by John Rechy
When they saw the knife touching Chuco’s throat, the others didn’t move.
Chuco tried to twist away on the ground. The knife tore across his chest in an eruption of blood.
“And all the time he was crying,” the frightened boy who had told that account of the fight said about Manny.
My son was defending me! That was Amalia’s first thought as she sat in that punishing courtroom and heard of the incidents that had led her and her son here. It had happened because Chuco made that ugly insult to a mother. Amalia could not repress a moment of pride out of the pain, pride in her son’s love for her. But quickly that triumph was drowned in the reality of what was occurring in this gray room. It had been an accident. She was sure of that as she stared at her son sitting nearby, looking even younger, a boy, a child. Who could possibly think he had attempted murder?… And if the boy died it would be murder.
When that day’s eternal session was over, Amalia saw her son handcuffed and taken back to jail. He was defending me! This time the pride she was able to extract from that thought was pulled away even more quickly by an overpowering sense of helplessness and sadness, and an anger which spread out to everything.
She stood alone in the corridor outside the courtroom where her son’s life was being reduced to one violent act. It was as if nothing but that existed, not the many times of sweetness that had occurred between her and her son, nothing but the knifing of a stranger nicknamed Chuco, who had killed another stranger named Indio. Amalia was thinking that when a woman in a black-dyed dress held her hand tightly and said passionately:
“Your son was right to go after that savage, that Chuco, who murdered my son.”
Amalia faced Indio’s mother. In that moment, another woman Amalia had seen in the courtroom—a thin, dark Mexican woman with eyes full of loss—looked at them and called out:
“Las gangas, las gangas malditas.”
Amalia recognized her as Chuco’s mother.
The three women nodded, yes, the cursed gangs were to blame. Now Chuco’s mother stood with them, the three women bound by mutual grief. They held one another’s hands. Then the moment passed. They looked away from each other and separated.
Amalia needed to talk to Rosario. Who else would know what to do, what to feel?
“She’s gone,” said Milagros, at the sewing factory.
“Gone? Where?” Amalia believed the absence immediately.
“Who knows? You hear so many stories,” a woman nearby said.
“I told you what happened,” another woman asserted. “Jorge’s disappeared, too. He paid a coyote a thousand dollars to bring his daughter and her husband across the border and the coyote abandoned them, and Jorge killed the coyote, and Rosario took them all in and la migra caught her—”
“No,” a Guatemalan woman said, “Jorge killed one of the men of la migra, the one who found his daughter and her son in the desert and—”
“Whatever,” the Guatemalan woman said. “They caught Rosario.”
“Caught her—?” Amalia was grasping it all instantly, wishing she could disbelieve it, but she remembered that Rosario had told her something like that one day, about a man and woman abandoned in a hovel in the desert by a coyote, and something about Jorge—
“She’s probably in jail,” a Salvadoran woman said, “just like in my country.”
“No, she ran away before they could arrest her,” another woman offered.
“All I know is that I miss her,” Milagros said.
Amalia walked silently away from them.
Milagros followed her to the hall. “Amalia, come and see me, please. To talk.”
Then she knew more about Rosario! Amalia promised and took the address Milagros had scribbled on a piece of paper.
The public attorney appointed to represent Manny told her to get there “an hour early” when she went to visit her son in the Hall of Justice. She arrived even earlier on a sweaty afternoon to find that people were already lined up for a whole block to visit their own inmates. Almost all were women, many with children, several pregnant. Some sat on the sidewalk, on newspapers. Older children attempted to play in the street. Most of those here were Mexicans and black people. Very few were Anglos—only here did Amalia remember them looking out of place.
Along the jagged line, vendors hawked cold drinks, hot dogs, syrupy popcorn.
A slender woman stood hesitantly near her. Amalia saw a look she had come to recognize in the courtrooms on the faces of mothers whose sons were in trouble. “Your son—?”
The woman nodded. “M’ijo, si.”
There was something more in her anxiety, something added, Amalia detected. The woman seemed to want to pull away from her at the same time that she lingered. When they had reached the end of the line, the woman said hurriedly, “I hope everything will turn out right for your … son?”
“Mi’jo” Amalia confirmed.
The woman rushed away.
Only then did Amalia notice that there was another line on the opposite side of the entrance to the Hall of Justice. A younger, pregnant woman in a bright dress noticed Amalia’s confusion. “That other line is for the visitors of the maricones.”
Amalia did not know what to think. She didn’t like homosexuals any more than the next person—sometimes they disgusted her; but why should their families—their mothers, that woman she had just talked to?—be separated as if they shared contamination? “Of course, God does forbid that sternly,” she addressed her own confusion. She remembered the doubled pain on the face of the woman who had fled from her, who was here to see her son. “But that woman—”
“I wouldn’t feel that sorry for her,” the pregnant woman said. “She’s a divorciada.”
A divorced woman! But God understood that, Amalia knew. She had clarified it with Father Ysidro. Now she avoided even glancing at the separated line. She also avoided the pregnant woman, distancing herself by letting two women get ahead of her in the line.
