Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer Read online

  The angel hums along to Rufina’s song. She smokes a cherry Colt, thin and dark as a wet branch. Its cherry cigar flavor nothing close to natural. There is what the angel will say and what the angel will not say. Pay attention to this.

  She studies her watch, so many ways to construct time. An hour equals what, exactly? A minute opens even more possibilities—and a second? Barely noticeable, and yet, so delicate, so durable. It all matters, but not in the way you think. There are some things not meant for your intellect, but rather meant for the wild you have forgotten inside you that senses all things. Never mind the watch on the angel’s wrist, its plastic face the size of a pebble, the digital numbers lit up:

  5:12 pm

  Fri. 5.29

  Time does not step, moment by moment, into the future. Rather, it twirls in an all-encompassing, multidirectional way, not unlike a nest of roots, which truly seems incomprehensible to those accustomed to noticing only the obvious. You do not have to understand this in order for it to be true. The angel has never attempted an explanation, but here is this weekend, the gamble of it. Here are these two lives.

  Three

  Rafa nods at the wife in time with the music, or, rather the absence of it. All the babys and all the holys chasing each other in one unending refrain. The nodding helps him feel his head on his body. He has a body. It sits in a chair. His legs are crossed. The guitar on his lap like the tomb of some small creature forced to die before it was ready. In this way, his nodding, his body, pins him to this actual moment, not some moment imagined or remembered, but this very instant. Something inside him is still interested in living; notice how much this interest irritates him.

  The wife, realizing that Rafa’s attention has spotlighted her, laughs. She lowers her chin as if readying herself for a photograph. Her most flattering pose—tip of nose pointed down, right cheek forward, palms mounted on hips. If she could shimmy her shoulders, she would. In her mind, she can dance, is dancing. It’s her body that doesn’t pick up the signal. Instead, she lifts her elbows, continues to laugh—a hesitant, awkward noise. Bless her heart. There just might be a pinch of rebellion inside her. You’ll notice she resembles a hen. Careful, all she needs is someone to believe in her.

  Rafa strums the absence of guitar strings. Squints. His nodding continues, steady. It could mean anything. Less than twenty-four hours ago, he had been tucked beneath his mother’s bed, where he watched a clutter of dust hanging precariously from the web of a spider. His lower back locked in spasm. He could still smell his mother. Rufina was sidling up next to him, cursing. The wife squirms because she thinks it’s about her, his gaze. Her cheeks flush. She is almost dancing, so close, and yet.

  It’s not the wife that has Rafa’s attention, it’s her shadow, the shape of it, the subtle shifts in gradation. Don’t be confused, this has nothing to do with the placement of the sun—that flaming beast plowing its way across the sky—but has everything to do with the wife’s internal ratio of darkness and light. Her shadow, a committed subject, both her and not her, cast flat onto the ground, destined to doggedly follow her through her days. All that she refuses to acknowledge is perceptible by those who have the gift to see inner shadows externally displayed. We could easily say not many possess this gift. Rafa measures how dense the darkness is. And there, swimming beneath the blackened surface, an image barely visible. He’s seen it before. Not an unusual arrangement for a woman like this: queen with a goat. As Rafa studies the image, it becomes clear she is sitting high in a tree, on a sturdy limb. It’s drizzling. The goat is tethered to a rope leash tied to the trunk. Know this: Rosalinda would note not only the quality of darkness in the shadow but the image itself. She would have been able to decipher whether this queen had children or grandchildren and how many. Would have discerned the ridges of her deepest wounds, detailed her symbol of royalty—crown, scepter, sword studded with jewels, and if so, which jewels. If her hair were braided, the style of braid, what the expression was on her face. Rosalinda had seen the potential in her son and tried to help him hone his ability, but it was as if certain obvious details would always stay hidden from him. Due to his own stubbornness, she’d figured. Rafa slows his scan, sees an inverted crown under the hind end of the goat. His mother had the power to translate and apply the meaning of these symbols in relationship to the person being studied. Which is to say, she’d end her observations by asking one question. That one question was a kind of medicine, a drawing salve of sorts. A way to incite attention, clarity, and the cure—transformation. Rafa has never been able to see that clearly, or interpret the meaning successfully. Never once has he been able to formulate the question that could lead to understanding and to action. In spite of this, when he looks at people, he cannot help but see what is following them, the dark matter of their silhouettes. How desperate it is to be included.

