Bulletproof Vest

by Maria Venegas

  “¿Quiubo?” he calls out.

  “¿Apá?” I stop in my tracks.

  “¿Ey?”

  “Are you still sleeping?”

  No response.

  “I want to talk to you,” I say.

  There’s a long silence.

  “Give me five minutes,” he calls out, his voice heavy with sleep.

  I grab an extra beer out of the fridge and wait, hear him shuffling around in his room, hear the squeak of the metal shutters, and then the white line of light appears beneath his door.

  “Adelante,” he says.

  I push the door open, and he’s sitting on his bed, in a pool of afternoon sunlight. He blinks sleep from his eyes, his bare feet resting on top of his black plastic sandals.

  “Want one?” I say, taking a seat next to him and holding out the extra beer.

  “No, gracias,” he says.

  I take a gulp and stare at our shadows stretching across the floor, not sure where to begin, not even sure of what I want to say, though I can feel him looking at me—waiting.

  “You know that country in Europe where marijuana is legal?” I say, glancing over at him.

  He frowns.

  “Well, there is a country in Europe where mota is legal,” I say, “and several years ago, when I was backpacking around Europe with some friends, I went there, and in a shop they sold peyote buttons in small clay pots, and my friends wanted to try it, but I refused because I always felt like if I was ever going to try peyote, I wanted it to be here, you know, in Mexico. And do you remember this morning when I was sitting on the stoop of the other house?”

  “Uh-huh,” he says, narrowing his gaze on me, as if he’s trying to figure out where I’m going with all of this. And maybe I don’t even know where I’m going with all this, but I do my best at explaining that I had just eaten some peyote, and what my intent had been, because Tito had recently told me about the day that she had brought me back here, and how after that day I had never asked about them again. Then, when the broom snapped the chick’s neck, it had felt like it was me, like it was a reenactment of that day, because when I realized they weren’t here, it must have been the equivalent of having my neck snapped.

  “It’s like I died here,” I say, and try explaining that whatever person I was on my way to becoming, was forever altered in that moment, so that the girl who arrived at that stoop, and the one who left, were no longer the same. “Or maybe I wasn’t the one that died, but you and mi amá were, because when I realized you guys weren’t here, I must have thought you were gone forever, must have mourned you as if you were dead. You know what I mean?” I say, glancing over at him.

  “Well, yes,” he says, clearing his throat. “I guess you were too young to understand what was happening, so you must have thought something had happened to us.”

  “Right,” I say, “but maybe having lost you at such a young age turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Maybe it was that initial experience that helped me to bear the brunt of all that came after. Like when you left Chicago, it didn’t really faze me because I had already lost you once,” I say. “But not Yesenia and Jorge. When you left, it probably affected them more than anyone, because they had never been apart from you.”

  His hands are gripping his knees and he contemplates the ground for a long time before glancing over at the extra beer.

  “A ver esa cerveza,” he says, and I hand him the can. He cracks it open, takes a gulp, and stares at the far wall, seems to be pondering something, and perhaps he’s thinking about the time he called home and no one wanted to talk to him, or maybe he’s thinking about the day that he pulled out of the driveway in the dark hours of morning, not knowing it would be years before he would see any of his kids again.

  “When you left, if you knew you weren’t going to come back, why didn’t you say goodbye?” I ask, turning to face him.

  He studies the label on the can in his hand, as if the answer to my question might be written there in the fine print.

  “I was planning on going back,” he says. “But then someone told me that the police were looking for me. That there was a warrant out for my arrest, and that I’d be best off staying away.”

  “But by then, you were already living with that other woman, weren’t you?”

