When he hears a noise, for a moment he thinks it comes from outside, but it is closer, inside the morada. A rustle. Amadeo looks from his daughter to the statue.
The suffering is garish under the buzzing fluorescent bulb: blood flows down Christ’s pale neck and torso and knees, smears the cross and the wall behind Him, every wound deep and effusive. This statue’s pain is personal and cruel, and He’s not bearing it with perfect grace. Suddenly, Amadeo knows that the statue on the crucifix is a living man, a living witness to his transgression. He looks wildly from the statue to Angel, then back, heart pounding and hands trembling.
“There aren’t no Baby Jesuses here, are there?” Angel observes. No Blessed Mother, either, no audience of saints. “I guess it’s not a good idea for Baby Jesus to have to see hisself 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 slack, and he’s startled when she asks, “So you really want to know what it feels like?” With her finger she traces a trickle of blood down the bound wooden feet. “Why?”
He can’t say it, but 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 town and do a performance so convincing he’ll transubstantiate right there on the cross into something real. He looks at the statue. Total redemption in one gesture, if only he can do it right.
Angel, no longer waiting for his answer, shrugs and turns to the door. As he watches it shut behind her, a longing wells in him so rich and painful that 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 yawns, makes an effort to talk about other things all the way home, and Amadeo does not tell her what he sees that keeps him silent: Manuel Garcia, standing on the other side of the road in front of the dark windows of the drugstore, watching.
SINCE EARLY MORNING, Manuel Garcia has been sitting on a lawn chair in front of the house, scratching his balls with his stiff-curled claw. When Amadeo gets up after eleven, Angel is planted at the table with a glass of milk, watching the old man watch the house. She doesn’t shift her eyes from the window when Amadeo ambles in, rubbing his head with the heel of his hand. “Who is that, well? Is he retarded or something?”
Amadeo considers pulling on a shirt, then decides not to. He bangs out the front door and across the yard, working his fists, limbs loose with adrenaline. “Hey, man. Go on home. You’re scaring my daughter.”
Manuel Garcia gazes up through pink eyes. “The puta whore. No Jesus never lived in a house of putas.”
“You watch your mouth, viejo.”
“Puta whore mama y puta whore daughter.” Manuel Garcia smiles, because he knows he’s an old man and cannot be hit. He’s spent his whole life making people uncomfortable. He scratches his balls again and squints into the sun behind Amadeo.
“Go on home,” Amadeo says again, suddenly afraid, as if the old man had the power to work evil, though, of course, he doesn’t.
“I seen you last night. You know I seen you. Bringing her in the santuario.”
Amadeo considers denying it, then considers pushing the old man into the dirt, grinding the lumpy skull beneath his heel.
As though he’d read Amadeo’s mind, Manuel coughs and spits, nearly hitting Amadeo’s work boot. Amadeo flinches, and the old man laughs. “Hija de Jesús, shaking her nalgas until someone gives it to her good.”
Amadeo steps toward Manuel. “Shut your mouth.”
“I’m thinking what your uncle will say when he finds out a whore been in the morada.” He blinks red-rimmed eyes, smiles blandly. Suddenly he lunges forward, pointing his finger at Amadeo. “You watch how quick they cut you down from that cross,” he hisses. “They’ll cut you down fast.”
Amadeo thinks he might throw up. He kicks the dirt. “Don’t you come here again,” he says, and turns back to the house.
Manuel Garcia calls to Amadeo’s retreating back, “No Jesus never defiled the santuario!”
Amadeo lets the screen door slam. “What’d he say?” Angel asks, still watching out the window. Sitting there, plump and content, she seems inviolable in her impending motherhood. He tries to remind himself how young she is. But he’s furious at her, for giving Manuel Garcia something to sneer at, for tainting his Passion Week with her pregnancy and her personality.
Amadeo goes to his room. The bed is unmade, clothes piled on the floor. He’s angrier now—look at him, living here like a surly teenager—and comes back out to reclaim the living room. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands. Hit a wall, break something, put his daughter in her place. “Don’t you even got a boyfriend?”
Angel turns and looks at him like he’s stupid. “What do you think?”
“Didn’t your mom never teach you not to sleep around?”
“All the girls in my parenting class, not one of them has a guy that matters. Not one. You think you mattered?”
Amadeo is shaking. “You shouldn’t have come here. You think you have a right to just barge in my house and make yourself at home.”
Angel’s eyes widen, and then she narrows them once more. Slowly, enunciating every word, she says, “It’s not your house.”
Amadeo thumps the table with his fist and retreats to his room.
THAT EVENING, the phone rings, and Angel calls to him, “Dad?”
