Bulletproof Vest

by Maria Venegas

  “I heard she has a new house.”

  “Yeah, Salvador built it for her.”

  “Salvador makes good money, huh?”

  “I guess. Every house he builds sells for about a million dollars,” I say, though I’m sure he already knows this. Salvador has his own construction company, and in a few years he’ll be building homes for the Chicago Bears, will be living next door to the punter.

  “A million dollars,” he says, choking on his water. “That’s a good deal of money,” he says, and I can’t help but think how ironic that while he is down here digging for gold, on the other side of the border, most of his kids have made their own small fortunes.

  A cloud of dust comes barreling through the open window as a car idles by. He stretches his neck up, looking over my head and watching the car pass as if from behind a barricade. The skin on his neck is looser and the scar where Joaquín lodged the knife under his chin is plainly visible.

  “Is that the same rifle you brought down from Chicago?” I ask him.

  “No, that was my father’s rifle,” he says, studying the rifle on the wall. “I sold the one I brought down with me; I sold most of those guns actually.” He scans the floor as if contemplating something. “No, when I got here and unloaded the truck, my father took one look at everything I brought and told me I was crazy for having taken that risk.”

  “Whatever happened to the Puerto Rican guy you drove down here with?”

  “Who knows,” he says. “He spent a good amount of time down here, a few months, going to the rodeos and hanging out in San Martín and Santana. Then someone told him about the cargo and one day he showed up here.” He motions to the blue metal door that leads to the courtyard. “He stood right there, asking me if it was true.” He stares at the door for a long time, as if the Puerto Rican were standing there now, demanding answers. “We had a good laugh over it,” he says, slapping his thigh and looking back at me. “So, how long have you lived in Washington?”

  “It’s not Washington,” I say. “It’s New York.” We’ve already been through this, but he’s confused. It’s only been four months since September 11, and he keeps thinking the towers were in the nation’s capital, in Washington, D.C. “I’ve been there for about seven months,” I say.

  “Aren’t you scared of the terrorists?” he asks. “Maybe you should go back to Chicago.” Go back to Chicago? Was he not the same man who had taught me to stare down the barrel of a loaded gun? The same man who had warned me about never running away from a fight? Another car drives by and again he stretches his neck up and watches it pass. “Did you hear about how I was ambushed?” he asks.

  “Ey,” I say.

  “People keep telling me I should leave this place, that I’ve created too many enemies, but I tell them I’m not going anywhere,” he says. “If anyone has a problem with me, they know where to come find me. As long as they’re straight, you know, because those culeros that ambushed me went behind my back.” He tells me how he had seen the blue car pulled over on the side of the road, near the slaughterhouse, and had thought nothing of it until he had seen them running back toward it. “Those cowards didn’t even have the guts to approach my truck and make sure I was dead.”

  “Were you wearing your bulletproof vest?” I ask, thinking that he must have been. How else was it possible that he had walked away from two machine guns?

  “No, I wasn’t,” he says, and though I don’t believe him, years from now, Rosario will confirm that he wasn’t. He sets his cup down on the limestone floor. “One of the bullets hit me right here.” He slaps his right biceps. “That’s why I don’t have a lot of strength in this arm.” He flexes his hand. “Two other bullets scratched my head.” He tilts his head down so I can see his hairline, and there are two scars that overlap, two lines crisscrossing over each other. “Me dejaron la cruz pintada,” he says, and he’s right. The scar on his forehead looks like the sign of the cross.

  “Did you ever find out who did it?”

  “Sí, cómo no.” He picks his glass up off the floor and takes a swig. “It was these two guys that someone hired, I’m not sure who, but I’ve got my ideas.” He cocks his head and looks toward the kitchen door. “Not that long ago, those two guys turned up dead, and the only reason why I know that is because the feds came by here, questioning me, asking where I was on such and such night. I had been out drinking with Máximo and Rogelio on that night, and so I had an alibi.”

