Cutting Edge

by Andrew Moulton

A haze washes the far off mountains a sleepy blue. Down below us, hidden in the braches of the mango trees, crickets are wailing in complaint of the late day heat. The grass is long, almost sweating with growth and gleaming in the sun. The ground beneath us still steams although its direct exposure has long since passed into shaded reprieve. An underlying quiet in the day permeates my bones and allows me a rest I haven’t experienced since childhood. [And as I lay back into this ease I am flooded with memories of Mr. Morgan’s field up the top o’ the street where us three kids tried to fly plastic kites with Dad.]

I close my eyes from the painfully blue sky and reach my hands back and over my head and stretch from toes to fingers. I inhale deeply and ease the exhale into my bones. The air is clean and comfortable and fills my lungs with delight. It has a slight undertone of wet earth.

“Adelman, I think the last time I ever had time to lounge around on the grass was when I was six.”

I open my eyes to look over toward him. He sits with his arms draped around his knees, clothes draped over his thin muscular build, as quiet as the mountain. My eyes drift back toward the ocean of blue above me. I take another luxuriously restful breath, close my eyes and sink further into the grass. It holds me softly in the palm of its hand. I hear it crackling and shifting beneath me, occasional blades of grass flicking free and spearing the exposed nape of my neck. A runway of miniature life courses beneath me despite the burden of my weight. I remember that it always does.

“I hear you bought a machete with Roberto yesterday. Have you sharpened it yet?”

I look toward him. “Yeah, I bought one. How’d you hear that?

He shrugs but his eyes twinkle.

“Do you want to see it?” Again he shrugs. “Roberto said it was a good machete but I don’t know.”

I peel myself up off the ground, bound up the newly constructed steps through the kitchen and into the dark of the living room where it stands in a corner along with a new metal file. I quickly pinch the file from the floor and grab the weight of the machete in my right hand and go out into the dazzling afternoon.

“Roberto said that even though it feels too big, I’ll grow into it.”

He nods, then takes the blade with the hardened grace I had been practicing all night. He takes it as a skeptical surgeon. He first flicks the metal with his thumbnail to hear its sound. He turns it on its edge to eyeball straightness and then weighs its balance point on his finger. He nearly bends it in half over his knee and as a final cou de gra swashbuckles the sword through its motions as any pirate or machetero would.

The new blade draws the attention of Jose Angel who carefully bends and steps through the barbed wire fence separating my yard from Nila’s. He walks strongly and I notice the thick protruding veins running the length of his arms. He leads his walk with a smile and offers me a firm fun handshake; Adelman the same.

“Que tal ustedes? Can I hold the new Bellota?”

Adelamn looks for my ok before passing the machete grip-first to Jose Angel.

“It’s pretty. Nice and heavy too." His strong hand massages the grip while the index finger of the other squeaks along the flat of the blade.

“You guys haven’t scraped or filed it yet, huh? You can ruin a file if you forget to scrape it.”

“Scrape it?” I ask. “Scrape what? The edge?”

“Give me your file.” And he sits on his foot pinning the machete between his right calf and thigh and brings the flat of the blade up to rest upon his left knee. Taking the file in his right hand and guiding with the four fingers of his left, he begins pushing the square tip of the file along the flat of the blade, releasing a clear coat of rust preventative.

“Huh. But isn’t the blade going to rust now?”

He flips the blade. Begins working methodically from the bottom up on the other side. 

“Yup.” He says with a smile. “It can’t be new forever and if you don’t get this stuff off you can’t file it without ruining every file you use.”

He stands, takes a moment to brush his pants off with his hand, then gets right back down into the same crouched position moving the tip of the machete closer to the fulcrum of his knee.

Screetching!

The file passes perpendicular to the cutting edge of the machete.

Screetching!

In a mildly pleasant way it sounds similar to fingernails on a chalkboard.

Screetching!

He works the blade in small sections from the top down but always filing away from himself.

Screetching!

We fall into its rhymithical trance, watching the passes get longer and longer as he makes his way down the length of the blade and twenty minutes have passed before.

Screetching!

Tching!

Tching!

Tching!

He taps the square end of the file on the flat of the machete, loosing the filings trapped between the ridges.

He stands. Sweat glistens upon his thin mustache. A big smile. Adelman reaches for the tools. Two boys scramble through the barbed wire echoing in chorus, “Hola, Andres!” and roll down the hill in a wrestled tangle of arms and legs. I watch them wriggle over the wooden fence and run howling with arms flying overhead toward the group of kids kicking a green plastic soccer ball in the field.

Screetching!

“The first filing is always the hardest,” says Jose Angel through his smile.

Screetching!

“But mira, it’s easy once you get it broken in.”

We watch Adelman work the opposing edge of the machete and when another two hundred passes have traveled the length of the blade, he passes it to me with a smile.

“It’s sharp.”

“No kidding,” I say and without mimicking too much, eyeball the edge and run my own tentative tests of the blade’s quality. I sure as hell don’t touch the edge but turn it over and gave it a hefting feel.

“You could shave with it if you wanted,” says Jose Angel.

Adelman wordlessly asks for the machete again. He sights the edge, then uses his thumb to verify the imperfection his eye had noticed, by drawing it across the sharp of the blade in several places. He doesn’t crouch but instead pushes the tip of the machete into the earth and bends the blade in front of his knee jamming the grip into his stomach. He files. Slowly unbends the blade, pulls it from the earth, flips sides and resets the tip and repeats until his eye is satisfied.

He takes a step downhill and away from us, then stooping, swings the machete one half-inch level from the earth cutting an arc in the wild grass as clean as a golfing green. The air erupts with the smell of cut grass. He demonstrates his technique three more times then holds the machete out toward me. I take it and possessing none of the confidence he has shown me, stiffly swing the machete. I hack three inches of grass and land in the soil. I try again, this time bending at the knees and succeed in trimming only the very littlest of a wide swath of grass. I swing again only to land in the soil again. I stand up, regrouping my thoughts while rubbing my wrist. I don’t meet their gaze. Instead I wipe the sweat from my hand and re-grip the machete. Bend and hack. Hack. Hack. Hack! Try to forget that I am on center stage and get a bit looser about the task. Use my torso more, wrist less and find a sweet rhythm cutting mostly grass at mostly the same height. I keep at it until I fear the machete might fly from my sweat slippery hand, then stand, heaving with exertion, the muscles of my right arm throbbing and veins bulging. Eyes sparkling. I breathe deep into my chest and look back toward Adelman and Jose Angel.

Disappointingly their attention is drawn to the picket fence, which Junior is struggling to hurdle while maintaining his radio clutched in the crook of his arm. He calls from the fence, “Andres! Andres! Hello how are you?!!” His English accosts my ears. I send Adelman an apologetic shrug. Take a breath.

“Hey Junior. How’re you doing?”

“I’m good.” He says as he cranks the volume knob of his one speaker radio. Metallica’s Wherever I May Roam roars into prominence subduing everything around us. He wears his red and blue Honduran National futbol jersey, blue Umbros and a well- worn pair of Nike cleats without socks. He offers his hand to me like an American businessman, a nod toward Adelman and Jose Angel. He speaks excitedly in a hybrid language of his own invention bringing together all the movie and radio he’d been exposed to. The flipping and flopping between languages leaves me utterly confused, but if I could guess, he’s probably talking about futbol. He usually is.