by Alfredo Vea
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1 - the amazon luncheonette
Chapter 2 - the house of toast
Chapter 3 - the male recumbent
Chapter 4 - french lessons
Chapter 5 - the infamous blue ballet
Chapter 6 - mexicans in space
Chapter 7 - on tourette’s hill
Chapter 8 - the ballet rose
Chapter 9 - the spider’s banquet
Chapter 10 - gods go begging
Chapter 11 - the women’s chorus
Chapter 12 - the biscuit libretto
Chapter 13 - the soloist
Chapter 14 - a night in tunisia
Critical Acclaim for Alfredo Véa andGods Go Begging
“Written in a style that is urgent and poetic … lit by
phosphorescent desire and shadowed by heartbreaking waste.”
—The Baltimore Sun
“A terrific book: street-smart, savage, brutally funny but also
intelligent and compassionate.”
—San Jose Mercury News
“A meditation on the Vietnam War and on race, desire, and urban
gang wars [that] equals the passion and originality of [Véa‘s] earlier
work … He is becoming one of California’s best novelists.”
—Los Angeles Times
“A tightly wrapped tale of mystery, desire, hopelessness, and
death … Véa composes his plot with great skill, leaving the
reader strongly convinced of his story’s credibility.”
—Publishers Weekly
“An ambitious, complex story tracing the efforts of
several men and women to put the horrors of
Vietnam behind them … gripping and intriguing.”
—Kirkus Reviews
A practicing criminal defense attorney and the author of two previous novels, La Maravillaand TheSilver Cloud Café(both available in Plume editions), Alfredo Véa was born in Arizona and lived the life of a migrant worker before being sent to Vietnam. After his discharge, he worked a series of jobs—from truck driver to carnival mechanic—as he put himself through law school. Winner of the 1999 Bay Area Book Reviewers’ Award for Fiction, Gods Go Begging was also named one of the Best Books of 1999 by the Los Angeles Times. Véa lives in San Francisco.
“A riveting tour de force … Alfredo Véa has become
one of America’s most important fabulists.”
—Brick, A Literary Journal, Toronto
“A stunning novel that draws on the author’s own
experience in Vietnam. A beautifully crafted story of
emotional scars and battles.”
—Strictly Books
“Véa expertly marries the magical realism of Gabriel García
Márquez to his visceral accounts of battle. Indeed, whether we
measure by the breadth of his imagination, the strength of
his characters, or the hallucinatory power of his prose, there
seems to be no novelistic terrain that Véa can’t conquer.”
— [http://amazon.com] amazon.com
“A passionate exposé on war and desire.”
— [http://Latinolink.com] Latinolink.com
“Véa is a very good writer, powering up a scene
with description and dialogue. He keeps the
reader’s attention from first page to last.”
—Library Journal
“A hybrid of court drama, dramatic fiction, murder mystery,
and war novel … Uses flashbacks, fever dreams, and
recollections to bring the elements of the book together.”
—Albuquerque Journal
Praise for the previous novels of Alfredo Véa
The Silver Cloud Café
“Blends Gabriel García Márquez and Raymond Chandler.”
—San FranciscoChronicle
“Véa has passion and imagination … Engaging.”
—Los AngelesTimes
“Ambitious, energetic … A highly original, moving work.”
—Kirkus Reviews
LaMaravilla
“Beautifully written, thematically vital.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Powerful … enchanting … From the very first
sentence I was trapped and could not resist.”
—Isabel Allende
“A lustily told tale … La Maravilla almost does it all.”
—The WashingtonPost
“In the search for the Great American Novel, it’s time
to start looking in this direction … Unforgettable.”
—East Bay Express
ALSO BY ALFREDO VÉA
The Silver Cloud Café
LaMaravilla
PLUME
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
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Published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in a Dutton edition.
First Plume Printing, September
Copyright © Alfredo Véa, 1999
All rights reserved
Lines from “The World’s Wonders” from The Selected Poems of Robinson Jeffersby Robinson Jeffers. Copyright © 1951 by Robinson Jeffers.
REGISTERED TRADEMARK MARCA REGISTRADA
The Library of Congress has catalogued the Dutton edition as follows:
Vea, Alfredo.
Gods go begging / Alfredo Véa.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-17398-5
I. Title.
PS3572.E2G63 1999
813’.54- dc21 99-14338
CIP
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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dedicated to all the boys on all the hills.
