He cuts me a single glance that lasts as long as it takes to say his name and his look says, ’Cause I’m dead, I got permission to fuck my life up and still outlive you. A woman’s voice says something over the intercom and he gets up and walks to his gate. And I get up and walk to mine.
MY RIGHT FOOT
I SEE IT ON MY way out to the airport. The largest equestrian statue in the world, Don Juan de Oñate on his rearing stallion looking larger than even the jet planes that circle over him. El conquistador español who founded our city. Fuck. He’s the Big Bad Daddy of the town, as omnipresent as the sun, which cuts a deep shadow from his visored helmet over his bronzed eyes. That shadow is his darker legacy of murder and brutality that we’re still living down today. Like the blueprint for our future scrolled up neatly in his hand. Oñate and his men put down a rebellion of the Acoma Pueblo Indians in New Mexico, killing 600 of them, and then ordered that all surviving males over twenty-five have their right feet severed clean off just to make sure they stay put. That was in 1598, but it seems like everywhere I look, people are still hobbling around, walking the slow hulking walk of the lifelong cripple. Maybe that’s why so many of us hardly ever stray far from the city limits. We loiter around our personal ruined memories like ghosts. Like that mute runner with the long hair dashing along Alameda as if in terror of Oñate chasing his ass down. Or those rumbling sedans with puffy-eyed low-res vatos cruising the parks and callejones with their Jack Daniels in paper bags and blunts in the ashtray, looking for God knows what in the middle of the night. Maybe their own chopped-off feet.
At the TSA screening, I look down at my Tony Lamas as I take them off and watch them disappear into the X-ray machine, and I think of a retablo of a bloody pile of right feet with the Holy Virgin suspended above them, I think of how I’ve been lamed by my own past and then I think of how often I’ve walked away and yet always manage to walk back. We’d all like to shed our dimmest and most painful memories, to disown them or reimagine them as miracles of restitution, circles of renewal. Sometimes they are. But I’m late for my flight and Oñate’s on his unblinkered horse, almost airborne, hooves raised, hooves high, hooves reaching for the deadpan skies of el paso del norte.
THE RUNNER III
I SEE HIM ONE MORE time.
Driving through New Mexico on a cold bright January day. Only a few more miles to the city limits, to the place I used to call home. I have to take a piss. I pull over to a truck stop, tank up, relieve myself and buy a candy bar for the road. On the way to the car, the sprinting man is there.
He’s old. His clothes fused to his body, all gray as cement. His beard gray too. His eyes sunken into a face long and drawn and darker than I remember. His ancient tennis shoes are missing their laces and there are no socks. Dark sweat stains on his shirt and on the seat of his pants. The veins on his arms and his neck are thick and ropey and I picture all his frame strung together with rebar. Like a statue, which is ironic, ’cause there’s nothing statuesque about him. He’s still racing as hard and fast as his legs will take him, though he’s hardly a blur by now.
But maybe he is. ’Cause nobody sees him. Nobody sees the prints he leaves behind on the coarse gravel shoulder. Nobody hears the wheeze of his breathing. Nobody seems to be aware of the displacement of air along that part of the frontage road. It’s like he’s moving in time to the Earth’s rotation, as fast as the clouds’ progress in the bleak sky above. I wonder if he’s been running in place the whole time. Catching up with his life, which apparently remains just out of arm’s reach. I know he has to have stopped somewhere, for sleep, for food, for the evacuation of his bowels. For love and companionship. And there must have been a place and time when he didn’t run, where being stationary made all the sense in the world. I think I’m trying to say the word home. When he stops, when he finally takes no more strides and comes to a complete halt, maybe that’s where he’ll be. Maybe that’s where he’s going.
I get in my car and drive in the opposite direction. I’m watching him the whole time in my rear-view mirror as we head toward our horizons, him to his vanishing point and me to mine.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Author of more than twenty plays, Octavio Solis is considered one of the most prominent Latino playwrights in America. His works have been produced in theatres across the country, including the Center Group Theatre and the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, South Coast Repertory, the Magic Theatre and the California Shakespeare Theatre in the San Francisco Bay Area, Yale Repertory Theatre, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Dallas Theater Center, and other venues nationwide. Among his many awards and grants, Solis has received an NEA Playwriting Fellowship, the Kennedy Center’s Roger L. Stevens Award, the TCG/NEA Theatre Artists in Residence Grant, the National Latino Playwriting Award, and the PEN Center USA Award for Drama.
His fiction and short plays have appeared in the Louisville Review, Zyzzyva, Eleven Eleven, Catamaran, Chicago Quarterly Review, Arroyo Literary Review and Huizache. This is his first book.
For more information: www.octaviosolis.net
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to acknowledge the following for inspiring and supporting the work of these Retablos throughout their various stages of development: Oscar Villalon and Laura Cogan of Zyzzyva, Elizabeth McKenzie, Catherine Segurson and Chorel R. Centers of Catamaran, Jenn Bennet of Arroyo Literary Review, Dagoberto Gilb and Huizache, Peter Maravelis, Stacey Lewis, and my scrupulous editor Elaine Katzenberger of City Lights Books, Charlie Jane Anders of Writers with Drinks, Word for Word Performing Arts Company, Frances Lefkowitz, Amanda Moody, and Karen Macklin. None of this would be possible without my daughter Gracie and my dear wife Jeanne, who with her unerring love and counsel helped me navigate the faulty shoals of memory and invention. But to the family represented in these pages, I owe so much more.
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