The thing about you, your father likes to say, is that you’re dumber than the barnacles on a whale’s ass. Which shouldn’t hurt when you think about it, because he knows as well as you this is Eagle Pass, two hundred fifty miles away from the closest ocean which is a murky saltwater gulf where there are no whales just as here there are no eagles, no passes. You could remind him you both belong to the river — its copperhead heft snaking between the mesquites just behind you, in this casino parking lot on the Kickapoo Tribe Reservation, where land thick with dust and prickly pear and rock as bleached as bone can shear into cliffs so dramatic they draw the eyes of other pilgrims, seem to offer up the river like a thing worthy of its famous name, truly grande, truly bravo, míralo, admíralo — and maybe you could but then what would he say? And what simile would he use to say it? On a day like this one, what would have been your mother’s birthday, and you two standing without her at her favorite place, the Eagle Star Resort & Casino rising before you like a monument or a model sculpted from salt, all wide windows and breezeway-linked buildings and a detached three-level parking garage, a model stolen from someplace far away where buildings are white and sculpted and monumental and mistakenly set here on this expanse of land deemed neither Texas nor Mexico — but what is one from the other, really, in this place of huisache, of mesquite, of brown people like the both of you, where only things with thorns survive? Neither of you knows. Neither of you understands one another without her. Behind you the sun cracks open dark corners of the river and you think how her absence is like that: something so bright it blinds, casts into sharp relief the distance between you. You don’t tell him that either. So when you nearly walk into the path of an oncoming car and its brakes squeal and you wave your hands in apology and make it to the awning where your father is waiting he says it loudly, that bit about barnacles and whales’ asses, behind you the river, before you the casino’s cigarette smoke and conditioned air and the ring-bling-bling of the slots. You meet the eyes of the casino worker sweeping up discarded tickets from this morning’s raffle, who heard what your father said and whose skin is even darker than yours because somewhere in him the Tejano ends and the Tribe begins, but you smile at him like it doesn’t sting, like you’re not biting the inside of your lip to keep back the hurt because — because your father chuckles for a moment, for one moment thinks of something other than your mother who is not here to feed a machine a twenty, to turn a year older, to curb his hurtful words with a hand on his shoulder that he can lift to his cheek. Because the hands your father lifts now are only his own, fingers brown as yours raising the mangera over the lush St. Augustine grass he insisted on planting over her plot even though St. Augustine uses so much fresh water, a currency here worth more than gold or green cards. Because he is the only one besides you who knows why you both keep coming to the Eagle Star Resort & Casino, which burns white in the desert like a flame, or a beacon, or a blister, beside a river on a reservation neither Texas nor Mexico but other, you two neither husband nor daughter but other — so as the worker says pásale and gestures with his broom for you to cross through you follow your father, smile past the teeth drawing blood inside your mouth, say only muchas gracias, muchas gracias, like that.
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Kimberly Garza’s stories and essays have appeared in Copper Nickel, TriQuarterly, DIAGRAM, Creative Nonfiction, CutBank, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere. A native of Southwest Texas, she earned a PhD from the University of North Texas and is an assistant professor of creative writing and literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio.