American Chica

by Marie Arana

  It wasn’t much later that I found that Room 8, next door to Great-Grandma Clapp, was where my cousins lived. Huey was Aunt Erma’s son—a tall, gangly eighteen-year-old with radiant eyes. Nub was Aunt Helena’s boy—sixteen, unruly, brooding, and beautiful. They were students at Rawlins High School and temporary wards of our grandfather, who had volunteered to break them in.

  When we saw the boys, they seemed different as a pair of wild broncos, on the far side of tame. In Huey’s case, he was there because Aunt Erma, my mother’s oldest sister, was a teacher out on the range, in a log-cabin schoolhouse, improving the minds of a rich rancher’s children. We saw Erma only on weekends, mincing up the metal stairs of the Ferguson Building with books under one arm, a pencil jutting from her hair.

  Nub was there because his mother was “plumb out of her gourd,” living in an asylum, having her skull rocked with electric shocks, and because his father was nowhere to be found. He was a bad-boy virtuoso, a genius for testing the law. He had started small: joy rides in the wee hours of morning. A little gas from a neighbor’s truck. But soon enough he was heading down Route 30 in swiped cars, siphoning out filling stations, drag-assing home in the back of the sheriff’s car. He was reckless, raw-boned, irresistible.

  Grandpa Doc felt a keen responsibility for those living under his roof—or the roof of the Ferguson, anyway. He told us a story that summed up what he was having to shoulder. One warm spring day when he was working on a Comanche, he found Nub on the waiting-room sofa, a freckle-faced girl at his side. “You two there long?” said Doc.

  “Nope,” said Nub, flashing a rakish grin.

  Grandpa Doc proceeded to work on the Indian, slipping out from time to time to shoot tobacco juice into the spittoon and eye the two on the couch. He could hear Great-Grandma Clapp clanking up and down the metal stairs, knocking on doors, visiting with the uranium prospectors down the hall. “How’s business, folks?” she barked. “You found some good rocks today?” But she was too deaf to hear their answers, and so she continued to career through the corridor like a bat with bad sonar, bumping against the walls.

  Doc was excavating his patient’s jaw when he realized that the conversation in the waiting room had grown muffled; there were unmistakable sounds of clothes rustling, heavy breathing. Doc weighed his choices. Should he stop midsurgery and let his patient bleed? He wavered there, one foot on his chair pedal, his scalpel midair. Until the solution came a-knocking.

  The sheriff was at the door. Next to him, ashen, diminutive, crowlike in her floor-length black cape, was Doc’s mother. Nub rose. Grandpa Doc stepped forward. The Comanche’s eyes rolled up in alarm.

  “Ho, Doc,” the sheriff said, shifting cud to the other side of his smile. “Doggone if she ain’t done it again. I found her streaking through town like a banshee, screeching to everyone, asking if they seen her daddy.” He nodded toward Nub. “You keep your kin reined in now, hear, Doc? Two generations of your folk are working me up one side and down the other! I’m gittin’ a little raggedy.”

  As little as I could relate to my dying grandmother and her wacky mother-in-law, I found myself drawn to my pretty-boy cousin. I was crazy for Nub. In a time when the world seemed to have more moving parts than an Andean earthquake, he struck me as someone I could rely on. He had a will of his own and a wry, wicked humor. I began seeking him out the way I’d sought out Antonio: On the roof of the Ferguson Building, where he went to smoke. Down in the grassy alley between the dry-goods store and the sheriff’s office where I’d find him chewing on a weed. Like Antonio, he welcomed me, grinning wide, patting whatever ledge he was perched on, signaling me to put my little rump by his side. Whereas Antonio’s lessons had been about laws of nature, rules of energy, the consequence of historias, Nub’s school was something else: Laws were for breaking. Rules were for chumps. History counted for nothing. Mornings were for shuffling the deck.

  More than anything, Nub taught me how to throw my head back and take in the sky. He’d lean against a wall or stretch out on a patch of green, blowing circles of cigarette smoke at our sheltering firmament. Sometimes he’d pass me a butt end and let me try puffing my own. More often, I’d put my elbows behind my head and watch his perfect rings rise, curling high into the crisp spring air.

