el paso

 There was a song going through her mind.

“Out in the west Texas town of El Paso…”

Her dad used to sing it.  She could picture him leaning toward her, tweaking the tip of her nose and grinning.

“…I fell in love with a Mexican girl…”

She wasn’t Mexican.  This inconsistency bothered her, though he didn’t seem to notice.  He’d had black hair, hazel eyes, sideburns that came down into his full cheeks, the skin pockmarked by former acne.  When he was older, his nose broadened, even the pores, giving him a splattered appearance she would find herself staring at in fascination.

What was the Mexican girl’s name?

Across the room, the dog shifted and groaned.  He was showing his age.  Well, who wasn’t?  From her seat she stretched first one leg out, then another.  Felina.  That was the girl’s name.  Her dad leaned toward her, his green-brown eyes dancing.  She turned her head, as if he were really there, as if his lips could buzz her cheek.

He hadn’t been discriminate.  He’d sung the same song to her mother, whisking her away to dance in the small living room, bending her across his arm, kissing the pale skin on her exposed neck and making her laugh.  She’d watched from the kitchen, happy they belonged to him.  She’d thought him the tallest man alive.  She got up and went across to the bookshelf, pulled down an album.  He was there, on the first page, side by side with her mother, only an inch or so taller.  She blinked.  That made him, what?  5’8?  She flipped through the other pages, but he was sitting in all the rest of the photos.  She shut the book, opened it again.  Her mother’s face stared back at her, composed, serene.  Could she trust any of her childhood memories?  She closed the cover, put it back.

*

She was humming it again.  The sun was coming through the window, warming her arms.  There was a whole story to the song – a gunfight, an escape, a dying embrace – but she only ever heard the first line in her mind.  Was that the only line he’d known? 

“I fell in love…”  

She leaned her head back in her chair, watched the dog twitching in his sleep.  There was no use getting angry at someone dead and gone.  He was a romantic, she could see that now. 

“I fell in love with a Mexican girl…” 

She could remember dancing, spinning away from him, the twist of his wrist bringing her back.  No one ever danced with her like that again, innocent, kind, free of expectations.

She took out her phone, typed in the line she knew, waited for the lyrics to come up.  There was a video, so she played it.  Halfway through, she shut it off.  She didn’t want to hear the whole thing, didn’t want that other voice crowding out his in her memory.  The dog sat up suddenly, began barking.  A bad dream, maybe, or some distant sound from the street triggering his “alert!” response.  She called him to her and patted his head in her lap. 

“Good dog,” she whispered.  A memory: her mother holding her hands tightly over her ears, forehead wrinkled, shoulders hunched. 

“Your mother needs it quiet,” her dad saying and the little brown dog disappearing the next day.  Juno.  That was the dog’s name.  She took out her phone again, dialed.  A man’s voice answered.

“Do you remember Juno?” she asked.

“The dog?  I think so.  Smallish?  Brown?  We didn’t have her for long,” her brother said.

“No,” she said.  “She barked, I think.”

Silence.  Then, “You okay?”

“I’m fine.  Give my love to Charlie.”  She tucked the phone down between her leg and the chair.   The dog looked up at her with his soft eyes and she shifted to move him. 

“Go lay down now,“ she said.

She’d never been to Texas, had her father?  West Texas meant nothing to her.  The whole state stretched out in her mind like one big plain, populated by cattle with long, curving horns broader than their shoulders, horses, improbably saddled, with their bridles hanging down, tumbleweeds, funnels of dust in the distance, the occasional sagebrush.  That wasn’t right, she knew.  There were cities, big cities, but her mind clung to the landscapes from TV westerns.  The kind of place where a cowboy and a Mexican girl might fall into tragic love.

There was a mirror hanging by the front door.  She stepped over the dog’s sleeping body, turned on the light so she could see her reflection.   From a distance it seemed her mother was walking toward her.  They had the same pale skin, the same heart-shaped face.  She pushed her hair back, tucking it away from her face.  That too, was her mother, the way her hands moved, the way the fingers traced the line around her ear.  She got closer, so close her forehead was pressing against the glass.  There he was.  The green irises, the flecks of brown, the circle of gold around the edge.  Kind eyes, good eyes.  She let her breath out and the glass fogged around her mouth obscuring her mother-face.

