American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [93]
“How do you know?”
“Do you see how we all gather around it? Old Man Widener over there. Joe Krozier there. Me here. Wouldn’t sit here looking up at it if something weren’t drawing us, would we? That’s how I see it.”
“Does the apu ever get angry?”
“You mean like a volcano? No.”
“I mean if you do something to make him mad. Like if you dig in him for bones.”
“Oh, well, I reckon the Injuns think so. They tell me things like that. But I don’t know. Never seen anything like that myself. And I tend to believe in what I see.”
I must have looked at him with a puzzled face, for he continued, “Wish it were different, honey girl. Sure would like to believe in something otherworldly. Something that would make me one hundred percent sure I’ll see your Grandma Lo again. I just don’t know what to believe.” He squeezed my hand, lifted his heavy frame out of the chair, swung open the screen door, and disappeared inside.
That night I overheard my parents discuss our three months out West. The house was small, the walls were thin, and I could lie in the blanket spread out on my grandfather’s sofa and listen to every nuance of conversation. Vicki was doing fine, they said, but needed some distraction: something to get her mind off death, something to make her laugh. Maybe a museum, a quick visit to a historic site, a concert in some park. Marisi was a sport, no problem there; she seemed to have taken it all in stride. But George, it seemed, was suffering. Oh, he’s all right, my father said. No, he was not, Mother insisted. He was ill. Some shock; hadn’t he noticed? A trauma of some kind. Probably because he’d been made to look at his dead grandmother, Papi said. No, Mother said sharply, it started long before that. In Peru. Nonsense, my father said, but we’ll make a point to see a doctor while we’re here, if that will make you feel better.
The next morning, old wifeless Joe came winding up Rattlesnake Pass on his mange-bitten, swaybacked mare. As we downed the last of Grandpa Doc’s flapjacks—lighter and sweeter than any a servant had made us—Old Joe thrust his mug in the door and called out, “Goin’ta Rawlins, anyone? Got room for a big-fisted horseman with no car and a li’l ass?”
We did go to Rawlins that day. We dropped off Joe, watched him go into the bar down the street from the Ferguson Building. Then we boarded a train that took us to Boston. It was a big town, hard town, with nothing to recommend it except that my parents held hands briefly when they walked down the Fenway. But I do recall that we saw three things there we’d never dreamed we’d see: a television, a jukebox, and a psychiatrist.
The television was in a hotel lobby; there was a Cuban man in it, scolding his redheaded wife. It was just the thing to make Vicki laugh. The jukebox was in a corner soda shop; I fed a nickel into it and our waitress stood over us and bleated every word of the song. The mind god was in Children’s Hospital; he gave George a vial of pills and made his face go slack, smooth—tranquil as the dunes of Pachamama, smiling and beckoning us home.
9
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POWER
La Conquista
PACHAMAMA WAS NOT the only one welcoming us to Lima. Tension greeted us, too. There was an arch in Abuelita’s spine.
“Y la Abuela Clapp?” Abuelita asked me, issuing the right name like the sharp report of a gun. “Did you see her before she died?”
So. She knew about the Clapps. With that volley, it was clear to me that the skirmish between her and Mother would resume. Much later, when I was grown, Papi told me that for years letters had been delivered to Abuelita’s door addressed to Mother, with Clapp printed neatly on the envelopes. When Mother’s remarks to him indicated that the letters were from her parents, he didn’t say a word, never posed a query. But then he found himself rushing to flood walls, plugging the leaks in advance.
“She changed her name to Campbell before I met her in Boston,” he told them once. “Clapp has an unfortunate medical meaning in the United States. Not nice for a woman.”
Not nice? Clapp, as in cloepian, Saxon for “name”; or clappen,