by Manuel Munoz
As if the wheelchair were a part of him, his father gripped the handles hard as they exited the house; the ramp sounded like a lakeside dock, planks shifting, the chair’s front wheels precariously close to the edge, with no rails to hold them back. They eased down the ramp together, Emilio at his father’s mercy as his old hands struggled some to keep the wheelchair from pitching forward. Would the ramp ever feel less steep — was it the unfamiliarity? The ramp’s edge came down to the grass of their front yard, and Emilio bore down on the wheels to help his father move him along. At the car’s passenger side, his father opened the door and positioned the chair as well as he could, and then the real effort came, a greater effort than Emilio had known all this time — his father had to lift him to his feet to get him into the car. The pain shot through his armpits again as his father lifted, and up he went, helpless and relying completely on his father’s strength, floating in the space between the car and the safety of his own chair. Such second nature to get in a car, Emilio thought, how you got in and lowered your head just so, the rarity of actually bumping your head. But now his body tensed up, out of his own control, and every shift of his father’s legs for leverage made Emilio anticipate being dropped; but instead his father lowered him bit by bit onto the car seat, and with relief, Emilio pulled the whole dead weight of his legs into the car on his own, and then his father shut the door. They were headed toward the answer to this dependence. Without speaking, his father started the car and backed out into the street. All his life Emilio had lived here. Leaving home had been inevitable, like marrying Catri, just a matter of knowing when the time was right; but here he was, still on Gold Street — and now he always would be — among the houses either crumbling down at the foundation or boasting a fresh coat of paint. He counted the houses on his side of the street as they drove along, skipping the vacant lots, the new apartment complex, Catri’s house with no cars out front today. Fifty-nine houses before they reached the stop sign and headed for downtown. One hundred and twenty houses, or thereabouts, each of them with some combination of parents and children or newlyweds, so many people, and after a year probably some Emilio did not know. What change in a year of not leaving the house. Downtown, his father pointed out the new movie theater with its single screen, the renovated stretch of L Street, where the boot store had moved to a choice corner lot and the woman who sold handmade fabric had finally closed out and moved away. Out of town they drove, past the converted film-developing shack, now a drive-through for coffee in the morning, for people heading to work in Fresno. The fields and the orchards whizzed by, just as he remembered them, cyclical and permanent, and Highway 99 with its cars forever traveling. But Fresno itself, once his father chose an off-ramp for Olive Avenue, mystified him with its sudden vastness, its billboards for restaurants and stores located on what used to be the fringes of the northern part of the city. “Way over, on and on,” his father said, waving his hand forward as if he knew why Emilio studied the signs. The deterioration of Olive Avenue, in the older part of Fresno, spoke everything about where the money was headed nowadays. Here were the cars with dangling mufflers and work trucks with bad paint jobs, the meat markets with their hand-painted signs in Spanish, the long-closed beauty salons with their broken neon signs, and everywhere people walking because they had no choice. On and on they went, Olive Avenue even more endless than Gold Street, the traffic surprisingly heavy and the red lights stopping them along the way. Finally, in one of the residential stretches between half-vacant strip malls, his father turned the car into a driveway lined with stacks and stacks of old, bald tires. The house was deep in the yard, hidden behind heavy shrubs, an old Chevy pickup parked at the end of the driveway. Immediately, Emilio saw the two high steps leading up to the porch. A bougainvillea trailed up the railing, but despite its deep, gorgeous color, it made Emilio think of the unruliness inside the house. How would he move around in a place like this, rooms and rooms of knickknacks and tiny tables, porcelain milkmaids and doilies, all leading back to the kitchen table, where he imagined the curandera would do her work? His father turned off the ignition and went to the front door, not turning to speak to Emilio. He knocked patiently on the screen door and waited, listening. When no immediate answer came, he opened the screen and knocked hard on the front door itself, and this time Emilio could sense the movement inside the house. The door opened and his father spoke his business, and after he closed his mouth, a woman poked her head out to look at the car. She seemed to study Emilio so intently that he finally waved at her, as if to assure her that he was real. The woman turned to Emilio’s father