The Madonnas of Echo Park

by Brando Skyhorse

  Cleaning lady? A hell of a term. There’s nothing ladylike about it. To be a good cleaning lady, you must learn to act like a man.

  On my last cleaning day, I arrived to find a note from Mrs. Calhoun on the dining room table. I couldn’t read it because blinds had been installed on the sliding glass doors and the house was coated in blackness. Opening the blinds for sunlight, I squinted to read the faint handwriting.

  “Take the day off,” it said. “You deserve it.”

  On the opposite side, “For Felicia,” and a list of her personal items, including the corduroy couch. Confused, I wanted to ask Mrs. Calhoun to explain, but the house was quiet, save for what sounded like rain pelting the sliding glass doors, drop drop drop. Through the blinds, I saw the jacaranda tree raining crisp, dazzling violet blossoms from its branches atop a floating body in a lavender bathrobe, its legs together, its arms outstretched as if reaching for something.

  I plunged into the cold water, wading through the thick swamp of jacaranda until I reached Mrs. Calhoun’s feet. The flowers pounded our bodies, drop drop drop, with a sudden violence that blanketed us. Mrs. Calhoun’s bathrobe was heavy and her body rigid. My head bobbed for air as I struggled to stay afloat; I was drowning. All around me was the loud roar of water, a sound that still wakes me up in the middle of the night, screaming. I could not carry us both back to the rim of the pool. When I surrendered her body, it floated out to the center of the pool and slid under the thick carpet of fallen flowers.

  Beneath a raining jacaranda tree, the blossoms shuddered and fell.

  3

  Our Lady of the Lost Angels

  Isn’t a miracle something we see every day but ignore? Then I, too, am a miracle, but I want to be seen, and be heard. The telling is the most dangerous part of my story. And though we’ve just met, I can tell you have time to listen. I can tell we are going to be friends.

  Evil is everywhere. The Devil is looking for lost angels; on the streets you wander, in your neighbors’ hearts, which you peek into when gossip chirps in your ears, even under the bed you lie on. Do you know about the Devil’s Toe? If you feet dangle over the bottom edge of the mattress, the Devil reaches up from Hell, touches your big toe, and controls what direction you walk in when you wake, steering you into bad luck, pain, misery, and death. I was nine when I overheard my mother scold my father Ruben’s younger brother, Archie, for falling asleep in a bed too small for his body.

  God sees where the Devil leads you, she said, and nodded at the room where my two sisters and I slept.

  Mother could pretend unpleasant events weren’t happening, but she would store away memories of them from which some future argument could be heated up and served without any advance notice necessary—call them emotional leftovers. Archie laughed and told her as long as we lived in his house she had better things to do than to worry over his soul. Had Ruben heard this, he’d have beaten Archie’s soul right out of him.

  Archie was a sniveling cur, but Ruben strutted like a man who crosses the street against the light, a defiant sneer in his canter, daring a car to strike him. You feared more for the chrome on those wide bumpers than for his legs. In the Zoot Suit Riots of ’43, he tackled five sailors armed with baseball bats who were beating a poor spade they’d stripped of his drapes. Ruben fought them off as if that colored man was one of his own. My father believed in fairness for everyone. Well, except for women; he left my mother for a whore fresh off the coyotes’ teats, a fifteen-year-old girl from Nayarit named Blanca. She bore him a bastard son, Jesús, who trains pit bulls for dogfighting in a brush-strewn lot somewhere around here. En el Viejo Echo Park, he could live across the street or cross my daily path and I’d never know who he was.

  With Ruben gone, Archie’s Devil’s Toe stumbled him into my sisters’ tiny beds, his thick, jaundice-yellow toenails, curved like horseshoes, poking out from under the delicate handmade quilts our abuelita made when Mother was pregnant. She listened to my mother’s belly in a twilit den to see whether a boy or girl was coming, then sewed a quilt she felt best suited what that baby’s personality would be. My eldest sister, Aracely, had roses dipped in a pool of fire on hers, Patricia a pink ribbon swirled in a bow around a cloud. Mine was a pale black wolf howling at a turquoise sunset, made for the son who didn’t come. I cringed under that bedspread at night, chewing the top of it until it was damp, terrified the Devil that possessed my uncle’s toes, along with every body part below his waist, would steer him into my bed next. My grandmother would come to the side of my bed wearing her favorite turquoise handmade puebla dress embroidered with pink lotus flowers and try to rub away the chilled goose bumps on my arms.

