American Chica

by Marie Arana

  Grandpa Doc, too, was tense as a buckjump rider, numbing himself with work. He took on more surgery. He had always offered it free to Indians who needed it. Now he’d book himself solid for days, spelunking in heads, yanking his way through teeth, emerging one afternoon with four of my father’s molars. On weekends he was out on the ranch, working on his house, or down at The Rustic Bar. “Come with me, honey,” he’d say, when Georgie scampered off after Huey and Nub, volunteering to help them pound nails. “Let’s go look at them bobcats awhile.” We’d jiggle down the dirt road to Saratoga, where he’d sit and sip whiskey for hours. I’d sit at the oak bar beside him—silent as a stone—watching two stuffed mountain cats claw at the carcass of a doe.

  The Clapp ranch spraddled out beyond the tracks of the Union Pacific, where Rattlesnake Pass cut through to a creek. The land was grave-slab flat, running a fast course to the horizon. But due east, just where the sun rose, Sheep Hill leaned up against Elk Mountain the way a calf in high wind leans into its mother. That bigger mountain rose haughty, unknowable, thrusting its snow-covered hump into a nimbus sky.

  Doc’s brand—reverse Z, double quarter circle—was burned into the haunch of every cow, bull, and horse that grazed his many acres. There was a cabin, an outhouse, a shed, and, behind these, his new house, going up all white and perfect, like a jewel box sitting out on a table. Out by the corral, where the animals were kept, a weathered wood fence traced the foot of Elk Mountain.

  There were only two other houses the human eye could see from Doc’s land. One was an abandoned shack he had given to Clem Riley, a black ex-convict who had knocked on his cabin door one winter morning, looking for a place to stay. Ole Black Riley, my grandfather called him. The man had lived there for years, working a vegetable garden and hunting jackrabbit, until he woke up one morning and wandered away in search of a better life. “Hey, Grandpa Doc, what happened to Old Black Riley?” I asked, looking out toward that shack and feeling a certain affinity for a man who would have been consigned with me to the other side of the tracks in Rawlins proper. “Dunno, honey. Took off, I guess.”

  On the other side of Grandpa Doc’s land, where stone cliffs ran west like a frill collar of gray, where coyotes bayed at the light of the moon, stood the second house. The Widener place: It was four miles down the Pass and barely visible from Doc’s new house. Jack Widener was the cattleman who had hired Aunt Erma to teach his children. On a good day, you could make out the pillbox that was her school.

  Over the rise, behind the Widener house, lived Old Joe Krozier. He was a wild man with a mysterious past—eyes as flared as roulette wheels, hair all a-kilter. “Now, he truly is a heavy drinker,” the Mormon and the saloonkeeper would say to each other, and then they’d both bellow and guffaw until tears ran down their cheeks. Rumor had it that after Old Joe’s wife had left him, he’d vowed never to own a car again. He was the only man in America—as far as I could tell—who had ever sworn off cars. There was good reason why: One hot August morning his wife had taken his last one and torn down Rattlesnake Pass in it to meet her boy lover. She had never come home again. We’d see Old Joe hunched over a slung-back mare, making his way down the ruts of Rattlesnake Pass, or ambling along the railroad tracks on his thin bowed legs, alone.

  “Get up, you lazybones, and get me a stone!” Gramp sang out to George and me when we were out at the ranch, to get us out of bed and into the morning. We’d scramble out and find one quickly, about the size of a mango, and run back to the house, knowing we’d hunt that day. Doc dropped the stone into the bottom of a large pot, rattled in some beans and a ham bone, added water, and left it to cook.

  Learning to shoot was the first order of business when Doc took us out to Rattlesnake Pass. “You can’t live on this land and not learn how to handle a rifle,” he’d tell us. “I don’t care if you’re knee-high to a grasshopper. There are snakes out here. Bears. Wolves. And by my sights, you two look like juicy little morsels. You need to learn about guns.” At first we shot cans on the fence or potatoes set out on the brush. But soon we learned to fit the butt of a .22 into a shoulder, line up the crosshairs, finger the trigger, feel the ping, and see our bullets twig to their targets like qosqos to black light.

