Blue Rodeo

by Jo-Ann Mapson

  Following mass, while Amparo visited with friends, Leo shouldered Peter into the chapel of the Santo Niño. “Church and shrine have healing power,” Leo signed, gesturing to the paintings, statuary, and hundreds of crutches and braces left behind by generations of miracle seekers. “People scrape dirt from the floor when no one’s looking.”

  “Why?” Peter said.

  Leo frowned. “Sign, Peter. Don’t be lazy.”

  Chagrined, Peter made the gesture for why.

  “To eat. Some say it’s holy and can cure the incurable.”

  Holy dirt? Nickel-colored milagros, tiny, crudely fashioned amulets portraying different parts of the body were pinned to the skirts of one robed doll dressed to represent the Virgin Mary. Various shrines bore handwritten notes on yellowing paper, some in Spanish, others in English, asking for cures to physical problems. Leo signed, “Farmer might leave one in the shape of a horse, if his animal was ailing.” He took Peter to a glass-encased carving of the Santo Niño, whose palm was upraised in eternal blessing. The Holy Child’s face was starting to lose its layers of paint, poor bare-plaster-nosed niño in his crumbling robes. Beneath the glass box there was a large ledger with handwritten entries. Using the wooden page-turner provided, Leo flipped back a hundred pages, then pointed out one particular entry to Peter. It was written in Spanish, way back in 1954. Fly spots decorated the paper.

  “See those words? I wrote them. When my son was born deaf, I prayed hard, certain God would restore his hearing. When my daughter was born deaf, too, I thought maybe booze. Pendejo that I was, I did not see the gift they already were to me, hearing or deaf. It’s in my genes they cannot hear. Mine and ’Paro’s. Some people will tell you that being deaf is to be part of a special culture, and that is so, for when you have no choice, you work to find your specialness within. But your hearing was lost. If there is anything medical that can be done, you must seek it out. If that doesn’t work, okay, in time, you will learn that silence, too, is a gift. Now let’s go eat many tamales and be thankful men.”

  While everyone was having flan, Peter went back inside to look at the statue again. He’d eaten two tamales, felt satisfied, and thought long and hard before reaching for a third. During his hunger he could think of nothing but filling his face with all that food. Watching the others at the table eat, taking small portions so everyone had enough, he’d changed his mind. He didn’t see how gorging himself made this any more of a holiday. Inside the small room the thick walls felt warm and close, so comfortable it might be spring outside. He looked closer at the statues now that he was alone. One of the wax Madonnas wore black lace skirts, like some kind of Spanish dancer, and somebody’d painted her mouth with peach-colored lipstick. He smiled. It looked like some well-meaning visitor had wanted old Mary to keep up with the times and lent her a little Cover Girl. His mom didn’t wear much makeup, but Nori piled it on with a trowel. On Nori it worked. In fact, without eye shadow and lip liner, Nori looked older than his mother, and so pale and tired out she was kind of scary. However, to put any kind of makeup on Bonnie Tsosie would be serious overkill.

  Peter knelt and pinched some dirt between his fingers. It looked ordinary, but lots of great things looked ordinary at the start. Carefully, checking to make sure no one was watching, he folded it into a scrap of paper he had in his wallet, some receipt, the ink so faded it was no longer readable. Leo had a point. For Peter to eat magic dirt and wish for hearing was like saying God’s designs made no sense. But in between that thought and acceptance, there was a large gap to step over. Peter had almost fifteen years of sound for reference: human voices, birds calling, the ocean slapping onto the sand. And some of it he’d sneered at his father’s yelling, the alarm clock, static on KROQ because where he lived the station didn’t tune in clearly. Had he ever once said thanks for any of it? Still on his knees, he faced the Santo Niño and bent his head. He had never learned any prayers except for a simple grace and the Our Father. He remembered the kindergartners at Riverwall signing their blessing: “Make the Earth Bright and Thanks.” Most of the words were gone, blown away in the wind, like Leo’s gesture to him back in the workroom. His hearing was never coming back, even if he let the doctors put transistors and telephone cable in his head. He would have to learn to listen in his own way, more closely, to everything. And to see Bonnie anywhere besides in class at school, he would have to smooth things over with his mother, and that meant going to Blue Dog for Christmas.