  “Who haunted you, nieta?” she’d say.

  “Abuelita, why didn’t you make me a new manta when you saw I was a girl?”

  “Thirty-seven years I’ve been listening to women’s bellies. Thirty-seven years I’ve never been wrong. I thought you were a boy but you came out a girl. That means you have the soul of a man somewhere inside you. You’re a fighter, you’re my baby lobo,” she’d say. “You’re strong, fuerte, a wolf.”

  “I don’t want to be a wolf,” I’d pout.

  “The wolf is the strongest of all animals. Nobody can hurt him except himself. Do you know what happens when a wolf gets caught in a fence?”

  “No,” I’d lie. Her wrinkles would crease into smiles, and I would hear her tell my favorite story once more.

  “If he goes under, he loses his back paws and will have to drag himself everywhere he goes, lame and of no use to anyone. If he goes back, he loses his front paws and his courage to try to return. If he doesn’t move, he will die from thirst and starvation. There is no easy way forward, no easy way back, and no easy way to sit still.”

  “What does he do, Abuelita?”

  “Why, he stands up. He stands up and walks around the fence.”

  “Wolves can’t stand up!”

  “Si no lo crees, m’hija,” she’d say, “no lo puedes hacer.” If you don’t believe it, you can’t do it.

  Then my night with Archie came. This would be a fight between good and evil, between God’s ears and the Devil’s Toes. My sisters had fought with tears and cries out to God to stop. Did they not stand up tall enough for God to hear them? Perhaps a woman asking God for help needed a stronger voice. But how could I stand up lying on my back?

  If I learned anything from my grandma’s story, it was that pain brings clarity. I closed my eyes, loosened my grip across the top of my blanket, and let him slide into bed next to me, his toenails scratching the tops of my feet as my uncle’s hardness crept up my thighs and brushed against the mousetrap I’d set under my legs.

  His castrato shrieking was fit for the choir at St. Vibiana’s Cathedral. His Devil’s Toes hopped him out the front door and into the street. This was the confirmation I needed that God hears the screams of a man better than those of a woman. From that day, God kept my uncle out of our beds, but he also stripped us of a place to live. Archie threw us out of the house. My mother and sisters blamed me, and I was sent to a convent, where I tried to fend off the monjas’ beatings and bed hoppings with my prayers and my fists. Prayers were weaker than mousetraps; my fists got God’s attention.

  Since then, I have come to understand that God is the fear that motivates you to protect yourself from evil. God cannot be everywhere at once, and it is up to each of us to use our own faith in Him to protect ourselves. My husband, Gabriel Esperanza, taught me this. His father was one of the few Californios to hold on to his land when the gringos came. They drew a line in the desert and said, Your property belongs to us now. When writs and warrants didn’t scare him, a mob of drunken gringos came with a hangman’s noose to “reposses” his land. Gabriel’s father, an educated man of prominent civic standing, repelled them armed with nothing more than a Bible and a shotgun. When his father died, Gabriel kept up the vigil, leaving enough of a parcel for his own estate, then selling much of the land to the city at a handsome profit. That land becam
e Angelino Heights, the first suburb in the City of the Angels. Can you imagine that? A Mexican created our first suburbia, a place built on the fundamental notion of keeping people you think aren’t as good as you believe yourself to be—out.

