“You disrespect me!? I tell you ‘I fix it!’ ”
“I had to go to work!”
“Why? To see you boyfriend!?”
Up the ladder, I turned my ears off and opened a new comic book, savoring every stipple of shade, every contrast of color. I had to make them last though these dark nights. The screaming droned on. Movement, creaking on the floors. Screams of “Let me go!” and “Ow!” Slam.
Claudia went to work the next day with a black eye. In the middle of her shift she broke down. She finished changing the demented patient in 3B and then sat on the bed beside her and cried. The woman sat up with a look of wonder. “You know how I feel, dear?”
The next Saturday we went to Fabricio and Trina’s for dinner. In the kitchen Trina told Claudia that Fabricio’s drinking had gotten so bad he couldn’t even get it up to make love anymore.
“Why do you stay with him?” my mother asked.
“He’s my husband.”
I shuttled back and forth between the uncomfortable conversation in the kitchen and the ominous drinking in the dining room. On the way home, Leopoldo wrenched the car back and forth across both lanes, skimming along the edge of the precipice and ranting about my mother’s alleged infidelity. “Who you fuck!? You tell to me!” If she had really been shopping on Friday, where was the proof? “Where the receipts!?” he screamed over and over as we fishtailed through the snow.
The next day Claudia and Leopoldo came to a settlement. My mother would give him all her money when she cashed her paycheck. That way he could keep track of how much she spent and make sure she wasn’t cheating on him. Watching her count out her money for Leopoldo, I didn’t understand the logic behind the agreement, but was relieved that the matter was settled.
“Claudia, why you keep ten dolares?”
“For coffee.”
“Why you need money for coffee? We have coffee here.”
A new argument began, but it was mercifully short, ending with the surrender of my mother’s last ten dollars.
A few days later, my mother came home from work sweaty. Leopoldo inspected the wet stains under her arms with suspicion.
“You trick me. You fuck the men at you work!”
“Who, Leopoldo, who? The old people? Lupita, the sixty-three-year-old nurse? José, the fat orderly?”
She kept presenting her defense, but it was no use. José had been named, so José was the man. The smoking gun, of course, was that José was Mexican. Everybody knew you couldn’t trust Mexicans around your woman. The door slammed. I slipped in and out of sleep.
Near dawn, Leopoldo came crashing through the door. “¡Mis manos!” My hands!, he was screaming, holding his frozen paws up in front of him. He was shivering, covered in snow and dirt and twigs. I helped Claudia wrap him in blankets, and then she sent me outside for more firewood. As the house began to warm, Leopoldo volunteered bits and flashes of drunken events. He had seen the police on the way home. They were parked on the side of the road above Clear Lake. They were up to no good, waiting for him. Waiting to send him back to El Salvador, to the death squads. He had to hit them first. He did. He came at them with full force. Their car went flying and sank into the lake below.
“That didn’t happen, Leopoldo,” my mother assured him.
“It happen.”
“It didn’t. If you’d drowned a policeman, they’d be all over the place right now.” I looked out the window to see if a SWAT team was descending on us. Nothing, just darkness and flashes of snow.
“I got away. They no find us. ¡Ay, mis manos!”
His hands were thawing out, but nearly frostbitten. He’d left the car in a ditch down on Janicki Road and then climbed straight up the hill. No trails, just a vertical climb through icy brambles and frozen forest, screaming ¡Mis manos! as he came.
It was morning. The car was totaled. They were laughing. When I came down for granola and soy milk, they called me over to the bed, giggling like children.
“Did you hear that, Joshey? It’s been so hard on Leo for me to be apart from him, but we figured it out.”
He completed her idea: “We goin’ get a job together, work at the same place, be together every day.”
They were laughing again. I was happy they’d figured it out, but we were out of soy milk.
Leopoldo sang to Claudia, and she wrote in her dream journal: Working on a divorce from Frankie… dreaming of having the real thing with Leopoldo. Love him enough to be happy… to be lovers. To be Partners is a little like the dream of enlightenment. A focus. A reason to be strong and beautiful inside and out.
