The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue

by Manuel Munoz

  “Of course it did,” he replies. “I moved on, didn’t I?”

  “My key doesn’t work. It’s supposed to open everything.”

  “Well, maybe you made a mistake.” Santiago peeks into the classroom he has just finished. Because it has no interior closets, he picks up his toolbox and starts down the hall to the next door.

  “It’s not possible,” the teenager calls out. “The keys I’m using should open everything on this floor.”

  “I’m telling you I did what I was supposed to do.”

  One more time, the teenager jiggles at the locked door, trying his set of keys. Santiago works faster, putting extra muscle into his screwdriver, breaking past some paint carelessly sealed over the metalwork. He dislodges his latest doorknob, starts extracting the key chamber, keeping his eye on the kid down the hall.

  Finally, whether he built up enough courage or simply knew he had to ask Santiago for help, the teenager starts to walk down the hall, the rubber of his sneakers squeaking against the floors. “Mr. Salinas,” he says, stopping short. “Can I check the keys you used? In the box?”

  “Which one?”

  “They’re all labeled,” the kid answers quickly. And curtly — his voice carries the hurried, swallowed quality of facing down a bully, a voice perfectly suited to these halls, and it’s this voice that corners Santiago.

  Santiago knows he has made a mistake and the kid knows how the keys work better than he does. He fumbles around the box with the tiny manila envelopes. “This one,” he says, handing it to him.

  “It’s the wrong one. This should have gone on the second floor, not this one.” The kid points to the label. “See?”

  “Fucking change it yourself, then.”

  The kid looks at him as if he might have been joking, but quickly realizes Santiago is serious, and he gathers his things. Santiago knows he’s in for it when the teenager almost shrugs as he turns away and begins the walk down the hall, his perfect keys jingling, the door closing ominously behind him. Carrasco will be on his way soon.

  In the corner of the next classroom there is a little closet, and after replacing the lock on the hallway door and testing it, Santiago walks toward the closet. Tempted to close the door behind him, all the harder for Carrasco to find him, he thinks the better of it. He will no doubt hear Carrasco’s angry footsteps all the way down the hall, but so far there is only quiet, and Santiago calms himself, choosing not to rehearse a defense. Carrasco should understand. Who wants to take orders from a fucking kid?

  The door before him, though, takes his mind off the impending confrontation. Curiously, the keyhole has been painted over and the doorknob doesn’t turn in either direction. The paint on the door has been slathered on so thickly and so many times over the years that he’ll have to destroy a hefty chunk of the door just to get it open. Santiago gets to work, chipping away at some of the paint, dislodging one of the screws. He studies the knob closely, the shape of it. Such an old fixture, he thinks, that it may be worth something, may be worth sneaking it home if he can keep it intact. Loosened, the doorknob slips out, and the door is left with a gaping hole in the lock; still, it is sealed shut. Frustrated, Santiago grabs a hammer and starts cracking at the wood around the fixture, the sound echoing into the hallway. He doesn’t hear Carrasco come into the classroom, and he almost drops the tools in surprise when Carrasco speaks.

  “Tough one, huh?” Carrasco says from behind him.

  “Oh, it’s a son of a bitch, all right.”

  “Need help?”

  “Got it,” Santiago says, pounding harder, thankful that the wood finally gives way. He cracks open the door, the paint seal all around the doorframe flaking away. “Wonder what’s in here.” He steps inside.

  “Books,” Carrasco says, leaning his head in. A small closet, the room has a window on one side, left open all these years just enough to allow a layer of dirt to cake itself to the sill. Lined with wooden shelves, the closet holds books numbered and neatly stacked. Small cobwebs sway as the first faint gusts of air come from the classroom. Santiago looks up to the ceiling; sure enough, the light fixture holds one of the old translucent bulbs, the clear glass showing the filament radiant inside.

  “Fucking teachers,” Carrasco says, still leaning inside. “Always complaining about not having books. Look at this treasure.”

  Santiago pokes around the books, wiping away at the heavy dust to read the covers. Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. A Separate Peace. Carrasco is quiet, but Santiago knows he is still there.

  “You gotta lay off the kid,” Carrasco tells him finally. “You gotta take it easy.”

  “He just got the envelopes mixed up, you know. He’s a kid,” he tries, but Carrasco isn’t buying it.

  “A really smart one. Superintendent’s nephew. Who do you think got him that cushy little job, instead of him out cutting grass like the rest of them?”

