North of Montana ag-1

by April Smith

  “She is such a pretty girl,” Mrs. Gutiérrez observes. “Just like her mommy.”

  She is wearing lipstick and today, perhaps to visit the spiritualist, all white: an oversize white T-shirt, white leggings, and white mules. She looks the most together I have seen her.

  “Mr. Monte wanted me to talk to you.”

  “I already tell him that I write to the grandmother to see what she want to do. I waiting to hear.”

  “Until the family is contacted, the children will have to be cared for.”

  “I caring for them.”

  “You leave them alone in the apartment.”

  “Only one time, when I have to go to the store.”

  “Teresa doesn’t even have a bed.”

  “In my country we sleep on petate mats on the floor. What is more important — the bed or the love? Why you not understand about family?” she demands. “These kids are your family, but you don’t think so. You are too Anglo.”

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Just like Mrs. Claire,” Mrs. Gutiérrez goes on. “Her kind don’t understand. If Mrs. Claire didn’t fire Violeta from that job, the children would have a mother today.”

  I take a very deep breath.

  “Mrs. Eberhardt fired Violeta because her daughter fell into a pool and almost drowned while Violeta was jabbering with another housekeeper and not paying attention.”

  Mrs. Gutiérrez shakes an angry finger.

  “What you say is not the truth and a disgrace to the memory of your cousin.”

  “I have noticed there is always more than one truth, Mrs. Gutiérrez.”

  In answer she spits on the sidewalk and stalks into Tienda Alma.

  The children are gathered around a cardboard Christmas tree studded with lollypops. I wander deeper inside, lured by the smell of spices. A rack holds packets of arnica, cinnamon stick, chile postila, anise, te de yerhabuena. There’s not much stock — a few coconuts, oranges with green spots, two kinds of bananas, pineapples, and flowers. Rickety shelves are stacked with cans of guava nectar, hominy, sardines, menudo, and corn masa and old gray plastic sacks of rice and flour. The lights are off.

  Mrs. Gutiérrez is pulling the children outside.

  “Is it okay if I buy them a lollypop?”

  She only glowers. I give them each a dollar, then notice that behind the lollypop tree is a picture of a saint laminated in plastic, resting on an overturned blue milk carton.

  “What is that?”

  Mrs. Gutiérrez isn’t talking. A young woman comes out from around the counter.

  “El Niño de Atocha.”

  She moves the rack aside to reveal a painting of a young boy surrounded by heavenly objects and animals. In front of him there are candles and a dish filled with loose change, small plastic cars, rubber balls, and candy.

  The girl, wearing a USC sweatshirt and silver star earrings down to her shoulders, speaks without an accent.

  “El Niño is a saint who comes from a lake and helps drowning people, or those who are lost. We have a festival in Guatemala where every year we take him out of the lake and parade him through the streets in a big procession.”

  “People leave him things?”

  “For good luck.”

  “Why the toys?”

  “Because he’s a little kid. Roberto, next door, told my mother to make this for El Niño. Every other store on the street has been broken into except us.”

  “You go to USC?” She nods. “And you believe in this stuff?”

  “My mother has faith on Roberto. I didn’t used to believe, but people come to see him from Las Vegas, Texas, San Francisco.… He has a very great gift. They come sick and they leave calm.”

  I drop some change into the dish.

  “Isn’t that a funny place for a shrine?”

  “A shrine can be anywhere. A lot of Spanish people make shrines in the place where someone has died, like in Baja, you see them along the road where people have been killed in car accidents.” She moves the lollypop tree back in place. “We keep ours here so people won’t steal from El Niño.”

  Some saint, I think, following Mrs. Gutiérrez outside.

  The children have trailed the sounds of the rooster to a tiny pet store crammed with aquariums and rank with the smell of tropical fish in stagnant water. Two roosters blink suspiciously from cages on the floor.

  “Are those fighting cocks?” I ask the man.

  He nods. Cock fighting is illegal, but the hell with it. The children are fascinated by a pair of parakeets. Although Mrs. Gutiérrez is keeping her back to me, I lay a hand on her shoulder.

  “I want to know the truth about my cousin.”

