Mochomos

Another Excerpt

This is another section of what I hope will eventually become enough for a book. I’ve been working on this particular section since last summer, reworking a story I wrote in college. Publishing here is all just to force myself to edit, and much more editing is still needed. The sun is out in New York, a storm has blown through, the leaves are bright green in the botanical gardens, and there is a dove on my balcony railing.

I can tell you parts of stories and hold them together for a moment. In acts of imagination for short intervals, I can see what I was told, though it requires the creative movements of fiction. To try to see a thing changes it. Nothing remains intact. My parents were together for nearly fifteen years before I was born. 
The plane flies low over the desert from Mazatlán, the foothills of the Sierra Madre on either side. The desert gives way to tropical forest, green hills rising from a dry plain. The constellation of a white town stands in the middle of the basin and clouds build over the mountains. On the mountainsides, rising moisture sweeps upwards from wet hillsides. The plane rattles gently in a headwind. My father and my uncle fly. They are interchangeable figures, the specifics are lost to me. They were all pilots— my father and my uncle and my grandfather— I can imagine them all trading turns at the controls, high over the yawing faces of the Mexican desert as they fly to my grandfather’s ranch in Alamos. I know that in their early years together my parents were in Alamos, that some of their sense of one another and some of their sense of their own trajectories came together in that town.
So, the plane eases downwards and the sun shines off the blue painted nose. Under the wing is a lone road, winding northeast from Navajoa into the town. Light shines off the altimeter and the plane’s shadow skips over a dark canopy. Bright birds fly out of the trees. Alamos is a small town of five thousand people. It is old, built nearly four hundred years before, the northernmost point in a chain of cities along Spanish silver mines. In the town center is a church with a buttressed tower and two stone domes surrounded by the white walls of houses and hotels. Royal palms crane out of mazed streets and courtyards. The walkways are covered by arches. In clearings beyond the pueblo, piles of trash and brush burn in the countryside. Through the low smoke, herons eat the frogs that leap out of the irrigation trenches.
Flying low, they tip their wings to the town as they approach the airport. A cloud of dust roosters out of the straight dirt line of the road, arcing into the sky. Beyond their view is another cloud of dust, the town’s other taxi, racing to meet them at the airstrip. The driver of the second taxi turns onto the road to the airport, sees the cloud of dust ahead of him, and slows in despair. 
The airstrip is surrounded by orange groves. Dust coats the dark waxy leaves. There is an old, corrugated metal hanger and little sheds beside it, where patchy, blinking dogs run out barking from behind a leaning wooden shed. Many of the planes are outside, their wings tied to the ground. An old man stands at the end of the runway, holding two sticks in front of him. He wears uniform, a gift from a retired airline pilot, now ragged. The gold bars on the sleeves are frayed and discolored with grease. The hat has lost its shape. Capitán they call him. He sleeps with the dogs by the airfield and guards the planes. He makes a show of directing the plane into a hangar, his thin arms sweeping in the wilted sleeves of his uniform. My father gives him a few dollars and helps my uncle tie down the wings of the plane. 
The taxi drives my uncle and my father down the main road and through the town. All the town is a maze of white houses with arched wooden doors that open across open courtyards with tile fountains. The old houses have walls that are three feet thick. The ceilings are built from vegas, wooden beams, and there are sticks between the vegas in diagonal crosses supporting dirt and more sticks and then cement. The heavy dirt walls and ceilings are cool under the high sun and desert heat, though termites eat the wood and collapse the roofs and kill the people burrowed inside. The gate of my grandfather’s place is lined with yuccas. The white walls are almost yellow in the late sun. Above them, vines and flowers gather, masses threatening to spill out into the street like the sea. The courtyard is full of music from a radio in the house next door. In the kitchen, pans and onions hang from the rafters and sunlight shines through the window onto the white tile walls. My grandfather is in the back yard. I have seen pictures of him at the Alamo house, I imagine him with his shirt is unbuttoned, digging. His shovel arcs above his head, dirt flying through the air into the pile beside him. He sets his shovel down on the side and climbs out and cleans his hands on his pant leg and shakes my father’s hand.
After dinner, the sky is white and purple and the walled streets are empty and still warm. In the center of a square filled with gardens of roses and palms, boys in boots and pressed white dress shirts walk slowly in line along the outer edge of a covered bandstand. A line of girls walks in bright dresses walks inside them, against them, the smooth crowns of their black braided heads are bowed. The parents and grandparents sit around the square, among the rose bushes with little children. They talk in the evening light, paying only momentary attention to the boys and girls in the dance. The boys in the bandstand smile at girls as they pass and the girls laugh and whisper to their friends. They look back across one another in a storm of eyes and smiles. A small band plays on the steps, dressed in sharp grey uniforms with red trim.

