Bulletproof Vest

by Maria Venegas

  Though it was actually Martin who had come up with the nickname. He and I had gone to see a band, and were supposed to meet up with some friends at a rooftop party in SoHo afterward. I’d had one too many gin and tonics and on the way to the party had gotten into an altercation with some thugs.

  “What happened to you guys last night?” my friend asked, when we ran into him the next day.

  “I needed to get Maria home before midnight,” Martin said, “or she might have turned into a chainsaw.”

  My father didn’t ask any questions, probably didn’t want to know how I ended up with such a nickname, though he must have understood that whatever part of me was a chainsaw was fueled by his blood. That the “nerves of steel” he had been so proud of had grown up to be a chainsaw. Another wave breaks and again the white water is rushing past his thighs.

  “You need to come a bit deeper,” I yell, waving both my arms above my head. “I’m standing, see?”

  He takes two hesitant steps in, grabs the Santo Niño de Atocha leather necklace that hangs around his neck, and swivels it around, letting it fall onto his back. His chest and gut are riddled with scars. Each of those scars has a story behind it, though when I was a kid, I used to think that he had been born that way. I have often wondered what his life would have been like had he been born in a different time and place. Had he had a vocation or craft—music or writing—into which he could have channeled all that passion that turned to violence.

  He kneels down and braces himself against the white water that is rushing toward his chest. Once it passes, he cups both his hands, scoops up some water, and douses his head, his shoulders. He waits for the next wave to break and pass, and then he holds his breath and dunks his head into the water. Just as quickly as he went under he is back up and gasping for air as if he has just plunged to the bottom of the sea and back.

  * * *

  On the day he leaves, I help him arrange his things in his backpack: the extra clothes Sonia brought him, the flip-flops, and all the things he’s collected on his morning walks along the beach. Since he arrived, his internal clock had continued operating on the same schedule, and though my sisters and I slept until 7:00 or 8:00 a.m., he had been up at 5:00 a.m., walking down the shore, chatting with the Mayan men that rake debris from the beach in front of the boutique hotels that line the waterfront. Eventually, he returned from his walks carrying seashells and pieces of coral that he collected along the way. He laid everything out to dry on the front deck, saying he was going to bring those things back and place them on the table in front of the Virgen de Guadalupe portrait in his house.

  “When you get back, make sure you clean out the starfish or it’s going to start to smell,” I say, placing the starfish in a plastic bag and putting it in the front pocket, apart from everything else. The starfish was still alive when I found it floating near the water’s edge the night before. I had carried it back to the cabin to show it to him and he had held it in his hand and watched in awe as it curled its arms around his fingers. He had not known such a thing existed—a living star, not in the sky, but in the sea. La estrellita del mar, he had called it and said that would be a good nickname for me—the Star of the Sea. When I suggested we go throw it back in the water, he had looked confused.

  “Why would you want to do that?” he had said. “What if this is the thing that’s going to bring us good luck, and you go and throw it back in the water?” I told him that if we didn’t, it would die. “Let’s do this,” he said, suggesting that we leave it out overnight, and that if it was still alive in the morning we’d throw it back in the ocean. But if it was dead, then he’d take it back home with him. “Obre Dios, obre Dios,” he had said, placing it on a small wooden table near the bathroom, and all through the night I could practically hear it struggling, found myself wishing I had never found it.

  I place a copy of the British literary journal where I had been published the year before on top of his clothes and zip up the backpack. When I had first shown it to him, he had taken it and flipped through the pages. It was written in English, so he didn’t understand a single word. I turned to the page where my story began. There was a black-and-white photograph of him and my mother standing in front of the house with the pink limestone arches. In the photo, it’s snowing and Mary and Chemel, who are roughly two and four, stand between them. My father is wearing a large white sombrero, a black button-down, black trousers, and black cowboy boots, and there is a switchblade and a gun slung from his belt.

  “Where is your photo?” he asked, and I told him that the story was not so much about me as it was about him.

  We head into town and board the Kombi to Playa del Carmen, an hour away. I had agreed to go with him to the bus station in Playa and make sure he got on the right bus back to the Cancún airport. When we arrive at the station, we’re informed that the next bus to the airport doesn’t leave for another hour. We purchase his ticket and go for a stroll along the promenade, find a place to sit, and have smoothies. He orders mango, I get blueberry, and as we suck them down we watch the mostly white tourists strolling by with shopping bags and Frappuccinos from Starbucks in hand. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out the small linen pouch the Mayan medicine man had given him, says that when he gets back, he’s going to empty the contents all around his house; the man told him that stuff would reverse any curse.

  We had stumbled upon the medicine man by accident a few days before. We were in the neighboring town, and on the way back, we noticed a handwritten sign on the side of the road, something about medicinal Mayan herbs. Since Yesenia is taking an herbology class, she pulled over. We made our way through the grounds, along narrow dirt paths that were lined with labeled plants growing out of clay jugs, plastic buckets, and old tin pots. The medicine man was at the far end of the grounds, standing under a gazebo and conducting a lecture to a group of German medical students. He looked up when he heard us coming. He was a short, solid, dark-skinned man, and when his gaze landed on my father, he stopped mid-sentence and blinked twice, as if he were seeing double. The German students moved aside and my father made his way to the front. He walked up to the medicine man as if they had an appointment, like one had been expecting the other.

