Bulletproof Vest (33 page)

I walk over to the sink, grab the pink bar of Zote soap from under it, and adjust the hose between my knees, bend into the ice-cold stream of water while he holds the light over me.

“This is the flashlight you gave me for Christmas last year,” he says.

It's a long, black metal flashlight with adjustable beams—identical to the one Martin had given him on our first visit. He had told me how he really liked that flashlight because it had such powerful beams, but he had lost it. He and his buddy were driving home from a fiesta in the next town over, and since he had had too much to drink, he let his friend drive his truck, and though he kept telling him to take it nice and slow, because it was best to arrive late rather than never, still his friend had gone off the road, and as the truck began to roll, the flashlight had been thrown from it.

I place the soap back under the sink and am still hunched over when we hear the first gunshots. Only a few scattered blasts in the distance, then they seem to get louder and closer like an approaching hailstorm, and soon they're all around us. My father drops the flashlight into the back of his truck, goes into the house, and comes back out with two loaded guns, hands me the bigger one, a .357 Magnum.

“Truénela,” he says.

The light from the fire is reflecting off the long silver barrel and the mother-of-pearl grip. I turn it over in my hands, taken by how beautiful it is.

“I don't know,” I say. “I've never shot a gun before.”

“It doesn't matter,” he says, a huge smile spreading across his face. “Just point it straight up and shoot it.”

I look at the gun. Hesitate. If I shoot it, I feel as if I will have crossed some line, a transgression—a .357 Magnum took my brother's life.

All around us guns are going off. He points his at the sky and unloads it, shooting fast, one right after another, the way he used to do in the Chicago suburbs when we were kids.

“See,” he says, his eyes dancing with excitement. “Just point it up and shoot it.”

“Bueno,” I say. “No puedo pensar en qué otro lugar sería mejor, um, estaría más bueno como para truenar…” What I'm trying to say is that if I was ever going to shoot a gun, I can't think of a better time or place, but again my Spanish is failing me and I'm slurring my words and now he's looking at me like maybe he's regretting having handed me a loaded gun.

“Truénela,” he says, his smile fading.

I turn around and point the gun straight up, hold it over my head with both hands. I look toward the small church in the distance, press gently on the trigger, and am surprised by how hard it is. It's as if the force of gravity has reversed its course and is pushing back up against my finger. I press down harder. The pressure releases, fire shoots from my fingertips, and sparks rain down from the electrical wires above as a high-pitched ringing sound fills the air. I hear my father yelling something, but I can't hear what he's saying. It's as if I've slipped into a water well, my ears slowly filling with water and muffling the sounds around me. The only thing I hear with utter clarity inside this space I have cracked open is the loud ringing. Its steady pitch sounds like an om.

“Do you hear that?” I yell to my father over my shoulder, as instinctively my hands move to cover my ears, and for a split second I forget I'm still holding the gun.

“¿Qué?” His voice is so faint that it sounds like he's yelling at me from the other side of a thick wall.

“That ringing sound,” I yell back to him. “Do you hear that?” I turn around and he's ducking behind his truck.

“Cuidado con la pistola,” he says, looking at my swaying hand, the gun pointing slightly in his direction. “Empty it out,” he says. “Point it straight up and shoot it. Fast. One right after another, it sounds prettier that way.”

I turn around and hold the gun up with both hands, point it at a slight angle away from me. There is nothing but the stars and the sliver of moon above, and though there is no music playing, I swear I hear the tamborazo coming down the mountainside, the drums and horns thundering all around me. I aim at the moon, convinced I can put a hole in it. Fire shoots from my hands as four bullets follow each other into the night sky, and with each blast, I feel the adrenaline unleashing in my veins. I look at the revolver and am overwhelmed with the urge to shoot it again.
It sounds prettier that way.
Amazing that all those blasts that robbed me of hours of sleep were like music to his ears. It all makes sense—his music, his guns, his drinking—they all go hand in hand.

