Ember Days (a novel excerpt)

by Nick Ripatrazone

…. It was the right time to talk about the bomb. Ortiz, though, could barely distinguish between the bomb he experienced and the bomb he’d imagined those lonely years in the desert. Still, some facts remained on his skin like the indelible wrinkles that pinched his hands. Back in ’45, he lived on a ranch near Carrizozo, a mule deer’s skip from the same highway the gas station bordered now. He was awakened when the bomb blew at 5:29, blasting his windows and covering the floor in shards. The wobbly sun reflected off the cut glass and heated the walls, the bed. A low sound rumbled toward the house, so low it seemed to crawl along underground caverns. A storm beneath their feet. The sound culminated with a swamp of grey. Ortiz’s wife swept the sheet over them and they breathed the sheet into their mouths, against their tongues.
….. “The Army is shooting us.” Gumersinda really had no idea. She wanted to peek, but Ortiz kept the sheet in place. He was scared to look.
….. He couldn’t see her but could imagine her face.
….. “My sister. Jesus.” Gumersinda pulled the sheet away. A misty cloud rotated along the ceiling, carrying black specks of dust that glued to the walls on contact. Ortiz pulled the sheet back over their heads but Gumersinda grabbed his neck. “I need her.” Ortiz was more concerned with their slow-eyed spaniel tied to the fence outside than her overbearing sister, but he relented.
….. Gumersinda stood on the bed and cupped her hands over her mouth. The smoke rested above her like a web. Ortiz laid the sheet on top of the glass-covered floor and stepped across with arched feet. He ran down the hall, now beginning to flush with smoke, and still heard the rumble, though the sound now seemed to reverberate from the earth’s core.
….. Gumersinda tugged the knobs of the closet. Muffled screams pinched from beyond the doors.
….. “Watch your feet.” Ortiz held back Gumersinda. “¿Que haces?”
….. “Carmela won’t come out. She thinks we’re being shot.”
….. “She’ll suffocate there.” Ortiz tugged open the doors and Carmela stumbled out, her robe clinging to sweat-dampened skin.
….. A clocking boom shook glass spiked on the windowsill. The women crouched under the kitchen table in the center of the ranch.
….. “Ven.”
….. Ortiz walked over the glass.
….. “Ven, tonto.”
….. A cloud draped from the sky. Inside the grey fire formed the shape of an orange bull, primed to leap. Purple flashes clipped its hide.
….. “Ven.”
….. Ortiz pulled glass from a sill. The last boom had quelled his ears. He heard from memory now. He climbed out the window and sauntered through a rank, lukewarm wind. His eyes stung from particles carried by the stray air. He looked for his dog but could not find it.
….. The pigs piled in the trough. One heaped on its back, mud in its eyes. Ortiz poked it, but the stick sunk inside the boiled skin.
….. That was the end of Ortiz’s true memory for the morning. He’d imagined events past that, but couldn’t be sure of them. The rest of his images from that day resided in his memory like a shuffled puzzle.
….. He sliced a pig open during the afternoon, and its insides poured on the mud.
….. Gumersinda said the devil had come and Ortiz hadn’t done a thing.
….. He found his dog crouched behind the cellar doors. Half the leash burnt away. Her fur molted black. But she lived.
….. Night came slowly. He leaned on his fence. The devil’s breath still winded across his cheeks. He walked to the front of the ranch to find Carmela in the passenger seat of the idling pickup. Gumersinda walked out of the house and asked him what he was going to do. He said nothing. This was his ranch, his land. Why would he leave? She said the house is destroyed, cursed. There was no life left for her here. He waved her off, and in that passing gesture he sealed his loss: a woman will pass lasting judgment during particular moments. Gumersinda and her sister took the pickup and the dog to Corona.
….. Ortiz would never hear from them again.
….. It was his fault. Sure, they were superstitious and scared, but Ortiz knew the bomb was coming. He had been warned: not that there would be a bomb specifically, of course, but that something would happen. The Army mailed him a deed in 1942 for the house and the land. A manila envelope carried the typewritten decree. The land was in the range of expected testing. They didn’t say what would be tested, but Ortiz soon felt the desert would burn: when he drove south he saw wires strewn across the yuccas. So many covered trucks. Army. Tough looks and little talk. The other ranchers moved in droves, caravans of covered horses and shifty eyes. The threats, the visits that he hid from Gumersinda. Trying to not make her worry only resulted in her anger.