“I’ve been here for two hours,” a black woman said to no one. Her sweat was drenching the child she cradled in her arms. “Hate that building.” She did not even look at the looming Hall of Justice. “Can’t even buy a cold drink.” Her perspiration dripped onto the child’s face, eyes, and he began to cry.
“I don’t even know why my husband is here, and he doesn’t either. We can’t understand what they’re saying,” a Mexican woman complained to everyone.
“Well, I know why mine is here—because he tried to kill me,” another joined in.
“Then why are you here, mujerT
“Who else has he got, woman?”
“My son did not—” an older black woman asserted with indignation.
“—drugs—” … “—resisting arrest—” … “What will we do now?” … “—las gangas—” … “—drogas—” … “—no job—” … “What will we do now?” … “—the police said he—” … “I don’t know why, mujer … “—the gangs—” … “drunk but he—” … “What will we do now?”
As their time in line stretched, the women looked drabber, poorer, more desperate, and their words became one terrible lament punctuated by the crying of children as Amalia waited to see her son.
The line began to move now. At the entrance to the Hall of Justice, two guards checked purses, cleared the visitors. A square-faced woman in uniform—could she be Mexican and work here? Amalia wondered—barked in English and Spanish that they were to surrender “any weapons, knives, guns, drugs” they were carrying. Amalia closed her eyes as if that would allow her to endure. She felt as if she, too, were being incarcerated.
An old rusted elevator took them to another floor. With a jangle of doors, the elevator opened into a bare room drenched in yellowish light. That room led to a larger one, where a series of partitions created small open cubicles; each contained one stool and a telephone. Behind a wall of heavy glass, inmates in blue uniforms were being marched to assigned places before their visitors. Searching urgently for her son, Amalia saw, i
n another section of the large room and along another row of cubicles, the woman she had spoken to first; she was sitting before a young man dressed in a prison uniform like the others, except that his was bright orange.
Amalia turned away, too overwhelmed by her own grief to deal with anything else. She saw her son. Through the glass pane, he smiled at her, his mouth moving eagerly now, forming words she could not hear through the glass. Then he picked up his telephone, and she picked up hers. How strange to be about to speak to her son through a telephone when they were sitting only inches away, how strange to see him so near and not be able to touch him, hold him, as she longed to. Even his voice had been taken away! she thought, until he spoke into the telephone and she heard on her end of the line his familiar:
“—‘Amá! ‘Amita!”
“M’ijo—”
Then they rushed assurances that they were fine, just fine.
“Everything is going to be okay, ‘Amá,” he asserted. He made motions of kissing her fingers. “I promise.” He converted the thumb and forefinger of his right hand into a cross, which he kissed, a holy vow.
Amalia stared at the place on his hand where the white scar had not entirely obliterated the tattoo of the burning cross. “It was an accident, m’ijo,” she said.
He nodded, deeply.
She was sure she had meant that the near-killing of Chuco was an accident, but she wondered—later—whether her son had been remembering the burn on his hand.
The visit was over, short minutes! The public attorney had told her she could bring a restricted amount of money to her son. She had worked an extra day to manage the maximum, $40. Before a counter in the dirty-lit room through which she had entered, she lined up again in a smaller line with others who had money for their inmates, mostly change, a dollar. She filled out a slip to indicate to whom the money would go, the amount. Behind another glass partition, the inmates had lined up.
Amalia handed her slip and the $40 to a guard. He was wearing plastic gloves! Afraid of what contamination? Amalia saw him give the bills to another guard, who dipped them in water, washing them.
“In case somebody has stuck drugs to the money,” a woman explained to Amalias startled stare.
But Amalia did not care about their reasons now because she saw her son. He was standing behind the glass pane. On a sliding metal tray the money was passed to him through a small opening. He rejected it.
No, he mimed. For you.
Then he kissed his fingertips and extended them to her and she kissed her own and blessed him with a sign of the cross.
From jail, Amalia received a letter from her son.
… I love you with all my heart… I’m goin to do right—I promise in the name of the Blesst Mother you allways comend me to & love so much & who loves you …
Amalia had to stop reading. Each word filled her with love and hurt.
Two men appeared at her house. They were not in uniform, but she recognized them. They had an official look that was cruel even when they were attempting to be kind.
“—that your son Manuel is dead.”
Amalia frowned.
“He committed suicide in his cell.”
“Liars!” Amalia screamed at both men. She felt furious at their lie, the terrible accusation about her son. Sorrow would come later with the awareness of his death, and it would come in huge waves that would inundate her. Now she was enraged.
The men led her to a chair inside the house. Then they walked out.
That night it seemed to Amalia that the world itself had died. She went into her room and did not allow anyone to enter. She pushed her head into a pillow to keep herself from screaming. She lay shivering in the coldness of her own perspiration and tears, which then turned hot. Then the crying would stop. A terrifying stillness would clasp her, the stillness she knew would exist forever in her life, the stilled voice of her son. The sobbing and the tears would convulse her again until there were only sobs without tears, exhausted. She would fall into a terrifying sleep, as if she were awake within total darkness, waking suddenly, again and again, into this terrible realization: My son is dead, I’ll never see him again.
