The ground is chapped. It is all cracked up and rough, like crocodile skin made into fancy lady's boots and the dying sun paints it red. Railroad tracks run through it. They're like scars dug into the sides of old horses from spurs. They run through the face of the land and don't stop going. You could stand on those tracks and look towards the horizon and they'd be stretching on and on and on winding into the hills.
They sky is dented.
Dented up like the front of an old Ford pick-up.
The stars are measly excuses for light; a bunch of foolish virgins with no oil in their lamps sitting up there, sitting on their heels and rocking back and forth. Sometimes, they shine a little light on the majesty of of the desert. They make things glow a little, like embers in a fire you use to roast marshmallows over. But you gotta look for it. Otherwise, the hugeness – the vastness – of the desert overwhelms those locust-eyed candlelights in the sky.
Cicadas click as the six o'clock train from Palestine, Texas comes into view around that last hill. You can feel the train coming if you press your cheek to the ground. You can feel it vibrating up through the soles of your feet; little San Fransisco earthquakes and it approaches long and black-skinned. There are cattle grouped around on tracks a half mile ahead and so the locomotive eases back a little, puffing steam and cinders into the air like hairspray.
The moon shines its owl eye on the train, lining it with silver. It pulls its lonely horn and you can see a light shining on from it like those headlamps that coal miner's use on their hard hats. It approaches quickly and the whole world seems to hold its breath a little, drawing up tight and tortoise-shelled.
As the train passes by, slowing and snorting, wheezing, a kid jumps out of one of the boxcars and is dragged down into the dust and the hard, mud-bed ground.
**
He gets to his feet slowly, dusting himself off. He can't be more than fourteen or fifteen years old and he looks all rumpled and shabby with carpet bag skin. His eyes are tarnished in the moonlit dust-storm and you can see that he's a little bit shaken from jumping out of that train. The sky spins kaleidescope patterns and he stumbles a little, like a newborn colt (still slimy and steaming with all that heat from the mare's insides) using fishpole legs to mount the earth.
But he shrugs it off pretty quick though and takes a road-map out of his pocket, whistling. Around him, the night creaks, like stirrups and fresh morning leather. The sound of him unfolding the map sounds amplified a million time he holds it up to the sickly, feverish light of the moon.
After a moment, he nods.
He folds the map up again, takes a cigarette from his pocket and sticks it unlit between his teeth.
The desert around him is washed and naked, like ladies in their underwear.
He smiles.
Out of his backpack, he takes a radio and clicks it on and waits as it makes pigeon dropping static.
He tunes it.
He tunes it to an old Lone Ranger program.
And then he walks off, walks off toward nowhere, the sound of the radio trailing behind him and the night yawning at him, like a broke car on the side of the highway with its hood propped up.
“High-ho, Silver!” says the radio.
**
When JFK got shot in Houston, my mother locked herself in her room and cried for a long time.
She cried because a man with a split-level smile and prairie-grass hair had all his brains leaked out of the back of his head. Had this hole put right through the side of his head so that gray matter and a bunch of skull fragments hit Mrs. Kennedy in the face like a cream pie. My father was out of town, as usual. He had this dumb conference to go to and so he missed all the crying on television. Everyone was wailing, wailing like horses dying on the battlefield. It's a terrible sound. It's a coyote sound. Lonely and flat and hollowed out.
My mother.
My mother didn't come out for ten hours. And when she did it was only to get into the medicine cupboard again. She was rolled up and shaky and her eyes were red, like cheeks when you scrape them with broken bottle glass. She passed me as I stood in the hall, looking at her. She passed me like I was some kind of Negro on the street.
Maria says that black people are made out of baking grease and empty footprints.
Maria says a lot of things.
Like how if you peel away the skin of a person, all you'll find is dirt, dirt where organs sprout veins and nerves like tulip bulbs; warm and moist. She says that horses are made up of kisses deposited on the foreheads of women by lovers and that when you cry, you're tears are actually sequins stolen from the dresses of pretty ladies.
I don't ever know what I can believe out of her and what I can't.
When JFK got shot in Houston she was watching the TV with me. She looked at the screen for a little while, then shook her head and shrugged.
“Died like every politician should,” she said.
The thing I like most about Maria is her skin.
It feels like Navajo ponchos knitted out of mountain goat hair and sunsets.
The thing I hate most about Maria is her helplessness.
She is only a poor Mexican woman. She is made out of copper pesos and beans. Nothing more.
And so I blame her for everything, even when I know that everything bad that happens to me is because of my father and mother. I guess I do that because Maria is all that my parents aren't.
**
I look down the hall. At the end is my mother's room. The door is dark and hunched over and gives way to a darkness that is as cold and black as a whaling ship. Inside, my mother sleeps. She sleeps with heavy eyelids and a heavy tongue. Her lips are purple. She is like some great, slumbering poppy with petals that are made out of glitzy pimp suit-jackets.
The whole hallway reeks of incense and drunkenness.
I know that she is in a world right now where things are soft and round and slow. Where she can draw the sky around her shoulders like some kind of woven blanket. The sleep is good, probably. As peaceful and stately as whippoorwills humming in trees plum colored by the dark.
One of these days, I'm going to open her medicine and dump every last bottle down the toilet. All her life-blood flushed into the sewer system. She would, of course, beat me until she drew enough of my blood to fill up each and every one of her bottles again.
I hate her.
I hate her for how lacy and gnat-winged her hair has become. I hate her for the way she smells. I hate her for how her eyes are stained and knobby, like old crayons. I hate her for her tears for JFK, a dumb president with buttery corn-on-the-cob words.
Sometimes she smiles at me.
But her smiles are stitched.
They are sewn into her face.
