Bulletproof Vest

by Maria Venegas

  “And you recognized him?” I ask.

  “Sí, cómo no, méndigo cojo,” he says. “One of the men I was with went up to him and put his arm around his shoulders. “Hola, amigo,” he said. “Do you remember me?” The méndigo shook his head, saying no, he did not. “You might not remember me,” the man said, leaning in a bit closer, “but I’ll bet you remember Chemel Venegas, don’t you?” he said, pressing the barrel of his gun into the méndigo’s ribs, right through his coat pocket. It must have been at that moment that the son of a bitch realized his past had caught up to him.” He polishes off his drink and tells me that the cojo didn’t even bother putting up a fight. He went quietly.

  This isn’t the first time he’s told me this story. Over the past few years he’s told me the same story, and each time the story is exactly the same—almost verbatim, and there’s something about its exactitude that makes it seem a bit too polished, like he’s recounting a story, not as he witnessed it, but as it was related to him. And what does it matter whether he killed that cojo, or had someone do it for him—nothing will ever bring my brother back, nor erase the nightmares that have haunted me for years.

  “No, está cabrón, mijita,” he says. “If anyone ever took one of my kids like that again, in such a cowardly way, or hurt one of you, even, I’d go after them, and I don’t care who tried standing in my way—brother, father, sister, mother—I don’t care who, they’d get trampled all the same.” The other two brothers had skipped town when he returned, and years later he heard that they had both died, car accidents or something like that. After he was released from prison and came back here, he had kept an eye on their father. “That’s all you really have to do,” he says. “Just watch their moves, know what doors they’re going in through, and which ones they’re coming out of, and then when they least expect it.” He shrugs. “That man eventually died of a heart attack,” he says. “Who knows, maybe he knew I was watching him and he got so scared that he croaked.”

  He’s back on one knee, adjusting the logs in the fire, and I can’t help but wonder what he would do if I happened to show up here one day with the dog of dogs that found me passed out in the basement. A ride out to the ranch—beyond the reach of any antidote, and fifty scorpions in his pants ought to do it. I polish off my drink, and stand up.

  “Is there any more left?” he asks, grinning at me, a glint of the fire in his eyes.

  “Yeah,” I say, taking his cup. “I’ll go make us two more.”

  The minute I step away from the fire, the cold air grips me. Night has fallen and so has the temperature. I make my way to the kitchen and hit the light switch. The single lightbulb covered with a layer of grease and dust dangles from the black cord that’s slung over the wooden beam. The fried chicken Rosario and I made earlier sits in a large, green plastic bowl on the table with a cheesecloth draped over it. Grease is already seeping through the fabric. Since the day I arrived, two weeks ago, he kept mentioning how he had a taste for that fried chicken from the other side, how he hadn’t had it in years, how he used to eat at the fried chicken place all the time, and how even the side dishes weren’t bad. I went into town, downloaded the KFC recipe off the Internet, bought two chickens, two bottles of Crisco, a few potatoes, and some greens: fried chicken with two sides.

  I grab the bottle of rum from behind the white, rusty metal cabinet where I stashed it earlier and mix two more drinks. This was the deal we made when he arrived slurring and glassy-eyed, pulling his red truck right into the courtyard as Rosario and I were finishing frying the chicken. She had gone to bed, and I agreed to have a few drinks with him, celebrate the New Year, as long as he gave me the bottle, let me be in charge, monitor how much more he drank, make sure he didn’t have too much, black out, forget where he was—who he was with.

  I hear his truck door slam shut and expect to hear a corrido come blaring through the house, but the music never comes. I mix our drinks, making mine a double, his a lot weaker, and head back outside. He is sitting in front of the fire, right where I left him, as if he had never moved. I hand him his drink and sit down; he takes a sip.

  “Uouh, this doesn’t taste like anything,” he says, taking another swig. “It tastes like pura Coca-Cola.” He eyes me. “Did you put anything in here?”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “No parece.” He grins and glances at my cup. “A ver,” he says. “Let me try yours.”

  I hand him my cup and he takes a gulp.

  “A jijo!” he coughs. “Did you put the rest of the bottle in here?”

  “There wasn’t much left.” He takes another swig. “Are you sure you don’t have another bottle stashed somewhere?” I ask.

  “No, that was it,” he says. “And the only reason I had that bottle is because I ran into a buddy of mine in town and he gave it to me, wanted me to go with him to the cantina, but I told him one of my daughters was in town, and that we were going to spend the New Year together.”

  I take both cups. Empty my drink into his, then pour it all into mine, back and fourth I go, mixing the two together, then hand his cup back to him. El Lobo comes up and nudges my elbow. I pet his head, run my fingers down his neck; it’s wet, sticky. I set my drink down and run both my hands down his neck, then hold them to the fire. They’re covered in blood.

  “Se lo chingaron,” he says, looking at the blood. He walks over to his truck, which is parked right behind us, comes back with a flashlight, gets down on one knee, and aims the beam at Lobo’s neck. I hold Lobo’s head still—there’s a deep gash about two inches long on his neck, oozing thick blood. “They ripped his tumor off,” he says, pointing at the spot. “Right there he used to have a bump and now it’s gone,” he says, being careful not to touch it, not to get blood on his hands. “That’s good.” He stands up. “Now I won’t have to cut it off.”

