Night at the Fiestas: Stories

by Kirstin Valdez Quade

  She’s got a big gold purse with her, and a duffel bag, he sees, courtesy of Marlboro. Amadeo gets out. Her hug is straight-on, belly pressing into him.

  “I’m fat, huh? I barely got these pants and already they’re too small.”

  “Hey.” He pats his daughter’s back between her bra straps, then, because he is thinking of her stomach, thinking of her pregnant, steps away. “What’s happening?” he says. He realizes it’s too casual, but he can’t afford to let her think she’s welcome, not this week, Passion Week, and with his mother away.

  “My mom and me got in a fight, so she dropped me off. I didn’t know where you and Gramma were.”

  Amadeo hooks his thumbs in his pockets, looks up at the house, then back at the road. The sun is gone now, the sky a wan green at the horizon.

  “A fight?”

  Angel sighs. “I don’t know why she’s gotta be all judging me, trying to act all mature. Whatever,” she says without bitterness. “What me and the baby needs right now is a support system.”

  “A what?” The clarity is long gone. He shakes his head. “I’m real busy,” he says, like an actor portraying regret. “Now’s not a good time.”

  Angel doesn’t look hurt, just interested. “Why?”

  She lifts her duffel and begins to walk toward the door. “My mom’s not here,” he calls. He’s embarrassed to tell her, embarrassed by the fervor that being a penitente implies. “I’m carrying the cross this year. I’m Jesus.”

  “And I’m the Virgin Mary. Where’s Gramma, well?” She holds the screen open with her hip, waiting for him to unlock the door.

  “Over there in Vegas with her boyfriend.”

  Angel laughs, a raucous teenage laugh. “We’re all kinds of Virgin Mary.”

  Yolanda is making her way across Nevada in a travel trailer with Cal Wilson, and, depending on how things go, she could be home tomorrow or in a month. As if to check if she’s coming, Amadeo turns and sees Manuel Garcia standing in the road, watching him and his daughter.

  The old man’s ruined face spreads into a grin around collapsed teeth. Loose, dirty pants are cinched at his waist with a belt, his wounded hands before him. Amadeo’s mouth goes dry.

  Up on the step, Angel is saying, “I was all, Whatever, take me to Gramma’s if you want to. She don’t care.”

  Amadeo turns from Manuel Garcia. He takes the duffel from Angel’s hand and pushes open the aluminum door. “Come on.”

  THAT NIGHT, ANGEL CHATTERS about food groups as she makes dinner—a can of chili dumped over an underdone squash and a package of frozen cheese bread—then takes over the TV. She talks to her belly as she watches America’s Next Top Model. “See, baby? That heifer is going home. You can’t be like that to your girls and win the game.”

  Amadeo sits at the other end of the couch, uneasy. He wipes his palms along his thighs, works his tongue inside his mouth. Three times he looks out the front window, but the old man is gone. With a sudden stitch in his gut, Amadeo thinks of Tío Tíve. He can’t know that Angel’s here and pregnant for all the world to see.

  “So,” Amadeo says. “Your mom’s probably gonna want you back soon, no?”

  “Nah. I’m staying here with you and Gramma awhile. I gotta teach her she’s not the only one in my life.”

  Amadeo kneads his thigh. He can’t tell her to leave. Yolanda would kill him. He just wishes that Yolanda were here.

  She and Angel are pretty close; Yolanda sends the girl checks, twenty-five here, fifty there, and a couple of times a year the two go shopping at the outlets near Santa Fe. Amadeo tries to remember the last time he was alone with his daughter, but can’t. Two or three Christmases ago, maybe; he remembers sitting awkwardly in this same room asking Angel about her favorite subjects while Yolanda was at the grocery store or the neighbors’.

  Amadeo is having trouble breathing. “Maybe you could visit when my mom gets home.” A needle of guilt slides into his side.

  Angel doesn’t seem to have heard him. “I mean, the woman’s all preaching to me about how I messed up and why couldn’t I learn from her mistake, but what am I gonna do now, huh? I mean, I get it. It’s gonna hurt like hell and I’m missing prom and did you know I probably won’t get to sleep a whole night until it’s three years old? I’ll be eighteen by then.”