—

I wrote about one of these evenings when I was in college. I gather the ends from my mother, imaging the nights. The distances seemed fixed. Before they passed on, it was all a fiction, a place within the past that could be altered and narrated, real as it may have been. I wrote dialogue. At the time, I had what I believed was an understanding of my family’s turns through death and setback and resignation and progress. In Alamos, we regathered ourselves. 
These were days of my life when I believed in a sense of arcs and progress, of generational trajectories, of lines drawn through life like boats sailing upwind, tacking against the breeze and rolling whitecaps. Wakes roll behind them, reading the shifts off the shore.
I’m much less sure of my bearings now. Where the other boats are, I can’t say. Strange to rework the past and to write it down as the intricate moment spins by and changes.

I imagine my parents in these scenes. My uncle is there. The three of them are walking down the stone paved streets.
“I might fly into Navajoa tomorrow,” my father says. “I’m going to buy some more wood for the cabinets.”
My mother takes his arm. “I’m staying here,” she says. 
The streets are empty. A man in a cowboy hat walks by. His boots tap on the cobblestones. The sunlight flashes on crushed cans in the bright dust.
 “There were flannel shirts for sale today at the market. Thin ones, the kind you like.” She takes my father’s hand. “I’ll buy you some tomorrow if you’d like.”
“I’m alright with shirts,” he says.
“Gary,” she says, “would you like a new shirt? Your brother won’t let me buy him anything.”
My father pretends to walk into a parked car. They are all laughing.
“Gary, I hope you let your girlfriends buy you shirts,” she says.
“Don’t listen to her,” says my father.
“Buy me all the shirts you want,” my uncle says.
“See,” my mother says, “Gary knows a good thing when he sees it.”
Easy. Just as they were.
When they get back to the house, my mother goes to their room to change and my father and Gary sit out in the courtyard. They can hear my mother hanging her things in the closet.
“I’ll be right back,” says my father, and he stands and leaves and comes back with two open beers and two bananas.  

—

My uncle told me a story once about my grandfather. My grandfather was a pilot in the second World War. When he was twenty-one, he joined the service and applied to the aviation training program. My grandfather’s older brother was a bomber pilot early in the war and died returning from a mission in Italy. While my grandfather was in aviation school, his brother and his crew crashed into a mountain in Lebanon. Their instruments failed in the clouds. It was early in the war, before Pearl Harbor. If a family had already lost a son, the military tried to put surviving brothers in noncombat positions. My grandfather learned to pilot C-47 paratrooper planes. Drop the paratroopers and fly home with the wounded. Even so, it was a hard assignment. They would drop men and watch them die as they fell through the sky. In Holland, they would tow gliders and watch the glider pilots descend into mazes of barbed wire and machine gun nests. Many of the men they dropped died, many of the planes flying with them were shot to pieces in the skies over France and Holland. A plane beside my grandfather was hit by artillery and folded into flames. Dozens of men killed in a moment, ripped out into the sky.
The story my uncle tells me is a story I’ve heard once. My grandfather and his planes didn’t have an escort to protect them. Nazi fighter planes found them up in the clouds and started shooting down planes in my grandfather’s squadron. Planes filled with rows of paratroopers wrecked into the farmland below them. There was nothing any of them could do. Suspended in their sky in a slow and unarmed plane, their benches full. They waited to be killed as the enemy howled by, tearing open planes with their hammering guns. My grandfather opened a window and shot at them with his service pistol. 
That’s the whole story— my grandfather shooting back at them out the window. How he survived I can’t say. Allied fighter planes came to help, or the enemy ran out of fuel, or left to gun down other planes. Open the window and hang your arm out and shoot back. Something to do.

