Island of Divine Music (23 page)

Paul walked in silence, his brow knitted. Angelo had to work to keep up with him. They were walking through what Angelo might call a ghetto, and the boys he saw crowded around a car he would call gang-bangers. Thumping hip-hop blended with salsa, corny organs and melodramatic chords on synthesizers, the word
amor
in a sleazy echo repeated every few seconds,
love, oh, careless love,
he thought, mixed with rap cadences punctuated by
butt, bitch,
and
fuck.
His old soldier/junkie brother, the baseball star, Mr. Strong and Silent, whose exploits on the field had been their father’s favorite subject when they’d been kids, marched fearlessly through the valley of gangstas to a taqueria.

All of the other patrons were Mexicans, apparently. Angelo bought them little tacos with radish and lime garnish. He drank a Corona while Paul stuck with water. Paul wanted to stay when they were done eating, so Angelo ordered another beer. A tall man with long white hair entered the restaurant, and Paul went up to hug him.

Jim Littlebear, Paul said, this is my brother, Angelo. He knew Jesús.

Not in the biblical sense, Angelo said. He chuckled and shook the man’s hand. Well. Can I buy you a beer? Some tacos?

Jim Littlebear accepted a beer. He and Paul sat and stared at each other for some time, Mona Lisa smiles playing across their lips. Angelo tried to engage them in conversation. You guys should try
these fish tacos. Where do you guys know each other from? You live here, Jim? You guys in the same outfit or something?

Their silence became embarrassing to Angelo. He gazed out the window. He pulled out his laptop and checked his mail. He got within one digit of writing his wife. Jim Littlebear walked slowly to the jukebox, which had just finished a Mexican
corrido,
and dropped quarters into it. He smiled as the music started up again: Nights in White Satin. The Moody Blues made no sense to Angelo in a little Mexican taqueria. His brother and Jim Littlebear resumed their postures at the table, now and then closing their eyes and rocking their heads to the music. Both men were silent through the entire song. Angelo found the crapper, which seemed to him imported specially from Tijuana. He could hear the cheerful beat of another ballad from Northern Mexico, then Nights in White Satin again. Gag me with a patchouli stick, Angelo thought. When he came out there were three more people at the table, two of whom were Indian or Mexican women, the third a little white troll with a longer beard than Paul’s.

My brother, Angelo, Paul said. Lorna Dee Hernández, Kathy Manslayer, and Roger the Lodger. I don’t know your last name, Lodger.

That’s cool, nobody does, the little man croaked.

Man slayer? Angelo asked.

My brother knew Jesús, maybe better than I did because they worked together.

The ladies nodded their heads and made oohing sounds. Lorna
Dee was a dark, plump woman with short black hair and thick glasses. Manslayer had long silver-and-black hair which fell across her sharp cheeks. Something in the arc of her neck made him think of Jennifer. Roger asked if anybody besides him was hungry, and Lorna Dee called out to the waitress in Spanish.

I guess we should start, Jim Littlebear said.

Paul said that he guessed they were all as anxious as he was to see Jesús again. Angelo noticed that the younger woman, Lorna Dee, had a puzzled expression on her face as his brother spoke. Paul related the hands-on healing experience, how he’d been cured of heroin addiction.

Amen, Angelo said. He raised his hands in the air. He kept a straight face. A slow Mexican polka with quivering, nasal voices groaned in the background. Plates of beans, tortillas, and rice came to their table. The Lodger dug in.

Lorna Dee’s brow remained knitted during Paul’s talk and continued its scowl through Littlebear’s description of Jesús preaching on Alcatraz. How Jesús had seemed aware of the troubled spirits of the former inmates, how he’d told riddles which you had to puzzle over until they hit you right here, and he struck himself on the head by way of punctuation.

Hallelujah, Angelo said, raising his arms again, trying to catch Lorna Dee’s attention. Nobody seemed to notice.

Lorna Dee raised her hand, like a kid in class, and Jim called on her like a teacher. Her maroon nails extended a couple of inches past the tips of her fingers. When Kathy called me, I thought we were going to talk about the newspaper articles, she said.

Newspaper of Jesus, Angelo said, arms rising again.

