Bulletproof Vest (24 page)

“Oh, for God's sake,” my aunt blurts out. “Will you two give each other a hug?” She gives my shoulder a slight nudge. I take a step toward him. He seems shorter, like gravity has taken him down a few notches, while I've grown a few inches. I reach for him and my chest recoils as my fingertips give his shoulder blades two taps. I'm vaguely aware of his hand on my lower back.

“Where is el baño?” Martin asks to no one in particular, and my cousins start laughing.

My aunt tells him to go out in the corral. Of course—there's no bathroom. When I was a kid, I remember overhearing conversations about la luz y el agua, water and electricity, arriving at all the different ranches that sprawled from Valparaíso. La luz y el agua had arrived in San Martín, in Santana, in Las Cruces. La luz y el agua were like two long-awaited guests of honor—saints practically, one arrived streaming through pipes below and the other traveling on wires above, and sending lightbulbs shining, illuminating rooms that had only known the light of a kerosene lantern. Though they arrived in La Peña years ago, there's still no bathroom—not even an outhouse.

Martin and I take turns going out to the corral. Adjacent to it is a huge roofless room with twenty-foot adobe walls. A few wooden beams jut out into the blue sky above. I find a spot behind a green metal trough and squat down. There is a pick and shovel leaning against the far wall, and a hole in the ground that is about six feet long and three feet deep. A crow swoops and lands on one of the beams, and while watching it ruffle its feathers, it dawns on me why while camping out with Abigail and the guys from Chico in the south of Spain, there was something so familiar about going outdoors.

Once I'm finished, I climb a set of wide limestone steps at the far end of the corral. They lead to a grassy plateau, and from here, I can do a three-sixty and see where the mountains meet the sky all the way around. The sky is so vast that I feel as though I'm on a different planet.

“What's that hole in the corral for?” I ask my father when I return.

He explains that back when La Peña was an hacienda, what is now the corral used to be the church, and legend has it that there is gold buried somewhere between those four walls.

*   *   *

Later that night, after everyone has left, Martin and I are in the bedroom where we'll be staying. It's a large cinder-block room with high ceilings and a tin roof that rattles against the wooden beams each time the wind gusts. The wardrobe is filled with women's clothing. I assume it belongs to the woman and girl who live with my father. They're out of town visiting relatives in the sierra for the holidays.

The walls are covered with portraits of saints, including a large one of the Virgen de Guadalupe. A pink shower curtain hangs in the doorway that separates our room from the storage room and the rest of the house. At the foot of the doorway the year 1986 is etched. This must be the room my brother built. When would he have ever thought that he was building the room in which his wake would be held? No matter where I go, he always finds me. Even after I moved to Brooklyn he showed up at my front door one day. I took him by the hand and guided him around my neighborhood. We walked down to the East River and sat on the rock from where I watch the sunset. “Can you see me from the other side of the sun?” I asked, but when I turned around he was gone, had been pulled under by the turbid current.

I hoist my backpack onto the bed, next to Martin's. We pull out extra layers—long johns, wool caps, socks, and sweaters. As soon as the sun went down, the temperature dropped—desert climate. A portrait of a Spanish conquistador hangs above the bed. It's painted on red felt, and black feathers sprawl like spiders from the conqueror's wide-brimmed hat. He has a black beard and mustache and his hand is resting on his sword. On his finger there is a ring with a red stone, which resembles a ring my father used to have.

“¿Se puede?” my father calls out from the storage room.

“Ey,” I say.

He comes in and stands in front of the curtain, watching us layer up.

“Make sure you shake out the blankets before going to bed,” he says. “Puede que ahí anden unos alacranes.” He scans the ceiling above, says that sometimes they fall off the wooden beams.

“There might be scorpions in the bed,” I say to Martin, hoisting my backpack off it.

“Are you serious?” He jumps off the bed, shakes his layers out.

“So, how long are you staying?” My father asks.

“We're not sure,” I say, glancing over at Martin, who is busy throwing his clothes back into his backpack. “We might leave tomorrow.”