  Gabriel was rugged and dashing, and I considered myself fortunate that a sixteen-year-old would be married off by the convent to their fifty-six-year-old benefactor. God and a fistful of spiny, pink cactus needles sewed into a throw pillow kept him out of my bed until I turned eighteen, but Gabriel was a decent man, or as decent as a man who bought a girl from a convent could be, and while I never bore him a son (there was one daughter, Felicia, whom I sent away when she was four because Gabriel had no interest in raising a daughter, and I had no interest in being a single parent), he was content to live a life apart from me, listening to his Lucha Reyes records on a separate floor while I lived a life on my own floor of his turn-of-the-century Victorian mansion in Angelino Heights. It was a house he’d bought from a silent film mogul who was shot by a jealous mistress. The bullet didn’t kill the mogul, but her thirty-seven stab wounds to his abdomen with a poisoned stiletto letter opener did, an excess that befitted the style in which he’d decorated the mansion’s seventeen rooms—burgundy velvet wallpaper, gold candelabras, and an actual waterfall built into the stairwell’s balustrade.

  When Gabriel died, my faith would no longer endorse his often profligate spending: the Mexican maids he hired to “service” him when I wasn’t in the mood to be ridden like a cow and his extravagant donations to the convent. A pair of white nuns came out in a fancy automobile and, in my house, had the audacity to say that, without Gabriel’s contributions, they couldn’t afford to keep the convent open.

  “Sell your car and give the money to the poor,” I said. Luke 12:33. The church is too rich anyway.

  Then my sisters, Aracely and Patricia, begged to move into my house. There was more than enough room for us, they said, including my mother, who with age had grown slow, senile, and nearing death’s hands, desperate for reconciliation.

  Where’s Abuelita? I asked. Where was my real mother?

  She drowned herself in Echo Park Lake, my mother said, because Archie wouldn’t let us back into his house. That’s where I will die if you don’t give me a roof to put over my head.

  I told her: “And above all things have fervent charity among yourselves, for charity shall cover the multitude of sins”—1 Peter 4:8. Find the paths that don’t cross mine, I said. That was my charity to them.

  Thanks to me they found their way. Within a year, my mother was living a happy life with my daughter, Felicia, in a tin shack in Chavez Ravine; my sisters had left America and moved south, to a small Mexican village in Guadalajara, where they belonged; and the convent had been converted to a high school, St. Gottschalk’s. I believed this was a better use for the community, but a foulmouthed miscreant—their running coach—now blasphemes the Lord’s name by teaching his charges profane chants, which they bellow on their morning jogs throughout the neighborhood. Thank God I still have the strength to walk to the curb every morning with a garden hose and a hose end insecticide sprayer filled with holy water.

  Do you now see how much of my industriousness has been devoted to Him? “Let your good deeds shine out for all to see, so that everyone will praise your heavenly Father”—Matthew 5:16. I am a pious woman and have lived a righteous life, never once strayed in my path of conviction.

  This is why God sent the Virgin Mary to me.

  Ah, you see now why telling you this story is dangerous! You’ve heard what happens to those who claim they’ve seen Our Lady. They are ridiculed and ostracized by disbelievers, hounded and persecuted by believers yearning to be healed, either in body or in spirit. But Mary didn’t “appear” out of thin air; she had to earn my belief, as you have had to earn my confidence to hear this story.

  There was an old Italian woman—a beggar—with a fake black wig, a cane, and ankles as sturdy as a nursemaid’s who used to hobble across a hectic intersection in Echo Park every morning without crossing at the light. I made the mistake one time of helping her. Then, whenever she saw me, she’d motion me to help her across without so much as asking. Do once, and be prepared to do again and again, I say. Why should I help an old woman take a shortcut? Who has ever helped me across the street? The day I need help to cross the street is the day I learn how to find what I need on this side of the street.

  When I saw her flailing that cane in the air, I walked to the bus shelter on Sunset Boulevard in front of Pilgrim’s Supermarket (it’s now some kind of convenience store that isn’t convenient if you are poor or an old woman like me). There in the doorway of a block-long ninety-nine-cent store stood a shiny-faced teenage girl in ankle-length blue slacks and a matching blue coat spotted with a constellation of translucent stars, flat nurse’s shoes, a red scarf wrapped around her head in the shape of a circlet to protect her fair skin from the sun, and a white lamb’s-wool sweater with a fraying ring of delicate gold thread across her chest. There was nothing remarkable about her clothes—you’d find them at las tiendas descuentas up and down the block—but a young woman wearing such an old lady’s outfit? Even back then, most of the girls went to church like putas in miniskirts and thongs, with their faces made up like payasos. It’s worse today with that chisme coming out of their telefonitos! Who could be more important to talk to in a church than God? Tus novios? Tus amigas? Tus chulos? Disgraceful.