I was still looking for breakfast when Claudia came running back from the mailbox. The government had declared that her divorce from Frankie was final. “Now I’m free, Joshey!”
ELEVEN
The Groom
“Joshey?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you awake?”
“No.”
“I’m worried.”
“He’ll be OK. He always is.” Leopoldo had hitchhiked down the mountain that morning to find work and he still wasn’t back. Maybe he just couldn’t find a ride back home. But then he would have called. We had a telephone now. Claudia had finally committed the paperwork and the dollars to get a little piece of the twentieth century strung up the hill. The phone was working—she’d checked for a dial tone five times already—and yet, it refused to ring. Leopoldo was more likely drunk behind a wheel somewhere, crashing into deer or policemen. I could see him now in a drunken rage, storming his way through a phalanx of police. How many cops would it take to bring him down? Three? Four? He was strong and fast, a kung fu master. Five? And my mother loved him, and I had to support him for her. I had to want him to be OK, to root for him. Six, seven, eight. I could see him whirling in the air, fists and feet flying, knocking cops around like socks in a dryer. Ten, twenty, or more. It would take a hundred cops to subdue my mother’s lover.
As it turned out, it only took two cops to arrest him. One threatened to shoot him, and the other put on the cuffs. The phone went limp in my mother’s hand. She rolled her head back and exhaled like she was giving birth to a nightmare. “Joshey. Leopoldo is in jail. Aw, Joshey, what are we going to do?” I suggested we go to visit him, which I intuited to be the proper etiquette in this sort of situation. My mother nodded her head in assent. “What else can we do?” she choked out, mashing her lips together to keep from crying. We plodded down the road in the rain, holding hands like the family of the condemned. By the time we picked up a ride on Old Day Creek Road, we were soaked and shivering.
“Where you guys headed?” said the fat white woman with the yellowed glasses.
“Believe it or not, to visit the jail,” my mother apologized.
“Huh! Me too. What’s your man in for? Drunk and disorderly?”
“Something like that.”
“They’re all the same.”
I felt sorry for the poor fat woman. Her man was some drunk hick. Ours was a Central American refugee, a revolutionary poet. A man who drank not because he was an alcoholic, but to kill the pain of what he had seen. At least that’s what Claudia had told me. We were trying to heal him. But now he was locked up in Skagit County Jail.
They wouldn’t let us in. “Suárez, Leopoldo? He ain’t here,” said the sheriff’s deputy with the REEL MEN FISH coffee mug. “They just took ’em next door for arraignment.” The deputy returned to his fly-fishing magazine, and we were left to wander our way into the neighboring courthouse. There, a redbrick facade concealed a cavernous chamber where the defeated came to be humbled. Out they herded Leopoldo, the middle man in a string of five prisoners, shackled together at the ankles, waist, and wrists. He shuffled forward with the others, his face pale and lined, framed with the limp blackness of his unkempt hair. They’d taken his headband from him. He was left small and vulnerable in his oversized blue jumpsuit and clanking shackles.
Various men in suits and ties spoke, and at one point Leopoldo had to say “yes” a
nd “no” and “not guilty.” He only looked over at us once. A sideways glance, a raised chin of recognition. He had to look tough. I got that. Even Claudia, who was usually so sensitive about being slighted, got it. One look at the four grizzled men he was hitched to told us he had to appear like the toughest son-of-a-bitch he could be. After they led him away, my mother worked the pay phone, calling Grandma Harriette collect and pleading with her for an hour. She invoked our Hebrew ancestors, she appealed to Grandma’s Communist sympathies, she catered to her social justice appetite. Leopoldo was Joseph thrown into the pit, Julius Rosenberg, and Martin Luther King, Jr., all rolled up into one. I knew Grandma Harriette would cave in eventually. Yes, she thought her only child was totally farblunget—a lost, dysfunctional fuckup. But doling out money in times of crisis was her only contact with her estranged daughter, and some combination of guilt for past mistreatment and fear for Claudia’s future compelled her to open her pocketbook. By the time my mother hung up, Grandma Harriette had committed to paying for bail and wiring another three hundred dollars to buy a used car.
