Valleyesque, p.8
Valleyesque, page 8
It was the voice of the City Girls, who ruled the internet vintage clothing market, thanks not only to this particular ropa usada, but to all of them throughout the South. If you wanted to sell clothes on the internet without any trouble, there was a tribute to be paid to the City Girls. Cassie had had a troublesome relationship with them in the past, and after she got into grad school she swore she’d never deal with them again. It’d been a while since Cassie had seen them. As they circled her, she remembered the most obvious thing about them, which was that the City Girls looked like supermodels. Though their style was one Cassie felt was very conventional and capitalist, she couldn’t help wanting to weep at their collective blinding beauty, and fought to hold it together and stand her ground before them.
“Did you bring what belongs to us,” the City Girls asked, in that mechanical way they spoke, in unison, like a Greek chorus.
Cassie pulled out the purple envelope she’d brought and said, “Count it. It’s all there.”
The City Girls were pleased at this and said, “No need. We trust you. Yet we also know you inwardly judge us. Because unlike other people who are just buying clothes here for their families, we are here to find the good stuff people throw away. We can tell the good hand-stitching from the bad machine stuff. All the big cities thrive on the clothes we find here. And even though you aspire to be like us, you inwardly judge us. For shame. For shame,” they whispered, then screamed, not in unison, but one by one.
Parting from one another, the City Girls wheeled through a lounge cart with a deep bowl and a silver platter. “You know what happens now,” the City Girls said to Cassie, who knew this was coming. “You powder our doughnut.”
The platter was uncovered to reveal a small brown doughnut sitting on a plate like an ugly duckling. The deep bowl beside it was filled with a white powder. Cassie grabbed the doughnut and did the deed while in ecstatic glee the City Girls hissed, “Yes. Yes. Powder our doughnut. Powder it.”
When Cassie was finished and every last spot on the doughnut was covered, the City Girls split it up into even pieces and ate the powdered doughnut.
Breathing heavily, and thoroughly fulfilled, the City Girls needed a cigarette, and afterward, a nap. “Go now,” the City Girls said, as they each found a different handkerchief mound to pass out on. “You can sell clothes on the internet without the shakedown.”
Cassie walked away as they fell into slumber; for a moment they looked harmless, as if, once surrounded by that wreckage of used clothing, the City Girls weren’t in charge of who ate and who starved in the vintage-clothes-selling racket. Cassie had lived in the city for over ten years now, and she dwelled on the reasons why she’d never be made a City Girl; then, feeling she was taking a stance, told herself she would never become a City Girl even if given the opportunity.
She lost track of time, heading in the vague direction of an exit, and everything around was flannel. Cassie tried to remember the clothing on her wish list for her internet store. Though the powdered-doughnut incident had made her nauseated, hunger was overtaking Cassie once again. The distant chime of a bell resounded and the thick humidity of the ropa usada became only thicker. Cassie couldn’t remember when the last time was that she’d even seen a fan.
The smoke was slight at first—Cassie wondered if it even was smoke, then saw the trash bin emitting white fire and white smoke, with meat unlike anything she’d ever seen roasting over it.
Small houses made of broomsticks, parkas, and cheap coats lined both ends of a short road. A woman was ringing a bell that was hanging on a brick tower. Cassie had heard of the village in the ropa usada, but, like everybody else, had always known to stay away. Since she was wandering without a map, she’d stumbled upon it by accident, and Cassie walked right up to the woman ringing the bell. The woman had bandages around her eyes, and Cassie concluded she must be blind.
The woman stopped pulling the rope that rang the bell and yelled, “Harold, your bride has arrived.”
Cassie looked around and couldn’t see this bride the woman was referring to.
“Excuse me,” she said to the woman.
From one of the little houses, the one made of suit jackets three stories high, came a tall man with shaggy hair that covered his eyes. Cassie couldn’t tell if he also had his eyes bandaged, but he seemed to have no trouble finding his way around.
