The Islands of Divine Music

by John Addiego

  Jesús would find himself cornered by Mormons in the grammar school, cheerful young men with crew cuts and skinny neckties who’d invite him to play checkers and basketball at their church. These men would invariably ask him about his home life and whether or not he was part of an Indian tribe. By his third year in school he understood almost everything the Mormons said to him, except for a reference to a tribe of Laminites, which sounded like something the librarian liked to do. One of the men even said that he, Jesús, was a Laminite, which made him a cut above a Mexican, in terms of redemption.

  What if my dad was Italian, hey?

  Not good, the young man said. You need to be Indian.

  One night Jesús and Maria sat before the set until Arturo knocked. Beyond the old man’s shoulder were the distant sounds of hooting and a kind of growling laughter, like the noises some hybrid of man and dog might make. Maria told Jesús to wait, and he sat through two shows before he got anxious. He stuck his head out the door, into the frigid night air. Something was next to the snow-covered, stunted hedge, some bundle of clothes which, after Jesús’s eyes got accustomed to the dark, seemed to have a head attached to it. Jesús called out, then made his way across the snow to Arturo, who had a black skein of blood on his face. The child yelled for his mother and ran from door to door, finding one of them ajar. Maria was in that room, lying on her stomach aslant a bed. Her dress was torn up to her neck, and there was blood on her legs and buttocks.

  His howling brought Yvonne, the bovine redhead who, until that evening, had never spoken a word to Maria or Jesús. Yvonne had three grown boys who spent much of their time in various correctional institutions or on the rodeo circuit, and she had recently moved to the Top Hat from a trailer behind a Truax truck stop, where she’d waited tables and performed fellatio on truckers. She’d seen the three cowboys earlier that evening and told Arturo no dice because Yvonne could spot mean little shitkickers a mile off. Holy fucking mother of God, she said when she rushed into the room.

  Yvonne had just drawn only one eyebrow onto her shaved forehead, and her bathrobe was unfastened. She lifted Jesús onto her hip, and tears gushed out of her eyes and smeared her makeup as she blabbered about what she should do, casting her thoughts aloud above the sound of the child’s weeping. She set the boy down, and the two of them turned Maria onto her back and shook her back to consciousness. Moaning softly, Maria opened her eyes and hugged her child. Yvonne stomped out into the snow and dragged Arturo into the room, blubbering and talking to herself the entire time. She placed a motel towel on the gash in his head, and Arturo came around and started cursing in Spanish.

  Maria had a mild concussion as well as a lesion in her colon where the cowboys had shoved a broom handle. Despite the rambling explanations Yvonne offered, this cruelty was a bitter mystery to Jesús. Moreover, the subject was off-limits after that evening. Maria and Arturo each spent a week in bed attended by Arturo’s cousin Esperanza. Yvonne moved back to the trailer behind the truck stop and never spoke to them again. Neither the police nor medical authorities were called; the assailants were sons of old families in the valley. Whenever Jesús brought it up, he was silenced.

  Of course Penny had no sense of the life the child and his mother lived, though her thoughts returned to them every so often, especially during Sunday mass. The old story of the migrant stream, of a life following the crops of the American breadbasket, became more somber after she’d read Steinbeck. She wondered if Maria’s beautiful shoulders were now disfigured by years of stoop labor, or if the boy had become bitter with poverty.

  Mormon missionaries on the playground, Catholic sisters from the church where the Mexican people went, and a couple of teachers knew that things weren’t right at home for Jesús. They prayed for him. They gossiped about the mother. He learned to avoid answering their questions directly and to respond tersely, or sometimes with aphorisms he’d piece together, using a bit of each idiom from home and school. Well, that’s how the tree falls, no? From such sticks you get such splinters, que no? When it rains, you get wet, y que?