Kathy Manslayer touched his arm. They were all glaring at him now. Why are you here? When Kathy asked him this, Angelo blushed. It wasn’t just her neck, it was the shape of her eyebrows, especially now that she was mad, which made him think of Jennifer. He apologized, but Kathy kept glaring at him.

Okay, he said, I am really sorry. I’ll try to be a better person.

I wonder if you really knew him, Kathy said.

Well, I did. We used to make each other laugh when we were supposed to be cleaning the Venetian blinds in the church rectory. You guys talk about him like he was God’s only begotten son, but I saw a very human side to him. He could imitate voices, for one thing. He did that Indian shtick as a gag in our guerrilla theater. Paulie, don’t you remember he was Mexican and Italian? He just looked like an Indian.

The group at table sat silently for a moment. Even the music stopped, the whining waltzes and polkas about love. Kathy Man-slayer stared at Angelo. Finally she asked him why he was such a pessimist.

I’m a pessimist because I don’t think our step-uncle, or whatever you want to call him, was the actual son of God?

Negative, Jim Littlebear said. Heads nodded sympathetically.

Angelo felt his face burning. Did you know that I wrote a lot of those riddles Jim was talking about? Jesús and I came up with these enigmatic, pithy sayings together, when we were stoned and doing people’s voices. He would do this evangelist act right at the pulpit in our church when we were the only ones there. I used to pretend to
be crippled, and he’d say something nonsensical, some puzzler we made up together:
If the pelican catches a fish but cannot swallow it because the fisherman has tied twine about its throat, how does the armadillo dream in his shell?
Then he’d lay his hands on me, and I’d walk away, healed. Sometimes I’d jump and click my heels. Paulie, I’m sorry. He was an actor.

Paul.

Paul! He goofed on people with me, for money! It was an act!

Now, hold on a second. It was the little white troll, Roger the Lodger, who spoke in his sandpaper voice through a mouthful of beans. Hold on. I got by most of my life as a thief and a con man, and I’ve seen them all. The religious cons, too. This boy might have pulled some con, but what he done, when I seen him, was the real McCoy. I mean . . . Roger spread his arms out and looked up. I mean, you felt it, the energy, man, you felt it!

Jim and Kathy smiled and nodded. He was maybe a little bit the trickster, Jim said, and Kathy laughed. Yes. I think he had the trickster in him, too.

Tricked our sister into setting fire to the draft-board office, An-gelo said to himself while the others grinned and nodded. His laptop tinkled, and he walked outside to a sidewalk table to read the message.

Naomi wanted to warn him about the rejection before his copy came in the mail. She always warned him first. He wrote back, thanking her heartily for giving him the bad news. He described the situation in the restaurant and how he needed an excuse to leave the table.

He didn’t want to return to the group inside, so he pretended to press the keys. He could see them sitting around the food with their hands joined, now. Manslayer was a beautiful woman, he realized, and in his inimitable way he’d made sure she hated his guts, hadn’t he? Now she was holding something, and it looked as though she were reading aloud to the group from a newspaper clipping. The Lodger looked at him, and Angelo pretended to read the screen until the familiar tinkling indicated that he had another message from across the continent.

Naomi asked him how he felt about his brother’s desire to find this person. Didn’t Angelo want to find Jesús Verbizcaro, too? The story he’d written, and which she’d helped him publish so many years ago in a journal and cited when she offered further representation, was ostensibly about that same young man on Alcatraz Island. Shouldn’t he join his brother’s search?

Jesús had called Alcatraz La Isla de Alcatraces, which Angelo had translated to The Island of Pelicans as the title of his old story. So, Naomi thought he should join his crazy brother and write a follow-up story on the adventure or something

Everybody around him was going insane.

He wrote back, asking if Naomi could find an electronic address for the real Jesus in Heaven so Angelo could tell Him about the group of old hippies in the restaurant, and how He might need to appear and set them straight. Poor bastards, they’re waiting for you, Big Guy, and they’ve got you mixed up with my great uncle. Why don’t you show, you old trickster? Help my brother, for Christ’s sake.

