While his father was in prison, his mother would tell him and his sister that the fault was the dead man’s for not heeding the warnings as the fire crept toward his log home. Never a passionate vocal defense, but it was practiced, and soon she stopped talking about blame altogether. Sometimes his mother wouldn’t come home at night, and he’d call the dentists’ office where she worked, and they’d inform him that she’d left hours before. Once she called him from Raton to tell him that there were extra frozen waffles in the freezer in the basement, that this would take care of him and his sister until she returned, but she was always home on Sundays, when she would dress up and haul them to church, a family procession he didn’t dread unless it was NFL season and the Broncos played the early game.
Driving down off the Front Range he passes a large truck heading in the opposite direction, and although he can’t make out the driver, Armando imagines a Forest Service uniform and a sidearm. He slows the van and pictures his father standing near the fire. When the truck pulls up to the still-burning tree, will his father run? Laugh? Align his wrists for cuffs? Then the startling thought that he might have to be the one to pull the plug on his mother if his father is in jail. He doesn’t know the rules, but as he speeds back up for home, he thinks of standing over the hospital bed when the doctor hands him the form to sign, points, says, “Sign here.” His messy signature materializes.
When Armando arrives home, his sister is watching Xena: Warrior Princess and eating a bowl of Corn Pops.
“You stink,” she says.
The next day there’s nothing in the Colorado Springs Gazette about a fire, no rumors at his school, and when his father shows up at their house two days later he wears new clothes.
“We’re going out to eat,” he says.
Armando’s mother wakes up twenty minutes after O. J. Simpson is acquitted. Thinned out and shaky, she carries some internal organ damage, but the doctors tell the Torres family that their mother will be relatively fine, save a limp and the need to regulate her insulin for the rest of her life.
The first thing his mother asks for is a chocolate pudding pie in a graham cracker crust.
“Just this once,” says the doctor. The dessert is Armando’s favorite, and after she tears into the pie and nears the last couple of bites she asks him if he wants some.
“No,” he says, amazed.
In the weeks after his mother’s return home she discovers that she no longer likes to read, she has perfect pitch, and the color yellow brings on headaches. Armando never hears her complain about the needles.
What he does hear is her singing voice. Never one to carry a tune outside of church—and even then quietly—his mother devours CD after CD and sings along at top volume. Her favorites are Chicago’s The Chicago Transit Authority and Tower of Power’s Tower of Power. One day Armando comes home from school and his mother hands him a trombone.
“Learn, for me,” she says, eyes wide and expectant. “You don’t have to play at school.”
Soon Armando finds himself with his trombone in hand, sitting down for private lessons in a padded room inside a rancher on the east side of town. The instructor is a blind man pushing seventy.
“‘Hot Cross Buns,’” the man says, face toward the ceiling, already nodding. “First, second, third position. Ready. Play.”
The first thing the Torreses buy with the $400,000 settlement from the car company is a two-story stucco home on a hillside near the Broadmoor.
This is the home where the family watches The Empire Strikes Back on an April Saturday night.
When the film ends, Armando’s mother says, “The Force is the gospel. That movie was inspired. I believe that.”
“Mark Hamill plus car crash equals ugly Skywalker,” his father says. “Kind of resembles Joseph Smith.”
“You’re not serious,” says his mother.
Later that night, while his family sleeps, Armando watches Risky Business in his bedroom. They have a free six-month HBO trial, so he’s been staying up late. As Tom Cruise starts fondling Rebecca De Mornay onscreen, he feels himself go hard. He doesn’t know if there’s actual no-masturbation doctrine anywhere in the Bible or the Book of Mormon, but there are enough context clues in Sunday school to guess that God would be pretty pissed at a young man jobbing himself hours before taking the sacrament. But still, he’s sixteen now and this feeling is back again. De Mornay is ungodly hot, and he thinks he might come even if he doesn’t touch himself. He begs for a concession between release and salvation somewhere in the night, and within ten seconds he thinks he’s found a compromise as he grabs his penis but doesn’t move his hand. If something happens, he thinks, then it happens.
Armando’s eyes and groin sync in heartbeat rhythm. He lets the pressure build as De Mornay straddles Cruise, and for a few seconds he thinks he may suffocate. He squeezes himself slightly and briefly considers dry-humping the new couch, and he hates himself and absolves himself: he didn’t seek out this I-want-to-do-this-beautiful-woman-for-days urge, but here it is, undeniable and strong, and yet this sensation collides with the vision of a white-robed, muscular, Caucasian God peering down, shaking his head, shaking a tiny bottle of Wite-Out, taking out the thin Wite-Out brush and painting over “Armando Torres” on the “Welcome to Heaven” list. Then, too quickly for Armando and his racing insides, the sex scene ends, and fully clothed actors talk onscreen in daylight, and his blood slowly settles. He feels a dull ache, and already he thinks about how he’ll be okay if he’s asked to say a prayer in front of people in ten hours. He is still clean.
