Bulletproof Vest

by Maria Venegas

  My father spends two weeks in the hospital in intensive care, and we go visit him after school.

  “Your father is lucky to be alive,” the doctor says, explaining how the blade missed his jugular vein by a hair, and had that been severed, my father would have bled to death within minutes. I sit next to his bed watching dark fluids drain through the blue plastic tube that is attached to the gash under his chin, and I think that maybe he will die, that maybe he deserves to die. If I could trade heads, I would give his up to have my brother back. By then, there were rumors that my brother being killed had something to do with my father, an old vendetta or something. We heard that someone had paid to have Jose Manuel Venegas killed, and they had killed the wrong one. Even my mother claimed that it was my father’s fault. According to her, God had taken my brother in order to “deal” with my father—this would be the thing that would make my father surrender at the Lord’s feet, once and for all. My mother had already surrendered, had given up Catholicism and become a born-again Christian a few years back.

  Not long after my father is released from the hospital, we start hearing new rumors. Joaquín has two brothers in the area and they have been asking questions around town: Where does Jose live? How many kids does he have? How many sons? Daughters? My father buys himself a bulletproof vest, and before leaving the house in the evening, he slips the heavy black vest over his undershirt and snaps the Velcro side straps in place. Then he throws on his cowboy shirt, and tucks it into his jeans.

  “Can you tell I’m wearing a vest?” he asks us as he turns to one side, then the other.

  “Sort of,” we say, pointing to his horseshoe belt buckle, which appears to be pressing on the bottom edge of the vest. “Maybe you should pull your shirt out a bit,” we say.

  He retucks his shirt, making it a bit looser, and throws on a black leather vest over it.

  “Now can you tell?”

  “Not really,” we say.

  He slips one of his guns into the back of his Wranglers, grabs his black cowboy hat and goes out the door: metal, leather, bulletproof—indestructible.

  In early October he starts preparing for his annual trip to Mexico. He buys linens and a blender for his mother, Hanes undershirts, socks, and a small television for his father. We go through our closets and throw anything we no longer wear into the growing pile in the corner of the dining room. On the day before he leaves, he takes his guns from the trunks in the closet and lays them out on the living room floor. He covers each one in several layers of tin foil, then swathes each with a towel from the factory where my mother works. Each towel has a different bright design on it—yellow butterflies, red roses, or pink flamingos, and they all smell of the same chemical dye that my mother smells like when she comes home from work. Finally, he wraps each contraption tight with duct tape. He arranges most of the bundles inside the steel trunks, along the bottom, and covers them with clothes from the pile in the dining room.

  His two friends come over that night and help him rig his gray truck. They drive it onto two red metal ramps in the driveway, pop the hood, remove the spare from the back, split the doors open by pulling away the inside panels, and load up whatever contraptions didn’t fit in the trunks. Carlos, the Puerto Rican man who is helping him drive down, shows up a few hours later with a duffel bag and a big grin. He’s excited, has never been to Mexico. He also has no idea that—on paper—he’s the legal owner of the gray truck with the red leather seats. They pull out of the driveway in the dark hours of predawn, and by the time we wake up and start getting ready for school, he’s long gone.

  “Your father is never coming back,” my mother tells us, a few days later.

  “How do you know?” we ask.

  “Because God showed me in a vision that He has taken him away for good,” she says. “Plus he took all of his things.”

  “He did?”

  “Yes,” she says. “He didn’t leave a single thing, not in the closet or the dresser or anywhere. Nothing.”

  What a coward, I think. He’s the one who created this mess, and what had he done? He had bought himself a bulletproof vest and left. He had run away, had saved himself, and hadn’t even had the guts to say goodbye.

  After he leaves we begin noticing things, like the two men who park their black car and sit across the street from our house in the morning. We go out the back door, hop the fence, cross the neighbor’s yard, and catch the bus on a different street. At night we start hearing noises. Whenever I hear something outside my window, I roll out of bed onto the carpet and then drag myself by the elbows into the living room where, close to the cool hardwood floor, I usually bump into one of my sisters. They heard a noise too. We crawl to the phone, reach up and pull it off its ledge and onto the floor, dial 911.

  “Nine one one, what is your emergency?” the operator asks.

  “Someone is trying to break into our house,” we whisper.

  Soon we hear police cars whizzing by on the back street, the front street, speeding around the house with their lights and sirens off. We watch flashlights make their way from the kitchen windows to the living room windows while we sit under the ledge, breathing into the receiver.

  “Miss? Hello, miss, you there?” the operator asks.

  “Yes,” we whisper.

  “It appears the coast is clear,” she says. “There is an officer at your front door, please let him in.”

  My mother wakes when she hears the knock at the door.

  “¿Qué andan haciendo?” she says, stepping out of her bedroom in her white slip, bra straps hanging halfway down her arms. “You called the police again?” she asks, yawning. “Ay, no, no, no, next thing you know they’re going to want to charge us.”

  “Mom, it’s nine one one. It’s free,” we say as we open the front door and the officer comes in.

  “Where exactly did you hear the noise?” he asks.

  “Outside that window,” I say, pointing toward the bedroom I share with Yesenia.

