First Place
1999 Fiction Winner

Miracle of the Purple Petunias

It was Oscar Montoya peeing on Ms. Nieto's purple petunias that led to the Ontiveros Street neighborhood getting all that publicity. See, Oscar's problem was that when he went to Esmeralda's Lounge, five blocks down the street from his house, he would sit there on a bar stool, drinking one beer after another, and he would talk nonstop. Oscar spent the day by himself in his little house on Ontiveros Street, not coming out once because of his arthritis, but after he had his daily TV dinner at about seven p. m., he would hobble down to Esmeralda's and all of those words that he had been building up during the day would come pouring out, aimed at anybody who would listen, and if there was nobody to listen, Oscar would just talk to the air, especially after his sixth or seventh beer. But the thing is, Oscar would be talking so much, he wouldn't notice that his bladder was full until the lounge closed at eleven p.m. and he was on his way home.

So Oscar's stopping along the way to take a pee on that particular night wasn't at all unusual, kind of a nightly ritual, as a matter of fact, but he would usually find a tree or a patch of grass to pee on. But it was a dark night, no moon, no stars, and Ontiveros Street had no street lights--just as it had no sidewalks, no stop signs, not much of anything except plenty of potholes--so when he had to go, and I'm sure he had to go bad, he stopped in front of Ms. Nieto's house and cut loose, right on her purple petunias. He had no idea what strange and life-changing events he was setting in motion by the simple act of taking a pee.

What happened next was that when Ms. Nieto got up seven hours or so later and went out to look at her flower beds, as she did every morning of the week, she at first got very angry, because in the process of positioning himself to take his pee, Oscar had stepped into her bed of petunias, so he'd stepped all over them as well as watering them. The outcome was a smashed, mashed mess of purple pulp. Seeing this, Ms. Nieto got -- pardon the play on words -- highly pissed-off and was about to go into her own little house and call nine-one-one. But then Ms. Nieto noticed something, something strange, something astonishing, and she murmured, "Dios Mio! Dios Mio!", then she dropped down on her knees and stared.

After ten minutes or so on her knees, however, Ms. Nieto stood and, feeling a need to tell someone about what she'd seen, she went running down the street--not very fast; Ms. Nieto is seventy-two years old and built mostly round and low to the ground--yelling, "Come see! Come See! Hurry! Hurry!"

Well, within minutes, since Ms. Nieto has a very shrill voice, there were a dozen or so people out in their front yards, and when Mrs. Nieto saw them she got even more excited. "Come and see my purple petunias."
Well, of course some of the people figured the old lady had finally slipped her clutch and they started to go back in their houses, but there was something in the old woman's voice that made them hesitate then walk down to her front yard where she now stood, breathing hard, pointing with a trembling finger at her flower bed. Pretty soon there were fourteen or fifteen people gathered around her, staring at her flower bed.

"A miracle," Ms. Nieto said, puffing. "Look. Don't you see it?"

All the people gathered around the flower bed, staring down, frowning. Mr. Washington, who lived two doors from Ms. Nieto, and who had been deep asleep after having just finished his shift as night watchman at a lumber yard, muttered, "All I see is a bunch of smashed flowers."

"No," Ms. Nieto said. "Look from over here, look closely." Mrs. Castro, who lived directly across the street from Mrs.

Nieto, got down on her knees, bent close to the petunias. At first she just frowned, sniffing, but then she let out a scream. "Yes. I see it!" Then she looked up at Mrs. Nieto. "What do you see?" she asked.

Mrs. Nieto was still breathing hard, but now she had a wide, beatific smile on her face. "It's the Virgin Mary. Don't you all see her?"

And Mrs. Deleon, who went to Mass twice a day and three times on Sunday, let out a louder scream than Mrs. Castro. "Yes. I see! I see!" and right there in front of everybody, she got down on her knees and started praying.

Well, within minutes everybody there --except for Mr. Washington, who had gone back to bed-- had admitted to being able to see the Virgin Mary, see her mouth and her eyes -- they were turned downward -- and the shape of her face and the robe that covered her head and shoulders.