  Her clothes seemed to float atop her body. Plus it was a Tuesday— nobody’s idea of a holy day. When I turned to look, she was walking alongside me, a beatific smile on her face, one that for a moment made me forget my wariness of strangers, the only people I mistrust more than my relatives.

  “Ay, m’hija, my feet are so tired today,” she said.

  There was no one else on the street. My shoulders tensed, and I began to think of what I could say to scare her away should she prove to be crazy or, worse, a panhandler.

  “How have you been, m’hija? Did you hear about my son?” she asked. “Arrested him in the thick of night. Turned in by one of his best friends, ay. What am I going to do?”

  “I don’t have any money,” I said. “Leave me alone.”

  “Don’t be afraid, m’hija,” she said. “There’s nothing I want from you, Beatriz. What you have in abundance I want none of.”

  How did she know my name? Or that I was afraid?

  “Go away,” I said and quickened my pace. The woman kept up stride by stride without visibly moving her legs. She drifted alongside me as if carried on a breeze. There was a bus picking up passengers at the shelter, and I started to run; it wasn’t my intention to board it—I had nowhere outside Echo Park to go—but I needed the security of a crowd.

  “Beatriz, please.” She laughed. “Why are you running to be alone?”

  The bus pulled away before I could reach it. I sat down on the bench in the shelter to catch my breath. The woman hovered next to a garbage can, her ashen glow visible in the shelter’s advertisement glass display. “If you stay on this path you’re on, you’ll get to where you are going whether you run or walk.”

  “How dare you speak to an elder this way!” I shouted. “Leave me alone!”

  “Ay, don’t be so rude!” she said. “You are not talking to your daughter!”

  Not another soul living today knew about Felicia. “I don’t have a daughter,” I lied. “And I don’t know who you are. I’ve never seen you before,” I said, defiant. Her eyes were two pinhead flames of rose quartz, and I was unable to move, transfixed out of either anger or fear.

  “You know me and have seen me, m’hija. I am the mother of all children, and of my son Christ, our Lord,” she said.

  “Your Son, Jesús?” I scoffed. “This is silly. Everything you say is false. Get away from me and beg from someone else.” I turned my back on her, hoping she’d understand how degrading her behavior was for both of us, two women strangers arguing in public.

  “You will be tougher than I thou
ght.” She wafted down on the bench next to me like a fog moving onshore. The street noise, its traffic and people, disappeared. A strange feeling of warmth poured over my skin. Imagine the weight of your many years that you carry on your shoulders disappearing in one single, immense, breathtaking moment. Your humiliation dissolved, your hurts healed, your grievances redressed, your bitterness crystallized into acceptance; everything that has been done wrong to you has now been done right, as if an enormous switch deep inside your soul has been flipped, reversing the flow of years of anger and hatred and animosity and grief, turning it into love and compassion. You never want to say another word in anger again. You have no memory of your mother beating you with a hairbrush, no guilt over watching your sisters being molested by your uncle behind a fetid apple tree and doing nothing, saying nothing. The desperation and hopelessness that you tried to rid yourself of but couldn’t, because it left you exposed, floats away, leaving behind a body and a soul that feel transparent and blemish-free, like newborn skin.

  She rose from the bench, and the weight of my hurt came crashing back onto my shoulders. The street roared back to life with cars, noise, and people. I strained my eyes to look at her bright face. “I will return when you are ready to hear what I have to say,” she said.

  “You didn’t say anything. Wait,” I said. She floated behind the bus shelter and disappeared. On the bench was a trail of rose petals that led to the garbage can, where a rosebush—not a bouquet but an entire bush—was blooming.