Gusanos

Gusanos

I.

Mateo got me drunk and told me about his mother’s parties. I stared at my reflection in the half-empty glass and lost myself in the white organza and tulle, the light strings and floating lanterns. Teo masked his familiar scent with cigarettes and cologne, but I could still smell the sweat lacquering his forearms, Argentina moist on his dark skin. He bought another round of tequila, and we drank to Cash and the mountain, my throat raw and roaring, the drowned pink worm dancing against my lips like a second tongue.

The small room filled up with eyes watching this príncipe and his boyish gringa. I leaned on the bar and laughed like my father, Mateo spinning words into worlds and building horizons with his long hands.

He vomited later, outside in the dark, his broad shoulders heaving like great shuddering wings. I held back his long hair, the black strands ash against my rough palms. Standing, he rubbed spit from his cheek and looked at me. I found him beautiful, and the lack of a camera weighed on me.

There was a photo of him from earlier that week when we had met in Buenos Aires, another from the train where he had fallen asleep against his own hand, a third from two days before when he had tied a blue bandana around his head and grinned at me from under the shadow of his pack. That was a different Mateo, and I began to see the man who summited mountains.

We hiked out of the pueblito and turned toward camp. In the silence, I felt the finger light touches of the peak on my shoulders.

The wait was almost over.

II.

We forded the river, crossed the valley, ate dried mangos, and watched the sun begin its ascent of the sky. Under the weight of the mountain’s shadow, Cash rubbed his palms against his thighs and thought. I took his picture because of the look on his face, the lines around his eyes like striking claws. He flicked his head and the curling tip of his braid snapped against the gear on his back, asking to be touched. Behind me, Teo was singing, and if his Spanish could have been tasted, it would have lingered like caramel, elastic and soft.

Cash spat, and I framed the mountain in my lens, tracing the steep walls of the eastern side. Beneath the lightweight fabric of my clothes, the fine hairs of my body rose up, and Cash, who felt something like this, ran his knuckles over the smooth rock, tilting his head back as though listening.

III.

Teo came to the rock like a conquistador, but Cash breathed it, his body flowing in delicate surges up the mountain wall. I had documented enough ascents to know that Cash had the instinctive gift that every climber hungered after. He read the rock with the gentlest brush of his fingertips, rode its intricacies.

I rested in a shallow alcove above them, my slackened line allowing me to lean away from the wall face. I caught the wind ruffling Teo’s hair and his half-lipped smile. I focused on his thick and calloused hands and found dark markings on the pale stone underneath his palms. Tight lines etched like worms. 

Below us the valley spread and the three rivers doubled back into each other. I breathed in the beauty and lowered my camera, wondering after the feel of the fall.

Continued: IV-XVI at http://www.acm.edu/uploads/cms/documents/nickadams-2012-gusanos.pdf

"Gusanos" on "The Nervous Breakdown": 
http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/tnbfiction/2012/04/gusanos-by-clare-boerigter/

2012 ACM Nick Adams Short Story Contest winner: http://www.acm.edu/features/news/338

Discussing "Gusanos" at the 2012 ACM Student Symposium on Off-Campus Study: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=RelTx7McZgI 

ACM article about "Gusanos": http://www.acm.edu/features/feature/349?  

4, 10, 14, 20

4, 10, 14, 20

On my fourth birthday, I said goodbye to Saudi Arabia by rolling. I remember the blue carpet and how it overwhelmed the white-walled and now empty room, how Tommy and I floundered like beached fish against it despite both knowing how to swim. Mom made me a coconut cake and steak. We ate it outside waiting for the sky to darken. I could hear them talking in my living room, distant, and Tommy and I sat on the grass, combing our fingers through the stalks in search of smaller things. Lying back, the walls of the yard rising up, I felt his leg touching mine. He told me about America and how it was a place with strange animals called cows, which were a sort of camel but not. I listened, not frightened exactly but bewildered, trying to imagine being far away from me. Then he was done telling stories and even though it was my birthday, he sat on me and smudged a dandelion against my nose just to prove that he was still older.

