by Manuel Munoz
Is it Sebastián, then, born the way he was, who is the trial to her expectations? Is he the reason she is now suffering through this? Adelina stands in the grass and looks up at the stars slowly giving way to the coming of dawn. Perhaps he suffers, but there is no way to ask him. She cannot fathom asking her son about his pain, the suffering he must keep burrowed inside — he must have it, no? How can she ask his forgiveness? It would be like asking these stars any kind of question, talking to them when they have no language to respond except to shine back, flash a bit, and then die out.
“YOUR MOTHER WAS A good woman,” the brother says, the triplet who is neither dead nor imprisoned, and when he says this to Sebastián and Stevie, it is Stevie who says the thank-you and then, without hesitation, asks, “Which one are you?”
“Claudio,” he says. “I’m Claudio.”
“I work at Avenal,” Stevie tells him and leaves it at that.
“Yeah.” Claudio sighs. “Cristian . . . Chris.”
The house has been sold and Sebastián has no burden now; Stevie has made all the decisions and does all the talking. Stevie was the one to send a letter via family friends to their father in Mexico, and although their father did not appear at the funeral today, no one had actually expected him to. Stevie had already looked into the legalities of selling the house to help pay for their mother’s hospital costs, and with a lawyer’s help, he registered papers with the courts declaring their father’s default of ownership owing to absence.
Sebastián thanks Stevie, in his heart, for saving him from this. He thanks Stevie, silently, for giving him new life.
Their mother’s illness was broadcast to the neighbors via the rush of an ambulance early one evening, five minutes before the start of her telenovela, when she had collapsed on the living room floor and called out Sebastián’s name. Sebastián will never forget that, how she called his name with all the volume she could muster. Twice she called it, and he rushed to her from the backyard, dialing emergency, and while he spoke to the woman on the other end of the line, Sebastián half expected to hear his brother’s name come from his mother’s mouth. He felt guilty about it afterward, when the doctors said it wasn’t a heart attack or a stroke or an aneurysm, but a cancer already grown large. His mother was not dying right then and there, but she was close, and he had wished her to declare whom she really needed. A bad wish, a terrible want. She had called his name for help, nothing more or less.
They are standing a bit away from the burial site, watching the dismantling of the tent propped up to give shade to the mourners. Efficiency and respect drive the cemetery workers: the little tractor is somehow quiet as it scoops dirt into the grave. There are no men with shovels, working nobly while family stands to watch, as would have been done in the old days. Only a little tractor, two men folding up the chairs and loading them onto a waiting truck, two more men rolling up small sections of carpet laid down around the grave site. They stand and watch out of finality, Sebastián and Stevie, but Claudio waits with them for a moment.
“Well,” Claudio says finally, when his little girl comes running for him, oblivious to their seriousness, “you know the directions to the house.”
Such is his grace: if their mother had only known how many of the neighbors from Gold Street had come this morning, it would have surprised her. Sebastián never heard as much come from her mouth, but he knows how she felt disregarded. What would she have said to Claudio’s offer to have food in the backyard of his house, to Claudio’s mother making the rounds of the Spanish-speaking neighbors, inviting them to come and honor the woman who had lived in that house over there, no need to bring food because she would do much of the cooking? Was it, Sebastián wonders, all done because the woman from next door knew they had no immediate family here? Was it, he wonders, because she knew what it meant to have a father leave, had felt the void that fathers create by severing a broader reach of family? She has been saved, this woman from next door, by the appearance of her first grandchild, the little girl tugging on her father’s leg. She has been justified.
“You know your mother was a good woman,” Claudio says again. In his dark suit, he is so handsome, Sebastián thinks, and his heart wonders if Claudio is the one from his childhood, the one from the backyard. What would it mean now? What if it is not him?
“She saved my mom,” says Claudio, looking back at the cemetery men. “Did she ever tell you that? That day when the cops were going to arrest my mom for that fight? Remember that? We could’ve been dragged off to children’s services. Foster homes, even, because we didn’t have anybody here.”
The woman from next door is over by the cars lined at the side of the road. She is waiting but does not come over. When she passed through the receiving line, she had said his name, “Sebastián,” and then hugged him, and he had been ashamed of what she knew of him. Then even more ashamed as he stood through the service, knowing that at least one person knew the answer to his real secret. She had known his name. All along she has known his name.
“She did her best,” Stevie says. “But I gotta tell you, our mom didn’t really mention it at all.”
“Seriously, man?”
“Seriously.”
The little girl is tugging at Claudio’s leg more and more, so Claudio picks her up. “She’s getting bratty,” he says, “so we’d better go. See you guys at the house.” And as if he were departing for a long journey, Claudio leans over and hugs Stevie, onearmed but close, slaps him on the back, and even though the little girl is in the way, Sebastián can see Claudio’s eyes close as he does this.
