Dr. Brinkley's Tower

by Robert Hough

  Margarita was the sort of person who ceased taking in information when excited about something, and this was such a moment. Ignoring his request, she began to babble.

  — The radio station, Father. Have you listened to it?

  — A little, he answered.

  By this he meant that he was pretty sure he’d heard XER playing in the background the last time he’d been in the cantina. As far as he could remember, Brinkley’s station seemed inoffensive enough, little more than the tedious drone of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” interspersed with lectures regarding health and good welfare, all of which promoted Hinkley’s clinic in Del Rio. Mind you, the father had never really listened, if only because the station broadcast entirely in English, a language he had to concentrate to understand. When others had the option of studying the gringo tongue in high school, he’d been conjugating Latin verbs in a México City seminary.

  — So then you know!

  — Know what, Margarita?

  She leaned towards him. — The programming, Father. Much of it is … is … salacious in nature.

  — Salacious?

  — Sí.

  — Margarita, por favor.

  — I was listening last night. The language, Father. Particularly during the health report.

  Father Alvarez sighed. — As long as parents don’t let their children listen at certain hours I don’t see what the problem is.

  — But that’s not all! Much of the content is religious.

  — What I used to do is religious, Margarita. We can hardly blame John Brinkley for living in a country that hasn’t yet lost its soul.

  — But, Father! Have you listened closely? Have you heard the sermonizing? It starts most nights around seven …

  — Seven o’clock is my dinnertime, Margarita.

  — So then you don’t know! Father Alvarez … the ministers on the radio station … they’re Baptists! There’s one who is a … Pentecostal. They’re demons, Father, snake-handling degenerates. And they go on for hours!

  Alvarez felt a stab of revulsion and loathing. He commanded himself to breathe deeply, and reminded himself that the revolution had taken away his vocation, a situation he could do nothing to remedy, and that it was none of his business what tripe Brinkley chose to air on that ostentatious radio station of his. Margarita, meanwhile, was oblivious to the colour draining from Alvarez’s face.

  — The Pentecostal … he speaks in tongues! He has a segment in which people telephone the station and he puts them on air and they’re howling like monkeys or roaring like lions or — she took a deep, shuddering breath — speaking dead languages. The other day a child called up and afterward they said he’d been speaking Sumerian. In México, of all places! I’m asking you, Father. What are we going to do?

  Again he did not respond: the ground was swaying a little beneath his feet, and he found he needed all of his energies just to maintain his equilibrium.

  — I’ll tell you what I think we should do, Margarita continued. — I think we should talk to Miguel Orozco. He is the mayor, after all. It’s his town. He should be able to talk to Dr. Brinkley and demand that all religious programming of an unsuitable nature be banned from any radio station on our soil.

  — Miguel? Alvarez said weakly. — You want to talk to Miguel?

  — If it were up to me, I’d have the whole station taken off the air. It’s disgraceful, all this talk of men’s problems and goat glands and … Dios mío!… the vitality of the reproductive organs. Can you believe that, Father? That they’re talking about these things on a radio station broadcasting from our good town?

  Margarita sped off, the father now succumbing to a wave of frustration and despair. It was simply too much, this fresh knowledge that Pentecostals — practitioners of a faith that was guttural, adolescent, and completely lacking in nuance — had access to a radio station whose signal apparently reached all the way to Russia, while he, a father in the Roman Catholic Church, had had his profession thrown into the sewer like a spoiled armadillo carcass. He strode to the saloon and flung open its doors, startling the cantina owner and the mayor, both of whom were enjoying their second glass of cerveza while discussing whether or not they might indulge in a jigger of tequila.

  — Father, said the mayor. — Qué onda?

  Alvarez ignored him and marched up to the cantina owner. — Carlos, I need to borrow your radio.

  The cantina owner looked at him quizzically.

  — I need it, repeated the father.

  — Okay, okay. Take it, it’s behind the bar. The battery, though, is a little low. Do you want a cerveza too?

