Rain God

by Arturo Islas

  “Oh, Nina, you know I don’t believe in those things. And they’re not clouds. It’s just plain fog.” He was a graduate student at the time and was therefore a literal young man who took himself and others very seriously.

  Antonia, the oldest sister and the aunt Miguel Chico never knew, was their father’s favorite. She died of tuberculosis. Nina and Juanita nursed her at home for a time, then went to see her at the sanatorium every day for five years until her death. After they buried her, Nina did not go to another funeral until her own son was buried in the new cemetery at the outer edge of the desert on the north side of town.

  After that, Nina visited his grave on his birthday, on holidays, and on the Day of the Dead. She did so conscientiously, indulged in self-reproach over his tombstone, and tried to keep horror from overwhelming her as she imagined him beneath her with the desert in his mouth. She stopped paying homage to her guilt and grief on the day she realized Antony was no longer lying in wait for her.

  “Aren’t you going to the cemetery to visit Tony?” Juanita asked Nina on his birthday. He would have been twenty years old.

  “What for?” Nina replied casually. “He’s not there. He never was.”

  Juanita was puzzled but dropped the matter. She did look very carefully at her sister’s face to make sure she was not in some kind of trance. As a gesture of good will toward Nina’s interest, Juanita had begun attending classes in mind control. It was her way of seeing to it that Nina did not ascend into heaven without her.

  Nina and Juanita had loved each other deeply from the beginning. Their passage through the illness and death of their older sister, their suffering from their father’s arbitrary nature, their constant sharing even after their marriages and the setting up of separate lives in separate households had bound them irrevocably. If they were unable to see each other during the day, they would speak on the phone as if they had been apart for years. Nina was the pragmatic one for all her later spiritual adventures; Juanita was the idealist and romantic. Nina’s poetic nature expressed itself in the subtle mixture of spices with which she served up whatever had been plain meat or poultry.

  “My God, Nina, this is delicious. What is it?” Miguel Chico asked her, tasting a dish that satisfied all but his sense of hearing.

  “Roast chicken. Eat it before it gets cold.”

  After their father’s death, Nina and Juanita were left alone in the small house on the south side of town six blocks from the border. Nina cooked all the meals for them and the occasional relatives and friends who stopped by. Juanita cleaned house and did the laundry. Both already had part-time jobs which they kept, but only Juanita finished high school. Nina thought school a waste of time for industrious people with common sense. Unless they had some practical value, books bored her, and she could not bring herself to read novels or stories because daily life and real people were infinitely more interesting to her. Juanita, who joined a book club shortly after she married, could never get Nina to read the latest best seller that arrived monthly and which she read immediately. After thumbing through a few of them, Nina judged them boring and “pure trash.” Stories about the endless suffering of southern belles left her unmoved.

  “Why don’t they write about us?” Nina asked her sister.

  “Who wants to read about Mexicans? We’re not glamorous enough. We just live,” Juanita answered. She was getting ready to go out to the annual policemen’s ball with Miguel Grande. Four-year-old Miguel Chico watched his mother show off her new dress. He and the two women were reflected in the mirror of her dressing table.

  “Not glamorous enough, huh?” Nina said. “Look at yourself.”

  Juanita did and saw a tall, slender woman with a long, pale face and dark hair. She was wearing a burgundy-colored dress with a pleated skirt in the style of the early forties, and she delighted her son by turning gracefully from one end of the room to the other so that her dress ballooned out and displayed her beautiful legs. “My mother has glamour legs,” he liked to tell the neighborhood.

  “The new book came this week,” she said to Nina. “Read it after Mickie goes to sleep.”

  “No thanks. I’ve got better things to do.”

  “You’re going to remain an illiterate Mexican all your life,” Juanita told her as she kissed her son good-night.

  “I can read what I need to know. Anyway, in this country, all you really need to know is how to count.”

  Their aunt Antoinette came up from Mexico City to be with them after their father’s death. She was too delicate and ladylike for Nina, but Juanita was delighted with her wardrobe and the few jewels she had brought with her. Antoinette was in her mid-forties and had not married. Mysteriously, she hinted that she had more jewels at home and left the source to Juanita’s fancy. Her niece begged her to tell them about the dances and young men of the capital, and the aunt, flattered by the attention, made up stories that satisfied at least one of her brother’s daughters. Nina saw through her aunt’s pretensions but, so as not to spoil Juanita’s pleasure, did not share her insights. After a few months Antoinette was convinced that the girls were safe and could take care of themselves, and she returned to the capital where she lived in a poor section of town, far removed from the fancy dress balls and the pretty young men now part of Juanita’s imagination.

  Their aunts on their mother’s side had families of their own to care for and called infrequently. Nina and Juanita enjoyed their independence immensely. Now they could attend the Saturday night social events sponsored by the Church without having to sneak away and then suffer from the punishments of discovery when they returned home.

  “Devil’s daughters!” their father had bellowed at them when he found out that they had been to a social and not a religious function. “You are lost!” He, like others from the provinces, was unable to separate the body from the soul.