“Out in the west Texas town of El Paso….” she sang, breathing in, breathing out.  In the mirror her dad’s eyes looked back at her, steady, sure.

talisman

 In the overgrown tangle that was the yard behind the house, he found a nest of new-born garter snakes.  That’s how he knew it was the right house.  He used both hands to pull apart the hedge of weed and bramble and peered in at the nest, the twist of infant snake bodies like a knot of bootstrings, each with a pale yellow stripe running along its sides.  He could see the hole in the earth that was their den, a small black circle deep in the hillside.  If they hadn’t come out looking for the sun just then, he’d never have found them.  He placed his hand carefully on the ground beside the nest and stood very still, waiting.  He could hear his parents and the realtor lady coming out onto the deck, the clomp of shoes on the wood, his father asking questions in the brisk voice he used for work.  He heard, “Do you have a copy of that inspection I could look at?” and he shifted his body into the shade, made himself smaller so they wouldn’t see him there.

He felt the cool ribbon of a snake pass across his waiting hand.  His grandfather said that stillness was the way to gain trust with an animal, and so he didn’t jerk or clench.  The snakes had to know he was safe, that he wasn’t the type of boy to swing them violently into the air or…other things.  The back of his throat rounded and he swallowed quickly, remembering Josiah and the way he’d twisted the snake they’d found, smashed its head.  He blinked his eyes, concentrated on being quiet, sending the message through his arm and down into his hand that he was safe, they could trust him.  He inched his hand closer to the mass of them, let his fingers lift up the thin bodies at the edges.  The snakes shrunk and expanded, weaving and testing, accepting, pouring themselves over him as if he were a natural part of their environment, a common stone, or stick.  He felt the shiver go up his arm all the way to the top of his skull and he smiled broadly.  This was the house.  He twisted himself gently to look at it, the straight lines, the pointed peak right at the center, the white walls and the empty windows that looked like they were just waiting to hold faces, the reflection of lamps, inside them.

His mother had seen him and was coming down the steps; he watched her picking her way through the tall grass, her soft pant legs catching and releasing, gathering a confetti of seed heads.  Be quiet, please be quiet, he pleaded with his mind but he could see on her face that she already understood this.   She knelt down beside him, bringing with her the scent of vanilla, warm grass, the coffee they’d bought from a drive-through on the way here. 

“What did you find?” she whispered, pulling branches back, leaning in to see around his arm.  He tented his hand, a tectonic shift that lifted the snakes and revealed his knuckles, the arch of his fingers.  She grinned, leaning back. 

“A whole nest,” she said.  “That’s lucky.” 

He turned his palm upright and closed the fingers before all the snakes could slip away.  When he lifted out his arm, two black ropes were twisting around his hand.  He held them out so they could watch them, the flattened triangular heads, the eyes like tiny marbles, the upcurved line of their mouths like a knowing smile.  One of the snakes explored the road of his arm, moving past his wrist and then twisting back down towards his hand, but the other stepped out into thin air, leaning itself down, reaching for the earth.  His mother extended her own hand, let it slip across. 

“The people who lived here were old,” she said.  “They got too old to take care of the yard anymore.”  She had seen the poisons in the garage, the fertilizers and traps.  The man had apologized, the realtor said, he’d broken his hip, couldn’t keep it green and tidy as he used to.  She knew this shamed him, because he’d insisted that the realtor explain to them, wanted them to know the house was cared for, but she was glad of it.  The snake she held reached out into the air again, searching for the ground, and she let it go, slanting it back toward its nest. 

“Snakes are a good sign,” she said, standing up and brushing at the grass seeds that clung to her.  “That means there are frogs and insects, birds.”  She breathed in.  “It’s not much to look at, but it feels right, doesn’t it?” 

She put her hands on her hips and smiled down at him. He was silent, watching the snake.  He brought it towards his face, tilted so he could look into the inky eye.  Animals speak with their bodies, his Grampa had told him, and he knew the snake was speaking now, its thread of a tongue tasting the smell of him, its eye taking in his strangeness, its gaze steady and unafraid, its lithe black body calmly coiling itself into a bunched ribbon in the palm of his hand.