Island of Divine Music (24 page)

Paul was silent for a moment. Then he smiled. I love this place. I absolutely love this place.

They waited until eight to knock on the door of the school, which was really an old house with an enclosed patio. Paul started to speak Spanish, and Angelo listened and tried to understand. He saw his brother produce the wrinkled newspaper articles which he and Lorna Dee and Kathy Manslayer had been gathering from the Spanish-speaking press,
La Prensa de Milagros.
The blond woman, who spoke Spanish with a Scandinavian accent, seemed to know Señor Almas very well. Paul’s voice was rich with excitement.

Angelo had to jog to keep up with him. They found Fernando Almas asleep under an old Chevy Nova. He crawled out to shake
their hands. The articles he’d written, yes, Angelo understood a little of what they were saying about these reports of a miracle healer named Verbizcaro, almost the same last name as theirs. Jesús Gómez de Verbizcaro, and he didn’t practice here but in the Yucatán, where the palm is.

Oh, great, Angelo said. He asked Paul to translate some questions for the reporter about this Jesús of the miraculous healing powers who supposedly lived under a weeping coconut palm which, when photographed from a certain angle, looked a lot like a profile of Mother Mary or, in Angelo’s estimation, a praying mantis.

Cuantos años tiene Jesús?

The reporter raised his hands and guessed about twenty-five. The photo of the man beneath the miraculous palm tree looked like a twenty-five-year-old with long hair who could be the Jesús they sought if he’d never aged a day in the past thirty years.

Paulie, he would be fifty-five by now. Not like this guy in the picture.

He called Jennifer an hour later. We haven’t spoken this much for months, he mused.

Right.

Listen, we have to go clear out to the Yucatán, and it looks like we’re going by bus. I guess he’s at some place in Quintana Roo.

Oh, my God, that is supposed to be paradise, Jennifer said. Oh, God, Sam will die of envy. I wish she could be there with you. You could go snorkeling.

Well, I couldn’t fly her down there. I mean, she’s way too young to fly alone.

All she talks about is you and Mexico.

Paulie is obsessed with finding this guy. I hope it doesn’t break his heart because this sham of the weeping coconuts can’t be our uncle. Anyway, my agent, and Paulie’s desperation, twisted my arm.

Maybe I should bring her. I don’t even have a good swimming suit.

Your blue one looks great.

F
orty minutes before their bus took off he couldn’t find his brother again. He ran through the afternoon downpour, the rainwater cascading down church steps, a plastic poncho flapping around him like wings, and felt more foolish than ever. Inviting Jennifer to meet him in the Caribbean paradise, losing track of his crazy brother, not even certain how or where to find the faith healer or sham shaman that almost undoubtedly wasn’t the Jesús of their youth. He ran through the tropical deluge, flapping his yellow wings like Big Bird as cars and motor scooters roared past. He found Paul in the churchyard, which was called Jardin de Bodas, or wedding garden. He thought of his heart pounding under the poncho like a little pouch of blood, he thought of weddings and Jennifer and eternal spring, he thought of the word
sangre
as he told his brother they had to run for the Red Arrow or wait two days for the next chance.

Paul got up from the slab of marble he’d been kneeling on. His white hair and dirty white shirt and pants were soaked. Without a word, he ran.

H
e couldn’t put her out of his mind for ten minutes. Would they share a bed? Would it even be safe, in every respect of that word, since she’d slept with Charles in the interim, and he had spent one night with a coworker named Denise? Whenever the bus stopped, blind men and musicians would board, begging for pesos, sometimes selling tamales, and Angelo thought of men who would maybe kill a person like Charles for sleeping with their wives. It was an old Bluebird bus, the kind he and his brother had ridden to school over forty years ago, and chickens and goats were occasional passengers. They made their way over mountain ranges with the windows rattling and the goats complaining, and Angelo imagined himself with a straw sombrero and a machete, coming up to Charles at his Laguna Beach office and shouting, in a thick Spanish accent, You touch my wife and I keel you! I keel you!

