Fiction by Martha Gonzalez
El pueblo turned from buildings to trees, from trees to mountains, and mountains to a one-way road deep into the valley. A stone bridge connected the dirt road to the lush green grass on the other side. It separated the desert from paradise, their land from mine. We had to drive half a day to an unfinished house built by the hands of those to whom I owe my very life. And in the distance, I could hear the familiar howl from my pack upon realizing that I, their baby-faced omega, had returned. We moved together like wolves through the mountains that caged us, and across the untamed plains of grassland that freed us from ponds covered in green blankets and old cabins that were built long before we came to be.
The house was finished, but not. There was a wall around the house, like a poor man’s fortified castle. Inside, lawn chairs sat around a hand-crafted table, and a wire strung from wall to wall held our clothes in the sun to dry. The house itself was two stories high. The downstairs was simply two bedrooms and a bathroom, and the upstairs was a larger bedroom with two beds, and nothing else. There were so many crevices in the floorboards that we could see the rooms beneath. The bathroom was something of wonder, a pedestal of poverty with its old toilet, a rusted pump-well sink, and a barrel our uncle had found the year before in the desert, which we used as a bath and washing machine. The kitchen was a box in the corner with an old oven that needed wood and fire and constant cleaning from the day’s ashes. There was a stone slab beside it, holding bags of potatoes, rice, beans, handmade cheese, and the smallest ears of corn that were unsuitable for the market.
We were separated from our parents, who slept in their own rooms downstairs. In the west, the sun set between two mountains that mirrored each other. The oranges, pinks, yellows, and violets springing to life brought the pack peace and sanctuary. It was between the cracking walls that we forged our greatest friendships. We were bound together by bone and blood, and by choice.
But a week after my arrival, these twin mountains, the hidden ponds and lush green grass were tainted by the red-striped spider’s venom. Being one of the youngest, I watched as my cousins carried my uncle, Fernando, away. Foaming at the mouth and losing control of his body, he suffered while his son, Manolo, hauled himself into the back of the truck to hold his father close. I was held back in the arms of the others, told through sobs that everything would be fine, but I was smart enough to know it wouldn’t be. The trip through the mountains was long enough as it was, and to the nearest hospital, well, you can imagine.
In the days that followed, many of us couldn’t stand, eat, sleep, or bring ourselves to accept what had come to pass. For a few of us, like me, there was a growing fear of the eight-legged demons that plagued our family house. As family from the north poured in, we became very cramped inside the house, and many of us who would have slept upstairs slept downstairs instead, beneath the open sky on a cold, hard bed of concrete.
On the fifth day, we were made to look our best. The boys in their button-ups, the girls in our dresses and ribbons. We matched down to the buckles on our shoes, and the bows that bound our hair.
The plaza was a beautiful place, usually smelling of fresh churros and incense from Sunday mass, though on this day the air was bland and gray. The people and town, once vibrant and happy, bled black; the flag of our proud country was replaced with a black blanket of silk. Today, the people cried in grief, and my pack and I walked together behind our fathers who carried their brother to the church that had rested for hundreds of years at the edge of the red brick plaza. The people wept, bowing their heads to us as we walked tall and proud. They gave us their condolences and their respect. We hoped for rain so that we, the powerful children of a powerful clan, could let out cries silenced between droplets, but the rain never came to our aid.
We lowered him into the ground underneath a tree beside our grandparents and our aunt who we never got to meet. It was then that the strength of my pack started to chip away like rubble in a ruin.
There was no one we could rely on, and our parents left us to run the ranch on our own. We were tamed by the back-breaking work we took on. Hands burnt from salt, backs bruised by kicking horses, we made mile-long walks to feed the cattle, and hauled back 30-50-pound bags of crop from the fields in the east. As a distraction, perhaps, from the reality of our new lives. We told ourselves it was necessary to work and to bleed on the dirt that was left neglected.
The family was stone on the outside, hard to the core in the eyes of the public. But really, we were all as demented as the next grieving family. As time passed, my pack disintegrated and we no longer ran through the long grass, climbed the trees, or camped out in old cabins. We were working, mean, and slept with our backs to one another.
I spent the most time with my cousin, Manolo, who was only a tiny bit older than me, but not much bigger. We were close, but only after I found him in a rundown shack at the edge of the land with a belt noose around his neck and an unreadable note at his feet as his tears forced me to my knees. He had worked so hard to become the perfect son, to become the man his father had wanted him to be.
My cousin was grieving more than the rest of us and he hid himself away in the mountains. And I, simply a weaker version of my kin, would follow him some nights when he kept his distance from me. After a few nights in the woods on the twin peaks, Manolo taught me to hunt, to survive in the mountains infested with coyotes and gray wolves. You could hear the howling from miles away as the wolves cried out to the moon but never once was I afraid of them.
Manolo wouldn’t talk to me about anything else for weeks, until I lay next to him on a bed of leaves below a maze of branches and a full moon, miles from my parents.
“What will it be like when I leave to America?” I asked him, expecting a blank stare.
“Meaningless,” he told me, and I shuddered.
The weeks we spent away from my family’s land, away from his sisters, his brother, and our cousins, I was the only constant. I was his reason to live up to his expectations as a man. Had I not found him that day and had I not followed him and forced him to look at me—to speak to me, he would be dead.
He looked at me, his face resembling Fernando from the swoop in his black hair to the long lashes that blessed his caramel eyes. “What will America be like without me?” he asked.
“Lonely,” I told him. We spent our last nights in these woods, where he taught me the basics of survival. How to use a blade, how to make a fire, how to keep safe from beasts that lurk in the darkness.
When I left that house, my name added to the deed, I rode on the back of the green truck my dad drove, watching as the boys and girls who would once run behind me stood still at each other’s sides, growing smaller with every passing second. At the very last minute, Manolo burst through the wall of bodies with brute force as his legs went as fast as they could to reach me. His fingertips grazed mine.
I crossed the man-made bridge to the dirt road, and he slowed down at its edge, waving his goodbyes, yelling, “Don’t ever forget!” as if I ever could.
That was the last time I ever saw Manolo. Months later, we received a phone call and booked an overnight flight back to Mexico. We drove for a day to reach the ranch. And the next day, we were in our buckled shoes and our ribbons, putting yet another wolf six feet under ground.