We left Indiana two weeks before I turned ten. Mom cried when we drove away from the irises outside the garage, and I looked out the window as we made the familiar right-hand turn off my street. It was a funny thing to do, crying. We’d left two pennies in the cement were Dad had poured a new patio three summers ago: 1989 and 1991. I knew where the scratches were in my closet where I would go to hide and how it would feel to collect white paint under my fingernails, pinpricks of dazzling pain. When I rode in Dad’s moving truck, he let me use the walkie-talkie. Tommy and I told a winding story between the two U-Hauls until the batteries died. Callie sat between Dad and I, numbed, her ears low and back, her smile loose across her jaw. She put her long nose against my knee and I played with the soft fur around her eyes, wondering if this was how Mom felt brushing my hair on Sunday mornings. Dad asked me what it was like to be so close to double digits. I told him I wanted to be eleven because that’s the age, Tommy told me, when you start to know things. Callie sighed and I kissed the crown of her head, laying my cheek against hers for a moment, her hot breath filled with grass- and dirt-things.

Three days before I was to turn fourteen, I sprawled on the hot rocky outcrop of our last campsite and looked up at the light through the oak leaves. My hair, thick with oil and stiffly malleable, smelled faintly of smoke and sunscreen. My skin had progressed to that point where dirt had begun to build its own little worlds, towered cities around my ankles, a lighthouse against my neck. I was alright with it. It was only a week but already I felt like I was taking on something more animal. My body leaned from days of nothing more than trail mix, apples and dehydrated pasta, while my muscles strained to paddle and portage. I heard my best friend singing as she pumped water into her dented Nalgene, and closing my eyes, it felt as though the sun were melting against my face. It was a funny thing to realize then, what time was doing to us. Indigo smacked the ground beside me, pressing the cool plastic bottle to my leg: “Drink.”

I spent my twentieth birthday waiting to cry. On the phone home, Dad talked to me rationally about options. He has a way of saying things that I won't, afraid as I am of where they might lead. When he asked if I wanted to drop out of college, I paused for a long moment, my fingernails biting into the skin below my knee. There was no simple answer to that. This place dug into my bones when all I wanted was Arizona’s expanse of sky and time to watch the monsoons break from the tiered clouds and the kinetic canyons bringing to me the sense of motion in waiting. I remembered telling Travis that all you ever had to do was move fast enough over the rocks and you’d never have enough time to fall. But I had. I’d lost myself in the dust running down trails again and again, scrapping little mementos into my skin, taking a strange pride in my own blood and the grit I would wince to wash out later. Sometimes I felt like nothing more than a pair of eyes. Inside, I was hungry for more skies and mountains and dirt making powdery patterns on my hands. Away in California, Tommy told me to transfer, transfer now, like it needed to be done rapidly, like the switching at the junction of train tracks. He lured me over the phone with pictures of Claremont-McKenna’s hybrid campus and the promise of robust financial aid. I tried to tell him that moving to his coast wouldn’t solve my problems. Sitting on the grass, Dad waiting on the other end, I knew that leaving would always be easy. It was staying, it was waiting and letting all the other places fall away, that was hard. Later that night, I held my face together with my hand and Amanda said to me that birthdays got to be like this when you were away from home. I shook my head, resting my arms gingerly against my lap and told her, “No, it doesn’t even feel like my birthday.”

TN

TN

The cicadas sang to me from the tracks, from the yawning station deck, from up underneath the awning. My skin responded as it was want on afternoons like these, and sweat slickened the hollows of my ears and neck, running curious blind fingers through my unwashed hair. Down in Macondo, I could hear the boom and crash of church bells. The reverberations took moments to react against the fine hairs of my body and each little crest and breaking was like a hand pushing me away.


It was, three months later, time to leave. 


What I brought and what I took had a tendency to vary but never exceed the backcountry pack and compact hardtop. There were usually poems and boots, letters and books, photos and lists of all the places I had yet to see. I kept some of Tennessee’s postcards in my pack, the rest in my shirtfront pocket, buttoned closed. Mum was present on my wrist were she had wrapped a woven band with some of her hair. I kept my father’s utility knife looped to my smooth brown leather belt.


There were pieces of people tied up all over me, if you knew how to go about looking for them.


Since the Ecuadorian underwater aquarium, I had the bad habit of looking for Tennessee everywhere. A niggling feeling persisted somewhere in the region of my upper spinal column. My last sight of her would not include the shadow of a sea urchin, distorted and sickly, dividing her face like a fissure.

The planned-ness of that encounter counteracted its surreal qualities, and if it seemed that my life cleaved to fantastical literature too much, then fault was not wholly mine. Because Tennessee did then appear, white-shirted and short of breath.


To the right of me, the platform.