Rag and Bone (28 page)

“Why are you telling me this, Mr. DeLeon?”

“I don’t want John to stay away from his family because he doesn’t think you will be welcome. In my house, you will always be treated with respect.”

We looked at each other for a moment. He was sizing me up.

“Thank you,” I said. “I will always be respectful in your house and with your family.”

He nodded, then stood up with a grunt. “Damn arthritis. John doesn’t have to know I came to see you.”

“I won’t tell him.”

I walked him to the door where he stopped, turned and shook my hand.
“Pues, hasta luego, Rico.
”

“Mr. DeLeon,” I said. He hobbled to his car and drove away.

After he left, I scribbled a note for Elena and drove to John’s house. His red truck was parked in the driveway.

“Henry? I thought I heard a car.” He was standing at the railing, looking down. “I just tried to call you. How did you know I was back?”

“ESP. Can I come up?”

He started down the steps as I started up, and we met halfway. He was barefoot, wearing old khakis and a black tank top. Above his right eye was a faint scar. I had never noticed it before. He had a couple of days’ growth of beard and his eyes were even sleepier than usual.

“I missed you,” I said.

Something in my tone alarmed him. “Are you okay?”

“I missed you,” I repeated and embraced him. I held the weight of his body against mine, felt the warmth of his skin and rasp of his breath against my neck, and I was suffused with the joy that comes when everything is as it should be. “I’m glad you’re back.”

He stroked my hair. “I want us to be together. That’s what I was calling to tell you.”

John said, “You sure you have to go?”

He was lying naked on the bed, his hands cupping his head on the pillows, watching me dress. I paused and studied him. I remembered some of the boys I’d slept with in my twenties and thirties, with their hard, perfect bodies, and while perfection has its attractions, it isn’t really lovable. John had golden skin and big arms, but the muscles in his chest sagged a little and there were pockets of flab at his waist and a mesh of fine wrinkles above his eyelids, reminding me whenever I looked at him that among the reasons I loved him were that he spent his days in the sun, loved to eat and was halfway through life.

“You’re looking at me like you’re taking inventory,” he said.

“You’re beautiful.”

“Don’t embarrass me.”

I sat at the edge of the bed. “I love your body.”

“I love yours,” he said. He chuckled. “Man, that’s a hard thing to say to another guy.”

“I know, but I had to tell you at least this once.”

“You tell me every time you look at me,” he said. He started to unbutton my shirt.

“I can’t stay,” I said, stopping him. “Elena will be expecting me. We have to make a decision about where to send Angel to school, and after dinner I have to drive her to the airport. Why don’t you come and eat with us?”

“I have a better idea. Bring your sister and Angel back here and I’ll make dinner.”

“Really?”

He nodded. “Sure. Angel can hang out and watch a game with me while you take your sister to the airport, and then you can come back and we’ll all camp out here tonight.”

“Angel and me stay here?”

“He can sleep in my son’s room.”

“I don’t know, John.”

He frowned. “Henry, what are you trying to protect Angel from? He knows we sleep together. He knows we’re boyfriends.”

“I don’t want him to think there’s some kind of competition going on between you and him for my attention.”

“In the first place, Angel and me are buddies,” he said. “In the second place, I know when to back off.” He studied my face. “You have to get over this, you know. If Angel thinks you’re ashamed of who you are, he won’t respect you.”

“Believe me, John, I know that,” I said. “I’m surprised I feel this way. I thought I’d worked out being gay a long time ago.”

“It’s one thing when you’re on your own,” he said. “It’s another thing when you’ve got kids because you don’t know how something’s going to affect them and you want to protect them against anything that can hurt them.” He touched my hand. “Seeing two people who love each other can’t hurt him.”

“You’re right,” I said. “This can’t hurt him. When am I going to meet your kids, John?”

His face darkened for an instant. “My boy comes home from Spain in a couple of weeks and he’ll be staying with me till school starts. We’ll all go to a game or something. He’ll be cool. With my daughter, it’s gonna take awhile, Henry. Maybe a long while.” He smiled. “We’ll work it out. So, you coming back?”

