Ana Simo - Heartland

From across the river I could see the tiny stick figure high up against the darkening sky. McCabe was still standing on the edge of the ravine, where I had left her. Was she waiting for me to return and push her to her death? My elaborate plan for justice had not accounted for meekness. Oh, what meekness on the face of a criminal can do to the judge and executioner. Meekness, which carries no understanding of the crime, whether factual or moral, because it is an essential trait, like the wings of angels, that precedes any action or thought, even birth.

I sat on a fallen tree trunk to catch my breath. I had fled down Round Hill and across the bridge, then followed the trail by the water, toward the sunset and the remaining light. The shadows from the east were nipping at my heels as I rushed down the trail, trying to keep my feet dry. That is how Turgenev would have written it, and that is exactly how I remember it. The trail was getting soft, announcing the beginning of the marshes. By the time I collapsed on the tree trunk, the shadows had overtaken me. I did not have a flashlight, but I did not need one. I had taken the trail for years as a kid to sneak into town.

I stood up and began to walk toward Shangri-La. I do not know why. My feet just took me. I looked back up at the Judge’s land before the river turned. It was now too dark to tell if the tiny stick figure was still there.

Shangri-La did not appear before me all at once. It crept in, lazily, as always. First came big chunks of brush in between the little cinder-block houses. Then, the brush became smaller, and larger the number of mangy dogs and barefooted children staring at me in malignant silence from their tiny backyards.

In the white neighborhoods to the east, decks, gardens, terraces, and picture windows overlooked the river. Shangri-La, on the other hand, turned its back to the water, which it saw as the enemy. Windowless rear walls fortified her against it. Her first lines of defense were the slivers of mud enclosed by rusty chicken wire that were grandiosely called backyards. You could not sit inside a Shangri-La house or stand in any backyard and look at the river. Nor would you want to if you were in your right mind. The river did not flow by Shangri-La: it stagnated there, foul and ugly, breeding mosquitoes long before sewers were installed and began disgorging fecal matter into the waters. Once or twice a year, without warning, the river swelled and flooded the backyards. Chicken, pigs, and children were then corralled on front porches, while flood ditches were dug in back.

Shangri-La preferred to face its inner roads, once a symbol of progress and civilization when they were new and sidewalks had been promised. Now crumbling, they were an indifferent sight to the current inhabitants. The few old-timers who did remember sat on porches with their backs to the road, enclosed in thickets of morning glories and potato vines that kept their disappointment out of sight.

I climbed the low riverbank behind my parents’ house, holding on to roots with my hands while my feet slipped in the mud. After my mother’s death, seven years ago, I had sold the house for $15,000 to a Mexican who worked at the remaining poultry-processing factory. That money was long gone. I reached the chicken-wire fence and crawled under it into our pathetic backyard. The house had disappeared. Only charred ruins were left, covered by a forest of thick, oversized brambles with killer thorns.

I was nailed to the ground. Not by shock, but by egocentric predicament. The house was not there, yet it was still there. As long as I stood there, it would remain there. I had been happy in this house. I had a happy childhood. Even my sometimes unhappy adolescence was happy. I was loved here. An only child, I was my parents’ pride and hope, my grandmother’s joy, Ezequiel and Genoveva’s indulged goddaughter, standing in for the little girl they kept trying for in vain, and Rafael’s brother, pal, fraternal twin. The burden of past happiness became unbearable. Charred ruins were the ointment that healed.

Night had fallen. My limbs regained movement. In the dim reflection of the corner streetlight, I stepped into the land that had held my old bedroom, trying not to get flayed by the thorny brambles. They were impossible to avoid. Soon, my left hand was scratched and bleeding. I kept my right hand in my pocket for protection.

The ground was higher where the house had stood. Its charred remains had created a thick layer of blackened chunks of concrete and wood. It was in that rich fire loam that the unusually robust brambles had grown. If they spread throughout Shangri-La, life would become hell for men. Every summer and fall my father and Ezequiel spent entire weekends with machetes in their hands, hacking away at the old brambles, pygmies by comparison to these, and burning them to the ground. Just so that Rafael and I could play in our contiguous backyards.

Had the house burned down accidentally, or was it arson? Nothing remotely useful had been left in the charred debris—no copper pipes, bolts, electrical wire, or roof tiles, but plenty of mosaic shards. We had green and gold Byzantine mosaic floors in every room just like they had in La Esperanza, even if they were expensive here, and impractical in the cold, humid winter months. My parents had installed them by themselves, working nights and weekends. I carried them from their boxes on the porch to the room where, crawling on their hands and knees, they placed them down. It took them two years to finish the whole house.

The Cohen house, next door, kept its original cement floors. Years later, when cement floors became fashionable among the very rich, Ezequiel bragged that he had seen it coming. My parents never contradicted him, although I once caught my mother rolling her eyes. They loved Ezequiel and indulged him despite his lack of ambition, which, my mother explained to me one night, was his only fault, but not his fault. I understood then that people are born with a certain moral temperament that they cannot change and should not be blamed for. At school I was taught the opposite. Every first Friday of the month, the principal made us yell in unison, pumping the air with our little right fists: “Yes, I can!” “Yes, I can!” “Yes, I can, and I will!” The future National Security Advisor loathed those Inspirational Fridays as much as I loved them. He just mouthed the words until the day he was caught and severely caned on his bare buttocks in the principal’s office. After that, he screamed like everybody else, which was for him an unbearable humiliation.

I picked up a gold mosaic shard from our living room and put it in my pocket. The Cohen home was still there, on my right, packed now with destitute Mexicans, judging from the rotting lean-to shacks filling its backyard and the blaring norteño cacophony. I wondered if the house was rented, sold, or squatted in. Standing in the midst of the bramble forest that used to be our kitchen, I could not see Glorita’s house on the left, but I heard its soft hum. “Every house has a distinctive breath, and every room within every house,” Bebe had once said, showing me her room-tone calibrator.

It was snowing when Glorita moved in next door with her godmother, Altagracia, a cook in the white people’s retirement home on the other side of town. Glorita was five years old, like me. Our carnal liaison began that same day, rolling on the snow in her new backyard, warm tongues licking each other’s frozen lips, and lasted until the day I boarded that refugee bus. We were nineteen then. I never heard from her after that.

A father was never mentioned. Glorita’s mother, who had died in childbirth, was complicatedly related to the godmother. So Altagracia was doubly bound to raise Glorita. A godmother raising an orphan was better than an ordinary parent. Altagracia was somebody in Shangri-La. She’d had a choice and done the right thing. I envied Glorita her godmother. Altagracia was wide, and regal, with copper skin the color of Glorita’s hair, and a native south-Texas drawl that got stronger every year. No one ever ratted on Glorita, kid or adult, because they were afraid to break Altagracia’s heart.