by Unknown
Tíve reached into the breast pocket of his flannel shirt and handed Amadeo a folded piece of notebook paper. “Learn it good,” he said. “And don’t go talking about it to no one. These are secrets.”
Amadeo squinted at the unsteady block letters that had been copied out with a blunt pencil. It looked like a poem with many stanzas, and Amadeo had a flash of his fifth-grade language arts textbook, and a long rhyming poem about a butterfly that he’d liked to read to himself after school, whispering the words in his room, enjoying the rhythm, the inevitability of the sounds. Sky, eye, why. Stupid as fuck.
Midway down the page was a grease smudge, and Amadeo pictured his great-uncle frowning over the paper under the dim kitchen light, the cold remains of a sad, solitary dinner of scrambled eggs beside him.
“Hey, wait. This is in Spanish,” Amadeo said.
“Oh, hell,” Tíve muttered. He began unwrapping his burger, as if giving up.
Even Yolanda doesn’t speak Spanish well, though she, at least, can follow along with the telenovelas she watches weekday nights on her bedroom television. “I could do a much better job with English,” Amadeo offered, then, at his uncle’s incredulity, corrected himself. “I mean, I’m kidding. I can definitely learn it. I did Spanish in high school.”
The first part of the ritual was a call-and-response.
Novicio: Dios toca en esta misión, las puertas de cu clemencia. God knocks at this mission, on the gates of his mercy.
Hermanos: Penitencia, penitencia, si quieres tu salvación. Penance, penance, if you want salvation.
“Go on. Practice,” said Tíve, and Amadeo, suddenly shy, spoke his lines. He was surprised when, in reply, his great-uncle began to sing, his voice gravelly and beautiful. At the table next to them, the little boy paused in his chewing, his cheeks full, and watched.
To enter this morada, place the right foot, praising the most sweet names of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.
Once he crossed the threshold, Amadeo was to kneel before the old men who were to be his brothers, and ask for forgiveness.
“Then you cut me?”
“You take the oath first.”
“And then?”
Tíve gave an almost imperceptible nod.
“Deep?” Amadeo whispered, keeping his voice steady.
His great-uncle shrugged. “Not too deep. Go on, do your lines.”
Pardon me, my brothers, if in anything I have offended you or given scandal.
And Tíve sang in reply. May God pardon you who are already pardoned by me.
Amadeo’s eyes filled, an abrupt sadness caught in his throat. He looked away, embarrassed.
Tío Tíve cleared his own throat. “Be ready.”
There were practical reasons for the sellos—the three vertical cuts that were going to be made in his back—when he began whipping himself, the blood would flow from the wounds, so the skin wouldn’t swell or bruise.
At first Amadeo had enjoyed the prospect of kneeling before the sangrador who would mark him. On the morning of Ash Wednesday, though, his courage began to fail. All day, he thought of the sellos, and his knees weakened.
He shaved for the entrada (though he didn’t shower again, because he wanted to preserve the smudge of ash on his forehead, proof to his great-uncle that he’d gone to Mass), put on a new plaid shirt still stiff from the package, dress shoes, splashed cologne on his neck. Even so, he could smell the unpleasant tang of his sweat.
In the end, just before presenting himself at the morada door, Amadeo had buckled to his fear: though he’d fasted all day, he dug a bottle of vodka out of his sweater drawer, broke the seal on it, and took deep gulps.
The entrada, then, was a blur of impressions. The hermanos’ song, cresting and falling like waves. The secret oath, binding him for life. And the pedernal: obsidian with a knife-sharp edge, a dangerous crescent moon. Al Martinez’s big hand warm and steady on his shoulder, the man’s low assurance. “They’ll be shallow, son. Deep breath.” Amadeo’s heart like a steady, too-loud drumbeat, his sides slick with cold sweat. And, as the blade slid into the skin of his back, Amadeo’s swelling sense of his own falseness.
NOW, FINALLY, Tíve crosses himself. “All right,” he says irritably. “Amen.” Amadeo stands, legs needling. Around him the hermanos gather themselves. Some will talk quietly in the parking lot about this or that, trying out their rusty voices, and others will hurry to their families, kiss their wives, take their places on the couch in front of their TVs.
