(First published in Marrow Magazine.)
When the first miseries fell upon Felipe, he was twenty-two. After he’d been drafted and sent to fight in Vietnam, he had stepped on a punji stick covered in pig dung. The monsoon kept the wound from healing, and he lost his left foot to gangrene. He had followed orders and killed an innocent Vietnamese family. The ghost of one of his victims, a little girl covered in flames from the jellied gasoline known as napalm, followed him everywhere, pleading, “Giúp tôi.” Help me.
He returned to New Mexico with a medical discharge and for several years drifted from one carpentry job to another. After getting fired from the most recent for being both intoxicated and an asshole to the foreman, Felipe stood beneath a blood-orange sun, the desert heat gutting him. He tried to decide which direction to go—north and west to California or south to Mexico and maybe Costa Rica. Whichever direction he went, Felipe itched to build something, but the form eluded him.
He was dressed in tight jeans, worn and frayed but clean, which crumpled over steel-toed boots. His sweat-soaked t-shirt was tucked into the waistband beneath a skull-and-bones silver belt buckle, and a drooping straw sombrero that his co-workers had teased him relentlessly about framed close-shaven cheeks, except for a tuft of beard at the jut of the chin. His dark complexion was punctuated by brilliant, sparkling brown eyes, and his face was built tight to the skull, which seemed to express an iron control and will in the brain that few men wanted to test. Those few who did wished they hadn’t.
Deciding to head south for no other reason than gringos made him uncomfortable, he picked up a hitchhiker on the road to Los Alamos. Lucía Gómez stood with her thumb out in front of a jasmine-colored house perched on a path that led through cacti and wild chilies. She was sizing him up with her thumb, he could tell, measuring him like he measured a tree just before cutting his lumber.
Her curly black hair was primped around her cherub-sweet face, and her body was adorned in turquoise—earrings, necklaces, bracelets, a belt buckle, and a bolo tie that held her shirt open just enough to hint of cleavage.
“Where you headed?” Felipe asked. His voice was low and rich with the warmth of the far South and the natural, if outdated and beleaguered, machismo of the vaquero.
“Gonna meet Elvis,” she answered, tilting her head coyly.
“Presley? Where’s he at?”
“Memphis, of course. ¿Vienes?”
“Sure. ¡Vamos!” he answered. She jumped in and he floored the gas pedal.
As they drove, Felipe’s Eldorado convertible cranked mariachi. He sat on the top of the driver’s seat, his feet, including his left prosthetic foot, on the wheel. Lucía knelt on the floor with her face in his lap and her foot on the gas behind her.
For a short time, Pancho Villa rode again.
Hours later, they stopped beside a bend in the Pecos River that twisted through an aspen and desert willow grove. The willow’s branch hung his straw hat. The river fog unfurled over the bristlegrass and the moon, a bell in black stillness, rang ripe with crazy promise like a caballero’s bag of gold.
They never made it to Graceland, which was just as well, since unbeknownst to either of them, Elvis had died the previous day from a heart attack on his bathroom floor brought on by severe chronic constipation, which was itself brought on by chronic abuse of opioids.
“Where the hell’s the grace in that?” Felipe asked when he found out.
After making love, but forgetting first to check for poison ivy, Lucía read aloud from a book of poems by a Spanish poet named Lorca, her head bent over the pages in the moonlight, her finger tracing the stanzas. At first, Felipe snickered and pursed his lips to keep from mocking her. What need had he for poetry?
But then the words began to settle in his chest like hammered ten-penny nails. When she read the line—Death, vicious death, leave a green branch for love—he turned his head away. A burning Vietnamese girl watched him from beneath a nearby tree, the glow of her smoldering limbs painting the grass. He remembered he had lost something in the rice paddies, in the mud splattered with human viscera. He had worked so hard to forget. He couldn’t remember what it was, only that he’d lost it. Maybe it was love?
