A young guy in suction-cup jeans and laced-up white high-tops stares at me, then glances down, then briefly looks ahead as if sending Morse Code. Long-short-short. I’ve lived long enough to know when someone’s trying to pick me up, but I enjoy the attention. I lean one leg against the wall in the Cinemex theatre lobby and look down at my phone as if I have internet service here across the border. He tilts his head so far to the right that I expect his black curls to detach to the floor. His lips part, eyes still, gazing at me now as if I’ve lost my way.
Maybe I have. Why else would a white American middle school teacher be loitering outside the movie theatre popcorn stand in the Mexican border town of Reynosa? The young guy keeps staring, his pants a riot of bronze beads and silver curlicues sewn into dark denim. The kind the cool kids wear. I smell the habanero heat from a nearby bag of Taki’s, and beside me, an abuela squirts cream on her grilled corn and bends over to eat like she’s trying to recover time. I glance down at my phone, and the guy does the same. La abuela giggles. Children eat: taki taki taki crunch. I collapse my phone into my pocket, and so does he. Then he tips his wings and sparkles my way. Of this I’m certain: I’m a long, long way from home.
Some days I cross the border into Mexico. Watch movies. Drive around. Drink snifters of brandy at the Paradiso hotel or shuffle roadside pork tacos into my hungry mouth. Anything to get away from tests and lesson plans and assigned parking spaces; from the Texas women waiting to get married and the men I’m uncertain how to approach; from the perpetual feeling that I’ve done something wrong, ended up in a place I don’t belong.
I unfasten my seat belt when I get to the other side. The soldiers at the border crossing are young, from the south of Mexico: Chiapas, Oaxaca. They are small and weary — their guns hang over their shoulders like rakes. Full red lips and cheekbones riding high on their faces like bouncy balls. Like the Guatemalans I knew so many years ago. Some resemble my middle-school students: Ernesto, Michael, Humberto. Little soldier dolls. Maybe that’s why I smile at the soldiers a little too big or a little too long. Kind of like the way that guy, Auriel, looks at me outside the movie theatre.
Auriel compliments my Spanish and insists I should join him on a trip to Veracruz. Mi tierra, he says. His homeland. The Carnaval de Veracruz begins next week, and he and his friend Dulce are driving south from Reynosa to Tampico along the Gulf of Mexico, then a few more hours down to Veracruz. He tells me I’d like Dulce.
“She’s sweet?” I ask, removing my hands from my pockets and smiling.
He either doesn’t get the joke — how dulce translates to “sweet” — or I’m too tired to make sense in Spanish. He grins flatly, a nervous chortle flapping past his lips. I notice his dark eyes, a deep charcoal colour like the bottom of a well, and his cheeks covered in chocolate freckles as if someone had dotted his face with an eyeliner pencil. He shares those same soldier lips, but from the lithe of his Spanish and swish of movements, I can tell he’s no soldier. As for me, I’m big-nosed and bulky from mornings at the gym, high and tight falcon hair as if I’m on shore leave, a look that protects me, imparts an honour wholly undeserved.
“So,” he continues. “My friend Dulce?”
Auriel looks like he’s just taken a deep breath and wants to let it go. Across from us, three teenage girls trade headphones and smile. They remind me how nice it is to just let go. Maybe this guy, Auriel, is right: Dulce and I might really get along.
I ran to south Texas because I had nowhere else to go. I’d spent most of law school in Austin in a perpetual daze, uncertain why I’d chosen a profession I knew nothing about. My last semester, I was offered a job as a Foreign Service Officer for the US State Department — my dream job, specialising in Latin America, a region I had travelled through extensively in my early 20s — but I lost that after checking “yes” on the background check for having seen a psychologist. I’d lied about petty drug use because I knew that made sense, but I never thought a few visits to a therapist would mark me “unfit for the rigours of foreign service.” Even they knew something was wrong with me. I took the bar exam (passed!), but I never wanted to be a lawyer, so I ran as far south — always south — as I could go. And when I can’t run anymore, I cross the border and run some more. Run to the movies and into Auriel.
