Barbara Samuel (15 page)

There were many pilgrims and tourists in the church, a lot of them clumped together in the room with Santo Niño in his little white stall, all waiting their chance to collect the holy dirt. Placida was in no hurry. She fingered the turquoise rosary Thomas brought her from a famous shrine in California, and went to look at Santo Niño. At his feet were the shoes of babies, and on the walls around him were written many names. Placida closed her eyes to hear the echoes of the prayers that hung in the space—one voice and then another and another and another until they swirled around one another and up to heaven.

When she opened her eyes again, the tourists had all gone but one, an old woman like herself, who had to take a minute to bend her knees good enough. Placida nodded to her and went into the tiny room, where the air was so cold, and knelt. From the hole in the floor where the priest had found the crucifix, over and over, she scooped out a healthy measure of holy dirt. As she did it, the smell of burned sugar filled the room, blotting out even the damp animal smell of the sand.

Trouble. She made her way back outside, her rosary swinging around her hand, and hurried up to Tiny, who was eating something out of a foil-wrapped package. He gave her a tamale he had bought across the street, and she took it, washing it down with a Coke in a big white cup, standing right by the car in the sun.

The quiet came over her then, like the church was in
the holy palm of God and nothing could touch it. Across the street, a young man with bright green eyes was selling spices. He had the look of the boy she had once believed she would marry, a boy whose family had grown the sharp red Chimayó chiles she loved. She said to Tiny, “I want to buy some of his spices.”

Tiny gestured for the man to come over, and he sold them three bags of spices, two red and one green. Tiny gave him the money after wrangling. A good man, one who didn’t make an old woman pay for a trifle like spices. He would have the first charm.

They went to get in the car, Tiny coming around the car to hold her elbow, as he should do. Good manners, this one. But just as she bent, she saw right there, panting heavily in the full heat of day, a black dog. Pregnant. Placida narrowed her eyes, holding tight to her jar, but the dog only watched them climb in and drive away.

Trouble, trouble. The air was nearly orange with trouble.

On Friday, Thomas arose a little earlier than usual to check the weather. It had been raining lightly when he went to bed and he’d had little expectation that the crew would get any work done today. His expectation proved correct. Peering out his second-floor bedroom window, he saw that the sky was dark, the ground wet. On his way downstairs, he tapped at Tiny’s door and poked his head in. “No work today.” Tiny mumbled a reply.

The stairs were dark and twisting, and he had to duck beneath the beams, smelling coffee and something meaty cooking. That was something good about having his grandmother here—long before the sun woke, she was in the kitchen cooking. He kept trying to tell her she didn’t have to do it, that she was old enough she
could just sit in a rocking chair if she wanted all day long, but she waved that away, the recommendation of a lunatic. She liked to be busy.

This morning, as always, she sat at the table in her flowered apron, the snaps fastened all the way to the neck. Beneath, a dark blue cardigan poked out. The radio on the counter was tuned to her Spanish station, the voices rattling out very quiet news and weather reports. “Mornin’,” Thomas said, lifting the lid of a pot to smell the contents. It was a chicken cut in pieces, the skin still pink and cold. “Supper?”

She nodded, her attention on the task before her.

A pottery dish with a cover sat toward the back of the old stove and Thomas lifted the lid to find the fresh tortillas he knew would be there, along with a pot of beans she’d put on the stove to warm from the night before. He dished some into a bowl and poured coffee into a mug advertising Martinez Concrete, then settled at the table, looking over the arrangement of spices and cloth and something that looked like a bottle of dirt, and gold thread and tiny tin saint’s medals. “Whatcha doing?” he asked.

“Making charms.”

“For what?”

“Protection.” She didn’t look at him, her eyes focused on the needle and thread in front of a giant magnifying glass on a stand.

“Want me to thread that needle?”

“I could do it.”

He nodded and swiveled in his chair toward the wall phone, thinking suddenly of Luna calling him on this phone the night Placida had nearly burned down the house. He picked it up and dialed the first member of his crew, delivered the news of no work, ate some beans, dialed the next and the next. Only two of the six numbers
were busy so early, and he gave them a minute as he stood up to look outside. It was agreeably dark and a little chilly. Thomas opened the back door to take a breath of the sweet coolness of rain, standing there to feel a wind blowing rain across his face. Behind him, the dog clicked into the room, whining softly to be let out.

