The Islands of Divine Music

by John Addiego

  Angelo felt his face burning. Did you know that I wrote a lot of those riddles Jim was talking about? Jesús and I came up with these enigmatic, pithy sayings together, when we were stoned and doing people’s voices. He would do this evangelist act right at the pulpit in our church when we were the only ones there. I used to pretend to be crippled, and he’d say something nonsensical, some puzzler we made up together: If the pelican catches a fish but cannot swallow it because the fisherman has tied twine about its throat, how does the armadillo dream in his shell? Then he’d lay his hands on me, and I’d walk away, healed. Sometimes I’d jump and click my heels. Paulie, I’m sorry. He was an actor.

  Paul.

  Paul! He goofed on people with me, for money! It was an act!

  Now, hold on a second. It was the little white troll, Roger the Lodger, who spoke in his sandpaper voice through a mouthful of beans. Hold on. I got by most of my life as a thief and a con man, and I’ve seen them all. The religious cons, too. This boy might have pulled some con, but what he done, when I seen him, was the real McCoy. I mean . . . Roger spread his arms out and looked up. I mean, you felt it, the energy, man, you felt it!

  Jim and Kathy smiled and nodded. He was maybe a little bit the trickster, Jim said, and Kathy laughed. Yes. I think he had the trickster in him, too.

  Tricked our sister into setting fire to the draft-board office, An-gelo said to himself while the others grinned and nodded. His laptop tinkled, and he walked outside to a sidewalk table to read the message.

  Naomi wanted to warn him about the rejection before his copy came in the mail. She always warned him first. He wrote back, thanking her heartily for giving him the bad news. He described the situation in the restaurant and how he needed an excuse to leave the table.

  He didn’t want to return to the group inside, so he pretended to press the keys. He could see them sitting around the food with their hands joined, now. Manslayer was a beautiful woman, he realized, and in his inimitable way he’d made sure she hated his guts, hadn’t he? Now she was holding something, and it looked as though she were reading aloud to the group from a newspaper clipping. The Lodger looked at him, and Angelo pretended to read the screen until the familiar tinkling indicated that he had another message from across the continent.

  Naomi asked him how he felt about his brother’s desire to find this person. Didn’t Angelo want to find Jesús Verbizcaro, too? The story he’d written, and which she’d helped him publish so many years ago in a journal and cited when she offered further representation, was ostensibly about that same young man on Alcatraz Island. Shouldn’t he join his brother’s search?

  Jesús had called Alcatraz La Isla de Alcatraces, which Angelo had translated to The Island of Pelicans as the title of his old story. So, Naomi thought he should join his crazy brother and write a follow-up story on the adventure or something

  Everybody around him was going insane.

  He wrote back, asking if Naomi could find an electronic address for the real Jesus in Heaven so Angelo could tell Him about the group of old hippies in the restaurant, and how He might need to appear and set them straight. Poor bastards, they’re waiting for you, Big Guy, and they’ve got you mixed up with my great uncle. Why don’t you show, you old trickster? Help my brother, for Christ’s sake.

  THE ISLAND OF WOMEN

  Angelo

  Three weeks after the taqueria supper, Angelo stood near the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City and lost his brother. Anvil-shaped clouds gathered above the city as he hurried down the steps they’d just ascended. After an hour of searching he stretched out on a stone ledge, under the once-buried nostrils of a plumed serpent covered by Catholics when they built their church on top of the Indian temple, and moaned. The rain came and drenched him before he could seek shelter.

  An old woman leaned over him and asked if he was drunk, bo-racho, he understood that much, and he shook his head.

  No puedo encontrar mi hermano, he said.

  Su hermano, the woman said, pointing. Angelo looked and saw Paul wandering across the street.

  He rushed across a street which flowed now like a stream, and it made him remember something about the original Aztec city being an island with canals. Paul’s white hair towered over the mass of people in the open-air market, but Angelo’s cries went unheard. Muddy buses roared by like resurrected dinosaurs, kids kicked balls against crumbling walls, the streets were filled with people, three kids riding one bicycle, mothers and fathers carrying five little ones and three plastic sacks of food between them. Angelo saw a pharmacy with an electric pony in front of it and a line of kids waiting for a ride, like this was the Matterhorn at Disneyland. Above his brother’s head he saw a school of fish-shaped huaraches nosing up strings to the rafters of the market. He saw human-sized bleeding carcasses on tables, plucked chickens hanging among bananas and shell necklaces; he saw angel-faced children selling corn tortillas from baskets, and toothless beggars, one a leper, he supposed, with a cave for a nose. Paul stood before a stall filled with jars and bundled herbs.

