Night at the Fiestas: Stories

THE FIVE WOUNDS

THIS YEAR AMADEO PADILLA IS JESUS. THE HERMANOS HAVE been practicing in the dirt yard behind the morada, which used to be a filling station. People are saying that Amadeo is the best Jesus they’ve had in years, maybe the best since Manuel Garcia.

Here it is, just Holy Tuesday, and even those who would rather spend the evening at home watching their satellite TVs are lined up in the alley, leaning in, fingers curled around the chain-link, because they can see that Amadeo is bringing something special to the role.

This is no silky-haired, rosy-cheeked, honey-eyed Jesus, no Jesus-of-the-children, Jesus-with-the-lambs. Amadeo is pockmarked and bad-toothed, hair shaved close to a scalp scarred from fights, roll of skin where skull meets thick neck. You name the sin, he’s done it: gluttony, sloth, fucked a second cousin on the dark bleachers at the high school.

Amadeo builds the cross out of heavy rough oak instead of pine. He’s barefoot like the rest of the hermanos, who have rolled up the cuffs of their pants and now drag the arches of their feet over sharp rocks behind him. The Hermano Mayor — Amadeo’s grand-tío Tíve, who owns the electronics store, and who surprised them all when he chose his niece’s lazy son (because, he told Yolanda, Amadeo could use a lesson in sacrifice) — plays the pito, and the thin piping notes rise in a whine. A few hermanos swat their backs with disciplinas. Unlike the others, though, Amadeo does not groan, and he is shirtless, his tattooed back broad under the still-hot sun.

Today, he woke with the idea of studding the cross with nails to give it extra weight, and this is what people watch: he holds the hammer with both hands high above his head, brings it down with a crack. The boards bounce; the sound strikes sharply off the outside wall of the morada.

Amadeo has broken out in a sweat, and they all take note. Amadeo sweats, but not usually from work. He sweats when he eats, he sweats when he drinks too much. Thirty-three years old, the same as Our Lord, but Amadeo is not a man with ambition. Even his mother will tell you that. Yolanda still cooks for him, pushes one plate across the table at him and another at whatever man she’s got with her.

And now here comes old Manuel Garcia, dragging his bad foot up the alley, his wounded hands curled at his sides.

He must have heard about the show Amadeo is putting on, because when else does he exert himself, except to buy liquor at the Peerless? As he nears the morada, the people part to give him a spot against the chain-link, right there in the middle. Now, instead of watching Amadeo, they watch Manuel. He coughs wetly between strikes of the hammer.

Manuel Garcia is old, but still a legend: in 1962 he begged the hermanos to use nails, and he hasn’t been able to open or close his hands since. It’s true the legend has soured a little, now that he hasn’t been able to work for forty-five years and has been kept alive by the combined generosity of the hermandad, the parish, and the state, and shows no sign of dying. Some people have stopped paying their tithes for this very reason. Some have even gone so far as to say that maybe the man was suicidal, and a death wish is not the same as devotion, even if they look alike.

Regardless, only Manuel Garcia is qualified to judge this new Christ, and it appears that he has arrived at his verdict, because he coughs again, wet and low, dislodges something deep in his throat, and spits it through a space in the fence so it lands just inches from Amadeo and his cross.

DRIVING HOME, AMADEO TRIES to regain the clarity he felt when pounding nails, but hand and foot and universe are no longer working together. When the gears scrape, he hits the steering wheel with his fist and swears and hits it again. This last week was the most important in Jesus’s life. This is the week everything happened. So Amadeo should be thinking of higher things when his daughter shows up eight months pregnant. Angel sits in front of the house on the bumper of the old truck, waiting for him. He hasn’t seen her in more than a year, but he’s heard the news from his mother, who heard it from Angel.

White tank top, black bra, gold cross pointing the way to her breasts in case you happened to miss them. Belly as hard and round as an adobe horno. The buttons of her jeans are unsnapped to make way for its fullness, and also to indicate how it got that way in the first place. Her birthday is this week, falls on Good Friday. She’ll be fifteen.

“Shit,” Amadeo says when he pulls in and yanks the parking brake. She must not have seen his expression, because she gets up, smiles, and waves with both hands. The rosary swings on his rearview mirror, and Amadeo watches as, beyond it, his daughter advances on him, stomach outthrust. She pauses, half turns, displays her belly.

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.

When he hears a noise, for a moment he thinks it comes from outside, but it is closer, inside the morada. A rustle. Amadeo looks from his daughter to the statue.

