Adelante
“Retreat from the Season” by Aaron Lelito (originally appeared in High Shelf Press, Issue XVII, April 2020)
A spasm of guilt ripped through Aurelio sixty miles east of Ely, Nevada. He barely registered the whine of tires over the rumble strip just before the truck left the highway at seventy miles per hour. Even blinded by tears, Aurelio knew the wave that smashed into him had everything to do with the Spam burrito his mother had made for him that morning.
***
“No te olvides ésto, m’ijo. For when you get hungry,” his mother said, handing him the foil-wrapped bundle. She wiped her eyes in the predawn chill, next to the little pickup. Behind her, his half-sister stood frowning.
Cami does that when she’s sad, Aurelio told himself. She cares. I know she does.
“And make sure to put gas in the tank,” his mother gulped. She lunged in to press her cheek hard against his. “You can be so forgetful when your head’s in the clouds.”
“Knowing him he’ll end up on Jupiter,” Cami said.
“¿En serio, Camila? Now?” his mother hissed. She led Aurelio to the sidewalk and pulled his head down to hers. Aurelio began to cry as she whispered into his ear.
***
He crossed the San Joaquín Valley beneath a crushing homesickness.
Wasn’t this supposed to feel better? Didn’t doing this show character? Maybe a little bit of guts?
Aurelio didn’t think that trips to San Francisco, Modesto, or Tijuana officially counted as ‘travel.’ And he’d never been away from family before. It wasn’t until this summer that he realized he had been raised with the South Bay conceit that the world came to you and so there was little need to go into the world.
You could hear all the accents you wanted from the kitchen window.
The highway bent upward as the familiar black oak and eucalyptus foothills gave way to dark, pine-blanketed mountains. Aurelio remembered his mother’s warning and stopped for gas at the resort in Kirkwood, staring open-mouthed at the granite mountains above him while the tank filled. He knew from his junior-year Earth Science class that these mountains owed their existence to the Farallon Plate’s two hundred million-year nosedive beneath the continent. The rich kids at school—the ones who spent weekends skiing these mountains and came back smiling on crutches—never seemed to give two shits about plate tectonics. Standing there in the cold elevation, he was humbled by the beauty of the surrounding peaks, helpless in the face of the massive, unseen forces hundreds of miles beneath his Chuck Taylors that nudged them higher.
“If I’ve never actually seen anything past the Sierras, does it really exist?” Aurelio said out loud as climbed into the cab. He half-expected a response from the passenger side of the bench seat.
Nothing. Just a trucker’s atlas, a plastic water bottle, and a foil-wrapped burrito.
***
“Who is it that can tell me who I am?”
Aurelio’s eyes passed over the line again and again until King Lear’s words were torn from his hands. He knew it was stupid to let himself get distracted on the way home from the bus stop. The Shakespeare anthology was too big and heavy for his backpack.
“Think you’re special, fucking schoolboy?" Manuel pushed his forehead into Aurelio’s. His breath stank of Skoal and MD 20/20. Over his shoulder, Eddie and David elbowed one another and grinned, excited for the coming beatdown. “Bitch ass uniform,” Manuel sneered and flicked Aurelio’s starched collar. “Those priests make you suck their pitos, too?”
The blow landed so cleanly, Aurelio’s knuckles didn’t even hurt when he crushed Manuel’s nose.
The tall boy fell to the pavement, a thick slurry of snot and blood gushing through his fingers. Eddie and David stepped back when Aurelio moved to pick up the book. Heart galloping, he repeated his mother’s word for when things looked bad. Adelante, adelante, adelante...
“¡Jódete, culero! ¡Pinche bolillo!” Manuel gagged through the blood.
Aurelio kept walking. Being called an asshole white boy was an acceptable trade for getting home uninjured, he figured.
“Ya estuvo, Manny,” Eddie said.
“Yeah, bro. Let it go,” David piped in. “You can’t fight crazy.”
Adelante, adelante, adelante, Aurelio repeated.
***
Just as the trucker’s atlas suggested, there was indeed a world beyond California. At Carson City, Aurelio turned east onto Highway 50. Peering through the bug-smeared windshield, he was certain that the barren plain of central Nevada must be where Mars rovers were field tested and decrepit mariachis sent into oblivion when their arthritic fingers could no longer manage “El Niño Perdido” on trumpet.
