The Importance of a Piece of Paper

by Jimmy Santiago Baca

  There were reporters on the bleachers all around him with rucksacks filled with notepads, tape recorders, and cameras, sipping from whiskey flasks, putting the previous days’ interview notes in order. Tilting his head back to gulp the last swig of beer from his paper cup, out of the corner of his eye Franklin saw a woman’s face flash across the giant movie screen that hung from the coliseum canopy. At first he thought his eyes were playing tricks on him. The cup fell out of his hand, beer dribbled from the corners of his lips, and he coughed on the liquid that went down his windpipe. Regaining his composure, he wiped his eyes and mouth and studied the screen, but the woman was gone. He must have only imagined, for an instant, the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

  The halftime show started and two cowboys drove trucks with horse trailers into the arena. A cow trotted out from one of the chutes, its milk bag flopping to its gait. A referee whistled and the two cowboys jumped out of their pickups, took out their horses, and saddled them. The first cowboy to successfully mount his horse, lasso the cow, fill a cup with milk, get back on his horse, and race to the finish line, still holding the cup of milk, won. The race took place and then the clowns came out, chasing a Shetland pony with a blue heeler riding it. Some dove at the Shetland while others somersaulted over it. The clowns were ex–bronc riders who couldn’t ride anymore because of injuries but still wanted to stay in the scene.

  A little later, a tractor flanked by young 4-H cowboys came out and raked the arena smooth. They set up orange drums for the barrel racing competition and departed. A few minutes later, the first horse burst out of the gates and churned around the barrels, hooves spitting dirt puffs. Franklin was amazed at how far down these women riders could lean their horses—a mere five or six inches off the ground—while going that fast around a barrel. He saw the horses wrench sideways, snorting, every muscle strained taut to its limit. He watched in awe as rider after rider blasted out of the gate, determined to be the best.

  Then the last young rider, with long walnut-colored hair, flew out of the gate. He looked up at the screen and his lower lip trembled, perspiration beaded his forehead, and he found it difficult to breathe—he hadn’t imagined her after all. She was the same woman he had seen flash by on the screen earlier, and now she took his breath away.

  Six years later, as he looked at the photograph he held in his hands, the sight of her bloody face looking up at him still pierced him with its openhearted vow, innocent and truthful as rays of light radiating over water at sunrise.

  The initial sight of her had reignited something in him that had died, and it came alive as hot as the blinding camera flashes that flickered from the bleachers that day. All the qualities in a woman that he desired—indeed, fantasized about—he sensed she possessed. He had dreamed of her but had never pictured her face. She was more beautiful than he could have imagined.

  As she flew among the barrels, strands of her dark hair flew back with the horse’s auburn mane, her tanned almond complexion blended in with the horse’s dark coat, and its turquoise halter, reins, and saddle trim merged with her blue eyes. She lost her cowboy hat on the first turn. Like a general charging into battle, she attacked the barrels, at times leaning so low on the turns that her reins grazed the ground. Franklin had never experienced such desire for any woman, and watching her performance on the edge of his seat, he joined the crowd to roar her on.

  The times were announced immediately after each run, and after hers the announcer stated that five seconds had been subtracted from her overall time as a penalty for knocking down a barrel. It was enough to drop her to fourth. He saw her walking to the rear of the coliseum where the horses were stalled, watching closely to see if anyone met her. She was alone. Franklin hurried down the stands. He spotted her heading to the open-air stalls, and as he neared her, he started worrying that she would think he was a nut. But what could he do?

  And then suddenly he was beside her, gulping for air. The sight of her big blue eyes, high cheekbones, and shapely lips stunned him almost speechless.

  She glanced at him suspiciously and said, “Can I help you with something?” Her voice sounded light and yet powerful. He struggled to make himself relevant.

  “No, no, well, yes... uhh—Lynn, right?—you did great...” Franklin said.

