Martha Hipley                                                                     

Marco’s Father

Marco’s father told him this story, and then Marco told me, legs and arms wrapped all around me, after we had fucked or something, which has nothing to do with this story but might color how I tell it to you now or how I thought about it then at least and why I still carry it around, all these years later, like a little tumor lodged in my spine. When Marco’s father was young, say, seven or eight, or at least young enough to still be a baby pinched and coddled by his aunts, but old enough to be a boy pushed around by all his cousins, all of those cousins got in a truck and went to a fun fair one summer day. Where was the fun fair? Marco didn’t know, but he assumed – I assume – that it was somewhere in Guatemala City, and how big is Guatemala City anyway, or at least, how many fun fairs could there have been near or in Guatemala City when Marco’s father was seven or eight, which would have been sometime in the Sixties or Seventies, depending on if Marco’s father is the same age as my father, or older or younger? Marco is the same age as me, or only older by a month.

Marco was born in California, and so was his mother and brothers, but his father was born somewhere near Guatemala City, far enough to have tall tales to tell about the countryside but close enough to go to a fun fair, and also close enough to catch a flight from La Aurora to LAX when he was just eighteen and never go back until he was forty-five. I remember now that Marco and his brothers went on that trip, when Marco was just eighteen himself, and all their cousins they’d never met before called them gringos, and they rode around in the back of pickups and ate mangos and all stumbled over their Spanish, even Marco’s father, because he’d spent twenty years married to a White girl from Sacramento and living in some miserable White suburb that Marco ran away from not long after this particular family trip. I asked Marco if he had asked the cousins or the cousins’ fathers or anyone else in the family if they remembered this story, and he said of course not, because only the one who sees a ghost remembers it, and anyway, his Spanish wasn’t up to it. And was it a ghost? Well, nobody knows what it was, not Marco’s father, or anyone else he told, even the auntie who believed him or at least humored him enough to pass an egg over his little head and shoulders to suck it all away.

            So they had gone to the fun fair and were coming home, early enough to beat the sunset, as no one wanted to drive on those country roads in the night. Here I can’t help but imagine the country roads near my own grandparents’ old house – I have never been to Guatemala but I’ve been to West Virginia – and my father’s childhood stories of when the roads weren’t even paved, and before I know it I am transplanting Marco’s father to my father’s own hillbilly youth, at least in certain aesthetics of this tale. Even now, no longer in love with Marco, or even thinking of him often at all, I still find myself wanting his ghost story to be my ghost story, his father to be my father, as though these things are interchangeable, universal, as though all fathers are the same and all sons and daughters carry the same weight, as though our paths might run parallel instead of how they did, like perpendicular lines intersecting in a math problem just but once. The fun fair too is too easy to transpose. All fun fairs are the same, whether they are at the Jersey Shore or the Alexanderplatz or the Tuileries or the park in the middle of Guatemala City: always lights and music, fried things and sugar, rides that make you sick, and games you always lose.

So they were driving along those country roads, sun low but the light still yellow and clear, four cousins smashed into the cab and however many more bouncing around the truck bed, clinging to each other, screaming and laughing, sun-tired and happy, like the best memories I have of my own cousins, like the best memories I have of anyone, Marco included. And there was Marco’s father, as happy and loved and loving as any of them except that he had to piss. So Marco’s father whined and begged, and the oldest cousin pulled the truck over to the side of the road so that Marco’s father could hop down and go behind a shrub or a bush or a scrubby tree or whatever it was to piss. As soon as his pants were down, of course the oldest cousin hit the gas, and they all spun off screaming and laughing at poor Marco’s father, pants around his ankles, dripping piss on himself with surprise, suddenly alone on that country road as the car swerved away from his sight.

Marco’s father could do nothing about it but pull up his pants and walk home, and at least he was old enough to know the way home and to know he was close enough that he might make it before sunset if he hurried. So he did hurry, trotting along, pissed at his cousins for leaving, but understanding that this was the order of things: that the babies get left behind and made to cry until they are too grown to cry and to be a baby anymore. He was walking for some time, at least an hour or so, wondering if he was really going the right way at all, but of course he was, it was just the one long road, when he noticed a man sitting right on the top of a fence that ran parallel to his path. The man was dressed plainly: plain shoes, plain pants, plain poncho, all in black, with the poncho’s hood up over his head and his hands placed squarely on his knees, gazing ahead into the road.

