Before he dies, my great-grandfather gives my dad a pair of alligator boots. It happens before I am born. The boots are rattlesnake tan, thick-heeled, and calf-height, the way a puppy is. Every now and then, they whine at night. Stitched on the boots’ sides are six turquoise letters, spelling out our family’s first lie: Alfaro. 

I don’t know how the boots came to find us. Maybe they crossed the El Paso border, picked up cheap at some bodega outside the hot Juarez grocery store. Or, they were purchased wholesale from the Boot Barn. Perhaps, even, they were made in a place more careful than that: pressed together in a real person’s living room with the fast-talking television soap channel on, words falling over their leather like a prayer.

The boots could’ve come from anywhere. They seem to come from a different world from ours—rodeos and dirt and the macho brush of horsehair. But, instead, they landed with us. 

These boots knew the ancestor I think about the most, and they traveled to find me.

Until I come along, the boots live a life of never being worn, because they are tacky and gaudy and machismo-femme in the way American men do not like. Namely, in a way my dad does not like. Dad dresses in crisp Army uniforms with his black buzzed high and tight. He wears dark-wash jeans with Vans on the weekends. During the week, Dad fastens dress shirts and belted slacks. Sometimes, he tells me, he has to lean down in his dress shirt and tie to clean up the pancake batter mess customers leave leaking down the tilted bathroom floor. Unlike everyone else at his job, Dad does not think having a desk means he’s above working.

Dad is more like his customers at Social Security than his coworkers. He has a GED. He was raised by his grandparents. He qualified for the government job because he is also in the military, and his boss Rick finds that to be a personal attack on his manhood. A degree takes more gusto than military service, Rick thinks. Rick has translucent skin and red hair; Dad makes ginger jokes behind his back or in front of it. Can he see water running straight through his hands when he washes them in the sink? Does he need to reapply sunscreen for the walk to his car? Did his wife pack a ginger ale with his lunch today? Dad thinks he’s funny, always towing the line of some new bit. Still, he would not be seen dead in those boots.

I find the boots one night when I’m supposed to be brushing my teeth for bed. They’re on the floor of our computer room, which is also our Bronco room. The Bronco room has odes to John Elway lining every shelf—the foam white horse head, the signed football, the collector’s edition jersey. It’s the early 2000s, and John Elway is our God, just behind the other one. A poster of him stares down at me. I don’t find his toothy face to be scary in the dark because he’s as familiar to me as a friend.

Under our shrine to Father Elway stand the boots: tan toe pointed up, boot-neck erect, rhinestone bedazzled on the sides, practically glowing. I kneel beside the boots and poke their scratchy skin. I breathe in their crusted old scent, meeting them.

Don Juan botas, I name them.

The rumor goes that my great-great-grandfather—or, the one before him—was tired of having a regular Mexican name like Garza-Hernandez-Gomez-Ortiz-Garcia-Lopez-Martinez-Sanchez-Galvan. These names were for common folk who didn’t know how to read, to make money, to think. No more of that, my great-great-grandfather decided. Our name would be something new.

We would be the Alfaros. The name means beacon of light. Around certain members of my family, the alpha is emphasized most heavily.

If you speak a lie enough times, it will become a truth. My ancestor men repeated this name until thousands of sunsets passed, turning orange to blue, orange to blue. Now it is the truth.

As a girl, I had a hard time keeping up with what was a truth and what was a lie. Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy were the truth, but aliens were a lie. Boys being cute was the truth, but boys being nice was a lie. God was the truth, church a lie.

All I knew for certain was that the boots were magic. Magic, as in, bought with a magician’s money. This is another story Dad tells me. His grandfather, the one who gave him the boots, was Virgilio the Great. Virgilio was a circus magician. He had a face like the word certainty. His hands were working men’s hands, but they found a new kind of labor. Rather than digging in the earth, Virgilio palmed doves. He pulled bows and sawed bodies in half; flipped cards sixteen different ways. Once, he reached his hand out into the crowd the way Jack does at the bottom of the stairs in The Titanic. On the other side of that hand was a woman named Eva, watching sparkle-eyed from the audience. This is my great-grandma.

Dad does not say what Virgilio looked like, but I have ideas. He was the Mexican John Wayne; the suave Casablanca Bogart; a blue moon, he loomed so large. Every inheritance is evidence of his power. There are the worn photos showing a young man in a tuxedo standing on stage, tugging a bowstring taunt. There is the cedar and silver pocketknife, passed down to my father and, eventually, once I become pretty, to me. Forever, there is the trickery twinkle in Dad’s eye when he tells an impossible story. Those boots. 