  “Yeah, he did okay,” she said, petting her horse, “it was my leg that knocked over the barrel.” Her horse was beautiful— a black gelding, half quarter horse, half thoroughbred, it had four white stockings and a blaze of white down its face.

  All around them penned-up livestock bellowed, whinnied, and bleated, and the humid air reeked of dung and horse sweat. Yet, because he was gazing at Lynn, to Franklin the encounter seemed as sweetly romantic as a snowy evening in a mountain cabin.

  Lynn faced him with dust-caked cheeks, streaked where she had wiped away her tears. “What is it you want?” she asked, making an effort to sound cheerful.

  “Five seconds, that’s all you lost by. But you were the best... the very best.”

  She searched his face. “My horse might be poor, but he did good, it was my fault.” She flushed with emotion and it took all her composure to keep from weeping.

  “Can I walk back with you?” He paused. “This might sound crazy, but when I saw you, a part of me remembered you, as if you were someone I had known for a long time.”

  She gave him a long look as if to determine whether she could trust him. “Sure; right now I feel like the loneliest cowgirl in this whole rodeo.”

  * * *

  Lynn called his hotel the following morning and they went out for breakfast. She had no expectations, but when she saw Franklin leaning against the red brick restaurant a sparkling sensation overcame her. As she crossed the street, though it was a warm April day, snowflakes started to float down softly. Later, when she was alone and thoughtful, she would interpret the snowfall as a heavenly omen in their favor.

  From that moment on they could hardly stand being apart. They felt a history not yet lived awaiting them. And this certainty expanded and brimmed in all their senses, like the fragrant aroma of homemade bread just pulled from a brick oven. Days and nights blurred by. They gradually put their past lives behind them and in a short while it seemed they hardly even recognized who they had been, as if they had been wearing costumes until then, pretending to be people they were not.

  Still, there were times when Lynn agonized over what people said and thought about them: She was twenty years old, he was forty; she was white, he was Hispanic; he was Catholic, she was Mormon, and she’d been groomed by church elders to follow the Latter Day Saints life and marry someone condoned by the church officials. When she went home to visit her parents, they threatened to disown her if she didn’t come to her senses and discontinue her affair with Franklin. “He’s only five years younger than I am,” her father roared at the kitchen table. Her girlfriends, over drinks at the old college watering hole, guessed he was suffering a midlife crisis and advised Lynn to take advantage of it—have all the sex she wanted with him, travel, buy clothes, accept his money, then leave him. She was torn in two because she knew her parents and friends were probably right, but she loved Franklin beyond all understanding. No matter what adversity they had to face, they would take on each challenge together.

  Franklin’s friends were highly critical of him too; some accused him of thinking he was too good for his own kind. They mocked him for being a “coconut”—brown on the outside, white on the inside. But beyond what friends and family said, society gave the harshest condemnation.

  When Lynn and Franklin relaxed in the whirlpool at the gym, women turned their contemptuous eyes on Lynn for being a young woman with an older man. In restaurants in the ski resorts north of Salt Lake City, white people glared at Franklin for daring to claim the company of a young white girl. In southern New Mexico, in cafés packed with Chicanos, customers scrutinized them and smirked, inferring that she was merely his temporary sex toy and he was a foolish man without scruples. Wherever they w
ent in public, bigotry followed them, but in private nothing could lessen their romantic exhilaration.

  Lynn had set out to get Franklin healthy again and soon had him jogging with her. They ran along the West Mesa dunes, where rattlesnakes and coyotes greeted them as they scaled the dormant volcano. He puffed and coughed and she had to wait for him to catch up, but gradually he was running next to her. Along with juices made from fruits, vegetables, and wheat grass, she had him drink six glasses of water a day, and she fixed him robust salads. After he quit smoking, she taught him how to swim at the gym pool, and later, after swimming, they strolled along the Rio Grande, surrounded by willows, and meditated on the flowers, the flowing water, and the cranes wading in the shallows. Sometimes she would dance wildly in a clearing, captivating him in her gyrating, hypnotic mating ritual, and then they would make love on the ground.

