Rain God

by Arturo Islas

  Now, after every visit to the mansion, Yerma came home to find JoEl sitting on the piano bench, waiting impatiently to learn what his sister had been taught by the mysterious lady who lived on the hill.

  In the bar, Felix saw them sitting together on the bench, his oldest and youngest children, arguing and disagreeing about a phrase, humming the melodies out loud in key, and then playing them to each other on that sad old piano. He would borrow the money somehow to get it tuned for them. Food was not enough for his children. They needed music.

  The beer, the ballads, and JoEl’s eyes floating through the air began to act as a balm for the irritations of the day. He wished JoEl were outside waiting for him so that they might drive out to Tia Cuca’s together. Felix could not believe that JoEl was irrevocably lost to him. Yet he knew it was so by the way Angie had looked at him several weeks before and said, “That’s enough. Let him go.” How could he? To what? Who would protect him from his nightmares and his melancholy? Felix peered into the darkness of the bar for the first time in an effort to locate the young man who had entered earlier. He saw only a string of small Christmas lights, sad remnants which acted as permanent illumination for the far side of the room. He returned to his beer.

  * * *

  The lights on the tree, which was scraggly and already dried out after only three days, pleased JoEl. Yerma and Lena had stopped bickering long enough to complete the decorating with angel’s hair. It gave the lights a strange brightness that made JoEl think of heaven. He knew little about religion yet, but they had told him of heaven where he would go if he were good, and of a devil who would throw him in the fire if he were bad. He sat on the sofa in a trance while the girls finished their fussing over the tree and stood back to admire their work. Too big for them to pick up and hug and too small to help, he was content to sit and enjoy the colored lights made fuzzy by the synthetic cobwebs.

  From the kitchen, the aroma of their mother’s cooking reached them. She had worked a long time on the batter for the tamales, whipping it smooth and creamy so that its redolent corn smell made them want to eat it before it was cooked. “You’re going to get sick,” Angie always warned them, but sneaking tastes from the batter was worth the stomachache, even if it would cause your ombligo to burst. Your ombligo was where you were born, and to JoEl it was the most sacred part of the body. Often, when he was frightened or very happy, he would twist his finger in its hollow until he made small suction noises. He loved his ombligo.

  They ate the tamales before midnight mass, which he was not yet allowed to attend. Yerma opened his and cut it for him so that he tasted the meat and red chile inside even before he put them in his mouth. He was the official family taster.

  “Is it good, JoEl?” Angie stood over him and watched as he ate the first bites. His silence and the look on his face reassured her of her accomplishment. Everyone else commented on the lightness of the dough and the especially good flavor of the chile that year, or the tenderness of the meat Angie had saved every cent to purchase from the best butcher in town. Felix put his arms around her waist as she stood by him with more tamales and told her what a splendid cook she was. The children loved it when their parents touched each other in front of them. Angie, of course, was able to find fault with her cooking. “Next year, they’ll be better. You’ll see,” she said, trusting that the yellow-white corn husks which were more and more difficult to find would be available the following year. She could not imagine tamales without them.

  In the morning, after the gifts were opened, Felix prepared capirotada. It was his annual rite in the kitchen where for the rest of the year Angie reigned. JoEl was the only member of the family permitted to watch his father prepare the rich bread pudding, and sensing the privilege from the beginning, he kept still as Felix chose the best slices of dried bread and cut them into perfect cubes.

  They closely monitored the milk scalding on the stove, for if it overheated it would have to be thrown out and fresh milk brought in from the market. The brown sugar, the freshly grated nutmeg, the cinnamon lay waiting in small, carefully measured piles. They and the sherry beside them sent out fragrances that made JoEl drunk with pleasure. Sometimes their strength, particularly that of the nutmeg, made his head ache, a fact he did not mention to his father who would have ignored him. Felix went into a trance when he cooked. He shelled and chopped each pecan with precision, selected every raisin for its apparent succulence, and mercilessly discarded all of the imperfect. Looking upon their flaws with disgust, he wondered aloud what the world was coming to. “I don’t know what those cabrones think. I’m no fool.”

