by Jon Pineda
Shoe carefully set his new boots inside by the front door. They were still caked in mud. There had been plenty of time for the mud to dry on his walk back, but it hadn’t. It was his luck. He wished he had his old shoes, but the foreman had thrown them away.
In floppy socks, Shoe scooted into the kitchen, and his frame stooped more so as he looked over the wrapped plates shelved in the fridge. Finding the one that must have been intended for him, he brought it out and did not bother heating it up but sat, instead, at the kitchen table and peeled back the plastic wrapping. He began to spoon the food in quickly. He had forgotten to pack a lunch.
“Exequiel, slow down before you kill yourself,” his brother’s wife said.
She’d walked in with a basket of clothes fresh from the dryer. He could smell and feel it, their heat. She sat across from him at the table and started folding. As he ate, he looked up every now and then. There were his shirts, his underwear. A stacked tower of his future days before him. He watched her hands smooth the legs of his pants, pulling on the crotch before finishing.
“Aren’t you going to ask me how my first day was?” Shoe said.
“If I was your wife, yes,” she said.
They sat there for a moment.
He envied Paul’s life. Mariposa was a good woman for allowing him into her home. He knew this. As soon as he could save enough for a deposit, he would find a room elsewhere. He would give her back her routine.
“You and Paul should go out one night this week,” he said. “I’ll watch the kids.”
“We could get dressed up and go dancing.”
“Yes!” The thought of helping her was exciting.
She looked at him.
“What?” he said.
“You really think I’d leave you alone with my girls?”
The directness of the question shocked him.
“I’m sorry,” she said, trying to recover. “That is a nice offer. Thank you.”
He looked down at his plate. He had scooped a sizable pit out of the mound of mashed potatoes. The middle was gone. All of the cold gravy he now tasted on the back of his tongue. Mariposa was a good cook, but he would never go so far as to tell her so.
Paul came into the kitchen with his hands raised before him. He was a small man, smaller than Shoe, but more muscular. He looked like a surgeon preparing for a procedure. His forearms were streaked with dark lines of grease that ran down from his hands. The creases in his fingers were just as filthy. Seeing this, Mary jumped up and turned on the hot water in the sink, the entire time scolding her husband for thinking he could clean his hands where she had to wash dishes.
“Where would you have me rinse them, Mariposa?” Paul asked. He was being serious. Shoe snickered and shoveled more mashed potatoes into his mouth. His brother could be funny. For Shoe, it was like watching a show.
“The spigot outside might be one place I’d try,” she said.
“You can’t loosen it. I need to fix the stem,” Paul said. “Mano, maybe you could help me with that this weekend?”
Shoe glanced at his brother and nodded.
“Good,” Paul said. “See, Mariposa?”
“I see,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean anything.”
Tom sat in his bedroom and put his ear to the wall. He was trying to make out what his father was saying in the other room. Manny Serafino had called the police, and now two officers, greatly staggered in height and looking like odd twins in matching dark-blue uniforms, were sitting in the living room and taking notes. His mother had given them Teagan’s school picture from last year. Tom heard one of the officers stupidly say, “Don’t worry, Mr. and Mrs. Serafino, we’ll find her.”
When they left the house, the officers turned on the squad car lights. They didn’t turn on the siren, as Tom thought they might have done. Instead, the numbered car drove off quietly in the flashing of colors. The street was suddenly dark, filled only with parked cars belonging to those who lived there.
A few neighbors were standing on their front porches watching the house. Some came over and asked what had happened. Soon after, the husbands left with Tom’s father in a caravan of cars.
Tom’s mother knocked on his bedroom door and stepped inside to find him shirtless, sitting on the floor beside his dresser, knees bunched up to his chest and body slightly rocking back and forth. He wanted to go back to that moment with Teagan by the fence. He wanted nothing more than to see her twirl the red windbreaker, its transformation into a fireball.
“I shouldn’t have told her,” he said.
“Told her what, Tommy?” his mother said, taking a seat on the floor next to him.
“It was just so stupid.”
“Do you want to tell me?”
Tom shook his head.
“Okay,” his mother said.
She was looking around the room, taking it in.
Above his bed was a replica P-51 Mustang he and his father had glued together and painted not long ago. The airplane hung from a single piece of clear fishing line. It gave the appearance of floating in the air.
“I shouldn’t have said it.”
“What, Tommy? You shouldn’t have said what?”
There were the signature decals of its razor-like teeth near the propeller. She realized the airplane was slowly turning on its own.
“We were playing football,” Tom said. “She kept bugging us.”
“Okay,” his mother said. She slipped her fingers into his black hair.
“I told her to get out of my life.”
He dropped his head and cried.
His mother’s hand made its way to his back. She rubbed small circles over his skin.
“You didn’t mean it, Tommy,” she said.
“But I did,” Tom said. “I did mean it.”
When Shoe woke the next morning, he found himself facedown on the floor. He had fallen off the couch. He had even managed to bring the crocheted throw with him. It had tangled around his legs, as if it were a hammock he had fallen asleep inside, his own little cocoon.