And so it was that when Oscar Montoya came out of his house and looked down the street, three hours or so after Ms. Nieto had made her discovery, he saw a huge crowd milling around in front of Ms. Nieto's yard. There were also two TV vans, several parked cars, a raspa vendor on his bicycle cart, a helmeted police officer leaning against his shiny motorcycle, and several dogs of various sizes, most of them barking and rushing around excitedly. Oscar stood there for awhile, scratching his head, wondering what was going on. Finally he went in the house and put on some shoes and went to find out what was happening.

An hour or so later, Oscar came to see me. See, I am kind of the unofficial mayor of Ontiveros Street. Ontiveros Street is only four blocks long. It is in downtown San Antonio, has the freeway on one side of it, railroad tracks on another -- although the trains no longer travel it -- an old abandoned warehouse at its foot and bustling Broadway Avenue at its head. The houses are all small, all of them at least fifty years old, with postage stamp front yards, back yards only a bit larger, and with a populace of forty or so people, mainly made up of Hispanics, like me, but there are a few blacks, even fewer whites, and, of course, the Changs who own Chang's Grocery Store on the corner near Broadway and who live in the rooms in the building's rear.

I was once -- for a brief time -- a precinct chairman, and I also put in three tours in Vietnam, coming home a first lieutenant, but a medically retired one because I left part of my left foot in a rice paddy over there, and these qualifications earned me the respect of the people on Ontiveros Street, so when anything happens that seems to need the attention of authority, the people come to me, even though I'd rather they go to somebody else. I'm old, tired, and lame and all I really want to do, now that Maria is gone, is sit on my sofa and watch some TV. But, like Oscar, they usually come to my place, which is on the farthest corner, across from the warehouse.

"You heard, Felix?" he asked, dropping down beside me on the steps in front of my house. "You heard about what's happened in Ms. Nieto's front yard?"

I was having a cup of coffee before I had to get ready to go to my job at Albertson's up on Broadway -- I'm produce manager there -- so I wasn't really in the mood for company, especially Oscar's company; Oscar had stopped bathing when his wife Delia had left him to go live with her sister on the west side and, since she'd been gone for more than two months, Oscar was getting pretty ripe. "I can see it from here, Oscar, but I don't have time to check it out. I got to head for work in about fifteen minutes. What's going on?"

Oscar scratched his unkempt head of gray hair. "They're saying that Ms. Nieto's purple petunias have the image of the Virgin Mary, Felix. There's a line of people there waiting to see it and there's newspaper and TV people there, all of them interviewing Ms. Nieto." He looked at me, squinting his eyes because he wasn't used to being outside so much in the daytime. "She's probably getting paid by all those people, don't you think, Felix?"

I shrugged. "Could be. People like to read that kind of stuff."

Oscar sat there chewing on his lip and I finished my coffee and stood up. "I better get going, Oscar." Oscar was wearing nothing but baggy pants and a T-shirt and fumes from his underarms were beginning to make me feel a little dizzy.

"I did it," Oscar said, looking up at me.

"Huh?"

"I peed in her petunias, Felix. Also, it looks like I stepped on them and kind of mashed them up so that it's kind of a purple mess, but people are claiming they can see the Virgin Mary in that purple stuff, Felix." Oscar scrunched his face up, looking puzzled. "You think it could be, Felix?"

All I could do was give him another shrug. "Anything's possible, Oscar."

"If she's making money off of this, don't you think I should get part of it, Felix? After all, it's my pee, right?"

I sat back down on the steps but kept my distance. "Well, I guess so, Oscar, but do you really want to tell everybody that all of this came about because you stopped to pee on your way home from the Esmeralda?"

This time Oscar shrugged. "Why not?"

Then I said something to Oscar that I've thought about a lot since then, thought about and wondered about, wondered especially why I said it. "Maybe it was meant to be," I said.

"What does that mean?"

"Well, maybe it is an image of the Virgin Mary and you were meant to stop there and cause that image to appear."