An occasional sign mangled by shotgun pellets would remind him that he traveled The Loneliest Road in America. Rusted barbed wire. Splintered fence posts. Sun-battered sage. Twisted bitterbrush. Dirt roads that intersected the highway at ninety-degree angles and disappeared over the horizon. The only things missing were sahuaros and Roadrunner and Coyote.
Aurelio wondered where those eerily straight roads could possibly go. To nothing, he thought—and then doubted that Father Benítez would have accepted the idea that any road or path could ever lead to nothing. He imagined the Jesuit shaking his finger at him during one of their talks. “If your road takes you nowhere,” Father B might say, “then it’s probably because you didn’t actually want to go anywhere.” Aurelio rubbed his eyes and twisted the radio dial for anything other than preachers or pedal steel guitars. He was pretty sure he would give his left testicle for just one Metallica song out here in the middle of nowhere.
***
“This is it, gentlemen,” Father B said in their last Philosophy class before graduation. “The end that is a new beginning."
In the fall, virtually all of them would start college somewhere.
Aurelio liked his Philosophy class. It was where he got to think big thoughts without feeling self-conscious. He also liked that Father B rocked a leather jacket around campus and listened to the Rolling Stones in his office. Ever since his first fight in the cafeteria, he and Father B had met regularly, to “check in,” as old priest put it.
Father B walked slowly through the classroom. “Some of you will take paths that have been laid out for you. Others?" he said, resting the tips of his fingers on Aurelio’s desk without looking at him. “Others, will explore places for which you have no frame of reference." He tapped lightly on the desk before moving on. “What will that journey draw out of you? How will you use it to become you?”
***
Cami was beside herself when she found out.
“Michigan? May as well call it Me-chingan! Why there, Lio?” Cami said, hands in the air. She liked to call him Lio, slang for mess or hassle. “You also got scholarships to Berkeley and Stanford. Even UCLA would have been better!”
The only two things he and Cami had in common were their mother and a principled contempt for SoCal.
“I heard it’s so humid there it’s like living in someone’s mouth. And leaving me alone with Mom…” Cami trailed off, a deep worry line cutting into her brow. Aurelio wondered how long after he left before that frown became permanent. “Just like Bill.”
Aurelio rounded on Cami and just as quickly clapped his hands over his face to hide the shame. To invoke Bill’s name at a time like this... Only then did Aurelio understand the full extent of Cami’s anger. Her hatred for his White father was almost supernatural in its ferocity.
Could I possibly be like Bill? he wondered. How do you tell the only family you’ve ever known that you need to experience something different? How is that betrayal?
“You must really want to get away from here. Only gabacho kids move away from home just like that,” Cami said, snapping her fingers in his face. “Guess that settles it, huh?”
***
“I had a good time, Aurelio. For such a big guy, you’re actually a pretty good dancer—once I could pry you off the bleachers.” Wendy laughed, her eyes sparkling in the dark car. “I’m glad that we got paired up."
“Me, too,” Aurelio said as they took the off-ramp to Los Gatos.
The car rumbled confidently and he silently thanked Cami, as much as it galled him. “There’s no freaking way I’m letting you take one of those fancy prep-school girls to prom in Mom’s pickup,” Cami had moaned, her eye roll approaching lethal intensity. Aurelio had no idea how she had convinced her latest boyfriend to give up his car for the night, but the restored Plymouth Barracuda’s dual exhaust bumped like double-bass drums and the shift knob vibrated menacingly in his palm at the stoplight.
For perhaps the first time in his life, Aurelio thought he might be within spitting distance of cool.
He didn’t know this side of the Valley well, but Wendy lived close to the private girls academy that often planned events with his all-boys school and he was vaguely familiar with the neighborhood. The most popular guys at school had dates to senior prom all lined up in advance—some of them probably from birth, he figured. But people like him, the un-cool, had to enter a lottery where they were randomly paired with some similarly underwhelming specimen from their sister school.
Aurelio had resigned himself to entering the lottery for as shy as he was. Wendy, though, he couldn’t figure it out. With that smile and personality, there was no way someone like her should have struggled to find a prom date.