It is all the same, those eyes, the sighing and the moans, Sebastián’s longing and wishing, his memory always going back to the backyard that does not exist anymore, to a nameless boy whose body was ripening in adolescence, but Sebastián had been too young to understand what he was receiving. There is no way to go back to it. There is no way to go back and uncover the tracks of its anonymity.
“Sebastián,” Claudio says, and he reaches over to hug him as he did Stevie. Sebastián closes his eyes, can feel the proximity of Claudio’s little girl and her lace dress, the sticky-sweet smell of all children. He takes Claudio’s offer of condolence but feels the shape underneath, the solid back, the shoulder. Whether this is the brother or not, the shame of what he is doing so conflicts him that Sebastián begins to cry. At what, he does not know. Like Claudio’s mother, he has been released from a kind of imprisonment, and he can begin a new life now. But here he is trapping himself, feeling this man’s back and willing memory to rekindle some kind of happiness, if happiness is what he had been feeling way back then.
“It’s all right, man,” Claudio says, patting him on the back. “You took care of her. She loved you guys, man. It’s all right.”
THE FAITH HEALER OF OLIVE AVENUE
EACH BOX OF PAPER — regular business paper for copy machines and office printers — weighed 40 pounds, and they had been stacked the way they were supposed to be, eight in each layer, laid not side-to-side, but crosshatched for balance. Each row was 320 pounds, pressing down on the wooden pallets that the company kept using and reusing, through winters of deepening fog that dampened their rigidity, through summers that dried them out again. Each row contained that much pressure, each pallet stacked four rows high, the boxes crosshatched for balance, which meant you alternated the position of the boxes so that when it came time to unload, the pallet wouldn’t tip over — a danger, especially if the handler was a kid who didn’t know what he was doing. Emilio was twenty-one at the time. Four rows high, each row 320 pounds. More than half a ton: 1,280 pounds of paper. Simple paper. Cheap paper, too, the kind you could see right through if you held it up to the light. Usually when the pallets were shipped, they were wrapped in plastic, around and around, to hold the boxes in place. Paper was like eggs: the moment a box was dented, the paper became garbage. Imagine trying to persuade the insurance men over in the old Guarantee Savings Building in downtown Fresno to have their secretaries run rep
orts on paper that had a big fold in the corner, a ripple at the top. And Fresno was just thirty miles away; shipping there was easy. Still, you had to be careful. Pallets shipped all up and down the West Coast, mostly to Los Angeles and Seattle and Portland, and any of the boxes headed to San Francisco were actually bound for Honolulu. That was a long ways from home, a long ways for something to go wrong, for a pallet to tip over and break open like a carton of eggs. That kind of thing cost money, and since plastic was cheap, it made sense to have the teenagers who did the wrapping just keep circling the pallets. But that was during the regular day shift, Shift One, when the paper mill hummed along with the rest of the Valley and the trucks came almost one after another, and the majority of the workers were women, who needed to be home with their kids later. Shift Two ran from roughly five in the evening until one in the morning; in the summer, the crew on that shift didn’t have it so bad, since the paper mill was so far out of town that in July you could actually still see the blood-line of the sunset on the horizon until almost ten at night. Emilio worked in Shift Three, the skeleton crew who came in at one in the morning to keep the paper mill and its machinery going all night long, cleaning up the warehouse, making it ready for the arrival of the real crew, forklifts darting around like mice to rearrange everything so it was neat like a grocery store when it first opens in the morning, all items in place. Teenagers were not allowed to work at that hour, so if a pallet had to be prepped for shipping, you either called up one of the other guys on the floor or you did it yourself. On that particular shift, Emilio had been out on the loading dock, smoking a cigarette, keeping an eye on his watch. When his fifteen-minute break was nearly over, he had jumped down to the dirt below and scuttled quietly into the adjoining grape vineyard to smoke a joint. Lately, the paper mill had had so much trouble keeping Shift Three fully staffed that management basically turned the other way when the men disappeared into the vineyard to sneak whiskey, a joint, whatever kept them going in those odd hours when the world disappeared completely into sleep. Out in the vineyard, Emilio could smell pot wafting down the rows, hear leaves parting and boots in the dust. Shift Three was nothing but former high school troublemakers, or family of management, all men, mostly single, and generally suspicious of each other. Ask Patricio, the one they had fired just three weeks ago after someone ditched his own joints into Patricio’s work shirt, which was hanging in the break room, during a surprise inspection. This was why Emilio, despite having already had more than a few sips of whiskey, hurried with the joint, trying to savor it a little before smothering it into the thick dust of the vineyard, not wanting to be late back to his post. This was why, once back at his post, he hesitated to ask someone to help him wrap the pallet he had to forklift over to the opposite wall for shipping at nine sharp. Stubborn, Emilio tugged a few sheets around alone, a difficult job because the plastic almost adhered to itself, exactly the way it did when his father tried to wrap up