Free "The Flamenco Academy" by Sarah Bird

sand as it undulated past my feet.
The black basaltic rocks, shadowed even in the bright sunlight,
felt forlorn. Everywhere I looked petroglyphs thousands of years
old had been scraped into the dark lava to reveal the lighter, tan
rock beneath like chalk drawings on a blackboard. On the rocks just
beneath us was a drawing of many tiny hands raised to the sky that
made me think of HeartLanders when they were “receiving the
Spirit.” Farther on was a petroglyph that depicted strange,
extraterrestrial lines resembling those at Nazca. Another featured
a bloom of happy, square faces like Teletubbies. Contemporary
graffiti on a nearby rock had the Teletubbie heads committing
pornographic acts. On the path around the rocks the powdery dirt
was imprinted with treads from hundreds of pairs of running shoes,
the squiggles, waffles, and starbursts as mysterious as any of the
petroglyph designs.
    The sun edged low enough to shine golden
through the papery seed heads of the chamisa. A breeze scented with
sage and moist from the first exhalation of a cool evening wafted
by. In the distance, pylons marched across the open rangeland, a
line of silver kachinas that went on until they were out of
sight.
    Didi stared off and seemed to be talking to
the pylons more than to me, as if she were continuing a
conversation she’d been having with them that I’d interrupted.
“What I really loved about my father was that he liked me. He
didn’t just love me, he really liked me. He got my jokes and I got
his. Maybe I would have loved music without him, but he made sure
that I loved it for the right reasons. That I knew it was a gift
from the people who made it. I loved it that he never, ever said
one negative thing about my mother even though she didn’t like him.
I loved it that I could talk to him about anything.” She looked at
me, the sunlight cutting into her eyes, glittering on the gold
flecks there. “What about you? What did you love about your
father?”
    For one second, I didn’t want to say
anything. Not out loud. But the words flowed forth on their own. “I
loved how, in his heart, I was still a little girl. How he thought
my favorite food was corn dogs because I liked them when I was
five. I loved how he sang along with the radio, even though he had
a horrible voice, just because it made him happy. I loved how he
treated waitresses like queens and always gave bums money and
called them sir and wished them luck. I loved how much joy he could
get out of a corny joke. He could barely get to the punch line, he
was always cracking up so much. The jokes were never any good, but
it was funnier than anything to hear him try to tell one.”
    The more I talked, the more important it
became that I make one other person really understand who Daddy
was. “We had this sort of like code phrase that we always used.
‘Now what was that about?’ He would whisper it to me or I would
whisper it to him whenever something weird happened. It was the
punch line to this really corny joke he told me when I was
eight.”
    “Tell me.”
    “Now, it’s really stupid.”
    “It was your father’s joke,” Didi said. She
meant, it didn’t matter if it was a good joke or a bad joke, it was
my father’s joke.
    “Yeah, okay. So, the doorbell rings and a
guy answers his front door and finds a snail on the porch. He picks
up the snail and tosses it out into the yard.”
    “And?”
    “And two years later, the doorbell rings and
the man answers the door and there is the same snail. And the snail
says”—Didi helped me say the punch line—“ ‘Now, what was that
about?’ ”
    Halfway through the last line that Daddy had
said to me or I had said to him so many times—when my mom was
melting down, when I came home in a grumpy mood, when he started
cursing and yelling at the TV set because the Cowboys had made a
“bonehead” play, but mostly because my mom was melting down—I
stopped dead. It was as if I’d awakened in the middle of a dream
and