Bulletproof Vest

by Maria Venegas

  “It was the fright of my life,” Mary says, when I talk to her the next day. By then she’s heard that a convoy of SUVs had gone to pick up a woman from her neighborhood, but with all the banging someone had called the police and just as the SUVs were driving off with their hostage, the police descended on them and opened fire. They had chased the SUVs for several miles, forcing them to abandon two of their shattered vehicles on the main road—five people had been killed.

  “Do you think it was the same guys that have Dad?” I ask.

  “I wouldn’t doubt it,” she says.

  “Why don’t you go stay in Chicago until things settle down over there?” I say, but she refuses to leave.

  Later that day, we receive another message. His bond has been lowered again. The kidnappers want us to send $10,000 or whatever we can afford. Roselia’s partner jokes that if we hold out long enough, they might just ask us to send enough money to cover his food expenses so they at least break even.

  “I’m calling the kidnappers,” Roselia says. “This is ridiculous; we’re not going to let them kill Dad over $10,000.”

  She calls Rosario to get the number for the kidnappers, but before she has a chance to say anything, Rosario informs her that she has already come up with the $10,000. She borrowed the money from Raúl, Alma’s boyfriend, and says that they should be releasing my father as soon as the wire clears their account. Within the next day or two, most likely.

  By Friday afternoon, the latest wave of rumors is already sweeping all over town and drifting across the border. People are saying that they saw my father riding around with the kidnappers, hanging out at the gas station in Valparaíso with them—that perhaps he was not kidnapped at all, but rather had joined them.

  * * *

  “When did they let you go?” I ask my father when I talk to him a few days later. Though I already know the answer to my own question, I also know that our conversation is probably being tapped, and thus I can’t ask what I really want to know—about the shoot-out in Mary’s neighborhood, about the rumors that people had seen him riding around with the kidnappers, and whether he had actually joined them.

  He tells me they dropped him off in front of his house on Saturday night.

  “Did you ever find your gun?” I ask, and he says he hadn’t even had a chance to look for it, that the amigos must have found it because they had ransacked the whole house and taken anything and everything of value—his television, his stereo, his gold chains, his leather coats, and his father’s rifle. Again I feel a pang of guilt for having hid his gun. Perhaps if he had had it on him, he may have been able to defend himself. Though he just as easily may have gotten himself gunned down in that dusty lot, his gun no match for their machine guns, and his corrido would have had a different ending.

  “No, méndigos. There was a woman with them, and she was the mera mera. She kept ramming the butt of the rifle into my kneecaps and asking for my daughters’ phone numbers,” he says. “I kept telling them that they were mistaken, that I didn’t have any daughters. Except for Sonia, and that’s only because they found the number to her salon in my wallet. Though they seemed convinced that I had a daughter living in Jalisco, and that she owned her own gas station, even,” he says. “Y a huevo, they wanted me to give them her phone number, tell them where she lived, but how was I supposed to give them information that didn’t exist? Impossible, right?”

  “Ey,” I say, and I know he’s telling me exactly what he can’t say. “I’m glad you’re okay,” I say, though what I really want to say is, We didn’t turn our backs on you. Just because we didn’t call the kidnappers back doesn’t mean we weren’t trying. But I don’t say anything, because if the kidnappers are listening, they may go pick him up again.

  “I’m fine, alive and kicking anyway,” he says, though later Rosario will tell me that when they dropped him off, he was dehydrated, had lost weight, and his knees were swollen and bruised. “The one that wasn’t so lucky was your cow.” He informs me that on Sunday, after we had last spoken, he had gone out to the ranch and she was lying on her side. Her breathing was shallow but she was still alive. On Monday morning, he had gone to the vet and picked up a vaccine for her and had planned on riding back out to the ranch on Tuesday morning. “But then they picked me up on Monday afternoon and that was that.” He was just out at the ranch yesterday, and between the coyotes and the vultures, there was barely anything left of my cow.

  “Maybe she went instead of you,” I say. This is something he had once told me. How in Mexico, the indigenous believe that if death is coming for you, it can be diverted—tricked into taking a different soul in place of your own.

  “That’s the same thing Rosario said,” he says. “That maybe the veinte landed on your cow instead of me.” He tells me not to worry, he already has another cow picked out for me, and asks when might I be coming down again.

  “Maybe I’ll come once classes let out in December,” I say. “For the holidays.”

  “I’ll be here, waiting for you,” he says, though he probably knows as well as I do that I won’t be coming down for the holidays or anytime soon—the kidnapping has changed things.

  * * *

  Over the next few months, he goes through cell phones as if they were disposable. Each month, it seems, he has a new number. I keep reprogramming the new numbers into my cell, under Dad—that three-letter word no longer feels like a lie. It feels like the word itself is made of flesh and bone. Most of the time when I dial his number, my call doesn’t go through because he doesn’t have sufficient funds. That, or my calls go straight to voice mail, in which case I hang up, as he doesn’t know how to retrieve his messages. If he does pick up, it’s difficult to have a conversation with him. Not only does it feel like we’re being monitored, but more often than not he’s been drinking and his speech is slurred and difficult to understand.

