R&A 2: Short Story Collection

The following stories will be options for your first Writing Project as well:

Border as Womb Emptied of Night and Swallows by Ire’ne Lara Silva

The Rule Maker by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Uncle Rock by Dagoberto Gilb

What Got into Us by Jacob Guajardo

Woman Hollering Creek by Sandra Cisneros

Silva, Ire’ne. “Border as Womb Emptied of Night and Swallows^[1].” Nepantla Familias, Texas A&M University Press: 2021.

I followed you here. I’d follow you anywhere. My father said it wasn’t right. That we had it backward. That it was the woman who was supposed to follow her husband. But that never mattered to me. I’d never do anything that would keep us apart. What I am is yours. I am yours even when you are away. When I am alone. I am yours for as long as I breathe and even after. I am yours for as long as you want me.

Memory brought you here. Brought us here. Your history is here. Your family. Your parents and grandparents and great-grandparents. Your siblings and nieces and nephews. When we were in Ithaca, all you could talk about was how much you missed them. How much you missed this land and the endless horizons and the wind and the heat and the sunsets and the rose-colored fog in the morning and the sugar cane burning and the river and driving to South Padre Island and the roasted corn and the shaved ice with syrup and El Pato’s and the botanas and the chorizo from San Manuel and the taquitos de trompo served with frijoles a la charra and baked potatoes and the cabrito al carbon on the other side of the border. You missed everything, even the scent of the air and the heat of the nights and the feel of the earth. To you, the Rio Grande Valley wasn’t simply a place on a map—the name itself was an incantation. Earth and sun and magic all at once.

I promised you I’d follow you. To love you is to live here. The palm trees lining the highways and the fruit-bearing trees in the orange groves and the mesquites everywhere all whisper your name to me.

Most nights, when you’re at work, I go for long drives. On the freeways where all the lights blur, the access roads when I want to see things pass by more slowly. Interstates, state roads, county roads, farm-to-market roads, connecting one town to the next. Some towns hardly more than a city-limits sign, two houses, and a gas station. Some nights I turn onto caliche roads, counting the lights of trailer parks, surprised suddenly by what look like little houses with parking lots and too many cars. Some of them bars without permits, most of them brothels. I sit at truck-stop diners, drinking cup after cup of coffee. I have something sweet. Pancakes. Or pie. Or cake. Then more coffee until I can bear to go back out again and devour the miles. Windows open and the road screaming past. Everywhere I see roadside descansos, wooden crosses piled with plastic flowers and ribbons and beads. All the tattered and bright colors of someone’s grief.

Some nights I listen to the radio, and then I’m almost happy. I shout sing along. Doesn’t matter what it is—Top 40, country music, the songs I remember from the nineties, the Cure, the Cranberries, new and old Tejano, Michael Salgado and Intocables, and old conjuntos, Los Relampagos and Los Tigres del Norte and Los Cadetes de Linares looping over and over again.

When the whispers began, I tried to outrun them, first on the treadmill then at the university track. I tried weights. I tried punching the bag in the garage. I tried jerking off. I tried drinking. At home and then at the bar down the street. And then at the icehouse on the far edge of town. I thought about going across the border to the bars in Reynosa or Progreso, thought about how it wasn’t safe anymore, thought about how, even on good days, it pissed me off to deal with the border patrol and the checkpoints. I didn’t grow up like you—I wasn’t used to their omnipresence, to the constant questioning of my citizenship. I thought I might take a swing at one of them if I was drunk. So I stayed away from the bridges that would take me across. I stayed on the roads. Listened to the wind and the music.

I’m always home by the time the sun rises. Early enough to shed all of my clothes and warm our bed and for my eyes to become bleary with sleep before you arrive. I hear your car park in the driveway, hear your keys at the door, hear you make tea and drink it in the kitchen, hear the groan when you take off your shoes. And you sit there for a bit and breathe. And when you come to bed, I greet you with open arms and hold you tight. You tuck your face into my neck, and I breathe in the scent of your hair. And you tell me about your day. Sometimes we laugh. Sometimes we cry. And we lie there, breathing together until the alarm goes off, and I have to leave you, get showered and dressed, go to work. I sleep enough, I guess. I stay awake all day. I sleep on the nights you’re home with me. The rest of the time, it’s an hour here, an hour there. I start awake, find myself patting my own chest, feel a phantom warmth smaller than the palm of my hand over my heart.

Unlike you, no one’s life depends on how awake I am. I don’t love my job. But it’s a living, and sometimes that’s enough. I took it when we moved here and you were starting your residency. I sit in a cubicle all day, looking over reports, checking numbers and names, comparing endless streams of data for eight hours. The phone never stops ringing with people calling to ask me questions. For lunch, I walk over to the taqueria next door. Sit in the corner by the jukebox, back to the door, and eat my enchiladas while I take in the music. The waitress brings me limonada without having to ask me. There’s a streak of grey in her hair. She calls me, “mijo,” asks after you, and always tells me to get some rest, that I’m too young to have such tired-looking eyes. I pat the hand she puts on my shoulder and tell her in Spanish that I know that my mother, from the other world, would thank her for taking such good care of me. The name tag on her ruffled Mexican blouse says, “Altagracia.” You’ve never met her, but she knows all about you—how we met, your family, your job, your favorite foods, what we’ve done every weekend and every holiday for the last five years. She adds the “ita” of affection to your name, calls you “la Raquelita,” and I don’t doubt that she’d greet you like a long-lost daughter if you ever walked in through the door.

On the way back to my little beige cubicle, the urracas make their harsh cries, wings moving this way and that, dark eyes following my steps. I think of you when I see them. You love their cacophony. Their quick eyes.

I’ve never told you, but I loved a boy once. Loved him for his dark skin and the sadness of his eyes and for the way he dug his fingers into me when he held me. He was also from here and knew the sounds of all the birds. He taught me their names, their cries, their songs. Not just owls and crows but palomas and urracas and golondrinas and garzas and ruiseñores and chachalacas and cenzontles. He taught me the silhouettes of golden eagles and vultures, roadrunners and bob white quails, by tracing them over and over on my skin. I hardly had to say his name, Abel. I’d just cry out like a grackle the way he’d taught me, and he’d turn to look at me.

We met the very first week of our first semester of college. I didn’t tell my father about him. He didn’t tell his family about me. Before he ever said the word love, he said, “If they knew, my brother would fight over who’d put a bullet between my eyes.” Neither of us went home for Christmas break—his family in Texas and my family in Nebraska were too far and too poor for them to come and visit. Spring came and went. Our last night together, he wept in my arms. I called him every day that summer, left messages with a woman who only spoke Spanish. He never called me back. Eventually, she started to hang up when she’d hear my voice, and then the number was disconnected. When fall came, I went back but he didn’t. I couldn’t sleep. I’d wake up screaming, wake up calling for him. With time, the silence froze something inside me, but the bird songs stayed with me. I took to staring out an open window, even when winter came, even when the temperature dropped below freezing and there were hardly any birds in the sky.

It was because of him that I learned to love you. I knew your name before I ever spoke to you. Had seen you in class a dozen times, seen you talking to your friends, seen you across the room at a party or two. I’d even thought you had beautiful eyes. But I’d never talked to you—until the day I passed by you with your friends and heard you describing the urracas you loved, how they swarmed and flipped and wheeled in the sky above the grocery store parking lots back home. Thousands every evening. All of those splintered wings and their deafening sound. Your voice was filled with such longing. Later that afternoon, you were sitting alone at one of the cafés on campus. I decided to approach you, ask you something about a class assignment. We ended up deciding to meet over pizza to talk about our papers. We shut the place down; I walked you back to your building and then walked home in a daze.

Since then, my heart has belonged to you only. But that first night in South Texas, when you were introducing me to your parents, I heard the cenzontles and they made me think of him and I felt a little less like a stranger. I knew the names of the birds. Their songs already lived in my bones. And I knew your home could be mine.

I graduated but stayed with you because I refused to risk what we had to distance. I worked until you graduated too. We moved to California while you went to med school. I worked while you studied and then the pull of the border became too much.

I’d lived with the whispering for a while before I thought to mention it to you. We were sipping coffee with our pan dulce, both of us reading at the kitchen table. You lifted your head up for a second, titled it like a bird, and gave me an odd look. You turned away without saying anything. I knew what it meant when your face turned to stone and your silence swallowed everything. There were things you wouldn’t discuss, and if I insisted, you’d go to the small unadorned room farthest from our bedroom. You’d said it’d be your hobby room and double as a guest bedroom, but it didn’t even have a bed in it. Just a single chair. The first time I found you there, your eyes were closed and you were silent, shaking and shaking in that chair.

I didn’t bring up the whispering again, even when it started to follow me everywhere. For the first few years, I only paid attention to it at night when I was alone. It followed me to work and when I went jogging and when I ran errands. It was there when I was with you, growing so loud I could hear it even when we were with your family—the cacophony of voices, music, TV, children, and pets unable to drown it out entirely.

I started driving at night when the whispering stopped being whispering and became distinct voices. Men and women and children. Sad, angry, happy, lonely, lost, demanding. In English and Spanish and languages whose names I didn’t know. Sometimes it seemed like they were praying. Reminiscing. Weeping or laughing or screaming or whimpering or calling out for someone who never answered. Sometimes I can barely understand what they’re saying, but the voices grow louder and then fade and then grow louder again. And sometimes I go suddenly deaf—the voices and all the sounds of the world gone. And it feels as if my insides have been scraped at, leaving parts of me raw that should never be touched.

I haven’t spoken to them. I don’t even know if they know I can hear them. I imagine it would be worse if they were trying to get my attention. If every plaintive cry began with, “Antonio, Antonio.” Almost every night, I drive, keeping my eyes on the road, letting the wind and the music drown out the voices. I drive until I’m so exhausted I sleep even with all their voices booming and ricocheting inside my head.

I’m not imagining them. I’m not losing my mind. They’re real. I’ve never heard the voices of the dead before, but I know that’s what they are. I want to tell them they have the wrong guy. They’re not my ancestors. My family never passed through here. Not this land, not this river, not these roads, not even this sky. Why did they choose me when they could choose one of their own? Someone born and nurtured on this land, someone taught to speak, sing, pray here? I don’t know what they want. They’re not asking for my help. They just gather around me as if they’re moths, and I’m giving off some light I don’t know how to turn off.

I have deaths curled inside of me. Layered and limned with my grief. I lost my mother when I was little, my brother soon after I met you, my grandparents after we married, some friends, and now, too, our daughter. None of your people have died. Your parents, your grandparents, your great-grandparents, all of your sisters and brothers are still living.

I know our daughter was your first death. But you won’t call it that. Never born, you said, only sixteen weeks. As if that wasn’t enough time to start thinking of names, to imagine how she’d have your water-straight hair and your dimples. “Socorro,” I’d breathed against your barely rounded belly. Before you told me, I’d dreamt of a little girl riding on my shoulders, a little girl with my mother’s name. I heard her laughter and felt her tiny hands in mine.

I dream her all the time. Small enough to fit inside the palm of my hand—my little ruby-hearted girl. Perfect tiny limbs, fingers, toes. Her little belly. Her little arms. I wait, breathless, to see her eyes open, but they never do. Her flesh a rosy color. The tremendous pulse of her heart pulsing through her entire body. Sometimes I look for her when I’m awake. I get lost in our house wondering why I can’t find the nursery. I wake up thinking I hear her crying.

You won’t speak of it. I’ve never seen you cry. But sometimes something moves over your face that reminds me of the ocean, and I know you’re thinking of her. If I stay silent, you’ll stay in the kitchen but move to stand by the sink. Your mourning place. You keep your face turned away from me. And if I stand behind you and wrap my arms around you, you’ll lean against me but push my arms up so that they are wrapped around your shoulders instead of your waist. It doesn’t matter. I’m here if the day comes that you need to cry. I’m here even if that day never comes.

The first time we made love, I tasted my own tears on your skin. I didn’t know who else to go to when they called to say my brother had died. A car accident. No alcohol, no drugs; he just took the curve too fast and spun out of control. No seatbelt. Died instantly when he burst through the windshield. My little brother Armando gone, just like that.

Tears were streaming down my face when I knocked on your door. You let me to sit on your bed then crawled into my lap and wrapped your arms and legs around me while I sobbed on your neck. Even now, all these years later, when my lips are on your skin, I can still taste those tears. Or perhaps I’m tasting yours, all the tears you’ve never released, restless oceans pushing up against the surface of you.

It would have been simpler if I could have convinced you when the voices were only whispers. Or when it was only voices, because then I started to see their faces in my dreams. And then when I was awake. Shadows inhabiting all reflective surfaces. The bathroom mirror, the kitchen stove, my coffee mug, the car windshield, storefronts, anywhere, everywhere. All of them strangers. Sometimes they seemed to be looking at me. I learned to ignore them, learned to avoid focusing on their eyes, their mouths.

I went with you because it was your family’s tradition to go to the Shrine in San Juan on Sundays. We arrived first and waited on the sidewalk until your parents and grandparents and siblings and cousins arrived. There were hugs and kisses and handshakes and shoulder thumps in greeting. At least thirty of us when we started walking toward the Shrine. Palm trees and oak trees and acres of green grass. Concrete beds of overflowing flowers. It was always beautiful and grand. I would have preferred the outside grotto at the San Juditas Tadeo church that you and I went to when we wanted to pray, but your family preferred to get dressed up and come to the Shrine. I kept you close to me, my hand spread across your back, my thumb touching your bare skin. The sight, scent, touch, taste of you made the voices recede. I didn’t know why it worked that way. If it was because you didn’t believe in such things, if it was because you dealt with life and death every day, if it was because we had always been each other’s refuge.

I took your hand as we climbed up the steps. You gave me a worried glance when the first step inside the building sent a jolt through my entire body. I held your hand too tightly, but I managed to nod. You seemed reassured. The sound of trumpets, violins, guitars, and guitarrones filled the altar space and then rose in a wave toward us. The music sent the voices colliding into each other, rendering their words unintelligible. We took our seats in the pew. An intense brightness filled my sight, until I couldn’t tell where one thing ended and another began. The line of mariachis became one blur of blue with shining metallic streaks. The priest’s face and hands merged with his robes. Even the Virgen de San Juan on the wall—the blue of her dress wavered, as if it were water reflecting sunlight rather than wood and turquoise paint.