Oscar just stared at me. After a while he said, "You think that's possible, Felix? You think that ... you think that--" But he didn't finish what he was trying to say. He just lowered his head and sat there thinking, was still sitting there when I walked off down the street toward Broadway.

I usually keep pretty busy as manager of the produce department at Albertson's. I check in deliveries of fruits and vegetables, I make sure that there's plenty of produce on display, make sure that it's fresh, get rid of anything that's not fresh, especially anything that's wilted or dried up or beginning to rot, but I had some trouble that day keeping my mind on my job, even had a customer complain because she found a cantaloupe that was turning brown. But I just couldn't get my mind off of what I'd said to Oscar. See, when I left that hunk of my foot in that rice paddy, I left all my religious beliefs there with it, so I couldn't figure out why I had said that to Oscar. When I got off work I decided to go by Ms. Nieto's house, see what all the fuss was about. I thought I'd probably get a good laugh out of the whole thing.

It was after dark when I got to Ms. Nieto's place, which was at the opposite end of Ontiveros Street from my own little shack. Ms. Nieto's house was very much like mine, with four rooms -- a living room, a kitchen/dining room, two small bedrooms -- and I found Ms. Nieto sitting on a big old-fashioned sofa that had once been dark green Naugahyde but now was almost black, and sitting beside her, holding her hand, was a man I had never seen before.

Ms. Nieto looked up at me, blushed. "This ... this is Mr. Cepeda, Felix. He's my.. my agent." She was trembling, I think her teeth were chattering, and she looked.. well, far from pretty but her cheeks were flushed and her dark eyes were bright. Ms. Nieto had probably never had her hand held before, at least not by a man, because Ms. Nieto--we call her that because she calls herself that but she's never been married, never even come close, really should be Miss Nieto--because, you see, she is one ugly woman. In addition to being round as a butterball, she has a big, bony nose, a very narrow forehead with thick iron-gray hair growing not far above bushy black eyebrows that meet above that bony nose, and beneath the nose there's a very noticeable black mustache. Her mouth, small and heart shaped, is by far her best feature -- although it certainly clashes with the rest of her face -- and she does have those dark eyes which, unfortunately, bulge a bit. So love had passed her by, not only passing her but keeping a distance.

But now she was sitting here holding hands with a man who was at least twenty years her junior. He was long, lean, looked something like a vulture, in spite of a smooth reddish-blond wig that sat neatly on top of a large, bony skull. "I'm taking charge of Ms. Nieto's affairs," he said, looking at me, although his eyes didn't meet mine, moved across my face and settled on my shoulder. "These media people," he said, frowning, "take advantage of people who are not familiar with their sneaky way of doing things."

"Have you seen the Virgin Mary?" Ms. Nieto asked me. "If you haven't, Felix, you just got to go out there. It's the most..." She looked at Mr. Cepeda. "...the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me."

"So you're okay, Ms. Nieto?"

She again looked at Mr. Cepeda. "I'm wonderful, Felix. Just... wonderful."

I'd walked through the mob to get to her house but I hadn't walked over to the side of the front yard where there was a thick cluster of people gathered, a cluster of people that was at the head of a long line that stretched off down the street toward Broadway. Somebody had strung lights around Ms. Nieto's yard, erected wooden posts and strung up what looked like hundred watt bulbs, but the light didn't reach to the line of people waiting along the street down to Broadway so that they were all in shadow, but I could see movement amongst the shadows. There was also music playing. The loudest was church music --"Nearer My God to Thee" -- playing on a boom box sitting on Ms. Nieto's front porch, but somebody was also playing country and western music on a cheap radio so that the sound was scratchy, and there was a catering truck down the street a ways -- business looked pretty good, as best I could make out -- and there was music coming from the truck too, hard rock it sounded like.

