The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue

by Manuel Munoz

  Despite all of that, I have always wished good things for her. I couldn’t dream these things for myself, but I could see Lupe in a bell-shaped dress and getting married at the Baptist church over on K Street, even though she was Catholic. It was the one church in town with grand, wide stairs in front and a towering steeple, the walls built of beautiful dark gray stone and the street shaded with trees that had somehow escaped Dutch elm. That would be the church for someone like Lupe, and we could throw rice without having to stuff it into tiny lace bags first. I suppose it is wrong to assume that only someone beautiful like Lupe could deserve such a scenario, and maybe this is where jealousy comes from: the inability to picture ourselves firmly into the lives we can imagine hardest.

  That evening, I saw only what the other people saw. I was outside, having decided to wash my car with the hose in the little light left before sundown, because Lupe’s man was still out in the front yard building her fence. His shirt was draped on the last post like a reward, and he was working fast, like he was racing the sunset. I didn’t care that Tío Nico kept peeking out the window to disapprove of me. He’d been at his wit’s end with me and the way I’d been carrying on. Jilted boyfriends coming by the house and pounding on the door because they’d found out I’d moved here and wasn’t living with Tía Sara in Bakersfield anymore. But in Bakersfield, I’d never seen a man like Lupe’s. I’d never seen a man be so willing to give himself over like that, to work under the hot sun just to make someone happy. He could have had anyone.

  And though I was looking, and Terry Westmoreland kept driving by, and then Kristen Young and all the other metiches in town, we all knew there was something wrong when that car came up the street. We knew it didn’t belong here and we knew that it was looking for Lupe’s house because the driver paused on Gold Street and turned gingerly over to Sierra Way — he didn’t know how Lupe used her front door. We knew the imminent shadow of trouble. We knew that the squeak of unfamiliar brakes meant the men of the neighborhood had to prepare to intervene. And so people stepped out of their houses while that car idled and then killed its engine. I shut off the water hose, and Tío Nico came outside and stood on the lawn, the neighborhood slowly gathering into itself as it did through every argument, through the rare house fires, through the fistfights, the car bashings from angry ex-wives, the drunkenness of early evening Saturdays, the beating of someone’s mother and the shattering windows, the guns flaunted and then desperately coaxed away. The neighborhood inched out of their houses, hands on hips, eyes shaded against sundown, some of the men already easing into the street with order in mind, the younger boys lurking behind them like they knew a rite of passage was theirs for the taking. I watched and remembered that feeling, but I had always stayed on the steps.

  A man stepped out of that car and shut the door. Lupe’s man had stopped working and walked over to the last post to collect his shirt. If a fight was on the way, Lupe’s man wasn’t about to provoke it. He buttoned the shirt and listened to the other man ask him, “Hey, Guillermo, how come you left my sister?”

  That was all he had to say. I immediately imagined Lupe in her bed with the cool sheets lined against her naked breasts, staring at this Guillermo, finding some way to reward him for his day of hard work. I pictured Guillermo’s wedding ring sitting by itself in a tiny bowl on Lupe’s nightstand, a pale mark around Guillermo’s finger like a mark of shame that he would pay no mind. I imagined that scene, of Lupe receiving him with her arms, knew immediately why the women in town hated Lupe Rivera, and what she meant to their own insecurities, their holds on their marriages as tenuous as spiderwebs. “How come you left my sister?” the man said to Guillermo again, louder, and we all seemed to close in, as if to surround a boxing ring, even me. I was mesmerized by what I had just found out, that Guillermo was a married man, cheating on his wife, and that everyone in this town knew with who. But the men in my neighborhood were watching that man’s hands, and then the men swarmed suddenly — had they caught the flash of the knife before the rest of us did? I saw the blood spray and I heard Guillermo choke and collapse, the men shouting orders, everyone in the neighborhood gasping, but I still don’t know how the men in my neighborhood sensed it all coming, how they had ever gained that power of knowledge, that readiness to step up to the inevitable.

  From inside the house, Lupe rushed screaming to the front yard, but by then it was too late. She wasn’t naked, the way I thought she’d be, waiting for this Guillermo inside her house, but had on jeans and a white blouse. The man with the knife knelt in the yard, restrained by the entire neighborhood, and he raised his head to the sky to cry out. Strangely, his cry pierced us more than Lupe’s. It was filled with more woe than Lupe’s anguished, “Oh no, oh no, oh no . . .”

  When the town newspaper arrived at our doorstep a few days later, it brought clarity to the rumors that were racing like wildfire around town. The front page was plastered with pictures of Gold Street packed with police cars and onlookers. We passed the paper between us, me and Cecilia and Tío Nico, the cheap ink rubbing off on our fingers with each reading. Tío Nico gathered the story as best he could from the pictures, then asked Cecilia to clarify what he might have missed. “That man was getting revenge for his sister,” Cecilia answered Tío Nico, raising her voice to him as if he were hard of hearing. “He stabbed him as payback.”