  “Do you have anything to break a spell?” my father asked. “Say if someone has thrown the salt on you, do you have something that will get rid of it?”

  The man gave him a nod and then they were both off and walking down the path, the man pointing out and clipping leaves from different plants here and there as they went. The German students followed close behind, scribbling in their notebooks, jotting down antidotes for getting rid of the salt, notes that were probably lost in translation before the ink hit the page. My father and the man continued down the path and then were stepping into a small shack and closing the door behind them.

  When my father emerged some fifteen minutes later, he was holding the white linen sack and grinning from ear to ear, saying the man had told him that the reason why no one had been able to kill him was because the spirit of a soldier was watching over him. And that wasn’t the first time he had heard that. Once when he had gone up to the sierra with Rosario, a Huichol shaman had told him the same thing.

  After we finish our smoothies, we meander back to the bus station and find the line for his bus.

  “When we were coming here, all of a sudden the plane started shaking,” he says. “Out of nowhere, it suddenly started moving this way and that and everyone sitting around me started praying and crossing themselves.”

  “The shaking is normal,” I say, and do my best to explain how the turbulence has more to do with the clouds than with the plane, though I can tell that he’s nervous about flying. “You’ll be fine,” I say. “They say you have a greater chance of being killed in a car accident than in a plane crash.”

  “Why don’t you come with me to the airport?” he says as people start boarding. “What if I get lost?”

  “There’s no way you’ll get lost,” I say. “T
his bus goes straight to the airport.”

  “When do you think you’ll come visit again?” he asks, when we are almost at the door.

  “Maybe I’ll come in the summer,” I say, though I know I won’t, and he must know it also. He had told his sister that the worst part about having been kidnapped was that we were not going to go spend time with him anymore. It’s been seven months since he was kidnapped, and things in town have deteriorated so much that recently a young boy was gunned down by the cartel in the middle of the day and the police had never shown up. There is hardly a police force left, and of those who are left, it’s difficult to know who is still straight and who is working for the cartel.

  “I have a beautiful white mare for you to ride the next time you come,” he says, shooting me a smile. “She’s perfect for you, really nice and tame.”

  We reach the front of the line and give each other a hug. I give him a kiss on the cheek, and he gives me a nod and boards the bus. His chin had quivered when he had said goodbye to Sonia and Yesenia earlier today, but it’s not quivering now. He’s been here for two weeks and I assume he’s ready to head back to his cattle, to his mountainside. The night before, while we were sitting on the beach at sunset, he pointed to the pastel cloud formations at the edge of the sea, saying that they looked like mountains.

  We were admiring the violet hues when an eagle flew out of the jungle and landed on the thatch cabana next to ours. It spread its wings to their full span, revealing the black-and-white-striped feathers under the brown and beige ones. It held that pose for a long time as if wanting to make sure we grasped the full complexity of its beauty before it took flight, flew back into the jungle, and vanished.

  26

  BLUE MOON

  IT’S WEDNESDAY NIGHT, shortly after 11:00 p.m. and I have just dozed off when I hear my phone buzzing on the nightstand. I have two missed calls from Sonia and one text: Call me 911.

  What did he do now, I think. It had been eight months since we were in Tulum, and though he had stopped drinking for a while, he had started up again. He had recently called Sonia crying and saying that he was all alone down there, like a dog. “Como un pinche perro,” he said. Rosario had left him for good, had been gone for three months. Maybe he shot himself. He had once told me that if he ever got to the point where he could no longer fend for himself, or no longer wanted to be here, he would put a bullet in his head and that would be the end of that corrido. I knew it was the tequila talking. He may have had the nerve to shoot himself in the thigh when he was a teenager, but he would never have the nerve to put a bullet in his own head. Though, a few years back, that’s exactly what his cousin Máximo had done. It was New Year’s Eve, and he and my father had been out drinking, then Máximo had gone home and blown his brains out. If there was one thing that frightened my father more than anything, it was death. He was afraid of what might be waiting for him on the other side.

  “What’s going on?” I ask Sonia, when I finally call her back.

  “I’ve got some bad news,” she says, and a single thought flashes through me like a sudden prayer: Please don’t let it be my mother.

  “What happened?” I ask.

  “Dad died.”

  “That’s impossible,” I say. Hearing those two words used in the same phrase—Dad died—sounds like a lie. “How?”

  “There was a car accident,” she says.

  “It’s probably not him,” I say, not wanting to believe it. “Who called you?”

  She had thought the same thing. That the townspeople were claiming yet again he was dead when he actually wasn’t, and so she had called our cousin Norma and asked if she’d go to the site of the crash and confirm that it was him.

  “We just got off the phone,” she says. “It’s him.”

  “And he’s definitely dead? Did she check his pulse? Did anyone call an ambulance?” I ask, aware of how my voice is already breaking. “Where’s Mom?”

  “She’s on her way back from Mexico City.”