“Yeah, but we’ll have to leave early in the morning, because we’re going to church.”

“Church? When did that happen?”

I explained about Reverend Ortega.

“That’s not until ten,” he said. “I’ll get you out of here by then. I have to go to church myself with my mom and dad.”

Thinking of his dad, I said, “I’d like to go with you sometime.”

“Really? That would be great. All right, take off, man, so I can figure out what to feed the Rios family.”

“Can I bring anything?”

“Something chocolate for dessert.”

Angel was already excited about staying over at John’s house, but when he saw it, he could scarcely contain himself.

“It’s like a treehouse,” he exclaimed when we pulled up in the driveway.

John called down from the railing, “Hey, Angelito. Elena. Come on up.”

Angel clambered up the stairs while Elena and I followed at a more sedate pace, finishing our conversation about the schools she had visited. The most promising was a boarding school in Pasadena that had a strong commitment to “multicultural diversity.”

“Particularly,” Elena observed, “if the multiculturally diverse can pay the fifteen-thousand-dollar-a-year tuition.”

“That’s more than Stanford charged me for law school,” I said. “Of course, that was a hundred years ago.”

“On the plus side” she said, “the school takes in a lot of scholarship students. Black kids from the inner city and quite a few Central American kids, and they’re used to working with students like Angel who have some ground to make up. They also really want him.”

“Yeah, I bet a mom in jail has a lot of cachet. What did he think?”

From above us, we heard Angel giggling at something John had said.

“He’s going to struggle at any school he goes to for a while,” she said. “At this place, there will be kids struggling along with him and some wonderful teachers. What did he think? He loved the fact that they have a baseball team.”

“What’s our next step?”

“The headmaster wants Angel to come in for aptitude testing to see where he is academically. They’re starting a kind of academic summer camp in two weeks, which he highly recommends for Angel. Five thousand for six weeks.”

“Holy moley.”

She laughed. “Didn’t you know? Kids are a money pit.”

“Grandma, Uncle Henry,” Angel called. “Hurry up and see John’s house.”

“Remember how hard Dad worked to support us?” she asked. “Think of this as paying him back.”

La Iglesia de Cristo Triunfante was located in a storefront on a stretch of Beverly Boulevard known as Little Tegucigalpa because of all the Central American restaurants and travel agencies that had set up shop in the crumbling, ornate one-and two-story buildings that dated back to the 1930s, when it had been the heart of a prosperous Jewish neighborhood. The buildings were now painted blue and lime and pink, but they retained their original Art Deco zigzags and chevrons. The building the church occupied was not one of the older ones, but a featureless brick square, the windows of which had been painted white with the church’s name written in blue across them. On the sidewalk, a squat, dark man with a broad, impassive Indian face pushed a cart with an ear of corn painted on it and cried out,
“Elote, elote.
” An old woman in a black rebozo picked out kids’ T-shirts imprinted with Bart Simpson’s face from a bin in front of a store that sold everything from communion dresses to velvet tapestries of John and Robert Kennedy. Mariachi music blared out from a music store. A homeless man peed into the doorway of a shuttered bank. Outside the church, women in pastel dresses wearing veils over their heads greeted each other with kisses.

“This the place?” I asked Angel.

“Uh-huh.” He looked at me. “What’s wrong, Uncle Henry?”

I couldn’t tell him that I was afraid I would turn into a pillar of salt as soon as we crossed the threshold of the church.

“Nothing,
m’ijo.
It’s just that I haven’t been to church for a long time.”

“Is that because you’re gay?” he asked me.

“Yes,” I said. “Most churches don’t like gay people very much.”

My nephew’s expression was sympathetic. “Don’t worry, Uncle Henry. Reverend Ortega is really nice.” He glanced at the church. The women were going inside. “We should go before they start.”

I followed him into the church. The sky did not fall.

