Night at the Fiestas: Stories (7 page)

Elliot held the screwdriver in his teeth and peered. “Hold on.” He seemed to be counting wires. Elliot pinched a wire in his fingers and looked up at her, his face lit by the edge of the flashlight beam. “Your judgment was impaired, maybe. Onset of hypothermia. I’m amazed you didn’t start a fire in the sink.”

“I shouldn’t have given it away. Or I should have given it to Cordelia. If anything, it belongs to Cordelia.”

Elliot shrugged. “You felt bad for the kid. It’s a just dress. You don’t even wear dresses.”

Once, when they were hiking, Monica had picked up a beautiful rock, worn smooth by some ancient creek and intricately marked, as if with a fine-nibbed pen. She’d handed it to Elliot, expecting him, the geologist, to see what made it beautiful. “Hm,” he’d said, glancing at it absently. “Limestone.” And with that both she and the rock were dismissed, while he returned to his thoughts about contact formations and pre-Cambrian flood plains. Monica’s feelings had been hurt, but she hadn’t shown it. His thoughts were simply on a grander scale than hers, concerned not just with the minutia of a single life, or even of their species; he was concerned with the life of the planet itself.

Elliot was right. What, really, had Monica given away? An old dress. A relic of difficult times. So why, then, was she angry?

“I should have given it to Cordelia,” Monica insisted, and she felt her voice rise. If she wasn’t careful, she might cry.

“She won’t remember,” said Elliot. “Kids don’t.”

Maybe Cordelia wouldn’t remember. It was possible. But despite being a child, Cordelia knew more about Monica’s first marriage than anyone else, knew how bad it had gotten and how long Monica had stayed. Cordelia never talked about those days or about what she’d seen, never discussed what it was like to hear her mother yelling and sobbing and smashing plates; a mother could almost fool herself into believing a child could forget these things.

It occurred to Monica that now Cordelia herself was the only thing left from that old life. When she’d taken off the dress today, Monica hadn’t even felt cold, so filled was she with the dark exhilaration of punishing Cordelia. In giving away Cordelia’s lovely, meaningless inheritance, she’d made an adversary of her seven-year-old daughter, and now even that she held against her.

The park was dark, the trailers asleep, except for Amanda’s, where the blue light of a TV glowed, shifting and desolate.

“I should go over there. I should go explain to Amanda’s mother that I made a mistake. Right now. Before they go to bed.”

“Monica.” Elliot laughed. “You can’t do that.”

“Of course I can.” Of course she could. She’d knock at the door, wait while Amanda’s mother pulled herself to her feet, switched on a lamp, and made her way across the carpet. Monica would step into the warm trailer, introduce herself, explain, and Amanda’s mother would fetch the dress. The interaction would be awkward, perhaps, but nothing Monica couldn’t smooth over, and it wouldn’t matter because Monica had the chance to make things right. “I’m so glad to finally meet you,” Monica would say. “Amanda’s always welcome at our place. And you, too. We should have coffee.”

“I’m going.” She pushed the flashlight at Elliot, but he wouldn’t take it. The beam danced across the dirt. “
Here
,” she said.

“Come on, Monica. Think about it. You’re going to go over there and snatch back something you gave to a little kid? That mother of hers is going to drop dead of a coronary any minute, and you’re going to go fight with her about an old dress in the middle of the night?”

“It doesn’t mean anything to Amanda,” Monica said, and as she said it she knew she wouldn’t go. “It doesn’t even fit her.”

“It doesn’t fit Cordelia, honey.” He put a hand on her leg, patted her briefly. “You’re not thinking.”

“What do you know?” Monica said with bitterness she hadn’t realized she felt. “You don’t even know Cordelia. You’re not her father. You’ve just met her.”

Elliot’s hands stilled on the wire. He turned, face wide open and hurt. “That’s not fair, Monica. I care about her very much.”

He wouldn’t be able to see her beyond the flashlight’s beam. Monica bit her lip, glad for the dark.

“That’s not fair,” he repeated.

Elliot returned his attention to the heater, and they stood in silence. Out on the highway a car passed. After a time he clipped a wire.

