Night at the Fiestas: Stories (10 page)

Manuel leers past Amadeo at Angel and spits, “Puta.”

Angel looks up, startled, then to Amadeo. “Dad—”

Rage wells in him—Amadeo nearly drops the cross and bludgeons the old man—but then turns inward. He calls between heavy breaths to the hooded men behind him, “Whip me!” And then, because they do not respond, louder, “Whip me!”

When the lashes come, Angel clamps her hands over her mouth.

Amadeo grinds the soles of his feet into the sharp stones, scrapes his shoulder under the edge of the cross. He feels the rough wood break skin, the hot blood rise, his own blood, his own heat. He must leave his body, become something else.

Manuel laughs so hard he begins to cough, spits in the dirt under Amadeo’s bare feet. Suddenly it comes to Amadeo: this mockery is a gift! The filthy old man is playing his part and doesn’t even know it. Amadeo laughs out loud, tears streaming down his cheeks. He’s getting stronger on Manuel Garcia’s mockery!

And Angel isn’t a distraction—she’s the
point
! Everything Jesus did He did for his children!

“Get away from me,” Angel yells at Manuel. Her eyes redden and well with angry tears. “Leave me alone!”

“Just wait,” Amadeo whispers, but she doesn’t hear.

His second fall is not intentional; neither is his third. He has forgotten to pick up his feet, and he stumbles over a numb knot of foot, the cross crashing down with him.

Angel kneels beside him, her eyes worried, Manuel forgotten. “You gotta have water.” She opens the little plastic top and pushes the bottle into his hands, but he doesn’t take it.

In the brush, birds chirp and little lizards dart, then freeze, from rock to rock. He watches Angel follow one with her eyes. Inside her, the baby twists and turns—he can almost sense it—hot in her flesh and under the sun. For the first time he’s glad she’s here: more than anyone, he realizes, she’s the one he wants with him today.

At the top of Calvario, the hermanos lift the cross from his shoulders and rest it on the ground. Amadeo straightens, and the word
good
thrums in his head with each step:
good, good, good.
The hermanos help him down, position his arms along the crossbeam, his feet against the block of wood that is all he’ll have to stand on. Amadeo spreads his arms and looks up into wide blue sky; there is nothing in his vision but blue. As they bind his arms and legs against the wood, lines once memorized surface:
With a word He stilled the wind and the waves.
But the wind skates over his body, drying the sweat and blood at his temples.

Then the hermanos lift the top of the cross, and Amadeo’s vision swings from sky to earth. Upright, his weight returns; his torn heels press into the wooden block. Below him, on the highway, a few glittering cars move slowly, oblivious. The hot air tastes of salt, and dust sticks in his throat.

Angel stands before him, holding her hands under her belly. The nails, the nails. He isn’t sure if he says it or thinks it. But Tío Tíve nods as if this was what he expected and reaches into his pocket for the paper bag. A hooded hermano steps onto a stool and pours rubbing alcohol over the wood and Amadeo’s hot hands. The alcohol burns cold and smells sharp and clean.

T
HIS IS THE MOMENT
they’ve been waiting for, and the people crowd closer. Parents nudge their children to the front, turn their babies to face the cross. These children will remember this their whole lives. Perhaps one of them, one day, will make the town proud. For now, though, the people are proud of themselves, because they were right about this Christ. True, a few of the onlookers might have hoped for a more artistic arrangement of blood, but no one can deny that he looks awful up there; he is exhausted. The man has put himself through Hell for them. Flies land on Amadeo’s cheeks and neck, and—mira—he’s too tired even to shake them away.

The Hermano Mayor cleans each nail. Alcohol splashes into the dust. Someone in the crowd thinks, This is like our time on earth, just a splash, then we rise into Heaven. The Hermano Mayor wipes each nail with his white handkerchief, then hands them one by one to the other hermanos. The people’s hearts fill with joy for Amadeo, glad it’s his uncle who will do this for him. Family is important.

