The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue

by Manuel Munoz

  At the restaurant, we sit in a booth with comfortable cloth-covered seats, etched glass, and spacious tables. The young waiters circle quickly with hot dishes. I think of all my friends Over There and how they would deny that they come from such places. They feel a particular shame, I think, about coming from towns like this. But I’m glad for it: I think of my father and the town elders planning and hoping, counting the jobs at this restaurant, at the video store across the way, at the giant supermarket and the pharmacy. I wish I could be a little more like them or Doña Paulina, looking out for other people.

  Brother John studies the menu, and while his eyes are downcast, I study him: he seems smaller, his shoulders narrowed, his chest caved. Because I’ve been Over There and know more than just Mexican faces, I see the mystery of his parents through his face. He has the wide face that we all have, and the dark skin, but his hair is fine — fine and brown. I don’t remember it being brown. Beautiful, actually, the length of it creeping past his neck. With his face down, his eyes not showing, he could be a white boy, but I have never even tried to imagine who his parents could have been. None of the stories have ever convinced me.

  “You look tired,” I say to him.

  Brother John sighs and closes the menu. “Tough lately.” He looks up at me. “Being here.” His eyes lock on mine. It’s only Over There that people look me in the eye — that I feel okay about looking someone in the eye.

  I look back down at my menu and don’t say anything to Brother John. Our waiter takes a long time to come to our table, and I put on an act of not knowing what to order. For a while, it works; Brother John has little to say. But as soon as the waiter has come and taken our order, Brother John starts up, naming names, the people we went to school with. As with my friends Over There, I try to keep as much to myself as possible, only nod my head, try to avoid contributing to conjecture. It doesn’t faze Brother John. He tells me that Agustina had a baby a year after high school and could never determine the father. “And word is, Ginger — that teacher’s daughter — she had a baby, too, but no one knew about it and she gave it up for adoption. Beto and Patsy got married and then divorced, because Beto was having an affair with Carla — remember her? Carla Ysleta? Now Beto and Carla are married and Patsy’s alone with no kids.”

  Brother John says all this without keeping his voice down, and I can sense people are cocking their ears for gossip. People know people in this town. People know.

  “Violeta, of all the ones, never got married or had kids, but word was she couldn’t have any and had depression for years. That happened to her sister, Sofía. Remember her? That’s why a lot of people think she killed herself. And Emilio Rentería — he hurt himself so bad on night shift at the paper mill that he can’t work anymore. But you can see him at the Little League games. He coaches the kids, even though he uses a wheelchair.”

  A friend of my father’s passes by our table on his way out and extends his hand. “Good to see you,” Señor Treviño says. He beams proudly at me, and behind his smile I can almost hear my father telling his lies to the old men at the Iglesia de San Pedro. “Say hello to your father.” Brother John says nothing to him, does not meet his eyes, and it surprises me that Señor Treviño simply goes on his way, giving Brother John only a slight nod.

  “What’s that about?” I ask Brother John when the old man leaves the restaurant. “He knows you.”

  Brother John sniffs. “He thinks he does.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They’re making me pay back the scholarship. Remember that?”

  I do remember it. I remember the envy, the luck I thought he had, how the Iglesia de San Pedro had silently pushed their bake sales and Saturday breakfasts and tithing to present Brother John a check to attend a school in Oklahoma. My father had reprimanded me one night when I said something about how unfair it was: “You think about what that kid has been through. All his life. Who does he have to turn to except these people right here at the church?” My mother had been sitting on the couch watching her telenovela. She had rolled her eyes in disgust. That was the year before she left.

  “Why are they making you pay it back?”

  “I didn’t finish,” says Brother John, and he looks back down. His brown hair falls a little, but I can still see his face, and for the first time — maybe because I’m old enough now — I recognize what a sad life he has had, all the things he does not know. At least my mother, even though she is not with my father anymore, calls me. “Why are you Over There anyway?” she pleads, and right now, as I think of her and see Brother John’s downcast eyes, her pleading is not a nuisance.

