Los Angeles Noir - Denise Hamilton [113]
What’s a skit?
It’s like a platform made of bamboo, Mom said. It has wheels and a little lawn mower engine. Boys run them over the train tracks like homemade taxis. Anyway, Tio Bien hired one and was riding into town to drink some halo halo, when the skit was stopped by bandits. He gave them his watch and money, but they shot him in the kneecaps anyway. Then they left. When he got back to the hacienda, his brothers grew furious. They found out from tenant farmers what village the bandits came from. They rode there on horseback with machine guns from the war. They shot into the thatched nipa huts.
Why didn’t they find out who did it? I asked. They could have hit anyone. Even a baby.
They weren’t thinking about that, Mom said. They were sending the message that this is what happens if someone hurts our family.
I shook my head, furious, bothered. My mother and aunt spoke with disapproving low voices, almost whispers, shaking their heads with shame. But they were also secretly proud, I sensed.
When I got jumped into a Latino gang, my mother and her sister and their brothers may have been disappointed in me. But on a trip I took back to Manila, my grandmother’s brother Eduardo took one look at me—the broad muscles, the weight-lifter’s shoulders, the tattoos covering my arms and back—and he nodded in approval.
You are a true Laurel, he said.
That night, we got shitfaced on San Miguel gin.
In my church we have an inscription that indicates the bread and wine are not His body and blood, but only symbols, remembrances of the Father. But I have a secret heresy. When I eat from the loaf, when I sip from the cup, I feel in my heart His presence and know I have consumed real flesh and real bodily fluid that is absorbed by my body. It is the Philippine Catholic inside me. I have other secret idolatries. There is a tattoo of the Virgin Mary on my back, from the base of my neck down to the crest of my buttocks; her shoulders spread across my shoulder blades, her feet step on the serpent coiled at my hips. All the other tattoos my congregation knew about, and I removed them by laser—across my arms and shoulders, my neck, my chest. When we went out to the frigid stream for full immersion, I kept two layers of undershirt on so they would not see the Holy Mother beneath.
They would not understand. But about some things I cannot let go.
I took Veronica to my church once. She hadn’t been to Mass in years. She said the rituals were meaningless, rote, hierarchical. I wanted to expose the unborn baby to Jesus, and thought our more spirited evangelical service might rekindle the piety of her childhood. But she looked surprised at the Spartan worship space and asked where the altar was. She puzzled at the aluminum chairs we had instead of pews, scanned the floor for kneelers.
When the Christian rock band played and the clapping started, she moved and swayed, even smiled. Her eyes teared during the witnessing, as a man read a letter from an eleven-year-old boy who had written an autobiographical story about hearing his alcoholic father beating his mother through the bedroom wall, then confessed that this boy was his own son. A feeling passed through the crowd like a cool insuck of breath through our bodies. Veronica looked around with surprise.
She seemed impressed when I showed her the boys’ club facility and explained our drug rehab programs and outreach ministries.
Afterwards I felt hope as we stepped out onto the crunchy gravel, the strip-mall glass glistening across the boulevard.
What did you think? I asked.
I liked it, she said.
You think you might want to come back?
She seemed sad as she smiled at me. I don’t think so, Tomas, she said. She touched my arm, and her fingers lingered.
Well, if you ever change your mind …
She looked sorry. As if I had shown her my ugly baby and expected a compliment.
Veronica kept active even during her pregnancy. She continued to