Bulletproof Vest (40 page)

“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.

“Wouldn't it be crazy if you and mi amá had a reconciliation down here and ended up going back to Zacatecas together?” I say.

“Ouh, qué bueno fuera.” He grins, and I notice his teeth, how white and perfect they are—it's an entirely new set. Gone is the gold trim that once lined his two front teeth, and the gold caps that once covered his upper molars. Though I want to ask what happened to his teeth, I don't, afraid of what the answer might be. “No, imagine the look on people's faces if we were to arrive back into town, arm in arm, after all these years?” It had been twenty-three years since they had separated, and they had recently made their separation official; they were legally divorced. Mary had gone with my mother on the day they signed the papers and told me that my father kept trying to make small talk with my mother, until she had grabbed her purse, stormed out of the room, and waited in the lobby for the attorney to arrive.

“Do you want to stop and rest for a bit?” I say, when we reach a cluster of small trees—one of the few shady spots on the entire grounds. Two large white rocks sit across from each other under the shade. We take a seat on one and he removes his hat, placing it on his knee. “The shade feels nice, huh?” I reach into my straw bag and pull out a water bottle.

“Ey,” he says.

I take a sip and offer him the bottle. He takes it, drinks. We sit in silence for a while, watching couples and young families stroll by, and I feel the weight of everything I want to say to him, of everything I've been unable to say over the phone. He has another swig and passes the bottle back to me.

“You know, when you were kidnapped?” I say, turning to face him. “We were trying.” I inform him that Roselia had called detective agencies, the FBI, practically everyone she knew in Mexico. That my journalist friend had put me in contact with the fed, and I thought about asking him to send in the troops, but Mary didn't want the feds getting involved, and Yesenia was afraid that if a shoot-out ensued, he might get caught in the cross fire. “One would say yes, another would say no, and by the end of the week, we hadn't moved an inch to the left or to the right,” I say. “What did you think when you heard we weren't calling back? Did you think we had abandoned you?”

“No, I knew it was a tough situation,” he says, glancing down the path where two kids, a boy and a girl roughly six and eight, are racing toward us. “It's a good thing you guys stayed out of it. Those people are ruthless.”

“We didn't call Rosario back because we thought she might have something to do with it, found it peculiar they had left her as the middleman,” I say.

“I wouldn't be surprised if she did have something to do with it,” he says. “A lot of those men are from la sierra, from the same area she's from up in the mountains. That's where they grow their crops, la mota, la amapola, all of it. They grow it up there and then bring it down in truckloads.” He explains how they have their lookouts stationed on either end of town. Two SUVs sit at the gas station on the north, and another two sit in front of the slaughterhouse in the south, and all day long they are monitoring the road that runs in front of La Peña as it stretches from the mountains on one end and all the way to the border, practically, on the other.

The two kids arrive screeching with laughter and throw their arms around the rock in front of us. “Chapucero,” the girl yells. They're out of breath and arguing about who won and who cheated. The boy turns and shoots my father a smile—kids and dogs have always been drawn to him. My father waves at them, they wave back, and then they're off and running down the path, racing toward their parents.

“Did you think at times that might be it?” I ask.

“At times, yes.” He looks across the sun-drenched grass and begins to recount the events of that afternoon. When they picked him up in the lot, they escorted him to one of the SUVs, where there was a woman sitting in the backseat, holding his father's rifle between her knees. She went by the nickname of La Mona, they all went by nicknames, but she was the main one, the one giving the orders. She blindfolded him with duct tape and toilet paper and kept calling him her “little golden chicken.” “I don't know, I guess she assumed she was going to collect a fortune from you guys,” he says. Once again, the two kids are throwing their arms around the rock, laughing and arguing. Their parents arrive on their heels and take a seat on the rock across from us, and though my father is looking right at them, I can tell that his thoughts are elsewhere. “There's a campground in the desert where they train their recruits, young boys mostly, some as young as eight or nine,” he says. “A lot of those kids are homeless and they pick them up off the streets and offer them jobs, offer them food and money, and then they get them hooked on the white powder, until eventually the kids are willing to work for the powder alone.”

“Poor kids,” I say.

“No, imagine a life like that? Those kids grow up and they don't give a damn about anything,” he says. “On that same campground, they have these large cylinders filled with acid, and that's where they dispose of the bodies. There's a man who goes by the nickname of the Soupmaker, and all day long he's poking and prodding inside the cylinders with a long stick, constantly stirring, and…”

“You saw that?” I turn to look at him.