I can’t say what good these kinds of stories do. My grandfather never talked about the war. The few things he said to my father and his siblings were repeated to me, in lilting repetition. He was a war hero. He transported a top British general, was sworn at by General Patton on a runway for not saluting, dropped some of the first paratroopers in the D-Day invasion, and then dropped those soldiers into Bastogne. On a mission in Holland, when the men dropped ahead of my grandfather were being slaughtered, he disobeyed orders and turned his plane around. The rest of his planes followed him. He saved hundreds of men. If there were repercussions, they are unmentioned. In an old reunion book for my grandfather’s paratroopers, there is one mention of my grandfather. There is a picture of men running onto his plane. The book says that the men from the airborne invasion would pull strings to get on board my grandfather’s plane, that he got them into Sicily and France alive and they trusted him — they would fly anywhere with my grandfather’s crew. 
In my grandfather’s letters to his oldest sister, there is no mention of any of this, only that he is fine and that the war is uneventful, that in Sicily he landed in a tomato field and filled his hat as the farmers ran out to curse at him as he stood amidst the wrecked wet stems. I imagine the fuselage was spattered with seeds and tomatoes had warm dust covered skin. I once scattered another of his sister’s ashes on his white marble gravestone. 
I can tell you stories, but I cannot tell you when or how they lift or ascend into any mythic formation. Often, they do not. Stories are just stories. I do know that writing is the only meaningful form of arrangement I can find. 
Growing up, my father and his four siblings ate dinner in a separate room. The adults would have cocktails and dinner in the dining room. My father and his brother and his sisters lived in the antechambers of homes filled with parties and music and dancing under instructions to behave and be quiet. The whole family fit into these sprawling, bohemian formations. A family of jazz pianists, wild Norwegians. My father’s cousin describes how her father would nod off at the piano and awake and play frantically with his eyes closed, stupored and free and burdened. They made fortunes and lost them. They lived in beautiful homes with banistered staircases and ballrooms in Seattle and Oakland and San Francisco. There were seven siblings. My grandfather was the quiet, intelligent brother they all loved. 
I hear many of these stories once. 
My grandfather and my grandmother and two of their friends are driving up to San Francisco for a late dinner. They are drinking martinis on the highway and they nearly strike another oncoming car. They crash. My grandmother is in the passenger seat and goes through the windshield and lands in a ditch. There is glass all around her. She has a few cuts, but she is alright. They get back in the car and go to dinner. That was the story, anyway. My father tells me these things with little commentary, like light on the bottom of a pool.
I know very little about my grandmother. She was an actress when my grandfather met her. I have photographs of her in beautiful sweaters and silk kimonos. My grandfather saw her on a trolley car as they rattled up the hill from the Ferry Building, climbing back from their work in the family grocery. The sold sandwiches to office buildings. Viking Foods it was called. “I’m going to ask to marry her by Christmas” he told his brother. She died young. Her face was just beginning to form into the angles and shapes I see in the faces of my aging aunts. I know her death sent my grandfather to Mexico, that he brought my youngest aunt with him, that my father felt they were left to fend from themselves.
I can’t tell you when my grandfather bought his place in Alamos or when the family sold it. I know the family was in Mexico often, in Alamos or another town. They hurtled over the reaches of the Pacific Coast, started and closed businesses, packed homes into cars, invested in new ventures and sold or abandoned them. 
My grandfather insisted that he had excellent night vision. He would drive down dirt roads in the jungle with the headlights of his truck off, hurtling through ruts and potholes with my father and my uncle standing on the bench seat to see over the dashboard. My father tells me he could see nothing, only the occasional flash of the moon through the dome of leaves above them. There are variations of this story, it happened many times. My grandfather’s brothers beside him, asking “Are you sure you can see Dan,” they ask as the truck spins around bends. 