  The two of us step outside where the long hot afternoon sun smacks our faces with a direct hit. Mrs. Gutiérrez pats her white vinyl pocketbook several times. She is still seething.

  “Your cousin was fired because she saw Mrs. Claire with a man who was not her husband.”

  “When was this?”

  “Violeta came back from a walk with the baby and a man was with Mrs. Claire inside the door.”

  I remember Warren Speca telling me that he saw Violeta one time when he went over to Claire’s near the end of their affair. This must have been the time.

  Mrs. Gutiérrez waves a hand in disgust. “They were doing bad things.”

  I can see Warren Speca surprising Claire, emboldened by the fantasy that she will leave her marriage, pushing her up against the wall of her husband’s house and trying to make love right there, standing up, underneath the crystal chandelier.

  Violeta came in. They were surprised but they no care. The man leave right away. Violeta is very angry. She is a religious person—”

  Mrs. Gutierrez’s voice breaks. She wipes her eyes.

  “ ‘You have a husband,’ she tells Mrs. Claire. ‘You sin against God.’ ”

  The pocketbook opens and the pound-size roll of tissues comes out.

  “Violeta says, ‘I love your children like they are mine. I leave my own children to work for you. I no lie to you but you lie to me. You are sleeping around like a whore!’ Mrs. Claire fires her on the spot.”

  “She was afraid Violeta would tell her husband about the affair.”

  “Yes.” Mrs. Gutiérrez blows her nose savagely. Her manner turns cold. She is going to tell me the facts of life:

  “Mrs. Claire spreads this terrible lie that it was Violeta’s fault the little girl almost drowned. Violeta cannot get a job. She does not have a reference. She cannot pay the rent. Teresa has a bad ear infection and the clinic takes only cash. Violeta is terrified that she and the children will end up on the street or in a church basement with the homeless, or maybe the welfare people will take the children away. After many weeks she finds work at night, washing the laundry in a big health club in West L. A. Her children sleep in my apartment until she comes home at six in the morning. Only one night, she doesn’t come home.”

  The crime scene photos tell the story. Violeta gets off the bus on a destitute corner before dawn, trudging past hustlers and dealers. By now the route is habitual. She’s almost home, she’s tired, her guard fails.

  “This is why I say it was the fault of Mrs. Claire.”

  I remember Claire Eberhardt’s overwhelming guilt the very first time I met her at the front door. She was acting like a suspect with something to hide: an illicit affair. A desperate cover-up that ended in ruin.

  “Here also is the truth: the girl did fall into the pool, but it was Violeta who saved her life.”

  My eyebrows raise in skepticism but Mrs. Gutiérrez nods many times.

  A youngish man with dyed auburn hair walks up to us and unlocks the rusted gates.

  Mrs. Gutiérrez makes a small deferential bow, as if to a priest. “Buenos días, Don Roberto. ”

  He returns the formal greeting, pushes the gate open, and continues inside.

  Mrs. Gutiérrez speaks with breathless urgency: “The only person who knows what is best for the children
is the mother. The government of the United States will not decide. Don Roberto will ask the spirit of Violeta. She alone will tell us what to do.”

  Hispanic workers are getting off buses, sending curious glances my way as they stop into Tienda Alma on their way home. Mrs. Gutiérrez has gathered the children. With a last look at the busy street bathed in setting sun, I follow the clap-clap of her heels into the darkened botánica.

  • • •

  Mrs. Gutiérrez, Roberto, and I sit in the back of the shop at a card table upon which is a small radio and a white candle. I wonder if we will hear Violeta’s voice through the speaker. Roberto is about twenty-five years old, a homosexual with a dark complexion, a hip haircut that is partially shaved at the neck and longer on top, and a gold hoop earring. He wears a silky tan shirt and brown pants, but something is out of whack. The body is out of proportion — arms too long for a stunted torso — and he has trouble speaking. One side of the mouth seems to be paralyzed and as he struggles to explain how he got his gift, fingers rub the forehead with frustration:

  “My father and grandfather did this in our village. A hundred people would stand in line at the door. I learned from the age of seven.”

  When it comes to spiritual advice the deal is simple: “You tell me the truth and I tell you the truth.”

