Matthew Dexter

_______________________________________________________________________

Cloud Walking

I used to drive down the road so fast that it would kick up the dust and blow it in every direction, often laughing at the poor people who had to walk past. That was until I took that walk myself. Now I notice the hopeless old Mexican lady with the napkin covering her nostrils and mouth. I can see the whites of her eyes and the panic on her face before her vision disappears for minutes until all the dust clears and she emerges a different person.

Though immersed in a virtuous profession, mechanics in Mexico are certainly not the most efficient on the planet. They ask for half the money up front and then make you wait months to fix a problem which a proficient mechanic with proper equipment can diagnose and repair in a couple days. It’s no big deal, just one of the concessions an expatriate has to make in order to embrace the good life south of the border.

The Red Dragon is the name of my car. It’s actually my girlfriend’s car, but since mine has been collecting dust with the mechanic for three months we share the monster. We happily named her for the obvious reason of color, both for the exterior and the mysterious puddle of blood that leaks from underneath her engine when she sleeps.

We drive down most other roads with the windows open because the air condition is broken. It’s been broken for years, and I’ve never seen it working. It probably only costs about twenty dollars to fix it, but we will never know because we are idiots who didn’t bother checking to see if it’s anything serious. Maybe it costs two hundred dollars. That’s a big difference for poor people like us.

We weren’t always this poor, my girlfriend and I. We were never wealthy, but it used to be better before we moved into the house too big for us to afford. The views are beautiful and we’re healthy, but it’s tough to pay for food, let alone anything else. All our money goes to mechanics. So we walk down the road now, ever since the Red Dragon was taken out of commission.

This decision to walk was not one which I accepted with a smile. It was a vile idea, but it quickly became our reality. In my dreams I often envisioned the old lady. I wanted to hold her hand and tell her everything was going to be ok. I saw her face almost every day for many months strolling down that road. We never spoke, and she never once glanced in my direction. She was never contentious but just seemed lost in her own world, struggling step by step to escape from the bubbling cauldron of her mind.

As summer fell back into autumn, the weather grew warmer and very oppressive. I began to reason that my plight was a curse from the heavens, a demented punishment for all the seasons I had lived with such burning contention.

On Halloween not even trick-or-treaters had the courage to journey up the road, even though it’s a festive holiday celebrated with purpose and passion in Cabo San Lucas. The tropical weather had become an optical illusion, as my delusions of an easy walk were diminished by a procession of ignorant drivers speeding with derision, without a care in the world for the poor man on the shoulder of the road.

As soon as my flip-flops touched the road a truck drove past, instantly covering the entire vicinity with dust, smothering my skin with sand. I shut my eyes and trod onward, breathing the filth into my lungs, coughing and walking beneath the sweltering sun. I caught up to the old lady about halfway down the road; she was spinning in circles, crying, and trying to clear the dust away from the front of her face. I gradually came closer and noticed that she was much older than I suspected. She looked like a ghost, neglected and I began imagining that she was lost in a cloud, somewhere ages and ages hence.

I grabbed her by the shoulder and told her that we would make it together.

“Quitalo,” she said, slapping me in the neck. “Me asustas gueyâ que pendejo eres.”

“Esta bien Senora,” I told her, hoping she would let me hold her hand and guide her safely from the cloud, “quiero ayudarte--”

“Estoy bien joven,” she responded, scolding me with another slap to my hand; albeit a much more gentle and playful gesture than the first.

“Por favor Senora,” I said, “pero podemos hacerlo juntos.”

“Gracias gringo,” she said, “pero callate--estoy bien.”

There’s no convincing an obstinate elderly lady about anything, so I let the matter slide and walked to the other side of the road, leaving a trail of footsteps I hoped she might follow. The dust subsided as we approached the main road and we went our separate ways; me across the highway toward the store to buy some cold cerveza and her to wait for the bus.

