Prayers for the Stolen

by Jennifer Clement

  With your name on it? I asked.

  For the US police that white wood cross is the best proof that I’m dead. It’s in my FBI file. Imagine that a riverside wood cross with plastic flowers actually proves to the FBI that my family thinks I’m dead.

  With your name on it?

  My name is not Julio.

  From the master bedroom’s bay window in the marble house we could see past the garden and large bronze horse, to the bay glittering with night lights. When I looked out after our day trip, I knew a virgin lived under that blue water.

  Since I was a person who had never experienced cold weather, I loved to close the door and windows and turn up the air-conditioning until the room was freezing. My teeth chattered. My teeth seemed almost to break against each other. I had never felt that kind of cold before. I loved it. I even loved the pain.

  This room is the North Pole! Julio said.

  He never asked me to turn the air-conditioning off.

  I would gather up all the blankets I could find from around the house and pile them on the bed. I had never slept in a cold room under blankets.

  This is because you grew up in the jungle, Julio said. I grew up close to the desert where it can get very cold.

  At night, in our Acapulco igloo, Julio told me his philosophy.

  Life is a crazy, out of order, inside out, salt mixed with sugar place where the drowned can be walking on dry land, he said. Like the best outlaws, I know I’m going to die young. I don’t even think about old age. It’s not even in my imagination.

  You have tamed me, I answered. I picked up his hand from the pillow and cuffed it around my wrist.

  Julio thought people could be divided into day and night people. He said words could be divided this way also. Ugly night words, according to him, were words like rabies and nausea. Pretty night words were words like moon and milk and moth.

  When Julio and I moved around under the blankets sparks of electricity crackled and lit up our bed.

  Never had we seen anything like this before, only in the sky.

  We would make love in the wool blanket lightning.

  My mother’s phone calls always brought news from our mountain. Estefani and her siblings never returned from Mexico City after their mother Augusta died from AIDS. Sofia, Estefani’s grandmother, who’d run the OXXO by the Pemex gas station, had packed up and left to go and care for her orphaned grandchildren.

  My mother told me that Paula and her mother had really disappeared. No one ever heard anything about them again.

  I also knew that Maria’s gunshot had healed and that she and her mother were still on our mountain.

  I have a case of the misery, my mother said.

  Oh, Mama. Please don’t tell me.

  I’m all wrong inside.

  This meant she missed me, but she’d never say it.

  Some mornings Julio and I would go out to the garden and spend the whole day there.

  He’d lift me up onto the bronze horse and I would ride it.

  Seven months went by in the empty marble house.

  One day my mother called. She was angry. She said she’d been trying to call for days.

  Why haven’t you answered your phone? she asked. Damn, I’ve called and called! So you’ve forgotten about me? Is that what you’ve done?

  I’m here.

  If I had not reached you today, I was going to go straight to Acapulco.

  Please, calm down. Why do you exaggerate? We talked a week ago.

  Something has happened. Nothing happens here and now something happens, she said.

  What?

  Listen.

  I’m listening, Mama.

  Can you hear me?

  Yes, I hear you fine.

  Mike’s been arrested. He’s being taken to Mexico City.

  Why to Mexico City?

  They say he killed a man. They say he killed a little girl!

  What?

  Mike says that you were with him. You were on a bus.

  I remembered. A girl’s dresses were drying in the sun on the maguey pads. There were seagull feathers on the ground.

  I could not even swallow my saliva, it just sat in my mouth, growing and growing, until I had to spit it out into my hand.

  Mike says that you were with him. You were on a bus.

  I held the phone in one hand and the gob of my saliva in the cup of my other hand.

  You need to come here right away, she said. They want you in Mexico City to give your testimony. Mike says you can clear him. It will be quick. Tell them the truth! He says you know what happened.

  I had a dream in that car. I was with Maria, my dear sister who looked just like my father. In my dream I called her sister, little sister. My dream told me she was the one I loved the most. I had not known this before, even when I held her broken, bloody arm in my arms. The word sister in my dream woke me up as if I’d been awoken by the sound of a firecracker or bullet in the air. The word cracked me awake. White seagulls flew above the shack and the Rottweiler and the skinny man. Maybe the birds were clouds. Maybe the clouds were birds. A little girl in a white dress picked up the feathers from the ground. Mike’s red-rose tattoo filled the car with rose perfume. I obeyed him when he told me to keep the heroin for him. I obeyed and placed the brick of heroin inside my black bag with its broken zipper. I obeyed.

  I can’t hear you anymore, Mama. I’ll call you back.

  I hung up the phone.

  There was no need for me to pack my bag and get on the bus to Mexico City. I did not have to get on that well-known, well-worn asphalt sprinkled with scattered garbage, lost gloves, used condoms, and old cigarette packs.

  I did not have to take the highway my grandmother tried to cross carrying a jug of milk. I did not have to take the road that has always been a river of blood and white milk mixed with car oil.

  I did not have to take the road that has killed at least twenty people since the day I was born as well as dogs, sheep, goats, horses, chickens, iguanas, and snakes.

