The Sky Below (33 page)

“Stranger.”

I opened my eyes. Early morning. An ache in my neck, the musty books behind me. Scent of coffee. Julia, squatting next to me, drinking from a tin cup. Chickens everywhere, scratching around by the adobe bricks. “Oh, no.”

“They were bored. They told me they wanted to go out.” Julia offered me the cup. “Wake up.” Funny, wild, happy shapes in green felt-tip marker covered her hands and forearms. She threw a stone at one of the chickens and laughed as it squawked and ran away. “
Ai, gordito,
” she called after it.

I sat up. The coffee was weak and sweet. “You shouldn't
have let them out,” I managed. “We're going to have to find them all and put them back in.”

She settled herself next to me and leaned against my shoulder. Had her legs, in just the time I'd been here, gotten longer? Was her face more defined? Her heavy eyebrows were almost comical, Groucho-like, and, ai, those teeth. She would never be pretty. She would have a different kind of power. I didn't see any auras around the girl, of indigo or any other hue, but Jabalí was right that Julia had a certain quality that was rare in a child. Sorrow, perhaps. I don't know if it was simply the wry cast of her features or something deeper, but even in her liveliest, most knock-kneed moments, she seemed tuned to a pitch children shouldn't be able to hear. She pinched my elbow. “What are you doing out here, Stranger? Coyotes going to get you and eat you.”

I gestured at the books. “I found all these. Aren't they amazing?”

She craned her neck. “You gonna sell'em?”

I looked down at Julia, with green marker all over her arms, the scab on her knee, her unbraided hair, finishing the coffee in the tin cup. “No,” I said, “I'm going to make them into a library.”

She giggled, wiggling her toes in the dirt. “A library! Why? For the chickens?”

“No,” I said. “For you.”

She turned around again to look at the books. “My books?” she said, knitting her heavy eyebrows together. “Okay. My books.” She took one down from the stack and began turning its pages. It was a medical textbook, with illustrations of livers and gallbladders. Julia peered closely at the illustrations, tapped them with a finger, tried to see what was under the spine. Had anyone taught her to read? She seemed to be palpating the book.

We sat there together in silence as Julia examined it,
leaning against the others, watching the chickens wander through the field of adobe bricks in the morning light. After a while, the adobe crew arrived. Sweet took his leg off and leaned it against the wheelbarrow. Helena brought a paper bag of fresh tortillas, a thermos of coffee and another of hot milk. Xolotl did a sun salutation. Julia did it with him, adding improvisatory movements of her own. We took our places by the adobe pit, reached in, and began our workday. I thought my father would be proud of me if he could see me now, covered in dust and building with my strong, calloused hands.

 

The library is still there, as far as I know, occupying the small, cool stone building, like a catacomb with its low roof, that had at one time been the ice house, then a fallout shelter, then a shed. I like to think that my little nun had sneaked in there on a hot day, chipped off a piece of ice with a nail, and ran the ice illegally inside her collar, took off her wimple and put the ice against the back of her shorn neck, lifted her heavy skirt and held what was left of the bit of ice, already melting, against the back of a knee. I like to think that that was where she began composing
Ma Vida
in her mind, away from the chores and gossip and entanglements of the other nuns, who were always so busy.

Who will ever know about me? she might have thought, and then felt guilty. A workaday nun like herself, in an unimpressive convent in these unimpressive mountains. The town was no more than a few filthy, patched prospectors' tents then. She would have known that it was terribly arrogant, and possibly a sin, to imagine that her life was of any consequence, but she could write, couldn't she, of how she had come to devote her life to Jesus. How she had seen him in a bucket of water and he had transformed her from a poor, ignorant girl into a teacher, a warrior, a bride. She could draw the sacred images she saw in her mind before falling asleep at night.

