Black smoke floated over the bone-colored house. Fernando, half-deaf, was back from a flea market. Sweat made his back watery. He didn't want to walk around the house, into the backyard, which was a dungeon of dormant tongues. His cousins, standing in a circle, talked about chemical plants, Chinese whorehouses, Ford trucks, the hours Mass was given in Spanish. He shoved the black Chicago White Sox cap deeper over his puffy hair.
Fernando could still hear the dirty-blonde cashier lady at the flea market say something about how nobody cuts they hair no more, they just let their friends give them a fade. His cousins, cutting up fajitas, were a chorus of blank faces. He didn't like the mythology of barbecues. He was a vegetarian, yet fat, who liked eating alone. Zooming in on his baby-blue sneakers, new Reebok pumps, was easier than talking to them about their marriages.
Hours ago, he was sure insects worked the tables at the flea market. He wanted to buy a Boyz in the Hood t-shirt from a cockroach. Let the prickly fingerless arms of the cashier hand him Ice Cube's face. He was used to them, the roaches, climbing up his leg when he stood in the kitchen of the bone-colored house where his Dad came home with a full lunch box and dirt in his beard.
Sergio, a seven-foot pipefitter for Shell, was cutting up beef. His mouth moved at others across the backyard. He didn't look like he grew up working in fields in Lubbock until his hands bled. He was dressed in lizard cowboy boots. Fernando thought they made him look like a male stripper named Antonio "El Wizard" Hernandez that was gunned down on the news last week. Fernando counted how many of his cousins wore dead, slithering skin.
They all were.
"Why do you want to be black?"
"I'm not."
Hairy faces, related to him, quietly shuffled.
"Didn't your dad buy you boots?" Sergio said.
"No."
Fernando wanted to tell his cousin his sneakers were like the nouveau boots for boys whose fathers weren't home. Dumb ass cousins didn't read British fashion magazines like the ones he jerked off to in his sister's room when they went to church and he acted sleepy. He kept his mouth sewed. He would be worse off if they knew he knew where Britain was on a map.
"Your a dog gangster? Don't shoot me, Ice-T."
"What?"
Fernando took off his shirt.
"Why you care so much about what I wear?"
He threw the T-shirt at his cousin's face.
His cousin, for a few seconds, wasn't seven feet.
Belly laughs braided with burnt beef in the sky. He saw all of the hairy faces, bugging out on Sergio, cackle at his telephone pole arms. Fernando, scared of getting punched in the face, turned around, ran past his own house, to their Cutlass Supreme with the dead-eyed Jesus photo glued on the dashboard.
Fernando got under the car. Lizard boots shuffled through grass past the yard and stopped.
"Stop trying to be black."
He could have sworn they were really lizard feet.