Angelo

T
hree weeks after the taqueria supper, Angelo stood near the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City and lost his brother. Anvil-shaped clouds gathered above the city as he hurried down the steps they’d just ascended. After an hour of searching he stretched out on a stone ledge, under the once-buried nostrils of a plumed serpent covered by Catholics when they built their church on top of the Indian temple, and moaned. The rain came and drenched him before he could seek shelter.

An old woman leaned over him and asked if he was drunk,
bo-racho,
he understood that much, and he shook his head.

No puedo encontrar mi hermano,
he said.

Su hermano,
the woman said, pointing. Angelo looked and saw Paul wandering across the street.

He rushed across a street which flowed now like a stream, and it made him remember something about the original Aztec city being an island with canals. Paul’s white hair towered over the mass of people in the open-air market, but Angelo’s cries went unheard.
Muddy buses roared by like resurrected dinosaurs, kids kicked balls against crumbling walls, the streets were filled with people, three kids riding one bicycle, mothers and fathers carrying five little ones and three plastic sacks of food between them. Angelo saw a pharmacy with an electric pony in front of it and a line of kids waiting for a ride, like this was the Matterhorn at Disneyland. Above his brother’s head he saw a school of fish-shaped
huaraches
nosing up strings to the rafters of the market. He saw human-sized bleeding carcasses on tables, plucked chickens hanging among bananas and shell necklaces; he saw angel-faced children selling corn tortillas from baskets, and toothless beggars, one a leper, he supposed, with a cave for a nose. Paul stood before a stall filled with jars and bundled herbs.

Hey, Angie, where you been?

T
hey boarded the Red Arrow, La Flecha Roja, for Cuernavaca. Mexico City was like two or three Los Angeleses, Angelo thought, a pasta bowl heaped over the rim with smog and people, but what would be considered a slum in LA was affluence beyond the imagination here. The suburban house built of a deodorant ad, where Jennifer and Sam had spoken to him this morning, would be considered a palace. The disparity between rich and poor hadn’t hit him so hard since his radical days, when he and Jesús and a group of troublemakers had smeared themselves with ketchup and carried
Eat the Rich
placards into some bank on Market Street.
Because it’s never too late to make a first impression.

His brother slept in the seat beside him. He’d taken to drinking beer again, ostensibly because the water was bad, and this made him much easier to be around. Angelo found him a kinder, gentler Paul after a few Negra Modelos. Also, he’d shaved his Santa Claus beard and accepted, along with the plane ticket, some new clothes.

Popocateptl loomed like a purple wave over the city of eternal spring as the bus descended a snaky highway in twilight. Angelo had read that Cuernavaca was a favorite for summer hideaways because of its lovely climate and proximity to the capital, that Cortez and Maximilian, even the shah of Iran, had kept secret palaces here. Weird to think that their step-uncle, the guy who’d inspired religion in Paulie and political vandalism in Penny, may have found refuge where, for centuries, despots and fat cats had hidden out.

That evening Angelo called his daughter, and Sam asked about volcanic eruptions. Mom says you’re right under a huge volcano which could blow any day.

Jennifer’s voice was sweet. All our daughter can do is talk about your adventure. She really wishes you’d taken her along.

His adventure. After he hung up he thought about the way she’d said that, the hint of, what, admiration? A memory of how Jenn used to speak when his life had seemed more interesting to her? He stood before the mirror, a middle-aged guy with extra pounds and a receding hairline, and thought about his adventure.

At five in the morning Angelo awoke and realized that his brother was missing. He waited for first light to go looking for him. Some of the streets he called his brother’s name down were narrow and cobbled, others wide and filled with commercial logos. Everything
was drenched and oozing with the morning’s warmth. Bird-of-paradise along walls with glimmering glass set into their tops to slice the fingers of the poor. A church with a garden of exotic flowers and a few bats coming in from the night, like shattered pieces of the night sky gathering under the church eaves. The streets led him to the
mercado,
which was in a ravine with the volcano towering over its end, and among the vendors who were setting up stalls and stoves or simply laying out their blankets of limes and potatoes he found his brother.

Paulie sat with a beer and a Bible, leaning against a wall in the ravine. Angelo asked him where he’d spent the night.

The school wasn’t open.

No kidding? Not at three in the morning? Angelo squatted beside him. The nerve of some people. His brother stared off somewhere, he guessed at the mountain. So, what do you think?