Angel is waiting for him at home, so Amadeo lingers. Tíve’s Doberman Honey is beside herself with joy to see the men emerge, and tears around the lot, barking her head off, her long, narrow muzzle pointed to the sky. Based on this particular specimen, it’s hard to believe the breed is a fierce one; Honey is relentlessly attention-seeking and ill-mannered, her expression demented and eager. Her reddish fur is dull, as if she’d once been a normal black or brown dog and had been left to fade in the sun. She pushes her head under Tíve’s hand and wags her tail nub furiously.
“Buddy,” says Al Martinez in the doorway, clapping a hand on Tío Tíve’s skinny shoulder. Tíve flinches. “I want to show you Elena’s newest—my second granddaughter!” He’s already pulling his phone out of his pocket, expertly swiping at the screen. “See her?”
Tíve peers at the photo, and Amadeo also cranes to see a charmless, purple-faced infant with a frothy lace headband strapped around her wrinkled head. “Well,” Tíve says.
“Oh, she’s a beauty. Got her grandma’s pretty mouth.” Al brings the phone close to his own face, examines it blissfully, then tucks it into his pocket. He clears his throat. “Listen, buddy, Isaiah, my youngest, wants to join us. He wants to be an hermano. And since we’re taking novicios”—he angles his head at Amadeo—“he’d be a great candidate. He wants to get back to his history.”
“No,” says Tíve. “No more novicios.”
“But Tíve. He’s a good boy, a manager at Lowe’s. Just turned forty. We need young people. You said so yourself.”
“No,” says Tíve. “It’s not the right time.”
Anger flashes across Al’s face, then disappointment. He glances again at Amadeo, seems about to say something, then says quietly, “Please, brother. Isaiah needs this. I did good with Elena, but Isaiah is bad into chiva, in and out of rehab and all that, even robbed his sister once, took the computer and TV and everything. We don’t know what to do with ourselves. He’s doing better now, but it’d give him comfort, give him something bigger than him. He thinks it could save him, and I do, too.”
“You’re not bringing that poison into the morada. Hell no.” Tíve heads for his truck, his walk stooped and uneven.
“Harsh,” Amadeo says, but he can’t deny feeling pleased, because he was chosen, and not just for the hermandad, but for the most important role there is. “His son Elwin OD’d.”
“I know.” For a long moment, Al continues to gaze after Tíve, his expression troubled. Quietly, Al says, “In my grandpa’s day, there was a Jesus who asked for nails. Best Jesus they ever had.”
Amadeo swallows. “Seriously? He actually got nailed to the cross? With real nails?”
Al Martinez nods. “That’s some sacrifice, huh? Think of it.” He slowly turns his hand, one way and then the other, then touches the center of his palm.
“Who was he?” Amadeo has the sense that he is teetering on the edge of a great mystery. Around him, the night is huge.
Al shrugs. “I just know what my dad told me his dad told him. I just know he did it.” He tosses his keys lightly and heads to his car.
Amadeo stands alone in the deserted lot. After that, a man would never be the same again. He imagines the scene, as he always imagines the olden days, in black and white: the man’s steadfast expression as the nail pierces his flesh, the searing light that fills him. The gathered people fall to their knees.
AT SIX THIRTY in the morning on Holy Wednesday, Amadeo wakes to the gurgle and hiss of pipes in the wall near his head
. He flops over in his limp bed, tries not to think about Angel. Christ’s pain, he reminds himself. Think of that. Each night, Amadeo practices his expression in the bathroom mirror after he showers, water running down his forehead. He spreads his arms, makes the muscles in his face tighten and fall, tries to learn the nuances of suffering. Now, lying in bed, he tries again, but his face is stiff as tire rubber. He tries to train his mind on that long-ago man, who with a few nails, made something real.
It makes him queasy to think of Angel, queasier to think about whoever got her this way. This is not a detail that made it into the story Amadeo heard from his mother, but he doesn’t need facts to picture it: some cholo dealing chiva from the window of his lowrider.