  Who the cabrones were did not seem to matter and JoEl did not ask why they ruined the raisins. Evidently they were with the devil. “Pobres cabrones,” he said with sympathy, and his father laughed long and loudly every time he remembered the story or told it to Christmas day visitors. Profanity from the mouth of a child never failed to assure him that innocence, if not perfect raisins, still existed in the world.

  “Pobres cabrones,” Felix said into his empty beer glass.

  “What did you say?” The young soldier, fair with light-colored eyes, stood next to him while ordering another beer.

  “Cabrones?” It’s just an expression we Mexicans have. In English, you’d say something like ‘poor bastards.’”

  The boy did not respond. Instead, he ordered his beer with the cockiness of someone underage, almost daring the bartender not to serve him. Felix took to him immediately and offered to pay for it. The boy looked at him without smiling and thanked him in a sweet southern drawl.

  “You’re welcome,” Felix said. “Where you from?”

  “Tennessee.”

  The boy’s voice and his guarded, tentative answers excited Felix. He enjoyed making these shy types respond to his warmth. Even when they reacted in a surly or defensive manner, he did not give up the chase. They were his greatest challenge. Usually these encounters ended when he made them smile, talk, and even laugh openly at his bad jokes, their fear gone, their suspicions laid to rest. Once he had assured them that he was not interested in them for any perverse reason, they fell into his charming trap. Later, when he did make sexual allusions or even put his hand on their thighs while driving them to the base, they either responded according to their needs and desires or in embarrassed abrupt ways. Felix did not force them to do anything they did not want to do.

  Most of all, he loved their youth and lack of guile. Even the most experienced among them had a certain purity that gravity, not worldliness, pulled down with the passing of time. They were in their prime, and when he was in their company and they permitted him to touch them, he tasted his own youth once again.

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-one.” The boy was lying. Felix knew he could be no more than eighteen.

  “What’s your name?”

  The boy told him and Felix observed that he had the mouth of a young girl. He had long since stopped wondering why his pursuit of the past led him to young men instead of women. He was secure in the love of his children, even when they quarreled with him, and he knew that Angie loved him. He was not looking for any of them in this boy’s mouth. He was looking for something else.

  “Can I give you a ride to the base?”

  “Sure. Thank you very much,” the boy replied with southern courtesy.

  “It’s just about sunset. Maybe we’ll stop at the canyon on the way. It’s nice there this time of day.” The boy did not reply, and as Felix opened the door for them to walk out into the crisp winter light, he could smell the bright polish of the young soldier’s boots.

  It was one of his favorite times of year, the air clean and stinging his nose as they walked to the car. He had forgotten to phone his brother Miguel and ask for the money, but he would drop by tomorrow and talk to Juanita before Miguel got home. He usually visited his sister-in-law every Friday after work. They were fond of each other and he loved to make her laugh until tears came out of her small brown eyes.

>   Felix drove along the mountain so that he would not waste any time if the boy agreed to accompany him into the canyon. The eastern sunset was fine now, but the color would be gone by the time they got to his special place. Soon the March sandstorms would begin and the road would be closed. He detested those storms because they made him feel buried alive, and JoEl had learned not to tease him about his fear of them or the handkerchief he tied around his nose and mouth so that he would not smell the dust. He hated its bitter taste.

  In the twilight there was no wind at all, and he was glad the young soldier did not smoke. They usually did. The sky was a bleached-out blue and the granite on that side of the mountain was a beige that made it difficult to distinguish planes and depths. A brilliant red-orange light outlined the edge of the mountain from the sun still setting on the other side. Off in the distance, toward the east, he saw the darkness coming at them.

  “Ah don’t think ah want to go into the canyon,” the boy said.

  “Oh, come on, only for a few minutes. It’s real nice in there.”