  Alvarez claimed the radio and, instead of joining his friends for a drink, headed towards the swinging wooden doors. He stepped into the laneway, where he was bathed by white sun, and walked along Avenida Hidalgo until he reached the sagging one-room adobe row house where he lived. It was neat as a pin, solely because young village daughters now came once a week and cleaned up. While the Father appreciated this, the arrangement also meant he could never find anything. His newspaper, his reading spectacles, his wallet, the slippers he wore in the early morning and late evening … they all seemed to disappear into the wasteland of orderliness that the muchachas left behind every time they visited.

  As with many homes in Corazón, a hammock stretched along one wall. Alvarez climbed in, the motion causing the ceiling beams to groan. He came to rest and pressed a few buttons on the radio. A weak light appeared on the tuning dial. This was accompanied by a man’s voice, speaking in English. Alvarez had to listen intently, for the light on the dial kept fading and the voice kept rising and falling in volume. And though Alvarez couldn’t understand all that was being said, it seemed there was nothing distasteful reaching his ears beyond the nasal pitch of a farmer discussing soybean prices. The voice faded in and out for another minute, at which point the dwindling light coming from the dial ceased being a light at all. Father Alvarez shook the radio, causing nothing more than brief snippets of sound to come from the infernal box.

  He sighed, climbed out of his hammock, and surveyed the room, his eyes scanning each clean surface, each uncluttered stretch of floor, and each dust-free piece of furniture. Finding his wallet was no simple matter; it required a degree of concentration that he had once reserved for spiritual questions. First of all, he had to remember which señorita had come yesterday — they all had their own methods of cleaning and their own spots for hiding away his possessions. He could barely picture her; he seemed to recall black hair and a halo of freckles across the nose. Of course, this described pretty much every young female in the town of Corazón de la Fuente. To be truthful, whenever he gazed upon a girl poised to become a woman, it was her youth and nothing but her youth that made an impression — it trumped eye colour, skin tone, distinguishing birthmarks, or whatever particular loveliness the girl happened to possess.

  Finally it came to him — it was the girl who had a lisp, the one they called the Little Spaniard. He could hear her, clear as a bell: Buenath tardeth, Father. Her real name was Rosita (or Rosana or Rosaura or Rosalita), and she was the one who never failed to put his wallet and reading spectacles in the little hutch that greeted visitors as they stepped inside the front door. He rushed towards it, opened the squeaky hinged door, and, gracias a Dios, saw his wallet sitting atop his slippers and an unfinished tripe sandwich he’d told her not to throw away. A second later he was out the door, his wallet in one hand and the cantina owner’s radio in the other, heading for the store run by the hirsute Zacatecan.

  A bell chimed when Father Alvarez walked into the dark, crowded store. Fajardo came out from the back and greeted him. A stand of tomatoes, avocados, jalapeños, cilantro, and onions separated the two men.

  — Father, said Fajardo. — Can I help you with something?

  — I need a battery.

  — What type?

  — Whatever type this damn thing takes.

  The father held up the radio. Fajardo nodded; he knew the model for the
simple reason that he had sold it to the cantina owner in the first place. He ducked behind the counter. Upon surfacing, he passed over a heavy battery.

  Father Alvarez paid and shook the store owner’s hand, a moment of contact that would have given him pause a few years earlier but that he didn’t think about now. Like most residents of Corazón de la Fuente, he had long ago decided what Fajardo looked like beneath his insulating layer. Now his eyes automatically subtracted the fur, revealing a wiry Mexican man who worked hard, lived with his condition with grace, and contributed greatly to his community.

  The father retraced his steps through Corazón. At home he lay in his hammock and put the radio on his stomach. He switched it on. The voice of an announcer filled the room. Though he was fairly sure it was Dr. Brinkley speaking, he wasn’t certain. Any characteristics of Brinkley’s voice — the quiet self-confidence mixed with his quaint Appalachian slang — were lost behind the barrier of a foreign language. Alvarez listened intently, and in so doing he extracted many words and phrases that were more or less the same in Spanish, including impotencia and la función de la próstata and, of all things, los secretos del bedroom. Despite the grim amusement these words caused him, he soon grew bored with listening, if for no other reason than the words between these phrases formed an indistinguishable blur. He put the radio on the floor next to him, concluding that Margarita must have been exaggerating.

