The light in the gloaming fades to violet, turning us to ghosts in the cotton. We don’t move. We don’t hazard a look away for a second. I’m eleven and I’ve never seen anyone like her. She’s strange and beautiful in her dread. She looks to be fourteen or so because already I can see breasts pushing through her blouse and her cut-offs show her long smooth legs annealed by summer sun. She’s poor, the child of a hungry household, and she’s crossed the shallow Rio to make a new life here. I wonder what she thinks of me. I’m almost as dark, my hair as black, and my name comes from across the Rio too, but everything else says I live a settled untroubled life. Nothing fugitive about me. I’m the American she hates and hopes to be, and I can bring ruin on her just for being here. I see that apprehension pass over her face. She stirs. Moving with slow feline care, she swivels and creeps through the cotton into the next rut, making no sound at all. And just like that, the girl vanishes. I sit for a moment to ponder this apparition of my desire. All the prior times I came into the cotton, I came to dream myself to peace, and sometimes I dreamed a girl for company. I would talk with her. I would tell her stories. Before I even knew what desire was, I would sit with her and feel her warmth against mine. And now this girl appears, and she’s like nothing I imagined. I think I should leave, I think I should run back to a hiding game that’s probably all done by now.
But I follow her. I hold my breath again and wade through the welter of bolls and leaves and she’s there. This time naked. Her brown naked back to me, she undoes her hair and lets it fall long, loose and black down her sloping shoulders. I see the fleshy curve of one breast when her arm is raised. Seeing the girl in this terrible intimacy scares me as something about the moment marks it all at once miraculous and forbidden. Like if I stare too long, I’ll die or become a stalk of dumb cotton. She puts on a tee-shirt, then a light jacket, then quickly slips her legs into a long charcoal linen skirt, and I’m thankful for it. She must know this because she’s aware of me now. She turns her head to confirm my presence as she shoves her wet clothes into the tote and puts on a floppy hippie hat in the style of the day. Her breathing calmer now. She raises her eyes to give me a look of confused pity that excites and devastates me. She parts her lips as if to say something but doesn’t. That’s all right. I know that already she dreads the world a little less.
I hear a motor turning in the coming darkness. A searing yellow light blazes through the field, skirting the upper edges of the crop. It’s a Border Patrol cruiser throwing its searchlight into the cotton. The fugitive dullness falls over her face while my stomach churns with panic. I gaze for a second into the long, panning beam, and when I look back to the girl, she’s not there. I look for her in the jungle of stems and leaves and across the ruts to the left and right, but she’s gone. Or maybe turned to cotton. The bullhorn voice of la migra blares out garbled commands to come out, but I lie face-down in my rut to wait them out. They’ll go soon. They’ll give up their game and drive away, and I’ll get up and go inside and eat my dinner and tell no one where I go to hide and seek.
LA LLORONA
I SAW HER.
Who.
La llorona.
No mames.
It was her. Swear to God.
We’re playing this game, Kino, Marcos, and me, Michael and his little bro David, my brothers and my little sister too. Something involving the Sun Shopper. The thin tightly rolled weekly advertising rag that appears on our lawns every Thursday. We collect as many as we can and use them as weapons as we ride our bikes up and down the sidewalk in front of our chante, laughing and yowling, playing at gladiators till it’s so dark we can’t see faces, only our bicycle reflectors and the soiled white of our tees.
It’s Demon who says it. Standing in the grass looking south on Polo Inn Street. Though we can hardly see him, we know him from his height, from the shape of his head, from the odd halting walk he’s adopted for the street. We find ourselves walking our bikes toward him with the kind of trance-like apprehension only kids know, looking where Demon is looking, down this dark street on an evening where everything is pitched blue and black except the pale ice of the stars.
I saw her.
Are you sure?
Es la llorona, he says, like he wishes he hadn’t. Actually, I’m not so sure he did. The words sound like they came out years ago, before Demon was Demon.
What does she look like, ese?
No sé. But I know it was her.
Did she say anything?
She made this sound.
We wait and listen for the sound. Looking in the dense tree-lined shadows of Polo Inn Street, which runs past Cowboy Park and the dried-up irrigation ditch and the older crumbling houses of the last half-century all the way to the Rio Grande, where already they are laying the groundwork for the Border Freeway, we listen for the call of la llorona. We don’t know what la llorona is, nor what she signifies, not even what her call might sound like, but we know it can’t be good.
You wanna go see?
I will if you will.
Pos, vamos.
I straddle my bike and pedal in with some of the others, including Demon in his blocky shoes, while the younger ones hang back to watch from a safe distance. We feel brave like little shits sometimes can, armored with the insistence inside us that says we’re too old to be fooled now. Stepping into this long soundless street where the darkest of nights might be chiseling out some legend of our abuelas’ imaginations; that’s just another game for us to play. But then, wait.
Híjole, is that someone . . . ?
Did you see that . . . ?
What is that?