  Dear Mom,

  I hope you had a nice Thanksgiving. Try not to faint, okay? I went to church with the Hidalgos. It was tolerable. Listen, thanks for that painting of Echo. I wouldn’t mind if you sent me some others, you know, stuff you just have laying around.

  Okay. The big question. If it’s okay with you, could I come there for Christmas? It’s not a problem to get a ride from some kids who live up that way, so you won’t have to drive down or anything.

  Peter

  While the letter was printing, he unfolded the paper in his wallet. He studied the contents, trying to see if here, by desk light, the magic was any more perceptible to the human eye. It was just dirt from the floor of an old church where people went when they lost all hope, in search of miracles that would never happen. He opened his mouth and tossed it down his throat anyway, swallowing the dusty sweetness with a sip of Classic Coke.

  12

  INSTEAD OF A PHONE CALL IN RESPONSE TO HIS LETTER—HIS MOM trying not to cry through the TDD, asking him what he wanted for dinner, offering up some little holiday fable about mother and son trimming the tree—to which he’d already rehearsed his replies—she didn’t call at all. He was starting to panic. All the kids were making holiday plans, some of them getting permission to go home with each other, arranging ski trips to Angel Fire, all kinds of plans that didn’t sound too rank, actually. If he didn’t ask Bonnie for that ride soon, there might not be room for him in her uncle’s truck. She might have made other plans, or have offered some other guy a ride.

  His father was awaiting the impending miracle of birth. The last note he’d gotten from him said he’d “catch you after the first of the year, if filming goes according to schedule.” He’d probably almost forgotten what his son looked like. He’d forget he had a son completely when the new baby was born. Maybe his mother didn’t want him home for Christmas. He supposed the Hidalgos would let him share their family reunion, but he didn’t want to.

  The Friday before Christmas break, a brown envelope arrived. He checked the postmark—Blue Dog—and tore it open in front of the mailboxes, screw what the other kids standing there thought. As he slid the paper from the envelope, he saw it was another not-a-letter. On an 81/2-by-11 sheet of nice paper, his mother had drawn a cartoon strip, four frames’ worth. For a second he remembered when he was little, sick in bed with a strep throat so sore Chloraseptic didn’t even come close to numbing it, how she’d taken out a pad of paper and gotten in bed next to him, ballpoints, pencils, and crayons between them on the blanket. You tell me what you want, she’d said. Just name the adventure, and we’ll send Peter the Well there. Does he need a horse? I know you like horses. How about a Percheron? That’s a good, sturdy breed for rough terrain…. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world, her fingers making the pencils move, drawing her way into a whole other world. Her pictures had done more than pass the time. They made him forget his fever. Changed the scratchy sheets to a slightly more bearable softness. Made him somehow be able to swallow juice and drift off into a deep, restful sleep.

  In the first frame of this cartoon, she’d drawn a tiny Echo, curled up napping, little commas to indicate her paws were twitching with dog dreams. In the large thought balloon above her head, his dog envisioned a skimpy pine tree bearing a single ragged, half-burnt-out string of lights. Beneath the tree a plate of dog biscuits and bowl of milk were set out for Santa. In the next frame, Santa, who looked like an elderly golden retriever with a beard, came down a chimney, sampled one biscuit, then sat down to read Echo’s
note. Dear Santa: I’ve been a good dog this year, except for that one time I dug a rather sizable hole in Mom’s garden. But I’m not chasing the sheep anymore! For Christmas, I can do without that fancy rhinestone collar, and I guess I don’t really need a new squeaky toy. This one’s ratty, but it still works. What I’d like more than anything is to see my boy Peter again. But if you can’t make that happen, I’ll still try to be a good girl. Say hello to Dasher and Dancer. Hope you liked the biscuits—made them myself! Love, Echo.

