Bulletproof Vest

by Maria Venegas

  “Your brother was pure life around here,” Jose, a man that I met at my father’s wake, told me. He had been one of the twenty that had gone down in the bus from Texas, as one of the other men who died with my father was his brother. Jose had lived in La Peña back when my brother was there; they were the same age and went everywhere together. I asked if he knew the man who had killed my brother. “Sí, cómo no, méndigo cojo,” he said, yelling over the music, while we stood outside the church, warming our hands near the fire pit and sipping coffee with tequila from Styrofoam cups. “Your brother was always giving him lifts, we all were, but your brother would drive him to his front door. Though it was really his two brothers that had it out for Che,” he said. “One time we were at a rodeo and the two of them showed up with a few others. They started taunting your brother, saying things to him, but he ignored them. Che was really calm, never went looking for trouble, pero eso sí, if it came looking for him, he didn’t back down either. We were leaving the rodeo when one of them threw a bottle and it hit your brother in the back. We all stopped, wanted to jump in, but he told us to stay out of it. He turned around, and there must have been about six or seven of them, and one by one, they came at him, and believe me when I tell you that just as they came, so, too, did they fall,” he said. “You know Che was a karateka?”

  My brother was a black belt in karate. He had always loved those old Bruce Lee movies, and while Jose spoke, I could practically see my brother standing in the field, the dust rising around him as he sent them reeling to the ground—a black belt cowboy.

  “Well, ever since then they had it out for him, but it had really started long before then, because Che and one of the brothers both liked the same muchacha, and she liked Che,” he said. “Incluso, on the night they killed him, he had gone to say goodbye to her. To tell her that even though he was leaving for the other side, someday soon he’d be returning, because he had decided he wanted to stay here,” he said.

  “He did?” This is something I hadn’t known, I had always thought my brother didn’t like living in Mexico, assumed the last two years of his life had been miserable. Though it made sense that he would have wanted to stay—what was the point of going back to the other side, to pick up his day shift at the factory, where he would be breathing toxic fumes day in and day out for years to come.

  “Told me so himself,” Jose said. “Even his corrido was written that way, don’t you remember?” There was something about the way he asked this question that made me feel as though we had known each other for years. My father had played my brother’s corrido night after night and though I had memorized all the other ballads, I could not remember a single word of my brother’s. “It’s hard to believe that your father is gone,” he said. “When he was ambushed I stepped out of my house in the morning and his truck was still pressed up against the wall across the dirt road, and on the driver’s-side door alone I counted forty bullet holes.”

  The morning after the wake, the red poster had been reduced to ash in the fire pit in front of the church. Rafael telling us to take that poster down and burn it had been the first of my father’s messages to reach us—he had left messages with others, including Doña Consuelo.

  “When you take your father away from here, tell the músicos to play ‘Las Golondrinas,’” she said. She had been in her courtyard hanging laundry when she heard the music coming from my father’s house, and so she set out across the dirt road to find me. The white truck that would be taking his coffin to the cathedral in town was already stationed in front of his courtyard, his coffin resting on the truck bed, while the musicians played from under the shade of the mesquite—a final send-off. “Two weeks ago, your father came over, he had been drinking, and I made him a sandwich,” she said. “And while we sat in my kitchen, he told me to tell you that when you took him away from here, to take him with that song.”

  “Las Golondrinas” is a ballad about the final flight of the swallow that speculates where the swallow that has left this place will find its new home. While it played, the procession made its way out of La Peña. I sat next to his coffin and the noon sun shone strong and bright while the drums and horns echoed off the distant ridges. A few people were milling about at the curve, and in front of the slaughterhouse, under the shade of the mesquite, were two Hummers, parked side by side, like two scorpions nestled under the cool dank of a rock.

  “You and your sisters need to be careful of who you talk to and what you say,” one of my father’s acquaintances told me when he came by the wake. I looked at him and asked if he thought we were in some sort of danger by being there, though it’s not like we could have left town and abandoned my father’s coffin. “No, nada de eso,” he said. “It’s just that there are going to be a lot of cabrones coming around here tonight. Some of them you may know, but others you probably don’t. And you and your sisters just need to be careful, that’s all.” He suggested we stay in a hotel, or with relatives in town, while we finished putting all of my father’s business in order, saying we should do what needed to be done and leave town as soon as possible. “You and your sisters have a reputation for having money, and now that your father is gone, some imbecile might start getting bright ideas,” he said.

  After we passed the slaughterhouse, I kept looking back, wouldn’t have been surprised if the Hummers had come after us. No one would have stopped them. It had been a year and a half since the jail break, since the SUVs had arrived in town like a plague, like a swarm of moths that had begun to eat away at the fabric of the community, leaving holes where so many had been killed or disappeared. It started with kidnappings, though eventually people were simply vanishing. Someone would go missing and there was no phone call, no ransom to be paid—there was nothing but the growing sentiment that the government had turned its back on the people, that the cartels and the government were the two sides of the same coin.