“Can I tell you a secret?” she said in a stage whisper. “Several guys from your school asked me to prom.”
A sudden shot of jealousy ricocheted through Aurelio.
“But…how do I say this…they all seemed like handsy mouth-breathing snobs who’d end up eating my pepper spray, so I decided that I’d try the luck of the draw instead. And it worked!” She laughed with no hint of sarcasm or irony. “Ugh, this princess shit is uncomfortable,” she said, torquing her neck and tugging at the high neckline of her gown.
Aurelio’s heart swelled. They were actually having a good time. He swallowed hard and, when the light changed, dropped the clutch too quickly. The Barracuda’s rear tires howled and they sped through the intersection with Wendy screaming out the open window and Aurelio sawing at the steering wheel to keep them from fishtailing into the light pole.
“Whoa, Aurelio! You drive even better than you dance!”
***
The suede hardpan slid past. Mind-numbing desert endlessness. Aurelio thought of Cami and then looked at himself in the rearview mirror for the hundredth time that day.
Only gabacho kids move away from home just like that, Cami had said.
***
“Do your parents know we’re here?”
Aurelio glanced nervously around the foyer of Wendy’s massive Los Gatos house. He hadn’t really noticed it when he picked her up because her parents were gushing, all the frenzied pictures, and she looked so stunning in her dress. Gaping at the high ceiling and mission-style chandelier, it slowly dawned on him that Wendy might live in an actual mansion.
“Their room is all the way on the other side." Wendy smiled as she put Aurelio’s hand on her waist. She placed her hand on his shoulder and began to turn slowly, moving to imaginary music. “A bomb could go off out here and they’d sleep right through it."
“A pin drops in our kitchen in the middle of the night and my mom’s running around with her gun yelling about robbers,” Aurelio said quietly, his voice slightly hoarse. He could feel his heartbeat in his ears. The blue crêpe silk of Wendy’s dress slid beneath his fingers. Her hip was round and firm.
“Ha! Your mom sounds awesome. My parents would just hide in the safe room and sip wine until the police showed up." She looked up at Aurelio through half-closed eyes, her lips parted slightly. “So,” she whispered, “I’m not really down for anything super heavy, you know, but...maybe something?"
Aurelio’s scalp began to tingle, a cold dread rising in the pit of his stomach. He’d figured this would happen someday. Wendy slipped her fingers under his cummerbund and gently pulled him up against her. “We could still have some fun before you go.”
***
Noises from the kitchen told him he wasn’t the first one awake. His mother stood at the stove in her floral print nightgown, her short, compact shape moving efficiently to manage a frying pan and two steaming pots.
Aurelio took in the aroma of his mother’s chile colorado. He had never learned how to make it like her. Albóndigas, mole poblano, huevos con chorizo, chile verde—he learned his mother’s other recipes so well even Cami couldn’t compete. But the chile colorado had always eluded him. There was a magic that he couldn’t conjure from the deep red sauce like his mother.
It has to be the cumin, Aurelio thought.
He gently nudged her aside and took over at the stovetop. In the black iron skillet was a can’s worth of cubed Spam bubbling in chile. She’d taught him to turn the Spam at just the right rhythm—too quickly and you would turn it to mush, too slowly and it would burn. He turned his head to keep from inhaling the pepper fumes rising from the pan.
His mother grinned. “Ya sabías que nuestra gente—”
“Yeah, I know, Mom,” Aurelio coughed, blinking through watery eyes. “Our ancestors held their kids over burning chiles as punishment." She snickered and Aurelio wondered whether he deserved to be punished for what he was about to do.
At exactly the right moment he scooped the fried Spam onto the large flour tortilla his mother had laid out and prepared with spiced black beans and potatoes. Aurelio had seen his mother fold a thousand tortillas and it always left him in frustrated admiration. When he did it, a stray kernel of rice or errant frijol would escape and require herding. His mother’s tortillas, on the other hand, were perfect. Always.
They lingered in the kitchen until Aurelio acted like it was sleep he wiped from his eyes. “I’mma start loading the truck,” he said, leaning in to kiss the thick salt-and-pepper hair spread across her forehead. She smelled like warmth and home.
His mother nodded and turned quickly back to the stove.