….. Ortiz forked-over three quarters of the land but said he wouldn’t budge on the rest. He had a cop friend in Carrizozo, a Hispano with light hair, who said Ortiz could go to Judge Dominguez in Lincoln County and keep his land. Ortiz wouldn’t move because there was nowhere to go. Not even in this big desert.
….. So he sat there and let the bomb topple him. He spent one more night in the house after Gumersinda left. Wind spun through the smashed windows and he moved his mattress to the kitchen. He kept a blanket over his face and wondered if he would ever wake up. He had dreams within dreams and saw the desert in black and white, and imagined peeling off his own skin and touching bone and feeling so real.
….. He hiked to Carrizozo the next morning. He bundled chicos and cleaned pipes.
….. He asked if anyone had seen the bomb.
….. Hadn’t he? They all knew his story. He had spoken it, half-drunk, leaning against the wall of cramped bars, and while playing dominoes with chalked hands.
….. No, Ortiz had seen only what the bomb had left.
….. So did they. One person said they climbed a molted, broken tower, atop which the bomb had been detonated. Another said they saw the cloud disperse and choke the rain-clouds with grime and ash. A boy said he saw flying saucers dart from the cloud, but he was prone to lying. Ortiz was scared to go see the site of the bomb. Scared to actually go south. He knew the way. Instead, he hiked around it. He hoped the bomb would find him. Wasn’t that the point? Someone told him such a dream was selfish. The bomb, whatever it was, was not made for him. If he was killed or moved or made sick because of it he was one of many. Of course none of them used that word, bomb. They said blast, they said explosion, they said great death.
….. Ortiz stoned jackrabbits in the morning and rubbed his finger under their dead noses. He tied them as bait, tossed them onto open dirt, and lay at the base of a creosote as the stinky, oily leaves dribbled on his forehead. Spear-headed bugs crawled up his thighs while he waited. A mule deer over-leapt the rabbit, expecting the smaller animal to dart forward. The deer turned back and swept the rabbit in its mouth as Ortiz shot. Each pull of the trigger shook the creosote.
….. The rabbit still pressed between the deer’s frozen jaw. The deer thinned along the ribs; its underbelly was a weak pink. Although Ortiz charred the deer’s purple meat over a tumbling fire, the meat maintained the consistency of hot dough. He ate the meat and it pained his stomach. He slept knees to chest under the paling night sky and woke countless times, swearing the bomb’s cloud had crept toward him again, and imagining that the bomb had bled inside the mule deer, spinning and churning inside like a second heart, heated from the fire, and now inside Ortiz. A parasite.
….. Next week or next month, a stringy, yellow-green mucus clamped Ortiz’s right eye shut. He longed for a puddle of water to clean the mess, but the desert erased that luxury. He rubbed his eyes, and each motion brought more mucus down with his fingers. Could it have been the mule deer he had eaten hours before? She had wobbled with the sickness of the desert.
….. Ortiz pulled his eyebrows apart and heard a soft pop. His vision clouded in his right eye. He felt sand along his pupils. He ran from where he slept, still groggy, mucus trailing down his cheeks and onto his lips. He stumbled past the razed ranch but doubled back and tossed plywood aside to find a cloth, a towel, but the Army had scoured everything except the worthless wood. He continued on, criss-crossing his old driveway, now a mess of split gravel, and he finally reached 380.
….. His eye closed again; the mucus locked his eyelids. He settled for one eye and jogged east on the highway. He had lost his shoes somewhere. His shirt stuck to his chest: he had vomited sometime during the night, or, more likely, during the morning.
….. He smacked the collected mucus from his lips and ran faster. He could no longer see his ranch, or much of anything, until he reached Carrizozo again, where a little runt said Ortiz had a golden eye. A man in a business suit took Ortiz’s left arm and gave him a handkerchief.
….. Ortiz held the cloth against his eye.
….. “Where are you coming from?” the man asked.
….. “West. The desert.”
….. “Come.” The man led Ortiz by the arm through the cobblestone street, then into a shoe store that was very dark, but not black, more like a musty, maroon hue. The man pushed open a door to a room with a wide table, black straps hanging from either side.