I pushed my way through to Ms. Nieto's flower bed, getting some dirty looks and a few muttered curses, but I managed to work my way up to where I could see the flower bed. I was too far away to see it clearly and somebody had put up a wire fence around it, about three feet high, but from where I was standing all I could make out was a purple mishmash. I saw that somebody was kneeling inside the fence, in addition to several people kneeling outside the fence, a couple of them making quite a bit of noise. At first I thought the man inside the fence was praying but then I saw that it was a Catholic priest, old Father Mahan who kept getting sent away for alcohol rehab, and I saw that he wasn't praying but had a spray bottle in his hand and was spraying what was left of Ms. Nieto's purple petunias. He happened to look up and he saw me and waved-- I'd been an alter boy way back when he was a handsome young man with a shock of carrot red hair -- and called out, "It's drying up, I'm afraid, Felix, but I'm doing my best to keep it fresh as long as I can." I saw then that he had the same bright smile he'd had as a young priest and I waved back at him then turned and walked away.

Out on the street a TV newswoman with a pile of orange hair was interviewing Mrs. Castro and Mrs. Deleon. Mrs. Castro had been the first one to recognize the Virgin Mary after Ms. Nieto, and she was telling the newswoman this, while a cameraman directed a bright light at her. "I saw it right away. Actually I saw something as I was coming toward it, like a bright light shining down from the sky, a -- what do you call it? -- a column, that's it, a column of bright light, golden light, and it .... "

"It was more like silver," Mrs. Deleon broke in, leaning toward the camera, smiling, her eyes bright. "And a mist moved down the column, kind of a soft white mist and--"

"It was really more like a soft rain," Mrs. Castro said, moving a bit in front of Mrs. Deleon. "A soft gentle rain. And when I looked at the petunias -- I was the first one after Ms. Nieto to see that it was Mother Mary -- when I looked at them I saw the rain touch them and that's when I saw it. That's when I saw the miracle."

"Well, actually," Mrs. Deleon said, "It looked --"

And that's when I walked away.

The next morning I was sitting on my steps, drinking my cup of coffee, when I saw Oscar hobbling down the street and I thought, feeling something like disappointment, Well, things are back to normal. Oscar's got a hangover and the purple petunias are all dried up and the whole thing was just ... just a lot of bullshit. But then Oscar got closer and I saw that he looked different.

"Hola, Felix," he said, sitting down beside me. Well, I started to do as I usually did --edge away from him -- but then I realized that he smelled nice, like soap, Ivory soap.

"Hey, Oscar," I said, looking him over. He had on a clean shirt, had shaved, had his hair combed for a change, and his eyes didn't look quite as red as usual. "You're looking good this morning."

Oscar grinned. "I didn't go to the Esperanza last night, Felix. You believe that? I kept thinking about what you said, you know, about maybe my peeing on Ms. Nieto's petunia's was meant to be and, see, even though I'm not sure I really believe that, still it made me think. You know what I mean, Felix?"

I nodded, although I wasn't all that sure. In fact, I wasn't all that sure about anything anymore.

So how did it all turn out? Well, Ms. Nieto's "agent," Mr. Cepeda, he disappeared along with the media, whose interest faded with the fading of the purple petunias. He made some money off the deal, not very much though, and Ms. Nieto simply went back to her regular routine. But she seemed to smile a bit more than she had before; after all, she had had her hand held for a while, and it had been held by a man.

Mrs. Deleon changed very little except that she started going to Mass even more often than before. Mrs. Castro changed considerably though, became sort of a media groupie, showing up at crime scenes and hanging around in the background, waving at the camera when it swung her way.

As for Oscar, he became a changed man. He got in touch with his wife and arranged a reconciliation but after two days and two nights with the "new" Oscar, she not only moved back in with her sister, she sued for divorce. "Oscar the drunk was hard to take," she told the judge when they appeared for their divorce hearing, "but Oscar the saint is more than I can handle."

Oscar, as the story goes, said to her, "I forgive you, Delia." For a while he would come around to see me and at first I put up with his visits but after a while I started hiding out inside my house whenever I saw him coming. Delia was right: Oscar the saint was a royal pain-in-the-ass.

As for me, well, I'm still confused, still don't know what to make of all of this. If I was right in what I said to Oscar, if his peeing on Ms. Nieto's purple petunias was meant to be, was my telling him that also meant to be?