  From time to time I’d scramble into his lap, place my hands on his shoulders, and hoist myself up so that I could look down into his eyes. They were a crystalline blue. Just as Antonio’s eyes had been the color of a rich brown loam, Nub’s eyes were alive with clear hyaline. Looking into them buoyed me up, made me feel light, dizzy, high.

  I know now that to Nub I was just a silly child with amusing eccentricities. But from time to time, when I’d lie beside him as he looked into the blue serene, something would move him to pour out his heart. I’d stare into that vastness listening to his voice, the warm twang of it, and hear about his world. He would talk about his mother, my Aunt Helena, who had been institutionalized for some years now but was forever escaping from the asylum, found heading down some highway, scampering off in her nightgown. Or about his father, who was somewhere in Nebraska or Kansas or Colorado, on an endless rye binge. Or about the incomprehensibility of being made to sit on a hard wooden chair in Rawlins High School to acquire the kind of learning he’d never use. “I jist wanna git,” he’d say to me. “Jist wanna make myself scarce. Like Uncle Jabez.”

  “Uncle Jabez?” I asked him. “Who’s Jabez?”

  “One of your uncles, Mareezie. But I doubt you’ll ever meet him. He’s out in the mountains. Far away.”

  Jabez wasn’t my uncle, as it turned out. He was my second cousin. I learned a good bit about him in those conversations with Nub, but as spring wore on and the years went by, Jabez’s story emerged like a full-fledged historia.

  Even as Nub and I lay there, Jabez Clapp was whiling away time in a cave on an Indian reservation, somewhere in the cliffs of Arizona, under the same cosmic void. He was my mother’s cousin, the son of Grandpa Doc’s brother, a fugitive from the military. Gone AWOL in ‘29.

  As Nub related it, Jabez’s father—Grandpa Doc’s brother—had died young of leukemia, and little Jabez had been raised by his mother, a Southern belle more intent on teaching him pretty verses than the hard rigors of life. Jabez was a dreamer, inclined to stargazing and poetry, reduced to openmouthed wonder by the smallest manifestations of things. A lacewing over the nettle. An ant hauling grass across rock. The prospect of a long, shiftless afternoon. Somewhere along the way, someone made the disastrous decision that the U.S. Army could make a man out of him, be the father he’d never had.

  One night as he wandered away from his barracks, he went farther than he meant to go. “Imagine it, Mareezie,” Nub said. “He took a gander around. No one was there! That’s when he decided to do it. He lit out. Skedaddled!” Down the asphalt he went, across the plain, over the horizon, past the rocky crags into a hole on the side of a mountain. Apparently, he fed on wild berries, roasted roots over a fire, grew a beard down to his knees. The Indians said they saw him drifting through their hills, his face forever turned up. Looks At Stars, they called him. They figured much of his spirit had already departed, gone off to the Great Beyond. So they left him out there to his thoughts, and they taught their children and their children’s children to do the same. For thirty years, no hunting posse, no military police could find him.

  But long after those lazy afternoons with Nub, long after we were back in Lima, long after history had passed Jabez by—long, long after his military cohort had marched into Nazi camps or dropped death on the Pacific, after Stalin had purged millions in the name of the proletariat, after Mao descended into Beijing with red dreams and promises—Mother got word of what had happened to Jabez. It was 1959, and a group of government workers had come onto that Arizona reservation to canvass the terrain. One blizzardy morning, they looked about for shelter and saw the great stone at the mouth of Jabez’s cave. They moved it aside. They huddled in. And there, to their surprise, they found themselve
s surrounded by strip after strip of bark etched with poetry. There were necklaces of bloodstone and jade. There were three feather dream-catchers, a U.S. Army identification, a pan full of gold dust, a diary with silver initials.

  Deep in the heart of that stone sanctuary, they found Jabez’s bones, strung out in repose, cold as the ash of his fire.

  The story of Jabez—even in its thin, original version—was the single historia that Nub offered me. I listened hard to that story, as I had to so many of Antonio’s, puzzled over its meaning, turned it over in my mind, decided it must be important. All these years later I understand why. It has to do with my own longing for the horizon. It has to do with a part of me—a very un-Peruvian part—that wants to run. Leave. Go.