“Is she the one,” Harold said, moving his head up and down, checking out Cassie. “Is she the one you gave your eyes for, Mother? Is she?”
Laughter came from one of the parka houses, and across the street a couple were heard arguing while a child cried.
Cassie shook her head—wanted to scream No—and the flannel under her feet became unsteady, as if the clothes were beginning to slide in an avalanche.
The wave of clothing was fifty feet away when she saw it.
T-shirts of old bands and businesses, discarded quinceañera dresses, pearl snap shirts, denim in every form, jackets, polo shirts, school uniforms, scarves, boots, chanclas, high heels, ties, sneakers, Oxfords with worn soles in every size, long skirts, miniskirts, shawls, aprons, galoshes, tank tops, bathrobes, leather jackets, vests, belts, suspenders, ruffled blouses, tunics, hooded sweatshirts, earmuffs, all styles of hat, and every snarky saying ever printed on 60 percent polyester, 40 percent cotton came together like the earth had quaked from deep in its depths. Cassie was taken by the tsunami of clothes, as if the distant levee holding pallets and pallets of them had finally burst—she tumbled and nearly drowned many times, but managed to grab hold of a floating desk chair as the sea of clothes gurgled and shifted.
Before her eyes flashed the reasons she’d come out here in the first place: her debts and student loans, which had started being deducted automatically from her bank account every month, no matter what. As the clothes slowly came to a muddy halt, Cassie stood and dusted herself off.
I’m alive, Cassie thought.
It made her sad to think that, in what she felt were her final moments, what tumbled through her mind was all the money she owed: not her mother, her family, the people she loved, or the possessions she held dear, but her crushing debt.
Cassie saw that her slippers were gone and, barefoot, she went looking for survivors.
The clipetty-clopetty of a horse moved toward her and a foggy voice yelled, “Report the dead. Report the dead.” Cassie watched as the horse-drawn wagon passed by, hauling a pile of dead bodies.
Wails and moans came from deep within the clothes. Cassie saw two legs sticking out of a clothing dune, clearly tussling to get their torso and head out. Cassie walked up and carefully grabbed one foot. The person fought against it, then must have sensed good intentions because they let Cassie grab the other foot, and she pulled without further struggle.
Like a thorn being pinched from a wound, Harold’s body emerged from the dune of clothing.
“My bride,” Harold said, walking on his knees toward Cassie.
“I can’t marry you, Harold,” she said. In a flight of improvisation, she added: “The truth is that I’m already taken.”
Sitting on the beach of clothing like a stranded mariner, Harold started to loudly weep. “I’ve lost it all,” he said, “and you deny me even this?”
Cassie knew better than to fall for the trap of consolation, so she said, “It’s for your own good, sweetie,” and went looking for the exit.
* * *
The terrain had changed. The old polyester, wool, and denim roads were all destroyed. Cassie looked down at her dark feet—though there were shoes her size everywhere, she didn’t want to walk in any of them. Up ahead there was a bright light, and the train was still sitting there, broken-down, unaware of the disasters that had occurred.
The ground of clothing below her became concrete, then eventually tile.
Cassie saw her reflection on the wall-sized mirror near the entrance as she walked by. She didn’t recognize the clothing she wore—somewhere inside, her wardrobe had changed, unbeknownst to her. It looked like she’d even lost weight.
The bouncer saw her walking up. Though he’d developed a thick skin in this business, Cassie’s staticky hair, dirty face, and just-got-off-the-UFO stare warmed his heart. He noticed she had bought no clothes, asked for her ticket, and, as a shoplifting precaution, weighed her again.
He was holding a fur coat and said, “Someone tried shoplifting this Gianni mink coat from us a while ago. My manager’s not here right now and it’s cold out there. Since you’re a few pounds lighter than how you came in, why don’t you have it?”
