Some Rise by Sin

by Philip Caputo

  “Where are you going dressed like that so early?” he asked. It wasn’t clear if he disapproved of his pastor’s attire or merely found it inappropriate at this time of day.

  “Hermosillo. To visit César Díaz. He phoned me last night from the hospital. He wants to see me.”

  “But it is Holy Week next week, and we have a lot to do,” Father Hugo protested. “He is not near death, is he? He cannot wait until he’s home to have you call on him?”

  “I think he’s nervous. They’re going to put stents in two of his coronary arteries this afternoon. A routine procedure these days, but the idea of it—”

  Father Hugo tore a tortilla in half and dunked it in his tea. “I thought he did not have a heart attack, that he has … what is it called?”

  “Pericarditis. An inflammation of his heart lining.”

  “But don’t they put in these stents when people have heart attacks?”

  Riordan raised his mug and watched the ring of condensation it left on the table evaporate. “They also install them to prevent heart attacks. When they examined César, they found two blocked arteries. So now they’re going to fix the plumbing.”

  “I want to go over the Holy Week preparations with you,” the vicar said.

  “When I get back. Late this afternoon, probably.”

  “But the Mayos will be here on—”

  “The Mayos will know what to do,” interjected the Old Priest, seated by himself at one end of the table. He, too, was fasting, though he was at an age when it was no longer required. His hand as he popped a tortilla shred into his mouth looked mummified. “They have been celebrating Easter here for two hundred and fifty years. Padre Tim is to visit the sick—a corporal work of mercy.”

  Father Hugo acknowledged the catechism lesson with a little bow. “I have known the corporal works of mercy, and the spiritual ones, too, since I was eight years old.”

  The Old Priest swallowed and licked his shriveled lips. “Ah, lard,” he said.

  “Lard? What has lard to do with anything?” said Father Hugo.

  “María made these tortillas with lard. Between those made with lard and those with oil, there is no comparison. You and I, Father Hugo, will offer a prayer for César Díaz.”

  * * *

  Riding a motorcycle, particularly an ebony, chrome-trimmed Harley-Davidson, lent itself to fantasies. Cruising the state road as fast as its condition would permit, which wasn’t very fast, weaving around the potholes, Riordan pictured himself as Marlon Brando in The Wild One. He rumbled through dusty hamlets and cattle ranges, the roadside gilt by desert poppies opening their petals to the sun, crossed the Río Yaqui, and in three hours reached Mexico 15, the federal superhighway. Military and police checkpoints had slowed his progress; otherwise he would have covered the hundred miles in half that time. He turned north for Hermosillo.

  The CIMA hospital was on San Miguel Street. As he double-locked Negra Modelo to a tree in the parking lot, he heard American voices—an older couple crossing the lot, the man pushing a wheeled walker. The hospital was a destination for medical tourists from the States. A fifty-thousand-dollar operation there cost twelve grand here.

  César had a private room in the cardiovascular ward. How small and vulnerable that substantial man looked, in bed in a hospital gown tied around his neck, an IV drip stuck in one arm, the other arm hooked to a machine broadcasting his vital signs on a monitor screen. He was watching TV when Riordan entered—some silly daytime game show. He switched it off.

  “Padre Tim, good to see you,” he said in a slightly hoarse voice. “Did you bring it?”

  Riordan drew a chair to the bed and, reaching into his jacket pocket, produced a half-pint bottle of bacanora. Mexican moonshine.

  “You first,” César said.

  “No, you. I insist.” Riordan unscrewed the cap and passed the bottle to him.

  César took a sip, let out a sigh of satisfaction, and handed the bottle back to Riordan, who merely wet his lips with the clear, potent liquor.

  “No more than that,” he said. “It’s not even noon.” He nestled the bacanora under César’s pillow. “How are you feeling?”

  “I can’t wait to get out of here.” César made a sweeping gesture with the arm connected to the IV bag. Everything in the room was white or a shade of off-white, except for the black chair. The sunlight angling through the window looked more like moonlight.

  “They’ve been sticking a thing in me, here,” César said, pressing a hand to his ribs. “To drain the fluid, they said. And now they’re going to cut me open—”

  “That’s not what they’re going to do,” Riordan said confidently. “It’s an angioplasty. I talked to Dr. Lisette about this. She told me to tell you not to worry. It’s routine.”