  The sky can have that effect on you. Look out at the Gobi Desert and the eye hugs the ground. Stand by the sea and the urge is to wade in, gurgle under. But gaze up at sky and the soul rises, floats up, off, as helpless as a feather in warm wind. Before you know it, you’re looking for roads, leaving your family, searching for something beyond the comfortable world you know. Catholics always sensed this and learned to use images of sky sparingly, in domes of churches only, under the watchful eye of God. But out West, as I was learning, a big sky was everywhere. Little wonder a spirit yearned to move on.

  BY THE END of our first week in Rawlins, our parents had found a house with a comfortable ground-floor apartment on West Buffalo Street. It was small and furnished, less than three blocks from the Ferguson Building, between the penitentiary and the railroad track. It was a cheerful little place, a two-story structure raised high off the street, green and white, with a double-A roof and small windows. There was a kitchen that opened to a dining area, something we’d never seen before. A pullout couch in the living room, which Georgie immediately claimed. The two bedrooms, allocated to my parents and to Vicki and me, were joined by a common bathroom. The best thing about it was that there was no fence, no wall, nothing to keep us from exiting that front door and running down the street on our own. There were no servants to stop us, and Mother didn’t seem to mind.

  George was increasingly nervous. It was almost as if he were a mirror of our father’s disorientation, our mother’s jitteriness. He seemed delicately strung, too easily affected by noises, too cringing in public spaces. He preferred to play inside. Mother was consumed by Grandma Lo’s illness, constantly at Grandma Lo’s bedside, but George’s condition did not elude her. I could see that she was watching him, and I noticed that they’d both begun to chew their nails.

  The day we moved into the house, I felt a new life had started for us. Vicki was enrolled in an elementary school down the street. Papi wandered down West Buffalo to look at cars, inspect new machines, figure out Rawlins, look at the oil refinery in Sinclair. “Hey, you!” a butter-haired boy yelled at me. He was hanging off the porch next door as I trudged up the walk with my suitcase. “Jist who do yew think yew are?”

  There was a five-and-ten-cent on the corner. George and I begged Papi for a dime, ran to the store, wandered through rows and rows of knickknacks and candy, and settled on a pack of Juicy Fruit gum. We crossed the street, sat in front of the school, and shoved the sweet sticks in our mouths. The children we saw through the school windows were about our age. They were pasty, nondescript, fading into their flannel clothes.

  “Extrañas a tus amigos?” I asked George, searching his twitchy face. Do you miss your friends?

  “Nah,” he replied. “Te tengo a ti, no?” I have you, don’t I?

  An old man hobbled up the street and turned to look at us. He was grizzled and gaunt, with a long, beaked nose and a crumpled hat. He crossed to where we sat and stood awhile, listening to our chatter.

  “What you yunguns doin’ sitting there?” he said finally, drawing himself up by his bony shoulders. “You spick-a-da Spanish? You Mexican or what?”

  We stared back at him, speechless.

  “On the wrong side-a town, ain’tcha?” he continued. “Suppose-ta be across those tracks over there on the niggah side, ain’tcha, now?” Spittle was gathering in the corners of his mouth, and his stubbled chin was trembling.

  “Cat got yer tongues?” he said. He took his hands from his pockets and wiped them against his little protuberance of a gut. Then he stamped on the grass and clapped his hands at us, but the sound was little more than a pathetic thwap. A bird scooted across and flitted into a tree.

  “Well, go on, git!” he screamed. “Git!” His tiny eyes were burning and red. “You deaf’r sumpin? You li’l chiggers don’t belong here and yew know it! Whole damn Mexico gonna come up here and take over uf we don’t watch out!”

  “Hey, Pop! Pop!” a large woman called out, waving her arms and waddling toward us quickly.

  “This man is a loco,” George whispered to me, his eyes aglow. “Don’t move until I tell you to.”

  “What do you think he wants?” I said. “Our Juicy Fruit?” A loco was supposed to be made an offering, after all.

  The old man was muttering to himself now, pawing the ground with his feet. The figure behind hurried closer. “Come away from there, Pop. Leave those kids alone,” she called. The woman was wide, dough-faced. Her straw hair flapped in the wind.

