The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue Read online

  The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue

  Manuel Muñoz

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

  To the heart-thieves

  and the heartbroken—

  our redeemers

  and requiters

  This, at least, is Real, and what I know.

  —Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Coora Flower”

  CONTENTS

  Lindo y Querido

  Bring Brang Brung

  The Heart Finds Its Own Conclusion

  When You Come into Your Kingdom

  Tell Him About Brother John

  Ida y Vuelta

  Señor X

  The Comeuppance of Lupe Rivera

  The Good Brother

  The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue

  Gracias

  About the Author

  Special Preview: What You See in the Dark, a novel by Manuel Muñoz

  The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue

  LINDO Y QUERIDO

  PEOPLE KNEW THAT ROAD, that intersection, how often it happens. They recognized it when the newspaper ran a picture from the scene, the motorcycle on the road and a policeman writing something on a notepad. It had been the kind of accident that happens only in fog. But this had been in broad daylight, summertime, the boys coming back from Fresno or wherever they had gone to, and neither of them wearing helmets. At least Isidro made it, people said when they saw it in the papers. The other boy, one of the triplets from over on Gold Street, died right there on the road.

  Now look at his mother in that little blue house on Sierra Way with no car out front. Who knows what she is going to do? For days people have been driving slowly past her house. There are no lights on at night, but people know she’s there. Perhaps the bedroom where she kept Isidro is in the back, a small lamp providing some light. Like any good mother, she slept in that room, watching him, and when morning arrived, maybe one of her friends came to the house to cook food for the day or to bring groceries. But no. The house remains quiet. You’d never know that poor boy had been in there, the front door closed and never opening.

  But it does open, because Isidro’s mother must work and get on with her life. Isidro’s mother works for a woman on the good side of town, doing work that doesn’t need defining. You know what she does and how she does it and how hard it is. His mother knows she is lucky to have this job, because she understands, having lived in the Valley for so many years, that she could be in far worse circumstances. Isidro’s mother has no legitimate birth certificate, no piece of paper that validates her name, the day she came into this world, the country she can claim. The woman she works for calls her Connie, because her name is really Concepción and the English way of saying that sounds sacrilegious. That is the name on the birth certificate she has and the Social Security card, too: Connie Islas, no middle name, and not Concepción, but Connie doesn’t mind. The documents are fake, cost her fifteen hundred dollars and are for show, to flash at anyone who questions who she is. Thus far the price has been worth it. The woman she works for pays her on the side, a small stack of bills every Friday afternoon, and this has been good enough.

  Despite what has happened to her son, Connie sets out from her house on Sierra Way for the walk to the good side of town, in her hand a plastic beach bag that holds her lunch and a container of water. The south side of town has roads so skinny they don’t need painted lines; the neighborhood cars must slow down to ease past each other. Her side of town has vacant lots with overgrown grass, houses only sometimes painted, severely pruned trees. She walks past all of this on her way to work, stepping delicately on the worn strips of lawn where the neighbors' grass blends into the street. Connie thinks of her son when she walks past the high school, through the town center with its shops closed because it is not nine yet, past the post office with its flag disturbed by a slight breeze, past the barbershop with the striped pole that swirls all day and night, past the car wash and the gas station, the gradually prettier houses, the greener grass, onto the wide sidewalks and the streets paved rich and dark, to a house with boulders nonchalant on the lawn, a driveway with two cars, and a husband who waves timidly at her as he goes off to his job.

  The woman she works for is named Georgia, and every morning she gives Connie a list of things to do, written in English. It is Georgia’s way of helping Connie familiarize herself with the language. Connie has worked with Georgia so many years now that the list is no longer just words: dishes, laundry, dusting. The house is routine. She knows the windowsills and the closet shelves and the kitchen drawers and the laundry hamper and the husband’s habit of leaving socks around and the large potted plants in the foyer and the portraits of Georgia’s children and grandchildren on various walls. Connie knows exactly what they own, where the jewelry is, where Georgia keeps her purse and checkbook, what Georgia would notice missing, and thus she has never given herself over to the temptation to take something, something small and easily concealed, valuable at the pawn shops over in Fresno, if she could somehow get a ride there.

  This morning, though, is Connie’s first day back since the accident. Georgia’s house is quiet and the door to the master bedroom is closed. Connie does her morning chores and is surprised to find the house in reasonably neat condition. For a moment, she wonders if Georgia has hired another woman in her absence, but the dusting is so poor that she reasons only Georgia could have attempted it. At lunchtime, Connie takes her plastic beach bag and goes to the backyard. She eats lunch there every day, seated on the little stone bench in the shade or on the deck swing or in the tiny pagoda at the corner of the lawn. Today she wants the comfort of the tiny pagoda.

  She can hardly believe it sometimes when she gets to thinking, eating her cold flour tortilla with peanut butter, some summer fruit. She could be worse off: her husband abandoned her when Isidro was seven years old, and women she knows in that same situation have had to move away. But she still lives in the same house because her husband pays the rent and she does not have to say thank you. Isidro’s death will not change anything. Georgia and her husband keep her employed, so she has never had to navigate the state services, the scrutiny of her fake documents. She knows she isn’t Connie, knows she was not born on July 1, 1955, in Del Rio, Texas, though surely someone was. She’s never even been to Texas.

