Night at the Fiestas: Stories

THE MANZANOS

MY NAME IS MY GRANDMOTHER’S: OFELIA ALMA ZAMORA. I am eleven years old and too young to die, but I am dying nonetheless. I have been dying since the day my mother went away. I’ve been to doctors — to the clinic in Estancia, and all the way to Albuquerque — but they take my temperature, knead my stomach, check my throat, and tell my grandfather the same thing: perhaps it is a minor infection or virus, one of the usual brief illnesses of childhood, and they see nothing seriously wrong. They don’t know about the ojo, the evil eye.

There is no one left in this town who can cure me, so for now I sit at the edge of the yard, my feet in the road, turning a piece of broken asphalt in my hands, in case a stranger passes. Are you a healer? I’ll ask her. I think of how it will be when I find her, how when she lays her hands on my head I’ll close my eyes and feel the blessing pass through me like fire.

I imagine this, knowing I can’t be cured, knowing I couldn’t bear to be.

I’M WAITING FOR MY GRANDFATHER, relieved because today, finally, he has gotten up and dressed for the city: plaid shirt buttoned all the way up his thin tortoise neck, bolo tie with the silver dollar set in a ring of turquoise. Face scrubbed, white hair combed in lines over the brown crown of his head. He’s in the house rinsing our coffee cups and wiping toast crumbs from the oilcloth.

I am ready, too, wearing my blue dress (though the sleeves no longer cover my wrists), white tights (dingy and loose at the knees), and my sneakers. In my pocket is the address for the VA clinic, which I have copied from some papers in my grandfather’s desk. This morning my grandfather braided my hair and fastened the ends with rubber bands from the newspaper. Because I’m tall, I sat at the kitchen chair, and he leaned over me, his trembling fingers slowly working the braid into shape. When I was younger, he would tease me as he combed out the knots, pretend to find things in the tangled mass. “A jackrabbit!” he’d cry. “My pliers!” I’d laugh as the yank of the comb brought tears to my eyes.

Behind me, the porch sags under the weight of the refrigerator and the gyrating washing machine on legs that my grandparents bought during a good year in the fifties. There are places we cannot step, because the boards are gray and fragile with rot. “I’ll fix the porch,” my grandfather says. “One day I’ll find the time and shore it up.” But the truth is that for years he has been unable to do jobs that he once did without even thinking.

Every day for a week I have dressed for Albuquerque, and every day he has shivered and shaken his head. “Not today, mi hijita. Perhaps the weather will be better tomorrow.”

He spent those mornings in his pajamas, blanket pulled tight around him. It’s late spring, the sky above the swaying cottonwoods so blue it has a texture, but he wore his wool cap, sweating. He would not let me go to the neighbors or the priest.

But today he is up and dressed, preparing for our monthly trip to Albuquerque. We will shop for what we need, and we will have lunch in a restaurant, and my grandfather will see the doctor, though he doesn’t know this yet.

I touch the slip of paper in my pocket. I catalogue every detail of my grandfather as he is now, as if by leaving nothing out I can keep him safe. I catalogue the smooth, pink mole on his neck, the brown spots like smudged fingerprints on his temples. His eyebrows, gray and wiry and curled. Often a drop of clear fluid hangs from the end of his nose. My grandfather’s nose is large now, almost a beak, but it wasn’t always that way. In my cigar box, I have a picture of him as a slight, handsome soldier in the army, his features delicate: serious mouth, light eyes, black lashes.

THERE ARE A FEW families still in our town — mostly old people, no other children — and those of us who are left are used to the high weeds, the crumbling houses of neighbors, the plaster that falls like puzzle pieces. The exposed mud bricks dissolve a little more each time it rains.

Across the road from where I sit is the dance hall that belonged to dead Uncle Fidel. It hasn’t been a dance hall since long before I was born — hasn’t been anything but empty and overgrown with branches — but there is still the green silhouette of a bottle painted on the cracked wooden door. When he was young, my grandfather tells me, there were bailes every Saturday night, and, if he’d had a drink and his shyness left him, he would dance until he was breathless and sweaty, twirling the girls, clapping and stomping with the rest of the town through cuadrillas and polcas. In those days they sprinkled water on the ground to keep the dust down, and dirt clotted on the black toes of his shoes.

