Bulletproof Vest

by Maria Venegas

  We ride alongside the deserted cornfields, where nothing but a few dry cornstalks are reaching toward the blue sky, as if praying for a single drop of rain. The sun bites our shoulders, and the wind gusts and sends a dust devil twirling across the field; it collides with an abandoned tractor and explodes into a thousand particles. One at a time, they continue to materialize and go barreling across the expanse, as if taking turns, like men at a rodeo. My father rides a few strides ahead of me and doesn’t seem to notice or care about the mini twisters. Then I notice one is coming right at us and watch it, thinking it will change its course. Instead, it seems to be gaining momentum, its funnel growing higher and wider as it approaches.

  “Apá!” I yell, but he doesn’t hear me over the roaring wind. “Apá!” I yell again, as it draws near. It looks like it might have enough force to send us both flying over the distant mountain range.

  “¿Quiubo?” He stops and turns his head sideways, shoulder bracing against the wind.

  “Mire.” I point in the direction of the approaching twister, and the minute he sees it, his hand flies to his hat.

  “¡Cuidado con la gorra!” he hollers back, and I grab my hat just as it crashes into us—a single blast of dust, like someone has slammed a door on the side of the mountain. The gust whips my hair and the pink linen scarf I keep tied around my hat into my face. The scarf is my own safety net—from a distance, anyone can see that the person riding with him is a woman. Even if he has enemies out there, they tend to leave women and children out of it.

  When we reach La Mesa, the dogs are the first to enter, crouching under the barbed-wire fence that surrounds the property, like they always do.

  While rounding up the cattle, my father waves me over to a patch that is overgrown with weeds. He points up at the sky where three vultures are circling.

  “Do you know what they’re doing?” he asks. I shrug, and he motions at the tall weeds, where two calves are curled up next to each other and sleeping. A cow stands watch over them, while the other cow is napping nearby. He tells me that the cows take turns resting and watching over their young so the predators won’t get them. Just two weeks ago, the coyotes had killed a calf. He didn’t seem surprised, said the cow was always leaving her calf behind, was more concerned with keeping up with the herd rather than staying near her young.

  We round up the last of the cattle and soon we are trailing behind the herd as it makes its way toward the river. Their hooves kick up the loose dust in the field, sending it rising like brown smoke. The cows with calves stay in the back of the herd. My father had explained that they do this to keep their young from being trampled. We are about halfway across the field when my left knee starts hurting. I pull my foot from the stirrup and stretch my leg—an old childhood injury coming back to haunt me.

  When I was nine years old, we were on a family outing in the park, and while my mother and aunt flipped tortillas and skirt steaks on the grill, my father and the other men hung out in the parking lot, drinking beer and blasting ranchero music from his truck. I was playing soccer with the other kids, and a boy who was easily twice my size and I went running for the ball at the same time. He collided into my leg, pinning my foot under his weight as we both went crashing down. I felt things twisting, even thought I heard something crack as my knee was wrung out and the sky shifted. Through the tall grass blades, I saw my mother running toward me, her brown, floral-printed dress flowing in the breeze.

  “It’s broken,” I yelled. “I heard something snap.”

  She helped me to my feet, helped me limp to the picnic table, and handed me an ice-cold can of beer, told me to hold it to my knee, which was already swelling.

  “What happened to you?” my father asked when he came down from the parking lot. I explained what had happened. “Does it hurt?” he asked, reaching into the cooler, grabbing a beer, and cracking it open. I nodded. “Well, if the pain doesn’t go away,” he said, looking at the can in my hand, “drink that beer and you’ll soon forget about it.” He turned and made his way back to his music.