  He lights the candle.

  Despite the battle-scarred exterior, the place has clean floors and a certain order, and smells pleasantly of lavender incense. Behind old-fashioned wooden counters are shelves filled with small square half-ounce bottles of red, blue, and green oils. Floor-to-ceiling cases are filled with eight-inch glass candles, each with a picture of a saint and a promise of luck or salvation or protection.

  From the ceiling hang ropes of colored beads. Near the door are packets of herbs and spices, a model made of plaster of paris of a Native American chief, and an aloe plant, colored ribbons tied in bows on its spiky leaves. A display holds rosaries, statues of cows, pendants with single eyeballs looking out of black triangles, greasy little booklets about “Red Magic” and “Green Magic,” and on a revolving rack there are plastic pictures of all the saints, numbered for easy selection.

  We have left Teresa and Cristóbal with the Indian chief and staring eyeballs to sit at the card table behind a partition. Behind us is a multilevel altar upon which have been placed glasses of water, candles, pots of chrysanthemums, and a dish holding three small eggs covered with colored confetti.

  A lot of the reading takes place in Spanish with a few sidebars in English. Mrs. Gutiérrez talks about the situation of Violeta’s children. Don Roberto listens and asks her to write out her name and her mother’s maiden name on a pad. He counts up the letters in the names then deals that number of Tarot cards.

  “Please think about the mother of these children, Violeta Alvarado.”

  She obediently closes her eyes. I stare at the radio and conjure up the photo of the parrot. Then the feeling comes to me of holding Violeta’s small leather Bible in my hands; the dryness of it, like the poignant tiny body of a hummingbird I once found on my balcony.

  Mrs. Gutiérrez is warned not to cross her legs or lean on the table as that would affect “the energy.” She must turn over two cards, right to left. The first is El Sol, The Sun.

  “This card means El Salvador,” says Don Roberto.

  The second, with a baby on it, represents America.

  Yawning, he mixes the cards with great practiced sweeps and gathers them up again. He asks Mrs. Gutiérrez to pick sixteen.

  “Now you must think about this person very hard.”

  We are silent. Mrs. Gutiérrez bends her head forward in prayer. Don Roberto whispers, “I feel her spirit is very close. Tell us, mama, what is your wish concerning your two beautiful children?”

  Solemnly Roberto spreads out the sixteen cards Mrs. Gutiérrez has chosen. He nods and she turns one over at random. It is the card called El Sol

  A chill goes through my body like a temblor.

  Roberto’s mouth twists with the effort of expressing what he sees. “The mother wants the children to come home to the grandmother in El Salvador.”

  Mrs. Gutiérrez presses both hands over her heart.

  “I always know that!”

  He indicates that she turn over the card right next to El Sol. It is The Devil. Infierno!

  “But”—the side of the face contorts and a stutter clicks out—“El Salvador will be a living hell.”

  Mrs. Gutiérrez cries sharply, causing Teresa to look over anxiously from where she has been spinning the rack of saints.

  “The children must stay here.”

  “No!”

  “It is best.”

  She shakes her head and cries and grips Don Roberto’s hands. I am unnerved by the depth of her feeling.

  The young man’s head twists close. “I will tell you about Violeta,” he says softly and with difficulty. “She is not at peace.”

  All at once I know this is true, not only for Violeta but for legions of the dead. Legions of them.

  “She had lighter skin than me,” Don Roberto goes on. “She liked to laugh. It is not certain that the children are of the same father.”

  Mrs. Gutiérrez nods eagerly.

  “There is another child, a lost child.”

  The boy in El Salvador. Hot tears are in my eyes and I’m afraid I’m going to lose it.

  “And she had a very great struggle in the water.”

  Mrs. Gutiérrez lets go of his hands and sits up with wonder.

  “Yes,” she says, “in a swimming pool.”

  Don Roberto closes his eyes.

  “Violeta is struggling in the water. Somebody is in danger. They are drowning. On the bottom of the pool Violeta sees una bruja del mar. A sea witch!”

  Mrs. Gutiérrez gasps and a shudder goes through me.

