Bulletproof Vest

by Maria Venegas

  “He told me to tell you to take that poster down and burn it.” He looks off to the side, toward the gravel lot where the outdoor mercado is held every Sunday. “You know your father had a pact, not with God, but with the Other One.”

  “Okay,” she says, “we’ll burn it.”

  He gives her a nod, says he’ll see us later at La Peña, at the wake, and turns to leave, but stops as if he suddenly remembered something, as if there is just one more thing he wants to say. He looks at her, presses his lips tight, gives her a nod, and walks away.

  “That was strange,” Sonia says, once we’re all back in the car and driving to La Peña. She says she had called my father a few days before, and had told him that we might be coming down for the holidays, which were only six weeks away. None of us had been back since he had been kidnapped. But she, Yesenia, and I had been egging each other on, saying, I’ll go if you go, practically daring each other to enter together into that new and uncharted territory where norteños were no longer arriving in shiny new trucks—they were hardly arriving at all. Even the locals seemed to have bets on who could drive the most beat-up car, because the last thing anyone wanted was to call attention to themselves—to become a target. By then most of the SUVs had been replaced with bulletproof Hummers, which belonged to a different cartel, and it had become increasingly difficult to know who in town was still straight and who was working for the cartels. When Sonia told my father that the three of us might be coming for the holidays, his response had not been the usual “My home is your home” or “I’ll be here waiting for you.” “We’ll see if you catch me,” he had said. She hadn’t thought much of his remark at the time, but now it seemed to take on a whole new meaning. “It’s like Dad knew he was going to die,” Sonia says as we clear the last speed bump on the edge of town.

  “He probably did know,” Yesenia says. “A lot of people know. They have dreams—premonitions. That’s kind of crazy about that red poster, though.”

  “That poster always gave me the creeps,” I say, thinking how not once but twice I had found a black scorpion lurking underneath it. Maybe he did have a pact with the Other One after all, and I can’t help but wonder what would be worth trading his soul for. A reconciliation with each of his kids in this lifetime, perhaps? We drive past the yonke and soon we are flying past the slaughterhouse, and the curve, where there are a few people milling about.

  At the entrance of La Peña, one of the original limestone pillars is gone, has been demolished and replaced with a cement replica. There are cars and trucks parked haphazardly all over the grounds, and people are lingering in the courtyards of homes that are usually locked year-round. I’ve never seen so many people in La Peña, and yet it feels dismal—empty. Smoke smolders in a fire pit in front of the small church. Its tall wooden doors are wide open, and inside, two coffins sit side by side, flanked with fresh white flowers and waiting for my father’s to arrive.

  Chickens scatter when we pull up in front of his house. The old blue Ford truck is parked in front of the eucalyptus trees, and three dogs crawl out from under it and come up to the car, growling and barking at us. I’ve never seen any of them before. There’s a tall Doberman, a yellow-colored mutt with black stripes running across its back so that it looks like a miniature tiger, and a German shepherd puppy, but there’s no sign of El Negro.

  “Do you think they’ll bite?” Sonia asks, as she rolls down her window a bit. The puppy starts wagging its tail. I push my door open, just a crack. The Doberman sticks his snout in, barking and sniffing, and soon his tail is also wagging. Slowly, I step out of the car and make my way to the courtyard. I pull the gate open, chickens scurry away, and his yellow cat and a white cat with sky-blue eyes crawl out from under the slate sink. They meow as if voicing some deep complaint.

  “Poor animals,” Yesenia says. “They’re probably starving.”

  We look for the key, checking the usual hiding spots: inside the plants that line the cinder-block wall, under the slate sink, and behind the slab of limestone that sits next to his bedroom door.

  “That’s probably from when they kidnapped him,” Sonia says, staring at the door. It’s bent in several places and has rusted where the blue paint was scraped away. A new deadbolt lock has replaced the old one, and the sheen of the brass keyhole seems to glare at me, and there’s nothing I can do to douse the sudden flash of guilt I feel for having doubted him.