and said something to him, which Emilio strained to hear, so he rolled down the window. After his father nodded in agreement, the woman stepped out. She was barefoot. Otherwise, she looked like any of the women you might see in Fresno wandering the aisles of the grocery store. Her black T-shirt was too long for her but still covered her prominent belly, and her faded blue jeans bulged at the thighs. Her lips bore a frosty shade of pink, and around each wrist she wore the bracelets that all the television commercials swore had healing powers, the ones with the tiny balls at each end, not quite meeting. The woman came over to the car, not bothering to say hello, and peeked in to get a look at Emilio’s legs. She felt his forehead and ran her fingers under his chin as a doctor would. “Do you believe in God?” she asked him, and when Emilio did not immediately answer her, she said, “Well, do you?” Emilio told her that he guessed so. “That might be the problem,” she said. “Do you believe in the devil?” This time, Emilio shook his head, and she felt his forehead one more time. “A lot of people do, you know. You should. He’s the reason a lot of times.” She went back to the front porch and walked past Emilio’s father, who had removed his cowboy hat. They waited a few minutes, the bustle of Olive Avenue cut off enough by high shrubs to allow them to hear birds chattering in the branches, making a racket. A cat eased onto the porch and sniffed his father’s boot so quietly that his father didn’t notice. When he looked down and saw the cat, he gave it a shove with his foot, and the cat moved away but stared at him malevolently. The look on his father’s face almost made Emilio laugh — the involuntary disgust his father always felt around animals clashing headlong with superstition. “It’s just a cat,” Emilio said, laughing, and it was the first time all day that he had been free of worry, of anguish. His father would not unlock his eyes from the cat, though, which sat on its haunches with tail twitching. Finally the woman came out and handed what looked like a Gerber baby-food jar to his father. Emilio heard her explaining the directions in Spanish, demonstrating with her hands how he was supposed to rub the salve, her hands circling as if she were washing a window. “¿Entiende?” she asked him, and when he nodded, her hand stopped cleaning the imaginary window and flattened out, expectant. His father took out his wallet and laid out bill after bill, so many that Emilio wondered if he hadn’t planned long in advance to come to this curandera, the sudden tears only a show. After she counted the money, the woman folded the bills and reached deep into the black T-shirt to hide the bills in her bra, and then she walked back out to the car. “You rub that crema on you every night, you hear me?” she ordered, and put her hands on Emilio again, as if to feel once more whatever she might have felt before. “Someone put the evil eye on you,” she told him as her hands traveled up the back of his neck and into the fringes of hair on the back of his head, rubbing him as a lover might, looking away from him in concentration, eyes closed. “You have to believe in it for it to go away.” She lifted her hands and showed them to him, but Emilio saw nothing. “Feel them,” she ordered, and he touched her palms, which had gone completely ice cold. “That’s only the beginning,” she said. “There’s a lot more to take out of you.”
Emilio and his father left the curandera’s with the silence deeper between them, as if both had understood that the other would never understand. True enough, he had felt the woman’s ice-cold palms, as if she had extracted something tangible, but the larger pain came in seeing his father
count out bill after bill and lay them in the woman’s hand, how she tucked them away, gone forever. What she said at the end of the visit, the way she stood looking at them as Emilio’s father slowly backed out of the driveway and onto Olive Avenue, convinced Emilio that she would hold nothing but empty promises, visits extending as long as his father’s wallet held out. He wanted to tell his father how foolish he was to believe in something like this. Even if it were true, how could anyone harness that kind of power in the service of cheating people? Olive Avenue stretched onward — they were traveling to the eastern end of Fresno instead of the highway, all the way down to Clovis Avenue with its tin-roof car washes and antiquated drive-ins, a busy road that edged south from the city into farmland and back out to the old Highway 99, the two-laner that sidled by the smaller towns of Fowler and Selma, for their trip home. Emilio could see the new 99 over to the west, the cars speeding along as always, never a moment’s peace. He didn’t ask his father why he had chosen this slower way home, but he guessed it had something to do with his father needing to come away from the curandera’s with a sense of peace and calm, something heavy traffic would drain away from him. Here the speed limit was only fifty-five, and the offroads eased away in empty ribbons on either side, swallowed up by