*****
The next week I go farther into Reynosa than I ever have before, to Auriel’s Benavides housing complex. Auriel answers the door in black shorts, white socks, and sandals. “I’m just so glad you could come,” he says, keeping a heavy grip around my body, his tight and curly hair against my cheek. “Please, come in.” His skin is light brown, the colour of russet potatoes, and his body is neither diminutive nor overbearing. Only his curved belly draws attention. I’m nervous, though I’ve done nothing wrong.
“I’m sorry the house is such a mess,” Auriel says as he walks me across a small foyer. “My mother has been gone a while.” I notice his jagged front teeth, one atop the other like Jenga blocks before the fall. He stands with his hands on his hips, smiling at me, then looks around. He half-twirls and bends over toward some boxes on the ground, emerging with a handful of hangers, then points me toward a half-closed door. “There’s a monster in there,” he says.
Inside the room, a large bed directly abuts a smaller bed, like the letter “T.” Below the beds crouches Dulce, sweeping dirt into a flattened shoe box. She’s short like my younger sister, a bit squatty, but with firm and milky skin. Hardly a monster. “Bad news,” she says, lifting herself and kissing me on both cheeks as if we’ve met before. “The road is all washed out.” Her brown eyes burst with intensity despite the flatness of her frown. I think about the long trip suddenly getting longer, consider backing out, but I’m interrupted by Auriel, who enters with a pair of silver women’s shoes in his hands.
“Do you think mami will like these?” he asks. He holds the straps of both shoes in his bent-back hand, while the other hand rests against his waist as if he’s hawking his fashion line on QVC. This is the type of man, I realise, who could sleep next to his mother in an improvised king-sized bed; the kind of man who invites another man, a perfect stranger, on a twelve-hour trip to Veracruz. And I? Lonely enough to go.
Later, Dulce tells me that Auriel’s mother had surgery in Mexico City last month and is recuperating now with family outside Veracruz. It’s the longest he’s gone without seeing his mother, she divulges, before Auriel can return from the kitchen. “And he hasn’t seen his father in ten years,” she adds. She shuffles makeup from the table into a small duffle bag as Auriel’s shadow enters the doorway. “¡Sssh!” she whispers, flinging her ponytail away from her neck.
“I’m not supposed to tell you.”
*****
It takes us three hours to pack up his mother’s things and clean the rest of the house. By midnight, we are on the road, weaving our way around the many torpes, speed bumps, dominating the road east out of Reynosa, to Matamoros, where we’ll continue southward toward Tampico. Neither of them has brought a map. South of Matamoros, potholes line the curved road, which slowly transforms into a pebble-lined path covered in mud. Just as I suggest turning around, another small car heads in our direction. Dulce points from the back seat: “It can’t be that bad,” she says, “Even the Dodge Neon gets through.” She and I laugh, but Auriel is hyper-focused on the road, bent forward in the driver’s seat as if opening a lock. Nervous. About his mother, his father, the road, and me. I pat his knee and offer a half-smile. Behind me, I see Dulce wink. She seems to like me. And Auriel was right: I like her too.
Six hours later, on the road from Tampico to Poza Rica, the man pumping our gas tells us the nearby bridge is washed out. Auriel wants to push ahead, but soon we’re trapped behind a line of traffic. I sit, notice. White horses roam the field to my right. Further on, up a hill, hundreds of cattle chew grass. Tall skinny palm trees, like pushpins on a map, soar above random shrubs. Dulce suggests I walk with her to see how far the line of traffic lasts.
We leave Auriel fidgeting with his watch and walk toward the midmorning light. An hour later, we reach a small bridge partly covered by mud, but with just enough space for a lane of traffic to squeeze through. No one directs the cars, but somehow everyone knows what to do. The vehicles in one direction pass for several minutes, then cars heading in the opposite direction do the same. Dulce and I perch on two rocks beside the bridge and wait for Auriel. It’s hot sitting still. I remove my shirt. Then Dulce cinches hers in a knot above her stomach. I see her light freckled skin and fine blond hairs running down toward her pelvis. Bulky men in big red trucks whistle at us, and I count the number of Tamaulipas license plates until I reach 50. “Do you want some water?” I eventually ask, touching the side of Dulce’s hand and pinkie as I hand her a plastic bottle someone had given us a few kilometres back. I’m not sure what I want from Dulce, but I know she makes me feel at ease. She wants nothing from me. I’m comfortable enough to take my shirt off here in the Gulf Coast wilderness, far away from the buttoned-up and staid demeanour of my middle school persona, the one unsure what he’s doing and too embarrassed to ask for help. The one who thinks he should know this all by now.