  “Who is this?” he growls into the phone.

  “It’s me, Dad, it’s me…”

  “Who?” he asks, and then he’s gone. Either he hangs up or the call is dropped.

  Mary tells me that she has called him a few times, and he’ll say he’s up at his ranch, but later she’ll find out he had been home all along. One time he tells her he’s up at La Mesa—hiding.

  “Hiding from whom?” she asks. “Who are you hiding from, apá?” Before he answers, either the call is dropped or cut off.

  Then he starts showing up at her house, looking wild-eyed and fatigued, alcohol fumes exuding from him. He’s lost weight, all of his teeth are missing, and white stubble springs from his chin like needles. He seems so much older. It’s as though all the years he managed to stave off with sheer force of will have suddenly come crashing down on him. They sit on her stoop, and though she insists that he come inside and take a bath, have a hot meal, he refuses. He puts his arms around her, pulls her close, and bursts into tears. He starts rambling on and on about those men, how they are heartless, how they do horrible, horrible things, kill innocent people—women and children even, how he had not wanted to do it, but not to worry, because as long as he’s alive, no one is going to come bothering her.

  “You didn’t want to do what, apá?” she asks. He pulls away and stares at her as if trying to remember who she is. Red veins cut across the whites of his eyes, and she can’t help but wonder how long it’s been since he’s had a full night’s sleep. “What is it that you didn’t want to do?” she asks. He pushes himself to his feet and looks around like a man that has just come to, and then he’s swatting at the low-hanging fig branches in her driveway and stumbling back to his truck. He climbs in, rouses the driver, and he’s gone.

  He had found someone to drive him, had traveled three hours to spend a mere twenty minutes with her. It’s like he had come all that way just to be held by her, as if she were his last chance—a life raft in that abysmal terrain. He shows up a few more times after that. His visits are always the same, always brief, with him weeping and saying that he hadn’t wanted to do it, that th
ose men are heartless, do horrible things, but not to worry, because as long as he’s alive, no one is going to bother her.

  Once he’s gone, she’s left with the sinking feeling that the kidnapping rattled his mind off its hinges.

  * * *

  “We have to help Dad,” Sonia says, calling me out of the blue one day. She too has heard how he’s been drinking a lot, how he’s been showing up at Mary’s. “We have to get him out of there.”

  “Where will he go?”

  “I don’t know, maybe he can go stay with Yesenia in Tulum,” she says, because by then Yesenia was working as a massage therapist on the beach in southern Mexico. “Or maybe we can get him across the border somehow.”

  “How?” I ask. We had already tried getting him a U.S. visa about two years before. Sonia had filled out all the paperwork, and a few months later, he had received a letter in the mail. He had been issued an appointment. He needed to report to the U.S. consulate in Guadalajara on such and such date, and bring certain records—his birth and wedding certificates, bank statements, proof of the livestock, and land deeds. I had made the rounds around the plaza with him, collecting all the documents he would need. By then, the prison had been relocated to the outskirts of town, there were two banks in the square, and most of the government offices were in the building where the house with the pink limestone arches had once stood.

  On the day of his appointment, he had really looked the part. Wearing sneakers, blue jeans, a forest-green Windbreaker from J.Crew, and a baseball cap—very believable, I thought—very American. He handed the woman behind the counter his paperwork, all neatly organized inside a manila envelope. She asked him several questions: What was the purpose of his trip? How long did he intend to stay? Where would he be staying? He answered her questions with a smile and a flutter in his eye, and she smiled back, and perhaps in trying to be convincing, he had convinced himself that it just might work, that he might be able to charm his way back into the United States, until she placed a small pad in front of him. She assured him it was no big deal, really, just a formality, and would he be so kind as to press his thumb onto the pad? Even before doing so, he knew the charade was over.

  “Maybe we can drive him to Tijuana and pay a coyote to take him across the border,” Sonia says. “Or maybe my tío Antonio will let him borrow his documents.”

  My tío Antonio, my father’s older brother, had been living legally in the United States for years. They looked enough alike that maybe my father could use his papers and we could drive him to Tijuana, where he could walk across the border, but would he actually have the nerve to cross? It was no longer as easy as it once had been, back in the seventies and eighties when he had gone back and forth numerous times, treating the border the same way he had treated the law—as a mere suggestion.

  He was also no longer as young and daring as he once had been. Besides, would he cross, knowing that he would be living in the suburbs, at the mercy of others to get around? There would be no way for him to get a legal driver’s license, and even if he got a crooked one, would he take the chance of potentially being pulled over, questioned, and arrested? Would he go, knowing that there would be no more solitary horseback rides in the moonlight, no more horses, no more cattle, no fresh mountain air, and no vast blue skies—nothing but his body being shuffled from one house in the suburbs to another, even as the years continued to pile up on him like an unstoppable avalanche that would eventually push him into the brightly lit corner of a nursing home?

  “Where would he live?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “With me, I guess.”

  “What if he keeps drinking?”

  “Maybe we can take him to AA,” she says.

  We both fall silent.