At night I imagine I can hear the accordions and fiddles and guitars across the street, but it takes effort, and soon I am weary and overcome with the sense that I have arrived too late. I long for that other Cuipas, for the families and the river. I want to have known my grandfather as he was then, to have been with him all those long years.

THE SUN STRETCHES ALONG the road and warms my legs in my tights. If I turn my face to its heat, I must close my eyes, and in the drowsy redness behind my eyelids I remember what makes me uneasy. Last night I lay stiff in my bed — which I used to share with my mother, which I imagine still smells of her — kept awake not by the ojo, but by a sound I’d never heard before. Instead of my grandfather’s steady sleeping breath from across the kitchen and through the open door of his bedroom, I could hear a rattling, chattering gurgle. The sound, so much like an animal — but an animal I have never heard and cannot picture — kept me tense and afraid until dawn, when my grandfather stirred, his bed creaked, and his slow footsteps assured me that he was okay.

SOME DAYS I GO to school, some days I don’t; like a fever, the ojo comes and goes. I try not to bother my grandfather with it. When I am well enough, I ride the bus into Estancia, listen to what they tell me. I buy my lunch in the cafeteria and sit with the younger children, who don’t ask questions when I am silent.

My grades aren’t good. I struggle to form letters on the page. Three times a week I’m called from the classroom by the resource teacher, a young woman — as young, perhaps, as my mother — whose skirt swishes against her hose when she walks. She and I sit together under a fluorescent light in a room that was intended to be a closet. She shows me flashcards, asks me to write sentences, tries to make me explain what I am thinking. I tilt my head. When she tires of waiting, she’ll pat my hand and sigh and give me a chocolate wrapped in red foil. I learned this during my time at school: they want to replace the past with their rhymes and procedures, their i before e and carry the one.

When I was in kindergarten, I used to beg my grandfather to move us to Estancia, because it is a town with a store and a school and a senior center, where he and I can have lunch for a dollar, dessert included. Now I understand what he has never told me, that we must watch over Cuipas until it shrinks to nothing, until the houses are mud once more, and dead Uncle Fidel’s bar collapses to splinters.

SOMETIMES, WHEN MY GRANDFATHER is well and I skip school, we walk together, and he tells me again the history of this place: the original land grant, thirty thousand acres given years ago to my grandfather’s great-great-great-grandfather, parceled smaller and smaller through the generations, until our piece, my grandfather’s and mine, which he put in my name on my seventh birthday, became twenty-five acres, and not the best twenty-five, but grassland. I wish it were in the mountains, with a spring and tall, fragrant piñon. I would walk there in the fall and gather the dropped nuts, roast them to eat through the winter, sell the surplus in bags along the road. But my land is good only for cattle, which I do not have.

“When I was a boy,” my grandfather said last time, as we stepped across the dry riverbed, “the water ran all the time. My cousins and me, we used to catch tadpoles and crayfish in jars.”

“Where did the water go?” I asked.

My grandfather squinted as if trying to remember. “Perhaps it was diverted into the bean fields. Perhaps it rains less now. Perhaps it all happened when I was at war.”

My grandfather has told me that Cuipas was one place before he left and another when he returned. Though he was in the Army for two years, the war had already ended, so he lived in Rome, an eighteen-month vacation, he said, on the government’s dime. Each day he swam in Mussolini’s pool. It was the first and best pool he’d ever seen, huge, lined with marble smooth under his feet. My grandfather was strong, glistening, brown muscle in blue water.

He almost married a girl there. Silvia Donati. As we walked along a furrow in the bean field — the plants no higher than my calf, leaves broad and soft and heart-shaped — I asked him to tell me about her again.

She had buckteeth, my grandfather said, and the palest, rosiest skin he had ever seen, and black-black hair. She lived with her mother above their hat shop, and she made ladies’ hats.