Cassie tried to smile as the bouncer snuggled the coat around her shoulders. She couldn’t think of the words for “thank you,” and walked outside. It was snowing. Barefoot, she walked to her car and started it. Cassie wondered how long she’d been at the ropa usada. She drove away and thought the bouncer had been nice to give her the coat. As she surfed for a radio station, Cassie said aloud, “It’s people like that man who are keeping this world going, holding it together.” Then, when she had found her song, she wondered what a Gianni mink coat like this could go for on the internet.
PANCHOFIRE & MARINA
Last night, after finally watching the documentary on the unsolved murder of the young nurse in South Texas, I realized all I had was a can of tuna in the pantry—in the fridge was half an onion, some mustard, and a nearly empty carton of expired milk.
Looked in all the drawers for the can opener with no luck, then, using a kitchen knife, stabbed all along the can’s edge, the tin cringing like a viola popping strings. When I’d cleared nearly half the can, I pried it open with a fork and thought, How funny, remembering the days I’d lived next to Father Chabelo Andrade in the east side, while forcing clumps of tuna into my mouth.
His name was never mentioned in the documentary entitled Preying on the Holy. But, since I’d known Father Andrade personally, and was only now piecing together the events that occurred back in 1957, it didn’t surprise me.
* * *
When I learned about the documentary, it had interested me because the murder took place in South Texas, close to where I’m from. It begins as the story of a young Mexican American woman, the studious and charismatic Linda Salazar. She is the first person in her family to receive a high school diploma, and, later, a college degree. She gets hired as a nurse at McAllen Renaissance Hospital. In her twenties, she exchanges letters with her former female classmates, which are narrated by an actress; they reveal Linda to be a romantic and pious young woman, who still wears her promise ring and goes out on dates with young doctors.
In dealing with the sick from day to day, Linda learns to love God and attends church every Sunday and Wednesday. She is described as attractive and is known in the community for dressing well. Single men attend the church, hoping to have an exchange with the young nurse. She goes to confession frequently and even befriends one of the priests, Father Sims. Linda Salazar agrees to have dinner with a young doctor after church one Ash Wednesday. That day, there is a thunderstorm before Mass. At the service, according to eyewitnesses, Linda is fidgety. Waiting in line to confess, she asks a few gentlemen if she can cut ahead, for she is in a hurry, and they modestly acquiesce.
The following day, her parents report to the authorities that she never came home, and her car is discovered at San Juditas Church. A few blocks from the church, Linda’s purse is discovered in a bush with her driver’s license and money intact. Six miles to the northeast, a pair of women’s black dress shoes are found in the mud by the side of the road, apparently thrown from a moving vehicle, and are identified by the family as having been worn by Linda the evening she disappeared.
Five days later, her body is found by construction workers, floating along the Rio Bravo River in Anzalduas Park. The autopsy reports she has been dead for three days. Linda Salazar’s blouse is ripped open and her underwear is missing; the left side of her face is bruised and swollen, as if she’d been beaten with a blunt object. Any evidence that could’ve identified the killer or killers has been washed away by the river. Within a week, everybody in the congregation, her family, her coworkers, and her suitors since high school are interviewed by the authorities. The name that keeps popping up is Father Sims’s. She confessed to him on Ash Wednesday, and it’s reported by a few people, including another priest and an acolyte, that Father Sims and Linda Salazar went off to the back room of the church for a private confession. This was not out of the ordinary, since a private confession is offered to anybody upon request.
The service ended shortly after this, and nobody saw Linda Salazar alive again except Father Sims, who, it turns out, is the youngest and least experienced priest in San Juditas. He’d come down from Tulsa, and after living for a time in Premont, made it all the way down to the Valley, in South Texas.
