Refuge and repair.
by Joel Deutsch
Aching everywhere, Daniel sat slumped on the couch. There was gravel ground into a gash on his forehead and into both raw, bloody knees. A huge lump swelled from one temple. There were bruises on his arms and shoulders, and every breath he drew cost him a stab of excruciating pain. Gingerly, he prodded one knee with an exploratory index finger.
“Don’t pick at anything,” the woman called from another room, as if she were reading his mind. “As soon as I put the baby down, I’ll be right in with my first aid stuff.”
Except for the cutaway mockup that had been used as the main set of an old TV series, Daniel had never seen the inside of a house trailer of any sort at all. The series had featured an eccentric Los Angeles private detective who lived in one, right on the ocean. His beachfront residence, or at least the back lot replica presented as such, had always struck Daniel as curiously spacious. Cluttered with the domestic chaos of bachelor living and a haphazard excuse for a home office, yes, but for all that, not anywhere near as cramped as he would have imagined such an abode to be.
This place, by comparison, was about as confining as a submarine Daniel had toured once with his parents on vacation in San Diego, but so neatly kept as to not induce even a hint of claustrophobia. In the dim light that managed to filter in through the nearly opaque black curtains snugged up against the few small windows, he looked around.
Off to the right, on his side of the trailer, was a galley-style kitchen equipped with sink, cabinets, stove, oven and refrigerator, and across from it was a four-person dining booth. Beyond that RAN a short, narrow hallway down which Nora, for that was the woman’s name, had disappeared carrying her baby—o those long, bluejeaned legs, that luxuriant blaze of hair– leading back to what had to be the bedroom and the bathroom.
The living room was wood-paneled, like a basement family recreation room from the time of his childhood. The couch, an old black leather number that was worn but not yet sagging, was against the wall opposite the trailer’s door, flanked on one side by an end table with a small lamp and fronted by a glass-topped coffee table.
By the opposite wall was an old recliner that matched the couch, similarly just short of decrepitude.
One rear corner was occupied by a TV stand with an old-fashioned 21” set atop It and a VCR and a DVD player stacked on its lower shelf. In the other corner, on a pedestal draped with scarlet cloth, stood a large version of the weird statue Daniel had noticed on Miguel’s ashtray, three feet or so tall, made of what looked like alabaster. It had the same sepulchral, skull-like visage, the coiled ropes of hair, the gnarled skeletal hands and feet, and the upraised scythe, but this one looked all dressed up for some kind of macabre dance: A jeweled ring flashed from every finger, it wore a plumed purple hat instead of a cowl, and large twin spots of what looked like rouge conferred a festive blush on its pale, bony cheeks.
Carefully arrayed before the statue’s base lay a cluster of what looked like ritual offerings: A partially-smoked cigar resting in a glass ashtray, an unopened bottle of Presidente tequila, a small pile of coins, and a fat black lighted candle in a chipped white saucer. On the wall a foot or two to one side of the statue’s head was a framed handbill or poster of some sort whose images and lettering were too small for Daniel to see clearly from where he sat.
Nora had laid out her first aid supplies on the coffee table, and was dabbing at his forehead with a gauze pad she had dipped into a small bowl of warm soapy water. The dabbing, gentle as it was, stung, and Daniel winced.
“Sorry,” she said, giving Daniel’s forehead a final pat and dropping the gauze into an empty Supermarket bag she’d set on the floor between couch and coffee table. “But this laceration has got to be cleaned out, or else you’ll be looking at a nasty infection. Trust me. I’m a nurse.” Using a tweezers, holding Daniel’s head still with her free hand, she began picking out the embedded bits of gravel.
Vacantly, Daniel stared down at the open brown paper bag with its two brown paper handles and the big red Ralphs logo on its side. Why “Ralphs,” he had always wondered? Why not Ralph’s, with the possessive apostrophe? When he spoke the word aloud, there was always an apostrophe in his mind’s eye, a reflexive correction. He ought to look it up online, he told himself for the millionth time. Google it. There was bound to be something about that on the Web. These days, there was something about everything. He remembered when not everybody had a computer, and if a person had one, it wasn’t hooked up to search engines, databases or email or anything. If you were a lawyer, or maybe a journalist, he supposed, you had a terminal sitting on its own desk in the office where you typed requests for information into Lexus or Nexus, and that was about it. And Lexus or Nexus were not going to tell you anything about the spelling of a supermarket chain’s name.
Although the tweezer’s probings stung, the operation had its upside; to Daniel, who, apart from handshakes and shoulder pats, had lately not been touched very much at all, the press of this woman’s steadying palm was distracting, analgesic, nearly sedative. And then there was the fragrance of her hair, the kindly concentration in her green eyes, the knowing, graceful rise and fall of her forearm. He was floating in a memory haze of better times. The boyhood comfort of being mothered when mothering was needed, the hopefulness of young manhood that, if you learned what women’s conditions were and then learned how to fulfill them, that at least a few precious crumbs of such comfort might, on occasion, be restored.