  Santiago turns around, his investigation of the shelves exhausted. Carrasco stands in the doorway, arms crossed in front of him.

  “Salinas, you need a break, man. You’re mouthing off to a fucking kid.”

  Santiago sighs and moves to the doorway, but Carrasco doesn’t budge.

  “Take a week off. You’ve got days.”

  “I don’t need a break,” he tells Carrasco. He puts his hand on the broken door, readying himself to change the subject, talk about how they’ll need to get somebody in here to clean up the mess inside, make the closet usable again.

  “After all that’s happened, man?” Carrasco asks. “You’re telling me you don’t need a little time? It’s been months. Why don’t you just get a little time away?”

  “Luisa and I separated,” he tells him, the words coming forth as both an admission and a prayer that Carrasco will now leave him alone. Instead, unexpectedly, Santiago feels a quiver in his left knee, feels the heat of the closet on his neck and face, the lump in his throat, gathering there at the admission.

  “I heard,” Carrasco says quietly, shifting a little but making no movement toward him. “It’s a tough thing to go through, losing a son like that.” He pauses as if to gauge whether what he has said is enough, but Santiago keeps his head down, concentrating on the dusty floor and a spider scurrying from one of the shelves.

  “Come on out here.” Carrasco motions, opening the closet door, which creaks and groans, releasing more of the old paint. “Sit,” he tells Santiago, taking one of the desks himself.

  Neither of them can fit comfortably in the students' desks anymore; they sit sideways.

  “You never took bereavement,” Carrasco tells him. “Just put in for it. Take a week. I can talk to the main office and explain. They have the records.”

  “What am I going to do for a week?”

  “Relax. Think a little.” Carrasco inspects the corroded paint around the doorframe. “Talk to your lady. Settle some things.”

  “It’s too late.”

  “Never too late. Not when you’re married.” Carrasco sighs. It is his wife who buys the shirts with the tiny check pattern, the lilac tinge. It is she who holds him together, Santiago can tell. “Besides,” Carrasco says, “everybody wonders what’s going on with you. You just came back after it happened. Not a day off.”

  Santiago looks around the classroom, sensing somehow that this is a freshman English class. Wasn’t that the year he had toted around A Separate Peace, a book he couldn’t get more than a few pages into, his eyes wandering over the spine to Luisa, more dutiful in her reading? Carrasco seems patient enough, waiting for an answer, and Santiago takes in the room, the pristine summer blackboards, the last prizewinning essays still stapled to one of the walls, a flag fluttering.

  “Come on,” Carrasco says, rising. “Don’t even worry about signing out. I’m sending you home. The guys can take care of these floors.”

  Alejandro would have entered high school in September, Santiago thinks. He would have sat in a classroom much like this. But it is July, and there will be time enough to think about
that when September comes, when he sees the teenagers making their way along the sidewalks, pushing each other and horsing around. He closes his toolbox and starts to follow Carrasco down the hallway, but then remembers the ornate doorknob. Doubling back, Santiago stuffs it into his toolbox and follows once again, leaving the classroom door wide open behind him.

  There will be time enough in September, he tells himself. There will be time enough today even, the morning only halfway through. “I’ll go in your truck,” Carrasco says, leaving his own vehicle there. “I’ll come back with one of the guys.” The drive to the warehouse is silent. After parking the truck, Santiago unloads his toolbox and heads to the warehouse doors. He can see the teenager sneaking a glance at him through the office window, but he won’t give him the satisfaction of acknowledgment. Nor will he look up at the guys milling around the soda machine, taking their time so they can eavesdrop. They think he is being let go. A week from now, Santiago knows, some of them will have to eat crow when they find out he was sent on bereavement leave and not fired.

  The drive home is quick, no traffic now that everyone has made it to work. Home is empty, cavernous almost with its yawning rooms, Luisa gone, Eva with her, the door to Alejandro’s room unopened for months. His steps sound strangely loud, even against carpet. Santiago takes a quick shower, though he hasn’t broken much of a sweat. For the journey, he wants to feel clean, to enter the hotel in fresh clothes, assured of belonging. He chooses a long-sleeved white shirt and khaki trousers and presses them the way his mother showed him. In the back corner of the closet, past his regular, dark dress shoes, are a pair of brown leather sandals — Luisa’s idea — and he takes those out to wear even though they make him feel slightly effeminate. Not knowing how long he will be gone, and refusing to make himself consider it, he hauls down a suitcase from the top of the closet and folds in enough clothing for a week, along with his favorite pair of black dress shoes.