He remembered a time he had jumped a freight train outside of Salinas. He did so thinking he was heading north, and had ended up going east. On one stretch of the trip, oblivious to his misdirection, he had emptied sacks of fruit and used the ripped cloth to make a crude sling. He fastened its ends on the eye hooks that protruded from the rusted metal corners of the storage car. Passing the blistered rows of newly harvested fields, the lines of soil ticking by, Shoe lay in the makeshift hammock and drowsed as best he could.
He checked the digital alarm clock plugged into the outlet by the couch. The clock was something Paul let him use now that Shoe had found a job. It was still early. Everyone in the family is asleep, Shoe thought, scratching at his chest and then at the meshy spot on his shoulder. The scar itched. He made an inadvertent noise the way a dog might.
You can’t stay here, Exequiel.
The train was years away from him now.
Shoe put on only his pants. His right foot squeaked against the floor. He stopped and changed his walk so that it wouldn’t drag, then went into the kitchen to make coffee.
Mary was sitting at the table and reading the morning paper.
Without a shirt on, Shoe felt self-conscious. He tried to suck in his stomach, but it didn’t matter. His posture was still slightly broken. As he poured himself a cup, he imagined her staring at the spot on his shoulder that caused him to stoop like a hunchback. It was the wadded flesh of scar tissue that made him look deformed.
He wondered if Paul had ever told her about how they found him that day long ago, when he was still a boy living in another country. Paul had left for the States by then. Paul had not seen the large, fresh wound from which his younger brother had to recover.
“I can make you something,” Mary said.
“It’s okay.”
“No, I don’t mind,” she said, and set down her paper.
She went to the fridge and took out a carton of eggs and some butter and a bell p
epper that had been cut in half and covered with foil. There was also part of an onion she brought out and began to dice. She then cut a pat of butter and slid it onto a warm skillet. When the omelet was finished, she folded it onto a plate and placed it on the table before him. Shoe closed his eyes as if in prayer.
He was trying to memorize her scent.
When he opened his eyes, he saw that she had returned to her chair across from him. As the paper unfolded between them, he noticed her hands gripping the edges lightly. He felt his brother was a lucky man. They sat in silence while he ate.
Shoe wanted to be the first one on site. He kept reminding himself that he had only been sent home the day before, not fired. He still had a chance. He wanted the foreman to pull up in that cream-colored custom Ford truck and see that there was at least one person left in the world who still believed in an honest day’s work. He wanted to be standing alongside the boss when the others finally showed up. There would be a sweetness to it.
Shoe even harbored the small hope that the foreman would reconsider the name he had given him; that instead of Shoe, perhaps he could be known as Early Bird or Rooster. He would even settle for some bastardization of Exequiel. X, or Zeke.
But after some thought, really, what did he care?
When he reached the site, Shoe went behind the portable urinal and relieved himself. A breeze sent a shock of cool air between his legs. His scrotum recoiled from the chill. There in the thicket of milkweed and other random brush, he stood listening to his piss hiss against the fiberglass siding.
He considered for a moment climbing up on the bulldozer to cover the driver’s seat. The white guy who had operated it yesterday had been a real cocksucker to him, laughing and yucking it up the loudest. But when Shoe finished, his mind leapt to sitting at the table with Mary. He found that despite this environment of strange machinery and torn earth, he could easily recall the memory of her scent. The implication of tenderness.
It was strange to be standing there and thinking of his brother’s wife in this way. He did not want his brother’s wife, it was not that. His life seemed to him a series of moments in which he felt adrift, felt both the ease and unease of being temporarily settled, then uprooted, felt the odd comfort that was in such an existence. And if he did not necessarily feel adrift, then perhaps he felt something entirely opposite. Perhaps he sensed a permanence around which the rest of his life revolved endlessly.
Shoe could sense his own future complacence. It scared him.
He glanced around. There was the calmness of the bulldozer and the excavator. There were the tracks in the dirt and scattered sand. The evenness of the machine and the tread of his own boots. Down the road there were headlights of vehicles leaving the driveways of the neighborhood, but not one was headed this way.
He was not thinking of his brother’s wife now. He was not wishing that it was her hands on him. It was someone else he remembered. A shadowy wall and her silhouette alongside it, sliding down onto her knees. She wanted to take him and hide him inside her. Her mouth was a lovely prison, he felt. He could spend his life there.
Her memory neared him, the smooth edges falling away. He could not get inside her fast enough. Before he could settle on the image, before he could see her entirely again, he immediately felt ashamed and crouched, rubbing his palm over the streaked wall and then to the grass and dirt.
All of it was cold already, its dampness. He imagined Mary coming now with a basket of warm clothes; her folding, and then handing him one of his own clean T-shirts to use.
Shoe, in his stooped way, walked around to the other side of the urinal. He dragged his right foot behind him. The boot made walking more difficult. Shoe put his lunchbox on top of a sawhorse and leaned against the equipment, waiting for anyone to appear at that point.
