by Manuel Munoz
Up ahead is the hotel, the tower of it gleaming in the late afternoon sunshine. A barge lingers offshore, so far away that Santiago cannot tell if it is moving north or south. He, though, is moving with clarity, with purpose, the hotel beckoning in the way only memory can. He remembers it all: the sweep of the lobby large for such a tiny hotel. The front desk in a sunken area of red carpet, its phone almost apologetic in its quiet ring. It will be just as he remembers. The room number, 806, in a diamondshaped placard, and the lemon-colored walls, the door painted a forest green, so deep and green against the brass. The large beds with their antique-style headboards, the coverlets a soft beige, not the garish floral patterns that hotels usually present. The sea air, the look down onto the pool. Back then, in February, five o’clock would have meant the sun was going down, but it is now July. The sun is still in force. The coast, though, will be just as it was then, the temperature never deviating much from its mild norm. The palm trees sway a bit in the parking lot, where the slots are mostly empty.
At the front desk, the young woman asks him for a reservation number, but he does not have one. “We’ll have something for you,” she says, nonplussed. “I’ve got a nonsmoking on the third floor.”
“If you have room 806, I’ll take that,” he tells her, and when she looks back at him inquisitively, he says, “My wife and I . . . we stayed in that room before.”
She taps at the keyboard. “Yes, that’s a big room. It’s available,” she says, and makes her adjustment. She slides over the check-in forms and clicks a pen for him, giving him a small envelope.
“What’s this?”
“Card key,” she says. “Do you need another for your wife?”
He signs the forms. “We had keys before. Real keys.” He twists his hand at her, as if she needed a demonstration.
“We renovated this spring,” the young woman tells him, grinning. “People were always losing the regular keys and it was getting too expensive to replace locks. Card keys are better for security anyway — makes our guests feel safer.”
“I suppose so,” Santiago says, and heads to the elevator bank without prompting. He is disappointed that it will not be the same, not exactly the same. He wants the elderly Russian women to be down at the poolside, quietly singing through their previous devastations. He knows what he is seeking in this return, a kind of redeeming exile, but as the elevator climbs to the eighth floor, Santiago knows his quest is as futile as changing direction midair. Decisions have been made and they are irreversible. Luisa will never come back. He can picture her, though, even now as he makes his way down the breezeway to room 806. His wife kneeling at one of the beds in their hotel room, Eva crying and struggling to contain her mother’s shaking. “Please forgive him, Lord,” he could hear Luisa saying. “Please forgive him, Lord.” He had not known whom she was referring to at first, her tears stifled by the repetition, her insistence. Eva had turned to look at him, her hands tightening on her mother’s shoulders as if to warn her. But Luisa had paid neither of them any mind. “Please forgive him, Lord. Remember him, Lord, when you come into your kingdom.”
At the door, he slides the card key in and the electronic lock lights momentarily, inviting him to click open. He does, and there is the room. There are the beds with the soft beige sheets. There are the paintings on the wall: he wills himself to remember the scenes, a young milkmaid accepting a boy’s offer of love, her face twisted away in shame. Back there is the bathroom, the dark space, the door now open, but that is where Alejandro had been. That is where, Luisa told him later, he had gone to cry, the locked door alarming her. That is the door that had swung open when she raised her voice, Alejandro bolting out — “as if the devil had gotten into him, that look in his eye, I’ll never forget,” said Luisa — and running for the balcony. This very balcony. Santiago stands in the archway of the room for a long time, the door ajar, surveying, afraid to go near the edge of the breezeway. He does not trust his memory. The outside walls are indeed lemon yellow. But the door is white.
Santiago knows he has come here to understand how Alejandro could have looked at such a miraculous horizon — the sheer blue line of the ocean meeting its own impossible expanse — and seen, instead, an exit. He does not trust Luisa’s account of what happened and wishes, somehow, that he could have seen it all for himself. He would’ve done more than just stand there. Look at the distance from the bathroom to the open doorway, the steps along the breezeway, the height of the balcony wall. He could have stopped him. He pictures his son in the sudden burst of a runner from a starting block, his body racing from the end of the room, relentless, the lift in his legs coming from a diamond-muscled calf, his legs extending, his arms graceful in giving himself a heave, a vault into his own understanding.
But it wasn’t so. It was sloppy, clumsy, a gesture tripped up by fear. Santiago knows it was, because he stands there contemplating what it would take to make the same leap. A fearful space opens in his stomach at the thought, his body bracing against the doorway. Santiago has to hang on to the doorframe, as if his body could make a decision his mind could not refuse. And yet his feet will not yield, will not allow him to close the door and sit in the room, resist the danger. He stands in place long enough for the late afternoon to slowly give way to the early evening. There, now, is the fog gathering faintly. There is the barge, so far away, its destination still imperceptible. There is the sun beginning its embrace of the horizon, its dark time coming, its rest. The ocean shimmers with the pink light, the brassy orange, the sun made strangely brighter as it fights the fog.