Auriel is furious by the time he arrives in his car. He speaks so fast I cannot understand him. Dulce apologises. I offer him a melted Snickers bar from my backpack, but I will not touch his knee again.
I soon learn that we are not going to Veracruz at all, at least not the city — or el Puerto, as the locals call it—but to Auriel’s family ranch two hours north of Veracruz in a place called Nautla. I’d forgotten all about the Carnaval, but still I feel duped. As if the world had promised me something but gave me this life instead.
*****
It’s well past dark when I finally see a sign for Nautla, 170 kilometres away, the same distance from Key West to Havana. About halfway there, we pass another military checkpoint, the first since the border. I’m relieved to see two short men in military fatigues, the bow of their legs and the width of their backs confirming their indigenous roots. Men like the affable Guatemalans who taught me Spanish in a Western Guatemalan language school called Popol Vuh one summer in college. Or my host “father,” who showed me Spanish verb conjugations and how to sip Mezcal like a local, his two little boys jumping on my bed Saturday mornings to wake me for another soccer game beneath majestic green mountains.
We pass two more military checkpoints on our way south down the Mexican Gulf Coast, and at each, I care a bit more, recalling my younger days when I was infuriated at American foreign policy or Guatemalan governmental greed. From the front seat, I see the soldiers’ perfect eyelashes at our final checkpoint, smiles unbroken by drought and disappearances. I imagine their boyhood playing in the fields and waking up to their mother’s atol de elote, a sweet corn and milk drink. I smile wide and graciously at the younger soldier on the left, hoping for the same, but instead he nods and curls his fingers for Dulce to hurry up and drive through. His cap looks strangely like a French beret. Is it ever too late, I wonder, to get back something that we’ve lost. Or if looking ahead, perhaps down the road, is simply naïve.
About an hour later, we pull up to a rotting wooden gate topped haphazardly with barbed wire. I’m relieved despite not knowing where we are. Auriel opens the gate with a key I didn’t know he had, and suddenly we’re through and on our way up a small incline toward a yellow concrete building. A lone woman waits for us. She wears glasses and a long pink shirt covering dark stretch pants. Dulce waves and stops the car.
Auriel races toward his mother. “Mami,” he shouts, opening his arms in front of her but slowing down and walking softly as he bends down to hug her. That’s when Dulce tells me about the cancer. “It was a long trip,” I hear Auriel telling his mother. She nods her head, as if to say he doesn’t need to tell her what she already knows. That guy trying to pick me up outside the movie theatre no longer exists. Instead, I see a young man in a crumpled navy shirt hunching down to hug his mother. His lightness, now, is like a sheet unravelled in the breeze. Like me, he might not belong at the border. But I’m still not sure.
Dulce and I fall asleep over couch cushions on the white tiled floor while Auriel and his mother chat on the sectional sofa above us. Sometime during the night, I’m awoken by a small cat or kitten, which must have sauntered through the bars of the open window and taken refuge near my chest. I notice Auriel and his mother sleeping feet against feet on the sofa. I’m calmed by the cat’s purr — I want to sleep like this forever.