  The following frame was the one that made him bite his lip and run down the hall for the privacy of his room. In it Echo was just beginning to stretch awake as the sun came in her window. The dead tree, previously sketched in light pencil, now transformed through more serious lines and shading into part of a larger, living forest. The half-broken string of lights had become snowflakes and fat winter birds. Next to the tree there was a Christmas-wrapped package in the shape of a person, with twin airholes cut into the nose area. On the package’s tag, his mother had drawn each hand shape for the signs, so that it read “For Echo” in the manual alphabet. The last frame of the cartoon was blank. He knew what that meant. She wanted him to fill it in, to make the next move. He took that for a yes.

  “Maybe sometime you should try wearing different colors,” Bonnie signed to Peter from the front seat of her uncle Eddie’s pickup. She gave Peter’s collar a tug, then signed, “Black’s nice, but so are other colors.”

  Peter nodded stupidly at her easy grin. She was wearing her faded blue jeans, that pink jacket, a dark green turtleneck peeking through the collar. The warm colors made her skin glow, and he thought he’d never seen her looking prettier than right now, even with her hair tied back in a plain rubber band. He’d stood in front of the mirror in the bathroom at the Hidalgos’ for half an hour, just trying to decide what shirt to wear under his jacket. In the end he picked a solid black flannel. It was one of those shirts his mom had bought that he’d never worn, what she called “a nice shirt,” which probably meant it cost megadollars and had an impressive label. He thought maybe Bonnie might like it. But Bonnie was basically letting him know that his wardrobe was funeral material. California and New Mexico were only two states apart. How could what was cool in one place be so stupid in another?

  He looked out the window at the freeway overpass they were approaching. He’d passed it before, when he drove with Amparo to buy chiles and wondered what the spray-painted letters on the gray concrete arch, KEEP WIPP OUT OF NEW MEXICO, meant. It had struck him funny, that kind of message versus some tagger’s placa, or gang-affiliation marking boundaries, like on the freeways at home. He signed to Bonnie. “What’s WIPP?”

  “Waste Isolation Pilot Project.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Government wants to use Carlsbad for a dump.”

  “To dump what?”

  “Radioactive waste.”

  He’d never thought of stuff like that as belonging to anyone before. Back in California, when the alarm went off for San Onofre’s nuclear power plant, it was usually a mistake, or some test they were doing to make sure the alarm still worked. Below the twin domes on Trestles beach, he just kept on bodysurfing. Trav made jokes as they drove by—Dude, cover your nuts, or your children’ll be mutants. It sucked—all that bogus crap you inherited from your parents, one day their shit, then suddenly your problem to fix. There was so much wrong that couldn’t be fixed. When the doctors stood around his bed, trying to explain to him that what he was “hearing” was really nothing more than leftovers of all the sounds he’d known before he got sick, he refused to buy into it. Okay, on some level he knew they were right. But he couldn’t let them know. He figured out he was deaf—it didn’t take ten years of medical school not to hear doors slam or not understand the nurses’ voices. He thought the hardest thing in his life had been that one moment he realized they were telling him the truth. But, no, what was really fucked was every hard moment seemed destined to be replaced by another, even worse. The nuclear waste might not end up in New Mexico, but it sure wasn’t going away. The thought of government trucks filled with barrels of it, driving around, trying to find a place to put it, God! He knew some night soon he’d sit up with the light on, worrying about those barrels, and that somewhere in the back of his mind, now that he knew they existed, he wouldn’t ever be able to forget them. But what was worse was knowing there was something else out there, too, something even darker, just waiting its turn. He’d thought the hardest thing he’d ever done in his life had been asking Bonnie for this ride. He’d been so nervous his palms were sweating, and he was sure she noticed when he took her aside as they were leaving the cafeteria to sign his request.

  “Any chance you have room in the truck for me to catch a ride as far as Blue Dog?” He’d rehearsed and rehearsed, memorizing the signs.

  Bonnie had looked up at him, her arms full of textbooks stacked atop her notebook. Her lips parted slightly, and he thought she might be about to speak, but she didn’t. “No problem,” she signed back, left for class, and then all that was left was the waiting.

