Gods Go Begging (26 page)

Carolina spent her days at work listening to the Trio los Panchos and laboring quietly in her photographic studio or in her darkroom. She loved to work all day and into the smallest hours of the morning, choosing backdrops and lighting for the next shoot. In the winter she labored as a temporary secretary in one of those huge, dreary law offices downtown.

Summertime was her favorite time of year. Each June she would quit her office job and drive out to her storage unit on César Chávez Street. She would pour a tablespoon of gasoline into the carburetor of an ancient, dented, decal-ridden Ford Stepvan, start it up, and drive it to the nearest carwash. Carolina spent each summer driving up and down the streets of Bernal Heights and the Mission District, selling cherry popsicles, “drumsticks,” and ice cream sandwiches to tiny Mexican and Guatemalan kids.

This year, the loudspeaker on the roof of her van played “Somewhere My Love,” over and over again. The first time she had ever seen Jesse Pasadoble he had been standing in line with the kiddies, waiting to buy a grape Missile. The lawyer had purchased her entire stock that day, enough for the seventy kids at a nearby playground. Selling
paletas
was fun, but someday she hoped to be like Manuel Bravo or Graciela Iturbide and make a living with her photography.

In her studio she kept a small navy surplus cot beneath her shelves of chemicals, her bottles of developer and stop bath. It was where she slept when Jesse was not sleeping beside her. Lately she had been sleeping there every night. Her queen-sized bed upstairs had been undisturbed for almost five weeks.

“Señorita Carolina, there is a man behind you who seems very interested in you. He has been staring at you for some time now.” The old man who ran the kiosk made a slight nod toward the oak bench behind Carolina.

“Is he a Chicano carrying a beat-up leather briefcase and wearing a red and blue tie?”

“Si, señorita. That is him.”

“What do you think of him, señor?” she said without turning to look behind herself.

“Oh, I have seen many men like him back in Mexico. They think that love, el amor, will turn them into someone else, someone they would not respect.
;Pendejo!
I tell you, if I was twenty years younger, he would have to fight me for you.” The old man raised one fist into the air in a gesture of both defiance and chivalry.

“Pero, tengo
una pregunta
para ti. Why do you hide your beauty? Why do you hide behind your clothing? Even an old man can see what you are doing.”

“What am I doing?” asked Carolina, a stricken look on her face.

“You are trying to keep time from passing by.” The old man raised both arms as he spoke. “You are trying to stop the natural way of things. You hide from the eyes of other men because he is the one you want. But most of all you hide because it makes you more like him.” He nodded toward Jesse.

Carolina stood silent for a moment, stunned by the old fellow’s words. As a young girl she had been mortified by the mere idea of makeup, by the thought of wanting to be looked at. Over time she had come to think of beauty as a personal weakness. Perhaps this is what kept Jesse away. In the last few months her manner of dress had become less and less feminine. Skirts and blouses had given way to canvas and denim from the local surplus store. Had she purposefully chosen a man who could not love? Was she testing him, trying to determine whether he could love her soul? It all seemed so crazy.

“Gracias,” she whispered as she disappeared through the door and down the cement stairs. There was a look of desperate confusion on her face. She walked away without looking back at either Jesse or the old señor.

Behind her Jesse remained on the bench for ten silent minutes. Carolina was unlike any other woman he had ever known. Jesse suddenly realized that he missed seeing her… touching her.

‘“Hey, Jesse,” said deputy Jeri Pietrelli, “you’ll never guess what’s happening here. Milton Salteeno is in trial!” At the courtroom entrance nearest the bench, a female bailiff was using a portable metal detector to scan anyone who entered.

“You’re kidding!” said Jesse, a look of stark disbelief on his face. He rose from the bench. Thoughts of Carolina would have to wait for another time. There was too much to do. Besides, nothing had changed. She still wanted something from him that he just couldn’t give.

“Salteeno hasn’t had a trial in twenty years!” exclaimed Jesse. “Have the newspapers been notified? Has someone called a press conference? Have they picked a jury yet?”

“‘Not yet,” said the bailiff.

“Ten bucks says it folds before lunch,” sneered Jesse. The bailiff shook her head, her long hair landing first on one shoulder, then the other. She wanted nothing to do with that bet.

