The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue

by Manuel Munoz

  “I’m worried about you, Connie,” Georgia tells her. “Charlie and I are very worried about you.”

  “I’m fine,” Connie says.

  “Don’t you need help? How are you doing it?” Georgia begins, but then cannot say any more. She brings her hand up to her mouth as if to stop herself, and her voice cracks at the end as if she will cry, but Connie can see that the tears are not coming. “You need family,” Georgia tells her.

  “Yes,” Connie agrees.

  “Do you go to church? To San Pedro?”

  Connie shakes her head and is ashamed to admit it. Such a thing is no one’s business, but now that Isidro is gone, she knows what the question implies. How will she bury him?

  “Charlie and I were thinking . . . not knowing if you were going to have a service for him . . . if maybe you wanted to have our church perform something. Charlie can talk to our pastor. Only if you want.”

  A breeze shudders a few leaves in the tall trees of the backyard, and Connie looks up to them. She imagines the inside of Georgia’s church, the cavernous, beautiful halls that she sees on very early Sunday morning television. A coffin would look so minuscule in such a place.

  “I think it would be a beautiful service. We’d do it for you, Connie. We have a children’s choir and I’ve heard them sing some beautiful songs. ‘Take Me to the Water.’ Do you know that one? Or ‘Shall We Gather at the River’ — those songs.” Georgia hums a little, but it is nothing Connie has ever heard. “Oh, Connie, those songs always make me cry. ‘Jesus, Remember Me When You Come into Your Kingdom.’ Oh, yes, that one, that song.” Georgia is crying full now. The single hand over her mouth has become two, her fingers covering up her eyes. “It just breaks my heart, all of this, Connie. Just breaks it.”

  Connie allows Georgia to cry and is too embarrassed to ask her to stop. It has been so long since she has been to a funeral, Connie thinks as she waits for Georgia to finish her tears, but she remembers how people want to make themselves the center of it, to distinguish themselves as the person suffering most. She tries to picture Georgia at the cemetery and knows already that people will gossip about her employer — she cannot allow Georgia to arrange the music.

  “I have many things to do,” Connie tells her finally, and Georgia wipes at her tears and stands with her. Gathering her plastic beach bag and her container, she steps across the grass, Georgia still with her arms folded. The small dents from Georgia’s aqua pumps are there just as she suspected.

  “Why don’t you come to the grocery store with me and then I’ll drop you off home?” Georgia suggests. “These chores can wait until tomorrow.” In her aqua pumps, she is going somewhere else, but Connie does not ask where; she only agrees. Though she wants the time to think on her walk back to her neighborhood, it would be good to spend time with Georgia, even if they talk about nothing at all.

  On the way to the store, Georgia is careful behind the wheel and they say nothing. At the store, she follows behind Georgia as she fills the cart with more things than she and her husband need, and in the checkout line they both try to ignore the town paper with its picture of the accident. She is surprised, too, when Georgia takes her back to the neighborhood without asking for directions.

  “If you need anything,” Georgia says as Connie opens the door, “just call me.”

  “Okay,” Connie says. “Good night,” she says, as she always does at the end of the day. Once inside the house, she realizes it is only three thirty. She leaves the front door open and turns on the television, parts the curtains in the living room. She is grateful for the noise, but she ignores the television program and watches her neighborhood, where things go on as usual. By nine o’clock, when the other houses have settled down for the night, Connie goes to bed.

  Connie wakes up the next morning as if she were going to Georgia’s house, but calls her instead. Today she needs to stay home. Georgia’s voice on the other end is understanding, but Connie can hear her distress: did she offend her yesterday?

  Connie stands in Isidro’s bedroom and looks at his clothes. She thinks of scenes in the movies when women collapse like dolls against closed doors while clutching a jacket or a shirt, wiping their tears and looking dejectedly at something in the corner of whatever room they happened to be in. Jackets and shirts, she can understand, but Connie is thinking of socks, underwear, old worn-out jeans that she couldn’t give away if she tried. And the other things in Isidro’s room, the pictures of basketball stars that he had torn from magazines, toys he had long forgotten. She would have to draw a line, reminding herself that nostalgia had only as much power as she gave it.