“¿Tan rápido?” he says. “So, if we're going to go out to the ranch, we would have to go tomorrow morning.”

“Está bien,” I say. Earlier, he had told us about his ranch that sat at the top of the distant mountain range behind his house. It has two waterfalls, a freshwater spring, and three naturally formed slate pools; it's where he keeps his cattle and the rest of his horses. He had said that if we wanted to go, we could make a day of it, pack a lunch, ride out on horses, and if Martin and I wanted to, we could take a dip in one of the pools. It sounded like an adventure, and Martin and I had decided we should go.

“But the thing is, we need to leave here by four or five in the morning. That way we can make it out there by about seven or eight, spend a bit of time, and hopefully be back here before the sun really starts biting,” he says, glancing back at me, at my backpack, at Martin who is now standing next to me holding his backpack. “I also need to go to San Martín and see about borrowing a horse. I only have two here in the stable. The others are all up at the ranch,” he says, crossing the room and unlocking the blue metal doors that lead out into the courtyard. “So the soonest we could go would be the day after tomorrow,” he says. But not to worry, because tomorrow, after he gets the borrowed horse squared away, he can take us to some hot springs that are nearby. We can have a hot bath, get to bed early, and set out to his ranch first thing the following morning. He pulls the door open and a blast of cold air fills the room, sends the braided garlic wreath that hangs above it swaying. “Whatever you guys decide is fine, just let me know,” he says, stepping out into the courtyard.

“So if we want to go out to the ranch, we might have to stay for two days,” I tell Martin.

“Whatever you want to do is fine with me,” he says. “Though, if we're going to stay an extra day, I need to get into town, call my parents, buy some sunblock.”

“Here,” my father says, coming back in with two white plastic chairs. “If you keep your things on these, they should be fine.” He sets the chairs down in the middle of the room.

Martin and I place our backpacks on the chairs, and I explain to my father that if we're going to stay an extra day, then we need to go into town in the morning and run a few errands.

“You guys can take my truck,” he says. “We can get up early, have some breakfast, and while you go run your errands, I'll ride over to San Martín and see about borrowing a horse.”

*   *   *

The morning sunlight shines in through the blue metal bars of my father's bedroom window. The wool blanket on his bed pricks me through my linen skirt. I shift my weight and springs creak beneath me. Next to his bed there are a blue vinyl car seat and a small end table that is littered with toiletries—a blue plastic razor, a toothbrush, toothpaste, scissors, a bottle of brilliantine, a sardine tin filled with black hair dye, and a black plastic comb next to it. The sound of plates and silverware hitting against the slate sink filters in from the courtyard. After breakfast, Martin volunteered to wash the dishes, saying that my pops and I had a lot of catching-up to do. On the wall above my father's bed, a rifle hangs from a leather strap, which is slung over a rusty nail. A forest-green trunk sits in the far corner, and resting on top of it are his cowboy hats, each one inside a plastic cover.

A framed black-and-white photo of my father hangs above the dresser. In the photo he looks roughly twenty-seven and he's wearing a large sombrero, a white button-down shirt, tapered black pants, and a holster with a gun slung from them. He's mounted on a black horse that has a white mark on its forehead and one white foot. The photo looks like a throwback to a different era. There's a part of me that wants to ask him if I can have it, but I decide against it. Assuming that if it's the only photo of himself that he has on display, he must be quite proud of it. Next to his photo, there's one of my brother. He's standing outside in the corral next to his horse. The photo was probably taken soon after he arrived because in it he's wearing the same outfit he wore when he left Chicago: a light-blue Windbreaker, jeans, and his white leather Nike sneakers—how I wish I had hugged him goodbye.

On the same wall there is an oil painting—a family portrait of sorts. My father's face is on the upper-right-hand corner and the faces of Yesenia, Jorge, and Sonia radiate around his—immortalized in whatever top they wore to school on picture day the year before he left. I recognize the blue top Yesenia is wearing. It's actually a dress that, at one point, had belonged to me. The clatter of silverware comes from the courtyard again and I get the urge to march out there and tell Martin we are leaving—fuck the hot springs, his ranch, and his dishes—let him wash his damn dirty dishes. The green metal door that leads into the kitchen swings open and my father comes in carrying two glasses filled with water. He hands me one and sits on the vinyl car seat.