Some of the people watch Manuel Garcia. They hope he doesn’t feel too bad, but really it’s time, and the old man has rested long enough on his laurels. Manuel Garcia’s back is to Amadeo. He gazes down the hill he’s just climbed.

One or two of the people glance over their shoulders at Angel, to see how she’s taking it, to see if she’s proud of her daddy, to see if some of the bad girl is getting washed out of her. But her face is blank, and she’s standing there with her hands dangling dumbly at her sides, her big cheap belly hanging low.

A
MADEO HADN’T EXPECTED FEAR
, but here it is, hammering in his heart. What he sees from up here are eyes, and though he knows these people, knows all their names, they are like the eyes of strangers. He sees the back of Manuel’s head and knows that the old man won’t turn around. He seeks Angel with his gaze, and when he finds her he rests there. He leans into her across the distance, her body supporting his own. Just wait, he wants to whisper to her. Just wait.

They pound the nail through Amadeo’s palm.

I
N A MOMENT, PAIN
, but for now he thinks,
This is all wrong,
and he has time to clarify the thought.
I am not the Son
. The sky agrees, because it doesn’t darken. Amadeo remembers Christ’s cry—
My God, why hast thou forsaken me?—
and he knows what is missing. It’s Angel who has been forsaken.

All at once he sees her. He is surprised by the naked fear on her face. It is not an expression he knows. And she feels not only fear—Amadeo sees that now—but pain, complete and physical. Nothing he can do will change this, and soon it won’t be just her suffering, but the baby, too.

Angel cries out and holds her hands aloft, offering them to him. This is when the pain makes its searing flight down his arm and into his heart. Amadeo twists in agony on the cross, and below him the people applaud.

NIGHT AT THE FIESTAS

F
RANCES WAS PRETENDING TO BE SOMEONE ELSE, SOMEONE
whose father was not the bus driver. Instead, she told herself, she was a girl alone in the world, journeying to the city. With every gesture, she pictured herself: turning the page of her book, tucking a sweaty lock of hair behind her ear, lifting her chin to gaze out the bus window. Except Frances wasn’t alone, and her father, evidently thinking she’d come along today for his company, kept calling back to her with boisterous cheer over the exertions of the engine.

“Broke down here in ’42, Francy.” He indicated the endless yellow grass, summer-dry and dotted with cows and the occasional splintered shed, and Frances sighed and lowered her book politely to meet his eye in the rearview mirror. “Had a busload of fellows all on their way to training at Fort Bliss. Every day for three years I picked up two, three boys from each town and brung them south.” He chuckled at the memory. “You wouldn’t believe how many ideas twenty ranch boys have about a bus engine.”

Not counting Frances, eleven passengers had boarded early that morning in Raton, many of them also heading to Santa Fe for the Fiestas. Frances’s father had offered each and every one of them a jolly greeting. “Glorious day, isn’t it?” “Got my girl with me.” “Getting off in Santa Fe? So’s my Frances.” Each time a lady boarded—three did—he took her bag and followed her to her seat and stowed it in the net above while she removed her gloves and arranged her purse. Then he stood aside with his bulk pressed into the seats to let other passengers by. Frances had found herself looking away from his sad, obsequious displays of friendliness, embarrassed.

The day of the breakdown must have been a good one for her father; it must have been a thrill to share in the camaraderie with fellows his own age, part of a brotherhood, if only until the gas line or distributor or whatever it was got fixed. Frances pictured him twenty years younger, standing among the uniformed boys, grinning and eager and tongue-tied. Pity and affection welled in her.

Frances hadn’t been born then, but she was aware that the war years must have been hard for him, strangers looking him up and down, wondering why he wasn’t in Europe or the Pacific. Frances had felt the shame herself as a child when kids at school talked about their fathers’ service. They’d traveled to incredible places, those fathers—Japan and Singapore, Italy, England, France—and they had souvenirs in their houses to prove it: flags, medals, a Nazi helmet, a tin windup rabbit found in the pocket of a drowned Jap.