  “To me, it’s cutting me open. The doctor … oye, you should see him, Padre Tim. He looks like a high school kid. First time I saw him, I wanted to ask, ‘Where is your father?’ He told me that I will have to delay the trip to El Norte for a week. I have to come back for a checkup.”

  “Where is Marta?” Riordan asked.

  “At the hotel. She’ll be here before they wheel me in.” He motioned at the TV, mounted high on the wall. “Been watching the news. I don’t feel so bad now.”

  Riordan intuited his meaning. “About leaving,” he said.

  “Yeah. Like I was running out on everybody. It’s almost over. The Brotherhood is finished, I think. All those people they caught, Salazar on the run, a bullet in him. He might be dead already.”

  César grew silent, and the quiet in that white, sterile room lasted long enough to become disconcerting. Staring off into the middle distance, César seemed to be mentally somewhere else.

  “You wanted to see me about something?” Riordan asked to draw him back.

  “When something happens like what did to me…” César paused. “They’re going to put me under. You ask yourself, Am I going to wake up?”

  With a half turn of his head, he looked directly at Riordan, an appeal in his eyes.

  “You want to make a confession?”

  “Yes.”

  He jerked his head at the door. Riordan closed it, then resumed his seat. He felt awkward, knowing about himself what his friend did not know; and his decidedly unclerical outfit heightened his discomfort.

  After crossing himself, declaring that he had sinned and that his last confession had been a few months ago, César squirmed and dropped his eyes to his hands, resting flat on his lap.

  “Okay … Lupita … me and her…” he began. “You remember at the Christmas pageant? At Las Posadas? You saw me with her, and I was a little, you know, borracho … You remember that?”

  “Sure. Go ahead.”

  “She was … you know.… She needed someone to…”

  “Would it be easier if I asked what you did and you answered yes or no?”

  “Yeah. I mean, yes, Padre Tim.”

  “Are you saying you committed adultery? You had sex with your sister-in-law?”

  “That makes it worse, doesn’t it? My dead brother’s wife?”

  “Adultery is adultery,” Riordan said. “How many times?”

  “Three, four, I think,” replied César. “She started it. That night. She was feeling terrible, Christmas Eve, her kid dead. Abrazame, she was saying, so I hugged her, and, you know…”

  “One thing led to another. Her starting it doesn’t make you innocent, César.”

  “I know that!” he shot back, affronted. “Why do you think I’m confessing?”

  “It’s over now? You’re resolved not to do it any longer?”

  “Sure, yes. It ended more than a month ago. Marta got suspicious, she asked me, Something going on? And I lied to her. So I confess to that, too. Lying. And then Lupita and me stopped and I’m sorry for what I did.”

  “I’m sure you are. Is there anything else you want to get off your conscience?”

  César’s gaze shifted, to some point on the opposite wall. His lips parted, the
n closed.

  “Anything else, César?” Riordan repeated.

  He made two slow movements of his head, side to side. “But I got a question. The soldiers who killed my nephew and the Reyes boy—was that murder?”

  “That’s not for me to say. I wasn’t there. They fired into the air to push the crowd back, didn’t they? It was either a terrible accident or fate.”

  César grew agitated, shifting his weight from hip to hip in the bed, rattling the IV drip on its metal stand. “They didn’t need to shoot at all. We weren’t attacking them in the plaza. We were holding signs, marching around—”

  “What does this have to do with your confession?” Riordan asked.

  “Nothing. Or maybe something.… Lupita…”

  Again César paused. It wasn’t like him to be so indirect and hesitant. An uneasiness crept into Riordan.

  “Before we started,” César resumed, “she was saying to me, to everybody, ‘The soldiers are assassins, and if my brother was still living, he would avenge the murder of his son.’ She got a little crazy. One night, she went outside and screamed it: ‘Who will avenge the murder of my son?’ Even though I was drunk, I remember what she said to you the night of Las Posadas. About the soldiers the Brotherhood killed. Do you remember?”

  Riordan thought back. “That she thought it was justice for them to die. Except it wasn’t. The four soldiers who were killed were not even the ones who fired the shots in the plaza.”