  At the top of the hour, the talking ended. Father Alvarez yawned, climbed out of the hammock, and searched for the spot where Rosita (or Rosaura or Rosana or Rosalita) might have left his newspaper. Meanwhile, his small house was filling with twangy American music, all violins and washtub basses and atonal vocals. The father found his paper, read a bit, drifted off, woke up, helped himself to a draught of goat leche he kept in a green plastic bucket on the cool ceramic kitchen floor, read a bit more, drifted off a second time, and then made himself a simple dinner of machaca, tortilla, and beans seasoned with epazote sprigs. On the far side of the room, the father folded his newspaper and thought about his evening plans. Probably he would spend his night reading.

  That’s when it occurred to him that the music on the radio had stopped and had again been replaced by talking. This time his ears perked. His face flushed. Today, he heard, we’ll be talking about the end of days and how it’s almost upon us …

  Alvarez stood and drew closer to the radio. He did so cautiously, as though approaching a poisonous snake. For the good Lord told us in the Book of Revelation that, one day, each and every one of us would endure a reckoning … Alvarez swallowed, his throat suddenly dry. Though he didn’t totally understand what the announcer was saying, he did know that these weren’t the sage ramblings of a radio doctor but the fire-and-brimstone language of a country preacher.

  He went closer to the radio, the glow of its dial now something demonic, its very operation a taunt from the world of darkness … For those lucky few who have devoted their lives to Christ, there will come a rapture … and with each step, the fact that this signal was being heard in Alaska — ay, ay, in Russia — further enraged the father. He stopped about a metre from the radio and stared. What little English he did know was religious in nature, and certain terms kept leaping out at him: day of judgement … signs and wonders … the Lord’s limitless fury … number six-six-six. He felt himself growing nauseated. This was the verbiage of philistines, of simpletons. And yet it was reaching the ears of Eskimo fur trappers, and not the poetic nuance of Catholicism.

  Trembling with umbrage, he took another half-step closer to the radio. The voice — he could make out a heavy Southern drawl — stopped and was replaced by a different voice. Judging by the sudden presence of static, the father concluded that it was a phone-in caller. It took him another moment or two to realize that the caller — a highly agitated woman — was not speaking in English and was speaking in Latin. He listened closely, trying to pick out individual words, and couldn’t — the voice was racing, desperate, crazy, inflamed. And yet this poor caller’s Latin was a hundred times more intelligible than her next choice of dialect. For as the father stood rooted to the floor, his face burning with enmity, the caller suddenly stopped talking, made a sound resembling an indigestive growl, and began squawking like a chicken.

  The radio host’s voice returned. Because the father’s mind was sharpened by rage and disgust, he more or less understood what the preacher said. — Glory be to God, he boomed, — we got ourselves a durned soothsayer!

  Father Alvarez stormed out of his house, trudged towards the cantina, flung open the wooden doors, and marched over to the bar. The cantina owner’s mouth hung open when he saw the state of his old amigo.

  — Mescal, Alvarez ordered. — And for the love of Dios, leave the bottle.

  { 17 }

  A LIMOUSINE DRIVEN BY ONE OF BRINKLEY’S CHAUFFEURS stopped in front of the home belonging to Malfil and Violeta Cruz. Though the car was incrementally smaller than Brinkley’s Duesenberg and was made by a manufacturer called Mercedes, it was similar in that the initials JRB appeared on the dashboard, on all four wheel hubs, on the front and rear bumpers, on the polished mahogany running boards, on each of the sun visors, and on all of the Corinthian leather seats. The driver stepped out and was immediately attacked by a team of ravenous curs emanating from the alleyway. He jumped back in the car and began swinging a rolled-up newspaper at the dog closest to his window. In response, the animals barked with rabid intensity and vindictively doused all four tires with pheremonal spray.

