Bulletproof Vest

by Maria Venegas

  We chew in silence, listening to the rush of the two waterfalls, which are flowing heavy with rainwater. He pulls the binoculars out of his satchel and scans the ridge on the other side of the river.

  “See that white thing over there?” he says, pointing at something among the green shrubs on the ridge. “Is that a cow or a rock?” He hands me the binoculars.

  Even before I bring them to my eyes, I can see that it’s a rock, but still, I have a look. The only reason I know that his eyesight is failing is because recently, when I was walking past his bedroom window, I looked in and saw him sitting on his bed in a pool of sunlight. He was going through some documents, a pair of reading glasses with thick lenses resting on his nose. It had been a while since he’d dyed his hair and mustache the usual jet-black, and they both had a silver sheen to them. He suddenly looked so very old and so calm—like he was incapable of harming even a house mouse. I knocked on his bedroom door, he called out for me to come in, and when I entered, he was still sitting on his bed, papers strewn about, but the glasses were nowhere in sight.

  “It’s a rock.” I hand the binoculars back to him, and he slides them back into his satchel.

  He finishes his torta and leans back, resting his head on a rock and saying he’s going to take a quick nap before we head home.

  “What if there’s a reindeer under there?” I say. Two weeks before, we had come out here and had spent the morning making rock piles around the property so that the man he had hired to reinforce the barbed-wire fence would know where the wooden posts should go. “Careful,” he said, watching as I slid both hands under a rock and picked it up. “There could be some reindeer under there.” He rolled a different rock over with his boot, and sure enough, there were two blond, almost translucent, scorpions sitting side by side underneath it. Their pincers curled above their heads so that they looked like deer antlers. Seeing the two scorpions was as though he had hit a light switch—there were rocks scattered all over the grounds. “If one of these stings you, it will definitely be goodbye green mountaintops and goodbye blue skies,” he said.

  “Don’t they have the antidote for it in town?” I asked.

  “Eeow, by the time we make it to town, we’d be stiff as a board,” he said.

  He places his hat over his face and folds his arms across his chest, tucking his hands under his armpits.

  “I just say a little prayer. I say, listen, cabrón, I know you’re under there, but if you don’t bother me, I won’t bother you,” he says, crossing his legs at the ankle, one over the other. “Either way, we’ll wake up here or on the other side.” He’s snoring almost immediately.

  I finish my torta and clean up, wrap the cheese in the cheesecloth, and put the leftover food away. I polish off the rest of the water and lean back, rest my head on a rock, place my straw hat over my face, and focus on the dots of dispersed sunlight that are filtering through the hat, trying not to think about the scorpions that might be lurking below, and doze off.

  When I wake, my father and the sun are gone, and it seems that the sky itself has shifted. Gray clouds have moved in and hover heavy and low, though in the valley below, rays of sunlight are shining through the openings in the clouds, like waterfalls pouring from the sky.

  “Vámonos porque nos agarra el agua,” my father says. He’s making his way back from the pools and carrying the water bottle, filled to the top. “Did you see your cow?” he asks, handing me the bottle.

  “No,” I say, taking a gulp. The water is ice-cold and delicious, as it always is. I can’t remember when I started drinking the water, but it has yet to make me sick.

  “If you want, we can walk around the corral so you can take a picture of her before we head back.”

  “Next time,” I say, not knowing that in two weeks, my cow will be dead.

  We untie the horse and donkey and sling the leather satchels over the neck of the saddles.

  “Why don’t you take the donkey,” he says. “It’ll be easier on your knee.”

  “Let’s go back the way we came.” Since his hip is still recovering, he rode the donkey and I rode the horse. “My knee will be fine,” I say, stepping into the stirrup and kicking my leg over Chemel’s horse saddle.

  He hands me the rifle, and I sling the leather strap over the neck of the saddle. We never bring the rifle to the ranch. He usually brings his gun, tucked into the back of his belt. But on the day that he had one too many mescals, he had ended up giving me his gun and saying that I should hold on to it. I assumed he had gotten the urge to shoot it off in the house but thought better of it—what if he sent a bullet through his bedroom door and I happened to be on the other side? Since the day he handed it over, he has not asked about it, probably too ashamed that it had come to that.

