Night at the Fiestas: Stories (30 page)

When my grandfather begins to talk, it isn’t about the past but about a future in the world outside Cuipas.

“You must not be shy,” he tells me.

“You must be happy and laugh.”

“You must talk to strangers.”

I nod and tell him, “I will, I’ll try,” and panic rises in me.

“This is no place for a young person,” my grandfather says. I know he thinks of a day—a day that will never exist but that is as real to him as if it already did—when I will shoulder a bag and climb up and over the Manzanos without turning back. He says again, “This is no place for a child.”

I want to make him take it back. Instead, I pull the slip of paper from my pocket. “I want to stop here,” I say firmly. “I need to stop at this clinic.”

He takes the slip from my hand and frowns at it. I nearly grab the wheel, but his one hand is steady and the road is straight. He lifts his foot from the pedal and the car loses power. He turns to look at me for a moment, then turns back to the road. He folds the slip of paper, tucks it into his breast pocket, and gives the car gas.

“So can we? Can we stop?”

“No,” he says, in a voice he rarely uses with me, a voice that is harsh and foreign and final. The ojo stirs and my vision smears. I think of my mother. I’ll never leave my grandfather, but it isn’t even my loyalty he wants.

The road twists and curves and begins to rise. When we are in the Manzanos, I swallow the stone in my throat, look out over the piñon, imagine the murderer in these mountains, alone with the knowledge of his crime.

I
N THE CITY
, the bright billboards flash along the highway, and white sun glints off the windows of the tall hospitals and hotels. As the fast cars pass, I look for my mother. I don’t think she will be in the driver’s seat of one of the fancy cars, but I watch the faces anyway. Her hair could be different by now. Other things might be different for her, too, I know, because in the world people’s fortunes rise and fall.

If I find her, I think, then my grandfather will see the doctor. He will see the doctor and he will be cured and together we will bring my mother home.

I wonder if he is looking as well. He gives no indication, keeps both hands on the steering wheel. It’s harder for him to drive now, and the traffic makes him nervous.

“Look, hijita,” he tells me before we shift lanes. His voice is familiar again. “Am I clear?” And I crane my neck, watch the cars coming at us, tell him yes.

At the Kmart we load our cart with things we will need for the next month: tubes of toothpaste, large packages of paper towels, corn flakes, sometimes new sneakers for me, undershirts for him. My grandfather buys me toys also, plastic dolls, characters from films and television shows I have never seen. He will ask me to open the toys in the car, and I will scatter the bright plastic packaging on the floorboard. As he drops the toys into the cart, I smile and exclaim, though I’m too old for them and wish he would save our money. At home I will line them up on the windowsill in my room, leave a few scattered on the floor, so my grandfather, walking by, will think I have been playing.

When we’ve found all the things we need, we continue to push the cart down aisles under fluorescent lights. We are both a little dazed by the colors of this place, the bustle, both unwilling, it seems, to leave and be alone together. We push the cart, turning our heads left and right.

The woman at the checkout is stout and middle-aged and wears braces on her teeth. She asks what we think should happen to the horses. When we look at her blankly, she asks if we’re from here.

“Cuipas,” my grandfather says.

The horses, the cashier explains, are wild. They came down from the mountains because they were starving from the drought. They gather along the highway to eat chamisa and grass and the corn tossed to them by concerned citizens.

“I can’t believe you don’t know,” the cashier says. “It’s all over the TV. They say the horses are the same ones brought by the Spanish hundreds of years ago.”

The cashier scans each item as she talks. She moves too quickly. I’m afraid she will be done before she has told us everything about the horses.

“What will happen to them?” I ask.

“Who knows? People have to fight about it, like everything else. I saw on the news where some people are saying they’ll have to be slaughtered because there just isn’t enough grass, what with the drought.”

My grandfather fingers the bills in his hand, ready to count them out when she gives us the total.

