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THE CUEVAS / Kevin Mcllvoy Of all that a later day and much earnestness of endeavor have enabled me vaguely to recall. (Edgar Allan Poe, "The Pit and the Pendulum") AFTER THE SURGERY, I pecked the shell enclosing me, though I had no real intention of breaking it. Sometimes I actually would be asleep; but not most of the time. No one knew for sure, because the doctors had said to my family (I was there): "The brain. The eyes." Their words ticked the skin of the hospital walls. The surgery was a "simple procedure." It was not supposed to have the results it did. After my week recovery period, they sent me home with an appointment to visit the surgeon in two days. They warned my parents I might continue to have the temporary blindness then, and that it might confuse me. "Not unusual," they said. On the drive home, I felt like dice enclosed in a bony palm. Every few miles my mother said, "Okay, Sebastian?" She usually called me Bass. My father was quiet. My sister Anna narrated. "Albertson's Supermarket. The new one. We're on 70. Feel it, how it goes up hill?" "Hmm," I said. The layers of gauze bandage under my nose and the bandages under my swollen, bruised eyes were most with blood. I wondered if it showed through yet. "Tegmeyer's Restaurant," she said. "Mac's taking me there. Those are good steaks, don't you think?" Something in the timbre of the word "you" made me think the question was offered to my father.She said, "Well, I think they're good." She touched my arm. "That new plant place. More houses. Don't you think Mac's cute?" My mother said, "Dear . . ." Anna was sixteen, and my father did not approve of her having a college sophomore boyfriend. "Well, not like muscular cute or anything like that. But wimpy cute. Some big houses up ahead, Bass. Some trailers. On the right." A few months before, in November, when we'd moved to Las Cruces from Illinois, my father had described the house completely by saying, "It's adobe." Td never heard of the word but thought it sounded awful and wondered what he thought was so fine in it. Almost thirteen, I was inclined to disagree with my father on even the time of day. My parents didn't say why we were moving; nevertheless, Anna and I knew the move was in order for him to take a high-paying job at White Sands Missile Range so I could have the surgery done and we could, he said, "start all fresh." 128 ¦ The Missouri Review This is how Anna and I knew. In the U-Haul truck on Highway 82 we came to Artesia, and my mother muttered, "God." She covered her tracks and said, "We get better coverage. At least thank God for that, huh, David?" Now, I had the unnatural sensation of feeling my body counterturn as the car went right. "Our turn off," said Anna. I calmed myself down by picturing our home near The Cuevas at the foot of the Organ Mountains. The farthest visible horizon is the western mesa which plunges downward to the Rio Grande; east of the river, the desert begins to boil into arroyos and rilles and wrinkled talons, then saw-spined foothills, until it becomes The Cuevas, the caves every human thought must explore before it can earn the ascent to the granite steeples of the Organs, La Sierra de la Soledad. "Home." Anna helped me out of the car. "You can see your breath," she said for the joke. It was May. "Here," my father said, and though I felt him close behind me, he didn't touch me. I think I heard the friction of his shirt on the shoulder of my mother's blouse. Later that afternoon, while changing my bandages, my mother said, "Bass. You hurt much?" Even that young, I could be frustrated, embarrassed by the innocence of my uneducated mother. And her voice reminded me. I meant to answer, but I couldn't. The warm wet cloth she used to wash the crusted blood...

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