  The next day, my knee was about five different shades of purple and had swelled to the size of a softball. When my father came home from work and I was hobbling around the house like an injured bird, he had driven me to see an old man that he knew—a curandero. The old man had sat me down on a wooden chair in his kitchen and, after squeezing and prodding my knee with his long fingers, he had determined that nothing was broken, that it was only my nerves and tendons that were twisted over and under each other. He grabbed the bottle of Crisco off the fridge, rubbed some on his hands, and then reached for my knee. His hands were warm, almost soothing, until he started digging, kneading, and rubbing with so much force that it felt as if my knee were caught inside a meat grinder. My father stood on the front porch, on the other side of the screen door, turning away from my cries, and then he was in the kitchen offering me a Blow Pop.

  My knee fully recovered after that, and had never given me problems until after I moved to New York. I had an MRI taken, and when the orthopedic surgeon looked at the results, he asked if I had suffered a knee injury when I was a child. He explained that I had a bit of extra bone mass on the side of my knee, and often if a bone sustains a fracture or a break, it will go into trauma and generate more bone mass in an attempt to heal itself.

  Though my knee rarely gives me trouble, it has been flaring up since I’ve been here, perhaps stressed by my morning jogs and the long horseback rides. Each time we’ve ridden out to the ranch and back, it has throbbed on the way home. I reach down and start massaging it. The donkey comes to a sudden stop, draws a deep breath, and lets out a long cry. His belly starts pulsing as he inhales and exhales rapidly, singing out, and I feel as though he’s drawing his breath from my lungs, like we’ve merged and become one. He seems excited; I wouldn’t be surprised if he started prancing sideways.

  “What’s he doing?” I call out to my father over the roaring wind.

  “He’s happy because this is his land,” he yells over his shoulder. I assume he’s referring to Mexico, but then he points across the river to San Martín, says that’s where he bought the donkey. He turns and notices my leg, dangling next to the stirrup. “How’s your knee holding up?”

  “It’s fine,” I say.

  “You should keep your foot in the stirrup,” he says. “That donkey can be sneaky. The minute you let your guard down, he’ll have you sitting on a cactus.”

  I slide my foot back into the stirrup, tighten my grip on the reins, and we continue toward the river. Soon the front of the herd has reached the ravine and the cattle start making their way around the boulders and tall weeds that line the water’s edge. We ride into the shade of a mesquite and watch them pass, until the tail end of the herd has disappeared around the weeds.

  “Did you see your cow?” he asks, and I tell him no, though even if I had, I wouldn’t be able to pick it out of the herd. When I first arrived, he told me that my cow had had a calf a few years back. Then both the calf and the cow had more offspring and I now had four cows.

  “You want a beer?” I ask.

  He holds up a finger and waves it back and forth.

  “Not now, but maybe on the way back,” he says, and then he’s sitting straight up on his horse, stretching his neck up, and scanning the ridge on the other side of the river. “Did you hear that?” he asks, tightening his grip on the reins.

  “Hear what?” I ask, watching as he reaches into the back of his jeans and pulls out his gun. The very sight of it still makes me uneasy.

  “Wait here,” he says, and rides off, the back of his shirt billowing in the wind until he has vanished around the ravine.

  What is it that he heard? Was it a person or an animal that sent him full stride down the river? What should I do if I hear gunshots? Would I be better off staying on the donkey and cutting back across the field, or should I take off on foot along the river? More places to take cover along the river. I get off the donkey, and the minute my feet touc
h the ground I’m aware of the peyote, coursing thick and slow in my veins. I had noticed a faint trace of it earlier, when I felt as though the donkey were drawing air from my lungs, but now, standing on the ground, I feel about fifty feet tall, am convinced that if I took two giant steps to the north I’d clear the distant mountain range in no time at all. I’m almost certain that if I were to reach out, I could run my hand along the spine of the horizon. It’s as if every particle in my being has expanded beyond the confines of my flesh and blood and has merged with my surroundings—I feel at once connected to the soil, the wind, and the sky.