—

I write about these things in college, about Alamos, about my grandfather, about my dad, because I understand, however faintly, that we have oscillated for generations between security and ruin, that the dream of continuity, of a visible future unbent by the force of unknown calamity has often appeared to us only to fade back into the world of dreams. Our history exists as a flare falling over the empty ocean. We live within the memory of three, maybe four generations. That’s all that any of us can see or feel— all else may as well be fiction. 
Whatever it is, I want to hold it together. 
My father was in a car crash in high school. They are boys, drinking beers and smoking grass, driving through the mountain roads on a summer night. Maybe the driver is changing the dial on the radio. They run through a guard rail and launch off the road into a canyon. My father is in the back seat. I know very little about the crash, but I know what dead redwood needles smell like. I know how the fine dirt hangs in the air beneath the trees, how it would have caught the red light of the taillights, how still the air is in the forest, how the hot metal of the car would have slowly whined as it cooled in its resting place against the dirt and stones and moss. My father has skin grafted from his thigh onto his forehead. The hospital calls my grandfather though the night. He doesn’t come to the hospital until the next morning. I think that was when my father felt the most abandoned by my grandfather.
When my grandmother died, my father was a senior applying to college. He never turned in his applications and he never finished high school. The draft had started and kids from classes ahead of my father were coming back dead, flown home in flag draped coffins. Others killed themselves. My father didn’t have the fifteen hundred dollars to get into New Zealand. He escaped the draft with a medical deferment, his back is still injured from the car crash. A doctor with an office in the Transamerica Pyramid keeps him from the war with a signature. We were on our own, my father says. My uncle slept on the beach for a summer and joined the Coast Guard. He sailed in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. My uncle was the only one of those kids to go to college. My youngest aunt finishes high school in Mexico. 
He just left us, my father says. 
For a summer my father and my uncle have the house to themselves. They throw parties. Though the summer, the parties develop their own cadence. They come home to strangers in the house that must be asked to leave. The strangers are older, drugged, sinister, the mountains are visited by wandering characters, searching for the next good time. The summer of love is over, a darker element has arrived. One morning, my father steps outside and finds a new red Porsche in the driveway. My father is sure it is stolen. He calls two of his friends and they cut the car in half and load it onto a truck. They dump one half down a canyon and one half down another. Driving home from a job, he shows me one of the canyons, on a turn in the road only a few miles from our house. I hike down one summer years later, hoping to retrieve a rusted hood ornament, but I find nothing. 
I’ve never resented my grandfather. I can’t say if my father did. I know he was hurt, though I never sensed, in the thin fabric of all of these stories, that he was angry. The family broke apart, my grandfather reached his limit. The center could not hold. He left with his brother’s widow, a partnership made familiarity and companionship. It was something my family discussed very little. Still, I know my grandfather, his silhouette—he was like my father and like my uncle and like my uncle’s son and like me. My father’s friend in high school would draw cartoons. He drew a caricature of my father with rainclouds above his head. All of us sharp and sensitive and quiet and wild and worried.