the grape vineyards. The old broken-windowed motels stood forlorn yet dignified. Emilio studied each of them as they passed by, thought of their histories, of the owners who had watched with worry as the new highway sprang up all those decades ago. What would a town like Fowler have become had the highway not come through? What would have happened instead had the highway not fated the town to move in another direction? To break the silence in the car, Emilio turned on the radio, not asking his father if he would mind, and he spent some time searching the dial until he found the station the mill foreman had played all through Shift Three. He caught the end of Freda Payne’s “Band of Gold,” and then a voice came over and urged them to shop downtown Selma — they would be passing through it in a matter of minutes. After some more ads, the announcer came on to answer a phone call, and the woman said she was from Caruthers. “Caruthers?” the announcer asked in mock surprise. “You get reception out there?” The woman laughed; she sounded older, her voice jagged, the kind of edge that comes from smoking and loving the wrong person. When the announcer asked her for her song dedication, she replied, “‘I’d Rather Go Blind,’ but I don’t remember who sang it. You remember?” she asked the announcer. “That would be Miss Etta James, darlin',” said the announcer immediately, as if he had known without having to look at anything, and the woman laughed again before she spoke the name of a man who lived in Laton. The announcer didn’t ask for their story; he just played the song, and as Emilio listened, he watched the old motels go by, the used-car lots with their triangular plastic flags fluttering, the new strip malls and fast-food joints of Selma, just miles from home now. He listened to the song and thought of Catri, how she had stopped speaking to him after the accident and never visited him in the hospital. The story of how the accident happened must have gone around. Her parents were religious people, and she had been under their thumb for too long, on the edge of wounding them terribly by sneaking him into their house at night. Why the accident changed everything, Emilio didn’t know. He had never been in love with her, but he had liked being with her, liked feeling under her blouse in the quiet of her bedroom at three in the morning, the way her hands would stroke his arms as if in disbelief at their size. He had never been in love with her, but he had whispered those words to her at four in the morning, her eyes glistening some in the dark with tears that never brimmed over. Emilio rested his head against the car door; another song came on, pitch perfect about loving and then not loving. Another song came, and then another, each one speaking to everything his head could contain about love, about Catri: heartbreak, second chances, the heartbreak of second chances. He thought of what the curandera had told him about belief, and he wondered if the same advice would count for Catri, if he willed it enough to happen. Momentarily, Emilio debated speaking aloud to his father, asking him if the curandera did love potions or spells, but he knew it would be the wrong question, and he felt ashamed at the thought of his father imagining him in his bedroom, pining after a girl long gone. But when they came back into town and turned onto Gold Street and he saw the front of Catri’s house graced by the old Mercury her family had always owned, Emilio’s heart skipped; but he refused the urge to turn his head for another look. He waited until they pulled up to their own house, for his father to get the wheelchair out of the trunk, and he gathered all his breath and strength to make the transition to the chair quick. He grabbed his father by the shoulders as he lifted, as if he could stand on his own. His father, stumbling a little in surprise, dropped him quickly into the chair, and Emilio immediately wheeled away from him. “I’ll be back soon,” he told his father. “¿Adónde vas?” his father asked, but Emilio kept going, maneuvering the chair despite the difficulty of the light gravel on their driveway. “Just down the street,” he said, wheeling himself onto the road. “Thirty minutes.” He would have to hug as close as possible to the cars parked on the side of the street: some of the houses still didn’t have sidewalks in front, some had grass too thick for him to manage alone. But he moved down the road as fast as he could, spinning the wheels and ignoring the sudden tightness in his shoulders, his muscles balking. All those houses to pass, fifty-nine of them on this side. Neighborhood cars spotted him and waited patiently for him to get out of the way — cars he recognized, but he ignored the faces turning to look at him, waiting for him to say something first before greeting him. His head remained bent in determination. The street seemed strangely alive with neighbors, people looking up from the hoods of cars they were fixing, curtains parting, doors creaking open to get a better look at him passing — all people who knew his story, knew what had happened. Kids rode by on