Angelo fell asleep thinking of his daughter and her mother. He awoke when the bus came to a stop. They were on the shoulder of a dark highway. He wondered if they were waiting to take on passengers, or if an accident or obstruction blocked their passage. The driver got up and spread a bedroll down the aisle between the seats, then lay on it. He heard some passengers sigh with a little exasperation in their throats. The driver started snoring. People got out to relieve themselves in the bushes, Paul among them. He never re-boarded.

The bus started up an hour later. Angelo was calling in the
darkness near the highway for his brother. For Christ’s sake, Paulie, don’t do this! Paulie! The bus took off.

Some time later they were sitting in the dim light just before dawn, beside a road which stretched across miles of mountainous forest. Paul looked at Angelo and said, You know what you are? You’re a doubting Thomas.

Really? Angelo tried to hide the anger in his voice. Imagine that. Doubt.

Don’t take offense. Your skepticism and wit serve you really well, for the most part. But you won’t believe until God shows his face to you, will you?

Well. Angelo rubbed his eyes. The light was softly giving the trees their colors. How does, or how will, God show his face to me?

Somebody we both knew, somebody who changed our lives, was filled with God’s grace, and you can’t accept that. But we are going to see him again.

I’ll admit that he was charismatic and kind of, I don’t know. He yawned. Kind of radiant. Is that good enough? But you don’t know if this guy Verbizcaro is him or not, do you?

Paul stared at him for a while. Angelo could see the flecks of green in his brother’s brown eyes. Paul smiled. He looked younger, almost as he had as a high school baseball star. You don’t understand the spirit of Jesus.

Our Jesús, the kid I cleaned toilets with, was the actual guy from Nazareth, you’re saying?

No. That’s not what I’m saying.

And when that drunk guy shot him, he died for our sins, but you think he’s really alive? The sky was turning from purple and black to a soft whitish-blue. An expensive-looking car approached, and Angelo tried to flag it down. Stop, you sons of bitches!

I think there’s no such thing as death. Not really. There’s really only love, and life.

And there’s only about one car an hour on this fucking road, Paulie.

Paul. The rich people won’t stop, but some poor man will come along, soon.

Not fifteen minutes later a beat-up pickup truck clanked up to them. Angelo and Paul climbed in back with a large pig. To the Ritz-Carlton, Jeeves, Angelo said to the pig. The truck bounced through the mountains to a village, where they spent much of the day arranging for further transportation, Paul doing the talking. Angelo guessed that all those years in the Southwest had at least given Paulie some grasp of a second language.

The next morning, somewhere on the Gulf coast, they stopped and had
huevos rancheros.
The bus would be delayed, a man at the counter said. Maybe two hours. Maybe more. Angelo would be at least one day, possibly two, late in meeting his daughter and wife, or estranged wife. He would try to leave a message at their hotel. They walked on the beach of this Gulf city, Coatzalcoalcos, which smelled of petroleum, and came back. Now the guy at the station said the bus would be ready that night or the next morning. Who knows?
Quien sabe?

Angelo followed his brother, who seemed to need to keep moving, all around the town. He repeated the bus clerk’s phrase over and over,
quien sabe, quien sabe,
trying to get that world-weary inflection perfectly. Sometimes Paul said he was listening to God speak to him and asked Angelo to be quiet.
Ay, dios,
Angelo said.
Quien sabe?

They went to a five-year-old, dubbed George Clooney movie, and an explosion shook the seats in the middle of the film, and the theater went totally dark. They groped their way outside and saw that the entire city was blacked out. Paul laughed. When the lights came back on, the people walking the promenade near the beach cheered and clapped.

A bus came into town. Angelo and Paul happened to see it from the promenade. They ran for it and boarded just in time. It rolled along a fairly level terrain, and the sweet smells of the tropics washed across them from the loose windows. Angelo fell asleep, thinking of the perfume of trees and women, thinking of his daughter’s hair after her evening bath. When he awoke his brother was standing outside, near his window, speaking to a man. Angelo wasn’t sure if he was awake or still dreaming because the view of Paul through the smudged window seemed unreal at first. Paul looked as he had when he was a little boy. He and the man squatted and drew circles and lines in the dirt. The man’s hair was black and shiny as a beetle. He and Paul stood and embraced.