Leopoldo’s face was light and clear as he left the jail. He breathed deeply the sweet air of freedom and hugged us, going so far as to drop to one knee to hug me.
We met with his lawyer a few days later. He wore a tie and kept referring to Leopoldo as Mr. Suárez, which demonstrated to me that he viewed Leopoldo as an important person. He knew what was at stake. “There’s some indication in the police report that the car was stolen. It is registered to a Mr. Sosa. Mr. Suárez, do you know Mr. Sosa?”
“Yes, Adolfo. He my friend, he no talk to nobody,” Leopoldo reassured us all.
“Yes, well, apparently he’s not cooperating with the prosecution, so I think that issue will go away. There’s a DWI charge that will be hard to shake, but we can probably divert that with a twelve-step program. The thing they really care about, of course, is the resisting arrest. But I think we can probably plea-bargain that down to time served and some community service. Mr. Suárez, I think the main thing you have to worry about here is your immigration status. You’re an undocumented alien and now you’re a criminal defendant. That’s a combination that usually leads to deportation proceedings. Do you know what that means, Mr. Suárez? That you could be sent back to El Salvador?”
He nodded. He knew.
The lawyer continued: “Immigration issues are outside of my scope of representation, but I do want to tell you that there really aren’t any defenses to deportation. It’s the federal government, and if they want you back in El Salvador, there’s not much you can do. That said, there are pathways to citizenship available to you, Mr. Suárez. The main one of course is marriage to a US citizen. I know that’s worked for some of my other clients in the past.” The lawyer specifically avoided looking at my mother for this last part. It was beyond the scope of his representation.
Leopoldo was silent on the ride home in our new, very used Ford Pinto. This was unusual. He usually insisted on driving himself or on ceaselessly criticizing Claudia for her loco handling of the car. But this time he was distracted, running through possibilities in his head. When we got back to the cabin, he began to tremble and shake. I rushed to build a fire for him. When the warmth and some coffee had soothed his anxiety, and his hangover, he began to confide in us. If they deported him, he would be shot in the head. There was no other way to put it. The secret police would be waiting for him at Cuscatlán Airport. They’d execute him on the tarmac. “We’ve been waiting for you, Señor Suárez.” They wouldn’t say “Suárez,” of course, because that wasn’t his real name. He couldn’t even tell us his real name. But they had his photo on a “Wanted” list. They had not stopped looking for him since he escaped from the detention center in San Salvador. And now the US government was going to package him up and deliver him with a bow right into the arms of the death squad. His feet would hit the tarmac, and they’d blow out his brains with a bullet to the back of his head.
And, if they deported him, he wouldn’t be here for us. To protect us. He knew how far the government would go. He’d been a follower of Cayetano Carpio, a guerrilla leader. Cayetano was surrounded by guards twenty-four hours a day and hid out in a dormant volcano. But one day, the government announced he had killed his lover in a jealous rage and then committed suicide. But Leopoldo knew better. “They killed Cayetano Carpio! They even killed too Cayetano Carpio’s woman!” Even now, the Atlacatl Battalion was being trained by the CIA right here in America in the arts of assassination and counter-insurgency. They could be slipping into the surrounding woods, coming for all of us as we spoke. Who would protect us if not Leopoldo?
This was his proposal for marriage. There was no down-on-bended-knee, offering-of-a-ring silliness. There was only the case for marriage spelled out in cold, hard facts. And it was a compelling proposal: Marry me to save my life, marry me to save yours. A fount of energy welled up inside of my mother, and she threw herself into the cause of Leopoldo Suárez with a dedication and fervency not seen since her anti-nuclear days with the Three Mile Island parade. She began making calls and running errands as though our lives depended upon it, which, of course, Leopoldo had convinced us they did. She found a pro bono immigration lawyer in Seattle who would take the case. She enrolled Leopoldo in Social Security, filed his applications for entry into the United States and a driver’s license, and began drafting a history of genocide in El Salvador to use in a request for amnesty. And, of course, she began planning the wedding.