Each afternoon after his swim — back in his uniform, wet hair combed — my grandfather sat across from her at the table by the open window, waiting as she finished her work. He listened to the sharp scissors pressing through wool felt and to voices in the street below, watched her pale hands as she steamed and formed the pieces on faceless wooden heads. When my grandfather left Italy, she gave him a hat for his mother in Cuipas: gray with pink velvet roses. For years my great-grandmother and Silvia Donati wrote each other, one in Spanish, the other in Italian, until my great-grandmother died. I often wonder if Silvia Donati heard about my grandfather’s marriage, or my mother’s birth, or my grandmother’s death in one of those letters. I wonder if she heard about me, if she knows that these days we live alone.

She would be an old woman now. I like to think she does not dye her hair. I like to think she has kept a trim figure and pink cheeks, perhaps remained a virgin for my grandfather. (This is important, I know, from the romance novels my mother left behind.) I imagine they marry, raise me in Italy beside the sea. They hold hands and walk along the beach, and I trail behind, all of us wearing hats that were fashionable once.

MY GRANDFATHER’S UNIFORM is folded in the cedar chest in the crowded back bedroom where I sleep, and which I once shared with my mother. This is my grandmother’s wedding veil (netting torn), my grandfather’s garrison cap. I don’t know what became of my great-grandmother’s gray hat, whether she wore it until it lost its shape and color, or it was trampled by a horse, or a gust of wind caught it and flung it across fields and mesas. Perhaps she left it on a bus in Albuquerque. Perhaps she gave it away.

There are some papers here, too, records of business long since concluded. And here, the baptismal gowns of lost children, like limp little ghosts.

WHEN THE RIVER DOES RUN, after the late-summer storms, I sometimes pull on a pair of my mother’s old shorts and wade in the muddy water, thinking of Mussolini’s pool. I cup the water in my hands and fling it in a sparkling arc around my head.

If the old women see me walking home, calves muddy, shorts wet, they will shake their heads at my bare legs and call me a cabrasita. Bad little goat. But they don’t blame me too much for my wild ways; they tell each other I am not at fault for being raised by a man alone. They don’t know that I am at fault.

OUR TOWN IS SURROUNDED by grass. Yellow grass on land that shifts and dips like waves. Distance is difficult to judge; the grass is deceptive. The Manzanos rise just beyond our town. I have tried to walk to the mountains, where a man lived for weeks after killing his father-in-law with an iron poker. My grandfather’s father was part of the posse that searched for him. My grandfather has taken me in the car, pointed to the distant spot among the juniper and piñon where they found the murderer’s camp: fire burned down, dusty bedroll. They never found him, though; I imagine him running from their excited voices and the clomp of hooves in dry soil.

Once when I was seven, I played a game that I was the murderer and would be safe when I reached the mountains. The mountains loomed, and I ran through the tall grass and into the sun, burrs catching on my socks and pants. When my breath burned my throat and I could no longer run, I walked, my pursuers getting closer, and fear and guilt clogged my heart. At a barbed fence I parted the wires and slid through, snaring my shirt above my shoulder blade. Long-horned cattle, black and white and mottled, backed away from me, the calves close to their mothers. Two rattlesnakes slithered from my footsteps, sounded a warning. Even the breeze knew what I’d done. When the sun sank behind the Manzanos, Cuipas was small behind me under a depthless violet sky, and the mountains were no closer.

HERE ARE THE PLACES I’ve seen my mother: crossing the field behind the courthouse, hair loose and tangled in the winter wind; through the front window of a bank, filling out a deposit slip; in the school library, glimpsed through the stacks. When I see my mother, it is always from afar or from behind or through glass. Each time my heart flips like a fish in my chest, and each time she is someone else.

My mother left us seven years ago to live in Albuquerque. Perhaps she is there still; perhaps she has moved on to other places: Los Angeles or Chicago or England. She would choose someplace big, I’m sure. She was too young, my grandfather tells me. Never could take responsibility.

