Lord of California

by Andrew Valencia

  Yes, yes, I will cry, and turn away sobbing. God help me, yes. I want to suffer and I want to sacrifice. I can’t be alone.

  Where is the city we were promised? How do we begin to build?

  After recuperating in darkness for the better part of two weeks, Sandra finally came out to rejoin the rest of the family right as the summer harvest was about to commence. Her appetite had returned in short jumps over the course of her seclusion, with the biggest jump, from liquid to solid food, giving us the most anxiety along the way. Whatever expired medicine she had taken in her moment of weakness, none of us had any idea what the long-term damage might be and whether her system would ever fully recover. Dawn stayed close by her side all through her recovery, just as she had with Beth some months before. She was the one who figured that calcium would help to repair her stomach lining, and who drove into town each morning to make sure we had plenty of fresh milk on hand. And when Sandra at last agreed to come out from her bedroom, it was Dawn who held her arm on the slow walk down the hallway.

  Now they were at the kitchen table with a half-eaten cheddar cheese sandwich beside them on a plate. The other half of the sandwich was working its way through Sandra’s uneasy digestive tract while Dawn stood behind her with a pair of scissors, cutting her long mess of hair down to a cooler, more comfortable summer coif. Ellie was by my side at the gas range. We stood and leaned our palms on the counter and waited for the leftover Sloppy Joe meat to finish reheating in the pan. A week of free room and board and our prisoner still hadn’t softened up. He kept his back to me whenever I entered the room. He sneered and demanded vodka and saw every kindness we showed him for the desperate bribe that it was. Even Ellie, with all her liberal reservations about violence, seemed almost ready to give the go ahead for execution. Though she never had to worry about pulling the trigger. We all knew who that task would fall on.

  Every minute he stays here puts all of us at risk, she said, stirring the bubbling meat in the pan. The foremen are already suspicious, what with Dale walking off the job without a word. Won’t be long till they start getting nervous about whatever’s going on up here at the house. Then we’ll be lucky if we can find a pack of blind junkies to lead the harvest.

  I shook my head and sighed and watched her split a couple of cheap supermarket hamburger buns in half and arrange them on the paper plates resting beside the range. She stirred the steaming meat mixture one last time and scooped a heavy spoonful onto the flat bottom half of each bun. The Sloppy Joes were her own doing, part of her continued effort to make things easier for our mothers in the wake of everything that was going on. For three days the house had been filled with the smells of ketchup, cumin, and chili powder. Ellie smacked the top bun onto the congealing meat and cut the sandwich in half with a butcher’s knife and laid the knife on the counter over a paper napkin. She managed to take a bite without slathering the corners of her mouth with sauce. I wished my brothers knew that trick.

  There’s no middle way between it, I said. If he can’t be reformed, he has to be dealt with. Trouble is, my heart isn’t in it the way it was a few days ago. If you’d told me then we’d have to give him the Old Yeller treatment, I’d have jumped at the chance. But now I don’t know. It’s funny. You bring a person meals and tend to their needs and you start to feel responsible for them, no matter how big a bastard they are. Makes me wonder how the guards at San Quentin used to manage it back in the day. Wish I could pick one of their brains right about now.

  Ellie scratched at a mosquito bite behind her armpit. With the heat rising more and more each day, she’d started going around the house in some of my old t-shirts with the sleeves cut off clean at the seam. We’d grown familiar enough with each other to share such things in common, and to where I didn’t think twice about seeing her bra straps running free in the breeze.

  I wish there was a way to get through to him, she said. I don’t like to believe it about a person, least of all someone with the same blood as me. I don’t like to believe someone could be so cruel and heartless. But then I think about how it’s Elliot’s blood running in our veins, and I wonder if we aren’t just a herd of black sheep all flocked together. You’ve got to admit, he’s more like him than we are.

  Is that supposed to make me feel better?

  It should. I wouldn’t want to be like either of them.

  That’s what I mean. You can’t kill a man unless there’s distance between you. The longer I spend acting like his maid, the harder it’ll be for me to put him down.

  It shouldn’t have to come to that. But we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t.

  You don’t know how right you are, I said. I’ve been studying on it these past weeks, and what I found isn’t too encouraging. The Bible takes a hard stand against fratricide. Men who kill their brothers wind up marked and exiled. Entire races cursed for the sins of one ancestor.

  Ellie set her Sloppy Joe down on the plate and looked at me with raised eyebrows. Glad you found something to keep your spirits up through all this, she said. But we need a practical solution. The Bible’s not going to help us here.

  She smiled a smart little smile and continued chewing through the mouthful of meat lodged in her cheek. Blasphemous as she was, I suppressed the tongue-lashing I would have given her just a few weeks before. To that end, I suppose I owed her for planting the seed of the solution in my mind.