  Angel looks like her mother. Amadeo doesn’t remember Marissa acting this young back then. Marissa was sixteen, Amadeo eighteen, but they felt old, he is sure of that. Her parents had been angry and ashamed, but had thrown a baby shower for the young couple anyway. Amadeo had enjoyed being at the center of things: congratulated by her relatives and his, handed tamales and biscochitos on paper plates by old women who were willing to forgive everything in exchange for a church wedding. He stood to sing for them, nodding at Marissa: “This is dedicated to my baby girl.” Bendito, bendito, bendito sea Dios, los ángeles cantan y daban a Dios. They all clapped, the old ladies dabbing their eyes, Yolanda blowing kisses across the room.

  Later, of course, after there was no wedding, no moving in together, after Angel was born and learned to walk and talk—with no help from Amadeo—he was relieved by how easily the obligation slipped from his shoulders. The old women shook their heads, resigned; they should have known better than to expect anything from Amadeo, from men in general. “Even the best of them aren’t worth a darn,” his grandmother used to say. (“Not you, hijito,” she’d say kindly to Amadeo. “You’re worth a darn.”) By the time Angel was five and Amadeo had moved with his mother back to the little town where he’d grown up and where their family still lived, he felt lucky to have been let off the hook.

  As though answering a question, Angel says, “I didn’t drop out of school for real. I’m gonna start back up after the baby comes, so don’t worry.” She looks at him, waiting.

  Amadeo realizes that he forgot to worry, forgot even to wonder. “Good. That’s good.” He gets up, rubs his shorn head with both hands. “You got to have school.”

  She’s still looking at him, demanding something: reassurance, approval. “I mean, I’m serious. I’m really going back.” Then she’s off, talking about college and success and following her dreams, the things she hears at the parenting class she goes to at the clinic with other girls her age. “I got to invest in myself if I’m gonna give him a good life. You won’t see me like my mom, just doing the same old secretary job for ten years. I’m doing something big.” She turns to her belly. “In’t that right, hijito?”

  This depresses the hell out of Amadeo. He opens a beer and guzzles half of it before he remembers who he is this week. “Fuck,” he says, disgusted with himself, and pours it down the drain.

  Angel looks up at him from the couch. “You better clean up your mouth. I don’t want him hearing you say that. He can hear every little thing you say.”

  “Fuck,” Amadeo says again, because it’s his house, but he says it quietly, and thinks about the sound passing through his daughter’s body to the child inside.

  THE TEACHER OF ANGEL’S parenting class has arranged for someone to drive her into Española at two-thirty every afternoon. Angel is up by seven. Amadeo can hear her, clattering dishes, the TV going. Midmorning, she’s in the shower. The pipes hiss and gurgle in the wall near his head. He flops over in his limp bed, tries not to think of her, the naked lumps of flesh, but he can’t help it. Christ’s pain, he reminds himself. Think of that. Each day, Amadeo practices his face in the bathroom mirror after he showers, water running down his forehead. He spreads his arms, makes the muscles in his face tighten and fall, tries to learn the nuances of suffering. To think of his daughter makes him queasy. It makes him queasier to think about whoever got Angel this way. This is not a detail that made it into the story Amadeo heard from his mother, but he doesn’t need facts to picture it: some Española cholo dealing meth from the trunk of his lowrider. When he finally hears Angel leave, Amadeo gets up. He watches from the kitchen window until the teacher’s car is out of sight, then sinks into the chair in relief and
eats the cold eggs and bacon she has left out for him.

  He’s on the couch with a Coke and the remote balanced on his thighs when Angel comes home. As she swings her backpack to the linoleum, she looks at him, surprised. “Aren’t you working?”

  “It’s Holy Wednesday,” he says.

  “Where you working now?”

  “It’s slow. I’m waiting to hear.”

  “Huh.” Angel drops to the couch, then scoots down so her neck is cricked and her belly high.

  Who is she to criticize? “I’m getting something together with Anthony Vigil. We’re doing a business, outfitting cars for the races down in Albuquerque.” Actually, this was the plan—Amadeo enjoyed working with Anthony, and was good at it, reboring the engine, replacing the metal front and sides with fiberglass, removing what wasn’t essential. Yolanda had been glad that Amadeo was “getting involved” and had offered to give them what she could afford to start them out. But in the end Anthony partnered with his cousin. “No offense, man,” Anthony told Amadeo, “but in a business you gotta know your partner’s going to show up.”