Only two months passed before he asked Lucía to marry him.
They were married in La Capilla de Nuestra Señora de la Luz in Santa Fe. There, he saw the helical, wooden stairway built more than a hundred years prior and now curled to the ceiling. There was no center pole to hold the structure’s weight; instead, it rested on the bottom rung. The image embedded itself in his brain—thousands of pounds of intricately carved wood relying solely upon the integrity of the very first step. It was a mystery, and Felipe disliked mystery.
“Am I not a mystery?” Lucía asked him after they argued about the subject.
He recognized the quote from her poetry book.
He scratched his head and frowned.“Sí, y te amo. But I don’t need grace or poetry. Why must we settle for mysteries?”
“Mi santísima madre, may she rest in peace, told me that grace is the greatest of mysteries, for it falls as gentle snow, my love.” She held his head in her hands and kissed him on the lips.
They settled in a town called Lágrimas de Ángeles in southern New Mexico and homesteaded a small plot on the outskirts. They lived in a cramped trailer while Felipe labored to build a farmhouse. His first love was carpentry. Wood was a living thing that could be sculpted, shaped, and hammered into something useful, yes, but beautiful above all. Felipe’s were powerful but gentle hands—the skin cracked and blue-black. They could grip the heaviest hammer or gently cup a hummingbird.
Felipe used an old mare they had bought with their savings to pull stumps so he could plow their field for beans. The horse’s coat was nearly white, and her back was bowed, while her head hung low from years of misuse and beatings she had suffered from her previous owner. Felipe’s prosthetic foot kept getting stuck between rocks, but he muscled onward, stumbling and swearing.
Once it was finished, Lucía brought him a pitcher of water.
He took a huge swig and tied a red bandana around his forehead. The New Mexico sun raised blisters on his face.
Lucía wore a blue cotton dress soaked with sweat that clung to her chest and hips. She had been using an axe to hack at tree stumps while Felipe and the mare pulled them out the ground. She poured what water was left from the pitcher over his head and he pulled her to him.
“If I didn’t have a bum foot, I’d whip your ass, Madam.”
Lucía laughed. “Too many excuses, husband. I’m pregnant, and do I complain?”
“No. You are my strength and my morning star, Doña Guerra. Tell me what I can do for you.”
“Learn to forgive yourself for your mistakes.”
He moved away and picked up her axe that she had set against a stump. Holding the handle with both hands, the muscles on his neck and shoulders bunched like steel ribbons. He spun and flung the axe high into the sky, where it tumbled end over end and landed in the middle of their little field of bean seedlings.
She massaged his shoulders as the flaming Vietnamese girl watched him from behind the barn. He had never told Lucía about the burning girl or much about his time in Vietnam. He feared, of course, that she might never be able to forgive him.
Felipe carved a baby’s crib in the shape of a swan from local gray oak. He had seen a vision of a white swan settling on a lake surrounded by wildflowers. They painted it together, then placed it in a small room with yellow, blue, and pink papel picado bunting that Lucía had stitched adorning the walls.
When the house was finally built, however, and their dream should have been starting, that was when it ended. Their mare died, the well dried up, and a plague of locusts and jackrabbits ate their entire crop of beans and peppers. Felipe took every odd carpenter job he could get his hands on. Lucía got three minimum-wage jobs, working eighteen hours a day, often sleeping in the car between shifts and not coming home for days.
That same year, however, she died, along with their infant daughter, in a collision with a telephone pole when she fell asleep at the wheel after working thirty-six hours straight. The infant was born dead while Lucía slowly bled to death in the mangled car.
Felipe was twenty-eight years old. He believed the burning girl took them from him, and his initial anger turned to self-pity. He wept until there were no tears left and then did what almost everyone else visited by heartless death does. He picked himself up and continued living.
After the funeral, he tied what few belongings they had on top of a small trailer, then set the house and barn on fire. He drove his dented and rusty Eldorado into an approaching thunderhead and never once looked back at the flames and coal-colored smoke that rose into the desert sky behind him.
