Late August we are caught, giggling and naked, fucking in the preacher’s bed.

Rio comes back taller and darker. Beside me in our bed his skin is still hot from Texas. He kisses me, like we had so many times before. Then he takes my pants off and pulls my cock out and licks his hand and gets my cock wet and puts me inside of him. After that we are fucking everywhere. We are naked when our mothers are at work in the taco stand. We fumble around in the darkness for each other, like moths to the only light in a room. Our sex life will never again be as exciting as when we are fourteen and sharing a bed.

The morning I left the house where I became a man

And then I felt his fist on my jaw and I fell back on the ground. I took a breath and closed my eyes. I just lay for a while, feeling the pain in my jaw. My lip was bleeding. Myfather looked down at me. “Get up,” he said.

“I’ll kill you if you ever come near one of those pipes again. I will fucking kill you.”

Don’t go to Juárez. Don’t go into my room. Don’t fuckin’ do drugs. And start thinking about what college you want to go to. That’s your homework.

I nodded, and took my passport out of his hand. “I have a rule,” I said. “Never open my mail. And never walk into my room.”

This whole thing, I thought, this whole thing was because of men like my father.

I wondered if that made me a good boy or a bad boy. Maybe I was just an afraid boy.

“Your father says you write a lot.”

“I’ll get you a bike.” That made me happy. He didn’t throw me a birthday party, but then my mother had never thrown me a party either. And anyway, I didn’t like parties.

I bought a yellow pad and some pens and a drawing pad and some pencils and a pencil sharpener. I wasn’t hungry and I didn’t eat anything. I got home before dark and sat at my desk and wrote down all my father’s rules.

My mother had put a picture of herself in my suitcase. She was smiling and she looked like she was happy. But photographs lied. They always lied. I put the picture in my desk drawer.

“Yeah, I’m Mexican. Look, not every Mexican has a Mexican name.” He laughed. “Maximiliano McDonald.” He laughed again. “It’s got a ring to it. Where were you born?”

“You can cry. But after the first week, no more crying. I don’t like people who cry about things.”

I didn’t hate her.

“Yes,” I said. “I hate you.”

I didn’t need her help with that

And after awhile, I didn’t want to be around my mother anymore. It made me sad. And it made me mad too.

When I was about nine, things started to get weird. My mother started to disappear more and more. I would come home from school and the house would be empty. Sometimes she would be gone for more than a week. She would give me money to buy myself food or whatever I needed. She never gave me Mexican pesos. It was always American dollars. Sometimes when I woke up in the morning, there was no one home but me. And then sometimes she would spend days and days in bed. I would make her soup. Well, I didn’t actually make the soup. I just went to the store and bought it and opened the can and warmed it up. She didn’t eat it anyway. I didn’t know what was wrong. And I asked her, “Maybe you should go to a doctor?”

All he gave her was me.

She glared at me.  “We have food and a house and—”  She stopped me cold in the middle of my sentence. “What does a boy know about money?”

I was sad sometimes, but not sad, sad, sad. Just sad in a normal way, I think.

But El Paso wasn’t Juárez and it wasn’t mine and I always felt that I was just a visitor there.

I knew it was serious business because she almost always spoke to me in English. When she spoke to me in Spanish, it meant I’d better listen.

The small house where I grew up was clean—but it was clean because I taught myself how to clean a house. It’s not a bad thing to teach yourself things. And besides, I didn’t want the house I lived in to be dirty and I didn’t want the house to smell bad. I sometimes sprayed the house with my mother’s perfume. Except my room. I didn’t spray my room with anything. It smelled like old books and it probably smelled like me. Maybe my room didn’t smell so good, but I took a shower every day and I always brushed my teeth and combed my hair. And I washed my own clothes.

I’d lived with the whispering for a while before I thought to mention it to you

San Martín Caballero

And anyway, after that fight, Marcos and I became friends. Marcos had good fists. But he had a better heart.

I didn’t think it was a good thing to know how to fight, to use your fists on other people. I never liked the idea of hurting other people—and if that made me a joto, then I guess that’s what I was.

There are things I still remember about growing up in Juárez: I remember the name of my school, Escuela Carlos Amaya. I remember my first grade teacher’s name, Laura Cedillos. I wanted her to be my mother, not because she was pretty, but because she was so nice and smelled like flowers. I remember the playground, cement and dirt and grass that never really grew up to become a lawn because it was never watered and because we stomped the ground until it was a fine powder. We couldn’t pound anything else but we could pound the dirt.

