Island of Divine Music (7 page)

Of God’s dark plan Jesús was also aware because his mother spoke of it often, even as she worked the rows of artichokes and lettuce in the heat of midday. The foundation of her apocalyptic vision may have come from the priests of her childhood in the tropical mountains of Oaxaca, in a primarily Indian community still darkened by the shadow of colonial oppression, or it may have come from the deaths of her parents and brother which had led to her childhood prostitution in San Francisco’s Mission District. She said it came from God’s mouth itself because she heard His voice in her head on a daily basis, and generally He was not pleased with things. Jesús understood God’s dark plan to involve mass destruction and wholesale death, the ocean suddenly tumbling over the Gabilan Mountains and filling the valley they were in, the city of San Francisco falling and burning magnificently. He understood it to require the presence of various tools of the devil, men whose hearts were possessed or turned to stones as cold as the river cobbles he struck with his hoe while working alongside his mother, to tempt and torment the few righteous souls on God’s earth.

It wasn’t surprising then that little Jesús, toddling the rows barefoot with his straw sombrero and broken hoe, spotted the evil man before the others who stooped in the field. Paolo stood on the dirt road beside the irrigation ditch, and Jesús ran to tell his mother. The collector had been searching the Salinas Valley all day after he had convinced old Rosanidia, by way of breaking her finger and
burning her cheek with a cigar, to give him an idea where to find the woman he loved. He stood in the mountain shadows of late afternoon wearing a dark suit and dark glasses, smoking, nodding his head. Maria called to José, and another man ran for the
patron.

The
patron
was an obese Argentine who carried a shotgun for the gophers and snakes, and this he leveled at Paolo, who backed away. Maria watched the collector gesture with his arms while the
patron
marched him down the irrigation road to his shiny car. The car didn’t leave immediately, though. Maria could feel Paolo watching her from behind its windshield. A couple of men stacking pallets went up to the driver’s window, and it looked like the collector handed something to one of these men. Later, after the car had gone, a boy handed Maria a box of chocolates, in which she found a ten-dollar bill and these words, written in a mishmash of Italian and Spanish:
Maria, Every night I lie in a torment of love for you. Please come back. I will treat you like a queen because I love you more than I love my own mother. Your Paolo.

Maria convinced José that they needed to clear out that night, and a few other farm workers followed their station wagon north. They picked apples outside Hood River, Oregon, and this was the first vision of snow for mother and son, from a tall, three-legged ladder in the apple trees where Mount Hood filled the sky. These were days of beauty for her, the ache of the ladder pressing on the soles of her feet and the shape of apples in her hands. The sensation remained in her bones and in her dreams at night, along with the volcano which gleamed above her like a loving face. Jesús would eat the sweet fallen fruit and talk with her while she worked in the dappled
light, and they would collapse in a sweet sort of apple-scented exhaustion at night, left alone in the wall tent while José slept in the car, a world away from the evil of the city.

They worked their way east to the sugar beets along the Snake River, dry country with little to see beyond the grain elevators and distant peaks until nightfall, when the sky filled with stars and the creamy brush strokes of the galaxy. Maria and Jesús wondered about the enormous silo dug into the river clay like the grave of a giant, and were told by the rancher’s wife, a ruddy-faced Frenchwoman, that it held
earth apples
by the millions. This excited the child, the idea of apple trees growing in some land deep within the earth, and Maria teased Jesús in a friendly way and encouraged his fantasy.

One windy afternoon in the beet fields Maria felt a chill and looked to see a boy staring at her. In that moment she knew several things which God had planned: that this boy had accepted more than chocolate from Paolo in Salinas, that the bill collector would come soon, and that blood would be shed. She told José that they needed to leave again, that night, and he refused because payday was the following Friday. Woman, he said, you believe too much in dark signs. He resumed work, but crossed himself first.

The next day there was a heavy frost on the beets and sagebrush. Maria worked all day with a chill in her right shoulder as she swung her machete. Even at midday she was cold enough to leave the poncho on as she worked. A sour wind, filled with the stink of a potato-processing plant, swept the fields.

