Bulletproof Vest

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Bulletproof Vest Page 24

by Maria Venegas


  “Apá, how do you feel?” I ask, and he says he’s fine, though he looks beyond exhausted, seems to have aged twenty years since he arrived. The oxygen tube has slipped out of his nose and is resting on his chest, and his blue gown is stained and draped loosely around his exposed shoulders. He seems so helpless. I adjust his nightgown, place the tube back in his nose, and turn the oxygen knob up a few notches.

  “Inhale,” I say, thinking maybe a boost of oxygen to the brain will help clear the tunnel through which his mind keeps slipping. He takes a deep breath. None of this makes sense. What are we supposed to do? Sit by his bedside and wait until his heart stops beating?

  “Again,” I say, and he inhales with less gusto. I can’t help but feel partially responsible for his condition, like perhaps he had risked his life, put himself in the hospital, just to keep me around a little longer. He must have known the horse would rear if it heard gunshots. Perhaps this was his backward way of showing his love for me.

  “Again,” I say, and he inhales, and swats at the green smudge on his sheet, still thinking it’s a spider. What if he dies? Will I be able to live with knowing that I watched him slip away and did nothing to help him? I go to the foot of his bed, pick up his chart, and start jotting down all his stats: blood pressure, meds, heart rate. Martin has a friend in Chicago who is a doctor, and I think I’ll send him an e-mail. Get a second opinion.

  “Hola, mija,” he says. I look up and he’s looking at someone behind me, and just seeing the way his face is lit up, I know that it must be my mother. He smiles wide and stares at her in awe, as if the ceiling has opened up and a ray of sunlight is shining down just for him. This is probably not the way he imagined a reunion with my mother. With him lying in bed, stripped of his cowboy boots, and wearing a blue dress.

  “Your kids asked me to come pray for you,” she says, holding her purse against her chest like a shield. “Do you want me to pray for you?”

  “That might be a good idea,” he says, still staring at her in disbelief.

  She takes two steps toward his bed and tells him to close his eyes and repeat after her. His whole face puckers up as he squeezes his lids tight, seems to be using all his might to keep them shut.

  “Dear God,” she says, closing her eyes and bowing her head.

  “Dear God,” he repeats.

  I stand at the foot of his bed, watching as his eyes snap open and he gazes at her, repeating every word that is rolling off her tongue as if he were afraid to let a single syllable slip from her lips onto the floor. I glance back and forth between them, and can’t believe that here, standing in the same room, in such proximity, breathing the same stale air, are my parents—reunited after twenty years.

  “I come to ask your forgiveness,” she says.

  “I come to ask your forgiveness,” he repeats.

  “Please, forgive me for all the pain I’ve caused onto others,” she says.

  “Please, forgive me,” he says. His smile waned, and he looks as though he wants to reach out and take her in his arms.

  “For all the pain I’ve caused onto others,” she repeats.

  “Forgive me, Pascuala,” he says, and she opens her eyes and glares at him. “Forgive me for having left you with the burden, with all the kids,” he says, “and for having ended your brother’s life. Please, forgive me.” They stare at each other, and for a split second I think it actually might start pouring rain inside the hospital. “Ever since I left you, my life has been unstable, I’ve done nothing but roll around, and…”

  “I have already forgiven you,” she says, thrusting her chin up. “Now, let’s ask God to forgive you.” She closes her eyes, continues with the prayer, and though he repeats everything she utters, he does not take his gaze off her.

  “Amen,” she says, and opens her eyes.

  “Amen,” he says, once again smiling wide.

  “Take care of yourself, Jose,” she says, and turns to leave.

  “Wait,” Sonia practically shouts, jumping away from the wall where she and Jorge have been standing semiparalyzed—as shocked as I am to be seeing our parents standing face-to-face after all these years. “I want a picture,” she says, already clawing around in her purse. She pulls out her camera, hands it to me, and runs to the head of the bed, waving my mother over. My mother goes and leans in on the other side, and I snap the only photo of our makeshift family reunion. They say a photograph is worth a thousand words, but no camera could have captured the magnitude of that moment.

  Again my mother goes to leave, and this time it’s my father who calls after her.

  “Can I have a hug?” he says.

