Sky Bridge

by Laura Pritchett

  “No.”

  “I want a dog. To protect me. Is she nice?”

  “I don’t know. You want me to bring her over? If she’s no good, I’ll take her back.”

  “And leave her by the side of the road?”

  Miguel shrugs. “I’ll take care of it.”

  “Why would a guy drop off a dog? People are mean.”

  “And stupid.”

  “Mean and stupid,” I agree. “They allow pets at the new apartment complex in town. I just called them. Actually, I couldn’t find the number, so I had to call Marsha.”

  “Marsha the sheriff’s wife?”

  “No worries.” I wink at him. “I don’t know her all that well. But I asked her who to call about renting one of the apartments where she’s living now. She gives me her landlord’s number and says, ‘You want to hear something funny? This housing development is called the Preserve. And isn’t that funny? They take a farmer’s field, build it up and call it the Preserve. Actually, it’s the Preserve at the Meadows. She said it made her embarrassed to live there.”

  “It would me too.”

  “I want to live there.”

  “So, you moving?”

  I shrug. “I had some money saved, but then my car broke down last winter and needed a new engine, and I bought Derek a pair of ropers for his birthday, and pictures of Amber, and now it’s all gone. I hate myself. I really do. I got to get out of here. I do.”

  He’s listening, at least, so I go on. “I wish I knew where my dad was. I’d say, ‘Look here, you bastard, you owe me about a million bucks for all the child support and birthday presents you never sent, so pay up and help me out for once.’ Amber’s awake. Look, Juan, the baby’s awake.”

  Juan wanders over and takes a look. “Let’s throw her in the trash can.”

  “Juan!”

  The boy covers his mouth and giggles. “Let’s give the baby a cookie.”

  We all stare at Amber, and she stares back at us, and then out from her mouth gurgles white spit.

  “Ick,” says Juan. “That baby needs to go in the trash.”

  “The landlord said rent’s four hundred a month, plus utilities.”

  Miguel leans over to catch up Juan in his arms. He pulls him back into his lap and tickles him, and Juan throws his head back and laughs and squiggles free.

  “I have half my last paycheck and forty bucks Baxter gave me for helping out with the cows. So, what’s that? One more paycheck to cover rent. Plus the deposit. And phone. And hookups.”

  “And then my only neighbor will be gone,” Miguel says. “I wouldn’t blame you, though. I’ll be moving in one of these days too. But don’t forget about the diapers, the formula. More expensive than you think. The father isn’t helping?”

  “No. And you will have a neighbor. You’ll have Kay. You can have her.”

  Miguel laughs. “Ay, mi amiga. Your mother is okay.”

  “If I move, though, I’ll have to find a babysitter in town. Driving twenty minutes here to drop her off with Kay and then twenty minutes back into town—forty minutes twice a day—that won’t work. If Tess comes back, we could move to town together.”

  “What’s Derek say?”

  I shrug. “Derek doesn’t say anything because he’s in the middle of his seven days on. At the rig. I haven’t seen him.”

  He nods. “They got him still as a worm?”

  “I hope they promote him to driller.”

  “But the pay’s good.”

  “Yeah, twelve.”

  “Hard to leave twelve.”

  “Worms are good,” says Juan. “Butterflies are good. Crickets are good. Ants are good. But red ants are bad. Wasps are bad. Some spiders are good. Some spiders are bad.”

  “He’s figuring out what’s safe in this world.” Miguel says over Juan’s list. “What hurts, what doesn’t.”

  I laugh because ain’t that something we’d all like to figure out? Then I show him Tess’s postcard. Miguel reads the last line out loud and then looks up at me and waits for me to say something.

  “I don’t need Tess anyway.”

  Miguel tilts his head at me, because he knows I’m lying, and then he rubs his hand over his face and then holds his palms in front of him and speaks to them. “Libby, what do you do—How do you survive it when—when you realize you do need somebody and they’re just not there?”

