My lips were dry like the sand beneath my feet and I licked them in earnest. I put my hand up to my eyes, scouted the bleached plain in front of me. I had taken a wrong turn somewhere and knew I would have to turn back sometime, but the heat pouring down on me was too much. I stuck my thumb out into the road.

    The man who picked me up was driving a light blue truck, and besides the scar on his face, looked like Emilio. He had big dog eyes and his mouth seemed permanently turned upward.

    “Dónde va?” He questioned. His breath smelled of conchas and cigarettes.

    I gave him several directions and he nodded his head, a cowboy hat placed atop it. I was going home, to see Paulito and my mother. She had sent me out an hour before, to go find oil for the tractor, but I had never found it. Maybe I had hit my head on a rock and had fallen unconscious. Maybe that was where the ache in my head had come from. I cleared my throat as the man put on the radio and he turned to look at me.

“Hmm?” I questioned and stared up.

“Oh, nevermind. Nothing…” His words faded as we increased on my small village and he stopped at the church center. The man let me out but made a noise in the back of his throat as he looked around. I wanted to ask him what that was about, but instead, I only thanked him and let my boots smack the dirt as I got out. Padre Rafael was outside.
It was midday and there would be Mass tonight, but he had no reason to rush. He was a slow man, slow with his sermons, slow with his speaking, slow to getting you that rosary for your aunt down south. He smiled when he saw me and raised a wrinkled hand. I nodded, smiled shyly, and stepped away toward my mother’s home. I could hear the noise from inside, through the walls: mostly women’s voices, and then a young voice (my brother), and lastly, the voice of a young man. My fingers lingered too long on the door before I opened it.

    They were gathered in the middle of the kitchen, my mother’s friends around the table and my brother beside her, trying so hard to somehow add on to their conversation. I looked to the left. Emilio was there, his elbows on the table, his face clean-shaven and bright. I had not seen him in two years and his eyes met mine as I stood in the doorway.

    “Jesús,” his mouth formed my name in a flourish and he left the table. His gait was slow, he was wearing spurs and the heels of his boots tapped against the packed earth of the floor. The vest he wore was adorned with colorful beads and flowers and he pressed this leather into my chest as he hugged me. “Two years now. I have counted all the days.”

    I had too. His hand was warm on the back of my neck, but he dropped his grasp as we returned to the women. My mother smiled. She had forgotten about the oil, too concerned with Emilio’s arrival to pay attention.

    “Look at the two of you,” she crooned and clasped her hands together. Her friends stared up, happy smiles on their faces also. Paulito was beaming. He walked up to me and showed me a small clay figure. I took it from his hands; it was still soft.

    “Emilio made that for me,” he said. It was a cowboy with a pistol pointed out, directly at the viewer. “...with a stick and his hands.” Emilio leaned back on his heels, laughed. He breathed out in a sigh.

    “We have a lot of catching up to do, mi Hermano de Sangre.” He had not called me that in a long time, not since we were young, not as often as he did when he first named us.

Emilio had a fondness for switchblades and weapons. He had named his first blade Rosita and it was the one that had made us bleed.

The metal glinted with moonlight and I shoved his hand down. At fifteen, the police could have you pinned down and taken to your mama in an instant. She would be the one to whip the criminal out of you. I widened my eyes at him, but he rolled his and slid down the wall of his uncle’s house. I was pressed against the neighboring home.

“Come here, closer,” he whispered, and I thought of banana leaves brushing against my skin. I moved to him so that our feet touched. He caught my gaze, raised an eyebrow, and quickly looked back down at his hand. He held the blade above his skin and before I could expect it, he pushed it into his palm. His voice was a cloud that floated from his mouth to above my head. His words soaked me. “Hermanos de Sangre, that’s what we shall be.” It was a pact. I watched his face contort a little at the pinching pain. “Hurry,” he said, at last, as he handed me the switchblade and let the blood drip by his feet.

    Emilio watched hungrily as I matched his actions. I winced and hurried to give Rosita back to him, cupping my hand to catch the falling blood. But Emilio reached for me and clasped my palm, fingers wrapped around mine. Our blood mixed for seconds and then he moved his unsullied hand to grab the back of my neck. He brought his lips to my forehead, where Padre Rafael had placed a cross of holy water the day before, and breathed out harshly, “Ah, Jesús, we will always be together.” And it was there that we were joined, in the alley outside his uncle’s cottage.
 
