Dusk & Dust. Esteban Rodríguez

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Dusk & Dust - Esteban Rodríguez


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being anchored to a face,

      so as not to face the features in the face

      that were slowly changing, growing

      stranger by the year. And there was

      the white complexion so different from

      the darker shades of skin around me,

      and the pimples unwilling to renounce

      their loyalty, leaving me to reinvent

      the candy-red bumps as chickenpox instead.

      Even if I didn’t know the one-hit wonder

      of this disease, once I saw those Mexican

      men fighting on TV, I couldn’t care less

      if anyone else believed it, if I, like them,

      was putting up a front because a front

      was the surest thing to guise myself in,

      to carry my confidence further than

      their choreographed jumps, than their lunges,

      plunges, angelic dives, than the tiptoe

      rope-walking as they back-flipped farther

      into the ring, or as their sweaty bodies

      began to sync with the crowd’s shock

      and awe, feed off their praise and screams.

      And there I was, bouncing off my bed,

      mumbling Spanish I could barely speak,

      and hardly able to drop-kick, eye-poke,

      cross chop, pile drive, head-butt, body slam,

      brain-bust, somersault, shoulder claw,

      slingshot or sleeper hold into my role

      as rudo, the dirty-playing villain desperate

      to pin the appearance I no longer wanted,

      to wait for the count and finish off

      with a headlock so I wouldn’t have to take off

      my mask, reveal to myself who I knew

      I really was.

       FENCE

      We weren’t exactly tourists anymore, amateurs at crossing over,

       tossing change

      and lint inside their half-cut, empty jugs of milk, nodding as they

       blessed us

      from behind the fence; their scabbed fingers anchored to the plastic’s

       jagged edge,

      heavy with the weight of pity, stares. We weren’t exactly shocked by all

       the begging

      at the border, the women sprawled outside the bridge, sleeping children

       cradled

      in serapes, strapped like hammocks below their mother’s breasts,

       as hordes of flies

      dove at their eyelids and crawled across their swollen cheeks. As sad

       as the scene

      was supposed to be, I still had fun feeding quarters down the slot,

       swinging past

      the metal arms, the rattle from the turnstile louder than pennies dancing

       inside a can.

      We’d matured from trivialities, group photos at the flagpole,

       at the emblem

      of an eagle with a snake perched above a cactus, copper cruelly

       chipping off,

      a metaphor for the landscape of this country. At ten, I had no

       metaphors

      for barefooted boys selling Chiclets like insurance, running after

       every passerby,

      tugging their sleeves, nagging how their gum was cheaper than

       the other guys’.

      But diez centavos was too desperate to translate to my mother’s ears,

       and even though

      she spoke their language, she used her English silence to mute

       their pleas; those shouts

      for discount pharmaceuticals, healing herbs and Freon, strings of garlic

       and streetside

      taco stands drenched in spices I had never smelled. We were them

       without the burden

      of being them, shared last names with them, an economic convenience

       living so close

      to them, but when my mother tugged me closer to her waist, clenched

       the collar

      of my white and sweaty shirt, I heard the tension in her grip saying

       I was not,

      would never be one of them, would play the role of ‘in-between’ instead,

       the relative

      from el otro lado, the boy straddled on the valley of two geographies,

       walking over

      with his stoic, middle-aged mother, unaware that her stay-at-home salary

       didn’t come

      with dental, that her enamel was dissolving, riddled with cavities across

       her molars,

      where she’d thrust and dig with toothpicks, nails, scoop out the half-

       chewed gunk

      of food, repeat the rhythm after every meal. And there came a point

       when all she scraped

      was nerve and gum, when her habit spread into years of sleeplessness,

       aggravated

      by a dentist speaking Spanish too clinical to understand: drilling, talking,

       drilling,

      pausing, yanking out the reasons why we made our trips, those weekend

       afternoons

      crossing back high on anesthesia and lobby candy, staggering past

       the line of women

      still staring through the heavy mesh, and still melting along the shadeless

       pavement,

      wondering, I imagined, how our sloppy smiles tasted.

       CACTUS

      Mid-August. The last of July’s clouds curdle

      like expired milk, stain the dry Bermuda grass

      with shifting Rorschach shadows, and with a sense

      the afternoon will offer nothing more than sweat

      and stale air. I sit and watch the parched cactus

      perched along the splintered porch-rail: pot-ridden,

      small,


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