….. “His eye is badly contagious.” The man spoke to someone on Ortiz’s right. He couldn’t see.
….. “Where did you find him?”
….. “A block down. He was talking to a boy.”
….. “Does he have any money?”
….. The man searched Ortiz’s pockets. “I have nothing,” Ortiz said.
….. The room was silent then. Smoke puffed from the corner.
….. The man dropped a handful of pesos on the table. “I can’t babysit him. Will you treat him?”
….. “Yes.”
….. The man left, and shut the door behind.
….. The second man shuffled about in the corner of the room and turned a free-standing light toward Ortiz. The glare caused his eyes to tear profusely, running more mucus onto his moist cheeks. The man pocketed the pesos, and pulled rubber gloves over his hands. He was very well dressed, almost as professional as the Samaritan who led Ortiz here.
….. “Are you a doctor?”
….. The man pressed down Ortiz’s bottom eyelid. His top eyelid came down also. The man drubbed alcohol onto a small cloth. “Keep your eyes closed.” He patted Ortiz’s right eye with the cloth, and mucus, tears, and alcohol streamed down his face. The man gave him a towel, which was crusted in parts. Ortiz dabbed his face. He could open his eyes, but not see very well. The man had set his cigarette in an ashtray and taken off his suit jacket.
….. He spread Ortiz’s eyelids and held a mirror for the reflection. Ortiz’s eye was a ripple of bloodshot lines, searing into his pupil.
….. The man handed the mirror to Ortiz and lifted his top eyelid so high it almost split. “There’s something in your eye.” He let the eyelids drop, and they closed with a slight suction. “Please.” He directed Ortiz to lie on the table. The man swabbed some tan oil onto a Q-tip and smeared it along Ortiz’s eyelid. He blinked to avoid the sensation and the man did not stop him, as if the reaction was expected.
….. “Where do you live?”
….. “Here.” Ortiz crossed his hands under his bottom.
….. “I don’t recognize you.”
….. “I live below the clothing store.”
….. The man cut a piece of medicinal tape and stretched it between two fingers. “Then why did Manuel walk you here?”
….. “I stayed in the desert last night.”
….. “I wouldn’t go near there.” The man set the tape on Ortiz’s top eyelid and tugged back. He taped the other end on Ortiz’s forehead. Ortiz winced. The man positioned tweezers between his forefinger and thumb and pressed down on Ortiz’s lower eyelid. His tears coagulated with the still-producing mucus. He could only feel the tweezers like a fat finger poking his back, but blood rushed his vision red, and he rocked on the table but the man held him down. He splashed water on Ortiz’s face and sat on a chair next to the table. Water pooled in the wells of Ortiz’s eyes. The man removed the tape, sat back down, and began to smoke.
….. The sound of children buying shoes slipped through the walls. The man rested his elbow on a round table, his hand holding the cigarette to his mouth. His legs were crossed and his shoes looked expensive: they were without holes. The tweezers sat next to the man’s elbows. Droplets of blood collected beneath the tips. A small, rusted chip rested on a coaster. The man’s smoke crossed his fingers, and his ashes fluttered as if there was wind in the small, dark room.
….. “Why were you in the desert?” the man asked.
….. “I used to live there.” Ortiz pushed himself off the table.
….. “No. Sit back down. Lay down, in fact. Your right eye is useless now. You will lose your sense of balance and fall.” The man stood. “Something happened out in the desert. We all know that. It is best that you stay here. The desert is bad for an injured eye, especially when the wind is carrying around scraps of metal.”
….. “Can I work?”
….. “You can sleep.” The man eased Ortiz’s back down onto the table. He set his cigarette in an ashtray and cut several lengths of bandages. He covered Ortiz’s right eye and instructed him to keep the eye shut beneath the bandages. “Otherwise your eye could get worse.” He said that headaches would soon follow, but whatever he did, to not remove the bandage. “Can you find your way back here in two weeks?”
….. “The shoe store, right?”
….. “Yes.” The man helped him up and out into the store. Ortiz looked at a pair of brown shoes with soft bottoms. He tried them on a walked and few steps before giving them back and leaving, and although he walked the street barefoot he imagined the cushion of those shoes. He walked past the clothing store and out of Carrizozo and he did not stop walking. He did not look back. Those men were the bomb, and the bomb had found him again, and it would not rest until it swallowed him.