bicycles, staring at him as they passed, their weaving straightening out as if they suddenly knew why they must heed their parents' long-drawn calls to be safe. Emilio passed by the old house of the last white woman who had lived in their neighborhood — La Viejita, they had all called her, even though she didn’t speak Spanish — a house with new occupants, but now lost to the elements: the overgrowth of weeds in the yard, a blackberry bush gone unruly and staining the sagging planks of what had once been a white picket fence. He had run away from home one foggy evening in winter, angry over a punishment meted out by his mother, and while his parents watched television, Emilio had tiptoed into the kitchen to steal one of the thick brown paper bags from United Market. In it he had put a pair of pants and his two favorite shirts, careful to tuck a pair of socks and underwear at the bottom in case the bag tipped over and spilled everything out. He had left quietly through the back door, crept along the side of the house, and walked down Gold Street, the whole length of it, aiming for the railroad tracks a few blocks beyond there. Sometime during the night, he imagined, a train would pull slowly along the rails, and he would jump into an open boxcar and it would take him far, far away. But when the stop sign at the end of Gold Street came into view, barely visible through the thickening fog, the warm lamplight in a window of La Viejita’s house had urged him to go and knock on the door. When she opened it, he told her without hesitation that he had run away from home. “Pray to the Lord Jesus,” La Viejita told him while he looked past her into the house, at the clarity of its white walls, the lamps on little tables, a delicious scent of something cooking, something he had never smelled at home. “Jesus will take care of you,” she assured him, closing the door slowly, inch by inch. “Now go on back home.” Left alone in the austerity of the fog, he became frightened, and he quickly walked back home, clutching his grocery bag of clothes. La Viejita’s house had no such look of warmth now that she didn’t live there. One of the windows sat open, and a curtain with an ugly yellow and brown pattern curled a lip of itself at a slight breeze. The front yard, once green and lush, had surrendered to dust, and the formidable oak tree had been p
runed down to nubs, scars around the trunk where a dog had been chained. Emilio moved on just a few houses more to Catri’s place, which wasn’t in much better condition than La Viejita’s. He stopped at the edge of the front yard, unable to go any farther because of the height of the grass, the heavy gravel in their driveway. Lifting an arm, he waved futilely at the window as if someone were staring out at him, and just when he put his arm down because of how foolish he felt, the door cracked open. A woman’s head popped out — Catri’s mother, who squinted at him in recognition — and when she popped her head back in, she left the door open. A moment later, Catri came out of the house, arms folded shyly across her breasts as if it were the cool, foggy evening Emilio had run away, and she walked toward him across the grass. She wasn’t smiling. “Catri,” he called out to her. “Hi. How are you?” Emilio asked, wanting to see her smile. She had filled out in the hips, and the way she crossed her arms made them look plumper than they might have been. But she was still pretty and she still had the look in her eyes of expecting a good love from someone. “I’m married,” she told him, even before she reached the street. “I’m married now and I have a baby.” Her crossed arms took on a posture of both defensiveness and shame, as if she now had to confront the truth of never having visited him in the hospital. Behind her, he could see the curtains moving in the windows. If her husband had been there, he would surely have walked out by now. But even without that threat, Emilio put his hands on the wheels and slowly turned himself around, not bothering to look at her. He thought he heard the shuffle of her sandals coming after him, but he kept moving himself forward, leaving all the questions behind. Why? Who? When? Why not? How come? There was no rush to his movement and no deliberate slowing, just turn after turn of the wheels, the rubber working against the calluses made long ago on his palms. All those years ago, returning from La Viejita’s, he had bolted into the front door to the surprise of his parents, and it had been his father who opened his arms to him, put away the clothes in the grocery bag, and gave him a cup of Mexican hot chocolate to put him to sleep. It would be his father now, much older, whom he would see once he reached their house, pausing at the lip of the ramp to be led inside. Yet it still surprised Emilio somewhat when, house in sight, he saw his father sitting on the ramp with his cowboy hat in hand, waiting patiently. His father walked out into the street without asking if he needed help, and he pushed Emilio the rest of the way into the yard and up the ramp, then wheeled Emilio into his room, all without saying a word.