Bulletproof Vest (41 page)

“Within an hour or so, we were in the vicinity of La Laguna,” he says. “Pascuala's grandfather used to have a ranch near there, and when we were first married, we rode out there numerous times. If we set out at daybreak, we'd be arriving at his ranch right around noon.” Once they reached La Laguna, he knew exactly where he was, and by the time the first light of day was illuminating the horizon, they were practically crossing right in front of the gate to his ranch. He even had the urge to say, hey, why don't you just let me out here, I've done my part, but he didn't say anything, thought it best to keep his mouth shut. And besides, he didn't want them knowing where his ranch was. He watched the entrance come and go and then they were making their way down and around the boulders near Santana. “How is it that you know this terrain so well, viejo?” La Mona asked, and he told her that in his younger years, he had crossed that terrain on horseback numerous times, had ridden as far as Monte Escobedo and back.

By early morning, they were clearing the speed bumps on the south end of town. They pulled into the gas station and even let him use the bathroom—unescorted.

“After that day, they were a lot nicer to me,” he says. “Even La Mona was nicer. She was such a harsh woman. But you should have heard her tone change whenever one of her kids called. She sounded like the pure truth, saying she missed them too and asking how they were doing in school, and were they obeying their grandmother, and had they gotten the gifts she had sent, and hee hee hee and ha ha ha. But other than that, she was heartless.”

We sit in silence for a while and I try to wrap my head around his story, uncertain of what is true and what is fabricated. He seems to know an awful lot about their campgrounds and their routes, and why would he have helped his captors escape the police? Had he really guided them along the terrain or was he just trying to make himself out to be the hero? Perhaps even before he was kidnapped he had already gotten himself entangled with them, somehow. Why had he been so concerned with knowing when Mary would be returning from Chicago? Almost as soon as she returned, they picked him up in the lot.

“Did you hear about the shoot-out that happened in Mary's neighborhood?” I ask.

“Ey,” he says.

“Do you think it was the same one?” I ask, thinking that it must have been.

“I don't think so,” he says. “As far as I know, those people who picked me up never went near her neighborhood,” he says. Though, if he were blindfolded, how would he know if they went near her neighborhood or not? Maybe if the police hadn't shown up, the kidnappers would have been kicking down Mary's front door next. But would he betray one of his own daughters like that? Guide the cartel right to her front door? Or maybe they had forced him to lead them to her front door, and he had taken them to the neighbor's door instead?
Don't worry, mijita, as long as I'm alive, no one is going to come bother you.
I'm filled with so much doubt that I start thinking he may have never even been kidnapped, grow convinced that the next time I go see him, his door will be intact and his father's rifle will still be slung above his bed. There are now two guards standing solid as pillars next to the rock.

“Are you hungry?” I ask. “There's a good seafood place just down the beach from here. We can walk there and sit with our feet in the sand, have some mariscos and an ice-cold beer.”

We get up and make our way down the path. He tells me that after they let him go, La Mona and some of the others kept coming around the house, wanting him to go have a beer with them, but he didn't really like hanging around them and would usually have Rosario say he wasn't home. He says La Mona showed up one day, practically demanding to know who was watching over him, what saint was it that he prayed to? And was it true that he had a pact with the Other One?

“I don't know, I guess she heard stories around town,” he says. This is a rumor that has followed him his whole life—that he has a pact with the devil, though I'm not certain where it started. “But I told her it was just Diosito that watched over me. She didn't seem convinced. Pero bueno, not long after that day, her corrido ended. I heard that her convoy had gotten into a shoot-out with the soldiers and she had been killed in the cross fire.”

“Poor woman,” I say, and can't help but feel for her kids.

“Poor nothing,” he says. “With the way those people live, most of them don't last long.”

*   *   *

On the night before my mother leaves Tulum, my two sisters and I meet her for dinner at La Nave, a brick-oven-pizza place in town that is run by an Italian family.

“How's your father?” my mother asks once we've settled into a table.