  I press my finger gently against the gash. Lobo yelps.

  “He’s bleeding a lot,” I say. “Shouldn’t we take him to a dog doctor or something?”

  “He’ll be fine,” he says, grimacing at the blood. “You should wash your hands.” He points the light toward the gray slate sink.

  I walk over to the sink, grab the pink bar of Zote soap from under it, and adjust the hose between my knees, bend into the ice-cold stream of water while he holds the light over me.

  “This is the flashlight you gave me for Christmas last year,” he says.

  It’s a long, black metal flashlight with adjustable beams—identical to the one Martin had given him on our first visit. He had told me how he really liked that flashlight because it had such powerful beams, but he had lost it. He and his buddy were driving home from a fiesta in the next town over, and since he had had too much to drink, he let his friend drive his truck, and though he kept telling him to take it nice and slow, because it was best to arrive late rather than never, still his friend had gone off the road, and as the truck began to roll, the flashlight had been thrown from it.

  I place the soap back under the sink and am still hunched over when we hear the first gunshots. Only a few scattered blasts in the distance, then they seem to get louder and closer like an approaching hailstorm, and soon they’re all around us. My father drops the flashlight into the back of his truck, goes into the house, and comes back out with two loaded guns, hands me the bigger one, a .357 Magnum.

  “Truénela,” he says.

  The light from the fire is reflecting off the long silver barrel and the mother-of-pearl grip. I turn it over in my hands, taken by how beautiful it is.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I’ve never shot a gun before.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he says, a huge smile spreading across his face. “Just point it straight up and shoot it.”

  I look at the gun. Hesitate. If I shoot it, I feel as if I will have crossed some line, a transgression—a .357 Magnum took my brother’s life.

  All around us guns are going off. He points his at the sky and unloads it, shooting fast, one right after another, the way he used t
o do in the Chicago suburbs when we were kids.

  “See,” he says, his eyes dancing with excitement. “Just point it up and shoot it.”

  “Bueno,” I say. “No puedo pensar en qué otro lugar sería mejor, um, estaría más bueno como para truenar…” What I’m trying to say is that if I was ever going to shoot a gun, I can’t think of a better time or place, but again my Spanish is failing me and I’m slurring my words and now he’s looking at me like maybe he’s regretting having handed me a loaded gun.

  “Truénela,” he says, his smile fading.

  I turn around and point the gun straight up, hold it over my head with both hands. I look toward the small church in the distance, press gently on the trigger, and am surprised by how hard it is. It’s as if the force of gravity has reversed its course and is pushing back up against my finger. I press down harder. The pressure releases, fire shoots from my fingertips, and sparks rain down from the electrical wires above as a high-pitched ringing sound fills the air. I hear my father yelling something, but I can’t hear what he’s saying. It’s as if I’ve slipped into a water well, my ears slowly filling with water and muffling the sounds around me. The only thing I hear with utter clarity inside this space I have cracked open is the loud ringing. Its steady pitch sounds like an om.

  “Do you hear that?” I yell to my father over my shoulder, as instinctively my hands move to cover my ears, and for a split second I forget I’m still holding the gun.

  “¿Qué?” His voice is so faint that it sounds like he’s yelling at me from the other side of a thick wall.

  “That ringing sound,” I yell back to him. “Do you hear that?” I turn around and he’s ducking behind his truck.

  “Cuidado con la pistola,” he says, looking at my swaying hand, the gun pointing slightly in his direction. “Empty it out,” he says. “Point it straight up and shoot it. Fast. One right after another, it sounds prettier that way.”

  I turn around and hold the gun up with both hands, point it at a slight angle away from me. There is nothing but the stars and the sliver of moon above, and though there is no music playing, I swear I hear the tamborazo coming down the mountainside, the drums and horns thundering all around me. I aim at the moon, convinced I can put a hole in it. Fire shoots from my hands as four bullets follow each other into the night sky, and with each blast, I feel the adrenaline unleashing in my veins. I look at the revolver and am overwhelmed with the urge to shoot it again. It sounds prettier that way. Amazing that all those blasts that robbed me of hours of sleep were like music to his ears. It all makes sense—his music, his guns, his drinking—they all go hand in hand.

  I give the gun back to him, and he passes me a heavy, blue, square-shaped glass bottle.

  “I thought you didn’t have another bottle,” I say.

  “I just found that one in my truck,” he says.

  Even before the bottle touches my lips, I smell the sharpness of tequila. I take a sip and hand the bottle back to him.

  “Are those the same guns you brought down from Chicago?”

  “No,” he says. “I sold most of those.”

  “What about your bulletproof vest?” I ask. “Do you still have it?”

  “Ouh, who knows what happened to that vest.” He takes a long pull. “I think I sold it, or maybe I gave it away, I don’t remember.”

  He hands me the bottle and I lean into his truck, prop my foot up on the tire.

  “How did you know Joaquín wanted to kill you?” I ask.