  “Where is he?”

  “On the road, near the curve somewhere.”

  After I ask all kinds of questions for which she doesn’t have the answers—was he drinking, was he driving, was he alone?—we get off the phone. I sit in bed staring into the abyss for a long time, trying not to think of him lying out there on the side of the road somewhere, two thousand miles away. I scroll through my phone and stop on that three-letter word: Dad. There he is, still wedged between Cait and Dawn. I get the urge to call him as if he just might pick up. The last time I talked to him, I told him that some publishers were interested in a book. That perhaps he’d end up with an entire book written about him and not just a corrido.

  “Está bien, mija,” he said, and I could practically hear the smile spreading across his face. “Sígale echando ganas a la vida, y sin mirar atrás.” He told me to keep on keeping on in life, without ever looking back.

  Those were his last words to me.

  * * *

  “You’re Jose’s daughter, aren’t you?” a woman behind one of the counters at the indoor mercado asks me, when my two sisters and I walk in on Friday morning. The scent of freshly squeezed oranges and oregano lingers in the air, and the place is abuzz with laughter, loud conversations, and the sound of spoons hitting against ceramic plates—life as usual.

  “Ey,” I say, and though I want to ask how she knows who I am, I can tell by the way patrons at other counters are stealing glances that everyone knows exactly who we are.

  “You’re a profesora, right?” she asks, wiping her hands on her white-and-green-checkered apron.

  I tell her yes, because I don’t feel like explaining that the teaching was only a part of the MFA program. She offers her condolences and says that my father often ate at her counter, and that every time he came in, he would tell her that he had a daughter who looked just like her. There is definitely a resemblance.

  “Your father was just in here the other day,” she says. “He sat right there.” She motions to the bench in front of me, and it seems impossible to be occupying the space his body recently vacated. “Where is your father now?” she asks.

  “In Fresnillo,” I say. The day before, after having spent the entire day traveling, I had arrived at the funeral home in Fresnillo. Mary and my mother were already there, along with my father’s younger sister. When they rolled his coffin in, his mustache was jet black, recently dyed, and his head was covered with a white linen cloth in order to conceal his skull, which had been severely fractured in the accident. We had stayed up all night, taking turns nodding off in foldout chairs, and the whole thing felt off—the stale air in the place, the glare of the fluorescent lights, the cold coffeepot in the corner—not what he would have wanted. “We’re having him transferred back to La Peña today,” I say.

  My aunt had tried to protest, saying that we shouldn’t take my father back to La Peña, that we shouldn’t be going there ourselves—it was too dangerous. Rumor had it that he had something hidden in the house, drugs or weapons, or both, and what if whoever that stuff belonged to came looking for it? We assumed she was being overly dramatic, or that perhaps she had an ulterior motive for wanting us to stay away from his house. She was the one who had nearly sold off all of their inheritance when he was in prison.

  “That’s good that you’re taking him back to La Peña,” the woman says, looking not at me but at something or someone behind me. “That was his home. That’s what he would have wanted.” She smiles politely and goes back to stirring the giant pot of menudo in front of her.

  After eating, we make our way back to the rental car and run into Rafael, the young man my father had hired to fix the barbed-wire fence posts on his ranch. He offers his condolences, asks when my father’s funeral Mass is going to be.

  “Tomorrow at noon,” Sonia tells him. “At the cathedral in the plaza.”

  “Good to know. People have been asking, but no one seemed to know anything.” He removes his baseball cap and cocks his head to the side, s
quints in the sun. “I went looking for him in La Peña yesterday, a few others did as well, but he wasn’t there. Rosario and Miguel are there, inside the church,” he says. Rosario and Miguel were with my father on the night of the accident—all three had died. Both Rosario and Miguel were also from La Peña. I had never met Miguel, as he had recently moved back to La Peña from elsewhere. And though Rosario lived in Texas, I had met him once, briefly, during the annual Día Tres de Mayo festivities, which had been held inside the church where his body now lay. When I first heard that two others had gone with my father, I couldn’t help but think that he had taken them with him so that he wouldn’t be alone when he crossed over to the other side. “Where is your father now?” Rafael asks.

  Sonia tells him that his coffin should be arriving at La Peña by early afternoon.

  “That’s good, that the three of them are going to be together,” he says. “They went together, so it makes sense that they should be together.” He cranes his neck to the side and it seems he’s trying to look over his shoulder without actually looking. “Can I ask you something?” he asks.

  “Sure,” Sonia says.

  “How well did you know your father?”

  “Pretty well, why?”

  “No reason.” He places his baseball cap back on his head and pulls it down tight over his ears.

  “Listen, there is nothing about my father that would surprise us,” Sonia says.

  He takes a deep breath and then he’s speaking rapidly, as if he’s being timed.

  “I was with your father two weeks ago and he told me to tell you to pray a lot for him. He said he had done some very bad things, and to tell you to ask God to have mercy on his soul.” He scans the sidewalk behind her. “There’s a red poster in his house, perhaps you’ve seen it? It has the portrait of a Spanish pirate or conquistador on it?”

  She knows the one—we all do.