Prayers for the Stolen

by Jennifer Clement

  It wasn’t a zoo. Every day the lion and tiger excrement was picked up and wrapped into drug shipments bound for the United States. This practice kept the drug-sniffing border dogs away from the shipments.

  Paula’s job on the ranch was to sleep with McClane every now and again and to help pack the lion and tiger excrement around the drugs or rub a small film of the excrement on the outside of plastic packages.

  Someone told me they were fed human meat, Paula said.

  The sky began to darken as we sat on the log holding hands. In the dusk, small clouds of mosquitoes began to surround us, but since Paula continued to talk I sat there and let them bite. She didn’t seem to notice the feeling of insects crawling or biting her skin.

  I don’t need to tell you that along the way I was a plastic water bottle, right? Paula said. I was something you pick up and take a swig of.

  I shook my head. No, no.

  Those guys who stole me were from Matameros. They took me north to that party. It was McClane’s daughter’s birthday party. She was fifteen.

  A whole circus had been rented for the party. Several large tents had been set up in a field to one side of the ranch house. A man walked around giving away clouds of pink cotton candy on long wood sticks. There was a band and a large dance floor.

  Paula was taken to one of the tents that had been placed very far away from the party. She could hardly hear the band play. Inside this tent there were a few men and over thirty women. Rows of plastic chairs were set up at one side of the tent. In the middle of the open space there was a table with Cokes, beers, plastic glasses, and paper plates piled high with peanuts covered in red chili powder. The women in the tent had been stolen. The drug traffickers, who’d killed Paula’s mother’s dogs and had stolen her wrapped naked in a white towel, were now going to sell her.

  McClane was in the tent. He looked at the women and asked them to smile. He wanted to see their teeth. But he didn’t look into Paula’s mouth.

  McClane picked Paula. He picked the most beautiful girl in Mexico. She should have been a legend. Her face should have covered magazines. Love songs should have been written to her.

  On the log beside me, Paula continued to look straight ahead as she spoke. When she seemed to grow tired she continued to tell her story only as a mix of impressions.

  You don’t need to know about the sun rising and setting, she said. You don’t need to know what I ate or where I slept. You need to know that McClane had over two hundred pairs of boots. They were made from every kind of animal and reptile that was in Noah’s Ark. He had a pair made from donkey penises. One pair he liked to wear on Sundays. These were a pale yellow and everyone said were made of human flesh.

  Paula’s impressions tumbled out of her as if they were a list she’d penciled down on a paper. She said that McClane’s daughter had over two hundred Barbie dolls. One doll had been dipped in gold and had real green emeralds for eyes. McClane had a box filled with feathers from the cocks he raised for cock fights. McClane had a scar across his belly as if he’d almost been cut in half by a magician. The sons all had their own toy cars. These were real cars, but miniatures, that even ran on gasoline. The ranch had a miniature gas station and a miniature OXXO store beside it.

  The women that Paula met in the tent, and saw at other times at parties, were Gloria, Aurora, Isabel, Esperanza, Lupe, Lola, Claudia, and Mercedes.

  Who are those women? I asked.

  Oh, girls like me, she said. And the daughter had a small house to play in with toilets that flushed.

  How much did you cost?

  Oh, I was a present.

  Why do you have those cigarette burns on your arm?

  Oh, but we all have them, Ladydi. She looked down at the inside of her arm, stretching it out before her as if she were showing me the page of a book.

  If you’ve been stolen, you burn the inside of your left arm with cigarettes.

  Why? I don’t understand.

  Are you crazy? she asked. Are you stupid?

  I’m sorry.

  A woman decided it a long, long time ago and now we all do it, she said. If we’re found dead someplace everyone will know we were stolen. It is our mark. My cigarette burns are a message.

  I looked at the pattern of circles on her arm as she continued to hold her limb, stretched out like an oar into the jungle air.

  You do want people to know it’s you. Otherwise how will our mothers find us?

  It was almost dark.

  We have to go now, I said. Come with me. I’ll take you.

  Her mother was standing at the front door waiting. She held a baby bottle filled with milk in one hand.

  It’s time for my baby to go to bed, Concha said. What on earth were you doing out in the jungle?

  Paula didn’t answer and went straight into the house.

  Her mother walked me out to the edge of their property.

  Did she say anything to you? Concha asked. Don’t say anything to anyone, Concha said in a panic. How did they know she was here? Who watched and knew a beautiful girl lived up here? They came for her. They knew what they were coming for. If they know she’s back, if they find out, they’ll come back and get her. We have to leave. There’s no time. In a day or so. I’ve been planning. Ladydi, we’re escaping. What did she tell you?

  She told me about the cigarette burns.

  Did she tell you that she did it to herself? Did she tell you that all the women who have been robbed do this to themselves?

  I nodded.

  Do you believe her? Concha asked. I don’t believe it at all. I can’t even imagine burning myself. That’s impossible.

  Yes. I believe it.