Like a person standing in the street. She seems to be waving something. A light appears behind this figure and it turns into headlights and the headlights brighten and dim according to the levels of reality that spill from our crazy heads. They seem to come directly toward us at a fast clip, then stop about fifty yards away, throwing more unsettling light in our eyes. We move to the gravel shoulder and wait for whatever to pass, but it just sits there for a long minute. And not a sound from it, either. The lights blink off, blink on. We speculate on what that means. Is it a drug deal? A coyote picking up some tired mojadito who just came across? A fight between lovers? A kidnapping, maybe? Before we can make up our minds about anything, the figure appears again silhouetted in front of the lights, startling us, and it or she or whatever hovers there for a moment, until the lights go into reverse and fade out completely. After that, nothing. We’re weirded out by this mystery of lights and figures, but just when we think we’ve seen the end of it, the end of it comes. This thin faraway cry.
Was that a dog?
I don’t think so.
It sounded like laughing.
No way.
Somebody crying.
Coulda been a radio.
No mames.
I think I want to go back.
Let’s just see, I say. It’s probably nothing.
We take a few unsteady paces toward what was there before. I’m listening hard for the reed song of the cricket in the little ditch along the road but no. Not even the rustling of leaves. Up ahead, there’s nothing I can see except the dim lights of houses in the far distance. Then, unbidden, some compulsion catches hold of me and the others at exactly the same time. Not another step taken. Not a word exchanged. ’Cause right then, right at this moment, we see it, we know it, this cavernous hole that extends all the way to the border levee and beyond, this unseen, unnamable airless nothing; Polo Inn Street, where a speeding truck that didn’t stop left a broken-backed carcass where my dog used to be, where a thousand ghosts left a trail of cold river water as they made their way to a better, worse life, where a police cruiser with its lights off slowly rode the margins of some secret uncommitted crime, where a thick tongue bellowed in some house out there of sins older than God, when God was still a Mexican; it’s our own personal, lonely, designated hour staring back at us and there ain’t shit to do or say about it except . . .
You
know what? I’m hungry.
You know what? Me too.
Let’s go inside.
Yeah.
And we turn back to our own chantes and sit at our proper sides of the table, watch our shows, share the jokes and stories of the day, except this mystery on pinche Polo Inn Street, before we head for baths and beds, and thereby soak up the vivid and visible life we know for as long as we know it.
It had to be a dog, anyway.
WILD KINGDOM
HE FIRED HIS GUN AT us but not ’cause he wants us dead. How could he? He’s our dad. The same Dad who took us to Ruidoso every summer for some fresh mountain air and got us new bikes for Christmas. The same Dad who loves the Flip Wilson Show and croons along to Lucha Villa on the radio. But something’s collapsing inside him for sure and lately he’s a tense brooding man walking around the house with his hands clenched around some invisible giant rubber band. He’s still our dad, though. Our apá.
We’re supposed to be quiet in the afternoons, ’cause he’s working six nights a week at this local greasy burger joint and he needs to sleep days. He’s not so good when he’s roused. He bellows for us to shut the hell up if we even pad down the halls too loud, and once he threw his shoe at my little brother and caught him right at the temple and almost knocked him out. So today we figure we’ll watch some TV with the volume low. We’re all sitting around watching Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. But my mom’s not happy about something. She’s all knotted up and tight-lipped, chewing on a fingernail while the jackals nip at the wildebeest carcass. She suddenly charges into the room where he’s sprawled on the bed and snarls something nasty about him coming home later than he’s supposed to, and smelling of drink on top of it, and he mutters something back, which results in Amá slamming the door and marching to the kitchen where she proceeds to wash the dishes as noisily as possible. He calls for her again after a while and she stomps back to him. We hear them yelling in the room. My brothers and me ignore the episode as best as we can, but we’re quietly wishing we were out with our sister at Ascarate Park riding the cheap roller-coasters. It looks like it’s gonna be another bad night.
Then the rubber band snaps and Amá sprints right through the house yelling for us to run. ¡Córrele! ¡Tiene la pistola! With hardly a second to think about it we’re all scrambling to our feet and dashing after her as we hear pop! pop! pop! I’m the last one out and just as I reach the door, I catch sight of a man I’ve never seen before, in tee-shirt and boxers, hair mussed up, glowering like a Lucha Libre wrestler, and in his hand, one of the guns that he keeps hidden in his closet. As he fires off one more POP! I fling myself out the front door, swearing there’s a bullet searing into the small of my back but it’s only fear burning there. Fear and exhilaration that we’re out of the house unharmed. I think my mom’s almost laughing, she’s so scared.