Thank you
Rosemary Ahern, Sandy Dijkstra, Hong Thu
c Ha,
Shannon Raintree, Jeff Biggers, Carla Paciotto, Edmund K. Oasa.
Thanks to all the vets who shared their stories with me.
Above all, thanks to Carole Conn.
It is easy to know the beauty of inhuman things, sea,
storm and mountain; it is their soul and their
meaning.
Humanity has its lesser beauty, impure and painful; we
have to harden our hearts to bear it.
I have hardened my heart only a little; I have learned
that happiness is important, but pain gives
importance.
The use of tragedy: Lear becomes as tall as the storm he
crawls in; and a tortured Jew became God.
—Robinson Jeffers, The World’s Wonders
1
the amazon luncheonette
For a time, they both held on to their lives, gasping softly, whispering feverishly, and bleeding profusely, their two minds far, far away from the cruel, burrowing bullets that had left them mere seconds away from death. Face to face, they spoke their last words in crimson-colored breaths. Theirs was a withering language, one for which there are no living speakers.
Then, like warriors abandoned on the field, they lay in unearthly calm as the things of life deserted them. They had seen the mad commotion boiling in the air above them. In bemused silence, they heard the alarms, the screams, and the growing wail of sirens.
Pronounced dead on a cold city sidewalk, they held on to each other as the gurney rolled from cement to asphalt and into a waiting ambulance for a long, anonymous ride. In the end it was clear to every onlooker that neither dying woman would ever let go of the other. Leaves of lemon grass had drifted to the ground from the dress pocket of one of the women, marking their trail to the ambulance. Some of the sprigs and blades were bloodstained, adding spice to the liquid life that had trickled away.
Now they lay nameless on a long metal tray, two cooling women, breastbone to breastbone. Struggling together in motionless travail, they had become wholly entwined—their arms, their fingers, their final breaths; even their histories had become entangled. The tags tied to their toes bore the same name.
From a growing distance the dead women watched in nonchalance and saw in the swelling dimness the chief coroner and his assistant doing their lonely work. Unashamed, they saw themselves stripped naked in an airless, comfortless room and they felt dispassionate probing and bloodless cutting as if it were being done to bodies far, far away. From that great distance they watched their own innards sliding out like roe.
Devoid of cushions and warmth, it was a room of numbing dimension, a room made of corners, certainly not a place meant for living things. It was an empty, airless space with walls that concealed gleaming, heartless edges carefully arrayed within rows of silent drawers. Its hidden compartments were lined with finely honed contrivances, sharpened saws, and suction pumps. That nature that so abhors a vacuum must detest a sterile straight razor even more.
It was a chamber of stainless steel and sanitized white tile backlit by banks of lifeless light. Even sounds were frightened to death in a room like this one; bold timbres and shy tenors alike were suffocated, haunted into silence by a legion of echoes. A hall of mirrors for the spoken word.
“My wife says that music happens whenever you take the time to look carefully at another human being. Well, no one on earth looks closer than I do,” he said. He grunted as he shifted the large object beneath the cloth and rudely tugged the material to his right and away from the table. “And I have yet to hear a single solitary note, much less a melody.”
The assistant medical examiner grabbed a stiffened brown shoulder with his right hand and an ivory-colored one with his left. To get a better grip, he pushed his hands between two brassieres and toward the two breastbones. As he pulled, his words reverberated from the walls around him. The sound of his own voice coming back at him again and again never failed to make him dolorous. It was a dolor that had tormented him for three years now. He had consistently mistaken it for a migraine headache. So many echoes, yet no voices ever overlapped in this room; no matter how many spoke at once, each voice always sounded alone.
“My wife keeps telling me that there really is a melody in the slow, shifting weight of a mature woman walking on the beach, the easy metronome of her breasts; that if you watch a child quietly playing alone, you can detect definite musical tones and the overtones of an imagination running wild. Personally”—he shrugged—“I think my wife is worried that I’ve handled too many women. Maybe she thinks it’ll make her body less special to me.”
“What is your wife anyway, some kind of poet?” asked the chief medical examiner, his voice a mixture of humor and disdain. His own wife was waiting at home, and the very thought of her evoked at least a dozen reasons to work late. He nodded his head, indicating his impatience with his assistant. It was a common gesture. The subordinate quickly stepped back, allowing the chief to attempt a solo separation of the women.
“Not really. She’s a dancer and a painter hidden inside the body of an office manager. She’s in a modern dance troupe here in town, but she needs to keep a day job.” The assistant paused to let an image of her form in his mind. “She hates what I do for a living.”
