Tony Lamas

 

Tony Lamas

I buy a dump of a house in Frisco.
It comes with a tenant named Tito
who stays a few days trading work.

Tito spreads plastic on the steep roof
as a storm blows in from the Pacific. He's agile,
a daredevil in blasts of wind and splats of rain
as the sky turns black. Easier, Tito says,
than some sailboats he's crewed.

 "I don't do good with kids," Tito says.
He has a child in Maine with cerebral palsy.
The mom, he says, started out gorgeous.  
"I'm the snakebit type," he says. "I'm a bad star."
I tell him I don't believe in fortune and stars.
"Try sailing," Tito says.

Soon Tito departs, crewing to the Panama Canal
then up the coast, back to Maine.
"Kid's got my nose."
Traveling light, he gives me a pair of boots.
"I ain't the cowboy type," he says.

I find I'm not the city type. Sell the house,
go rural where my child Joshua finds
those Tony Lamas, too big for little legs
but he clomps merrily into the yard
only to be struck by a giant rattlesnake.

My heart screams.
Joshua literally jumps out of the boot.
The rattler can't extract fangs from the leather
and goes thrashing and dragging into the weeds.
Joshua unbitten.

Out there where the tumbleweed tumbles,
if you find by the light of stars a single Tony Lama
with a rattlesnake skeleton attached, take it.
Keep it. For good fortune.

…..

First published in I-70 Review. Thank you editors Maryfrances, Gary, and Greg.
Photo by Roy Harryman
Note: not my boot in the photo, and probably not a Tony Lama. But it captures the spirit.