***
Aurelio had driven almost the length of Fallon when he remembered about the gas. He didn’t technically need to fill up yet, but his mother echoed in his head along with Cami’s jab that he’d end up on another planet if he wasn’t careful. With a jerk of the steering wheel he pitched the little pickup truck into the last gas station in town.
Do they think I’m gabacho now? Under a white sun, he watched the digits slowly tally the gallons and dollars on the pump. Do we not get to go places, too? Why should I have to stay home to be me? What does ‘being me’ even mean?
Aurelio hesitated before getting back into the truck. The tin foil bundle glinted in the sunlight blazing through the windshield. He could not shake the feeling that something waited for him in the cab. Get in, it purred. Just another 2,100 miles to Ann Arbor—or 300 miles back home. You decide.
He slipped behind the wheel, sweat beginning to bead on his forehead.
A gaudy procession of fast food joints slid past on his way out of town. His mother had cautioned him, “M’ijo, when you’re there, make sure to eat well. And stay away from the chicharrones!”
“I don’t think they’ll have chicharrones in the dining hall, Mom.”
“¿Te imaginas? A place without chicharrones!”
***
On the way back from the kitchen, Aurelio stopped in the dim hallway to inspect the family photos he had ignored for years. He winced at the picture of himself at age two, smiling proudly in his giraffe-patterned footie pajamas. Oh, man. And the one at eleven—an acne-ridden, pubescent, Picassoesque monstrosity with Carlos Santana curls and broad Mexican teeth testing the physical limits of his braces. “Jesus Lord,” he mumbled.
The other frames displayed his and Cami’s annual school photos, with pictures of their mother mixed in. Over the years his mother’s thick, black hair had become shorter and grayer, while Cami’s had grown longer and more glamorous as she transformed from a sullen dork into a curvy bombshell with blue-black Farrah Fawcett hair and a tattooed beauty mark on her cheek.
The only thing consistent across the years of photos was that Aurelio was by far the lightest of all them.
***
The road rippled in the stupefying heat. He checked the temperature gauge and felt some relief. It wasn’t exactly a looker, but the truck ran well.
The previous winter his mother had insisted that they browse the used car lot.
“Why we need a truck, Mom?” he asked, walking between two dented Chevys still wet from rain.
His mother shrugged with that tilt of the head that Aurelio knew from junior-year Rhetoric class was a lie of omission. She pointed at a Mazda mini-pickup that had seen better days. “¿Qué te parece esta troca?”
“I like this one better,” he said, pointing his chin at a slightly less-old Ford. “It’s only $200 more. We’ve never had a car with air conditioning, Mom.”
“Uy, no,” she said, wagging her finger. “Too expensive.”
**
For the next two hours, Aurelio fought sleep while the heat shimmers danced across the two-lane highway. Between head bobs, he would peek at the foil bundle and the plastic water bottle next to it. Outside, the mirages quivered and swirled into the shapes of arrows or hands. Some beckoned him forward, others back. The phantoms crowded his windshield until he couldn’t see past the end of the hood.
“Fuuuck!” he shouted at no one, sweat dripping into his eyes. He opened the bottle, splashed warm water onto his face, and stuck his head out the open window. Hot wind flung the water from his face, like slobber off of a dog. It helped. The asphalt still folded and swayed in the afternoon heat, but the spirits had retreated. The sharp perfume of heated sage and rabbitbrush filled his head.
***
“Shitshitshitshit. What’s wrong? What can I do?”
Aurelio felt Wendy move next to him on the bed. His eyes were closed tightly, the tears salty on his lips. He shook his head and waved his hand to indicate that everything was fine, there was no problem, nothing to see here. But he knew it was hopeless, that Wendy would see him plainly now.
“Here, sit up." Wendy’s voice projected a calm authority that both embarrassed and centered him. Aurelio swung his feet onto the floor and slouched over to hide his face.
“Hey,” she said, placing a hand on his shoulder, “I really need to get out of this thing—like, right now. It suddenly feels pretty stupid. You’re upset and I’m all in this fucking princess costume.”
Aurelio bent over to bury his face in his hands. Sounds of Wendy moving behind him to the dresser. “I won’t look,” he said. “I promise. I’m sorry.” He rocked back and forth, as if the motion might somehow absorb the shame. “I am so, so sorry."
