Tortuga (19 page)

“What you say, Tortuga?”

“He's talking to himself again.”

“Hey, remember the truck load of turtle soup that overturned on the highway just south of here? They were going to lose it anyway, so they donated it to the hospital and for weeks we ate nothing but turtle soup and stew! God, it was awful! The chunks of green meat tasted like it wasn't dead yet! It gave me the creeps … I felt like I was eating something alive …”

“I swore I'd never eat turtle soup again!”

“Hey, how do you feel about that, Tortuga? You're a turtle. How would you feel about getting cut up in little pieces and dumped into the soup?” They looked my way and laughed.

“That's what la Llorona will do if she gets hold of you. Snip, one cut and she makes soup out of the old tool.”

“That old wailing woman's not going to get Tortuga, brothers, cause he's got Ismelda to take care of him. She's not goin' let no Llorona get her baby!”

They laughed.

“How do you know Ismelda's not la Llorona? She lives near the river, doesn't she? Some of the janitors say she and Josefa are witches.”

“Hey, she's not a witch, ask Salomón.”

“Ah, what does he know!” Sadsack frowned. “I'm tired of listening to his stories. What good do they do?”

“Pass the time,” Ronco said.

They didn't know. They didn't understand what Salomón was working. Perhaps it wasn't affecting them, but I felt it was drawing me into a complex web. Somehow Ismelda and Salomón and Filomón and all the others I had met were bound together, and the force created was sucking me into it. When Ismelda sat by me I felt another presence hovering over us. When I looked into her eyes I often saw the outline of the mountain. When I asked her questions she would smile and tell me that my concern should be with getting well. But I had the vague, uneasy feeling that other things were in store for me.

“… You'll never change as long as you're meat eaters,” Danny said. He had come into the room unobserved.

“So I'm a meat eater,” Ronco shrugged, “what difference does it make if you eat meat or vegetables? Vegetables feel the same as animals. How do you know when you take a bite into a carrot that that poor carrot isn't going ‘Ouch, ouch, here come the big, bad cutting teeth!'”

“Ohhhh my—”

“But that's besides the point. Everything gets used in one way or another, right? Salomón said it's
how
it gets taken in that's important. Does anybody remember what he said?”

I listened carefully. I thought I heard Salomón say, we're all bound together, one great force binds us all, it's the light of the sun that binds all life, the mountain and the desert, the plains and the sea. I listened, and the stories came clearly and vividly, as if I was there at the time the story took place, that's how good Salomón was when he told a story. I listened, and time ceased to flow; it became the light of the sun; it became a liquid in which we all swam. Sometimes I worried, because I found myself struggling to leave the vortex of time the story created. I worried because I was afraid to remain fixed forever in the story being told. Sometimes I looked around me and thought that everyone would remain forever in the hospital, that no one was ever really going to get out, that we had created our own time and place and nobody was breaking free. Were we one of Salomón's stories, and would he let us free when he was ready?

When I felt like that I pushed harder to get out, and I made KC push harder. I swallowed the pain and begged for extra time in therapy.

“You're working too hard,” she said, and surprised me because I never expected that from her.

“I want out,” I said.

“I know,” she nodded, “but sometimes you work your body to a peak … then it drops. You have to know that there's highs and lows …”

“I've had my low,” I said, “I want a high … and that's going to come the day I walk out of here …”

When she was done Ismelda would come in and bathe my sweating body. She massaged my tired muscles with a special ointment Josefa had given me. I was growing stronger every day. Dr. Steel said it was a miracle.

“You're going to beat a lot of these sadsacks out of here,” he smiled.

“I have good help,” I answered.

“It's more than that—” he nodded vaguely in the direction of Salomón's ward.

“What?” I asked.

He muttered something and walked away. He didn't know.

“It's your destiny,” Ismelda whispered as she rubbed my legs. “Every person has a destiny which follows him like a shadow. And every destiny must be fulfilled …”

“But what is mine?” I asked.