  On the way back, the horse and the donkey move at a swifter gait, and by the time we clear San Martín, the clouds seem to be at war with one another. From the four corners of the earth—north, south, east, and west—cloud formations have risen and are now merging overhead, snuffing out the last rays of sunshine. A rumble rips through the clouds above, and then a bright whip cracks down against the mountains as if trying to make them gallop. Lightning bolts are crashing down in the nearby ridges and fields, and each time one hits, the horse surges forward, breaks into a trot, catches up to the donkey, but soon falls behind again.

  “Make that lazy horse move faster or the storm is going to catch us,” my father yells back to me over the roaring wind.

  I loosen the reins and dig my heels into the horse’s ribs, but he ignores the soft rubber of my Merrell hiking boots. When I arrived, my father had asked if I had a different pair of shoes, something less chunky and less likely to get caught in the stirrup—just in case. Another bolt comes crashing down somewhere behind us, sending a flash across the back of my father’s white shirt. Again, the horse picks up the pace, its head turning from side to side as if trying to figure out where the next bolt will hit.

  “Maybe we should pull over and wait,” I say when we catch up to my father.

  “Wait for what?” he says, turning to shield his ear from the wind.

  “For the storm to pass,” I say.

  He holds up his index finger and waves it back and forth. We ride on, and we are making our way along the dirt road on la mesa when two young men come riding full stride across the field toward us, the wind billowing in their button-down shirts.

  “Ándele, Don Jose,” one calls out over the wind. “Hay viene el agua,” he yells, his eyes lingering on the rifle as they fly past.

  A purple bolt snaps out of the gray clouds and spiders into five smaller threads that crack against a nearby ridge with so much force that the air itself seems to tremble. Again the horse is galloping, and I start doing an inventory of everything that might attract the lightning to me—the rifle, the bridle parts, and the stirrups—all metal.

  “What if we get hit by lightning?” I ask my father, when we catch up to him.

  “Pues, si nos toca, nos toca,” he says, as if he’s accepted his fate. If it’s our turn to go, it’s our turn to go. He glances over at me, and stops. “A ver ese rifle,” he says, holding out his hand. I pass him the rifle and he slings the leather strap across the donkey saddle, asks if I want to throw on the poncho, but since we’re almost at the horse trail that leads down to La Peña, I tell him I’ll be fine.

  We continue on, and when we reach the horse trail, El Negro takes off, sprinting ahead of us back to the house. Must be some storm, I think, as El Negro is not one to scare easily. Though, ever since the scuffle with the wild animal, he never jogged with me again. It was as if he knew that whatever was lurking out there was sure to take him down. I never saw the animal again, but just the other day I happened to look back, and in the distance there was a cloud of dust rising from the dirt road and a gleaming SUV was barreling toward me. A brand-new SUV on that road, at that hour, was so out of place that before I knew it I was racing along the dirt road until I reached the horse trail. I dropped
down into the rocks and thorns and waited, listening to the whir of tires as they approached on the road above, and the whole time my heart was beating in time with my thoughts: Please don’t stop. Please don’t stop. Please don’t stop. After the tires passed, I waited several minutes and then sprinted back home.

  When I told my father about the SUV, he said it was probably just some norteño making his way to visit a relative farther up the mountain. Maybe it was a norteño, or maybe he was trying to downplay my fears, same as he had done with the wild animal. Still, after seeing the SUV, I stopped jogging on this road, stuck closer to home.

  Soon we are descending the rocky trail and I’m relieved to be getting off the mesa, to be on lower ground.

  “Here comes the rain,” my father says, when we clear the back entrance to La Peña.