Only her face was as I remembered it, dark and serene. Her eyes black and radiant. When it was time to kneel, I looked to her, looked only to her, and prayed with my heart in my throat:

Milagrosa, make it stop. I can’t do this. One man can’t contain all of this. Can’t channel it. I will lose my mind if this goes on much longer. What do I do, Virgencita? Any moment now, they’ll learn my name and then their voices will never stop. I can barely sleep. Barely work. All I hear is them. I am not strong enough to bear this. To hear them. To carry them. Help me. Please help me.

The voices and all the colors came crashing back as soon as we stepped through the doors of the Shrine. I put both hands to my head, unable to take another step. Spikes of pain. You wrapped your arms around me as if you feared I was dizzy. I heard your parents saying my name. You made our apologies and took me home. I leaned my head back and closed my eyes, the voices too close, too urgent when you weren’t touching me.

The house was dark and cool. You put my arm over your shoulders and took me to our bedroom. I shrugged off my guayabera after you unbuttoned it. Took off my undershirt. Shoes and pants. Laid down on top of the comforter in my boxers. You were gone for a second but then came back with a cool compress for my eyes.

I took hold of your wrist, “Don’t go away, lie down with me.” I heard you slip off the strappy sandals and the salmon pink dress you’d worn. Earrings and bracelets and rings clacking onto the night stand. I sighed when you lay down on your side against me, and I felt the long bare expanse of your skin. The voices gentled.

“Antonio, what’s wrong? What’s happening?” It wasn’t the time to tell you. It was too late. There was too much and too little to tell. It would have been different if you’d asked me when it was just whispering. “Just let me hold you, Raquel. I feel better when I hold you,” I kissed your temple, and you sighed when I pulled you on top of me, wanting to feel not just your skin but your weight on me. So that I could pretend you’d never leave our bed. That I would spend the rest of my life like this, your body on mine holding the voices at bay.

I slept for the first time in days. When I woke, you’d already left bed. We had dinner, your eyes dark and worried the whole time. I didn’t know what to tell you. The voices were too loud, and the light was so bright I kept wincing. Before you left the hospital, you brought me a class of water and painkillers. “We’re talking about this when I get back, Antonio,” you shrugged with one last helpless look before you picked up your keys and opened the door to the garage.

I don’t know if I slept or not. If it was one hour or many. The bathroom mirror showed me a man with swollen eyes. Beard stubble. Sweat-drenched hair. Alone with the voices. With the faces. They kept whispering my name. Over and over, in looping chains, so that the o at the end merged with the A at the beginning, creating a new name for me. A name without end.

I shoved on my sneakers and headed to the garage, passing by the kitchen counter where a single religious candle burned. The Virgen de San Juan. I touched the cool base, watching the light flicker and flare across the dark room. I remembered my prayer, the blurring colors, the sharp pain I’d felt. I leaned forward to read the prayer on the back, but the only words I could distinguish were, “the Way of Life which gives meaning to moments of sorrow.” There’s always a candle burning on the counter—a second one always lit before the first goes dark.

The voices left me unable to think, but it had all become habit. Car door. Ignition. Garage door. Windows down to let the hot air out. Warm wind poured in. I didn’t know where I was going. I just wanted to go fast. Fast so that the wind was louder than their voices. A few turns and a couple of miles between our quiet neighborhood and Highway 107. And I saw their faces everywhere I looked, under the streetlights, in the headlights of oncoming traffic, in the rearview mirror. I refused to look at them, didn’t want to see their mouths shaping my name—oantonioantonioantonioan. . . .

I’m not in Edinburg anymore. It’s dark out here. My foot presses harder on the gas pedal. The radio seems louder, all fluttering accordions and rolling drums. Other towns pass in quick-lit blurs. I stop reading the city-limits signs. I turn and turn and turn on impulse. I stop reading the signs that tell me how many miles it is to San Antonio. How many miles to South Padre. North. South. East. West. One and then the other and the other. Where I go doesn’t matter, only that I go. I don’t want the city, and I’m not going to the beach. That much I know. It’s not the ocean I want tonight. The night smells different now—more earth, more green. Finally, it’s cool enough that the earth has begun to release the day’s heat. The scent is what life would smell like if life didn’t depend on blood.

The voices are getting louder. I turn up the radio. I barely brake turning onto a caliche road. Don’t slow down even though the road is uneven and narrow. I want the wind to tear me away. I imagine a cyclone whirling on the road, tossing up me and the car and all the faces, all of us spinning and spinning until we’re flung away from each other and into the silent sky.

I hear it right away—the small sound. Much softer than the voices, the wind, the music. It’s not calling my name, but I know it’s meant for me. It’s mine. It’s so dark here it’s hard to make out where the turnaround is. Barely enough reflectors to keep the tires off the grass. And then I floor it. As fast as I can go, following the soft sound. Sometimes I think I see animals in the shadows. Sometimes I see people, their faces too bright, surprised by my headlights at this hour of the night. The city-limits signs come and go again. If I’m thirsty or hungry, I don’t feel it. If I was tired or sleepy, that’s gone too. I’m listening as hard as I can, entering the ramp for the freeway, swerving around eighteen-wheelers and cars and pickup trucks.

It’s not as if I’m responding to my name. Or your voice. It’s almost like something I felt in those first delirious months of falling in love with you. As if I could feel you thinking of me when we were apart. As if something of me was twisting and pulling against something of you. That’s what this was. A pull on my insides, as if something was threatening to unravel if I didn’t listen, didn’t respond, didn’t follow.

The wind was changing. A slight coolness. The scent of sweet green things. I pull over on the side of the road by brush and mesquites. Hope that my car doesn’t draw the attention of the Border Patrol. I walk in the dark. For a long time, constantly scanning every direction. But there’s no one to stop me. Only one light on the sign at the entrance. No security. My feet know the way. I’ve been here a hundred times. Raquel and I were here only a few weeks ago, protesting the wall they want to build here. The wall that will desecrate one of the last few wild places. The branches of the trees move serenely in the wind, as they have moved, undisturbed, all their lives. Even though there’s hardly any light, the little neon orange flags marking a line on the ground are as obscene as they are in full daylight. I fall on my hands and knees, the voices swirling around me and start pulling the flags out of tehground. The earth is soft beneath me. The earth is solid. I can hear the river. Smell it. The trees are wide shadows, more alive than I am. But I know what’s possible. Remember how horrified I was the first time I saw the endless concrete of the California–Mexico border. San Diego so green and so blue and then the roads to Tijuana and the shock of towering walls—the earth burned, razed, salted. Pale dead earth as far as the eye could see. The lights. The Border Patrol trucks. The uniformed men with guns.

Here in this natural place there is no concrete. There are no walls. Only these little orange flags marking death, death, death. In this darkness, I can’t see the faces, but the voices are growing louder. You can feel it here, a shuddering under the skin. How the river here connects to the river everywhere. How the river carries hopes and dreams and losses and anguish. How the river is both water and blood. How the earth here weeps and sings at the same time. How it longs to be like the quiet earth elsewhere. And I understood that the voices were telling their own stories and the stories they’d been trusted with and the stories of this land that no longer had a voice to speak them. And my story was one of those stories. The faces had been witnessing, telling my story, braiding my story into all the stories that lived in this earth, connecting me, making me theirs.

There’s a sudden dip I don’t see in enough time and I go sprawling. End up on my back and only realize when I see the blurring stars that I’m sobbing. I couldn’t hear myself over the voices. Couldn’t feel my chest with the flags in my hands. The voices sound like they’re sobbing too, but it’s only my name, on loop, on loop, on loop, drumming at my temples.

The small sound is constant.

And then the wind stops. And then the voices stop. Completely. They stop completely.

I am alone.

No, not alone.

It wasn’t fog that had slowly crept toward me but a mass of shadowed figures. There was the rushing of wings and the silhouettes of birds in flight. And the soft sound, louder now that the voices were gone. I could feel it under my skin. I wiped at my eyes with both hands, and knew I was streaking my face with dirt.

He was whistling the song of the golondrinas and cradling something I couldn’t see. My eyes were busy devouring his face. He looked exactly as I remembered him, hardly a day older. He smiled at me the way he used to smile at me, his eyes crinkling the way they’d always crinkled.

“Abel,” I breathed.

He was so close, impossibly close. And I closed my eyes the way I’d always closed them when he was close. His lips on mine. Impossibly light. Impossibly soft. And I leaned into him the way I’d always leaned into him.

“Antonio,” he whispered, drawing back, “Here, I’ve been taking care of her for you.”

And the small sound filled me. She wasn’t crying, wasn’t whimpering. She was humming. She was so tiny in my hands. As beautiful as she’d been in my dreams. My little ruby-hearted girl. She opened her eyes. As wise and black as yours. Her little hand tried to grasp my fingertip. I held her up to my cheek, humming the lullaby my mother had hummed to me. And the small sound became a large sound, a thunderous sound. Her body, tiny and powerful, rumbled with it. And my hands warmed and started to radiate a golden light. And even in the blanket she was swaddled in, I could see her ruby light flashing like a jewel through her skin. Her heart beating fast like a hummingbird’s.

I don’t know how long I stood there holding her and looking into her black eyes. It was still dark when I heard Abel’s voice again.

His voice was soft, “Come back whenever you want. We’ve been telling your story. Your mother and brother are almost here.”

I stared at him. He held out his hands. I didn’t want to give her back, but I knew we were running out of time. He held her delicately, reverently, as the light of her dimmed.

“One of us will always be waiting here for you. We’ll teach you how to live with the voices.”

 In the night, the birds wheeling around us were almost silent. I stood there, watched their shadows draw away, watched the darkness lighten bit by bit.

The voices returned, but this time I didn’t fight them. And somehow, though they were still loud, it no longer hurt. I walked and walked. Trying to understand what it meant to let them in, to let them flow through me, to feel like I was walking with one foot in this world and the other in theirs. Soft earth, soft light, soft river. And underneath it all, the small sound. Alive in me.

It’s okay, Raquel. I can tell you everything now. Or at least, as much as you can bear to listen to. I know what I am now. I am a bridge. The voices will always be with me. And it will be my work to listen to them—while I work, while I live, while I love you, while life moves forward. And when you’re ready to see our Ruby, I’ll bring you here. There’s nothing to fear. Everything is here. Abel. Our little ruby-hearted girl. Soon, my mother and my brother and all my lost ones. Here amongst the wind and the trees and the river. The voices and the light and the humming. And the birds. All the birds.

Sáenz, Benjamin Alire. “The Rule Maker.” Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club. Cinco Puntos Press: 2012.

 1.

  There are things I still remember about growing up in Juárez: I remember the name of my school, Escuela Carlos Amaya. I remember my first grade teacher’s name, Laura Cedillos. I wanted her to be my mother, not because she was pretty, but because she was so nice and smelled like flowers. I remember the playground, cement and dirt and grass that never really grew up to become a lawn because it was never watered and because we stomped the ground until it was a fine powder. We couldn’t pound anything else but we could pound the dirt.

  I remember the fence around the school, a fence that was there to make us feel safe. I remember the first time I got into a fight. I wasn’t any good at it. I was eight and Marcos Manriquez punched me right in the stomach and I writhed on the ground in pain. “¡Levantate!” he screamed. But I just lay there on the ground and refused to get up. Everyone laughed at me and called me a joto and all the other mean names kids call each other. I don’t think I cared that they called me names. It didn’t bother me because I didn’t think it was a good thing to know how to fight, to use your fists on other people. I never liked the idea of hurting other people—and if that made me a joto, then I guess that’s what I was. Not that I knew what joto meant at the time.

 And anyway, after that fight, Marcos and I became friends. Marcos had good fists. But he had a better heart. He was the best friend I ever had. We rode our bikes around the streets of my neighborhood yelling and screaming and laughing. And then one day my bike got stolen.

  I never really knew where my mother got the money for us to live. We had an okay house, small, two bedrooms, a living room, a bathroom, a kitchen. The walls were all painted white—except the yellow and blue kitchen. My mother had a picture of San Martín Caballero in her kitchen. San Martín was a gentleman on a horse and he was offering a beggar his cloak. I don’t know why I remember that. I guess you could say he became my patron saint because I’ve always given beggars on the streets all the change in my pockets. I didn’t have a cloak like San Martín Caballero, but I always had a quarter and a few pennies.

  The small house where I grew up was clean—but it was clean because I taught myself how to clean a house. It’s not a bad thing to teach yourself things. And besides, I didn’t want the house I lived in to be dirty and I didn’t want the house to smell bad. I sometimes sprayed the house with my mother’s perfume. Except my room. I didn’t spray my room with anything. It smelled like old books and it probably smelled like me. Maybe my room didn’t smell so good, but I took a shower every day and I always brushed my teeth and combed my hair. And I washed my own clothes.

There wasn’t a father in the house. I didn’t know if my mother had been married or not married and nobody ever said anything about him. I remember asking her once, “Do you have a picture of my father?”

  She looked right at me and said, “Nunca quiero que me preguntes de tu papá.” I knew it was serious business because she almost always spoke to me in English. When she spoke to me in Spanish, it meant I’d better listen. She had this thing that I had to learn English, even though I lived in Juárez. She said I was a U.S. citizen and that I should know the language of my country. But Juárez was the only country I knew—and it was the only country I cared about. She’d bring me to El Paso sometimes and I’d play with my cousins and we spoke both languages, English and Spanish. But El Paso wasn’t Juárez and it wasn’t mine and I always felt that I was just a visitor there.

  I had a friend named Jorge who lived next door. I liked Jorge’s family because even though my mother disappeared for days, they always watched out for me. And Jorge’s dad was good to me and he would take me and Jorge with him to do things and I sometimes felt like he was my dad—only I knew he wasn’t. I was sad sometimes, but not sad, sad, sad. Just sad in a normal way, I think.

  I liked my life when I lived in Juárez. And even though I was sad sometimes, I was also happy sometimes. I loved my mother and it’s not as if she was really mean to me. I knew she had lots of problems. People can’t help it when they have problems. Everyone in the world has problems—even rich people. At least that’s what Jorge’s father said. Jorge’s mother said that maybe it was true that rich people had problems too. But she also said, “If the rich don’t care about the problems of the poor, then why should the poor care about the problems of the rich?”