With all his might the chief medical examiner strained to pull the two shoulders apart. He set his legs farther apart on the tile floor, then tried again, holding his breath for strength.
“Give me a hand, will you?” he said, finally exhaling his fatigue and exertion into the room. His assistant moved forward and reached out with both hands, placing one palm in an armpit and the other on the top of a shoulder.
“If the truth be known, I’ve seen a lot more men than women while I’ve been here,” said the assistant. “I guess it’s the nature of this business.”
“I’ve got half a dozen specimens of manhood laid out and cooling in back right now,” answered the chief. As he spoke he nodded toward the darkened morgue. Behind the wall to his back there were five males lying stretched out on refrigerated metal racks. One poor soul had been a bystander at a botched drive-by shooting. Another one was the victim of a carjacking; his body had been found by a jogger in McLaren Park.
Two other bodies were those of homeless veterans who had expired of unknown causes during the night. The corpses had been found beneath the elevated freeway near Potrero Hill. Their dark skin had been hardened by exposure and their knuckles and knees had been indelibly discolored by dirt and grass stains. The fifth body was that of a young schoolboy who had been driven over the railing of the Golden Gate Bridge by years of unnatural affection from his own father. His brother before him had done the same thing.
“Did you hear about John Doe 39? He came in about three hours ago. He was working underneath his classic car when his wife and her boyfriend lowered the jack on him. We got a full name for him just about an hour ago. The guy still has a brake pad embedded in his skull.”
The younger man secured the shoulder closest to himself and the two began pulling in opposite directions, each with one foot on a bar beneath the table for leverage. They had been straining for twenty or thirty seconds when one of them released his hold suddenly and without warning. The other almost fell to the floor, just catching himself by hanging on to the stiffened arm of the smaller woman. The two embracing bodies hung precariously over the edge. The long hair of the smaller woman was hanging down like a shimmering tent, enshrouding their frozen faces.
“Let’s get them back onto the table,” said the chief, out of breath and a bit embarrassed at the crudeness and clumsiness of their attempts. “My wife never lets me touch her anymore,” said the chief. “I think she’s projecting.” He gasped. “I’ve noticed that sometimes she’s repulsed by my hands. She pulls away from my touch.” He examined the mutual death grip more closely. “I think we’re going to have to cut them apart. Is there family listed, any claimants? Someone to object?”
“If we knew the answer to tha
t question,” said the assistant, who nodded toward the toe tags, “we wouldn’t have to Jane Doe them.” The assistant laughed uncomfortably. He had lost his mental balance for a moment. During his three years in this office the chief had never once mentioned his wife or his home life. He had never shared even a single personal opinion or feeling. The assistant knew that his glib remark had offended the chief medical examiner, so he added quickly, “Cut the fingers? Should a procedure like that be included on the protocols? What if the relatives do show up?”
After thinking about it for a moment, the chief shook his head. “We have to do what’s necessary. Cosmetics are the least of our worries. I can see now that just one of them has her fingers completely interlocked. I think we only need to cut her at the tendons. Let’s put that on the 36 protocol. After they’re separated you can work on 37. Well, what do you think?”
“About what? Number 37?”
“No, damn it, about my wife!”
“She’s afraid of you,” said the assistant in a lowered, more respectful voice. “When she’s alone she imagines what your eyes must see when you look at her. She may take her clothes off in front of you, but she knows you’ve seen women far more naked. You’ve seen women stripped of life.”
The chief medical examiner did not respond. There was deep regret in his eyes for having said anything about it. He might have responded a decade ago, before death had become so completely empirical to him, so damned quantifiable. Lately his wife had stopped wearing makeup and she was letting the gray in her hair overrun the auburn. She had even stopped buying wrinkle cream.
“Fire them up!” he snapped.
His assistant nodded, then moved to the console near the back of the room. There he turned on the amplifier and tape recorder marked table 3. The first doctor tapped the microphone softly and watched the VU meters jump. Satisfied, he began to speak.
“Refer to crime scene investigation this date regarding original location of Jane Does 36 and 37, both pronounced dead at the scene. They are two women, one black and one Asian, both dressed, though number 36 has no panties and number 37 has no shoes. They are in a face-to-face position, each with her arms wrapped tightly around the other. Number 36, the larger woman,has herfingersinterlocked in the small of the back of number 37. Number 37 has her arms around the neck and head of the other. ”
