Painting Their Portraits in Winter

by Myriam Gurba

  Ixchel’s fear migrated to the boys. “Let him go!” they yelled. I didn’t want to. The hill was giving me power. A strange noise formed in the dentist’s son’s throat. It was a stifled death rattle. I quit spinning. My hands unclenched. A frozen bitch, I watched my victim blink and twitch. White people color returned to his face. He was breathing again, high on some hormone, and he began to swim away. His crew jogged after him. They ran up the street, towards where the road curved left. At the turn, the dentist’s son stopped. He stood near ivy, panting.

  “I’m coming back!” he threatened.

  “I look forward to strangling you again!” I shouted back. The hill wanted his blood.

  The dad of the boy I strangled went crazy. My best friend told me so. She said all he did was stare out his bedroom window at the vineyard that swelled behind his across-the-street neighbor’s house. He wore his bathrobe non-stop. He cackled so big you could see his fillings. Maybe he filled himself. He was a dentist. My best friend knew he went crazy because her mom heard from a doctor’s wife who worked in the same medical building as him. I wondered if he’d kill himself. In my public speaking class, a girl did an informative speech about her dad killing himself. He’d been a dentist, then he gassed himself. I wondered if the ivy that covered the dentist’s yard had anything to do with his madness. Ivy is a crazy plant. Sometimes, I thought I saw the dentist. I thought I saw someone unshaven in a brown robe at his balcony’s French doors.

  The dentist recovered from his madness, and one afternoon, he and his wife were driving their BMW down country roads. They saw a car accident at a hill by broccoli fields. Ooh, it was ugly, and since the dentist was a doctor, he pulled over to help. He walked to the smashed up car and found his youngest son crushed in the passenger seat. The kid behind the wheel, who was not crushed at all, was the only Jewish kid in our neighborhood. The dentist carried his son from the wreck and placed his body near an irrigation ditch. According to my best friend, a light wind blew as the bully’s soul left. I felt bad for the Jewish kid. First, you’re the only Jewish kid in the neighborhood. Then your shitty driving kills the crazy dentist’s son.

  There’s a picture of me I can’t find. It’s from the summer before I went to college. In it, I’m at the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, by their redwoods. Dad shot the image with his 35-millimeter camera from the top of some stone stairs. I’m looking up at him, my eyes green with forest. I’d asked to go to the gardens. He’d taken me. It’d been so long since plants had dwarfed me, and I’d been happy about it.

  Chihuawhite

  I got obsessed with a moth, a Mexican Goth. She wore black bodysuits. When she stomped, her saddlebags jiggled. Her lazy eye took long siestas. Talked in its sleep. Her good eye was robust. Enlightened. I always saw it reading.

  After spying on the moth for weeks, I came to believe that Satan had handcrafted her for me. She was la walking dead uglier than Frida Kahlo, probably hecha en México para esta budding lesbianita. I wondered if she tasted like cilantro.

  The moth managed the second floor mall bookstore. Everyone who worked at that bookstore was hot. Everyone who worked at the first floor mall bookstore was white and ugly.

  To get close to the moth, I volunteered across the street at the library. The librarian put me to work paging books, which is a fancy way of saying I shelved. I washed books, too. People say money is the filthiest thing handled by humans but the boogers, minestrone, and cum I massaged with a rag off Curious George taught me that it’d be more hygienic to pleasure a thousand pennies than to kiss a single library card.

  I took breaks to go spy on the moth. I skulked through the bookstore entrance and lurked in Magazines. I lurked in Science Fiction. I crouched amidst Art and Photography coffee table books. My asymmetrical eyes peeked across the top shelf of Do-It-Yourself.

  Stalking excited me. I brushed my hair for it. I applied lipstick. I polished my combat boots. I tore extra holes in my dress. I bleached my facial hair.

  I got the balls to walk up to the register and say, “Hi, I always see you reading. Wow. Good for you. Who are your favorite writers?”

  In a baby voice that contradicted her sinister look, the moth recited a list until closing time, “Sylvia Plath, Anton Chekov, Carson McCullers, Anne Sexton, Octavio Paz, Martín Espada, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, Shel Silverstein.”