“Don’t apologize!” she said between grunts as she wriggled out of her dress. “I’m worried I did something wrong, that I hurt you.”
Aurelio could only shake his head as he fought to steady his breathing, the way Father B had taught him. “No. It’s not you." In, one-two-three. Hold. Out, three-two-one. “I—I didn’t mean to scare you. I just sorta...panicked. I guess.”
The bed settled again and Aurelio felt a hand under his chin gently turning his face. He opened his eyes. Wendy’s formal makeup contrasted heavily with her 49ers t-shirt and sweatpants. “No, I’m the one who’s sorry. I just assumed…." She searched his face, her lips pulled tight.
“Assumed what?”
Wendy reached down to squeeze his hand and gifted him with a look. Aurelio knew that, even though they had met through their schools’ lottery, had only spoken on the phone twice, and had first met in-person only a few hours ago, this girl’s concern was real. Aurelio felt something that he’d never felt with anyone else his age. Trust.
“What did you assume?” he asked again.
Wendy cocked her head slightly and leaned in close. “Aurelio, can I ask you something—I mean, no judgement?”
He smiled and squeezed her hand back to let her know that it was okay, that it might as well be now. That maybe he was ready. “Go ahead.”
***
Father B flicked the glass drinking bird he kept on the corner of his desk. It tipped forward to sip from a matching shot glass and then rocked back, the green-tinted water flowing down its fluted body.
“Some booster sent me this as a gift,” the priest said, shaking his head. “Apparently he figured a life of celibacy and service to God and his children merited this chingadera.”
Aurelio liked it when Father B cursed. It made him more approachable. “You did take a vow of poverty,” he said under his breath.
The priest leaned back and laughed, ample belly shaking beneath his black button-up shirt. “Smart ass,” he said, catching his breath.
They both welcomed this break. Their talk had become serious and lasted far longer than usual, especially after Aurelio had shared what happened with Wendy.
Father B straightened his shirt and sat upright again. He looked thoughtfully at the bobbing bird. “Aurelio, I’ve dedicated my life to the Church and to those who seek peace through its teachings. At the same time, we Jesuits have established ourselves as holy pains in the ass for going off script.”
Aurelio sat stone-still, hanging on every word.
Father B smiled vaguely, inspecting the bird. “I want you to know that when it comes down to it, I’m here for you, regardless of what the Church says about any of it. Doctrine should serve people, Aurelio, not the other way around." He paused for Aurelio to say something. The boy sat, impassive as ever. The priest sighed. “I know you better than maybe anyone else in this school. Once I established that you weren’t a menace, I came to appreciate you as a horrible technical practitioner of Catholicism and an exceptional spirit. Behind that inscrutable façade is a real, feeling person dedicated to learning and giving more than he takes—with some minor hiccups along the way,” he said.
Aurelio’s scalp prickled in embarrassment. He’d come for guidance, not compliments.
“You have the soul of an explorer, Aurelio,” Father B said. “This is just one more thing to make the expedition more interesting.”
***
The little truck climbed into pinyon-juniper highlands. Father B had made his class read Edward Abbey their sophomore year. Aurelio wondered whether the hiker who died of dehydration in Desert Solitaire sat beneath one of those kinds of trees in his last moments. Looking out over the mountainside of short, handsome conifers, he figured he agreed with Abbey that there were worse ways to go. He glanced at the atlas spread across the steering wheel and traced the red line of Highway 50 eastward.
He was starving—and still so far from Eureka.
***
“When are you leaving, Aurelio?” Father B asked. They’d arranged to meet one last time after graduation.
“Two weeks. I’ll show up just in time to find my dorm and get my classes." They sat for a while in silence. This time it was the priest who waited.
“I don’t know why I’m doing this,” Aurelio blurted out. “I don’t have any of it figured out yet. Maybe I should wait.”
Father B grinned and shook his head. “Aurelio, if we waited until we knew it all, we’d never go anywhere. We’d be like the band that never leaves the garage to play a real show, or the self-loathing writer who keeps revising and never submits.”
Aurelio let that sink in. He wondered whether anyone ever went out there feeling finished—or if they ever should. Maybe feeling like you’ve got it all figured out meant you’re delusional. Or dead.