Thomas pushed the door open. Tonto stood at the door, sniffing and uncertain, balefully looking at Thomas as if he could turn off the drizzle. “In or out, dog.”

The dog went out, hanging his head. Business was business. The cat, licking his chops over the chicken smell, settled his paws more firmly on the worn linoleum.
No thanks.

The phone rang. Placida got up to answer it even though he waved her down—she liked knowing what was going on—and Thomas hung by the door, waiting for Tonto to come back. The dog was edging along the porch, trying to find a dry spot, his ears down miserably, and Thomas couldn’t help but chuckle.

“It’s you,” Placida said in a disapproving voice, holding out the phone.

He took it, expecting one of the guys. Instead, it was Nadine’s voice. “Thomas? Do you have a minute?”

No, he wanted to say, looking over his shoulder for rescue. “Not really. I gotta call my crew. What’s up? Something wrong with my brother?”

“No … I mean, not really …” She burst into tears. “I just don’t know who else to talk to.”

“What is it?”

“I just … he isn’t…” At the other end of the phone, she gulped and sniffled and was obviously out of control. Thomas frowned. This was the real thing, deep tears, sorrowful tears. His cheek twitched in memory and a feeling like panic came into his chest.

He didn’t say anything, waiting while she gathered control. The dog came to the screen, wagging his tail, and Thomas looked to his grandmother to see if she’d let him in, but she’d gone into deaf-dumb-and-blind mode the minute he took the phone.

Women. Damn.

Trying to keep the phone line above the table, Thomas moved toward the door, using his right hand to keep the spiral cord aloft. “What’s the problem, Na-dine?” he said impatiently. “I really have calls to make.”

He probably sensed the disaster coming, and if it had been anyone but Nadine on the phone, crying in his ear the way she’d cried on his table the night she told him she was leaving, he might have stopped it.

Instead, he was trying hard not to feel that night coming back into his body, gritting his teeth, bracing his bones, as Tonto leapt up on his back legs like a circus dog, waiting to get in. With youthful exuberance, the dog blasted through the first slight opening, wiggling into the kitchen. The floor was wet from blown mist, and Tonto’s wet paws skittered. Thomas, still gritting his teeth against the soft, broken sobs in his ear, swerved out of his way, backed into the cold body of the fridge, as the dog tried to stop and couldn’t, his momentum sending him into a skidding slide across the linoleum.

The cat, alarmed, leapt up on the table, knocking over a bottle, then a dish. Something broke with a crash, and Placida stood up, yelling, and caught the edge of the phone cord in her upraised hand, which yanked it out of Thomas’s hand. The receiver went flying, crashing into the things on the table and the cat’s head, who yelped and jumped off the table, landing too close to the dog, who yipped, turned, slipped, and slammed into Thomas.

Who went down flat on his ass, laughing, trying to
keep from landing on the dog or the cat, who both took one look at the furious Placida and the broom in her hand before departing—fast—for parts unknown. Thomas laughed until he was choking, knowing even as he did it that it was a reaction to that sound of grief in Nadine’s voice, a way to let it go without losing his mind. It wasn’t until he realized his grandmother was staring in dismay at the table that he stood up, extracted the phone from the mess, and said, “Gotta call you back,” and hung up before she could say anything.

“Let me help you,
Abuelita,”
Thomas said, reaching for an oval medal. There was a smell of roses and heat coming from the mingled powders. He saw a pinkish barklike substance he thought was incense, and chile spices, and dirt scattered together, pink and brick red and pale brown sand. He pinched a little of the mix and put it in his palm. The smell made him a little dizzy. “What is all this?”

She just looked at it, her gnarled hands loose at her sides. The radio poured out a chipper little salsa piece, heavy on the trumpet, and helplessly, Thomas picked out the medals, the lengths of gold braid, the broken bottle, a small plastic can of incense with a label that read,
INCIENSO DEL ESPIRITU
—
INDIO PODEROSO BENDI-CION AL HOGAR.
Spiritual Incense—Powerful Indian house blessing. The pile of sand suddenly made sense. “Chimayó dirt?” he asked.

She nodded, staring balefully at the mess.