“You will know when you meet it,” she said, “you might try to fight it, at first you might not accept it, but you can never escape it …”

“Does it have to do with what has happened to me?” I wondered. Is coming to the hospital part of my destiny, and how do you and Salomón and the mountain fit into my destiny? I knew Salomón held the key to my questions; I had to see him, I had to talk to him.

You know, I said, my grandfather believed in the destiny. He said some men are born to a good destiny. He told me the story about a man he knew at El Puerto who was like that. It seemed that everything the man touched turned to good luck. When the years of drought came a spring appeared on this man's land, and his herds increased and he made money while others were going broke. In the summer the worms came and ruined the herds that were left, but his weren't infected. He took life easy, while others slaved just to keep their families alive, he gambled every night at the saloon and never lost. He became very rich, and he had many beautiful women. He was robbed once and left for dead by the bandits, but he recovered and in a few months he made twice over the amount he had lost. In other ways, he lost his fortune many times, but it always kept coming back to him. He bought worthless land and in a year the railroad was built on it and he was rich again. Some people said he had sold his soul to the devil, but that wasn't what my grandfather said, it was just that the man was destined to be lucky and he wasn't afraid of his destiny. That man met his destiny face to face, and he was in harmony with it.

So maybe destiny does hover over us, I said to myself, maybe Salomón's cosmic kiss is another form or a part of that force, maybe Jerry's path of the sun is the road to know your destiny. I thought and remembered that I had often felt a force directing my life. At first I thought it was God. The force would move, like the soft fanning of swirling wings, it would call to me, and it would lead me to see things I would otherwise have missed. There seemed to be a purpose behind the smallest incident. So maybe there was a reason for my stay at the hospital. But what was it? And who knew? Salomón knew. So I spoke to him about the afternoon Ramón's father was killed on the Agua Negra ranch.

A spring afternoon thundershower had just moved across the llano, leaving the earth cool and wet. Raindrops glittered on the mesquite bushes and on the snakeweed. A giant rainbow lit up the dark bank of clouds as they moved eastward. The rain had passed quickly, as it does on the open llano, coming suddenly without a groan, with the stillness, then the cool breeze, and then the quick deluge. It left a fresh silence in which meadowlarks called and mockingbirds answered them. Isolated raindrops still fell to the earth as I ran across the field toward Ramón's home. Ramón's father stood in the middle of the field he was plowing. Like me, he had not sought cover from the rain. We were drenching wet but happy because of the rain. I remember waving and running towards him to ask for Ramón. I ran on the damp, just-plowed furrows, feeling my shoes grow heavy with the red clay that stuck to them. I was only a few feet away from him when I heard my name called. I stopped and looked up in time to see the grey-flint clouds strike a flash of fire, then an angry, twisting snake flashed out of the dark clouds and thrashed its way violently into the wet earth. It was so close I could smell the fresh current of air it created, and I could see the blue sparks which sputtered alive. Ramón's father saw it too. I saw him frown, as if he knew some wrong had been done and a small mistake was about to catch up with him. His movement away from the plow shook raindrops from his tanned face. One hand moved as if to caution me away. Fear clouded his eyes and he tried to turn so I wouldn't see, but I was too close, I saw what I had never seen before in a man's eyes. He lifted one foot from the wet clay, but he never brought it down. Suddenly the earth stood still, a breeze stirred like a rattlesnake about to strike, the sun glistened over the edges of the dark clouds and made the light so vivid and alive I thought I could touch it, like one touches water or fire. Then the snake-lightning which had disappeared into the wet ground reared out of the earth in a blinding flash of fire and blew Ramón's father out of his shoes. He was dead when he hit the ground. He was dead before the scream could work loose from my frozen throat. The plow horses clawed frantically at the air, then bolted and ran. Now the fresh smell of earth after the rain was tinged with the odor of singed flesh, and my mouth grew sour with a sharp, metallic taste.