  The husband, several feet ahead of his wife, has inched closer and closer to Rufina, who is planted in front of the only speaker, dented and duct-taped, merely a prop. The cord of the microphone slithers between her grip and its insertion point at the speaker when not anchored to its stand. On top of the speaker squats the collection basket. The husband’s head bobs, not unlike a goose strutting toward the edge of water. And like a goose, he leans his head forward as if preparing for the imminent strike.

  Rufina’s blouse grips her breasts. It’s all it can do to keep them contained. The strained stitching travels in tiny purple threads that dot the seams and cinch her, a corset of sorts. A row of shy, petite pearl buttons trace her midline. Some are missing and some still manage to hang on. Her hair sighs loose, a net of it, waiting.

  “My baby,” she sings. Her voice saturates the crowd.

  Unlike her brother, Rufina wears shoes—wooden heels, buckskin laces—a skirt that could gather the world. Her brother’s ankles dangle from the bottoms of his pin-striped navy trousers. She glances at them while she sings, thinks them a crude pair of crossbones. He wears a matching pin-striped vest without a shirt. Instead of fixing his teeth, he spent his money on ink, evidence of love attempted, love failed. A green mess of tattoo covers his heart in Sanskrit. Ask him what the symbol means and he’ll say, “Keep Out.” Or whatever else he feels like making it mean.

  “Holy. Holy.” The notes are getting higher and more pitchy. She’s holding them for longer with each breath, more of a siren than a voice meant to please.

  Unlike her brother’s, Rufina’s skin is blanched. They have different fathers after all, which makes them half-siblings, half-strangers. Each of them a souvenir from an intimate war. Rafa is older by twenty months, born during harvesttime. Rufina was born during planting season. For him, winter is always on the verge—slow, deep, hidden. For her, perpetual spring—shedding, expansive, fresh. He stinks of peat, cumin, and fresh piñon sap. She stinks of peat, cumin, and fresh piñon sap.

  “Return.” Rufina releases all of her breath into this last note. It rings out, piercing the ears of every living thing for miles. Listen closely and you can hear it, too.

  Four

  Officer Armijo watches from the newspaper vending boxes on the corner. He sees the back of Rufina. The way the hem of her skirt is shorter on the right. The way her spine curves ever so slightly in the wrong direction. Her hips, a mismatched pair. It’s clear to him some internal part of her is protesting. He’s trained himself to track such things. He wants to guide her, lead her to be the woman he knows her to be, a woman who can grow a new heart no matter how severe the previous damage, a woman who can remember the force of her own two feet on the ground. As he watches her, he dreams of ripe fruit—apples and peaches—that at this very moment are ever so slowly swelling and sweetening. He dreams of the sound water makes in the acequia at night. His job is to keep the peace. Depending on the day, and the situation he finds himself in, he has an entirely different idea about what this means. He knows men, hidden in the night, snort and stomp the ground; women feel the thick, wet potential inside themselves, pulsing. It may or may not incite v
iolence. It’s late spring, after all, and the moon is waxing. None of this is in his control.

  Laborers cross the plaza on their way to the bank, where they wire money to husbands, wives, or parents thousands of miles away. We could say they come from Honduras or Guatemala or Mexico. Look closer, see the blisters on toes from borrowed shoes, see the burn marks on fingers from scalding dishes, see the relief and the burden of being free. They leave the bank penniless again and cross the plaza on the way to a second or third shift.

