Cracker

Even the thought of letting my naked feet touch the ground made me feel dirty and guilty. Mamá warned that bare soles attract the nastiest worms, whether round, hooked, or whipped, apart from the flesh-eating fungi and those little pinprick eggs of carnivorous spiders that are the black-heads of Beelzebub. She winced at the sight of americanitos running barefoot on the hot, sticky streets of southernmost Miami, especially in August when baby iguanas by the roadside get fossilized in hot tar.

"Tell me what separates us from the jungle?" she'd ask. "A sturdy sole of burnished Spanish leather, not bumpkin rawhide or gringo rubber."

Though being shoeless was expected from beggar boys, she'd explain, even the humblest farm horse gets shod, and thus barefooted McIvor, my best friend, represented the worst kind of annoyance: a paradox. While he did have the long delicate fingers, the corn-silk hair, and the rosebud navel of those Germans who visited Cuba during World War II, McIvor was more of a savage than an Amazonian or a Papua New Guinean. The eyes were too green, she'd point out, like the scum that proliferates in puddles of rain. His arms would take on the texture of curdled milk when he sweated too much. And, above all, his feet were so bruised and swollen they looked like mangrove stumps.

Whenever McIvor showed up at the front door asking if I wanted to play, his hand either clenching a bb pistol or a blowgun, Mamá shooed him away with a broom or a feather duster, sometimes even sprinkling holy water in case he'd turn rabid. Because of the likelihood, more the certainty, that our association would cause my own regression, Mamá had forbidden me to be his friend, and thus McIvor and I would play hooky right after lunch at school, riding out a couple of miles to his house on a pine bluff overlooking Biscayne Bay somewhere between Perrine and Naranja.

While I lived in a ranch house with Roman baths, an intercom, and a screened-in pool, McIvor's had been built by his great-grandfather with logs and posts of coquina and cement. There was little furniture inside, blankets for rugs, doors meshed with chicken wire, and a black-and-white television that sat on a wooden crate from one of those cucumber farms in Homestead. But mostly there were Dobermans raised by his mother, a huge woman ruddy as mahogany with the neck of an ox and the strength of a stevedore, evident in that she could hold an infant in one arm while the other hand docked a puppy's tail. She adorned her head with Spanish moss, and the tips of her tresses terminated in little bows made from orchids.

Unlike my mother who could not stop talking with gestures (even while dreaming), Mrs. McIvor never used her hands but instead relied on those long, flat feet to express her moods. For example, if her toenails (more like talons) scraped the wood floor it meant she was happy, but if her mood was sour she shuffled (actually skated) around the house, muttering complaints in her Southern drawl. While my mother buffed her calluses after a long day of wearing stiletto heels, Mrs. McIvor let hers turn wild with their corns, bunions, and tumors like galls on an oak.

I'd not seen a book or a magazine, not even the funnies or the sports section from the Miami Herald. Words were meant to be spoken not written, she'd say, except for the Bible whose words belong to God, so only preachers should learn how to read. The rest of us could get along with speech, dreams, and visions. Talking was in fact of little use to her homesteading ancestors, stern and silent pickers of coonties and pomelos who took on the names of Jewish prophets but would've been horrified at the thought of circumcising a newborn boy.

"Proud to be a cracker," she'd say, her fist punching the air or hammering the pockmarked kitchen counter. The word made me think of those saltines Cubans...