  (Shel Silverstein???)

  “Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Sophocles, all the people who wrote the Holy Bible, Anne Rice, Stephen King, Nietzsche, H.P. Lovecraft…”

  With my allowance, I bought some books by the authors she mentioned. I stole the rest from the library. I slept with them under my bed. I absorbed their influence through nocturnal osmosis.

  I lurked with such tenacity I earned the moth’s trust.

  She said, “Come to my house.”

  I said, “Okay.”

  We rode the city bus. In her parents’ almost bare living room, the moth introduced me to her mother.

  “Mucho gusto,” I said to her.

  The moth’s mother mutely grinned. Her silver teeth glowed. A white lightning bolt streaked her hair’s center part. Lumpy tits rode at her elastic waistband. I respected her.

  In the moth’s cocoon — that’s a moth’s bedroom — I knelt on the black and white checked floor. For a bed, the moth had what appeared to be a homemade coffin. A child-size crucifix served as its headboard.

  “Can I get in?” I asked, pointing.

  The moth turned her stereo louder. “Go ahead.”

  I climbed into her tomb. I folded my arms in an X across my chest. I closed my eyes. I was practicing.

  A few weeks later at the mall pizza place I lunched with the moth, telling her about a new athletic record I’d set in PE: a thirty-minute mile.

  She laughed. She laughed so hard, she farted. It sounded like a tiny pebble shot out from between her nalgas. I wondered if it was trapped in her calzones.

  “You remind me of me!” cried the moth.

  “Did you have a long mile, too?” I asked.

  “I never ran the mile.”

  “Did you forge a doctor’s excuse?”

  “No, I refused to run it. I had conscientious objector status.”

  “You conscientiously rejected physical education?”

  “Yes.”

  I wanted to impress the moth so badly that I blurted, “A boy I know got expelled for coming to school dressed as Courtney Love!”

  She countered, “Before dropping out, I almost got expelled for a costume, too.”

  Of course she did. “What’d you go dressed as?” I asked.

  She grinned and explained, “My best friend, Veronica, and I borrowed sneakers, thick socks, acid-washed jean skirts, and pink t-shirts. We put our hair up in scrunchies and got orange cover-up and smeared it on so that you could see the gross change in color between our necks and our faces. We said ‘like’ a lot.” Her lazy eye stirred.

  “You went to school dressed as white girls?”

  She nodded.

  The moth moved out of her parents’ house near Fremont Park to her boyfriend’s apartment, also near Fremont Park. One weekend when the boyfriend went to see the Grateful Dead, the moth had me over to smoke hashish. On her davenport, we sucked a joint down to a roach. My eyes felt loose.

  “Once, when I was little…” the moth was saying, speaking to me from inside an intergalactic prism, “in Chihuahua, I got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. I was walking and at the end of the hall I saw a woman in a white nightgown. She said, ‘Come here,’ and held out her arms. I walked over to her. When I put my arms around her, I fell. I felt for her but there was no one there.”

  “I felt things, too, when I was little,” I offered quietly.

  Ignoring my admission of childhood clairvoyance, the moth continued, “One time, when she was about thirteen, my mom was at her friend’s house. They were sleeping in different beds, and my mom woke up in the middle of the night with a shadow on top of her. It was crush
ing her.” I had a vision of a Rorschach inkblot dry-humping the moth except the moth had her mother’s hair. “She tried screaming but she couldn’t move. She was paralyzed.” The moth paused. “The shadow disintegrated and my mom was just, like, there. Awake all night. Like a week later, my mom’s friend said to her, ‘Patricia, remember that night you slept over? Something happened. Something got on top of me and...’”

  I visualized two ectoplasmic rapists laughing at the border fence.

  It turned out that the moth was keeping a secret. Her Halloween prank, her whiteface, had invited a white spirit into her body. The white demon took full possession of her and not even the best local curandera, a witch doctor named Elvira, could exorcise the whiteness with a limpia. A limpia involves a white (not racially) witch waving or rubbing an egg across the sufferer’s body. The egg sucks out the bad, and then the witch breaks the egg. She empties the contents into a bowl. The witch will say, “Look.”

