His second fall is not intentional; neither is his last. He has forgotten to pick up his feet, and he stumbles, the cross heaving down with him.
“You got to have water.” She opens the little plastic top and pushes the bottle into his hands, but he doesn’t take it.
In the brush, birds chirp and little lizards dart, then freeze, from rock to rock. He watches Angel follow one with her eyes. Inside her, the baby twists and turns—he can almost sense it—hot in her flesh and under the sun. For the first time he’s glad she’s here: more than anyone, he realizes, he wants Angel to see what he’s capable of.
At the top of Calvario, the hermanos lift the cross from his shoulders and rest it on the ground. Amadeo straightens, an unbelievable relief, and the word good thrums in his head: good, good, good. The hermanos help him down, position his arms along the crossbeam, his feet against the block of wood that will support his weight. Amadeo spreads his arms and looks up into wide blue sky; there is nothing in his vision but blue. As they bind his arms and legs against the wood, lines once memorized surface: With a word he stilled the wind and the waves. But the wind skates over his body, drying his temples.
Then the hermanos lift the top of the cross, and Amadeo’s vision swings from sky to earth. Upright, his weight returns; his torn heels press into the wooden block. The cross sways as the hermanos anchor it in the hole they’ve dug, packing dirt and stones around the base. Below him, on the distant road, a few glittering cars wink behind the trees, oblivious. He sees distant mesas and pink earth, pi?on and chamisa. The air tastes of salt.
Angel stands before him, holding her hands under her belly. The nails, the nails. He is not sure if he says it or thinks it. Tío Tíve looks surprised, but nods and reaches into his pocket for the paper bag. The hermanos pour rubbing alcohol over the wood and Amadeo’s hot hands. The alcohol burns cold and clean.
They hold the tip of the nail against his palm, and he feels it there a moment, light as a coin, and then they pound it through.
The pain is so immediate, so stunningly distilled, that Amadeo’s entire consciousness shrinks around it. He is no longer a man: only reaction, outrage, agony.
He imagined the pain spreading through him like silent fire, unbearable in the most pleasurable of ways, like the burn of muscles pushed to their limits. He imagined the holy expansiveness that would swell in him until he was, finally, good.
But instead there’s only this confused searing clamor, out of which rises a voice he only dimly registers as his own. “The other! Give me the other!” His voice sounds out over the heads of the onlookers, rolls down the slopes of Calvario.
Briefly Amadeo registers dismay in Tío Tíve’s face, and Amadeo is proud of himself, because even though he hurts so bad, he’s about to hurt worse.
IN THE CROWDED ER waiting room at Espa?ola Valley Regional Hospital, Angel sits beside him in cold silence, flipping angrily though a ragged parenting magazine, while Amadeo cradles his hands in his lap, marveling at the bright stickiness of his own blood soaking the towels. The doctors are taking forever. He’s been sitting under the fluorescent lights in this plastic chair bolted to the floor—leaning forward so as to protect his scourged, tender back—for nearly two hours. Through the automatic doors, the sky is already pink.
“Hey,” he tells a nurse rushing past in scrubs printed with Easter eggs. “How long’s it going to be? Because this is really serious.” He indicates his hands, but the nurse regards him with only the barest tightening flicker around her mouth, then rushes on, consulting her clipboard.
Most of these people don’t even seem sick. Not a single other person is losing blood. Where are the gunshot wounds, the heart attacks, the massive head injuries? Where is the carnage? Would someone please show him a single emergency greater than his own that might explain this unconscionable wait? He is Jesus, for Christ’s sake.
“Whoa,” he tells Angel. “I’m feeling really light-headed.” But she doesn’t even glance at him.