  Even before I turn around, I hear it. All along the mesa raindrops are exploding on the dirt road where we just were, and as the wall of rain moves toward us, the water is bouncing off the trees along the ridge, then off the cornstalks in the fields, as it draws near. My father clears the gate to the corral and rides up under the aluminum shed. I dig my heels into the horse’s sides but he continues to walk, taking his time along the stacked stones though the mist is already blowing past us. Just as the horse reaches the gate and turns to enter, the sound and fury of the storm overtakes us. Rain and hail the size of Ping-Pong balls come crashing down, hitting us head-on.

  The horse starts jerking about, turns away from the hail, and surges, attempting to bolt for the river. He almost rips the reins from my grip, but I hold tight, and then his neck is thrashing and he’s moving backward, and there’s nothing I want more than to be back on solid ground—but it’s too late. I think about sliding my feet from the stirrups in case he rears—wouldn’t want to get dragged along the rocks like my father, who is yelling something from under the tin shed, his voice so faint it’s as though he’s yelling from the edge of a distant shoreline. Muddy waters are raging all around us; the minute the hail hits the ground it vanishes below the surface of the water.

  “Bring him in,” I hear my father yell. I pull on the reins and try to turn the horse toward the gate, but the minute he turns, hail pelts his forehead and sends him thrashing.

  “I can’t.”

  “Make him.”

  “You come and get him,” I yell.

  The horse is jerking and trying to break free, and it feels like the ground itself is moving as the brown water goes rushing by. This is how it happens, I think, this is how easy it is to slip away. I have to remind myself to breathe, to stay calm, because if I start to panic, the horse will panic, and whether I like it or not, we are now in this together. I reach out and run my hand slow and steady down his strong neck.

  “O,” I say, in a firm tone, as hail continues to crash down all around us. “O,” I say in a voice that resonates in my chest. “O.” Again I run my hand down his neck. He bows his head and I loosen the reins to give him space. “O,” I say, “O.”

  I see my father’s black cowboy boots come splashing through the muddy water. He pulls the leather strap that holds the hitching rope to the side of the saddle and the rope uncoils, falling freely, half of it vanishing into the water below. He grabs it and pulls the horse along the stacked-stone wall, through the gate, and into the corral, like a mighty ship giving us a tow. I duck to clear the tin shed and once I’m under it, the storm takes on a different sound. It’s somehow louder—metallic as the hail hits against the tin roof. The minute my feet touch the ground, I want to drop to my knees and kiss the soil.

  “We almost made it,” I say, though I realize he had timed it perfectly. If my horse had been moving just a little faster, we would have beaten the storm. We’re both soaked and stand side by side, looking out at the rain and hail.

  “At least now you’ll have a story to tell the others when you get back to the other side,” he says, shooting me a smile, the excitement of the storm dancing in his eyes.

  * * *

  Two weeks later, after having spent a week in Chicago and another week in Maine visiting Abigail’s mother, with whom I’ve forged a friendship, I’m back in New York. Since the day I left, he had been calling. It’s Saturday afternoon, and I finally buy an international phone calling card, find a shady spot on a bench in a community garden in Brooklyn, and call him back.

  “How was Chicago?” he asks.

  “It was nice.” I inform him that I had given everyone the cheese he sent. On the day I left Mexico, we had driven to the house of an elderly couple that, according to him, made the best cheese in town. He had asked me to pick out one cheese wheel for each of my siblings. “Guess what?” I say.

  “¿Qué pasó?”

  “Remember how you had to keep driving me into town to use the Internet?” I say. He had driven me to an Internet café a few times, and while I checked my e-mails, he had sat in the chair next to me, asking exactly how e-mail works.

  “Ey,” he says.

  “Before leaving New York, I had submitted a short story to a British literary journal,” I say. “And while I was in Mexico, I had been e-mailing with the editor. Then, when I was in Chicago, they e-mailed me saying they are going to publish my story in their upcoming issue.”

  “That’s good,” he says. “Did you happen to see Maria Elena when you were in Chicago?”

  “Ey,” I say.

  “Did she say when she’s coming back to Mexico?” he asks.

  “She was supposed to drive back down a few days ago,” I say, but perhaps he should call her because she always says she’s going to do one thing and then does another.

  “So,” I say. “Guess what the story is about.”