The little nun would never have, couldn't have, imagined anyone like me, or that I would be the one to find her book so many years later, nearly lost on the floor of a chicken coop. Or maybe she had. In that, the little nun might have been ahead of me, trusting as she did that her book, like her soul, would be found and saved in a world to come that she couldn't have imagined, either. And that I, the unimaginable man from that unimaginable world, would salvage the book of her life,
Ma Vida,
from the convent's destroyed library; that I would cut, plane, and sand what was left of the busted bookshelves, and then anchor them, with considerable trouble and two smashed fingers, into the old stone walls of the ice house; that I would set
Ma Vida
in alphabetical order among its loftier, waterlogged fellows, covered in chicken shit, that had once explained how the sun went around the earth and how homunculi lived inside each drop of sperm. The little nun couldn't have imagined a girl such as Julia, hesitating in the doorway in her torn Communion veil/tablecloth. Or maybe the little nun never existed, because Julia didn't say anything about sensing such a person; she didn't say much at all, gazing around, one end of the veil clutched in her fist. Or maybe the little nun did exist, and she wasn't surprised to see me blow out the lantern and close the door as the dinner bell rang, just the way she had done, heading down the dirt path with Julia to join the others.

 

The roof of the chicken coop, née convent library, was a sheet of corrugated tin, and after we built the walls, we all attached it in less than a day, with the help of the rest of Helena's family and sixteen borrowed ladders. The chickens flowed into their spot and settled themselves in the shade. Sweet put his leg back on for the last time, buckled it, and tootled away, the adobe globe spinning on the roof of the adobemobile.

 

I remember the muddy sweat in my eyes, the smell of the dirt, the worn, pocked surface of the long dining table that had
grown silky from use, the murmur of talk at dinner, the scratch of chicken feet on what was left of the chicken coop's stone floor, the half inch that the new, splintery latrine door never fully closed. You had to hold the edge of it with one finger as you squatted in the dark. I remember the lesion, like a strange fungus, that welled up around the lump on my thigh, silvering it. I remember the night my nightmares stopped and the week without dreams that ensued. For seven days straight, I felt empty and full at the same time, like the roaring wind of Ixtlan. Then I dreamed my name.

 

At dinner one night, Jabalí announced that Julia had dreamed that CNN was coming in a few days. The next morning, I slipped the wings back on. They were light and pliable, as if I'd never taken them off, as if they'd actually grown from my shoulders in the time that I'd been at the ex-convento. They seemed that natural. With a subtle movement, I flapped one. It felt spectacular.

Jabalí adjusted the straps for me, smiling. “These are yours now,” he said. “You've earned them.” Close though he was to me, nearly chest to chest, I couldn't smell him at all. There were a few new pieces in his hair: a bit of painted bark, a fork with bent tines. Julia playfully pulled at a wing tip. I twitched the wing from her grasp.

“You look tall,” she observed, coming around to stand in front of me.

“I am tall.”

“Not so much,” she said. “But now you look it. Let's go.” She hopped around impatiently in her little moth wings.

Jabalí stood back, pleased. “Good.
Pájaro.
”

We all hiked out to the sacred tree. When we climbed up, my branch was empty and strong, but now I was able to balance effortlessly. The wings provided ballast, and though we all sat there for the rest of the day, my legs didn't get tired the way they had before. I wasn't bored, either. From my perch,
I could see our humble church, the road that led to the very small town, the mountain road, Ixtlan, and the steeple of the massive church there, inside of which, I knew, was Jesus in a wig and gold lamé hot pants. The local priest, a middle-aged man with a mustache and a confiding way of speaking, was walking slowly down the road toward our church. He was gesturing as he walked, like a man rehearsing a sermon. His hands waved.

“Jabalí.” I pointed with my chin.

Jabalí opened his eyes. “
Hola, Padre!
” he called out in a booming voice through his monkey mask, raising his arm and rattling a branch.

The priest on the road glanced up, around. His hat fell off.

Jabalí laughed. “Probably thinks it's the voice of God.” He cupped a hand to his ear. “Can you speak up, please?”

Everyone in the tree laughed, lightly shaking the branches. “Ah, we keep his collection box full,” said Jabalí. “That's what he cares about.”

On the branch above me, Julia, in pink trousers and a yellow dress with ruffles, sang a song in Spanish. We all got dozy in the afternoon, so we swapped jokes, stories, gossip, cures, and unusual events. Alien sightings. Malcolm X told a funny story about seeing the Northern Lights when she'd been doing hallucinatory breathwork for three days. Toward sunset, when everyone had been quiet for an hour or so, listening to the wind, Julia stood up on her branch, grasping the one above her.