Once again, Jesús saw the evil men in their dark suits and ran to
tell his mother. Paolo was accompanied this time by a huge, dim-witted thug named Anastácio Váldez. They walked among the beet rows laughing softly, striding with the confidence of landowners. It was near sunset, and their shadows stretched across the rows as they made their way to Maria and her child.

Paolo sang a few lyrics from a popular doo-wop song of the times, a song about crossing mountains and valleys to get to the woman he loved, while Tacho Valdez laughed. Then the Neapolitan spread his arms, inviting Maria to embrace him. Maria stepped back.

It puzzled Tacho, as he put it to Maria in his street Spanish, that she would prefer digging in shit like a pig to a life of luxury in the city with a rich man like Paolo who loved her. She stood with dried mud dusting her bare feet and legs, her hands scratched by thistles and leaves and callused by work, and described the punishment that God had in store for them. This made both men laugh. By now José and three other men had gathered in the dusky light near Maria and her child. Paolo shrugged and pulled a stiletto from his pocket. Tacho produced a length of chain.

Former zoot-suiters who’d cut their teeth breaking thumbs for the mob, Paolo and Tacho were accustomed to frightening the poor country Mexicans in the barrio with a gesture or a threat. While Paolo brandished his knife Tacho explained how much he and the mafioso next to him enjoyed breaking bones and performing various acts of castration and vivisection on little
indios
such as them. Although Paolo didn’t understand all of the monologue, he got the gist of the Spanish insults and chuckled. What neither he nor Tacho knew was that every campesino, from age five onward, wielded a
machete with breathtaking authority. Country folk like Maria used the tool from childhood in order to chop firewood, harvest crops, slaughter livestock, and separate the heads of vipers from the rest of their bodies.

Paolo grabbed Maria’s elbow, and José shoved him, as much to save face in front of his
compañeros
as to defend the woman. The bill collector’s stiletto sliced José’s throat, and the powerful little man stood holding the gash while blood squirted between his fingers. He stared at Maria before his legs buckled. Then Maria swung the machete from beneath her poncho and buried it in her former lover’s leg. A storm of blades and screams followed.

The little drunk
patron
saw the carnage, vomited, and called the rancher. It made sense to both him and his boss to let an entire migrant community take to their heels before calling the authorities. In fact, with payroll a couple of days off, the crisis became an opportunity in disguise from the rancher’s perspective. Scare the hell out of them, he suggested.

José died in the arms of his
compañeros
and was left in a trough between two endless rows of beets. The two thugs were so horribly slaughtered that a photo of their dismembered corpses found its way into a
National Enquirer
issue some weeks later, under the caption Crazed Farmworkers Attack Threshing Machine! In the photograph Paolo’s eyes seemed to be regarding each other from two separate faces across the mangled expanse of his torso. Parts of Tacho Valdez lay in the dust as if awaiting assembly. A leg punctuated by a laced oxford lay across the big man’s neck.

When the
patron
told the workers that an army of immigration
and police was on its way, the campesinos scattered All but Maria, who held her child in one hand and the bloody machete in the other, unable to move. The camp grew quiet, the land dark, while she stood holding her child and the blade, waiting for God to complete His celestial thought. God seemed in the middle of an idea of how the woman should kill herself and her child, but He wasn’t clear about the details. Should she slit her wrists first? How would He have her end the innocent one’s life with the least pain? Should they leap into the river? The Snake curved in the distance, a dull shard of black glass near a warehouse, a dark shape slithering between the fields.

When the sirens sounded Jesús urged his mother to move. Here was where their thoughts diverged, as if a fork in the road of God’s mind appeared and the child would always take a different road from his mother’s. It even seemed possible, as Maria would see it later, that Jesús was able to convince God to change His mind. Lights bumped along the dirt road near the fenced housing enclosure, swept through the field and smeared across the distant river. Jesús tugged on his mother’s hand, and she started, as if awakened from a dream. She walked like a somnambulist, tugged by her child toward the dugout silo more than a mile away, the huge grave where the apples of the earth were stored. They could hear the voices of demons warped by a bullhorn among the shrieks of sirens. The mound at the end of the beet field became a formless sweep of black, an emptiness at the edge of the starry sky.