MY GRANDFATHER KNOWS the stories of every grave in the dirt churchyard: This is a great-aunt, this a cousin, this a whole family killed by the Spanish flu. The murdered man is here, here a woman who hung herself from a viga in her kitchen after her third stillborn child, but they buried her in sacred ground nonetheless. Profirio Narciso, Nacio Valentin. Maria Candelarita. Maria Ascension. And this here, beside the plaster statue of the Blessed Mother, is my name: my grandmother, whom I never met. When my mother was thirteen, my grandmother left for Santa Fe, where she found work in the post office. My grandfather went after her several times, but each time she refused to return. She came home only to be buried — a heart attack.

Once I asked my grandfather why she left, but he shook his head.

Some of the graves have iron fences around them, with little gates as though for children. Some are decorated with plastic flowers, petals bleached from the sun. I imagine I know which spot will be mine in the churchyard: pressed between my grandfather and the boy whose neck was snapped so many years ago when he was thrown from a horse. Once we are gone, the memory of my mother will be extinguished as well. I wish I could reorder the graves in the yard, straighten the slanting stones, arrange them by date or name.

I CAN FEEL THE OJO in my bones, which ache in the morning and at night, and in my skin, which is prickly and electric. Growing pains, the doctor at the clinic tells me. Still, I must put my affairs in order. First, there is the problem of the land. When I’m gone it will go to the distant offspring of a cousin of my grandfather’s. My grandfather doesn’t know I know this, doesn’t know I won’t have children of my own.

I have toys and books that must be disposed of, too. A collection of stones.

THE OLD WOMEN SAY the ojo is caused by a covetous glance, by looking overlong. The man who gave it did not admire me, however, and looked for only a moment. The one thing of mine he desired, he took.

These are the symptoms: At night heaviness crouches on my chest and I wake gasping for air. Occasionally my eyes blur for no reason and Cuipas slants and washes away. At my worst, I shiver and burn, and my grandfather wraps my feet in cold rags.

My memories of my mother are insubstantial. I see her lying on her back on the living room floor, a beauty magazine held above her head as she reads, limp pages rustling. Holding me in the yard at night, bare feet, my hand gripping the flannel nightgown at her breast as I follow with my eyes her pointed finger to the moon. A dish of yogurt cracked on the board floors of the kitchen, my mother crying. I do not know if my grandfather remembers these moments, but he must remember others: my mother as a laughing toddler, perhaps, my mother at her first communion, my mother too young and pregnant with me. Possibly he remembers the sound of her voice.

ONCE A MONTH we drive west to Albuquerque, once a week we drive east to Estancia. In Estancia we buy groceries and the newspaper. At home my grandfather prepares our favorite lunch: cheese and mustard sandwiches and a glass of milk. We wash our dishes, and then it is time for the paper. We turn to the back, to the comics, but we don’t read them. Very carefully my grandfather tears out the puzzles, the spot-the-differences for me, the word search for him.

We sit, working with our pencils.

“These are good for my eyes,” he tells me. “They keep my mind sharp.”

His favorites are the ones that match English and Spanish words. Sometimes my grandfather disagrees with the paper’s translation. “Moths are palomitas,” he tells me, “not polillas,” and I look up, try to remember. When I finish my puzzle, I stand beside my grandfather’s chair and point out words he’s missed.

At night, if I can’t sleep, I creep to the kitchen and take the paper from the crate by the woodstove. I spread it on the bedclothes. Somewhere north of here they are building a new casino. They are angry about the economy. In a country far away something has changed. I lie back on my pillow and try to imagine living in the world where these things matter. In the morning, when my grandfather wakes me for my oatmeal, he gathers the paper and replaces it beside the stove.

Sometimes my grandfather remembers church, and if it is Sunday, he shakes me awake and braids my hair, and we walk to the chapel. We sit in the pews with our neighbors and try to listen. The priest talks about the soul, as beside me my grandfather’s chin sinks to his chest. The soul is a ball of light or a jewel that must be treasured, given to Jesus.

“Christ calls for our souls though we are foul in body,” says the priest.

Jesus looks down on us from the cross, mournful and distant and preoccupied with his own story.

I feel my soul inside me, made of thin, pale paper, fragile as a Japanese lantern, resting above my heart. I move with care and take shallow breaths so as not to crush it.