  Doc killed deer. We killed rabbits. Doc killed antelope. We killed sage hen. Running after them through the brush as they warbled and lumbered away, eyeing us with alarm. When we were done, we would drag the carcasses onto the pickup truck for the ride back to the house. The beans would be waiting for us, fragrant and steamy, cooked evenly through by the stone. But we wouldn’t be allowed to sit down to them until all the animals were clean.

  Doc taught us as equals, and taught us well. We knew to shoot heads, kill quick. We knew to snap necks, be sure. He had taught us to skin our game, chuckling at us when we crept away pale and green. But it was cousin Nub who taught me how to gut a sage hen and cut fast to a butcher’s fortitude. Slit the throat so it bleeds to the ground. Grab the hen by the anus and pull. Take her wings and swing ‘til the guts fly. Pluck her to pink-butt tender.

  “You’re the only one around here who ain’t flat-out bats,” Nub told me one day. “Course, you’re still young and all. You could go any minute.” He’d stick out his tongue and roll his eyes until I screeched with delight.

  “Reckon I’m takin’ a big shine to you,” he’d say. He’d lift me up and set me down on the long fence at the edge of Doc’s land and listen to me talk a blue streak about the power of my qosqo and Peru’s pishtacos and the spirits in the trees. Then he’d yelp and pound his knees with his hands. Whether it was my accent or my tales about ghosts that amused him, I never knew, but the more he’d laugh, the more I’d perform: louder, faster, scarier. Then I’d sit back and survey his face.

  Nub was almost golden, openly handsome, honey hair hanging down into his eyes. He was slim-hipped, slim-chested, with eyes that flashed up hot.

  “Should I tell you some more?” I asked him. “About the Danish man with the worms in his head?”

  “Yip. I’d like to hear that one. You’ve got the damnedest stories I ever heard, tyke.”

  “Do you think I talk funny, Nub? You think I’m a foreigner?” I was remembering the large woman on the Pullman train, the old man who had growled at us in Rawlins, every gringo that raised his eyebrows when George and I walked into the shops, chattering.

  “Naw, Cousin, sure don’t. I git what you’re saying fine. But tell you what. This’ll prove to me that you’re not.” Nub mounted the fence beside me, reached into his pocket, pulled out a pouch, and grinned. “Here.” He thrust it under my chin.

  I looked down at the pungent brown strands in the bag. “Tobacco,” I said. “I know what that is.”

  “Have some.” I looked up at his face. He was serious. “Go on, girl, take a hit.”

  “Sure will,” I said, “yip,” and grabbed it. I pulled out a handful and shoved it in my mouth.

  “Aw-raaat!” he sang out, and beamed a bright row of white.

  That was how Nub introduced me to chaw and how I finally learned to spit. It took more than once—a great deal of hollering along the way—but I got so that months later, by the time I left Wyoming, I could hold my tobacco and squirt it from the side of my mouth just like him.

  Hit the cowpie. Squeet! And Nub would hold his sides and laugh so hard I thought he’d fall off the fence and die.

  “You know what you look like? You look like some pea-size cowboy on a drunk, that’s what!”

  “Oh, yeah? How about a llama?”

  “A what?”

  “A llama. Aw, Nub, c’mon, you know—the Peruvian animal I was telling you about.”

  “They chaw?”

  “Naw, you dummy, but they spit!”

  “Haw!”

  “Yeehaw! Watch this. Just like a llama. Peeew!”

  “Well, I’ll be damned. More like a whale, I’d say. Out the ole blowhole. Pow!”

  I reckon it was the ole blowhole that did it. In any case, something was pushing. I pul
led up my shirt, aimed my belly at the stone cliffs, and howled, “Qosqo-o-o-o!”

  Nub gawked at me as if I were mad, his eyes glittering and wide. Then he threw back his head and roared his big laughter into the sky.

  WHILE THE SKY was getting our attention, it turned out there was much going on in the landscape. A strange phenomenon was under way, underfoot, in Wyoming. Nothing familiar. Nothing we understood. Nothing like shifting plates of subterranean rock. Nothing like forces that had bucked us before. Nothing like those moments in Peru, when Pachamama heaved and buildings collapsed and glass flew and we would run screaming for our lives.

  No. This wasn’t rambunctious or noisy. This was coal fire, silent and eerie, smoldering just below the earth’s surface. Burning, with time on its hands.

