Amadeo feels cheated. By Passion Week, by the penitentes, by Jesus himself. The fact is that no one can be crucified every day—not even Jesus could pull off that miracle. Jesus never had to face the long dull aftermath of crucifixion, the daily business of shitting and tooth-cleaning and waking reluctantly to a new day. Jesus never had to watch people return to their own concerns and forget what he did for them.
No, instead Jesus died on the cross, and before the women quit weeping outside his tomb, before all those Marys had to deal with grocery shopping and returning to work and paying the bills, Jesus rose from the dead! Oh, he must have felt smug, up there on the cross with that trick up his sleeve. He was spirited away to heaven where he lives in the lap of luxury, looking down on the people with their big endless worshipful party. Because what is Christianity except a never-ending memorial service with people singing his praises and invoking his name until the end of fucking time, just because one day he got three nails and a poke in the ribs?
It’s not like Jesus was the only person to ever suffer, Amadeo thinks sourly as he jogs through the Plaza, head down. Hadn’t people died before? Haven’t they died since? And in worse ways, too. How about all the Jews in the Holocaust? How about that guy down in Arizona who used a two-hundred-year-old saguaro cactus for target practice and it fell on him, pinning his torso to the dirt, and he bled and bled, taking ever-shallower breaths, and they say he wasn’t even dead when the vultures and coyotes starting taking away pieces of him. That guy definitely had Jesus beat for suffering. In fact, now that he thinks of it, what Jesus went through barely even counts as suffering when he knew all along he had good things coming down the pike. Daddy would bail him out, sweep him up to heaven and seat him at his right hand. Real suffering isn’t just about physical pain, but about not knowing when the pain will end, not knowing what the point of it all is.
He failed, Amadeo realizes. Failed deeply, irredeemably. This isn’t the surprise, though. The surprise is that for all those weeks of Lent, Amadeo managed to convince himself that failure wasn’t inevitable. All along, however, some absolute core in him had known failure was coming the second he saw Angel waiting for him on the steps.
Kaune’s Market is mercifully open, and Amadeo buys himself a forty of overpriced craft beer. It’s nine now. More people are around, and the last thing he needs is a cop hassling him, so he opens it in the alley by the dumpster. The trash smell is thick in the warm September air. He barely tastes the beer, but it’s refreshing, and he drinks it down quickly. His burp is big and soft, and in its wake his anxious stomach settles some.
The alcohol does its magic, and Amadeo feels calmer. He walks back toward the park. He’ll apologize to the blond guy. “No hard feelings, man. I’m going through some shit. Sorry for—” How to phrase it? He’s sorry for calling the guy an asshole, sorry for snapping at him, sorriest for treating the man like someone who deserves Amadeo’s venom. How do you say that to a homeless person? But when he gets to the river, the picnic table is empty. Now he has the homeless guy to feel bad about.
Amadeo makes his way to Evangelo’s in time for it to open, where he sits drinking and watching ESPN, because at this point it’s all shit and who cares if he’s off the wagon. He drinks until the sick pounding of his heart slows, and then he keeps drinking.
He can guess what’s going on back in the parking garage. At lunch Yolanda probably insisted on going out to the car with Monica, eager to see Amadeo’s job well done. Together they would have discovered the disaster Amadeo made of her car. Yolanda would have apologized over and over, humiliated, and she would have offered to pay for the damage, and maybe Monica took her up on it, but maybe, in a gesture of largesse, she didn’t, which would have humiliated his mother still further.
On the street, tourists stream past the window, arms full of shopping bags from the trading post, the bookstore, the folk art shop. He rests his head against the cool window.
Yolanda leans into her chair, suffused with an unfamiliar euphoria. In this very building, her son, five months clean, is doing his first repair job, getting his life in order, and all around her the business of the State of New Mexico ticks along.