  We find the skeleton key, and inside the spare bedroom the red felt poster hangs on the wall above the bed where it has always been. I stare at the man in the portrait and for the first time notice the slight resemblance between him and my father. The Virgen de Guadalupe portrait is flanked with faded plastic flowers, and the green wooden table in front of the frame is covered with all the seashells and pieces of coral that he had collected on his morning walks along the beach in Tulum. Tucked behind the plastic flowers, on the bottom edge of the frame, is the starfish. I pick it up and turn it over in my hand. It’s been dead for eight months, and there is still a slight odor emanating from it.

  I place it in my bag and make my way to his bedroom, crossing through the storage room where Yesenia is filling up several tin cans with corn kernels and dog food. I pull open the shutters in the kitchen and can see the door to the corral is unlatched. Though El Relámpago and his other horse had gone missing within hours of the crash, in his house everything seems to be as he left it. The pine bowl sits on the kitchen table and is filled with a few Granny Smith apples, two overripe bananas, three potatoes, and one yellow onion. In the fridge there’s an orange plastic pitcher filled with milk; a thick layer of cream has solidified on top. Next to it is a white plastic pitcher filled with pinto beans. The freezer is packed with fresh red meat, which is not fully frozen yet.

  In his bedroom, too, everything seems to be as he left it. His bed is made, and his gun is in the same place where he had always kept it, the same place where his father had kept it, and his father before him—under his pillow. It’s a gun I’ve never seen before. A handsome .357 Magnum and it’s fully loaded and cocked. His cell phone sits on a chair at the foot of his bed, charging. I had called him on Tuesday and my call had gone straight to voice mail. Then I found out that on Tuesday, he had been up at the ranch branding all the new calves that had been born during the rainy season. Service up at the ranch was always spotty. The rusty nail on which his father’s rifle once hung juts out of the wall above his bed, and I wish there was a way I could find him and tell him I was sorry I had ever doubted him.

  At the other end of the room, on the spare bed, all of his hats are laid out in a row. Though he had always kept them either in their box or hanging on the wall and wrapped in a plastic casing, now they are all seemingly on display. Next to the hats are two framed prints of the black-and-white photo that had always hung on his bedroom wall. In the photo, he sits atop El Tapatío, the black horse he had owned in his younger years. He once told me that he had taught that horse how to dance. He had taken the photo down, had two prints made and framed, and had laid them out on the bed along with the original. The hats and the photographs are neatly organized in two rows that seem to say, “Pick one.”

  Sonia stares at the display on the bed and seems to be thinking what I’m thinking—my father knew he was going to die. It wasn’t a mere premonition, but something more concrete—a threat or a warning. Maybe he had seen the chance to get even, had gone for it, and he knew it was only a matter of time before they came looking for him, before they arrived and kicked down his front door yet again. And perhaps he knew that the second time around he might not be so lucky, the second time around there wouldn’t be enough charm on the planet to save him. Be that as it may, he was not going to run away. It’s as though he had accepted his fate.

  We head back outside and one of the neighbors makes her way over. She offers her condolences and says they’ve already made a space for my father inside the church, next to the other two.

  “Who could have foreseen such a thing,�
�� she says, and tells us that just a week ago, two men from a ranch that sits a bit farther down the road had also flipped their truck at that curve and died. And only a few days before, a van with five students had also gone off the road at the curve, and how strange it is that people who grew up here, traversing that stretch of land their whole lives, would all come to die at the same spot.

  She had seen my father on the day of the accident. It was about three in the afternoon and he had just fed his horses and was coming out of the corral when he ran into Miguel and Rosario. They were already in Rosario’s Suburban, heading into town to run a few errands, and he had asked them for a ride. His compadre, a mechanic, was doing some work on his black Bronco, and he wanted to see if it was ready. She had seen the three leave together, and then it was just after nine when the news reached her. Someone from Tejones, the small ranch that sat near the curve, had called—the people there had heard the noise when the Suburban went flying off the shoulder. The vehicle had been going about ninety miles an hour, and it had rolled some six or nine times as it went thrashing along the side of the road in a fury of spinning lights and crushing metal, sending each of its passengers soaring into the moonlit night. The music was still blaring from the mangled mess after it stopped, the drums and horns of some corrido sounding out as if serenading the men—bidding them farewell.

