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 prÃncipe 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/
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
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