The year I meet the alligator boots, I am five, silent, unwilling to string together words and spit them out.

I spend my days playing in my room and around the couch, carrying my baby doll and Barbies to different sides of the room. They are the only people I like to talk to; the only people I know will listen other than my brother when he’s in the mood. When I’m bored, I slip a nickel or penny in my mouth to suck on. I like the way there is a bite and a tang to the metals; I like that they give me something back. I swear to never suck a penny again when I swallow one on accident, but it’s a habit I can’t break. My parents call me The Piggy Bank.

Every day at noon, I find my way to the kitchen and ask Mom if it’s time for my nap. She calls me the perfect child. Once my nap is done, I get up and go again. Lately, Zack has been trying to teach me how to sit crisscross applesauce. He’s been trying to teach me how to pronounce M&M, the same as Eminem. We practice several  times a day—in the car on the way to school after Livin’ La Vida Loca ends, during the living room commercial breaks, at the dinner table. Zack thinks it’s funny at first. But after several hours of practicing the same word over and over, his face grows tired and he says, You’ve got to be faking this, CC. No one is this stupid.

But I’m not faking it. I really am this stupid. I sit on the floor with my Barbies and we practice late into the night.

Em ee em. Em en em. Em and em, I tell them. One day, I will learn. I will know how to say every word in human history. I feel my eyes start burning.
The Barbies watch me with flat eyes and frozen smiles. They don’t help me. I get none of it down. 

By the time I meet the boots, I am worried about our family magic. I cannot find it, cannot see or taste it. Instead, I was born tongue-tied and quiet. I am afraid that I won’t know what to say when the time comes for me to say it. My face is a trick mirror, pulling reactions from everyone who notices it. When Latinos see me with my parents, they say Dad and I have the same face, the same dark eyes and humped nose. But when white people see us all together, they call me Mom’s little twin: open faces with fuller lower lips and sunny smiles. Only those who really know me—Zack, Barbie, babydoll, Mom, Dad, Grandma, and the boots—know how to beat the trick.

When they look at me, they see Ciara, CC, Mouse Burger with Cheese. They know our history is gone and our future is yet to come. But this is a lesson I never learn. What I know is different: the magic is leaving us, and it is up to me to save it. 

At night, after my Barbies and baby fall asleep, I wait for the house to go silent. I listen until the sound meets the color of the darkness. Once it does, I crawl across the hallway to the Bronco room. Nobody tells me I shouldn’t spend time with the boots, but I find myself sneaking around to meet up with them and sprinting back to my room when I hear Dad coming around the hall. Inside my stomach lives a hiccup fear that I shouldn’t be caught.

Quietly, I scan the dark floor, looking for the two phantom feet laid against the carpet. I always find them somewhere different—halfway beneath a blanket, tossed in the closet, set right beside the door. At all times, the boots remember the shape of someone’s feet, though I can’t be sure who. Chunky white rhinestones dot the corners of each letter in the Alfaro name, and I think they are very pretty. Though the boots are just tan and turquoise, they cast an unexplainable emerald shine in the night. Dorothy in Oz. 
After the house goes to sleep, I sit in front of the boots and tell them about the girl who hits and kicks me at school. I tell them about M&M and how I wish they could help me practice. I hold hands with one of the pointed toes and sigh.

Every night, they call me closer. 

The moon is bright and the boots are in the corner of the room when I decide it’s finally time. I leave the door open behind me and move until I am standing right over them. The tops of the boots open into two black holes that reach towards the center of the earth. I want to know what’s at the bottom.

I’m wearing a t-shirt that hangs down to my knees. My hair is damp, curling. One at a time, I dip a small foot inside the boots. They are warm and slippery. My toes slide towards the front until the top of my ankle hits the leather sleeve. I grab onto the wall to steady myself. John Elway watches me from a photo hanging, his face focused, tongue out. He looks nervous, but I tell him not to worry.

I know what I’m doing, Elway, I whisper.

Just as the promise leaves my lips, the mouth of the boots wraps around my knees, gripping me tight. A tunnel of darkness rises from the ground, cascading around me. History is a train running in the wrong direction—from the carpet to the ceiling—and it pummels by, whipping my hair fast against my cheeks. 
I hear men talking to me from the grave, pulling me down, their voices pleading. It’s something I’ve never heard before—grown men terrified. I can’t breathe. Desperation sinks its teeth into my heart.

Bundled darkness kicks the air from inside me: fathers running, language failing, words and spells and tricks not rising. The desperation is syrup sticky and shadowed deep. It is a wave of shame that does not belong to me.

