A Santo in the Image of Cristóbal García

by Rick Collignon

  Flavio rose to his feet and stretched out his back. The day outside looked hotter than ever and, worse, now a dry wind was beginning to blow. In his mind, Flavio could see Ramona’s alfalfa field wilting and dying in such heat while he sat inside doing nothing. “I should take you home, Felix,” he said. “Back to Pepe where you belong.”

  Behind him, Felix leaned forward and reached out and touched the back of Flavio’s leg. “My feet hurt too much, Flavio,” he said, “and I don’t feel so good.”

  And, without thinking, Flavio answered, “That’s what you get, hombre, for walking through the mountains at your age.” Then, he fell silent.

  A sudden chill ran through Flavio’s body so deep that his legs nearly buckled. The rasp of Felix’s breath filled the room, and again Flavio felt the brush of Felix’s hand. As if he were still a child, Flavio thought that what was happening couldn’t be and that it was possible one of them had died while dozing on the sofa. What he should do, he thought, was walk out of the house and get in his truck and drive home—even if it was he who was dead. He actually took a step toward the door before he stopped and turned around.

  At first, not one thing about Felix seemed to be any different. His hands still shook, his back was badly bent, and he seemed to be no more than bones inside his clothes. But, now, his eyes stared straight up at Flavio without wavering.

  “Where have I been, Flavio?” Felix asked, and this time, though his words were still harsh, they came out of his mouth in a way Flavio remembered.

  “Felix,” Flavio said, and his voice broke. “Are you back, Felix?”

  “I don’t feel so good, Flavio.”

  “I can’t believe my ears,” Flavio said. “You’re talking, Felix. It’s like a miracle.” He grinned and suddenly felt like running in small circles about the room. “Wait until Pepe finds out. Wait until the village hears. It’s so good to see you again, Felix.”

  “Where have I been, Flavio?’ Felix asked again.

  Flavio looked down at him. “When?” he asked.

  “When?” Felix asked. His eyes moved away from Flavio and went nowhere. “I don’t know when,” he said. Then he began to cry silently. Tears ran down his face and, mixed with blood and dirt, dropped to the floor.

  Flavio took the two steps back to the sofa and sat down. He put his hand on Felix’s leg and gave it a little pat. “It’s okay, Felix,” he said. “Quiet yourself now. You’ve been sick for a long time, but now you’re better. I don’t blame you for being so upset.”

  Felix shook his head. He opened his mouth to say something, but all that came out was a cough so deep and full of phlegm and tears that Flavio clenched his teeth and shut his eyes until it passed.

  “A little water,” Felix said. “I could drink a little water, Flavio.”

  “Oh sí,” Flavio said. He picked up the glass from the floor and held it to Felix’s mouth. “There,” he said, “but don’t drink too much, my friend,” and he took the glass away.

  Felix sat there swallowing water and air. Then he turned his head, and the two men looked at each other. “I’m so happy to see you, Felix,” Flavio said, his own eyes filled with water.

  “IT WAS A POT THAT MADE ME SICK,” Felix said. “The big pot that my grandmother had cooked in. This pot had been in my family since before I was born, and it was one I always trusted.”

  Felix talked staring straight ahead, his words not much more than ragged air. Sometimes, as he told his story, he began to tremble so badly that Flavio would put his arm around his shoulder as if to hold him together.

  It was early on a late winter morning that Felix had his stroke. It was still dark out and the only one in the café was Paco Duran, who was sitting by himself, smoking and drinking coffee by the front window. Outside, old snow was crusted along the side of the road and the moon was shining in the melted ice on the highway. Felix’s son, Pepe, was rolling out tortillas in the kitchen, and Felix had just begun to prepare his beans. A small radio on one of the counters was turned on low, and as Pepe sprinkled flour, he sang a little with the music.

  Felix had slept badly the night before, dreaming of things that disturbed him and that he couldn’t remember. He could feel grit beneath his eyelids and his shirt felt too heavy and too close to his skin. He thought that after he put on a large pot of water for his beans, he would step outside to feel the cold air on his face.