  She stops, places her purse at the foot of his bed, pivots, takes two swift strides toward him, gives him two quick taps on his shoulders with her fingertips, and a kiss on the cheek. She turns and grabs her purse, and though his arms are still rising to meet her embrace, she’s already gone.

  Later that day, I send Martin an e-mail detailing my father’s condition, and ask if he can please forward it to his friend, Eric, the doctor. Eric responds almost immediately. Does Maria’s father drink? Is it possible he is going through alcohol withdrawal? Is he having trouble sleeping? Does he feel he’s slipping off the bed? Is there a tunnel? Spiders? If so, have her call me ASAP.

  “The painkiller your father is on is not enough to make anyone hallucinate,” he says when I call him. “It’s aspirin, basically.” He tells me that my father is having classic alcohol withdrawal symptoms, and that he needs a sedative immediately. “If they don’t give him a sedative, he will have a heart attack. I’m surprised he hasn’t already. I honestly don’t understand how your father is still alive.”

  After getting off the phone with Eric, I go straight to the hospital and practically demand they give my father a sedative. The doctor tries to explain his catch-22 theory yet again, and I stop short of telling him to fuck off—how was it possible that they didn’t know my father was going through alcohol withdrawal, while a doctor thousands of miles away had diagnosed him based on an e-mail? Perhaps to them, if he were to have a heart attack, he’d be one less “elderly” person on social security or one less drunk on the street. Maybe to them, he was just another patient, but to me, he was my father—the one and only.

  The head of the hospital comes down to have a word with us, saying they will give my father a sedative, but if he never wakes up, they won’t be to blame—we will. Is this really what it had come to? Whether my father lives or dies, somehow being our responsibility?

  “Fine,” I say, knowing that if my father never wakes up, at least I can live with knowing that when he was unable to fend for himself, I had not turned my back on him.

  Once they give him the sedative, he sleeps for thirty-six hours straight, waking only now and then to ask for a drink of water. When he wakes, the tunnel and the spiders are gone, and so too is the man who had been in the bed next to his. The man had died in the middle of the night. Had gone quietly, without making a fuss—he, too, had fluid in his lungs.

  Three days later, my father is released from the hospital, and Yesenia and I drive him back to La Peña. It’s been raining so much that the face of the land itself has been transformed. On either side of the road, the fields that had been parched and dusty now stretch all the way to the horizon shimmering with different shades of green.

  * * *

  When classes let out in mid-December, I pack my bags, a stack of books, running shoes, and a month’s supply of espresso. On the night before I leave for Mexico, I throw a going-away party, an apple-pie party. I make the pie from scratch, using Abigail’s recipe, and while it’s in the oven, a bottle of tequila makes its way around the room. This has been my routine for the past two years. The minute classes let out for summer or the holidays, I’m throwing a going-away party and hopping on the first flight back to Mexico.

  “So, where in Mexico are you going?” Matt yells, over the music. “Are you going to the beach?”

  “I’m going to see my father,”
I say.

  “Nice,” he says. “You’re going to go spend the holidays with your parents?”

  “Not exactly,” I say, making my way to the kitchen to check on the pie. Though my parents had had that moment, their brief reconciliation two years earlier, and my father had not stopped talking about my mother, how she had been to see him, and who knows, maybe once he got out of that place, they could work things out. But deep down he must have known that the past would forever run like a deep, dark vein between them.

  “Almost ready,” I yell over the music as I pull the pie from the oven and cheers erupt from the living room, where everyone is dancing to a mix of hip-hop and disco.

  When I had returned to New York after that trip, I suddenly felt like an outsider in my own neighborhood. Williamsburg had undergone massive construction that summer, and new buildings, complete with doormen and elevators, had sprung up on every other street corner, it seemed. I was walking home from class one day and had come to a full stop at an intersection. Where there had never even been a stop sign, now there was a traffic light. Before there had been no need for stop signs or traffic lights, as there was hardly any traffic, but now the line of cars waiting at the light stretched all the way down the street like a metallic snake. And dispersed among the cars was the one thing that had been as uncommon in Williamsburg as tourists—yellow cabs. It was disorienting.