On the eleventh hole of the Broadmoor’s West Course, Armando clips his tee shot off to the left and the white ball splashes into a pond. Early afternoon and the clouds have begun to gather over the peaks. He reaches into his bag for another ball, but he’s out. He’s a poor golfer, which he accepts, but he still waits a second before asking his mother for one of her balls. She used to be a scratch player but now carries a four handicap. “My car-crash four,” she calls it. She still maintains an effortless swing, but there’s a hitch now when the weight transfers to her damaged left leg, as if she tries to stop everything a split second before it happens.
Armando’s mother wears a blue visor and a form-fitting white polo. She is thirty-six years old and attractive, her slim waist and long hair often a target of silent male acknowledgment. Armando notices the minor nervousness of the two strangers who play with them. One wears a bright yellow shirt. The other, he overhears, is a retired Air Force Academy economics professor. Mr. Yellow Shirt shifts his gaze to the sky and smirks each time Armando’s mother flattens her back and sticks out her butt during her preshot routine.
Armando’s parents married when his father was twenty-two and his mother nineteen. He was a return missionary from England, smart enough to showcase a sliver of his bad-boy status by drinking Coke and growing long sideburns. His mother was a sophomore at Cornell. Within a year of their marriage she was pregnant with Armando. His father never finished his studies at Brigham Young, opting for a decent-paying job in the diamond business, but his mother keeps her framed diploma in their study on the wall above their new Apple computer.
While always weary of the attention his mother’s beauty receives, Armando is proud of her golf talent when they are alone on the course, but he’s not thrilled to be humbled in front of strangers—including a stranger who responds to “Colonel”—by asking his mother for a ball, which he knows will be a pink Slazenger.
“Need one, Mom,” he says.
His mother opens the side of her golf bag and reaches in, and he sees a gun among the golf balls—his father’s black 9-millimeter. The Colonel and Yellow Shirt don’t notice, and Armando’s body clenches.
“In the ancient days these used to be made by stuffing goose feathers in a leather pouch,” his mother says, impersonating her husband’s voice. She fingers the ball before tossing it over. “Swing hard.” She grins.
The rest of the round Armando catches himself staring at the Pi
ng logo on his mother’s bag, thinking about the weapon behind the light-blue fabric. He loses two more of his mother’s golf balls and each time watches as she unzips the bag and chooses a replacement.
On the way home he works up the courage to ask about the handgun, but his mother strikes first. “Tell me about Marie. How much should I be worried?”
That night he and his mother sit at the kitchen counter eating chocolate pudding.
“You had a gun today,” he says. “In your bag.”
She swallows a bite, then takes her spoon and swirls the remaining pudding in her bowl. Her elbows rest on the polished granite slab.
“You never know,” she says. The tone in her voice signals the end, but Armando presses.
“For bear?”
“You never know.”
“Where else?”
“Let’s see,” she says. “I carry a smaller one pretty much everywhere. I don’t care if you know, but don’t tell your sister. Got it?”
“To Broncos games? Supermarket?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
She spoons up some pudding and eats it.
“I grew up with guns, and you drive around long enough and you see bad situations. It always comes across as this random thing, but it’s not. Do you understand?”
“I guess,” he says, mouth full.
His mother stares above him. “I never want a fair fight. I don’t understand why anyone would.”
“Yeah. That makes sense.”
“Now eat your dessert or I will.”
Armando spoons the pudding to his mouth and peeks over at his now quiet mother. Her face has thinned, and Armando wonders what she’s thinking about: Guns? Fights? Pudding? Although his dad is the talker, almost all decisions for the family end with his mother’s approval: trips, major purchases, allowances, movies. This power enchants Armando and his sister—their father talks and talks and talks, then, in the end, waits for their mother’s nod, smile, or grimace. When she was in the coma the family would encounter unsettling swaths of silence after a debate, no matter how minor, before realizing that her approval was absent. As Armando thinks about it now, he wonders if he’ll always seek her consent, especially in challenging times, and it comforts him to think that he will. He doesn’t yet know what he’ll ask her, or what adult choices he’ll face, but he hears his mother’s confident voice in the space before future difficult decisions. Next to him, she stares beyond her bowl at the gray and white and black swirls of granite. Armando sits and listens to the sound inside his mouth as he swallows his pudding.
Under a cloudy and warm autumn afternoon, Armando and his father rest on the corner of South River Boulevard and West Walnut Street in Independence, Missouri. The manicured grass surrounding them is a gorgeous, shiny green. Armando’s mother and sister are in one of the Temple Lot’s visitor centers.
“We’ll never know if all this is true unless we find out it isn’t,” his father says. “But if we’re right, God is supposed to come down from the heavens and land right here. We’ll get the message, drop our stuff, and congregate at this exact spot. It’ll be busy.” He breathes in. “I tend to believe it. You’d think God would choose Tahiti or the Yucatán. But that’s too easy.” He scratches his forehead. “Missouri. Damn, it’ll take God coming down here to get me to relocate. Lots of fat people running around.”
“What about Jerusalem?”
“Jerusalem sounds more important, but it’s not. You know, someone in Jerusalem right now is high on dope or banging a prostitute or reading the Bible or sharpening a knife.”
Armando, confused, notices the perfect mower lines in the grass.
“Come on, Kansas City or Jerusalem or Berlin—it won’t matter. I wouldn’t mind touring Germany.”
