Prayers for the Stolen

by Jennifer Clement

  I went outside and gave the sheep some water. The animal lapped it up with its small tongue. It was the first time I’d seen blue eyes in real life and not on television.

  When I went back inside the house, the sheep followed me in.

  My mother turned and looked at it and said, That is not a sheep, Lady, that’s a lamb, just in time for the slaughter.

  I was not exactly sure what she meant by that. It could mean that we were going to kill the lamb and eat it for supper or maybe she was into biblical sayings now that we had become the Noah’s Ark for insects.

  Since I had looked into the animal’s blue eyes, I knew I could not eat it. I ended up shooing it out of our house and down the mountain. I hoped a large silver passenger bus on the way to Acapulco did not run over it.

  The reason for all that craziness on the mountain was the earthquake. On the news, we heard that the epicenter had been just outside the port of Acapulco.

  That’s us, my mother said with excitement. We live outside the port of Acapulco! Of course it was right here, under us!

  That earthquake hit at seven thirty that morning. We were having breakfast when our two-room house began to shake. Outside we watched the ground move in waves as if it were made of water.

  On the day my mother killed the flies, ranted about praying to panties, and was drinking too much, I felt scared. She was breaking. I could see the shards.

  What are you trying to tell me, Mama? I said. Be clear.

  My mother threw her head back and rolled her eyes.

  Yes, yes, yes. Some days I pulled, tore with my teeth, the skin around the sides of my fingernails and gave them to you to eat.

  Are you saying this?

  You were not even a year old. I mixed it in the rice. What did you want me to do? There are women who have cut off slabs of skin from their bodies to feed their children. I heard about that on TV.

  Shit, Mama, I said.

  What’s the difference between that and mother’s milk? You tell me?

  No, Mother, I said. Those fancy Mexico City writers are not going to write about that!

  God only knew if any of this was true. My mother placed lying in the category of stealing. Why should one tell the truth about something, if you can lie instead? This was her philosophy. If my mother took the bus, she said she took a taxi.

  It was going to be a long afternoon until she passed out. The tequila bottle from Paula’s house was empty. My mother stood and took another beer from the fridge.

  I killed them, she said, so you can clean them up.

  I grabbed an old rag by the sink and started to wipe the dead flies off the chairs, tabletops, and walls.

  A few hours later when I left to meet Maria at the schoolroom, my mother was on her fifth beer. She was lying on her bed fanning herself with a piece of cardboard she’d ripped off the side of a cornflakes cereal box. The television was on full blast. In her stupor, she was watching a program about wild animals in the Amazon.

  Why doesn’t NatGeo come here and film our mountain? Mother asked.

  As I walked away from my house, I stopped and looked back. Our small two-room structure had long rusty girders sticking out toward a second floor that was never built. All the houses on the mountain were like this. We built with the dream of a second floor. But, instead of second floors, we all had parabolic antennas. If our mountain were seen from space, it would look like a white land made of thousands of opened umbrellas.

  Maria was at the schoolroom. She was sitting at her old desk and looked like a portrait of our childhood. Her hair was fixed up in a round bun at the top of her head. We called this her onion hairdo. It was pulled so tight she could not blink properly.

  Every time I looked at her, and saw my father in her face, I had to stop myself from telling her the truth. Sometimes I even thought that the only reason I could remember what my father looked like was because Maria was there to remind me. When my mother found out that my father had another family over there she burned all his photographs on the stove, just like tortillas. One after the other they curled and toasted on the stovetop until they turned into black, gray ash. I watched his Sinatra smile and my birthday cakes and birthday balloons float out the door in smoke.

  The scar from Maria’s harelip had faded. But when I looked at her I always saw the old face, the vulnerable old face that was mythical and painful. The scar had gone, but that harelip still made her who she was.

  I sat down at my old school desk right next to hers. We had sat like this for years. Our dry, scratchy, little-girl elbows used to touch as we practiced our penmanship and numbers. In this room we had been able to leave our homes and the jungle and dream about a different kind of life.