  “I know that, and I told her. But she said she was happy they died, and you know, I was, too.”

  “I still don’t see what this has to do—”

  “So is that a sin—to be happy for someone’s death?”

  “Is that all that’s on your mind?”

  “Yes.”

  “It is not a thing a Christian should feel,” Riordan counseled, breathing a sigh of relief that some new, shocking revelation was not at hand. “If you want to confess it, you have.”

  “I didn’t start with her because I felt sorry for her. It was to calm her down.”

  This statement dismayed Riordan. Latin machismo. The cure for a hysterical woman was a good screwing. “César, God doesn’t care why you committed adultery,” he said, with severity in his voice. “Do you think Marta would care about your motives? God doesn’t, either. He cares that you committed it. He cares that you repent of it, and that’s the end of it.”

  “After what you did for me on that bridge…” César faltered. “I respect you, and I wanted to explain myself. So you respect me.”

  Riordan took his hand, a hand rough as sandpaper. “I do, my friend. No explanations required. I’m a bigger sinner than you are. Every one of us will be three days in our graves before the devil is done with us. Now say a firm act of contrition.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Pamela left for Philadelphia on a hot, cloudless Saturday morning. Lisette watched the plane take off from Hermosillo International into sunlight so bright it seemed to be sticking pins into her eyes. Driving back to San Patricio, she hummed to herself, happy for the respite from monitoring medications, from keeping her ears tuned for the changes in intonation in Pamela’s speech that sometimes heralded a manic flight and sometimes did not but in any case frayed Lisette’s nerves.

  Yet within a day or two, she found herself missing Pamela as she crawled into bed alone, woke up alone, and, in the twilight after she’d seen the last patient of the day and Anna Montoya had gone home, dined alone in a silence that was palpable. She missed hearing Pamela say things like “Holy moly.”

  The news had broken only hours after she’d boarded her flight. It was just as well that she was gone. The atmosphere in San Patricio was unsettling, a mixture of excitement and fear. Wild rumors placed Ernesto Salazar in a dozen different places at once. No one strolled in the plaza or on the streets at night, and people locked their doors, despite—or maybe because of—the presence of more police and soldiers than anyone had ever seen in town. They’d resumed their random searches, ransacking houses on the flimsiest of pretexts; and when they did not find the fugitives hiding in closets, they would make off with jewelry or cash to reward themselves for their trouble.

  Lisette could not get Evangelina off her mind. Three days after Pamela’s departure, she returned to San Tomás with Anna to check up on the girl. Rumors were filtering out of the Sierra Madre that with its leaders in jail or on the run, the Brotherhood had already fractured into freelance bandit gangs. If the stories were true, the risks were greater than usual; but she and Anna made the trip without incident.

  She saw Evangelina in the house of her aunt, Cornelia Valdez, the curandera. There was nothing she could do for the girl except to note the progress of her growing blindness. Lisette presented another food parcel to her mother, once again explaining that a change in diet might alleviate her daughter’s diabetes, which, in turn, might slow the advance of the darkness shuttering her sight. Alma accepted the gift with a tremulous gratitude. Her face had the shape and color of a brown egg, and it wore a timid expression. Maybe her father-in-law had forced more nonsense on her: Do not give any food offered by the American doctor to Evangelina. It’s been poisoned to kill her so her organs can be harvested. Ignorance! Backwardness! Whenever Lisette thought of Javier, fury surged through her. A fury she had to suppress. Here in these Indian villages, male power prevailed, a power founded on simple physical superiority and a capacity for violence.

  Don’t take this so personally, she counseled herself as she watched Alma trudge down a dirt street, the parcel under one arm, guiding Evangelina with her free hand.

  Villagers began to crowd into the ramada, and Lisette conducted an impromptu clinic, examining kids with bronchitis, a woman who complained of chronic headaches, an old man suffering from COPD. People begged for aspirin, not because they were sick but because they found a doctor’s visit a novelty—and the aspirin was free.

  When everyone except the old man had left, Cornelia made good on her promise to teach Lisette the secrets of her herbal cures. She plucked sprigs from the plants hanging from the rafters, plants she had gathered herself, scouring the nearby hillsides.