  He learned to read English, mostly by poring over Arturo’s old National Enquirers, and years later he found Penny’s letters, which Maria had never been able to read. The latest one, written nearly two years before Jesús read it, described Penny’s first days of a high school year. Jesús read it several times, enjoying the long sentences which cataloged the many events in the girl’s big-city school, the rallies and football games, the dances with local rock-and-roll musicians, an assembly featuring some hootenanny singers. He enjoyed her descriptions of the disaster drills, how the girls in their long, tight dresses had to bend their knees enough to fit under their desks, how the Russians were building so many atom bombs that Penny’s dad was considering digging a bomb shelter in the backyard. He decided to write back, and one of the young missionaries helped him address the letter. All he could think of to say was a thank-you, along with a brief response to her thoughts about the atom bomb. His mother had always spoken of mass destruction, of God’s plan to end the world, and Jesús had often imagined the various ways the world might end in flames and floods and explosions. He wrote to Penny: Thank You! With atom bombs I think only God drops the Big One, and that’s the way the ball jumps, no?

  Penny was in her room listening to Dion and the Belmonts and graphing some coordinate geometry when her brother Angelo barged in and threw the letter at her. Angelo was always first at the mailbox those days because he awaited some quasi-pornographic novelty his parents didn’t know about, and he enjoyed barging in on his siblings and startling them with some weird noise or impression he’d create. This time he imitated President Kennedy: Um, Miss Verbicaro? You seem to have received a message from Cubar or Chinar.

  There was no return address, and Penny’s name was scrawled in pencil. She had no idea who it was from, or why some kid would write to her about the bomb. Maybe some weird elementary school project? She returned to her math while Angelo hung over her shoulder. Is it from the communists, Miss Verbicaro? It looks like a communist stamp, Miss Verbicaro. I think it’s Cubar.

  Mr. President, get lost. She looked at the stamp and the postmark, which had Ida on it, then she shoved it aside.

  Maria took a job waiting tables at a cowboy bar called the Five-Ten Club, where she got decent tips only when she wore a low-cut blouse and let men place their hands on her. Arturo rarely asked her to service clients at the Top Hat after the assault, so she cleaned a few rooms for rent and occasionally crawled into his bed while Jesús was at school. He would twist open a bottle of Ripple wine to share, and they would watch a quiz show while she placed her hands on his lap and lectured him about the end of the world, which was imminent.

  A storm hit the Western states that fall, knocking down redwoods and Douglas fir, snapping power lines, and leaving Jesús and Maria in the dark for two days. It brought a torrent of rain to Northern California and stopped the World Series in San Francisco. Penny thought of writing to Maria about it, describing the flooded neighborhoods along the bay front and the day she and her father had to cross San Pablo Avenue with the water up to the car doors. Then she picked up the child’s letter and realized from whom it had come.

  She began a letter in response to Jesús’s words, thinking that he must be an odd little boy to write the things he had written. She asked about his mother and sent a news clipping about the flooding in the Bay Area. She described crossing San Pablo Avenue in the high water.

  Jesús read the letter by candle because the power was down again. He was thinking of writing a response one day when Arturo stumbled into their room stinking drunk and shouting about the Russians and the end of the world. According to the old man, the country was about to go to war and, with the help of the Russians, blow up the world. Maria started packing.

  It was October 23, 1962. Arturo drove them through town with the car radio squawking war from the metal dash, and he and Jesús tried to translate for Maria. Before the appliance store on Main there was a t
raffic jam of pickup trucks and old sedans, and people were standing beside their vehicles or on the sidewalk watching the TV in the window. Jesús saw the president’s handsome face in the window for a second before Arturo maneuvered the car to an Esso station. There they waited, among a cluster of fuel hoarders, to fill the tank.

  The old man wiped tears with his sleeve and guided the car drunkenly across the desert, aided now and then by Maria’s hand on the wheel when he drifted across the line. From the faint radio waves traveling hundreds of miles from Salt Lake or Boise to the old Ford, Jesús heard that the Russians were getting closer and closer to Cuba just as the jalopy bounced farther and farther across the sage desert and onto a narrow gravel road. Huge, pale-faced men in fur hats guided dark warships from their frozen shores, sliced across the ocean toward an island where Latinos like them were brainwashed slaves who denounced God. The dark ships were weighted down with missiles nearly as large as the vessels themselves, and the communists wanted to set these death rockets in Cuba, where they’d be close enough to hit America easily and start a war to end the world.