  I did not have to take the highway dotted with drops of blood from Maria’s gunshot wound.

  No.

  I did not mention my mother’s phone call to Julio or Jacaranda.

  I felt as if my body were green inside like green logs that cannot burn in a fire. I felt too young to be out in the world.

  I didn’t even own a pair of shoes.

  Three days later there was a knock at the front door.

  Julio, Jacaranda, and I were in the kitchen having breakfast.

  No one had ever knocked on the door. The person who was outside knocked again and then rang the doorbell. It was not really a ring as whoever had their finger on the small plastic ringer outside did not let up. The sound wailed through the house like a siren.

  Julio stood and left the house and went out to the garden. Jacaranda and I walked over to the front door. It was wide open.

  At the entrance stood three policemen. Their faces were covered with wool ski masks and they carried machine guns. They had come for me. They wanted to search the house.

  Yes, come in, Jacaranda said.

  The policemen made us walk with them as they checked all the rooms. When they inspected the master bedroom, they broke into the dressing room we had never been inside.

  In the place where I had expected expensive dresses, beautiful blouses and sweaters, and sequined satin or velvet evening gowns was a large storage room. Instead of high-heeled satin shoes and fur coats, it contained hundreds of assault rifles, thousands of rounds of ammunition, cartridges of dynamite, grenades, and dozens of bulletproof vests stacked in piles. There were even several guns, cradled like babies, in USA flags.

  Julio and I had made love at the edge of carnage.

  The first thing one of the policemen did in my small room was lift the mattress up off the bed.

  My mother’s words came to me across the hills and down the highway and straight into me, Only an idiot hides things under a mattress!

  The policemen too
k the brick of heroin and Paula’s notebook with the photos and told me to pack my bag.

  Julio never said goodbye. He jumped over the garden fence as soon as he realized there were cops at the door. I’m sure he thought they were coming to get him. He, and his delicious rose and magnolia kisses, disappeared forever. He drowned in the river.

  Do we shoot the grandma? one policeman asked.

  I wonder if she’s bulletproof? one of the other policemen answered and then he shot her.

  Jacaranda fell backward on the marble.

  Her body lay on the cold marble.

  Blood from her head washed into her gray hair on the white marble. Her eyes were open and fixed in a stare like the glass eyes of the stuffed animals from Africa.

  One policeman handcuffed me and pushed me into a police car. We drove through the early-morning streets following the signs to the airport. From the car window, I could see the dirty streets and endless rows of T-shirt stores closed tight with metal curtains.

  I saw a fisherman walking toward the beach with a pole resting over his shoulder and a small red plastic child’s bucket in one hand.

  I looked toward the Pacific Ocean to the place where I knew the Virgin Mary was drowning under the waves.

  Mrs. Domingo’s diamond ring was still on my hand. I turned the diamond inward, toward my palm, so that it looked as if I were only wearing a gold wedding band.

  I knew an army helicopter would take me to Mexico City. My crime was too important to be handled by the state of Guerrero. Thanks to television, I had done all this before. I knew exactly what was going to happen.

  I knew I was going to go straight to the women’s jail because I was a witness and an accomplice to the murder of a girl who was the daughter of one of Mexico’s most important drug traffickers. This was the crime that had captured the nation.

  If I had not stopped watching television at the marble house, I would have known that the brutal killing of a girl shocked the world. I would have known that a teacher from a rural community claimed it was vultures that led him to the shack. He told one reporter that there were over twenty vultures above and they looked like a cloud of black feathers swimming in the air.

  In the helicopter I sat with my back to the pilot. Only one policeman got in and sat straight in front of me. I had to lean forward on my seat since my hands were still handcuffed behind my back.

  As we lifted off and rose above the port of Acapulco, the helicopter turned and headed toward Mexico City. I looked out the window and down on the jungle below. My feet began to feel cold in the plastic flip-flops as we reached a higher altitude.

  There were two canisters stored between the two seats in front of me. They were labeled with the skull and crossbones symbol for poison. In large black letters I read the word Paraquat.

  I didn’t bother to look out the window when the helicopter flew over Mexico City. I’d always thought I’d visit the city’s parks, museums, and the famous Chapultepec zoo and castle, but now I knew it would never happen.

  The guard sitting across from me was still wearing the wool ski mask. The sweat from his scalp dripped down his neck and the front of his shirt. He was so sweaty that even his hand resting on the machine gun glistened. His eyes peered through the holes in the wool and looked into my eyes.

  You’re all a bunch of stupid girls, he said.

  I looked away from him and out the window at the Popocatepetl volcano with the long plume of smoke blowing from its crater.

  He shook his head back and forth.

  All you stupid bitches care about is money.

  My hands were handcuffed behind my back and I felt the diamond in my palm.

  Long ago, my mother taught me how to protect myself against a man. She said to take my index finger and poke out the man’s eyes, to just scoop them out like clams out of their shells. She did not teach me what to do if I were in handcuffs.

  I never want to have a daughter, he said.

  He took out a piece of gum and pushed it through the hole in the mask and into his mouth. His mouth moved under the wool, under the small round opening, as he chewed.

