Picture Tape

His girl had been out here before. She's gone now; she's left and she's not coming back. He keeps her picture taped to his mirror. It's one of those affairs, this picture, which makes me shake with delight and sadness. Because the picture is taped together with packing tape and her face is this fracture now which looks back at him when he's getting his coveralls out of his closet or when he's brushing his teeth and holding his rinse cup in his hand, there she is as beautiful and destructive as anything else you'd see out here or anywhere. His girl would bake bread while he was in the fields or running the hills or tending the horses – tending the horses with clicks of his tongue, with a turned shoulder and a hiss, with a clap of his hand on his thigh – while he sat on one of the old chairs and tongued sips of whiskey, letting his eyes blur on her as she moved around in the kitchen with a towel tied around her waist as an apron and the smells of food cooking filling the room.

They used to go up into the hills, into the mountains. Loaded the bed of the truck with a cooler of sandwiches, apples, whiskey in a brown paper bag, jugs of water, a small tent and sleeping bags, thin sheets, cassettes to play from the truck speakers, tinny sounding cantina music of horns and plucked guitar strings. They'd go up into those mountains waving as they went, the truck jumbling over the macadam driveway and through the open gate and over the first cattle guard with a thrummed rattle and behind them a hazy thicket of white dust from the gravel piling on the air as though the ground itself were producing clouds.

After they were gone, when I could see the truck snaking along the thin switchback road of the mountain, I'd go into the house to lie on their bed and wonder what it was like as it had been a long, long while since I had a woman to speak to beyond the woman of my brother.

On their bed I would close my eyes. Listened to the sounds of the house, the wind against it, howling through the eaves, through the cottonwood trees lined against the irrigation creek, through the hedges and yucca plants around the house and on the hill that led down to the fields.

I'd lie there and let a tiredness seep through my body until I was asleep, my breath the only noise of the house besides that of the wind. I'd dream or a curtain of black would close over and I'd come to soon after, a pall of sweat darkening my t-shirt and stippled on my forehead.

If I dreamt it was of storms, waves, a great sea of endless depth and cold, colored to silt, all things suspended in its water.

The thing for me was that I could never settle down.

I'd get to thinking and wondering.

And then she'd figure out what was on my mind, as though it were printed on my face and threaded in the tone of the words I'd speak to her.

In the kitchen I would lower my head below the tap and let open the faucet to gulp at the warm water that came. I'd splash it over my face. Rubbed the water over my neck, my arms and back over my face. Lapped it up with my hands until puddles slicked the floor where I stood.

Outside I'd squint into the mountains to see if I could make out the truck. If I could see them stalking around their campsite or sunning themselves in the bed of the truck. I'd call out to them, shouted, Hey. Hey. Hoping the wind would carry to them, my voice a whisper.

Edmund Sandoval lives in Chicago, Illinois, where attends the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is working toward his MFA.