  Felix took the boy’s silence as an indication of consent and he began the slow drive up the canyon road. He maneuvered the car expertly, familiar with every turn and obstacle. They reached his secret place just as a soft quarter moon rose in the eastern horizon.

  “Nice moon, isn’t it?” Felix said and put his hand on the boy’s knee. The boy sat rigidly on his side staring at the windshield and not the landscape. Felix sensed his preoccupation with the hand as it stroked his thigh.

  “Don’t do that,” the boy said in a quiet, even tone.

  “Don’t be scared. I’m not going to hurt you. Let’s have some . . .” The blows began before he finished. They were a complete surprise to him, and the anger behind them stunned and paralyzed him. He began to laugh as he warded off the attack, then stopped when the moon took on a strange shape and color.

  “Hey, come on. I was just kidding.” He was vaguely aware that he spoke through a mouthful of stones. It did not occur to him to struggle or to fight back. He forced his door open and fell to the ground, kicked sharply in the kidneys from behind. The stones in his mouth looked like teeth as he spat them out, and he turned to avoid the blows to his back. The boy stood over him. The kicking continued and he felt great pain in his groin and near his heart. Then his mouth was full of the desert and then it was not. He could no longer see the boy. The pain in his loins and along his side seemed distant, blotted out by a queer painful sensation in his left ear. He tasted the dust.

  —Angie, where is my handkerchief? I hate this smell.

  The biting ache in his ear began to recede and it seemed odd to be falling from a great height while lying on the desert floor. The sound of walking on stones puzzled him because he was surrounded by water. Its reflection and the luster of the boots flashed before him in an irregular, rhythmic motion. The beautiful youth was gone. Felix had time to be afraid before he heard his heart stop.

  The desert exhaled as he sank into the water.

  Ants

  Tia Cuca was lighter-skinned than her sister Chona. Nevertheless, like Mama Chona, she was unmistakably Mexican with enough Indian blood to give her those aristocratic cheekbones the two sisters liked the younger generation to believe were those of highborn Spanish ladies who just happened to find themselves in the provinces of Mexico. Their Spanish was a cultivated imitation of the Castilian Spanish they believed reigned supreme over all dialects, and they despaired that anyone in Miguel Chico’s generation, because they were attending “American” schools, would ever master it. They were right.

  Mama Chona and Tia Cuca were taught by nuns in Mexico before the 1910 revolution. If they did not approve of the language in which Miguel Chico and JoEl were learning to read and write, they did approve of the discipline under which they were instructed. “Listen to your teachers at school,” Mama Chona told them in Spanish, “and learn to speak English the way they do. I speak it with an accent, so you must not imitate me. I will teach you how to speak Spanish properly for the family occasions.”

  Tia Cuca was more romantic about language. “Italian is the language of music,” she said to the children in her lovely contralto voice. “French is the language of manners, English is the language of business, and Spanish—don’t forget, children—is the language of love and romance.” The only poetry she thought worth reading was that written in Spanish, “because it sings!”

  Because of them Miguel Chico and his cousins learned to communicate in both languages fluently, a privilege denied the next generation, who began learning to read and write after Tia Cuca was dead and Mama Chona nearly senile. That generation understood Spanish but spoke it in ways that would have scandalized Mama Chona and her sister. “A truly educated person,” Mama Chona told them, “speaks more than one language fluently.”

  The snobbery Mama Chona and Tia Cuca displayed in every way possible against the Indian and in favor of the Spanish in the Angels’ blood was a constant puzzlement to most of the grandchildren. In subtle, persistent ways, family members were taught that only the Spanish side of their heritage was worth honoring and preserving; the Indian in them was pagan, servile, instinctive rather than intellectual, and was to be suppressed, its existence denied. Aunt Eduviges, Aunt Jesus Maria, and even Miguel Grande had learned this lesson well, taking to heart their mother’s prejudices; Felix and Mema would have no part of it.

