If there’s anything that says America, it’s Canada against Morocco in Houston on the Fourth of July. If anything was a surprise, it was Métis people running into old Moroccans and their families forming a halqa just as one of the Métis was telling the others about li Jiyaab comin’ to town on the back of a House Hippo who looked like Terry Fox, the hands of his buddies trying to swat that tumbling jangle of local words out of his mouth, rolling their eyes, apologizing for realizing they were standing right in the middle of the circle just as halaiqui invoked the classic kān ya ma kān, bismillah, gallik … and the televisions on the walls of the bars bounced from ad to ad. The bar light hung from a lone yo-yo string and could well have been wearing its own Cowboy Hat. Like the first light of the theatrical world. The television light shone like a VHS cassette tape that had been left out in the sun and had begun to fade. And they weren’t the only ones at the bar — there was someone who’d gone fishing in the Buffalo Bayou out by Rosenberg and was telling his friend that he couldn’t have the papusas; that he couldn’t have the golden cheap and golden good tamales; because he’d had some of the fish and felt funny. Why, and he paused and he looked up at the television. The team up there just looks like something out of a lava lamp, the way that collective shape moves …