It is discovered that a week prior to Linda’s disappearance, a male matching Father Sims’s description was reported to have attacked a librarian named Estela Casas in the middle of the day, by the shrine with the votive candles in San Juditas Church. She is able to identify Father Sims as her attacker, but there’s still insufficient evidence for the authorities. Father Sims denies all the allegations and has alibis that are confirmed by others for the investigators. Suspiciously, during the days after Linda’s disappearance, other priests at San Juditas notice cuts and scrapes on Father Sims’s hands and around his neck—they go on record saying the explanation Father Sims gave for the cuts was that he’d gotten locked out of his apartment and had a rough time climbing a tree to get through a window.
The doctor Linda had the date with is also questioned by the police, and, later, in the documentary as an old man. He is found to have a reliable alibi, and in the film he explains how this incident ruined his reputation and upward mobility for a long time. The documentary makes you believe Father Sims committed the crime and got away with it. He moves back to Tulsa the following year, continuing with the clergy—then, ten years after the death of Linda Salazar, Father Sims is found dead in a chapel, surrounded by snuffed candles and statues of the saints, his cassock stained with his own semen. He appears to have shot himself through the chest with a revolver—the weapon is found at the scene, and the incident is ruled a suicide, the events shrouding it just as mysterious and elusive to the authorities as those around Linda’s death.
The documentary ends with a giant question mark: Why would this priest, Father Sims, commit suicide, and was the act related to the murder of Linda Salazar?
Why the semen?
Where did the gun come from?
Though the bulk of the evidence suggests he killed Linda, he never confesses to the crime—he moves away, doesn’t change his name, lives unharassed. Then one day at the chapel he jacks off and kills himself?
It doesn’t add up to the police nor to the documentarians.
What began as an ordinary mystery ends as a profound one.
* * *
Again, I was attracted to the documentary because I love a good South Texas story; ten minutes into it, I sensed something ominously familiar. Something within it emerged like a sleepy bear from the deep woods of my memory, as if the story had been reworked from an old fairy tale or myth, and I felt I had some kind of answer to it—then I remembered it wasn’t me but my old neighbor from the east side—the other priest, Father Andrade—whom this story is really about.
He was an old, blind brown man who wasn’t really a priest, but everybody on the block called him Father because the younger nuns of the convent Sala Sagrada had been his volunteer helpers most of his life. They maintained his house, shopped for his groceries, made sure his bills got paid, and thrice a week Father Andrade played the organ at their church. He had learned to play the piano as a boy from his uncle, who in his youth had traveled with the Familia Nievesverdes Circus. Father Andrade had also heard his first Bible story from this uncle, who explained to him the books of the Bible and the different authors, their lives, and how their voices together try to harness the One Voice. Later on, when he learned Braille, the books available to him were mostly the classics: Virgil, Shakespeare, Herman Melville, Sappho. Father Andrade read everything he could, and memorized various passages from Aesop, Chaucer, and Edward Lear nonsense that gave him a chuckle.
His way of dressing reminded me of gamblers from my grandfather’s generation in Mexico. He wore shaded reading glasses, and I never got to see what his eyes looked like.
* * *
Thinking about it now, I’m proud to have formed a friendship with a man like Father Andrade, though at the time I was drinking too much and took it for granted. I wrote everything using a typewriter, with my front door open, so sometimes when he heard the machine he’d come over. I’d stop writing, relieved, and invite him in every time.
I tape-recorded a lot of conversations I had in that efficiency, and many of these were with Father Andrade. After watching Preying on the Holy, I told myself I needed those cassettes back, and knew just what had to be done to retrieve them.
* * *
I borrowed my boss’s car and drove five hours southwest to Atascosa, where my old roommate from the east side, Sally, lived. Neither of us held a grudge over our failed relationship and subsequent falling out. She invited me in for barley soup with her husband, Elian, then brought out a milk crate with things from the old days that weren’t hers. There were seven 120-minute cassettes in there, and in my excitement I asked Sally if she’d seen Preying on the Holy—she hadn’t, and I told her it was fucked-up, highly recommended. When I grabbed the cassettes and started my thank-yous and goodbyes, Sally and Elian commented on the immense amount of time we have in life and proposed a threesome. I politely declined, got back in the boss’s car, and peeled out of there. I popped an unmarked cassette in the tape deck, screwed with the controls on the stereo, then immediately heard my own voice—and, like it always does, it gave me a sense of dread to hear what I actually sound like.