  Before the procession reached town, we could already hear the drums and horns thundering in the plaza. The music overtook ours as we pulled into the square. It seemed the entire town was there, like everyone who had claimed that my father was dead, time and time again, had come to see him off. One of my cousins had approached me at the wake and told me about the first time that the town had claimed my father was dead.

  “When your father was still a teenager, fifteen or sixteen, he was at a rodeo, pulled out his gun, and unloaded it into the sky, as he always did,” my cousin said. “Two feds rode up to him. ‘Jose,’ they said, ‘we already warned you. Hand over your gun. You can go pay the fine and pick it up on Monday morning.’ And what do you think your father did? He made his horse rear and took off at full gallop. The two feds went after him, shooting at him from either side. Up ahead, the road was barricaded. Someone had parked their truck across it, and the feds stopped, thinking your father would have to stop. Well, believe me when I tell you that his horse leaped clear over the truck and disappeared into the desert. A few hours later, when he hadn’t resurfaced, everyone started saying that he was dead—shot by the feds. The feds themselves swore that they had been aiming for his horse, but they had seen the dust flying off your father’s back where the bullets hit. So, imagine everyone’s surprise when a few days later he was hanging out in the plaza as if nothing had ever happened? It was from then on that people were afraid of your father, started saying he must have a pact with the devil.”

  The procession pulled up in front of the cathedral as the first bell rang out. Its tall wooden doors were wide open, and six men carried my father’s coffin up the stairs as a parade snaked around the square. Young girls in floor-length dresses and ribbons in their hair twirled round and round with their partners, who wore cowboy hats and handkerchiefs around their necks. Behind the dancing couples was a marching band, and behind the band were teenage girls dressed like Adelitas. They too wore long dresses and the iconic revolutionary bullets across their chests—it was Saturday, November 20, 2010, the centennial anniversary of the start of the Mexican Revolution. It was
on that same day, one hundred years ago, that the people of Mexico had taken up arms and risen against an oppressive government.

  The second bell rang as the men steadied my father’s coffin at the front of the altar—this was the same cathedral where he had been baptized and married. The third and final bell sounded out as I took a seat in the front pew, next to my sisters. When the priest was about halfway through the sermon a woman entered through the side door and sat down at the foot of the pulpit. Though she was facing us, her gaze was on the coffin. I had seen her around town several times and, no matter the weather, she always seemed to be wearing the same dark polyester slacks and navy-blue sweater. Her hair was boy short and looked like she may have chopped it herself using a machete. Had it not been for her full breasts, which practically rested on her stomach, obvious through her bulky sweater, one might have mistaken her for a man.

  “No, no, no, no, no,” she started chanting, as she rocked forward and back. The priest paid her no mind. He was saying something about how each one of us had our designated hour with God. “No, no, no, no, no.” Her chant grew louder and all the while she kept her gaze on the coffin. The priest adjusted his tone to overpower hers, and soon both their voices were echoing off the high ceiling and being amplified by the acoustics of the cathedral, so that they seemed to be arguing with each other, and I got the feeling that I was not in a church, but a courtroom, and it was my father’s soul that was on trial. And what if he did have a pact with the Other One? The love I felt for him was so overwhelming I was convinced it might be the antidote—the one thing strong enough to break any spell.

  The woman rose to her feet and slouched over to the coffin, craning her neck this way and that, like some prehistoric bird. She walked in a semicircle around the coffin, keeping her ear close to it, as if she were whispering or listening for something. She then reached for the lid, though her fingers stopped short of touching it. Her hands hovered there for a bit, she seemed to be negotiating something, and then she turned and went back out the way she came.

  After the service, the men hoisted the coffin onto their shoulders and went out the side door. The musicians played softly as we made our way across the river and up the hill to the cemetery on the edge of town—the same cemetery that had lived in my memory for years. The house my brother had built for my mother still sat next to it; she had never lived there and probably never would. Before we reached the cemetery, I saw her standing at its iron gate. She was wearing a long, light-blue dress that was fluttering in the breeze, a white wide-brimmed hat, and she was waiting for my father at the entrance. Later she would tell me how when she had received the call, they told her there had been an accident and word had it that the man she had been married to for a number of years had died in the crash.

  Bajaron al Toro Negro. This had been the one thought that had flashed through her—they have taken down the Black Bull. The Black Bull was immortalized in a corrido that told the story of a notorious black bull that no one had been able to take down, though many had tried.

  On the day after we buried my father, the last of his messengers found us.

  “Your father had a lot of money in that house,” the man said. “Just two weeks ago, we were having a few drinks at his house, and he took me into the storage room and moved an old wooden trunk away from the wall, and in the wall there was a large hole that was filled with weapons and money,” he said. “He had a great deal of old silver coins, and he told me to tell you to look for them. To search the house, search everything.”

  My sisters and I had ransacked his house but found nothing. Though by then, the only thing I wanted more than anything was to get out of town, thinking that whoever that stuff belonged to might come looking for it. For days after returning to New York, the minute I fell asleep, my mind raced back to his house and searched in vain for the hidden treasure. I climbed into the chimney, which led to a labyrinth of rooms from which there was no exit. Other times, the limestone floor would turn to dust beneath my feet, and I’d fall into a sinkhole that was infested with rattlesnakes.