***

….. Ortiz hitched his way from Carrizozo to Texas on the back of a Ford Ranger. He jumped out in a little town named Newhouse, found a county map, and walked the remaining seven miles to his cousin’s ranch. The whole way he saw with one eye: the right eye was buried beneath bandages, and that dead eye was always straining to break through the cloth, hungry for a bit of light to see again. When he finally found Santos he could barely recognize him.
….. Santos stood in the bed of his pickup and shoveled rust off the metal. His jeans rose to his chest and his boots dirtied burgundy. His face weathered beyond his years. He left Mexico years before–he had been one of the corrupt police, although he would always offer excuses. Said it was better to be somewhat bad than fully rotten. But he’d gotten too drunk one night and held a pistol to the jefe’s throat. He’d been laughing but nothing mattered besides that pistol. He left the next morning. He walked down the dirt driveway and met Ortiz halfway and hugged him for a long minute and then took him by the elbow and led him to the house.
….. Santos knew something had happened but wasn’t sure what. Some said it was a fire. He didn’t know what caused it, but had heard enough from family to know that Gumersinda was gone, living in Mexico again, with no interest in Ortiz.
….. “She called you every name. Including cobarde.”
….. “I earned it.”
….. “How so?”
….. “I knew. I could have led them away.”
….. “Now that would have been a coward’s way.”
….. Santos said Ortiz could stay with him as long as he needed. There was room in the house. It was the only house on that long road, save for the shack next door that looked like a lost appendage. Dolan lived there.
….. Santos had a boy named Leonard who loved milk. Begged to be bathed in it instead of boring water. He splashed milk on his cheeks at the dinner table, and then Santos would smack him. Ortiz would wince at that, but wouldn’t say a word. You don’t correct a man in his own house. Ortiz would go back to eating his pie. That was all Santos’s wife Rosa baked. Rough bread that crumbled to cracker after an hour in the deep brick oven. Chorizo, stringed along and slung over Santos’s shoulders when he came home from the market. White-yellow potato halves, smashed and mashed by the heel of Leonard’s hand. Green and red peppers, cooked under foil and crunched. Leonard was born a few weeks early. Santos called him incomplete.
….. Ortiz slept over the pigpen. Santos didn’t have much of a farm. Always five pigs in the trough during the day that slept in the two-level shed after dusk, warming Ortiz during cold-winded nights. Santos had two dogs. And he had about ten mules. And a few Tennessee Walking Horses.
….. One morning Ortiz found Leonard in the blueberry patch. His face was violet. He ate the blueberries in handfuls and spoke as he ate, saying my momma planted these berries and they’re the best damn berries in Oklahoma. But they weren’t in Oklahoma. Ortiz lifted Leonard from the patch. The boy asked what caused the fire that destroyed his house. He asked if it was God or the devil. Ortiz said he didn’t know and carried the boy back to the house.
….. Santos stood in the open door. He seemed to be growing, consuming space. Ortiz placed Leonard on Santos’s forearm and the boy vomited on his sleeve. The boy had a stomachache all night. Rosa put lime on Leonard’s tongue but he spat the wedge on the floor. Then she baked rice and poured heated milk over the rice and the rice almost dissolved in the bowl and she fed Leonard, spoonful by spoonful. Santos turned his matchbook in his fingers and said you should never eat too much of something.
….. “May I leave?” Ortiz stood at the door.
….. Santos laughed. “You never have to ask.” He put the matches in his chest pocket. “Can you bring in the horses? There’s a storm coming.”
….. So Ortiz did, holding all three reins in his hand at once. He stood and watched the storm collect in the sky, tainting the cream clouds above. He locked the stable.