Santiago sees how his son saw. He is in the growing dark of the hotel room with the door open and it is midweek in July. No one has passed on the breezeway. The hotel is empty. The elderly Russian women are gone, each with a new vision to trouble her sleep, so late in life. There are no sounds coming from the pool, only the lonely rasping of the palm fronds. Santiago stands there and sees how he is not capable of forgiving himself, but at least he accepts his own fear. His son was a lonely child. Santiago accepts that he is lonely, too, and always has been. Loneliness is greater than any anger, any shame he has ever felt. Greater, in fact, than love. He can see how his son saw, and he knows what it is to be him and prove incapable of resisting his own body, how his hands and feet could move forward as if on their own.
The sun gives way. The orange glares for a moment, then disappears, leaving the sky to soften into reds and pinks. A thin fog rolls toward shore, but everything loses out to the violet of nightfall, the ocean contributing its own darkness. He does not know what to do with the terrible pain he has carried within himself for these months. It is nothing but guilt, and that goes away in time, Santiago’s hands whisper to him. He has to get a grip on himself. Shame goes away. Anger goes away. Fear goes away. Lust goes away, too. Yes, even love. He sees the elderly Russian women nodding silently in agreement, yes. Even love.
TELL HIM ABOUT BROTHER JOHN
EVERY TRIP BACK FROM Over There is a wreck of anxiety. Every trip back, I used to be welcomed home eagerly and with open arms, but today it is only my father, subdued, babysitting the nephews. Over There is “Allá,” the way my father says it and then tips his chin at the horizon. Right there. As if the place he means to talk about is either across the street or too far away to imagine. My mother is Over There: she packed her belongings and left with another man, headed for a big city. It’s a different Allá, a different Over There, but the way my father tips his chin is the same. It isn’t here. I love my mother still, but I wish she would come home sometimes, just so she knows how this feels, this coming back, this answering for the way things are.
My father takes care of the nephews, and they start immediately with too many questions about living Over There, the romanticizing of its danger, its enormity. My nephews watch old Charles Bronson movies on television, still popular on the local stations in the midafternoon. They ask me if my life is like this: stolen drugs and brutalized girlfriends and guns illuminating the night streets.
My oldest nephew is only ten years old.
I started saying Allá, too, because I was embarrassed about it. “Here,” I say, giving one of the lighter suitcases to my oldest nephew. “Put that in the bedroom for me.” It pains me to hear my nephews ask such stupid questions, the way their young hearts believe that I’m lying to them and holding back the details of a life filled with excitement and anticipations. My life is this: I’m broke, cramped in my apartment, on edge in the late night – early morning hours, convinced I’m missing out on some unimaginable vitality somewhere in the city. I say nothing to my nephews or my father about my job, but then again they hardly ever ask.
Every year, when the tiny plane descends, bringing me back into the flat arid interior of the Valley, back to the house I grew up in on this street, when my nephews climb on my every limb to welcome me home, I think I might be yearning. But then a fear comes over me, a feeling of being fooled and hypnotized by nostalgia. Sometimes I imagine Gold Street as a living being, an entity with arms waiting. Sometimes I imagine waking up Over There, parting my curtains, and seeing not the shadowy city streets but the plum blossoms and the Chinese elms, the paperboys tossing the morning news, cycling down Gold Street at the point in the neighborhood where you can do a U-turn and not a three-point. All of that imagining gives me a tight, constricted feeling.
“So who’s called?” I ask my father, and try to shoo the boys away.
“Your cousin Oscar, your tía Carolina. Your grandpa Eugenio. Your sister wants to show you the new baby.” My father shakes his head. “Can you believe it? Seven boys and still no girl.”
My nephews run back down the hallway toward me, all of their tiny hands grabbing at a basketball, ready for a game on the dirt driveway. My father has built them a hoop out of a large plastic bucket and a piece of plywood. “Not now,” I say, sending them out. “Maybe later.” I send them out even though there isn’t much to say to my father. My father, as if he knows this, too, goes over to the phone and starts making a spate of calls, announcing my safe arrival.
I wait patiently on the couch, looking around at the house, which is becoming more unfamiliar, bit by bit, with every trip home. At the back of the kitchen, where the door opens out onto the garage and the dirt driveway, one of my nephews bounds back inside. I can hear his voice, already breathless and heated. I can hear the refrigerator door open, the sound of thirst being quenched. He’s drinking cherry punch — some things do not change. I can hear my nephew’s voice, but I’m embarrassed to admit that I cannot tell which one it is. My father is still on the telephone, but my nephew asks him anyway, “Did you tell him about Brother John?”
BROTHER JOHN ISN’T MY brother. He isn’t anyone’s brother, though all of us on Gold Street claim him as one of ours. This is why, whenever I come home, I’m obligated to see him.