*****
I’m awoken sometime later by the rush and riot of clanging pots and happy squeals. Auriel’s mother Violeta and her sister Cúi chatter in the kitchen. They share the same brown curly hair and small dark moles on their skin, which are coloured like an aged leather saddle. Cúi hugs me immediately in the kitchen, and when I offer to help with breakfast, she orders me to sit on the couch. I do as she says, lowering myself next to a little boy, who almost immediately leans sideways and rests his head against my arm. His skin is dark like Auriel’s, but his cheekbones are high and colored like blackberries. His lips are exquisitely feminine. He reminds me of Victor, a child I had befriended years ago at an orphanage in the Western Guatemalan highlands. “His father,” Cúi explains as she drops spatulas of beans onto paper plates at the table, “is from Oaxaca,” as if to clarify the boy’s behaviour. I caution myself that this boy is not an orphan. When I rub the little boy’s hair on the couch, he looks up at me and smiles, his widened gums like the rind of an orange slice, his mouth only halfway full of teeth. I easily romanticise this child and the world from which he comes, so different from how I usually harden myself against life’s little joys. But then I remember that not all males from the indigenous south are orphans. Or soldiers. And neither am I.
It wasn’t always this way. Before I went rogue, I travelled through Central America as a naïve college student learning Spanish. I desperately wanted to connect with people. To help where I could. There I’d drop masa dough into corn husks along the shores of Lake Atitlán, fold banana leaves like paper dolls to be stacked and steamed in oblong silver pots at the orphanage. I ended up in Perú eventually, hypnotised by easy smiles and grace along the mountainside villages. I remember a young Quechuan boy along a narrow mountain pass outside Cuzco, a bent-backed, beautiful boy huddled in the freezing cold against a broken stone wall. “He’s Indian,” one of my companions told me. “He’s used to it.” But I could see the boy’s eye sockets clutched tightly, the sunflower seeds of his eyes barely visible. I took off my jacket, a stiff-collared brown corduroy coat, and gave it to the boy. At what point did I erase that boy’s smile from my mind? At what point did I tap out on life?
“Juanito,” shouts Cúi, as I rise from the couch for breakfast, the little boy trailing close behind me. “Leave Cristóbal alone.” The boy’s mother, Helena, quietly squeezes oranges with a silver hand-press in the kitchen. I’ll exoticise this child — Juanito, the soldier-boy — for the next four days the same way Auriel eroticizes me. But I know we must rein ourselves in: we’re not at the border anymore.
That evening, Auriel takes me to another small house on the property. This is where he and I will sleep while Dulce shares the couch with his mother in the main house. We pass a three-legged lamb roped to a tree, its cries loud and plaintive. A young man in shorts and sandals ropes a bull from his horse and walks it toward the gravel road. I imagine myself on a horse. Yet I know this is not me. This is not my home. Instead, I seek clues to discern my proper role. Inside the white concrete cabin is a stove, an old couch, and something like a bathroom. On each side of the main room, a door leads to a bedroom. In one, a beautiful white blanket covers a four-poster bed, as out of place here in the country as a goat wearing knickers. Two white towels are folded into the shape of birds and rest atop a red towel. An empty silver picture frame stands on the dresser. I put my bag on the bed.
“Tsk, tsk,” Auriel says. “No, no, no no.” He shakes his head. I don’t know what I’ve done, but he takes my bag off the bed and places it on a nearby chair. “That’s for the newlyweds,” he says, pointing at the bed. I like the sound of the word in Spanish: matrimonios. This is where the happy couple comes after the wedding. His aunt makes extra money renting out the room, explains Auriel, for the newly-married couple or guests at the nearby ranch weddings. I look out the small bedroom window. First, a slaughtered three-legged sheep or dissembled turkey, and then a symbolic feast on the white wedding sheets here in the middle of el campo! We’re to sleep in the other room, Auriel says, walking me across the cabin. When I look inside, I only see one bed — a much smaller bed.
During the night, Auriel moves closer and I pull away. He moves, and I retreat. I turn away from him, but the bed is so small. He’s certain I have something to give.
*****
In the morning, I tell Dulce that I might take a bus back home. I don’t tell her why. I speak softly, try to be polite. We’re scrubbing our clothes in a giant outdoor sink. She dabs at pink soap in a half-cut milk jug and carefully sponges her shorts.
