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The first time I saw Mama’s novio, Arturo, I stared. It wasn’t that it was the first time either Matteo or me saw a man spreading his lap over one of our chairs, but that he was large and hairy. The man looked like a bear, an animal Mama had led into our home to feed and clothe. Mama saw us come in and didn’t slap Matteo over his torn shirt hem like she usually would; she just stood behind the man wringing the swollen knobs of her finger joints. We could hear them popping from across the room.
The door clanged shut behind us and the man smiled, the wicker of the chair sagging beneath him.
“Hi boys,”
The heavy scent he carried with him, deep musky earth and something sharper inflated our lungs and laid there, leaden. We would later come to know the scent as that of the polo ponies he groomed por La patrona. There was a clay mix of manure and sawdust caked into the tread of his boots, leaving bits of the stuff about no matter how much Mama swept. His nose ran brown with horse dander and his sweat was that of the small thoroughbred mixes. The grime of their hides never left the underside of his nails and his large, hairy body seemed to soak up those animals so you could smell him coming and then see him walking around the corner with the relaxed gait of the ponies on the hot walker, their haunches working in endless circles.
We had three rooms in our home and I slept in the one next to Mama and Arturo. Usually he got off early and would hang with friends before coming home. By that time, we had already eaten and gone to bed, but Mama would stay up waiting for him and they would eat together, saying little but he would still laugh through the wall and into our room. We would hear them together on the other side of the wall, their breathing sometimes harsh and sometimes a soft rhythm like rain on a roof that blurred with the night noises and our own sleep. And then in the mornings, he would be gone before we had risen.
He shook me awake one morning, months after his scrubbed laundry had begun hanging across our room in banners of faded stain, cloth fragrant with his most private areas.
“Wilmer, hey. Get up.”
When he tried to rouse Matteo, my brother swatted him away. He stood over my bed, the netting brushing against him in translucent rustles.
“Come on,” he said, “you’re coming with me.” He only left when I sat up and rubbed the crust from my eyes. The window screen by my head let in the balm of the morning and its warm bluish cast across Matteo’s bare chest and briefs. He had my mother’s dark skin and black hair that glowed purple, as if the heat from his body gave rise to a steam you had to squint your eyes to see.
Arturo was waiting for me, drinking coffee. He downed the rest of the mug and whipped the residue from his chin whiskers before heading to the door. The door to Mama’s room was half a-gape, and she was on her side sleeping, one of her dark breasts exposed behind the netting and sheet. Mama slept the same way Matteo did, with their arms hanging off the bed and mouths open, dribbling saliva on to the mattress. Arturo called to me as he hunched his broad shoulders and let the door slap behind him.
The man’s truck was shiny but getting rusty around the edges where the wheels turned in their high-suspension sockets. I clambered in and shut the door behind me, looking to Arturo expectantly, but he just turned the key and pulled away from home, the wheels spinning in the dewy mud. After a few minutes, he told me the guy he worked for, the pony man, could use an extra hand. As he paid for two McMuffins, he described what I would be doing: shoveling manure, sweeping aisles, filling troughs, graining and throwing hay to the animals in their stalls. I would not, he emphasized, be touching those animals.
“It’s crazy,” he said, “how much people paid for them. You wouldn’t believe it!”
“More than this truck?” I asked.
Arturo chuckled a bit into his food. “More than your life, kid.”
We drove out of town until the trees were trimmed back from the freshly paved road. The homes were pushed back from the roadside so that you could see only see a tunnel through the domed trees that led to a front stoop and larger and larger stretches of verdancy beyond. I watched with my face against the cold window as the fencing circumventing the yards became painted wood and then wrought iron topped with Fleur de Lis.
When I saw my first horse grazing in the morning dew at the far reaches of the pasture, I straightened in my seat, feeling sick and sweaty. White oak bearded with long strands of Spanish moss lined the stable drive, brushing the car with soft fingers. Arturo parked around the back and called to me to get out of the truck. As I watched the ponies graze and rub their hinds on the paddock fencing, I recognized the scent Arturo brought home each night.