  Ready, Santiago trails the suitcase behind him and gathers his keys and wallet from the kitchen table. Luisa has not called him in several weeks, and Eva pays him little mind. Nevertheless he digs out pen and paper from one of the kitchen drawers. Luisa, I’m going out of town for a few days to think things over. Maybe we can talk when I get back. For a moment, he considers what he has written, tries to imagine Luisa coming to the house to find him and seeing the note, tucked here on the counter under a glass. But the house is pristine in its emptiness — the things she has taken, the little he has done in his day-to-day life since she left with Eva. The kitchen counter is spotless. He rinses his breakfast dishes every morning, the sink empty, a small drop collecting at the faucet and then giving way, its watery echo in the grand silence of the house. Santiago crumples up the note and tries again. Luisa, I needed to get out. He sets the note down, puts the glass over it. It matters little what the words say. The note will remain there, untouched.

  Nostalgia, the will of memory to rectify everything — what a weakness, he thinks. But Santiago gets in the car nonetheless, feeling an eagerness to get going on the drive. It’s just past noon and the traffic will be light all the way to the coast. There is no use pretending that the drive will quiet what’s in his head. Already he is starting with comparisons and he has yet to even gas up for the trip. How empty the car feels this time, when in the past the kids argued in the backseat and Luisa fiddled with the radio stations.

  At the mini-mart in the center of town, he buys snacks for the road and fills up the tank. The gas is more expensive here: it’s mostly high school kids who come to buy chips and sodas, but summer has a lulling effect, and Santiago wants the calm start, the slow ease into what is coming. He travels down the main street following the speed limit, and the car behind him angrily pulls up to his rear bumper, trying to nudge him along. People are going about their day: shopping on foot if they live on the south side, hanging around the corner hoping for under-the-table construction jobs. Mexican kids are practicing on skateboards, of all things. He drives by the barbershop, the lone Chinese restaurant with its pale aqua storefront, the ninety-nine-cent store, the church-sponsored thrift shop. The stores crumble down as he gets closer to the main road leading to the highway: just the tire shop now, the car wash, a tractor rental place. His town gives way to farmland, an open road that will take him back to the hotel for no other reason than to let him face his mistake, his error, and to ask the sea, the Pacific sky, for a little peace in the matter.

  The farmland slips along and he hits the other side of Highway 41, the old part that snakes into the western foothills, the dry flatlands cut through with the vague outline, way out there in the distance, of a canal carrying mountain runoff to the farmers of the West Valley and on down to Los Angeles. Santiago sets the radio to an oldies station, the only music everyone in the car could agree on, and he catches Connie Francis in the middle of her spiteful mourning. The music keeps the thinking out of his head, and mercifully, the station’s DJ rarely interrupts except to announce a stretch of music. He keeps waiting for the station to throw in something too upbeat and whistle-clean like the Association or the Beach Boys, but he begins to suspect that the DJ is a romantic of the old kind, his age, who knew the music he and Luisa listened to when they were dating, parking up at Avocado Lake and looking down at the Valley lights while listening to the radio. The brown flatlands start to give way to gentle hills, yellowing grass, but still the music comes. The Delfonics and Eddie Holman’s rueful yearning, and Eva’s favorite, Billy Paul singing about Mrs. Jones. It will be at least an hour until Kettleman City, the lone town on this stretch of highway cutting over to the coast, and Santiago puts his hand on the empty passenger seat when the Stylistics sing “You Make Me Feel Brand New,” as if this were the very car he had kissed Luisa in all those years ago.

  But by Kettleman City, the radio station fades to a static, the tune coming in spurts, and Santiago finally has to turn it off and sit through the silence. Here, then, is the long climb, the treacherous road. He can see it miles ahead — the road climbing in a straight shot to the top of the first hill, where he knows for miles on end the highway will twist, climb, and dip and the car will speed on its own, commanded by gravity. It will take concentration to handle this part of the journey, his eyes focused on the painted yellow lines on the asphalt, but Santiago is already at his destination, at the base of the swimming pool all those months ago, he and Luisa sitting in lounge chairs under the afternoon sun. Three elderly Russian women, rotund in their sundresses and yet somehow still looking frail, sat under the shade of a palm tree, one of them telling a story to the other two. Their heads nodded collectively, as if they shared in the memory, had no doubt that each recalled it with the same precision. The two women hummed as the third told her story. Yes, their heads nodded, yes. The third woman remembered best of all, yes. And then she began to sing, at which Luisa turned as if annoyed, but Santiago listened to the song, not understanding, but knowing what the melody invoked.