  25

  STARFISH

  WE’RE CONVINCED he’s not going to make it. He’s been drinking for days and on the day before his flight is to leave from Guadalajara, I call him in the late afternoon.

  “¿Quiubo?” he yells over the music that’s blaring in the background.

  “Apá,” I say, “are you going to come meet us or not?” My two sisters and I planned a trip to Tulum, and we bought him a ticket. It’s been seven months since he was kidnapped, and none of us has been back to see him.

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s me, apá.” This is the same conversation I’ve been having with him for the past five days. He doesn’t seem to remember that he has a flight to catch. He tells me to wait a moment, and then I hear him having a conversation with someone, yelling something over the music. “Who are you with?” I ask.

  “No one,” he says, and is then mumbling something incoherent about saddling up his horse and riding out to the ranch.

  “Apá, if you don’t sober up, they’re not going to let you on the plane.”

  “Oh, oh, oh, okay, okay, está bien,” he says, and then he’s gone.

  After getting off the phone, he manages to get himself into the shower and into a clean change of clothes. He shoves his toiletries, extra socks and underwear, and one change of clothes into a small beige backpack, and then finds someone to drive him to the bus depot, boards a bus to the next town over, where he sits in the station nodding off for an hour before boarding an overnight bus to Guadalajara. He arrives at Guadalajara at 6:00 a.m., and though his flight isn’t due to leave until 1:00 p.m., he takes a cab straight to the airport, clears security, finds his gate, and there he sits, nodding off and watching the seats around him fill up and then empty as everyone filters through the gate and onto the plane. The young woman behind the counter asks where he’s traveling to, and he tells her he’s flying to Cancún, to meet up with his daughters.

  “That flight is not due to leave for several hours,” she says. “Why don’t you go for a walk, get some fresh air, grab a bite, and then come back?”

  “No, with my luck, I’ll go on a walk, get lost, and end up missing the plane,” he says.

  He stays put; he’s already made it that far.

  * * *

  The day after he arrives is a Sunday, and Yesenia drops him and me off at the Mayan ruins in Tulum, saying that she needs to go into town and run a few errands.

  “Where was Yesenia going?” he asks, as we make our way along the path, which is covered with crushed white seashells.

  “To meet up with mi amá,” I say.

  “Your mother is here?” His face lights up.

  “Ey,” I say. Yesenia and I had been traveling through Guatemala with my mother, and since we assumed there was no way he was going to make it, my mother decided to continue on to Tulum with us.

  “How long is she staying?” he asks.

  “She’s leaving either tomorrow or the next day.”

  “Why so fast?”

  “Why do you think?” I say, glancing over at him.

  He shrugs, though he must know it’s because of him. When we found out he was on his way, my mother had gone and checked into a hotel, but not without putting up a fight first, insisting that he should be the one to go stay in a hotel, and she should be allowed to remain at Yesenia’s. But since we had harassed him so much about coming to meet us, we couldn’t ask him to stay in a hotel.

  “You see that white line out there?” I say, pointing out over the sea where, in the distance, the waves are breaking along the reef and forming a continuous line across the surface. He nods, and I tell him that there’s a reef out there, brimming with all kinds of ocean life, and Yesenia is friends with a Mayan man who goes by the nickname of El Capitán, and he paddles out there in his boat around sunset and casts his net, and then returns just before sunrise and pulls in his catch. “The last time I was here, he caught a shark,” I say. “He sold it to one of the fisheries in town and then took to the bottle for days.”

  “Pobre amigo,” he says, looking out across the water. “That’s rough. I’m not going to be drinking anymore. Sometimes when I drink too much, I say things, probably say more than I should, and then the next day I have no
recollection of it.”

  “Tito always says that a man might consume alcohol his whole life, but the day comes when the alcohol starts consuming the man.”

  “That’s what Andreita says, huh? No, caraja viejita, she always did tell it like it is.” He’s right. Though Tito is in her early nineties, nothing ever escapes her. “What is the world coming to?” she said when she heard about the introduction of genetically modified seeds into Mexico. “Sterile seeds?” she said. “Imagine? One day that could lead to world hunger, and possibly the extinction of the human race.”

  We stroll around the back of the largest pyramid on the grounds. It sits on a cliff overlooking the turquoise-blue waters of the Caribbean. Tourists smile and squint in the morning sun as they pose for pictures in front of the pyramid. I notice how their eyes linger on my father as we pass. He stands out amid the flip-flops, sundresses, and baseball caps in his black cowboy boots, jeans, cowboy hat, and burgundy-colored button-down shirt, which is lined with beige piping and has the inlay of a bull’s head on the back, the horns stretching out toward his shoulders. I feel like I’m walking around with a relic from the mainland. I wouldn’t be surprised if people started asking if they can have their picture taken with him.

  “How is Pascuala getting back to Zacatecas? Is she taking a camión or the avión?” he asks.

  “I think she’s taking the camión because she wants to stop in Mexico City to visit a church where she knows some people.”

  “Well, I guess that’s always been her negocio,” he says, as we make our way along the path. “Eso sí, los hermanais have always been her priority. I think if she hadn’t become a hallelujah, we might have made it,” he says.