbols.
3)   This made it possible for language experts all over the world to decipher a whole mess of previously untranslated Aztecan codices.
4)   A bunch of these translated writings (some of which predated Francisco’s expedition by hundredsof years) mentioned the legendary El Dorado.
5)   Apparently, El Dorado had less to do with a city of gold and more to do with a vengeful Aztecan bruja (witch) who plundered seven of the most prominent Aztec cities at the height of their power and hid their wealth from them as a punishment for the greed of their leaders.
“According to a few of the most recently trans- lated codices,” Ernie continued, “the only person who ever discovered the secret location of the treasure was this kid—a sort of beggar-thief— who tried to steal some from la bruja. Supposedly, though, she laid this horrible curse on him, and he was never seen again!”
“That wasn’t very nice of her,” I said.
Ernie shrugged, absentmindedly swinging his metal detector around, searching for El Dorado underneath an anthill now. “Anyway, according to some other manuscripts, the witch left behind three clues to the whereabouts of the treasure, in the form of three cursed items.”
“Wait. How cursed are we talkin’?” I asked, suddenly sort of interested.
Ernie’s voice dropped to a creepy whisper. “Extremely cursed!”
“What were the items?” Liza wanted to know.
“A bejeweled Aztecan dagger carved from a single slab of meteoric rock, a large black sombrero of unknown origin, and a riddle written on an ancient piece of amatl paper by la bruja’s own hand.”
“What’s the riddle?” I asked, and instantly saw a goofy grin split Ernie’s lips, like he’d been desperately hoping one of us would ask.
He quoted it now, word for word, like it was one of Captain Kirk’s famous lines: “ ‘Cross the waters without a greedy hand. Walk the path without a greedy eye. Stab the heart of greed. Offer a worthy sacrifice and seize the true treasure that lies before you!’ ”
“Sounds sort of ominous,” I had to admit.
“Sounds super ominous!” he hissed excitedly.Apparently, he was pretty stoked about the riddle’s ominousness. “But get this! From all the writings I’ve come across, the riddle has something to do with the witch’s challenges! See, the bruja was said to have protected the treasure with a series of deadly challenges, so that anyone seeking the treasure would have to prove themselves worthy of it. From what my dad and I have been able to dig up, the ancient Aztecs believed that only with all three clues could someone break the curse and discover the secret location of the vast treasure—a place the witch had named El Dorado.” Ernie’s eyes were bugging so far out of his face in excitement that I was half-afraid one might roll right out. I had my hand ready to catch it in case one did. “But here’s the best part: all three artifacts are currently less than a fifteen- minute bike ride away, because the museum is in town and already setting up shop!”
The museum he was talking about was the Museum of Natural Wonders, this big fancy institution in Chicago.
See, if you thought Ernie was obsessed with El Dorado, just wait until you hear about his dad . . .
That man had taken El Dorado Syndrome (yes, I’d given the condition an official name) to a whole ’nother level. Recently he’d convinced (i.e.,bribed with a series of huge donations) the museum’s board of directors to do a pop-up show with some of their world-famous exhibits down here in New Mexico.
Obviously, their El Dorado exhibit was the main attraction, and from everything I’d heard in the buildup to the show, Ernie’s dad was basically drooling all over himself to get an up close andextremely personal look at the three famous artifacts.
And now I knew why.
Anyway, the head curator of the museum was personally setting the whole thing up at the local civic center, which Ernie’s dad had rented out for the weeklong event.
“My dad actually talked to the curator last night to see if he would let us examine the artifacts our-selves,” Ernie rambled on. “Y’know, with some cutting-edge techniques we’ve been researching. But he said the guy acted like a total dope—basically went ballistic on him just for asking, and threw him out. My dad told me not to worry, though. He promised we’d get our hands on the artifacts one way or another.”
“Hold up. Let me see if I follow,” I said. “So El Dorado is where this—I’m assuming super- powerful—bruja hid the treasure of the seven Aztec cities?”
“Correct.”
“And El Dorado hasn’t been found or even glimpsed for the last thousand years or so?”