“Did you bring what belongs to us,” the City Girls asked, in that mechanical way they spoke, in unison, like a Greek chorus.
Cassie pulled out the purple envelope she’d brought and said, “Count it. It’s all there.”
The City Girls were pleased at this and said, “No need. We trust you. Yet we also know you inwardly judge us. Because unlike other people who are just buying clothes here for their families, we are here to find the good stuff people throw away. We can tell the good hand-stitching from the bad machine stuff. All the big cities thrive on the clothes we find here. And even though you aspire to be like us, you inwardly judge us. For shame. For shame,” they whispered, then screamed, not in unison, but one by one.
Parting from one another, the City Girls wheeled through a lounge cart with a deep bowl and a silver platter. “You know what happens now,” the City Girls said to Cassie, who knew this was coming. “You powder our doughnut.”
The platter was uncovered to reveal a small brown doughnut sitting on a plate like an ugly duckling. The deep bowl beside it was filled with a white powder. Cassie grabbed the doughnut and did the deed while in ecstatic glee the City Girls hissed, “Yes. Yes. Powder our doughnut. Powder it.”
When Cassie was finished and every last spot on the doughnut was covered, the City Girls split it up into even pieces and ate the powdered doughnut.
Breathing heavily, and thoroughly fulfilled, the City Girls needed a cigarette, and afterward, a nap. “Go now,” the City Girls said, as they each found a different handkerchief mound to pass out on. “You can sell clothes on the internet without the shakedown.”
Cassie walked away as they fell into slumber; for a moment they looked harmless, as if, once surrounded by that wreckage of used clothing, the City Girls weren’t in charge of who ate and who starved in the vintage-clothes-selling racket. Cassie had lived in the city for over ten years now, and she dwelled on the reasons why she’d never be made a City Girl; then, feeling she was taking a stance, told herself she would never become a City Girl even if given the opportunity.
She lost track of time, heading in the vague direction of an exit, and everything around was flannel. Cassie tried to remember the clothing on her wish list for her internet store. Though the powdered-doughnut incident had made her nauseated, hunger was overtaking Cassie once again. The distant chime of a bell resounded and the thick humidity of the ropa usada became only thicker. Cassie couldn’t remember when the last time was that she’d even seen a fan.
The smoke was slight at first—Cassie wondered if it even was smoke, then saw the trash bin emitting white fire and white smoke, with meat unlike anything she’d ever seen roasting over it.
Small houses made of broomsticks, parkas, and cheap coats lined both ends of a short road. A woman was ringing a bell that was hanging on a brick tower. Cassie had heard of the village in the ropa usada, but, like everybody else, had always known to stay away. Since she was wandering without a map, she’d stumbled upon it by accident, and Cassie walked right up to the woman ringing the bell. The woman had bandages around her eyes, and Cassie concluded she must be blind.
The woman stopped pulling the rope that rang the bell and yelled, “Harold, your bride has arrived.”
Cassie looked around and couldn’t see this bride the woman was referring to.
“Excuse me,” she said to the woman.
From one of the little houses, the one made of suit jackets three stories high, came a tall man with shaggy hair that covered his eyes. Cassie couldn’t tell if he also had his eyes bandaged, but he seemed to have no trouble finding his way around.
“Is she the one,” Harold said, moving his head up and down, checking out Cassie. “Is she the one you gave your eyes for, Mother? Is she?”
Laughter came from one of the parka houses, and across the street a couple were heard arguing while a child cried.
Cassie shook her head—wanted to scream No—and the flannel under her feet became unsteady, as if the clothes were beginning to slide in an avalanche.