  Bonnie’s uncle, Eddie, a quiet, short guy in a Levi’s jacket with worn sheepskin lining, hadn’t seemed to notice Peter was there. He threw his stuff in the truck bed, and Bonnie scooted over on the seat to make room. Eddie kept his hands on the steering wheel and drove just under the speed limit. They were slowly climbing in altitude. Probably the old Chevy couldn’t do any better on the grade, even if he nailed the pedal. But there wasn’t any real hurry. This ride could last all day and Peter wouldn’t mind staring at Bonnie, just inches away, even if he had no clue what to say to her. He wanted to talk. To use his voice, and even if he couldn’t hear her, have her use hers back. She spoke to Eddie. He saw her turn her face to her uncle and saw Eddie’s lips move as he answered. But those unwritten rules at Riverwall applied here too. She wouldn’t talk to him.

  They stopped once to buy lunch—burgers Eddie and Bonnie relished and Peter turned down. Amparo had packed him lunch. Well, you could call it a lunch, or a little more accurately, a Peace Corps relief package. It weighed about ten pounds. It would have looked stupid to start unwrapping all that food in front of Bonnie, like he was tapeworm boy or something. Pretending it was Christmas presents, he’d stowed it in the truck bed along with his duffel bag of clothes—black clothes, he reminded himself. Maybe Blue Dog had a store like JC Penney’s, or New Mexico’s equivalent of Miller’s Outpost. Wouldn’t Mom have a joy attack if he asked her to take him shopping?

  It was kind of like all of them were spending Christmas in foreign countries. His mother in Blue Dog, his father in London. White Christmases, with piles of snow. You could always count on Dad to send another big fat holiday check for Christmas, though, merry and glad tidings, just so long as I don’t have to see you, son. It might already be there waiting at his mom’s. Oh, well. Might as well spread his money around Blue Dog as anywhere else.

  Eddie drove slowly over the icy road indicated on the map as leading to the house. Peter craned his neck against the window to look. A brown horse ran across the pasture, parallel to the truck, as if he got off on trying to race it. Behind him snow sprayed up like the wake off a speedboat. Near a small barn, he could see an old green pickup and, for just a few seconds, some cowboy dude standing there, looking back at him as he fed some dirty-looking sheep. The farmhouse was like something out of one of his father’s old TV series. He couldn’t picture his mother being comfortable with shoulder-high weeds, dirty snow, and livestock crapping nearby. He remembered her jeans and sweater when she came down to ask him home for Thanksgiving, how she looked different, but he couldn’t say what it was about her that had changed. Now it struck him. What had been missing were the little ironed-in pleats and the tasteful designer labels. At first, he almost hadn’t recognized her. He guessed her life had changed, too, and that he was a geek to think she could move to a place like this and stay the same. She’d moved by herself, rented this house on her own. Like that cartoo
n she’d sent him that almost made him cry, his mother was not the same person. She was getting along, and he wasn’t, unless you counted Dr. Kennedy’s sessions as having a friend.

  Bonnie insisted they walk Peter to the door of the farmhouse. He was secretly glad that she wanted to, but if she’d dropped him off at the top of the gravel road, he could have scoped out the place and endured his mother’s hugs and the welcome-home tears in private.

  “What are you thinking?” Bonnie signed.

  A girl’s favorite question. He made O’s with his hands, and drew them over his chest, opening them as he did so.

  “Nothing? Liar. Why you look scared?”

  He drew his thumb under his chin. “I’m not.”

  She smiled, then made the sign for “Good.” “Eddie has friends in Blue Dog. Some night, we come over. Play—?” She made a sign he didn’t know, and his face burned with embarrassment.

  “P-o-k-e-r,” she finger-spelled, then repeated the sign.

  He nodded, color flooding his face. They were in the driveway now, so close to the house he could see the woodpile behind it, as tall as his shoulders. Frost rimmed the lower windows, and a set of icicles hung along the north side of the roof.

  As Eddie cut the engine, Bonnie signed, “Save your Christmas money, Peter.” She made the poker sign again. “I always win.”

  On top of being pretty, she had to be a card shark. He opened the car door. Cold air hit his face in a bracing slap. He stretched out his legs and began to gather his bags from the truck bed, wishing there were ten more miles between this truck and his mother, wondering how it was going to be spending these weeks with her.