“Who is Milton Salteeno?” asked Hong Ha, the interpreter, as he descended the stairway with Jesse on his way to the first floor.

“You’ve never heard of him? He is the world-famous Panamanian plea artist,” replied Jesse. “If plea bargains were paint, this guy would be Jan Vermeer or Pablo Picasso. His problem is that none of the prosecutors are afraid of him—they all know he isn’t going to trial. So the deals he gets for his clients are lousy. You’ll recognize him as soon as you see him. He’s always out here in the hall bluffing and strutting with that empty briefcase of his. He’s the only man I know who can fake an orgasm.

“He was at the very height of his powers during his Afro-Latino period. He’s almost single-handedly sent half the black and brown men in this city down the river. In fact, a whole wing at Folsom Prison is named in his honor. His intimates and confidants report that for Christmas last year he gave each one of his own kids a suspended sentence and a term of supervised probation.”

“I guess you don’t like him.” Hong was laughing.

“I hate him and everyone like him,” spat Jesse. His eyes were becoming red again. “He should get out of the business. You can smell that man’s fear of trial right through those expensive suits of his. The defendants can smell it, too. It’s a stench that is a blend of aftershave, terror, and apathy. With that
cagatinta
as your lawyer, the decision whether or not to fight the case has nothing to do with the strengths or weaknesses of the evidence. That man’s ass has never been in the grass.”

“Mister Pasadoble, I have a question that I must ask you. Back in the courtroom I saw you with that small piece of jade,” said Hong. “To my amazement you placed it into your mouth. I have not seen that done in many years. I didn’t think anyone believed in that anymore, especially here in America.”

Jesse looked at Hong, then reached into his pocket for the sliver of jade.

“I first put this stone into my mouth almost thirty years ago. Back then something unbelievable happened to me as soon as I closed my lips around this stone. It has never happened since, but I keep trying.”

“It works on very few men,” said Hong softly, “and for those for whom it works, it does so only under very special circumstances.”

“Do you know what they are?” asked Jesse, his voice rising with hope.

“I had hoped that you could tell me,” smiled Hong. The interpreter reached into his own pocket and retrieved his own piece of jade. “My father gave this to me.” He smiled. “He told me that it was used against the French. He always said that the jade will only work for women, certain priests, or for men who are drowning. It has never worked for me.”

Jesse left the building and walked to his car. Just yards behind them, the jury panel that had been assigned to Milton Salteeno’s case was filing out of the building and spreading into the parking lot. This time the case had not folded as Jesse had predicted. This time, when the judge had announced the name of the case as the People of the State of California versus Virgilio Madrugada, the defendant had risen on his own behalf and announced that his name was Artemio Sanchez and that this man seated next to him was not his lawyer. When the defense attorney was asked by the judge whether he recognized his client, it had become apparent to all present that Milton Salteeno had never interviewed Virgilio Madrugada, had never seen his face.

As Jesse drove south down Highway 280 and made the exit at Potrero Hill, his troubled mind was, once again, climbing another hill, one that rose up in his thoughts a dozen times a day from a time long ago and a place half a world away. Sometimes Jesse truly believed that the hill near Laos was the true, concrete world of the present, while the lawyer and his cases in San Francisco were merely wishful phantasms—the fabricated, desperate dreams of a frightened soldier.

The lawyer’s thumb had begun to rub the dog tags once again, but this time with even greater intensity. Jesse detested hills, and he worked in a city filled with them. That hill near Laos was far more than a memory. It was lodged in his mind like a formless, massless tumor. Moments from those nights almost three decades ago had long ago invaded his cells and callously mined his cytoplasm with indelible pangs. Shouts, cries, and whispers in the present were paltry counterpoints and halftones to those in the distant past. Every word in the present was but a pale copy of the truest utterances. Every laughing voice, in Jesse’s ears, eventually melted into a death rattle. Every lovely, vital face, in Jesse’s eyes, had already begun to molder.