  As he took the pot down from the hook on one of the vigas, he glanced inside it to make sure that Pepe had cleaned it well the night before. The light from the ceiling danced on the bottom of the pot, and in that instant, with the sound of Pepe’s singing in his ears, Felix’s life passed before his eyes.

  “It was like eating,” Felix said to Flavio, “and in one bite is your whole life.”

  He saw his grandparents, bent and stiff and always arguing about anything, walking together on the path that led to the church. He saw his mother and father cooking beans and tamales and canning chiles in their own kitchen, and he understood the look his mother would sometimes give his father when she would bend over to pick up something she had dropped. He saw his wife, Belinda, as a young girl in school before he had ever kissed her or touched her face and then, later, on their wedding night when he knew in his heart there was no such thing as death. He even saw his sad little baby with the twisted foot that Belinda had lost giving birth to, and he remembered the sound of Belinda’s crying, which he had worried would never end.

  Felix saw things that he thought he had forgotten. Then, with the pot still in his hands, he turned to his son. “Pepe,” he said, “my life is too full”—although the words his son heard him say were, “Your mother’s breasts, hijo, are the reason I cook so well.” Then, as Pepe stood shocked into silence, and without even the thought of catching himself, Felix fell to the linoleum floor.

  FELIX STOPPED TALKING AND LOOKED UP at Flavio. “That’s what happened to me, Flavio,” he said. His head was going through such a myriad of motions that he appeared to be shaking it. “I can still see my grandmother cooking chickens in that pot.”

  Flavio didn’t know what to say. He had never seen anything in the bottom of a pot but rust and old food—which, it now occurred to him, was probably a blessing. He also thought that if he saw all of his life at once, there would be little to see.

  “You said eight years?” Felix asked.

  “Sí,” Flavio told him. “Eight years, Felix, and in all that time you never said a word.”

  Felix looked down at his hands. They were filthy and marked with scratches and dried blood. He turned one over. “This doesn’t even look like my hand.”

  Before his stroke, Felix had been a solid man. His hands had been thick and callused from cooking and his arms strong from lifting. If his hands had ever been dirty, the dirt had come from food, which bothered no one. There was little that resembled that Felix in the one now sitting beside Flavio.

  “What was it like, Felix?” Flavio asked.

  “How should I know?” Felix said. “I was asleep. You should be telling me these things. What’s happened here since my stroke?”

  For a moment Flavio was quiet. He thought that in the eight years Felix had been somewhere else nothing had changed. “A lot of the viejos are gone now,” he said slowly. “And my sister, Ramona, died también. And Martha. Many of our old friends.”

  Felix looked down at his hands without speaking. Finally, he said, “This is too hard, Flavio. I’m sorry you had to go through that alone. Martha was a good friend to my wife, and she could cook biscochitos like no one else. They were so soft I remember they tasted like warm snow. Eight years is a long time. And what of the village?”

  “The village?” To Flavio, the village was not a thing that ever really changed. It was something that just was and always would be. But not even he was blind to all the things that had been happening in Guadalupe and in the hills around the village.

  People from other places had begun to move north out of Las Sombras and into the mountains surroundi
ng the valley. From the center of town you could look into the foothills and on the ridges, where the land was full of rocks and there was never enough water, stood sprawling adobes. No one knew who these people were or what had brought them to such a place, and sometimes there was talk, especially at Tito’s Bar after too many beers, that all of these outsiders should be burned out and sent back where they came from. They had no respect for the old ways and drove through the village as if it were just a stretch of highway to get somewhere else. Besides, the men in Tito’s Bar would say, that land was once ours. It was where our grandfathers cut fence posts and firewood and picked piñon and hunted deer and elk.

  But Flavio had lived his whole life in the village, and he knew that what he heard people complaining about could also be said about many of them. It was obvious to him, too, that the hills would still be empty if the people in Guadalupe had not sold their land.