    I nodded at him and we drifted into my room. He sat on my bed. “You do remember that, don’t you?”
 
“Of course,” I mumbled. I had just relieved it all within my head.

“Good.” There was a pause. “All the women in the East are beautiful and glossy.” He laughed. I didn’t know what to say, so he continued, taking a ball from beside my bed and throwing it up into the air, above his head. “They have wide hips and thick waists and you can confuse them with those, ahh, what do they call them? Yes, cypress trees.”
I hummed and he noticed my disinterest, so he invited me to sit beside him on the bed. I leaned to slip off my shoes and he placed a hand on my back. His fingertips moved to the line of my vertebrae as I undid the laces. My body wanted to curve, but I resisted the urge and sat up quickly, causing him to pull his hand back with just as much speed.

    “What have you been doing while I’ve been gone?”

    “I’ve been here with Paulito and Mama,” I answered him. He sucked on his teeth and the ball fell off the cliff of my bed, into the sea of the floor. “We sold three-hundred of Mama’s blankets in the last two years. I took Paulito and the donkey and we went south, to the next town to sell.”

“That’s good for you three.” His voice faded and we were silent for more than a minute. I turned to look at him over my shoulder and he gave me a smile. “I can smell you on these sheets. Cinnamon and hay.”

“You smell like sweat,” I responded. He laughed loudly and his smile was the sun. “And cologne.”

Paulito entered my room, his face covered in splotches of oil. He leaned against the doorframe. “Mama said that you and Emilio should go get the oil for the tractor.”

“Alright,” Emilio spoke before I could, but didn’t rise from the bed as I did. Paulito came closer to spin the spurs on Emilio’s boots. “Maybe I can bring you a pair when I go into town tomorrow,” he told my brother.

Paulito’s face turned into an expression of joy, but I don’t watch it as I laced my boots on once more and fiddled with a small lighter on my bedside table. Emilio grunted as he lifted himself from my bed.

Paulito padded across the room with bare feet to the door. “Do you have your bike, Emilio?”

“Of course.” Emilio adjusted his vest as we passed through into the small hall.

“And where is Jesús going to sit?”

“On the handlebars.”

“He’ll fall off,” Paulito laughed and followed us outside to the backyard. The women had moved out there and were drinking lemonade. Mama waved goodbye to us and thanked us for going to get the oil. I waved back.

“No, he won’t,” Emilio unchained his dusty, old bike from the side of the cottage, ducking under the foliage leaking from the garden and neighboring house. “He’s so small, he’ll fit just fine.”

Paulito chuckled and disappeared in the backyard as Emilio swung his leg over the tall seat and sat down. “Come on,” he beckoned me. I inched over to the bike, rising on my tiptoes to seat myself on the handlebars. “Are you alright?” He touched my arm with warm fingers. I turned away and looked down at the ground.

I breathed out, “Don’t go too fast.”

“I would never.” He began pedaling, his knees barely brushing my sides and his chin brushing my shoulder. We turned onto the dirt road leading into the village center quickly and small rocks rolled past as my eyes watched the ground. His dark knuckles held tight to the steel on either side of my thighs, his skin against my jeans. The wind caught my hair as he picked up speed and I exhaled into the air coming at me. We passed the church and the market, the bike tires streaming over the pavement. We finally reached the main street and Emilio carried us down, away from the village. I had the courage to look back, see it shrink slowly, but I also caught the concentrated face of Emilio: eyebrows furrowed and mouth closed tight.

There were no houses beside the wide road, only the long plains of desert and several fields of peppers. Emilio breathed into my ear and my pinkies kissed his. I didn’t feel confident enough to not hold onto the handlebars myself. As we continued, the number of trucks increased. We were nearing the asphalt-covered roads and the gas station.
The distance must have been too far for me to walk without becoming dizzy. A pickup passed, holding an arrangement of fruits. Emilio mumbled something in my ear about apples. I nodded, afraid that moving too much would cause me to fall.

We stopped and I slid off the handlebars. Emilio knocked the kickstand from the bike and parked it beside a pump.
“Gas can,” Emilio murmured. I looked at him. He shook his head. “We forgot them.” He slanted himself against the same pump that his bike stood by.