  Eating her lunch, she thinks about her parents and how she does not trust them, her parents who shipped her off to a husband when she was very young. Much of what they told her, she knows, was a lie, a confusion. Her father insisted she was born on May 9. Her mother said May 10. Sending her terrible news to them, though, is of no use: a woman used to write letters home for Connie, and when no answers came back, this woman told her that correspondence was often lost in Mexico and never delivered.

  Connie has her own way of getting by, and she is not a dumb woman. Plenty of people are in worse spots. Plenty of people cannot sit in backyards like this. What has changed, really? she wonders. Connie knows that people saw her walk along Sierra Way to her job this morning. She knows that people wonder what she does in there, in that little blue house, now that she is alone.

  There must be, she thinks, a few neighbors for whom the situation is unbearably sad. Neighbors who cannot believe that anyone would want to be this alone, could endure so many days of being without anyone, no immediate family coming to help. Surely they want to knock on her door after she has come home from work, to ask her if there is something they can do for her, to ask if she wants to sit out on the front steps and just think aloud, talk some. Deep inside, though, Connie knows she would refuse.

  She drinks water from her container and notices movement in the house. Georgia is out of her bedroom and in the kitchen. Her shadow e
ases across the curtains. Connie imagines the people on Sierra Way looking out of their own kitchens at her house. She imagines them wanting to alleviate the terrible feeling they have about her being alone in the blue house. They go to her front door, knowing Connie cannot be home, and they knock. They knock on the door and stare at the yellow curtains with the eyelet lace trim and the black doorknob chipped at the top, exposing a wink of white plaster. It is a front door with a wide glass plate set hastily into its frame: Connie can remember the green gray putty pressed into place and the fingerprint whorls when the job was done. The curtain moves a little from a fan she has left running in the living room. The eyelet lace trim sways slightly, stops, sways again. But it is daytime and there is no one in the house.

  Georgia has done little to intrude, so when she peeks through the kitchen curtains and their eyes meet across the backyard, Connie feels guilty for having caught her. Georgia will step out here now, away from whatever comfort she took sealed up in the master bedroom.

  Georgia’s husband provides. Georgia has so much, she gives to Connie the things she has no use for. From time to time, they will sort through the bedroom closets and pick out the clothing that will go to the Salvation Army. Georgia is a short, squat woman with legs that remind Connie of the thick tables she dusts in the living room. Georgia’s elegant pantsuits and dresses would do her no good, but sometimes Georgia will hold up an item and ask Connie if she wants it.

  Oh, the things Georgia has given to her: a practically new color television set, thirteen inches; a Betamax VCR; a winter coat every two years; rain jackets; the plastic beach bag for her to carry lunch; vinyl records of Crystal Gayle and Loretta Lynn, which Connie didn’t understand because of the English, but which she listened to anyway because the women’s pictures reminded her of Yolanda del Rio, her favorite; an older set of dinnerware after too many pieces had been broken, with teacups and plates that line Connie’s kitchen cabinet even though she never uses them; dress shirts and ties that Georgia’s husband never wears to work anymore, all for Isidro to have grown into; towels after the fluff has been lost, better to give to Connie than to let her husband use them to dry the car after washing it.

  Her prized possession, though, is the bed set that Georgia gave her three years ago. It has held up very well, the Egyptian cotton, “Eight hundred count,” Georgia had told her. “Or something like that. Do you know what that is? Thread count?” The set was a creamy beige that didn’t look as cool and inviting as it did in Georgia’s house. Her own bed was smaller and she could not use the fitted sheet. But Connie cherished the bed set, washing it by bucket in the backyard with a little Woolite and then hanging it up on the laundry line, stepping back with pride to watch the cloth sway in the breeze.

  But pride can be an enormous, crushing weight. Connie felt that pride when she was all alone in the house and Isidro soiled his bed for the first time — the weight of her son, how long it took her to steer his body in order to remove his bedsheets. The words of the Spanish-speaking hospital staff came back to her relentlessly in the hour it took to complete the task. There are ways to pay for his care. Just fill out the applications. We’ll help you with the questions you don’t understand. Connie had considered it, but papers paralyzed her.

  Isidro had been born in this country on March 22, 1973, and that was his Social Security number on all the hospital forms, but Connie had given none of her own information, for fear the state might take him away. The Spanish-speaking hospital staff assured her that it was not possible, but Connie refused to sign any more papers. She began to cry her refusals, begging them to just let her take her son home. She pleaded with the staff in Spanish to be honest with her — to tell her if her son was going to die, because if he was, then he should be at home.

  What the Spanish-speaking hospital staff had given her: plastic bags with liquid inside and a tube to poke into her son’s arms; diapers with sticky light blue tape; a large bottle of lotion to rub on his body because Isidro had been involuntarily scratching himself so hard that he broke the skin; ointment for the stitches on his head, and large bandages for the incision cutting through his once-smooth chest; a schedule to tell her when a county nurse would come to make sure the boy was not suffering unnecessarily, a nurse who carried needles and vials with something inside that could erase the pain in her son.