  “What did it sound like?” He takes a few steps toward the bedroom door, shines his flashlight between the bunks. “Did it sound like someone was trying to open the window?”

  “Yeah,” Yesenia says. “It was like a scratching noise.”

  Other times, there had been a shadow standing outside the living room window, a gentle tapping at the back door, a strange noise on the front porch. He glances at my mother, then back at us.

  “Where’s Jose?” he asks.

  “In Mexico,” we say.

  “When is he coming back?”

  “He’s not.”

  “Doesn’t he have a court date?” he asks. Even though it was proven to be self-defense, my father was out on bail and still had to appear before a judge for possession of an unregistered weapon.

  We shrug.

  The officer is looking at us as if contemplating something, and years from now Sonia will run into a retired officer from that town. “Oh, you Venegas kids,” he will say, “we used to talk about you at the station, we worried about what would become of you.” Perhaps what they worried about was that, once we grew up, we might keep them busy for years to come.

  “Can you park a police car in our driveway and leave it there?” I ask, though we’ve made this request before, have told them about Joaquín’s brothers. But since they haven’t threatened us directly, since we don’t know their names, don’t even know what they look like—there’s nothing the police can do to protect us.

  “Maybe you should move,” he says.

  * * *

  After my father leaves, news of his whereabouts always reaches us, and I’m certain it’s only a matter of time before he turns up dead—shot by the federales, killed in a bar brawl, in prison, or crushed under the weight of his truck after going off the road for the umpteenth time. I know that sooner or later we will get that phone call, and I assume I’ll be prepared for it. We hear he’s back in Mexico, then in Colorado, then back in Mexico, in prison. When he’s released from prison, he returns to La P
eña, the old hacienda where he was born and raised. The house has been abandoned for several years and I imagine he arrives with nothing but the clothes on his back, a few pesos in his pocket, and the rope he made in prison slung over his shoulder. Perhaps he draws a bucket of cold water from the well and splashes some on his face before going inside to open the metal shutters, dust off the horse saddles, and reclaim his place among the scorpions that had infested the house.

  This is where he is living when I go back to visit him fourteen years later. After the first visit, eventually, I return and spend summers and holidays with him, and between herding cattle and fixing barbed-wire fence posts together, he begins sharing stories. A lasso will remind him of one of the final conversations he had with his father. From there he will follow the rope further back in time to when he was extradited for murder from the United States. Then he’ll go further still, to when he was a newlywed and the federales sliced him open at a rodeo. Over the years, I realize that he keeps going back to the same stories, as if they had been prerecorded and he was the needle, stuck in a groove, running over the same old ground. He had identified the defining moments in his life, and though he could pinpoint the twists and turns that had shaped him along the way, he was powerless to free himself of his past.

  In sharing his stories with me, perhaps he’s trying to explain why he lived such a violent and self-destructive life, or maybe he’s trying to make sense of what road led him back to the same dusty corner of the world where his life began, and so, too, would come to end. Twelve years after the ambush, the feds will find him near the same curve, at the foot of a huisache, his skull crushed in.

  After he dies, his neighbors, relatives, and even my mother seem eager to share stories about him and, other than slight variations, they are the same stories he had been telling. It was as though he had already written his own corrido—the ballad of his life.

  2

  HANDICAPPED BASTARD

  “WHAT DID YOU SAY was your relationship to the patient, sir?” the woman behind the counter asks, looking up from her chart.

  “I’m his second cousin,” he says, clearing his throat, and perhaps the way he’s fidgeting with his coat, or the way his gaze keeps darting around the lobby, is giving him away. The very thought of being face-to-face with that handicapped bastard sends the blood boiling in his veins. One of the first things he did upon returning to Mexico was go to the prison in the plaza to pay the handicapped bastard a visit, but he was informed that the man he was looking for had been transferred to a higher-security prison in the next, larger town over. A two-hour drive and he arrived at the prison, where they informed him that said inmate had been deemed mentally unstable, and thus was transferred to a mental institution in the next, even larger town over. A six-hour bus ride later and there he is standing in the brightly lit lobby, his gun weighing heavy in his coat pocket. “He probably doesn’t remember me,” he says to the woman. “It’s been a few years, but I happened to be passing through and, well, I thought I’d pay him a visit.” He flashes her a winning smile and watches as she goes through the files, aware of the line forming behind him, the shuffling of feet, the occasional impatient cough.

  She pulls out a manila folder and looks through the papers in it.

  “That patient was discharged three months ago,” she says.

  “Discharged?” he forces through his teeth. He knows exactly how things work in Mexico—a country where people have more time than money, and those who have money can buy themselves all the time they need. He wants to ask the woman how much was paid and who took the bribe—who was the cabrón that gave the order to set the bastard that killed his son free. He feels the hot flush under his skin, feels his hands trembling and draws them into a tight fist. “Discharged. That’s. Great.” He bites down on that word. “Well, how about that? My cousin is out there somewhere,” he says, motioning toward the window with his hand, “and I’m in here looking for him.” Though he’s overcome with the urge to laugh hysterically, he stifles it because he knows that if he starts laughing, his laughter may turn on him. He draws a deep breath, forces a smile. “You wouldn’t happen to know who it was that gave the order for his release, would you?”