Broken in heart and spirit, Felipe wandered in the De-Na-Zin Wilderness, a hunched figure with a missing foot, plagued by suicidal thoughts. His eyes were jaundiced, his brow constantly covered with a feverish sweat. Sometimes he forgot his wife and child were dead and imagined they had abandoned him.
Love and family had not saved him from his tribulations. They had given the world more whips with which to scourge him.
To drown the sound of the burning Vietnamese girl’s voice, he spoke to animals. When one of them talked back—an old, crusty armadillo who he named Rumpole—he found some respite. After all, if animals could talk, what other wonders did the world contain?
Unfortunately, all Rumpole kept repeating was, “Go fuck yourself.”
Felipe considered what he might bring to the world to atone for murdering an innocent family—a mother clutching her slit throat and trying to scream as she bled to death, a father eviscerated by shrapnel and writhing in the corner of their hut, a son whose body lay next to his severed head, and a daughter in flames, clinging to his leg. Perhaps grace was a scale, and he could balance things.
At Saint Casimir’s, the only Catholic church in Lágrimas de Ángeles, he visited the priest, Padre Domínguez.
“I will build a helical staircase to the choir loft that will be a great wonder,” he told padre Domínguez. He had come to lay flowers, pictures, and trinkets on the graves of his wife and daughter, who were buried in the church cemetery.
“We have no money, hijo mío,” Padre Domínguez said. “Look around you. Do you see a rich city like Albuquerque? Our patrocinadores shovel manure, pick chili peppers, and die without a single dollar to their name.”
“I will procure the supplies and work for nothing but my room and board, Padre.”
#
Felipe built a log cabin on the church grounds as he worked on his dream beside a garden of cilantro and Hatch chile peppers. The garden was next to the cemetery, and Felipe could see his daughter’s grave through the cabin window. He named her Isla—“Island”— for he believed that her death, before she could know anything of life, held her in an infinite solitude on an island in an ocean of time, where every second lived forever, past and present. He lived in the past whenever possible, meticulously fixing things in his mind that were broken.
His only companion was Rumpole the armadillo, who took up residence under his cabin and rooted for grubs in the garden.
As Felipe worked on his staircase, his brain burned with a fever. The padre finally forced him to go to the hospital. Undiagnosed leprosy, Felipe would later discover. The surgeons cut off pieces of his body to save him, and it nearly killed him. In his hospital bed and delirious, he wrote a letter to his beloved Lucía and sent it to her mother in Michigan, who, like her daughter, had long since passed. He wrote it in English since writing in Spanish only made him weep, and the pen trembled.
Lucía, my love,
I linger with the winter days to hear from you, take down your picture often and carry you with me as I work. Put aside your book of poems. Take the ferry ‘cross the straits in spring and come to Lágrimas before the whirling mayflies die.
I built a timber house beside a church and culled a brace of oak to plank the floor. My hand got broke last month—it’s crooked now, but almost works as good as new.
Did I tell you that I lost my faith in God? I was watching the Milky Way unfold above my head in glory, like that Chinese fan of yours I like so much. It hurt my eyes to watch the shimmer and broke another bone inside me like a reed. He never gave me anything that I wanted.
I will build a dancing stairway to heaven. That, to me, is poetry.
Come soon, Lucía, and tell your mother you’re not coming back. Bring your linen skirts and lace. It’s time to set your combs upon my mantle, love, and let your hair unfurl.
Bring that book of poems if you want.
Forever yours, Felipe.
He was discharged early from the VA hospital, not because he was cured but because they desperately needed the bed. He wandered in the garden beside the cemetery, and although the leprosy was gone, he was still gripped by fever as infections ravaged his body. A finch alighted upon the limb of a bois d’arc tree and watched him pass, twisted in his rapture. He raised a rusty hoe above his head and planted it deep in the garden’s dirt, where the witch hazel nodded. His brown skin sparkled with sweat, his eyes bloodshot and cloudy. Struggling in the weeds, he cursed. He imagined this was where Lucía had fallen and his daughter had died, leaving him alone forever with the agony of his cursed body.