  At that moment Paula appeared behind her mother. She was like a white vaporous creature. She held a baby bottle in one hand. She was naked. In the dark, under a river of moonlight, I could see the nipples of her breasts, the black hair between her legs, and the constellation of cigarette burns all over her body. I could see the cigarette-burn stars that made up Orion and Taurus. Even her feet were covered in the round burns. Paula had walked through the Milky Way and every star had burned her body.

  Concha turned and picked up Paula in her arms as if she were a four-year-old girl and carried her into their house. That was the last time I ever saw Concha and Paula.

  We knew they were gone when Concha’s three dogs appeared near our house rummaging for food. They were stray dogs Concha had picked up after her other dogs had been slaughtered the day Paula was stolen.

  Why didn’t she kill those damn dogs before she left? my mother said. We’re not taking care of them. Don’t give them anything to eat Ladydi, do you hear?

  We went over to Paula’s house to see if they’d left or not.

  As we reached the small two-room house everything looked as if Paula and her mother were about to return.

  Yes, my mother said. This is how you disappear: as if you’re going to appear.

  There was a fresh and full carton of milk on the small kitchen table and the television was turned on. The sound of the news from Acapulco filled the room: there’d been a shootout at a bar. Two new morgues were being built. A severed head had been found on the beach.

  My mother started to poke around that house and it was that kind of poking around that I knew too well. She picked up a half-full bottle of tequila, an electric coffee maker, and a large bag of potato chips.

  You go and look in Paula’s room and see what she’s left behind. Maybe there’re some jeans or T-shirts you can use, she said.

  Her small bed was there. It was raised up from the ground on a pile of bricks. This kept her away from the mouse-sized cockroaches that crawled around the floor at night. The wall was covered with dozens of huge, thick nails on which she’d hung her clothes so that her wall looked like a collage of cloth. I could see several pairs of plastic flip-flops and a pair of tennis shoes lined up in a row under her bed. There were two empty baby bottles lying on the pillow and a shoebox on her bed.

  I opened t
he shoebox.

  The jungle heat filled my mouth. Ants and spiders were running through my blood.

  There were a few photographs in the shoebox. I looked deep into the small black eyes of the man who had squeezed the sweet girl out of Paula’s body. The photos were of a man and his family. The man was dressed in a red-and-white checkered shirt, jeans with a wide leather belt that had an oval silver buckle. He was also wearing black, high-heeled cowboy boots. These people were from the north of Mexico. Their clothes told that story. It was McClane.

  I took the photographs out of the box and stuffed them down into my jeans. At the bottom of the box there was a small notebook, which I placed into my back pocket.

  My mother appeared in the doorway.

  It’s horrible to think, but someone must have been watching Paula for years, my mother said. They were just watching her grow up.

  She was holding the bottle of tequila in one hand and the bag of potato chips in the other.

  She’d been picked out a long time ago, my mother said. She’d been watched the way we watch an apple on a tree: we watch it grow until it’s ripe and then we pick it.

  As we walked home, I could feel the dry, thin cardboard photographs tucked down the front of my jeans as I moved. My mother had left her flat, white plastic sandals behind and was wearing Concha’s bright green plastic flip-flops that had a red plastic flower attached to the front straps. My mother followed my eyes and looked down at her feet.

  Well, Ladydi, she said, Concha’s not going to use them anymore, right?

  My mother was carrying the bottle of tequila and the bag of chips.

  We walked in silence for a while and then my mother suddenly turned her head and spat on the ground.

  If anyone wants to create a symbol or a flag for our piece of earth on Earth it should be a plastic flip-flop, she said.

  When we got home the front door was open and Mike was sitting inside our house waiting for us. It seemed strange to me that he would wait inside. People did not do that. They did not go inside a house and sit down when there was no one home. Our house even smelled strongly of his cologne, which had a minty smell, like chewing gum.

  He sat in the kitchen with the refrigerator door wide open the way people sit in front of a fire. Two telephones rested on his thigh. I could see that Mike had begun to grow out his hair, which he had shaved off a few years ago, so that it looked like small bushy tufts of black grass all over his head.

  So, you were confused and thought this was your house? my mother said to Mike.

  She placed the tequila and chips on the kitchen table.

  Shut that door! she commanded.

  Now don’t get angry, Little Mother, he said, standing up quickly and closing the refrigerator door with one swipe of his hand.

  Mike called all the older women on our hill Little Mother. Even my mother, who didn’t take sweetness from anyone, seemed to like it. I knew she was about to scream at him for coming into our house, snooping around and opening up the fridge, but the words Little Mother stopped her. It was as if the words caressed her and could make her purr.

  On our mountain a refrigerator was our most important appliance, piece of furniture, or whatever one wanted to call it. It was our door to the North Pole, polar bears, seals, and glaciers. On a hot day everyone sat around it with the door wide open. During the day we kept our pillows inside to cool them. The cotton pillows rested among cans of beer, a box of eggs, and packets of cheese wrapped in plastic. At night, for an hour or so, our heads would rest on cool cotton. When one side of the pillow warmed up, we’d just flip it over. The pillow cooled down our minds and dreams. My mother was the inventor of this idea. Everyone on the mountain did it.

  The refrigerator was one of the main things my mother prayed to. She said that a cold beer could make you love a refrigerator.