  Maria told me that Augusta, Estefani’s mother, was running a high fever and that they were leaving tomorrow morning for Mexico City where there was an AIDS charity that gave her the pills she needed. Augusta had been sick with AIDS now for over six years and these trips back and forth to the city had become routine.

  I told Maria that Paula and Concha had left the mountain forever.

  I told Maria about the photographs. When Maria heard about the photographs she stood up.

  Ruth? Maria said. Did you ask about Ruth?

  On the mountain everyone was sure that the disappearance of Ruth and the stealing of Paula were related.

  I shook my head.

  I didn’t ask. I’m sorry, I said.

  I watched Maria rub her finger over her harelip scar. The day of the operation I watched my mother and Ruth smoke a whole pack of Salem cigarettes. The menthol smoke filled the beauty parlor. As little girls Maria and I used to steal the butts from Ruth’s ashtray and suck on the filters as if they were a Halls Mentho-Lyptus. I could taste the mint filters as I looked at Maria’s face.

  Did you look at them carefully? Did you look and see if one of the women in the photos was Ruth?

  No.

  Let’s go.

  We stood and marched out of the schoolroom toward my house. We walked quickly, almost skipping, filled with the hope of finding Ruth’s face in the photographs. In our foolish dream we ran through the jungle filled with a silly joy.

  It was that fast, fast like an arm that becomes a snake. Her arm moved. I saw the shadow on the wall and then, so fast, like when a scorpion lifts up its tail or an iguana zaps its tongue out into a hive-like vapor of gnats. That fast. My mother had the small silver pistol in her hand and everything was ready. It was as if the whole Sierra Madre grew still. I heard the sound of crushed bone and that was a sound I’d never heard before.

  I heard the sound of crushed bone as that bullet went into Maria, into my half-sister, into my father’s other daughter, into the daughter that looked just like him.

  This can happen after ten bottles of beer mixed with tequila. If they’d drawn my mother’s blood into a syringe, her blood would have been yellow. If her blood had been placed in a test tube and held up to the light it would have been pure Corona. But no one would do a test or call the police on our mountain.

  Calling the police was like inviting a scorpion into your house. Who does that? my mother always said.

  What happened to my mother that afternoon? The light held that moment between afternoon and dusk. In that light, that is almost not light, who did she think was at her threshold?

  I knelt beside Maria and looked into my father’s face. I looked at her face and it was like looking into a lake. Under the surface, as if I could see a lakebed of stones and silver fish, I could see her torn face, the stitches, and the scars of the harelip.

  I could feel the warm blood in my hands as I opened her clothes to look at the wound.

  When Maria opened her eyes we looked at each other.

  What was that? she asked.

  Where the hell did you get that gun, Mother? I spat the words at my mother as I placed my hand around Maria’s waist.

  Mike.

  I wanted to hold onto my mother as she faded and left the planet forever just as Maria’s
blood baptized our piece of jungle.

  Take me back to a minute ago; take me back to a minute ago, my mother said.

  The clocks were turning backward in her mind. Rewind, she was thinking. Press rewind.

  My mother had always told me that death was on time and never late.

  The room darkened from a cloud moving overhead. I could hear the sound of a parrot outside.

  As my mother sat down in a heap on the floor she said, She’ll be fine. It was just a scratch.

  I wrapped Maria’s arm in a dishtowel and placed my arm around her waist. Together we stumbled out of the house and down our mountain.

  There was no one on the highway. A few large passenger buses whizzed by. The black asphalt burned under our plastic flip-flops and the heat made the car oil on the road turn blue and green.

  After standing in that devil heat for twenty minutes a few taxis drove past but it seemed to take forever to get a taxi to stop and take us to the hospital. No taxi drivers want blood in their cars. As soon as I said we were going to the hospital, they took one look at Maria’s face. When their eyes followed her face down to her arm, which was wrapped in a dishtowel, the taxi drivers hit the accelerator and took off. In Guerrero there are some taxis that have a cardboard sign on their dashboard that says No Bloody Bodies.