She claimed her son’s body and buried him. She allowed no one with her. She made Raynaldo promise to stay with Gloria and Juan. She stood over the scraped earth and said softly:
“M’ijo.”
And she waited, actually waited, to hear his answer:
“’Amita.”
Then she walked away with a new presence in her life, the absence of her son.
“‘Amá, please don’t be so sad,” Gloria said. Amalia glanced at her daughter. “’Amita,” Juan said.
“Don’t call me that!” Amalia’s body had jolted. “Only my Manny called me that, that was his name for me.”
Juan retreated. Gloria stood next to him.
Amalia saw the hurt on their faces. She reached out for both of her children. Their tense bodies did not entirely surrender to her. “I do want you to call me ‘Amita,” she said, but she knew she was pleading to her dead son.
In those days it seemed to her that she could not even “see” her two other children. Oh, it wasn’t that she didn’t see them, really. It was just that she wasn’t clearly aware of them. She realized this when, suddenly arriving home from work—and she continued to work fiercely—she would see Gloria and catch her looking at her in a certain way she could not remember before. Or was it that something else was different about her? Not the added lipstick, the teased hair, the new fullness of her breasts. A look.
And Juan. She saw him across the street one day, idling, as he had begun to now that he no longer laughed as often—when had he stopped?—and she thought, What a handsome young man; why is he so sad?—before she realized he was her son.
Now there were the endless reports concerning Manny’s death. The return of the clothes. Infernal visits to the public attorney—and she insisted to Raynaldo that she did not want anyone with her.
This is what was claimed: In jail, Manny had threatened two guards who had come to quiet his screaming. When they tried to handcuff him, he pulled one bound hand away and lashed at the face of one of them, drawing blood. The city psychiatrist to whom he was taken ordered that he be placed in a “behavior observation module” because of “unstable comportment.” Instead he was put into an isolated cell.
“So they could murder him,” Amalia told the attorney. “They choked him with his shirt.” She read him Manny’s letter, portions of it. “Is that the letter of someone who’s going to kill himself?” Even those words tasted ugly to her. “They killed him.”
The attorney agreed. “It’s possible, God knows it’s happened before. And there were irregularities in the report. I’m asking for an investigation by—”
“No,” Amalia said firmly. She had come only to assert the truth, what she knew, to have it confirmed. And it had been. “I know what happened and so do you. Those men would just keep on lying, and then there would be others who would support them, and nothing would come of it. I don’t want any more lies pulling at my son’s life. I don’t want any more pain added to his memory.”
The attorney said he would write her about any “pending matters.”
“I don’t want to hear about them,” Amalia said.
Teresa shouted at her: “He let himself be killed rather than come back to you with all your men!”
“Liar!” Juan screamed at her.
“Liar!” Gloria cried.
Amalia slapped her mother.
Teresa staggered back. Then she began to chant loudly a prayer for the dead.
“Cruel liar!” Amalia yelled at her mother. “Listen to his letter to me.” She pulled out the letter she had read from over and over. “‘My dearest mamacita—’” She could read only a few more words: “‘I love you with all my heart—’” before she gasped and stopped.
Throughout, Raynaldo stood by her, but she was remote. He was gone more often on overnight hauls, perhaps to honor her repeated a
ssertion that she must be left alone. During that period, Amalia felt dazed. Everything and everyone seemed to move before her without a sound that she could understand. She heard words Juan uttered—and Gloria—of consolation, of sadness. And cries. She heard Teresa’s whispered prayers.
Only later would she become aware that Juan was talking tough now—and any gang would welcome him because of the defiant glow they would attribute to his brother. She would realize, later, that boys came to see Gloria and she went out. She would deal with all that soon, when these darkest days would end, this eternal time saturated with Manny’s death, a time during which he died over and over in the isolated jail cell, alone.
Sometimes—she would realize this only after it happened—Juan would suddenly hug her and Gloria would rest her head on her lap. But Amalia could find nothing to say to them that would not add to her awareness that Manny was not there.
She worked frenziedly, taking extra jobs, staying late, getting up before dawn.
And she prayed to the Blessed Mother.
At dinner she realized Juan had been hiding a plate of food. He took it out. She followed him to a dilapidated garage behind the court. He was about to pry open loose boards.
“Who’s in there, Juan?”
He seemed about to turn away.
Amalia entered the dark garage. Among broken fixtures and car parts discarded there, a young man sat on a blanket spread out on the dirt. He was about seventeen, about Juan’s age, Mexican, or deeply tanned.
“The dude goes to my school,” Juan used his tough new voice. “He ran away.” The posturing voice faded. “He was sleeping in the alley, ‘Amá. I told him about this garage.”
Amalia looked at the boy. Was he a runaway?—she knew young people were sleeping in parks and in the streets now. Or was he a gang member, hiding because of something he had done? On drugs? He looked frightened.
“Give him the food,” Amalia said to Juan.
The young man took it, began eating.
“After he eats, he’ll have to leave. I don’t want any more trouble than I have,” Amalia told her son.
As if used to flight, the young man gathered a few belongings scattered on the dirt.