The voices returned, but this time I didn’t fight them. And somehow, though they were still loud, it no longer hurt. I walked and walked. Trying to understand what it meant to let them in, to let them flow through me, to feel like I was walking with one foot in this world and the other in theirs. Soft earth, soft light, soft river. And underneath it all, the small sound. Alive in me.

“One of us will always be waiting here for you. We’ll teach you how to live with the voices.”

“Antonio,” he whispered, drawing back, “Here, I’ve been taking care of her for you.”

He was whistling the song of the golondrinas and cradling something I couldn’t see. My eyes were busy devouring his face. He looked exactly as I remembered him, hardly a day older. He smiled at me the way he used to smile at me, his eyes crinkling the way they’d always crinkled.

How the earth here weeps and sings at the same time. How it longs to be like the quiet earth elsewhere.

Here in this natural place there is no concrete. There are no walls. Only these little orange flags marking death, death, death. In this darkness, I can’t see the faces, but the voices are growing louder.

The trees are wide shadows, more alive than I am. But I know what’s possible. Remember how horrified I was the first time I saw the endless concrete of the California–Mexico border. San Diego so green and so blue and then the roads to Tijuana and the shock of towering walls—the earth burned, razed, salted. Pale dead earth as far as the eye could see. The lights. The Border Patrol trucks. The uniformed men with guns.

The wall that will desecrate one of the last few wild places.

I barely brake turning onto a caliche road. Don’t slow down even though the road is uneven and narrow. I want the wind to tear me away. I imagine a cyclone whirling on the road, tossing up me and the car and all the faces, all of us spinning and spinning until we’re flung away from each other and into the silent sky.

And I saw their faces everywhere I looked

The Virgen de San Juan

“Antonio, what’s wrong? What’s happening?” It wasn’t the time to tell you. It was too late. There was too much and too little to tell. It would have been different if you’d asked me when it was just whispering.

One man can’t contain all of this. Can’t channel it. I will lose my mind if this goes on much longer.

Milagrosa

San Juditas Tadeo

Tears were streaming down my face when I knocked on your door. You let me to sit on your bed then crawled into my lap and wrapped your arms and legs around me while I sobbed on your neck. Even now, all these years later, when my lips are on your skin, I can still taste those tears. Or perhaps I’m tasting yours, all the tears you’ve never released, restless oceans pushing up against the surface of you.

My little brother Armando gone, just like that.

I have deaths curled inside of me. Layered and limned with my grief. I lost my mother when I was little, my brother soon after I met you, my grandparents after we married, some friends, and now, too, our daughter. None of your people have died. Your parents, your grandparents, your great-grandparents, all of your sisters and brothers are still living.

They just gather around me as if they’re moths, and I’m giving off some light I don’t know how to turn off.

I heard the cenzontles and they made me think of him and I felt a little less like a stranger.

until the day I passed by you with your friends and heard you describing the urracas you loved,

We met the very first week of our first semester of college. I didn’t tell my father about him. He didn’t tell his family about me.

I’ve never told you, but I loved a boy once.

Unlike you, no one’s life depends on how awake I am. I don’t love my job. But it’s a living, and sometimes that’s enough.

When the whispers began, I tried to outrun them, first on the treadmill then at the university track. I tried weights. I tried punching the bag in the garage. I tried jerking off. I tried drinking. At home and then at the bar down the street.

To you, the Rio Grande Valley wasn’t simply a place on a map—the name itself was an incantation

Chapultepe

I refuse to be absorbed.                I am Joaquín.

mariachi strains                fiery tequila explosions        the smell of chile verde and

Mariachi music, the heart and soulof the people of the earth,the life of the child,and the happiness of love.

These thenare the rewardsthis society hasfor the sons of chiefsand kingsand bloody revolutionists,

I am the campesino,        I am the fat political coyote

And this giant                little Zapotec

STOOD AGAINST THE WALL OF                                 INFAMY

I was both tyrant and slave.

I must choose                betweenthe paradox ofvictory of the spirit,despite physical hunger,                orto exist in the graspof American social neurosis,sterilization of the souland a full stomach.

confused by the rules,scorned by attitudes,suppressed by manipulation,and destroyed by modern society.