Bulletproof Vest

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Bulletproof Vest Page 31

by Maria Venegas


  “Wouldn’t it be crazy if you and mi amá had a reconciliation down here and ended up going back to Zacatecas together?” I say.

  “Ouh, qué bueno fuera.” He grins, and I notice his teeth, how white and perfect they are—it’s an entirely new set. Gone is the gold trim that once lined his two front teeth, and the gold caps that once covered his upper molars. Though I want to ask what happened to his teeth, I don’t, afraid of what the answer might be. “No, imagine the look on people’s faces if we were to arrive back into town, arm in arm, after all these years?” It had been twenty-three years since they had separated, and they had recently made their separation official; they were legally divorced. Mary had gone with my mother on the day they signed the papers and told me that my father kept trying to make small talk with my mother, until she had grabbed her purse, stormed out of the room, and waited in the lobby for the attorney to arrive.

  “Do you want to stop and rest for a bit?” I say, when we reach a cluster of small trees—one of the few shady spots on the entire grounds. Two large white rocks sit across from each other under the shade. We take a seat on one and he removes his hat, placing it on his knee. “The shade feels nice, huh?” I reach into my straw bag and pull out a water bottle.

  “Ey,” he says.

  I take a sip and offer him the bottle. He takes it, drinks. We sit in silence for a while, watching couples and young families stroll by, and I feel the weight of everything I want to say to him, of everything I’ve been unable to say over the phone. He has another swig and passes the bottle back to me.

  “You know, when you were kidnapped?” I say, turning to face him. “We were trying.” I inform him that Roselia had called detective agencies, the FBI, practically everyone she knew in Mexico. That my journalist friend had put me in contact with the fed, and I thought about asking him to send in the troops, but Mary didn’t want the feds getting involved, and Yesenia was afraid that if a shoot-out ensued, he might get caught in the cross fire. “One would say yes, another would say no, and by the end of the week, we hadn’t moved an inch to the left or to the right,” I say. “What did you think when you heard we weren’t calling back? Did you think we had abandoned you?”

  “No, I knew it was a tough situation,” he says, glancing down the path where two kids, a boy and a girl roughly six and eight, are racing toward us. “It’s a good thing you guys stayed out of it. Those people are ruthless.”

  “We didn’t call Rosario back because we thought she might have something to do with it, found it peculiar they had left her as the middleman,” I say.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if she did have something to do with it,” he says. “A lot of those men are from la sierra, from the same area she’s from up in the mountains. That’s where they grow their crops, la mota, la amapola, all of it. They grow it up there and then bring it down in truckloads.” He explains how they have their lookouts stationed on either end of town. Two SUVs sit at the gas station on the north, and another two sit in front of the slaughterhouse in the south, and all day long they are monitoring the road that runs in front of La Peña as it stretches from the mountains on one end and all the way to the border, practically, on the other.

  The two kids arrive screeching with laughter and throw their arms around the rock in front of us. “Chapucero,” the girl yells. They’re out of breath and arguing about who won and who cheated. The boy turns and shoots my father a smile—kids and dogs have always been drawn to him. My father waves at them, they wave back, and then they’re off and running down the path, racing toward their parents.

  “Did you think at times that might be it?” I ask.

  “At times, yes.” He looks across the sun-drenched grass and begins to recount the events of that afternoon. When they picked him up in the lot, they escorted him to one of the SUVs, where there was a woman sitting in the backseat, holding his father’s rifle between her knees. She went by the nickname of La Mona, they all went by nicknames, but she was the main one, the one giving the orders. She blindfolded him with duct tape and toilet paper and kept calling him her “little golden chicken.” “I don’t know, I guess she assumed she was going to collect a fortune from you guys,” he says. Once again, the two kids are throwing their arms around the rock, laughing and arguing. Their parents arrive on their heels and take a seat on the rock across from us, and though my father is looking right at them, I can tell that his thoughts are elsewhere. “There’s a campground in the desert where they train their recruits, young boys mostly, some as young as eight or nine,” he says. “A lot of those kids are homeless and they pick them up off the streets and offer them jobs, offer them food and money, and then they get them hooked on the white powder, until eventually the kids are willing to work for the powder alone.”

