The Saint Jude Hands of Healing Caves were discovered last year when the San Gabriel River bank opened up and all that miserably shit-filled water just swirled away into oblivion, leaving nothing but muddy banks and a cave system big enough to drive a Greyhound bus through. Eons of bathwater emptied down the drain. Those who witnessed it said that the pull of the river water around their ankles was stronger than an ocean’s back out to sea. They insisted aliens. They insisted sacred Mayan cenotes.
This part of the river was called Marrano Beach and considered a reserve, a protected oasis that was home to some of the rarest and most beautiful birds known to East Los Angeles—that was to say that the land was relatively worthless and boggy and overgrown and really only suitable for some of the poorest families to enjoy on a Saturday afternoon. But it was our oasis. The younger generations called it Pig Beach. If you looked out the passenger-side window of my father’s truck on the way to my aunt’s house, you’d look out over the narrows, down to the Mexican families splayed out under saplings, sunning and swimming in the muck. Some did laundry to crunch time. They came from all over Los Angeles to take in pea gravel sand, thorny-edged paths, a steady run of water, and eddying pools where their babies played in waterlogged diapers, or simply leapt in naked from tire swings. Some shit there. The Catholic girls from Sacred Heart took advantage of the muddy water’s zero visibility to skinny-dip on dark weekend nights when the stars and moon were smogged out. The boys? They got all crazy down in that bed.
What left with the water was replaced by the deadly radioactive gas radon. Levels were so high coming from the caves that the cities of Rosemead, El Monte, and Montebello fought as to whose problem it was to mitigate. None wanted the liability or the cost of quarantine and cleanup, at least not for a beach known for its history of floating pig parts from an upriver slaughterhouse. It took a cattleman from Montana by the name of Don Gannon to fix the problem. It so happens that an excessive level of deadly radon gas is a pure money-maker.
Pinche radon.
I cleaned up Isabel, wiping away the sweat from behind her neck.
“I feel better,” she said.
“Everyone feels better after throwing up,” I said. “It’s the release.” I pulled her sweat pants up around her beanpole waist and cinched the drawstring that seemed to lengthen from week to week. “But do you feel better-better?”
“Hold my flower.” Isabel took the plastic hibiscus from her head and handed it to me with both hands as if it were an injured bird. I untangled some of the fine hairs from the metal clip and pocketed them. I had a box back in our tiny apartment with hairs like these. Perhaps I could reconstruct her someday. Isabel reached out to the cave wall and flattened her palms against its granite. Cave water mapped across the back of her hands to her forearms, where it changed direction and dripped off the bony tips of her elbows onto the hard-packed dirt floor.
“The amazing thing is there’s no faucet,” she said. “Cave water just happens. It’s the cleanest water there is.”
“I think glacier water might be cleaner,” I said.
“But this water is two hundred years old. It filters through all the rock.” She kicked the muddying ground. “If it’s all the same to you, I feel different-different, like maybe something inside me is facing the right direction.” She took back her flower and searched her scalp for the next best spot to clip. “Soon I’ll need double-sided tape.” She laughed.
I showed her the hairs I had buried away in my pocket. “Put these back?” I asked.
“You know, after treatment, my hair probably won’t grow back the same. Straight hair grows back curly.”
“I’ve never heard that before.”
“And it can even change color,” she said. “Imagine that.”
I ran my hands through my own hair like it was a stranger’s. “That’s weird.”
She flipped make-believe locks around her tilted head. “No, it’s exciting—can you picture me with red hair? I’d look more like my sister.”
“You would, but I don’t want that,” I said.
I held out Isabel’s hairs, closer this time. “Throw these out then?” Isabel took the straightest, blackest hair from the collection and wrapped it just above the second knuckle on my index finger. Its tensile strength surprised me as my fingertip gorged with blood and began its slow turn to purple. I showed the other cave dwellers all the hope in my bourgeoning finger. “You’re welcome,” I told the room. Only about half the cave dwellers bothered to even look up.