  Miguel Chico’s father practiced this kind of bigotry when he referred to the Mexican women who helped Juanita with the housework as “wetbacks.” One of those “wetbacks” helped take care of Mama Chona in her last years with the devotion and humor of those saints who dedicate themselves to poverty.

  “Is the Indian here yet?” Mama Chona would ask from the heights of her sickbed, even after she had forgotten most of her own children’s names. “Tell her to do the dishes.” The “Indian”—the last in a long line of distinguished women from across the border to be closely associated with the family—would say without sarcasm and with a wink at the children, “I’ve been here for several months, Señora Angel, and the dishes are already dry. Can I get you anything?” Having forgotten her question, Mama Chona would comment grouchily on the terrible accent of the illiterate masses.

  Had she been alive in that period of Mama Chona’s long act of dying, Tia Cuca would have joined her in criticizing the accent. She would not, however, have commented on any of the Indians’ personal lives, no matter how often her sister asked her opinion of this or that girl who happened to be cleaning the house that year. Tia Cuca judged no one in matters of the heart.

  Tia Cuca and Felix loved each other and were drawn together with the instinct of great sexual sinners. Like fat, contented cats, they enjoyed sharing a meal alone or in Mama Chona’s company. Their frequent, unprovoked laughter would cause Mama Chona to ask, “What are you two up to now?” Since they were “up to” nothing, Tia Cuca, unable to resist teasing her puritanical sister, would answer, “You wouldn’t understand, Chona; you’ve never understood anything about love.” She meant “lust” and Chona knew it. Her defense was to ignore Cuca’s comments except to indicate with a slight twitch of her nostrils that she had just caught the traces of a bad smell in the air. Tia Cuca and Felix laughed all the more.

  Because his father was her favorite and because he was the youngest grandchild, JoEl spent more time in his childhood with Tia Cuca than did any of his older cousins or siblings, who had already served their periods of paying her their respects. He was frequently at Mama Chona’s and thus it often fell to him to accompany her on the long bus ride to the house in the desert where Tia Cuca lived with a man named Davis. JoEl did not like these weekly visits, which were tediously the same, and he felt nothing for the old lady—an antipathy reinforced by his father’s devotion to her.

  JoEl and Mama Chona took the bus at ten in the morning when the weather was good, stayed for lunch, and returned by three to take their naps. For these visits, Mama Chona wore her formal black dress, put on blac
k gloves, and carried her black umbrella. Puzzled, JoEl asked why she needed the umbrella, since rain fell only six or seven times a year in torrents that lasted but a few minutes. “I don’t want the sun to burn my skin,” she said. “It’s dark enough already.” JoEl looked closely at her very dark, leathery skin but asked no more questions. It was all a mystery, like her wearing even on the hottest days the black woolen dress that reached almost to the ground.

  The mystery was enhanced by the atmosphere of sin that surrounded Tia Cuca’s relationship with Mr. Davis. The old man, very white, tall, and skinny, reminded JoEl of a plucked pigeon, though he had a nice voice and a kind manner. Tia Cuca and Mr. Davis had lived together for as long as any of them, even his oldest cousins, could remember, and they remained together until they both died several weeks apart some time after JoEl’s father was killed. Everyone knew they were lovers, but because Tia Cuca’s explanations were deliberately evasive, no one knew if they had ever married. She always called him “Meester Davis,” and he called her “Dolly.”

  Only JoEl’s grandmother, his father, and his aunts Mema and Juanita visited Tia Cuca. Eduviges and Jesus Maria used their lack of transportation as an excuse for not going—they prayed for her daily and thus fulfilled their duty in a more spiritual way, they said—and Miguel Grande always spoke of her with contempt. Tia Cuca did not seem to care what anyone thought about her “arrangement” with Mr. Davis, and JoEl eventually came to feel a measure of respect for her. When she died she left modest sums—hardly more than six thousand dollars in all—to those members of the family who had always visited her. JoEl and Yerma each got five hundred dollars, which they understood was in memory of their father, though they were told it was to help pay for their music lessons.