  “Huh,” Angel says again. After a moment, “You still sing ever?”

  “Nah.” Not for years, though at one time he’d thought he could actually go somewhere with it. He’s grateful to Angel for remembering; Amadeo offers her his Coke.

  She shakes her head. “It’ll dissolve his baby bones.”

  From eleven on, Angel was a little shit: surly, talking nasty, applying dark lip liner like she was addicted to it. Amadeo remembers when she was younger; he looked forward to when she’d come from Española to stay with him and his mom, enjoyed taking her out for the day, showing her off to his friends. He felt like a good influence, teaching her how to check the oil and eat ribs and not to listen to Boyz II Men. She was sweet then, eager to please, riding in the truck, fiddling with the radio, asking him at each song, “Is this good? Do you like this one?” When he’d nod, she’d settle back and try to sing along, listening hard, each word coming a little too late. Sometimes Amadeo would sing, too, his voice filling the cab, and Angel would look up at him, delighted.

  Now she resembles that child again—her cheeks full and pink—but there’s something frightening about her. It’s as though she’s reentered the world, proud to be a member in good standing. Now she regales Amadeo with facts she’s learned in her parenting class, facts about fluids and brain stems and genitals. “Like, did you know he had his toes before he even got his little dick?”

  Amadeo looks at her, surprised, then back at the TV. “Why you gotta tell me that?”

  Angel faces him enthusiastically, grinning around her big white teeth, one foot tucked under her belly. “Weird, huh, that there’s a dick floating around in me? Do you ever think about that? How Gramma is the first girl you had your dick in?”

  “The fuck. That’s disgusting.” Amadeo is horrified; this is his daughter.

  “Jesus, too,” she says, singsong. “Jesus had his stuff in Mary.” She laughs. “Couple of virgins. There’s something for your research.” She settles back into the couch, pleased.

  Angel has seemed only mildly interested in Passion Week, which is a relief to Amadeo, and an irritation. “So it’s like a play?” she asks.

  “It’s not a play—it’s real. More real . . .” He doesn’t know how to explain it to her. More real even than taking Communion, Tío Tíve had said months ago when he sat with Amadeo at the Lotaburger and offered him the part. Tío Tíve looked at him severely. “You got a chance to thank Jesus, to hurt with Him just a little.”

  Angel asks, “They’re going to whip you and stuff? Like, actually hard?”

  He’s proud, can’t keep the smile from creeping in. “Yeah.”

  “My friend Lisette cuts, but she just does it for attention.”

  “It’s not like that. It’s like a way to pray.”

  Angel whistles low. “Crazy.” She seems to be thinking about this, turns a pink crocheted cushion slowly in her hands.

  Amadeo waits, exposed.

  “So it’s gonna hurt.”

  He tries to formulate the words to explain to Angel that the point is to hurt, to see what Christ went through for us, but he’s tongue-tied and shy about saying these things, as shy as he’d be if he were explaining it to his old friends. And he isn’t even sure he’s got it right. But here it is: his chance to prove to them all—and God, too—everything he’s capable of. “But it’s a secret, right? You can’t go tell nobody back in Española.”

  “Why?”

  “The Church don’t agree. You just can’t say anything.”

  “Can I see it? The morada?”

  He’d like her to see it, to see what he’s at the center of. “Tío Tíve don’t let women in there. You can go to Mass at the church. You can be in the procession.”

  Angel scrunches her face. “Can’t I just see it? Once? You’re Jesus, aren’t you?”

  “Tío Tíve would kill me.”

  She’s good-natured in her pleading, all smiles. “Come on.”

  “Women can’t go in. And besides . . .” Before he can stop himself, he glances down at her belly. Her face slackens and she turns back to the TV. When Amadeo looks again, she’s crying soundlessly, her face blotchy and ugly, mascara running down her cheeks.

  It’s not his fault. He didn’t tell her to be a girl. He didn’t tell her to get knocked up. They were doing so well, she was showing some interest, he was feeling so good. “It’s just a building. It’s mostly empty, anyway.”

  But now Angel’s shoulders rock. She has her fist pressed over her mouth, and she’s still not making a sound.

  “Hey. Hey, don’t cry.” He turns awkwardly on the couch, pats the shoulder near him.

  When she speaks, it’s with a gasp. “You think I’m too dirty for your morada. Is that it? Too dirty for your morada, too dirty for prom, too dirty for everything.”