Sheila, unfortunately and paradoxically considering her choice of a helping profession, had not been the nurturing type. Throughout Melanie’s childhood, she had treated her daughter more clinically than maternally, her counseling style evolving over time through three or four variants of the interpersonal approach and then settling into a fervent devotion to the principles and techniques of cognitive behavioral therapy,. With the result that Melanie had learned early on to turn to Daniel, not to her mother, if it was simple human empathy and soothing encouragement she needed, instead of a lesson in how to recognize and catalogue her patterns of negative thinking so that a salutary cognitive shift might be induced. Whatever sins and follies a hard judge might ascribe to his marital and parental comportment, and whatever the stereotype of male lawyers might suggest, Daniel had not been the kind of work-obsessed, narcissistic and emotionally unavailable father even he had seen plenty of among his colleagues. Probably one of the few upsides to his late start. The kind of job that would have distorted him that way, he couldn’t have gotten even if he’d begged. Which left no one watching over him, of course, as he had watched over Melanie. but such were the tradeoffs, such was his personal river of spilled milk.
“All gone,” said Nora, relaxing her grip on the tweezers to let one last nugget of gravel drop into the Ralphs bag. “I’ll do something else here before I clean up your knees.”
“Thanks,” said Daniel, relaxing tensed shoulders, releasing held breath. “Mind telling me What’s up with that statue over there? Is it some kind of shrine?”
“that’s la Santa Muerte,” said Nora, setting the tweezers aside and rinsing the wound with another folding of wet gauze, this time soaked in clean water from a second bowl.
“Saint Death?” asked Daniel. “Seriously?”
“or La Niña Blanca,” laughed Nora. “The little white girl. Or la Negrita. The little black girl. Or Santa Marta. Or La Flaca, the skinny one. Prison inmates call her La Madrina. The Godmother. Take your pick. You know how the Virgin of Guadalupe is the official patron saint of Mexico, right? Well, Santa Muerte is the patron saint of the Dark Side. She’s the saint of the people who don’t completely trust the Blessed Virgin to sympathize with their kinds of problems. People who live risky or dangerous lives. Drug runners, for instance. But not only criminals. Taxi drivers. Prostitutes. Cops who work in the roughest barrios. Creative people, too. A lot of actors and poets and street musicians worship her. And wrestlers. La Santa Muerte is very popular with professional Mexican wrestlers.
she took another gauze pad out of its sterile wrapping and cut two strips of white surgical tape to make a bandage. “do you know what lucha libre is?”
Daniel shook his head.
“It’s like the World Wrestling Federation matches they show on TV,” she said, “ but even crazier. A lot more dangerous. ‘Free-style combat,’ is what it means, more or less. The wrestlers all wear these wild-looking masks that cover their whole heads and make them look like bank robbers on Halloween or something. They practically don’t even have any rules. It’s faked as far as who’s supposed to win, but it’s rough and dangerous, anyway. That part of it is real.”
She positioned the bandage and pressed down the strips of tape. “Let me show you something,” she said. She got up, went over to the corner with the statue, took the small framed poster off its hook, brought it back and, taking her seat again beside Daniel, gave it to him to hold.
It was a Spanish language handbill for a wrestling exhibition at an arena he had never heard of in Panorama City, scheduled for a Saturday night four years past. In the center was a picture of an empty, spotlighted fight ring, with text trumpeting the big event superimposed. ¡Sábado! ¡La battala más grande del año 2002! And down each side were photographs of the contestants on that night’s bill, facing each other across this middle space, each one with the wrestler’s stage name underneath. Daniel was able to translate a few: The Monster, the Angel of Death, Mr. Thunder. They were bulldozer-bodied men in garish hooded masks, a gallery of nightmare executioners. And halfway down the roster of these matched, musclebound opponents was a pair of dwarves, striking threatening poses. One of whom was called El Diablito.
Miguel’s mask—for Daniel, remembering the sign on the truck, knew it had to be Miguel—was fire red, with hellish-looking orange flames radiating out from the eyes and the mouth hole. His misproportioned body was much more developed and powerful-looking than Daniel would have imagined, and there was no sign of the modest middle-aged belly of the present.
“I was working graveyard shift at the County USC ER the night someone brought Miguel in after a lucha libre match with a concussion and a dislocated shoulder,,” said Nora. “That’s how we met. I was divorced from my first husband, no kids, and all I had going for a love life was this cute Bangladeshi neurosurgery resident who never even took me anywhere, if you don’t count the Norris Cancer Center cafeteria. He was really a sweet man, but he was from a traditional Muslim family, immigrants, and all his friends were the same. Everybody was constantly trying to set him up with a Muslim woman for marriage. He flew to Houston to meet one of them, and another time he went all the way to England. He said no one would understand him dating me. He was very affectionate, very sincere. But he was serious about that, and I didn’t have any illusions about us having a future.
“And then, with Miguel, I don’t know. It just happened. If you’d asked me back then if I thought I would ever be living with a man who doesn’t even come up to my chin…”
While she was talking, she had cleaned both of Daniel’s knees and begun tweezing gravel again.
“you mind if I ask you something personal?” said Daniel.
“depends how personal,” said Nora. “You have no idea the rude things some people think they can ask you.”
“I was just wondering about the baby. How does that work? I mean, is he going to be like Miguel?” Though of course he had wondered other things, as well. Wouldn’t anybody?
“Carlito’s not a dwarf,” Nora said. “Miguel is an achondroplastic, and achons—she pronounced it ‘á-kons’– have one dwarfism gene for stature and one normal gene. And I have two normal genes. Which put the odds at 50/50,and they turned in his favor. So he might grow up tall, or he might grow up short, but he won’t be like his daddy. Now, can I ask you something?”
Daniel, wincing at the prick of the tweezers, nodded.
“It’s about what happened out there when the police came. I couldn’t have just let him go, the way you did.”
To be continued…