Cynthia Sylvester
Silver Blue and Gold
Her dad was a cowboy, or at least that’s what she thought. He listened to country music, dug fence posts and ran the wire himself. He wore western shirts, Lee jeans, and cowboy boots – work ones and show ones. The show ones were kangaroo and ostrich, and on Sunday mornings, she would apply some elbow grease to them and make them shine. He could dance the two-step, drove a pick-up truck, drank whiskey, and sprinkled salt in his beer.
On Saturday’s, she might get to go to the dump with him. Then her and her dad might take the twenty-two and shoot bottles, or stop at Red Dog Dan’s Saloon on the way home. Red Dog Dan’s was a topless bar. But the topless part was behind a curtain he’d sometimes disappear behind, while she stayed perched on a bar stool drinking coke, eating popcorn, admiring the velveteen paintings on the wall, and listening to the country hits on the jukebox. It may not seem like something a responsible father would do, but it was Albuquerque, New Mexico, and he was a cowboy, and she was his little renegade Indian.
In the eighth grade her dad moved out. The same year Glen Campbell’s Southern Nights was released. She was in her last year at the little parochial school she’d attended her whole life. His leaving meant it’d be public school with half the parental guidance. One day while at school, the nurse came to tell her that her father was on the phone. He’d called to wish her a happy birthday and ask what she wanted. The new Bad Company Album—Run With the Pack. She’d been transfixed by it when she saw it in the music section at Sears. The cover was embossed silver, and she ran her fingers over it like a blind person. Over the silver wolf pack—a father protecting the mother and the cubs she nursed. One of the cubs was a human, a naked child.
Her dad bought it, and when he gave it to her, he rolled his eyes. This was something he would continue to do. Roll his eyes when she told her Nebraska corn-fed beef father that she was a vegetarian now. Not only did he roll his eyes but proceeded to send her Omaha Steaks for her birthday and Christmas that year. It was a way of dismissing her. A sign that he’d forgotten he raised her for a while. Forgotten that she was his little renegade half-breed.
But she remembers. She remembers he was a cowboy who married an Indian and the trails they rode.
Sometimes she’ll put on Glen’s “Galveston,” or Coyote 102.5 might play that B-side song from Run With the Pack, and she’s right there with her dad, riding shotgun on the way to the dump. He’s got an open can of beer between his legs, and a Pall Mall burns in the ashtray of the pick-up truck. Her hair blows as dust swirls around her through the open windows, and the sky is silver, blue, and gold, and love isn’t difficult at all.
Caught in the Mosh
Yoda has taught at the university for years, but this afternoon, as he got his coffee from El Don Motor Lodge lobby vending machine, he can’t remember the name of his class or the building he’d taught in for how long? He stands on the sidewalk. Cars zoom by, and the Number 66 bus belches smoke as it travels west on the Mother Road. He looks down at his shirt. Two letters in Anthrax, his daughters’ favorite band, were splashed with bleach, so it just says ANT AX. He looks further down. His khakis are wrinkled. And what is that stain?
He recalls now that he’d been writing a lecture most of the night. He smiles and sighs with relief at this memory of where his head had been. He teaches Bafflement 101 and a graduate-level course that traces the origins of obfuscation. He has found early mystification at the level of the protozoa.
As he wrote his lecture last night, just before dozing off, he thought about what his auntie had told him once. “Your thoughts are more powerful than anything. There is nothing without thought.” Then, she’d read the first chapter of Genesis to prove it to him.
He sighs and smooths his black t-shirt. He waves to a colleague exiting Room 109 of the motor lodge. Yoda brushes black bits of pavement off his pants and walks to a parked car in front of what used to be Arby’s but is now a bakery. A loaf of wheat bread cracked and dusted with flour is eleven dollars. Enigma Bread. But how good would a slice of that fresh bread be with his coffee.
Where had he set his coffee?
He sees his reflection in the car window and smooths his greying hair. Examines the side of his face with a scrap as if he’s fallen or been hit with something.
That’s right, he’d fallen asleep at his desk. It’s just a mark from his head resting on a stack of books. A paper cut, too. Books can be dangerous.
That’s why he’s trying hard to avoid entering the building just up the street. It’s full of books. The place that calls to him like church does for others. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out the folded notice of an author talk. He’s drawn by the cover of the book – a sunrise after a long, long night.
He looks across the street at the new library. It’s built where the Caravan East used to be. The Caravan, where he’d spend nights with fellow students and MaryAnne from Pojoaque.
MaryAnn from Pojoaque had the most beautiful smile and black hair, so black it turned blue at midnight. MaryAnne from Pojoaque, whose voice soothed him, lowered his anxiety levels several notches when she’d speak of anything, but mostly when she talked about pie. She loved pie. After a some beers and dances, they would leave the Caravan, walk down to Harriet’s Diner, and have lemon meringue pie, and MaryAnne from Pojoaque would tell him how meringue was made. It required strong arms. Arms that had the endurance to stir and stir and stir. The kind of arms that could churn and churn and churn as if you were running through a desert with no end in sight.
Churn and churn and churn like his stomach now just thinking of books and MaryAnne and nights at the Caravan and bottles of beer sweating on the table and her love of pies and how she’d disappeared from him because she couldn’t understand his need to study so much. To stay out late with his colleagues working on his dissertation, and, of course, his need to teach. To teach students like his auntie taught him about thoughts that can lead out of bafflement. For example, thoughts of yellow pie with meringue.
He thought maybe this could be his last year? Maybe he was ready to retire from all this. He could hitchhike out to Pojoaque and see if MaryAnn is in her kitchen that’s yellow like her favorite pie. With yellow tiled countertops and a yellow Formica table with four chairs. One with a crack in the seat so that when she sits in her cut-off jean shorts, the gap in the vinyl scratches the back of her thigh. So, she fixes it with a piece of silver duct tape that matches the silver legs of the chairs. And, in the center of the table are sunflowers and lilies and just coming out of the oven a pie, the meringue, like foamy edges of a warm sea. MaryAnne from Pojoaque will say, “Come and get a slice, Myetsoh.”
“Myetsoh.” His birth name. The one he almost forgot because his colleagues call him Yoda because he knows things they don’t. Like protozoans split because they just couldn’t live with themselves, and Auntie, God is baffled and made us so.
Just like Myetsho knows, as he crosses the street with cars honking and enters the shiny new building, someone will be talking, in a soothing voice, not about pie, but about pie and how it is the dusty road home.
Cynthia Sylvester
Cynthia Sylvester is born into the Kiyaa’áanii Clan for the Bilagáana Clan and is an enrolled member of the Diné. She is a native of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her work has appeared in ABQ in Print, Leon Literary Review, Lunch Ticket, As Us Journal, and Bosque—The Magazine, among others. She was the recipient of the Native Writer Award at the Taos Writer’s Conference. She is the host of Albuquerque DimeStories—3-Minute stories written and read by the author. Cynthia received a bachelor’s degree in the allied health profession from the University of New Mexico, and her MFA in creative writing from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Sylvester’s debut book The Half-White Album, is published by the University of New Mexico Press as part of the Lynn and Lynda Miller Southwest Fiction Series. The Half-White Album is a finalist in two categories in the NM-AZ Book Awards. Find upcoming events and forthcoming books at cynthiajsylvester.com.