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CHAPTER 1
Manifest
KIERSTIN BRIDGER
I am a child of HUD houses,
I am a child of the 80s, of television, turning the silver knob on the squat console, no '84 Olympics; the smashed black-and-white against the drywall's corner bead —
I am the mutt of Black Ireland,
I am sanity's child who fled by rutted frontage roads stained by black lung and bad luck,
I am a child of stocked pantries, aluminum canisters of powdered milk and blocks of government cheese.
CHAPTER 2
Moving West
DEBBIE DAY
We leave the East, with its swarming cities, dripping hot woods, and waterways. The wetness and green is squeezed out dry with every rotation of our minivan tires. We arrive at our new town, nestled under the Wyoming mountains. Endless yellow plains, parched and rocky. The silence carves a hole in my stomach for the wind to blow through. The neighbors tell me it's a great place to raise kids, though they keep to themselves. I take my children to the empty parks, barren walkways. Cactus grips the broken cement. We stare at the Platte River dug into the red rock. An owl swoops across the water that glistens against a decorated sunset like we've never seen the sky before. Pale sunrises whisper each morning, the smell of hollowness. Every day I wait for something I can't hear. The lost train bids goodbye, briefly passing through, entering into sand, brush, nothing. My husband loves it here. I wonder if we'll stay long. I think of fireflies in the East, the wall of beech trees curtaining the sky, the nosy old woman downstairs, the screams through the ceiling, waiting for Daddy as he sits in five rows of stagnant cars. Laugher awakens me. I look out the window at my children playing in the front yard. Beside the vacant road, they jump sprinklers and zig-zag with bicycles, garbed in dripping popsicles. A gush of air opens the door. An invitation. I step out to greet the strange quiet. A loneliness, a ghost from a distant memory, a peace I've never known.
CHAPTER 3
The Rancher's Third Marriage
DAVID LAVAR COY
No dust on the seat of his pants,
The new bride is tough as him,
who pull garden weeds together — farm and raise cattle — two in the fields bailing hay, riding the trails horseback.
and bugs bump against the windows.
down hilly back roads like a truck with worn gears and broken mirrors.
CHAPTER 4
Slut
LISA LEVINE
Note: As a story born of the border, "Slut" contains unitalicized Spanish as a representation of regional speech patterns.
From inside the ring of girls, Elisa darts out and slaps her. "Slut."
Even the sting in María's eyes must be the mingling floral stink of their perfumes, because no tears break as she cuts a look towards Patrick. He stands apart, spinning skateboard wheels back and forth across his palm and saying nothing in her defense. "It wasn't my fault." Her mouth flattens into a sullen line. "He made me."
From beside Elisa, the victim on attack, another girl with blue-rimmed eyes shoves her face in María's, so close María can smell her minty, sour breath: "Mary Alvarez. You're so —" but the girl can't produce a word.
Instead another picks up: "It was the boys' bathroom."
"Apologize to her."
"You could have told him no, slut."
"Slut," chimes in the last, but the rest are pulling away, tossing hair over shoulders and bending to pick up backpacks. The fight is over, and the girls break apart as a distant bell reminds everyone of places they need go — Annex B, West Campus, P.E. fields. María waits for the others to disappear. Her thin cheeks burn as Patrick moves away, grabbing the board lengthwise and reaching for Elisa's hand. She waits, invisible again, as they run off, two this way, one that, the fight vanished save for her fists, balled too late, and her stinging cheek. Finally, she shoulders her backpack and starts to sprint toward the P.E. fields, passing Elisa and Patrick on her way. From behind she hears a falsetto echo: "Slut," followed by a high-pitched giggle.
