1.
Pueblo
Pueblo, my home town.
The Anglos pronounced it “Pee-eblo” —
I guess to keep from sounding like Mexicans.
The Chicanos said “Pueblo,”
but hardly pronounced the p’s,
so that it sounded like “Huelo,”
or “Oelo.”
Some of the Anglos talked like Mid-Westerners,
and the rest talked like Okies or Texans.
Either of these might say “Peeyew-eblo,”
as if to express disgust
at the noxious, sulfurous gas
that spewed from the smoke stacks
of the old steel mill — the
Colorado Fuel and Iron Corporation.
2.
Tumbleweeds
Our first year on Fairmount Lane,
tumbleweeds blew down the street by the hundreds.
Dried skeletons of big prairie weeds,
they’d pile up in the carport by the back door.
They seemed to have no weight at all —
brittle — a child
might break one trying to carry it in her arms.
We’d wrangle hundreds into a house-high pile
at the edge of the prairie,
and set fire to them.
They’d go up in an instant
in a brief but furious sky-high blaze,
leaving nothing behind
but sparse, feathery ash.
The next year there were fewer,
with new streets of houses springing up to the west.
Soon the salsola weed had given way
to vast forests of sunflowers —
brief station on the plateau’s pig-headed journey
back to short grass prairie.
3.
The Motorcycle Hills
Only found pieces. Nothing but
wind-scoured memory in soft, muddled layers.
The ground to the west of town rises
bristly like an old dirty hairbrush —
with snarls of prickly pear and sage
and a scurf of rifle cartridge and shotgun shell —
up to a quick drop-off at a line
of steep, rounded buttes:
the Motorcycle Hills.
Visiting them again recently, I was struck
by what a shambles they are.
Powdery sandstone strata,
rock slabs poking out of whitish clay
or lying in rubble heaps — one scrap
slanting upwards by a yucca plant,
a brown lizard looking over it
with a level eye.
The hills are marked vertically with
motorcycle trails, though I can’t
recall ever seeing the machines that ground them in.
Occasionally we’d get up the nerve
to ride our bikes down one of them.
I remember once wiping out at the bottom
when my front wheel ran into a rut in the clay.
Another time, an older boy took me
down on his handlebars.
I don’t remember who he was, but he
must have been strong —
I fell backwards into his lap on the way down,
and we didn’t crash.
4.
The Skink
One day when my father and I
happened to glance at the side of the house
(above the asparagus and iris),
we noticed a large, scaly creature
clinging to the stucco wall.
A skink, my father declared
with confident zoological
discernment; and judging from the internet
pictures I’ve looked at just now, it might
have been a skink at that —
orange, short-legged,
with a powerful thick tail.
My father must have thought a skink
was an amphibian of some kind, because
he filled an aquarium tank with water
and put the skink in it.
I’m sure he was off base, because the lizard,
after thrashing violently for just a few seconds,
gave up the ghost and drowned.
5.
Macías
The Macías family lived on the
next street to the west, their yard separated
from ours by only a thin wire fence
bent halfway to the ground by
constant scrambling over.
They were a family of 6 —
Kenny and Mike (both older than I was),
Nicky, baby Andrea,
and the parents, Delores and Raymond.
Kenny and Mike were good baseball players.
One of my first memories of them
is of playing 3 Flies Up on their street.
They lent me a glove — one of those
pancake-shaped mitts from before the war,
all scuffed up, the leather inside
eaten away from sweat.
The kids frequently had to “work” —
some yard chore usually.
I remember one day they couldn’t play
because they had to help Delores put up
peppers for the winter — the whole house
reeking with the sour, acrid smell
of roasted New Mexico chilies.
I got bored and went home.
I remember Raymond once criticizing me
for not “working” enough, and I
understood this as a criticism not just of me
but of the way my family brought me up.
I suppose that Raymond was a typical Hispanic
Father of the Family.
When he wanted to watch something
on TV, no one else’s preferences mattered. —
The Three Stooges would have to give way
to his bowling or golf show.
Kenny especially was pretty vocal
about the unfairness of this, but, of course,
he always submitted.
In those days, there were a lot of shows
with WWII themes —
GIs in netted helmets
swimming along the ground with dirt
exploding around them, or firing
machine guns from behind
demolished city walls.
Raymond was a WWII veteran (my own father
had been exempt because
of a heart murmur).
The kids bragged that Raymond had killed 3 Japs.
“How did you kill ‘em, Dad?” — Raymond made
strangling motions with his hands.
6.
Karen
Next door to the Macíases, Karen and Russell lived.
Russell was my age,
a sandy-haired boy whom I liked fine.
His sister Karen was a year older —
between the ages of 10 and 13 when I knew her —
tough, tall, and fleet as a deer.
Of all my promiscuous childhood loves
she was the holiest.
She ran meetings in the Macias’s garage
to plan our games and hikes.
Once, when we were trying to raise money
to buy fireworks or go to the state fair,
Karen made me go up to an elderly couple’s door
and pretend to be a poor immigrant boy.
They politely invited me in
and asked me where my family went to church.
I answered, with a fake “Italian” accent,
that we hadn’t been in America for long enough yet
to find a church.