Christ’s frozen eyes gaze at the ground. He declines to see my sleeping grandfather; He declines to see what He has abandoned. Rage rises in my chest, threatening to crumple my soul. Christ has no time for Cuipas, no time for my grandfather.

“Peace be with you,” the priest says, and my grandfather wakes, squeezes my hand.

I HAVE NEVER SEEN a Japanese lantern, only read about them in my mother’s novels. Used chiefly at night parties, they sway from strings above wide lawns, while music plays and women in backless gowns sip champagne.

MY GRANDFATHER OWNS nine vehicles, several of which run, though none are insured. When we go to Albuquerque, he lets me choose the car. Usually, I pick the old blue truck or the heavy brown ancient Mercedes with the rat’s nest in the heating vent, which a man up north gave my grandfather as payment for a stone fireplace in his guesthouse. These are cars my mother will recognize.

Together my grandfather and I walk behind the house, where the vehicles sit, some with cracked tires, some parked on blocks. I hear him breathe beside me, even and smooth, familiar.

Today I pick the Mercedes.

In the car, we roll down the stiff windows and trail our hands in the air outside. Along the road the yellow grass sifts the wind.

When my grandfather begins to talk, it isn’t about the past but about a future in the world outside Cuipas.

“You must not be shy,” he tells me.

“You must be happy and laugh.”

“You must talk to strangers.”

I nod and tell him, “I will, I’ll try,” and panic rises in me.

“This is no place for a young person,” my grandfather says. I know he thinks of a day — a day that will never exist but that is as real to him as if it already did — when I will shoulder a bag and climb up and over the Manzanos without turning back. He says again, “This is no place for a child.”

I want to make him take it back. Instead, I pull the slip of paper from my pocket. “I want to stop here,” I say firmly. “I need to stop at this clinic.”

He takes the slip from my hand and frowns at it. I nearly grab the wheel, but his one hand is steady and the road is straight. He lifts his foot from the pedal and the car loses power. He turns to look at me for a moment, then turns back to the road. He folds the slip of paper, tucks it into his breast pocket, and gives the car gas.

“So can we? Can we stop?”

“No,” he says, in a voice he rarely uses with me, a voice that is harsh and foreign and final. The ojo stirs and my vision smears. I think of my mother. I’ll never leave my grandfather, but it isn’t even my loyalty he wants.

The road twists and curves and begins to rise. When we are in the Manzanos, I swallow the stone in my throat, look out over the piñon, imagine the murderer in these mountains, alone with the knowledge of his crime.

IN THE CITY, the bright billboards flash along the highway, and white sun glints off the windows of the tall hospitals and hotels. As the fast cars pass, I look for my mother. I don’t think she will be in the driver’s seat of one of the fancy cars, but I watch the faces anyway. Her hair could be different by now. Other things might be different for her, too, I know, because in the world people’s fortunes rise and fall.

If I find her, I think, then my grandfather will see the doctor. He will see the doctor and he will be cured and together we will bring my mother home.

I wonder if he is looking as well. He gives no indication, keeps both hands on the steering wheel. It’s harder for him to drive now, and the traffic makes him nervous.

“Look, hijita,” he tells me before we shift lanes. His voice is familiar again. “Am I clear?” And I crane my neck, watch the cars coming at us, tell him yes.

At the Kmart we load our cart with things we will need for the next month: tubes of toothpaste, large packages of paper towels, corn flakes, sometimes new sneakers for me, undershirts for him. My grandfather buys me toys also, plastic dolls, characters from films and television shows I have never seen. He will ask me to open the toys in the car, and I will scatter the bright plastic packaging on the floorboard. As he drops the toys into the cart, I smile and exclaim, though I’m too old for them and wish he would save our money. At home I will line them up on the windowsill in my room, leave a few scattered on the floor, so my grandfather, walking by, will think I have been playing.

When we’ve found all the things we need, we continue to push the cart down aisles under fluorescent lights. We are both a little dazed by the colors of this place, the bustle, both unwilling, it seems, to leave and be alone together. We push the cart, turning our heads left and right.