Brother John, then and now, is the same person he has always been. He was the boy in town with no parents, no family. He had been held under the care of various aunts and uncles in some of the other small towns, always being shuttled back and forth between Orange Cove and Sanger and Parlier and even Pixley, his clothes carried in a single paper sack. Everyone on Gold Street watched from behind window curtains whenever he was brought back to the neighborhood to stay with the Márquez family, everyone shaking their heads about how poorly dressed he was, how underfed. Long after the Márquez family moved away — back to Mexico, some said — the car with Brother John came back and stopped at the empty house. The two women who had driven Brother John there knocked on the door; then one of them went back to the car and beeped the horn. They kept honking until one of the neighbors came over, told them that no one was living there, and then claimed Brother John, just like that. Our nextdoor neighbors, in fact. The car that brought Brother John drove away, and from then on, we were all instructed to treat Brother John as if he were one of our own.
I was too young then to know about legalities and I’m too old now to ask something so improper, something that is none of my business. Rumors about Brother John flew all around, but they were not mean spirited. They were things we asked only among ourselves, and it was understood that we were never to mention our questioning to him. Was he from Mexico? Did his parents abandon him? Were his parents dead? Why didn’t his aunts or uncles want him? Was he sick? Did our neighbors get money from the government to keep him? Had we all noticed how the neighbors drove new cars every couple of years, ever since they had taken in Brother John? Why didn’t he look like anybody in town, where cousins lived around almost every corner? Did his parents love him?
“You should go next door,” my father says to me, “and see if Brother John is home.”
I try to think of some excuse to delay the obligatory visit, but there is no avoiding it, not with my father. Even though my mother left him, my father is still a well-respected man in town. He is a war veteran; he marches in all the town parades, holding the American flag. He attends Saturday breakfasts at the Iglesia de San Pedro, where the town elders raise funds. He sits on the town council and reviews applications for new businesses: always yes to franchise restaurants, always no to the new liquor stores. I can wait only so long before I have to go next door to see Brother John. It’s expected, because of who my father is, that I not be arrogant.
I can hear my nephews arguing in the driveway. They are still young. I wonder when my father will start coming down on them.
I KNOCK ON THE heavy black security door and I hear shuffling in the living room. “Who is it?” says Doña Paulina in her broken English, and when I call out to her that it’s me, she parts the curtain as if to make sure. She opens the door and motions me in, but she isn’t smiling — I’ve never liked her. I point to my car next door, as if it were running and ready to go. “Brother John?”
“¡Juanito!” she calls out, holding the door open, wiping one hand clean on her apron. The living room looks much smaller than I remember it.
“Hey,” Brother John says, emerging from the hallway. His room is in the back, the same room. We’re twenty-six now, both of us, and it flashes through me: why is he still here, when he had a chance to get away? He got away, actually — to Oklahoma — but he came back. “Your dad told me you were coming to visit.”
“Yeah,” I tell him. “Hey, do you want to get a bite to eat? Just here in town?”
Doña Paulina stands staring at both of us. I know she understands what we’re saying, and even though I’ve never liked the woman, I respect her. Brother John is no one’s flesh and blood, not on this street, but she raised him when she didn’t have to.
“Sure,” Brother John says, walking to the door without gathering anything, as if he had been expecting the invitation. He extends his hand and I shake it; it’s thick and hot. Neither of us lets go, and I’m almost afraid to: it’s as if my father were in the room and not next door. I can imagine the town elders talking to my father on Saturday morning: “¿Y tu hijo? When is he coming home?”
THE TRIP HOME FROM Over There will be only a week long. I will visit my ailing grandfather Eugenio between his afternoon naps and then drive back to my father’s house feeling guilty about my grandpa’s health. I will supervise my nephews as my father escapes with relief from this daily task my brothers and sisters put on him, knowing he feels too guilty to say no to their demands. My brothers and sisters will go to work, grateful for the savings in day care, but won’t say thank you. It will mean an uncomfortable session with my father, a sitting-in-silence that means nothing except that my father is still thinking about my mother and how she abandoned him. Luckily, my high school friends Willy and Al will invite me over to Willy’s place for beer and then me driving the car home drunk. It will mean, one morning at the grocery store, running into the girl who had a crush on me in high school — Lily still not married, still idling in the culde-sacs of the men she now wants, parking outside their houses and waiting through nothing. It will mean opening my town’s thin paper and whistling at how much property you can get for only five figures and what
a pushover I am for living Over There. During the week, I will have to nurse a pulled and aching hamstring from playing basketball with my nephews. They know the small dips and holes in the dirt driveway better than I do. It will mean resting on the sofa with my hamstring wrapped, leg raised, the house quiet, and next door Brother John, and the story he told me unable to be taken back.
BROTHER JOHN KNOWS WHERE the new places are and he directs me to one of the franchise restaurants in town, along the new strip mall that has sprouted on the east side, the painted stucco bright against the fresh parking lot, the cars eager with patrons. Everyone in town comes here now, avoiding the dilapidated downtown and its struggling stores. The strip mall is wide, neon lit, smooth tarred, convenient, sparely landscaped with fledgling trees and shrubs. I would never find a place like this Over There, and part of me is grateful for the proximity of all this, the wide space, the cleanliness and the order and the newness of everything in sight, everything an enormous city could never offer.