He had stopped resisting these things long, long ago. How could he ever explain this to Carolina … to anyone? The painful memories had evolved into a cold, quizzical passacaglia, eternal notes in basso profundo and in unbreakable code. Someday he would solve the riddle of it. Someday he would live one sweet, mortal moment without the constant accompaniment of percussive anger and a grinding bass line of grief. Until that day, Jesse hated hills.

Even in broad daylight the hill was difficult to see. The mounds of discards and heaps of trash on the hillside had begun to fuse with the industrial rubble down below to form a wide, formless mass of fast-food wrappers, rusted metal, plastics and paper soaked in rainwater, and engine oil.

Above this ruin, the dreary rows of buildings had been painted with a muddy, battleship-gray enamel that had been donated by the naval shipyard just before it was shut down. That unsightly coating had been augmented over time by the work of hundreds of graffiti artists. The result was a perfect camouflage that no military technician could ever duplicate. For all intents and purposes these housing projects were completely invisible to the uncaring eye.

This hill, affronted by neglect and veiled by the muddled human haze of five hundred marginal lives, was being savaged once more. Now strangers had come to cut and probe at the hillside, to unearth the refuse and disturb the residue of squandered, half-lived lives.

Emergency vehicles were parked everywhere on the hill, their doors ajar, their red and blue lights flashing, and their radios squawking intermittently. The police had delineated the entire eastern perimeter of the hillside below the projects with a long line of wide yellow tape. Work crews were scattered on the eastern face of the hill, gingerly digging ominous, shallow holes into the firmament. Somber men were kneeling beside those holes, first recoiling, then photographing, then collecting the things that lay below. Eddy Oasa had parked just outside the police line. Upon seeing Jesse, he exited his car and joined his friend.

To the right, on the north side of the hill, Jesse and Eddy could see the beautiful back yard and the newly shingled blue roof of the Amazon Luncheonette. The police had nailed one end of their yellow tape to the fence that surrounded Persephone Flyer’s lovely garden. Suddenly Jesse noticed a solitary figure moving between the garden boxes and trellises and glancing every now and then in the direction of the macabre activity on the hill.

“Who is that?” asked Jesse.

“Oh, that’s Mr. Homeless. That’s what the boys up here on the hill call him. There are a lot of homeless guys living up here in abandoned trailers and drainage ditches, but he’s the only one the kids will talk to. All of the gangbangers and druggies up here complain that he’s a real pest, always asking them weird questions and trying to talk them out of using guns and drugs. But the kids like him because he’s got some strange, exotic stories to tell. He probably belongs in a mental hospital. There’s an entire encampment of them at the base of the hill, and under that overpass.”

Jesse turned to look in a northeasterly direction. Beneath a huge structure of asphalt and cement he could see a dozen cardboard and corrugated-tin hovels built up against a straining, deformed stretch of Cyclone fence. Holes in the sides of these hapless, flimsy shanties had been plugged with rags, many of which were olive drab. Near the center of this collection of poor homes was a silent pack of dusty dogs and the telltale heat waves that rose from a small, hidden campfire.

“They live near the projects because the cops don’t bother them here. There are just too many guns on this hill. It’s just too well fortified. No one ventures up here, not the Mormons or the Jehovah’s Witnesses, not the United Parcel Service, not even the pizza delivery people come up here. As far as I know, Mr. Homeless is the only one of them that has a name, the rest are nameless. He seems to have free run of the projects. For some reason all the gangs leave him alone. I’ve already tried to ask him some questions, but he won’t say a word.”

“Like Bao Vung,” said Jesse in a voice just above a whisper. “You’ve got to try him again. Someone like him could see and hear everything that happens up here.” Jesse handed Eddy three twenty-dollar bills. “Buy him lunch up at Klein’s deli. Better yet, get him enough gift certificates for one full meal a day for two or three weeks. But no booze.”

Jesse and Eddy moved around the yellow tape to the crime scene nearest a large gray Dumpster. Two of the bodies were already wrapped up and ready for transport. A third was lying in the back of the coroner’s white van. They were three recumbent males—two of them virtually weightless and indistinguishable from soil and a third still heavy but tight with rigor mortis.

They looked so much smaller than life under the white cloth and the ridiculous restraining belts that covered them. Eddy pointed to a shallow trench that ran parallel to the Dumpster. A stand of grass hid its dimensions.