—

The moon is well above the courtyard walls now, pouring light over the walls and vines and flowers. My father turns a beer bottle in his hands and wipes condensation from the paper label. My mother is in the doorway of the house with her hair down. She says goodnight and begins her retreat to the bedroom and to the coolness of sleep. Her bare feet make a low, soft fall on the tile floors. My father follows her.  
My uncle hears my mother and father talking lowly and then the house is quiet. He walks through the moonlit rooms, out into the backyard and lays down in the dirt. The stars are out, shining through the dim lights of the town. He lays very still and feels sleep rising in the back of his eyes and stands and brushes the dirt from his shoulders and shirttail and then makes his way through the kitchen and into the dark hallway and to the door of his room, feeling with his hands before him. 
In the night, he sits upright in bed. Dogs are barking. Some years the streets of Alamos are full of stray dogs. In those years, in the height of the breeding, men leave poisoned meat in the streets, soaked in antifreeze. Dogs with owners are kept indoors. It is a rhythm the whole town understands. The stray dogs are poisoned, the barking stops.
My uncle turns over in bed and turns his pillow. A light is on in the kitchen. He can hear drawers opening and closing. He rises and lowers a shirt over his shoulders and stepping into the light of the doorway he can see my grandfather’s back and the barrel of the shotgun in the light. My grandfather is searching through his desk. His hands move slowly, feeling through the shaded contents of the drawer. As my uncle walks out into the hall, my mother comes to him in her nightgown.
My mother asks him about the noise. In the neighboring houses, other families are awake.
“I’m not sure,” my grandfather says. He stops and lifts a box out of a drawer and opens it and loads two shells into the barrels.
“There was gunfire out in the street.”
My father is beside my mother now.
“It might have just been a drunk.”
My grandfather closes the barrels and tucks the gun under his arm. “No,” he says evenly, “It sounded like real shooting.”
He walks to the front door and opens it and stands out in the street and his voice trails into the courtyard. He is talking to the neighbors. After some time, the barking ends. A tiger moth taps against the glass bulb of a ceiling light, the black toothlike patterns on its wings strobe in the wavering beams. My grandfather returns to the kitchen and puts out the lights and sits down in the kitchen.
My uncle lies awake in bed. The moon rises over the mountains and cuts through the mists. Then he is asleep. He awakes when the first light of day is beginning to show in the sky and roosters are crowing. The rest of the town is silent. Gary sits up and brushes his hair back and stands up. The floor is cold. He takes a shirt from the drawer finds his pants on the floor, puts them on, and walks out into the kitchen.
My grandfather is pouring a cup of coffee.
“Good morning,” he says. He points to an empty cup and my uncle nods.
 “What happened last night? Why was there shooting?”
My grandfather pours another cup of coffee and then opens the icebox and takes out a glass bottle of milk. “I’m not sure,” he says. “I haven’t left the house yet.”
Gary stands at the window and rubs his eyes. He cuts a slice of bread from the loaf on the tile counter and spreads butter over it. The shotgun is hanging back on the wall, above one of the bookshelves.
In the kitchen, my grandfather stands in the open doorway. My uncle slips into his shoes. A blue macaw sits perched in one of the mango trees, preening his deep blue wings. The painted walls are beginning to glow pink in the morning light. My father runs into the courtyard after them, pulling a shirt over his arms above his head. The parrot flies beyond his line of sight behind the palms.
On the other end of town, a crowd is gathered on one side of the street by the hotel. Mothers hold their children against their chests and the men talk in low tones. Two older men argue quietly, their hands motioning before them. A dog lies rigidly in the shade. Three hens run across the street lined with cars and into the shade where a white Chevrolet Suburban is parked in an alley.
The sheriff of Alamos and his deputy are shot dead in the street. The sheriff is sitting against a mud brick wall with his chin resting on his chest. A stream of blood, in a dark and hardened run, flows from his left ear down to his chest. His white shirt is steeped in blood from the neck to the waist along his side. It sticks to his ribs as the right half of his shirt flutters in the breeze and dust blows into his hair and across his cheek. His eye is shot through. The wound looks like an open daffodil.
Behind the sheriff, in the white Suburban, the deputy lies against the steering wheel with his eyes open. A line of bullet holes runs out of him from the rear of the car to the door, each hole a silver star of ripped metal and paint around a void. His corpse looks up through the windshield, the backs of his hands hang limp against the seat. Dust lays in his eyelashes.

I hear this story, about the dead sheriff and his deputy, from both my parents. The deputy had a young family. They were killed by the cartels from the mountains. The sheriff and his deputy lay dead in the street for a long time, days; the locals were afraid to be seen moving the bodies. The killers may have still been watching.

I first write this scene alongside more exposition. My grandfather talking to the local men in a bar, ordering drinks, learning what had happened in the measured, even speech and mannerisms of a quiet and centered man. I too little about my grandfather to imagine him in this moment. I have no reason to believe he heard the gunfire that killed the sheriff and the deputy, but I know the killing happened. I know the locals would poison the dogs. I don’t know if my grandfather owned a gun, it is quite possible he detested them. There are limits to what I can feel about my own family now, and fewer and fewer people to ask. Fiction is more interesting. I’m convinced it’s also more useful. 

My grandfather was a quiet, thoughtful man, much like my father. He would leave a room when someone was talking down about someone. He was conflicted about his service in Europe, about all the men he flew to their deaths. Whatever he brought back home, he kept within himself. I’m not convinced there’s anything wrong with that. I don’t think it matters either way.
I know my grandfather dug an entire swimming pool by hand in Alamos, working a shovel in his slacks with his shirt off. Digging for weeks.
I mention all of this outwardly, the story I wrote in college, the strange stages of familiarity and fiction, because increasingly, it seems to collapse into itself, one frame into another. My grandfather, then my father, then me. Writing is just something to do. If my dad can build that house, I tell myself, can finish this book. You have to do something.