  Hey, Angie, where you been?

  They boarded the Red Arrow, La Flecha Roja, for Cuernavaca. Mexico City was like two or three Los Angeleses, Angelo thought, a pasta bowl heaped over the rim with smog and people, but what would be considered a slum in LA was affluence beyond the imagination here. The suburban house built of a deodorant ad, where Jennifer and Sam had spoken to him this morning, would be considered a palace. The disparity between rich and poor hadn’t hit him so hard since his radical days, when he and Jesús and a group of troublemakers had smeared themselves with ketchup and carried Eat the Rich placards into some bank on Market Street. Because it’s never too late to make a first impression.

  His brother slept in the seat beside him. He’d taken to drinking beer again, ostensibly because the water was bad, and this made him much easier to be around. Angelo found him a kinder, gentler Paul after a few Negra Modelos. Also, he’d shaved his Santa Claus beard and accepted, along with the plane ticket, some new clothes.

  Popocateptl loomed like a purple wave over the city of eternal spring as the bus descended a snaky highway in twilight. Angelo had read that Cuernavaca was a favorite for summer hideaways because of its lovely climate and proximity to the capital, that Cortez and Maximilian, even the shah of Iran, had kept secret palaces here. Weird to think that their step-uncle, the guy who’d inspired religion in Paulie and political vandalism in Penny, may have found refuge where, for centuries, despots and fat cats had hidden out.

  That evening Angelo called his daughter, and Sam asked about volcanic eruptions. Mom says you’re right under a huge volcano which could blow any day.

  Jennifer’s voice was sweet. All our daughter can do is talk about your adventure. She really wishes you’d taken her along.

  His adventure. After he hung up he thought about the way she’d said that, the hint of, what, admiration? A memory of how Jenn used to speak when his life had seemed more interesting to her? He stood before the mirror, a middle-aged guy with extra pounds and a receding hairline, and thought about his adventure.

  At five in the morning Angelo awoke and realized that his brother was missing. He waited for first light to go looking for him. Some of the streets he called his brother’s name down were narrow and cobbled, others wide and filled with commercial logos. Everything was drenched and oozing with the morning’s warmth. Bird-of-paradise along walls with glimmering glass set into their tops to slice the fingers of the poor. A church with a garden of exotic flowers and a few bats coming in from the night, like shattered pieces of the night sky gathering under the church eaves. The streets led him to the mercado, which was in a ravine with the volcano towering over its end, and among the vendors who were setting up stalls and stoves or simply laying out their blankets of limes and potatoes he found his brother.

  Paulie sat with a beer and a Bible, leaning against a wall in the ravine. Angelo asked him where he’d spent the night.

  The school wasn’
t open.

  No kidding? Not at three in the morning? Angelo squatted beside him. The nerve of some people. His brother stared off somewhere, he guessed at the mountain. So, what do you think?

  Paul was silent for a moment. Then he smiled. I love this place. I absolutely love this place.

  They waited until eight to knock on the door of the school, which was really an old house with an enclosed patio. Paul started to speak Spanish, and Angelo listened and tried to understand. He saw his brother produce the wrinkled newspaper articles which he and Lorna Dee and Kathy Manslayer had been gathering from the Spanish-speaking press, La Prensa de Milagros. The blond woman, who spoke Spanish with a Scandinavian accent, seemed to know Señor Almas very well. Paul’s voice was rich with excitement.

  Angelo had to jog to keep up with him. They found Fernando Almas asleep under an old Chevy Nova. He crawled out to shake their hands. The articles he’d written, yes, Angelo understood a little of what they were saying about these reports of a miracle healer named Verbizcaro, almost the same last name as theirs. Jesús Gómez de Verbizcaro, and he didn’t practice here but in the Yucatán, where the palm is.