I got sidetracked and spent the rest of the afternoon doing reckless things I won’t bother to mention, other than to assure you that they were definitely an unproductive waste of a wonderful day. I eventually returned in time to discover the old lady stepping off the bus. It took her what seemed to me an eternity to descend the three stairs, for she was carrying a few bags of groceries and her arms were outstretched like a scarecrow holding her balance. I decided to offer a hand, but before I could speak she rejected my suggestion.

“Estoy bien joven,” she said with a flinch of her elbow, as if she could sense my presence and didn’t need to hear my words. She didn’t turn around, but only gripped the yellow plastic bags tighter as the vehicles began to race past and kick up dust. This time it was a couple crazy motorcycles and other off-road racing vehicles. The construction workers were just finishing work at this hour, and they tore down the road like lizards out of hell, so fast you would have thought they would turn into pumpkins if they weren’t on the highway by five o’clock.

I walked a few steps behind the elderly lady. I couldn’t see her face but her pace was slower than usual. I noticed her dress was torn and dirty, and her slippers were dusty but beautiful. She reminded me of Cinderella and I wondered where she lived. I had always seen her walking this road but never going anywhere other than in and out of the clouds.

“Por favor Senora--let me take your bags and help you,” I said. “Puedo traerlasâ”

Just then two trucks interrupted my thoughts, screaming down the road full of workers smiling and laughing, either at us or to celebrate the satisfaction that comes suddenly at the end of the afternoon to those who labor all day, I will never know.

“âquiero ayudarte con las bolsas,” I told her when they passed. “Es nada Senora.”

The residual filth made us both invisible, but I could hear her coughing. I started walking faster to find her but I did not see the disaster I was placing myself in. I had wandered too far from the shoulder and we had become nothing but ghosts in the clouds. The road was almost entirely consumed by a thick cloud of smoke and I could hear vehicles approaching from both directions.

“Ven aqui gringo,” the old lady told me, grabbing my wrist and swinging her grocery bags around my neck. She pulled me toward her with such force that I catapulted forward off my feet and into an enormous pile of sand where the plow deposits the dirt on the shoulder of the road.

“Eres tanto guey,” she said, caressing me by the neck as the vehicles whizzed by in an invisible surge of neglect for those less fortunate individuals without cars, “quieres morir en la calle gringo?”

She kept asking if I wanted to die in the street and I couldn’t decide what to answer. Her bony hands were on my shoulders, still holding the bags, and still invisible; like a ghostly rendezvous nobody will ever remember except for us. She helped me up as the dust finally began to subside. I could see her eyes as she flashed a toothless smile, wider and better than the most beautiful jack-o'-lantern I had ever seen. I felt so alive and grateful.

“Hasta luego--necissito caminar,” she said. “Ahorita ya me voy, adios gringo...”

I watched her walk away as I gazed into the dust which I had become a part of.

“âcuidate,” she told me over her shoulder, “cuidate gringo.”

I was speechless and words were meaningless. I had nothing to offer her except my life.

“Ahorita, ahorita, ahorita,” I muttered to the dust, which was all who was listening. “Estoy bienâ.la calle esta hermosa, obscura y profundo--pero tengo promesas guardarâ kilâmetros caminar antes dormiendoây kilâmetros caminar antes dormiendo.”

I waited a few minutes and watched her disappear into another cloud as I sat there. There was something magical about that old lady. I had seen her hundreds of times, but after our exchange I never saw her again.

I think she must have gotten lost in the dust and floated away in the clouds.

*          *          *

Summer School

It was one of those majestic moments deep enough into summer when the months and weeks all flew together as one, so that you never knew or even cared what day it was. Not a minute concern in the world more tedious as keeping time should ever enter the brain of an eleven year old child during the perfect summer vacation. Even better is attempting to go weeks on end without learning the date or the day of the week so that you’re interminably uncertain about everything except that each new day will be the same. Not monotonous but magical. The best is being lost beneath the surface of the season so submerged amid the sweet intoxications of summer that you’re swimming under a current so wonderful and strong that you’re not even sure what month it is.