  Tío Nico seemed to nod in agreement as he studied the newspaper, and then he pointed to the picture of that man kneeling in the front yard, saying sorry to the sky and asking it for forgiveness. Tío Nico seemed to nod in sympathy, and when he put the paper down, I waited a moment before I picked it up. Lupe’s house, dark in the cheap ink of the newspaper. Lupe with her face ravaged by tears. The wailing man in the front yard. A photo, taken elsewhere, of the handsome Guillermo. I couldn’t take my eyes off it, remembering his hairy chest, raising the paper a little because Tío Nico was staring at me. He had had enough and got up from his chair, snatching the paper from me. “Give me that,” he snapped, taking one last look at the front page, his finger pointing to the wailing man. “When grown men cry,” he said, “it’s usually for themselves.”

  I thought about that later, when I fished the newspaper out of the garbage can and smoothed its crumpled pages just enough to tear out two pictures: the handsome Guillermo and the one of Lupe “oh no’ing” in her front yard. If the wailing man cried for himself, then who was Lupe crying for? Who did I cry for when I was a little boy, thinking of Tío Nico? Did Tío Nico cry for himself when he sat staring at his page of Xs and Os, trying to remember? Did he cry for himself when Tía Sara left him? I couldn’t answer myself, so I stuffed the pictures into my pocket like a terrible secret, but I knew why I needed them. I wanted a reminder that everyone suffers somehow, that we all make mistakes, that bad luck can ruin everything, even for someone beautiful like Lupe. Someone beautiful like her man Guillermo. I wanted something to give me strength to send away those ex-boyfriends who trailed me all the way from where I used to live in Bakersfield with Tía Sara, those boys who made me weak kneed with their pleading, who confused me with their rage and anger. I wanted Lupe as someone to look up to, even after all of this, so that I could set aside the weight of Tía Sara’s stare and Tío Nico’s disapproval and live my own life, just like she did, no matter that it invited contempt.

  “Sergio,” Cecilia said to me a few days later, “did you know that guy got stabbed in the neck? Can you believe it? In the neck?” She was helping me wax my car, and we looked across the street. “People are crazy,” she said, keeping her eyes for a moment on the half-finished fence. I kept waiting for her to comment on the for sale sign in front of Lupe’s house, the windows suddenly without curtains and the bare walls gleaming through. I couldn’t say I was surprised, though no one had run Lupe out of town. I don’t know how or when the house was emptied or who did it. I was at work when it happened and so was Cecilia. Tío Nico wouldn’t say a word about it.

  “Do you know where she moved?” I finally asked
Cecilia.

  “I have no idea,” she answered, but she looked over at me knowingly, and the way she did it reminded me of the way Lupe Rivera had looked at me years ago, when I was a little boy, that look of knowing what I was all about.

  “I ran into Nicole Garcia,” Cecilia said. “She’s Nicole Sargavakian now. Remember her?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “She said Lupe moved to Los Angeles.”

  “How does she know that?” Los Angeles, I knew, was where you could live on a wide boulevard. The men who stepped out of the advertisements for tejano music lived there, waiting to tip their hats to Lupe.

  “Word gets around,” Cecilia said, “I guess.”

  I had to look down at the car to keep the knot out of my throat, and then I refused my tears because I didn’t want to explain to Cecilia what I was feeling. In looking at the empty house, in knowing that Lupe’s whereabouts were already being found out and rumored, I discovered something that made my heart weight down some. I realized suddenly that, during the times my ex-boyfriends had driven up to Tío Nico’s house with their unfamiliar cars and their loud banging and their threats, the street had been empty. No one had come to see about the car still shuddering outside of Tío Nico’s house; no one had come even to check to see if Tío Nico was okay. When I opened the door those times, with the porch light burned out, I saw nothing but the silhouette against the screen coming back to claim me, and the street silent behind.

  I let loose the tears, and my cousin Cecilia finally saw. I heard her put down the rag she was using to wax her side of the car, and she walked over to me. “Jesus, Sergio,” she said. “You’re just too sensitive.”

  “I just feel so bad for her,” I lied, but what did it matter? The pictures I had saved to give me some kind of strength would someday fade, and I swore to myself right then that later that night I’d close my eyes and let myself think of Guillermo the way I wanted to. I had no tears for Lupe Rivera, though I still wanted to be like her, to go wherever she was, to whatever place she had found that would just let her be. I let loose my tears, Cecilia’s arm around me, the way I had cried when the ex-boyfriends cried and begged me back. I thought of Lupe in Los Angeles, the way the sun was gentler there, and how you could open a door whenever you wanted. Someone would be standing there and he would be worth the tears, worthy of both praise and longing. Someone in Los Angeles, with its wide boulevards, the long avenues that slithered into the hills with your secrets.

  THE GOOD BROTHER

  WHEN THE WOMAN FROM next door had come to beat up his mother, Sebastián’s mother had not been home. She was at the grocery store, and when Sebastián told this to the woman from next door, whose triplet sons stood behind her with their arms crossed, waiting, the woman cursed at him in Spanish, using the vulgar words that he had never been allowed to use without severe punishment. His little brother, Stevie, had stood next to him; Stevie had heard those words before. The woman from next door had been wearing a pink housedress: sheer, thin-hemmed cloth that showed the dark bra underneath, the broad panties. It had embarrassed him, seeing her like this with her boys behind her, all three of them a year ahead of him in junior high. Sebastián had stood there with the screen door open, letting in the summer flies just as his mother had told him not to do.