“He seems fine,” I say, thinking he actually looks good, healthy, even though Mary had said that he had lost a lot of weight. He must have put most of it back on. “He has a new set of teeth,” I say. “Maybe the kidnappers knocked his teeth out.”

“What teeth?” my mother says. “Your father never had any teeth. Even before we were married he had no teeth. He got them knocked out by a mule when he was a teenager,” she says. “Why? Did he tell you that the kidnappers knocked his teeth out?”

“I didn't ask about his teeth and he didn't say anything.” The waitress comes by and drops off the menus. “He says he befriended the kidnappers, that they come by looking for him all the time,” I say.

“Your father is such a liar,” she says. “By the time he's told you one truth, he's told you ten lies. If those men are going by the house looking for him, it's because he must have joined them.”

“He told me he didn't, said he befriended them, but only because he helped them escape the feds one night, guided them from Jalisco back to Zacatecas across the terrain,” I say.

“That's what he said?”

“Ey.”

“Who knows,” she says. “Your father does know that land like the palm of his hand. My grandfather used to have a ranch out there, near La Laguna. When we were first married, we used to ride out there on horseback all the time.”

“That's what he said.”

“Maybe he did help them.” She frowns. “Pero eso sí, your father doesn't have any friends, he doesn't trust anyone. He'll pretend to be their friend, but the first chance he sees to get even, he will.”

*   *   *

He walks into the ocean sideways, crablike, bracing himself against the three-foot waves that are rushing toward him. The waves break and send the white water rushing above his knees. He's been here for a week and has yet to fully submerge himself in the ocean. When he first arrived, he had removed his cowboy boots, rolled his jeans up to his knees and walked to the water's edge, saying that the sand felt nice—he had never felt the sand on his bare feet before. He'd only been to the beach once, somewhere in California, but had kept his boots on and had stayed under the shade of a tree, sharing a few beers with his buddies.

“You have to come in past where the waves are breaking,” I yell to him. “It's not deep, see?” I hold both my arms up so he can see that I'm standing. The waterline is just above my waist.

He holds up one finger and waves it back and forth. He doesn't know how to swim, almost drowned in the river when he was a kid. Another wave breaks and sends the white water rushing up his thigh, wetting the bottom half of the blue swim trunks that Sonia brought him from Chicago. He had arrived with one change of clothes—a pair of jeans and a black cowboy shirt, so I had called Sonia on the day before she flew down from Chicago. She brought him trunks, T-shirts, and flip-flops. I let him borrow my black baseball cap, which has STIHL written across the front in bold orange letters. He wore it into town one day and came back asking if I was aware that STIHL was a chainsaw brand. I told him a friend had given me the cap as a gift because that was the nickname my friends in New York had given me—Motosierra.

Though it was actually Martin who had come up with the nickname. He and I had gone to see a band, and were supposed to meet up with some friends at a rooftop party in SoHo afterward. I'd had one too many gin and tonics and on the way to the party had gotten into an altercation with some thugs.

“What happened to you guys last night?” my friend asked, when we ran into him the next day.

“I needed to get Maria home before midnight,” Martin said, “or she might have turned into a chainsaw.”

My father didn't ask any questions, probably didn't want to know how I ended up with such a nickname, though he must have understood that whatever part of me was a chainsaw was fueled by his blood. That the “nerves of steel” he had been so proud of had grown up to be a chainsaw. Another wave breaks and again the white water is rushing past his thighs.

“You need to come a bit deeper,” I yell, waving both my arms above my head. “I'm standing, see?”

He takes two hesitant steps in, grabs the Santo Niño de Atocha leather necklace that hangs around his neck, and swivels it around, letting it fall onto his back. His chest and gut are riddled with scars. Each of those scars has a story behind it, though when I was a kid, I used to think that he had been born that way. I have often wondered what his life would have been like had he been born in a different time and place. Had he had a vocation or craft—music or writing—into which he could have channeled all that passion that turned to violence.