Leopoldo wanted to consecrate the union in the occult traditions of ancient Egypt. He planned on building an immense lattice pyramid for the ceremony, but an errant hammer blow to the thumb scuttled the project on the first day. He designed outfits for my mother to make. White tunics made from used bedsheets, held together with golden cords. White pharaonic head cloths fastened with blue headbands for the two of them and a plain white headband for me.
For the ceremony, Leopoldo was adapting some of his occult Spanish poetry into a song he would play on my secondhand guitar. But the guitar didn’t sound quite right, even after Claudia bought him all new strings, and he had to abandon the idea. For her part, Claudia wrote poems that included lines like: your music hums in the quietest places in my soul and together we can generate enough energy to light up a part of this dark world. She planned on talking about how Leopoldo had caused a physiological change in her. She needed less food and sleep when he was around. He enabled her to gain strength and peace, to feel clean, beautiful, strong, and innocent.
As the appointed date on the second Friday in May of 1986 came closer, they invited Fabricio and Trina to serve as Leopoldo’s family, and Crazy John and his girlfriend Erica to play the same role for my mother. Because no priestesses of Osiris were readily available, Reverend Carol Taylor, a Sanctuary minister who sheltered undocumented Central American refugees, agreed to preside.
The day before the wedding, I walked alongside my mother in the narrow pungent aisles of the food co-op. We had come to buy blue chips, black bean dip, and a big glass jug of red Gallo wine for the wedding celebration. It was hard for me to believe that it was all really happening. Leopoldo wasn’t going away like all the other men. He was going to be my stepfather. I’d never had a father before, and I wondered how it was all going to work. Leopoldo still scared me half the time, but I knew this wasn’t about me. This was about the smiling woman next to me, waving her hands in conversation and scrutinizing the ingredients in the soy sauce. My mother was so visibly addicted to him, so elated with being loved and wanted by such a heroic man. There was nothing for me to do but throw my support behind this pending union.
Leopoldo had given me a line in the ceremony. Today, Leopoldo becomes more than a husband, he also becomes a father. I was up-the-ladder in the little loft, practicing the line, repeating it over and over. Did I want to emphasize also or father? Below me, Leopoldo had taken a head start on the jug of wine and was now yelling: “What you say!? You think I no do nothing for to make the wedding?
It was my idea! Maybe you want to marry other mens!?” I shut it out and focused on the line: Today… becomes a father.
You fuckin’ bitch! The concussion of shattering glass announced something new. Crashing, clattering. A chair burst into kindling against the stove. Claps and cracks. My mother shrieking. Choking and cries for help.
What was going on? It couldn’t be what it sounded like. I slid over to the square hole in the loft that served as the door to my room and hung my head down. The world was upside down. He was in his red tank top, standing over a crouching form, beating it with both fists, his elbows taking turns to pull back in my direction. Under his fists was a flurry of waving white palms, fingers fluttering to absorb the blows. That couldn’t be my mother, under there, the anvil for all that fury. There must be some other explanation. What was he doing!? A need to scream and jump and kick overtook me. Do something! Say something, anything! Command him to stop. Tell him I see what he’s doing. But I couldn’t move, couldn’t even speak. He was clawing at her now, trying to grab her by the wrist, latching on to her hair. Finally a tendril of resolve slid out of my throat. Shhhhhhhh! Was this the best I could do, to shush him? Yes, it was. He had her by the collar now, hoisting her up with two fists. I caught a flash of her face, red and recoiling with terror.
I rolled back up into the stillness of the loft. I goaded myself. He’s going to kill her! You fucker, he’s going to beat her to death, and you’re not doing anything. I finally sprang into action, scrambling around my room for a weapon. The samurai sword? I’d relied on it to overcome my fear of the dark, swinging it up and down into the eerie night air to guard me on the forest trails. But now, it was plastic and hollow. A toy. What was there? Somewhere outside was the machete, but I didn’t even think of it until later. My desperate eyes came to rest on my aluminum globe piggy bank. I weighed it in my trembling hands. Below me he was bellowing, smacking, and slapping. The globe was half full of change, but still puny. It was the heaviest thing I had.
Free Spirit Page 21