“We’ll get you some more. We’ll drive down today if you want.” A bag of ground red chiles bled into the piles of dirt and incense. He rescued it. “Do you have some more of this?”

Her eyes narrowed and she raised her old, sharp eyes to his face. “Was it
La Diabla
on the phone?”

He hated for her to call Nadine that, but nothing he’d
said had dissuaded her. He nodded, fingering the piles of charms in his palm. “What d’you want me to do with these, eh?”

She scowled, looking suddenly tiny and old and uncertain as she stared at them, her brow furrowed and pained. “Put ‘em down.”

“You want me to drive you down to Chimayó?”

Thunder shuddered through the sky and Placida jumped. “No,” she said harshly. “No. Put them down, and go. Go. Out of my kitchen.”

It didn’t seem like the time to say it was his kitchen. Thomas put the medals down in a pile on his table, feeling sand sticking to the lines in his palms. He brushed at it, then backed out of the room. “I’ll go down to Rosa’s café for my breakfast. Tell anyone who calls to reach me there.”

“Good. Go.”

The phone rang as he left the room, but Thomas didn’t bother to wait for it. He knew it would be Na-dine and he didn’t want to talk to her. He fled into the rain, the smell of Chimayó chile and dirt and rose-scented incense filling the truck as he started it and drove through the morning gray to Rosa’s café.

The rain plagued Joy Loggia, too, as she stood miserably beneath the eaves of school, wondering if she should call her grandmother to come get her. It wasn’t a heavy rain, just a slow, soft kind of grayness that would creep under the collar of her coat and down her back in a particularly icky way. But she didn’t really want to see her grandmother right now. She was grumpy and her period had started during second hour, which meant she had to use the lumpy, thick pads they sold in the school machines, and feel yucky all day. Her grandmother
would be all nice, but she’d fuss and Joy didn’t feel like being fussed over.

Thunder rolled through the valley, low and deep, and Joy glared at the sky. Why didn’t her mother have a driver’s license like normal mothers?

The thought made her feel guilty, which made her chest ache, and that made her even more mad. It wasn’t her fault her mom had lost her license, but who was paying the price today?

“Hey, girl. ‘Sup?” Maggie, skinny and big-eyed, came up beside her. She had her notebook clasped close to her chest, like always. Her hair, long, long, long, curled all over in the wet, making her look like one of the dolls April collected. Maggie even had the pretty red mouth like those dolls. All she needed was a red flamenco dress.

“Hey,” Joy said, and some of the irritation left her nerves. “What’re you doing?”

“Nothin’. Wanna come to my house this afternoon? My mom’s working.” She lifted an eyebrow wickedly. “She has cigarettes there.”

She scowled at the sky. “I guess you don’t have a ride, either?”

“Nah. It’ll be all right, though. We’ll just get wet. No big deal.” She shrugged, cocked her head. “C’mon.”

“Ugh. I don’t know. I started. No tampons. Maybe I oughtta just go home.”

“My mom’s got a tea from the
bruja
that’ll make you feel better.” She smiled, tugged on Joy’s arm. “C’mon.”

Joy liked being with Maggie. She liked even just looking at her. It was amazing that Maggie had no idea that she was one of the most beautiful girls in the entire school. The other girls knew it, and all the guys, but Maggie was just lost inside her head somewhere and
didn’t pay attention to the rest of the world. Joy didn’t know why she liked that so much, but she did. It was easy to be around her.

Tucking her chin close to her chest, she followed Maggie on to the little road that led toward their houses. A mile away. “The rain is
cold
here.”

“Nah, it’s not cold!” She flung out her hands, and tossed back her head to let the rain fall on her face. “You’ll see. Winter is cold. Snow is cold. This is nice.”

“I can’t help it if I have southern blood.”

Maggie laughed. “Girl, you are
so
grouchy!”

“And you are too cheerful. Did something happen today?”

A car drew up beside them, with a guy around twenty driving. “Magdalena,” he said, glaring at her, “what are you doing in the rain?”

“Ricky! When did you come home?” She danced up to the car and gave him a hug. “My mom know yet?”

He looked over Maggie’s shoulder to Joy, lifting his chin in greeting.

“Hi,” Joy said back. Her heart sped up a little. His eyes were long, shaped like cat eyes, and dark.