The wave of clothing was fifty feet away when she saw it.
T-shirts of old bands and businesses, discarded quinceañera dresses, pearl snap shirts, denim in every form, jackets, polo shirts, school uniforms, scarves, boots, chanclas, high heels, ties, sneakers, Oxfords with worn soles in every size, long skirts, miniskirts, shawls, aprons, galoshes, tank tops, bathrobes, leather jackets, vests, belts, suspenders, ruffled blouses, tunics, hooded sweatshirts, earmuffs, all styles of hat, and every snarky saying ever printed on 60 percent polyester, 40 percent cotton came together like the earth had quaked from deep in its depths. Cassie was taken by the tsunami of clothes, as if the distant levee holding pallets and pallets of them had finally burst—she tumbled and nearly drowned many times, but managed to grab hold of a floating desk chair as the sea of clothes gurgled and shifted.
Before her eyes flashed the reasons she’d come out here in the first place: her debts and student loans, which had started being deducted automatically from her bank account every month, no matter what. As the clothes slowly came to a muddy halt, Cassie stood and dusted herself off.
I’m alive, Cassie thought.
It made her sad to think that, in what she felt were her final moments, what tumbled through her mind was all the money she owed: not her mother, her family, the people she loved, or the possessions she held dear, but her crushing debt.
Cassie saw that her slippers were gone and, barefoot, she went looking for survivors.
The clipetty-clopetty of a horse moved toward her and a foggy voice yelled, “Report the dead. Report the dead.” Cassie watched as the horse-drawn wagon passed by, hauling a pile of dead bodies.
Wails and moans came from deep within the clothes. Cassie saw two legs sticking out of a clothing dune, clearly tussling to get their torso and head out. Cassie walked up and carefully grabbed one foot. The person fought against it, then must have sensed good intentions because they let Cassie grab the other foot, and she pulled without further struggle.
Like a thorn being pinched from a wound, Harold’s body emerged from the dune of clothing.
“My bride,” Harold said, walking on his knees toward Cassie.
“I can’t marry you, Harold,” she said. In a flight of improvisation, she added: “The truth is that I’m already taken.”
Sitting on the beach of clothing like a stranded mariner, Harold started to loudly weep. “I’ve lost it all,” he said, “and you deny me even this?”
Cassie knew better than to fall for the trap of consolation, so she said, “It’s for your own good, sweetie,” and went looking for the exit.
* * *
The terrain had changed. The old polyester, wool, and denim roads were all destroyed. Cassie looked down at her dark feet—though there were shoes her size everywhere, she didn’t want to walk in any of them. Up ahead there was a bright light, and the train was still sitting there, broken-down, unaware of the disasters that had occurred.
The ground of clothing below her became concrete, then eventually tile.
Cassie saw her reflection on the wall-sized mirror near the entrance as she walked by. She didn’t recognize the clothing she wore—somewhere inside, her wardrobe had changed, unbeknownst to her. It looked like she’d even lost weight.
The bouncer saw her walking up. Though he’d developed a thick skin in this business, Cassie’s staticky hair, dirty face, and just-got-off-the-UFO stare warmed his heart. He noticed she had bought no clothes, asked for her ticket, and, as a shoplifting precaution, weighed her again.
He was holding a fur coat and said, “Someone tried shoplifting this Gianni mink coat from us a while ago. My manager’s not here right now and it’s cold out there. Since you’re a few pounds lighter than how you came in, why don’t you have it?”
Cassie tried to smile as the bouncer snuggled the coat around her shoulders. She couldn’t think of the words for “thank you,” and walked outside. It was snowing. Barefoot, she walked to her car and started it. Cassie wondered how long she’d been at the ropa usada. She drove away and thought the bouncer had been nice to give her the coat. As she surfed for a radio station, Cassie said aloud, “It’s people like that man who are keeping this world going, holding it together.” Then, when she had found her song, she wondered what a Gianni mink coat like this could go for on the internet.