  An image flashes: Angel naked, sweaty and grunting with some boy. “You’re not dirty,” he says.

  Guilt thick as tar bubbles in his gut, and suddenly he’s nineteen again and it’s summer, and he’s with Marissa in her parents’ backyard. They stretch out by the kiddie pool, beers warming in their hands and in the sun, while Angel slaps the water. Amadeo holds a plastic dinosaur, and he’s making it dance on the surface of the water, while Angel, with her damp black curls and lashes, slick red smile and swollen diaper, laughs her throaty laugh. They’re talking about Marissa’s older sister’s new trailer—two bedrooms, full bath, cream carpet—and Marissa says she wouldn’t mind a trailer, they could get a trailer, used at first, and beside them Angel splashes, a blade of grass stuck to her chest. Amadeo says, “You won’t catch me living in no trailer. Besides, they just lose value,” and Marissa says, stubbing out her cigarette emphatically in the grass, “It’s not that I wouldn’t rather have a house, but when? And we gotta be saving if we ever want to have a place of our own—are you even saving anything?” This is when the fight starts, escalates. Amadeo accuses Marissa of getting pregnant just so he’ll have to take care of her, and he calls her dirty, dirty whore. (She isn’t, he knows that, hasn’t done any more than he has, but ever since she slept with him he can’t look at her the same way.) Then they’re both on their feet, and he slaps her, hard across the upper arm, which is bare and exposed in her sleeveless shirt. Marissa staggers back, reaches behind her into air to steady herself, finds no hold, falls.

  Amadeo looks at his hitting hand, horrified. But if he were honest he might admit that even as he moved to hit her he knew he could stop himself and knew he was going to do it regardless. The real surprise is the shock on her face, proof that he can act on the world.

  Marissa stands. The skin on her arm turns white then red where his palm made contact.

  “You asshole! Don’t you ever hit me again.” She screams at him, throwing plastic buckets and toys. Some strike him, some miss and fall to the grass. Amadeo wishes she’d kill him. But she keeps yelling, “Don’t you ever hit me again
!”

  And it is that word, again, that terrifies him, as if by uttering it she opens up the possibility that he has it in him to do this again—even, somehow, makes it inevitable. From the kiddie pool, Angel looks up at her parents, eyes wide and black and unwavering.

  “Don’t you walk away!” Marissa yells, and Amadeo turns just long enough to see her grab the baby, too roughly, Angel’s head jerking back as Marissa swings her onto her hip, water from the baby’s sodden diaper spreading dark across her shirt, her denim cutoffs, down her short brown legs. She’s yelling at him, calling him names, and he’s thinking of how loud her voice must be so near Angel’s soft pink ear. Even as he starts the truck, Amadeo doesn’t think he’ll go through with it. His breath is ragged, he’s shaking, and he’s on Paseo de Oñate before he realizes he’s somehow still gripping the dinosaur.

  Now, fourteen years later, Amadeo turns to Angel, who cries into her hands. He looks at his watch. Almost eleven. He touches her shoulder again. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  THE MORADA IS NOT much to look at. Outside there’s still the dark skeleton of a sign on a pole from when it was a filling station, the bright plastic panels long gone, and two blank pumps. During the day, strangers passing by will pull in for gas and look around, confused by the trucks parked in front, before heading straight through town to the Shell station on the highway. Tonight the parking lot is deserted.

  Inside, the cinder-block walls are painted white, and a few benches face the front. The only thing worth looking at is the crucifix, and Amadeo watches Angel take it in. She walks the periphery of the room, stopping at various points to gaze at the man on the cross. This Christ is not like the Christ in the church: shiny plastic plaster, chaste beads of blood where crown meets temple, expression exquisite, prissy, a perfect balance of compassion and suffering and—yes, it’s there—self-pity. No, this Christ, the wooden Christ nailed up on the morada wall, is ancient and bloody. There is violence in the very carving: chisel marks gouge belly and thigh, leave fingers and toes stumpy. The contours of the face are rough, ribs sharp, the body emaciated. Someone’s real hair hangs limply from the statue’s head. The artist did not stop at five wounds but inflicted his brush generously on the thin body. And there are the nails. Three. One in each hand, one skewering the long, pale feet. Amadeo feels his own palms throb and ache.