The woman at the checkout is stout and middle-aged and wears braces on her teeth. She asks what we think should happen to the horses. When we look at her blankly, she asks if we’re from here.

“Cuipas,” my grandfather says.

The horses, the cashier explains, are wild. They came down from the mountains because they were starving from the drought. They gather along the highway to eat chamisa and grass and the corn tossed to them by concerned citizens.

“I can’t believe you don’t know,” the cashier says. “It’s all over the TV. They say the horses are the same ones brought by the Spanish hundreds of years ago.”

The cashier scans each item as she talks. She moves too quickly. I’m afraid she will be done before she has told us everything about the horses.

“What will happen to them?” I ask.

“Who knows? People have to fight about it, like everything else. I saw on the news where some people are saying they’ll have to be slaughtered because there just isn’t enough grass, what with the drought.”

My grandfather fingers the bills in his hand, ready to count them out when she gives us the total.

“Some people say the state should feed them until the rains come, some say they should be driven to Colorado or Wyoming.” The cashier pauses, tongues her braces. “The one sure thing is no one’s going to leave them alone. People will interfere.”

When I look toward the doors, I know it’s for a reason. It takes a few moments for me to see her. My mother. She pushes a cart, the corner of a box of sugared cereal poking out of a bag. She is as young as I remember, her hair as straight and heavy. She squints up, her gaze brushing over my face.

When I turn to him, I know from the way he holds the bills in his trembling hands that my grandfather has seen her, too.

If it really were her, I would run across the crowded store, throw myself against her. If it were her, I would beat at her chest and belly with my fists. The cashier sighs and says that everything is expensive nowadays. I want so much for this woman to be my mother, and suddenly I fear it, too. If she returns, my grandfather will get better, but he will also remember everything she put him through. If she returns she might leave again, and then he might get worse. But it isn’t her, of course, and the woman passes through the automatic doors.

My grandfather is still looking toward the doors. His face is open and longing.

“Grandpa,” I say, to draw his attention. “I’m hungry. I want my lunch.”

Slowly he turns to me. He blinks, and then his face is shuttered.

IN THE CAR my grandfather asks where I want to eat.

“I want to go home. Let’s eat at home. We’ll have cheese and mustard sandwiches.”

He nods, and we drive in silence until he begins to speak.

“Your mother never forgave me for the way I treated your grandma,” he says, looking hard at the road.

“It wasn’t her,” I tell him. “It was just someone who looked like her.”

My grandfather sits upright, close to the steering wheel, his gaze fixed on the horizon. “Once I shook your grandma so hard the skin around her eyes bruised,” he says. “Your mother stood against the wall and watched.”

“Grandpa, that lady didn’t even look like her, not really.”

He says, “Your grandma’s head went back and forth.”

I won’t look at him. I won’t.

“It took a week for the black to fade, and during those days I stayed away from the house. One night I even slept at a job site. On the weekend I worked on the cars. I changed the fluids in every single one, checked the pressure on every tire, recorded the mileage. I couldn’t go into the house where they were.”

The ojo begins to flare. I want his story to stop. My skin burns.

“It wasn’t her,” I say.

He clears his throat. “I never touched your grandma again. I wouldn’t have, even if she hadn’t left. And I never touched your mother. But that didn’t matter, because your mother never forgave me.”

I can’t stand it, but he keeps going. I hear him even over the hot throbbing in my ears. I think of his voice earlier, that hard, hoarse severity, and think of Ofelia Alma Zamora, my grandmother, being shaken so hard the fragile skin around her eyes bruised. I’ve never heard this story, but now I understand that I knew it all along. I need him to stop.

“She blamed me for her mother leaving her, and maybe she was right.”

USUALLY AS WE LEAVE the rush and concrete of Albuquerque, the vast beige housing developments, my grandfather and I begin to relax and breathe. Today, though, his terrible story remains packed around us, as thick and suffocating as cotton. I feel it would take great effort for me to move.

As we wind up and over the Manzanos, I thank him for the trip, say I’ll be glad to get home. My voice is stiff. He pats my hand, and behind his glasses his eyes are rimmed red with age.