  “Poor kids,” I say.

  “No, imagine a life like that? Those kids grow up and they don’t give a damn about anything,” he says. “On that same campground, they have these large cylinders filled with acid, and that’s where they dispose of the bodies. There’s a man who goes by the nickname of the Soupmaker, and all day long he’s poking and prodding inside the cylinders with a long stick, constantly stirring, and…”

  “You saw that?” I turn to look at him.

  “Ey.”

  “I thought they had you blindfolded.”

  “They did,” he says, his eyes locking with mine. “They kept me in the backseat of a Suburban the whole time and sometimes they’d stop at the camp to drop someone off, and a lot of the time they left me alone in the truck or sitting under a tree and if I leaned my head back and lifted the duct tape a bit, I could see what they were doing.” He wrinkles his nose as if he can still smell the stench of the acid, as if he can still see the butchered human parts flying through the air like logs. “It’s horrible the things that they do. Horrible.”

  The family gets up and the father ushers them away, glaring over his shoulder at us as they go. My father doesn’t seem to notice. A grave look has settled on his face and stayed there.

  “You know, people in town were saying that they saw you driving around with them,” I say. “That you must have joined them.”

  “People will say whatever they want to believe. Look at how many times they’ve said I was dead, but here we are, right?” He cocks his eyebrow. “In the end, I befriended them, but that’s only because I helped them one night.” He lifts his hat off his knee and contemplates the inside of it as if he can see that night unfolding right there before him. He speaks in a steady voice, recounting the details. How the SUVs had crossed the state line, gone into Jalisco to pick up a man, and they had made such a racket trying to break through the front gate that by the time they got in, the man had escaped or hidden, and because of all the noise, the neighbors had called the police and the sirens were already approaching.

  They didn’t bother looking for the man. They took his wife instead, and from the backseat he could hear her screaming. Car doors slammed, the screaming was gone, and soon La Mona was back on one side of him and a man on the other, and then they were moving, bouncing along a dirt road. La Mona was shouting to the driver to go faster, and all the while the sirens were drawing near. There were a few scattered blasts in the distance, and then they were overtaken by machine-gun fire. He hunched over as glass shattered all around and felt the weight of the man who had been sitting to his right slump over him. He thought for sure he’d be next, could almost feel the bullet that would crack his skull, and so he did the one thing he had always done in these life-and-death situations. He began to pray. Asking Diosito to have mercy on his soul. And then they must have made it onto a paved road, because suddenly they were moving faster and the blasts and sirens were fading in the distance. He turns his hat over in his hands, oblivious to the security guard that has made his way over to the shade and is standing with his foot propped on the rock the family just vacated.

  Even through the static of their walkie-talkies he could hear the panic in their voices. Two of the SUVs had fla
t tires, and a few of those riding in the SUV behind theirs had also been hit. They rolled to a stop, car doors slammed, the door next to him flew open, and then the weight of the man was gone. “Vamos, viejo.” Someone gripped his arm and pulled him across the slick seat. Over the wailing of the approaching sirens, he could hear La Mona saying something about just leaving the woman because she had been hit and what good was she going to do them dead, anyway.

  They ushered him into a different SUV and again they were moving, flying around curves on an open road, the sirens growing louder and La Mona yelling that they needed to get off that road or they were never going to lose the feds. The driver snapped, what was he to do? This was the only road that led back to Zacatecas. They were in such a state that for a minute he thought they might turn their guns on each other, and that’s when he saw his opportunity. He knew that if they were on one of the only roads that ran from Jalisco back to Zacatecas, he could help them, and he told them so.

  “If we need your help, viejo, we will ask for it,” La Mona said.