“Fixed.” He dangled a twisted length of wire in his gloved fingers. His voice was stiff. “The lead to the thermostat had corroded. The heat should kick in now.”

They’d make it up, she and Elliot, find each other under the covers as the chill ebbed around them. Outside, the wind would pick up again, and in Amanda’s trailer the television would flicker all night. In the morning, Cordelia would awaken early. She would look down from the loft at her family: her mother, her stepfather, and between them, arms flung wide, her little sister. Cordelia would forever feel on the outside, Monica saw, and Monica herself had put her there, because a person couldn’t live with that kind of reproach. It would only get harder between them, Monica saw that, too; Cordelia’s judgments would become more pointed, Monica would rankle ever more under her sharp eye. But Cordelia wouldn’t know any of this, not yet. Tomorrow, while her family slept below her in the gray dawn light, she would place her cheek back on the pillow and watch them, waiting for them to stir, and she wouldn’t even notice that she was finally warm.

THE FIVE WOUNDS

T
HIS YEAR
A
MADEO
P
ADILLA IS
J
ESUS
. T
HE HERMANOS HAVE
been practicing in the dirt yard behind the morada, which used to be a filling station. People are saying that Amadeo is the best Jesus they’ve had in years, maybe the best since Manuel Garcia.

Here it is, just Holy Tuesday, and even those who would rather spend the evening at home watching their satellite TVs are lined up in the alley, leaning in, fingers curled around the chain-link, because they can see that Amadeo is bringing something special to the role.

This is no silky-haired, rosy-cheeked, honey-eyed Jesus, no Jesus-of-the-children, Jesus-with-the-lambs. Amadeo is pockmarked and bad-toothed, hair shaved close to a scalp scarred from fights, roll of skin where skull meets thick neck. You name the sin, he’s done it: gluttony, sloth, fucked a second cousin on the dark bleachers at the high school.

Amadeo builds the cross out of heavy rough oak instead of pine. He’s barefoot like the rest of the hermanos, who have rolled up the cuffs of their pants and now drag the arches of their feet over sharp rocks behind him. The Hermano Mayor—Amadeo’s grand-tío Tíve, who owns the electronics store, and who surprised them all when he chose his niece’s lazy son (because, he told Yolanda, Amadeo could use a lesson in sacrifice)—plays the pito, and the thin piping notes rise in a whine. A few hermanos swat their backs with disciplinas. Unlike the others, though, Amadeo does not groan, and he is shirtless, his tattooed back broad under the still-hot sun.

Today, he woke with the idea of studding the cross with nails to give it extra weight, and this is what people watch: he holds the hammer with both hands high above his head, brings it down with a crack. The boards bounce; the sound strikes sharply off the outside wall of the morada.

Amadeo has broken out in a sweat, and they all take note. Amadeo sweats, but not usually from work. He sweats when he eats, he sweats when he drinks too much. Thirty-three years old, the same as Our Lord, but Amadeo is not a man with ambition. Even his mother will tell you that. Yolanda still cooks for him, pushes one plate across the table at him and another at whatever man she’s got with her.

And now here comes old Manuel Garcia, dragging his bad foot up the alley, his wounded hands curled at his sides.

He must have heard about the show Amadeo is putting on, because when else does he exert himself, except to buy liquor at the Peerless? As he nears the morada, the people part to give him a spot against the chain-link, right there in the middle. Now, instead of watching Amadeo, they watch Manuel. He coughs wetly between strikes of the hammer.

Manuel Garcia is old, but still a legend: in 1962 he begged the hermanos to use nails, and he hasn’t been able to open or close his hands since. It’s true the legend has soured a little, now that he hasn’t been able to work for forty-five years and has been kept alive by the combined generosity of the hermandad, the parish, and the state, and shows no sign of dying. Some people have stopped paying their tithes for this very reason. Some have even gone so far as to say that maybe the man was suicidal, and a death wish is not the same as devotion, even if they look alike.

Regardless, only Manuel Garcia is qualified to judge this new Christ, and it appears that he has arrived at his verdict, because he coughs again, wet and low, dislodges something deep in his throat, and spits it through a space in the fence so it lands just inches from Amadeo and his cross.