“I know my name,” she announced, her toes gripping the branch at her feet, just above my head. I looked up. Her long brownish-blackish hair flew out behind her; her expression was grave.

Jabalí stood up on his branch, too. “Child!” He clambered up to where she was and crouched next to her. “This is a great day. When is the ceremony?”

Julia, stretching in her yellow ruffles between the two
branches as if growing taller on the spot, nodded. “I think . . . in one week plus one day. Stranger and I will have our ceremony together.”

My heart opened its petals. I began to cry. “Yes,” I said, “yes, that's right, that's how it's supposed to be.”

Julia gazed gravely down at me. Her thick eyebrows, buck-teeth, perfectly oval face, and knotted hair added up to a melancholy beauty. I suddenly saw exactly how she would look when she was eighty-five and we were all gone. “It is,” she said. “This is how it's supposed to be.” We left the tree quietly that day, walking back to the ex-convento across the field, tails and fins trailing in the dirt.

We continued our vigil, though after a few more days in the sacred tree, I didn't know if we were still waiting for CNN, or if the tree occupation had morphed into some sort of ongoing ritual, or if some of us were, indeed, waiting while others were engaged in a different project altogether. Helena came and sat under the tree for a while, peeling garlic. It didn't matter what we were doing, because I was so glad to have my wings back and so excited that Julia and I were taking names together. I didn't care if CNN never showed up. Now and then, I reached into my pocket to feel the slip of paper on which I'd written my name. On the fourth day, it came to me that I was supposed to wear the wings all the time, except when I was asleep. Malcolm X, laughing as she rolled me over in her narrow single bed, said that was a phase. You're ready, she said, reaching for me.

 

I wore the wings to dinner.

I wore the wings to breakfast.

I kept them spotless, pulling out any bugs or twigs or other crap and repairing any tiny breaks with glue and thick white thread, sewing in the evening in my nun's cell the way the nun had probably once sewn in the evening, repairing her habit.

I wore them constantly, except at night, when I hung them on two sturdy iron hooks in my room. I fell asleep looking at them. In the morning, I put them on and unfurled them, flapping them, making a great, gorgeous rush of air.

 

“Leda me,” said Malcolm X as we sat by the river watching the water rush over the Burros, and I did.

 

Xolotl was a pretty fair barber. Almost as good as Sal. He cut my hair for the naming ceremony. In return, I found five perfect sky-blue eggs, pierced them, softly blew out the contents, and gave them to him to use in one of his mobiles. No one knew what was wrong with Xolotl. He had a crack in him where the demons got in sometimes, but the mobiles, which were extremely complex, seemed to help.

 

The Alma members left us all their power tools on their way to Amsterdam, and though generally we disdained power tools at the ex-convento—and didn't have enough electricity to run more than one or two at a time—Jabalí allowed that they might come in handy. We gave the Alma emigrants a big sendoff dinner. Two of the trapeze guys sat on either side of me at the long table, each one appreciatively stroking a wing-tip. I slept between them, drifting from one to the other, being caught and released all night.
Come with us,
the freckled one said in the morning, pressing a piece of paper with an address into my hand.
No, no,
I said as I kissed them goodbye and brushed feathers out of their hair,
it's too cold in Amsterdam.

 

Gabriel, thirty-eight, in the cave. Julia, just visible on his right, is turning her head to look at, or maybe listen for, something.

 

Julia and I sat on the same low branch in the sacred tree, my large wings and her small ones rustling in the breeze. Everyone else had gone in for dinner, but we dawdled in the late afternoon sun.

“. . . and then we eat,” she finished up. “Helena makes chicken mole.”

“That's it?”

“It's fun, you know? Like Christmas. We have presents—Papi will give me a present. Malcolm will give you a present.” Julia swung her legs. I was surprised she knew about Malcolm X, but then again, the ex-convento was quite small. None of the old doors had locks. Probably everyone knew everything, including the contents of my knapsack and how often I jacked off. I didn't mind, especially. I had become part of them; I didn't need to keep secrets anymore. It was a relief.