  I have to stay silent to that one, because answering will make me cry all over again. Because I’ve been wondering myself. At first I thought that maybe it was best to fill that space with someone else. Like maybe instead of Tess, I’d find someone new. But then I figured out how you can’t really do that. It’s not the same. And you just go on hurting.

  “Miguel, do you ever hope that other people are pissed off or sad too, because then you’re not the only one? Or do you ever yell at imaginary people? Like: ‘Fuck off, I know my mom used welfare and WIC, and I’ll probably do the same, and I’ll probably never have my act together , but look at me! What am supposed to do? I know our house looks like shit, and probably I won’t go to college after all, and I’ll never be a nurse or an artist or anything else, but I don’t know how to make it different. And I’m sorry about that, but either teach me the rules of this game or fuck off.’” I say all this to the sky and then look at him. “Do you ever do something like that?”

  Miguel’s been staring at his palms this whole time. “That sounds a little familiar, I guess. I didn’t know you wanted to be a nurse.”

  “I don’t. But it’s a job. I want to be an artist. I draw pretty good, you know. But nobody pays for art. Do you think there’s something wrong with me? Because sometimes I dream that the world gets screwed up bad somehow, a bomb or disease or war. A 9/11, but bigger. I want that to happen. No I don’t. But yes I do. Because if everything gets crazy, if everybody’s life gets messed up, then I could find a way in, somehow. Then I’d have a chance. I don’t really want that. But it’s like, if something big doesn’t happen, I don’t see a change. And I want there to be a change.” I can hear my voice getting a little wobbly, so I bite my lip and tell myself to shut the hell up.

  “You want there to be a level playing field,” he says.

  “Exactly. That’s a good phrase.”

  “My family—my cousins, for example, in Mexico—they say the same thing, sometimes. They say, those bolillos, those gringos , they start someplace easier. It makes it hard for them to like you. They want the playing field leveled too.”

  “I don’t blame them.”

  “Some people’ll never know about this. Because they had enough from the get-go.”

  “I guess it’s not their fault. But still, I hate them.”

  “Doesn’t matter whose fault. It just means that some people are never going to understand some things. What it’s like, por ejemplo, to cross rivers and deserts and suffocate in the back of semi-trucks to get to a place to work your ass off. What white person will walk for days in a desert just to get a lousy-ass job? In Mexico they call it la lucha—the fight. The fight for work. That’s what I see, is how hard la lucha is, and how the crossing can scare a man, and how he goes on in the face of that fear, and how he trusts, and how he hopes. What you gringos see is people taking your jobs, taking over your language, using up your space—”

  “That’s not what I see.”

  “I know. But them, out there. Big bomb, yeah. Because then they’d be brought down a notch, closer to us.”

  “Cat, gato, cat, gato,” says Juan, chasing after Tess’s cat, who bolts under my car and hides. Juan gets down on his knees to throw more rocks and one pings off something under my car.

  “Ya, hijo, déjalo en paz. Don’t throw rocks at the cat.” Then to me he says, “Funny, how you’ve got to teach a thing like be gentle or be kind. They don’t come naturally.”

  “You want that cat? You can have it.”

  Miguel says, “I was cheating on her. Shawny.”

  “I know,” I say softly. “She wrote me.”


  He nods, slowly. I can see he’s surprised. We’ve talked about Shawny a little in the year since he moved back, but we never talked about this. He says, “She was being so mean to me, you know. She wasn’t happy there and I was sick of her complaining. Will you tell me, what she said?”

  “She wrote, ‘I think Miguel’s cheating on me, the son of a bitch.’”

  He laughs softly. “That sounds like her. She was always calling me a son of a bitch. I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known, it’s not like I ever thought, huh, I better not cheat or she’ll kill herself.”

  “That’s not why she killed herself.”

  He looks away from me and shrugs. “You don’t know that.” He clears his throat. “You said before, about the pot—”

  “Kay saw it. She was riding over there, fixing the fence. Don’t worry. She doesn’t care. She said it looks very green and very healthy. She also said you were an idiot, but that’s okay, because she calls everyone an idiot. It’s her favorite word. But you’re less of an idiot than the law, she said. It’s all relative, she said.”

