Bulletproof Vest

by Maria Venegas

  The thought of standing face-to-face with her now sends the rage flaring in his veins. The bartender comes over and fills up his empty glass, eyes him as if saying, have this one on the house and then you should move along, Jose. But he’s not paying attention to the bartender. He’s trying to keep up with his thoughts, where, in that vast void, a new idea is dawning. It’s something that stems from the same bottomless pit that drove him to the boulders behind Pascuala’s house when he was seventeen and she was fourteen and kept him there, day in and day out, for three years, waiting and hoping to catch a glimpse of her face. He still remembers the moment that she stepped out of the small church in Santana, and into his life.

  It was a Saturday, and he and Salvador, his younger brother, had just completed their mandatory military training and were due to perform in a parade in Santana. They were wearing their pressed uniforms and milling about with the other young men under the shade of a mesquite in the square when three young girls stepped out of the church. Though there were three, he only saw the one. Her long black hair fell loosely around her shoulders, framing her high cheekbones and her full lips.

  “Que no se te caiga la baba,” Salvador said, cupping both his hands under Jose’s chin as if to catch the drool. “That’s Pascuala, she’s Manuel’s younger sister.” Jose knew who Manuel was. They were roughly the same age and often competed at the local rodeos. Any bull released in the horse run in front of either of them was sure to be taken down.

  He watched her turn away, and then the three girls were walking down the dirt road and before he knew it he was on their heels. “Oiga, señorita,” he said, trying to keep up yet look nonchalant. “Would you like to be my novia?” She pushed open a wooden gate, held it open for the other two girls to go through, and then she was gone.

  “Pascuala,” he repeated, later that night, and for countless nights after, while he tossed and turned in the dark. In the morning, while tilling the fields, each time the mules reached the end of a fallow, though he knew he would not see her, still, his neck craned, his head turned and he looked toward Santana. When he could not stand another day without seeing her face again, he saddled up his horse, rode to Santana, hitched it to a mesquite in the square, and waited for hours, hoping that she might once again step out of the church or happen to walk by.

  After several days of riding to the square and waiting in vain, he relocated. There was a boulder behind her house, which provided him with a clear view of her courtyard, and from there he sent the rays of sunlight skipping across her front door and reaching into bedroom windows with his pocket mirror. He hoped that she might see the light and step outside, maybe even have a word with him. When this approach didn’t work, he decided to write her a letter. This is something he was dreading, as he knew he had terrible penmanship—hadn’t written a single word since he had been expelled from school when he was twelve years old. In the letter he wrote how he had not stopped thinking about her since the day they had met. She was his rising star and his setting sun, and if he could, he would collect all the colores in the campo and give them to her. He was willing to kill and to die for her if she so much as asked him to.

  He passed the letter along to a young boy, who then handed it off to Doña Adulfa at the communal water well. Doña Adulfa was Pascuala’s neighbor, and she hand delivered the letter to her. He waited for days, until finally, there was a response. He tore into the letter the minute it was in his hand, and, in it, she wrote that she would much appreciate him leaving her alone, as ever since the day he had appeared on the boulder she was practically a prisoner in her own home.

  “A prisoner?” he repeated later that night at a local tavern while knocking them back, lifting his head off the bar just long enough to shove more money at the musicians and request the same two songs again. Ever since the day he had laid eyes on her, all those sappy love ballads had taken on a whole new meaning. It was as though every song ever written by a man in despair over a woman had been written just for him. While the musicians played, it occurred to him that it was she, not he, who needed to be listening to those lyrics—only then might she understand how she was tormenting him.

  From miles around they heard him coming, the drums and horns echoing off the ridge as he and the musicians made their way to her house. They took their stance across the river, facing her courtyard, and from there they sent the music thundering through her front door. For months, he dragged the musicians from the rodeos, the cockfights, and the fiestas back to her house, to serenade her. Had Pascuala had a father, he would have never gotten away with his antics, but her father had been killed when she was seven years old.

  Though she never stepped outside, he knew that she heard the music, and he also knew that sooner or later their paths were bound to cross again, and for that specific moment, he had committed to memory everything he wanted to say to her. Six months later, during las ferias, he and Salvador were strolling through the fairgrounds, making their way along the brightly lit cobblestone streets, when in front of the Ferris wheel they ran into Pascuala and her cousin Carmela. Standing before her sent the flood of everything he wanted to say rushing to the tip of his tongue and rendering him, momentarily, mute.

  “You guys should take a ride on the Ferris wheel,” said Salvador, smacking him on the back as if to dislodge something. “Come on, my treat,” he said, offering an arm to Carmela, who took it eagerly.

  Sitting next to Pascuala made him feel as though his entire being were vibrating on a different frequency. He stared at her delicate hands, her slim fingers resting on the metal rail, and had to resist the urge to take her hand in his. He gripped his knees and stared straight ahead as they were carried up toward the darkening sky. With each rotation, he felt time itself slipping away. It had been two and a half years since he had first laid eyes on her, and who knew when—if ever—he would be in such proximity to her. He drew a deep breath and turned to face her.