PANCHOFIRE & MARINA
Last night, after finally watching the documentary on the unsolved murder of the young nurse in South Texas, I realized all I had was a can of tuna in the pantry—in the fridge was half an onion, some mustard, and a nearly empty carton of expired milk.
Looked in all the drawers for the can opener with no luck, then, using a kitchen knife, stabbed all along the can’s edge, the tin cringing like a viola popping strings. When I’d cleared nearly half the can, I pried it open with a fork and thought, How funny, remembering the days I’d lived next to Father Chabelo Andrade in the east side, while forcing clumps of tuna into my mouth.
His name was never mentioned in the documentary entitled Preying on the Holy. But, since I’d known Father Andrade personally, and was only now piecing together the events that occurred back in 1957, it didn’t surprise me.
* * *
When I learned about the documentary, it had interested me because the murder took place in South Texas, close to where I’m from. It begins as the story of a young Mexican American woman, the studious and charismatic Linda Salazar. She is the first person in her family to receive a high school diploma, and, later, a college degree. She gets hired as a nurse at McAllen Renaissance Hospital. In her twenties, she exchanges letters with her former female classmates, which are narrated by an actress; they reveal Linda to be a romantic and pious young woman, who still wears her promise ring and goes out on dates with young doctors.
In dealing with the sick from day to day, Linda learns to love God and attends church every Sunday and Wednesday. She is described as attractive and is known in the community for dressing well. Single men attend the church, hoping to have an exchange with the young nurse. She goes to confession frequently and even befriends one of the priests, Father Sims. Linda Salazar agrees to have dinner with a young doctor after church one Ash Wednesday. That day, there is a thunderstorm before Mass. At the service, according to eyewitnesses, Linda is fidgety. Waiting in line to confess, she asks a few gentlemen if she can cut ahead, for she is in a hurry, and they modestly acquiesce.
The following day, her parents report to the authorities that she never came home, and her car is discovered at San Juditas Church. A few blocks from the church, Linda’s purse is discovered in a bush with her driver’s license and money intact. Six miles to the northeast, a pair of women’s black dress shoes are found in the mud by the side of the road, apparently thrown from a moving vehicle, and are identified by the family as having been worn by Linda the evening she disappeared.
Five days later, her body is found by construction workers, floating along the Rio Bravo River in Anzalduas Park. The autopsy reports she has been dead for three days. Linda Salazar’s blouse is ripped open and her underwear is missing; the left side of her face is bruised and swollen, as if she’d been beaten with a blunt object. Any evidence that could’ve identified the killer or killers has been washed away by the river. Within a week, everybody in the congregation, her family, her coworkers, and her suitors since high school are interviewed by the authorities. The name that keeps popping up is Father Sims’s. She confessed to him on Ash Wednesday, and it’s reported by a few people, including another priest and an acolyte, that Father Sims and Linda Salazar went off to the back room of the church for a private confession. This was not out of the ordinary, since a private confession is offered to anybody upon request.
The service ended shortly after this, and nobody saw Linda Salazar alive again except Father Sims, who, it turns out, is the youngest and least experienced priest in San Juditas. He’d come down from Tulsa, and after living for a time in Premont, made it all the way down to the Valley, in South Texas.
It is discovered that a week prior to Linda’s disappearance, a male matching Father Sims’s description was reported to have attacked a librarian named Estela Casas in the middle of the day, by the shrine with the votive candles in San Juditas Church. She is able to identify Father Sims as her attacker, but there’s still insufficient evidence for the authorities. Father Sims denies all the allegations and has alibis that are confirmed by others for the investigators. Suspiciously, during the days after Linda’s disappearance, other priests at San Juditas notice cuts and scrapes on Father Sims’s hands and around his neck—they go on record saying the explanation Father Sims gave for the cuts was that he’d gotten locked out of his apartment and had a rough time climbing a tree to get through a window.