  “That too,” he says, craning his neck and scratching his chin. “I think that if Pascuala hadn’t converted to that religion, we may have made it. Ever since she became a hallelujah, we started having problems,” he says, though he probably knows that their troubles began the day he laid eyes on her. My mother always claimed that she didn’t want to marry him, but if she hadn’t, he would have taken her by force, had already tried once. She maintained that she never loved him, a sentiment that grew louder after he left, and no matter what either of them alleges, I’ll never know the details of whatever conversations transpired behind their bedroom door. “Then everything happened with Manuel and after that, I knew there was no going back.” He takes another swig. “My poor brother-in-law, we even got along, you know?” he says not to me but to our shadows. “Pero, bueno,” he says, slapping his knee. “It’s best not to dwell on the past too much, it will only bring us down.” He polishes off his beer. “So,” he turns and looks at me, “you were on your airplane all day, huh?”

  “Ey,” I say.

  “What’s it like?” he asks, though I’m pretty sure he knows what it’s like. A few years back, Yesenia had brought him some peyote that she had picked herself, and she had explained to him that it was medicinal, that perhaps it could help him make peace with his past.

  I tell him it’s intense, but mellow. How it skews the perception of time and distance—makes an hour feel eternal, and a lifetime fleeting.

  19

  BLUE DRESS

  ON THE DAY that I leave, I sit at the top of the limestone steps in the corral and watch my father run El Relámpago in circles. El Relámpago goes bucking, kicking up a ring of dust around my father. Sometimes he rears, rises up on his hind legs, jerking his head from left to right, trying to free himself from the harness before crashing back down to the ground. El Lobo runs up to the horse, barking at him. El Relámpago lowers his head to the ground and charges at the dog, and when he’s close enough, he bucks, attempting to kick El Lobo with his hind legs.

  “Lobo, cabrón,” my father yells, and the dog goes away.

  After my father saddles up the horse and ties him to the mesquite in front of the house, he drives me into town and drops me off two blocks away from Tito’s house. I’ll be spending the next week with my mother and Tito before flying back to New York. Since I arrived, I’ve gone back and forth between Tito’s and La Peña, between my mother and father. The last time he dropped me off at Tito’s, my mother opened the door and hugged me. “This is the house where we lost each other,” she said. “Maybe this is where we’ll find each other again.”

  I set my stuff down on the sidewalk and climb back into his truck, reach over and give him a hug and a kiss on his cheek, and I catch a whiff of alcohol coming from his breath. I know he’s been drinking again, I’ve smelled a trace of it here and there. Rosario told me he keeps bottles stashed everywhere—in his bedroom, the kitchen, the courtyard, his truck, and even the corral.

  “I’ll be back as soon as classes let out in December,” I say. “For the holidays.”

  “Ándele pues, mija.” He says that he’ll be here waiting for me, that as long as he’s alive, his home is my home.

  Two days later, my mother, Tito, and I are at Mary’s house, in Jalisco, three hours away. It’s just before midnight and we are getting ready for bed when the phone rings. It’s Rosario calling to say that my father has had an accident. He’d been drinking since the day I left, and had come home earlier that day, saddled up El Relámpago just after sunset, and set out for his ranch. Somewhere along the way he unloaded his gun into the sky. The horse had never been in such proximity to gunfire and reared, fell backward, and crushed him against the rocks near the riv
er. If it hadn’t been for a man who happened to be riding on a nearby ridge, he might have lain near the river until morning. The man offered him a hand, but my father told him not to move him, because he could tell that he was in pretty bad shape. He told the man to go to La Peña, ask for Rosario, and she would know what to do.

  “He’s all broken,” Rosario says, though she doesn’t elaborate when we ask, broken how? After the man arrived, Rosario had called an ambulance and they had picked up my father and driven him to the nearest hospital in Fresnillo, two hours away.

  Mary and I drive to the hospital and the road stretches endlessly before us. The fields on either side of it are pitch-black, and I stare into the darkness and try not to think about what we will find when we reach the hospital, try not to think about all the different ways in which he may be “broken.” We drive in silence and the whir of the tires on the asphalt fills the cabin. There’s something almost hypnotic about the fluid rhythm, and before I know it, each breath I draw has fallen in sync with the cadence, has turned into a chant: Please don’t die, please don’t die, not yet, please don’t die. I had just begun to get to know him and was not prepared to lose him again.