  “Mire, Pascuala,” he said. “I’m twenty years old. I’m ready to get married and start a family, and I would like for you to be the mother of my children.”

  She kept her gaze on the horizon, where the last glowing light of day was fading behind the silhouette of the mountains. He stared at her profile, traced the slender line of her nose down to her full lips, and willed them to move, to say something, to say yes, please, say yes.

  “I don’t plan on marrying you or anyone, for that matter,” she said, and then they were descending. The ground spinning out from under them, the noise of the fair swelling up, as smoke rose from a fire pit where a whole pig rotated above the flames. “I’ve been contemplating what I might want to do with my life,” she said, as once again they were being carried toward the sky, “and I’ve decided to become a nun.” With a violent jerk, the Ferris wheel came to a sudden stop, leaving them suspended at the top, swaying back and forth at the tipping point.

  “A nun?” He repeated later that night as he had one stiff one after another at the tavern. Pascuala a nun? It didn’t make sense. There was something so barricaded about that three-letter word—nun. There was no room to negotiate, or even to argue. It wasn’t like he could challenge a rival to a duel. Who would his rival be? The convent? The priest? God himself? Nun. It was the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end.

  In the following days, he started contemplating something that had never occurred to him, but the more he thought about it, the more obsessed he became with the idea, and not before long, he was making calculations—measuring the distance between town and her home in Santana. On Sundays, after misa, Pascuala, her mother, and her three sisters usually went to visit their tía Nico in town before heading back to Santana—the journey on horseback along those solitary dirt roads took about three hours. That would be the perfect place to take the women by surprise, unless Manuel was with them. If Manuel was with them, things could get complicated. So be it. If it came to blows, he was ready and willing to fight for Pascuala, to the death if need be.

  He picked a date
and enlisted Salvador and two of his cousins. There was a tavern two blocks away from Nico’s house, and that’s where he and his men were waiting when the boy he had paid to be the lookout came barreling through the swinging doors, announcing that the women were loading their groceries onto the horses. The men polished off their drinks and headed outside. Everyone knew what to do. They would track the women from a distance, and when they reached the outskirts of town, they would descend upon them, kicking up dust and disorienting them enough so that he could swoop in and claim his bride. He was feeling good, the adrenaline already surging through him, and the minute he was on his horse he dug his spurs into its ribs and pulled back on the reins with such gusto that the horse reared and sent him flying backward. He hit the ground with a thud, smacked his head on a rock, and was knocked unconscious.

  The day finally came when in a fit of desperation he rode his horse out to Santana and right into her courtyard. His parents arrived close behind, already apologizing to Andrea, Pascuala’s mother, from the other side of the gate, saying that the boy had been at a rodeo all day, and had gone home saying that he needed to see Pascuala, that he had to see Pascuala and, well, before they could stop him he was back on his horse and on the way. Andrea invited them in for a cup of tea, and while he sat nodding off on the couch, his parents explained to Andrea that the kids had recently taken a ride on the Ferris wheel and had talked about marriage. Andrea knew nothing about the ride on the Ferris wheel, but she was a firm believer that marriage was not something one should rush into. She suggested they set a six-month plazo, this way her daughter would have time to think things over. His parents agreed, and when they got up to leave, they couldn’t wake him. He was out cold. It was already late, Andrea gave them some spare blankets, and they spent the night in the living room. Though they woke and left before sunrise, Santana and all the nearby ranches were already abuzz with the chismes, the latest gossip—he had slept under her roof.

  His parents were very punctual, and six months later they were back, asking what the girl had decided. To everyone’s surprise, she had said yes. Yes, she would marry that man. They were married a month later in the main cathedral in town. She was seventeen, and she wore a proper white wedding dress and a long white lace veil. He was twenty-one, and the black shoes he wore were so finely polished that the tips were gleaming. After the ceremony, they walked across the plaza to the sprawling house with the pink limestone arches that belonged to Timoteo, Jose’s grandfather. This is where the reception was held, and where they spent their first night together as husband and wife.

  When they were first married, he could hardly believe that it was she—alive and in the flesh—breathing next to him. He fumbled around under the blankets, wrapped his arms tight around her small waist and buried his face in her long neck. “If you ever leave me, Pascuala, I will find you and kill you,” he whispered in her ear.

  “You wouldn’t dare,” she said, laughing at him. “Usted me lleva por dentro como la sangre en sus venas.” She was right. Back then she had flowed through him like the very blood in his veins, and to kill her would be to snuff out some part of himself, but now there is only the smoldering of the flame that had once burned so bright for her.

  He orders another stiff one, thinking that perhaps this was her plan all along. Get him out of the way so that she could have her blessed freedom. So that she could do as she pleased with the ministers. Take road trips with them. Stay in roadside motels with them. The last time he had seen her, they had stayed at a roadside motel in the outskirts of Monterrey. She was in town visiting her mother and he went to see her. They had sat in the kitchen and talked, and he had offered to drive her to the airport. Then, on the day she was to leave, the unexpected happened. A snowstorm blew through town, knocking out power lines, and shutting down the local airport.