  The waiter comes with the food, the plates hot, and I shovel the food in. I can sense it coming from Brother John, the need to say something, and I feel sorry for having asked him out to eat. He does not touch his food.

  Finally, when I’m halfway through my plate, he picks up his fork and starts eating. “Did you think I was praying?” he asks.

  I laugh nervously. I remember the school he was sent to, a religious school smack in the middle of Oklahoma.

  His voice hushes a little and I have to lean in to hear him. He starts telling me, even while he’s eating, but I can understand him. He doesn’t swallow the words. “I got there, to Oklahoma, and I had that money. But I ran out real quick after I bought books and stuff, and I couldn’t afford the dorms. So I found this room from a family that lived in the middle of town. When I told them I was a student down at the school, they let me stay real cheap. The room was upstairs, like an attic, and I had my own stairwell that ran above the garage. I had to be real careful in the rain. Or the snow. They had used this real cheap glossy paint on the wood and it was slippery. But they never bothered me. I still needed money, though, so I started tending bar without telling them, just to make some extra. Things were going fine for a long time, and then . . .”

  I resist saying, What? My food is nearly gone, but Brother John takes his time. He pushes the fork around on his plate, takes a few small bites.

  “I met someone,” he says very quietly. “One of my classmates. He was from South Carolina.”

  He is telling me this because I’m living Over There; he thinks anywhere but here will let you live a life never allowed. He thinks Over There is full of people falling in love, people waiting to listen to you while you do the falling. He sees right through me, my moving Over There. But I still say nothing.

  “His name was Gary. Gary Lee Brown. I met him and started seeing him a lot. And a few months later I lied to that family and told them that Gary needed help and could he stay with me, and they said yes. The father even helped us move Gary’s bed up to that room, even though we never used it. We just set it up in case the family came upstairs, but they never did. The hard thing was, Gary was real religious. He believed it, I mean, and even after we’d been together like that for a year, he kept telling me that what we were doing was wrong, that it was a sin. He’d scare me sometimes, the things he’d say, like driving out in the middle of the wheat fields and just sitting, thinking about killing himself. ‘You’re just out there, thinking?’ I would ask him when he’d come home late, real late — two in the morning, sometimes. And that’s what would scare me, all those hours, being alone at night when I knew what he was thinking. You remember going out to the orchards at night, drinking, how you can see the stars all out? It’s pretty when you’re with other people, but when you’re by yourself . . . And Oklahoma’s flat. Flat, flat — flatter than here.”

  “He didn’t kill himself, did he?” I ask him, because the way he’s talking is making me nervous, the anticipation of terrible news.

  “Nah, he didn’t,” Brother John says, pursing his lips. “We went on like that for a long time. A long time. Then one day I came home from school and Gary’s things were gone — his clothes, even the bed. He left me a note taped to the mirror in the bathroom, explaining how it wasn’t right, saying he went back to South Carolina. Back to his little town.”

  This
is where the tears start, and the waiter comes by as if he’s been listening the whole time. “Everything all right?” he asks. He must be sixteen or seventeen, young, and he looks like one of the Ochoa brothers.

  “Some bad news is all,” I tell him, and Brother John holds his head in his hands, and I’m grateful that the waiter walks away before Brother John begins again.

  “I loved Gary. I really did. And I ran out of money and couldn’t concentrate on the studying anymore, so I just came back home,” he says, sobbing softly, and if only it weren’t here in this restaurant, I would listen. But it’s difficult. “It’s been real hard to keep inside, ever since I came back. But I don’t have anywhere else to go. I don’t have family. I only had him. And I remember telling myself, all those times walking home from the bar in that little town, This is it, this is it. How could he go like that? I just couldn’t believe it when I read that note, and I haven’t heard from him since.”