  How many wine bottles do we have left in the pantry?

  Ellie shrugged. Beats me, she said. Go ask the two drunks. They’re bound to know.

  Come on. That’s not fair. Your mother drinks more than mine.

  Yeah. But that’s saying a lot and you know it.

  All right, fine. I’ll go see for myself.

  What are you going to do?

  I’m going to do what I should have thought to do a long time ago. Do me a favor and fix another sandwich. I’ll be right back.

  While Ellie ladled some of the dripping meat onto the remaining bun, I went around the house collecting everything I would need for the mission at hand. I started in the pantry. Of the nine compartments built into the big cardboard box, only four still contained full bottles of wine. A few odd bottles were arranged on the shelf beside the box, but I reasoned they appeared even more questionable than the cheapo Mexican stuff our mothers purchased in bulk. Nothing from the local vineyards was ever worth a damn, though sometimes a passable Chilean brand went on sale down at the supermarket. In school the ag science teachers taught us all about the Napa region and the unsurpassed quality of California reds, but once you got to the age of sneaking drinks for yourself when no one was around, you realized that hardly a soul east of the Diablos had ever really tasted the wine of our country. I grabbed one of the bottles from Sonora and blew the dust and dirt off the label and carried the bottle by the neck to my bedroom.

  The Bible was resting closed on the four-inch space of wood frame between the headboard and the mattress. An old edition of the New American Standard Bible that had outlasted America itself, the book was battered and yellowed with a stripe of filth down the side from where my unclean fingers had gripped the pages. Stained much darker since Dad died. The cover was deeply cracked, like my ankles in August, when the sun blazed and there was no moisture left in the air or ground. I flipped to the New Testament and skimmed the pages until I landed on the passage I was looking for. Marking the page with my thumb, I carried the Bible and the wine to the kitchen and collected the sandwich and the rest of my supplies. I came down the hall balancing the paper plate on my forearm like a waiter. The prisoner lay curled up on the edge of the bed with his back to the door and the loose chain wrapped around his calves. I set the plate, bottle, and glass on the dresser and took the heavy corkscrew from my pocket. He didn’t acknowledge me at all until the cork popped out. Then he turned his head.

  Is that what I think it is?

  Three meals a day for days on end and this was the first time he’d spoken before I did. Tilting the stemmed glass to an angle, I p
oured the deep red wine against the side of the bowl and watched it rise up halfway to the rim. It’s not vodka, I said. But it should help to get that monkey off your back.

  I set the bottle on the bookcase and held the glass out for him to accept. He looked at the offering with his hands pressed flat against the bed. I raised the glass to my lips and took a sip and made sure he saw me swallow.

  See, I said. It’s fine. Go ahead and drink.

  He reached out and seized the glass with both hands. It couldn’t have been more than five seconds before the glass was empty again and he sat gasping and eyeing the rest of the bottle. Another, he said.

  I took the Bible out of my back pocket and opened it to the passage I had chosen. He saw what book it was and shook his head. You can have another one in a little while, I said. First, there’s something I want to read to you. You said you were a believer once, but that you had lost your faith. So I’m here to bring you back into the fold. Right now you’re probably thinking I’m wasting my time. Maybe you even feel sorry for me. Well, brother, I feel sorry for you too. Cause whether you’ll admit it or not, you were a prisoner long before you showed up at our door. You’re a prisoner of your own sin and arrogance. But I know someone who can set you free. Someone you used to know before you started down the path of darkness.

  It pleased me for the most part to hear how I sounded. Seemed like I was doing at least as good a job as any of the priests or missionaries they talked about in church, the ones out there in the world spreading the Word to the desolate places far from Christendom. At the same time, I understood it didn’t matter how I felt about my ministerial abilities, that the only thing that would save either of us was how he felt. And to be fair, he did look at me for a long time with what appeared to be thoughtful consideration. Then he burst out laughing.

  Go ahead and laugh, I said. We both know there was a time when you weren’t too high and mighty to believe. There was a time when faith still meant something to you.

  He drained the last transparent drops from the bottom of the glass, keeping his eyes on me all the while. If you knew what it took for me to stop believing, he said, you wouldn’t have much faith either. In God or anything.

  You’re wrong. Faith isn’t about being free from pain. It’s about being strong enough to handle pain when it comes.

  Right. That’s why you’re extorting me with a bottle of cheap Shiraz. Because faith is so attractive on its own.

  I gave you one glass because I knew you wouldn’t listen to a word I said without it. And I’ll give you another if you agree to listen some more.

  He slid his feet off the covers and sat forward on the edge of the bed. The chain went lax, settling in small coils across the floor. Go on, then, he said. Tell me the good news. Show me what I’ve been missing.