  I set the pie to cool on the counter, next to the cheese and charcuterie boards, and grab two pints of vanilla ice cream from the freezer. For the past two years, the gentrification had continued at such a rapid pace that each time I went to Mexico and came back, another slew of buildings had gone up, another wave of foreigners had moved in, and another handful of friends who could no longer afford the rising rents had moved away, including Josh. He had moved to Bushwick, and within a few years would be returning to California. I felt more and more like an outsider as I watched the neighborhood I had fallen in love with practically vanish from underneath me.

  Another bottle of tequila makes its way around the room and I take a swig, knowing that I’m going to feel it on the plane in the morning.

  20

  SHOOTING GUNS LIKE SHOOTING STARS

  SCATTERED STARS BEGIN TO APPEAR, one by one, like eyes glistening against the cobalt sky. The sliver of moon doesn’t illuminate enough of the darkness, out there beyond the courtyard, on the dirt road where the dogs have fused into a ball of claws and teeth tearing through the night. Out there where dust is already clinging to fresh blood. One dog breaks from the pack and runs toward the church that sits under the single light post in La Peña. A cloud of dust rises toward the light as the pack pounces on the one that broke from them, the one that tried to get away. A log collapses in the fire, red sparks soar into the cool air, mingle with the growling, and then vanish.

  “Should we do something?” I ask my father.

  “About what?” he asks, leaning back in his white plastic chair, his legs extended in front of him and crossed one over the other so that the soles of his cowboy boots are almost in the fire.

  “The dogs,” I say. “Won’t they kill each other?”

  “Nah, they’ll work it out,” he says, taking a swig of the rum and Coke in his nicked tin cup.

  The battle continues to rage in front of the small church, while in the distance, along the dark ridge, lights from other ranches are coming into focus. Out there where a pair of eyes could be watching the glow of the fire dance across our faces. Normally, we don’t stay outside past dark. Once the chickens have tucked themselves into the branches of the eucalyptus trees and the sun has gone down, we go inside, lock the doors, and stay put until morning. I hook my index finger in the rubber band holding my ponytail and slide it off, let my hair fall freely around my shoulders.

  “Why are they fighting like that?” I ask. My father is now down on one knee, rearranging the logs in the fire. “Maybe it’s a sign,” I say.

  “Yeah, maybe,” he says. “Maybe La Huesona is on the loose, desperate to take a few more souls before the year ends.” He rolls a thick log into the fire. “Only a few hours left,” he grunts as he centers it in the burning pile.

  Maybe he’s right. Animals are always the first to know. When I had been here for the holidays last year, the dogs had howled all through the night, and then in the morning, we found out that the ninety-two-year-old woman who lived across from the church had died at dawn. My father and I had gone to the service, and afterward we followed the procession, the truck with the coffin and the one with the musicians guiding the way to the cemetery. As we idled along, the drums and horns seemed to be pounding in my chest.

  “With the music, you kind of get the urge to cry, huh?” my father said, staring out his window.

  “Ey,” I said. When I had first gone to the cemetery on the hill I had stood at the foot of my brother’s grave, staring at his name carved into the stone, and had hardened against it, had refused to shed a single tear. “Did you guys have music at Chemel’s funeral?” I asked my father, and he said there were so many people at Chemel’s funeral that by the time the truck with the musicians reached the plaza in town, cars were still pulling out of La Peña. We drove along in the procession and I could feel him staring at my profile, and then I was fumbling around for my sunglasses, as if they might be able to dam up the tears that had been years in coming.

  “This log should last us all night, or at least until the New Year,” he says, taking his seat. “Encino. Great wood. I chopped it myself. It doesn’t burn down as fast as the others.” He glances at me and follows my gaze out to the rumbling that is now moving around the back of the house.

  “I think one of those dogs is in heat,” he says. “That’s why they’re all worked up.” I lean back into my chair and take a sip from my rum and Coke. The dry heat from the fire feels good on my bare arms. “You see those three stars?” he asks, pointing at the Big Dipper. I look past the clothesline and electrical wires that hang above. “When we were kids,” he says, “we used to call those Los Reyes Magos.”