  “The police turned off the music,” she says and explains how she, her husband, and a few others from La Peña had gone out to the site and waited with the three bodies until they were picked up. It was a frigid night, and the moon was shining bright, as it would be a full blue moon in a few days. Its rays were illuminating the three white sheets under which the bodies lay. All three of the men had landed facedown. Miguel was missing an arm. My father’s legs were crossed at the ankle, he wasn’t wearing any shoes, and his skull was caved in. Had his Bronco been ready, he wouldn’t have been with the other two. “It was nearly three in the morning when the vehicle of the coroner in Fresnillo arrived to take them away,” she says, and it breaks my heart to hear that my father had lain on the side of the road for six hours before being picked up. I thank her for having waited with him and she says it was no bother, it was the least she could do—they were neighbors, after all. “People in town often asked if I wasn’t afraid living next door to that neighbor of mine,” she says. “On the contrary,” I told them. “Having him for a neighbor was like having a security guard in La Peña. Who knows what will happen now that he’s gone.”

  She tells us that the musicians who usually play at all the events in La Peña called and offered to come play at the wake in the evening for a few hours—free of charge, as they knew all three of the men. She’s making a large pot of coffee and asks if we can pick up some cookies and bread from the panadería in town, since it’s going to be a long night and there will be a lot of people coming to pay their respects. Just yesterday, a bus with about twenty people, most of whom were originally from La Peña, arrived from Texas.

  “There will probably be people coming just to see if it’s true, if Jose is really dead. Your father was famous for cheating death,” she says. “Pero bueno, se nos fue el héroe del valle.” She jokes that people will have to find something else to talk about now that he’s gone, as he was the one who was always out there causing trouble and creating stories. She’s right. There was a long list of stories, myths, and rumors that had surrounded him his whole life, and though he was gone, his stories had not died with him.

  “Which one of you is the writer?” asked a woman who had come to the funeral home the night before. She and her husband operated a tavern on the edge of town, and my father had been one of their regulars. “Just two weeks ago, he brought me a book, saying that his daughter had written one of the stories in it, and could I please translate it for him.” She was fluent in English, as she and her husband had lived in California for several years before returning to Valparaíso. And so in between pouring drinks and busing tables, she had begun to relay bits and flashes of his life back to him.

  Over the next few days—and years, even—people will share stories about him. My tío Antonio will tell me the story about the shoot-out with Fidel, how it had all started because of a misunderstanding over a bull. For the most part it will be the same story my father had told me. Though in my uncle’s version, it was Salvador who was twelve years old and my father was a bit older.

  I lock up his house, drop the skeleton key in my bag, and we make our way back into town. People are still lingering near the curve. We pull over and park next to the cars and trucks that are stationed on the dirt road that runs parallel to the paved one. Red and orange bits of taillights and shattered glass are strewn about. The windshield is still lying on the shoulder, and though it’s completely shattered, every shard of glass is still in place, held together by the black rubber lining around it. Someone has made the sign of the cross with stones, marking the spot where each body was found, and just off the side of the road, two stone crosses lie side by side. Next to the crosses is the side-view mirror. Red and blue wires reach out from the base where it was ripped clear off the door. Half the mirror is still inside the frame, and in it I see the reflection of my black motorcycle boot and the vast blue sky behind it.

  “Do you know where they found Jose?” I ask a man who is roughly my father’s age and is wearing a straw cowboy hat and has a leather cell phone case slung from his belt.