the leftovers plate after dinner. Three sheets around, he quickly looked to see if anyone had noticed, and then scrambled onto the forklift, hoping to get the pallet over where it was supposed to be and let the morning crew worry about it. When he raised the pallet, though, the forklift let out a metallic groan and jerked to a halt just when the load was about six feet off the ground. Jiggling the controls did no good. His senses heightened into a mild paranoia about being caught with whiskey on his breath, Emilio gunned the forklift one more time, but to no avail. He jumped down from his seat and leaned a look into the front end of the forklift, seeing almost immediately what the problem was: one of the chains had jackknifed out like a broken bone. Putting his hand forward to touch it, Emilio flinched immediately, recognizing the danger. But just as he let go of his stubbornness and was about to yell down the warehouse aisle for help, the wood of the pallet creaked with a sound that reminded him of an old bridge back in Texas, the sensation of looking down into a cold, racing creek. But Emilio was looking up at the ill-wrapped boxes of paper collapsing, the wooden pallet splintering and suddenly shifting the entire weight of the load. The forklift itself could not handle the distribution, either, and it came crashing down, rolling over on its side, Emilio futilely raising his hands to the massive amount of weight. All of those men who had been in the vineyard had come running and he had heard them screaming, but Emilio couldn’t let any sound out of his own mouth. He had felt the blood drain away around his legs with every painful thump of his heart. The cement floor of the warehouse had gone slick with blood — dark red, almost brown, against the gray — and Emilio had turned his head to see work boots leaving faint footprints of it as the men struggled to lift off the boxes of paper, one at a time.
His father lifted him, both hands reaching upward into Emilio’s armpits, and struggled — his father was too old for this. He lifted Emilio from the lip of the toilet and slid him into the seat of his wheelchair. Morning’s call was done, a little coffee and a cigarette to force the bowels, but the process was taking longer these days. How did it feel, he wanted to ask his father, around his arms? Was he losing too much weight? Lately, Emilio couldn’t tell if his father’s bony hands or the disappearing muscle tone around his own arms was to blame for the discomfort he felt while being lifted. His father sat on the edge of the tub, exhausted, and Emilio maneuvered his wheelchair closer to the sink so that his father could get up and leave the bathroom, but he would not budge. Twice a day his father had been doing this, for almost a year now, and the complaint had always been present in the way he averted his eyes from Emilio. At first, during the initial months of recovery, when Emilio had no choice but to use a bedpan, he grimaced and closed his eyes whenever his father entered the room to inspect the pan for evidence that Emilio needed attending. Embarrassment was not the word; neither was shame. Those words were too easy for how Emilio felt when he turned his head away, listening to the baby wipes being pulled from the plastic container, two at a time. It would be easier, the doctor had told him, once a few months had passed and the strength came back into his arms. He would have mobility, dexterity in his fingers. Remembering this, Emilio would flex his fingers as his father finished up, letting out a small laugh that only made Emilio close his eyes. “I did this when you were a baby,” his father would say, as if it were of no consequence, but surely he was mortified by the bedpan he had to empty daily. Months later, in late autumn, when Emilio was more mobile, he had discovered that his shoulders could not sustain him as he tried to lift himself from the toilet for the very first time; Emilio had struggled to pull his underwear and pants back on, listening quietly to the television in the living room before finally yelling out to his father for help. For the rest of that day, Emilio had sulked in his room, as if he had many possibilities to weigh, as if the problem before them required only identifying the right relative to ask for help. From the floor of his room, he had grabbed two books, a dictionary and a Bible, and lifted them as if he were back in his high school gym pumping out a shoulder press in preparation for football season. He stared intently at the bare white wall of his room as if it were a mirror at the gym, willing his shoulders to regain themselves. In the mall over in Visalia, when he was a teenager, hadn’t he seen some of the older Vietnam vets wheeling around, arms loaded with muscle, one even with a pretty woman stroking his forearm as they looked at jewelry? But he put the books down, defeated, his shoulders pinching with fatigue, what used to be a good pain, good memories of the strain of racing down the edge of the field on Friday nights, hamstrings tight, chest pounding, the feet behind him unable to catch up. Underneath the mattress, because he had counted on his father’s generally slovenly nature, Emilio had hidden some of the pills he was supposed to have taken long ago. For days like these, when he knew his mind would not allow him any consolation, he was grateful for them, and he positioned himself on the bed so he could reach them more easily. A pill under his tongue, then swallowed, and then he would watch the ceiling blur away as he slept — would this be his existence? His father’s exhaustion on the edge of the tub sai