  The waiter comes back with a coffeepot and two cups, even though we didn’t ask for it. I’m too speechless to refuse him, and Brother John is too busy wiping away his tears, so the cups come down, and this means more that I have to sit through, waiting for the coffee to cool down, waiting for the check.

  “For the longest time, I thought about going to South Carolina, to his little town, to find him. Call him out in the street in front of all his people and ask him why. But then I think about somebody doing that to me here and I know it would just be mean. At least he didn’t kill himself, I hope.”

  I pour some sugar into my coffee, some of the warm milk, and slide the little condiment tray over to Brother John. He takes it calmly, the story out of him, and I figure maybe what he wants is a story in exchange. He wants to know about Over There, what you do when you feel like this Over There, where there isn’t an empty wheat field to cry in. So I tell him a little bit, just to say something. But I just talk circles. I say that Over There is tall buildings. Over There is restaurants and the people who eat in them. I say that Over There is long, high windows by clean dining tables, and bright candles for the patrons. Over There is side streets with doors always open to the restaurant kitchens, the cooks sitting on the steps to get air. How there are enough restaurants Over There to employ actors and dancers who bend like Ls over the tables, enough work for the Mexican busboys and the dishwashers, how they all split the tips between cigarettes at the end of the long shift. Living Over There is cars and taxis, vans and too many horns, a bus to get you from one side of the city to the other whenever you needed.

  I don’t offer much more, and Brother John sips his coffee, quiet, not asking for more. What city doesn’t have those things — tall buildings, too many cars, immigrants in the kitchen, actors and dancers eager for the spotlight? His face is done crying and it settles into resignation — he doesn’t bother looking me in the eye.

  The waiter brings the check, and both of us reach for our wallets. I don’t want to do the dance of who pays, so I let Brother John put the money down when he insists and get up to leave. We walk out to the car, past families going in to eat, the smell of the brand-new tar of the parking lot in the air. When he shuts the car door, before I turn the ignition, Brother John clears his throat. He wants to revive the life in himself, and he says, “I loved that guy. Gary Lee Brown. I still love him . . . ,” but I interrupt him.

  “No more,” I say apologetically. And then, “Keep it to yourself.”

  DURING THE REST OF the week, I think about Brother John next door, and I feel bad about how I left things with him. I nurse my aching hamstring in the quiet of the house, all of my nephews outside playing basketball, tireless. They’ll come in filthy later, and it takes a long time to get all of them to wash their hands. I am lying on the couch and I close my eyes, hoping they’ll stay out there until my brothers and sisters come back to collect them.

  I keep wondering if I did the right thing by not telling Brother John my story, even though I knew he wanted to hear it. But I learned a long time ago to keep things simple. Don’t tell much. Don’t tell everything. Don’t reveal what people don’t need or want to know. It makes it easier all around.

  Of my father: say no more of what happened to end the marriage. Of my brothers and sisters: nothing of the spider-cracks in their own unions. Of my tía Carolina: nothing of the money she stole from her job as the cashier of the mini-mart. Look at the people we went to school with: Agustina, though she knew the father of her baby, never brought him up. Ginger, whose mother worked with the school superintendent, wore big sweaters to hide the pregnancy. Maybe credit should have gone, then, to Ginger’s mother for saving reputations all around. Beto and Carla married at the Iglesia de San Pedro, and no one raised a fuss, not even Patsy, alone and with no kids to show for her time with Beto. Violeta never talks about what is wrong with her insides, never takes her older sister Sofía’s tragedy and brings it under the wing of her own misery. Emilio never admits that the accident at the paper mill might have been his fault, might have been caused by the sips of whiskey and the pot during his long breaks at four in the morning. No one needs to know the whole story, I wish I could tell Brother John. No one wants to know what Lily does in her car while she waits outside the houses of the men she loves. No one wants to know about Gary Lee Brown.

