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Virgil Suárez

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Manuel and the rubber boots story

My mother claims this is true:
like the one about getting my head
caught between two wrought iron bars
of the new fence my father put up
in the house in Havana. Bad child,
she says, what I was. Once, I almost
put out my left eye building a bottle
cap shooter (whatever it was, I don’t
remember), but it ricocheted back
on my face, slicing the skin right under
my eye. No scar though, so who can
believe it? The story I do believe,
as she tells it to my daughters, is about
the time I put on Manuel’s garden boots.
Manuel was our next-door neighbor
who worked in the lettuce fields,
and one day he came home, left his
plastic shiny boots by the front door.
I snuck in, put them on with my own
orthopedic boots already on, and well
the rest of the story is about not doing
what you are warned about, but I don’t
remember Manuel ever telling me not
to wear his boots, which my father
had to cut off my own boots with a pair
of shears, then he paid Manuel the price
of his boots. All I remember, frankly
was all the laughter, then the boots
falling like a pair of dead birds on
the patio’s cracked cement floor.
There, I thought they would simply
stand straight, shake off the guilt,
then shoot skyward to the telephone
wires on which they could perch
and preen themselves like new.

 

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