D
RIVING HOME
, A
MADEO TRIES
to regain the clarity he felt when pounding nails, but hand and foot and universe are no longer working together. When the gears scrape, he hits the steering wheel with his fist and swears and hits it again. This last week was the most important in Jesus’s life. This is the week everything happened. So Amadeo should be thinking of higher things when his daughter shows up eight months pregnant. Angel sits in front of the house on the bumper of the old truck, waiting for him. He hasn’t seen her in more than a year, but he’s heard the news from his mother, who heard it from Angel.

White tank top, black bra, gold cross pointing the way to her breasts in case you happened to miss them. Belly as hard and round as an adobe horno. The buttons of her jeans are unsnapped to make way for its fullness, and also to indicate how it got that way in the first place. Her birthday is this week, falls on Good Friday. She’ll be fifteen.

“Shit,” Amadeo says when he pulls in and yanks the parking brake. She must not have seen his expression, because she gets up, smiles, and waves with both hands. The rosary swings on his rearview mirror, and Amadeo watches as, beyond it, his daughter advances on him, stomach outthrust. She pauses, half turns, displays her belly.

She’s got a big gold purse with her, and a duffel bag, he sees, courtesy of Marlboro. Amadeo gets out. Her hug is straight-on, belly pressing into him.

“I’m fat, huh? I barely got these pants and already they’re too small.”

“Hey.” He pats his daughter’s back between her bra straps, then, because he is thinking of her stomach, thinking of her pregnant, steps away. “What’s happening?” he says. He realizes it’s too casual, but he can’t afford to let her think she’s welcome, not this week, Passion Week, and with his mother away.

“My mom and me got in a fight, so she dropped me off. I didn’t know where you and Gramma were.”

Amadeo hooks his thumbs in his pockets, looks up at the house, then back at the road. The sun is gone now, the sky a wan green at the horizon.

“A fight?”

Angel sighs. “I don’t know why she’s gotta be all judging me, trying to act all mature. Whatever,” she says without bitterness. “What me and the baby needs right now is a support system.”

“A what?” The clarity is long gone. He shakes his head. “I’m real busy,” he says, like an actor portraying regret. “Now’s not a good time.”

Angel doesn’t look hurt, just interested. “Why?”

She lifts her duffel and begins to walk toward the door. “My mom’s not here,” he calls. He’s embarrassed to tell her, embarrassed by the fervor that being a penitente implies. “I’m carrying the cross this year. I’m Jesus.”

“And I’m the Virgin Mary. Where’s Gramma, well?” She holds the screen open with her hip, waiting for him to unlock the door.

“Over there in Vegas with her boyfriend.”

Angel laughs, a raucous teenage laugh. “We’re all
kinds
of Virgin Mary.”

Yolanda is making her way across Nevada in a travel trailer with Cal Wilson, and, depending on how things go, she could be home tomorrow or in a month. As if to check if she’s coming, Amadeo turns and sees Manuel Garcia standing in the road, watching him and his daughter.

The old man’s ruined face spreads into a grin around collapsed teeth. Loose, dirty pants are cinched at his waist with a belt, his wounded hands before him. Amadeo’s mouth goes dry.

Up on the step, Angel is saying, “I was all, Whatever, take me to Gramma’s if you want to. She don’t care.”

Amadeo turns from Manuel Garcia. He takes the duffel from Angel’s hand and pushes open the aluminum door. “Come on.”

T
HAT NIGHT
, A
NGEL CHATTERS
about food groups as she makes dinner—a can of chili dumped over an underdone squash and a package of frozen cheese bread—then takes over the TV. She talks to her belly as she watches
America’s Next Top Model
. “See, baby? That heifer is going
home
. You can’t be like that to your girls and win the game.”

Amadeo sits at the other end of the couch, uneasy. He wipes his palms along his thighs, works his tongue inside his mouth. Three times he looks out the front window, but the old man is gone. With a sudden stitch in his gut, Amadeo thinks of Tío Tíve. He can’t know that Angel’s here and pregnant for all the world to see.