When Amadeo emerges, his pulse throbs in his neck, and he avoids her eyes as he accepts the phone. Someone mutters a blessing and hangs up without identifying himself. It takes a moment for Amadeo to recognize the priest. The priest will spend tomorrow at home; he said his Mass this evening, and will have no part in what happens on Calvario. Amadeo replaces the receiver. He wonders if the priest can sense Amadeo failing everyone.
Angel has heated a sausage pizza for dinner. She’s already in her spot on the couch, eating. She raises her plate. “Dinner? Dairy, meat, grain, vegetable. All four groups.” Her voice is conciliatory.
Amadeo considers sitting next to his daughter and trying to eat, but he isn’t hungry, and he has to practice. There is so little time left.
In the bathroom he works on his Christ face, but his downturned mouth and drooping eyes are mawkish and ridiculous. Through the pink polyester lace at the window, he sees Manuel Garcia in his lawn chair, and he tries to picture how it will be tomorrow, the hermanos all dressed up, everyone watching Amadeo Padilla pretend he has what it takes to be Jesus.
When the screen door slams, Amadeo watches from the window as Angel picks her way in bare feet down the drive to where Manuel Garcia sits, gazing at the house. She hands the old man a paper plate: the leftover pizza. Amadeo cannot see the old man’s face under his hat, but he’s saying something. She waves him off dismissively and turns away.
Manuel says something else, and she stops, turns, walks back to him. She looks angry, glances at the house, and for a moment Amadeo wonders if she’s going to betray him to Manuel, tell the old man everything he’s done: left her to rental after rental, money always tight, the long series of Marissa’s boyfriends—some worse even than Amadeo—around his daughter.
But she doesn’t say anything, just shakes her head slowly and is still.
She stands before Manuel in her bare feet. The old man sets the paper plate in the dirt beside his chair, then gestures, impatient. She takes a step closer. Her face is stony; she looks away from Manuel to, it seems, a spot across the road in the Romeros’ yard. Manuel leans forward.
Amadeo is still watching when his daughter lifts her shirt above her belly, then higher.
Her breasts are too big for the blac
k lace bra, her maternity jeans low. Her belly glows red in the sunset, impossibly round and swollen. Amadeo sees her belly button protruding and remembers the same thing with Angel’s mother, how toward the end he’d tongue the lump of it while he touched her down there.
Angel doesn’t blink.
Manuel extends a gnarled brown hand, places it against her belly. Reaches out with the other. Cups her belly in both his hands, moves them over the surface of it. Angel stares at the Romeros’ yard.
Amadeo could go outside now, put a stop to the terrible thing that is happening, but he stays, one hand touching the pink lace. His legs are weak. When the old man closes his eyes, so does Amadeo.
ON THIS LAST NIGHT, he is supposed to stay awake, walking outside through the Garden of Gethsemane, thinking about his soul and about salvation. He is supposed to fast, to steel himself, to be betrayed, to hear the cock’s crow. In houses all over town, hermanos are on their knees, leather thongs bound around their thighs, murmuring about suffering and gratitude, yearning for pain.
But Amadeo focuses on the sick sensation of his dick in his jeans, on willing it to shrivel up and fall off as the scene replays in his head: Manuel’s hands on his daughter’s body. Pacing the length of his room, he finishes a six-pack, then moves on to the next, and the image still won’t dissolve.
The television is off, the house silent. In the living room, Angel sits on the couch, staring at the wall. She doesn’t look up at him. “He’s not gonna tell. You can have your Jesus day.”
“I never asked you to do that. I never asked you for nothing.” His voice wavers.
Angel sighs. “It doesn’t matter.”
He can’t tell if she believes this or if she is saying it for him, and he doesn’t know which is worse. Angel points the remote at the TV, and the bright sound of a commercial floods the room. “Just forget about it, okay?”
“I never asked you to do that.” It’s a plea, too quiet to hear over the sound of the television.
Amadeo realizes he’s drunk.
“We can’t be fighting.” She pats the couch, glances quickly at him. “Look, it’s Law and Order.”
Amadeo hesitates, then drops beside her, grateful, exhausted. He takes a handful of chips when she passes him the bag, thinking about the new feeling swelling in him: he’s warm and swaddled, buoyed by forgiveness, suddenly too tired to sleep, too tired to move. They watch the show together, then a second and a third, until Angel goes to bed.
AMADEO WAKES TO ANGEL calling him and the sun streaming through the window. Good Friday.
They gather at the base of Calvario. Nearly two miles 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, three of them sharing the weight. All the Lenten preparations are for this: the hermanos have washed their white pants, braided their disciplinas the old way, from the thick fibers of yucca leaves, mended rips in the black hoods they will wear to insure their humility in this reenactment. When the pito sounds three times—the cock’s crow—Tío Tíve steps forward, Pontius Pilate giving his sign, and the hermanos seize Amadeo.
It starts as acting, soft punches, and then they’re slugging him, tearing at him, shouting the worst curses of two languages and two thousand years. Amadeo splutters and cries out under the barrage, surprised that it is actually happening.