d otherwise. “Apá,” Emilio finally said, “what’s wrong?” He looked past his father at the old lead pipe, dragged from the backyard, that his father had bolted into the tub’s sidewall to help Emilio gain leverage so he could bathe. He pictured his father trying to think of ways to help him when he had no real way of doing so. How many afternoons had Emilio lain in bed, watching the ceiling blur away, the faint sound of a hammer pounding nails into wood, the back-and-forth of a saw in tired hands? All this time — almost a year now — the ramp had been waiting for him from the front door out to the rest of the world, but Emilio had never used it. Ignoring his father’s invitations — his pleadings — to leave the house, Emilio only wheeled into his room and slammed the door. But here was his father now, tired, sitting on the edge of the tub in a bathroom that was ill equipped for Emilio, the house itself too old and small for him to be comfortable, and his father looked like Emilio must have, all those months ago, sitting on the lip of the toilet and wondering how to ask for help. “Apá?” he tried again, hoping almost perversely that something was physically wrong with his father, something to explain the empty pause in his father’s life, something to rid them both of the obligation. “No puedo,” his father sobbed, choking the tears back the way he used to when he drank, years ago when Emilio was a little boy. “No puedo,” his father said again, his words strangled thoroughly with defeat. There was no answer Emilio could give — not after his father’s efforts with the tub, with the ramp that Emilio had yet to use, with his almost year-long refusal to exit the house, even to see the doctor. If his own heart could not settle comfortably around his deterioration, what must his father have been thinking all these months, as he sat in the next room? All over town — all over this street, Emilio knew — fathers abandoned their children all the time and fled to Mexico, allowed themselves to be swallowed up by that country. Little children, unable to fend for themselves, four or five of them at a time, the oldest one guarding the door and watching the oven flame for dinner. Somewhere in men like that lay the answer to why love could not override guilt, and maybe the same virus crept in the blood of Emilio’s father. Adults were adults, even Emilio, un hombre. As they sat in the silence of the bathroom, his father still crying, Emilio contemplated what he might have to do if he were alone, but the possibility of a stranger lifting him from the toilet instantly stymied him. “Allá en Fresno vive una curandera,” his father said suddenly, before Emilio could imagine himself in their kitchen with the linoleum worn down to its black core. So there was his father’s solution: a faith healer over in Fresno, a witch woman. When his father said no more, Emilio realized that he had spoken of a faith healer not as a request but as a demand. People his father’s age gave utmost respect to the power of the body, no matter how much they damaged it with heavy drinking, with Mexican bread in the morning, with the lard set to frying in a pan for every meal. The body persevered no matter the circumstances, was made to perform the way it did when Emilio played football. They never understood how hard it was to maintain a physique like that, and for every minor muscle tear, every time he had come limping off the field, he knew his father had been scanning the bleachers for the person casting the evil eye. In the awkward, translated dialogues with the doctors after the accident at the mill, Emilio had shuttled back and forth between the doctors' refusal to admit how grave things were and his father’s underlying suspicion that black magic was at the root of it all. Emilio would have dismissed the idea, too, had he not remembered seeing what he had seen: the black bile his father had thrown up for weeks when the witch woman cured him of his alcoholism; an egg swept over the body of a cousin in deep fever, then cracked bloody red into a glass of water; the months of calm, just before his parents' divorce, when the curandera ordered his father to strip the bed of the quilt made by his mother-in-law for their anniversary. He believed in these moments as much as he did in the fate that had toppled the boxes of paper to put him where he was: nothing could explain them, but nothing could negate them, either. His father wept as he sat on the edge of the tub, inconsolable. Emilio reached for the faucet, washed his hands clean, arched over to rinse his face, gathering the water in his mouth as if he were gathering this moment, spitting it into the basin, wishing it away. He unbuttoned his shirt down to the navel, cupping a handful of water and bringing it to one armpit, then the other. At Catri’s house when they had been dating, this was what he had done in the deep hours of the night, washing himself down while her parents were sleeping, Catri begging him to be quiet, to run the water only a trickle so the pipes wouldn’t wake anyone up. He checked his face in the mirror and decided against shaving, the bother of it, and buttoned his shirt again slowly. Still, his father would not look up from his crying. So finally he said, “Let’s go, then,” and backed out of the bathroom, wheeling himself to the front door, down the narrow hallway where his father had been forced to roll up and put away the long plastic runner that had protected the carpet. At the door, he felt like a cat waiting patiently to be let out for the morning; he could hear his father creak the bathroom floor with his weight as he walked to his own room. Emilio did not know if he had retreated in defeat, the way all of his relatives did when confronting each other, slouching away from an argument only to relive it differently when telling about it later. But before long, his father ambled down the hallway and he eased past Emilio in the chair to open the front door, cowboy hat and car keys in hand. And there outside was the ramp, its wood brand-new and smoothed, sloping gently down to the front yard.