  She takes down the curtains that cover the sole window in Isidro’s bedroom, the yellow curtains that she had put up even though he had protested. Connie sets them to soak in the kitchen sink with a little Woolite. She sweeps the thin rug with a broom and bends down to pick up the stubborn balls of hair. From the single dresser with the broken knobs, the one she bought for fifteen dollars from the next-door neighbor, Connie removes almost the same items as her husband’s from years ago: cologne, deodorant, loose change, hair gel, a bottle of lotion. Isidro had a small stack of papers from school, his writing in pencil and a teacher’s marks in green ink. Lots of green ink — praise or warning, she cannot tell which. Near the foot of his bed are his schoolbooks, with papers tucked in between. She bends down to pick up one of the books. Math with numbers in complicated configurations and lots of smiling teenagers with calculators and sharp pencils. A thick book with four pictures on the cover: a red frog, a desert landscape, ocean waves breaking, a field of flowers.

  Connie had disposed of her husband’s belongings slowly and discreetly. She would bundle a shirt or a pair of pants and take it with her on the way to Georgia’s. Bit by bit, she deposited the remains of her husband’s wardrobe in the large metal Salvation Army bin, the one right next to the newspaper recycling shack that sat on no one’s property. It took only a few months to clean him out, draining the cologne out of the bottles shaped like wild stallions and then tossing away the heavy glass, counting out the coins she found at the bottoms of some drawers, using some of his old white T-shirts to wipe clean her windowsills and the thick pane on the front door.

  Methodically, she picks clean Isidro’s dresser with the broken knobs, folds what she can donate anonymously to the Salvation Army, wipes away the dust. The drawers sound hollow when she closes them, and Connie slides them back and forth just to hear that sound.

  On the bed is the Egyptian bed set. Even though she washed and scrubbed at the small dot in the center of the bedsheet, the stain from Isidro is still there. She can still see its faint, irregular reminder. For a moment, she wonders if she should fold the sheets and stack them along with the clothes she will give away, but Connie runs her fingers on the cloth. It is soft as skin, and with the open breeze coming through the window, the fabric feels cool to her fingers' touch.

  These are her things. These belong to her. They are worth the effort to save them.

  In Isidro’s room, she struggles with the mattress, raising it so she can drag it into the hallway and pound it for dust and hair, and then she sees the envelopes. Connie stands there with the mattress lifted, surprised but not surprised. The mattress becomes too heavy to hold, so Connie lets it down. She reaches underneath the mattress — the envelopes are within arm’s length, and she pictures Isidro on hands and knees getting them.

  Years ago, when Isidro was a young boy, she had seen Coal Miner’s Daughter on television and cried when the singer silenced her audience by breaking down onstage. Connie had watched the movie on a Saturday afternoon, having recognized the songs from the vinyl records Georgia had given her. Even though she had not understood half of what the characters were saying, she knew the movie concerned a real-life person and gave a complete account of what that woman’s life was really about. She saw something in the fans who wanted to pull the singer’s hair, a packed house of husbands and wives witnessing their own inexpressible torments
about marriage and love and wanting and mistakes. Connie had wanted to sing to an audience like that; she had wanted to collapse like that singer on a stage to earn honest sympathy. She had gone to the bathroom and fluffed a pretend dress and held a hair dryer in an attempt to sing something the way that woman had. She had cradled the extension cord as if it came from a real microphone, but no words had come out, because just as she was about to imitate the English, she had seen Isidro in the mirror, peeking at her through the partially open door.

  Connie had stood absolutely still, afraid to move, afraid to draw her son’s attention. His face disappeared and the moment fluttered away; she gave the bathroom door a gentle push and closed it shut, then put the hair dryer down as softly as she could. She looked at herself in the mirror. For a moment, she wondered how that actress did it, how she lost herself in that kind of imagination, and if she ever felt ashamed when people watched her act like that.