My hand slapped my back pocket and the thin fold of money in it. “It’s alright,” I walked away from him, into the shade of the gas station’s overhang and entered the small store. The red gas canisters were sitting beside the counter and I picked the first one up and handed it to the cashier. He smiled lightly and took my money in exchange for a full can. Emilio was still waiting for me with his hands in his pockets. This was one of his cigar poses. The other featured him in a rickety old chair with one leg over the other, like he was some kind of tycoon. I swallowed my spit and handed him the can.

“Full?” He asked.

“Full.”

He bent over until I could see a line of his warm tan body between the waistband of his jeans and the body of his shirt. My mother would have told him to tuck his shirt in. My fingers itch to pull it down, to cover skin that burns my eyes.
The gas station suddenly feels too hot, too hot even for the desert, so hot that my hands are sweating and I called his name suddenly. He turned quickly, eyes wide, back still bent, gas pump in his hand.

“Are you alright, Jesús?” His voice came to me in a dream.

My figure shook. “I have really missed you. I’ve missed you so much. Your eyes, your mouth, hands, feet, the sprinkling of stubble on your face. Everything.” But I did not really say the last two sentences. They wanted to leave my throat in a spray of words, but they were caught. Emilio eyed me and let the last drops of gas fall. He shook the pump, rose, and replaced it. We stood face to face and his boots scraped over the asphalt.

“Jesús,” he whispered in a breathy voice. “Ahh, my dear hermano. I know. I know.” And he held me like I was a child with one of his hands on my back and the other on my arm. He pulled me to him and my forehead rested on the slope of his shoulder.

We did not speak as he stepped into the seat and I climbed back onto the handlebars. He put the gas can in my hands and I held it like I was holding him. He touched me often, his head near mine, his lips near my ear as he pedaled back to my mother’s home.

***

Paulito went to work on the tractor and Emilio and I resigned to the dining room. My mother’s friends had left and she was cooking dinner. Emilio lit a cigar and offered me one, even though he knew I didn’t smoke. I shook my head and relaxed into the chair. I could hear the dishes clanking in the kitchen. Emilio suddenly grabbed my hand and made me catch his gaze. I felt like crumbling. He brushed a thumb over the back of my hand.

“You still look so similar. That thin face and swooping hair.” He reached up and touched my head. “I wish I had a flower to place behind your ear.” I wished flowers would spill from my mouth instead of words, just to tell him how I truly felt.

But his eyes wandered mine and I knew he could see the warmth in my face. He placed a small kiss onto my brow, one that smelled of tobacco. His finger drifted to my palm and traced an invisible line. “If only scars had developed, we could have had something to reminisce about.”

“I still reminisce,” I mumbled. He smiled.

“I can imagine. My little Jesús has always liked memories.”

I was his little thing, easy to hold, easy to mold, easy to hurt. Emilio licked his lips and opened his mouth:

“I have something to tell you.”

I did not still and I did not move but waited as his fingers continually traveled my hand. They threatened to creep up my arm as he continued.

“In the East...I met a woman, and I know that it doesn’t seem interesting to you, but I have to confess.” I imagined that he would tell me that he wanted to stay there, with her. I stared at his dropped head and the shiny black hair. I licked my lips. “Her name is Rosa.” I thought of his switchblade and imagined a woman with sharp red lips and long nails. He laughed and made a nervous noise. “She says she is in love with me.”

“Do you want to stay with her?” I asked.

“No, I mean, I don’t know it. Coming back here is an overwhelming wave that has left me shipwrecked for the time being.” He laughed again. “I read a lot of poetry there, too. But anyways, I wanted to apologize for breaking our promise.”

Our promise, our pact. It had been at the top of my mind like a headache. I bit the inside of my cheek. “Really?”

“I--I, it was all an accident and it happened too quickly. I told her that I was waiting for someone. She had laughed and said that what the priests taught you about marriage was a lie. But instead, I was waiting for you...here.”
My eyes ached hot, as if from staring at the sun for too long. There were stories about men who had been mauled to death by coyotes. I could be added to that list, my name and the year written at the bottom. Emilio had led the coyotes from their caves, a pied-piper from the desert with a loud voice like music. He had called them, had been calling them as he sat there with me, evading, dragging them to me so that they could tear my limbs from my torso. I swallowed hard.

My mother approached from the kitchen with Paulito behind her and a large plate of meat steaming in her hands. “Are the two of you catching up?” She raised her thick eyebrows at us.

Emilio answered with a grin, “Yes, we’ve caught up a lot.”