  No one in the neighborhood can know how much she suffered being alone with him. Look at the struggle she had removing the soiled bedsheets from underneath her son, and the dilemma she faced down in finally deciding to use her prized Egyptian cotton sheets because there was nothing else.

  The nurse came every day for three days, and each day she used more of the vials and the needles, inspected the hard bruises, changed the dressings, checked Isidro’s temperature, writing all of these things down in her chart. The nurse spoke Spanish — a large woman in her forties, a little older than Connie — and she spent part of the time trying to convince Connie that it would be best for the boy to be back in the hospital. She showed Connie the forms she had already seen, and Connie held them importantly, but she did nothing with them.

  “Bueno,” the nurse told her on the second day when the forms were still unsigned and she checked the wounds again. She asked if anyone in the family had come to help her, and Connie said yes.

  “Bueno,” the nurse told her when she was set to leave and had recorded Isidro in her chart. “While you’re sleeping and someone else is looking after him, tell them to watch for the scratching. Use the lotion and try to keep his hands still. He’ll want to scratch and scratch and scratch because the blood is slowing down.”

  Connie sat at his bedside with only a little lamp on and waited. She cried and then wondered if Isidro could hear her. She apologized to him for crying and for not being able to take care of him. She apologized to him for God’s allowing this to happen, and said to him that he would have every right to ask God about it when he got to heaven. She sat on the bed and held his hands, felt the veins on his arms, fat from so many needles, his skin too cool. Connie leaned into him to feel his breath, and it came, belated, but it was there. She straightened out the Egyptian cotton sheets as best she could, and in the morning she washed the other soiled bedsheet and hung it up.

  She had fallen asleep, and a knock at the door surprised her. Connie walked to the living room and drew back the curtain on her front door. It was the mother of the other boy from the accident, crying, her two remaining triplets by her side. Connie could only nod her head through her own tears as they spoke on the front steps. She had never met this woman or the boy who had died, but she sensed that this woman knew she had no family, and when that thought crossed her mind, standing and hugging the other mother, the two remaining triplets silent, Connie hugged her harder and then told the woman that Isidro was resting, and maybe she could visit another day when he was feeling better.

  After they went away, Connie realized that she had given the impression that her son was home to get better, and she wanted to go after them, to tell the mother that they would soon have equal losses, to say something like our sons or both of them or our boys, but it was too late and she did not know where they lived.

  When his scratching began in earnest, the hours slowed and Connie found it much harder to calm Isidro. She smoothed on the lotion, but he kept scratching. He let out deep breaths and groans. The nurse came and went. This went on for hours, from late afternoon till past the time Connie should have turned on the lamp. She did not turn on the lamp because she did not want to see. Isidro’s heavy breathing was different — it wasn’t a sigh of rest or exhaustion. She knew what was coming. “M’ijo,” she said to him, holding his hands, but still she did not turn on the lamp. He could not resist her, she knew, but who was she to hold back his hands? She wanted to let him scratch, to let him at the itch of his own body.

  She looks at her own hands now, folded in her lap. Connie is finished with lunch, and without looking at her watch she knows it is near the end of her hour. But she
does not rise. She knows Georgia must finally speak to her face-to-face and offer condolence. If she goes inside, she will set about wiping down the kitchen counters or dusting some of the heavy drapes in the living room, keeping busy rather than looking Georgia in the eye. She knows Georgia will come out to the pagoda, so she waits.

  Connie sighs. It is true what they say about the last breath. It is so deep and the exhalation is not exhalation at all, but release, with nothing back in. Connie knew what it was and turned on the light. She cried at the unanswered letters that had been sent to her parents. She cried at her husband’s having left her. She cried for the bad stroke of luck both her son and that other boy and his mother had had, and then she cried because she could not go to that woman’s house to share the misery.

  Connie remembers how she said Isidro’s name and asked him to forgive her. She wiped at her face and then went next door to use the phone. Connie knocked on the neighbor’s door. It was evening and she looked at the street, how the day had passed. A young girl looked at her from behind the curtain, and Connie recalls hearing the girl’s father ask her who it was, but the young girl did not answer. The young girl kept staring at her, and the father, fed up with the silence, came over and opened the door.

  It is past one o’clock when Connie finally looks at her watch, a tiny silver face with a black band given to her by Georgia. All it needed, Georgia had told her, was a new battery. She sees Georgia coming her way, folding her arms across her bosom even though it is so hot out. Georgia steps timidly toward her bench, and Connie figures this is how you walk toward someone with a great sadness, looking down at the grass.

  “You sure you don’t want to take the rest of the day off, Connie?” Georgia asks, still standing.

  “No,” she answers. “I have a lot to do.”

  “Do you mind if I sit?” Georgia asks, and Connie nods because it is her house. Georgia sits with her arms still crossed, and Connie can see the shoes she is wearing, aqua pumps with a thick heel that must have left small dents in the lawn when she crossed over.