  I set my finger on the page and began to read.

  He entered Jericho and was passing through. And there was a man called by the name of Zaccheus. He was a chief tax collector and he was rich. Zaccheus was trying to see who Jesus was, and was unable because of the crowd, for he was small in stature. So he ran on ahead and climbed up into a sycamore tree in order to see Him, for He was about to pass through that way. When Jesus came to the place, He looked up and said to him, Zaccheus, hurry and come down, for today I must stay at your house. And he hurried and came down and received Him gladly. When they saw it, they all began to grumble, saying He has gone to be the guest of a man who is a sinner. Zaccheus stopped and said to the Lord, Behold, Lord, half of my possessions I will give to the poor, and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will give him back four times as much. And Jesus said to him, Today salvation has come to this house, because he, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which is lost.

  I closed the book and looked up at the prisoner’s blank face. He was holding the empty glass out in front of him, ready to accept a refill the moment it was offered.

  You understand why I chose this passage? I asked. Course you do. You’re a smart guy. The message should be clear to you. Zaccheus was a sinner and a cheat, but Jesus gave him the chance to redeem himself. But first Zaccheus had to prove that salvation meant more to him than money. He had to humble himself, and offer retribution, before he could truly be saved.

  The prisoner nodded. Indeed, he said. And I suppose in your reading of the story, I’m the sinner. I’m Zaccheus, and you’re one of the people I’ve tried to cheat.

  I took up the bottle and started to pour. This time I gave him three-quarters of a full glass, more or less, and watched him empty it all the faster. How would you have me read it instead?

  Well. For starters, I’d say you should look at your own house before you presume to judge me. How much attention did you pay to this story before I showed up? Did you ever read it and wonder what Jesus thinks of you and your family living here in a house while your pickers are forced to stay in the state camp down the road? Sounds to me like you should sell the land to Russert and give the money to the poor folks around here. Or do you only bother with the Bible when it suits your own needs?

  You don’t know what you’re talking about. We’re not rich. Even when Dad was alive, we were just barely getting by from year to year.

  Am I supposed to feel sorry for you? Is that what you expect from me? When you’ve got me chained up like a rabid dog?

  I expect a little gratitude. For the wine, at least.

  Right. Gratitude is the first step. First you do these small favors for me until I feel indebted to you. Then you work your Catholic guilt over me until I start sympathizing with you. Before long, I’ll be saying grace at the dinner table with the rest of the so-called family, and you’ll have a case of Stockholm Syndrome on your hands so classic you could publish an article about me in a leading psychiatric journal.

  That’s way out of line.

  Sure. Deny it. As if you didn’t realize the significance of what you were doing, bringing wine and a Bible in here and preaching to me about redemption.

  I thought it might do your soul some good to be reminded of the word of God. If I’d known you were going to be so paranoid about it, I wouldn’t have bothered.

  The good of my soul. Is that what the story was supposed to make me think about?

  So what if it was? It’s not like you couldn’t learn a thing or two from Zaccheus. Don’t you see something of yourself in him?

  The prisoner laughed. Hardly, he said. I should think an entrepreneur like me would have very little in common with a tax collector.

  He raised his glass for another refill. I looked at the glass and held my breath and let the breath out slowly. I’d sworn I wasn’t going to let him provoke me this time, even if it meant turning the other cheek as he took massive shit all over the Scriptures. All over me and my faith. I grabbed the bottle by the neck and stuck it right into the milky white palm of his other hand. Pour it yourself, I said, and retreated back down the hallway.

  Ellie was seated at the kitchen table with her mother, scraping bits of meat and sauce from her plate with a steel spoon. She looked at me as I sat down. Since the attack, the bruises on her neck had faded to a shade of yellowish brown that at times seemed to blend together with the color of her hair, making them less painful for me to look at.

  How’d the sermon go, padre? she asked. I was listening outside the door. I heard you preaching to him.

  I folded my arms over the table. In the seat beside me, Sandra was quietly patching a rip in one of Gracie’s nightgowns. She appeared comfortable with a needle and thread, though it still made me uneasy seeing her up and about after what she’d tried to do, let alone with a sharp object in her hand. He’s a hard case, I said. I tried everything I could to be civil to him, but it’s like he’s searching out ways to be difficult. Like the only joy he can find is in antagonizing me.

  What did you expect? You must have known he wasn’t going to drop to his knees and repent after one Bible lesson. You could have read him the whole book cover to cover a
nd it still wouldn’t have done any good. His heart’s frozen against it.

  So is yours. Maybe you should try talking to him.

  Oh, no. If I go in there and lose my temper, there’s a chance one of us might not make it out alive. You saw the way I was when we took Jennifer down. I can handle some things with a cool head, and other things I can’t. I really can’t.