  “Over there,” I say, “they call those the…” The word eludes me. It’s like this sometimes. I can’t find the right word in Spanish and hesitate. “It’s, um, it’s like the small pot or pan,” I say. “Or like the big spoon. See how the three stars are in a row? How they seem to form a handle?”

  “Uh-huh,” he says, and though his face is still turned toward the sky, he’s giving me a sideways glance, a one-eyed squint.

  The sky is filled with stars, thousands of them sitting around the moon, waiting for the New Year to arrive. A small piece of raw meat clings to the clothesline above. A few days ago, a cow broke an ankle and had to be put down. My father had salted the meat that didn’t fit in the freezer and hung it on the clothesline to be dried by the sun. Raw meat hung like laundry in the courtyard for two days. He reaches up, plucks the piece off the clothesline, and throws it into the fire.

  “I made that rope when I was in prison,” he says, pointing at the clothesline. It’s a yellow rope that’s tied to an extension chord that is then tied to the water-well post. “That one and the pink one I tied to your saddle this morning,” he says.

  “They teach you how to make rope in jail?” I ask.

  “They teach you how to do lots of things,” he says. “If you pay attention, you come out knowing more than when you went in. I gave those ropes to my father, when he came to visit me to tell me they had sold the house in the plaza and deposited the money in an account for the lawyer that was working on my case.”

  The dogs have worked their way around the corral and are now barreling down the dirt road toward us, the snarling louder and louder as they approach.

  “Maybe we should go inside,” I say.

  “Nah. If we go inside, we’ll fall asleep,” he says, perhaps thinking back to last year when I had picked up a bottle of red wine and made us a filet mignon and mashed potato dinner, and by the time midnight arrived we were both passed out. “It’s nicer here, by the fire. W
e can have a few drinks, a bit of a plática, and after the New Year arrives, we’ll go inside and iron our ears out.” He looks at my bare arms, my ripped jeans. “You want to borrow a jacket?”

  “No, I’m fine,” I say, taking a gulp from my cup.

  “Do you really want to go inside?” he asks.

  “Maybe,” I say.

  “Well then, we should put out the fire,” he says.

  We sit in silence for a while. I stare out past the dirt road, past the house where both he and I were born, and can’t help but feel like we are being watched. I sit up and face him.

  “What if someone shoots us?” I ask.

  His whole body turns toward me.

  “No, no, mijita,” he shakes his head. “¿Qué pasó? Don’t think like that.” He reaches into the fire, grabs one of the logs, and flips it. “No one is going to come bother us here, not at this hour, not just any pendejo would come near here,” he says. “Besides, it’s the holidays, everyone is too busy celebrating.”

  Everyone is busy celebrating—celebrating and drinking; drinking and celebrating—all day long men have been knocking them back at the rodeos, the cockfights, the horse races—the sun beating on their eyelids, vision blurring, old conflicts rising to the surface. It’s during the holidays that tragedies seem to happen around these parts. It was on Christmas Eve, twenty-two years ago, that my brother was shot, fell facedown in the river, and drowned. My mother had recently taken me to Las Cruces and I had stood near the river’s edge, watching the frigid water rushing over the smooth stones. His sweetheart’s house still sat on the boulder across the way, but she was long gone, married and living on the other side. For years I had blamed my father. Had blamed him for convincing my brother to come back here, for keeping him just a little longer, just until the holidays, but how could he have foreseen what was coming?

  “Do you know what ever happened to the guy that killed Chemel?” I ask.

  “Ouh, a ese méndigo cojo, yo mismo me lo chingué,” he says, staring into the flames. “After I came back down here, I went looking for him in the prison but was informed that he had been transferred to the federal prison in Zacatecas, so I drove there, and they told me that he had been sent to a mental institution in Guadalajara. I took the overnight bus to Guadalajara, only to find that he had been released, but I kept the word on the street and waited, knowing that sooner or later that son of a bitch would have to turn up,” he says, taking a swig. “Then I heard he was living near the border, in Mexicali, working as a paletero. There was a tavern he frequented, and I was told that if I were to show up at said tavern on any given weekday between such and such hours, he would be there. I recruited two others, and we drove up there. We found the tavern and sure enough, there was that méndigo, sitting at the bar and having a beer as if nothing had ever happened.”

 

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