Acts of Assumption by S. W. Leicher

Author:S. W. Leicher [Leicher, S. W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-940189-23-9
Publisher: Twisted Road Publications, LLC
Published: 2018-01-16T16:00:00+00:00

10

The following morning, as soon as Carolina and Doña Isabel were safely installed at the double sink with their scrub brushes (“no washing machine could get these robes as white as our hands,” my grandmother had retorted when I’d asked why she didn’t just buy a machine and be done with it), I put the front door on the latch and snuck out.

I inspected a park with a fountain in which water spurted out of the beak of an iron crane with outstretched wings. I strolled into a supermarket—La Muísca it was called—whose neat shelves held stacks of the canned sardines and Maria crackers that Doña Isabel liked so much. I peered into what must have been the original central market, smelly and bustling under a metal roof. Its stalls of fresh vegetables and fruits and arepas and cheeses and sausages made me faint with desire.

And I observed the chaos I was causing.

There was no mistaking it. Everywhere I went people looked up at me with startled expressions, whispered to their companions or just plain stared. It was really unnerving.

I was just about to head back—to admit that I should never have gone out—when I caught sight of something so wonderful that my every discouraged thought vanished. A shop with a window display of hand-tooled cowboy boots.

Cowboy boots are Manny’s favorite thing. For years he lusted after the carved leather, pointy-tipped high-heeled footwear of the Wild West. As soon as he started earning money at Fernando’s father’s auto shop, the first thing he did was save up for this pair of silver-studded boots that he’d once spied in a catalog.

I have no idea why he developed that passion. Certainly no one else I knew shared it. This was the Bronx after all, epicenter of sneaker obsession. Young men literally killed one another over a pair of Nike Air Max 97s. The first time Fernando saw Manny standing in our kitchen with his showy new boots he cuffed my brother on the head and said: “What the fuck are you doing with those things? Trying to look like a goddam Mexican?”

But Manny was not to be deterred. “Hey, I’m allowed. Better than trying to look like some idiot black basketball player.”

And here I was in my mother’s little home town gazing at boots more ornate and beautiful than my brother could ever have dreamed of. I just had to send him a pair of those boots! I walked into the shop and up to the counter where a thin man with salt-and-pepper hair and a stained apron was holding an awl.

“How much do you charge for your boots?” I asked.

“Dolores, as I live and breathe,” said the man.

“No. Not Dolores. Paloma. Her daughter. Doña Isabel’s granddaughter.”

“I could have sworn you were Dolores,” he said, gazing at me with an appreciation that bordered on the lecherous. “She liked cowboy boots, too. Or men in cowboy boots, anyway. What size do you wear?”

“Well, I was actually thinking of them for my brother, Manny. Dolores’s son.

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