“Correct again.”
“And according to the oldest and most reliable Aztec writings, no one can find El Dorado without the three cursed artifacts, right?”
“You’re three for three, Jorge!”
“And we obviously don’t have those artifacts on us at the moment, correct? Does that make me four for four?”
“Uh, of course we don’t have the artifacts, Jorge . . . I just told you the museum has them.”
“That’s what I thought I heard you say. So quick question: WHY IN THE CHEESE-AND-BEAN- FILLED ENCHILADA DID YOU DRAG US OUT HERE IN SEARCH OF A TREASURE THAT HASN’T BEEN DISCOVERED IN OVER A MIL- LENNIUM AND CAN ONLY BE FOUND BY SOMEONE WHO HAS ALL THREE CURSED ARTIFACTS, WHEN WE CLEARLY DON’T EVEN HAVEONE, AND IT’S HOTTER THAN A PIZZA OVEN IN HADES OUT HERE?!” Yeah, I was in kind of a bad mood. But that’s only because I’d leaked enough sweat to fill half the Pacific Ocean, and my face felt like it was getting the same deep-fry treatment as chicharrones right before they’re tossed into a snack bag. “I mean, this is the textbook definition of a wild goose chase! Actually, it’s even worse than that! This is closer to a wild goat chase!”
I had plenty more to say, too. But before I could, the patch of bare ground in front of us suddenly erupted like a mini-volcano, and out leapt the shaggy, scraggly form of a ginormous bloodthirsty monster!

CHAPTER 2
Okay, so I lied. It wasn’t some ginormous bloodthirsty monster. Well, in all fairness, heis sort of bloodthirsty (in a very literal sense), but he’s definitely no monster.
It was just Carter. My best bud.
“Somebody say ‘goat’?” he asked excitedly, blinking his mismatched blue and green eyes around at us.
Okay, don’t scream. Yes, Carter’s a real-life chupacabra. But he also happens to be the nicest, kindest, sweetest soul this side of pretty much anywhere.
We’d met on the roof of my grandparents’ house one night while I was dodging my grandma’s empanadas and missing L.A. and Carter was running for his life from a pack of bloodsucking vampire dogs.
You know the old expression “Don’t judge a book by its cover”? It applies double in Carter’s case. Sure, on the outside, the dude might look fit for a horror movie, but on the inside, he’s all squishy teddy bears and rainbow-colored marshmallows.
Don’t let those foot-long razor-sharp fangs scare you. Well, unless of course you happen to be a goat. Then you should totally let his fangs scare you. (And you should probably start running, too.)
“Carter! You scared the nachos out of us!” I shouted.
A long purple tongue slid out from between Carter’s fangy teeth as he licked his lips. “And where’d dey go? I didn’t eat no lunch yet, Jorge!”
Liza, who was still trying to catch her breath, said, “Carter, weren’t you just all the way on theother side of the field? How’d you even get here?!”
He gave her a look like, Silly human. I’m a chupa-cabra. Which means I’m basically Superman with a pettable, full-body coat.
“Chupacabras burrow, ’member? But ¡mira!” He stuck a huge, clawed hand out between the three of us. “I found da treasure!”
Yeah, the big guy had been treasure hunting with us. Though he clearly had avery different definition of the word “treasure.”
“Carter, that’s not treasure.” Ernie sighed. “Those are just some crusty old bottle caps.”
The chupacabra’s thick eyebrows pressed to- gether in something like a furry question mark. “But dey metal.”
“Yeah, so?”
“Jorge tole me gold and silver was treasure, and dey both metal.”
“Yeah, so?”
“So why dis metal not treasure?”
“He does bring up an interesting point,” I had to admit.
“And on that note,” said Liza, clicking off her metal detector, “I think we should call it quits on our Indiana Jones work for the day. I still have some homework to finish.”
Off to the west, the sun had sunk slowly behind the tops of the tall trees, and their telescopic shadows stretched out long ahead of us as we started back to Ernie’s.
“Who’s up for some El Dorado–inspired poppers?” asked my El Dorado–obsessed amigo.
“ME!” Carter and I shouted in unison. Yeah, we both had a thing for oven-fresh snacks.
“What’s in them?” Liza wanted to know.
“Jalapeños, nondairy cream cheese and cheddar cheese, bread crumbs, and a slice of golden beet. They’re totally vegan-friendly.”
“In that case, count me in!” she said with a hungry grin, which brought our hungry grin count up to a grand total of four. But, unfortunately, that was the last time any of us would grin that day. Because as we pushed our way through the hedge of bushes that ringed the green sweep of manicured lawns surrounding Ernie’s parents’ house, we saw somethingterrible . . .
It was Ernie’s dad.
He was being arrested!
CHAPTER 3
Watching Ernie’s dad get handcuffed and shoved into the back of a police car had me totally shook. And it wasn’t because I hadn’t seen someone get arrested before. I had. In fact, it happened pretty often back in my old neighborhood.
But the soft-spoken, generous, and (if I’m being completely honest) borderlinedorky dad of one of my best friends? Yeah, that was a total shocker.
And why had the police arrested him? Get this: for stealing from that fancy-schmancy Chicago museum—the museum he himself had shelled out mad dough to bring to town!
And even more mind-blowing? He was being accused of stealing the very same artifacts that Ernie had just been telling us about! The dagger, the bruja’s riddle, and the sombrero!
You couldn’t make this stuff up. But almost as shocking was how quickly the local TV news stations had run with the story, and how quickly the townspeople had turned on him.
Exhibit A: my sweet old nana.
“He’s as guilty as the first fox out of a henhouse!” Paz shouted later that night as the three of us sat down for dinner.
“You don’t think we should at least give him the benefit of the doubt?” I protested.
She considered that for a sec, her forehead creasing, then shooed the thought away with her fork. “Nah . . .”
“How’s Ernie doing?” my grandpa asked, cutting himself a big yellow wedge of tamale.
I sighed. “Not good. Before I left his house, he offered me half of his last strawberry shortcake ice cream bar.”
A look of confusion crinkled the sun-toasted corners of my abuelo’s eyes. “But that was nice of him. That’s a good thing, no?”
“Not for Ernie!” I said. “He never shares his ice cream bars with anybody! Andespecially not strawberry shortcake! It means he’s all messed up inside!”
“Probably, ’cause he just realized his dad’s a crook,” Paz chimed in.
“Grandma!” I snapped, but she just rolled her shoulders at me like,The truth hurts, kid.
“Bueno, let’s not jump to any conclusions,” said Patricio. “There’s this little-known tradition in the US legal system known as ‘innocent until proven guilty.’ Maybe we give that a try?”
“Ha! That’s a sucker’s game!” said my grandma. “I always start with guilty. It saves time.” She leaned comfortably back in her chair. “Besides, Ernie’s dad might as well have a giant sign over his head with the word¡culpable! flashing in bright neon lights. That weaselly looking curator saw the whole thing. They even got video footage of him going in and coming out of the museum at the exact time of the robbery! What more do you two want—a handwritten confession?”
My grandma sipped on her cup of agua fresca.
“Look, I’m not judging the man,” she said. “If I actually believed I could find the treasure of El Dorado with those crusty old artifacts, I’d go into the museum and steal them myself. But we have to face reality: technology has made high-stakes museum burglaries a losing bet these days. That’s why I never got into the business myself.”
My grandma as a high-stakes cat burglar. I could almost see it now . . .
“Anyway, I don’t even need any evidence,” said Paz. “I know he’s guilty.”
Annoyed, I pushed my plate away. “Grandma, what are you talking about? How could you possiblyknow that?”
“Because all rich people are crooks! That’s how!”
“Por Dios, Paz,” my grandpa groaned, setting his knife and fork down on the table.
“Uh, stereotype much?” I said to her.
“Stereotype? ¡No inventes! The only typing I’ve ever done was one time on your grandfather’s old computer when I made my own online blog calledAll White People Dance the Same.”
Sighing, I threw my hands up. I mean, what could you even say to that?