I give the gun back to him, and he passes me a heavy, blue, square-shaped glass bottle.

“I thought you didn't have another bottle,” I say.

“I just found that one in my truck,” he says.

Even before the bottle touches my lips, I smell the sharpness of tequila. I take a sip and hand the bottle back to him.

“Are those the same guns you brought down from Chicago?”

“No,” he says. “I sold most of those.”

“What about your bulletproof vest?” I ask. “Do you still have it?”

“Ouh, who knows what happened to that vest.” He takes a long pull. “I think I sold it, or maybe I gave it away, I don't remember.”

He hands me the bottle and I lean into his truck, prop my foot up on the tire.

“How did you know Joaquín wanted to kill you?” I ask.

“I just did,” he says. “There was something about him, he was a little too friendly.” He turns the revolver over in his hands. “That night he had thrown his arm around me and patted my back, acting like we were best buddies,” he says, “but I knew he was checking to see if I had my gun. We were playing cards and I said I was running home to use the bathroom, and I did. I used the bathroom and then I grabbed my .45.” I take another sip and hand him the bottle. “Then when I went back outside, he proposed a toast, a brindis, and with one hand he held up his beer and with the other he buried a kitchen knife in my neck.” He forces down a gulp. “But the bullet turned on that son of a bitch.”

“Did you ever find out who hired him?” I ask, because this is something I've wondered about over the years.

“Quién sabe,” he shrugs, though years from now Rosario will tell me that he had told her it was the guys who had killed my brother because they knew it was only a matter of time before he returned to Mexico looking for them.

“You know, when everything happened with Joaquín, the papers the next day reported that it was due to an argument over who would drink the last beer,” I say.

“¿A poco?” he asks, chuckling a bit. “That's what the papers said?”

“Ey,” I say. “You didn't know that?”

“No,” he says, laughing a little harder, and I guess it makes sense that he wouldn't know, as he was in intensive care for two weeks afterward, the doctor telling us that my father was lucky to be alive, how the blade had missed his jugular by a hair. “Imagine that? Killing a man over a goddamn beer,” he says, and he's laughing so hard that it makes me start laughing, and soon we're both leaning against his truck, howling with laughter.

In the distance, three fireworks race into the sky, their tails trailing behind like comets, like shooting stars that crash-landed in the mountains years ago, and are now returning to their home in the universe.

*   *   *

On the day that I leave, he drops me off at the bus station like he always does.

“How are you going to get that back without breaking it?” he asks, looking at the clay water jug in my arms.

“I'm going to carry it on my lap,” I say. I had found the jug inside the house where I was born a few days before. Each time I've come down, I've gone inside that house and dug around, and I've always emerged covered in dust and carrying something that I want to take back to New York: rusty skeleton keys, white tin bowls, my grandfather's branding rod, leather satchels, sheep shears, rake heads, kerosene lamps, and six of my mother's irons. Back in New York, my apartment seems to be turning into a mini museum, slowly filling up with relics I've salvaged from my past. The last time I was here, he gave me an old machete he no longer used. It came in a leather sheath, and the machete had a desert landscape etched on one side of it and an inscription on the other. “I'll be back in the summer,” I say, giving him a hug and a kiss on the cheek.

“Ándele, pues, mija,” he says. “I'll be here waiting for you.”

 

21

QUELITES

 

 

IT'S MID-JULY
, the start of the rainy season, when I arrive in town early on Sunday morning. I take a cab to Tito's house and my mother is walking out the door to go to the mercado, so I join her. We pull into the dusty gravel lot and make our way along the narrow passageways between the booths. There is everything from fresh produce and homemade cheese to hand-carved wooden bowls and used clothing.

“Why are you buying so many groceries?” my mother says, watching as I stock up on fruits and vegetables. “We've got plenty of food at home.”

“I'm bringing it to La Peña,” I say.

“Don't they have any food out there?” she asks.