  We were told that the prairie could fool you. Sage and grass sitting innocently out there as if all were right in the world. Mirages. Beneath them, a quicksand inferno. One wrong step—like Persephone’s encounter with Hades—and you’d drop to the hellfire below.

  There were stories about trucks crossing to Hanna, between Walcott and Medicine Bow. Without warning, the earth had caved in and swallowed them up with a yawn. We imagined the drivers descending. We imagined trucks sinking and rocking, the way camels go down on their knees. We imagined men watching their cars melt, just before they were sucked into ash.

  On one of those anxious evenings when worry festered behind an illusion of calm, I burned my mother’s incense and prayed that no harm would come to cousin Nub. He had been known to get in cars and take off across prairies with a bottle or girl by his side. I blew on the incense and watched its red eye wink at me from under a pointy white hood.

  “What are you doing, Marisi?” my father asked me. Qué haces?

  “Thinking about Nub,” I said. George was on the floor, pushing a toy truck down an imagined road.

  “Come here, then; I have a job for you.”

  “What?” I said, and walked over to where he lay on the couch with a newspaper, the Saratoga Sun, splayed out on his chest.

  “Aquí.” He bent his neck up and motioned me under it. “Sit, put my head in your lap.”

  I did as I was told.

  “You see what this grand all-American vacation is doing to me? You see those white hairs on my head?”

  I leaned in and saw them—a dozen, not more—sprouting from the V of his hairline. “Yes,” I said, and smiled at the thought of him searching the mirror. An engineer with nothing to do.

  “Pull them out. I’ll give you five cents for each one that you show me.” And greedily, I set to work.

  I was like this, curled over my father’s head, when Mother and Vicki came in. “They did it,” said Mother, lowering herself into a chair. “They took her off to the hospital.” My father patted my hands and sat up.

  “Unconscious?”

  “Barely breathing,” Mother said. Her eyes were sunken, jaundiced.

  There was a silence then, as we shouldered the weight of her news. Papi folded his newspaper into a neat square and set it carefully on his lap.

  “Well, well,” Mother said at last. She took a deep breath and glanced around the room. “And what’s new with you two today?” She looked from George’s face to mine and back again.

  “Georgie has a new girlfriend,” I said, and there was truth to it. A girl in George’s class at school had followed him home, giggling and grinning like an imbecile.

  “I do not,” George said, and scowled at me.

  “He does?” My mother’s face brightened. She sat up in the chair as if a harness had been lifted from her.

  “Oh, yes, you do,” I said, standing up and facing him now, my hands on my hips like a martinet. “And she’s a real princess, too. A narigona.” One with a big honker.

  “She is not my girlfriend,” George screamed. Red was climbing his neck, red as the eye of the incense. His tic was dancing, wild.

  I was exhilarated by the sight of my brother’s quaking face. Perhaps it was because I was bored, perhaps because I’d had a surfeit of gloom. But I felt a perverse pleasure in goading the god I had worshiped so long. Blow the cone, make it glow. It felt good to bicker. Felt right.

  “And another thing,” I gloated. “She’s a potona.” A fat ass. I jumped up and waggled my tail.

  “Ya, ya, Marisi,” Papi chuckled, in spite of himself. “That’s enough.”

  George sputtered.

  “I don’t know why you find it so surprising,” said Mother, “that Georgie would have a new girlfriend—that is, if he does—”

  “Do not!” he screeched.

  She winked at him knowingly. “Remember when you told me how you loved Antonio, Mareezie? Do you remember that? And do you remember when you fell in love with the young man who called on Tía Chaba?”

  “Now I’m in love with Nub,” I confessed.

  “Nub? Your cousin?” said Papi. “Dios mío. What next? You’ll have to get a special dispensation from the Pope. Your great-great-grandparents on my side were first cousins, too, you know. That’s what they had to do.”

  “Well, maybe she’s not thinking of marriage just yet, honey,” Mother said. “Maybe just love between friends, eh?”

  “Love friends,” I said, and nodded.

  “Aha, I see,” said my father, smiling. “Better not tell your husband about those,” he added, and winked.

  “Love friends, my butt,” said George under his breath. “There’s no such thing.”

  “Is so!” I barked.

  “Is not!”

  “Is so! Mother has one!”

  And then a hush fell over the room as I gaped around like a stunned animal.