A city bus stops near them, then drives away. A man walks by with an ice cream sandwich. The scent of fertilizer floats around them.
“Do we have to walk here?” Armando asks.
“That’s the rumor.”
“Is that written down?”
“Good point. I doubt you were trying to make a point, but still.”
“But we have to walk?”
“Walk to salvation with all our friends.”
“People in Europe are screwed.”
“Good point.”
“But what would happen if you didn’t? Say we drove here. Is God or Jesus going to tell us to go back home?”
“Put down your lendings. Put down your lendings.” He laughs. “‘The Fourth Alarm.’”
“What?”
“Cheever. You’ll get to him one day.”
“Who?”
“If the difference between driving and walking to Missouri is the litmus test for eternal life, then most are in trouble. Yes.”
“So the prophet will let us know when?” Armando says.
“I figure when we see the red chariot flying in the sky, we’ll start our trek.”
“With bolts of lightning.”
“No, you’re confusing mythology with Revelation.” His father balls his fists. “You’re too young sometimes. Soon you won’t be. It’s my fault. I’ve wished you older.”
“I know the difference.”
“Good.”
Armando watches his father pick at the grass between his legs, then toss it at his shoes. His father does this repeatedly, picking away a small circle of lawn.
“Let’s not talk,” his father says.
Armando leans back and stretches out on the ground. The day is too hot to get comfortable in his slacks, and he is starting to sweat through his gray shirt. He closes his eyes and listens to the traffic and his father picking blades of grass. He imagines walking here, to this place. His legs hurting, sleeping on the side of I-70 as cars and diesel trucks zoom by. How many will be with them? Then what? Do they live here forever? In Independence? What would they do? Look up at the sky and wait? Would they get bored? Is there a choice? He recalls a vampire book where the eternal bloodsuckers get bored out of their minds and need antidepressants to get through their days. Then a Sunday school talk comes to him. The well-dressed speaker had said that when contemplating the notion of “forever,” the kids should think of how long it would take a hummingbird to peck away at a piece of granite as big as the earth. “Well,” said the speaker, “eternity is a lot longer than that.”
Colorado driver’s license finally in hand, Armando chooses Gold Camp Road as his make-out parking location with Marie.
Marie is patient and understanding of his quirks: no gum, fascination with her birthmark, U2 and Bon Jovi ballads. And he of hers: breaks for air when she says so, and once in a while a lazy George Strait song.
After school one day, while he and Marie hang out in the living room watching reruns of The Wonder Years, Armando’s mother walks into the room holding a banana and an unopened condom. She’d watched a television special the night before in which Tom Brokaw lectured a town hall meeting on safe sex. She asks if Armando can put the condom on the fruit. Though unsure, he says he can.
“I’m not condoning premarital sex,” his mother says.
Marie buries her face in her hands.
“If you’re using this, you’re past the point of trouble. But if you’re past the point of trouble, use this.”
Armando’s mother puts the banana back in the fruit bowl and leaves the condom on the counter.
Armando’s father corners him one night after he breaks curfew getting back from Gold Camp Road. His father holds up the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue and points at the cover, two beauties instead of the regular one, leopard-print bikinis, gleaming smiles, gleaming bodies.
“The lineaments of gratified desire. Say it with me. The lineaments of gratified desire.”
Armando squints and shakes his head.
“An orgasm is pretty awesome, son. You know this. But it’s not mystical. Semen shoots from your penis. It feels good. These pictures have nothing to do with that. People were having orgasms long before photography and papyru
s. The women in these photos aren’t real. That isn’t their real skin. That isn’t the real sun, real light. They’re smiling, but they don’t know why.”
“Okay.”
Armando waits for more from his father, maybe something about masturbation, pregnancy, late-night HBO, Armando has no idea, but his father only nods, somehow satisfied, and tosses the magazine at him and walks away.
Part of Armando’s chores now involves stacking his mother’s dialysis fluid boxes every week after a large truck unloads them in the driveway. The machine in his parents’ bedroom stands on his mother’s side of the bed and makes puffing noises as her blood circulates through the contraption. Often this is where his mother will dispense her advice—hooked up, ready for bed—including her opinion that nothing good happens to teenagers after eleven at night. Sometimes she says after nine at night.
On weekend nights Armando and Marie drive out on Gold Camp Road and pull off in the trees, kill the lights, and try their best in the cramped back seat. He’s the novice, and while he’s unsure of the extent of her experience, he knows she has endured a couple boyfriends, good and bad. At sixteen, he doesn’t comprehend the vast possibilities that separate good from bad.
One night they drive out to the spot where his father torched the tree by the stream. They maneuver past their normal shirts-off, bra-off endpoint, and her hands start to show an interest in his jeans. In that moment he wouldn’t say “Stop” with a gun to his head. He feels Marie at the top of his jeans, running her fingers in the thin space between denim and skin, then fumbling with the button, then unzipping him. The roof closes in and spins. In this dark space in the Rockies he only wants to live forever, and for a moment he believes he will, weightless, on fire, and then he hears her, barely at first, crying.
“Marie?”
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m okay. Lie back down. I’m fine.”
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