  On top of all that was the copper mine that sat just five miles to the east. The village had fed off of it for so many years that few kept cows anymore and most fields were left fallow. All of these things made Flavio feel as if the village were shrinking and becoming less of what it once was and more of something he couldn’t understand.

  He didn’t know how to answer Felix’s question. So, he shrugged and said, “The village is the same as always, Felix. But maybe you shouldn’t hear so much all at once. You should take it easy for a while and get strong. Soon things will be as they were.”

  “I don’t know, Flavio,” Felix said. “I think the fire could be a big problem.”

  Flavio grunted and jerked his head back. “Qué fire, hombre? There’s no fire.”

  “No?” Felix said. “Maybe you’re right, but I have a bad feeling that already the mountains are full of smoke.”

  Flavio stared at Felix for a moment. Then he took his arm from around Felix’s shoulder. Suddenly, he felt exhausted and empty. He had spent the morning tricking himself into believing that if you went backward in life everything would be the same. Half of what Felix had said was crazy, and here he was, calmly listening to talk of pots and fires as if these were things he heard every day. Who knew what Felix had gone through in the eight years of sitting hunched over in the café. Flavio pushed himself to the edge of the sofa and stood up.

  “I guess we should go now, Felix,” he said.

  “I don’t blame you for not believing me, Flavio,” Felix said. He was staring past Flavio though his head drooped so low that his face almost touched his knees.

  The door creaked in the breeze, and Flavio felt a vague disquiet come over him. Hanging on the wall above the sofa were two of Ramona’s paintings. One was of a washed-out arroyo, a trail of muddy water running past bone-white rocks. The other was a picture of three horses standing so still in the rain that they seemed dead. Flavio thought Felix looked more like one of Ramona’s pictures than anything else, and one that she probably would have enjoyed painting.

  “Go outside and look for me, Flavio,” Felix said. “Let me rest for a little while.”

  Flavio stood looking at Felix as he grew quiet. Then, he turned and walked across the room to the open door.

  Even with the wind doing nothing but blowing heat around, Flavio felt better as soon as he stepped outside. He took the steps down off the porch and walked across Ramona’s yard. His pickup was parked in the shade beneath the cottonwoods, and he nodded at it as he passed by. He walked into the middle of the dirt road where he was nearly run over by Sippy Valdéz, who was driving too fast.

  Sippy hit the brakes hard, and the truck pulled to the right and bounced to a stop. The cloud of dust that had followed Sippy down the road got caught in the wind and blew off toward the foothills. Sippy stuck his head out the window. “Cuidado, Flavio,” he said. “I’m glad I didn’t run you over.”

  “No,” Flavio said. “I should watch where I’m going.” He glanced at Sippy and then looked away. Half of Sippy’s face was stained red from a birthmark, and as his eyes were too light in color and slightly crossed, it was difficult to talk to him without looking somewhere else. Sippy lived just up the road from Ramona’s in a double-wide trailer. It was rumored that he made his living selling drugs around Guadalupe and down in Las Sombras.

  Sippy and a number of others from the village had been dragged from their homes a few years ago when the state police, one helicopter, and thirty other cars that bore no markings came quietly into Guadalupe one morning before dawn. Flavio had been irrigating his own field that day, and he’d seen the helicopter flying low over the valley and the caravan of cars stopping, seemingly at random, at people’s homes. At first, he’d thought it was an invasion, but he had no idea by whom, let alone why. He had stood in his field with his shovel and watched as they’d pulled into Celina Mondragon’s drive and taken her away in handcuffs. Her four children, none older than twelve, were crying in the open doorway, and Celina had yelled back at them to call their grandma and not to worry. Then she had been shoved in the backseat of a car, and in a few seconds they had all driven off.

  Later, Flavio had heard it all had to do with drugs, and though some in the village were glad the problem had been dealt with, others wondered if things were done this way in other places. But since Sippy and Celina and everyone else taken away that morning all returned a few days later, the controversy soon died down and the village forgot about it as if what had happened hadn’t.