  Another gust comes whipping down from the mountains, skims a layer of dust off the plain, and whips it into the cornfields below, where I assume the dust-devil rodeo is still raging at full gallop. A cloud passes by like a white sheet drifting across the blue sky. It eclipses the sun and sends a shadow gliding over the terrain. More clouds continue to float overhead, and as each of their shadows traverses the field, I can practically feel time itself moving. With each passing shadow, I get the feeling that another day has slipped away. How many years are in a day? Is the span of a lifetime measured from the moment the sun rises until it sets? What were fourteen years in the face of eternity, anyway? Nothing but a handful of days.

  Again the wind comes gusting and sends a blanket of dust flying into the cornfields below, and I get the feeling that my father is down there, has gone off to dance among the dust devils. What if he doesn’t come back?

  A rustling comes from the weeds behind me and when I turn around, a cow is standing there and staring at the donkey and me. More cows are making their way around the boulders and weeds, and once they see us, they too come to a halt, until the entire herd is at a standstill, staring at me, as if awaiting instructions. There is no way I can take the herd back across the field by myself. I scan the ravine in the direction my father went, but there is no sign of him. What if he doesn’t come back?

  The bull pushes his way to the front of the herd and stops, as if demanding to know why the cows are not moving. He’s a wide and heavyset Angus bull, with thick blunt horns. What if he charges at me? I do a quick inventory of what I’m wearing: orange KangaROOS sneakers, brown cargo pants, white cotton tee, straw hat, pink scarf—good, no red. Slowly, I bend my knees and start collecting all the rocks within arm’s reach. I fill my cargo pockets, secure one in each hand, and stand up. It feels like a face-off—the bull and his herd versus the donkey and me.

  “¡Vaca!” I hear my father grunt from the other side of the river, and the herd jerks forward as if whipped by a giant lasso. They start moving across the field. “Vámonos,” he says, and once he’s standing in front of me, it’s as if he was never gone.

  “Where did you go?” I ask, dropping the rocks in my hands and emptying my pockets before getting back on the donkey.

  “I thought I heard something,” he says. We ride behind the cattle and dust rises from their hooves, engulfing us like a thick fog, and I feel as though we could get lost in this dusty terrain forever, this place where the streets still have no names. “Were you throwing rocks at the cows?” he asks, once we’re halfway across the field.

  “I was afraid the bull might charge,” I say.

  “No, ese huevón,” he says. “He’s too lazy to do anything. It’s the cows with the calves you need to look out for. They can be a bit unpredictable, especially if you get too close to their cría, but other than that, cows are very peaceful animals. You shouldn’t throw rocks at them. It’s important to treat animals with love.”

  * * *

  A tapestry of flies lifts off the ground with a single buzz as I let the weight of my body fall into the hammock. El Relámpago is still tied to the tree in front of the house, still kicking at the ground. The blue metal shutters in my father’s bedroom window are closed. When we got back from La Mesa, after we’d unsaddled the horse and the donkey, he said he was going to lie down for a nap. Across the way, Doña Consuelo is watering her plants. Her husband is sitting in his wheelchair under the shade of the tin roof, his oxygen tank next to him. When I first arrived, Doña Consuelo had waved me over and asked if I had come to stay with my father for good. I told her no, and she said it was nice that I had come to see my father all the same, that when he was first released from prison, he used to spend hours, entire days even, sitting under the mesquite in front of his house, drinking, listening to his music, and crying. “And do you know why he was crying?” she asked. “He was crying for you, for his kids. He was convinced he was going to die all alone down here, far away from his family, like a dog—those were his words.”

  The sun shines through the branches of the mesquite and sends dispersed patches of sunlight gliding over me as I sway back and forth. Up above, there are three blackbirds circling like sharks against the blue sky.

  “Ay,” Alma cries out, and her laughter fills the air. She’s sitting at the top of the limestone steps at the far end of the corral. Her long, jet-black hair conceals her face as she concentrates on strumming the guitar, practicing the three basic chords I taught her. When I first arrived and heard her call my father “papi” it had caught me off guard, and I had thought how ironic that he left us in Chicago, and the other two in Denver, and here he is, raising a child that isn’t even his own, and raising her as if she were a boy. He had taught her how to saddle up and ride a horse, how to lasso a cow, and how to drive stick shift. The three of us had gone to the mercado a few days earlier, Alma was sauntering back to the truck, and he yelled out the window, “Camina con ganas, chingado.” Once she climbed back into the truck, he was still yelling at her, saying that she best pick up the pace—start walking like she meant it, or the world was going to bulldoze right over her. “Ay,” she cries out, and again the air is infused with her laughter.

