April Smith - North of Montana

The second, with a baby on it, represents America.

Yawning, he mixes the cards with great practiced sweeps and gathers them up again. He asks Mrs. Gutiérrez to pick sixteen.

“Now you must think about this person very hard.”

We are silent. Mrs. Gutiérrez bends her head forward in prayer. Don Roberto whispers, “I feel her spirit is very close. Tell us, mama , what is your wish concerning your two beautiful children?”

Solemnly Roberto spreads out the sixteen cards Mrs. Gutiérrez has chosen. He nods and she turns one over at random. It is the card called El Sol

A chill goes through my body like a temblor.

Roberto’s mouth twists with the effort of expressing what he sees. “The mother wants the children to come home to the grandmother in El Salvador.”

Mrs. Gutiérrez presses both hands over her heart.

“I always know that!”

He indicates that she turn over the card right next to El Sol . It is The Devil. Infierno!

“But”—the side of the face contorts and a stutter clicks out—“El Salvador will be a living hell.”

Mrs. Gutiérrez cries sharply, causing Teresa to look over anxiously from where she has been spinning the rack of saints.

“The children must stay here.”

“No!”

“It is best.”

She shakes her head and cries and grips Don Roberto’s hands. I am unnerved by the depth of her feeling.

The young man’s head twists close. “I will tell you about Violeta,” he says softly and with difficulty. “She is not at peace.”

All at once I know this is true, not only for Violeta but for legions of the dead. Legions of them.

“She had lighter skin than me,” Don Roberto goes on. “She liked to laugh. It is not certain that the children are of the same father.”

Mrs. Gutiérrez nods eagerly.

“There is another child, a lost child.”

The boy in El Salvador. Hot tears are in my eyes and I’m afraid I’m going to lose it.

“And she had a very great struggle in the water.”

Mrs. Gutiérrez lets go of his hands and sits up with wonder.

“Yes,” she says, “in a swimming pool.”

Don Roberto closes his eyes.

“Violeta is struggling in the water. Somebody is in danger. They are drowning. On the bottom of the pool Violeta sees una bruja del mar . A sea witch!”

Mrs. Gutiérrez gasps and a shudder goes through me.

“The witch has long white hair and blue eyes. It is a jealous witch and its hand is around the ankle of the one who is drowning, trying to pull this person deep into the water, away from all life.”

Don Roberto rubs his forehead and squeezes his eyes tight.

“Violeta is very afraid, but she has a good heart.”

Mrs. Gutiérrez gives a mournful sob.

“And because she has a good heart she does not leave the water but grabs the drowning person. And this time, this one time , the sea witch let go. The person is saved.”

• • •

Mrs. Gutiérrez pays $20 for the spiritual consultation, $2 for a picture of El Niño, and $1.75 for a half ounce of red oil called Rompe Caminos, which Don Roberto says will “open up the four roads.” Looking at the bottle, I see the oil is manufactured in Gardena, California.

“And you,” he warns me, “if you continue to think of your cousin too much, you will become like her.”

I don’t know if that means Salvadoran or dead, but Don Roberto recommends this remedy: Fill a container with a mixture of goat’s milk, cow’s milk, and coconut milk, available at Tienda Alma. Remove the petals from a white flower, add any kind of perfume I like and eggshells, ground up very fine. Step into a shower and pour the entire thing over my head. This will relax me and provide a “spiritual cleansing.”

Then I am to float a white flower in a glass of water and place the water higher than my head. The top of the refrigerator is ideal. Every four days I must change the flower, but I do not throw it down , I throw it up . In this way, Violeta’s spirit will rise, and if I do this for thirteen days, Violeta’s spirit will rest at peace.

Still feeling unaccountably moved, I pluck a plaster saint dressed in blue robes from the shelf as a talisman, but Don Roberto refuses to sell it to me.

“You don’t need this. Perform the remedy I have given. If you have faith, it will work,” Don Roberto says, chopping at the words, “like a miracle. ”

Outside I offer Mrs. Gutiérrez a ride back to North Hollywood but, not wanting any favors from me, she says she prefers the bus.

‘What do you think?” I ask.

She is subdued. “I have faith on Don Roberto.”

“You know the children will have to go into foster care.”

She nods sadly.

“Barbie and I will see you on your birthday,” I promise Teresa.

She responds with that wonderful smile. “Thank you, Miss Ana.”

“And, Cristóbal — I’ll have something for you, too.”

Still there is a tearing in my chest as I get Lack into the car, for what the children will go through, a merry-go-round of depleted social services until they get pregnant, get shot, or turn eighteen. But there is hope. There is me. I can make a difference. I can make sure they’re treated well. I can be their advocate. I vow to talk to their teachers. Keep them out of gangs. Take them up to the FBI office, like other agents do for their kids, it really makes an impression. I’ll treat them to the movies and the zoo. I’ll take my young cousins to the beach.

By now I have crossed back up to Jefferson, a bleak landscape of low brick industrial buildings with curls of razor wire on the roofs, bordered by chain-link fences plastered with posters for hair braiding and discount video games. Savage graffiti — huge letters, cyclones of letters — roils across rippled metal walls. A hundred Black Muslims crowd out of a small church onto the street, deeply different from the Latinos in El Piojillo, all of them a galaxy away from the lunchtime shoppers north of Montana.

If only a bit of red oil could open up the four roads. The roads are dead, like dead nerves that no longer connect, and there are so many Violeta Alvarados, rolling around like marbles in a heartless maze.

I swing onto the freeway, thinking of the dead sidewalk on Santa Monica Boulevard where she lay watching helplessly as darkness rose from the bottom of her vision permeating everything, mouth, nose, eyes, gradually ending in the sounds of this noisy world with a grand silence.

Then she is alone in darkness and after a while she can’t tell which is which — life being rolled away from her or a curtain lifted.

The pupils of her eyes jerk once, then stop.

Her body stops.

She knows she has drowned. The hands of the sea witch are wrapped around her ankles and this time she doesn’t have the strength to pull away. But no — it isn’t the sea witch! It is her own mother, Constanza, and she is lifting her little girl up from this terrifying lonely darkness to the safety of her shoulder where the world is secure and bright. What a relief that it is Mother, I think, passing a truck and flooring it to seventy. Mother, after all.

I WISH I COULD SAY the mood in the office was radically changed by events concerning the Mason case; that people approached my desk with reverence and wonder at the turn it had taken, a Westside doctor dead by suicide, a major film star under a narcotics investigation. Maureen has given up the name of a dealer who turned out to be linked to the Mexican mafia, so one thing Jayne Mason did not fabricate was the fact that the Dilaudid came from Mexico. This is a good lead for Jim Kelly and the ladies and gents of the Drug Squad, but for the rest of the bullpen it is business as usual.