  These were emotionally packed days, grounded in a way Franklin had not enjoyed before. Being with Lynn had renewed his belief in God and given him a newfound faith in his ability to create a meaningful relationship. During this time, on the way back from a three-day camping trip, they stopped in at St. Francis Cathedral in Santa Fe. A dozen or so elderly parishioners were sitting in pews counting Hail Marys on rosaries when Franklin and Lynn entered and took a seat nearest the main altar. Franklin closed his eyes and when he opened them a few minutes later, he saw Lynn crying, overwhelmed with piety. Then she stood, went up to the communion railing, raised her arms, and began to pray aloud. The people around her stared as she thanked Christ for bringing Franklin and her together. When they left the church, Franklin asked her what had happened. Lynn said that she had had a religious experience and planned to convert to Catholicism.

  They headed to a café off the plaza, and as she talked avidly about her encounter with the spirit of Christ, which she had felt infuse her being, Franklin gave a silent prayer of his own: that God would give him the faith he needed to make the relationship work. Privately, he was still afraid love would blow up in his face again.

  As summer ended they took long drives into the country, along prairie roads bordered with rolling meadows and narrow black-top roads winding through forested mountains. During one trip Franklin told Lynn that he thought most men in their forties stopped trying to achieve the dreams they had as young men. Before he had met her, he said, he had been stuck midstream, unable to find the strength to reach the other bank, with no connections to anything worthy of belief—the spirituality movements he had sought out seemed too trendy and shallow and lacking in compassion. But now, for the first time in a long time, with Lynn’s love, he possessed the strength to cross the stream and believe in people and life again.

  In September the two found themselves in Washington, D.C., where Franklin had a weeklong job playing congas at a salsa club. One Saturday morning they drove to a frozen lake. Franklin picked up a large stone and threw it as far as he could onto the ice.

  “I’ll prove how much I love you,” he told Lynn, and started out on the lake to retrieve the rock. She watched quietly with her big blue eyes tracking his every breath and step. When he finally reached the rock and picked it up, the ice began cracking all around him. He couldn’t turn around, so he stood there, looking out over the frozen lake, wondering what would happen if it broke and he sank in. He carried the rock walking backward. Each step he took made the ice break more, fragments floated apart, bubbles gurgled beneath the thinned ice, and crack lines spidered all around like a huge white web slowly ensnaring him. Franklin remained calm as he felt the ice crackling and moving up and down. Five or six yards from the shore, the ice finally gave way and broke, and he fell into the slushy water— water so cold it would freeze him to the bone in seconds. But before he was completely swallowed up by the water, he threw the rock onto the shore and managed to crawl his way to firm ground. Blue in the lips and hands, and shivering, but smiling, he managed to chatter the words out, “I love you, Lynn.”

  Later, in December, Franklin flew home with Lynn to spend Christmas with her parents. Feeling nervous and awkward around her friends one night at a party, he got drunk and then drove crazily through the snow-packed streets, speeding through red lights and nearly killing them both. He left the next morning and she didn’t return with him. Lynn had never seen this side of Franklin and the incident completely unnerved her.

  She said she needed some time to think and that things between them were so intense, she wanted to slow down and get grounded. She called him later to tell him she was going to accept a job offer teaching English. He objected, arguing it would tear them apart, but she insisted it was only temporary. She needed to be around her friends, visit with her parents, and think about their relationship.

  He drove around a lot during that period, revisiting the area where he had grown up. His thinking was getting worse and worse, and he now wondered if their time together was nothing more than a cheap affair. At one point she said that her friends would not understand. Understand what, he thought now, that he loved her, that he wanted a life with her?