  On her knees, Connie feels that shame now, as if Isidro is again watching her. Within arm’s reach, the letters are so easy to clutch, but she cannot pull them out. She knows they are things she should not look at, even if she could read and understand them. She knows that her son must have known, way back then when he was so young, that there were things he should not look at, even if he could understand them.

  Her husband had kept three magazines, and one was clearly more loved than the other two.

  Connie brings the letters to light and counts them. Nine envelopes, none of them stamped, but all of them have her son’s name written on them and nothing else. She sits on the bare mattress and searches for the thickest letter, three sheets of notebook paper folded over, the ragged edges from the wire-bound notebook carefully plucked away. Isidro, she reads, and then the date, and then the words start, the words that can give her no meaning, but she thinks she knows enough of them. The closing, Love, Carlos, says more than anything else.

  Carlos was the boy driving the motorcycle.

  As if to make sure, she opens another letter, searching for the openings and closings, and when that boy’s name appears again, Connie puts the letter down and sighs. She wonders about the mother of that boy, and she wonders if she knows about these letters.

  Everyone knows that road, that intersection. They had been traveling south and had not made the turn east toward town. Connie knows that road: it winds down from Avocado Lake, a place Connie visited many times when her husband was not yet her husband. Up there, the deep green water rushed icy from the tops of the Sierra Nevada. Up there were the picnic tables where families gathered on weekends, and the snaky trails that disappeared into the hillsides. She had been up there — how long you could walk on those trails and never see anyone, then stop and listen to the water still roaring from so far away. As long as that sound was nearby, it was impossible to get lost, the trails so divided and hidden you could do anything up there under the blue skies and not be seen. She remembers those days when her husband was not yet her husband, when she rested her head on his bare chest under the blue skies without being afraid. She remembers what it was like to be so young that she did not recognize that deep pause and heaviness in his chest, the difficulty in saying something he did not want to say. “Te quiero,” he had whispered, and she had ignored his hesitation, how he had summoned the words like a hard breath.

  For a good part of an hour, Connie does nothing but sit in Isidro’s room, looking at the empty dresser, and she realizes that finally grief is coming and she will be washed over by it. She would say, if the mother of that boy came back, that she is stricken with a double loss. Connie stares at the letters, and for the first time she feels a gratitude at her inability to understand this language, the intimacies that surely lie on those pages. She begins to weep and puts her head in her hands, and when she tires of that, Connie takes the letters and begins to rip them into tiny, tiny pieces. Everything, the envelopes, the sheets of notebook paper. Through her swollen eyes, she does her best not to look at them as more than sheets of paper, as meaningless to her as the green ink corrections from Isidro’s teacher. But the difficulty, the impossibility, of ignoring the pencil hearts scrawled across the pages.

  She rips the letters angrily, just as she did her husband’s magazines all those years ago. If her husband had stayed, they would have had a better rein on their boy, and he would not have been on the back of that motorcycle in the first place. She would not be alone in this house as she is, with the pile of letter scraps on the mattress, scraps she will wet in the sink and squish tightly into the garbage.

  When they had left Avocado Lake, Connie had sidled up next to her not-yet husband as he drove the way home, her feet curled under her as she stretched the length of the bench seat. Those were the days, when they had a car with a long bench seat, when you could go up to Avocado Lake with no one being any the wiser about what you did up there.

  For the rest of the afternoon, Connie works with a new determination; she clears off the magazine pages from the walls of her son’s room, folds away the rest of his clothes, pushes the loose hangers to one end of the closet, dusts every corner. She allows herself no time to ponder what she finds in a box of his old toys. Everything she finds, she vows to herself, will go.

  Not everything. The Egyptian bedsheet will never lose that spot in the center, but she will get it to fade enough so that someone would have to look very closely to see it. But no one will ever see it. She will sleep on its cool fabric in her own room, in her own house, paid for by Isidro’s father, José Antonio Islas of Del Rio, Texas. She will never tell him that his son died at seventeen, and he will continue to sign checks for which Connie never has to say thank you.