  Again she’s searching through the file.

  “La licenciada Barcena,” she says looking up at him.

  It had to be a woman, he thinks as he steps back out into the hot afternoon sun and makes his way to the bus station. Had it been a man, he would have tracked him down, just to see his reaction when he looked him in the eye and reminded him that, in those parts, taking bribes was as easy as trading heads. By the time he boards the next bus out of that town, his mind is already racing. If the handicapped bastard is no longer behind the protective gates of the system, then he is out there somewhere. He watches the nopales and huisaches come and go. That bastard may have feigned insanity, but if that son of a bitch was so mentally unstable, how was it he remembered to run after he pulled the trigger? It had been a year, almost to the day, since his son had been killed, and he didn’t need to think back to that cold winter night to remember it. The events of that evening played on in his mind like a relentless reel. He and his son were in La Peña preparing for their trip back to Chicago. It was Christmas Eve, and the women were in the kitchen making buñuelos, their laughter and the scent of cinnamon drifted through the house. He was in the spare bedroom, polishing his boots, when Chemel came through the courtyard and stopped in the doorway.

  “I’ll be right back,” he had said, reaching up and resting his hands on the doorframe. “I’m going over to Las Cruces to say goodbye to some friends.” He looked up and saw his son’s silhouette in the doorway, the light of the sinking sun already setting the sky ablaze behind him. He knew the real reason why Chemel was going to Las Cruces—to say goodbye to his sweetheart. “Are we still leaving in the morning?” Chemel asked.

  “Before the first cock sings out,” he said. Everything was pretty much ready to go, the crates and suitcases packed.

  “Está bien,” Chemel said, giving the doorframe above him a solid tap, as if testing the structure, as if making sure it was strong enough to withstand the test of time. It was the largest room in the house—an addition to his grandparents’ house that he himself had just completed. At the foot of the doorframe that led to the storage room, he had etched the year of its construction into the wet cement: 1986. “See you in a bit,” he said, and then turned and walked away.

  “See you in a bit.” This was the last thing his son ever said to him. Had he known then what his boy was about to walk into, he would have tried to stop the sun in its tracks, because not only did he know where Chemel was going, the three brothers also knew where his son was going, and they were already waiting for him. Not even two hours had passed when there was a knock at the door. It was already dark out and he had just finished packing the last of the suitcases. The knock came again, and the women fell silent. They weren’t expecting any guests, but then again, it was Christmas Eve, so it could be just about anyone, a relative or a neighbor coming over to drop off some tamales or atole. He went to the door and stepped out into the cold December night.

  “Who was at the door, Jose?” his mother asked, when he appeared in the kitchen’s doorway, the pigment already receding from his face. The grease hissed in the frying pan on the stove as the raw dough bubbled and churned in the heat. He looked at his mother, but was unable to utter a single word.

  “Are you all right, Jose?” his sister asked, commenting on how pale he looked. Another buñuelo was dropped into the boiling grease and instantly curled in on itself.

  He turned from the doorway, and back in his bedroom he went through a string of motions, without stopping to think about what he was doing, without breaking his momentum. He reached under his pillow, pulled out his gun, made sure it was loaded, slipped it into the back of his jeans, grabbed his truck keys off the dresser, and before he knew it, he was clearing the entrance of La Peña. When he reached the main road, he turn
ed right instead of left, thinking he’d go into town to get the feds, to make sure whoever was responsible would be brought to justice, but by the time he reached the curve, he thought better of it, and so he turned around and headed out to Las Cruces.

  When he arrived, there were cars and trucks parked haphazardly near the wall that ran along the river, and men with kerosene lanterns were milling about by the water’s edge where a crowd had gathered. He climbed out of the truck and made his way toward the crowd, the red glow from their lanterns reflecting off the thorny branches of a mesquite above. They parted to let him pass, and when he got to the center, there was his son, facedown in the river. That was a moment he didn’t so much see as hear like a deafening clap. No one had touched his son. They were waiting for the feds to arrive. He dropped down to his knees and turned him over. His eyes were still open, and his face was scraped and bruised where it had hit against the stones on the river’s floor.

  Later, all the eyewitnesses gave the same account. They had been standing around near their trucks, next to the river, sharing a laugh, a final farewell with Che, as everyone knew that he would be leaving for the other side before the first light of morning. It had just grown dark out, when they saw what looked like a human grasshopper moving along the wall. They watched the man approaching slowly, steadying himself on his cane as he thrust the weight of his body forward and up before slumping back down. There was something almost mechanical about his walk.

  “Do you have any vino?” he asked, when he reached the circle, alcohol fumes already exuding from his nostrils. They told him no, they didn’t have any vino, and he stood there sizing up the group in a way that seemed off, though they thought nothing of it. They all knew who he was: El Cojo from Las Cruces. He was always hitchhiking in and out of town, and at some point, they had all given him a lift—even Che had picked him up along the main road several times, had driven past La Peña and all the way out to Las Cruces to drop him off at his front door, practically.