  “Sabes,” he says. “What’s it about?”

  “Well, you know, it’s kind of funny, because I never used to talk about you, or the past, but then when I got into this writing program, I started writing about it, and do you remember when everything happened with Joaquín? Well, I wrote a story about that,” I say. “¿Cómo ve?”

  There is a long silence on the other end.

  “And guess how much they’re paying me for it,” I say.

  “How much?” he asks.

  I give him the figure.

  “A jijo,” he says, “that’s great.” I can practically hear the smile spreading across his face. “No, there are so many things that have happened to me, you have no idea. Next time you come down, you should bring a notebook, and I’ll tell you some stories, and then you can go back, write them out, and make another billete for yourself.”

  “That sounds good,” I say, thinking that when I go back down for the holidays, maybe I’ll take him up on his offer. Bring a notebook and a tape recorder, even.

  “¿Dónde dejó la juska?” he asks.

  “You still haven’t found it?” I know this is why he has been calling so much since I left—he hasn’t found his gun, though I imagine he and Rosario have turned the house upside down looking for it. After he gave it to me, he never asked about it again, and when I was leaving, Rosario asked me to leave it with her, and I almost did but thought better of it. They had not been getting along, and what if she got some bright idea and turned the gun on him? Or what if he ended up doing something to her? On the day I left, I had taken it from under my T-shirt pile, wrapped it in a cheesecloth, placed it in a black plastic bag, and stashed it underneath a light-blue photo album inside one of the trunks in the storage room.

  “I haven’t really had time to look for it,” he says.

  I tell him where it is, though he will never see that gun again. Two days later, the men in the SUVs arrive and kick down his front door.

  BOOK THREE

  24

  THE KIDNAPPING

  THEY HAVE BEEN WATCHING HIS MOVES, keeping tabs on the road that runs in front of his house, and earlier that day they saw him and Rosario climb into his red truck and drive clear out of town. When he returns in the afternoon, he pulls into the dusty lot where the mercado is held on Sundays. R
osario waits in the passenger seat, while he goes into a cell phone store. He’s in the store for a mere ten minutes, but by the time he steps back out into the slanted rays of the afternoon sun, everything has shifted. Blinds have been drawn in nearby stores, the sidewalks have emptied, doors have been locked, and most of the cars that were parked near his truck vacated the scene when the black SUVs rolled up.

  He makes his way across the lot, scrolling through his phone when the sound of gravel crunching under his boots stops him in his tracks. It’s not the rhythm of the gravel that is off but rather the absence of familiar sounds. Missing is the laughter—the shrieking and yelling of kids playing a makeshift soccer game in the lot. Gone is the rustling of bags, of people rushing along, running afternoon errands. Even the incessant bell of the paletero has been silenced. Nothing but the echo of a dog barking in the distance fills the space around him. He looks up and notices the SUVs stationed on either side of his vehicle. Though it’s the sight of the man sitting next to Rosario and grinning at him from behind the steering wheel of his truck that sends the gold caps vibrating against his teeth so that he can practically taste the metal. He’s standing still but hears the gravel shifting, footsteps approaching from behind, as if his own shadow had sprung to life.

  “Vamos, viejo.” There are two men with machine guns standing on either side of him.

  They escort him into the backseat of one of the SUVs, where a woman is waiting for him.

  “Hola, mi gallinita de oro,” she says, her chapped lips parting in a grin and revealing her rust-colored teeth. The sour stench of alcohol exudes from her. He recognizes the rifle she’s holding between her knees. It’s the same rifle that has hung above his bed for years, the same rifle with which he had blown the head off a rattlesnake when he was ten years old. The woman snatches his cell from his hand and searches his pockets, pulling out his red handkerchief and his worn leather wallet. A man climbs into the seat on the other side of him and the convoy starts moving. The SUV he’s riding in follows his truck onto the main road, and by the time they clear the last speed bump on the edge of town, they have already removed his boots and tied his ankles and wrists together. “Who’s Norma Venegas?” the woman asks as she scrolls through his phone.