  “Sí, viejo,” the driver said, “we’re near Huejúcar. Why? Is there some secret road that you know of?” He told him there was no other road. Only the terrain.

  He doesn’t seem to notice, or care, that the security guard is now standing with both feet planted on the ground, arms crossed, and glaring at us. I wouldn’t be surprised if he came over and asked us to leave.

  “They all fell silent,” he says, describing how no one spoke, though their glances must have been dancing between them, and all the while the sirens were getting closer, and then he felt the sting of the duct tape practically ripping the flesh off his face. It was pitch-dark out, just before dawn. They killed the lights and he led them off the main road and through the streets of Huejúcar, turning left and right while the sirens continued to wail out on the road. Once they had crossed through town, they came to a dirt trail that wound up the mountainside. The path gave way to the terrain, they shifted to four-wheel drive, and as they swerved around nopales and magueys, he tried to get his bearings. It had been years since he had ridden through those parts on horseback, and he wasn’t exactly sure where he was going, but he trusted his instincts, and by the time the stars had begun to fade, the landscape was already looking familiar.

  “Within an hour or so, we were in the vicinity of La Laguna,” he says. “Pascuala’s grandfather used to have a ranch near there, and when we were first married, we rode out there numerous times. If we set out at daybreak, we’d be arriving at his ranch right around noon.” Once they reached La Laguna, he knew exactly where he was, and by the time the first light of day was illuminating the horizon, they were practically crossing right in front of the gate to his ranch. He even had the urge to say, hey, why don’t you just let me out here, I’ve done my part, but he didn’t say anything, thought it best to keep his mouth shut. And besides, he didn’t want them knowing where his ranch was. He watched the entrance come and go and then they were making their way down and around the boulders near Santana. “How is it that you know this terrain so well, viejo?” La Mona asked, and he told her that in his younger years, he had crossed that terrain on horseback numerous times, had ridden as far as Monte Escobedo and back.

  By early morning, they were clearing the speed bumps on the south end of town. They pulled into the gas station and even let him use the bathroom—unescorted.

  “After that day, they were a lot nicer to me,” he says. “Even La Mona was nicer. She was such a harsh woman. But you should have heard her tone change whenever one of her kids called. She sounded like the pure truth, saying she missed them too and asking how they were doing in school, and were they obeying their grandmother, and had they gotten the gifts she had sent, and hee hee hee and ha ha ha. But other than that, she was heartless.”

  We sit in silence for a while and I try to wrap my head around his story, uncertain of what is true and what is fabricated. He seems to know an awful lot about their campgrounds and their routes, and why would he have helped his captors escape the police? Had he really guided them along the terrain or was he just trying to make himself out to be the hero? Perhaps even before he was kidnapped he had already gotten himself entangled with them, somehow. Why had he been so concerned with knowing when Mary would be returning from Chicago? Almost as soon as she returned, they picked him up in the lot.

  “Did you hear about the shoot-out that happened in Mary’s neighborhood?” I ask.

  “Ey,” he says.

  “Do you think it was the same one?” I ask, thinking that it must have been.

  “I don’t think so,” he says. “As far as I know, those people who picked me up never went near her neighborhood,” he says. Though, if he were blindfolded, how would he know if they went near her neighborhood or not? Maybe if the police hadn’t shown up, the kidnappers would have been kicking down Mary’s front door next. But would he betray one of his own daughters like that? Guide the cartel right to her front door? Or maybe they had forced him to lead them to her front door, and he had taken them to the neighbor’s door instead? Don’t worry, mijita, as long as I’m alive, no one is going to come bother you. I’m filled with so much doubt that I start thinking he may have never even been kidnapped, grow convinced that the next time I go see him, his door will be intact and his father’s rifle will still be slung above his bed. There are now two guards standing solid as pillars next to the rock.

  “Are you hungry?” I ask. “There’s a good seafood place just down the beach from here. We can walk there and sit with our feet in the sand, have some mariscos and an ice-cold beer.”