In stupefaction, Diana and Joe from next door come out to find us crouched behind their station wagon. The other neighbors from across the street have also decided this escapade is better than Wild Kingdom. A few minutes later, the Chota pull up with no less than five cruisers with five cops looking at the front door of our chante with their five thumbs on the butts of their big black shiny pistols. One officer comes over to get the story from my mom. He has a mustache like my dad’s. The door of my house opens up a crack and I hear this stranger croak out, It’s over. I put the gun away. You can come back now. Whose voice is that? So broken, so clogged with misery and fatigue. I’m wondering if this is where the police blow him away. This is how these barrio stand-offs usually end. The officer with the mustache wants to know if he means to fire his weapon again. My mom shakes her head, but she can’t chew the doubt off her fingernails. He can see it too. So he turns to me with a questioning look that shames me to the core. I want to explain to him the deal, I want to jump ahead twenty years for the words to say, maybe it’s ’cause he hasn’t slept so good in months, or maybe this job serving drunks and whores greasy food all night long doesn’t pay for shit, or maybe he’s realized at last that he’s had five kids in five years by the time he’s twenty-three with a woman who deserves better than she’s getting and all the manhood dreams he conceived for his life are over for-fucking-ever, ’cause he’s caught in a country that won’t cut him a break except maybe to clean the toilets for the next shift and no last-ditch scramble back across the border is going to raise his prospects in any way. Too late for that. So what if he has a few on the way home, so what if he’s tired and surly these days and so what if he took his gun out of his closet and shot off a couple rounds? He wasn’t aiming for us. No way, ese. All the bullet holes are drilled into the floor, like he meant to miss, like he was only killing off our shadows. Maybe it’s his own damn shadow he was really shooting at. Maybe the real crime happened a long time before this and maybe another one’s going to happen as soon as five thumbs get the notion. I know these out-of-range words are waiting for me and my father sometime in that more clear-headed day to come, but the present twelve-year-old little shit just stands there whimpering like a fool who wants his dad back.
The officer nods and walks calmly to the front screen door of my house and they talk for a while. Mustache to mustache. Then he turns to his fellow officers and gestures that it’s okay and waves Amá over. Timidly to the door she goes and the three of them cluster in private conference until she steps inside. Then the officer walks away and just like that, the cruisers cruise away, the neighbors return to their homes, my brothers go back in the house for whatever comes after Wild Kingdom and the tired old sun slumps behind the Franklin Mountains.
I’m still standing by the station wagon, wondering what happened to my shadow.
OUR BLACKIE
BLACKIE IS OUR DOG. A handsome German shepherd with the most playful disposition. A stupid, happy, untrained dog who wears his tongue on the side of his mouth like a scarf. A dog house, a collar and a long chain attached to it are his. All the grass in the half circle of his perimeter in the backyard is gone, all dirt, all his. He is always barking, always pulling against the chain to be with us, to play with us. Always breaking it and leaping over the fence to run all over and befoul other neighbors’ yards. He’s never easy to catch, but we manage to get him every time. He drinks with huge sloppy bursts that spatter water all around and he eats like a bear. He is our playmate when we play Star Trek, we the crew of the Enterprise, Blackie the otherworldly creature. At night he is our sentry, warding off prowlers and cats when my dad is at work. When I am hurting, he is all the company I need and he lays his head across my lap to confirm it. His bark is fearsome, but we know it’s how he beckons for love. Please, please let me play with you.
This is a retablo of our dog. He taught me about death.
He gets out of the backyard, squeezing past someone’s legs at the gate, maybe mine. We try to catch him but he runs from us, throwing himself into the freedom of a larger world without chains or backyards or limited smells. His lolling red tongue is almost as long as his tail. He’s in the full delight of his being. How can he see the pickup truck roaring up the road, how can he know that it’s stronger than him, how can he foresee the pain it will bring in one thunderous crash, and how can he know that his spine is no match for the unforgiving impact in the bright Sunday light? There he is in the seconds he has left, lying in the gravel, struggling to move, his back visibly growing a new bone, and his happy dog face swelling with blood and all of us gathered around him like a campfire story we haven’t heard yet. We watch him slowly become something other than dog something greater than our pet all the happiness draining from his eyes and filling up with a new mystery some deep new secret about us it’s about us this dawning this world on the other side of our breathing where Blackie is now absorbed completely in one final gasping jolt while Kino and Marcos and my brothers cry openly and I think I should join them but I can’t. I can’t look at this thing anymore that used to be my dog so I go inside and turn on the TV and what is there but Lassie.
EL MERO MERO<
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WHAT THE HELL IS A man, anyway? I had a clearer sense of what that whole deal meant when I was a little mocoso, when everyone was older and taller and deeper-voiced than me and kept the Modelo Negro at arm’s length. But now I’m growing some fine hair on my lip and my balls, my voice is dropping, and my flared jeans are all high-waters. I’m an easy target for my buds at the schoolyard. When’s the flood comin’, ese? It doesn’t help that over my platform shoes, I’m often wearing white tube socks. Girls are kinda not into that. Clearly, I’m missing something.
But my jefe, my old man, my father. He’s a man. He’s got the forearms to prove it. He’s modeled his squint after Charles Bronson and puts spicier chile on his eggs than anyone in our house. He busts his ass slinging burgers over spitting grease nine hours a day for us and doesn’t ever complain about it. Then he comes home a drained man, dropping all the trappings of his day into the top drawer of his dresser before he drags himself into the shower. That’s where all the talismans of manhood are kept.
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