  I remember his cousins Máximo and Rogelio. They had lived in Chicago for several years before returning to Mexico. Sometimes my father would hang out with them on the weekends, and once they had been drinking at Máximo’s house when Máximo got it in his head that my father was flirting with his wife. They exchanged a few words, and then Máximo pulled out his gun, aimed it at my father’s face from across the table, and fired a single blast. The bullet singed my father’s beard before vanishing into the wall behind him. He didn’t have his own gun on him, and he had pushed away from the table, grabbed his cowboy hat, and gone out the door, Máximo already apologizing profusely as he went. Then it seemed all their relatives were calling my father from Mexico and apologizing for Máximo. Even my grandfather called several times, telling my father it was a dumb and drunken thing Máximo had done, and to let it be because God forbid this spark a family feud, and then where would we all end up?

  “They went and checked with Máximo, and he confirmed that we had been together on that night,” he says. Each time something happens or someone turns up dead, he’s sure to hear of it, because the feds always come pay him a visit. That’s how he had heard about the brother of the woman he used to live with turning up dead. The brother had come down from Colorado to visit some relatives, and then they had found his body along a dirt road just outside of town. Again the feds were knocking on his door. “I told them I had nothing to do with it, but they didn’t seem to believe me. They went and checked my alibi and everything, and finally left me alone.” He inspects the glass in his hand. “Although if I had had the chance to get my hands on that son of a bitch, I would have strangled him myself.” He knows for a fact that it was he who ratted him out, blew his cover, and had him arrested when he was living in Denver.

  “How was he killed?” I ask, though I had already heard about how the man had been dragged for miles and then been run over several times so that the feds had recovered nothing but human body parts, which were strewn all along the dirt road.

  “He had been run over by a car or truck,” he says, taking a sip of water.

  “Pobre,” I say.

  “Pobre pendejo,” he mumbles under his breath. We hear the sound of another car approaching, and again he stretches his neck up.

  “Did they ever find out who killed him?” I ask.

  “Nope.” He watches the car go by. “And they probably never will.”

  There is something about the restraint in his voice that makes me think he might not be entirely innocent.

  “Where do these go?” Martin asks. He’s standing in the doorway, holding the black plastic bin with the wet dishes.

  We go into the kitchen and my father gives us the keys to his truck, says he’s going to go saddle his horse. Once we’ve dried and put the dishes away, Martin and I head into town.

  “Roll down your window,” Martin says the minute we turn onto the road where my father was ambushed. “I want everyone to see who’s driving this truck.”

  I roll down the tinted window, and soon we’re flying around the curve and parking on the outskirts of town. We’ve decided that the less time we spend in his truck the better.

  * * *

  “You guys awake?” he calls out from the other side of the pink curtain, the lights in the storage room and the kitchen already on.

  “Yeah,” I say, though Martin is snoring next to me under the pile of wool blankets.

  “Time to get up,” he says, and I can hear him shuffling across the room in the dark before he hits the light switch.

  “Wh
at time is it?” I ask, squinting in the glare.

  “Just after four,” he says. He’s already dressed and wearing a green down vest and a camouflage winter cap with earflaps. “If we want to make it out there and back in time for you guys to catch that two p.m. bus, then we should be heading out in about a half hour or so. How’d you sleep?”

  “Good,” I say, sitting up and pulling my wool cap down over my ears, my breath visible in front of me.

  “I left two saddlebags on the kitchen table for you guys to pack your lunch,” he says, unlatching the door and pulling it open. A gust of frigid air fills the room. “You should make yourselves a café and eat something before we go, because it’s a bit of a journey.”

  “Está bien,” I say.

  “I’m going to go saddle the horses,” he says, stepping outside before turning and coming back in. “Make sure you don’t close your eyes or you might end up falling asleep.” He heads out, and I nudge Martin.

