Bocada Stretches A Tin Hand Across The Uncanny Valley

Bocada was the word that looped in my head as I watched them repossess my kidney. You could lose your house, your wife, the kids, the familiarity of the little bone-on-bone noise your father made getting out of his chair, your kidney, and still have the good fortune of finding a tooth in your pocket. That, in fact, was Bocada, even though I could hear my father yell over the din of the Lakers game that it was Bovada not Bocada. Same difference if you ask me.

And not your tooth. Or mine Mine were all accounted for, except the one that had cried every time I called it Bocada until it stopped taking my calls and had changed the locks on all the doors. Mi Bocadita… Mi corazon.

Lucky Room 7 at the Bocada Arms smelled of hot pennies and a hung jury when I threw the beer in the fridge and the tooth in the ashtray and the weary bag of skin holding my bones onto the boxspring bed. The ceiling fan rotated with the slow malevolence of a fever dream of a man destroying evidence destroy. On the bedside table was a wad of dollar bills and a note on the hotel letterhead that said “thanks for the good grip”.

Bocada waited outside the door with a bucket of melted ice. He came up to my chest, enamel belly warm as the television I used to leave on for the kids when I’d run out for a few nights. His mouth hung open around small, human teeth. Iced-out grill… Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make him comforting, and then stopped a moment too soon, the uncanny valley a gaping maw between Bocada and Bovada, between madness and its opposite.

Outside, the palms tore the sky to ribbons. The city held its breath. The tar pit behind the motel coughed up the bones of things that saw too much, on the hour every hour, like clockwork. “Old so-and-so” they called th pit, with the same care as my governess used to show as she sanded the gum off my shoes in the sleeper compartment every time we took the train from New York to Los Angeles to meet my father. Words for things that did not fit.

Like Bocada instead of Bovada when all you need is a sportsbook. Bocada like feu de joie, seems like a good idea until what goes up meets terminal velocity on the return flight just before some poor sap’s skull. We walked toward the tar pit. The pavement had the sponge of tongue. Every few yards a name whispered unintelligible from the grass: Bovida, I think. Or Brovada, maybe. No, it was Bocada. I was sure of it. I pretended not to hear. Bocada’s gears squeaked. His feet left wet child-sized prints. I asked about the tooth.

He put one metal finger into his mouth and touched a gap at the back. A hotel window lit up across the tar pits. Through it I watched a woman remove one earring. My mother used to do that when the telephone rang. One earring off, head tilted, as if bad news deserved the whole ear. She’d been dead forever, since the bad news kept calling and calling and she couldn’t pick up the phone one more time. The woman picked up a phone, looked down at me watching her from the street. Something rang inside my pocket.

I held the tooth to my ear: soft breathing; the clink of a spoon against a cup. I knew the cup: brown glaze, chipped handle, Bocada printed above a little painted robot whose face had faded in the dishwasher. I’d thrown it away after the funeral because keeping it seemed unbearable. Throwing it away had been moreso.

Bocada took my hand when he saw the tears wet my cheeks. His palm was soft. That was the worst thing by far. We descended steps into the tar pit, but the tar never rose above our ankles even as the buildings rose above us. A man approached along the edge of the pit, dipping his foot into the tar occasionally, one hand in his pocket. He was here for me, I could feel it, the weight of the iron in his hand in that pocket. He passed without looking. I turned, half to see him pull the trigger half to warn him about the fox on the cup, the awful economy of keeping anything alive, but the words weren’t there when the bullet wasn’t, each cancelling the other.

Frequently Asked Questions