It was here when I discovered the sudden courage of taking Holly’s hand, gently tucking her long brown hair behind her ear, kissing softly into her warm cheek for the first time. (Almost afraid of making any sound at all, as if something other than the nervous pathetic pucker might disturb the thunderous percussion of my own heart.) She tasted like chlorine and smelled like strawberries. The kiss was brief but auspicious, and the day was destined to be wonderful from start to finish--or so it seemed.

I was king of the New Jersey sidewalk, riding my crimson and black twenty-one speed Trek to the clubhouse with some neighborhood friends, just as I had done every morning, when I felt something electric pierce through the wind without warning. I was struck with an ineffable sensation of majesty and mystery, as if the August humidity was trying to channel something cavernous and hidden within me. I didn’t stop to fathom what was happening because the energy felt freshly invigorating. It actually inspired my Reebok running kicks to peddle faster and grip the rubber handlebars tighter and with a passion I had never previously imagined possible.

I was guided by an enormous--yet gentle--invisible hand that covered me in its palm and safely pushed me faster, like the words of a pastor erupting during the climax of a wonderful and vociferous sermon. My buddies were in this lovely palm too. But they never entered the congregation. They weren’t riding on the yellow line in the center of the street. They didn’t seem to listen to the silent revelations of the preaching. I did. They wanted me to stop, but I kept on peddling like hell to get further into the distance. I did it to get away from their words. To escape from the concern in their voices, the screeching of tires; but I heard it all.

“Watch out!”

The horns were honking and the holy fingers were pointing toward the heavens. The drivers looked demented, but I only smiled while locking eyes with the devils inside.

“Dude, watch out--traffic!”

The hand was pushing onward.

“Crazy bastard!

“Stupid-ass kid!”

Tempers were fuming. Ageless windblown sands and salty sweat was blurring my vision--burning my eyes as my friends were struggling to hold on to the curly hairs of the invisible hand, while I peeked my head out from between the humongous knuckles like an ancient turtle trapped in a vast asphalt shell.

“Come on!”

I was riding standing up hunched over the handlebars like an ogre. There was no reason I needed a mountain bike--even though I lived on Mountain Road, which was steep but smooth, paved with fresh black concrete every few years. My tires were freshly inflated, hugging the pavement so tight that after a couple minutes of maniacal peddling I arrived in record time. I tossed the magic monster into the bicycle rack, metal lock and chain spun like a spider around the silver web of aluminum spokes shimmering in the sun, never bothering to lock it of course, since there was nothing safer than summer.

There’s never been a freedom more visceral and treasured than that of an adolescent boy on a bicycle with not a care in the world. You feel leisured and liberated, like a dangerous cowboy riding the greatest stallion of the southwest, slowly cultivating the untamed beast only to feel the unmitigated power growing, blossoming like a magic flower between your legs.

Holly pulled me closer, yet it was never close enough. I wanted to feel her from the inside. Not in a sexual way. Nor even the way that society teaches girls and boys to behave. But in a spiritual and secular sense of two young souls coming together and discussing all the deepest unspoken matters of their innermost hearts and dreams. I wanted to dive beneath her skin and swim through her veins and feel for the first time those curious wonderful things that young spirits have never been able to put into words. I happily wanted to enter the unspoken center of her being. Of her mind, not her body, and actually find the riddles to the mysteries that lie beneath the surface. I was certain that two hearts could beat with one rhythm if they could only meet in the middle and get beyond those lonely pathetic greetings and rituals civilization has instilled in us through generations of awkward adolescent courtship.

I was lost in my own mind, driving nails through brief moments of boredom, when I saw them approaching. They were holding hammers and spray paint cans. These were the older kids, the boys a few years taller and dumber: the ones who smoke cigarettes in the summer and light dumpsters on fire in the fall. These boys are much more dangerous than the ones you ride bikes and eat ice-cream and barbecue chicken wings with. These are bona fide degenerates and delinquents. Only a fool would aspire to be like them. Only an idiot would want to hang out with them. But they were cool. And nobody wanted it more than me.