  She will point at a red fleck dotting the yolk. What was your affliction may now be turned into breakfast, but scoop out that freckle first.

  The demon made the moth break up with her hippie boyfriend and hop a boxcar. She rode across Oregon state lines and hopped off where it smelled the greenest and wettest. The moth changed her gorgeous Mexican name, Guadalupe Jesús de Guadalupe, to Dylan. She joined the Daughters of the American Revolution. She seduced a ginger lumberjack. He knocked her up. They named their twin daughters Ary and An.

  Dylan, the lumberjack, and their twins live just outside of Eugene, in a handmade log cabin surrounded by spruces and hard-working beavers. Dylan manages a faux taxidermy shop/vegan cupcakery. She shows her work — billions of handcrafted paper napkin snowflakes — at the local art gallery. She counts nettle, kelp, and imitation venison among her favorite flavors. She composts everything, including her past. The only word ghosts whisper to her now is in English: Boo.

  Dog People

  An omen slunk to the middle of the road. A frosty milk carton rode in a paper bag on our backseat. Maybe the black cat had sensed the dairy and been attracted by it. Black cats like lapping Vitamin D from dishes set by backdoors. They grab mice by their tails and dangle them over chilled cups of cream.

  The omen stiffened on a white dash mark. Her fur flattened. Her chin tilted down. Her whiskers got a hard on. Yellow eyes stared at our incoming bumper, challenging us.

  “Speed bump!” Dad announced.

  My fingers gripped my armrest. A dragonfly exploded against the windshield. Gutsy.

  That we were about to kill something dark and agile stole my breath. We flew right over her, roaring over her heartbeat, and I turned. My seatbelt wrestled me, and I twisted and lunged against yanks and snaps.

  Looking over my shoulder, I gazed across the backseat out the dusty rear window. In one sleek piece, the black cat was sitting in golden roadside grass. A grasshopper arced into the air beside her, landing in our lane.

  “Did I get it?” asked Dad.

  “No.”

  Dad absorbed the disappointment. Then he lectured, “Never brake for animals. If you’re ever driving, and it comes down to you versus an animal that’s run into the road, it’s the animal. I don’t ever want you to slam on the brakes and wind up sacrificing your life in order to save a squirrel’s.”

  In awe of the cat’s agility, I murmured, “That cat saved itself.” My heart tossed a penny into a stream. I wished on it that I could outrun minivans as stealthily.

  “If you ever kill anything with the car,” said Dad, “just consider it a sacrifice to the gods of our ancestors.”

  I contemplated a Mesoamerican man dressed in feathers and skins wrestling a cat lady’s beloveds on top of a pyramid. Their claws dug into his potato skin arms. They ripped stripes into his flesh and pecs. Pomegranate globs dripped onto stone. The sun, a visual vampire, grinned. He was wearing sunglasses, like he did in certain cereal commercials.

  “Hey,” said Dad. “Did you know that the Maya invented the concept of zero?”

  “I don’t like math,” I answered.

  “Neither do I,” said Dad. “But I love subtracting cats.”

  Mom and Dad are both dog people. They made this known on the Fourth of July, after the last sparkler had faded and a sea breeze whished through our front yard. It rustled Mom’s black and white hair. It lifted firework ash off the driveway slab. The powder blew to the loquat tree and sprinkled it over the roots.

  I felt kind of bad for Dad. He was going to have to wait another year to play with explosives. He was the only one allowed to light our fireworks, and like taking out the trash after tearing everything open on Christmas morning, you had to clean up a lot of shit after Independence Day, too. Dad was doing this. He was crawling on his hands and knees, reaching for burnt up things that smelled similar to Mom’s cooking. He tossed a black clump into a wet garbage pail. It plunked.

  As Dad had touched flames to fuses, my heart had beaten woodpeckerly. The anticipation of an accident, that this might be the moment my father became one-handed, made me almost whiz my pants. I’d have to wait another year for that same kind of rush. Right now, Dad was no better than a dog trying to figure out where to go. Crawling. Sniffing. More remains plunked into the pail.

