North of Montana (36 page)

•  •  •

Mrs. Gutiérrez, Roberto, and I sit in the back of the shop at a card table upon which is a small radio and a white candle. I wonder if we will hear Violeta’s voice through the speaker. Roberto is about twenty-five years old, a homosexual with a dark complexion, a hip haircut that is partially shaved at the neck and longer on top, and a gold hoop earring. He wears a silky tan shirt and brown pants, but something is out of whack. The body is out of proportion—arms too long for a stunted torso—and he has trouble speaking. One side of the mouth seems to be paralyzed and as he struggles to explain how he got his gift, fingers rub the forehead with frustration:

“My father and grandfather did this in our village. A hundred people would stand in line at the door. I learned from the age of seven.”

When it comes to spiritual advice the deal is simple: “You tell me the truth and I tell you the truth.”

He lights the candle.

Despite the battle-scarred exterior, the place has clean floors and a certain order, and smells pleasantly of lavender incense. Behind old-fashioned wooden counters are shelves filled with small square half-ounce bottles of red, blue, and green oils. Floor-to-ceiling cases are filled with eight-inch glass candles, each with a picture of a saint and a promise of luck or salvation or protection.

From the ceiling hang ropes of colored beads. Near the door are packets of herbs and spices, a model made of plaster of paris of a Native American chief, and an aloe plant, colored ribbons tied in bows on its spiky leaves. A display holds rosaries, statues of cows, pendants with single eyeballs looking out of black triangles, greasy little booklets about “Red Magic” and “Green Magic,” and on a revolving rack there are plastic pictures of all the saints, numbered for easy selection.

We have left Teresa and Cristóbal with the Indian chief and staring eyeballs to sit at the card table behind a partition. Behind us is a multilevel altar upon which have been placed glasses of water, candles, pots of chrysanthemums, and a dish holding three small eggs covered with colored confetti.

A lot of the reading takes place in Spanish with a few sidebars in English. Mrs. Gutiérrez talks about the situation of Violeta’s children. Don Roberto listens and asks her to write out her name and her mother’s maiden name on a pad. He counts up the letters in the names then deals that number of Tarot cards.

“Please think about the mother of these children, Violeta Alvarado.”

She obediently closes her eyes. I stare at the radio and conjure up the photo of the parrot. Then the feeling comes to me of holding Violeta’s small leather Bible in my hands; the dryness of it, like the poignant tiny body of a hummingbird I once found on my balcony.

Mrs. Gutiérrez is warned not to cross her legs or lean on the table as that would affect “the energy.” She must turn over two cards, right to left. The first is
El Sol
, The Sun.

“This card means El Salvador,” says Don Roberto.

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.

TWENTY-FOUR

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.

From the vantage point of my desk I make the observation that everyone’s got their own problems. Each agent out there is working forty cases and in my wire basket alone there are two dozen unfinished reports on armed bank robberies. But at this moment the only response I can muster to all this savagery is to sit here patiently linking one paper clip to another.

When Henry Caravetti rolls by in the electric wheelchair delivering mail, my interest peaks but not for long. It will take weeks to process the transfer to the C-1 squad, and I will probably spend the entire time planted right here, trying to work up the nerve to talk to Mike Donnato. We have been avoiding each other for days.

It’s going to be a very long paper clip chain.

The problem is … well, they don’t have a word for it for females, but I’ve heard male colleagues refer to the condition as “continuous tumescence.” It’s a localized sensation down there that flares into acute, unbearable craving whenever I catch a glimpse of, say, the small of his back and think about slipping my hands inside the belt and slowly pulling out the tails of the sweet-smelling denim shirt, feeling the warm skin, drawing my fingertips down the spine to that place where it tapers, just above the hard curve of the buttock. I’d better get up and walk.

The Bank Dick’s Undercover Disguise gives a friendly nudge. Donnato is across the room with Kyle and Frank, wearing that denim shirt, a forest green knit tie, and jeans, standing in what strikes me as a very provocative pose, hands clasped behind his head, stretching the chest and armpits open, open, open. Stumbling forward I tell myself it is perfectly reasonable to join the talk, which is almost certainly about the coming matchup in the All-Star Game, getting myself psyched by rehearsing a line I read in the sports page about San Francisco’s manager, Roger Craig, and the A’s manager, Tony La Russa, who is a vegetarian.

Halfway there, SAC Robert Galloway prevents this potentially sweaty encounter by intercepting and escorting me into his office. I figure I might as well use the line on him:

“You think Roger Craig will pound La Russa into a veggie burger?”

“I’ll always have a sweet spot for Roger Craig,” Galloway says. “He pitched the first game ever played by the Mets and had the distinction of finishing the season with ten wins and twenty-four losses.”