  A pail of water steamed on the mud-brick oven, and jojoba nuts roasted in the coals, throwing off a pleasing aroma. Anna sat at one end of the dining table—the picnic table Cornelia’s husband had salvaged from San Patricio’s town dump—and tended to the old man with COPD. Lisette’s pickup was parked alongside the ramada, the nebulizer running off its battery by means of an extension cord.

  “Breathe in, deep,” Anna said, and the old man went goggle-eyed as he inhaled, struggling to fill his wasted lungs.

  Lisette checked the indicator. His blood oxygen level was ninety-two. “Don’t let it fall below ninety,” she said.

  Anna murmured, “I know what to do.”

  “Señora,” said Cornelia in the sharp tone of a teacher calling a distracted student to attention. She was ready to begin her lecture, and was dressed for the occasion in a traditional ankle-length dress speckled with black rosettes. She pulled tuberous roots, like sweet potatoes, from the rafters. Jaramatraca, she said. Impossible to find in the mountains. Her husband, the local cattle inspector, had brought her these from “down below.” She meant the desert.

  Lisette, sitting on a straw floor mat, the pupil at the master’s feet, flipped through the booklet in her lap, Medicinal Plants of the Sonoran Desert. Jaramatraca was the common name for Peniocereus striatus, a cactus.

  “I call it ‘the Jesus root,’ because it performs miracles,” Cornelia said, smiling. “First you do this…” She peeled the brown skin and dropped the white meat into the pail of hot water. Squatting low, she plucked the jojoba nuts out of the oven and, while they cooled, shoved oak sticks into the coals and blew on them, raising a flame. “Next, you boil the root. When it is boiled, it makes a medicine for the bad stomach. It cures bites from snakes and from these things.” From out of a coffee can filled with water, she pulled a drowned centipede as long as a
finger.

  Lisette scribbled in her notebook, feeling a quiet excitement. She was acquiring hidden knowledge, back in med school, sort of, her professor a Mayo Indian woman who could neither read nor write but was a living encyclopedia of natural remedies. Her teachers at the Autonomous University of Guadalajara would probably regard Cornelia as a witch doctor at best, a charlatan at worst. But these Indians had survived for millennia, so their curanderos and curanderas must have something going for them.

  Cornelia continued: “This is the matadura. Grind it into a powder and it heals wounds, cuts, chafes, saddle sores on horses and donkeys. And this, the yerba del pasmo, it cures fevers. This one”—she yanked from her pharmacopoeia what looked like a bristly, shrunken apple—“is the toloache. It heals swelling, and its juice can make you drunk.”

  Anna announced that the old man’s level had reached ninety-five and would go no higher. She shut off the nebulizer and sent him on his way. Lisette looked up toloache in her booklet. Datura inoxia, otherwise known as the sacred datura for its powers to induce shamanistic visions, also as yerba del diablo, for its intoxicant effect, and locoweed, for the madness it produced in cattle that grazed on it.

  “I will show you what I do with the jojoba,” Cornelia said, and she scooped up the roasted fruits—they resembled hazelnuts—and poured them into the funnel of an oil press. As she cranked the handle, oil dripped into a small bottle under the spigot. This oil cured diarrhea and swellings from injuries, though not as miraculously as the jaramatraca—

  A disturbance outside interrupted the lesson. Someone shouted, and people were running toward a dirty, dented pickup that must have rattled into the village only moments ago—the dust it had raised still hung thick over the road below. A vaquero, wearing the inevitable straw cowboy hat, and a skinny teenage boy climbed out of the truck and jogged up to Cornelia’s house. Lisette recognized them as Tarahumara by their ankle-strap sandals and the boy’s headband (otherwise, he looked like any Mexican street kid: low-rider jeans, a black T-shirt emblazoned with an image of Eminem). The vaquero politely doffed his hat and greeted Cornelia in Tarahumara, saying, “Cuira.” (Hello.) That and a few other words—Cumí? (Where?), juri (yes), and tásirapé (no)—were all Lisette understood of the ensuing conversation, an agitated one accompanied by much pointing and gesturing. Cornelia said something—jumbled sounds to Lisette’s ear—while motioning at her and Anna. The vaquero gave them a puzzled look, as if he hadn’t noticed them at first, and asked Lisette in Spanish, “You also are a doctor?”