“We’re going to Veracruz tonight,” she says. “After Auriel sees his dad.” I splash water on Dulce’s forearm, but she does not look up. “I’ll take care of the bed,” she adds. I glance at her perfect breasts shaking beneath her shirt as she scrubs. Then I consider Auriel’s apprehension about his father, how long it has been. My thoughts scatter to my own father, a man who forced me to hammer and strip coconuts along the canal until my hands bled. A man’s man. The kind of man I desperately wanted to be, so that by late adolescence I’d curtailed smiling and worked my body into fits of masculine dominance. Never missed a deadline. No time for excuses. Perhaps that’s why I’d escaped to Latin America — anywhere but where I was.
After breakfast, Violeta tells us to hurry: we are taking a walk. Auriel spends longer than usual in the bathroom, and even asks me to bring him another bucket of water from the well. He emerges in blue jeans and a yellow shirt tucked nicely inside. The shirt complements his skin tone, and for the first time, I admit that he might be a little bit handsome. I open the gate, and the three of us continue down the gravel path. We reach another gate, which I open, and enter green pasture. The trail winds for nearly an hour. We pass scrub and short grasses eaten away by years of cattle farming, eventually turning a corner to reveal a small patch of palms and tropical hardwood trees. One is called a Mamey Sapote, Violeta explains to me as she reaches over and plucks an ugly brown fruit. Then she unfolds a small knife from her pocket and slices into the hard outer shell. She holds a piece of fruit on the edge of her knife and waits for me to taste it. An image of my mother comes to mind, her knuckles atop a spatula with a chocolate chip cookie on the end. She raises the spatula closer to my mouth, her face almost even with mine, the pink hue of her lips easing over vanilla white teeth. I am happy. I smile at Violeta. The fruit is Halloween orange and tastes like mango. I chew slowly and savour.
“There,” Violeta says, pointing toward a dull wooden structure in the distance. “That is the house of Auriel’s father.” I look toward Auriel, who hoists his leg over tall grass. He’s been silent for the past thirty minutes.
Violeta takes my arm and moves her head close to mine. “I lived here for nineteen years,” she says as we approach a waist-high gate. She pants lightly — I’d forgotten about the cancer. She slowly fingers the gate open, lingers, and takes a thoughtful step ahead. Auriel pauses outside the house for several moments. Violeta tells me this is where he spent the first eleven years of his life. “Auriel’s father,” Violeta continues, “no lo quiere.” Doesn’t love him. She links her arm with mine and says something softly to her son. I know she’d rather be holding him.
Auriel’s father emerges from behind the white house in knee-high rubber boots and jeans. He is weathered and handsome. His moustache unrolls nearly to the sides of his face, a few inches below his onyx eyes. Yet he struggles to look up, protected by a wide-rimmed sombrero. He stares at his boots and zigzags towards us.
“Your son,” Violeta says. The two Auriels look up, father and son. Neither knows what to do. The younger one loosens his body and holds his arms out awkwardly. They quick-clutch each other’s back, and the old man glances in my direction. He moves toward Violeta and begins to speak. The two of them talk rapidly and fluidly while Auriel watches, several feet away. “The kids want to know if they can ride a horse,” Violeta finally says, slowing down so I can understand. Her ex-husband nods and marches obediently toward the front of the house. He takes no notice of Auriel as he passes a few feet beside him.
On our horses, Auriel’s lightness returns. He crisscrosses horizontally behind and in front of me while I try to get my horse to move, jostling the reins like jump ropes. “Tighten your grip,” he shouts as he and his horse trot over the shallow brush. The ease of his smile reminds me of the little boy he must have been on the ranch. His back was tight, like a shaft of sugarcane, his arms loosely jangling over the reins. A fiery streak of white hair marks his horse, marks him. He stops beside me, tells me he wants to ride out into the fields ahead. I’ll be fine if I stay on the trail.
I jostle my lower body into my horse’s flank like Auriel showed me, but my horse doesn’t care. I fixate on the flecks of mahogany between the ears of my otherwise white horse. We’re moving, and that’s all that matters. The sun bursts in lemonade streaks, and from my new vantage point ten feet off the ground, everything looks different. Wildflowers hover over the ground like confetti, and giant bursts of orange and yellow sunflowers flare from the brush. My horse meanders off the trail into the undergrowth, dipping its head and munching on grass. I yank sideways on the reigns but still we move further out and away from the designated path. Yet I won’t force things. Not this time. Instead, I sit up straight and contemplate the many shades of green. I might never be the type of man who can control a horse, but perhaps I can quiet my unquiet mind. Stroke this land beautiful.