  “I just did,” he says. “There was something about him, he was a little too friendly.” He turns the revolver over in his hands. “That night he had thrown his arm around me and patted my back, acting like we were best buddies,” he says, “but I knew he was checking to see if I had my gun. We were playing cards and I said I was running home to use the bathroom, and I did. I used the bathroom and then I grabbed my .45.” I take another sip and hand him the bottle. “Then when I went back outside, he proposed a toast, a brindis, and with one hand he held up his beer and with the other he buried a kitchen knife in my neck.” He forces down a gulp. “But the bullet turned on that son of a bitch.”

  “Did you ever find out who hired him?” I ask, because this is something I’ve wondered about over the years.

  “Quién sabe,” he shrugs, though years from now Rosario will tell me that he had told her it was the guys who had killed my brother because they knew it was only a matter of time before he returned to Mexico looking for them.

  “You know, when everything happened with Joaquín, the papers the next day reported that it was due to an argument over who would drink the last beer,” I say.

  “¿A poco?” he asks, chuckling a bit. “That’s what the papers said?”

  “Ey,” I say. “You didn’t know that?”

  “No,” he says, laughing a little harder, and I guess it makes sense that he wouldn’t know, as he was in intensive care for two weeks afterward, the doctor telling us that my father was lucky to be alive, how the blade had missed his jugular by a hair. “Imagine that? Killing a man over a goddamn beer,” he says, and he’s laughing so hard that it makes me start laughing, and soon we’re both leaning against his truck, howling with laughter.

  In the distance, three fireworks race into the sky, their tails trailing behind like comets, like shooting stars that crash-landed in the mountains years ago, and are now returning to their home in the universe.

  * * *

  On the day that I leave, he drops me off at the bus station like he always does.

  “How are you going to get that back without breaking it?” he asks, looking at the clay water jug in my arms.

  “I’m going to carry it on my lap,” I say. I had found the jug inside the house where I was born a few days before. Each time I’ve come down, I’ve gone inside that house and dug around, and I’ve always emerged covered in dust and carrying something that I want to take back to New York: rusty skeleton keys, white tin bowls, my grandfather’s branding rod, leather satchels, sheep shears, rake heads, kerosene lamps, and six of my mother’s irons. Back in New York, my apartment seems to be turning into a mini museum, slowly filling up with relics I’ve salvaged from my past. The last time I was here, he gave me an old machete he no longer used. It came in a leather sheath, and the machete had a desert landscape etched on one side of it and an inscription on the other. “I’ll be back in the summer,” I say, giving him a hug and a kiss on the cheek.

  “Ándele, pues, mija,” he says. “I’ll be here waiting for you.”

  21

  QUELITES

  IT’S MID-JULY, the start of the rainy season, when I arrive in town early on Sunday morning. I take a cab to Tito’s house and my mother is walking out the door to go to the mercado, so I join her. We pull into the dusty gravel lot and make our way along the narrow passageways between the booths. There is everything from fresh produce and homemade cheese to hand-carved wooden bowls and used clothing.

  “Why are you buying so many groceries?” my mother says, watching as I stock up on fruits and vegetables. “We’ve got plenty of food at home.”

  “I’m bringing it to La Peña,” I say.

  “Don’t they have any food out there?” she asks.

  “I just want to bring the things I like to eat,” I say.

  “When are you planning on going?” she asks, though she knows the main reason for my being here is to spend time with my father, who is recovering from yet another horse-riding accident. Three weeks ago, El Relámpago had left him lying on the rocks near the river again, with four fractured ribs and a dislocated hip. He had been lying out there in the rain all night, and right around dawn, two men had spotted his horse, still saddled up and grazing in a field with a herd of free-roaming horses. They set out, riding along the river, until they located him. A crust of mud had dried all around him, hypothermia had settled on his bones, his breathing was shallow, and his skin so pale that not long after the men found him, once again the rumors that he was dead were runnin
g rampant through town.

  “I don’t know, probably tomorrow or the day after,” I say.

  “¿Tan rápido?” She tells me that she was going to go to Chicago, but then she waited because she knew I was coming. “If you’re going to go and stay with your father, then I’m going to leave tomorrow also,” she says. It’s always like this, always a struggle over who I’m going to spend more time with, though she knows that when I come to Mexico, spending time with my father is my priority. I can see her in Chicago, or if she ever wanted to, she could come visit me in New York. I’ve been there for eight years, and she has never been out. “Why don’t you stay with me for a week and then go to La Peña?” she says when we are loading the groceries into her Jeep.

  “A whole week?” I say. “He just had an accident. He’s already been waiting for me since Wednesday.”

  “Well, that’s why he has that vieja there, isn’t it? So she can help him.” By “that vieja” she means Rosario, who sometimes is there and other times isn’t—has left him for the umpteenth time. Alma had left for good the year before, had eloped with her boyfriend. “I’m the one who should have left,” my mother says. “Then maybe now you’d come looking for me instead of that viejo.” We climb into her Jeep, and soon we are idling along in the Sunday bumper-to-bumper traffic. “Your father never cared about anyone but himself,” she says. “He never loved you guys.”