***

….. Dolan rinsed his teeth over a ten-gallon drum. The wind flaked red chips from the drum and they stuck to his pants. He pushed his teeth back in his mouth and rubbed his finger along the bottom row. He stared into the sun and the sun stared back: he was not tall but claimed he was, sitting down in bars or at the courthouse. He had promised that he would show Ortiz a stack of playing cards carved from wood. Not that Ortiz cared. But Dolan had leaned on the fence that separated his property from Santos’s and would not shut his mouth until Ortiz came over for a minute. Just for a minute, he promised.
….. Dolan walked into his garage and came out with a sewing machine box. The box was full of the old wooden cards, painted with a child’s stroke.
….. “Well now what do you think?”
….. “How do you shuffle them?” They were unevenly planed.
….. “Lift and flip them.”
….. “Aren’t cards supposed to bend?” Ortiz didn’t wait for an answer. “Santos’s not happy with you.”
….. “What’s the problem?”
….. “The fence is here for a reason.”
….. “You can’t fence out the Lord. He steps where He will.”
….. “Listen to me.”
….. Dolan opened his arms. “I’m standing here.”
….. “Why’d you jump this fence last night?”
….. Dolan pulled down an eyelid. “Where did your eye go?”
….. “It’s still there. Only covered.”
….. “Did the fire do that?”
….. “There was no fire.”
….. “Did the Army do that?
….. “Don’t worry about that. Why’d you cross the fence?”
….. “I couldn’t. I took a ladder to it.”
….. “And your face was on Leonard’s window.”
….. “And?”
….. “And you scared the boy stiff.”
….. “I didn’t mean to.”
….. “You don’t lean the ladder on this fence again. Santos’ll shoot you.”
….. “He won’t do a thing.”
….. Ortiz nodded. “No reason to test a man, right?”
….. “I served, you know. Infantry. We never set fire to houses. We kicked in a few windows, pissed on some porches. I’ll help you build your house again.”
….. The sun dipped for a moment. There were clouds shaped like raisins. Dolan rested his chin on the peaked fence.

***

….. Blueberry baby Leonard was. His skin took on the color of the fruit. He wanted to be coddled by Rosa; he ran from Ortiz to her. She stopped on the porch and turned with him, lifting him up and down, his legs kicking, running. Ortiz wasn’t even sure how old the boy was.
….. “His first name was Lionel.” Rosa sat him on her lap at the table. She smoked near his face but the boy didn’t mind. “Then Tristan.”
….. “I like that name.”
….. “So do I. But Santos changed his mind. He does so often, you know? Like the wind he is.”
….. “How old are you, boy?” Ortiz asked. His arms were open, and he hoped for an answer.
….. Leonard turned his lip. He was about to cry. He was tired, and weren’t they all? Santos still slept: he had a dream that Clark Gable offered to buy his ranch, but Santos just took the actor’s money, spat on it, and handed it back. Ortiz found himself asking the pigs to be quiet at night.
….. “He doesn’t know,” Rosa said.
….. “What happened to your eye?” Leonard asked.
….. Ortiz patted the bandage. “Got some dust in it.” He wanted to swipe the smoke from her mouth. Didn’t she see Leonard’s skin almost tinted violet? The shade was dark and disturbing. She baked everything with blueberries: hotcakes that looked like big, flat cookies with purple chips, oatmeal, salads, even mashed potatoes. They had to do something she said, and not waste those berries. Ortiz suggested they pare back the bush, but Santos wouldn’t have that. He wanted to let things grow, and that’s why corn snakes curled like leather belts in the high hay-grass near the shed. Everything was overgrown. There were many places to hide. Leonard knew them all. Ortiz only knew a few. Under the blankets, sheets, and afghans needed for warmth in the shed and to dilute the smell of the pigs. In the basement of the ranch, where there was no sun, only rust-painted license plates, cast-iron trains and dogs, and a croquet set amongst the mess. The attic was a damn hot place, but if you rested your chin on one of the ventholes you could catch the calming wind. The stables. And Ortiz’s hiding place: the forest. The line of stumped oaks and brush that split their land from the next, the line that must have looked like a brown stripe from the sky. There were stumps to sit on, and there Ortiz could watch the ranch from afar. He would pray, and he would ask the great Iñigo for advice:
….. I am a man in another man’s home. Is that wrong?
….. I do not know how long I will stay. I love the boy like a son.
….. Tell me how it will be to have a son.
….. I will never have a son. The bomb took my wife. She will only have his baby.
….. Sometimes the hearing would go from Ortiz’s ears and be replaced by ringing, by birds, by wind, by wheat. Ortiz had to earn his keep here. He knew he owed a debt, but hadn’t yet found a means to pay.