By the time Auriel finds me, I can tell he’s been crying. His cheeks are raised and rumpled, and his straw hat looks awkward on his head. He’s pulling at his still-pressed shirt to wipe his face, which is covered in sweat. This time it’s he who doesn’t belong, el campo of his youth so clearly not his home.
We return to see the elder Auriel and Violeta sitting closely on a bench outside the house. Her turquoise necklace reflects the sun. Her smile is wide and sincere. I wonder about her as a younger woman. Did she smile like this? Had she ever loved this man? She rocks back and forth, laughing along with Auriel’s father. Her son remains quiet on his horse.
I dismount my horse the best I can, stand beside Violeta and feel the sun’s pleasant burn across my neck. Auriel says nothing for what seems like too long. I wish Auriel would speak to his father. I consider asking Violeta to take a walk. Instead, I keep standing next to my horse, rubbing circles over his ribs. I think about the type of men we’re supposed to be. Shouldn’t fathers, fetched from grief, steal kisses from their sons? Then I realise I’m midway between their ages, about 35, when the chilli heat of chocolate turns to ash.
I wonder if I’m any better. What did I expect from Carnaval? From Auriel? From Dulce? What do I expect from myself? Standing in the shallow grass next to a great white horse, I consider what I might say to Auriel. Can I father him the way he so clearly needs? I want to graft myself onto this landscape I’ll call Auriel, but instead I stand there and wait. I should ask him about his father, about the mother he is so scared to lose. Will either of us ever be whole again?
We leave a few minutes later, after Auriel and his father awkwardly embrace, their quiet good-byes not discernible to Violeta or me. She chats the entire walk home. She is happy, almost ecstatic, leaping over tapa verguenza plants so she doesn’t crush the mysterious flowers that open, she tells us, only to the human touch.
“Do you remember?” she asks her son.
“Of course, mami.”
Auriel speaks more as we near the ranch, yet his walk remains heavy, resigned. He looks out at the landscape as if deciphering some message.
Juanito waits for us with Dulce as we open the gate. He pets the three-legged sheep (it’s actually a lamb, someone tells me), which purrs quietly as the boy asks me if we can practice his letters. He likes to write. Then he climbs up my legs, into my arms, and kisses me on the cheek. At first, Violeta laughs. Then she scoffs: that boy. Auriel walks in the direction of our cabin, untucking his shirt before opening the screen door. Dulce follows. I softly place Juanito on the grass, looking toward the half-open screen door and Auriel’s furious movements inside. Part of me wants to enter. But what would I say? Does it matter anymore that I’m here? Instead, I allow Juanito to pull me towards the big yellow house, where Cúi hands me the placemats and finishes frying chicken parts. Juanito follows me around the table, his tiny hand hanging on to my cargo shorts. I offer my hand. He takes my finger and squeezes it hard. He makes me never want to let it go.
After lunch, Cúi tells me I should take a nap. She points to the cottage as she says it, but I look at the couch instead.
“I don’t want to disturb Auriel,” I tell her.
Then she says something about the chicken we had for lunch — the one Juanito had grown fond of — casually stacking plates next to the sink, shaking her head and reminding me they live on a farm. “It’s natural,” she says, although I’m not sure if she’s talking about the murdered chicken or me and Auriel. I imagine Auriel inside the cottage paining Dulce’s nails. Or perhaps they’re resting like children in barn-house hay. I should keep my distance.
*****
Later that afternoon, we pack for our overnight stay in Veracruz, just a few hours away. Auriel tells his mother he’s not up to it. “You should go,” he tells me. Violeta takes her son’s side against Cúi’s protests. Even cousin Hernán, until now silent as he roped the bulls, urges Auriel to go. Auriel sits sullen at the end of the table, his uncle Badó offering spoonfuls of salsa as if they were antidepressants. Dulce, too, insists I should experience Carnaval. She says Auriel can get like this sometimes. But I know this trip has not gone according to Auriel’s plan, and I wonder if I can do anything to make things better. Auriel offers to watch Juanito so Helena can make the trip to Veracruz with the rest of the family. Then I volunteer to stay on the farm, too. I know it’s the right thing to do.