  “Don’t it steam yew up?” the old man said to her. “They just sittin’ there spick-a-da Spanish. What they doin’ here anyway? They got a school over there fer these varmint.”

  “No, Pop. It don’t steam me up. What do steam me up is yer standing out here yellin’. Come on home now. Come on home.”

  She led him off without a glance our way. I fingered the gum in my pocket, weighing whether I should run after him and put it in his hand. If I did, he could swallow me whole. If I didn’t, his curse could prove true: Maybe I didn’t have a right to be here, maybe my mother was wrong; maybe I wasn’t an American after all. But George just sat there, and so did I. We drew up our knees and watched the man and his big daughter toddle down the street and disappear into a pretty little white house.

  I had never paid much attention to the way I looked, but I found myself standing in front of our bathroom mirror after that, studying my short dark hair, the skin on my face and neck, stripping myself naked and watching the way I moved. I barked in Spanish at my own reflection, then mouthed the words, imagining how the motions of my face would look to people who couldn’t understand what I was saying. I mimicked the boy next door. “Hey, you!” I shouted to myself, putting on his scowl, drawling the words like a native. “Jist who do yew think yew are?”

  Just who had that old man thought we were? He had said we belonged on the niggah side of town. Was Rawlins cut in half? Was there a Whites side and a Colored side, like the doors we’d run up against in the bathrooms of St. Louis? Would Mother be taken away from us? Would Papi be forced to go back where he belonged?

  “Your hair is black,” my mother had said to Vicki. “But you’re white, like me.”

  I, on the other hand, had suspected my skin would fool no one. There was nothing white about me. I was colored, for sure.

  There is a trait I recognize now in the child I was then, a curiosity about my own physical composition, an obsession bordering on fever. Perhaps that inquisitiveness is common to children of mixed parents. You till, you dig, you paw, searching for bits, scrabbling at roots, eager to learn to which tribe you belong. Are you more like one or more like the other? Are you one way when you’re in one country, but another when you’re not? You dangle from that precipice, wondering where to drop.

  It is exhausting work, that transit between worlds, that two-way vertigo. I was half and half. Dr. Birdseye had told me so. But I hardly thought I was better off for it. I had two heads, two hearts. I was as unwieldy as Siamese twins on a high wire: too awkward for equipoise, too curious about the other side.

  FRIDAYS AFTER SCHOOL, Huey and Nub would head for Rattlesnake Pass, Doc’s ranch at the foot of Elk Mountain. They were helping him build a house. Out there with them were two of Doc’s drinking pals: a beer-guzzling Morm
on and a saloonkeeper from the oil-refinery town of Sinclair. Mondays, my cousins would come back full of stories about the men’s booze binges, each tale giddier than the last. The cabin floor, it seemed, had started out well enough—the tiles straight-edged and orderly—but by the time the last squares were laid, the rows were as swacked as the hands that had laid them. Grandpa Doc didn’t seem to mind. The boys were out on the prairie, out of harm’s way.

  Each day in town, however, brought its grim turn, a shift in the bearing walls. Grandma Lo was in and out of a coma; her doctors’ efforts were proving futile. She was taken one day from her bed in the Ferguson and driven down the street to the Mormon’s house. Grandpa Doc’s weekend drinker had turned out to be married to a nurse. It was a matter of shepherding now.

  Mother and Papi continued on their respective reveries—she at her mother’s bedside, he on his shop-by-shop tour of the latest American inventions. Vicki was lost to her books. With no one to mind us, George and I started combing Rawlins like truants on a spree. We shoplifted candy from the five-and-dime, provoked rumbles with the little gringos next door, snitched cigarettes from our parents and puffed them out back. When George stole a toy truck at my instigation, Mother threatened to turn him in. She walked him, as he snorted and sniveled, all the way to the gate of The Pen. When she brought him home and thrashed him under the dining room table instead, he scrambled out with blood on his face. Soon after that we were marching down the street, our hands in Vicki’s firm grasp, headed for another kind of incarceration, on the very grounds where the loco had cursed us: the school with the pasty-faced children. Within its walls we spent endless days, freeing our parents to squarely face the anxieties, look death directly in the eye.