  “Mother has one,” I repeated, more softly this time. There was a scent of danger in the air, but I yipped my way through it. I wanted to prove to them that I knew what I was talking about.

  “A love friend?” Mother said, and leaned into the room, smiling thinly, her elbows on her knees.

  Fermata.

  And then me again. “Yes. You have one. A love friend. In Cartavio. I saw you sitting with him on the couch. You were staring in each other’s eyes. One of the solteros. The tall one with the yellow—”

  “Enough!” yelled my father. Presto. He stood now, a coal fire behind his eyes. Georgie was frozen on the floor, his shoulders hunched up to his ears. Vicki got up and banged her way into another room.

  “I can’t imagine who you think you saw. In Cartavio or anywhere else, Mareezie,” my mother said in a voice full of calm. “I can’t imagine.”

  “It’s true!” I yelled. “You were over there! He was over here! I saw you. You know it’s true!”

  Papi whirled around, slapped the newspaper down on the table, and lunged for the front door. The screen door snapped back with a loud slam, then shuddered against the frame. My mother stood and walked into the dining alcove. Her back to us, she pressed her knuckles down against the table, pushed her shoulders up into a shrug. But she didn’t say a word.

  He didn’t come home for dinner that night. I lay in bed sick with worry that he would never come home again. That I had driven him out to a hellhole in Hanna, somewhere between Walcott and Medicine Bow. When he staggered back through the front door at about four o’clock the next morning, I heard a sharp thwack and then a whoosh, as if air were rushing out of a tire. I crept from my bed, peeked into the living room, and saw an empty bottle with a dapper little man on its side, doffing his hat, swinging his cane. It was planted on our coffee table, where an angry hand had smacked it. Beside it on the couch, laid out and pickled as a corpse, was my father.

  Dawn brought one more thing. The news of Grandma Lo’s death.

  I’D SEEN A photograph of Abuelita’s dead sister. I’d come upon it in her family albums, pasted in between portraits of my be-whiskered ancestors in their starched collars and fancy top hats. Her little sister had been laid out in white lace on her funeral bier with garlands of roses cascading about her, a cluster of lilies in her hair. In the photo, her w
hite shoes point like a dancer’s, her arms lie peacefully across her chest, her curls are combed down on her brow, her eyes stare out, wide open. My Great-Grandfather Cisneros stands behind the body, and, above his black cravat, his face is long and gaunt. His eyes seem to be sliding down his cheeks like stones in a mountain huayco. His oldest daughter, my grandmother, stands beside him in a veil of black lace. Her eyes are dry but haunted. Although she is seven, her little face appears even smaller than her sister’s. Her sister cannot be two.

  I had seen this. I had seen funeral biers of the poor go by in Peruvian streets, the women wailing and staggering after, their heads draped in black cloth. I had seen men of society file into a church alone, their wives too delicate to see an inert body—for all the fragrant blossoms tucked in around it. But I had never seen a cadaver stretched out, serene, staring up into the ether.

  Grandma Lo’s body was set out for family viewing at Frank Wooten’s Funeral Home, three days after it expired at the Rawlins Hospital. “I’m taking the children there,” Mother said, sitting in front of her mirror, pinning a hat to her head.

  “You’re what?” I heard Papi say. “You can’t be serious. Funerals are not for children. You’re going to make them sick. Twist their minds for life.”

  Mother turned, her head tilted down like a bull’s, one hand jabbing a long hat pin in the direction of her brain. “Jorge, I’m taking them with me. You want to talk about twisting? Let’s talk about your borrachera. Your stinko night out on the town.”

  A truck rumbled down Buffalo Street, speeding its way out of Rawlins. My parents stared at each other and then Papi started again. “We’re talking about the dead here,” he said. “Where I come from you wouldn’t dream of taking a child to see one. Children are too impressionable. Even grown women don’t go.”

  “Well, where I come from you learn to look death in the eye,” said my mother. “They might as well learn it right now. It’s an important lesson.”

  The mortuary was on the outskirts of town. It was a clapboard house, dove gray and windowless, with no greenery save a struggling azalea in a clay pot by the stoop. “Clam-Hand” Wooten, the undertaker, lived on the right, behind two thick white pillars and a fusty porch. On the left, where the viewing parlor led into the embalming lab, was Grandma Lo.