I left without them giving me anything
or buying one of my plastic key chains.
Karen was disappointed in me.
It must have been shortly after she
moved into the neighborhood
that I became ill with “romantic fever”
(as my mother laughed at me for calling it).
One day, after leaving the hospital,
I saw through my bedroom window
Karen walking into the yard and approaching
my mother at the clothes line to ask
how I was and
when I’d be able to play outside again.
7.
The Fox Hole
In the year of sunflowers
we carried hatchets
and used them to chop mazes
in the stalk forests.
At the center of the deepest maze,
we used army shovels
to dig foxhole trenches —
and in one of the trenches
a secret chamber
about eight feet deep,
scooped out under a
4-foot clay ceiling,
big enough for two of us
to lie in wedged together.
We weren’t sure it wouldn’t
collapse, so we reinforced it
with a bit of lumber —
I think some cardboard boxes.
We said that no one else
would ever succeed
in mastering the maze,
so if the hole did cave in
and bury us,
no one would ever find us.
8.
Grasshoppers
The sunflower forests afforded
food and spawning grounds
for millions of grasshoppers —
not the thin, brown kind
that swoop along the ground
with a sound like shuffled cards,
but the fat, green,
gooshy kind —
in multiple sizes
(depending on age, I guess)
from tiny to thumb-size —
all with the same ravaging
masticating-locust profile —
a million instances of grasshopper,
all struck from the same
grasshopper master somewhere.
Often we’d see them on top
of one another, copulating.
We carried chains of thick
rubber bands tied together
to shoot the grasshoppers with.
They’d splatter against
the sunflower leaves, leaving
their sticky, brown ichor —
“tobacco juice” —
on our fingers.
9.
Pack Rat
It seems strange that in all those years
of wandering in the prairie, we never
saw a rattlesnake.
There must have been rattlesnakes around —
I remember hearing about a neighbor up the street
finding one in his back yard.
We saw plenty of lizards, though —
brown or gray — “western fence lizards,”
I think they’re called.
Also horny toads.
We’d hunt them by walking together in a line
until we scared one up.
When it scurried into a bush, we’d get at it
by tearing the bush apart.
Once, one of those bushes contained
a nest of pack rats.
When I pulled my hand out, an evil brown shape
was attached to my right index
finger by its fangs.
I flung it off, and we took revenge on it
by throwing it into an excavation hole.
In my terror, I must have kneeled on it, because
there were rat guts on the right knee of my jeans.
The kids warned me about rabies —
and my mother saw the puncture wounds
when I took a bath that evening.
A rabies treatment would have meant painful shots
in the stomach, but I wasn’t treated for rabies.
I think I got a tetanus shot.
10.
Mike
One late afternoon walking back from the sunflower forest
I somehow hit Mike in the face with my hatchet
and split his upper lip.
I hope I didn’t damage his teeth.
I remember the blood bubbling between
his fingers as he knelt on the ground,
clutching his mouth.
Mike and the others went off home together,
leaving me and my sister Mary Catherine
by ourselves on the prairie.
On our way home, we dug up a small barrel cactus
and carried it back on my shovel.
After dinner, I crossed the fence
to the Macías’s yard.
Mike had stitches on his lip.
They were mad at me, of course.
They agreed that the hatchet blade had gotten too dull.
It wouldn’t have done the damage it did
if it had been sharpened, they said.
I don’t know if this incident
caused my friendship with the Macías boys to cool.
A year or two later
Mike starred in the traditional baseball game
between the 6th graders and the teachers.
The teachers always won,
but not that year.
Mike caught a deep fly ball to left
off the bat of Mr. Roth, and in another inning
he struck Mr. Roth out.
A year later, I did the same thing —
the greatest athletic triumph of my life —
but I was just channeling Mike.
My father put the cactus in a pot.
I think it was still in the house
when I cleaned it out thirty years later
after my mother’s death.
11.
Bones
Just to the south-east of the motorcycle hills
was a large, uneven pit,
about 6 feet deep in places,
with loose sides that could easily cave in
if you walked too near the edge.
We believed that the pit contained
human bones, and always gave
it a wide berth.
A few years later,
a girl from my grade — Betty David —
was recognized in the paper for discovering
a nineteenth-century mass burial site
for smallpox victims.
I was jealous, and also somewhat smug
for having known about the pit all along.
12.
Horny Toad
One evening near twilight
we were still out on the prairie together
standing not far from the bone pit,
looking up over
the motorcycle hills to the north-west.
The darkening sky was streaked purple.
A dry wind blew through the sage and cholla,
igniting an apprehension in me
that the not-so-solid flesh of earth
would shift and crack beneath my feet
as if a gigantic horny toad were rearing up
from broken crusts of prairie floor —
carrying the whole plateau on its back,
the sunflowers and salsola weed,
the smallpox bones and shotgun shells,
the insubstantial motorcycle hills themselves.
Everything whirled around me so
that I wanted to fall down to the ground
and feel earth’s spiky,
puffed-up lizard hide
as it rose up higher —
I and the other children riding, riding
on its monstrous horny back,
or, losing hold, careening
off away into darkness.