  But I can’t explain it to Brother John without telling him about the Actor. Take the Actor: when the Actor told me he was an actor, I had wanted to know what kind, because actor didn’t differentiate him from any of the other actors Over There — stage actors, musical theater actors, dancers who did some acting because there were more opportunities to act than to dance, improv players, experimental and fringe performers, porn stars, soap actors, commercial hounds, film extras. But it had become apparent that I didn’t need to know. All that I needed to know was the Actor’s last hour at the bar, that the flirtations with the customers were nothing more than a way to get bigger tips, and that neither of us had to admit that this would be nothing more than a few brief months of small arguments and jealousies, caught hours and inconsequence. There would be no telling each other where we grew up and who our last boyfriend was and why it didn’t work out. I learned to keep it to sitting at the bar, having two drinks, watching the Actor bend elegantly down, watching the customers admire that elegance. For all his story, Brother John got nothing; I left out my part about the Actor, about dating the Actor, then loving him, sitting at the bar and waiting for the end of his shift, watching as he stretched over a table to deliver drinks, a sharp L as the customers peered up at him.

  “You shouldn’t go on the plane like that, hurt and everything,” my father says. His voice surprises me, and I open my eyes to see him standing over the couch. “Why don’t you stay until you get better?”

  “I have only a couple of vacation days,” I tell him. “I have to go back.” I put my hand over my eyes, as if I have a headache, but really it’s to ward him off. We have not had our usual session of just the two of us sitting in a room, quiet, until he asks the questions that still eat away at him, the questions about my mother. Each and every time, I refuse to answer. I stay quiet and let him ponder on his own because I don’t know how to relieve his exasperation.

  “Why are you Over There anyway?” my father asks me.

  “Dad, lay off,” I say, sighing, and I rub my hamstring as if he’s irritating it. My hand is still over my eyes, but I don’t have to look at him to realize that our usual session is here, the two of us quiet. I think about the difficulty of easing anyone’s pain after a sudden departure, the lack of reasons, the loss of hope. I can see Brother John in a small room in the wide plains of Oklahoma, the weather battering the thin glass of the windows of his attic apartment, him standing there and trying to ease his own confusion. It makes it easier to picture my father in this house on the first night after my mother’s departure, how Brother John’s story has allowed me to imagine. But then I realize my father has let go of those questions and those hurts, at least temporarily.

  After a long
while, I speak. “Dad,” I ask, “why did you send me over to Brother John?” I keep my hand over my eyes, my other hand rubbing at my hamstring.

  He does not answer. He stands at the foot of the couch. I can hear the clock ticking above the television set, the boys outside arguing, the ball bouncing against the dirt driveway. I still have my hand over my eyes, blind to my father’s reaction, and the longer he stays silent, the more I want the pain in my leg to stay fiery and fierce, my hand over my eyes like a blindfold.

  IDA Y VUELTA

  JOAQUÍN’S VOICE TOLD HIM over the phone that he was returning because of his father’s cancer, and as soon as Roberto heard the word, he knew what it meant: Joaquín’s father was already in the hospital and near the end. It was that way around here, how the old people kept their pains hidden until it was too late. The discovery of their afflictions was always too late, always meant an end was coming. Roberto listened to Joaquín’s tired voice tell him about driving back to the Valley on Friday after work. He lived in Menlo Park these days, over in the Bay Area, and he’d been gone for what seemed a long time to Roberto, though it had only been a year.

  “How long are you staying?” Roberto asked him. It was Wednesday evening and November.

  “I don’t think it’ll be more than a few days,” Joaquín answered, and his voice suggested that relatives were being summoned home, the older ones coming by car all the way from Texas. Some were probably keeping watch already at the hospital in nearby Visalia, fifteen miles away. Their town had shut down its own hospital years ago; where Roberto lived, on the south side of town, he’d sometimes hear the sirens wailing, ambulances rushing all that way to Visalia, and he imagined some never made it.