by Unknown
“It’s slow.”
Angel drops beside him, then scoots down so her neck is cricked and her belly high.
“Huh.” Her disapproval sounds remarkably like Marissa’s.
“It’s called a recession, Angel. Besides, I’m getting together a business. Windshield repair. I have a kit and everything.” The truth is he doesn’t have the kit, not yet. He saw it advertised on a late-night infomercial and has been waiting for his mother to get home to help him buy it. For $1,199.99, there are enough supplies for four hundred repairs. Amadeo has done the math: if he charges fifty bucks a repair—and that’s a bargain, people would easily pay twice that to not have to replace their windshields—he’ll make twenty thousand. Twenty thousand from an eleven-hundred-dollar repair kit.
“I’ve always been an entrepreneur,” he tells his daughter. He loves the early stages of creating a business.
“Yeah? Like your Amway?”
Mostly he’d sold to his mother and his mother’s friends. If Amadeo’s stint as a salesman didn’t last long, though, the industrial-sized bottles of product did. Even now he’ll occasionally come upon an old blue bottle of window cleaner or shampoo tucked under a sink or at the back of a cupboard. The truth is that the products aren’t very good. One acrid-smelling shaving cream gave him a rash over his entire face.
Then there was the time he started outfitting cars for the races down in Albuquerque with his friend Charlie Vigil. Amadeo enjoyed working with Charlie, and was good at it, re-boring the engine, replacing the metal front and sides with fiberglass, removing what wasn’t essential, making what was essential as light as possible. Yolanda hadn’t been happy about the prospect of fast cars, but she was glad Amadeo was “getting involved” and had offered to give them what she could afford to start them out. But in the end Charlie partnered with his cousin. “No offense, man, but in a business you got to know your partner’s going to show up.”
“Windshield repair is where it’s at,” Amadeo tells his daughter. “Look around: this whole state is rocks and dirt. I got to be my own boss.” Amadeo imagines windshield repair is a trade Jesus might get behind. It is, essentially, carpentry for the twenty-first century. “It’s about showing people a clear way forward, about helping them get to where they need to go.” It’s about repairing shattered lives. There’s a possibility Amadeo is overthinking it, but he’s pretty sure he’s not.
“Windshield repair.” Then, after a moment, Angel asks: “You still sing ever?”
“Nah.” Not for years, though at one time he’d thought he could actually go somewhere with it. He’s grateful to Angel for remembering. Amadeo offers her his Coke.
She shakes her head. “It’ll dissolve his baby bones.”
Amadeo remembers when Angel was younger; he looked forward to the weekends when she’d come from Española to stay with him and his mom, enjoyed taking her out for the day, showing her off to his friends. He felt like a good influence, teaching her how to check the oil and eat ribs and not to listen to Boyz II Men. She was sweet then, eager to please, riding in the truck, fiddling with the radio, asking him at each song, “Is this good?” When he’d nod, she’d settle back and try to sing along, listening intently, each word coming a little too late. Sometimes Amadeo would sing, too, his voice filling the cab, and Angel would look up at him, delighted.
She still resembles that child—cheeks full and pink—but there’s something frightening about her. It’s as though she’s a full contributor to the world, proud to be a member in good standing. Now she regales Amadeo with facts she’s learned from her parenting class, about fluids and brain stems and genitals. “Like, did you know he had his toes before he even got his little dick?”
Amadeo looks at her, surprised, then back at the TV. “Why you have to tell me that?”
Angel faces him enthusiastically, grinning around her big white teeth, one foot tucked under her belly. “Weird, huh, that there’s a dick floating around in me? Do you ever think about that? How Gramma is the first girl you had your dick in?”
“—The fuck. That’s disgusting.”
“Jesus, too,” she says, singsong. “Jesus had his stuff in Mary.” She laughs. “Couple of virgins. There’s something for your research.” She settles back into the couch, pleased.
Angel has seemed only mildly interested in Holy Week, which is a relief to Amadeo, and an irritation. “So it’s like a play?” she asks.