The service was in Spanish. I struggled to follow along, then gave up and looked around the small room. The air was hot and close and reeked of perfume, hair oil, flowers and bodies from the hundred or so people crammed into folding chairs. Only the ceiling fans kept it from being really unbearable. There were more women than men, though not by much, and everyone was dressed in their Sunday best: Easter-egg colors for the women, for the men dark trousers, white shirts. There was a sprinkling of children and a surprising number of adolescents, but most of the crowd seemed to consist of people in their thirties and forties. Here and there, hefty women in late middle-age fanned themselves with fans improvised from the church bulletin and watched the proceedings with a proprietary interest; the ladies sodality, I imagined. At the front of the room was a simple altar covered with flowers, and on the wall above it a cross. On one side of the altar was the choir—ten women and four men wearing sky-blue robes—and three musicians, a keyboardist, a guitarist and a flutist. Opposite them was a podium with a microphone. The choir had just finished singing a high-pitched, piping hymn, more like a chant than a song, and now Reverend Ortega took the podium and began to read a passage from the Bible. He was wearing the same black suit that he had worn when I first encountered him at court, the same narrow, unfashionable tie.

I had formed my stereotype of evangelists from channel-surfing through the Sunday morning religious shows: white Southern men in expensive suits, with brittle, poufy hair and faces slimed theatrically with tears as they condemned people like me to the crude hells they constructed out of ignorance and fear. Sometimes the face was black, and instead of tears was frowning sternness, but the condemnation was always the same and it was animated by that purposeful energy of hatred. I expected Ortega to be the same kind of shrieker and weeper, and assumed the best I could hope for was that Leviticus was not this week’s text.

I turned my attention to him. He read from Matthew about the afflicted woman who believed if she touched even the hem of Jesus’ garment she would be healed. She humbly made her way through the throng that surrounded him, touched his robe and was instantly cured. Among all the people who pressed against him, it was her touch that Jesus felt and her faith he praised. I had no trouble understanding the simple Spanish of the verse or the sermon that followed. Ortega was not a weeper and shrieker. He spoke in a conversational tone, in a resonant voice and seemed scarcely able to conceal his happiness; like someone bringing you the best news you would ever receive. I thought he had to be faking it, that this bubbling mirth was an orator’s trick, and perhaps there was something of that in it, but the joy was real, too. His message was not complicated: He used the story to assure his listeners that among the rich and powerful, it was the faith of the poor and the humble that pleased God best.

I thought of my niece. She’d responded to me with a passive blankness that made me wonder if she had an interior life at all. Now it occurred to me that perhaps she was like the woman in Mark’s story, her blankness concealing humility and her passivity, faith. When I was with her, it often felt to me as if she had hoped for someone else. Perhaps it wasn’t that she was hoping for someone else, but that she had placed her hope in someone else. I looked around the room; sweat poured down the mesmerized faces of the congregation as Ortega expounded his text. I was touched, but the mystery of faith remained mysterious to me.

When the service ended, we followed the other congregants as they filed through a door into an adjacent room equipped with an industrial stove and a double sink. Food, paper plates, cups and plastic utensils were laid out on the long counter that partitioned the room. A screen door was propped open, and through it I glimpsed a patio set up with tables and chairs and realized this must have been a restaurant. Reverend Ortega saw us and came over. He shook my hand warmly and ran an affectionate hand through Angel’s hair.

“Señor Rios, I’m glad you could come. Hello, Angelito.”

“Hi, Reverend,” Angel said.

“Will you excuse us for a minute, Angel? Reverend Ortega and I have to talk.”

Angel went off to eat. Reverend Ortega said, “Come, I have an office.”

His office was a tiny room that must have been the pantry. There was just enough space for a desk and two chairs. There was a cross on the wall and a bulletin board that sagged with announcements, calendars and photographs from church socials. Reverend Ortega squeezed behind his desk and invited me to sit down.

“Did you enjoy the service, Señor Rios?”

“Actually, yes. I expected something different.”

He cocked his head. “What?”

“Fire-and-brimstone. People rolling in the aisle. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be offensive.”

“God hears us even when we—” He paused, and I could see him searching for the English equivalent of the word he had in mind. “Even when we whisper. No one needs to yell.” He smiled apologetically. “Señor Rios, Spanish is more easy for me. If I speak Spanish, you can understand?”

“I think so, but I’ll have to speak English back.”