  Their father could be vicious in his rage and was capable of beating them severely when he drank too much. Though she could bear it for herself when he hit them, Nina could not stand to see him hurt her sister. Once she attempted to strike him as he was taking the strap to Juanita. He was so shocked by Nina’s temerity that he stopped in the middle of the whipping and walked out of the room without a word. Stunned, the girls could only look at each other in disbelief.

  Nina trembled for the rest of the day, waiting in dread to suffer from the consequences of her boldness. The punishment did not come. At the table they sat in their customary silence, a silence broken only by the sounds of their father’s eating. They were not permitted to begin their meal until he finished his. As the days went by without his saying or doing anything to her, Nina understood that her punishment was the constant fear of reprisal under which she lived. He was a clever man, she granted him that. But she was his daughter, and her strategy, once she understood, was to pretend to be afraid. Now they sneaked away at will, and their father never touched them again.

  On his deathbed, he called for them both and looked at them sadly. Juanita was crying and Nina wondered why. She was glad to be rid of him at last, a sentiment for which she would feel residual guilt until she came upon the spirit world.

  “Crybaby, Juanita. What’s the matter with you? Remember how he treated us?” To think of him already in the past tense relieved Nina and she refused to give him the satisfaction of her tears. She looked back at him with a straight, impassive face.

  “Daughters,” he said. “Behave yourselves.” He reached for their hands, recoiled from the contact, and died with his mouth and eyes open.

  Nina wanted to burst out laughing, but she restrained herself. “Behave yourselves!” It struck her as ridiculous that a man’s last words to his children should be so stupid. She hazarded a comment to Juanita as they were being led out of the room by their aunts. “What else have we ever done?”

  “Shut up,” Juanita said, “have respect for the dead.” She had stopped crying at least. With their aunts’ permission, they agreed not to tell Tonia that their father was dead. Anto
nia had stopped asking for him after the time he had visited her in the sanatorium crazy drunk and cursing her for having abandoned him.

  Years later, when they told her that Antony was dead, Nina was standing in her kitchen looking out the window at the desert that came right to their back door. Tony had not wanted to move to this house so far away from his friends and favorite cousins. It meant a change in schools for him, and he did not like the idea of having to adjust to new teachers (he had the reputation of being a gifted but “difficult” student), or of leaving his girlfriend behind.

  “Now I’ll be more isolated than ever,” Tony said to his mother. “Is that what you want?” He was sixteen, handsome like his father with Gallic features from Nina’s side of the family. His Mexican schoolfriends called him “Frenchie” and teased him for being so good-looking.

  “You’ll get used to it. And you’ll make new friends,” Nina said, unwilling to be swayed from her determination to buy the house. “The money we save will put you through college.” Tony, like his father, was interested in electrical engineering.

  “I don’t want to go to college, and your whole life revolves around money.”

  “Listen to you. If it weren’t for the fact that your father and I have worked all our lives to see that you and your sisters live decently, you wouldn’t have that car you run around in so much.” Nina had been against his having a car at so young an age.

  “I bought that car on my own, so don’t start in on how grateful I’m supposed to be to you for supporting me. I didn’t ask to be born.” He was a sophomore in high school.

  “If you keep talking to me like that, I’ll have your father take that car away from you whether you bought it or not. And you’ll go to college because you’ve got the chance to make something of yourself. Do you hear me, Tony?”

  “You never finished high school and you did all right,” he said to her.

  “It’s different now. Besides, I still have to work hard to make ends meet. So does your father.”

  “It’s different now, all right. Everybody’s going to college so that they can make more money, and for what? The country’s so fucked up, it’ll send me to Vietnam before I can even get into college.”

  “Don’t you use bad language in front of me.” Nina was not prudish, but she did not like her children to speak that way in her presence. She saw it as an indication of their disrespect for authority and she wondered what her children were learning in school.

  “If you make me change schools, I won’t study.”

  “Don’t threaten me. You’ll change schools if you have to, and you’ll study if I have to lock you in your room and throw away the keys to it and your car.”

  Tony walked away from her.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Out.”

  “That’s no answer.”

  “That’s the only answer I’m going to give you.”

  Nina went ahead with the deal for the new house. It was an extraordinarily good buy. In a few years, they could sell it for ten times as much and move back to the part of town they liked best. The money they gained would help put Tony through college. They owned a lot next to the house they were in, and Ernesto was a good engineer. He had built all the homes they had owned. He was as taken by the bargain as she and agreed with her readily over Tony’s protests.

  The house was one of those new, prefabricated structures that were going up everywhere on the northern and eastern ends of the town. If the economy continued as it had for the last five years, the house would be practically in the middle of town in the next five. At the time they bought it, however, its rear windows looked eastward onto miles of sand and tumbleweed.

  Their move was hard on Juanita, who was afraid to drive that far on the highway even in the daytime. “Are you crazy, Nina? You’re going to be shoveling sand out of your bathtub.”

  “What do I care? As long as it doesn’t get into my beans, let it do whatever it wants.” They moved in during the last days of August. The children changed schools, and Tony fulfilled his threats to stop studying. Nina threatened him in turn with whatever she thought might get him to stop being so obstinate. Juanita was disturbed by their struggle and she tried to interfere once again.

