Yolanda was dancing with a large black bear that smiled as he whirled her around. Oil lamps lit a small patch of raked yard. Guitars strummed boldly, maracas clicked a tempo, and the great beast, surprisingly light on his feet, gracefully swayed. His long teeth gleamed in the moonlight like ivory tusks.
For three days the old man lay in his bed. Flies had laid eggs in his nose and his eyes. No one noticed him missing. Across from the church where he had been baptized an empty rocker sat still on his porch.
They found him instead by the rank stench of death.
His wife had passed long ago. His sons had their own wives and children; his daughters had married away from the town. He had been a good man, generous to his friends and his church, and he often snuck candy to the children as they came out from Mass. For many years he had been the lone maker of shoes. But there were other shoemakers now.
As the music rose to a crescendo and Yolanda was dizzy with ecstasy, the bear lifted her high over his head. Like an angel she flew above the reach of the cockroaches in the cornmeal, the cracked thirst of the land, the touch of a drunken man on her skin.
What turned Yolanda's heart into a puddle, her sturdy legs to wheat, was everything that Carlos had been born into possessing. Thick black curls on a perfectly round head, a tickler of a mustache, a fine set of straight white teeth, and an apartato of such length and girth it made her squeal to hold it in her palm.
She had never been so happy.