  Mom uncrossed her arms. She breathed in and out, and I was glad none of my friends were here to comment on her velour high waters. Her glasses reflected garage lights but she was staring at the moon. In Spanish, she crowed, “Look. Look at the pretty moon.”

  Antonio, Ixchel, and I looked at it.

  “Where’s the man on the moon?” asked Antonio. “I don’t see him.”

  I looked for him, too, but only saw mozzarella. “He’s gone,” I agreed.

  As chunks plunked into the pail, Dad mansplained, “Many cultures don’t see a man on the moon. The Aztecs didn’t. They saw a rabbit. So did the Chinese.” Scooping up something crispy and holding it up to the moonlight, Dad added, “The Chinese are the reason we can do this. They invented fireworks.” Dad looked at the sky. He joined us in moon-gazing.

  “Can you guys see the rabbit on the moon?” Dad asked.

  The rabbit instantly materialized.

  “Yes! Yes!” I shouted. “He’s right there!” I pointed. In my moon frenzy, I shouted, ‘The Aztecs spoke Nahuatl!”

  Watching Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom had inspired me to begin digging a hole in our backyard, a hole that might puncture the earth’s molten nickel core and penetrate a royal tomb. After watching me excavate for a week, Mom had surprised me with a gift. She handed it to me as I was coming out of the bathroom, wrapped in a towel. I’d just showered the archeology off of me.

  “Here,” she said.

  “What’s this?” I asked, looking at the book.

  “Read it. It’ll make your abuelito happy to know you’re learning about Mexican culture.”

  I carried the book to my bedroom. I sat on the carpet in front of my closet and set the thing on my lap. It was simply titled The Aztecs. Instead of getting dressed, I dripped and read the whole thing. Lingering on the glossary that began with the word Agave, I decided that someday it would be my job to plunder whatever was left of Moctezuma’s capital. Flipping back through the pages, staring at the aerial map of Tenochtitlán, the metropolis’s precise topography burned itself into the part of my imagination responsible for adventure. So did Tenochtitlán’s caste system. I imagined bumping into an Aztec wearing a ponytail, heavy facial jewelry, and feathers. I would say to him, “’Scuse me, warrior.”

  I imagined a boy wearing a wooden collar and cowering. To him, I whispered, “I won’t hurt you, slave.”

  All roads led to the Great Temple of the Blue Hummingbird, and there I’d encounter Snake Woman, the best-dressed man in Mexico. The emperor wasn’t the real HAIC, Snake Woman was. With incense and fresh blood spatter spicing the air, we’d encounter one another at the top of the highest pyramid, where all the satellite dishes were. Snake Woman would be toiling in a hallucinatory state, his breath ran
k with ’shrooms. His left hand would be tugging a human heart from a rib cage. He’d hold it up for the hungry gods to admire.

  “They did speak Nahuatl,” said Dad. “Where’d you learn that?”

  “Mom gave me a book about the Aztecs. Are we Aztecs?” My pride surged in anticipation of his answer.

  “Sorry,” said Dad. “We’re Chichimecas.”

  I scrunched my mouth. I asked, “What’s a Chichimeca?”

  Dad laughed. He asked, “You really want to know what a Chichimeca is?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “The Chichimecas are the sons of bitches. The Dog People.”

  Son of a bitch, I thought. I wasn’t telling anyone I was a Chichimeca.

  “I’m a son of a bitch?” I asked.

  “Daughter,” said Dad. Mom laughed.

  “Son of a bitch sounds better,” I said. “And that’s no so bad. The Aztecs ate dog. They ate Mexican hairless dogs. They fattened them with corn and beans, and roasted them for special occasions, like Thanksgiving.”

  Dad mumbled, “I think we’ve eaten dog a couple of times.”

  Mom said, “If you think my cooking tastes like dog, you can cook for yourself.”

  “I wasn’t talking about your cooking,” said Dad.

  “Whose cooking were talking about then?”

  “Your mother’s.”

  Mom said, “It’s time for bed.”