***

….. Mist fumed off the shaking Tecumseh engine, blowing the sweat off Santos’s hands. The rolling saw peeked from the bench, whirring over their talk, hissing like breath between closed lips. The split, sprained halves of wood lay on the grain-dusted ground: separated twins. The moon was the color of burnt wheat, and the horizon did not stop with the clouds, but instead rose with the freedom of wind-blown ashes far higher than the stars.
….. Santos had wrapped a ripped sweatpant leg around his red, veined left bicep, and he moved his finger along the bench and sawdust collected on the tip. He rested his palm awfully close to that swirling blade. Leonard called for him from another room, but he did not answer. He never did. If he cared for that child, he showed it by providing for him a roof, or the grain and milk that he ate, or the shelter from wind and storm that these cabin walls provide, but he provided little else in the way of love, and that omission was not from the cold of his heart, but from some stubborn ignorance.
….. Yesterday he had gone to town for corn but really to pass the time, to get away from the faces he saw each hour of the day. He didn’t think those moments of solitude were selfish, they were simply necessary. He had a coffee with whiskey in the general store and sat at a table next to the window. He stirred the coffee often so that the whiskey did not become lazy at the bottom of the cup.
….. Before he returned home he checked his post office box expecting nothing but when he slid his hand across the metal he felt a thin envelope, the return address stamped Mexico. The letter was from Gumersinda, and asked if Ortiz had come. At first Santos folded the letter and stuffed it in the pocket of his shirt and rode back to his ranch but halfway down the long road that never held a bump or dip he took the horse to the side, where the wheat extended up half its legs, and he read the letter again. Yes, Ortiz had come, and you left him, so what could you possibly want now? He balled the letter in his fist and tossed the crumpled paper into the wheat. But he told Ortiz everything when he got home.

***

….. Rosa fell asleep on the mule. Her chin rested on its head, and she did not wake, which was a wonder because the mule was prone to shaking its head after each brush of wind. Santos was lighting candles in the back room, Leonard with him, taunting the faulting flames.
….. Ortiz gave the mule a muddied carrot and rubbed his thumb along its wet teeth. He smelled his thumb and was not phased by the stench. The mule chewed with a cracking tooth, and the movements of its jaw did nothing to rise Rosa, whose arms slumped over each side of the mule.
….. Santos stepped on the porch. He was exhausted. He picked tobacco from the gully of his lip and tossed the black onto the dust. He did not look happy that his wife had fallen asleep on a mule.
….. “Jesus.”
….. Ortiz scratched the mule’s cheek. Rosa snored. The candleflame lit the house like a burial room. Santos lumbered to the spigot and rested one knee on the dirt. He showed his teeth and slopped water over his gums, brushing out the muck, and then he took a great big mouthful and his neck relaxed as if he had swallowed. He walked over to the mule and put a hand on its ass and spat on Rosa’s exposed leg.
….. Rosa woke with a long face. The spit turned down her calf, rode her foot to her toes, where it stayed. “You slob bastard.”
….. Santos left his hand on the mule. The spigot’s water bounced off the ground. Ortiz bagged the rest of the carrots. “I’ll get a towel.” He began to walk inside, but Santos put a hand on his chest.
….. “She’s fine.”
….. Rosa kicked over her clean leg and sat still on the mule. “Your son sees you.”
….. “Come to bed.”
….. “I’m fine out here.”