The suffering is garish under the buzzing fluorescent bulb: blood flows down Christ’s pale neck and torso and knees, smears the cross and the wall behind Him, every wound deep and effusive. This statue’s pain is personal and cruel, and He’s not bearing it with perfect grace. Suddenly, Amadeo knows that the statue on the crucifix is a living man, a living witness to his transgression. He looks wildly from the statue to Angel, then back, heart pounding and hands trembling.

“There aren’t no Baby Jesuses here, are there?” Angel observes. No Blessed Mother, either, no audience of saints. “I guess it’s not a good idea for Baby Jesus to have to see hisself later.” Her voice is tired. She taps her belly distractedly, walks a few steps, stops. “I wouldn’t want my baby to know.”

Amadeo waits in dread for the statue to move, to lift His head. To fix Amadeo with His eyes.

Angel makes her slow way around the room again, stopping every few feet, head tilted. She turns to him, face pale and slack, and he’s startled when she asks, “So you really want to know what it feels like?” With her finger she traces a trickle of blood down the bound wooden feet. “Why?”

He can’t say it, but his answer is this: he needs to know if he has it in him to ask for the nails, if he can get up there in front of the whole town and do a performance so convincing he’ll transubstantiate right there on the cross into something real. He looks at the statue. Total redemption in one gesture, if only he can do it right.

Angel, no longer waiting for his answer, shrugs and turns to the door. As he watches it shut behind her, a longing wells in him so rich and painful that he must touch the wall to steady himself. At the front of the room, Jesus hasn’t moved, wholly absorbed in His own pain.

Amadeo switches off the light, checks the lock on the morada door. Angel heaves herself into the cab of the truck, looking like a kid in her too-large jacket. She yawns, makes an effort to talk about other things all the way home, and Amadeo does not tell her what he sees that keeps him silent: Manuel Garcia, standing on the other side of the road in front of the dark windows of the drugstore, watching.

SINCE EARLY MORNING, Manuel Garcia has been sitting on a lawn chair in front of the house, scratching his balls with his stiff-curled claw. When Amadeo gets up after eleven, Angel is planted at the table with a glass of milk, watching the old man watch the house. She doesn’t shift her eyes from the window when Amadeo ambles in, rubbing his head with the heel of his hand. “Who is that, well? Is he retarded or something?”

Amadeo considers pulling on a shirt, then decides not to. He bangs out the front door and across the yard, working his fists, limbs loose with adrenaline. “Hey, man. Go on home. You’re scaring my daughter.”

Manuel Garcia gazes up through pink eyes. “The puta whore. No Jesus never lived in a house of putas.”

“You watch your mouth, viejo.”

“Puta whore mama y puta whore daughter.” Manuel Garcia smiles, because he knows he’s an old man and cannot be hit. He’s spent his whole life making people uncomfortable. He scratches his balls again and squints into the sun behind Amadeo.

“Go on home,” Amadeo says again, suddenly afraid, as if the old man had the power to work evil, though, of course, he doesn’t.

“I seen you last night. You know I seen you. Bringing her in the santuario.”

Amadeo considers denying it, then considers pushing the old man into the dirt, grinding the lumpy skull beneath his heel.

As though he’d read Amadeo’s mind, Manuel coughs and spits, nearly hitting Amadeo’s work boot. Amadeo flinches, and the old man laughs. “Hija de Jesús, shaking her nalgas until someone gives it to her good.”

Amadeo steps toward Manuel. “Shut your mouth.”

“I’m thinking what your uncle will say when he finds out a whore been in the morada.” He blinks red-rimmed eyes, smiles blandly. Suddenly he lunges forward, pointing his finger at Amadeo. “You watch how quick they cut you down from that cross,” he hisses. “They’ll cut you down fast.”

Amadeo thinks he might throw up. He kicks the dirt. “Don’t you come here again,” he says, and turns back to the house.

Manuel Garcia calls to Amadeo’s retreating back, “No Jesus never defiled the santuario!”

Amadeo lets the screen door slam. “What’d he say?” Angel asks, still watching out the window. Sitting there, plump and content, she seems inviolable in her impending motherhood. He tries to remind himself how young she is. But he’s furious at her, for giving Manuel Garcia something to sneer at, for tainting his Passion Week with her pregnancy and her personality.

Amadeo goes to his room. The bed is unmade, clothes piled on the floor. He’s angrier now — look at him, living here like a surly teenager — and comes back out to reclaim the living room. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands. Hit a wall, break something, put his daughter in her place. “Don’t you even got a boyfriend?”

Angel turns and looks at him like he’s stupid. “What do you think?”

“Didn’t your mom never teach you not to sleep around?”

“All the girls in my parenting class, not one of them has a guy that matters. Not one. You think you mattered?”

Amadeo is shaking. “You shouldn’t have come here. You think you have a right to just barge in my house and make yourself at home.”

