Kirstin Valdez Quade - Night at the Fiestas - Stories

Then the hermanos lift the top of the cross, and Amadeo’s vision swings from sky to earth. Upright, his weight returns; his torn heels press into the wooden block. Below him, on the highway, a few glittering cars move slowly, oblivious. The hot air tastes of salt, and dust sticks in his throat.

Angel stands before him, holding her hands under her belly. The nails, the nails. He isn’t sure if he says it or thinks it. But Tío Tíve nods as if this was what he expected and reaches into his pocket for the paper bag. A hooded hermano steps onto a stool and pours rubbing alcohol over the wood and Amadeo’s hot hands. The alcohol burns cold and smells sharp and clean.

THIS IS THE MOMENT they’ve been waiting for, and the people crowd closer. Parents nudge their children to the front, turn their babies to face the cross. These children will remember this their whole lives. Perhaps one of them, one day, will make the town proud. For now, though, the people are proud of themselves, because they were right about this Christ. True, a few of the onlookers might have hoped for a more artistic arrangement of blood, but no one can deny that he looks awful up there; he is exhausted. The man has put himself through Hell for them. Flies land on Amadeo’s cheeks and neck, and — mira — he’s too tired even to shake them away.

The Hermano Mayor cleans each nail. Alcohol splashes into the dust. Someone in the crowd thinks, This is like our time on earth, just a splash, then we rise into Heaven. The Hermano Mayor wipes each nail with his white handkerchief, then hands them one by one to the other hermanos. The people’s hearts fill with joy for Amadeo, glad it’s his uncle who will do this for him. Family is important.

Some of the people watch Manuel Garcia. They hope he doesn’t feel too bad, but really it’s time, and the old man has rested long enough on his laurels. Manuel Garcia’s back is to Amadeo. He gazes down the hill he’s just climbed.

One or two of the people glance over their shoulders at Angel, to see how she’s taking it, to see if she’s proud of her daddy, to see if some of the bad girl is getting washed out of her. But her face is blank, and she’s standing there with her hands dangling dumbly at her sides, her big cheap belly hanging low.

AMADEO HADN’T EXPECTED FEAR, but here it is, hammering in his heart. What he sees from up here are eyes, and though he knows these people, knows all their names, they are like the eyes of strangers. He sees the back of Manuel’s head and knows that the old man won’t turn around. He seeks Angel with his gaze, and when he finds her he rests there. He leans into her across the distance, her body supporting his own. Just wait, he wants to whisper to her. Just wait.

They pound the nail through Amadeo’s palm.

IN A MOMENT, PAIN, but for now he thinks, This is all wrong, and he has time to clarify the thought. I am not the Son . The sky agrees, because it doesn’t darken. Amadeo remembers Christ’s cry— My God, why hast thou forsaken me? — and he knows what is missing. It’s Angel who has been forsaken.

All at once he sees her. He is surprised by the naked fear on her face. It is not an expression he knows. And she feels not only fear — Amadeo sees that now — but pain, complete and physical. Nothing he can do will change this, and soon it won’t be just her suffering, but the baby, too.

Angel cries out and holds her hands aloft, offering them to him. This is when the pain makes its searing flight down his arm and into his heart. Amadeo twists in agony on the cross, and below him the people applaud.

FRANCES WAS PRETENDING TO BE SOMEONE ELSE, SOMEONE whose father was not the bus driver. Instead, she told herself, she was a girl alone in the world, journeying to the city. With every gesture, she pictured herself: turning the page of her book, tucking a sweaty lock of hair behind her ear, lifting her chin to gaze out the bus window. Except Frances wasn’t alone, and her father, evidently thinking she’d come along today for his company, kept calling back to her with boisterous cheer over the exertions of the engine.

“Broke down here in ’42, Francy.” He indicated the endless yellow grass, summer-dry and dotted with cows and the occasional splintered shed, and Frances sighed and lowered her book politely to meet his eye in the rearview mirror. “Had a busload of fellows all on their way to training at Fort Bliss. Every day for three years I picked up two, three boys from each town and brung them south.” He chuckled at the memory. “You wouldn’t believe how many ideas twenty ranch boys have about a bus engine.”

Not counting Frances, eleven passengers had boarded early that morning in Raton, many of them also heading to Santa Fe for the Fiestas. Frances’s father had offered each and every one of them a jolly greeting. “Glorious day, isn’t it?” “Got my girl with me.” “Getting off in Santa Fe? So’s my Frances.” Each time a lady boarded — three did — he took her bag and followed her to her seat and stowed it in the net above while she removed her gloves and arranged her purse. Then he stood aside with his bulk pressed into the seats to let other passengers by. Frances had found herself looking away from his sad, obsequious displays of friendliness, embarrassed.

The day of the breakdown must have been a good one for her father; it must have been a thrill to share in the camaraderie with fellows his own age, part of a brotherhood, if only until the gas line or distributor or whatever it was got fixed. Frances pictured him twenty years younger, standing among the uniformed boys, grinning and eager and tongue-tied. Pity and affection welled in her.

Frances hadn’t been born then, but she was aware that the war years must have been hard for him, strangers looking him up and down, wondering why he wasn’t in Europe or the Pacific. Frances had felt the shame herself as a child when kids at school talked about their fathers’ service. They’d traveled to incredible places, those fathers — Japan and Singapore, Italy, England, France — and they had souvenirs in their houses to prove it: flags, medals, a Nazi helmet, a tin windup rabbit found in the pocket of a drowned Jap.

“My dad was a conscientious objector,” Frances had said at school when she was eleven. “We’re pacifists.” She’d shrugged, regretful, smug. “We just don’t believe in fighting.” But she’d had to stop saying that when it got back to her mother, who’d pinched her hard on the upper arm.

“Do you know what it would do to your father to hear you spreading those lies? He isn’t a coward. He has a condition.”

The condition in question was a heart murmur, and, as far as Frances knew, the only ill effect he’d ever suffered was fainting once on the football field in high school. Now, nearly an adult, Frances no longer judged her father for those war years, but it did strike her as darkly amusing that, not trusting his heart to hold out in the army, someone saw fit to put her father in charge of a busload of civilians careening down the highway at fifty miles an hour.

Now, an hour and a half into the trip, the passengers were scattered throughout the baking bus, dozing against the windows or reading newspapers; across the aisle, a stout woman was crocheting something in pink acrylic. Even with the windows lowered, the air blowing through was hot and dry, and Frances was worried about the state of her hair, which she’d tied up in rags last night. She lifted the limp curls off her sweaty neck and shifted in her seat and tried to concentrate on Tess of the D’Urbervilles. The frieze upholstery was scratchy through the cotton lawn of her new dress.