In the story I invent, my grandfather buys oleanders from farmers and plants them outside the courtyard. Across the courtyard, an old woman knocking dirt from her rugs tells my grandfather she will die. My grandfather laughs. He reminds her that she tells him she will die each year. My uncle arrives in the truck with wood for the cabinets. My mother prepares lunch. As they eat, they talk about how young the young deputy was. The cartels are slowly moving out of the mountains. Now the town will appoint a new sheriff and pretend the killing never happened.
Another morning comes. My uncle wakes to the crowing of the roosters and the tapping of the silversmith across the street. He lays in bed and listens to the sound of the town waking in the chill of the desert. The wizened woman is beating rugs again.
On the kitchen counter my mother has left a cup of coffee. My uncle takes the milk from the icebox and pours a stream into the coffee and watches the milk cloud. My grandfather and my mother and father are sitting out back on the edge of my grandfather’s excavation. The shallow end of the pool is finished. The piles of red dirt are neat and tall. A spined lizard is sunning itself on stacked rocks and broken cement. 
My grandfather stands and pats my uncle on the shoulder and leaves the courtyard. My mother and father return into the coolness of the house and soon my uncle can hear my father working on the cabinets, the rhythmic sliding of his plane over wood, the sound of wood curling under the blade. My grandfather returns to my uncle. His fists clenched and his eyebrows heavy. Outside, along the courtyard wall, there are dark holes in the dirt where the roots have been pulled and where the soil is still wet. Clods of soil spot the cobblestones along the thieves’ trail. 
“Those little bastards,” he says. “They stole my oleanders again.”

My uncle goes for a walk with my mother that morning. On the edge of town, beyond the walls, dirt roads wind into the jungle and through the hills. Trails lead through dirtswept yards and small fires to front doors of thatched huts. Burros stand, heads down, tied to the trees, sleeping as their ears and tails flicker against the flies.
A boy in white clothes runs by with red dusty feet. Away on the next hill another boy calls to him as his younger sister follows. There are termite nests in the trees. 
“I always wonder how they keep their white school clothes so clean,” my mother says. “Even the boys.”
A rooster runs into the bushes, pecking.
“You really love my brother don’t you?”
“Yes Gary, I do.”
“Will you ever get married?”
My mother smiles. “I can’t say, Gary,” she says. “We’re just happy with how things are. I’m happy.”
My uncle and my mother step aside for a burro with a little boy in white on his back. The boy stares at them as the donkey plods onwards to the town, neither in command of the other. Ahead is a thatched shack with red and yellow signs and a chipped red icebox. A young man in overalls is bent over the front of a flatbed truck. There is a can of oil at his feet, a rag in his back pocket. My mother tips her straw hat backwards.
“Come on Gary, I’ll buy you a soda.”

For nearly fifteen years it was like this, my parents together. After my grandfather passed, they rarely traveled. They within their means. In the twenty-six years of my life that they were alive, they lived in quiet attention to their only child and the house. They were, it seems, in the service of a dream.
—

Walking back into Alamos, a trail of ants is carrying cut leaves down the hill and through the town past the hotel and the empty bloodstained Suburban into the depths of the forest. The ants cut the leaves into parts, carry them aloft like sails back into the jungle. They walk in single file, each ant with a cut green sail held high in its jaws. They are gods with shining mandibles. Milky beads of moisture gathering at the cuts. Sun licks the curves their smooth brown heads and abdomens.
“Mochomos,” the men say. “They take a whole tree in one day.”
I imagine my uncle sitting on the cobblestones in the street, watching them. They march over the crests and troughs of the street, their leaves rocking above them, marching relentlessly through the town. They carry the world cut into pieces, dismantled, carrying it outwards and out into the jungle to their strange earthen hives. Consuming the world entire, piece by piece in unending hordes.
Beyond those ants, I’m not sure what else there is.

—
In the evening, there is a knock at the door. My grandfather rises from the table and crosses the courtyard to answer it. In the doorway are two boys, holding wilted oleanders before them like dead chickens, dirt hanging from their roots. They ask my grandfather if he would like to buy the plants they have brought him.
When my grandfather returns he is laughing, and the oleanders are planted again in the dirt outside the wall. My mother and father sit with Gary in the equipale chairs and the sun is low in the sky over the purple folds of the mountains, the white walls of the streets, and all of Alamos.