He knelt and beckoned to shadows, a human dowser of longing. The bone ache twisted down—the leaves trembled to stillness as he cast his threadbare and meager words. Hidden among irises and lilies, she had ebbed away like water, sieved by stone. Yet still, she came to him, called forth by a man who loved her. She kissed his forehead and answered him.
I forgive you.
#
He labored nearly every day for five years, pausing only when he was forced into a hospital. The church’s congregation watched the gradual progress in the nave during mass or weddings, and the word got out. The staircase and its ascent step by step became a marvel throughout the city and state, for it rose far higher than the one in Santa Fe. Only six feet in diameter at its base, it was thirty feet high upon completion, and deep coffee in color. There were small leaves carved into the balusters, and the handrails glistened from hundreds of hand-rubbed linseed oil treatments. It took people’s breath away, for they felt it would collapse from the pull of gravity, although it never did. It hovered in the air as if it had no weight at all, perhaps to prove that touch and sight and the other senses were just a dream.
It was made of New Mexico spruce, and he used only hand tools at every step—from gimlets and bradawls to adzes and mallets.
Padre Domínguez once bought him an electric circular saw. Felipe thanked him, handed it back, and picked up his handsaw. Nothing easy or painless was worth a damn to him.
Trudging home from the market with Rumpole one day, Felipe dragged his cheap and malfunctioning prosthetic foot through the New Mexico dirt. His now curved back ached from hunching over and sanding lumber for hours upon hours, days upon days. His left arm ached where the triceps had been amputated in surgery two years ago. His heart had stopped four times, and four times he was resuscitated. Fortunately, he’d only lost the muscle fiber in his left arm to the leprosy. Still, the tribulations came to him and showed no signs of abating.
“No quiero morir otra vez,” he half coughed, half spoke to the wind and Rumpole. Pain was the mother, and he was the son. He no longer wanted to live, but all signs indicated that the world wasn’t finished with him.
The armadillo snickered, which was partly muffled by the hiss from a scorpion in his jaws. He crunched it and swallowed as he waddled along beside Felipe. “Only four times have you died, my friend—hardly a record. Your heart stopping again and again is not unexpected, considering your condition. Frankly, I am amazed you’re not yet a corpse. I gave you leprosy by the way, accidentally of course, and still, you plod along complaining about life as if a little adversity didn’t make you a better man. But why do we speak about you? I am the interesting one here. Also, the fucking staircase will not build itself if you are worm food.”
Rumpole’s speech was strange—the consonants clipped and the vowels were accompanied by a hissing overtone. But it was easy to recognize the words. What was amazing, however, was that he had decided to say something other than his crass mantra.
Yes, the staircase. Felipe nodded. Rumpole was right, even though he was a major pendejo.
“Why do you always speak in English, never Spanish?” Felipe asked Rumpole.
“It is the way the Oracle speaks.”
“Which oracle is that?”
“Hooked On Phonics: English for Beginners, A Cassette. I found it in the desert, along with the Oracle machine that allows the Oracle to speak. It was being carried by one of the many dead travelers from the south who had tried to come to this ‘Land of Enchantment’ to live their lives without fear. The rest of the English I have been stealing from the reading of books. Many words are in my pouch of learning. I fluently prance in the English.”
Felipe frowned. “You waddle, actually. But you know metaphors, I see.”
“What is a metaphor?”
“A metaphor is when we say one thing is another in order to understand the one thing more deeply. My wife taught me this about poetry.”
“Ah.” Rumpole stopped and looked up at Felipe. “Definitions of metaphor are tedious. Tell me instead about why the world always shits on you. You make me laugh. Life is a comedy—some lives funnier than others.”