“It’s not a play—it’s real.” He doesn’t know how to explain it to her. As real as taking communion, Tío Tíve said that day at Dandy’s Burgers when he offered Amadeo the part. Tío Tíve said, looking at him severely, “You got a chance to feel a little of what Christ felt. You can thank him, to hurt with him just a little.”
Angel asks, “They’re going to whip you and stuff? Like, actually hard?”
He’s proud, can’t keep the smile from creeping in. “Yeah.”
“My friend Lizette cuts, but she just does it for attention.”
“It’s not like that. It’s like a way to pray.”
Angel whistles low. “Crazy.” She seems to be thinking about this, turns a pink cushion slowly in her hands.
Amadeo waits, exposed.
“So it’s gonna hurt.”
He tries to formulate the words to explain to Angel that the point is to hurt, to see what Christ went through for us, but he’s as shy as he’d be if he were explaining it to his old high school friends. And he isn’t even sure he’s got it all right.
When he was a kid, singing at family parties, watching Yolanda smile at him across the room, he’d been sure something dazzling was coming his way—and he kept waiting for it. For a long time he didn’t realize it wasn’t just about being chosen, but about recognizing his opportunity, and when he saw it, he’d better throw himself at it as though it were the single open boxcar in the last train out of here. And here it is: his chance to prove to them all—and not just them—God, too—everything he’s capable of. “But it’s a secret, right? You can’t go tell nobody back in Española.”
“Who’m I gonna tell?” she says bitterly. “Anyways, why?”
“Tío Tíve wants us to keep it on the DL. You just can’t say nothing.”
“Can I see it? The morada?”
He’d like her to see what he’s the center of. “Tío Tíve don’t let women go in there. You can go to Mass at the church. You can be in the procession.”
Angel scrunches her face. “Can’t I just see it once? You’re Jesus, aren’t you?”
“Tío Tíve would kill me.”
She’s good-natured in her pleading, all smiles. “Come on.”
“Women can’t go in. And besides . . .” Before he can stop himself, he glances down at her belly. Her face slackens and she turns back to the TV. When Amadeo looks again, she’s crying soundlessly, face blotchy and ugly, mascara running down her cheeks.
It’s not his fault. He didn’t tell her to be a girl. He didn’t tell her to get knocked up. They were doing so well, she was showing interest, he was feeling so good. “It’s just an old gas station. It’s mostly empty anyway.”
But now Angel’s shoulders rock. Her fist presses over her mouth, and she’s still not making a sound.
“Hey. Hey.” He turns awkwardly on the couch, pats the shoulder near him.
When she speaks, it’s with a gasp. “I’m too dirty for your morada. Is that it?”
An image flashes: Angel naked, sweaty and grunting with some boy. “You’re not dirty.”
LATER TONIGHT, the hermanos will gather for the last vigil, but for now the parking lot of the morada is deserted.
Amadeo unlocks the door and steps aside for his daughter. He watches Angel take it all in. On one of the benches is a canvas jacket, left last night by one hermano or another.
She walks the periphery of the room, stopping at various points to consider the man on the cross. His suffering is garish under the buzzing fluorescent bulb: blood flows down his pale neck and torso and knees, every wound
deep and effusive. This statue’s pain is personal and cruel, and he’s not bearing it with perfect grace. The figure on the crucifix is a living man, a living witness to Amadeo’s transgressions. Amadeo looks from the statue to Angel, then back, hands trembling.
The artist did not stop at five wounds, but inflicted his brush generously on the thin body. And there are the nails. Three. One in each hand, one skewering the long, pale feet. Amadeo feels his own palms throb.
Angel tips her head, impassive, and Amadeo is disappointed that she isn’t impressed, that for her, it really is just a gas station.
When he hears a creak, he thinks for a moment it comes from outside, but it’s closer, within the morada. Amadeo looks from his daughter to the statue.
“There aren’t any Baby Jesuses here, are there?” Angel observes. No Blessed Mother, either, no audience of saints. Amadeo is alone here with his daughter and the statue. “I guess it’s not a good idea for Baby Jesus to have to see himself later.” Her voice is tired. She taps her belly distractedly, walks a few steps, stops. “I wouldn’t want my baby to know.”