***
Aurelio steered the truck through a narrow river gorge. Stray thoughts of his mother, Father B, Cami, and Wendy flashed so vividly in his mind that he hardly noticed when the rock walls opened onto Ely. He almost ran the red at 5th Street and spared only a glance at the six-story brick structure with the sign announcing HOTEL NEVADA–A NEVADA LANDMARK SINCE 1929.
Highway 50 spit the truck out the east end of town. In the distance, a mountain his atlas called Wheeler Peak rose out of the plain. He tried to smile. The temperature was falling and the wide sky had taken on a surreal, purplish wash. His mood teetered on a precipice in the high-desert gloaming.
Aurelio’s stomach growled loudly enough to startle him. He had resisted his hunger not to save money, but to hold onto the last thing his mother had given him. Another grinding moan from his empty belly. It’s time, he thought.
***
The little pickup backed out of the driveway onto the street. Aurelio hesitated, the engine idling quietly. His mother waved first. Cami put her arm around her, wiped her face, and shook her hand in the air, like shooing away a fly. Aurelio watched them in his side mirror until they disappeared in the twilight.
***
It all happened at once
the dash cluster, gas gauge, the needle pegged on E
sixteen-gallon tank, 258 miles from Fallon to Ely, sixty miles past Ely, averaging 21 mpg—NO!
as he took his first bite.
The emotions pummeled him harder than Manuel ever did, an instantaneous overflow of guilt, grief, and memory.
Somehow the little Mazda did not roll as it slid sideways through the gravel turnout. Aurelio stumbled out of the cab and ran through the dust cloud into the desert. Gnarled sage and bitterbrush snagged his t-shirt and jeans. Images flashed before him.
Mom
Cami
Wendy
Father B
On his right, the looming silhouette of Wheeler Peak thrust upward to tear a hole in the painted sunset. Jet engines roared through his head. Still clutching the burrito, he reflexively took another bite.
Pain ripped through him again. Beans, potatoes, and cubed Spam spilled as he fell.
Face-down in the dirt, Aurelio cursed through clenched teeth. He grabbed fistfuls of silty gravel and pushed his forehead into the ground. At some point, the tears dripping off his nose, he passed out.
***
Cool desert sand rasped Aurelio’s cheek. He was unsure how long he had been there. Long enough for the indigo dusk to fall and a chill to set in.
He rolled onto his back and shivered. His mother’s words in the driveway echoed and looped round on themselves. “Aurelio, escúchame bien” she whispered in his ear. “We’ve known for a long time that this would happen. La troca came in handy ¿qué no? I know you feel bad about leaving. It’s okay! I’ll have my hands full with your sister, believe me. And please don’t worry about Cami. She will never totally forgive me for Bill. I’m sorry that sometimes she blames you, too. If you want, blame me. I made a bad choice that she and I live with, but what hurt me and Cami also gave me you. Así pasan las cosas ¿eh? The good with the bad. It’s time,” she said, patting his cheek. “M’ijo, whoever and whatever you become out there, we love you. No matter what. And when things get hard, que sigas adelante. You hear me? Not backwards. Adelante.”
He rolled over and gazed into the darkening sky. Far above, the faint births of stars, like the slow opening of eyes. “Thank you, Mom,” Aurelio said to one particular point of light. It glowed more than sparkled. He thought of Cami and wondered whether it was Jupiter.
The dust had settled by the time Aurelio got back to the truck. Falling into the cab, he sensed both opportunity and an overwhelming sense of responsibility.
“Sixty miles west to Ely,” he said and patted the dashboard. “Definitely won’t make it that way.”
The engine turned over on the first try. He eased the truck back onto Highway 50 eastbound, short-shifting to preserve the last drops of gas.
Aurelio grasped the wheel with clammy hands, not certain who he was about to become. With the needle tapping E, a single word repeated in his head like a mantra.
Adelante.
Tomás Baiza was born and raised in San José, California, and now lives in Boise, Idaho, where he is currently studying creative writing at Boise State University. Tomas’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Parhelion, Writers In The Attic, Obelus, In Parentheses, Meniscus, Rigorous, [PANK], The Meadow, Peatsmoke, and elsewhere.