Dusk & Dust. Esteban Rodríguez
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skin
peeling off, with a crown of spines cloaked
in a history of dirt, and worn by the sudden flares
of gravel rising locust-like around our home,
feeding every notion that the rain has fled,
become a fugitive spread like folklore in the north.
Not even God can save this place from geography,
not even the devil wants his fever back, an old spell
he cast, but couldn’t force himself to love,
as the rare breeze I love scuttles across my father’s
barren scalp, then moves down the bandana noosed
around his neck, the brown and sweat-clotting pores
of middle-age flesh, that entire arthritic skeleton
that resurrects into its daily chores again, relentless
like the sun, and that like the open grave of land
he was born on, has evolved to embrace the slow
embalming heat; the blisters, the burns, the small
stampede of mangy cattle he wrangles in our corral.
Though I feel the need to help him with another
day’s work, I hold back when his body language
suggests my hands are too young and handsome,
when I see his thick and scabbed calluses mapped
on his palms, and feel my own gripping the soft pad
of a ballpoint pen, sketching the cactus and him
along my textbook margins, because even if
this afterschool image was fading before I started,
decomposing like papyrus, at least there’s enough
space here for them to live, and for me to sketch
myself between them, let my stick-figure body
bleed through every page, wondering who,
if anyone, will find these portraits next year,
if they’ll study the way our faces melted, visualize
what little life there was for us to absorb.
Yowling, as if the space beneath our house bears a new one every night, they slither out, one by one against a pre-dawn haze of gnats and light, a pack of mutts with their younger mutts trailing close behind; the top of their muzzles ripe with mucus leaking from their eyes; their spines cloaked in ashen earth, and sprinkled bits of splintered oak gnawed by termites beneath the porch, that excavated den they’ve made their home. These are far from the Lassies trained for TV shows, the barnyard family pets, or workdogs guiding goats from the pasture in, but strays exhausting every place they’ve ever been, like nomads trudging through some bible desert, still without a place to go, aware that every inch of here is bruised with thirst, and that the ground brands their feet with scalded mounds of dirt. But I am just a boy, squatting low, crawling far beneath the steps, placing slabs of ham against the broken bricks, concerned their feral habits haven’t fully formed, that they’ll wander all day without a thing to eat, no bone or chow placed inside a bowl; that the mothers of the pack will return with teats still leather-black, wary that as I belly out this wooden womb, they’ll have to worry about another mouth that isn’t full.
I was born to a line of housewives obsessed with living more dramatically, devoted mothers immersed in Mexican telenovelas, those afternoon marathons built on the same basic plot: handsome Latin Boy falls for gorgeous Latin Girl, jealous ex-lovers scheme to break them apart. Their struggle aggravated by conniving aunts and uncles, pregnant maids and mistresses, rich and misleading step-fathers usurping everyone’s camera time, eager to push their way into frame when the scene shifts to a shirtless farmhand, slowly pans across his young and hairless chest; those polished blots of sweat dilating my mother’s eyes with subplots of haystack sex. To sit and watch her sit and watch another episode was an episode in and of itself: the rising action of her middle-aged and plus-sized body rising to adjust the foil-wrapped antenna, to smack the hiccup static from the box, catch the out-of-wedlock drama, it’s sharp and sudden orchestra coupled with another Julio, tu eres el papá! Because every twist fed her confidence, she’d nudge me to lift my shoes off the couch, mimicking every multitasking mother who controlled the show, women she imagined herself to be, as I imagined her inner-monologue saying she wanted out, courage to break the spell of having a household to clean, of cooking for a husband whose sun-branded skin secreted wet cement, filled the kitchen with a scent she tried to kill with Pine-Sol and potpourri. I could see her taking mental notes on how to fake a death, on the latest ways to use mascara, comb her knotted hair, hold back the waterworks when Boy was losing Girl, or when again a novela was about to end. And she’d turn to me as if I were the boy cast solely for his smile, to provide some sort of cute and comic relief, or comments so innocently profound they’d linger beyond the screen, beyond the shadows of the kitchen table where she helped me master English with her broken English, reading story after story like lines off a script, and rehearsing every scene where the mother sighs, hugs her son, accepts the role she knows she has to play.
And as March thaws the last of winter’s
vagrant winds, dusk smears what’s left of itself
across the fair’s parking lot, that shadowed grid
of cars and trucks where I watch the Ferris wheel
spin against a pink and purple sky, seep over
the silhouettes of mini-roller coasters, tattered tents,
a rusted stadium where the crowd cheers for one
fallen cowboy after the next. Regardless of the season,
no amount of change can erase the scent of cattle shit,
or the prized array of fragrances that linger near
the ticket booths, where I fall in line, accept
this smell everyone ahead of me accepts; a trade-off
for a chance at fun, or what fun can be had
from ping pong balls, fishbowls, dull darts,
balloons, rubber duck ponds, water guns, rope ladders,
or the Ring the Bell crowded with boys eager
to swing its chained mallet through the air.
As I walk past them – note their willingness
to be quantified by the height their light reaches –
the carnies, with their greased and tobacco-stained
faces, holler for my attention, as if they can sense
the same need for overcompensation; their voices
shrieking with the promise of rewards. And yet,
because another year has passed since impulse
led me in their direction, I settle for the consolation
of knowing that even the simplest things are rigged,
that as the bright myriad of games dilate into a panorama,
and the evening spreads like a pinned moth across
the