Amadeo waits in dread for the statue to move, to lift his head. To fix Amadeo with his eyes.
Angel makes her slow way around the room again, stopping every few feet, head tilted. She turns to him, face pale, and he is startled when she asks, “So you really want to get whipped? To know what it feels like?” With her finger she traces a trickle of blood down the bound wooden feet. “Why?”
The room waits, but Amadeo doesn’t have an answer. What he thinks about are the years passing blunts and working on cars with old friends now mostly married and supporting families, watching TV at night with his mother. Whole weeks go by without him remembering he has a daughter. Now here she is, standing before him under the eyes of Christ, and he doesn’t know what to tell her. Too much time has passed. He thinks about the shadowy memory of his own father, wonders if the man ever felt this lost for words, this insufficient.
Though he can’t articulate it to Angel, his answer is this: he needs to know if he has it in him to ask for the nails, if he can get up there in front of the whole village and do a performance so convincing he’ll transubstantiate right there on the cross into something real. He needs to know if he can face that pain, straight on and with courage, without dodging it as he did on Ash Wednesday. He looks at the statue. Total redemption in one gesture, if only he can do it right.
“You never asked me why I came here,” Angel says.
“You told me. You and your mom got in a fight.”
“You never asked about what.”
Amadeo is suddenly afraid. “Was it about me?”
She stares at him. When she speaks again, her voice is strained. “I thought you’d care.”
“Of course I care. Tell me. I just assumed it was some girl thing.”
“Some girl thing. I guess.” Angel turns to the door.
As he watches it shut behind her, the longing that wells in him is so intense he must touch the wall to steady himself. At the front of the room, Jesus hasn’t moved, wholly absorbed in his own pain.
Amadeo switches off the light, checks the lock on the morada door. Angel heaves herself into the cab of the truck, looking like a kid in her too-large jacket. She gazes out the window all the way home.
“I want to know, Angel,” he says.
She smiles at him sadly. “Tomorrow’s a big day. Thanks for showing me the place.”
Her ability to wrong-foot him is staggering, and he can’t even tell if she means to. Long after she’s gone to bed, after he’s returned to the morada for the vigil, then come home again, he stays up, clicking through online videos, guilt and unease sloshing in him. One beer, then five.
THEY GATHER AT the base of Calvario. A mile to the top, and Amadeo will walk barefoot, dragging the cross. He trembles and his upper lip sweats, though the morning air is cool. The hermanos help Tío Tíve unload the cross from the bed of his Ford. When the pito sounds three times—the cock’s crow—Tío Tíve steps forward, Pontius Pilate giving his sign, and the hermanos seize Amadeo. Tío Tíve places the crown of thorns on his head, and tears leap to his eyes. Amadeo turns and hoists the cross onto his right shoulder, stooping under the weight, and the procession starts. The hermanos walk in two lines behind Jesus and begin to whip themselves. Then the women and children, the bright clattering colors of them, so distinct from the neat dark and white of the hermanos. Amadeo cannot see her, but he knows Angel is there.
He feels like a star: he is young, he is strong, he could carry this cross all day. The sky is the deep blue of spring, the air still cool and spiced with the smell of piñon. The fluting notes of the pito sound thinner up here, competing with the breeze and the birds.
Soon, though, the cross grows heavy. He tries to get into the part. He was up all night, he tells himself, in the garden, crying out to God. He remembers to stagger: his first fall. The crown of thorns is pulled tight, so it pierces the skin at his temple, the stinging sweat slides down, but Amadeo is just not feeling it. He is still himself, leaden and slow, his brain hungover and filled with static.
Angel comes up alongside him on the right, panting in her sneakers and tank top. “Shoot. I should get two stickers today. I can’t believe I’m hiking up a mountain at eight months. This must be a record.” She pats her belly. “Your mama’s breaking the Guinness World Record, baby.”
“Get to the back,” he tells her. “You can’t be up here.”
She swigs water, holds the bottle out to Amadeo. Her cheeks and arms are rosy. “Want some water?”