  If I had a daughter, he said, I’d spit.

  In Mexico City, before I was formally booked and taken to jail, I was paraded for the press in a room at the airport.

  I was made to stand behind a long table that was covered with several dozen rifles, pistols, and ammunition. This was the cache of weapons that had been found at the house in Acapulco. The reporters screamed out questions at me and television cameras filmed my face.

  Who killed her, you or Mike?

  Why did you have to shoot her in the face like that?

  Why? Why did you kill an innocent little girl?

  What happened at that ranch?

  Are you Mike’s girlfriend?

  As the reporters called out questions, I bowed my head, pressed my chin to my chest, and looked down toward my heart so they could not photograph my face. But then I remembered something. I looked up.

  If I looked up, and let myself be filmed, my eyes would pierce right through the camera. In two seconds the image of my face would be beamed down into the bowl of the white satellite dish antenna my father had bought. In two seconds the image of my face would be beamed down straight into the television screen and right into my two-room home on our mountain. I knew that if I looked up into the camera, I would see my mother as she sat in front of the TV with a beer in her hand and a yellow plastic flyswatter across her knee. I looked into the camera and deep into my mother’s eyes and she looked back.

  PART THREE

  The Santa Marta Jail in the south of Mexico City was the biggest beauty parlor in the world. The bitter and citric scent of hair dyes, hair sprays, and nail polish permeated the rooms and passageways of the building.

  The odors took me back to the day that Maria had her harelip fixed. It was the day a kettle of vultures circled above our home. And it was also the day my mother was angry with the Acapulco fortune-teller because the woman never predicted that my mother would have to bury someone.

  Did that fortune-teller tell my mother that her daughter was going to go to jail?

  In the prison office where I was booked there was a blackboard on the wall. A scrawl of white chalk kept track of the foreign inmates and children. In the jail there were seventy-seven children who were all under the age of six. There were three inmates from Colombia; three from Holland; six from Venezuela; three from France; one from Guatemala, one from the United Kingdom, two from Costa Rica, one from Argentina, and one from the United States.

  After I was booked in and my photograph and fingerprints were taken, I was given a pair of clean beige sweatpants and a beige sweatshirt and told to change. The clothes were worn so thin I could see my skin beneath the weave. How many women had placed their arms in these sleeves before me?

  The jail was a chessboard of beige and navy-blue squares. The women in beige were awaiting trial and the women in blue had been sentenced. In jail I learned that everyone would get hungry for yellow or green, as if colors had turned into food.

  No one gave me a pair of shoes or sneakers.

  I walked through the jail in my red plastic flip-flops with traces of Acapulco beach sand between my toes.

  A female prison guard pushed me through the octagonal maze of corridors toward my cell. Instead of windows, long rectangular openings in the cement walls, like slashes from a knife, looked out on the main yard where a few women in navy blue kicked a ball around.

  On the other side of the building, across the yard, was the men’s prison. It was close enough to hear shrieks and cries coming from over the wall. The men and women prisoners could wave to each other from certain points.

  My cell contained a bunk bed. When you are charged with killing the daughter of one of the country’s most important drug traffickers you get special treatment. You get to share a cell with only one other prisoner. Most of the inmates had to share rooms with at least four people, two to a bed. I was placed in a cel
l with a foreigner because this makes it harder to be killed by orders from outside. I knew this. The person who killed that little girl had no chance of living, not for long.

  The woman who shared my cell was also dressed in beige and was so small her sweatpants were rolled up around her ankles so she wouldn’t trip. Her hair was pulled into a long black braid down her back and, when she turned toward me, I could see her left sleeve hung loose and empty, falling from her shoulder as if it were a flag on a day without wind.

  Since the moment I had been taken from the house in Acapulco and brought to the jail, I could not hear my mother’s voice. It had almost been forty-eight hours of silence. I heard the rush of my own blood through my body and it was the sound of Acapulco’s ocean.

  When I looked at the tiny, childlike woman, my mother’s voice came back. Her words crossed the jungle, soared above the pineapple and palm trees, traveled over the mountains of the Sierra Madre, past the Popocatepetl volcano, down into the valley of Mexico City, and moved through the treeless streets straight into me.

  So what the hell happened to your arm? I heard her ask.

  Chop, chop, chop, the woman answered.

  In a few moments I figured out that everything the woman said was plunk plunk this and splash splash that and clonk clonk, quack quack, bang bang.

  I could hear my mother again. Right inside of my head she said, Well, well, well, look who’s here! It’s Miss Onomatopoeia herself!

  Miss Onomatopoeia’s name was Luna and she was from Guatemala. She pointed up at the top bunk with the pointer finger of her right hand, her only hand, and told me the top bunk bed was for me. She had long and square fake acrylic fingernails pasted onto her real nails and each nail was painted black and white in a zebra pattern.

  One woman from El Salvador was up there, but she left yesterday. I hope it’s clean, Luna said.

  I am sure it’s fine.

  Nothing in here is fine. All that woman ever said was God. She said God all day long as if the word were her heart beating.