“Some people say the state should feed them until the rains come, some say they should be driven to Colorado or Wyoming.” The cashier pauses, tongues her braces. “The one sure thing is no one’s going to leave them alone. People will interfere.”

When I look toward the doors, I know it’s for a reason. It takes a few moments for me to see her. My mother. She pushes a cart, the corner of a box of sugared cereal poking out of a bag. She is as young as I remember, her hair as straight and heavy. She squints up, her gaze brushing over my face.

When I turn to him, I know from the way he holds the bills in his trembling hands that my grandfather has seen her, too.

If it really were her, I would run across the crowded store, throw myself against her. If it were her, I would beat at her chest and belly with my fists. The cashier sighs and says that everything is expensive nowadays. I want so much for this woman to be my mother, and suddenly I fear it, too. If she returns, my grandfather will get better, but he will also remember everything she put him through. If she returns she might leave again, and then he might get worse. But it isn’t her, of course, and the woman passes through the automatic doors.

My grandfather is still looking toward the doors. His face is open and longing.

“Grandpa,” I say, to draw his attention. “I’m hungry. I want my lunch.”

Slowly he turns to me. He blinks, and then his face is shuttered.

I
N THE CAR
my grandfather asks where I want to eat.

“I want to go home. Let’s eat at home. We’ll have cheese and mustard sandwiches.”

He nods, and we drive in silence until he begins to speak.

“Your mother never forgave me for the way I treated your grandma,” he says, looking hard at the road.

“It wasn’t her,” I tell him. “It was just someone who looked like her.”

My grandfather sits upright, close to the steering wheel, his gaze fixed on the horizon. “Once I shook your grandma so hard the skin around her eyes bruised,” he says. “Your mother stood against the wall and watched.”

“Grandpa, that lady didn’t even look like her, not really.”

He says, “Your grandma’s head went back and forth.”

I won’t look at him. I won’t.

“It took a week for the black to fade, and during those days I stayed away from the house. One night I even slept at a job site. On the weekend I worked on the cars. I changed the fluids in every single one, checked the pressure on every tire, recorded the mileage. I couldn’t go into the house where they were.”

The ojo begins to flare. I want his story to stop. My skin burns.

“
It wasn’t her
,” I say.

He clears his throat. “I never touched your grandma again. I wouldn’t have, even if she hadn’t left. And I never touched your mother. But that didn’t matter, because your mother never forgave me.”

I can’t stand it, but he keeps going. I hear him even over the hot throbbing in my ears. I think of his voice earlier, that hard, hoarse severity, and think of Ofelia Alma Zamora, my grandmother, being shaken so hard the fragile skin around her eyes bruised. I’ve never heard this story, but now I understand that I knew it all along. I need him to stop.

“She blamed me for her mother leaving her, and maybe she was right.”

U
SUALLY AS WE LEAVE
the rush and concrete of Albuquerque, the vast beige housing developments, my grandfather and I begin to relax and breathe. Today, though, his terrible story remains packed around us, as thick and suffocating as cotton. I feel it would take great effort for me to move
.

As we wind up and over the Manzanos, I thank him for the trip, say I’ll be glad to get home. My voice is stiff. He pats my hand, and behind his glasses his eyes are rimmed red with age.

A
ND BECAUSE OF WHAT
he has said, I remember the thing I nearly always succeed in forgetting, the thing my grandfather believes I can’t remember because I was four: the day I last saw my mother.

She had been gone for three weeks, left without telling us. One day she returned in a truck I’d never seen, driven by a man I’d never seen. She jumped from the passenger seat, and what I remember is being furious, but I ran to her because I couldn’t stop myself. When she opened her arms, I backed against the house and yelled at her to go away. She looked at me, lips parted in hurt surprise, and I thought she’d come to me, but instead she walked into the house.

The man in the truck—Anglo, cowboy hat tilted forward—looked straight ahead, tapping his thumbs on the steering wheel.