  “Jose was all the way over there,” he says, pointing to the barbed-wire fence that runs along the side of the dirt road. On the other side of the fence there’s an open field with dried cornstalks, and just beyond it is the river that runs between Tejones and La Peña. From where I’m standing, I can see the entrance to La Peña. “He was the one who got thrown the farthest,” the man says. “You see those skid marks?” He points toward the road, and just before the curve there are two sets of long black lines that snake into and away from each other before disappearing into the tall grass. “The truck started rolling from where those lines end and it took out that sign.” He motions to a slightly bent green road sign that has TEJONES written across it in white letters. “But the people of Tejones already stood it back up. They say they heard when the truck hit the curve, heard the metal grinding and the voices of the men crying out as it rolled over a span of about twenty-five meters,” he says, and while he speaks I can practically see the truck thrashing along the expanse, like a mighty bull bucking, refusing to go down, and yet it went.

  “They must have been flying,” the man says. “No, pobres, the truck landed right about here.” He is standing near the two crosses. “Rosario and Miguel were right next to it, practically, but Jose was about twenty meters away from where it landed.” He starts walking across the dirt road, toward the barbed-wire fence, and stops in front of a slanted wooden fence post. “Jose landed somewhere around here and then he either crawled or dragged himself, I don’t know, I guess with the anxiety of death upon him, he started pulling himself across the ground. You can see the trail he left.”

  The man makes his way along the barbed-wire fence, pointing to the flattened grass, which is streaked with dried blood. There are imprints in the dirt, not from a shoe but from something smaller, an elbow or a knee perhaps. The arms of a nopal are reaching through the barbed wire, and one of them has a dark-brown streak where the thorns have been wiped clear off it. I had heard that my father had a few thorns in his face when they found him. The tracks continue on in a straight line along the fence, moving in the direction of his home. Hurt as he was, his instinct had not been to hold steady and wait for help to arrive this time but rather to keep on moving. What was he trying to get away from?

  The movement comes to a sudden stop at the foot of a huisache, and there, next to the third stone cross, is a dark pool of dried blood. A few leaves are caught in the grass blades around it and are fluttering in the breeze. I squat down and pluck one of the leaves from the grass and run my thumb over the dried blood on its surface.

  “Th
at is where they found Jose,” the man says, and I’m vaguely aware that he’s standing somewhere behind me. “As you can see, that’s where he left his blood. How did you know him, anyway?”

  I stare into the dark pool where life had drained from him. It’s like staring into a black hole—a space so dense that nothing escapes it, not even light.

  “He was my father.”

  EPILOGUE: EL CORRIDO DEL CIEN VACAS

  MY FATHER had already written his own corrido. A few days after we buried him, we found it inside the green trunk that sat in the corner of his bedroom, along with his will, old land deeds, court documents, letters, and newspaper clippings. My sisters had each taken one of his hats, and I took the original black-and-white photograph, the newspaper clippings, and several old documents. I placed everything inside the same beige backpack he had in Tulum and brought it back to New York. The backpack sat at the foot of my bed for weeks, as I had intended to go through everything. Eventually, the sight of it became unbearable—a constant reminder that he was gone. I finally shoved it under my wardrobe, behind a row of shoes, and it sat there for three years before I worked up the nerve to go though it. I had not been back to Mexico since we had buried him, though I had heard about the roadside memorial the people of La Peña had erected at the curve in memory of the three men.

  I poured myself a glass of wine, placed my father’s photograph on a wooden shelf in my kitchen, next to a small cactus plant, and spread all the documents out on my living room floor. He had saved everything—newspaper clippings for each time he had made the paper, the court documents with all the testimonies for when everything happened with my uncle and my brother, and love letters that women had sent him while he was in prison. I started reading through the testimonies, and stumbled upon that of the man who had killed my brother. Up until then, I had never known what his name was because everyone had always referred to him as the handicapped bastard. His name was Herman Sinmental and in his testimony he stated that on the day he shot my brother he had not been drinking, though he had been very anxious and that he had been hearing voices all day, as he often did. Sometimes he’d have visions as well, visions of naked women and children playing in a lake of fire. He stated that his brothers had given him the gun and later that night, when his father told him that he had shot Chemel Venegas, he had no recollection of it.