They usually accepted me, often with trepidation and always for the purpose of doing their favors. Straightforward errands like biking into town and buying Camel cigarettes or spraying flammable Right Guard deodorant all over my pants and then lighting it on fire. Agghhh, the good life.

I followed after them and forgot about Holly, who was afraid of the boys yet oddly admired me more when I hung out with them. She waved and laughed as I danced away after my heroes, juggling five spray cans against my stomach like a deranged puppy running after its master’s laughter, the way I’ve done all my life, struggling to keep up with the madness of my imagination.

We crossed the brook where it was most shallow, but not before I took a nasty spill in the water while trying to cross a fallen tree trunk in an awkward attempt to get to the other side. The accident smothered my hands and face with wet sand, slamming my kneecaps into rotten tree trunk mushrooms and rocks beneath the surface.

Like most mothers, my mom was constantly forbidding me from being in the brook at any time under any circumstances, which obviously only made it even more elusive and treasured. I never told her about the afternoon I inadvertently stirred up an enormous hornets’ nest (just days after a similar yellow jacket incident), getting stung dozens of times before finally ripping the black t-shirt off my back and running like hell.

This water accident wasn’t nearly as serious, but the embarrassment stung worse than a hundred angry insects. The cretins laughed. I smiled while following the idiots through a sharp and jagged secret hole cut into the fence. It was clear that our destination was the school.

We climbed rusty railings, scaling creaky aluminum pillars, pulling ourselves up to the rooftop. Terrified of heights, I was the last one to make it up. They had already begun spray painting their initials on the roof so that helicopters could see them if they wanted to land. All four of the brave imbeciles were busy. Either using hammers to pound enormous nails into the ceilings of the classrooms below or using transparent neon lighters (always with the flame as high as possible) to ignite spray paint into a stream of fire.

Elijah was taller and more immortal than the rest. He stood above them and peered through my eyes, into my soul. He was channeling something with a wicked expression, grinning and summoning me with his twitching middle finger, his head swaying slowly back and forth. I could feel a noose loosening around my waist, rising and growing tighter around my neck.

The next thing I know I’m hanging off the rooftop, dangling face first fifteen feet above the earth. Elijah is holding my ankles, shaking me and laughing into the heavens like a demented preacher. I can hear my pulse pounding in my ears, feel it in my temples. My legs are going numb. My soul is creeping into the top of my head with the rushing stream of blood and I’m wondering when this creature is going to drop me onto the colorful concrete hopscotch course below. I can see tiny sticks of pink chalk. I’m screaming for help, begging for my life, pleading with the power of the hand that holds my being within.

“Pleaseeeee--don’t let me fall!”

Reaching into my spirit I can hear it. His cavernous voice is deeper than normal and his hands are connecting me with something higher than us all.

“You think I’m gonna drop you?”Elijah asks.

“I can bench two hundred and fifty pounds—why would I drop you?”

After the first few minutes my vision grows dizzy. I feel my body lifting beyond the hopscotch playground, away from the graffiti rooftop, past the distant street where vehicles whiz by every few seconds, above the leaves of the sycamore trees. I scream. I scream and I plead and I pray until there is nothing left in my voice and the wind in my lungs becomes the breath of the breeze.

I plead with the six foot bully for my life, and he finally pulls me back up. I’m lying on my back staring up at the sun and the whites of the clouds are burning into my eyes, and I’m thinking about Holly and how Elijah is the strongest person on the planet. My hero tested me and I passed. But eleven years later Elijah dies in a car crash, and I stop believing in heroes and coffins and begin driving with caution and watching the sky as often as I can.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

Matthew Dexter is an American anomaly living in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. He writes novels, memoirs, poetry, journalism articles, short stories of literary fiction, short stories of narrative nonfiction, and everything else in between. When Matthew is not writing he enjoys life by the ocean; beautiful beaches, breathtaking views, reading, and being inspired. But never candlelit dinners on the beach. He’s afraid of Pirates.