  They drove on washboard gravel until a rock formation came into view, a granite batholith rising out of the desert like an island in the sea. In a circle of boulders and broken beer bottles they parked under the bullet-pocked sign: City of Rocks.

  They used the decrepit outhouses and slung their things over their shoulders. Not five minutes up the trail Arturo fell to his knees, in a clamor of bottles and Spam tins, and wept. He asked forgiveness from God and his mother for all the awful things he’d done. Abandoning his wife and children in Mexico and promoting prostitution were among the many sins he wanted to get off his chest before the end of the world. He told the others to go on without him, that he would return to the car to wait it out because he was too old and sick and rotten with sin. Maria made the sign of the cross and told him to go with God. She and Jesús climbed into the massive rock formation while Arturo went with God back to the brown ’52 Ford, opened another bottle of Ripple, and passed out in the backseat. The sun set.

  Under a cliff, in a cleft of rock which was not exactly the cave Maria had envisioned, mother and child huddled in their motel blankets. Jesús had never seen rock like this, smooth but jagged at the crags, polished granite with veins of quartz. He looked at the stars of light in the rock, and later he looked at the stars themselves, the black sky thick with them, cloudy with them, alive with them. A shooting star crossed the sky, and they gasped and clung to each other. Then Maria pointed out a faint orange glow above a rim of distant mountains. Though it probably indicated the city lights of Pocatello, she said that this was a burning city struck by a bomb, hundreds of kilometers away, and that they should cover their mouths and noses with the blankets so as not to breathe the poison.

  The next morning Maria heated beans over a can of Sterno. Jesús unfolded a piece of paper and began his letter to Penny. He used a flat boulder as a table and gazed into the pinnacles of rock as he thought about what to say.

  Ten days later Penny received a letter written in a bumpy scrawl. We are in the city of rocks at the end of the world, it began. if the world is all destruido you probable can’t get this letter. Mama says the peoples in santo francisco will probable boil like chickens in a pot so the meat comes off the bone. I am sorry for you with much heart. We see the city burn far over the mountains and cry for the peoples. well. Arturo stay behind in the ford and might cook like meat in a can or maybe not. You live all sins and you die like spam in a lata que no?

  Once again, Jesús’s words left Penny dumbfounded. Was he just a weird little boy? Was he precocious or mentally unstable? The letter continued in smoother printing, apparently written some days later and on a better surface:

  Well we are home we walk all day for that arturo leave and mama is much in anger. The world is not over and I am happy you are fine and me tambien, well it’s the way the wiener wobbles. Mama says we will soon leave this place for good. With much love I hope you are happy. Even in the city of rocks many brite flowers find a place to grow.

  On a cool November evening seven years later Penny stood before a Mexican bakery in San Francisco. A group of sugar skulls peeked from the windows of a hacienda made of dough or gingerbread. She knew enough Spanish to translate the icing on the building: Dia de los Muertos, Day of the Dead. It made her think of the six days when death had hung so close to them all, her mother sitting before the TV, her brother in some silent world of his own, her father when Paulie had joined the marines, and how unreal that time seemed now, after its passage, compared with the very real and daily reports of death from Vietnam, with the real problems in their lives. As she stood before the plate glass she imagined the baby and his mother peering from a window in a city made of stone, an ancient city carved into a cliff, leaning at the end of the world.

  Penny had only heard from Jesús twice in those last seven years, and the last letters she’d sent had come back unopened. Mother and child had been on the move, mostly in the Rocky Mountain states and the Great Basin, in desolate towns full of work crews, oil fields, mining operations, dam construction. Penny didn’t know Jesús had taken up his drunk mother’s burden and, at the age of twelve, sneaked into taverns with her, dressed in her clothes, in order to take men’s money. He was a convincing transvestite, a slim-hipped Latin beauty with scarlet lipstick and turquoise eyeliner, and it amazed him how easily these men, who spent months in danger and drudgery in order to mail money home to their wives, who spent all day sweating and moving machines with their callused hands, could be fooled into stuffing ten-dollar bills into his. And then there were the men who saw through the costume and called him a queer and paid to enter him from behind. For Jesús there was that sudden frightening violation with its attendant thrill of pain and its disgusting pleasure mixed with the pain. There was a debasement and acceptance of what is most dirty and wrong and deeply pleasurable about being a human being, that most basic giving over of himself to another. He was a queer. He was something men fucked and told jokes about and talked about lining up against a wall and shooting, ridding the world of them. One evening their cruelty nearly killed him, much in the way it had nearly killed his mother: he was stripped and sexually assaulted, then beaten and left for dead in a parking lot.