Isabel twirled in the open space between the tables that lined the cave wall. “Can you imagine such a thing?” She twirled as a perpetually dizzy person twirls, all cockeyed and pinball, ding-dinging between the cave wall and me. She clipped a card table holding a game of checkers. The checkers vibrated like superheated atoms on the board. Two old men in white cowboy hats playing cribbage across the room stopped to watch. They took sips of cave water from Tijuana glassware that they refilled from the dripping ceiling. I couldn’t tell if they were empathetic to Isabel or bothered by her heaves and dance and heaves and dance. The caves echoed everything. I stared at the two men until they turned their expressionless faces back to their cards.
“I used to come here when I was a girl,” Isabel said. “We could have gone to the ocean, I suppose, but we thought we belonged here. We’d spend Saturday mornings at Grant Rea Park, and by noon, when the monkey bars started to burn our legs, we came here to swim.”
Railroad ties eyebolted together shored up the length of the cave that ran thirty-five feet. Portable heaters helped to regulate a temperature thirty-five feet underground that never climbed above sixty degress. The walls seeped water continuously, or they wept, depending on whom you asked. Almost every inch of wooden beam and cribbing was filled with scratch graffiti: Vangi heart Arnie. Becky heart Chewie. Rest in Peace Loca, you could spiral a football, and that nasty Left Arm of God, Sandy Koufax, could throw a 12–6 curveball inside—there was that much space. The cave narrowed down to a four-foot ceiling at the far end, an area fenced off by chicken wire–wrapped rebar cemented into Yuban coffee cans. And just beyond the homemade No Trespassing sign was the black hole. This was where the graffiti hearts stopped.
Everyone had his or her place in the cave. The old Mexican men stood on plywood sheeting, bent as withered juniper in the corners of the cave, some with arched backs and propped up on canes made from unused lumber or a felled branch, some still bearing the buds of unborn fruit. They breathed in deeply, using cupped palms to scoop the surrounding cave air into their gaped mouths. They had first dibs on everything. There was an understanding in the cave that gave way to all the mothers and abuelitas, and most everyone gave up their chairs accordingly. The oldest Mexican men were too proud to take a handout. They leaned uncomfortably against the wall until they had to shift to rest their bony hips or their sharpened shoulder blades. They came for their Parkinson’s and the nerve-pain gift that was the shitstorm handed down by multiple sclerosis. They came to treat the gout and the stenosis spines that curved similarly to the dried-up narrows. They came to the caves so the deadly radon gas could take away the arthritis that had crippled and bridged their joints into knots. A blind man from Boyle Heights splashed the cave water into his eyes during his stay. He’d talk the whole time about how he couldn’t wait to see us all for the first time, that we’d be the most beautiful people in the world.
Some just wanted to be surrounded by the plumerias and birds-of-paradise planted around four cabin-like structures Mr. Gannon had built to accommodate those coming from out of town. From there, the cave dwellers could wave to all their dead friends and relatives buried in Rose Hills. The higher your family plots were located on the hill, the more pull you had at the caves. At least that was the game.
Isabel came for her cancer, or rather, to offset the symptoms of her treatment. Her doctor had drawn her disease process on an oversized clipboard holding graph paper, like he was her coach. He X’d and he O’d the development of h
er body’s decision to attack itself in a way that resembled an offensive alignment in the red zone. Isabel had been reduced to a small blue dot on the board behind a wall of large circles that represented her immune system. One by one the doctor licked his finger and erased a circle. His tongue blued each time until he finally smeared Isabel away under his large thumb pad. He had even gone so far as to call her chance for survival a trick play, and that even though victory was not likely, Isabel could gain some level of respect with a real push during the last drive. Dr. Gutiérrez had obviously never been a coach. Had he been, he would’ve known that there are no good losses, no goddamn moral victories. It is hard to say if the gas really helped Isabel. It was tangible on a periodic table, so it was good enough for her to give it a whirl.