  The rich and the poor, they were big topics of conversation in Jorge’s house. In my house too.

2.

My mother never hit me, not once, not ever, and she kissed me just when I needed to be kissed. She would read books to me in English and I liked listening to her voice. I asked her where she had learned to read and speak in English. She said her mother had sent her to Loretto High School in El Paso. It was a good school, a Catholic girls’ school. “Those were the best days,” she said, “but we lost all our money.” My mother hated being poor. I told her once, “We’re not so poor.”

  She glared at me.

  “We have food and a house and—”

  She stopped me cold in the middle of my sentence. “What does a boy know about money?”

  I didn’t argue with her. My mother didn’t like people to disagree with her.

  All my aunts lived in El Paso and sometimes we would stay with them on weekends. My aunts, they weren’t really rich. But they weren’t really poor, either. When we went to El Paso, my mother would take me shopping and buy me clothes. She told me once, “The clothes here are a better quality.” She had this thing about quality. She liked elegant and beautiful things. She had lots of jewelry and she wore it all the time—rings and necklaces and earrings and bracelets. I think she probably thought my father wasn’t a quality man. Or maybe he couldn’t buy her quality—elegant, beautiful things. All he gave her was me.

 I just couldn’t get my mind off where my mom got the money to buy me clothes, to pay for rent, to buy food, to do anything. She had a car and she had the money to put gas in it and she had nice dresses—but she didn’t work. She told me she did, but I knew she didn’t.

  When I was about nine, things started to get weird. My mother started to disappear more and more. I would come home from school and the house would be empty. Sometimes she would be gone for more than a week. She would give me money to buy myself food or whatever I needed. She never gave me Mexican pesos. It was always American dollars. Sometimes when I woke up in the morning, there was no one home but me. And then sometimes she would spend days and days in bed. I would make her soup. Well, I didn’t actually make the soup. I just went to the store and bought it and opened the can and warmed it up. She didn’t eat it anyway. I didn’t know what was wrong. And I asked her, “Maybe you should go to a doctor?”

  “A doctor?” she said.

  “Yeah. I think maybe you’re sick.”

  She gave me one of her looks. I didn’t like those looks. It was her way of slapping me. We lived that way for about a year, her slapping me with her looks.

  And after awhile, I didn’t want to be around my mother anymore. It made me sad. And it made me mad too.

One day a man knocked on the door. I was reading a book and I had the radio on. I never knew whether I should open the door or not. My mom never gave me too many rules. She did tell me I shouldn’t speak to strangers. But I spoke to strangers all the time and nothing bad ever happened. So I just decided to answer the door. A man stood there and he seemed nice. He was wearing a suit and he was wearing cologne and he seemed nice. “Is your mother here?” he asked. His English was perfect.

  “No,” I said. “She’s not here.”

  “Do you know when she’ll be back?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Your English is good,” he said.

  “I speak Spanish too,” I said. “I like Spanish better than English.”

  He laughed. He took out a big brown envelope. “Give this to your mother,” he said.

  I nodded.

  He reached into his pocket and gave me a ten dollar bill. “This is for you,” he said.

  I nodded. And when my mother came home, I gave her the envelope and told her he’d given me ten dollars.

  She looked at me and said, “Don’t ever answer the door if I’m not here.” She gave me a crooked smile. “I have to get dressed. Now, go on and play with Jorge.”

  She always told me that. “Go on and play with Jorge.”

  So that’s the way it was. I spent a lot of time at Jorge’s house. Not that I minded. And Jorge and his family, they didn’t mind either. His mother was nice and I ate dinner there almost every night and I would teach her a little English. And my life was okay. Eating at Jorge’s became normal and Jorge felt like a brother. He and Marcos didn’t get along, and that wasn’t so great, but they both liked me and somehow we managed to hang out together all the time. We were like a team. Since my bike had been stolen, they got together and stole another bike—and gave it to me. That made me really happy. You really have to like someone to steal a bike for them.

  But when I’d come home, I was alone. I hated that. I would read books. And I would watch television. I liked the telenovelas. When I got tired of telenovelas, I would draw. I liked to draw. Sometimes I think books and telenovelas and drawing saved my life.

3.

It was a Thursday, I remember that. That evening, my mother came walking through the door. She was drunk. Really drunk. She kissed me and I could smell cigarettes and alcohol on her breath. She told me she was sorry, sorry for everything and that everything was going to change. Everything was going to be better. I helped her get to bed. I gave her a glass of water. In the morning when I woke up, she was still sleeping. I got ready for school. I didn’t need her help with that. When I came home that Friday afternoon, my mother was making dinner. I remember that meal. She made sopa de fideo and chiles rellenos. It was the best meal I’d ever had. I studied her and I knew she was sad and there was nothing I could do to make her happy.

  And then she said, “Let’s spend the night in El Paso.”

  “Sounds great,” I said.

  We crossed the bridge and my mother showed the border guys her passport and then we took a taxi to my aunt’s house.

  I remember watching television with my cousins. I remember my mom telling me that she had to leave and that she would be back in the morning. I remember seeing a strange look on my aunt’s face.

 I slept on a bed with my cousin Rafie. I was afraid my mother wasn’t coming back. But she did come back. She had a suitcase with her. The suitcase was full of all my clothes.

  I looked at her and she said, “I’m going to take you to meet your father.”

  I didn’t say anything. Maybe I did. I don’t remember. I was scared. That’s what I remember.

  My aunt drove us to the place where my father lived, a small house that was close to downtown. When we stopped, my mother got out and knocked on the door. A man came out. He was thin and handsome and tall and had black hair. My aunt was watching me. “That’s your father,” she said. “You look like him.”

  I nodded.

  I noticed that my mother and the man who was my father were arguing. I couldn’t hear what they were saying. They were standing on the front porch of the red brick house. Finally, I heard my mother yelling “You sonofabitch, you have to fucking take him!”

  She put the suitcase on the steps of the porch and walked away.

She opened the door to the car and looked at me. “You’re going to live with your father.” She sounded angry.

  I didn’t say anything. I wanted to ask her why all of this was happening. But I knew she wasn’t going to tell me. My mother never liked to talk about anything.

  I got out of the car and looked at her.

  She looked back at me. “Do you hate me?”

  I didn’t know if I hated her or not. I just wanted to go back to Juárez. I wanted to go back to my life.

  She asked me again. “Do you hate me?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I hate you.” And then I just walked toward the man who was my father. I didn’t look back, didn’t wave, didn’t say goodbye. If she didn’t want me, then I didn’t want her either.

  That was the last time I saw her.

  I didn’t hate her.

4.

 I remember my father staring at the suitcase sitting on the steps. “Your mother says you speak English.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “That’s good,” he said.

  We kept studying each other.

I was thin like him. I had his hazel eyes, his thick brown hair, his thin lips. I even had dimples like him. “Your mother didn’t tell me about you.”

  “She didn’t tell me about you either.”

  “Yeah, well, your mother doesn’t like to talk. I have that in common with her.” He didn’t seem all that happy to have me around. “I didn’t plan on this.” Then he mumbled something and I didn’t quite understand what he’d said. He spoke with a Texas accent even though he looked Mexican. I didn’t like it. He shook his head at me. “You don’t talk much, do you?”

  “Mom said I shouldn’t talk to strangers.”

  That made him laugh. “So you’re a fucking comedian.”

  I didn’t think it was funny.

  He took me inside the house. It was neat and spare. He had a leather chair and a leather couch and a television. There was a rug on the wood floor. There wasn’t much to the kitchen. He had a stove and a refrigerator but he didn’t have pots, pans, spices, stuff like that. He had a coffeemaker. I guess he didn’t cook much. I didn’t know how to cook either so I guess I thought I was going to have to learn.

  The bathroom was really dirty. There were a couple towels on the floor and the toilet had stains and the bathroom mirror was broken. “Your job is to keep this bathroom clean,” he said. “I’ll get you some cleaning stuff. I’ll fix that mirror. You do know how to clean, don’t you?”

  I nodded.

  He showed me a bedroom in the back. “This is your room,” he said. There was nothing in it. He looked at me. I guess I looked sad. “You can cry. But after the first week, no more crying. I don’t like people who cry about things.”

  He had a big black pick-up truck that was sparkling clean. We drove to a huge home improvement store. I’d never been in a store that big. We bought paint. I got to pick the color. I picked white. I picked a lamp. I picked a rug for my room. He bought cleaning supplies. “I want you to keep your room clean. And the kitchen, keep that clean too.”

And then we went to a furniture store. He bought me a one-person bed. He bought me a bookshelf and a desk. “You’re going to study,” he said. “You’re going to read books, you’re going to make straight A’s in school. If you don’t, you’ll be out on the goddamned streets.”

  I nodded.

  Then we went to another store and he bought me some blankets for my bed and some curtain rods and some curtains. We painted the room that afternoon. Mostly, he painted it. I watched, but I did the corners with a brush just like he told me to. We didn’t talk. He didn’t ask me questions. I didn’t ask him questions either. He listened to country music. I had never listened to the radio in English and I thought that the songs were sad.

  I slept on the couch that night.

  I was sad and I was confused. It took me a long time to fall asleep. I listened to all the sounds on the street, an ambulance, the train, cars coming and going. I thought, at first, that my life in El Paso was going to be just like my life in Juárez—only the language would be different. I tried not to think about bad things. I tried not to think about my mother. But I did think about her and I thought about Marcos and Jorge and then I started to cry and I cried for a long time. And then I stopped.

  And really, my father didn’t seem to be such a bad guy. He wasn’t nice like Jorge’s father, but he was getting stuff for me and making sure I had my own room and I knew he was going to give me rules that I had to follow, and if I followed them, then he’d take care of me.

When I woke up in the morning, we moved the furniture in. He hung up my curtains. He told me to sweep and mop the floor.

  I nodded.

  “So do it then,” he said. “Then make your bed.”

  He looked around the room and nodded. “I’m going to take a shower,” he said.

  I walked around the house. There was a nice big room with lots of windows that faced the backyard. It had a brick floor and I liked the room a lot but it didn’t have anything in it. It was empty and that’s how I felt—empty. I walked into the backyard. It was just dirt and weeds and a nice big tree.

  I walked to the living room and thought about watching television but I didn’t feel like it, so I walked out to the front porch and sat on the front steps. There was a newspaper in the front yard and I sat on the steps and started to read it.

  I could hear the bells of the cathedral and then I heard my father’s voice. “You’re going to church. I’ll let you skip this Sunday. But starting next Sunday, you’re going to church every week. Have you made your communion?”

  “No,” I said.

  “How old are you?”

  “Ten.”

  “You should have made your communion,” he said.

  “Mom didn’t go to church,” I said.

  “I don’t go to church either,” he said. “But that’s no excuse.” He shook his head. Then he looked at me, like he was studying me. “What’s your name?”

  “Maximiliano.”

  “They call you Max?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s your last name?”

  “Gonzalez.”

  “That’s your mother’s name. We’ll have to fix that. Your last name’s McDonald.”

  “McDonald? You’re not Mexican?”

  “Yeah, I’m Mexican. Look, not every Mexican has a Mexican name.” He laughed. “Maximiliano McDonald.” He laughed again. “It’s got a ring to it. Where were you born?”

  I shrugged. “Here. El Paso. But I don’t know where.”

  “Guess I’ll have to do some paperwork. Have that name changed. Legally, I mean.” He looked at his watch. “I’ll be gone for the day. I have some business.” He took out a twenty dollar bill. “Get yourself some food. If you walk down that way,” he pointed directly ahead of us, “and you walk up Mesa Street, you’ll find places.” He put a key in my hand. “Don’t lose it or I’ll kick your ass.” He started walking toward his pickup truck in the driveway. He turned back, “And don’t ever walk into my room. Not ever.”

  When my father left, I cleaned the bathroom. That took a while. Then I took a shower. I looked through my clothes, hung them up in my closet. They were a little wrinkled. I looked everywhere but I couldn’t find an iron. I’d been ironing my own clothes since I started school. Besides teaching me to read and write in English, it was the only other thing my mother had taught me how to do.

  My mother had put a picture of herself in my suitcase. She was smiling and she looked like she was happy. But photographs lied. They always lied. I put the picture in my desk drawer.

  I put on a T-shirt and I decided to take a walk. I walked all day in every direction. I had nowhere to go and I didn’t have my aunt’s phone number and didn’t know how to get there on my own. I thought of walking over to Juárez but I was afraid of getting lost.

  I bought a yellow pad and some pens and a drawing pad and some pencils and a pencil sharpener. I wasn’t hungry and I didn’t eat anything. I got home before dark and sat at my desk and wrote down all my father’s rules.

  1. Make straight A’s at school.

  2. Clean bathroom and kitchen once a week.

  3. Go to church on Sundays and make my first communion.

  4. Never go into his room.

  5. Don’t lose the key to the house.

  I knew there would be more rules. And I was ready to write them down. So that was the way it was going to be with me and him, this man who was my father. He was the rule maker. I was the rule follower.

  And then I sketched my room and put the sketch pad under my bed. It wasn’t a very good drawing. But I didn’t care.

  And then, before I put my yellow writing pad away, I wrote down my new name: Maximiliano McDonald. I liked Gonzalez better.

5.

  My father sent me to St. Patrick’s. I could walk there from where we lived. I knew the school wasn’t free. My father, who I called Eddie behind his back, said when the time came to go to high school, he was going to send me to Cathedral. I asked him what kind of school that was. “It’

s a Catholic boys’ school.”

  I nodded. I did a lot of nodding around my father.

  I got used to living in El Paso. I had friends. I liked school. I made A’s. There was nothing special about my life. And special wasn’t something I expected. I learned how to cook, sort of. I could fry eggs and I learned to make omelets because my father liked them. I knew how to make hamburgers. We ate a lot of sandwiches. We ate a lot of pizza and take-out food. My father and I would watch television together sometimes. But he went out at night a lot. I think I was numb, that’s what I think. I’ve been numb most of my life. That’s how I’ve survived.