They entered the place of utter darkness where the
pommes de terre, manzanas de la tierra,
were heaped, and felt their way until they
were hidden, half buried among them. To the mother the close darkness, the musty earth odor, and the lumpy, cold potatoes were a taste of the necropolis in God’s plans, a city where the corpses of sinners would soon be stacked by the millions. But for the child the tubers were whimsically shaped apples from another world. He knew a hidden orchard lay somewhere farther back, deep within the earth. He knew trees of golden fruit gleamed in a light not of this world.

Narciso

N
arciso Verbicaro, the eldest child of Giuseppe and Rosari, was slow-witted. He was also, from his youth until his last breath, elegantly slender in a charcoal double-breasted coat and wide pleated trousers. A childhood spent in the egg candler’s and two leather tanneries led to an adolescence hauling debris from the buildings his father demolished. Narciso would run from the rubble to the trailer all day, back and forth, his skinny arms filled with broken boards and bricks, a cigarette nearly touching the brim of his fedora, while Giuseppe swung his hammer and cursed at the things he hit. The wheelbarrow was too complicated for Narciso, all the loading and balancing and preparing a path over ditches and bumps, so he carried everything, all day, in his arms.

In those days old Moe Blumenfeld, the racetrack owner who paid the local Italians to clear his lots, liked to park his Duesenberg and watch. He’d see the old man attack a house like an ax murderer and he’d smile; he’d see the little mountains of planks and stone, propelled by the skinny legs of a boy hidden beneath the rubble, fly across the yard, and he’d laugh.

They called Narciso by the last part of his name, pronounced
cheese-o,
or they called him Lucky Pants because of the Italian folktale of the magic breeches which filled with an endless supply of gold coins. Narciso had deep pockets filled with keys and pocket knives and lighters and candy and, later in life, money. He always seemed to have whatever was needed right there in his pants. The family thought an angel or the devil himself followed him around, filled his pockets, yanked his collar a second before a truck might squish him. To them he seemed a man living in a dream, charmed and free of worries, but asleep at the wheel.

In fact, behind the wheel was his favorite place. Narciso learned to drive his father’s Model T when he was twelve because Giuseppe had no patience for a machine and beat it with his hands and feet whenever it confounded him. By contrast, Narciso was as gentle with a machine as he was with dogs and mules and nanny goats; he coaxed the Tin Lizzy into gear, talked it around sharp turns with a loaded trailer in back, sang it through busy intersections. He was a hazard, to be sure, because his mind was a tabula rasa, and he drove as if on an empty road while others screeched and swerved around him. He laid the windshield down and set the looking glass so he could watch himself drive, watch his hair sweep back with the wind and see his handsome face beam in the shadow breaks of passing trees and buildings and trucks, his young life there before him, filled with adventure and beauty and charm.

Women adored him. Powerful men confided in him. He gave money away, once a twenty to a bootlegger at a speakeasy because the man had just lost his shirt at poker and Ciso had just gotten paid.
Two weeks later the racketeer gave Narciso a shiny black Packard. The young man took friends and family on thrilling rides about town until Giuseppe returned from two months working north of the bay. The old man promptly hitched his yard trailer to the beautiful sedan and had his son drive it to his next demolition job.

B
y the mid-1940s Narciso and his younger brothers had found their way to the other side of their father’s coin, pouring foundations and filling East Bay swamp with apartments during the war boom years. By the end of Eisenhower and the first year of the Catholic presidency, Narciso met daily with his brothers and their friends for breakfast at a Holiday Inn near the freeway, ostensibly to be in on the schemes and deals they discussed. Then he would wander in his convertible Cadillac, play golf, pick up groceries for his wife or mother, visit a building site, or yak with some guys leaning on shovels. He often drove his wife, Alice Elaine, to stores and forgot her, taking off alone while she was shopping or in the ladies’ room. She would call for a ride, sometimes to Narciso’s brother Ludovico. Lu, she would shout into the pay phone’s mouthpiece, Ciso took off again. Is he at the office? Ludovico would leave his desk, cursing, and give Alice and her groceries a ride home.