“My dad was a conscientious objector,” Frances had said at school when she was eleven. “We’re pacifists.” She’d shrugged, regretful, smug. “We just don’t believe in fighting.” But she’d had to stop saying that when it got back to her mother, who’d pinched her hard on the upper arm.

“Do you know what it would do to your father to hear you spreading those lies? He isn’t a coward. He has a condition.”

The condition in question was a heart murmur, and, as far as Frances knew, the only ill effect he’d ever suffered was fainting once on the football field in high school. Now, nearly an adult, Frances no longer judged her father for those war years, but it did strike her as darkly amusing that, not trusting his heart to hold out in the army, someone saw fit to put her father in charge of a busload of civilians careening down the highway at fifty miles an hour.

Now, an hour and a half into the trip, the passengers were scattered throughout the baking bus, dozing against the windows or reading newspapers; across the aisle, a stout woman was crocheting something in pink acrylic. Even with the windows lowered, the air blowing through was hot and dry, and Frances was worried about the state of her hair, which she’d tied up in rags last night. She lifted the limp curls off her sweaty neck and shifted in her seat and tried to concentrate on
Tess of the D’Urbervilles.
The frieze upholstery was scratchy through the cotton lawn of her new dress.

Frances was sixteen years old and twitchy with impatience. If Frances’s life was to be a novel—as Frances fully intended—then finally,
finally,
something might happen at the Fiestas that could constitute the first page.

She’d spend the weekend with her aunt and cousin in their little stucco house on Marcy Street. Tonight they’d watch the burning of Zozobra, the enormous gape-mouthed effigy of Old Man Gloom, and then walk back to the Plaza for music and dancing that would last all night. And Saturday there’d be the Hysterical Parade and night dances at the La Fonda and the Legion Hall with mariachis imported all the way from Mexico. “We’ll be out until morning,” her cousin Nancy had assured her on the telephone. “We might not even go home then.” Frances believed it. A widow dying to remarry, her aunt Lillian was fun-loving and young-dressing, lax and indulgent of her teenage daughter, which was exactly why it had been such a feat for Frances to convince her mother to let her go.

“Lillian’s got absolute feathers for brains,” her mother had said again last night of her sister-in-law. “If having your husband drop dead before your eyes doesn’t pull you up short, I don’t know what will. Man crazy, the two of them. That girl’s going to end up in trouble, and Lillian will be too busy batting her own eyelashes to notice.”

“Mother,” Frances had said with superhuman forbearance, which was the only way she could bring herself to speak to her mother now. “Nancy’s not going to end up in trouble.” But Frances didn’t actually believe this, which was why Nancy was so appealing to be around, even if she was a year younger and made Frances feel dull and wholesome, an actual country cousin.

Frances was also hoping to see some beatniks and artists, who, Nancy had told her, lived in such unimaginable filth it would make you sick, and they actually
liked
it, didn’t even try to better themselves. “Ugh,” said Nancy. “A painter rents the shed behind my friend Sally’s neighbor’s house, and he’s so poor he trades his paintings for dog food. Sally says he eats the dog food right alongside the dog.”

Frances had somehow missed these characters in previous visits to the state capital, but apparently they came out in droves for the Fiestas, high on their drugs and flouting conventions left and right. Maybe one of these artists would take her back to his dingy house with the mattress on the floor and ask to paint her. Frances considered herself, like Tess,
a vessel of emotion untinctured by experience,
and Frances very much wanted to be tinctured.

So in preparation, she’d spent her carefully hoarded babysitting money on a new pink lipstick at Rexler’s and, at Barton’s, this emerald-green dress, with its low, square neck and matching belt. Frances was sorry that she hadn’t been able to afford a discreet weekend valise, too, powder-blue leather stamped to resemble alligator skin, like she’d seen in an ad for face cream in one of her mother’s magazines. Instead, she’d had to pack her clothes in her orange sun-patterned swimming bag, embarrassing and childish and completely inappropriate for this weekend.