  In the kitchen, Martin and I huddle around the stove, warming our hands and waiting for the water to boil. We make Nescafé instant coffee, and pack the groceries we picked up the day before—bread, an avocado, sliced ham, and a can of picked jalapeños, along with the saltshaker, a knife, a water bottle, and a few napkins.

  “¿Listos?” My father is standing in the kitchen’s doorway.

  We polish off our coffee, grab the saddlebags, and follow him outside. It’s still dark out. The dogs are in the courtyard, tongues dangling, tails wagging, and the two horses are saddled and tied to a mesquite on the other side of the dirt road. An extra saddle sits on the ground next to them. Once Martin and I are on the horses, my father hoists the extra saddle off the ground and leads the way on foot. The horses follow him and the dogs trail close behind. The moonlight creates menacing shadows as we make our way along the dirt road. Bushes look like animals lurking and cracks in the ground have the appearance of giant black snakes slithering along the terrain. We ride toward the distant mountain range, which looks like a sleeping giant under the canopy of stars. It seems impossible that the moonlit shadow moving in front of me is my father—alive and in the flesh.

  “That’s San Martín,” he says, pointing to a few scattered lights along a nearby ridge. Once we get closer to San Martín, the scent of wood burning fills the air and cocks can be heard singing out. The horses’ hooves click and clack on the narrow cobblestone paths that wind up and around adobe homes, which are tucked away behind stacked-stone corrals. We reach a whitewashed adobe house at the top of the ridge. “Wait here,” my father says and disappears behind the house.

  “How you holding up?” Martin asks.

  “Fine,” I say. Behind him, the first sliver of daylight is running along the horizon like a golden thread. “You?”

  “Good,” he says, smiling wide. “This is kind of amazing, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I say. I know that if it weren’t for him, I probably wouldn’t be here. We’ve talked about him moving to New York. I have even started looking for an apartment for us.

  “A ver.” My father comes around the corral with the third horse already saddled up and ready to go. “Tell Marsimino to switch to this horse,” he says. “He’s a lot tamer than mine.”

  They switch horses and we continue toward the distant mountain range at a much faster pace, and soon we are cutting through an open field, when a bird that looks like a chicken with long stick-legs goes running by, zigzagging in front of us before disappearing into the field.

  “What the hell was that?” Martin calls out from behind me. His horse is clearly the runt of the three, already falling behind.

  I ask my father what that bird thing was.

  “Un correcaminos,” he says.

  A roadrunner. They really exist? All these years, I thought roadrunners were imaginary, something found only in cartoons—like mermaids and unicorns.

  “That was a roadrunner!” I yell back to Martin.

  “A roadrunner? They really exist?” He looks in the direction where the bird went. “What are we going to see next, a pink panther?”

  We both laugh and I try explaining the pink panther joke to my father, asking if he remembers those Saturday morning cartoons, the one with the roadrunner that was always being chased by a coyote and the one with the pink panther. He shrugs and says we might run into a wolf or some wild boar. Especially once we get farther up the mountain.

  “There are wolves out there?” I say.

  “There’s a little of everything out there, even lions.”

  “Really? Lions?” I say, thinking it’s probably too late to turn around. “There are lions out there,” I yell to Martin.

  “Holy shit, are you serious?”

  I nod.

  “And what are we supposed to do if we see one?”

  “What do we do if we see a lion?” I ask my father.

  “They’re more like large mountain cats, rather than lions,” he says, and explains how we probably won’t see one, as they’re not so common in these parts anymore. Though when he was a kid, they were everywhere. “If we run into anything, just remember to stay calm,” he says. “If a wild animal senses fear, it’s more likely to attack.”

  “What’s he saying?” Martin calls out from behind me.

  “He says that if we run into a wild animal, to just stay calm,” I say.

  Soon we are riding along a ravine, following a river, and the murmur of rushing water fills the space around us.

  “You see those houses over there?” my father says, pointing to a ridge on the other side of the river where adobe homes are tucked among the trees and boulders. “That’s Santana,” he says. “That’s where Pascuala is from.”