  Penny waited for the electric Muni to take her to San Francisco State College, where she taught composition writing as a graduate student. She had combed her long, wavy hair onto the kitchen counter of her flat in Noe Valley and ironed it straight. She had drunk two cups of coffee and shared two joints of marijuana with her boyfriend, Charles, who said that the straightening accentuated Penny’s vulnerable angularity and made her look like a ghost with sunken eyes and a Roman nose. Charles was a self-professed Yippie and revolutionary trying to find the right organization to identify with, and he’d spent time in meetings with the SDS, Peace and Freedom Party, SLA, Weather Underground, Patriot Party, Diggers, and recently a Black Panther support group called the Motherfuckers, but he still hadn’t found the right fit. Penny didn’t tell Charles her class didn’t meet that evening, that she was going instead to a conscious breathing class taught by one of her exlovers, a past-life-regression therapist and parking-lot attendant named Frank.

  Charles had a low opinion of most of the classes offered at San Francisco State through the Experimental College unless they had to do with revolution, and his impression of Frank and consciousness-raising in general was lower still. Penny didn’t vocally disagree with Charles, but a lot of reading and talk about the boundaries of consciousness, as well as recent experiences with marijuana and LSD, had made her feel receptive to an intuitive journey which seemed accessible through the simple act of breathing, and the course, after two meetings, was going well. Also, Frank was cute, and things just presented themselves to her lately when she practiced his breathing technique, the coincidence of a word repeated, a snippet from some song with special significance. The Mexican bakery display seemed a portent, a little message from God,
reinforced by the synchronous appearance of the word Idaho floating past her feet on the side of a windblown french fries sack. Penny boarded the Muni and closed her eyes to concentrate on her breathing. She saw faces: her grandfather’s on the day he died, her mother’s the day of her parents’ divorce, her brother Paulie’s in the U.S. Marine Corps portrait on the mantel.

  Death had passed over Paulie, but not without leaving its mark: he’d returned home that year dishonorably discharged and addicted to heroin. He was now living in a wino hotel south of Market, wandering to and from his methadone treatments at the mission and drinking quart bottles of ale with a couple of other vets on a park bench. His hair had grown out, and he was always dressed in an old military coat which reeked of booze and smoke and sweat. With his bushy beard and wild eyes he scared Penny and gave her the impression of Rasputin or Charles Manson in a Giants baseball cap and glasses. Whenever she saw him she wanted to flee his presence, to make sure he didn’t know where she lived, which was less than two miles from his hotel.

  Jesús was less than a mile from her at that moment. He had run away and come to San Francisco, as had thousands of teenagers that year. One night he’d watched his mother stagger around the room in a red negligee stained orange at the armpits and then looked at himself in the mirror, his long black hair and feminine affect so much like hers, and the next morning he’d said his farewell and stood on the highway with his thumb out. He found his way to the city and ingested hallucinogens and made money for a month panhandling and turning sexual favors on the streets where his mother had done the same many years before, until one evening, when he stood on the bridge staring east toward the lighthouse on Alcatraz, he juggled the idea of jumping. There was a way to end suffering, and it really took no effort to achieve this, just a simple act of letting go, and there was something tremendously seductive in the music of that gesture of stepping onto the rail and dropping toward the little island and the black water, something comforting in knowing that this was available to him, this means of breaking the circle of pain. And the pain was his beautiful mother dying slowly from booze and despair, her swollen face the day he’d left, and the pain was a man pressing too deep inside him, and the pain was the endless fields stripped bare and lifeless under the machinery of stupefied work crews, and the pain was the desperate children like him come to escape their lives in the city of love. The choice to live came down to a coin toss, a chance sign, a gull drifting above him among the bridge wires. If the bird flies to the right, I jump, he said to himself. To the left, I walk back.