  The Original Enduring Ones positioned on the portál of the government building are ever watchful. Rafa had named them years ago. He had wanted to protect them from what the Explorer had called them: savage, squaw, injun, chief. Clearly, they bothered the Explorer when they were on the plaza, at the grocery store and the gas station, in the laundromat. He resented their presence. As vendors, they were competition and meant less income from the tourists. “Bad artists, lazy, drunks.” It was all said lightly as the Explorer raised his left eyebrow. As if he dared someone to correct him, always ready to turn the slur into a joke. He didn’t really mean it. Wasn’t it funny, after all? These silly names. These silly people. He’d imitate their creativity in a second if it meant attention, he’d tell their stories, too. Even when he managed to call them Indians and Native Americans, it sounded degrading. As in “I can be a better Indian than they could ever be,” his far-off gaze locked in fantasy. But Rafa had stared at them all those hours he posed as the Explorer’s mannequin and saw what he felt was their humanness. The sight of them reminded him to breathe while he stood immobile, as if a cast poured by the Explorer’s hands. They saw him, too, and it came to him one long day in the direct sun, “The Original Enduring Ones.” It seemed obvious to him, the need to show respect, as with anyone. It was what he himself craved. Whenever the Explorer would hear Rafa’s term, he’d say, “Well, aren’t you clever?” The ends of his mouth bent into something related to disgust.

  Now, look the way Rafa looked at them all those years ago and still does. Note their attention to the seen and the unseen. Which is to say, there are those who have always been here, their DNA sung into the rocks. It’s quite possible that, while Rafa understood this as a boy, you will not. Notice how they are positioned behind their silver, turquoise, and coral-beaded strands of sellables, their black and mica pots, their bank bags unzipped and ready to make change. Leaning against truck hoods with braids, buzz cuts, or hair bound at the napes of their necks, speaking Diné, or Keres, or Tewa. Languages that unlock a reality, parallel to yours. Take, for example, when the raven calls from the cottonwoods, and you hear caw, caw, but the Diné woman at the stand selling mutton fajitas hears caution, caution and steps out of the line just as a homeless man crashes into her stand, splashing hot grease onto the sidewalk where moments before she had been standing. Not all is equally seen and heard. Just as the land knows, the Original Enduring Ones know that this, too, shall pass. After all, it’s been thousands of years.

  Officer Armijo waits ten yards away from Rufina’s side. If he asks them for a permit, he knows what will happen. Rufina will say, “Stop bothering us, Lucio.” She will give him her back. Rafa will say, “You’re gonna have to try harder than that.” He will look Lucio up and down, chew the inside of his cheek, waiting for a comeback, the hook. It will be as if the three of them are in high school all over again. Ninth grade, homeroom, Ms. Abeyta. In the back row, Lucio inching his desk closer to Rufina’s, his backpack weighted with another offering. Biscochitos he helped his mother bake, the tops crusted with cinnamon sugar and a handful of cherries from the tree outside his bedroom window—the same tree that had been calling to him since he was a toddler, its branches insistent against the glass. He wanted to tell Rufina that each sweet orb of fruit was an entire blushing planet, waiting to be discovered by her mouth, but he disclosed no such thing. And when the bell rang, in the hallway Rafa was waiting for her, the two merging as they traversed the territory of the school. Rafa sulking, distracted. Rufina striding crisp and purposeful and straight. And that’s how the school days went, Lucio positioning himself at the door of her next class, Lucio loitering in the lunchroom by the trash cans, Lucio lingering after the last bell. It was everything he could do to be close to Rufina.

  The tourists’ large white heads bob and their necks blister in the sun’s unrelenting grasp. Saucers of sweat stains under their armpits, asses pressed flat from sitting on the plane, from sitting on the shuttle, from sitting in the hotel, in the restaurants, in the bicycle taxis. Sitting at the job that made this trip possible. Sitting is what they do. They have mastered sitting. Their legs, those unsightly stubs and sticks of purpose, are punctuated by highly functional rubber sandals. They are necessary guests, and yet, see how easy it is to resent them, to see all tourists as one tourist? Just as easy as it is for the tourist to see a price tag dangling from every visible thing, including from the wrist of every indiscernible brown arm.

  Officer Armijo’s fingers trace his badge, his gun, his collar. It’s a tic he’s developed in the twelve years he’s been an officer. A way to convince himself of the obvious—he is in control. He rests his hands on the disobedient mound of his belly.

  The duo. Brother, sister.

  Exotic, the husband thinks as if he’s naming her, adjusting the belt of his long shorts.

  Exotic, the wife thinks as if she’s naming him, her hands cupping her elbows, swaying from side to side.