When he wakes again, Angel is looming over him, prodding his shoulder. “Dad? Can you drive me to school? You need to get up.”
Amadeo murmurs something into his pillow as she shuts the door. Later, faintly, he hears her call his name again, but the sound doesn’t break through the surface of his sleep.
When he wakes, it’s after ten, and the house is sunny and empty. He still has two hours before Mass. Angel has left a note on the table: Got a ride with Tío Tíve. No signature, no XOX. Guilt sits heavy in his gut. He eats the cold eggs and bacon Angel has left out for him, and then, because that jumpy, awful feeling won’t go away, he cracks open a beer.
Angel never used to work out, has never once joined a team or performed a proper push-up. All through elementary school she feigned menstrual cramps and carpal tunnel syndrome to get out of PE, and in middle school, thanks to sweeping cuts in public school funding, she never had to register for it at all. But because studies show that exercise during pregnancy results in lower rates of illness and obesity in infants, every afternoon Angel takes a walk. Brianna, Angel’s teacher at Smart Starts!, gave them each a daily planner and a sheet of foil stars to mark their daily exercise. Angel loves her planner with its maroon plastic cover stamped to look like leather, and she loves pasting the star neatly next to each date.
The Smart Starts! curriculum is mainly an exercise in record keeping. In journals and planners and charts, the girls record not just their exercise, but also their consumption of prenatal vitamins, their day-to-day feelings. Each day they note their highlights and lowlights, Peaches and Pits. Those who have given birth record their babies’ feedings and bowel movements and naps, and those who haven’t record their own feedings and bowel movements and naps.
“It’s about being mindful,” Brianna tells the class. “It’s about becoming aware of how you’re actually living your life so you can make the conscious choices necessary to live the life you want.” She sits on the edge of her desk, knocking the heels of her big hiking sandals against the side. Those hiking sandals are one of many things Angel likes about Brianna. Their clunkiness makes her look small and tough and somehow very feminine.
Brianna. One of the prettiest names Angel has heard. She’s never had a teacher who used her first name with students, and the fact that Brianna does makes her approachable and modern and, if anything, more worthy of respect. She grew up in Oregon, she’s told them, which Angel imagines as a lush green Eden filled with burbling creeks and open, loving people. Around her teacher, Angel truly is her best self: hardworking, good, nearly innocent.
At home—at her mom’s house—Angel varied her walking route as much as possible. You see a lot, walking through Española, and not just the low, brown Rio Grande making its slow way out of town. Once she saw a white-clad Anglo Sikh woman with blond eyebrows pause in her telephone conversation to vomit into the gutter. “I’m back,” she said when she was done, straightening her turban. Another time a man reeled around the parking lot of the Jade Star restaurant, yelling at passersby, perplexingly, “I want to get my rock salt!” Sometimes she passes addicts, slumped docile and unseeing behind this or that building, drowning in their fixes, but Angel gives them a wide berth. Once one looked up at her imploringly. “Hey,” he said, defeated. Outside the public library one afternoon, she even came upon a whole dog circus run by a rescue organization and got to watch terriers in tutus leaping through rings and driving toy cars and balancing on one another’s backs. It was an amazing showcase of talent—and to think that once they’d been nobodies sitting in a pound, just waiting around to be put to death.
Way out here, though, there’s just dry piñon and clumpy grass and short withered cactus, occasionally rabbits or quail, and the single road curving through the hills. Strange that with all this open land stretching around her, her path should be so much more restricted than in Española. Turn right at the end of the driveway, and the cracked asphalt soon gives way to dirt and then ends completely. Turn left, and a mile or so later you’re in the sad little village of Las Penas.
Most of the families out here have been on the same land for hundreds of years. Trailers and newer cinderblock structures are wedged into yards alongside crumbling adobe ruins. Some families, like the Romeros, continue to farm small plots of corn and squash and chile, irrigated by acequias, the straight green rows defiant in the face of discount Walmart food. The same few surnames: Padilla, Martinez, Trujillo, Garcia. Marriage and intermarriage like shuffling the same deck of cards.