AND BECAUSE OF WHAT he has said, I remember the thing I nearly always succeed in forgetting, the thing my grandfather believes I can’t remember because I was four: the day I last saw my mother.

She had been gone for three weeks, left without telling us. One day she returned in a truck I’d never seen, driven by a man I’d never seen. She jumped from the passenger seat, and what I remember is being furious, but I ran to her because I couldn’t stop myself. When she opened her arms, I backed against the house and yelled at her to go away. She looked at me, lips parted in hurt surprise, and I thought she’d come to me, but instead she walked into the house.

The man in the truck — Anglo, cowboy hat tilted forward — looked straight ahead, tapping his thumbs on the steering wheel.

My grandfather sat silently at the kitchen table, while in the tiny back room she packed. I stood in the doorway, where by turning my head left or right I could see them both, my grandfather sitting still, one palm pressed against the table, and my mother working fast, shoving skirts and blouses into my grandfather’s canvas army duffel. Outside in the truck, the man waited.

My mother’s back was to me and she cried as she packed. I looked at her with hate that burned her edges, until she browned and curled like a photograph cast into the stove. I looked at her and sliced through her with cuts so fine she hardly knew they were there until pieces of her began to drop away. I looked at her and she began to dry up and shrink from my gaze, until she was as cold and brittle as a marigold in November.

I wish now I had cried and flung myself at her and gripped the hem of her shirt. If I had, she might have stayed. Instead, I trailed her stiffly. Out on the porch she kneeled to hug me, and I remained rigid with hate, and over her shoulder I could see the man watching us. My mother was crying and murmuring in my ear, love or promises, but I couldn’t listen. The man’s eye caught mine, and that’s when the ojo began to spread through me. My mother pulled away, jogged to the street, where she swung her bag into the back. She didn’t call to me when they drove away.

For a long time I watched the road that led to the Manzanos, and beyond, to Albuquerque. I watched until the sun dropped so low in the sky that it burned my eyes and I had to turn my head.

I don’t remember what I did when I lost sight of the truck, but I imagine I went inside to where my grandfather was sitting in the kitchen. I imagine when he heard my step he looked up and saw me.

NOW HE SAYS, “I told her to go, hijita.”

Outside, the landscape blurs.

“I told her she couldn’t come home. I didn’t think she’d listen to me — when had she ever listened before? — but she did. She left you.”

It wasn’t the man’s gaze at all, I realize now. It was my own eye that was evil, my own look that was covetous and overlong, my own furious, envious gaze that has made me sick. I wanted my mother and she’d gone to him.

WE HAVE BEGUN our descent through the Manzanos — Cuipas is a meager cluster of buildings in the distance — when we see them, the wild horses. There are two, pulling at the dry grass. My grandfather slows the Mercedes in the middle of the road. The horses are thin. Ribs visible through dusty coats. The Mercedes thrums, diesel coursing, so he turns off the engine. It shudders and goes silent, and then we hear the wind in the grass, weeds scraping against the asphalt edges of the road, and, I’m sure of it, the sound of their mouths as they eat. One of them raises her head, cocks her ears, listening. The light is silver on her velvet muzzle. I’m certain she is aware of us, will raise the alarm, but she dips her head once more and tears at the grass with yellow teeth. I think about a relative long ago losing his horse, calling her name through the mountains, returning to the fort or mission on foot, perhaps never making it, his name lost to history. A third horse emerges from the piñon, swats at the air with her tail.

If I could time my death, I would time it thus: exactly fifteen seconds after my grandfather. I would like to die in my sleep, but I must be certain I outlive him. I will lay my ear against his thin chest, listen to the silence beneath his humped sternum, and then, when I am sure, it will be my turn. Fifteen seconds is good: any longer and I might feel grief. Any longer and I might raise my head to the world opening up before me, wide and calling.

In a moment my grandfather will pat me again, and his hand will stay there, resting on mine. I’ll look down, run a finger along the veins knotted and bruised under his thin brown skin. I wait for his touch. But for now we watch the horses separately, sitting as still as we know how.