Angel’s eyes widen, and then she narrows them once more. Slowly, enunciating every word, she says, “It’s not your house.”

Amadeo thumps the table with his fist and retreats to his room.

THAT EVENING, the phone rings, and Angel calls to him, “Dad?”

When Amadeo emerges, his pulse throbs in his neck, and he avoids her eyes as he accepts the phone. Someone mutters a blessing and hangs up without identifying himself. It takes a moment for Amadeo to recognize the priest. The priest will spend tomorrow at home; he said his Mass this evening, and will have no part in what happens on Calvario. Amadeo replaces the receiver. He wonders if the priest can sense Amadeo failing everyone.

Angel has heated a sausage pizza for dinner. She’s already in her spot on the couch, eating. She raises her plate. “Dinner? Dairy, meat, grain, vegetable. All four groups.” Her voice is conciliatory.

Amadeo considers sitting next to his daughter and trying to eat, but he isn’t hungry, and he has to practice. There is so little time left.

In the bathroom he works on his Christ face, but his downturned mouth and drooping eyes are mawkish and ridiculous. Through the pink polyester lace at the window, he sees Manuel Garcia in his lawn chair, and he tries to picture how it will be tomorrow, the hermanos all dressed up, everyone watching Amadeo Padilla pretend he has what it takes to be Jesus.

When the screen door slams, Amadeo watches from the window as Angel picks her way in bare feet down the drive to where Manuel Garcia sits, gazing at the house. She hands the old man a paper plate: the leftover pizza. Amadeo cannot see the old man’s face under his hat, but he’s saying something. She waves him off dismissively and turns away.

Manuel says something else, and she stops, turns, walks back to him. She looks angry, glances at the house, and for a moment Amadeo wonders if she’s going to betray him to Manuel, tell the old man everything he’s done: left her to rental after rental, money always tight, the long series of Marissa’s boyfriends — some worse even than Amadeo — around his daughter.

But she doesn’t say anything, just shakes her head slowly and is still.

She stands before Manuel in her bare feet. The old man sets the paper plate in the dirt beside his chair, then gestures, impatient. She takes a step closer. Her face is stony; she looks away from Manuel to, it seems, a spot across the road in the Romeros’ yard. Manuel leans forward.

Amadeo is still watching when his daughter lifts her shirt above her belly, then higher.

Her breasts are too big for the black lace bra, her maternity jeans low. Her belly glows red in the sunset, impossibly round and swollen. Amadeo sees her belly button protruding and remembers the same thing with Angel’s mother, how toward the end he’d tongue the lump of it while he touched her down there.

Angel doesn’t blink.

Manuel extends a gnarled brown hand, places it against her belly. Reaches out with the other. Cups her belly in both his hands, moves them over the surface of it. Angel stares at the Romeros’ yard.

Amadeo could go outside now, put a stop to the terrible thing that is happening, but he stays, one hand touching the pink lace. His legs are weak. When the old man closes his eyes, so does Amadeo.

ON THIS LAST NIGHT, he is supposed to stay awake, walking outside through the Garden of Gethsemane, thinking about his soul and about salvation. He is supposed to fast, to steel himself, to be betrayed, to hear the cock’s crow. In houses all over town, hermanos are on their knees, leather thongs bound around their thighs, murmuring about suffering and gratitude, yearning for pain.

But Amadeo focuses on the sick sensation of his dick in his jeans, on willing it to shrivel up and fall off as the scene replays in his head: Manuel’s hands on his daughter’s body. Pacing the length of his room, he finishes a six-pack, then moves on to the next, and the image still won’t dissolve.

The television is off, the house silent. In the living room, Angel sits on the couch, staring at the wall. She doesn’t look up at him. “He’s not gonna tell. You can have your Jesus day.”

“I never asked you to do that. I never asked you for nothing.” His voice wavers.

Angel sighs. “It doesn’t matter.”

He can’t tell if she believes this or if she is saying it for him, and he doesn’t know which is worse. Angel points the remote at the TV, and the bright sound of a commercial floods the room. “Just forget about it, okay?”

“I never asked you to do that.” It’s a plea, too quiet to hear over the sound of the television.

Amadeo realizes he’s drunk.

“We can’t be fighting.” She pats the couch, glances quickly at him. “Look, it’s Law and Order.”

Amadeo hesitates, then drops beside her, grateful, exhausted. He takes a handful of chips when she passes him the bag, thinking about the new feeling swelling in him: he’s warm and swaddled, buoyed by forgiveness, suddenly too tired to sleep, too tired to move. They watch the show together, then a second and a third, until Angel goes to bed.

AMADEO WAKES TO ANGEL calling him and the sun streaming through the window. Good Friday.