***

….. Ortiz woke and swallowed the stench that almost put him back to sleep. He rolled off his cot and walked outside, because he would suffocate amongst the pig skins. He had dreamt that he was speaking to Iñigo before the cannonball had split his leg, and Iñigo’s hair was perfumed and his shirt was pressed velvet with pearl buttons. He wore a base musket on his near-wooden leather belt. He talked about women. He then asked Iñigo about the bomb; he asked if Christ knew the bomb, and Iñigo said he not only knew it, he had made it with careful hands.
….. The mule was not tied. It pranced around the paddock and nosed the gate. When Ortiz walked close, he could see the mule’s hair shudder from the winded morning. He cleared dust from the mule’s ears and took his saddle and walked it along the paddock fence, looking up at the stars and the way the ranch’s roof stabbed the low moon.
….. Rosa stood in the stable’s dark, her hair tucked under a scarf or kerchief. She wore a man’s shirt and no pants. The shirt showed how small she was, curling up around her knees.
….. “The mule’s shaking like a shingle.”
….. “He was coughing. He could use some night air.”
….. Ortiz held onto the mule’s saddle.
….. “Let him loose.”
….. Ortiz didn’t.
….. “Let him go, and let him walk.”
….. “Why don’t you tie him up and go inside?”
….. Rosa leaned against the open stable door. “You’re not my cousin.”
….. “This is Santos’s place.”
….. “This is my place.” She put a hand on the mule’s saddle. She had low cheeks and half a nose. Her skin dipped an unnatural brown along her neck.

***

….. Santos was soaked with whiskey, and so was Rosa. Santos did say that he kept the devil close. Ortiz sat with Leonard on the porch, and the boy drew a cathedral with pastels. His perspective was off, his lines were curved, his windows were unnaturally small, but Ortiz did not correct him or tell him to stop. He wanted to watch, to understand the boy’s movements. Again, he imagined him to be the son he never had.
….. “What happened to your eye?” This was the fifth time Leonard had asked. “I’ve never had anything happen to my eyes.”
….. Ortiz leaned his boot on a railing and looked at the porch’s ceiling. Inside Leonard’s parents made up for lost time, for lost laughs: moments of drink enabled the suturing of broken hearts. “You really want to know what happened to my eyes?”
….. Leonard gave a long nod.
….. “I used to live in New Mexico. I was walking through the desert one morning and I-”
….. Dolan walked to the edge of the porch steps. “Mister and missus inside?”
….. Ortiz knocked his knuckles on the window. Santos’s voice boomed from the table for Dolan to go on. He did on his own accord and patted Leonard’s shoulder while he passed.
….. He sat at the table and Santos offered him a glass. The three of them were loud, chair legs rocking against wood, palms smacking tabletop, laughs belching from bellies.
….. “Are you going to finish?” Leonard asked.
….. “I was walking through the desert one morning and got a fly in my eye.” He took the drawing and slid it beneath this chair, along with the pastel sticks.
….. “A fly did that?”
….. “A fly did it.”
….. “What about the fire? I thought everything burned.”
….. “Everything did burn. The fly flew away from the fire and landed on my eye. In my eye.”
….. Ortiz put Leonard to sleep and joined the others at the table.