  “Your father is lucky to be alive,” the doctor says when we arrive at the hospital at 2:00 a.m. He informs us that my father has eight fractured ribs. One of his lungs has completely collapsed, and the other is only about 30 percent functional. They have inserted a plastic tube through either side of his rib cage to help drain the fluids that have accumulated in his lungs. The tubes are slowly filtering blood and dark fluids into two large glass jars that sit on the floor on either side of his bed, like external glass lungs.

  “Apá,” I say, leaning over his bed. His eyes are bloodshot and weary, and his lips are chapped and laced with dry blood. I catch a whiff of alcohol coming off his breath, strong and sour. “How do you feel?” I ask.

  “Bien,” he says, attempting to smile, though it looks like it pains him. He glances from my sister to me to her, and asks who else came. We tell him it’s just us, and that Rosario and Alma are napping in the lobby. He asks for a drink of water, but the doctor says that until they can determine if his intestines are functioning properly, he can’t eat or drink anything, it’s too dangerous. After the doctor leaves, again he asks me for a drink of water—practically begs for it. I pull my water bottle from my bag, find a clean paper towel, soak it, and squeeze a few drops onto his parched tongue.

  In the morning, after nodding off by his bedside all night, we call the rest of our siblings in Chicago. Sonia arrives the following day, and my mother picks her up and drives her to the hospital.

  “Why didn’t you call me?” my father asks Sonia. “I could have gone and picked you up at the airport.”

  “Oh, yeah,” she says. “And what would you have done with those jars?”

  “These?” He looks at the tubes jutting from his chest and a sullen expression overshadows his face, as if he’s just realizing that the tubes are attached to him. He says that he could have pulled his truck right up next to the bed, loaded the jars in the back, and then driven to the airport.

  I shoot Sonia a look. After the first night, it was clear that something was wrong—really wrong. One of the first storms of the rainy season had raged all through the night, and he had not slept a wink. He was convinced the rain was pouring down the walls inside the hospital, kept asking me how they were going to get all that water out. Lightning flashed through the ward and then he was clawing at the sheets, convinced he was slipping into a dark tunnel at the foot of his bed. When I asked the doctor why my father was hallucinating, he cited a number of reasons. It could be the strong painkiller he was on, or the lack of oxygen to his brain since he was breathing with less than half a lung. Also, the elderly had a harder time recovering from these things, he said.

  “He’s not that old,” I said, and the doctor motioned to the head of my father’s bed. There among the gleaming knobs, switches, and valves was a piece of paper that read:

  Jose Venegas

  65

  Sixty-five. That number looked like a misprint, like a mistake. Until I saw that number in writing, I had continued to think of him as forever forty-five—the same age he was when he left Chicago. My father might be sixty-five, but he was far from elderly. One of the first things he had asked the doctor was how long before he could ride his horse again, saying something about how the rainy season had just begun, and he needed to move his cattle from La Mesa to his ranch before the fields started sprouting. The doctor had chuckled and told him not to worry so much about his cattle or getting back on his horse. He needed to focus on getting better first, on getting out of this place, where half the men were here thanks to their horses.

  Jorge arrives the following day, and the day after that comes Roselia—this is how my mother gets roped into the situation, gets caught up chauffeuring us around.

  “Who brought you?” my father asks Roselia.

  “Mi amá,” she says.

  “Your mother is here?” he asks, his face lighting up a bit, though he looks beyond fatigued. He hasn’t slept at all since he arrived three nights before. “Is she going to come see me?”

  “What do you think?” says Roselia.

  He shrugs, sort of looks like a child that has just been scolded.

  “Do you want her to come see you?” I ask.