  He wrote to her, saying that he was ready to settle down, that he was prepared to spend his life with her. He didn’t care what people thought or said; he promised her he would be true and they would have a good life. But her replies seemed cautious, mistrustful, and emotionally strained. He grew angry and accused her of playing him and his emotions—for her, he said, his love was all a game. This made her withdraw into silence and when he did hear from her again weeks later, she sounded relieved to have her life back to normal. She was back in her old apartment, having coffee with old friends before work and beers with girlfriends after work, and she was content to let their relationship cool off.

  Over the next three months, they talked on the phone almost every night. He questioned her about why she was unprepared to commit herself to him and she in turn wondered how stable a life with him would be. She kept returning to the night when he got so drunk. It worried her. They went over the problems they had already encountered because of their age difference and cultural backgrounds. When Lynn asked him how he felt about marriage, again he backed away from saying he would marry her. He was afraid of not being able to measure up to her expectations and he said he wanted to first try living together. With some reservation, she agreed to jump-start their relationship again and flew down to Santa Fe for a weekend with him.

  At his apartment, they talked long into the night, speaking truthfully and solemnly about their mutual fear of commitment, of failure, of hurting each other and being hurt. They couldn’t articulate the contradiction that struck at the center of their souls: the desire to love and be loved, to give and yet take, to be together and alone, and last, the impulse to be courageous and fearful. Though they both admitted they had never loved anyone so intensely and deeply, perhaps the safest thing to do would be to give each other time and space, and if it was meant to be, they’d end up together. But as soon as they woke, they found that they couldn’t stop crying and kissing and holding each other. They were quiet on the way to the airport and they wept as they parted.

  Over the next two months they lived in separate worlds, dated other people, worked, and made new friends. They tried to forget each other but it was useless. Franklin called Lynn one day to tell her he had decided to move to Mexico. He left a message on her machine and she called him back that evening.

  Lynn said she was due for a break from teaching and agreed to drive down to New Mexico and meet him at the hot springs. He tried to sound nonchalant but his voice broke in places nevertheless.

  Sunday morning he rose early, packed a lunch basket with various fruits, sandwiches, bottled water, and juice, and drove two hours to the hot springs. She looked as beautiful and stunning as she had that first day at the rodeo. It was a perfect day, blue sky, sunshine. At the springs a host of Chicano families was scattered around, and as Franklin and Lynn talked in one of the pools, they watched kids squeal with delight as they ran over the grassy meadows down into the stream to swim and spla
sh. The scalding, mineral-green water made their flesh red and hot, and Franklin soon helped Lynn climb out of the muddy hole so they could rush down to the swiftly moving stream. They clambered precariously over river stones, hollered vigorously as they lay down in the freezing water, endured it for a few minutes, then leaped up and dashed back to the pool, where they sank down to their necks in the hot bubbling water.

  They massaged each other, and then Franklin suggested that he hold her up while she floated in his hands. She stretched out, he put his palms under the small of her back for support, and she remained that way for a long time with her eyes closed. Then she did it to him, had him lean back and surrender to her hands under him. Everything but his eyes was underwater and he could hear the bubbles issuing from the earth below him, rising from the molten rock miles under the surface, making its way up thousands of feet to reach his body to caress him and ease him with its nurturing warmth. For a long time he drifted off with his eyes closed, feeling himself float away into particles that glided out into the universe, attaching to the spirit of all creatures and life-forms. Though neither could explain how, they both felt the power of the water that had flowed up from the center of the earth to bless them and unite them in a mystical resurgence of faith and hope.

  “And that was it...” Franklin heard himself whisper, studying the photograph that captured their glazed looks in the hot sun. Early that day they’d been drinking tequila at the Tijuana Hotel, hours before the bullfights. The matadors stayed at the same hotel, and from time to time, one would sweep by on his way to a waiting car, or another would stand on a coffee table in the lobby with an attendant applying last-minute touch-ups to his costume.

  Off in a corner beside windows that looked out over a patio garden, he and Lynn were drinking with a Chicano photographer wearing a bull’s spine necklace and his boyfriend, the editor of an L.A. magazine. The two men had invited them over to join them in sampling exotic tequilas.