Esperanza, Desert Star



As pale morning rose over South Tucson, in a brief and twinkling moment of naked innocence she awakened; the rumble of cars and trucks on South Sixth Avenue rattled the glass in her window and the bone-dry heat of summer was already sweltering at hand, carried on the sharp blades of sunlight that stabbed through parted curtains into her room, burning her eyes as their lids unwillingly dragged themselves open.


He was gone now, gone back home to his wife and kids in Wherever-the-Hell, having left her with the smell of stale liquor and cigarettes and his sweat souring on the bedsheet that covered her body, a pair of twenties on the dresser, and a tied-up rubber draped over the rim of the wastebasket to remember him by. As she lit one of his half-smoked Camels from the astray on the bedside table, it occured to her that at this very moment he was probably sitting at the breakfast table with the wife and kids, explaining over a bowl of corn flakes that he had fallen asleep at a friend's house; and grinning within at the secret knowledge that, in fact, he had spent the night tasting forbidden fruit in the bed of a girl barely older than his own teenage daughter.

His little hot tamale, he had called her, with his greasy attorney-at-law smile; his little Mexican jumping bean.

His Esperanza.

He'd be back, she knew, with his sweaty privates and his Camels and another pair of twenties.

Her head hurt. Stubbing the cigarette butt out in the ashtray next to her, she slid open the drawer of the bedside table and rummaged through its contents until she found the little tin of aspirin she'd placed there yesterday; then arose from the bed and, wrapping the stained sheet around her body she took the aspirin over to the kitchenette sink and poured herself a glass of water. As she struggled at the "press here" points on the corners of the tin with her thumbs, it finally burst open, flinging its contents of little white disks here and there across the sinkboard. Gathering up three of them, she dropped the tablets into her mouth and swallowed them with the glass of water. Then, she went back over to her bed and sat at its foot next to the window.

From her vantage point on the third floor of the Desert Star Hotel, she gazed down onto the stream of traffic that moved past along the South Sixth string of laundromats and liquor stores and bars, toward the sparse crop of semi-skyscrapers poking up over downtown Tucson in the distant yellow haze. Overhead, she could hear the dull roar of an aircraft on its departure from the Tucson airport; and off to her left she could see the distant curve of the I-10 freeway, tiny beads of reflected sunlight flickering from the windows of passing cars.

As her eyes focused in on the distant freeway, she thought of leaving - of taking the pair of twenties he had left her and whatever additional cash she could scrape together and buying a ticket on the Greyhound bus and leaving - maybe going back home to Nogales or on up to Phoenix, maybe Las Vegas, maybe L.A.

Then whitewashed in the alabaster light of the eight-a.m. Arizona sun, she lay back down across the bed and waited for sleep to return.





Mark Christopher Eades
Arizona, 1997


Previously published in Poetry & Prose Annual, 1999 (Manzanita OR: Sandra Claire Foushee, Ed.)


NEXT>>>