  He had lost himself in lounging that day, in listening, when Eva and Alejandro came to the edge of the pool, hot and sweat-streaked from whatever they had been doing. Even before Alejandro had put his first foot in, Santiago called him over. “Not with the shirt on,” he told him. “You need something dry to wear to dinner.”

  “But I have a shirt upstairs,” Alejandro had protested, his voice loud, breaking through the gentle atmosphere the three Russian women had created around the pool.

  “Do as I say and stop being such a baby.”

  “Leave him alone,” Luisa told Santiago. “He’s got one upstairs, he told you.”

  What drove Santiago to get up from his chaise lounge was the way Alejandro turned around, as if Luisa’s word were the decree: the son would have his way. What drove him to get up and reach for his brown leather sandal was watching the wide, sagging back of his son turning and making his way to the pool, self-satisfied. Without warning, as if Alejandro hadn’t heard him walking up from behind, Santiago smacked him with the sandal on the exposed part
of his lower leg, his shorts long and baggy.

  Alejandro cried out in surprise, his hand around the spot where he’d been hit. The elderly Russian women turned in their chairs to watch. “You do as I say,” Santiago told him. “Do not make me hit you again.”

  “I have another shirt . . . ,” he began, the words long and drawn out and whining, but Santiago did not let him finish. He smacked him again, harder, egged on by his own frustration, and this time Alejandro began to cry, then bolted from the pool.

  “Now see what you did?” Luisa admonished. “Just lay off of him, Santiago, for God’s sake.”

  “You baby him,” Santiago told her, sitting back down. “I’m getting really sick of his shit,” he said, regretting his words almost immediately. He could see Eva out of the corner of his eye, leaving the pool area. She’d overheard him.

  “You don’t know what his life is like outside of us, outside of the house. You don’t think the kids are teasing him at school? Day in, day out.” Luisa took off her sunglasses and shook them at him. “Eva tells me all the time about those damn kids picking on him. You don’t have to contribute to it.”

  “He’s got to grow up,” Santiago insisted. “You have to grow a spine sometime.” They both sat in the lounges, but his skin flushed with anger and the sun seemed to beat down on him unbearably. He wanted to stand his ground with Luisa, though, and refused to head to the pool.

  “Mom!” Eva called. Her voice was tiny. “Mom!” It was coming from the balcony and they all looked up: Santiago, Luisa, the elderly Russian women shading their eyes, squinting to look up at Eva on the eighth-floor balcony, frantically waving her hands to get their attention. “Mom!” she yelled.

  “Goddamn,” Luisa muttered. “You see what you started up?” She gathered her towel and slipped on her sandals. She exited the pool area, and Santiago tried not to look at the Russian women, who eyed him with a withering contempt. One of them kept her eyes shaded, looking upward, as if Eva were still on the balcony, but his daughter made no further noise to warrant such attention. It is only now, as Santiago hurtles toward Paso Robles, toward the turn onto the coastal highway that will take him back to the hotel, that he imagines the old woman looking up as if with prescience. The singing woman, the one who had continued to look up, had been the one to shout first, a terrible, guttural cry summoned from the terror of the things she must have witnessed in her day. The other two women instantaneously turned and shrieked, and Santiago himself cocked his head, looking upward now, only to see his son plummeting down from the balcony, his legs and arms flailing as if in disbelief at what he had just done, in disbelief that he could not, in fact, reverse himself. Luisa and Eva appeared on the balcony, sudden as apparitions, crying out, their bodies leaning forward as if they could somehow catch Alejandro. All of them were caught paralyzed at the sickening distance, the pitch of the boy’s body, the inevitable thudding on the pavement, the terrible wait. The Russian women cried out as if in pain, and Santiago began running, his heart jarring — breaking — at the sound of Alejandro slamming into the edge of the pool’s deck. He ran, guided by the echo of Luisa’s wailing from the balcony, Eva’s voice suddenly that of a little girl. He ran to kneel beside his son’s body, the entire collapse and crush of Alejandro’s bones, the blood trickle warm against his knees. He does not remember a sound coming out of his own mouth, not until the paramedics came, their hands futilely checking for a pulse.