  I kept looking at Maria’s arm and hoping the dishrag could contain or even stop the flow.

  A taxi driver finally stopped and agreed to take us.

  He looked at Maria’s arm.

  No, I’m not bringing that in here unless you put it in a plastic bag, he said.

  He reached over to the glove compartment, took out a plastic supermarket bag, and handed it to me.

  Put the arm inside it.

  What did he say? Maria asked.

  Put your arm in the bag or you’re not getting in here.

  I carefully took Maria’s wounded arm and placed it in the supermarket bag as if it were a leg of lamb.

  Okay, her arm is in the bag, I said. Let’s go!

  Knot it at the end.

  Sorry?

  Tie it up.

  I took the ends of the bag and made a small knot with the corners of the plastic at the top of her arm. She let me do this to her without protest. It was as if, now that my mother had shot it, her arm belonged to my family.

  So, who were you bothering? the taxi driver asked as we drove down the highway.

  The only people in all of Mexico who knew what was going on in the country were the taxi drivers. If we wanted to know about something that had happened, we’d say, Take a taxi. It seemed to me that someone should get all the taxi drivers together, someone like Jacobo Zabludovsky (the old journalist who my mother swore was the very last noble person in the whole of Mexico), and ask them what the hell was going on in our country. My mother always said that there was a taxi driver out there who knew exactly what had happened to Paula and Ruth.

  The drive to Acapulco took less than an hour. I wanted to tell Maria that she was my half-sister and that my mother had shot her because, in my mother’s drunken state, she thought that Maria was our father. But I had to keep quiet because I knew that taxi driver’s ears were standing on end to hear the news.

  The man had a boxer’s hands: huge knuckles covered in scars. He gripped the steering wheel fiercely. The man even turned off his radio in order to hear any information that might come out of the back seat.

  So, who were you bothering? the taxi driver asked again.

  I decided not to answer and held Maria in the circle of my arm.

  He looked at us in his rearview mirror.

  You must have been a bad, bad girl to deserve a shooting, right?

  He was a man with black curly hair shot with gray. He had deep smile wrinkles at the edges of his eyes.

  It was an accident, I said.

  An accident? That’s what everyone says.

  Please.

  She’s a bad girl, he said as if Maria were not there. He’s going to go to jail; you know that, don’t you?

  Yes.

  He’s going to go to jail. As soon as they see a gunshot wound in the emergency room the doctors there, you know, well, they have to notify the police. That’s a law.

  It was an accident.

  I bet it hurts.

  I pressed my lips together. His face never stopped looking at mine in the rearview mirror. I had to keep looking away. He was observing me more than watching the road.

  That must really hurt, he said.

  It sure does, I answered.

  Hey, doesn’t your friend know how to talk? I’ve always said if someone doesn’t talk then they’re hiding a thing or something.

  Yes, it hurts, I said. She can’t talk because it hurts.

  Why don’t you let me see your little boobies? he said. I’ll give you your money back if you show me. Your hurt friend doesn’t have to show me anything, just you.

  Maybe another day, I said.

  You remind me of my daughter. You’re a marzipan.

  I looked over at Maria who was pale. She mouthed the word asshole.

  I squirmed forward in my seat. Then I reached around my back and lifted up my skirt. I peed deep through my underwear and into the black cloth seat of the taxi. I felt the wet heat from my urine surround my bare thighs. My mother had taught me about revenge. I knew this would have made her proud of me.

  I turned and held Maria’s arm and tried to stroke her head a little, which was hard because of Maria’s stiff, onion-bun hairdo. I looked at her arm in the plastic supermarket bag but it was not filling up. Maria gave me an intense look and tilted her head toward the side of her body. The blood was not going into the plastic bag. As she was holding her arm, it was being pulled backward and down, through the tie in the plastic supermarket bag, down the side of her body. I could see that the red, short-sleeved blouse above her ribs was drenched.