  We get up and make our way down the path. He tells me that after they let him go, La Mona and some of the others kept coming around the house, wanting him to go have a beer with them, but he didn’t really like hanging around them and would usually have Rosario say he wasn’t home. He says La Mona showed up one day, practically demanding to know who was watching over him, what saint was it that he prayed to? And was it true that he had a pact with the Other One?

  “I don’t know, I guess she heard stories around town,” he says. This is a rumor that has followed him his whole life—that he has a pact with the devil, though I’m not certain where it started. “But I told her it was just Diosito that watched over me. She didn’t seem convinced. Pero bueno, not long after that day, her corrido ended. I heard that her convoy had gotten into a shoot-out with the soldiers and she had been killed in the cross fire.”

  “Poor woman,” I say, and can’t help but feel for her kids.

  “Poor nothing,” he says. “With the way those people live, most of them don’t last long.”

  * * *

  On the night before my mother leaves Tulum, my two sisters and I meet her for dinner at La Nave, a brick-oven-pizza place in town that is run by an Italian family.

  “How’s your father?” my mother asks once we’ve settled into a table.

  “He seems fine,” I say, thinking he actually looks good, healthy, even though Mary had said that he had lost a lot of weight. He must have put most of it back on. “He has a new set of teeth,” I say. “Maybe the kidnappers knocked his teeth out.”

  “What teeth?” my mother says. “Your father never had any teeth. Even before we were married he had no teeth. He got them knocked out by a mule when he was a teenager,” she says. “Why? Did he tell you that the kidnappers knocked his teeth out?”

  “I didn’t ask about his teeth and he didn’t say anything.” The waitress comes by and drops off the menus. “He says he befriended the kidnappers, that they come by looking for him all the time,” I say.

  “Your father is such a liar,” she says. “By the time he’s told you one truth, he’s told you ten lies. If those men are going by the house looking for him, it’s because he must have joined them.”

  “He told me he didn’t, said he befriended them, but only because he helped them escape the feds one night, guided them from Jalisco back to Zacatecas across the terrain,” I say.

 
“That’s what he said?”

  “Ey.”

  “Who knows,” she says. “Your father does know that land like the palm of his hand. My grandfather used to have a ranch out there, near La Laguna. When we were first married, we used to ride out there on horseback all the time.”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “Maybe he did help them.” She frowns. “Pero eso sí, your father doesn’t have any friends, he doesn’t trust anyone. He’ll pretend to be their friend, but the first chance he sees to get even, he will.”

  * * *

  He walks into the ocean sideways, crablike, bracing himself against the three-foot waves that are rushing toward him. The waves break and send the white water rushing above his knees. He’s been here for a week and has yet to fully submerge himself in the ocean. When he first arrived, he had removed his cowboy boots, rolled his jeans up to his knees and walked to the water’s edge, saying that the sand felt nice—he had never felt the sand on his bare feet before. He’d only been to the beach once, somewhere in California, but had kept his boots on and had stayed under the shade of a tree, sharing a few beers with his buddies.

  “You have to come in past where the waves are breaking,” I yell to him. “It’s not deep, see?” I hold both my arms up so he can see that I’m standing. The waterline is just above my waist.

  He holds up one finger and waves it back and forth. He doesn’t know how to swim, almost drowned in the river when he was a kid. Another wave breaks and sends the white water rushing up his thigh, wetting the bottom half of the blue swim trunks that Sonia brought him from Chicago. He had arrived with one change of clothes—a pair of jeans and a black cowboy shirt, so I had called Sonia on the day before she flew down from Chicago. She brought him trunks, T-shirts, and flip-flops. I let him borrow my black baseball cap, which has STIHL written across the front in bold orange letters. He wore it into town one day and came back asking if I was aware that STIHL was a chainsaw brand. I told him a friend had given me the cap as a gift because that was the nickname my friends in New York had given me—Motosierra.

 

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