“Ey.”

“I thought they had you blindfolded.”

“They did,” he says, his eyes locking with mine. “They kept me in the backseat of a Suburban the whole time and sometimes they'd stop at the camp to drop someone off, and a lot of the time they left me alone in the truck or sitting under a tree and if I leaned my head back and lifted the duct tape a bit, I could see what they were doing.” He wrinkles his nose as if he can still smell the stench of the acid, as if he can still see the butchered human parts flying through the air like logs. “It's horrible the things that they do. Horrible.”

The family gets up and the father ushers them away, glaring over his shoulder at us as they go. My father doesn't seem to notice. A grave look has settled on his face and stayed there.

“You know, people in town were saying that they saw you driving around with them,” I say. “That you must have joined them.”

“People will say whatever they want to believe. Look at how many times they've said I was dead, but here we are, right?” He cocks his eyebrow. “In the end, I befriended them, but that's only because I helped them one night.” He lifts his hat off his knee and contemplates the inside of it as if he can see that night unfolding right there before him. He speaks in a steady voice, recounting the details. How the SUVs had crossed the state line, gone into Jalisco to pick up a man, and they had made such a racket trying to break through the front gate that by the time they got in, the man had escaped or hidden, and because of all the noise, the neighbors had called the police and the sirens were already approaching.

They didn't bother looking for the man. They took his wife instead, and from the backseat he could hear her screaming. Car doors slammed, the screaming was gone, and soon La Mona was back on one side of him and a man on the other, and then they were moving, bouncing along a dirt road. La Mona was shouting to the driver to go faster, and all the while the sirens were drawing near. There were a few scattered blasts in the distance, and then they were overtaken by machine-gun fire. He hunched over as glass shattered all around and felt the weight of the man who had been sitting to his right slump over him. He thought for sure he'd be next, could almost feel the bullet that would crack his skull, and so he did the one thing he had always done in these life-and-death situations. He began to pray. Asking Diosito to have mercy on his soul. And then they must have made it onto a paved road, because suddenly they were moving faster and the blasts and sirens were fading in the distance. He turns his hat over in his hands, oblivious to the security guard that has made his way over to the shade and is standing with his foot propped on the rock the family just vacated.

Even through the static of their walkie-talkies he could hear the panic in their voices. Two of the SUVs had flat tires, and a few of those riding in the SUV behind theirs had also been hit. They rolled to a stop, car doors slammed, the door next to him flew open, and then the weight of the man was gone. “Vamos, viejo.” Someone gripped his arm and pulled him across the slick seat. Over the wailing of the approaching sirens, he could hear La Mona saying something about just leaving the woman because she had been hit and what good was she going to do them dead, anyway.

They ushered him into a different SUV and again they were moving, flying around curves on an open road, the sirens growing louder and La Mona yelling that they needed to get off that road or they were never going to lose the feds. The driver snapped, what was he to do? This was the only road that led back to Zacatecas. They were in such a state that for a minute he thought they might turn their guns on each other, and that's when he saw his opportunity. He knew that if they were on one of the only roads that ran from Jalisco back to Zacatecas, he could help them, and he told them so.

“If we need your help, viejo, we will ask for it,” La Mona said.

“Sí, viejo,” the driver said, “we're near Huejúcar. Why? Is there some secret road that you know of?” He told him there was no other road. Only the terrain.

He doesn't seem to notice, or care, that the security guard is now standing with both feet planted on the ground, arms crossed, and glaring at us. I wouldn't be surprised if he came over and asked us to leave.

“They all fell silent,” he says, describing how no one spoke, though their glances must have been dancing between them, and all the while the sirens were getting closer, and then he felt the sting of the duct tape practically ripping the flesh off his face. It was pitch-dark out, just before dawn. They killed the lights and he led them off the main road and through the streets of Huejúcar, turning left and right while the sirens continued to wail out on the road. Once they had crossed through town, they came to a dirt trail that wound up the mountainside. The path gave way to the terrain, they shifted to four-wheel drive, and as they swerved around nopales and magueys, he tried to get his bearings. It had been years since he had ridden through those parts on horseback, and he wasn't exactly sure where he was going, but he trusted his instincts, and by the time the stars had begun to fade, the landscape was already looking familiar.