  “The witch has long white hair and blue eyes. It is a jealous witch and its hand is around the ankle of the one who is drowning, trying to pull this person deep into the water, away from all life.”

  Don Roberto rubs his forehead and squeezes his eyes tight.

  “Violeta is very afraid, but she has a good heart.”

  Mrs. Gutiérrez gives a mournful sob.

  “And because she has a good heart she does not leave the water but grabs the drowning person. And this time, this one time, the sea witch let go. The person is saved.”

  • • •

  Mrs. Gutiérrez pays $20 for the spiritual consultation, $2 for a picture of El Niño, and $1.75 for a half ounce of red oil called Rompe Caminos, which Don Roberto says will “open up the four roads.” Looking at the bottle, I see the oil is manufactured in Gardena, California.

  “And you,” he warns me, “if you continue to think of your cousin too much, you will become like her.”

  I don’t know if that means Salvadoran or dead, but Don Roberto recommends this remedy: Fill a container with a mixture of goat’s milk, cow’s milk, and coconut milk, available at Tienda Alma. Remove the petals from a white flower, add any kind of perfume I like and eggshells, ground up very fine. Step into a shower and pour the entire thing over my head. This will relax me and provide a “spiritual cleansing.”

  Then I am to float a white flower in a glass of water and place the water higher than my head. The top of the refrigerator is ideal. Every four days I must change the flower, but I do not throw it down, I throw it up. In this way, Violeta’s spirit will rise, and if I do this for thirteen days, Violeta’s spirit will rest at peace.

  Still feeling unaccountably moved, I pluck a plaster saint dressed in blue robes from the shelf as a talisman, but Don Roberto refuses to sell it to me.

  “You don’t need this. Perform the remedy I have given. If you have faith, it will work,” Don Roberto says, chopping at the words, “like a miracle. ”

  Outside I offer Mrs. Gutiérrez a ride back to North Hollywood but, not wanting any favors from me, she says she prefers the bus.

  ‘What do you think?” I ask.
r />   She is subdued. “I have faith on Don Roberto.”

  “You know the children will have to go into foster care.”

  She nods sadly.

  “Barbie and I will see you on your birthday,” I promise Teresa.

  She responds with that wonderful smile. “Thank you, Miss Ana.”

  “And, Cristóbal — I’ll have something for you, too.”

  Still there is a tearing in my chest as I get Lack into the car, for what the children will go through, a merry-go-round of depleted social services until they get pregnant, get shot, or turn eighteen. But there is hope. There is me. I can make a difference. I can make sure they’re treated well. I can be their advocate. I vow to talk to their teachers. Keep them out of gangs. Take them up to the FBI office, like other agents do for their kids, it really makes an impression. I’ll treat them to the movies and the zoo. I’ll take my young cousins to the beach.

  By now I have crossed back up to Jefferson, a bleak landscape of low brick industrial buildings with curls of razor wire on the roofs, bordered by chain-link fences plastered with posters for hair braiding and discount video games. Savage graffiti — huge letters, cyclones of letters — roils across rippled metal walls. A hundred Black Muslims crowd out of a small church onto the street, deeply different from the Latinos in El Piojillo, all of them a galaxy away from the lunchtime shoppers north of Montana.

  If only a bit of red oil could open up the four roads. The roads are dead, like dead nerves that no longer connect, and there are so many Violeta Alvarados, rolling around like marbles in a heartless maze.

  I swing onto the freeway, thinking of the dead sidewalk on Santa Monica Boulevard where she lay watching helplessly as darkness rose from the bottom of her vision permeating everything, mouth, nose, eyes, gradually ending in the sounds of this noisy world with a grand silence.

  Then she is alone in darkness and after a while she can’t tell which is which — life being rolled away from her or a curtain lifted.

  The pupils of her eyes jerk once, then stop.

  Her body stops.

  She knows she has drowned. The hands of the sea witch are wrapped around her ankles and this time she doesn’t have the strength to pull away. But no — it isn’t the sea witch! It is her own mother, Constanza, and she is lifting her little girl up from this terrifying lonely darkness to the safety of her shoulder where the world is secure and bright. What a relief that it is Mother, I think, passing a truck and flooring it to seventy. Mother, after all.