My grandfather sat silently at the kitchen table, while in the tiny back room she packed. I stood in the doorway, where by turning my head left or right I could see them both, my grandfather sitting still, one palm pressed against the table, and my mother working fast, shoving skirts and blouses into my grandfather’s canvas army duffel. Outside in the truck, the man waited.

My mother’s back was to me and she cried as she packed. I looked at her with hate that burned her edges, until she browned and curled like a photograph cast into the stove. I looked at her and sliced through her with cuts so fine she hardly knew they were there until pieces of her began to drop away. I looked at her and she began to dry up and shrink from my gaze, until she was as cold and brittle as a marigold in November.

I wish now I had cried and flung myself at her and gripped the hem of her shirt. If I had, she might have stayed. Instead, I trailed her stiffly. Out on the porch she kneeled to hug me, and I remained rigid with hate, and over her shoulder I could see the man watching us. My mother was crying and murmuring in my ear, love or promises, but I couldn’t listen. The man’s eye caught mine, and that’s when the ojo began to spread through me. My mother pulled away, jogged to the street, where she swung her bag into the back. She didn’t call to me when they drove away.

For a long time I watched the road that led to the Manzanos, and beyond, to Albuquerque. I watched until the sun dropped so low in the sky that it burned my eyes and I had to turn my head.

I don’t remember what I did when I lost sight of the truck, but I imagine I went inside to where my grandfather was sitting in the kitchen. I imagine when he heard my step he looked up and saw me.

N
OW HE SAYS
, “I told her to go, hijita.”

Outside, the landscape blurs.

“I told her she couldn’t come home. I didn’t think she’d listen to me—when had she ever listened before?—but she did. She left you.”

It wasn’t the man’s gaze at all, I realize now. It was my own eye that was evil, my own look that was covetous and overlong, my own furious, envious gaze that has made me sick. I wanted my mother and she’d gone to him.

W
E HAVE BEGUN
our descent through the Manzanos—Cuipas is a meager cluster of buildings in the distance—when we see them, the wild horses. There are two, pulling at the dry grass. My grandfather slows the Mercedes in the middle of the road. The horses are thin. Ribs visible through dusty coats. The Mercedes thrums, diesel coursing, so he turns off the engine. It shudders and goes silent, and then we hear the wind in the grass, weeds scraping against the asphalt edges of the road, and, I’m sure of it, the sound of their mouths as they eat. One of them raises her head, cocks her ears, listening. The light is silver on her velvet muzzle. I’m certain she is aware of us, will raise the alarm, but she dips her head once more and tears at the grass with yellow teeth. I think about a relative long ago losing his horse, calling her name through the mountains, returning to the fort or mission on foot, perhaps never making it, his name lost to history. A third horse emerges from the piñon, swats at the air with her tail.

If I could time my death, I would time it thus: exactly fifteen seconds after my grandfather. I would like to die in my sleep, but I must be certain I outlive him. I will lay my ear against his thin chest, listen to the silence beneath his humped sternum, and then, when I am sure, it will be my turn. Fifteen seconds is good: any longer and I might feel grief. Any longer and I might raise my head to the world opening up before me, wide and calling.

In a moment my grandfather will pat me again, and his hand will stay there, resting on mine. I’ll look down, run a finger along the veins knotted and bruised under his thin brown skin. I wait for his touch. But for now we watch the horses separately, sitting as still as we know how.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

F
IRST, MY HEARTFELT GRATITUDE TO MY WONDERFUL EDITOR
, Jill Bialosky, for her incredible insight and for making this a far better book, and to my amazing agent, Denise Shannon, for being such a generous champion of my work (and for giving me a nudge forward now and again). I still can’t believe my good fortune at getting to work with such brilliance. Thank you also to Bill Rusin, Fred Wiemer, Rebecca Schultz, Steve Colca, Angie Shih, Erin Sinesky Lovett, Francine Kass, Don Rifkin, and to all the other people at Norton who helped guide my book into being.