“Where did you have that painting made?” I ask, motioning toward his family portrait.

“In town,” he says, turning to look at it. “There's an artist, several artists actually, and if you take them separate photos they can put them all together in a portrait for you.” He glances at me. “Why? Did you want to have one made?”

“No,” I say. “I was just curious.”

He studies the portrait for a while.

“Yesenia really changed a lot, huh?” he says. “The first time she came down here, I didn't even recognize her.” He takes a sip of water. “She smokes a lot of mota, doesn't she?”

“I don't know,” I say, though Sonia told me that he had called her once, saying that he was concerned about Yesenia. That someone needed to keep an eye on her, because she had just been in town and had been seen hanging around the carnival smoking joints with the local riffraff. “La Ovejita Perdida,” he had re-nicknamed her, and I couldn't help but wonder if he realized that her being a little lost sheep might have something to do with his having left.

“And Pascuala?” he asks. “How's she doing?”

“She's fine,” I say, though I really want to say
None of your business how she's doing
, as I feel he has no right to even breathe her name. “She's in Chicago.”

“I heard she has a new house.”

“Yeah, Salvador built it for her.”

“Salvador makes good money, huh?”

“I guess. Every house he builds sells for about a million dollars,” I say, though I'm sure he already knows this. Salvador has his own construction company, and in a few years he'll be building homes for the Chicago Bears, will be living next door to the punter.

“A million dollars,” he says, choking on his water. “That's a good deal of money,” he says, and I can't help but think how ironic that while he is down here digging for gold, on the other side of the border, most of his kids have made their own small fortunes.

A cloud of dust comes barreling through the open window as a car idles by. He stretches his neck up, looking over my head and watching the car pass as if from behind a barricade. The skin on his neck is looser and the scar where Joaquín lodged the knife under his chin is plainly visible.

“Is that the same rifle you brought down from Chicago?” I ask him.

“No, that was my father's rifle,” he says, studying the rifle on the wall. “I sold the one I brought down with me; I sold most of those guns actually.” He scans the floor as if contemplating something. “No, when I got here and unloaded the truck, my father took one look at everything I brought and told me I was crazy for having taken that risk.”

“Whatever happened to the Puerto Rican guy you drove down here with?”

“Who knows,” he says. “He spent a good amount of time down here, a few months, going to the rodeos and hanging out in San Martín and Santana. Then someone told him about the cargo and one day he showed up here.” He motions to the blue metal door that leads to the courtyard. “He stood right there, asking me if it was true.” He stares at the door for a long time, as if the Puerto Rican were standing there now, demanding answers. “We had a good laugh over it,” he says, slapping his thigh and looking back at me. “So, how long have you lived in Washington?”

“It's not Washington,” I say. “It's New York.” We've already been through this, but he's confused. It's only been four months since September 11, and he keeps thinking the towers were in the nation's capital, in Washington, D.C. “I've been there for about seven months,” I say.

“Aren't you scared of the terrorists?” he asks. “Maybe you should go back to Chicago.” Go back to Chicago? Was he not the same man who had taught me to stare down the barrel of a loaded gun? The same man who had warned me about never running away from a fight? Another car drives by and again he stretches his neck up and watches it pass. “Did you hear about how I was ambushed?” he asks.

“Ey,” I say.

“People keep telling me I should leave this place, that I've created too many enemies, but I tell them I'm not going anywhere,” he says. “If anyone has a problem with me, they know where to come find me. As long as they're straight, you know, because those culeros that ambushed me went behind my back.” He tells me how he had seen the blue car pulled over on the side of the road, near the slaughterhouse, and had thought nothing of it until he had seen them running back toward it. “Those cowards didn't even have the guts to approach my truck and make sure I was dead.”