By lunch, multiplying versions of what happened in the bathroom are written in selected eyes, girls from certain cliques, even growing, to — she swears — the quick glance of a young, frizzed-out Home Ec teacher. Anticipating another gauntlet of stares from around the cafeteria, María closes in on herself, sensing warmth beneath her worn pink t-shirt, girls size 14, every point of its yellow star decal as faded as her feelings. She ignores the dour slap of mashed potato against plastic as she passes through the line. Her backpack rubs diagonal red welts across her collarbone, so tightly clutched are its pair of straps to her body. After eating she walks across the cafeteria, head down; she is going home early today. "Cramps," she tells the nurse, who looks at her through blue plastic glasses, offended, María thinks, like the girls, like Nana would be. Everyone must see her as the slut callers do, honest words forbidden in their small Mormon town. Even the old, gap-toothed front office aide who checks her dismissal pass smirks at her, licking his single incisor before initialing her out.
Intermittent rain falls all the way home from school, bursts that wet her hair and arms then disappear next block. Looking up at the sky between brief splatters, María walks down Far Street, past First Baptist and the EZ-Wash, conscious only of the rain and her feet, which she keeps moving. At her door, under a ray of patchy sunlight, she pauses to look at the empty porch next door. Between her yard and the neighbors' lies a bare dirt strip filled with puddles, a flood almost, with water running down the road where ruts now lurk underwater. At her door, her taut hands release the straps and her backpack slips to one hand, dangling at her side. She takes pleasure in slamming the swollen wood shut behind her, even though it will piss off Nana. Her anger lasts long enough for her to tear out a cola from the fridge pack and shove open the unscreened kitchen window, glaring where neighbor boys would be if this were after school. She can hear Nana bump into the squeaky bed frame in the back room. At the noise, María backs out of the kitchen, flops on the couch and finds the clicker. Too late, though — "Buenas, mija," says Nana, standing in slippers at the empty doorframe.
"Hi," she says, not looking away from the TV.
Together they watch the soap, caught up in the image of a matte-skinned brunette turning wide eyes towards the camera, lips quivering, the same longing for her lover in her face over and over in every frame and on every face. Her perfection becomes theirs by watching, María understands it; she's watched her grandmother get caught up in snippets of these her whole life. Nana's calm, but these women are forever in crisis — and watching, sprawled, feet up, skin sallowed by the fading light and electronic glow, María runs her hand through her hair where Patrick's had been a few days ago. At the time it was a clutching, unhurried request, how men and women talk. María. Her name was all it took. But she can imagine him with Elisa, too, his girlfriend in public, hands on her, keeping her close and telling her Mary Alvarez is nothing. She just — she makes shit up. A slut, a liar.
If María were prettier he'd be scared to say it. Beauty's terrifying. But Elisa isn't beautiful. Not to María. More that she's popular. Same thing.
Inside, it is sundown, almost, and no more rain is falling by the time Nana's telenovelas segue into a werewolf movie. Grateful to have vacated her thoughts, which have been swirling around the moment she stood facing Elisa, too shocked to react. María forgets about the slap, about the wildfire rumor that forced it to happen, until a harsh, exaggerated Latin insult — "Chinga tu hermana, cabrón" — snaps her head away from the television. She looks next door, where the guys are in each other's faces again, cigarettes dropping to the porch until someone sets a plastic cup back up on the railing and another digs into his pocket, holds his open palm out to the rest. María watches the boys' hands. The quarters are too thin to see from here, but she has played the game before. Everything about them, their tempers, their cigarettes, seems to suit a day like this, but before she can get up to borrow one, she hears their voices cut out, lowering, as the jingle of a key in the lock arrives at her front door. Her dad is lanky and loud — chains and motorcycle boots loud, not his voice, which is low and soft.
"Hey," she says.
"Hey," he glances up at her, still half on the phone. "Whatcha doin'?"
She looks at the TV and answers even if he isn't talking to her. "Who knows."
Miraculously, he clicks the phone shut. "Oh yeah?" Leans back out the front door and spits tobacco. "Must be watching something, if it's on."
"A movie."
"Huh." He heads back to his bedroom. Through the window María can see the game start up again, the boys settling back into their wicker chairs or along the wood railing, where the one she knows from school, Rico, is sitting. Through their sparkling front window, slanted with sunlight and air dust, she sees one of them turn in her direction. Can he see her? What's he heard? Better not stir.