  “You sure about that? She won’t say anything?”

  “That’s one good thing about Kay. She doesn’t really believe in the world’s set of rules. She thinks everyone ought to come up with their own.”

  “Oh, look,” says Juan. “A roly-poly that’s snailing around.” He picks it up and stares at the ball in his hand and then throws it at Amber, who’s sleeping again. It misses her and goes flying by my shoulder into the grass.

  “Ya, hijo, por favor!” Miguel puts his head in hands.

  “Don’t hurt bugs,” I say. “Please.” I turn to Miguel. “Kay said, ‘As long as he’s not smoking it around the kid, I could care less.’”

  “I don’t smoke around Juan.”

  “Well, then. But be careful. Ann Gayton—remember her from school?—she got arrested last month.”

  “I know.”

  “That’s smart, that you’re growing it down by the ditch. Shawny and I used to play there, in the ditch banks.”

  “I know, she told me.”

  “Kay said you put it between the water and the Johnson grass, which will hide it, and makes it look wild. She said you’re sure as hell going to get all scratched up, though, by the edges on that grass.”

  “I do.”

  “Kay’s the only one who’ll see it, though.”

  Miguel nods. “I’d work two jobs if I could. But I can’t, not with a kid. That’s why the pot. I need the extra money. I’ve got some family coming in this summer.”

  “And what, you need the money for them?”

  He shrugs.

  “What, cousins? Illegals?”

  He nods to both questions. “From Oaxaca. They’ll be staying with me for a while. If la migra don’t get them at the border.”

  “I don’t know anything about that stuff. Except that Baxter hires them. I mean, I guess I know they’re here. I just never thought about how they get here.”

  “It’s bullshit, that’s what to know. The INS could care less about them once they’re here since there’s work to be done by somebody and, no offense, but you gringos sure aren’t going to do it, and you sure don’t want to pay more for your food, which is what you’d have to do if you were paying enough to make it worth it. La migra’s just a show. That’s the one thing to know.”

  “What’s I-N-S?” says Juan.

  “Letters of the alphabet,” says Miguel. He makes a face at me like, Ain’t it sad what this kid’s going to have to grow up and learn about?

  “How many relatives?”

  “Fifteen or so.”

  “Fifteen? All crowded in at your trailer?”

  That makes Miguel laugh. “You don’t know what crowded is. Fifteen is fine.” Then he adds, “You just can’t know some things, not ever, not even if you try.”

  “I hate the world for not knowing. About my life. So I bet they hate me, for not knowing about their lives.”

  “I think so. I think that’s the way it works.”

  I bite my lip and look at him. Miguel was never meant to live alone, that’s what Kay said. When he moved back to Colorado, after Shawny died, it surprised us all that he moved back into the place where Shawny grew up. He didn’t move in with his mother, in Lamar, which was strange. Kay figured it was because he had some real pain to get through. Maybe he also moved out here, I’m realizing now, because it’s easier to grow pot in the middle of nowhere. But it could also be that Miguel likes to be alone; because it seems to me he’s got a quiet sadness about him that needs some space and time by itself. So I ask him, “Will that be nice? To have family here? Because, does it get lonely for you?”

  He doesn’t say anything to this, but I see his head nod a little. He says, “Libby, you’re one of those people I can trust.” I don’t know what he’s talking about exactly. His pot, maybe. Or his relatives. But it isn’t until after he’s gone that I realized he maybe meant being lonely. Because that seems like one of the biggest secrets of all to keep from the world.

  We were just kids, flying kites on a day with a good breeze. Tess and I were out in the alfalfa field and we were so little and so it was amazing that we got them up in the first place, and that we kept them up, and it was making us laugh because it was new, and hard, and we’d done it. We didn’t intend to get off the road and go out into the alfalfa, that’s just where the breeze and kites took us.