  When school ended that year, I hung out at the house a lot. I checked out books from the library and read and read and read.

  Like my mother, my father didn’t work. He spent a lot of time on the phone and a lot of time in his room and he would take off in his truck. Sometimes he didn’t come home at night. I asked him about that.

  “Are you my mother?” he said. But then he said, “Do you get afraid when you’re alone at night?”

  “No. Mom used to leave me alone all the time.”

  “What kind of a mother does that?”

  I shrugged. “Look, alone doesn’t scare me. It’s just that I worry.”

  “Worry?”

  “What if you don’t come home? What will I do?”

  He didn’t say anything for a while, and then he said. “I like women. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “So don’t worry.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I won’t worry.” And then I asked him, “Why don’t you work?”

  “I do work,” he said. “I’m a businessman.”

  “What kind of businessman?” I asked.

  “You’ll find out on your own,” he said. “And I don’t like you hanging around the house so much.”

  I shrugged. Where was I supposed to go?

  “Listen, Max, you know how to swim?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Learn,” he said.

  Another rule.

  “When’s your birthday?” he asked.

 “Next week. June seventh.”

  “I’ll get you a bike.” That made me happy. He didn’t throw me a birthday party, but then my mother had never thrown me a party either. And anyway, I didn’t like parties. But I liked the bike. I would ride around with Pete, a friend from school. I asked Pete if he knew how to swim and he said yes. So he taught me how to swim. It was a good summer: swimming, reading and riding my bike. It wasn’t such a bad life.

  One afternoon when I got home, there was a man in our living room. “Hi,” I said.

  He nodded at me.

  I looked at him and asked, “Where’s my dad?”

  “He’s getting something for me,” he said.

  I turned on the television.

  My father came into the room with a package wrapped in brown paper. He handed the man the package and the man handed my father a wad of money. They went outside and talked, then the man left.

  When my father came back inside, he looked at me and said, “Never talk about what I do.”

  I nodded.

  He handed me two twenties and a ten. “I’m giving you fifty dollars a month for your allowance.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “If you’re smart, you won’t spend it all and you’ll put some away.”

  “Okay,” I nodded. I wondered if saving money was a rule. It didn’t sound like a rule. It was more like a suggestion. Never talk about what I do. That was a rule. So I started separating suggestions from rules.

  After a while, I figured it out. My father was a drug dealer. I don’t think I cared, not really. And what was I supposed to do about it anyway? Some of his customers seemed really normal. Some guys came by in business suits. Some guys looked liked normal college kids. Others, not so normal. I really liked to study the guys who came to do business with my father if they had tattoos. One guy had a tattoo of a mermaid on his shaved head. I had a thing for tattoos.

  One morning, I asked my father, “Can I get a tattoo?”

  We were eating breakfast. I’d made him a cheese and jalapeño omelet. “No fuckin’ way,” he said.

“Not even if I pay for it with my allowance and the money I save?”

  “I said no fuckin’ way.”

  “So that’s another rule,” I said.

  “You’re goddamned right,” he said.

  I guess I must have looked sad or disappointed because he said, “Look, you’re a good kid, and you’re gonna stay a good kid.”

  “Dad, what if I’m not really good?”

  He smiled. “That’s the first time you’ve ever called me Dad.”

  “You want me to call you Eddie?”

  “No, Dad works.”

  I nodded. “Look, Dad, maybe I’m not a good kid. It’s not like you know me.”

  “You’re soft,” he said.

  “I’m not.” I hated him for saying that.

  He could tell I was mad. He put his hand on my shoulder. He hardly ever touched me. “I know a few things. I know what I see.”

  I did hate him. I did.

6.

  Sometimes I would take out the picture of my mother and stare at it. I took out my pencil and tried to draw her. I couldn’t remember her first name. But I didn’t want to forget her face.

7.

 One day my father came into the room and handed me my birth certificate. I stared at it. I saw the name on the birth certificate: Maximiliano Gonzalez McDonald.

  I looked at my father. “Thought I was gonna have to change your name. Turns out you had my name all along.”

  I nodded.

  “Why’d she name you Maximiliano?”

  “She thought the story of Emperor Maximiliano and the Empress Carlota was romantic.”

  My father laughed—then shook his head. He looked a little sad. “Carlota was mad. Fucking crazy. Just like your mother.”

8.

I made my first communion when I was eleven. I was about four years older than the other kids. Not that I cared all that much. From the very beginning, I knew that I would never be a very good Catholic. I wasn’t interested in God and I didn’t think he was interested in me either. We sort of just ignored each other. I was going to do the Catholic thing because it was one of my father’s rules. I guess he figured that the church thing would make me a better person. But this was what I didn’t really get: if my dad thought that going to church made you a better person, then why didn’t he go to mass? Maybe he didn’t want to be a better person? But if he didn’t want to be a better person, then why would he want me to be a better person? Maybe I thought too much about things.

  On the Saturday before my first communion, my father bought me a new pair of black pants, a new pair of shoes, a new white shirt, my first tie and my first sports coat. He took me to mass that Sunday. It was strange. I was used to going by myself. He was all dressed up, wore a suit and shaved. He looked really handsome. Before he left the house, he handed me a rosary. It was old and worn. He just handed it to me and said, “It belonged to my father.”

 I took it and looked at him. He looked sad. “He came over from Ireland when he was a young man. He settled in Guanajuato. Married a woman named Rosario. I was born in San Antonio. And that about sums up what I have to say about my family history.”

  I wanted to ask him if he’d loved his father, but I thought he’d hate me for asking the question. I smiled at him, “This is better than an allowance.” I put it my pocket.

  After mass, we stood outside the cathedral and one of my friends took a picture of me and my father. My father actually smiled. Then he took me out for breakfast. A woman named Blanca met us at the restaurant. She was pretty and she had a present for me. “I’m a friend of your father’s.”

  I shook her hand. “My name’s Maximiliano,” I said. “Most people call me Max.”

  “It’s a beautiful name,” she said.

  “You can open your present,” she said.

  It was a pen. An expensive one. “Your father says you write a lot.” I wondered if he read the things I wrote in my journal. I thought about making a rule that he couldn’t go in my room either. I smiled at her and thanked her. She was nice and she liked to talk and to laugh. We had a really nice breakfast and I wondered if maybe my father would marry her and quit his business and we could maybe live a normal life. Deep down inside I knew it would never happen.

  Blanca asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up. I could tell my father was interested in my answer. “Well, I’d either like to be a musician or an artist.”

  She smiled at me. “Do you play an instrument?”

  “No.”

  “Do you draw?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  My father was surprised. “What do you draw?” she asked.

  “The tree in the backyard. My room. My desk. My dad’s truck.” I didn’t tell her about drawing my mother over and over again.

  “You’ve been drawing my truck?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He never asked to see that drawing. But a year later, when I was better at drawing, I gave him a charcoal sketch of his truck for Christmas. I framed it and everything.

  “It’s good,” he said. He had a strange look on his face. I thought for a moment that he was going to cry, but my father wasn’t a crier—and the look went away. Just like Blanca had gone away.

9.

 I was a quiet and serious boy. I was even more serious and quiet when I entered high school. I made friends, but they were school friends. I didn’t want anyone coming over to my house. My dad had too many customers coming in and out at all hours of the day and night. And I guess I had a theory as to why my father had bought a house in this neighborhood. The house next door had burned down and no one had bothered to raze it to the ground. The rest of the houses were rentals and the houses weren’t kept up and half the renters around us all seemed like they were potential customers for my father’s business. It was all perfect.

  Our front yard wasn’t kept up and my father wanted to keep it that way. “I like weeds,” he said. “Nothing wrong with weeds. You want a nice lawn in this neighborhood? What’s wrong with you? You want people to notice us?”

  I hated weeds. I guess you could say I always liked everything nice and neat—even though I knew that everything was chaos. I decided to make a deal with my father. I fixed the backyard. I planted some bushes and I grew a nice lawn. It wasn’t a big yard. It had a big fence around it and no one could look in. I think my dad liked the backyard. He bought some lawn chairs and sometimes we would both sit out in the evening. I would read a book and he would read the newspaper. My dad had a thing for reading newspapers.

  About the same time I entered Cathedral High School, my father began using some of the products he sold. He began to smoke marijuana in his room. I could smell it. A lot of the times he would come out of his room and I could tell he was stoned because he whistled. He always whistled when he was stoned.

  One Friday night, I was thinking about meeting some of my school friends at a football game. I was reading a book and eating a sandwich in the kitchen. My father walked in and grabbed a beer from the refrigerator. He sort of smiled at me and patted me on the back. I liked when he did that, but that only happened about twice a year and I would have liked it better if he hadn’t been stoned. “What are you reading?”

  “A story by Hemingway,” I said.

  “Famous guy,” he said. And then he just nodded. “You know, you can drink if you want. Drinking is okay. Just don’t overdo it. And don’t ever drive when you’re drunk.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But you don’t have to worry about me drinking and driving, Dad. I don’t drive.”

  “Aren’t you old enough?”

  “I’ll be sixteen.”

  “June seventh.”

  I was glad he remembered my birthday—even though he didn’t remember how old I was.

  “You can get a permit.”

  “Guess so.”

  “I know a guy who teaches people how to drive. He has a little business.”

  “Is he one of your customers?”

  My father didn’t answer the question. I could tell he didn’t like that I’d asked. I shrugged. “Sorry.”

  My father nodded, downed his beer and said, “Just remember that you can drink.” It almost sounded like another rule. It sounded like I was supposed to start.

  He didn’t come back for a few days, but by then he’d gotten me a cell phone so I could call or text him if I got too worried. He said people who were worriers never changed. “You can’t help it,” he said. He made it sound like worrying was a sickness.

  That Sunday night, I texted him. U ok? A few minutes later, he texted me back. I like wmen. Do ur hmwork. I like women, I like women, I like women. Bullshit, I thought. It’s not just women. It’s women who like to party. By then, I knew from being around my dad’s customers that partying meant drugs plus sex. I knew what he was up to. I tried not to let it upset me, but it did upset me. But what the fuck was I supposed to do about it anyway? I would never rat him out and I would never run away from home. Those were things I just didn’t have in me. I wondered if that made me a good boy or a bad boy. Maybe I was just an afraid boy.

  10.

  A couple of guys came over one evening. I knew what was happening. My father went into his room. The two guys were smoking cigarettes on the porch and I could hear what they were saying. “This connect has good shit.”

  So that’s what my father was—a connect.

  After a few months, I realized my father had what other businessmen would call a diversified portfolio. He dealt in marijuana, cocaine, crack, ecstasy, heroin and crystal meth. I looked up all the drugs on the Internet. I knew all about them.

  My father came into my room one night. All he said was, “If you ever do drugs, I’ll beat the holy shit out of you and kick your ass out on the street.”

When he left my room, I sort of laughed. He was like fucking Moses writing down the Ten Commandments.

  I put the new rule at the top of the list.

11.

My father got a credit card in my name. My allowance increased from fifty dollars a month to a hundred dollars a month—but I was supposed to make the payments on my own credit card. He opened a bank account for me. “How much money have you saved?” he asked me.

  “About four hundred dollars,” I said.

  He nodded. “Good.”

  “You have to learn how to handle your finances.” Another rule.

  These are the things my father bought me that year:

  1. Driving lessons.

  2. An Apple computer.

  3. An iPhone.

  4. A brand new Volkswagen.

  It’s not as if I didn’t know where the money came from. I did wonder how he laundered his money. But I found some lawyer’s name on a business card on the coffee table one day. I didn’t know many things about my father. I knew he didn’t like to talk. And I also knew that he was a very smart man. I guess he was a real businessman.

12.

I had a habit of riding the bus on weekends. I would get on a bus and ride around and think. One Saturday, two women—I guessed they made a living by cleaning houses—were having a conversation. I liked listening to their Spanish and it reminded me of Juárez and of my boyhood. Everything had become so much more complicated since then. I just kept listening to them. One of the women was telling the other woman that the streets of Juárez were becoming rivers of blood. She spoke about a young woman the soldiers took away who was never seen again, and they spoke of the kidnappings and beheadings and houses where people were found tortured. They talked about all the women who had disappeared.

  I drifted away from their conversation, wondering what it would be like to take a gun to someone’s head, to kidnap someone, to torture a man. What would it be like to cut someone’s hands off? I knew there was a listserve that counted the bodies because I had joined that listserve. It was all about the dead bodies. The thing was that the bodies didn’t have names. Sometimes I made up names for them.

  I had a whole list of names.

  This whole thing, I thought, this whole thing was because of men like my father.

  I went out with some friends that night. I got drunk and I woke up the next day and discovered I was at Pete’s house. I had never felt that bad.

 Pete walked into the living room and laughed. “You really let loose last night.”

  Oh shit, I thought. Had I said something about my father? “I don’t remember. What did I do? What did I say?”

  “You kissed Sandra.”

  “What?”

  “No worries, dude, she kissed you back.”

  “Really?” That sort of made me a little bit happy.

  “Yeah, you sort of made out all night.”

  “That’s nice,” I said.

  “You were really drunk. But what have you got against 420?”

  “Why?”

  “Dave offered you a joint and I thought you were going to cut his fucking head off. We had to pull you away and cool you off.”

  I shrugged. “I just don’t do drugs,” I said.

  “420’s cool.”

  “I don’t do weed. I don’t do drugs. End of story.”

  “Straight-edger, huh?

  “Pretty much.”

  “Well, that’s cool too.” Pete laughed. “But you really did let loose on that liquor, dude.”

  I looked at my phone. I had a text from my father. U ok? That made me happy, that he was wondering where I was. I smiled and texted him back: I like women ☺.

  It was the first time I had successfully joked around with my father. I knew it was a joke that would make him smile.

  As I drove home that afternoon, I decided to get a passport. I don’t remember what had happened to the one I had. My mother had always kept it in her possession. I wanted to go to Juárez. I wanted to find Marcos and Jorge. I wanted to see what they had become. Or maybe I wanted to find out what I had become.

13.

It took me three months to get my passport. When I got it in the mail, it also included my border crossing card. My father intercepted my mail. I didn’t like that—but I never crossed my father. I was afraid of him. I’d seen his temper, and though his temper had never been aimed at me, I knew what could happen. Maybe that’s why I kept all his rules.