"What the fuck's wrong with you?" Dad asks, stripped to his t-shirt now, tall and broad, blocking the couch opposite her. "School called. You ditching?"
She almost glares back, but closes her eyes instead, Use your words, just like they told her right around when the state sent him home for good. One, two, three, four before looking at him. "I was on the rag, Dad, wanna see?"
His motorcycle boots clunk, his personal dialect of discontent. Like her, he speaks in code but doesn't give up. "Get yourself cleaned up?"
"Yes." Hair heavy in her face now, better than a curtain for hiding behind.
"Well." He gets up, walks to the door, jangling, pops it open, to lean out and spit again. "Let me know next time. Didn't know why they called."
María waits on the couch until she hears the back door shut. Dad will be out until dark, riding around town. On a different day she would follow him out there while he started up the bike and see about a ride to the QuikMart, but the idea of other people weights her mind — she can't walk past them, the bums, the shifties, the moms. When dinner time starts closing in, maybe she will slip out to sit with the boys, like she does sometimes with her girlfriends, perching on the porch railing until Nana comes out looking for her. She can win at their game, if she tries. She's good at flipping the heavy coins just so off her fingers, and doesn't care too much when they start to shift in their chairs or get up and mutter to each other. Either way, when she sits back at the end of her turn, their hands will end up on her, leaning forward, maybe, for a forceful toss.
Nana calls out from the back room but María can already hear her walking out as she lifts herself up on one elbow. "What?" she asks as her grandmother's stretched-long shadow crosses the screen. Really Nana is short; quick like a hummingbird.
"Te sientes bien?" Instead of answering, María looks outside again at Rico, who wears a dark sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off, his hair buzzed short. His is a face she has seen again and again, here and at school. He knows her — María, Mary — and the coins flip past to more laughter.
"I'm fine. I'm not sick," María says. As if on a string, she gets up and walks out to the side yard, where there's laundry with her shirts to pull from the line. She stares harder now that there's no window between them, but he doesn't look back until her head is bent over the stiff shoulders of dad's work shirt, folding, then unclipping the next.
"Doing your chores?"
She looks up, startled by the closeness of the husky voice, but the face is wrong. An older man, not the boy she knows from school, is watching her over the chicken-wire fence, hand resting on it as if it was a thing belonging to him. "I don't know," she tells him.
"Me either," he responds.
She shrugs and then stands up straight, preparing to walk away. "Bonita, pero joven," he says. She shrugs, not sure how to answer and backing away with the stiff bundle clutched over her chest. María's eyes can't help but drag over their porch, but from this angle the boys she'd been watching are out of sight. Was he looking? She knows he must have been. Hope for attention drags at her heels as she finally turns around and walks back inside, shadowy, like the feeling from when she first met Patrick away from school, an accident, because her dad worked for his mom. Maybe it was a work picnic or maybe just them, their families. There was the smell of charcoal and raw ground meat, there was wind all over the table and in her hair, there was the excitement of being watched in such a way that you know you are being seen all the way through, like a hollow earth. Patrick's mother worked two jobs. "Two?" María had asked.
She had sighed and rolled her eyes, yes. "My kids are teenagers, so ..." she explained, turning to look at Patrick, her boy, as he walked to the lake's edge. With sudden force his arm had swung out and flung a rock across the water.
María's dad had called out, "Hey, come get your burger," and Patrick came and sat next to María. When the others were busy with their meals, Patrick's hand crept across her leg, under the table, and stopped. She looked down and there it was, a little scarred at the knuckles, as familiar and solid as the handle of her screen door against her palm.
The memory settles, and she slips back inside her house, leaving the shirts on the arm of the couch and flipping the pages of her biology book. Her eyes trace sentences without remembering their meanings. After a page, she goes back outside and walks up the front lawn to where the boys are.
"Hey," she says to the boy she knows, twisting her hair and ignoring the others.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Manifest West"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Western Press Books.
Excerpted by permission of Western Press Books.
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