Mi Pipo

He had hooves in his boots and cured leather skin—like a strop—for sharpening his machete, mi Pipo. He could not read a book, but he could smell the rain three days before it came home to his palm-thatched roof, mi Pipo. He could converse on the finer points of the medicinal properties of goats with the dogs that he trained to have table manners, mi Pipo. He could surf through fields of tobacco on the back of a horse, and never lose his straw hat to the revolutionary winds contesting his crown, mi Pipo. He could deliver a catfish from a newborn storm puddle with only his feet and beat it in a staring contest before the fry, mi Pipo.. He could hatch two chiclets from any one egg, know them apart by name and by the pitch of their chirps, and teach them to make his children smile, mi Pipo. He could break—mid-sentence—into a wild chase, sprinting through the streets of Havana to catch a purse thief, and still have wind to whistle at the ladies, mi Pipo. He could labor in a camp in Matanzas for 9 months to gestate a miracle, to earn his family's way to America, flying them all like a lax bird of paradise to a new life in that prized land, just over the horizon, mi Pipo. He could cut the seatbelts out of his purple Barracuda—the AC compressor, too—, spreading leaded gas fumes all across Miami like laughter or lies, like a real-life John Wayne American Cowboy, mi pipo. He could shack up with two, ten, twenty women—light, dark, tall, short—fathering generations like a prized bull or Abraham, mi Pipo. He could look with disdain on $20 cigars, prefering to barter for authentic things in back woods, lightly gnawing on his nameless cigar the whole day through, never quite reaching their end despite how he chewed, mi Pipo. He could forget that this was America, bringing us sweetness and sugarcane in his classic truck that could not shift into reverse, but could only go forward, mi Pipo. He could still leap fences and amaze with one-handed chin ups at 80 years old like I never could, and when he left us one day, we didn't try to keep up, because guajiros never stop, and they never wait to die.