  Oh, great, Angelo said. He asked Paul to translate some questions for the reporter about this Jesús of the miraculous healing powers who supposedly lived under a weeping coconut palm which, when photographed from a certain angle, looked a lot like a profile of Mother Mary or, in Angelo’s estimation, a praying mantis.

  Cuantos años tiene Jesús?

  The reporter raised his hands and guessed about twenty-five. The photo of the man beneath the miraculous palm tree looked like a twenty-five-year-old with long hair who could be the Jesús they sought if he’d never aged a day in the past thirty years.

  Paulie, he would be fifty-five by now. Not like this guy in the picture.

  He called Jennifer an hour later. We haven’t spoken this much for months, he mused.

  Right.

  Listen, we have to go clear out to the Yucatán, and it looks like we’re going by bus. I guess he’s at some place in Quintana Roo.

  Oh, my God, that is supposed to be paradise, Jennifer said. Oh, God, Sam will die of envy. I wish she could be there with you. You could go snorkeling.

  Well, I couldn’t fly her down there. I mean, she’s way too young to fly alone.

  All she talks about is you and Mexico.

  Paulie is obsessed with finding this guy. I hope it doesn’t break his heart because this sham of the weeping coconuts can’t be our uncle. Anyway, my agent, and Paulie’s desperation, twisted my arm.

  Maybe I should bring her. I don’t even have a good swimming suit.

  Your blue one looks great.

  Forty minutes before their bus took off he couldn’t find his brother again. He ran through the afternoon downpour, the rainwater cascading down church steps, a plastic poncho flapping around him like wings, and felt more foolish than ever. Inviting Jennifer to meet him in the Caribbean paradise, losing track of his crazy brother, not even certain how or where to find the faith healer or sham shaman that almost undoubtedly wasn’t the Jesús of their youth. He ran through the tropical deluge, flapping his yellow wings like Big Bird as cars and motor scooters roared past. He found Paul in the churchyard, which was called Jardin de Bodas, or wedding garden. He thought of his heart pounding under the poncho like a little pouch of blood, he thought of weddings and Jennifer and eternal spring, he thought of the word sangre as he told his brother they had to run for the Red Arrow or wait two days for the next chance.

  Paul got up from the slab of marble he’d been kneeling on. His white hair and dirty white shirt and pants were soaked. Without a word, he ran.

  He couldn’t put her out of his mind for ten minutes. Would they share a bed? Would it even be safe, in every respect of that word, since she’d slept with Charles in the interim, and he had spent one night with a coworker named Denise? Whenever the bus stopped, blind men and musicians would board, begging for pesos, sometimes selling tamales, and Angelo thought of men who would maybe kill a person like Charles for sleeping with their wives. It was an old Bluebird bus, the kind he and his brother had ridden to school over forty years ago, and chickens and goats were occasional passengers. They made their way over mountain ranges with the windows rattling and the goats complaining, and Angelo imagined himself with a straw sombrero and a machete, coming up to Charles at his Laguna Beach office and shouting, in a thick Spanish accent, You touch my wife and I keel you! I keel you!

  Angelo fell asleep thinking of his daughter and her mother. He awoke when the bus came to a stop. They were on the shoulder of a dark highway. He wondered if they were waiting to take on passengers, or if an accident or obstruction blocked their passage. The driver got up and spread a bedroll down the aisle between the seats, then lay on it. He heard some passengers sigh with a little exasperation in their throats. The driver started snoring. People got out to relieve themselves in the bushes, Paul among them. He never re-boarded.

  The bus started up an hour later. Angelo was calling in the darkness near the highway for his brother. For Christ’s sake, Paulie, don’t do this! Paulie! The bus took off.

  Some time later they were sitting in the dim light just before dawn, beside a road which stretched across miles of mountainous forest. Paul looked at Angelo and said, You know what you are? You’re a doubting Thomas.

  Really? Angelo tried to hide the anger in his voice. Imagine that. Doubt.

  Don’t take offense. Your skepticism and wit serve you really well, for the most part. But you won’t believe until God shows his face to you, will you?

  Well. Angelo rubbed his eyes. The light was softly giving the trees their colors. How does, or how will, God show his face to me?