  The nearest airport was six hours away in Monterrey, and since he had been drinking right up until her departure, he had enlisted a chauffeur, paying a man from La Peña to drive his truck for him. They had driven out of the snowstorm and into the desert, and the whole time she was sitting next to him, she must have already been scheming, must have already known there would be no borrowed birth certificate. Had he known what her plan was then, he might have done it. How easy it would have been to pull off the road, drive into the heart of the desert, find a deep gulley, and take all her identification. Their kids would have thought their mother had gone to Mexico and disappeared.

  They pulled into a roadside motel in the outskirts of Monterrey and that’s where they spent their last night together as husband and wife. In the morning, he drove her to the airport and she jumped out of the truck, grabbed her suitcase, and walked away. She went through the revolving glass doors without ever looking back. It was as though she were afraid that if she hesitated, the doors of the airplane would slam shut, the engines would roar, and she’d be left behind, stranded on the wrong side of the border with him for eternity. They had been married for nearly twenty-five years, had eight kids, and she had not even bothered to say goodbye. He could have lived with the rejection from that country, and from her even, but now to be rejected by his own flesh and blood. This was unbearable. He had not only lost his firstborn—he had lost them all.

  “The next time I see Pascuala,” he says to no one in particular, polishing off his drink and setting the glass back down on the scuffed surface, “I’m going to put my .45 to her forehead and send her straight to her God.”

  The men standing closest to him chuckle, slap his back, saying cut the crazy talk, Jose. Maybe to them it’s nothing but crazy talk, but for him it’s something so real he can almost taste it. It is no longer something hypothetical, something festering in that deep dark pool of bitterness. It has pushed beyond the confines of his thoughts, has clawed its way to the surface—he has uttered it, and in doing so, has breathed it to life.

  5

  THE GRAPES OF WRATH

  AS NIGHT SETTLES, the moths appear on the other side of the window, drawn by the light of the chandelier. They search the glass for an opening, a way to come inside, to move closer to the light. It’s late August, the start of sophomore year, and I’m sitting at the head of the dining room table, doing my homework. I hear the toilet flushing, and then the bathroom door swings open, lighting up the corridor.

  “You and your books,” my mother says, making her way through the living room toward me, yawning. She looks tired. There’s a certain fatigue that settled on her after my brother was killed. A fatigue that had grown deeper when about a year later, Juan, her younger brother, had also been shot and killed in Mexico, at a rodeo, something over an unsettled dispute. “Imagine if you spent all that time you spend sitting here doing something useful, like working?” she says, pulling out a chair and sitting down. “Yolanda called the other day and said they’re hiring cashiers at Kmart. Maybe you should go apply. It sounds like a good job, and if they hire you full-time, who knows, maybe eventually they’ll even promote you to manager,” she says. “You could drop out of school, make some good money.”

  “I don’t want to work at Kmart,” I say. “I want to go to college.”

  “What for?” she says. “So that you can do as you please? Don’t think that I don’t know what goes on at those places. No. No, señorita. You are not leaving this house until you get married.”

  I know there is no point in arguing with her. She just doesn’t get it. She was raised in Mexico, had only attended school until she was about twelve years old, had married my father when she was seventeen, and expected I would do the same. Get married, have kids, and be a housewife.

  “I don’t plan on getting married,” I say. This is pretty much my constant refrain, whenever she says things like this, or whenever she tells me to iron Jorge’s shirts, or make him breakfast, because what kind of a housewife am I going to be if I don’t even know how to cook and iron?

  “Your brother is the one who should be going to college. He’s the man, the one that should get an education
, have a career, not you,” she says.

  “Jorge doesn’t even like school, amá. Why would he want to go to college?” I say, even though after my conversation with Ms. Flint, I had told Jorge and Yesenia that they should start paying attention in class, and whenever they didn’t understand something, they should ask questions, stay after school, and get help if they had to. It wasn’t too late for us.

  None of our older siblings had gone to college. Rose had gotten pregnant her sophomore year and had dropped out and got married, and Sonia had eloped with her boyfriend the minute she graduated. Salvador had started working as a carpenter right out of high school, practically, and had married a nineteen-year-old girl from my mother’s church and moved to Pennsylvania. Mary had dropped out of high school when she was a sophomore and had been hired at a factory, where she worked full-time to help pay the bills, while attending cosmetology school in the evenings. Chemel had been the only one who had talked about going to college and maybe becoming a lawyer. Even though he had graduated from high school at the top of his class, he too had gone straight to working in a factory to help make ends meet. He always smelled like turpentine when he came home from work. Sometimes he’d pick me up and throw me on the couch and kiss me all over my face and neck. “Gross,” I yelled, laughing and trying to break free of his embrace, as his stubble scraped against my cheek and I inhaled the factory fumes coming off his hair.

  “Have you heard about the rumors your father has been spreading?” my mother asks, staring out the window, looking beyond the moths that are still searching on the other side of the glass.