Where were they? Where were those who had ridiculed him for trying to pull himself out of the mess of the pit? They were probably at home still, rummaging in the darkness of their rooms while their wives slept off sickly sweet hangovers, or the crackling emptiness of meth.
Or there were no wives and never had been. He knew this situation best.
And what hadn’t he tried in the years it had taken him to arrive at this one moment? There were nights fused with white light burning, weeks lost entirely to his compulsions. Each time, it was mostly the same. Everything, in one form or another, left him hollowed out and waiting, or searching, for something to inhabit that space.
Once, when he had finished up a job in North Carolina, he left the empty motel where he was staying and walked across a nearby field. It was dusk, and he had come upon a design of poles that resembled a ship’s masts, the hull of that ship run aground in the surrounding farmland.
Hanging from the horizontal tiers were gourds painted white. Wide symmetrical holes had been bored into the bulbous ends. Martins were falling out of the sky, darting into the numerous shells of homes someone had taken the time to make for these birds. The gourds swung like pendulums, though at stranger intervals. Shoe had given up on chemicals by then. This image had come too late to warn him away from the life he had already led.
As for women, those he had loved were faceless, despite his attempts at summoning their images. Or they had merged into the same woman. He couldn’t remember which. Sometimes the culmination of memories made her hideous. Or if a passing thought came into sharp enough focus for him to give it his attention, she was always almost pretty. He could make out the outline of her eyes, or just fragments of the collective eyes that stared back at him from his past. Sometimes he laughed at his egalitarian lust. The shapes their eyes became, the different colors that made shadows, or the thick, salty scent of their skin, waves of hair that crashed endlessly within his mouth.
There had been one woman actually.
He had met her in a bar in Taos. He had taught the woman’s son to play chess, and sometimes, if it was still light when he came home from work, he and the boy would go out in the yard and kick a ball around.
He felt terrible when the boy, after some months, called him Dad. The mother had encouraged it. He could think of sadder things, yes, and it felt good to be someone’s father. Even if he knew he could never be the kind of man who would welcome the responsibility for the remainder of his life.
This mother and her son didn’t think it would be temporary.
It was this thought that haunted him some mornings when he woke, reaching absentmindedly for the emptiness beside him, or cocking his ear toward the ghost room that held the memory of the child, that same child waking in the dark and crying for him—Dad! Dad!—and him waking, hearing the call, and dragging his body into the darkness to disappear.
Shoe ran a hand along the nicked wood of the sawhorse; a determined hit to the largest cut could snap the sawhorse in half. He laughed at the thought. He knew he was no Bruce Lee.
If he owned a watch, he would have checked his wrist. He started to wonder if he had made a mistake. Had he missed the foreman telling the rest of the crew that they would have the day off? This seemed an impossibility. It wasn’t the weekend. But still, Shoe thought.
He struggled to climb on top of the bulldozer. Once there, he looked beyond the nearest street and out to the main road that fed into the neighborhood. There were headlights coming this way now, and he was glad for it. He decided it would probably be a good idea to have his shovel by his side once the foreman pulled up.
Still hunched over, with his right shoulder weighing him down as usual, he walked as best he could to the pit and turned around, easing his way into it. Like he was guiding himself down a ladder, rung by rung. His boots slid into the moist clay. Nothing seemed to have dried since he was last in this space.
When he reached the bottom, he stumbled. Something was on the ground. It made him fall against the far wall. When he looked down by his boots, there was just enough light to see the girl slumped on the floor, her head next to the shovel. Everything was still.
Shoe yelled, but his voice didn’t reac
h above him. He panicked. He tried to climb out with one huge jump, gripping near the opening, but he slid back down as if in slow motion. He tried again. Still, he fell back.
He thought she was dead.
The gash along the side of her head looked suddenly severe, as did the swathe of matted hair. Light was beginning to fill the space between them. Dark blood, he could see now, was what coated her hair and the side of her face. Shoe fell to his knees. He put his ear to her nose and mouth.
Why didn’t you do this sooner?
He didn’t mean to move her head, but he did. Now there was a tiny flutter of breath that kept returning.
He started to cry.
He knew she was alive.
A ball with his nephew’s name lay beside her.
For some reason, he picked it up and threw it out of the pit as hard as he could. Then he pulled the shovel out of the ground. The blade made a small sucking sound. He chucked it free of the pit.
His only thought now was that he needed to get her out, but there was no way he could do it alone. He wiped his face and took a deep breath. What had made him think that things had changed, or even that they were going to change?
Above was the world that would not believe him. Above was the world that would not think it was possible that he of all people would have shown up to work early. Nor that he had simply found this girl unconscious, fallen down into the pit where he had been the day before.
He could not summon any logic.
Nothing made sense, except for what he already knew of certain things. When had anything ever gone in his favor? Long ago he had jumped a train, expecting to see more of northern California, maybe even parts of Oregon, and instead, the farmlands outside the freight car’s sliding door eventually ended with sign after bewildering sign for elsewhere. His intentions occupied one space while his body occupied another.
