Рон Рэш - The Best American Short Stories 2018

They tell us we washed up on the shores of Lake Michigan. They say they spotted us lit up by the lighthouse against the rocky shoreline. They say gulls carried us to their doorstep. They fit us with seafarers’ names. Mine is Delmar, his is Rio. Both our mothers’ names are Maria—Maria Carmen and Maria Blanca.

We will never know our fathers. We know that they were light-skinned and fair of hair. Rio’s hair looks like bleached coral. My hair is black but my skin might as well be butterscotch pudding. The only way we look like our mothers is our eyes. When we ask about our fathers they tell us, in English, that they are no longer a park of the picture—an idiom they’ve grown up saying wrong. We imagine our fathers must have been small men to leave such boisterous women. Our mothers never complained, never cursed men and their unwieldy cocks. I will ask about my father again when I am leaving Marlin Street for college and my mother will ask if they were not enough.

The locals gave the taquería the unofficial name Authentico. Our mothers had bought a neon sign to advertise their authentic Mexican cuisine: tacos el pescado, camarones rebozados, paella de marisco, arroz con pollo. The gaudy neon sign flickered over the walk-up window. They’d meant to name the place El Lago, but the loan from the bank bought them just one sign. We made fun of the unofficial name. We warned that someday a couple hermanos could open up a place called Genuino and ruin them. We sit outside the taquería on picnic tables and pick gum off the seats. We watch our mothers fry tortillas and wipe their hands on grease-licked aprons. Our mothers shoo us off the picnic table when the stand is busy. Years from now, when our mothers can’t spend every day making tacos for tourists anymore, and I tell them I am too busy to run the place, Authentico will close up. I will buy the sign from them and hang it in my garage.

The vacation families drive their cars too fast down Marlin Street. They are on their porches smoking sausages, or taking boats out on the lake. They are fucking on the beach inside murky coves. We hear them and call them monsters. We call anything we cannot explain that June monsters. In Michigan, summer is only a few months in the middle of the year, but our mothers love the beach year round. It means every winter we have to hear about some gringo trying to walk on the lake and drowning. One year the gringo will be a boy from our high school that we hate and they will never pull his body from the lake and we will feel bad for having hated the boy. Our mothers make the holy triangle up and down and side to side.

We break into the empty summer houses. We scare the spiders out and play house. We spend the night in the empty beds after our mothers pass out drunk from rum and Cokes. We make the beds every morning, fluffing up the pillows. We take things that do not belong to us. Things we think no one will miss. I take cards from Euchre decks and tape them inside a lined paper journal. Rio cuts buttons from Sunday bests and carries them around in a velvet bag like they are marbles. We are monsters. We carve our initials into the underbellies of the summer homes’ expensive wood furniture. We lie under the giant oak frames of the summertime beds with a set of keys and cut away at the bed flesh. We find out that if the wood has not cured long enough the furniture will bleed. When I am twenty-eight and expecting my first child I will wonder what had gotten into us that summer and hope my child is not a monster.

When I am twenty-eight and expecting my first child, my husband and I will drive up Marlin Street to show my mothers the first sonogram. The child will be growing inside a woman we have paid through an agency. The surrogate will be a healthy, Latina woman getting her PhD in women’s studies at the college in Kalamazoo. I will believe that this detail will make my mothers proud. I will struggle to find the best way to tell them. I will expect that they will not understand. I will expect that they will have questions I will not know the answers to. I will bring them a flyer from the agency complete with illustrations and a number to call should they have any questions. They will make the holy triangle, up and down and side to side.

Rio and his mother fly to Texas for the month of July to visit familia. My mother and I take them to the airport. Carmen has to stand on her toes to kiss my forehead. She holds my face in her hands and says, “We’ll be back before you can say Tenochtitlan.” My mother spends July harvesting the garden in our backyard. She does other things too, but mostly she is outside on her knees where she can pray in the dirt. I hear her say Carmen’s name to the tomatillos once. The tomatillos’ papery husks crack and flake when they are ready to be harvested. I watch my body do the same. I spend July under the paddleboats in the dark where I press my fingers to my lips and put my other hand down my shorts and say Rio’s name.

Rio comes back taller and darker. Beside me in our bed his skin is still hot from Texas. He kisses me, like we had so many times before. Then he takes my pants off and pulls my cock out and licks his hand and gets my cock wet and puts me inside of him. After that we are fucking everywhere. We are naked when our mothers are at work in the taco stand. We fumble around in the darkness for each other, like moths to the only light in a room. Our sex life will never again be as exciting as when we are fourteen and sharing a bed.

In August there is a summer camp in the city at the Baptist church. The campers are new every week. We are too poor to go to summer camp. The campers swim on a private beach. We think maybe they can walk on water. We see them splashing out by the buoys. We start to call the boys buoys. We walk up the shore and get as close as we can. They wave sometimes and others push their noses flat with their fingers and stick their tongues out. I have not said out loud what I am but I think about it all the time. Especially the summer when we are fourteen and watching the buoys throw footballs on the church’s private beach. I want to pick each mole from their pink backs and eat them like Raisinets. We walk ten minutes into Grand Haven to sit outside the chapel and listen to the Bible lessons. The pastor’s sermons scare us out from under the paddleboats for a few days. I think I am more scared than Rio. Rio is brave. Rio is the bravest boy I know the summer we are fourteen.

There are days I’m not up for cove crawling, buoy watching, kissing inside the belly of the yellow slide at the park. I stay inside and read instead. Rio is not much of a reader and heads out to adventure without me. He calls me a faggot first, and then the screen door slams.

We will not always get along. When we start high school he will start to play varsity baseball. Our mothers will go to every game. I will love the way he looks in a jockstrap. He will be trying too hard. I will tell him he is trying too hard and that nobody believes him and he will hate me. He will have the chance to be popular and he will take it. He will run away from home the summer he is fifteen. My tio, Valentino, will be visiting from Arizona. He will have rented a car. One night, when they are out walking the pier, Rio will take Tio Valentino’s rented car and drive it as far as Tennessee where a state trooper will pull him over. Rio will have just picked a car and followed. We will all drive down to Tennessee to pick him up from jail. Carmen will be furious. I will think he’s so fucking cool.

We are subscribed to Michigan Animal Magazine this summer. Really we are taking them from the Johnsons’ mailbox, reading them, and then putting them back. We learn that cougars used to be native to Michigan but we drove them out. We learn that the feral swine are a problem. We already know that the state bird is a robin, but we learn that cranes fly necks extended—herons fly necks drawn back. We learn that what we thought were owls are mourning doves hooting in the trees. We learn that a monarch’s wings are orange with black veins, not orange with black stripes. I look at my veins, blue beneath my skin, and wish I could fly.