When they fall back, Tío Tíve places the crown of thorns on Amadeo’s head. Amadeo turns and hoists the enormous 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. Manuel Garcia follows, bearing no load except his own hands, and 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.
After the first mile, 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, and the stinging sweat slides down, but Amadeo is just not feeling it. He’s too heavy and slow, his brain hung over and filled with static.
Angel comes up alongside her father on the right, panting in her sneakers and tank top. “Shoot. I can’t believe I’m hiking at eight months. This must be a record.” She pats her belly. “Your mama’s breaking the Guinness world record, baby.” She swigs water, holds the bottle out to Amadeo. “Want some water? I got water.”
Amadeo shakes his head fiercely and heaves the cross up the slope after him, wishing she’d leave him alone, wishing he didn’t owe her. He can pay her back, but only if he can blot her out.
Manuel Garcia hobbles his way up the procession on the left, huffing and stinking like a dying man. Amadeo stumbles; Manuel Garcia wheezes laughter. The old man will turn back—he’ll have to turn back—and leave the day to Amadeo.
Manuel leers past Amadeo at Angel and spits, “Puta.”
Angel looks up, startled, then to Amadeo. “Dad—”
Rage wells in him—Amadeo nearly drops the cross and bludgeons the old man—but then turns inward. He calls between heavy breaths to the hooded men behind him, “Whip me!” And then, because they do not respond, louder, “Whip me!”
When the lashes come, Angel clamps her hands over her mouth.
Amadeo grinds the soles of his feet into the sharp stones, scrapes his shoulder under the edge of the cross. He feels the rough wood break skin, the hot blood rise, his own blood, his own heat. He must leave his body, become something else.
Manuel laughs so hard he begins to cough, spits in the dirt under Amadeo’s bare feet. Suddenly it comes to Amadeo: this mockery is a gift! The filthy old man is playing his part and doesn’t even know it. Amadeo laughs out loud, tears streaming down his cheeks. He’s getting stronger on Manuel Garcia’s mockery!
And Angel isn’t a distraction—she’s the point! Everything Jesus did He did for his children!
“Get away from me,” Angel yells at Manuel. Her eyes redden and well with angry tears. “Leave me alone!”
“Just wait,” Amadeo whispers, but she doesn’t hear.
His second fall is not intentional; neither is his third. He has forgotten to pick up his feet, and he stumbles over a numb knot of foot, the cross crashing down with him.
Angel kneels beside him, her eyes worried, Manuel forgotten. “You gotta 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, she’s the one he wants with him today.
At the top of Calvario, the hermanos lift the cross from his shoulders and rest it on the ground. Amadeo straightens, and the word good thrums in his head with each step: good, good, good. The hermanos help him down, position his arms along the crossbeam, his feet against the block of wood that is all he’ll have to stand on. 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 the sweat and blood at 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. Below him, on the highway, a few glittering cars move slowly, oblivious. The hot air tastes of salt, and dust sticks in his throat.
Angel stands before him, holding her hands under her belly. The nails, the nails. He isn’t sure if he says it or thinks it. But Tío Tíve nods as if this was what he expected and reaches into his pocket
for the paper bag. A hooded hermano steps onto a stool and pours rubbing alcohol over the wood and Amadeo’s hot hands. The alcohol burns cold and smells sharp and clean.
THIS IS THE MOMENT they’ve been waiting for, and the people crowd closer. Parents nudge their children to the front, turn their babies to face the cross. These children will remember this their whole lives. Perhaps one of them, one day, will make the town proud. For now, though, the people are proud of themselves, because they were right about this Christ. True, a few of the onlookers might have hoped for a more artistic arrangement of blood, but no one can deny that he looks awful up there; he is exhausted. The man has put himself through Hell for them. Flies land on Amadeo’s cheeks and neck, and—mira—he’s too tired even to shake them away.
The Hermano Mayor cleans each nail. Alcohol splashes into the dust. Someone in the crowd thinks, This is like our time on earth, just a splash, then we rise into Heaven. The Hermano Mayor wipes each nail with his white handkerchief, then hands them one by one to the other hermanos. The people’s hearts fill with joy for Amadeo, glad it’s his uncle who will do this for him. Family is important.
Some of the people watch Manuel Garcia. They hope he doesn’t feel too bad, but really it’s time, and the old man has rested long enough on his laurels. Manuel Garcia’s back is to Amadeo. He gazes down the hill he’s just climbed.
One or two of the people glance over their shoulders at Angel, to see how she’s taking it, to see if she’s proud of her daddy, to see if some of the bad girl is getting washed out of her. But her face is blank, and she’s standing there with her hands dangling dumbly at her sides, her big cheap belly hanging low.
Night at the Fiestas: Stories Page 7