Miguel crossed the border at Nogales and walked until midnight before resting at the arroyo where the water jugs were buried. He continued on until morning when he found the old cement granary and lay down to wait for his cousin to bring the horse. He fell asleep and dreamed of a deep blue lake. His father stood with him at the edge of the lake. They took hands and jumped in. The water was clean and cold against their skin. They reached out to touch the lake bottom but it kept pulling away from them, plunging down into the dark.
He woke in the midmorning heat and poured the warm water from the canteen into his cupped palms and washed his face. He wiped his hands clean on his pants and then he took the note from his pocket:
Morenci mine—enough work for two
Dad
His cousin brought the horse, skeletal in the dust. He put one arm around Miguel and with the other hand gave him an old pistol. The gun was cold and heavy in Miguel’s hand. When he was certain he was out of sight he slipped the pistol into his saddlebag. He rode all day and night and at dawn came down through a field of mine tailings, the wasted earth blood red in the rising sun, stars blinking out in the sky, all held together by the hand of God, one to another. He came up to the weathered bunkhouse expecting to see his father but instead in the dooryard stood a white man with a round bald head and no eyebrows and the fingers of his right hand gnarled into a fist and his eyes black in the flame of the cookstove. He took a strip of blackened meat from the flame and put it in his mouth, sucking his tongue in the heat.
“You from round here?”
“No,” Miguel said. “Just looking to water my horse.”
“That horse don’t look too long for this world,” the man said. Miguel climbed off and stood there in the half light watching the man eat his breakfast with his father’s good knife.
The man picked at his teeth. “Meetin anybody?”
“Guess I done met somebody,” Miguel said.
“I’ll treat your horse then,” the man said.
Miguel finished off the last of his canteen. The man crossed behind him and he heard the horse struggle in its reins and then he turned to see the man plunge the knife into the horse’s throat. The horse fell splayed to the ground, dark blood spilling out silent onto the desert floor.
“Done took care of the horse,” the man said, advancing on Miguel with the knife in his good hand. “Now I just need to take care of the spick.” He was very quick and he cut Miguel across the cheek and then deep along the thigh before Miguel took up a rock and brought it down hard against the man’s nose. He fell screaming in the dirt. Miguel picked up the knife. He took off his shirt and cut it in half and knotted the two ends and pulled the cloth taut around his thigh. Then he stood over the man.
“You can kill me,” the man said. “Then you can bring your sister and your grandma up here and fuck them blue on my grave until they shit out your babies. But ain’t none of them never gonna be no American. It’s spick for life.”
Miguel sheathed his father’s knife in his belt and lifted his boot heel and ground it deep into the man’s crotch. He moaned and slithered off in the dirt. Miguel stepped into the bunkhouse and saw the bloody mattress propped against the wall and his father’s few belongings strewn out on the floor. He picked up the small framed photograph taken of his father at the same age he was now. He slipped the photograph out of the broken frame and folded it in half and put it in his shirt pocket. He knocked the mattress to the ground and found the matches and set the mattress alight and piled his father’s belongings on the flame and punched out the windows and stood in the dooryard with his knuckles bleeding to watch the building burn. He took the photograph out of his pocket and traced his father’s image with his fingertip.
“Face of my face,” he said. “Blood of my blood.”
© 2008 Jared Smith