  “You’re being as stubborn as he is, Nina. Let him have his car so that he can at least get out of the house once in awhile. Tony’s young and healthy. You’ll make him sick if you continue to coop him up out here in the middle of nowhere.”

  “I’ll let his father give him the keys to the car when he decides to start doing his homework again.”

  Juanita saw that it was hopeless to argue with her sister about it. She saw obstinacy and grudge bearing as the main flaws in Nina’s character, and she was trying to keep them from doing too much damage. She went up to Tony’s room.

  “Tony, it’s your tia Juanita. May I come in?”

  “Sure,” he said and giggled. “You have to unlock the door from your side. She put in a deadbolt the other day.”

  Juanita went into his room. Tony was in bed listening to the radio and smoking a forbidden cigarette. His sister, in league with him against their mother, had smuggled it into his room.

  “Tony, I know it’s none of my business,” Juanita began.

  “If you’re going to try to talk me into doing what she wants, you’re wasting your time,” he said very quietly.

  Instead, she talked to him about her youngest son Raphael, Tony’s favorite cousin, and how much they all missed his visits to their house across town. Juanita saw the same faults in her nephew as in her sister and decided that her only course was to pray for them both and hope for the best. But when she went downstairs she said firmly to Nina, “You’d better think very carefully about what you’re doing to that boy.”

  “I have. It’s for his own good,” Nina said.

  The following Easter Sunday they came to tell her that he was dead, drowned at the smelter lake with all his clothes on. She had allowed Ernesto to give Tony the keys to his car for the holiday. As he had walked out the door, she had told him to behave himself.

  Nina thought of her father in that moment before she began howling. “Damn you, Father,” she said, inhaling the words, “why do you keep punishing me?” Juanita was holding her tightly from behind, and the two of them rocked together in a slow, horrible dance. She let her go when Nina said she wanted to sit down. Nina walked out of the kitchen, chile still toasting on the burner, and made her way into the living room. Her daughters and husband’s relatives were there. She stared at them blindly, sat on the sofa, and resumed her weeping. Her sister-in-law Carmela, Tony’s godmother, sat next to her but did not touch her.

  In the kitchen, Juanita turned off the burners and, glancing out the window, saw Ernesto standing on the sand, his back to the house. The spring light was still in the sky; the evening would be lovely. Behind her, she heard Miguel Grande say, “Don’t go out there. Leave him alone,” but she was already out the door and halfway to where Ernesto stood. Looking at the side of his face, for he did not turn to greet her, she sensed that his expression was as dry as the earth beneath them. It chilled her, and all of her instincts could not bear the silence. Quietly, she said to him, “And you, Ernesto? Why don’t you cry too?”

  He turned to look at her and she thought he was going to strike her. At that moment, he was the loneliest creature she had ever seen. He took her hand and slowly, guided by her, began to feel his loss.

  “My son,” he said. The desert was in his eyes.

  Tony appeared in the sand before him as he had looked on the floor of the emergency room. The medics had taken off all but his trousers, and Ernesto tried to revive him without knowing that the firemen had pronounced him dead by the lake an hour earlier. Miguel Grande and the doctors had to use force to get him away from his son. Police and newspaper photographers were taking flash photos. Juanita showed one of them to Miguel Chico the following Christmas when he was home for the holidays. As he looked at the photograph, Miguel Chico
was struck by his cousin’s youth, his athletic chest, the handsome face.

  “I don’t remember him as grown up as this,” he said.

  “You didn’t bother to see him,” his mother answered.

  “Don’t start, Mother. He didn’t exactly care that much for me, you know. He told Raphael that he thought I was a phony.”

  “That’s not true. He loved you.”

  “It’s too late, Ernesto. He’s gone,” Miguel Grande had told him when he had calmed down somewhat. After the identification forms were signed, he and Miguel Grande walked out of the hospital into the late mid-April afternoon. The day was sunny and warm.

  Miguel had parked his police vehicle next to Tony’s car. Ernesto noticed it. “Get that car out of my sight,” he said angrily to his brother-in-law. “I don’t care what you do with it.”

  They got into the police car. Raphael was waiting in the back seat, having refused to go into the emergency room. None of them said anything during the drive to the house on the east side. Miguel stopped once at a precinct station to phone Juanita and give her instructions. When they arrived, Juanita, Lola, and some of Ernesto’s relatives were waiting in their cars. Together they walked to the front door of Nina’s house. It was open, the screen door unlatched; the aroma of roasting chiles caused Ernesto to stop dead. He looked at Miguel and Juanita and then walked around the side of the house by himself.

  “God damn it,” Miguel Grande said for Juanita and Lola to hear, “I’m going to have to tell her.” The women followed him into the house.

  Ernesto was in the backyard looking at the desert. Seeing it at its most beautiful in the sunset of the holy day, he felt its desolation for the first time in his life. He thought he had always loved it, but now he understood that he had accepted it as a given fact, like breathing. From this day, he could no longer take anything for granted, though his duty as a man was to pretend to do so until the day he died. The vision was overwhelming, and bitterness and despair wrestled with his soul. Both were as dry and timeless as what he was gazing at; only his uncertainty was mortal.