  They had been coming back from Avocado Lake and they had been only a few miles from town. They had taken the back roads home, through and past Minkler and Reedley. They had only a few miles to drive back to town and the road was so quiet, but somehow sleep would not come. How could it when you were resting your head against the shoulder of the man you loved and you had nothing to watch but the yellow lines in the middle of the road?

  The house will be empty, only Connie, only her things. She will become the woman who lives alone in that little blue house on Sierra Way with no car out front. In next week’s paper, photographs of her son and the other boy will appear: Isidro Islas and Carlos Martínez, handsome in their school yearbook pictures. The day of the first funeral, a line of cars will drive through the town, out toward the cemetery near the foothills. Mostly kids from the high school will come, because neither family has a lot of family. Isidro’s funeral will be the second one, but Connie and the other mother will attend both. Connie will be unable to say anything to the other mother at the first funeral, and that very night she will wonder if she should make a gesture of friendship to her. But at Isidro’s funeral, it is only the same: the mother and her two remaining triplets in the same clothes, Georgia crying just as much, and a group of high school girls huddled together and trembling in their tears. “Un Puño de Tierra” will be the song that moves everyone to tears on both days, even those who don’t understand it. Sorrow, after all, comes in so many languages.

  Those high school girls will forget him. People will not remember.

  Connie will dream of the boys on a motorcycle. She will dream of her son hugging Carlos as the motorcycle speeds faster. This was love. At each of the intersections, she is there watching as Isidro hugs Carlos, feeling with her son as Carlos takes in a deep breath, the boys waiting for clearance, Carlos’s back widening. Isidro could not have known how men sigh with a deep pause and a heaviness, why they sigh like that. Isidro hugging him because this was love and there was so much of it ahead for them, so much.

  Up in her closet’s top shelf will sit her son’s wallet, its battered leather, handed to her by the police at the hospital, and a Giants baseball cap. Connie will regret having destroyed the letters: such beautiful things, even if she did not know what they said. If they had been her love letters, she would have written lindo y querido to say it
all: beautiful and dear, lovely and loved. But she never sees that kind of sentiment anymore except in the old bars of Fresno, scripted on the neon beer signs lighting a map of Mexico.

  Such beautiful things — they were the only things, really, worth keeping. Connie will wake up in the middle of the night and stare at the dark space of that top shelf. It will nag at her that the cap might have belonged to the other boy, and that there is another mother in town just like her.

  BRING BRANG BRUNG

  LINCOLN SCHOOL, ON THE north side of town, on the good side, without a single railroad track in sight, is where Martín enrolled Adán for kindergarten. When Martín was growing up, Lincoln was the rich-kid school and, by default, better. When his mother drove the back way home from Thrifty’s after an ice cream cone, you could see how much bigger the Lincoln playing fields were, and the blacktops still without the basketball nets ripped down. Nowadays, Martín wasn’t so sure how good the school was, but when he moved back to the Valley from San Francisco, he looked to rent first on this side of town, even though the places were too big for just him and Adán. There was Roosevelt School over on the west side in a newly incorporated part of town, brand-new buildings and landscaped fields resurrected from abandoned orchards. Or Grand View, where all the farmers' kids went, a tiny school a few miles out of town, springing up out of the grape vineyards, teachers always yelling at the children during recess when they cornered a gopher snake and threw rocks at it. Wilson and Jefferson he crossed out immediately, both of them on the south side of town, where he had grown up — on Gold Street — and now home mostly to kids struggling with two languages. It hadn’t been so bad when he was young, but later, when he was in high school, he would drive by those schools and wonder about their disrepair, their inadequacy, the ponds accumulating at the bus stops during rainstorms, the kids haphazardly jumping across them, trying not to get their shoes wet. But he settled on Lincoln because he remembered how that part of town had clean streets and sidewalks and wide lawns. There was never mud on that side of town, never a flooded street or a sewage leak. The north side was pristine.