Armadillo

Jeraldo wanted nothing more than to be an armadillo. He had seen them on their family’s trip from Mexico, through Texas to Oklahoma where their mother’s brother, Papillo, lived with his four dogs, two wives, Eline and Enerva, and three shotguns. Jeraldo’s mother had stopped at the first sighting between Austin and Round Rock and they all sat there, amazed at the armored creature as it used its extended claws to dig a hole ten times its size near the side of the road. His sister, Adalia, at only three years old, sat perplexed at the two foot long alien gracing their presence and not being able to hold it in any longer, screamed at the top of her lungs with roll upon roll of gleeful laughter.

“Look at how it moves,” his mother had said. “It knows that it is safe with us so it keeps digging as if we are not even here. But if it is scared, do you know what it does?” She had asked this with an upward cadence at the end of her question, turned completely around in the front seat to see her children’s faces. Seeing that her children did not know the answer, she quietly told them. “You see, if it gets too scared and it can’t run away, the little armadillo tucks its head and its legs into its shell, places its tail next to its head and pulls itself into the tightest ball you can imagine. That way, no one can get in and hurt it, you see?” Adalia had squealed with excitement. “Mami, I want to see the ball animal. Can we make it ball?” Her mother had said no, but not accepting that as a viable answer, Adalia had rolled down the window and thrown a plastic cube at it, smacking it right on the back of the shell. “Dios mio, Adalia!” her mother had yelled but the creature simply looked up, smelled the cube that had fallen to its side and continued digging. Jeraldo just shook his head, looked at the creature. Sensing something, the armadillo had paused, looked up from its ever-expanding hole, its nose covered in dirt and torn roots. For a full minute, it met Jeraldo’s eyes and they sat, watching each other, communicating child to creature, the kind of communication that adults have more often than not lost in the ridiculous toil of taxes and 8-5 workdays. Through eons of time they traveled, creature leading child through the phantasms of moments when man lived in unison with his surroundings, through the soil burrows of the armadillo past and present, across dens where their children lay awaiting their meals, into the depths of the Earth where only silence reigns and the warm bodies of armadillo mothers wrap themselves tightly around their babies. Safety, warmth, history, love. Jeraldo had sensed all of it, caught it and sent it coursing through his veins. The armadillo had lifted its head higher, curled its lips into a tender smile and all the days when Jeraldo felt alone as if no one understood him were gone, all the days of crying in the back of the school yard because the other boys were teasing him melted away, all the moments at home when he hated his father for leaving him, for leaving them, disappeared. He had put his palms to the window, pressed them tightly against the glass, wished that it would burst, that he could leave and live with his newly found friend and just get away. The armadillo had shaken its head and begun digging again.

Their mother had started the car again and Adalia had fallen fast asleep. “Are you okay, hijo?” she had asked, looking in the rearview mirror. “Si,” Jeraldo had curtly answered but he hadn’t been. He had watched the armadillo one last time, taken in the claws, the pink snout, the furry belly. Most of all, he had studied the shell, the nine lines across the top, the dark grooves.

As they had driven away towards Round Rock, he had begun constructing his own armor and had looked back to his friend one last time who had stopped digging to watch them drive away.