Later they said the only trace of how death entered were the two small holes burned at the bottom of his feet, but I had seen him glow with the fire of the lightning … and for a long time I couldn't forget the empty, mud-caked shoes. They said I had been lucky not to get hit.

For the first time since I entered the hospital I was remembering the past, trying to isolate those times when my destiny had hovered over me like my guardian angel … I had escaped the train which severed Sabino's leg the day we were laying pennies on the track … a thick tree had cushioned the fall from the river cliff the day we found Jason's Indian dead … I turned at the sound which exploded in my ears like a cannon to see Joey's surprised look, the smoking pistol on his lap, the bullet buried in the wall inches from my head … the nights in the streets, and the revolution which had swept around me like a fire on the llano, even the paralysis was a part of that, and still I was alive, for some purpose I was alive and my strength was growing day by day …

“There must be a purpose to all this …” I said.

“Yes!” Danny shouted triumphantly. “God's will be done! Glory be, brother!”

“Bull,” Sadsack scoffed, “you find it and I'll believe it … but it's got to be in black and white, none of this spiritual crap Danny's into!”

“Be careful,” Mike whispered, “find whatever you want to believe in, but don't go getting any ideas the Old Man upstairs is personally interested in what happens to you … it could mean trouble for you, none for Him, cause either way He is or He ain't, and it's us that suffer. There's only one rule: get out of here. Get out anyway you can, but get out!”

“There must be a reason for all this!” Danny insisted. “The Bible says not a sparrow will fall—” and he turned and looked at his withered arm and groaned as if in pain.

Somewhere Franco sang:

And where have you been my crippled son

And what have you seen my twisted, young one …

“He doesn't have the time to look over us!” Mike said emphatically. “If he did this goddamned mess would have been over long ago! We're on our own! That's all there is to it!”

“He sends us signs …” Danny whimpered and looked at me. I shivered.

“The only thing your arm means is you should quit playing with yourself!” Sadsack laughed.

“It's a sign!” Danny insisted and jumped up.

“From who? Answer me that! From who? Is God a crazy scientist working up there in his laboratory, mixing up batches of little germs and spraying them on us to watch us jump? Or is he still experimenting with life, trying to make us better? What kind of sign is all this goddamned suffering?”

“I don't know,” Danny moaned. He twisted away and faced the wall. We were silent. No one knew the answer.

Mike finally broke the silence. “Look, I'm not saying for sure He's not up there, but if He is He just doesn't have the time to watch this little, god-forsaken place! I mean there must be thousands of hospitals like this scattered around the world! Millions and millions of cripples, orphans, deformed rejects, each with his own private story to tell God, each with his own reason about his disease … And I don't think God has the time to listen.”

“The other theory is if he is everywhere, then he is us, and if he is us then we require no explanation. We simply are … and we happen to be here.”

“Oh my … we are, just simply here, no reason …”

“I think he doesn't have the time to listen to us because he's too busy playing pool,” Ronco suggested and winked.

“What's that supposed to mean?” Danny asked.

“I think the old man's a pool shark, you see, and the way this universe got started was when God chalked up and broke for the first time. Of course the game was billiards at first, cause they only had four suns to play with, but the minute he rammed that first sun which was his cue ball into the others then everything exploded and all sorts of universes were born … of course the game became eight-ball after that because now the sky was full of worlds. Well, it was a big surprise to God and his opponent when the whole sky blew up and became more complicated. God just stood back and laughed, and he lit a cigar … when you see a falling star that's just God lighting up his cigar … so he's chalking up and looking across the table at his opponent—”

“Wait a minute!” Danny interrupted, “Who's the opponent? Who's God playing pool with?” I looked sideways and saw that Danny was trembling. He was really afraid of the answer but he wanted it nevertheless. “Answer me dammit! Who?” he shouted.

“Take it easy, Danny, let him finish the story,” Mike said. We were all interested in Ronco's story.