  At this point Maria’s head lolled backward and her eyes closed.

  I thought she had died.

  Maria, wake up, wake up, I whispered.

  The taxi driver turned around and looked at us. Missy, she better die so I can leave you both at the side of the road.

  She’s not dead.

  If she dies, I’m leaving you both at the side of the road. I hope she dies because I want to get rid of both of you.

  When I saw the enormous gray bay surrounded by a wall of hotels and condominiums and smelled the salt, I knew Maria was going to live. She was curled against me, under my arm. I kissed the top of her head, which smelled like greasy coconut hair oil, with love because she was my sister and she was going to know about this very soon. While I still had the secret, I could love her.

  When I saw the bay I remembered coming to Acapulco for the first time. My father was still living with us and we’d come to visit him at work. He was a bartender at a small hotel at that time. I remember my mother got dressed up in a white dress that had a halter top so that her back was exposed. She wore high white heels and bright red lipstick. She also dressed me up in a red sundress and combed my hair into two braids.

  We’re going to surprise your father and we have to look pretty, like girls, for the surprise, my mother said.

  She carried her heels in one hand and walked in her flip-flops down to the highway to catch the bus.

  On the bus ride she checked her lipstick in a small mirror that she carried in her purse. Her arms were still slightly red in places, as she’d spent the whole morning plucking the black hair out of her forearms with tweezers.

  From the bus station we took a taxi to the hotel where my father worked.

  The hotel faced the bay. My father worked at the bar that was outside, beside the swimming pool and under a large thatched roof of palm fronds. The sunlight broke through small spaces in the roofing and made the glass of the liquor bottles shine. I had never seen a swimming pool before. The afternoon sunlight glittered off the water as if it were full of crystals. The sound system was tuned to a local radio station, which filled the ai
r with the sound of cymbals, bongos, and tambourines.

  My father was leaning against the bar dressed in white trousers and a pearly-white guayabera shirt. He was smoking a cigarette. The tobacco smoke mixed with the sun and salt.

  When he saw us he placed his cigarette in an ashtray and opened his arms to me. He lifted me up. He smelled like lemons and Alberto VO5, which he creamed into his hair every morning to smooth it down.

  He put me back down and gave my mother his arm and walked her over to the bar where we sat on stools and looked out at the bay. He made my mother a margarita with a rim of salt around the glass. He stuck a small, red paper umbrella in her drink. My father concocted a fizzy pink drink with ginger ale and orange juice for me and placed a plastic stirrer inside the glass in the shape of a mermaid.

  My parents looked handsome in their white clothes, which accentuated their dark skin. I thought that had been the happiest afternoon of my life until my mother and I got back on the bus to go home.

  I knew it, she said as she rubbed her lipstick off with a couple of squares of toilet paper. Your father is having an affair with that waitress!

  I knew exactly whom she was talking about.

  My mother was very skinny. When she described herself she’d hold up her pinkie in the air and say, Skinny like a pinkie.

  Her little finger would always be a symbol of her body to me.

  The waitress had been wearing very tight clothes so her stomach bulged over her jeans and her thighs rubbed together as she walked. She was a beauty. My father always said a woman needs to be full. No matter how much my mother tried to fatten up, she couldn’t. My father said that holding a skinny woman was like holding gristle and bone. He said that a real man wanted a body of pillows.

  He never said, You, Rita, are gristle and bone, or You, Rita, need to fatten up, or You, Rita, are like a chicken wing. He was never that obvious in his cruelty.

  The woman was wearing red flip-flops that were made with a plastic, two-inch heel. We would never forget those shoes.

  I knew my mother was right. That woman was too nice and that’s a sure sign if there is any perfect sign at all. I was expecting her to pull out a piece of candy at any moment. Of course my father denied it.