  My mother poured herself a small shot of tequila and opened the bag of chips with her teeth.

  So, what’s up? she asked Mike.

  Mike explained that he would meet me down on the highway on Monday morning, which was in two days, and that we’d take the bus together to Acapulco. I had an appointment to meet the family I was going to work with at eleven in the morning. I should pack a bag and be ready to stay there.

  I left my mother drinking in our little house and walked Mike some of the way down to the highway. I wanted to ask him about Maria. Now that we no longer went to school, I rarely saw Maria. I didn’t like to go to Maria’s house because it was hard to face the fact that her mother, Luz, had been my father’s mistress. Everyone on the mountain knew the scandal, and Mike knew, of course, as he knew everything about everyone. The only person who did not know who she was, was Maria. The only person who did not know that her harelip had been God’s curse was Maria. I wanted to tell her she was my half-sister and wanted her to love me even more as her sister, but I was so afraid that she would hate me if she knew who she really was.

  I told Mike to tell Maria that I wanted to see her. I asked him to tell her to meet me at the schoolroom late that afternoon.

  Mike skipped down the mountain to a tune of three cell phones all suddenly ringing at the same time. It was as if the reception dead zone had opened in the air and a phone signal came down on him like lightning.

  When I turned to walk back to my house, I remembered the photographs that were still stuffed down the front of my pants. I reached in and took out the square photos printed on soft cardboard.

  There were six photographs. One was of a man, who I assumed to be McClane, standing on an airstrip next to a small plane. Two other photographs were of women standing against a wall in groups. Paula was in both of these. Another photograph was of McClane standing in front of a row of medieval suits of armor. It looked as if he was inside a castle.

  The last two photographs in the group were of a large red horse trailer. It was a small unit capable of holding two or three horses, the kind that can be pulled by a pickup truck or an SUV. One of the photographs had been taken with care to show the blood spilling out of the door.

  When I got back home, my mother was in a frenzy killing flies with a flyswatter. The weather had been so hot over the past month there was an epidemic of flies. These were the fat, juicy kind of flies, with spiky fur on their backs. When this fly bites it leaves a big red welt that hurts for days. There were black, bloody specks all over our kitchen table and floor.

  Get down on your knees and pray for the flyswatter, my mother said. Who left the goddamned door open?

  You know, I said.

  My mother gave me a look, a nasty look, and continued to swat at the flies. I recognized the flyswatter she’d stolen from the Reyes’ house at least two years ago. Pray for the flyswatter, she said.

  My mother hated those flies but she loved to kill them. It was a happy bloodbath in that small kitchen.

  She knew, what we all knew, the flies always win.

  I ran past my mother and the dead black-and-red flies, and hid Paula’s photographs in my room under my mattress.

  When I walked back out to the kitchen, my mother was sitting at the table with the flyswatter lying across her lap. Bloody pieces of squashed flies were embedded in the plastic netting. She was taking a deep swig, almost half the bottle of beer, in one great swallow. Then she pulled the bottle from her lips. It made a hollow sucking sound.

  I sat down in the middle of the massacre.

  I am so angry, my mother said.

  What happened?

  On the television they were talking about a magazine that is publishing an issue about what it is to be a woman!

  So?

  I’d tell them the truth.

  What’s the truth, Mama?

  A woman’s world is in her panties.

  Yes?

  Do you think those Mexico City women writers are going to write about the sadness? Yes, the sadness when you find there is blood there and this means one thing. You’re beginning to lose your baby!

  What are you saying, Mama? I asked.r />
  Between the fly massacre and the rant about panties, I was worried about her. The look in her eyes reminded me of the look she’d had on her face when our mountain was hit by a bad earthquake. Later, after the earthquake, after it was all over, she said we should have known.

  Two weeks before the earthquake our little two-room house had been invaded by every creature around. Black widows, red tarantulas, and white transparent and brown scorpions began to show up everywhere. Red ants were crawling all over the ceiling. We found a nest of snakes, like a knot of black ribbons, behind the television.

  My mother’s reaction to this was to watch the television all day and all night. She didn’t cook and I had to rummage around for a dry tortilla and cheese and even open up a can of tuna fish, which we would normally never eat because she decided one day that it tasted like cat food. My mother watched television because it was the only way out of our mountain.

  As I killed as many insects as I could and ate dried mango strips, she traveled to Petra and visited a family of Bedouins who had been expelled from their cave and were now living in Bedouin Village, which was cement government housing. Their camel lived in their cement garage. My mother traveled to India where she watched medical tourists have cheap operations. She watched the Miss Universe contest. On the History Channel she sat through six episodes on Henry VIII’s wives.

  During one of those pre-earthquake days a stray sheep appeared at our doorway. I had gone outside to get away from the television and my mother and there it was, sitting on the ground in the shade of a papaya tree.

  When I went inside to tell my mother about it, she just looked through me and said, Next thing you’ll tell me is that Mary and Joseph are outside and need a place to sleep.

  These were the first words she’d said in days. But then she turned away from me and looked back at the program on the objects that have been found in the bellies of dead sharks. A man was cutting open the shark’s belly on the deck of a ship and pulling out a wedding ring.