***

….. It takes longer for things to happen in the day than it does during the night. That was a fact of existence, and it had been proven so many times that it need not be spoken about. Ortiz nursed his whiskey by backwashing sips, and no one had really noticed, their eyes askew, their lips moist. Rosa and Santos touched more than Ortiz had ever seen, and he wanted to be happy for them, but he couldn’t keep his eyes off Dolan, who brought the liquor down in gulps. Dolan excused himself from the table and went off with his hand cuddling his crotch. Rosa said he was going to shit and Santos laughed and said the house would stink for the rest of the week, it would smell like where Ortiz slept every night. Ortiz smiled but kept his ears primed on Dolan’s footsteps, and they eased down the hallway but stopped somewhere and disappeared.
….. “Want to go for a ride?” Santos stood. “All of us in the truck. Let’s go.”
….. “Yes.” Rosa sprung. She held out her hand for Ortiz. “Cousin?”
….. “I better watch the boy.”
….. “He’s fine. He’s sleeping.” She leaned close to Ortiz’s and her lips slipped across his ear. “Don’t go too close or he’ll bite you,” she whispered.
….. Ortiz heard boots against tile, and then he heard a door close. Dolan was taking a shit after all.
….. “I’ll stay away,” Ortiz said.
….. They walked outside arm-in-arm, and a minute later the ignition started. Lights flooded the kitchen. Tires swirled in dirt. Santos hollered. Ortiz watched them from the side window: they sped up and down the long driveway, the truck wobbling worse with each new lap. After ten or so rounds they shut off the truck and nearly poured out like water from a cup. They fell onto the ground as if both were spent and their chocolate chests rose and fall against the dirt. The truck’s doors were still open and the lights shined somewhere onto the plain.
….. Ortiz heard a flush and the faucet’s spit but the door remained shut. He poured everyone’s remaining drinks back into the bottle and put it back in the cupboard. He set the glasses in the sink and went to scrape clean the crusted griddle but stopped. The bathroom door hadn’t opened yet.
….. He walked down the hallway and stopped in Leonard’s room. Wind flapped the curtains straight and limp. The bed was empty, the sheets pulled down to the end. He whispered the boy’s name: it sounded so unnatural coming from his lips. No answer. He checked beneath the bed, in the closet. Then he crossed the hallway and looked beneath the door, where light shined through, and he could see Dolan’s boots resting on the ground. He kicked-in the door and saw Leonard clenched against Dolan’s bare chest.
….. Ortiz ripped the boy from the man’s arms and told him to run to his room and close the door. He did but looked back the entire time. Dolan reached for his shirt that lay piled on the ground but Ortiz stomped his hand and followed with a punch across his jaw. Dolan fell from the toilet seat and smashed his head on a knob of a drawer. Ortiz tied the flimsy shirt around Dolan’s neck and dragged him out of the bathroom, down the hall, and down the porch steps, past the sleeping Santos and Rosa, past the sleeping mules and horses, and stopped inside the stable before continuing past the paddock and toward the thin band of forest. Dolan flustered the entire way, his tongue tired and hanging. Ortiz dropped him in a mess of leaves and Dolan fumbled at the knot around his neck, coughing and cursing. Ortiz lowered the rifle and blew Dolan to the place where dreams come and stay and leave and love, the place where sin mingles with water and flows toward Oklahoma. Ortiz ripped the bandage from his eye and although his vision remained cloudy, he could see the world as it really was: the bomb was not gone. It would never leave this world: it had seeped into the desert and was spread by rain here and there. It was the evil of Dolan, the hatred of his wife. Ortiz left. He spent the night in the forest and watched Santos pace the property, looking. For a moment Santos stared into the forest. He might have seen Ortiz. But Santos knew enough to leave him alone.

####

Nick Ripatrazone is the author of Oblations, a book of prose poems from Gold Wake Press. His writing has appeared in Esquire, The Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, West Branch, Colorado Review, The Mississippi Review, Mid-American Review, Notre Dame Review, Southeast Review and Beloit Fiction Journal, and has received honors from ESPN: The Magazine. He can be found online at http://nickripatrazone.com.