Read Online Gringa by Sandra Scofield - Free Book Online

touch him?”
    â€œSure. Silky. Soft.”
    I had to know. “Did you kiss it?”
    She curled her hand into a loose fist, thumb stuck up. She raised her hand up to her face and bent over a little so that she could place her pouting mouth at the tip of her thumb. “Only a little, like this,” she said, and her little tongue darted out and touched the top of her thumb. I ached as if I’d fallen off a step. “Where did you learn that!” I asked.
    â€œFrom my daddy.” She put her arms out and put her hands on mine. “Didn’t anybody ever touch you there?” she said. I couldn’t say anything. “You don’t know!” she cried. She ran her hands down my sides and stopped at my waist like I was a dancer ready to leap. “Come closer,” she said. “I’ll show you.”
    Kermit never said anything. Ten days later the Moosters were gone. They were going out farther west towards El Paso. I watched them load up. Mrs. Mooster had thrown away a stack of magazines in the trash barrel by the laundry shed; I dug them out and hid them behind the vinyl couch at home. My mother found them and made me take them back. Then it was time for school again, when all the best parts of the day are spent on buses and sitting like a board at school learning nothing new and taking all day at it.
    Maybe it was early to learn this about sex, but at least after that I wouldn’t be as surprised: it could be fun, it could be funny, and it could be used to put you in your place. I didn’t know about concepts like fate, but I did sense that my life was laid out from that summer forward. I couldn’t get out of the way if I didn’t see it coming.
    My dad found a job driving a cement truck for a driller, and we moved to a small city. There were two high schools (not counting the one for colored kids), two pools in parks like oases, a shopping center and a library. We rented a square squat peeling house in a treeless part of town, and my mother found a job as a waitress. Right after that, Bud went to Lubbock. In a few weeks it was as if he’d never been there. Lenore sagged from the shoulders. She worked a split-shift, serving laborers who lived alone, and old people. She stopped cooking or cleaning. We didn’t make any effort to pretend we were a family. I thought of my dad like an old movie: there he was, far out on a ribbon of road, chewing on a toothpick and leaving everything behind.
    Kermit had a part-time job as a mechanic’s apprentice and a girlfriend two years older who worked at a bank. I was a junior in high school. I slept on a cot between the living-room sofa and the wall, my mother slept on the sofa, and my brother in the bedroom of the house. Sometimes when it wasn’t too hot or too cold I slept in the old trailer, parked in back. I liked to lie out there and think I was in space, like a pale far-flung planet. The year went by and school remained remote. I had no friends. The only thing I cared about was my Spanish class.
    My teacher, Xavier Morales, was a Mexican immigrant. He had gotten his first degree in Mexico City, and then a Master’s in Austin. He made jokes: he said he was one of the few Mexicans to enter the U.S. bone-dry. Everybody laughed except me. He should be proud, I thought; he speaks two languages. He ran his class at a brisk pace that once made a student cry out “shit!” when he couldn’t keep up. We did drills, read passages in choral practice, struggled with our accents, until we started grinning at ourselves, picking up our heads and wanting to answer. Some kids weren’t as fast, but even they liked Morales’ class. I felt it was the one safe place in my day. I liked the way the words felt on my tongue, the cadence and timbre of my voice. Spanish took me out of myself. Mr. Morales offered to lend me records to practice at home, and I was embarrassed because I didn’t have a record player. I lay