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75 In a hundred years, no one would believe this moment of sanctuary could have happened. Tipping over the summit, we gradually descended into a softer valley. The Subaru breathed relief, the air warmed, and the road widened. Dad no longer gripped the handhold, though he had left a permanent imprint, and his blood pressure fell. In a window of twenty miles, trees at altitude gave way to tall grasses and small ponds and then larger ponds, not a swamp but a wet flatness where reeds and bamboo might have found a hospitable home. And then the window closed. The wetness dried instantly into a savannah, as though nature herself had watched our progress and squeezed more and more water from the land with every mile we traveled south. “Amazing isn’t it, Dad?” “What dat?” “Twenty miles back we were in the mountains—hard to live there. Then we go twenty miles down and it turns into this dried-up grassland—also hard to live here.” “People, dey find a way. If dere’s noding else, dey live anywhere. Den everyding , it get swallowed up. No one, dey live ’lone after dat.” A sign on the road read palencia. “That’s where we’re staying.” “Down here?” “Just a little farther.” “Dat’s good. I need one nap.” 10 After Dad and Mom married, he bought the Blue Jay Bar across the tracks about two hundred feet from the Star Hotel. He built a small apartment in the back with two bedrooms, bathroom, and kitchen, fraying carpet, worn furniture , and a black-and-white television with nonfunctioning rabbit ears. Anything used and tattered, Mom made spotless and comfortable. A small doorway separated the apartment from the bar, which smelled of either Pine-Sol and Clorox or beer. No other odors penetrated these olfactory extremes. Patrons came in by 11 am, some staying for an hour until lunch, and others 76 remaining until the 9 pm closing. What the regulars lacked in number, they made up for in predictability, taking a day off a year—Christmas—not because the bar closed, or because they held the day sacred, but because spiked eggnog flowed freer and more abundantly in their own homes or at a neighbor’s party than it ever could in our bar. The regulars were creatures of habit who sought drink of least resistance. Jack, a retired teacher and a regular, had taught high school writing and literature for thirty years, serving as one of the best, most thoughtful educators who had ever graced the English department of our small town, or so I had been told. He liked highballs with little water, or whiskey straight, one shot every couple of hours, with conversation and argument filling the void between swigs. His blond hair lay like straw and his bloodshot eyes sagged. He drank more than most, but rarely exhibited slurred speech, imbalanced swagger, or sleepiness. He had a soft demeanor and made people feel safe, though every instinct told them to steer clear of men who drowned their own livers. When I turned four, Dad galloped from one end of the bar to the other with me on his back. My little hands lost their grip around his burly neck, and as I began to fall, he caught my arm from behind and snapped it in three places. Mom hurried me to the emergency room, where Dr. Moren, the same doctor who had delivered me, x-rayed my arm and molded a cast from hand to elbow. When I returned to the bar, Jack pulled a pen from his breast pocket and signed the pristine, still-drying plaster—Little man, hurt arm, dry your tears, stay from harm, be strong, go far, little man, hurt arm. Mom liked the verse so much she had me show it to everyone. Juanito saw the scribbles but couldn’t read them. He smiled and cradled my small arm in his hands and said, “Priddy nice.” A sheepherder who boarded at the Star, he commanded only a handful of English words. He was diminutive in size and appeared quiet and unassuming, but if struck by something funny, he exploded with a hyena laugh, part hiccup, part wheeze. People around him laughed too, not with him but in spite of him, as though Juanito’s cackle showed God’s own sense of humor on display. Not able to write himself, Juanito sketched next to Jack’s lines a caricature of a buxom...
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