  Our kites were the regular triangle cheap kind, pink, and they were bouncing through the air, and I was so busy watching mine, which is why, maybe, I didn’t hear Kay drive in or hear her walk up to me. One hand grabbed my arm and the other slapped into my head and she put out her foot and pushed me forward so that I’d trip. My hands hit dirt and my face hit a plant and the air got knocked out of me all at once. My body went from being happy to being full of hurt, all in one instant. Kay was screaming about us trampling some of Baxter’s good crop, stupid idiot girls, what the hell were we thinking? At the same time, she was pulling in the kite, which had fallen and was bouncing over the alfalfa plants now, and then she was breaking the sticks and wadding it all up into her palms. I was scrambling over to Tess before Kay could get there, and I led Tess out of the field and we tiptoed all the way, which was our way of saying See how careful we’re being? and I disappeared us down the road for a good couple of hours.

  We went home earlier than we normally would have, because there was a storm boiling up over the mountains and the clouds were green. It’s a hailstorm, I thought, and sure enough it was, a huge one, so bad that Kay made us get in the center of the house, away from the windows, and covered us with a blanket. She stood outside the blanket with her arms wrapped around us and hugged us till it was over.

  When the thudding noise stopped, we walked outside and the whole world looked different. The windows broken, paint chipped off the north side of the house, the garden crushed, all the green turned white. The hail had also knocked one of Baxter’s peacocks out of the tree, a male that used to roost in one of the cottonwoods near our place. Kay was standing over the dead peacock, looking at his bright body covered with globes of white and his long tail feathers floating up in the breeze, and she was saying, “Look at this, will ya? Will ya look at this?”

  It was beautiful and crazy-looking, but I was more interested in looking at the alfalfa, at all the bent and broken stems jabbing out from the ice, at the whole field that had been knocked flat. I was wrapping my arms around myself for warmth and I was thinking, Man, a few footsteps were nothing at all compared to the way the world can come crashing down.

  Here is something I know: some people pay attention to the world in a different way. An alert way. Because they know about danger. It depends on where they started, on how much their world got crashed up in the first place.

  I wish I would’ve told Miguel before he left: Pay attention. Ten cuidado. Be careful. Because pot and illegal relatives—it just seems dangerous, like how you get too caught up in a pink triangle in the sky an
d so you don’t see the danger coming up from behind.

  FIVE

  The cops’ “well-being check,” as they call it, came today, although Kay said, “Well-being my ass. She might be alive, but did they ask her how her heart feels?”

  It was the Durango police that tracked Tess down after Kay called them, which was after I showed her the postcard. Tess confirmed that she was eighteen and there of her own free will. That she was employed and housed and fine. That she didn’t have a phone number, that she didn’t want to be contacted, and that she had that right. So the police called back to say the “well-being check went well.”

  “Kay’s got a point,” I tell Derek. “I bet they didn’t ask Tess, ‘So, you never cry yourself to sleep at night? You never miss your baby and your sister? You’re really well?’”

  Derek stands there, watching me water the garden—a ring of water around the small tomato plants, a ring around the cucumbers. The water’s coming out in sudsy spurts because Kay hooked a hose up to the washing machine pipe, which runs outside, and told me anytime I run a load of laundry I need to water the garden at the same time to do my part in what she calls drought mitigation. According to her, we all got to figure out how to live better and to realize we live in a desert.

  Finally Derek says to me, “You’re a lot angrier at Tess than you think you are.”

  “I’m not angry at Tess.”

  “Yes you are.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Well, you are. I don’t know why you need that pointed out to you.”

  “I’m not angry, I’m sad. I can tell the difference. I just can’t believe she’s gone, that she has a job, that she’s staying away.” Since he doesn’t say anything, I add, “Then Kay wanted me to call Tess at work, because we got the name of the restaurant. I said, ‘No, you call.’ And Kay says, ‘No, you do it.’ It was like we were both kids. Ridiculous.”

  “You won’t call her because you’re mad at her.”

  “We don’t have long distance.”

  “You could come use my phone.”

  “I don’t want to.”