Subdivision Canyon Mural
Since you've been gone I'm just falling apart, there's a hole in my life, in my soul, in my heart, and I stare out this window 'till light becomes dark. I keep singing those words over and over in my mind during hikes around town with my Avon brochures, as if maudlin songs to my best friend Patrick will bring him back from death. And Tuesday was red dirt hard, somehow harder than the day he died. I packed my backpack with tiny orange samples of Healthy Boost Skintrition Lotion and as many books as I could lift, a pump bottle of Healthy Boost and a roll-on stick of Today perfume. I wore the outfit I knew Patrick liked best of all, my crazy uneven orange and green skirt and a tight pink t-shirt and I hit the road.
I did it right Tuesday morning, too. Between my dirges I knocked on doors and handed samples with a lopsided smile but my timing was off, or maybe those women felt my gravestone mind, because everyone I encountered lashed at me in ill-humored ways. No! No Avon! Don't come here again! Don't leave these books anymore!
One old woman in a frantic Hawaiian muumuu and periwinkle hair wound tight around pink curlers peered from behind her screen door with a deep scowl. "I'm calling the police if you stop here again!"
So I gave up two hours in, just said I Quit, at least I quit for today, and I looked at Hillside Street, at the way the scarlet bougainvillea cast tendrils over every fence in just the same way I felt the blood drip from my heart. Oh Patrick, send me some kind of a sign that you're still there. Come on Patrick. I need something today. But the manicured land lay silent.
I didn't want to hike back up that damn hill. So I plopped my pack on the cement and sat down across the street from the stop sign where illegal border men congregate in the early morning hours, hoping someone will stop and offer them work. Six men stood there now, and I saw them try not to look in my direction, saw they shoot looks from the corners of their eyes, and I coughed loud and waved hello. They looked rumpled and tired from nights spent sleeping under pieces of damp cardboard in the canyons hidden between subdivisions.
I pulled an apple and a baggie of shelled almonds from my pack. A good time for a snack, I thought, and I ate the nuts one by one and debated whether to continue down the hill and past the school to the new condo complex, or if I should head on home and call it a crappy day. A white delivery truck with no back door rolled to a stop across the street. A man leaned out his window and yelled to the men.
"Hey! I need five strong guys! Field work! Jump in the back!" The men jockeyed for position and the five youngest made it inside the truck first. It sped away, up over the hill, probably for the strawberry fields now ripe and ready on the other side of the lagoon. The man left behind began walking down the hill. His shoulders slumped low and he walked with a slight limp.
"Hola!" I screamed a little louder than I intended. "Hola, señor!"
I held out two baggies. I wanted to offer the man some almonds and my peanut butter sandwich. He turned, looked at my face then at my hands, and crossed the street and accepted the food.
"Gracias." His voice was delicate, gentle, a stark contrast to the scars running up and down his arms and his dirty clothes.
"Siéntese, por favor." I invited the man to sit with me. I apologized for my poor Spanish, and I tried to ask him where he was from, what was his name. I told him my name and pointed in the direction of my house. I told him I had five children and I sold things to women. I didn't know how to say beauty products so I pulled out an Avon brochure and handed it to him with a roll of my eyes as if to say I wasn't too crazy about my work at the moment.
"My name is Comet." He spoke in English, surprised me. "My name is Comet." He repeated himself, pointed to his chest.
We managed some kind of bilingual mime language between us, got each other's stories, shared the sandwich and fruit and nuts, and as we talked a tabby cat walked past us and Comet reached out to give him a scratch between the ears. Comet was forty-two years old. He crossed the border a few weeks ago near Calexico. He had a sister who was ill, who needed money. He was sending her the earnings from his time in the fields, digging ditches, picking up trash, any odd job anyone would give him.
I wish I could capture his language for you. He used unusual words, I couldn't catch all of it, but I knew he saw the world in some kind of interesting and vivid way. He called the cat a "little boy wearing his mother's coat" and he reached behind him and picked a couple of those spikey purple flowers that grow among the ice plant. He squished the petals between his fingers, rolled them, let them fall to the sidewalk.
We finished our snacks in silence, or at least I thought it was silence but I must have been singing my death song because Comet asked me a question, something about a song, music, sing, I knew those words, and I explained.
"My best friend died a little over a week ago. I'm singing because I miss him. I don't feel like I can do anything without him." I was bungling my Spanish, adding English words like sprinkled cheese and as I explained tears fell out of my eyes, fell too fast, covered my cheeks and my shirt, so many tears I didn't know I still had.
"I feel arrested, Comet. I can't do anything right anymore. I used to tell Patrick everything, we talked all day long over the computer or the phone, you know? Now I'm stuck. I can't even sell Avon things anymore. My magic is gone."
Comet watched me cry, stayed still and quiet as my flood of sadness turned into full sobs over the bad morning, the loss of my best friend, all the things I wanted to accomplish in life but stood wrecked and rusted on the roadside.
"Look." He took two purple flowers, squished the petals. He spit into his hand and rubbed until a light lavender ink spread across his fingers. He used his middle finger of his right hand and began to draw on the cement in front of us. He drew a hummingbird, a flower. He reached into the ice plant, felt around, pulled out a dirt-covered stone. He added some shading, a sprig of leaves. The painting was delicate, small, almost imperceptible to the eye unless you knew where to look. He wiped his hands on his pants, and in his own flood of words he spoke. His eyes seemed darker, more lined, as if what he told me came from a place of sorrow.
"My name is Xihuitl. It means comet. I come from Milpa Alta. I paint. I am an artist. I have painted many murals in my home city. I do the work I must do now, but I can make a mural wherever I am. I hope to return home some day. All of this life is sad."
I left him with my name and phone number written on the Avon brochure. I asked him to call me in a few weeks. I told him I would try to make some extra money so that he could paint me a mural on my fence. He said he would call. We shook hands, and our eyes echoed something primal and grateful in each other.
I tried to return to the mural later that day. I wanted to take a photo, to show my boys and tell them the story of the man with a space name, the man who makes art wherever he lands. But I stood in the same spot, now blank and wet from the subdivision sprinkler system, and I thanked Patrick for sending me this sign, thanked the universe for all the ways I make my own art, and thanked Xihuitl for his humanity.
I wrote a poem about Xihuitl the night after I met him, and I posted it at my Birdpoems page.
6:26:39 PM 
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