Saturday was pets day. It was the day you realized just how many three-legged dogs and cats there really were in Los Angeles. Some had no front or rear legs at all, just crude wheels strapped to their bodies like canine hot rods. Every once in a while there was a border collie with sweet rims that rolled around like she owned the place. Peed on everything like she had blown a gasket. They missed eyeballs and had chewed-away ears from alley fights. Pet owners brought their animals here because they felt guilty, hoping stupidly that the radon might actually make their limbs grow back. They brought the sickest pets swaddled in blankets and tucked in red wagons. These were the pets with large tumors growing off their necks, or completely fogged-out eyes, with no memory of running down the mailman. The caves, in this instance, were for the families. Dying pets in Montebello usually met with a twenty-two behind the ear, or a tricky brick to the head while eating a discarded bean burrito. These families hoped for the slightest chance at a turnaround. (If I come back to this world as a dog, and I get the carnitas platter from Rafael’s instead of the normal two cups of Purina, I’m sure as hell gonna look over my shoulder the whole time I eat.)
The Saint Jude Hands of Healing Caves did not allow children inside, so they stood just beyond the cave entrance, behind a spray-painted red line, and watched their pets sleep in the dark, cool corners for the afternoon, or beg for pity scraps from the cave dwellers, something more to eat than the orange peels that littered the dirt floor. The more aggressive dogs tug-of-warred with lizards, pulling them apart to the children’s hollers. Lizard parts grew back, but no one really gave a shit about them.
There was no healing gas in my childhood, but the neighborhood did come to my house for miracles. Every street had their miracle slinger, or curandera. On my block, this was my nana. She’d wake up in the morning and make my tata and me homemade tortillas and fried eggs over red chile with pork. After we were squared away, she began to heal the block. Sometimes it meant collecting clothes for the skid row homeless downtown, or crocheting winter hats for abandoned AIDS babies that stacked up in the backyard like cordwood. She burned through rosaries like racing tires.
“Nana had a collection of small bones that she said belonged to Saint Teresa,” I said. “Toe bones. A second-class Vatican relic she used to heal the block.”
“Did they look like toe bones?” Isabel asked.
“I suppose. They were small enough to be toe bones,” I said. I pointed to my own toe. “Small enough that I swallowed one for no good reason.”
“You swallowed a bone?”
“Saint Bone,” I said.
“Why did you do that?”
“I was that age.”
The mothers in the neighborhood brought their children to meet me that summer. Playing kickball or smear the queer with me somehow acted as a blessing. Some of the kids shook my hand, but they never looked me directly in the eye. To them I was the fragile kid with the holy bone floating around inside him. In reality, no one could really tell that I had two hundred and seven bones instead of the standard-issue two hundred and six. But kids sense these differences and respond as kids do.
“Did it work?” asked Isabel. “Did it actually heal anything?”
“I’m pretty sure it fixed Joe.”
Isabel motioned me out of the way for the plastic trash can under the card table. She threw up green bile. The hibiscus clip attached to Isabel’s hairs flipped over each time she wretched into the can and smacked the top of her head. She used my handkerchief to wipe mucus off the edge of the table. The men with white cowboy hats ignored her this time. “Do you still think I’m pretty?”
Fist into the air.
My uncle Joe had been diagnosed with a brain tumor. Nana made me go with Joe wherever he went that entire summer—the grocery store, to work at the docks all the way in San Pedro on light duty. Not as a companion, but more as a mobile healing relic, a modern-day novena-will-travel. I saw more Dodgers games that summer then I ever had. Joe even took me on his dates. Carmen Yanez worked the ice cream counter at Newberry’s and had the key to Ms. Pac-Man and Space Invaders. I’d play in the arcade for free, a holy toe bone deep inside my body, blessing my high score, while my uncle tasted his favorite flavor of the day. “Carmen Yanez was the very first naked woman I ever saw.”
“Touching,” said Isabel.
I hated using words like first. I know it made Isabel think of last.
“I think so. She was always nice to me.” And even after Joe broke up with her, she always let me play a game or two if I didn’t have enough quarters.