After the long walk alone, Marco’s father was happy to see anyone else alive. He called out a greeting and waved and started to run towards the man, but the man didn’t turn or wave back, and Marco’s father stumbled over himself to slow down, to walk solidly again, to wave and call out again a bit louder and then a third time, now timid. The man still didn’t turn or acknowledge Marco’s father in any way, and Marco’s father began to feel a real dread, step by step, that he would need to pass this man on this lone country road to get home. Marco’s father was old enough to know so many people in his town, at least by sight, in part because so many of them were cousins and cousins of cousins, a web of endless cheeks to be kissed and souls to be prayed for. This man’s head was covered so completely by his hood that Marco’s father couldn’t see anything of him from the side, but even without his seeing his face there was nothing familiar about his long and lanky build, and the closer Marco’s father got, the more the man’s clothes look strange, unnatural, clean and sharply ironed, but not in the style of any of the nice clothes they had seen on the sharply dressed men in Guatemala City.

Marco’s father thought that maybe the man was old, maybe he was deaf, and with the hood he just couldn’t see Marco’s father coming down the road. He could see the man’s hands now as he grew nearer, pale and clean but laced with wrinkles and thick veins. Marco’s father hoped to be comforted by this, by his theory of the man’s deafness and age, but the hands only made his skin crawl. They might as well have been little white snakes knotted up into balls, though this is a detail that I imagine — Marco was never so visual with things and only told me that they were thin and boney and pale. There was nowhere to go but forward, and Marco’s father folded in on himself, small and meek, the child that he was, step by step, until he was right in front of the man in the middle of the road and turned to look at him, but there was nothing to see. Under the hood there was just a dark void, as empty and endless as the doubt in a little boy’s heart when he lies awake and alone on a hot summer’s night.

Marco’s father screamed and ran as fast as he could, as far as he could, feeling like he was running through wet sand, or was being pulled back by gravity, screaming and running and crying until after an eternity he turned a corner and there were all the cousins, sitting and hanging all over the bed of the truck, laughing and waiting for him. They all wanted to know what he had been doing, why it had taken him so long, nearly fifteen minutes, to make it around the corner, was he taking a shit too? Marco's father asked them what they meant. It had been an hour at least, he was tired and thirsty, look, his tongue was dry, and didn’t they see the man on the road with no face? But the cousins swore there was no man, that they had only just gone around the corner, a hundred meters or so, not even an hour’s worth of walking, and once Marco’s father was seated in the truck bed, surrounded by a wall of the older boys and girls, they doubled back to show Marco’s father there was nothing to see, just a hundred meters or so of winding road and a little bit of brush or scrub with a still-wet spot of dirt behind it. They got back into town, and besides the auntie who gave him the limpia the next day after he’d spent a night crying in fear, no one seemed to believe his story and no one seemed to remember it either, no one but his own sons, or at least Marco, who told it to me and maybe all the girls he fucked, and me, who only knew Marco for a moment but still remembered the story better than most things we talked about in that summer.

When I was young, I had a little scar right at the base of my spine, pink and hot, right at the top of my asscrack, and when I would sleep with boys I would tell them I was born with a tail, just like everyone in my family was. They would touch the scar with wonder and ask me more questions about the tail than they might have ever asked me about anything in my life: what did it look like, how did it feel, did it hurt to cut it off, could I still feel it like a phantom limb, did I miss it? In truth there’d been no tail, just a little tumor between two vertebrae that scarred over badly once removed, and the story was a screen for my own insecurity: that a boy who wanted to fuck me might see it and change his mind, feel some disgust at the horror of my imperfect body, unless I pointed to it and made it something strange and new.

I never tell that story anymore, the scar has long faded into a tiny white line, and anyone I’d fuck now is old enough as well to have their own scars, fresh and faded, that none of it really matters. When was the last time someone felt the need to tell me about a scar or a chipped tooth or even a tattoo? I fucked a man last week and marveled at every little imperfection on his face – the gap between his two front teeth, an ingrown hair in his stubble, a mole barely hidden in his buzz-cut hair – all of it adding up to someone real, alive, decaying but not dead, a body as a corpse in motion. But back then I was young and told Marco about the tail, and he told me about the faceless man, and for a summer or a weekend or an evening, we were fucking, glancing around the holes between us.

END

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Martha Hipley is a filmmaker and writer from Baltimore, Maryland, who lives and works in Mexico City. Her stories have been published in Maudlin House, VOLUME 0, and ARTWIFE, among others. When not writing, she enjoys training as a triathlete and boxer.