“I just want to bring the things I like to eat,” I say.

“When are you planning on going?” she asks, though she knows the main reason for my being here is to spend time with my father, who is recovering from yet another horse-riding accident. Three weeks ago, El Relámpago had left him lying on the rocks near the river again, with four fractured ribs and a dislocated hip. He had been lying out there in the rain all night, and right around dawn, two men had spotted his horse, still saddled up and grazing in a field with a herd of free-roaming horses. They set out, riding along the river, until they located him. A crust of mud had dried all around him, hypothermia had settled on his bones, his breathing was shallow, and his skin so pale that not long after the men found him, once again the rumors that he was dead were running rampant through town.

“I don't know, probably tomorrow or the day after,” I say.

“¿Tan rápido?” She tells me that she was going to go to Chicago, but then she waited because she knew I was coming. “If you're going to go and stay with your father, then I'm going to leave tomorrow also,” she says. It's always like this, always a struggle over who I'm going to spend more time with, though she knows that when I come to Mexico, spending time with my father is my priority. I can see her in Chicago, or if she ever wanted to, she could come visit me in New York. I've been there for eight years, and she has never been out. “Why don't you stay with me for a week and then go to La Peña?” she says when we are loading the groceries into her Jeep.

“A whole week?” I say. “He just had an accident. He's already been waiting for me since Wednesday.”

“Well, that's why he has that vieja there, isn't it? So she can help him.” By “that vieja” she means Rosario, who sometimes is there and other times isn't—has left him for the umpteenth time. Alma had left for good the year before, had eloped with her boyfriend. “I'm the one who should have left,” my mother says. “Then maybe now you'd come looking for me instead of that viejo.” We climb into her Jeep, and soon we are idling along in the Sunday bumper-to-bumper traffic. “Your father never cared about anyone but himself,” she says. “He never loved you guys.”

“That's not true,” I say. This is something she's been telling us since the day he left—“your father never loved you guys.” And for years I let her say it, absorbing those words, until I believed them. He never loved me, and I'm okay with that, I don't need his love anyway—so I thought. But now I've seen the way his chin quivers each time he drops me off at the bus station, each time we say goodbye, and perhaps we're both hyperaware that any one of those farewells could be our last. I know that he loves me and I refuse to let her, or anyone, take that away from me. “Whatever happened between the two of you, happened,” I say. “But he loves me. I know he loves me.”

We sit in silence in the line of traffic, exhaust and dust coming in through the open windows. If she could have had it her way, I would have never come back to see my father—none of us would have. Even Salvador had been down to see him recently, and when he was here, my mother had complained that she had hardly seen him, as he had spent most of his time shuttling the concubine to and from the hospital in the next town over. He had taken her to have an operation so that she might walk again, which was possible, since her spinal cord was not damaged and she still had feeling in her legs. Though the operation had gone well, she had not healed properly and was still in a wheelchair.

We are crawling past the livestock supply store when I see his red truck go barreling along the shoulder, driving against the flow of traffic on the other side of the road before cutting across the parking lot and sending a cloud of dust rising in his wake.

“There he goes,” I practically shout. “Follow him.”

“I'm not following that viejo,” she says, keeping her gaze straight ahead. We go back and forth, me telling her to pull over and she refusing to do so, until I start gathering my grocery bags, and when she sees that I'm about to jump out of the Jeep, she pulls over.

“You better hurry up, or I'm going to leave,” she says.

I zigzag around cars and trucks and make my way across the parking lot, gravel crunching under my flip-flops as I go. I watch him step out of his truck and then stand there, holding on to the door as if he were catching his breath. He's reaching for something on the seat when I come up behind him.

“Quiubo, Don Jose,” I say in an exaggeratedly deep voice. He turns around and when he sees me, a big smile spreads across his face.

“¿Cuándo llego?” he asks, throwing his shoulders back and attempting to stand tall, though he's still holding on to the door.