  He asked me why I wanted a passport.

  “To go to Juárez to visit my old friends.”

  “Don’t you think it’s been too long?

  Don’t you think they’ve moved on?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. And I was really mad—and though I never talked back to my father—this time I did. “And you don’t know either.”

  “No fuckin’ way you’re going to Juárez. Don’t you read the goddamned newspapers? Don’t you fuckin’ know what’s happening over there?”

  “I know.”

  “For such a smart kid, you’re something of a dumbass.”

  I nodded, and took my passport out of his hand. “I have a rule,” I said. “Never open my mail. And never walk into my room.”

  I didn’t bother to study the look on his face. I grabbed my passport out of his hand and turned away from him.

  14.

  I think I knew something about addiction. I was addicted to drawing my mother. I had hundreds of sketches of her.

  I never sketched my father.

  15.

  I heard my father talking to a man. He was in the kitchen and I was doing my homework on my laptop while I watched television. My father was excited and I noticed his cell phone was on the coffee table. I knew he was using one of those throwaway cells. Once when we were on our way to eat dinner, we took the scenic route. He stopped to toss a cell phone out into the desert. My father was saying something about his fuckin’ ship coming in.

  He left on a business trip. “I’ll be back in a couple of weeks,” he said. “I won’t be in touch.” He gave me the business card I’d seen, the one with the lawyer’s name and number and address. “If something happens, call him.”

  I nodded.

  He must have left early in the morning, because when I got up the next day, he was gone. He left me a note on the kitchen table. Don’t go to Juárez. Don’t go into my room. Don’t fuckin’ do drugs. And start thinking about what college you want to go to. That’s your homework. So every night I would come home from school, do my homework, then get on the Internet and study all the schools I might like to go to. I stayed up until two or three in the morning every night. I got lost in the homework my father gave me. It helped to keep me from worrying. In the end, I made the following list:

1.Georgetown

  2.University of Texas

  3.University of Chicago

  4.Stanford

  5.UCLA

  6.Brown

  7.Washington University

  8.Berkeley

  9.Northwestern

  10.Harvard

  I didn’t want to go to Harvard, but if it hadn’t been on the list, it would have made my father mad. So I made another list and put Harvard as number one—even though in my world it was number ten. I don’t know what I had against Harvard. And anyway, it was just an assignment for my father. I doubted any of these schools would take me.

  My father came home from his business trip on the last day of school of my junior year. I was happy to see him. That was the first time my father ever hugged me. And it was the first time that he seemed really happy. “Everything’s going to be just fine,” he said.

  He was smiling and he looked so young to me and I thought that maybe now he would quit the business. He had money now. Real money, so maybe he would quit. But I was just fantasizing. Something inside me knew that this is what he knew. This is what he loved. I loved reading and drawing and music and writing. And my father, well, he loved his business. Everyone had to love something.

  “Maybe,” he said, “we should think about getting you an apartment. You know, so you could live on your own. So you could get used to it. You know, like a practice run before you go away to college.”

  “I don’t need to practice,” I said.

  “I hear that tone,” he said. “You don’t get mad much—but when you get mad, you really get pissed off.”

  “I must get that from someone,” I said. “Look, Dad, I follow your rules. I follow every fucking rule—and so now you’re throwing me out?”

  “It’s not like that. Look, there’s a lot of shit that goes down here. I don’t want you in the middle of it.”

  “I am in the middle of it, Dad.”

  I sat down and put my face in my hands. I took a breath. And then another. I walked into my room and took out my list. I walked back into the living room and handed my list to my father. “I did my homework.” I handed him the list. “And how am I going to get the money to go to any of these schools, Dad?”

  “Don’t worry about the money.”

  “Like I said, Dad, I am in the middle of all this. I’m in the middle of all the shit that goes down in this house. And I’m not moving. Not unless you’re fucking throwing me out.”

  “Watch your mouth.”

  “Is that another rule?”

  He was quiet. He bit the side of his mouth. He was in too good a mood to fight me. He studied my list. “Harvard,” he whispered. “Get dressed. Let’s go to a nice place.”

  My father wanted to know my reasoning for picking the schools I put on my list. So I did all the talking at dinner. He asked questions. I answered them. It was the longest conversation we’d ever had. I guess it was because we didn’t have to talk about ourselves. He was going to put some money into my education and he wanted to know what he was getting himself into. He was an investor. It was more like a business transaction than a conversation.

  16.

  Harvard said no. My dad was pissed. “Fuck Harvard,” he said. My sentiments exactly. The day I got an acceptance letter from Georgetown, my father was out. His addictions were getting worse and I couldn’t talk to him about it. I told him I was worried. He said, “People who worry never change.” I wanted to tell him that addicts never change either. But I said nothing.

  I left my father a note: GOT INTO GEORGETOWN! I went out with my friends to celebrate. I had fun. I was happy. I was so, so happy. When I walked into the living room that night, the house was full of people. Some guy was snorting coke. My father must have been in the kitchen or in his room. I recognized some of his guests. I suppose some of them were more than just clients.

  Some guy came up to me. He smiled. He sort of scared me, but I relaxed. Hell, I was really drunk. The guy offered me a glass pipe. It was just a little straight glass tube. I’d seen them before. I knew what those little glass tubes were used for. “You ever smoke?”

  I shook my head.

  “Try it,” he said.

  And I wanted to—I wanted to try it, to see what it was like. To know, to really know what it was all about.

  He handed me the pipe.

  I took it.

  He reached into his pocket and unfolded a piece of tin foil. He took out a little piece of white rock. “You’re gonna like this, kid,” he said. And then I saw my father standing next to him. It all happened so fast. “Motherfucker!” My father’s face was grotesque and contorted. He was pounding the shit out of him, pounding and pounding—and when the guy was on the floor, my father was kicking him and kicking him and I thought, for a moment, that my father was going to kill this man. Some of my father’s friends were yelling for him to stop but he wouldn’t stop, couldn’t stop, and finally some men had to pull him away.

  My father stared down at the man, just stared down at him. “Get that motherfucker out of here.”

  The man that had offered me the pipe was all bloody—but he was alive and moaning. A few guys dragged him out of the house.

  My father looked at me said, “Give me that pipe.”

  I handed it to him.

  “I’ll kill you if you ever come near one of those pipes again. I will fucking kill you.”

  I nodded. I was so ashamed. I walked into my room. I’d never felt so empty in all of my life.

  17.

  My father never mentioned what happened that night. I always wondered if he thought about it. I always thought about it.

  18.

  My father and I flew to Washington in July. It was hard for him to do without his drugs, so he drank a lot and I suppose that helped. We were there for a week. At night, he would disappear. I knew he’d found what he was looking for. During the day, we took in the sights, father and son. My father knew a man who’d died in Vietnam and we looked for his name on the wall—and we found it. My father traced his finger on the letters that formed the name of his friend. He didn’t tell me about the man, didn’t say a word about him.

  My father seemed so normal that day.

  We found an apartment for me. I knew it was expensive. But my father sent me away when he made the arrangements.

  On the plane ride back to El Paso, I asked my father, “Are you sure you can afford that apartment, Dad?”

  “Remember that trip when my ship came in?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  That’s when the conversation ended.

  19.

  I was sitting in the backyard, pad in hand. I was making a list of the things I needed to take with me when I drove to Washington. Me and my lists. I was drinking a beer and I was trying to imagine what my life was going to look like as a student at Georgetown University. I wondered if I would miss my father. And it was odd, but the thought occurred to me that I had stopped missing my mother. It was as if she had never existed and there was a blank piece in my heart that would live there permanently. Not a wound, not a hurt, but a blank piece.

  My father stumbled into the backyard. He looked like shit and I could tell he was coming down from his last high. He sat down on the lawn chair next to mine. He lit a cigarette and his hands were shaking. “Can you bring me a beer?”

  I walked into the kitchen, grabbed a beer, walked back into the backyard and handed it to him.

  “Dad, you have to stop.”

  He just looked at me. “Who the fuck do you think you are?”

  “You have to stop, Dad.”

  I was standing above him. He took a drink from his beer. He got up, looked me straight in the eye. “Say it again. Go on, say it again.”

  I looked right back at him. I never took my eyes off him. “You have to stop.”

  And then I felt his fist on my jaw and I fell back on the ground. I took a breath and closed my eyes. I just lay for a while, feeling the pain in my jaw. My lip was bleeding. My

father looked down at me. “Get up,” he said.

  I got up slowly. Then I heard his voice. “You haven’t earned the right to tell your father what to do.”

  I nodded. I wanted to hide my tears from him but I wasn’t strong enough. I sat there and cried, tears falling from my face. I wanted to howl, but I kept the howl inside me. I don’t know how long I sat there. I heard my father’s voice. “Here,” he said as he handed me a beer. “Have a beer with your old man.”

  20.

  After a week, there wasn’t much of a sign of my father’s fist on my jaw or my lip. I would not wear the scar of that afternoon on my face. That’s not where I would keep it.

  21.

  The day before I left for Georgetown, my father bought me a new car. It was practical, a Prius, not my father’s style, but the kind of car he imagined his son should have. I thanked him. I think we even hugged. Yes, I hugged him. And he hugged me back. He was on something, I knew. By then, he was almost always on something. We went to dinner and he was shaking. He ordered a nice bottle of red wine and we drank together and I wanted to cry, but I didn’t.

  I don’t remember what we talked about, but my father wasn’t in any hurry that night to get anywhere. He wanted to be with me that last night. And I wanted to be with him.

  After dinner, he looked at me, smiled and said, “Let’s go get our passports.”

  I didn’t know what he meant.

  “Let’s go have a drink at the Kentucky Club.”

  “In Juárez?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But, you said—”

  “It’s where you were raised. Don’t you want to have a drink with your old man where it all started?”

  “Where it all started?”

  “It’s where your mother and I used to go.”

  He smiled. I’ll always remember that smile.

  22.

  The only thing I remember about having a drink with my father at the Kentucky Club was my father telling me that he’d loved my mother. “I loved her.” And then I knew. She was the one. She hadn’t loved him back.

  23.

  The morning I left the house where I became a man, my father helped me put my things in the car. I didn’t have much. My father was wordless. And I was too. “Bye, Dad,” I said.

  “Bye, son,” he said.

  He looked sad. He just stood there as I drove away.

  24.

  I’m sitting here in my Georgetown apartment and I’m thinking about my dad.

  I’m packing a few things and I’m going back home. He’s on a respirator. He overdosed. Heroin, meth, I don’t know. It all seems so predictable, so inevitable. His attorney called me. “You need to come home and see to your dad,” he said. I’m going back to take him off the respirator. I know that’s what he would have wanted. At last, I can give him something. Something that matters.

  I just finished reading the journal I kept when I lived with him, my father. Every rule he ever made me follow is in my journal. I can almost hear his voice. I’m holding the rosary he gave me for my first communion, the one that belonged to his father. I’m staring at the picture of us in front of the cathedral, taken at my first communion.

  I always told myself I didn’t know my father. I sometimes told myself that I hated him. I always told myself that he didn’t know me. But that wasn’t true. It wasn’t true at all. I knew him. I really knew him. My girlfriend Emma, she asked me what kind of man my father was. “Who was he, Max?” she asked. “You never talk about him.”

  “No, I never do.”

  She wiped the tears from my face.

  “He punched me out once,” I said. And then I laughed. “My father,” I whispered. “His name was Eddie. Not Edward, but Eddie. He was the man who saved my life. That’s who he was.”

Gilb, Dagoberto. “Uncle Rock.” The New Yorker, 3 May 2010.

In the morning, at his favorite restaurant, Erick got to order his favorite American food, sausage and eggs and hash-brown papitas fried crunchy on top. He’d be sitting there, eating with his mother, not bothering anybody, and life was good, when a man started changing it all. Most of the time it was just a man staring too much—but then one would come over. Friendly, he’d put his thick hands on the table as if he were touching water, and squat low, so that he was at sitting level, as though he were being so polite, and he’d smile, with coffee-and-tobacco-stained teeth. He might wear a bolo tie and speak in a drawl. Or he might have a tan uniform on, a company logo on the back, an oval name patch on the front. Or he’d be in a nothing-special work shirt, white or striped, with a couple of pens clipped onto the left side pocket, tucked into a pair of jeans or chinos that were morning-clean still, with a pair of scuffed work boots that laced up higher than regular shoes. He’d say something about her earrings, or her bracelet, or her hair, or her eyes, and if she had on her white uniform how nice it looked on her. Or he’d come right out with it and tell her how pretty she was, how he couldn’t keep himself from walking up, speaking to her directly, and could they talk again? Then he’d wink at Erick. Such a fine-looking boy! How old is he, eight or nine? Erick wasn’t even small for an eleven-year-old. He tightened his jaw then, slanted his eyes up from his plate at his mom and not the man, definitely not this man he did not care for. Erick drove a fork into a goopy American egg yolk and bled it into his American potatoes. She wouldn’t offer the man Erick’s correct age, either, saying only that he was growing too fast.

She almost always gave the man her number if he was wearing a suit. Not a sports coat but a buttoned suit with a starched white shirt and a pinned tie meant something to her. Once in a while, Erick saw one of these men again at the front door of the apartment in Silverlake. The man winked at Erick as if they were buddies. Grabbed his shoulder or arm, squeezed the muscle against the bone. What did Erick want to be when he grew up? A cop, a jet-airplane mechanic, a travel agent, a court reporter? A dog groomer? Erick stood there, because his mom said that he shouldn’t be impolite. His mom’s date said he wanted to take Erick along with them sometime. The three of them. What kind of places did Erick think were fun? Erick said nothing. He never said anything when the men were around, and not because of his English, even if that was the excuse his mother gave for his silence. He didn’t talk to any of the men and he didn’t talk much to his mom, either. Finally they took off, and Erick’s night was his alone. He raced to the grocery store and bought half a gallon of chocolate ice cream. When he got back, he turned on the TV, scooted up real close, as close as he could, and ate his dinner with a soup spoon. He was away from all the men. Even though a man had given the TV to them. He was a salesman in an appliance store who’d bragged that a rich customer had given it to him and so why shouldn’t he give it to Erick’s mom, who couldn’t afford such a good TV otherwise?