For me, it was the summer of hiding in car trunks and pitch-black closets during dates. I can still smell the exhaust and hear the moans of girls he told me to call Aunt Lola when standing in line at 7-Eleven—You want Hot Wheels, mijo, you gotta do your part, or you get Matchbox, and Matchbox ain’t no kinda ride. And then in late September, he went to the doctor. The tumor was gone. No trace at all. His oncologist blamed it all on a film snafu. That was the last year the Dodgers won the World Series, 1988. I know because we went to all the home games as my reward for saving him. It was the least he could do, right? He arranged for me to run the bases after the last home game, and when it was time to leave, we just sat in the car until we were the last two people left in the parking lot. Joe didn’t say a word through the entire postgame. He sobbed as the last set of sweeping headlights left Solano Canyon into downtown.
“So he dragged you around for a summer while he got treatment.”
“Don’t you see?” I asked. “He was on a mission to live. He put the science aside and put his faith into something else.” I reached down and picked up a handful of the riverbed sand. I held it out to Isabel and let it all slip out from between my fingers.
“Obviously, they mixed up the film,” said Isabel. “It happens.”
“It doesn’t.”
“Tell me then,” she said. “What do you think’s going on here, these caves and healing gas? Because I don’t see any toe bones.” She poked my stomach. “Unless somewhere in there you’re still hiding one.” It embarrassed me that my gut felt rich—fat, really—to the sick look of her sucking midsection. “C’mon,” she insisted, “you’ve never mixed up film?”
“That’s a sin,” I said.
I became a radiology technician because it was the human equivalent of Superman—lead is my weakness. To look inside something, straight through its core, has always appealed to me. I became obsessed with the X-ray after my summer with Joe, the idea of being able to see the bones in my body, including that floating holy metatarsal. It made me believe in something I couldn’t see with my own eyes. So I bought old X-rays at garage sales when I could find them and hung them in my bedroom window: a baby’s deformed soft-boned wrist, a thirty-five-year-old man’s greenstick tibia, and an eighty-something’s broken hip illuminated my room. I’d change out body parts over time to fill out the gaps in age. Instead of a sunrise to greet me every morning, I insisted on a self-portrait of my own decay backlit by Jor-El’s yellow sun. This made me good at my job, empathy-riddled, and a decent man to my patients. During training, my team leader, an elder statesman, so to speak, in the radiology world, told me that it was my bedside manner that would allow me to do the job for
many years to come, that it was how I touched my patient with a gloveless hand that showed them I was their equal, that I was as susceptible as they were, and how I could be more than a cog in the healing process, but the actual healing itself. Like language stuffed into a baby’s mouth, I understood this intuitively.
The lead apron was fifteen pounds of dead weight that signaled to the patient something imminent and invisibly toxic was about to pass through their body. Patients didn’t want to look vulnerable, so I did my best to play down its necessity, saying that though it did stop stray particles, it was mostly a liability issue protecting the both of us. By the time I had said this, the weight of the shield had already taken their breath away, and it was far too late to explain the delicacy of the X-ray. So, from behind a partition, I looked through a window that was no bigger than a cracker box. This was the moment that a barely audible clicking sound separated what they had known before the X-ray and what they knew after. When Isabel says that film gets mixed up, I disagree. It is the one thing I take great pride in controlling. What does get mixed up is the indecipherable us, and how empathy can lull you into fucking your girlfriend’s sister, Yolanda, the unbroken version of the woman you loved, while attending her second cousin’s quinceañera at the Red Onion in Riverside. That is a mix-up of meteoric proportions. Isabel knew I was attracted to her sister in the same way I was attracted to her way back when. There’s no good to come out of the world knowing any of this, so it stayed with me, floating around with no real home. Now every time I located broken things with blasts of concentrated high energy, I felt I had knowledge that wasn’t easily digestible in my relationship, like finding a tumor when you’re only looking to identify a minor stress fracture.
Dodger Blue Will Fill Your Soul Page 13