Sometimes Angel can see what the Anglo artists see in the landscape. Here, in the fore, the young corn plants wave new-green leaves. A ground squirrel sits tall, then lowers his head to scratch with two dainty hands at a spot on his chest. Above, as though painted, the mountains rise, blue and golden.
All this beauty. Also underfunded public schools, dry winters, a falling water table, shitty job prospects. Mostly what people have now is cheap heroin. “It’s genocide, and we’re doing it to ourselves,” Mrs. Lujan, Angel’s English teacher said last year, tears in her eyes after another of her students—a junior Angel only knew by sight—had overdosed. “Please, please, please,” she begged the class. “Please don’t do it.”
Angel was, frankly, aghast to find only her dad here, and even given her woefully low expectations of him, he has still managed to disappoint her. He couldn’t even get up to take her to school? Was he really so busy being unemployed? What had Angel thought—that he’d have any interest in literally anything other than himself? It’s crazy how wrapped up he is in this penitente thing. Every night he has to go pray the Rosary, he told her yesterday.
“Do you even own a rosary? Since when’d you start going to church?”
“You don’t ask a man about his prayers,” he said.
Angel held her hands up. “O-kay.” So she spent the evening scrolling through her phone, trying to watch television. She tried calling her grandmother again, to no avail. Finally she went into her grandmother’s room and lay on the pink canopy bed, pressing her face into the pillow to inhale the velvety, perfumy scent.
Today is warm for April, and Angel breaks a sweat. She thinks of her sticker and picks up her pace. Above, the clouds are as fluffy and benign as those in a picture book.
The road rises and falls gently. In a car, taken with some speed, these hillocks cause a thrilling drop in the stomach. Angel remembers being little and yelling for her dad to go faster faster faster! And he always would, laughing at her laughter. On foot, the hills are just challenging.
She looks at her phone again. No missed calls. She’s tried her grandmother a thousand times in the last several days, and the calls always go to voicemail.
She brings up her mother’s number on the screen, but doesn’t press it. In the last year or so, a silence has settled between them, a silence instigated by Angel to both punish her mother and bring her closer. But it doesn’t seem to be working. Angel tries to hold out, to remain incommunicado until her mother is forced to call first, but her mother always wins. The galling fact is that Angel is a kid and needs her mother more than her mother needs her.
Marissa has no right to be mad at Angel—not when Angel was almost murdered by her mother’s stupid jerk boyfriend. You always hear about girls who don’t report their abusers to their
mothers and teachers and grandmothers, but Angel never understood that. Her mother, she was certain, would annihilate anyone who touched her. Of course Angel told her mother. With pleasure, she anticipated the scene that would follow: Marissa tossing Mike’s belongings into the yard—the hardback history books he keeps wrapped in plastic and alphabetized, his tilted drafting table that takes up half the living room, his expensive, needle-tipped pencils. Her mother would charge at him—possibly with a knife—her whole little body radioactive with fury.
But when Angel explained that Mike tried to strangle her, Marissa just shook her head. “He was joking. Mike jokes around.”
“No way,” Angel said, hand at her throat to demonstrate. “He tried to kill me.” But the truth is, now Angel does wonder if it had been a joke.
“Mike wouldn’t do that.” Marissa took Angel’s face in her hands—not very gently—and tipped it this way and that to examine her neck. “There’s no bruises.”
“So he did a shitty job of it! Plus I don’t bruise easy.” Angel’s eyes smarted and she hated herself, because she doesn’t know how to feel. It hadn’t hurt when Mike encircled her throat, and he hadn’t even squeezed, but still her heart had thrashed with terror.
Marissa turned and began putting the clean dishes away. Her temple pulsed. “I think he was kidding around and you couldn’t take a joke.”
And even if this was true—it might be true—her mother’s betrayal was so shocking that Angel didn’t at first believe the conversation was over. She waited for her mother to turn back, to apologize and admit how wrong she was and to make sure that Mike never, ever touched her baby again, but Marissa was opening the freezer, taking out the jumbo shrimp for Mike’s favorite coconut curry.
Angel lasted a week more at home, refusing to speak to her mother or Mike, with the disturbing sense that she had indeed blown things out of proportion.