When his mom was working as a restaurant hostess, and was going to marry the owner, Erick ate hot-fudge sundaes and drank chocolate shakes. When she worked at a trucking company, the owner of all the trucks told her he was getting a divorce. Erick climbed into the rigs, with their rooms full of dials and levers in the sky. Then she started working in an engineer’s office. There was no food or fun there, but even he could see the money. He was not supposed to touch anything, but what was there to touch—the tubes full of paper? He and his mom were invited to the engineer’s house, where he had two horses and a stable, a swimming pool, and two convertible sports cars. The engineer’s family was there: his grown children, his gray-haired parents. They all sat down for dinner in a dining room that seemed bigger than Erick’s apartment, with three candelabras on the table, and a tablecloth and cloth napkins. Erick’s mom took him aside to tell him to be well mannered at the table and polite to everyone. Erick hadn’t said anything. He never spoke anyway, so how could he have said anything wrong? She leaned into his ear and said that she wanted them to know that he spoke English. That whole dinner he was silent, chewing quietly, taking the smallest bites, because he didn’t want them to think he liked their food.

When she got upset about days like that, she told Erick that she wished they could just go back home. She was tired of worrying. “Back,” for Erick, meant mostly the stories he’d heard from her, which never sounded so good to him: She’d had to share a room with her brothers and sisters. They didn’t have toilets. They didn’t have electricity. Sometimes they didn’t have enough food. He saw this Mexico as if it were the backdrop of a movie on afternoon TV, where children walked around barefoot in the dirt or on broken sidewalks and small men wore wide-brimmed straw hats and baggy white shirts and pants. The women went to church all the time and prayed to alcoved saints and, heads down, fearful, counted rosary beads. There were rocks everywhere, and scorpions and tarantulas and rattlesnakes, and vultures and no trees and not much water, and skinny dogs and donkeys, and ugly bad guys with guns and bullet vests who rode laughing into town to drink and shoot off their pistols and rifles, as if it were the Fourth of July, driving their horses all over town like dirt bikes on desert dunes. When they spoke English, they had stupid accents—his mom didn’t have an accent like theirs. It didn’t make sense to him that Mexico would only be like that, but what if it was close? He lived on paved, lighted city streets, and a bicycle ride away were the Asian drugstore and the Armenian grocery store and the corner where black Cubans drank coffee and talked Dodgers baseball.

When he was in bed, where he sometimes prayed, he thanked God for his mom, who he loved, and he apologized to Him for not talking to her, or to anyone, really, except his friend Albert, and he apologized for her never going to church and for his never taking Holy Communion, as Albert did—though only to God would he admit that he wanted to because Albert did. He prayed for good to come, for his mom and for him, since God was like magic, and happiness might come the way of early morning, in the trees and bushes full of sparrows next to his open window, louder and louder when he listened hard, eyes closed.

The engineer wouldn’t have mattered if Erick hadn’t told Albert that he was his dad. Albert had just moved into the apartment next door and lived with both his mother and his father, and since Albert’s mother already didn’t like Erick’s mom, Erick told him that his new dad was an engineer. Erick actually believed it, too, and thought that he might even get his own horse. When that didn’t happen, and his mom was lying on her bed in the middle of the day, blowing her nose, because she didn’t have the job anymore, that was when Roque came around again. Roque was nobody—or he was anybody. He wasn’t special, he wasn’t not. He tried to speak English to Erick, thinking that was the reason Erick didn’t say anything when he was there. And Erick had to tell Albert that Roque was his uncle, because the engineer was supposed to be his new dad any minute. Uncle Rock, Erick said. His mom’s brother, he told Albert. Roque worked at night and was around during the day, and one day he offered Erick and Albert a ride. When his mom got in the car, she scooted all the way over to Roque on the bench seat. Who was supposed to be her brother, Erick’s Uncle Rock. Albert didn’t say anything, but he saw what had happened, and that was it for Erick. Albert had parents, grandparents, and a brother and a sister, and he’d hang out only when one of his cousins wasn’t coming by. Erick didn’t need a friend like him.

What if she married Roque, his mom asked him one day soon afterward. She told Erick that they would move away from the apartment in Silverlake to a better neighborhood. He did want to move, but he wished that it weren’t because of Uncle Rock. It wasn’t just because Roque didn’t have a swimming pool or horses or a big ranch house. There wasn’t much to criticize except that he was always too willing and nice, too considerate, too generous. He wore nothing flashy or expensive, just ordinary clothes that were clean and ironed, and shoes he kept shined. He combed and parted his hair neatly. He didn’t have a buzzcut like the men who didn’t like kids. He moved slow, he talked slow, as quiet as night. He only ever said yes to Erick’s mom. How could she not like him for that? He loved her so much—anybody could see his pride when he was with her. He signed checks and gave her cash. He knocked on their door carrying cans and fruit and meat. He was there when she asked, gone when she asked, back whenever, grateful. He took her out to restaurants on Sunset, to the movies in Hollywood, or on drives to the beach in rich Santa Monica.

Roque knew that Erick loved baseball. Did Roque like baseball? It was doubtful that he cared even a little bit—he didn’t listen to games on the radio or TV, and he never looked at a newspaper. He loved boxing, though. He knew the names of all the Mexican fighters as if they lived here, as if they were Dodgers players, like Steve Sax or Steve Yeager, Dusty Baker, Kenny Landreaux or Mike Marshall, Pedro Guerrero. Roque did know about Fernando Valenzuela, as everyone did, even his mom, which is why she agreed to let Roque take them to a game. What Mexican didn’t love Fernando? Dodger Stadium was close to their apartment. He’d been there once with Albert and his family—well, outside it, on a nearby hill, to see the fireworks for Fourth of July. His mom decided that all three of them would go on a Saturday afternoon, since Saturday night, Erick thought, she might want to go somewhere else, even with somebody else.

Roque, of course, didn’t know who the Phillies were. He knew nothing about the strikeouts by Steve Carlton or the home runs by Mike Schmidt. He’d never heard of Pete Rose. It wasn’t that Erick knew very much, either, but there was nothing that Roque could talk to him about, if they were to talk.

If Erick showed his excitement when they drove up to Dodger Stadium and parked, his mom and Roque didn’t really notice it. They sat in the bleachers, and for him the green of the field was a magic light; the stadium decks surrounding them seemed as far away as Rome. His body was somewhere it had never been before. The fifth inning? That’s how late they were. Or were they right on time, because they weren’t even sure they were sitting in the right seats yet when he heard the crack of the ball, saw the crowd around them rising as it came at them. Erick saw the ball. He had to stand and move and stretch his arms and want that ball until it hit his bare hands and stayed there. Everybody saw him catch it with no bobble. He felt all the eyes and voices around him as if they were every set of eyes and every voice in the stadium. His mom was saying something, and Roque, too, and then, finally, it was just him and that ball and his stinging hands. He wasn’t even sure if it had been hit by Pete Guerrero. He thought for sure it had been, but he didn’t ask. He didn’t watch the game then—he couldn’t. He didn’t care who won. He stared at his official National League ball, reimagining what had happened. He ate a hot dog and drank a soda and he sucked the salted peanuts and the wooden spoon from his chocolate-malt ice cream. He rubbed the bumpy seams of his home-run ball.

Game over, they were the last to leave. People were hanging around, not going straight to their cars. Roque didn’t want to leave. He didn’t want to end it so quickly, Erick thought, while he still had her with him. Then one of the Phillies came out of the stadium door and people swarmed—boys mostly, but also men and some women and girls—and they got autographs before the player climbed onto the team’s bus. Joe Morgan, they said. Then Garry Maddox appeared. Erick clutched the ball but he didn’t have a pen. He just watched, his back to the gray bus the Phillies were getting into.

Then a window slid open. Hey, big man, a voice said. Erick really wasn’t sure. Gimme the ball, la pelota, the face in the bus said. I’ll have it signed, comprendes? Échalo, just toss it to me. Erick obeyed. He tossed it up to the hand that was reaching out. The window closed. The ball was gone a while, so long that his mom came up to him, worried that he’d lost it. The window slid open again and the voice spoke to her. We got the ball, Mom. It’s not lost, just a few more. When the window opened once more, this time the ball was there. Catch. There were all kinds of signatures on it, though none that he could really recognize except for Joe Morgan and Pete Rose.

Then the voice offered more, and the hand threw something at him. For your mom, O.K.? Comprendes? Erick stared at the asphalt lot where the object lay, as if he’d never seen a folded-up piece of paper before. Para tu mamá, bueno? He picked it up, and he started to walk over to his mom and Roque, who were so busy talking they hadn’t noticed anything. Then he stopped. He opened the note himself. No one had said he couldn’t read it. It said, I’d like to get to know you. You are muy linda. Very beautiful and sexy. I don’t speak Spanish very good, may be you speak better English, pero No Importa. Would you come by tonite and let me buy you a drink? There was a phone number and a hotel-room number. A name, too. A name that came at him the way that the home run had.

Erick couldn’t hear. He could see only his mom ahead of him. She was talking to Roque, Roque was talking to her. Roque was the proudest man, full of joy because he was with her. It wasn’t his fault he wasn’t an engineer. Now Erick could hear again. Like sparrows hunting seed, boys gathered round the bus, calling out, while the voice in the bus was yelling at him, Hey, big guy! Give it to her! Erick had the ball in one hand and the note in the other. By the time he reached his mom and Roque, the note was already somewhere on the asphalt parking lot. Look, he said in a full voice. They all signed the ball. ♦

Guajardo, Jacob. “What Got Into Us.” Best American Short Stories: 2018. Houghton Mifflin, 2018.

    Rio is the bravest boy I know the summer we are fourteen. The beach is ours and all its coves and sandcastles. I have bug bites like beads of sap on my legs. It is June in Michigan and we giggle like princesses as we pull dresses on in the bedroom our single mothers share. We clip on earrings and hate their heaviness. We imagine our lives as women and say the things we think they would say. We tuck our penises between our skinny legs and walk with our thighs together. When we are through we hang the dresses up and put the earrings back inside their cedar boxes at his mother’s bedside. We promise not to tell anyone. There is a handshake, a promise with our bodies that I will not remember until years later when I see the neighbor boys slapping hands before they part for dinner.

        The summer we are fourteen Rio kisses me for the first time as he zips me into a dress. The dress is blue and white polka dotted and the zipper snags on my tighty-whiteys. The kiss feels like a bug landing on my shoulder. He kisses my lips after he kisses my shoulder. The smell of his teeth is the smell of our shared lunch, fried bologna sandwiches and rice and beans. We made the sandwiches ourselves, the rice and beans we heated up in the microwave. He does not zip the dress up all the way. My shoulder will sting later—like it had been a bee on my shoulder, not the harmless fly I’d felt. It will not always feel like stinging. When my husband kisses my shoulder it will feel good.

        We kiss when we think we are alone. We flip paddleboats on the beach and kiss beneath them, the seats dripping water on us. We kiss at the playground where there are secret places in the wooden infrastructure of the jungle gym. We get away with too much this summer.

        We grow up on Marlin Street in swim-trunks. Our mothers drive their Chevy with every window down. The wind ruffles our hair like pages in a book. Years from now I will move away from Marlin Street. Not far—a few streets. Close enough that our mothers can walk, thumbing their rosaries, to my house and sip mimosas on the porch, where they will laugh like Spanish witches.

        But we grow up on Marlin Street in a beach house. The beach house is blue and has a screened-in porch. On the porch there are two white plastic chairs and a second-hand end-table between them where our mothers sit with their sangrias. We sit on the splintered wood beside them or sit inside on the couch. Our mothers cannot afford to own two houses—will never be able to afford to own two houses. They sleep on two twin-beds in the master and Rio and I sleep together in our room on one queen size. We never have friends over from school.

        Families rent out the beach houses for brief Michigan summers, but our mothers own a taquería on the boardwalk. We own our vacation home. Our mothers are known by locals as the Taco Sisters. They are not sisters. They are not sisters the way Rio and I are not brothers. They are childhood friends—immigrants’ daughters who grew up translating for their mothers and fathers. They asked for what their parents could not. They are not sisters but they shared beds and sleeping bags on the floors of dirty shacks.

        They tell us we washed up on the shores of Lake Michigan. They say they spotted us lit up by the lighthouse against the rocky shoreline. They say gulls carried us to their doorstep. They fit us with seafarers’ names. Mine is Delmar, his is Rio. Both our mothers’ names are Maria—Maria Carmen and Maria Blanca.

        We will never know our fathers. We know that they were light-skinned and fair of hair. Rio’s hair looks like bleached coral. My hair is black but my skin might as well be butterscotch pudding. The only way we look like our mothers is our eyes. When we ask about our fathers they tell us, in English, that they are no longer a park of the picture—an idiom they’ve grown up saying wrong. We imagine our fathers must have been small men to leave such boisterous women. Our mothers never complained, never cursed men and their unwieldy cocks. I will ask about my father again when I am leaving Marlin Street for college and my mother will ask if they were not enough.

        The locals gave the taquería the unofficial name Authentico. Our mothers had bought a neon sign to advertise their authentic Mexican cuisine: tacos el pescado, camarones rebozados, paella de marisco, arroz con pollo. The gaudy neon sign flickered over the walk-up window. They’d meant to name the place El Lago, but the loan from the bank bought them just one sign. We made fun of the unofficial name. We warned that someday a couple hermanos could open up a place called Genuino and ruin them. We sit outside the taquería on picnic tables and pick gum off the seats. We watch our mothers fry tortillas and wipe their hands on grease-licked aprons. Our mothers shoo us off the picnic table when the stand is busy. Years from now, when our mothers can’t spend every day making tacos for tourists anymore, and I tell them I am too busy to run the place, Authentico will close up. I will buy the sign from them and hang it in my garage.

        The vacation families drive their cars too fast down Marlin Street. They are on their porches smoking sausages, or taking boats out on the lake. They are fucking on the beach inside murky coves. We hear them and call them monsters. We call anything we cannot explain that June monsters. In Michigan, summer is only a few months in the middle of the year, but our mothers love the beach year round. It means every winter we have to hear about some gringo trying to walk on the lake and drowning. One year the gringo will be a boy from our high school that we hate and they will never pull his body from the lake and we will feel bad for having hated the boy. Our mothers make the holy triangle up and down and side to side.