  Somebody we both knew, somebody who changed our lives, was filled with God’s grace, and you can’t accept that. But we are going to see him again.

  I’ll admit that he was charismatic and kind of, I don’t know. He yawned. Kind of radiant. Is that good enough? But you don’t know if this guy Verbizcaro is him or not, do you?

  Paul stared at him for a while. Angelo could see the flecks of green in his brother’s brown eyes. Paul smiled. He looked younger, almost as he had as a high school baseball star. You don’t understand the spirit of Jesus.

  Our Jesús, the kid I cleaned toilets with, was the actual guy from Nazareth, you’re saying?

  No. That’s not what I’m saying.

  And when that drunk guy shot him, he died for our sins, but you think he’s really alive? The sky was turning from purple and black to a soft whitish-blue. An expensive-looking car approached, and Angelo tried to flag it down. Stop, you sons of bitches!

  I think there’s no such thing as death. Not really. There’s really only love, and life.

  And there’s only about one car an hour on this fucking road, Paulie.

  Paul. The rich people won’t stop, but some poor man will come along, soon.

  Not fifteen minutes later a beat-up pickup truck clanked up to them. Angelo and Paul climbed in back with a large pig. To the Ritz-Carlton, Jeeves, Angelo said to the pig. The truck bounced through the mountains to a village, where they spent much of the day arranging for further transportation, Paul doing the talking. Angelo guessed that all those years in the Southwest had at least given Paulie some grasp of a second language.

  The next morning, somewhere on the Gulf coast, they stopped and had huevos rancheros. The bus would be delayed, a man at the counter said. Maybe two hours. Maybe more. Angelo would be at least one day, possibly two, late in meeting his daughter and wife, or estranged wife. He would try to leave a message at their hotel. They walked on the beach of this Gulf city, Coatzalcoalcos, which smelled of petroleum, and came back. Now the guy at the station said the bus would be ready that night or the next morning. Who knows? Quien sabe?

  Angelo followed his brother, who seemed to need to keep moving, all around the town. He repeated the bus clerk’s phrase over and over, quien sabe, quien sabe, trying to get that world-wea
ry inflection perfectly. Sometimes Paul said he was listening to God speak to him and asked Angelo to be quiet. Ay, dios, Angelo said. Quien sabe?

  They went to a five-year-old, dubbed George Clooney movie, and an explosion shook the seats in the middle of the film, and the theater went totally dark. They groped their way outside and saw that the entire city was blacked out. Paul laughed. When the lights came back on, the people walking the promenade near the beach cheered and clapped.

  A bus came into town. Angelo and Paul happened to see it from the promenade. They ran for it and boarded just in time. It rolled along a fairly level terrain, and the sweet smells of the tropics washed across them from the loose windows. Angelo fell asleep, thinking of the perfume of trees and women, thinking of his daughter’s hair after her evening bath. When he awoke his brother was standing outside, near his window, speaking to a man. Angelo wasn’t sure if he was awake or still dreaming because the view of Paul through the smudged window seemed unreal at first. Paul looked as he had when he was a little boy. He and the man squatted and drew circles and lines in the dirt. The man’s hair was black and shiny as a beetle. He and Paul stood and embraced.

  This place is holy land, Paul told him. He listed some of the reasons: the Mayan pyramids, the sacrificial cenotes, the ancient ruins covered by jungle vines, the old Franciscan churches. We’re very close, now, he said. Very close!

  They ate bananas and avocados in the jungle city of Valladolid. Paul arranged for the bus to the shrine of the weeping palms, and Angelo paid, as always. He caught a reflection of himself in a shop window and was shocked to see this haggard, whiskered person staring back. It took hours to reach the shrine, and it looked to be a commercial success with its billboards and souvenir stands. Decals of the Virgin of Guadalupe, hand-carved crosses with bleeding Christs, and garish paintings and postcards of the weeping coconut palm spread before them on blankets where smooth-faced people hawked them. The palm itself was surrounded by tourists, most of them Mexicans, snapping pictures. It looked no different from any of the other trees, in Angelo’s estimation, except that it leaned lower, as if a recent hurricane had almost uprooted it. He paid for their audience with the healer, and they stood in line.