Then I began my work of shoveling steaming road apples and pulling slivers of hay from beneath my nails, all the while engraining that scent into my pores. My nose began to run brown and for the first few days, I had a dry cough as the animals’ dander settled at the bottom of my lungs. Besides Arturo and me, there were two other guys working there: Santiago and Gus- both of them small and light. The three of them kept busy tacking and untacking the ponies, turning them out and catching them, wrapping their legs, injecting their necks, and bringing them for the men on the team to ride. During practices or when the riders were just hacking, I stood at the side of the practice field mopping sweat from my brow and watching their mallets crack the ball across the field in shark thwacks that jittered your teeth and coaxed a headache to rear up with the midday heat. When those animals shat in the middle of the green, I ran out with my pitchfork like some puto to carry it off field.
If I hadn’t had to scoop up every pile of crap they messed, I really would have loved those ponies a lot more. From far away, they looked like any thoroughbred you’d see on the track with their sleek bodies rounded with work, but up close, they were short enough for me to peer over their twitching backs. Since I had to go into each of their stalls every day to shovel, grain and water, I came to know each animal Some would sniff my pockets as I filled their buckets and murmur into my shoulder, lips sucking at the sweat pooled at my neck while others would flick their ears back and clack their teeth together, heads bobbing like angry snakes.
I never saw the money that I earned, but after mama got my first paycheck, it was clear I wouldn't be quitting. Each morning, I woke before my brother who now complained I had brought Arturo’s scent to roost in the wood of our room and the mattress I sweated into every night. My clothes now mingled amongst Arturo’s wash, hanging across the ceiling. Matteo spent all day kicking it with our friends going swimming in the river and hanging with the few girls allowed near us, while I gathered more horse oil on my skin and streamed sweat under the sun.
Shelled in salt and dander, Arturo and I would drive to the bar in town with the other guys after throwing hay to the last of the ponies. At first, I wasn’t allowed to go, and Arturo would leave me standing in the soot of exhaust in the drive of our home. I’d watch as he’d speed to join his friends on the other side of town, leaving Mama to wringing her red knuckles as she looked past him with a dark continence. If I didn’t move, she’d stand in the doorway of our home for a long time with shuttered eyes, seeing past me to what went on and on beyond the trees and the yellow lights of the homes. Then she’d turn into the house, her small darkness swallowed in doorway.
One day, Santiago and Gus had forgot to fasten the chain across the paddock gate and the new colt from Argentina, newly imported for a member on the team, got loose. The colt was beautiful, even in his most ungainly years with his cresting neck heralding stallion-hood. I had come out from graining the horses and hearing shouting, I watched in time to see Santiago running past the stable, halter in hand, as the colt dodged into my view before galloping in the other direction. The animal’s eyes were white and rolling, already a lather had foamed his chest and armpits. He raised his head and weaved away from the two men chasing him, leaving them both cursing. The riders would be arriving soon and one of their horses was loose and in danger of ruining himself.
I only caught the young animal because I hadn’t been pursuing him. He was deadly spooked from being out and chased, and he seemed relieved to see me cooing to him as I shook the scoop of feed in my hand. He approached with his head up and to the side and when I had put my hand out, he skittered. So I stopped trying to touch him. The shake of the feed eventually won the animal over and it nosed the scope in my hand and began eating. Arturo began approaching the horse but stopped. He pointed to the open stall behind me. I backed up, teasing the animal with the shake of the grain and led him into the stall before sliding the door shut behind it. The three men, now in the stable with halters in their hands signed in deep relief. That night I was invited to drink with them.
Despite everything, I had never liked Arturo much until that night at the bar. I sat next to him and for the first time, he spoke to me with warmth. There was a largeness in his laughter and in his earnest intent to listen to me as he leaned forward nearly off the stool that I quite liked. He told me how he left school when he was young to work at a breeding stable; then he moved to a showjumping stable and another and another, now finally polo. He lifted up his shirt and told me about the tattoo of a girl’s name on his ribs.
“I thought we were gonna get married,” he said. “You know, we were both, yeah, nineteen.” He laughed. “You won’t believe it, Will, but my best friend- my best friend- he got her pregnant! Can you believe that? And I have this tattoo of her name and forever on me. You know what it means to me now? It’s a caution. People never stop. They always want something from you. Everything we do is because we’re selfish, you know? Like, even love is selfish. I never her more than when she broke my heart and I was missing her.” I nodded and Arturo smiled at me like a friend might.