  I had always known my mother was from a place called Santana but had imagined it was a small town, not a handful of homes scattered along a hillside. We make our way around a steep incline, where the trail is so narrow that if my horse were to misstep a single stride to the right, we’d plunge into the valley below. There’s no guardrail, no safety net—nothing.

  “How often do you ride out to the ranch?” I ask my father once we’ve cleared the incline.

  “About two or three times a week,” he says. “I usually set out around four, while it’s still dark, and I take my time riding out, meditating as I go.” He takes the corner of his shirt and wipes dust from his eyes. “I pray and ask Diosito to look after each one of my kids. I go down the list from youngest to eldest.” He counts on his fingers. “La Vicki, Jorge, usted, Sonita, Chela, Chavo y Nena,” he says and tells me how, one by one, he asks God to protect each one of us, to never let us want for anything. I’m shocked to hear him say that he prays, can’t help but wonder what god it is that he prays to. “It’s peaceful out here, isn’t it?” he says, shooting me a smile.

  “Ey,” I say. The sun breaks the horizon like a giant eye opening and sending its long golden lashes across the terrain, illuminating everything. It feels like the mountain itself is awakening.

  It’s just before 8:00 a.m. when we reach the entrance to the ranch, and Martin and I have already shed a few layers and have slathered sunblock on our arms and faces. I’ve replaced my wool cap with a straw hat, and he’s replaced his with a baseball cap. My father unlatches the long metal gate at the entrance. It yawns on the hinges as it swings open. We follow him down an incline that leads to a shallow creek, which runs over a wide patch of gray slate. There are two pools carved into the rock, and he tells me that my mother used to wash our clothes in one and we used to bathe in the other. We cross the creek and ride up the hill on the other side, where two adobe shacks with tin roofs sit inside a stacked-stone corral.

  “This is where we used to stay during the rainy season,” my father says. “This is where Chemel was born.” He glances over at me. “That’s his saddle you’re on.” My father had bought Chemel his first saddle and a horse when Chemel was five years old, and ever since then, they had gone everywhere together.

  A few cows have started poking their heads out from behind bo
ulders and nopales. Some make their way toward the corral where the troughs are, but they stop when they see us, their heads turning from side to side as if contemplating what to do next.

  “They’re hesitating because they don’t recognize you,” my father says. “Why don’t you two ride up along the river and round up whatever cows are in the shade near the water,” he says, telling us to just follow the dogs, as they know what to do. He’s going to put some salt in the troughs because now that we’re here, the cows will be expecting it, will come looking for it, and it’s not nice to confuse them. There’s a small adobe shack at the top of the ridge, and he’ll meet us up there.

  “What if the cows attack us?” I ask.

  “They won’t,” he says. “Cows are very peaceful animals.”

  “And the bull?”

  “As long as you stay on the horse, you’ll be fine,” he says.

  Martin and I follow the dogs along the ravine, where clusters of cows are sitting in the shade and lazily swatting flies off their rumps with their tails. They eye us as if trying to decide whether to take us seriously or not. The dogs run up, barking at them, and the cows push their cumbersome weight off the ground. They come to stand and slowly start making their way toward the troughs.

  When we reach the adobe shack at the top of the hill, my father is already there, his horse standing next to a tree that is split in half and tinged with black soot. He’s holding a pair of binoculars to his eyes and scanning the canyon below.

  “Take a look down there and tell me if you see anything moving around,” he says, handing me the binoculars, and that’s when I see the gun, black and heavy in his other hand. I have not been in such proximity to a gun since he lived with us, and the very sight of it makes me flinch. I can practically hear my mother’s voice: “Why are you going to go see that viejo?” she had said when I told her about the trip Martin and I were planning. “What if he does something to you, or to Martín?”

  I scan the canyon below as fast as I can, keeping one eye on his gun.

  “Nope,” I say. “Nothing.”