  Sippy was smiling a little. His arm was hanging out the cab window and his fingers tapped on the outside of the door. “What are you doing in the middle of the road, Flavio?”

  Flavio took off his hat and then shoved it back on. “I’m looking for a fire,” he said, and he looked up at the hills. All he could see was what he had seen for months, mountains that were dusty and faded and too dry. He shook his head. “I thought the mountains were on fire. Pero, don’t even ask me why. Where are you going so fast, anyway?”

  “Didn’t you hear?” Sippy said. “My Tío Petrolino died a couple days ago. The funeral’s this morning.”

  “No,” Flavio breathed out, and he walked over to the side of the truck. “I didn’t know that.”

  Petrolino Valdéz had been a few years younger than Flavio, and though the two had never been friends, they had known each other all their lives. Ever since Petrolino was a young boy, he had walked up and down the highway picking up things that other people threw away. He would carry two large burlap bags and walk the length of the valley in both directions. His house, which was small and dark, was cluttered with crushed aluminum cans, glass colored by the sun, various car parts and bottle-cap sculptures, and other things he had thought valuable. He was someone everyone saw each day and had for so long that Flavio couldn’t imagine not seeing Petrolino stooped over on the side of the road.

  Flavio let out another long breath of air. “Petrolino’s dead,” he said. “I didn’t even notice.”

  “It’s hard to miss something when you see it every day,” Sippy said. “But don’t feel too bad, Flavio. Ever since those cows, I think he’d been in a lot of pain.”

  One morning, just before dawn, Petrolino had been found in the ditch beside the road buried beneath two cows. All that could be seen of him was the little hat he always wore and one of his feet. Ray Pacheco, who had been the Guadalupe police officer back then, said that one of those trucks that hauled hay had plowed into some cows and thrown them on top of Petrolino. But after he’d been uncovered, Petrolino said there had been no truck. He said that God had dropped them for him to find and it was only his own bad luck that they’d fallen on his head.

  “Everyone thought he was dead,” Flavio said.

  “And that was one of my tío’s better days,” Sippy said. “We ate hamburger for a long time.” He pulled a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and when he lowered his eyes to light it, Flavio glanced at his face. The birthmark ran halfway across his lips before fading away and down through one eyebrow to the bridge of his nose. Flavio remembered Sippy as a small boy who had few friend
s and who would often walk with his tío and help him carry what he had found.

  “I’m sorry about Petrolino,” Flavio said.

  “Yeah,” Sippy said and blew a lungful of smoke out of the cab. “Well, he got old and he never was an easy man to be with. I better get going, Flavio. They’re waiting on me at the church. I hope you find your fire.” Then he looked past Flavio at the hills. “Or maybe not. I can’t remember the last time it rained.” He slapped the side of the door with his hand. “Come by the house later,” he said, “and have a few beers.” Then he shoved the truck into gear and drove off.

  Flavio stood in the road and watched as Sippy drove to the stop sign and then turned right onto the highway. The breeze tugged at his cap, and he pulled it down lower on his forehead. He had left Ramona’s house halfheartedly to look for Felix’s fire, but what he had found was one more viejo who had died. At one time, he had thought that one’s death and the life one had led would hold some importance, but it seemed to him now that what death meant wasn’t much more than a curtain moving in a draft or a reason for others to drink a few beers. He watched the dust from Sippy’s truck twist away from the road. Then he walked back to Ramona’s.

  “Petrolino’s dead,” Flavio said, standing in the doorway. Though his eyes were still half blinded by the sun, he was able to see that Felix had straightened up and was actually leaning back against the sofa.

  “No,” Felix said.

  “Oh, sí,” Flavio said as he walked across the room and sat down. “He died a few days ago in his bed.”

  “That’s too bad,” Felix said. His hands were folded in his lap and they lay still now without trembling. “I never liked him, but he always knew what he was going to do each day. And he kept the roads clean.”

  Flavio leaned back beside Felix, took off his hat and put it on his knee. “Sippy said we should come by his house later and have a beer.”