He kneels down and braces himself against the white water that is rushing toward his chest. Once it passes, he cups both his hands, scoops up some water, and douses his head, his shoulders. He waits for the next wave to break and pass, and then he holds his breath and dunks his head into the water. Just as quickly as he went under he is back up and gasping for air as if he has just plunged to the bottom of the sea and back.

*   *   *

On the day he leaves, I help him arrange his things in his backpack: the extra clothes Sonia brought him, the flip-flops, and all the things he's collected on his morning walks along the beach. Since he arrived, his internal clock had continued operating on the same schedule, and though my sisters and I slept until 7:00 or 8:00 a.m., he had been up at 5:00 a.m., walking down the shore, chatting with the Mayan men that rake debris from the beach in front of the boutique hotels that line the waterfront. Eventually, he returned from his walks carrying seashells and pieces of coral that he collected along the way. He laid everything out to dry on the front deck, saying he was going to bring those things back and place them on the table in front of the Virgen de Guadalupe portrait in his house.

“When you get back, make sure you clean out the starfish or it's going to start to smell,” I say, placing the starfish in a plastic bag and putting it in the front pocket, apart from everything else. The starfish was still alive when I found it floating near the water's edge the night before. I had carried it back to the cabin to show it to him and he had held it in his hand and watched in awe as it curled its arms around his fingers. He had not known such a thing existed—a living star, not in the sky, but in the sea. La estrellita del mar, he had called it and said that would be a good nickname for me—the Star of the Sea. When I suggested we go throw it back in the water, he had looked confused.

“Why would you want to do that?” he had said. “What if this is the thing that's going to bring us good luck, and you go and throw it back in the water?” I told him that if we didn't, it would die. “Let's do this,” he said, suggesting that we leave it out overnight, and that if it was still alive in the morning we'd throw it back in the ocean. But if it was dead, then he'd take it back home with him. “Obre Dios, obre Dios,” he had said, placing it on a small wooden table near the bathroom, and all through the night I could practically hear it struggling, found myself wishing I had never found it.

I place a copy of the British literary journal where I had been published the year before on top of his clothes and zip up the backpack. When I had first shown it to him, he had taken it and flipped through the pages. It was written in English, so he didn't understand a single word. I turned to the page where my story began. There was a black-and-white photograph of him and my mother standing in front of the house with the pink limestone arches. In the photo, it's snowing and Mary and Chemel, who are roughly two and four, stand between them. My father is wearing a large white sombrero, a black button-down, black trousers, and black cowboy boots, and there is a switchblade and a gun slung from his belt.

“Where is your photo?” he asked, and I told him that the story was not so much about me as it was about him.

We head into town and board the Kombi to Playa del Carmen, an hour away. I had agreed to go with him to the bus station in Playa and make sure he got on the right bus back to the Cancún airport. When we arrive at the station, we're informed that the next bus to the airport doesn't leave for another hour. We purchase his ticket and go for a stroll along the promenade, find a place to sit, and have smoothies. He orders mango, I get blueberry, and as we suck them down we watch the mostly white tourists strolling by with shopping bags and Frappuccinos from Starbucks in hand. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out the small linen pouch the Mayan medicine man had given him, says that when he gets back, he's going to empty the contents all around his house; the man told him that stuff would reverse any curse.

We had stumbled upon the medicine man by accident a few days before. We were in the neighboring town, and on the way back, we noticed a handwritten sign on the side of the road, something about medicinal Mayan herbs. Since Yesenia is taking an herbology class, she pulled over. We made our way through the grounds, along narrow dirt paths that were lined with labeled plants growing out of clay jugs, plastic buckets, and old tin pots. The medicine man was at the far end of the grounds, standing under a gazebo and conducting a lecture to a group of German medical students. He looked up when he heard us coming. He was a short, solid, dark-skinned man, and when his gaze landed on my father, he stopped mid-sentence and blinked twice, as if he were seeing double. The German students moved aside and my father made his way to the front. He walked up to the medicine man as if they had an appointment, like one had been expecting the other.