        We break into the empty summer houses. We scare the spiders out and play house. We spend the night in the empty beds after our mothers pass out drunk from rum and Cokes. We make the beds every morning, fluffing up the pillows. We take things that do not belong to us. Things we think no one will miss. I take cards from Euchre decks and tape them inside a lined paper journal. Rio cuts buttons from Sunday bests and carries them around in a velvet bag like they are marbles. We are monsters. We carve our initials into the underbellies of the summer homes’ expensive wood furniture. We lie under the giant oak frames of the summertime beds with a set of keys and cut away at the bed flesh. We find out that if the wood has not cured long enough the furniture will bleed. When I am twenty-eight and expecting my first child I will wonder what had gotten into us that summer and hope my child is not a monster.

        When I am twenty-eight and expecting my first child, my husband and I will drive up Marlin Street to show my mothers the first sonogram. The child will be growing inside a woman we have paid through an agency. The surrogate will be a healthy, Latina woman getting her PhD in women’s studies at the college in Kalamazoo. I will believe that this detail will make my mothers proud. I will struggle to find the best way to tell them. I will expect that they will not understand. I will expect that they will have questions I will not know the answers to. I will bring them a flyer from the agency complete with illustrations and a number to call should they have any questions. They will make the holy triangle, up and down and side to side.

        Rio and his mother fly to Texas for the month of July to visit familia. My mother and I take them to the airport. Carmen has to stand on her toes to kiss my forehead. She holds my face in her hands and says, “We’ll be back before you can say Tenochtitlan.” My mother spends July harvesting the garden in our backyard. She does other things too, but mostly she is outside on her knees where she can pray in the dirt. I hear her say Carmen’s name to the tomatillos once. The tomatillos’ papery husks crack and flake when they are ready to be harvested. I watch my body do the same. I spend July under the paddleboats in the dark where I press my fingers to my lips and put my other hand down my shorts and say Rio’s name.

        Rio comes back taller and darker. Beside me in our bed his skin is still hot from Texas. He kisses me, like we had so many times before. Then he takes my pants off and pulls my cock out and licks his hand and gets my cock wet and puts me inside of him. After that we are fucking everywhere. We are naked when our mothers are at work in the taco stand. We fumble around in the darkness for each other, like moths to the only light in a room. Our sex life will never again be as exciting as when we are fourteen and sharing a bed.

        In August there is a summer camp in the city at the Baptist church. The campers are new every week. We are too poor to go to summer camp. The campers swim on a private beach. We think maybe they can walk on water. We see them splashing out by the buoys. We start to call the boys buoys. We walk up the shore and get as close as we can. They wave sometimes and others push their noses flat with their fingers and stick their tongues out. I have not said out loud what I am but I think about it all the time. Especially the summer when we are fourteen and watching the buoys throw footballs on the church’s private beach. I want to pick each mole from their pink backs and eat them like Raisinets. We walk ten minutes into Grand Haven to sit outside the chapel and listen to the Bible lessons. The pastor’s sermons scare us out from under the paddleboats for a few days. I think I am more scared than Rio. Rio is brave. Rio is the bravest boy I know the summer we are fourteen.

        There are days I’m not up for cove crawling, buoy watching, kissing inside the belly of the yellow slide at the park. I stay inside and read instead. Rio is not much of a reader and heads out to adventure without me. He calls me a faggot first, and then the screen door slams.

        We will not always get along. When we start high school he will start to play varsity baseball. Our mothers will go to every game. I will love the way he looks in a jockstrap. He will be trying too hard. I will tell him he is trying too hard and that nobody believes him and he will hate me. He will have the chance to be popular and he will take it. He will run away from home the summer he is fifteen. My tio, Valentino, will be visiting from Arizona. He will have rented a car. One night, when they are out walking the pier, Rio will take Tio Valentino’s rented car and drive it as far as Tennessee where a state trooper will pull him over. Rio will have just picked a car and followed. We will all drive down to Tennessee to pick him up from jail. Carmen will be furious. I will think he’s so fucking cool.

        We are subscribed to Michigan Animal Magazine this summer. Really we are taking them from the Johnsons’ mailbox, reading them, and then putting them back. We learn that cougars used to be native to Michigan but we drove them out. We learn that the feral swine are a problem. We already know that the state bird is a robin, but we learn that cranes fly necks extended—herons fly necks drawn back. We learn that what we thought were owls are mourning doves hooting in the trees. We learn that a monarch’s wings are orange with black veins, not orange with black stripes. I look at my veins, blue beneath my skin, and wish I could fly.

        Late August we are caught, giggling and naked, fucking in the preacher’s bed. From his house we’d collected sheets of cardstock paper with his parish’s name embossed along the top. He will tell the police officers hours later as we are being loaded into the backseats of the cop cars that he’d left a pair of good shoes at the lake house. This explained his unexpected visit. The preacher opens the door to the beach house and Rio and I jump from the bed, pulling on our swim-trunks. He grabs Rio by the hair and slams him into the wall. He thunders like a sermon. We get away and run and hide down in our spot by the paddleboats.

        Before we go home and before the cops arrive we are walking the shoreline, panting. Rio sees something and points. “Look,” he tells me. I see a brown mass—fur and antlers. It doesn’t move. I am scared to get closer. He runs ahead, kicking up sand. The beach looks so big, like he could get lost in it. I do not want to lose him. I follow, my ankles buckling to the uncertainty of the sand. The brown mass is huge. It is a monster—it could rear its ugly head and tear us limb from limb. It looks dead for weeks, stinking and bloated, its blood has turned the sand and water black. We know from Michigan Animal Magazine that this is a moose. Standing next to it Rio looks so small, but he is fourteen and taller and darker with skin still hot from Texas. He covers his mouth. We know from Michigan Animal Magazine that moose are only found in small numbers in the Upper Peninsula. We figure that the moose died up north and the water carried him here.

        Rio crouches, covering his nose. He says we have to do something. “What can we do?” I ask. He starts to gather twigs and shells, leaves and driftwood. He uses what we have: scattered branches, pebbles, brittle shells. He scatters them around the moose, creates a perimeter of earthly discharge to sanction off this bit of beach for the moose. I help him. I pull bentgrass up and pick flowers from the beach trees. We sit away from the moose and lean our heads on one another. We watch the shoreline for Wisconsin. The moose’s antlers have already begun to bleach clean in the sun.

        Our mothers will struggle through the winter. They will rely on second jobs cleaning houses. They won’t trust us alone in the same room together. The cop had been able to speak Spanish and had told our mothers what we’d been doing. The preacher dropped the charges. Rio will start to sleep with his mother and I will sleep with mine. Rio will crawl the coves without me. He is the gringo who falls through the ice that winter, but he will pull himself out and walk, shivering, back to our house where I will tell him how fucking stupid he is. I will take his clothes off and take my clothes off and press myself against him inside a scratchy mohair blanket.

        He will flunk out of college and move back home. Carmen will put him to work in the taquería. We will barely talk for months. He will become the kind of brave that says yes to everything. When I graduate college he will be in rehab fighting a heroin addiction. He will call saying that one of the steps is making amends and a week later we will end up fucking against the walls of the apartment I share with my boyfriend. He will break off in me like shells. I will meet my husband, Fisher, when I am twenty-six and he will meet Rio that same year at Thanksgiving and Rio will not be happy about it. In the kitchen, while Fisher is trying his best to speak with our mothers, Rio will tell me that no one can love me as hard and as real as he has every year since we were fourteen. I will say something to destroy him: “It took this long to find someone that could love the rest of you out of me.” Fisher will hear our voices rising and will step into the kitchen as Rio slams his fist against the laminate countertop. Fisher will ask if everything is all right. I will have to explain that night on the drive home about Rio and I.

        The summer we are fourteen and playing dress-up with our mothers’ clothes in their bedroom with Jesus hanging on a cross on the wall, we talk about getting older. We sit on my mother’s bed, the dresses zipped up halfway and pooling around our waists. We have not become monsters yet. We have not stolen the Euchre cards and buttons. We have not called the boys buoys. The boy from school that we hate has not drowned in the lake. The moose has not washed up on the banks of Lake Michigan. We do not know that we will never know our fathers. We will wonder what got into us. Outside, though the curtains are closed tight and all we can see are the curtains’ stitches in the sun, we know the beach is clean because summer is just getting started and the summer families haven’t moved in. Rio has just kissed me for the first time.

        “I’ll get a sex change,” Rio says. He gathers the dress up around his hips and clips at his penis with two fingers.

        “I like you as a boy,” I tell him.

        “Then you’re gay,” he says.

        “Don’t you like me?” I ask.

        “I love you,” he says. “It’s wrong though. We have to stop or something bad will happen.”

        We take off the dresses and hang them in the closet.

Cisneros, Sandra. “Woman Hollering Creek,” L.A. Times, 1 July 1990.

The day Don Serafin gave Juan Pedro Martinez Sanchez permission to take Cleofilas Enriqueta DeLeon Hernandez as his bride, across her father’s threshold, over several miles of dirt road and several miles of paved, over one border and beyond to a town en el otro lado --on the other side--already did he divine the morning his daughter would raise her hand over her eyes, look south, and dream of returning to the chores that never ended, six good-for-nothing brothers, and one old man’s complaints.

He had said, after all, in the hubbub of parting: I am your father, I will never abandon you. He had said that, hadn’t he, when he hugged and then let her go. But at that moment Cleofilas was busy looking for Chela, her maid of honor, to fulfill their bouquet conspiracy. She would not remember her father’s parting words until later. I am your father, I will never abandon you.

Only now as a mother did she remember, now, when she and Juan Pedrito sat by the creek’s edge. How when a man and a woman love each other, sometimes that love sours. But a parent’s love for a child, a child’s for its parents, is another thing entirely.

This is what Cleofilas thought evenings when Juan Pedro did not come home, and she lay on her side of the bed listening to the hollow roar of the interstate, a distant dog barking, the pecan trees rustling like ladies in stiff petticoats--shh-shh-shh, shh-shh-shh--soothing her to sleep.

In the town where she grew up, there wasn’t very much to do except accompany the aunts and godmothers to the house of one or the other to play cards. Or walk to the cinema to see this week’s film again, speckled and with one hair quivering annoyingly on the screen. Or to the center of town to order a milkshake that would appear in a day and a half as a pimple on her backside. Or to the girlfriend’s house to watch the latest telenovela episode and try to copy the way the women comb their hair, wear their makeup.

But what Cleofilas had been waiting for, had been whispering and sighing and giggling for, had been anticipating since she was old enough to lean against the window displays of gauze and butterflies and lace, was passion. Not the kind on the cover of the Alarma ! magazines, mind you, where the lover is photographed with the bloody fork she used to salvage her good name. But passion in its purest crystalline essence. The kind the books and songs and telenovelas describe when one finds, finally, the great love of one’s life, and does whatever one can, must do, at whatever the cost.

“ Tu o Nadie. " “You or No One.” The title of the current favorite telenovela. The beautiful Lucia Mendez having to put up with all kinds of hardships of the heart, separation and betrayal, and loving, always loving no matter what, because that is the most important thing, and did you see Lucia Mendez on the Bayer aspirin commercials, wasn’t she lovely? Does she dye her hair, do you think? Cleofilas is going to go to the farmacia and buy a hair rinse; her girlfriend Chela will apply it; it’s not that difficult at all.

Because you didn’t watch last night’s episode when Lucia confessed she loved him more than anyone in her life. In her life! And she sings the song “You or No One” in the beginning and at the end of the show. “ Tu o Nadie. " Somehow one ought to live one’s life like that, don’t you think? You or no one. Because to suffer for love is good. The pain all sweet somehow. In the end.

Seguin. She had liked the sound of it. Far away and lovely. Not like Monclova, Coahuila. Ugly.

Seguin, Tejas . A nice sterling ring to it. The tinkle of money. She would get to wear outfits like the women on the tele , like Lucia Mendez. And have a lovely house, and wouldn’t Chela be jealous.

And yes, they will drive all the way to Laredo to get her wedding dress. That’s what they say. Because Juan Pedro wants to get married right away, without a long engagement since he can’t take off too much time from work. He has a very important position in Seguin with, with . . . a beer company, I think. Or is it tires? Yes, he has to be back. So they will get married in the spring when he can take off work, and then they will drive off in his new pickup--did you see it?--to their new home in Seguin. Well, not exactly new, but they’re going to repaint the house. You know newlyweds. New paint and new furniture. Why not? He can afford it. And later on add maybe a room or two for the children. May they be blessed with many. Well, you’ll see. Cleofilas has always been so good with her sewing machine. A little rrrr , rrrr , rrrr of the machine and zas ! Miracles. She’s always been so clever, that girl. Poor thing. And without even a mama to advise her on things like her wedding night. Well, may God help her. What with a father with a head like a burro, and those six clumsy brothers. Well, what do you think! Yes, I’m going to the wedding. Of course! The dress I want to wear just needs to be altered a teensy bit to bring it up to date. See, I saw a new style last night that I thought would suit me. Did you watch last night’s episode of “The Rich Also Cry”? Well, did you notice the dress the mother was wearing?

La Gritona . Such a funny name for such a lovely arroyo. But that’s what they called the creek that ran behind the house. Though no one could say whether the woman had hollered from anger or pain. The natives only knew the arroyo you crossed on the way to San Antonio, and then once again on the way back, was called Woman Hollering, a name no one from these parts questioned, much less understood. Pues, alla de los indios, quien sabe-- who knows, the townspeople shrugged, because it was of no concern to their lives how this trickle of water received its curious name.

What do you want to know for? Trini the laundramat attendant asked in the same gruff Spanish she always used whenever she gave Cleofilas change or yelled at her for something. First, for putting too much soap in the machines. Later, for sitting on a washer. And still later, after Juan Pedrito was born, for not understanding that in this country you cannot let your baby walk around with no diaper and his pee-pee hanging out, it wasn’t nice, entiendes ? Pues.

How could Cleofilas explain to a woman like this why the name Woman Hollering fascinated her. Well, there was no sense talking to Trini.