  Eventually, Rosario told me that those things belonged to my father. That he still owned several of the weapons he had driven down from Chicago, including a machine gun. If there was some hidden treasure, it’s possible that Alma and Rosario found it. They had both come back for the funeral, and we told them they should stay and live in La Peña. Perhaps that was their inheritance—the house and the treasure—though my father also had a life insurance policy on which he had named Rosario as the beneficiary.

  I poured myself another glass of wine and continued sifting through the documents, and stashed between the birth and death certificates there were old land deeds dating back to the late 1800s, along with several rough drafts of his corrido. Traditionally, a person doesn’t write his own corrido. It’s usually written to commemorate a life after the person has died, but my father had hired some musicians to compose one for him. It was titled “El Corrido del Cien Vacas,” and the final copy was inside a plastic sleeve—it had even been notarized. His corrido was incomplete, of course, as he had no way of knowing how his life would end. He may have known his days were numbered, may have even accepted his fate, but he didn’t know what the last verse of his ballad would be.

  When he died he had made the newspapers yet again, and I had stored a copy of the article in the backpack. According to the report, on Wednesday night, just before 9:00 p.m., a blue Suburban that had been traveling south on Rural 44 had gone off the road and rolled several times, killing all three of its passengers. Miguel García, forty, Rosario Bueno, fifty-eight, and Jose Venegas, sixty-nine. Ever since the first time he had made the headlines, when everything had happened with Joaquín, I never trusted the newspapers, as more often than not they only scratched the surface of the real story. I could still practically hear my father laughing. Imagine? Killing a man over a goddamn beer?

  There was a knock at Tito’s door on the morning after the funeral. It was a man who had known my father since they were kids, and he had come to tell us the one thing the whole town must have been aware of but wouldn’t dare utter. The fear the cartels had instilled had silenced the community. The man was good friends with a couple from Tejones, and on the night of the crash, they had seen that when the Suburban went flying off the shoulder, practically traveling on its tailwind were two Hummers. My father had survived the crash and one of the men in the Hummers had hit him on the back of the head with the butt of a rifle—that was how his life had come to an end.

  I placed all the newspapers in one pile, court documents in another, birth and death certificates in another, as if by organizing everything, I might start to make sense of what was fact and what was myth. My father’s life story was written within those piles of paper, and the stories they contained were my patrimony. This was what I had inherited from him—not the hidden treasure, his cattle, or his ranch, but his stories.

  On the day we brought his herd down from the ranch, I stood on the plateau where I could still do a three-sixty and see the horizon all the way around. My mother was standing next to me and we were watching his cattle filter into the corral, and as the dust rose up around them, I could already feel his world receding from me. He was the doorway through which I had entered that terrain. Bringing his cattle down felt like the end of an era, like the mountain itself had been dismantled. He had no son to take over the livestock or the ranch. Chemel would have been the one, and now they both lay under the same headstone, under the same name, behind the gates of the cemetery that had haunted me for years. Where there was one cross, there were now four.

  “Look,” I said to my mother. “That’s Chupitos.” My mother had already heard all about the orphaned calf that had been adopted by La Negra. The last time I had spoken to my father, he had told me that Chupitos was pregnant. And now there she was in the corral, and trailing close behind her was a newly branded calf that looked just like her.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  According to Virginia Wo
olf, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write.” In an ever-changing cityscape, coming across either of these has become increasingly difficult. Thus, I feel the need to acknowledge the two individuals who provided me with ideal living situations while I was writing this book. George Wanat, thank you for keeping my rent stable throughout the years, even as the towers on the Brooklyn waterfront went up, the rents soared, and the neighborhood shifted—you are the most generous landlord on the planet. Elspeth Leacock, thank you for sharing your cottage over the summers, and for saving me from the city (and often from myself).

  This book would not have come to fruition without the encouragement and support of numerous friends and colleagues who read the manuscript and provided invaluable feedback along the way. Thank you to all at Hunter, especially Colum McCann, Vanessa Manko, and Peter Messina. I’m forever grateful to Granta and John Freeman for being the first to publish my work. My deepest gratitude to all at the Wylie Agency, especially Sarah Chalfant, for the guidance and all the hard work on behalf of this author. Many thanks to Kate Guiney, as well as to Gabriella Doob and everyone at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. I’m beholden to my brilliant editor, Eric Chinski, whose patience, encouragement, and keen edits made this a much stronger book.

  In the end, no one deserves more recognition than my family, especially my mother and my grandmother, both of whom helped me fill in the gaps. I’m also deeply grateful to my siblings for being there while we were going through the trenches, and once again while I was rehashing our lives. Cualita, Nena, Chavo, Chela, Sonia, Jorge, and Yesi: it’s your love and support that keeps me grounded. And finally, Chemel, my beloved brother, thank you for keeping watch from the other side. You may be gone, but your influence lives on.