  Rufina wants the husband near her. Then, she will reach out and trail her hands down the tops of his arms. She knows this has the power to make him shiver, twitch his head as if trying to rid water trapped in one of his ears.

  If Rufina wants them to pay, they will pay. She starts the business with her mouth. She can mimic a trumpet, she can whistle, howl, and wail, trill as if an entire band unto herself. It’s the whistling—the sweet, sexy surprise of it—that undoes the husband. Baits him.

  He grabs Rufina around the waist, pretending that he can dance her. His grip is animal, his smile frozen. She can feel him stiff against her. Step to the side. Step to the other side. Forward. Back. Forward. She is without her cane and her left hip drags noticeably behind, missing the beat. As the husband steps again, his leg advances too far, knocking over the microphone stand, which crashes against the pavement, echoing throughout the plaza. The Original Enduring Ones turn their heads. Front-row seats for hundreds of years. None of this surprises them.

  Rafa is close behind, as if he could protect her, as if she belongs to him. Rufina spits one word into his ear. Wallet. It’s a suggestion that makes him almost come to life.

  “What are you doing?” the wife shouts to her husband; her voice carries voltage.

  The husband spins around on his heels. He’s lost his way.

  The tourists cannot see the impending crime, the husband and wife’s confusion, the brother and sister’s scheme. They are blinded by papel picado as it ruffles in a sigh of wind, ice of all flavors is scooped into disposable cups, candy wrappers flit down the gutters. The tourists see the sky, bricks made of dirt, straw, and spit. They see silver and turquoise.

  The husband’s head is sweating, beads of it rolling through the desperate remaining strands of hair, down the front of his ordinary face. “Just going along,” he says, “with the song.” He wipes his palms against the front of his thighs. All that holy, all that returning. He tucks his shirt in, straightens up, glances sheepishly around the plaza.

  This is the moment Officer Armijo steps forward. He asks to see Rufina’s permit to perform on the plaza.

  The husband and wife linger. The wife puts her hands in her pockets. The husband puts his hands on the back of his neck. They continue to shift and twitch. Their hands finally hang at their sides. She reaches for him. They lock their fingers together.

  Officer Armijo picks up the mic and stand. The mic is crushed. The stand bent. He offers it to Rufina. She reaches instead for the spine of her cane. It’s her left leg that’s frozen, the right leg strong en
ough to hold her up—her brother, too.

  The wife says, “At least let us pay you for the damage.” She spins her wedding band. It has always been too loose.

  The husband reaches for his wallet. His hands pull at all the cargo pocket possibilities. He does this multiple times, says, “That’s strange.” Says, “It was right here.” Says to the wife, “You must have it.”

  The wife is not carrying her purse. Still, she pats herself down. Makes a show of it. She produces a nickel, a penny, a one-dollar bill.

  Both of their faces flush. The wife’s narrow nostrils flare. The husband pulls on his earlobe. Their eyes flit to each other and to the ground. Then, the wife says to Rufina, “Will you be here tomorrow? We’ll come tomorrow. We want to pay you.”

  Rufina’s eyes tell Rafa things no one else can decipher. She nods her head at the wife.

  “We want to pay you,” the husband echoes. He reaches out to touch Rufina, a gesture meant to comfort. His hand hovers at her wrist, then her shoulder, then the top of her head, but never makes contact. He settles both hands behind his back, one trapping the other.

  “Well, technically,” Officer Armijo says, “if you don’t have a permit, you can’t accept money.”

  “You don’t have anyone else to bother, Lucio?” Rufina says. “No wives trying to slit their husbands’ throats, no heroin overdoses, no neglected elders, no drunks crossing the center line on Highway Fourteen?” She rests on the cane, anchored in front of her pelvis, her whole body tilted to the right. There is roughly fifty dollars in the basket, which she has covered with a scarf. She signals to her brother, who gathers the damaged equipment and stuffs it all into the little red wagon they use to haul their props. “Let’s rename it,” Rufina had said earlier in the day as they’d walked into town. They took the path through the woods, along the narrow, deep vein of river that flowed into, through, and out of town. The wagon had belonged to the mother and had been christened Cacahuate, long ago. “We’re not renaming anything,” Rafa had said in return.