Take it. I can’t go on no longer, he says. He keeps pushing the boots up at me, but I don’t want to touch them.
Go where?
To find the tribe. I’m King of the Gipsies! But I can’t go on no longer. It’s your turn, he says.
When I still refuse to take his boots, he throws them a few feet into the stiff weeds and lays himself between the tracks.
You’d better get off the tracks, I say. The afternoon train’s going to be coming along soon.
I can’t go on, he says.
You’re gonna have to if you want to live, I say. Now, get up. I kick his leg lightly with my rubber-soled shoe.
I can’t, he says.
Don’t die here, I say, irritated. I don’t have time for this. Orkill yourself, I don’t care. I begin to walk away. I look back every couple of feet but he doesn’t move. I listen. Put a rubber-heeled sole on the track.
I walk back. Kick his leg again. Hey! If I give you a couple of bucks, will you get off the tracks?
Take my boots, he says.
Do you feel that? I say. It’s coming.
Let it come, he says.
For a second, I consider that option. What’s this guy got to do with me? I don’t know him from squat and he doesn’t know me from butter. But then it hits me that I’d be the last person he ever talked to, the last person he ever saw. It’s too much.
If I take your stupid boots, will you get up and go away?
He nods with his eyes closed.
Fine. Then I’ll take your old boots.
He raises his head and looks at me for a good long while. Behind his eyes I can see shooting meteors and traces of dust—a hundred different things happening in there at the same time. But now the train is within sight. A long whistle screams over the birds. He gets up slowly while I pick up his boots. I hold them out from me by the laces and we walk a few feet away from the tracks.
Find the tribe, he says. Then love. Gotta love. All you need is love, he says, clapping me on the back. See you, baby, in the next grove! Then just before the train passes by, he runs barefoot across the tracks and disappears.
You know what I do. I drop the boots. Close my eyes and breathe in flying dust and wind from the rusty cars going by. Why?
Because you know that on the Shroud of Turin, the body is riddled with cuts but the face is serene.
Lucia, Russell, and Me
Some things I saw growing up: drunks beating their wives, kids beating each other, a baby bird being drowned in a bucket, a mangy dog infested with worms, a priest and nun getting married, a naked old man, three bad fires, and a boy with glowing red eyes.
When we first moved to America, we lived in an apartment complex. People came and went all the time, but there were some of us who stayed and stayed. We lived there seven years until the third fire finally burned it down.
That’s where I met the boy with red eyes. I really thought he had them. Lucia did too. She and I saw him for the first time together. We were walking back from the gas station with our candy, weaving back and forth on an old country road that wasn’t used much anymore. It was so quiet. On either side were scrub brush and old trees. Every once in a while there’d be a clearing, grass growing in old tracks leading to half-built houses. They were for wealthy folks from Boston who nevercame because it was too far to commute and not quaint and pretty enough for a vacation home.
Sometimes the trees touched overhead. I loved the quiet of the place, like an outdoor church. I hated the gnats that would sometimes surround your head and travel with you awhile. Lucia was my best friend in the whole world. I knew even then I would never have a best friend like her again. You really only get one in this lifetime, I think.
We were eating candy bars, different ones because we had opposite tastes (she liked nougat!). My favorites were Kit Kats and Nestlé Crunch. I loved letting the chocolate dissolve in my mouth, leaving just the wafer or crisp to be eaten by itself. Lucia loved 3 Musketeers, of course. We both swung paper bags filled with Tootsie Pops and Mary Jane taffies.
The money for our loot had come from Bobby, Lucia’s mother’s new boyfriend, who wanted us out of the apartment. Bobby was new, but always there. I couldn’t figure it out. Lucia’s mother was a beautiful Russian redhead from Nebraska who usually went out with really good-looking men. Different ones every weekend. It was one of the things I most admired about her. She wasn’t dependent on a man, neither for money nor companionship. She was never alone when she didn’t want to be. I had woken up at Lucia’s plenty of times to meet the guy who’d slept over. It had become nothing to get excited about. I was fascinated by how different they all were.
But Bobby. Bobby had a gut like an old baseball player and was as hairy as a bear. He was a salesman at Sears, which was where he’d met Lucia’s mother. She worked in the emergency room at Hale Hospital. That was another reason she was bad-ass. And another? She had been a nurse in Vietnam. That’s where she’d met Lucia’s father, a handsome soldier. Italian, like John Travolta.
Lucia, of course, was striking. Her best feature was her eyes. They were a deep ocean blue and so round. She was a kindheartedgirl. Not like me. I could always see people’s weak spots early on and sometimes I couldn’t help but pull the trigger.
It wasn’t just that Bobby was unattractive. He