On the other hand, there were the neighbor ladies, one on either side of the house she and Juan Pedro rented near the arroyo. The woman Soledad on the left, the woman Dolores on the right.

The neighbor lady Soledad liked to call herself a widow, though how she came to be one was a mystery. Her husband had either died, or run away with an ice-house floozie, or simply had gone out for cigarettes one afternoon and never come back. It was hard to say which since Soledad, as a rule, didn’t mention him.

In the other house lived la senora Dolores, kind and very sweet, but her house smelled too much of incense and candles from the altars that burned continuously in memory of two sons who had died in the last war and one husband who had died shortly after from grief. The neighbor lady Dolores divided her time between the memory of these men and her garden, famous for its sunflowers--so tall they had to be supported with broom handles and old boards; red-red cockscombs, fringed and bleeding a thick menstrual color, and, especially, roses whose sad scent reminded Cleofilas of the dead. Each Sunday la senora Dolores clipped the most beautiful of these flowers and arranged them on three modest headstones at the Seguin cemetery.

The neighbor ladies, Soledad, Dolores, they might’ve known once the name of the arroyo before it turned English but they did not know now. They were too busy remembering the men who had left either through choice or circumstance and would never come back.

Pain or rage, Cleofilas wondered when she drove over the bridge the first time as a newlywed and Juan Pedro had pointed it out. La Gritona, he had said, and she had laughed. Such a funny name for a creek so pretty and full of happily ever after.

The first time, she had been so surprised she didn’t cry out or try to defend herself. She had always said she would fight back if a man, any man, were to strike her.

But when the moment came, and he slapped her once, and then again, and again, until the lip split and bled an orchid of blood, she didn’t fight back, she didn’t break into tears, she didn’t run away as she imagined she might when she saw such things in the telenovelas.

In her own home her parents had never raised a hand to each other nor to their children. Although she admitted she might have been brought up a little leniently as an only daughter-- la consentida, the princess--there were some things she would never tolerate. Ever.

Instead, when it happened the first time, when they were barely man and wife, she had been so stunned it left her speechless, motionless, numb. She had done nothing but reach up to the heat on her mouth and stare at the blood on her hand as if even then she didn’t understand.

She could think of nothing to say, said nothing. Just stroked the dark curls of the man who wept and would weep like a child, his tears of repentance and shame, this time and each.

The men at the ice house. From what she can tell, from the times during her first year when, still a newlywed, she is invited and accompanies her husband, sits mute beside their conversation, waits and sips a beer until it grows warm, twists a paper napkin into a knot, then another into a fan, one into a rose, nods her head, smiles, yawns, politely grins, laughs at the appropriate moments, leans against her husband’s sleeve, tugs at his elbow, and finally becomes good at predicting where the talk will lead; from this Cleofilas concludes each is nightly trying to find the truth lying at the bottom of the glass like a gold doubloon on the sea bottom. They want to tell each other what they want to tell themselves. But what is bumping like a helium balloon at the ceiling of the brain never finds its way out. It bubbles and rises, it gurgles in the throat, it rolls across the surface of the tongue, and erupts from the lips--a belch.

If they are lucky, there are tears at the end of the long night. At any given moment, the fists try to speak. They are dogs chasing their own tails before lying down to sleep, trying to find a way, a route, an out, and--finally--get some peace.

In the morning sometimes before he opens his eyes, or after they have finished loving, or at times when he is simply across from her at the table putting pieces of food into his mouth and chewing, Cleofilas thinks: This is the man I have waited my whole life for.

Not that he isn’t a good man. She has to remind herself why she loves him when she changes the baby’s Pampers, or when she mops the bathroom floor, or tries to make the curtains for the doorways without doors, or whiten the linen. Or wonder a little when he kicks the refrigerator and says he hates this shitty house and is going out where he won’t be bothered with the baby’s howling and her suspicious questions, and her requests to fix this and this and this because if she had any brains in her head she’d realize he’d been up before the rooster earning his living to pay for the food in her belly and the roof over her head and would have to wake up again early the next day so why can’t you just leave me in peace, woman.

He is not very tall, no, and he doesn’t look like the men on the telenovelas. His face still scarred from acne. And he has a bit of a belly from all the beer he drinks. Well, he’s always been husky.

This man who farts and belches and snores also laughs and kisses and holds her. Somehow this husband whose whiskers she finds each morning in the sink, whose shoes she must air each evening on the porch, this husband who cuts his fingernails in public, laughs loudly, curses like a man and demands each course of his dinner be served on a separate plate like at his mother’s, as soon as he gets home, on time or late, and who doesn’t care at all for music or telenovelas or romance or roses or the moon floating pearly over the arroyo, or through the bedroom window for that matter, shut the blinds and go back to sleep, this man, this father, this rival, this keeper, this lord, this master, this husband till kingdom come.

A doubt. Slender as a hair. A washed cup set back on the shelf wrong-side up. Her lipstick, and body talc, and hairbrush all arranged in the bathroom a different way.

No. Her imagination. The house the same as always. Nothing.

Coming home from the hospital with her new son, her husband. Something comforting in discovering her house slippers beneath the bed, the faded housecoat where she left it on the bathroom hook. Her pillow. Their bed.

Sweet sweet homecoming. Sweet as the scent of face powder in the air, jasmine, sticky liquor.

Smudged fingerprint on the door. Crushed cigarette in a glass. Wrinkle in the brain crumpling to a crease.

Sometimes she thinks of her father’s house. But how could she go back there? What a disgrace. What would the neighbors say? Coming home like that with one baby on her hip and one in the oven. Where’s your husband?

The town of gossips. The town of dust and despair. Which she has traded for this town of gossips. This town of dust, despair. Houses farther apart perhaps, though no more privacy because of it. No leafy zocalo in the center of the town, though the murmur of talk is clear enough all the same. No huddled whispering on the church steps each Sunday. Because here the whispering begins at sunset at the ice house instead.

This town with its silly pride for a bronze pecan the size of a baby carriage in front of the city hall. TV repair shop, drugstore, hardware, dry cleaners, chiropractor’s, liquor store, bail bonds, empty storefront and nothing, nothing, nothing of interest. Nothing one could walk to at any rate. Because the towns here are built so that you have to depend on husbands. Or you stay home. Or you drive. If you’re rich enough to own, allowed to drive, your own car.

There is no place to go. Unless you count the neighbor ladies. Soledad on one side, Dolores on the other. Or the creek.

Don’t go out there after dark, mi’ jita. Stay near the house. No es bueno para la salud. Mala suerte. Bad luck. Mal aire. You’ll get sick, and the baby too. You’ll catch a fright wandering about in the dark, and then you’ll see how right we were.

The stream, sometimes only a muddy puddle in the summer, though now in the springtime, because of the rains, a good-size alive thing, a thing with a voice all its own, all day and all night calling in its high, silver voice. Is it La Llorona, the weeping woman? La Llorona who drowned her own children. Perhaps La Llorona is the one they named the creek after, she thinks, remembering all the stories she learned as a child.

La Llorona calling to her. She is sure of it. Cleofilas spreads the baby’s Donald Duck blanket on the grass. Listens. The day sky turning to night. The baby pulling up fistfuls of grass and laughing. La Llorona. Wonders if something as quiet as this drives a woman to the darkness under the trees.

What she needs is . . . and made a gesture as if to yank a woman’s buttocks to his groin. Maximiliano, the foul-smelling fool from across the road, said this and set the men laughing, but Cleofilas just muttered grosero and went on washing dishes.

She knew he said it not because it was true, but more because it was he who needed to sleep with a woman, instead of drinking each night at the ice house and stumbling home alone.

Maximiliano was said to have killed his wife in an ice-house brawl when she came at him with a mop. I had to shoot, he had said, she was armed.

Their laughter outside the kitchen window. Her husband’s, his friends'--Manolo, Beto, Efrain, el Perico, Maximiliano.

Was Cleofilas just exaggerating as her husband always said? It seemed the newspapers were full of such stories. This woman found on the side of the interstate. This one pushed from a moving car. This one’s cadaver, this one unconscious, this one beaten blue. Her ex-husband, her husband, her lover, her father, her brother, her uncle, her friend, her co-worker. Always. The same grisly news in the pages of the dailies. She dunked a glass under the soapy water for a moment--shivered.

He had thrown a book. Hers. From across the room. A hot welt across the cheek. She could forgive that. But what stung more was the fact that it was her book, a love story by Corin Tellado, what she loved most now that she lived in the U.S., without a television set, without the telenovelas.

Except now and again when her husband was away and she could manage it, the few episodes glimpsed at the neighbor lady Soledad’s house because Dolores didn’t care for that sort of thing, though Soledad was often kind enough to retell what had happened on what episode of “ Maria de Nadie ,” the poor Argentine country girl who had the ill fortune of falling in love with the beautiful son of the Arrocha family, the very family she worked for, whose roof she slept under and whose floors she vacuumed, while in that same house, with the dust brooms and floor cleaners as witnesses, the square-jawed Juan Carlos Arrocha had uttered words of love, I love you, Maria, listen to me, mi querida , but it was she who had to say no, no, we are not of the same class, and remind him it was not his place nor hers to fall in love, while all the while her heart was breaking. Can you imagine.

Cleofilas thought her life would have to be like that, like a telenovela , only now the episodes got sadder and sadder. And there were no commercials in between for comic relief. And no happy ending in sight. She thought this when she sat with the baby out by the creek behind the house. Cleofilas de . . . ? But somehow she would have to change her name to Topazio, or Yesenia, Cristal, Adriana, Stefania, Andrea, something more poetic than Cleofilas. Everything happened to women with names like jewels. But what happened to a Cleofilas? Nothing. But a crack in the face.

Because the doctor has said so. She has to go. To make sure the new baby is all right, so there won’t be any problems when he’s born, and the appointment card says next Tuesday. Could he please take her? And that’s all.

No, she won’t mention it. She promises. If the doctor asks she can say she fell down the front steps or slipped when she was out in the back yard, slipped out back, she could tell him that. She has to go back next Tuesday, Juan Pedro, please, for the new baby. For their child.

She could write to her father and ask maybe for money, just a loan, for the new baby’s medical expenses. Well then, if he’d rather she didn’t. All right, she won’t. Please don’t anymore. Please don’t. She knows it’s difficult saving money with all the bills they have, but how else are they going to get out of debt with the truck payments. And after the rent and the food and the electricity and the gas and the water and the who-knows-what, well, there’s hardly anything left. But please, at least for the doctor visit. She won’t ask for anything else. She has to. Why is she so anxious? Because.

Because she is going to make sure the baby is not turned around backwards this time to split her down the center. Yes. Next Tuesday at 5:30. I’ll have Juan Pedrito dressed and ready. But those are the only shoes he has. I’ll polish them, and we’ll be ready. As soon as you come from work. We won’t make you ashamed.

Feliz? It’s me, Graciela.

No, I can’t talk louder. I’m at work.

Look, I need kind of a favor. There’s a patient, a lady here who’s got a problem.

Well, wait a minute. Are you listening to me or what?

I can’t talk real loud ‘cause her husband’s in the next room.

Well, would you just listen.

I was going to do this sonogram on her--she’s pregnant, right?--and she just starts crying on me. Hijole , Feliz! This poor lady’s got black and blue marks all over. I’m not kidding.

From her husband. Who else? Another one of those brides from across the border. And her family’s all in Mexico.

Shit. You think they’re going to help her? Give me a break. This lady doesn’t even speak English. She hasn’t been allowed to call home or write or nothing. That’s why I’m calling you.

She needs a ride.

Not to Mexico, you goof. Just to the Greyhound. In San Anto.

No, just a ride. She’s got her own money. All you’d have to do is drop her off in San Antonio on your way home. Come on, Feliz. Please? If we don’t help her, who will? I’d drive her myself, but she needs to be on that bus before her husband gets home from work. What do you say?

I don’t know. Wait.

Right away she says, tomorrow even.

Well, if tomorrow’s no good for you. . . .

It’s a date, Feliz. Thursday. At the Cash N Carry off I-10. Noon. She’ll be ready.

Oh, and her name’s Cleofilas.

I don’t know. One of those Mexican saints I guess. A martyr or something.

Cleofilas. C-L-E-O-F-I-L-A-S. Cle. O. Fi. Las. Write it down.

Thanks, Feliz. When her kid’s born she’ll have to name her after us, right?

Yeah, you got it. A regular soap opera sometimes. Que vida, comadre. Bueno- bye.

All morning that flutter of half-fear, half-doubt. At any moment Juan Pedro might appear in the doorway. On the street. At the Cash N Carry. Like in the dreams she dreamed.

There was that to think about, yes, until the woman in the pickup drove up. Then there wasn’t time to think about anything but the pickup pointed toward San Antonio. Put your bags in the back and get in.

When they drove across the arroyo, the driver opened her mouth and let out a yell as loud as any mariachi. Which startled not only Cleofilas, but Juan Pedrito as well.

Pues , look how cute. I scared you two, right? Sorry. Should’ve warned you. Every time I cross that bridge I do that. Because of the name, you know. Woman Hollering. Pues , I holler. She said this in a Spanish poked with English and laughed. Did you ever notice, Feliz continued, how nothing around here is named after a woman? Really. Unless she’s the Virgin. I guess you’re only famous if you’re a virgin. She was laughing again.

That’s why I like the name of that arroyo. Makes you want to holler like Tarzan, right?

Everything about this woman, this Feliz, amazed Cleofilas. The fact that she drove a pickup. A pickup, mind you, but when Cleofilas asked if it was her husband’s, she said she didn’t have a husband. The pickup was hers. She herself had chosen it. She herself was paying for it.

I used to have Pontiac Sunbird. But those cars are for viejas. Pussy cars. Now this here is a real car.

What kind of talk was that coming from a woman, Cleofilas thought. But then again, Feliz was like no woman she’d ever met. Can you imagine. When we crossed the arroyo she just started yelling like a crazy, she would say later to her father and brothers. Just like that. Who would’ve thought.

Who would’ve? Pain or rage perhaps but not a hoot like the one Feliz had just let go. Makes you want to holler like Tarzan, Feliz had said.

Then Feliz began laughing again, but it wasn’t Feliz laughing. It was gurgling out of her own throat, a long ribbon of laughter, like water.