They gather at the base of Calvario. Nearly two miles to the top, and Amadeo will walk barefoot, dragging the cross. He trembles and his upper lip sweats, though the morning air is cool. The hermanos help Tío Tíve unload the cross from the bed of his Ford, three of them sharing the weight. All the Lenten preparations are for this: the hermanos have washed their white pants, braided their disciplinas the old way, from the thick fibers of yucca leaves, mended rips in the black hoods they will wear to insure their humility in this reenactment. When the pito sounds three times — the cock’s crow — Tío Tíve steps forward, Pontius Pilate giving his sign, and the hermanos seize Amadeo.

It starts as acting, soft punches, and then they’re slugging him, tearing at him, shouting the worst curses of two languages and two thousand years. Amadeo splutters and cries out under the barrage, surprised that it is actually happening.

When they fall back, Tío Tíve places the crown of thorns on Amadeo’s head. Amadeo turns and hoists the enormous cross onto his right shoulder, stooping under the weight, and the procession starts. The hermanos walk in two lines behind Jesus and begin to whip themselves. Manuel Garcia follows, bearing no load except his own hands, and then the women and children, the bright clattering colors of them, so distinct from the neat dark and white of the hermanos. Amadeo cannot see her, but he knows Angel is there.

After the first mile, the cross grows heavy. He tries to get into the part. He was up all night, he tells himself, in the garden, crying out to God. He remembers to stagger: his first fall. The crown of thorns is pulled tight, so it pierces the skin at his temple, and the stinging sweat slides down, but Amadeo is just not feeling it. He’s too heavy and slow, his brain hung over and filled with static.

Angel comes up alongside her father on the right, panting in her sneakers and tank top. “Shoot. I can’t believe I’m hiking at eight months. This must be a record.” She pats her belly. “Your mama’s breaking the Guinness world record, baby.” She swigs water, holds the bottle out to Amadeo. “Want some water? I got water.”

Amadeo shakes his head fiercely and heaves the cross up the slope after him, wishing she’d leave him alone, wishing he didn’t owe her. He can pay her back, but only if he can blot her out.

Manuel Garcia hobbles his way up the procession on the left, huffing and stinking like a dying man. Amadeo stumbles; Manuel Garcia wheezes laughter. The old man will turn back — he’ll have to turn back — and leave the day to Amadeo.

Manuel leers past Amadeo at Angel and spits, “Puta.”

Angel looks up, startled, then to Amadeo. “Dad—”

Rage wells in him — Amadeo nearly drops the cross and bludgeons the old man — but then turns inward. He calls between heavy breaths to the hooded men behind him, “Whip me!” And then, because they do not respond, louder, “Whip me!”

When the lashes come, Angel clamps her hands over her mouth.

Amadeo grinds the soles of his feet into the sharp stones, scrapes his shoulder under the edge of the cross. He feels the rough wood break skin, the hot blood rise, his own blood, his own heat. He must leave his body, become something else.

Manuel laughs so hard he begins to cough, spits in the dirt under Amadeo’s bare feet. Suddenly it comes to Amadeo: this mockery is a gift! The filthy old man is playing his part and doesn’t even know it. Amadeo laughs out loud, tears streaming down his cheeks. He’s getting stronger on Manuel Garcia’s mockery!

And Angel isn’t a distraction — she’s the point! Everything Jesus did He did for his children!

“Get away from me,” Angel yells at Manuel. Her eyes redden and well with angry tears. “Leave me alone!”

“Just wait,” Amadeo whispers, but she doesn’t hear.

His second fall is not intentional; neither is his third. He has forgotten to pick up his feet, and he stumbles over a numb knot of foot, the cross crashing down with him.

Angel kneels beside him, her eyes worried, Manuel forgotten. “You gotta have water.” She opens the little plastic top and pushes the bottle into his hands, but he doesn’t take it.

In the brush, birds chirp and little lizards dart, then freeze, from rock to rock. He watches Angel follow one with her eyes. Inside her, the baby twists and turns — he can almost sense it — hot in her flesh and under the sun. For the first time he’s glad she’s here: more than anyone, he realizes, she’s the one he wants with him today.

At the top of Calvario, the hermanos lift the cross from his shoulders and rest it on the ground. Amadeo straightens, and the word good thrums in his head with each step: good, good, good. The hermanos help him down, position his arms along the crossbeam, his feet against the block of wood that is all he’ll have to stand on. Amadeo spreads his arms and looks up into wide blue sky; there is nothing in his vision but blue. As they bind his arms and legs against the wood, lines once memorized surface: With a word He stilled the wind and the waves. But the wind skates over his body, drying the sweat and blood at his temples.

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.