Later, Dulce tells me I can sleep on the matrimonial bed, away from Auriel. She says it in a monotone voice, so I’m not sure if she’s mad at me. She says she’d talked to Auriel earlier in the afternoon. I watch her pack a floral bikini top and a short white skirt. She glitters her face and laughs with Violeta in the kitchen. I’m already regretting my choice. Hadn’t I travelled so far south to have some fun again? Cúi writes down the name of the bus station and tells me I can join them anytime. All three women surround Helena in the bedroom as she skitters around with last-minute packing. Hernán tells me not to kill any chickens while he’s gone. He laughs because he knows I’m not a man of the farm. He’s got his eye on Dulce, I can tell, but she’s busy with the other women, laughing and tossing clothes into an open suitcase on the bed. A few minutes later, they pack up the truck and leave. I watch it bobble over the gravel road and out the gate, taking my good time with them.
I walk back to the cottage to check out the beautiful white bed. It’s been a long day, and I want to lie down. I’m so exhausted I nearly squash a cloth swan as I collapse onto the bed. Three framed pictures face the bed on the opposite wall, the middle one a black-and-white seascape dotted with skinny coconut palms. It reminds me of home. But here it’s hot, too hot, a crushing heat exaggerated by the lack of circulation. I’m tense and can barely breathe. I loosen my belt, sliding off my shorts and removing my wet shirt. I shimmy beneath the virgin white sheets, reaching down to remove my underwear. The cool sheet feels spectacular against my wet skin. I spread my legs and close my eyes, calm at last, the freedom of an empty farm like the loosening of a vice against my skull.
A few minutes later, I hear Auriel open the cabin’s front door, his steps closing upon my room. “This is where the young couples go,” he reminds me, sitting on the side of the bed. “You can get some sleep now.” He leans down to bounce himself off the bed, but I reach out to grab his arm instead. He looks toward the house and says something about Juanito. I tell him it would make more sense if we both napped in here.
“No,” he answers, waving his finger. “I don’t want to be . . . no, no, no.”
I tell him he would be no bother; he should lie down and take a nap. He hesitates, so I nod my head toward the end of the bed. He removes his t-shirt and lies on his back across the sheet, perpendicular to me. He spreads out his arms as if mimicking Jesus on the cross. Together we laugh. He hollers for Juanito, who we’re supposed to be taking care of while the others are in Veracruz. I hear the three-legged lamb bellowing against the tree just outside the bedroom and the barking dogs across the dry river valley. The cat has already jumped on the bed. I close my eyes and take in the brunt of Auriel’s heavy body against my legs and thighs, only a thin cool sheet between us. I nearly fall asleep to the rise and fall of the cat’s breath against my chest, unsure what to do about Auriel’s stretched body over mine.
Soon, I feel Juanito’s fingers across my hair, then the tapping at my chest for me to wake up like the Guatemalan sons in my host family’s home all those years ago. Auriel and I have merged, his body resting at a 45-degree angle next to mine, as if the two ends of the sectional couch had collapsed together. I feel the side of his arm against mine, the lower half of his body nearly off the bed. I move over so he can slide his full body on the bed next to me. Immediately, he does. I am naked under this sheet with a boy and a man and a cat, and the old expectations don’t seem to matter anymore. I can allow myself to soften. To be the man my young students need and to figure out how to live off the land, wherever I may be, and the people in it. Perhaps the only borders I must cross are my own.
Juanito smiles, with baby teeth and bleeding gums, and Auriel looks like a poet in his father’s vaquero scarf around his neck. I can run no more. I’m comfortable here, Juanito’s arm dangling over my chest, Auriel as close to me as he wants to be, my arm wrapped over him, assuring him that his mother will be fine and his father loves him, thinking (whispering?) how, in a way, I love him too, the three of us — and the cat — soaking together beneath these sheets. For a moment, perhaps, I’ve found my way home.