  How long had he stood there, listening to this woman? Why was it that he could not think of a response to her vulgarities, the things she was saying about his mother, the things she was saying about him, her triplets standing silently behind her? She never stopped cursing, just stood there in her pink housedress and the heat of the early evening, her rubber sandals and heels coated from a day’s dust, their dirt yard hard-caked from the drought that spring.

  When Sebastián’s mother pulled up to the side of the house, carefully steering the car onto the thin rows of gravel set down to guard against winter mud, the woman from next door paused in her yelling and just stared with arms akimbo. The neighbors from across the street had come out, pretending to mind their own business, but this was Gold Street, where everything sounded familiar, even cars. These neighbors had known the sound of his mother’s Chevrolet, the brown one that had belonged to their father who had long since gone, and they had recognized how much slower she drove it. Sebastián’s mother, that Mrs. Jiménez — such a careful woman.

  Sebastián’s mother had not been able to ask what was going on before the woman from next door rushed at her and grabbed for her hair. That is how it had begun: His mother’s purse had been knocked out of her grip, along with the paper cup of soda that she must have purchased when she’d filled up the car at the gas station. Sebastián had watched it tumble away from his mother’s hand, the soda she would always give him sips from, his focus for a slight moment on the cup instead of on the punch landing across his mother’s jaw. There had been that simultaneous spilling — the parched yard soaking up the soda, a flash of spittle and maybe blood from his mother’s mouth — and then her anger overwhelmed her confusion. Sebastián’s mother tussled with the woman from next door, pulled her to the ground, and by then men from the neighborhood rushed over to stop them. The men had appeared hesitant, not sure how to pull the women away from each other without touching their breasts, their thighs. It must have been the same shame Sebastián had felt when the woman from next door had first come over, how despite the vulgarities she had yelled at him, he could not keep his eyes away from the dark outlines of her bra and panties.

  The police had arrived, their car sudden and speedy on the street, kicking up dust. There had been no sidewalks in their neighborhood then, no curbs next to which the police could conveniently park, and so they had lurched the patrol car onto the dirt yard and left the engine running. The men who had separated the women put up their hands as if to say, All yours — they didn’t want any trouble. The officers had no difficulty handling the women, pulling both of them back, and one of the officers had spoken Spanish to them. “Cálmense, cálmense,” he had urged.

  Who had translated while Sebastián remained motionless at the screen door, still letting in the flies? The triplets gave their version to the police officers, but when one of the neighborhood men overheard them trying to portray their mother as the victim in the ordeal, the man verified that it was that woman and her kids who had started everything — they had all seen Sebastián’s mother drive up to her own house. She still had her groceries in the trunk of the car; they pointed at the soda cup in the dust, her purse knocked over, its contents somehow still inside.

  The police officers put the woman from next door in handcuffs. They made her a dark silhouette in the rear seat of the patrol car, the neighbors looking on in satisfaction. Sebastián had heard his mother call him forward, and for the first time, he and Stevie stepped onto their dirt yard and saw where the scuffling had drawn up the fresh, dark earth in patches. His mother had ordered them to bring in the groceries, had handed him the responsibility of her keys. She pointed to the car, told them to hurry and get the cold things first. Sebastián brought in the gallon of milk and two packages of chicken legs, Stevie the iceberg lettuce and tomatoes, his mother preoccupied with the business of the officers. Once inside the house, he couldn’t hear what was going on, so he set the items on the table instead of immediately putting them away and rushed back outside.

  This was years ago, when he was twelve and Stevie just a kid, and yet Sebastián still remembers it. He had gone back outside, and there was his mother shaking her head at the officers and pointing at the triplets. She had been pleading with the officers, and Sebastián had been too far away for too long, just that brief moment, to understand what had happened. His mother had pointed at the woman next door because the woman next door was not just a woman next door — she was a mother, and there was no one to take care of those three boys, no matter if they were already in eighth grade. They were still boys, still children in the eyes of the law, no matter what they had done to her son to cause such disruption. This was years ago — so many years ago, back w
hen their groceries held a carton of RC cola in tall bottles, and the store took back the empties; back when his mother drove them to the Fulton in Fresno, where the city had paved over a road to make a pedestrian mall; back when the Canada Shoe Store was still open, where his mother went only to look but once in a while treated herself to a blue and white box; back when the Woolworth’s in Fresno had an escalator, where children were scolded all afternoon for running up and down its metal steps; back when the new town pharmacy sold ice cream cones for ten cents a scoop on Fridays only; back when the new town pharmacy was still new, still open.

  So many years ago, yes, and yet how Sebastián would remember those things so sharply and not this, how his mother had changed such a situation.

  “Sebastián,” she had called out to him. “Come here,” she instructed him, and he remembers going to her, wishing he could stay out of the way, distant from the police officers and their polished boots in the dust. “I need you to tell them what happened,” she had said. “Tell these officers why you boys were fighting.”