  An elderly man is making his way across the dirt road in front of the church. He presses on his cane, lifts his right shoulder, thrusts his weight forward, and as he slumps back down onto his cane, his kneecaps seem to bend backward. The wind skims a layer of dust off the road and sends it flying past his feet. It no longer has the same force, no longer strong enough to make the devils rise up under its spell. A long strand of yellow plastic flowers left over from El Día Tres de Mayo celebration dangles from the church’s tower. The strand is blowing around in the dying wind, gently knocking against the church’s tall wooden doors, and I’m overcome with the urge to go knock on my father’s bedroom door, to wake him up and talk to him.

  Up above, beyond the branches of the mesquite, the three blackbirds are still circling, and I feel as if it’s me they are watching, but then I notice the dead baby chicken. Its body is caught in the branches and its wing has flapped open. When we returned from La Mesa, Alma and Rosario were in the courtyard hanging laundry and listening to music from an old silver boom box. I was in the kitchen getting a drink of water, when a gust had come flying through the window. It was so strong that it felt like the entire house trembled. It whipped my hair into my face before barreling into the storage room and onward to the bedroom, where it opened Alma’s notebooks and sent her love poems flying into the air. Then, just as quickly as it came, it was gone, and I heard Rosario screaming something about how the wind had taken her baby away. When I stepped back out into the courtyard, Alma was holding the black chick in her hand. Its neck was drooping over her finger and small drops of blood were escaping from its beak and exploding on the cement below like black raindrops.

  “That broom was the assassin,” Alma yelled excitedly, pointing at the green broom, which was lying lifeless on the ground. The gust had flung the broom over the clotheslines, from one end of the courtyard to the other, and it had crashed down on the chick, snapping its neck instantly. Rosario told Alma to go dispose of the dead chick, and Alma had walked across the dirt road and flung it into the field, but its body had obviously been intercepted by the branches of the mesquite. The three blackbirds are still circling above, and once again there’s the relentless urge to go wake my father,
to talk to him, while I still can, while he’s still alive.

  Chickens scatter as I trudge across the dirt road. The air inside the house is much cooler, and until my eyes adjust, everything goes momentarily dark. Rosario is in the bedroom, knitting and watching an afternoon soap. I go straight to the kitchen, to the fridge, crack a Modelo open, and take a swig, thinking it might help calm the emotions that are flaring up. His bedroom door is closed, and I stare at it for a long time, contemplating whether I should wake him or not. There are three bullet holes in the door. I squat down and run my finger over them. They are covered with something that feels like clay. How is it possible that he had escaped so many bullets? It seemed he’d been dodging them his whole life. One bullet is what it had taken for all the others—his brother, my brother, both my mother’s brothers, and her father—how had he managed to escape so many? Who was watching over him and why?

  He had once told Sonia that when he was a kid, human skeletons were strewn all along the mountainside—remains from the Mexican Revolution. He used to play with the bones, had even taken to giving them makeshift burials, and while covering a skeleton with dirt and twigs one day, a soldier had appeared before him and thanked him. My father had asked the soldier if he would protect him, if he would be his guardian. The soldier agreed, then walked right into him and vanished. Perhaps it was the spirit of that revolutionary man who had been watching over him, or maybe shooting himself in the leg when he was a teenager had been the equivalent of giving himself the antidote.

  I polish off the beer and knock on his door. It’s loud, metallic, and though I want to turn and run away, I wait, listening, my heart racing. There’s no response. Good, I think. I tried. Perhaps now the voice will leave me alone. I go to the fridge, grab another beer, and head for the outdoors.