Amadeo shakes his head fiercely, panic rising, and heaves the cross up the slope after him, wishing she’d leave him alone, wishing she hadn’t come to ruin his performance with her pregnancy and personality. He needs to concentrate!
When the lashes come, Angel clamps her hands over her mouth. She looks like she might be sick, and Amadeo is glad.
He scrapes his shoulder under the edge of the cross, wincing when the wood breaks skin. The hot blood rises, his own blood, his own heat. He must leave his body, become something else. Behind him, the hermanos sing the alabados.
His second fall is not intentional; neither is his last. He has forgotten to pick up his feet, and he stumbles, the cross heaving down with him.
“You got to have water.” She opens the little plastic top and pushes the bottle into his hands, but he doesn’t take it.
In the brush, birds chirp and little lizards dart, then freeze, from rock to rock. He watches Angel follow one with her eyes. Inside her, the baby twists and turns—he can almost sense it—hot in her flesh and under the sun. For the first time he’s glad she’s here: more than anyone, he realizes, he wants Angel to see what he’s capable of.
At the top of Calvario, the hermanos lift the cross from his shoulders and rest it on the ground. Amadeo straightens, an unbelievable relief, and the word good thrums in his head: good, good, good. The hermanos help him down, position his arms along the crossbeam, his feet against the block of wood that will support his weight. Amadeo spreads his arms and looks up into wide blue sky; there is nothing in his vision but blue. As they bind his arms and legs against the wood, lines once memorized surface: With a word he stilled the wind and the waves. But the wind skates over his body, drying his temples.
Then the hermanos lift the top of the cross, and Amadeo’s vision swings from sky to earth. Upright, his weight returns; his torn heels press into the wooden block. The cross sways as the hermanos anchor it in the hole they’ve dug, packing dirt and stones around the base. Below him, on the distant road, a few glittering cars wink behind the trees, oblivious. He sees distant mesas and pink earth, piñon and chamisa. The air tastes of salt.
Angel stands before him, holding her hands under her belly. The nails, the nails. He is not sure if he says it or thinks it. Tío Tíve looks surprised, but nods and reaches into his pocket for the paper bag. The hermanos pour rubbing alcohol over the wood and Amadeo’s hot hands. The alcohol burns cold and c
lean.
They hold the tip of the nail against his palm, and he feels it there a moment, light as a coin, and then they pound it through.
The pain is so immediate, so stunningly distilled, that Amadeo’s entire consciousness shrinks around it. He is no longer a man: only reaction, outrage, agony.
He imagined the pain spreading through him like silent fire, unbearable in the most pleasurable of ways, like the burn of muscles pushed to their limits. He imagined the holy expansiveness that would swell in him until he was, finally, good.
But instead there’s only this confused searing clamor, out of which rises a voice he only dimly registers as his own. “The other! Give me the other!” His voice sounds out over the heads of the onlookers, rolls down the slopes of Calvario.
Briefly Amadeo registers dismay in Tío Tíve’s face, and Amadeo is proud of himself, because even though he hurts so bad, he’s about to hurt worse.
IN THE CROWDED ER waiting room at Española Valley Regional Hospital, Angel sits beside him in cold silence, flipping angrily though a ragged parenting magazine, while Amadeo cradles his hands in his lap, marveling at the bright stickiness of his own blood soaking the towels. The doctors are taking forever. He’s been sitting under the fluorescent lights in this plastic chair bolted to the floor—leaning forward so as to protect his scourged, tender back—for nearly two hours. Through the automatic doors, the sky is already pink.
“Hey,” he tells a nurse rushing past in scrubs printed with Easter eggs. “How long’s it going to be? Because this is really serious.” He indicates his hands, but the nurse regards him with only the barest tightening flicker around her mouth, then rushes on, consulting her clipboard.
Most of these people don’t even seem sick. Not a single other person is losing blood. Where are the gunshot wounds, the heart attacks, the massive head injuries? Where is the carnage? Would someone please show him a single emergency greater than his own that might explain this unconscionable wait? He is Jesus, for Christ’s sake.