Felipe nodded. He did not like to dwell upon all his misfortunes and preferred instead to concentrate upon his fortunes, scarce though they were nowadays. For example, the burning Vietnamese girl was gone, and thus her voice was quieted. She had disappeared the day he had died four times in the hospital. He hoped she had found peace.
“God is punishing you, Felipe,” Padre Domínguez had told him one day. Before Felipe could speak, the padre continued. “Yes, yes, I know. You do not believe in God. To what do you attribute your uncommon tribulations? Surely not chance.”
“To a young girl, covered with napalm, who clung to my leg in agony, who I shot in the head for mercy’s sake,” Felipe replied.
“Then neither I nor God Himself can forgive you, my son. Only she can.”
This seemed a strange thing for a priest to say, but Felipe kept his mouth shut. He had once come upon the padre in the nave late at night while he was smoking a crack pipe, his brow sweaty and his pupils dilated. They both agreed, silently, to never speak of it.
Perhaps the padre bears his own burning child, he thought as he hammered the last peg into place on the last baluster attached to the last step.
“‘It is finished,’” he said out loud, knowing full well that he was being impertinent, if not blasphemous. Kneeling on the top step, he waited for thunder or a chorus of angels. Perhaps San Rodrigo, el coyote, would appear and escort him to fields of gold. It wasn’t so hard to believe that an angel chose a coyote to manifest himself. San Rodrigo was a harbinger of death, yes, but he was also an angel of mercy, or so most lagrimenses believed.
Both would suit me perfectly, Felipe thought. But nothing happened. The clock in the narthex struck midnight, and all he felt was a delicious tiredness, a lifting of weight from his shoulders. He came down from his finished masterpiece, stumbled to his cabin and onto his bed, and fell into a deep sleep.
He dreamt that he was whole again and healthy. He dreamt that he chewed a mouthful of stars—twinkling orange habaneros—and went up the mountain at twilight. Lucía waited for him, dressed in a saguaro blossom and adorned with her turquoise jewelry. Her curly hair was dusted with gray, for she had aged. Her eyes were onyx and gleamed as if she had just woken from a deep sleep. She knelt and held her arms open to him, trembling, when he strode through the cottonwoods, and she pressed her head against his stomach.
They came to a meadow on a mesa that overlooked Lágrimas in the moonlight. As they lay together, he held the whorl of her face and hair in his hands, then carved the curve of their love and nailed it to the meadow’s breast.
Lucía rose and turned from him, beckoning him to follow. Her eyes were dry and wide.
A young girl appeared from the mist as if she were part of it and stood beside Lucía. Felipe stared at her, knowing it was Isla. She smiled, holding her hand out towards him.
He allowed joy into his heart, something he had not felt since his childhood. It began to snow as he went to join them, and the three waltzed toward dawn, pushing the fiery sky along their path, and disintegrated through swaths of smoke and cacti.
#
When the last of the embers from the burning church and Felipe’s cabin beside it cooled, the townsfolk were covered in white ash. They had fought and failed to keep back the fire caused by a faulty circuit breaker. The flames had reached high into the sky, illuminating the desert with a blue-green shimmer all the way, it was rumored, to Guadalajara.
What remained was Felipe’s staircase winding upward toward the heavens. On the top step was Lucía’s book of poems by Federico García Lorca. On its opened page was a scrawled sentence in Felipe’s handwriting.
“Sólo el misterio nos hace vivir, sólo el misterio.” Only mystery permits us to live. Only mystery.
An old armadillo stood where the altar had been, among charred timber and in a pile of ash. The citizens of Lágrimas de Ángeles shooed him away so that they could begin the task of rebuilding the church around the staircase.
They held an outdoor funeral for Felipe Guerra, then buried what was left of him beside his wife and child. It was his last tribulation. All that was left was his metal foot.
The End.