  “If she wants to,” he says, swatting at a green smudge on his sheet. Earlier, they had fed him his first meal—mashed greens, and peaches in thick syrup. Though he had a hard time bringing the plastic spoon to his mouth, he had insisted on doing it himself and ended up spilling half of it on the sheet.

  “I’ll ask her for you,” I say.

  He nods and swats at the smudge again, keeps thinking it’s a spider. I grab my bag and head out to the parking lot. Though the sun is shining, a gentle rain is falling, and the scent of wet earth fills the air. It has stormed every night he’s been here, and every night he has been wide awake and watching the lightning flash through the ward. One minute he’s aware that he’s in the hospital, and the next he thinks he’s out on his ranch. The tunnel at the foot of his bed has not stopped spinning, and the day before, they rolled a new patient in and he had watched unflinchingly as the two male nurses hoisted the man onto the bed next to his.

  “Why did you bring that dead man in here?” he hollered at them. I shushed him, told him the man wasn’t dead, as one of the nurses pulled shut the thick rubber curtain between their beds.

  Later that night, while lightning flashed outside, he had been in a panic. Staring wide-eyed at the curtain and saying that the dead man was standing right there, next to his bed, and holding his hand out to him.

  “Apá, there is nothing here,” I said, going to the side of his bed and running my hand along the curtain. “See?” Eventually, he calmed down, though he didn’t take his gaze from the curtain for the rest of the night.

  “How’s your father doing?” my mother asks when I climb into her Jeep. She’s been shuttling us between the hospital and her sister’s house, where we have been eating, showering, and sleeping.

  “Not good,” I say, explaining how one minute he seems coherent, understands where he is, but the next minute his mind is gone and he thinks he’s out on his ranch, herding his cattle—even swears he can hear the tamborazo blaring all around him. “He’s convinced that the man in the bed next to his is dead,” I say.

  “Maybe he hit his head when he fell,” she says, pulling out of the parking lot. “There are a lot of rocks near that river where they found him.”

  I had already asked the doctor if they had checked his head, but he said that if the doctor who was on duty when my father arrived hadn’t ordered a CT scan, then it wasn’t necessary. When I asked if they could give him a sedative to help him sleep, the doctor explained my father’s situation as a catch-22. Since he hadn’t slept at all, there was a chance he could go into cardiac arrest, but he also had a very faint heartbeat, and a sedative might stop
his heart altogether. Even though it didn’t make sense, I had sat next to his bed, trying to accept this dilemma, thinking that maybe this was the way his life was going to end. Not with a bullet but with his heart. And what if he did die? Would it be so bad? My cousins still lived in and around town, and I’m sure they’d be relieved to know that the man who killed their father was gone. Tito and my mother would probably breathe a bit easier, as well. Recently, he had taken to driving circles around their house, blaring music from his truck, playing a ballad that he used to serenade my mother with before they married.

  “He asked about you,” I say to my mother when we pull up in front of my aunt’s house. “He asked if you were going to go see him.”

  “You should have never told him I was here,” she says.

  “He figured it out,” I say.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she says, gripping the steering wheel and staring straight ahead. I can see the conflict on her face. If he dies, she might regret not having seen him, but what if she opens that door and then he survives?

  “I think if it’s going to make you feel better, then you should go see him. Don’t do it for him, do it for yourself,” I say, using the same reasoning Martin had used on me.

  “It’s not like I can remove that blood from your veins.” She glances over at me, and it’s as if she can see his blood and her blood forever interlaced and swimming in my veins.

  The following day, she drives me back to the hospital, and Sonia and Jorge say that my father had kept the entire wing up all night. One minute he was yelling something about how the dead man was standing at the foot of his bed and the next minute he was trying to get up and leave. He demanded to know who had taken his boots and put him in that blue dress. The jars scraped along on the floor, as they struggled to hold him down. They had asked for a sedative, and received the same catch-22 response.