  Violeta and her mother heard the ruckus. Over the past hour they’d washed each other’s hair and put on the only nice clothes they possessed. In the case of the younger Cruz, it was the blouse and white skirt that she had worn to her fiesta de quinceañera. In the case of the older Cruz — who was still only thirty-three years of age, though neither as high-cheek-boned nor as raven-haired as her daughter — it was the pale blue dress she had worn to church in the days when Father Alvarez was still considered a man of the cloth. They stepped into the laneway and nodded respectfully at the driver, who was too intimidated to step out of the car and open the rear door for them. Instead he nodded his greetings and gesticulated at the seat behind him. Violeta climbed in and gazed out the window as the driver put the car into gear.

  As the limousine was too large to turn around in the narrow streets, the driver had no choice but to drive west along Avenida de Cinco de Mayo, past the House of Gentlemanly Pleasures. A few hundred metres beyond the radio tower, the street curved and linked with Avenida Hidalgo, which ran along the bottom of the pueblo. Well off in the distance, Violeta could see a thin spiral of smoke drifting skyward from the hilltop shack belonging to the curandera.

  The front of the car came around in a slow arc, a tiresome manoeuvre in that many of the homeless who had flocked to newly rich Corazón de la Fuente had turned the area flanking this intersection into a squatter’s camp. The Mercedes’ tires bumped over sleeping rolls, cooking logs, tent pegs, mescal bottles, pulque gourds, and old, dented pots. This angered the squatters, who chased after the car throwing rocks, old shoes, and lumps of bark soap, all the while yelling the vilest of profanities at the tops of their smoke-damaged lungs.

  Soon the limousine passed the cantina and entered the plaza, which was filled with vagrants, tortilla vendors, and toothless, emaciated prostitutes who had been refused employment by Madam Félix. Heads turned as the car circled past the town hall, the church, and the store operated by Fajardo Jimenez. It then exited at the northeast corner of the plaza, again turning onto Avenida Cinco de Mayo. The road meandered for several blocks before arcing around the ejido and Antonio Garcia’s hacienda and heading towards the bridge separating an obscenely rich nation from an incorrigibly poor one.

  The driver crossed without having to pay the usual assortment of bribes, and then travelled along the main street of Del Río before stopping in front of the Roswell Hotel. He opened Violeta’s door and wished her a good day.

  — Gracias, she said
to the chauffeur, who tipped his driver’s cap and smiled professionally.

  Violeta and her mother entered the lobby of the hotel, which in truth was a hotel no longer, in that every suite was now taken up by Brinkley’s medical facility or his radio station or his growing pharmaceutical enterprise. Naturally, he’d kept on the hotel’s staff to clean, make beds, deliver sandwiches, and bring coffee in the middle of the night.

  Violeta looked around, admiring the chandeliers and fine wool carpets, and was about to comment on the opulence of the hotel when a paunchy, middle-aged man dressed in a brown suit came up to them.

  — Greetings, he announced in English. — I am Dale Stollins, the manager of Radio XER, or, as we like to call it, the Sunshine Station from Between the Nations. You must be Malfil and Violeta Cruz, am I correct?

  —Jess, said Malfil.

  — In that case, welcome.

  He thrust a beefy pink hand towards Violeta’s mother. The older woman took it while smiling graciously. He then offered his hand to Violeta; her palm came away damp, and she had to fight the urge to wipe it against the fabric of her skirt.

  The two women followed him to a door marked Exit. He pushed it open with his shoulder and they followed him down a cement staircase. At the bottom of the steps he pushed through another door, this one bearing three white letters — XER — surrounded by a squadron of lightning bolts. They entered a carpeted, tomb-like quiet. The lights were low, and when Stollins told them that Dr. Brinkley was still doing his Happy Health Hour, he did so in a voice that was practically a whisper. This pleased Violeta, as silence had a way of calming her mind and stilling the worries that galloped through her head at all hours of the day and night. Stollins led them through the empty lounge — there was a sofa, stuffed chairs, thick orange carpeting, and a chalkboard running along the length of one wall. As they walked along a hallway lined with closed doors, Violeta could hear the sound of voices speaking into telephones, though these voices were muted as well, and she wondered if perhaps the offices had been soundproofed.