When we got home that night Mama was sitting in the kitchen. She was wax-like and old beneath the yellow light of the bulb above and little pit-pats of the lice-like insects stung the ear. She smiled tightly at me and looked at me with heaviness in her eyes.
“I was worried,” she said and then went to her room with Arturo. I could hear him trying to speak with her through the wall and her spare replies. “Damn it, woman,” he said through a rustle in the sheets, “I was having a good night.” In that strange clap of silence I heard, for the first time, the ripple of moth wing through the air: an infestation
Mama began souring on Arturo. He took me out more and more often, and she stopped waiting for us to come home. I could hear the whip snaps of her hard-edged voice through the wall and the patter of Miquipapalotl across the walls. I woke each morning in a shroud: moths crowding the fall of netting about my bed in a dark cloud. Matteo and I told Mama about the moths flocking our room in bat-like droves but they vanished with the coming of the day and she looked as if she would slap me if I tried to tell her again. Once, I returned home and found her peeking by the edge of my door with a broom.
“I know they are not there,” she said, “but ever since you told me, I can hear their wings.” Dark bags hung from her eyes as she stood watch for the butterflies.
I began going out with Arturo and the guys less often and returned to Mama after work each evening. I ate dinner with her and Matteo each night, but Arturo stayed out more and more. He left the door to their bedroom open when we left and now, the bed on the other side of the wall only creaked when they turned in their sleep. Yet, the moths hung in my room. I would lie on my back and see their witchlike eyes, the spread of their felt wingspan, and hear their empty mandibles working in a code of clicks.
Mama hung in the doorways of our home after dinner with the beyond-beyond look in the marble of her eye. Sometimes she sat in the plastic chair by the stoop and looked out toward the street and trees and dogs leashed in the yards beyond.
“I’m worried,” she said to me when I came out to her, “could you get him for me?” I wasn’t about to walk across town to find her boyfriend. When Arturo came home, for the first time in a long time, Mama was waiting.
Mama screamed, “What were you doing? Where were you? Who is she? Why don’t you ever come home? She went crazy. You aren’t here, so where are you?” Mama wasn’t the kind of woman to drum a man’s chest with her small fists. Instead, she shoved the table at him and tossed her wooden spoons at his head. She flung up the plastic chair across the room and a plastic legs shattered. He just looked at her with bloodshot eyes. She ranted and he waved her away, shaking his head and smiling.
“You’re crazy,” he said as she cried, “just crazy”
Weeks later, Arturo insisted I go out with him. Just him. His laughter did not drown my ears and his large frame did not swallow my eyes. When he looked at me, it was the first time he had done so since things had spoiled between him and Mama.
“I’m going to Florida, Will,” he said. “Santiago and I have been planning for a long time.” I had never seen him so rigid.
“Where? When?”
“We’re going to cross next week and go to Wellington. The people there live for horses- there’s always work.” He slid me his drink and looked at me for a while.
“What?”
“You should come too,” he said. “Not now, but when you can get away. Don’t stay here.” His eyes shone black and beady like a single compound of moth eye. “Stay here, and I think you’ll die soon like most other kids.”
There was nothing more to say after that so we sat for a while and then drove home. A few days later, Arturo left. Mama sat in the corner; a living shadow spreading its wings about the edge of the room and didn’t come out to see him leave. The last she saw of him was his large frame blocking out the sun in a man-spun corona and the rumble of the truck down our drive for the final time. I stood out by the stoop and watched him get into the truck and wave to me and then he was gone from our lives forever as if we had dreamt him up, save for the horse oil that haunted my mother in her sleep where it lived on in her bed linens forever. I looked out over the chained dog and the homes and trees with the flit of moth in my ear. Mama would bring new boyfriends in and out and her sickness would only bloom, but right then, there was only the dog and tree and Arturo’s truck going down the drive in a cloud of dust chalking my face. “Don’t die here Will,” he had said. I promised him I won’t.
Claire Winget
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