The doctor Linda had the date with is also questioned by the police, and, later, in the documentary as an old man. He is found to have a reliable alibi, and in the film he explains how this incident ruined his reputation and upward mobility for a long time. The documentary makes you believe Father Sims committed the crime and got away with it. He moves back to Tulsa the following year, continuing with the clergy—then, ten years after the death of Linda Salazar, Father Sims is found dead in a chapel, surrounded by snuffed candles and statues of the saints, his cassock stained with his own semen. He appears to have shot himself through the chest with a revolver—the weapon is found at the scene, and the incident is ruled a suicide, the events shrouding it just as mysterious and elusive to the authorities as those around Linda’s death.
The documentary ends with a giant question mark: Why would this priest, Father Sims, commit suicide, and was the act related to the murder of Linda Salazar?
Why the semen?
Where did the gun come from?
Though the bulk of the evidence suggests he killed Linda, he never confesses to the crime—he moves away, doesn’t change his name, lives unharassed. Then one day at the chapel he jacks off and kills himself?
It doesn’t add up to the police nor to the documentarians.
What began as an ordinary mystery ends as a profound one.
* * *
Again, I was attracted to the documentary because I love a good South Texas story; ten minutes into it, I sensed something ominously familiar. Something within it emerged like a sleepy bear from the deep woods of my memory, as if the story had been reworked from an old fairy tale or myth, and I felt I had some kind of answer to it—then I remembered it wasn’t me but my old neighbor from the east side—the other priest, Father Andrade—whom this story is really about.
He was an old, blind brown man who wasn’t really a priest, but everybody on the block called him Father because the younger nuns of the convent Sala Sagrada had been his volunteer helpers most of his life. They maintained his house, shopped for his groceries, made sure his bills got paid, and thrice a week Father Andrade played the organ at their church. He had learned to play the piano as a boy from his uncle, who in his youth had traveled with the Familia Nievesverdes Circus. Father Andrade had also heard his first Bible story from this uncle, who explained to him the books of the Bible and the different authors, their lives, and how their voices together try to harness the One Voice. Later on, when he learned Braille, the books available to him were mostly the classics: Virgil, Shakespeare, Herman Melville, Sappho. Father Andrade read everything he could, and memorized various passages from Aesop, Chaucer, and Edward Lear nonsense that gave him a chuckle.
His way of dressing reminded me of gamblers from my grandfather’s generation in Mexico. He wore shaded reading glasses, and I never got to see what his eyes looked like.
* * *
Thinking about it now, I’m proud to have formed a friendship with a man like Father Andrade, though at the time I was drinking too much and took it for granted. I wrote everything using a typewriter, with my front door open, so sometimes when he heard the machine he’d come over. I’d stop writing, relieved, and invite him in every time.
I tape-recorded a lot of conversations I had in that efficiency, and many of these were with Father Andrade. After watching Preying on the Holy, I told myself I needed those cassettes back, and knew just what had to be done to retrieve them.
* * *
I borrowed my boss’s car and drove five hours southwest to Atascosa, where my old roommate from the east side, Sally, lived. Neither of us held a grudge over our failed relationship and subsequent falling out. She invited me in for barley soup with her husband, Elian, then brought out a milk crate with things from the old days that weren’t hers. There were seven 120-minute cassettes in there, and in my excitement I asked Sally if she’d seen Preying on the Holy—she hadn’t, and I told her it was fucked-up, highly recommended. When I grabbed the cassettes and started my thank-yous and goodbyes, Sally and Elian commented on the immense amount of time we have in life and proposed a threesome. I politely declined, got back in the boss’s car, and peeled out of there. I popped an unmarked cassette in the tape deck, screwed with the controls on the stereo, then immediately heard my own voice—and, like it always does, it gave me a sense of dread to hear what I actually sound like.