This place is holy land, Paul told him. He listed some of the reasons: the Mayan pyramids, the sacrificial cenotes, the ancient ruins covered by jungle vines, the old Franciscan churches. We’re very close, now, he said. Very close!

They ate bananas and avocados in the jungle city of Valladolid. Paul arranged for the bus to the shrine of the weeping palms, and Angelo paid, as always. He caught a reflection of himself in a shop window and was shocked to see this haggard, whiskered person staring back. It took hours to reach the shrine, and it looked to be a commercial success with its billboards and souvenir stands. Decals of the Virgin of Guadalupe, hand-carved crosses with bleeding Christs, and garish paintings and postcards of the weeping coconut palm spread before them on blankets where smooth-faced people hawked them. The palm itself was surrounded by tourists, most of them Mexicans, snapping pictures. It looked no different from any of the other trees, in Angelo’s estimation, except that it leaned lower, as if a recent hurricane had almost uprooted it. He paid for their audience with the healer, and they stood in line.

Following the local custom, Paul dropped to the floor of the little wooden chapel and crawled the distance to his seat in a pew. Angelo didn’t prostrate himself, but he crossed and genuflected. The healer spoke in a singsong Spanish, and people crawled up to him and offered their heads to his hands. He looked to be about thirty and well-fed. The puffiness around his eyes betrayed a habit of drinking. Angelo watched his brother receive the blessing of hands and crawl back to his pew. The smile on Paul’s face was like Saman-tha’s over a hot-fudge sundae.

Excuse me. Angelo had waded among the faithful to the pulpit. Many had left the chapel to make purchases, but he knew that Paul was still kneeling behind him among the most fervent visitors. He knelt before the stout man and studied his face. You’re not the Jesús
we knew, I mean the Jesús from our family. I’m Angelo Verbicaro, and that’s my brother, Paul.

The healer raised his eyebrows. He placed his hands on Angelo’s head.

Ouch, hey, you don’t need to do that, Angelo said.

The man chanted something in Spanish. The only words Angelo understood were
muchos años,
or many years.

Some time later he waited for the bus to Cancún. He would see Jennifer and Samantha, and they might be a family again, or they might simply see how separate their lives must remain. Paul hugged him and sighed. His smile seemed unable to undo itself, and he kept saying, Wow.

I’m glad it was so good for you, Angelo said. Do you need a cigarette or something?

Did you feel it, Angie?

The sun was sinking into the trees.

I don’t think so. Did I feel it? I guess not. Actually, I felt some pain. Anyway, I’m sorry.

Don’t be sorry.

But we came all this way, and it wasn’t him.

Paul touched his face and turned it to him, as a child might to make sure you’re listening to everything he’s saying. It
was
him, Angie. We recognized each other. He recognized you.

Angelo started to respond, then shrugged and remained silent. The Jesús he’d known was as American as himself, a Chicano kid raised in California and the racist Rocky Mountain states of the USA. He was probably three inches taller than the Mexican shaman
or con man they’d met today, and if he hadn’t been shot by a drunk in San Francisco he would be fifty years old by now, not thirty. An-gelo saw no sense in mentioning any of this to his brother, however. Instead he asked Paul to tell him what the man had said while his hands were on his scalp.

He said that after many years, wait, how did he say it? Something like, after many years you once again see the face of the beloved.

A
ngelo sat alone in the dark as the bus flew under the black branches, as the frilly plastic tassels and religious icons swished across the windshield to protect the driver and his passengers while they roared through the jungle. The face of his wife, after a matter of weeks, of months since the separation: Wasn’t this the face of his beloved? Perhaps it
had
been years since they had looked upon each other, had really looked into each other’s faces, with love.

I
t required more hours of waiting to catch a ferry from Puerto Juárez to the island. The slow boat to Isla Mujeres reminded him of a Mississippi steamboat, its striped awning charred by the smoke of its engine. The water was the green-blue of Jennifer’s eyes. He found them soon enough, and their beauty together, mother and daughter wading in the surf, made him feel weightless.

What’s with your hair? Samantha asked.

My hair?

Yes, Jennifer asked, what
is
with your hair? It reminds me of those old-fashioned flattops with wings.

You have white wings, Dad.

I don’t have enough hair for wings. What are you talking about?