No Quedo’ Mas Nada (Nothing Else Was Left)
Based on the theme of “Housekeeping.” Dedicated to all migrants and the sheriffs who find their bodies.
The sheriff shook his head. “No se,” he whispered to himself.
“What’s that boss?” asked the deputy.
“Nada,” said the sheriff with resignation.
Miguel Castillo had been in law enforcement for almost thirty years and sheriff for the last ten. He had seen much in the way of meaningless death. He felt he was more of an undertaker than a man with a badge, a man who once felt so earnestly the desire to protect and serve in his small community of dirt farmers, ranchers, and Hispanics from all over Latin America, not just Mexicans. He was fifty-five, had the build of a linebacker, still looked young but felt every day of his job in his bones, inside his chest and against his ribs, sticking to his skeletal system like a bone-sucking parasite. He could feel it in his feet most of all.
Once he sat behind his desk, he never wanted to get up again. Yet another part of him craved something to do outside of thinking about the next body he would find or to avoid the anxiety of being notified of a mass grave uncovered by accident. Was this the sin of ambition biting him on the ass? Had he really once thought at the age of twenty-four that he could make a difference in a state that was once known for the Alamo and the wealth of oil wells?
Miguel Castillo felt sick, and all he really wanted to do was hurl the steak and eggs he had had for breakfast. He looked at the corpse hanging from the dead tree. He could see a crack in the branch to the right of the rope. Too bad it didn’t break when he tried to hang himself, but I guess dying of thirst is worse and would take longer, Miguel thought to himself.
The corpse that was once a man was a corpse even before he was dead. The dead man knew it, and Miguel knew the dead man knew it. He could see it plain as the dust on his boots that wafted across the plain in little swirls each time the hot wind blew. The man had been dead for days. His body, though, seemed all dried out, as if every ounce of liquid in it had been sucked by some sort of cosmic vacuum, leaving this shell of a corpse with sunken raisins for eyes. The body didn’t even stink like most corpses Miguel discovered or came to collect.
Why did this man have to look so dead? At least the swollen bodies of others stank enough to remind him that they were alive not too long ago. And at least the skeletons of those who’d been dead for months or years were so far removed from their former flesh that they resembled little that could elicit the relative pain of someone’s loss. This is not how Miguel felt all the time. Just on certain days when twenty or more skeletons would be found behind a boulder in a mass grave with just fourteen inches of dry dirt playing on their petrified bodies.
He sat down on the rock the dead man had rolled under the branch to climb up on and then push off of. He imagined the man’s hands, the signal from the brain to the hands that commanded them to move the rock, and what final strength it took for him to move that rock so that he could kill himself, knowing he was already dead. This was more than Sisyphus, though. This was awareness in all its existential finality. This man’s tiny frame and small hands that were probably very good at picking grapes and squash and peppers touched this rock, rolled it to this spot. Miguel then imagined the man putting his hands on his sides, resting the palms almost backwards on his kidneys, and breathing heavily, so heavily that he might not ever catch his breath, so heavily that he might die on the spot, still standing. But to push off the rock, hanging oneself and pushing the rock away at the same time, involved such a methodical resignation to inevitability.
“Shit,” said Miguel, staring at his own hands, hands at least two times larger than the dead man’s, hands that could easily have broken this man’s skull in one fell punch at the temple. This would have been a better death for the corpse. Better than reaching an empty container and finding no water there, than believing a sympathetic noose crafted from a torn shirt held peace.
What fucking deity could allow such suffering? Such futility—
Miguel saw no shelters or forests nearby. No rabbits or coyotes. Nothing. He knew this area. Some of the locals would collect rainwater in this container. They would leave it out and open, and when they would go out after the rains and take the goats to graze the little green buds growing from the desert floor, they would then bring them across this plain on the way home to the reservoir under the dead tree.
Some oasis, Miguel thought. Muy mal . . . muy mal, whispered Miguel. A very bad joke, indeed. How far had the dead man traveled? Did someone tell him of the container? Was he misled? It hadn’t rained for weeks. Did he see the galvanized steel of the thing glinting in the noonday sun? Had he heard a rumor about the goat can? And made his way here from the border? Fifteen miles of nothing? And for nothing? “Sheeeet!” Miguel tried to spit in the dust, but he knew that if he went through with it, out would come the steak and eggs, and that would just make everything worse right now.
His deputy might think he was losing his nerve, breaking from the stalwart figure that most thought he still was. But hadn’t he lost his nerve long ago? How long had it been since his right hand started shaking, the tremor that took him when he woke up and before he went to bed? He’d rather have Parkinson’s or ALS, something that would kick his ass for real, something concrete, and then kill him! Rather than this death by nerves! Death by being a voyeur to death.
A poem came to his lips, one of his own making. This happened often. He never told anyone of this, and no one would have ever guessed that Miguel Castillo, the broad-shouldered sheriff of a small Texas border town, a man who could squash the throat of a meth head into a toothpick, had the soul of a poet buried somewhere behind that bone-sucking parasite that made him feel a thousand years old. He had wanted to be a songwriter and play the flamenco guitar, but that dream was quelled by working security at a factory and then doing drill work in the Gulf. In that line of work, he saw men almost as dead as that corpse, but no one could be as dead as this man . . . no one he’d ever seen, at least.
The poem that came to Miguel’s lips today came to him while sitting on that rock, trying to spit and not spit simultaneously, as if a baby’s fist in his throat let it be known for the first time that it could make a fist and cry. He heard lines in his brain, but no words came out. It was written on the wind, and then was nothing at all. This was the fate of all his poems.
This was a man No quedo’ mas nada This was a thirsty man No quedo’ mas nada Un migrante pobre, cansado, y hambriento No quedo’ mas nada What is to be said of the soul of this man No quedo’ mas nada The soul of his kin No quedo’ mas nada His hijos No quedo’ mas nada His long lost loves No quedo’ mas nada Or the mosquito bite he almost scratched off with his nails when he was eight No quedo’ mas nada Now with no skin to remember No quedo’ mas nada No tongue with which to chatter No quedo’ mas nada No lips to pucker when kissing his daughter goodnight on the forehead No quedo’ mas nada . . .
He could go on no more. If this poor man had known a week ago how he would look today. Shit! Ojos que no ven, corazón que no siente. He got up, pushing his hands down on the tops of his knees, a push that seemed to resist having to get up in the first place.
When he got to the One-Eyed Bull, Frida asked him what he wanted for lunch. “Juevos rancheros, con un chile poblano, y frijoles— Oh!” He said abruptly, after a short pause, “and mas tequila . . . mas tequila, por favor!” He moved the empty glass, the one filled and brought to him on his arrival, to the edge of the table, hoping that fate would decide whether to rock the table and send the glass to the floor or to remain on the edge, still as the un-swinging corpse on a branch that could have broken but never did.
Khalil Elayan holds a PhD in American and Comparative Literature from Georgia State University and is a Senior Lecturer of English at Kennesaw State University, teaching mostly World and African American Literature. His other interests include gardening and spending time in nature on his farm in north Georgia. His poems have been published in many journals, including The Black Fork Review, About Place Journal, and The Esthetic Apostle, and he has also published creative nonfiction, with his most recent essay appearing in Talking Writing. Khalil's subjects focus on trauma (due to war, poverty, violence, rape, etc.), as well as nature and environmental issues.