I stumble over the boots sideways from the weight of the fear, falling to the carpet. It’s only then that I am able to kick the boots clean off. Around me, the room is as it was. From above, John Elway and his tongue stare down at me. The house is quiet and unsettled, but I know I am still alone. I rush back up, through the door and into my bed. My chest is five steps ahead of me.

It’s only once I’m buried under the covers that I realize I forgot to shut the door.

Stupid stupid stupid, I tell myself, breathing in my own hot blanket breath. I want my parents but don’t dare call for them.

My comforter is green and shimmers in the night. Under it, I feel Virgilio watching me until sunrise.

Something haunted begins to happen when I grow up. The family name chosen for us is rare enough that when I find another Alfaro in the world, it’s a gift from the gods. Then, the rumor of the lie awakens inside me, sent pinging.

After I leave Texas, doctors and coworkers and strangers ask me, Do you know VinnyChanceRebecca Alfaro? Are you related?

I say, No, probably not. But I mean, Maybe, just maybe.

Once, I help a Juan Alfaro at my bank job. I scan in his pesos and swap them out for dollar bills. He’s young—twenty something, alone. I type his name from his ID—six letters I know, and I know, and I know—and count out each white-faced bill on the counter between us. I want to tell him his name is my name, that I share this with him even if we are strangers. I want him to feel seen.

But he doesn’t speak English and I don’t speak Spanish. I’m unable to string together the words we need. That night, I go home and practice the bank words in front of my microwave dinner: notario, tarifa, ahorros. I get none of it down.

I never meet Virgilio the Great. He’s gone before I am born. But, when I’m eight, I meet my grandfather, Virgilio’s son, for the first time. He is the closest connection I have to my magician past. Dad and his father are forever estranged because his father is mean as the core of the earth. Once, he lit Dad on fire. Once, he locked him and Uncle B in a closet for several hours. Still, Dad is trying one more time because there is me and my brother, and we are grandfatherless through and through.

The man who would’ve been my grandfather has a house that is small and regular, brown bricked and white walled. He has concrete stairs and a small porch. When he opens the door, I see that he looks familiar. I think he and Dad have the same face, like Mr. Potato Head, except that my grandfather’s is hairier all over. A troll man, I think, but do not say.

The smell of his house is too far gone for me to remember where it came from—the dusty underside of a welcome mat. In one room, there is a couch, a television, another wife. We all sit and I don’t say a word, though I don’t remember what’s on TV either. His kitchen is tiled and blocked off by a dog gate, behind which small terriers shout at us.

A truly evil man wouldn’t have such annoying dogs.

Eventually, he leads Zack and Dad through a tour of the house. I’m there, too. In the back room, there are dozens of carved wood archery bows, lined against the wall. They look like massive Daddy Long Legs eating the room. They cast shadows across the floor in purple cuts.

I watch my grandfather I do not know grab one of the shiniest bows and give it to Zack. It’s chestnut and glossy. It’s the prettiest bow I’ve ever seen.

They hug, and then it is time to go. On the way out, his wife, who I do not know, gives me a Winnie the Pooh cookie jar. It’s cornflower blue and still has a cheap sticker tagged on the back.

$5, it says.

The second time I meet my grandfather a few weeks later, he chases me, Zack, and Dad off his concrete porch. He shouts at our car, saying words I don’t understand. Words like, If you ever come back here, I will kill you and your kids. I burn your whole house down.

This is normal for Dad. This is his father. I watch Dad’s ashy knuckles turn white on the gearshift the ride home. From the back seat, I think, But the tiny dogs. And, If I was prettier. Or, Maybe if I didn’t chew on loose change when I’m sad. I stay quiet and so does Zack. Lubbock passes the same way it always does—brown—until we’re home. Dad spends the night cursing to Mom in the kitchen. Mom hates my would-be grandfather, too, which is why she stayed home both times.

While the rest of the house is busy, I make my way to the boots. Though I haven’t visited them in years, they are waiting for me buried in John Elway’s closet. I sit on the ground, my back against the closet door, the yellow light on overhead, whispering to them. I tell the boots that I can forgive them but I will not wear them again. I tell them about my grandfather and what he said to us. I watch my words fall into their deep dark.

Even though my grandfather is not Virgilio, I sometimes mix the men in my mind. This is the knot I can never untangle: how much my dad loved his grandfather, and how evil the man between them is.

In the closet, I ask the boots, Is that man who should’ve been my grandfather what happens when an Alfaro loses his magic? He turns evil for good?

I listen for an answer. But it does not come for me, either.