Prayers for the Stolen (19 page)

As breakfast was no longer being served, Luna bought us each a sandwich from one of the prisoners. In jail everyone had a business and everything had a price, even toilet paper or Kotex.

Luna said she had no income but received help from a Guatemalan family in Mexico who were part of an evangelical organization that tried to convert prisoners.

They’re all trying to convert us, Luna said. Mormons, Evangelists, Baptists, Methodists, Catholics. Everyone. The missionaries come to the jail on Sunday, and sometimes they get in on other days, you’ll see. Every God is in this prison.

Luna suggested we go out and eat our sandwiches in the yard.

We can get some coffee there and watch the football and then see if we can talk to Georgia who has the telephone, she said.

To one side of the yard, twenty or so women were playing football. The other prisoners sat around on benches. When I looked up I could see a colony of faces. Dozens of women peered out from the windows. When I looked up to the opposite side, I could see the men’s jail and their faces were also looking out of windows. Looking out of windows here was an activity. It was a way to live.

Those men, Luna said, pointing in the direction of the men’s prison, they’re looking for wives. Do you have a husband?

No.

If you get married he can come and visit you. They give you a room with a bed and everything.

No. I’m not married.

None of those men over there at the jail want to marry me, Luna said. Because of my arm. I really don’t want a man, I want a baby. I want someone to love.

Even if they take the child away from you?

In jail a woman could only keep her child until the age of six.

It’s six years of love at least, Luna said. And then you can have another. Do you want a baby?

Yes.

That’s Georgia, Luna said, pointing to one of the women playing football.

Georgia was a tall, slim woman who looked thirty years old. She had blond hair and blue eyes. In the prison yard, she stood out among all the dark skin and hair. She looked like a stick of butter on a table.

She’s from England, Luna explained. A woman from the British Embassy comes and visits her and gives her money, and her family sends money too.

Why is she here? What did she do?

She was coming to Mexico for a fashion show, Luna said. She worked in fashion. She had shoes.

Shoes?

Yes, two suitcases filled with them, the platform shoes, you know, the shoes with the big platforms?

Yes.

Those platform shoes were filled with heroin.

Heroin! Heroin! You’ve got to be kidding! What idiot brings heroin into Mexico?

That’s what everyone says.

I thought of the hills and valleys around my house planted with red and white poppies. I thought of the towns on our mountain like Kilometer Thirty, or Eden. These were the towns along the old road to Acapulco and not the new highway that tore our lives in two pieces. These were the towns that you could only enter by invitation. If you accidently went there no one would ask you your name or ask you what time it was, they’d just kill you. Mike once told me that there were huge mansions in those towns and incredible laboratories that were built underground to turn
the poppies into heroin. He said that a miracle occurred at Kilometer Thirty a few years ago. The Virgin Mary appeared in a piece of marble.

Passenger buses always went on this road in convoy. They were scared that they’d be stopped and robbed. This was the highway where decapitated bodies were hung from bridges. This was the highway where the bus drivers swore that at night they’d seen the ghosts. They had seen the ghost face of a clown or the vaporous image of two little girls holding hands as they walked down the side of the road.

No one on this highway stopped to buy tamarind candy or live turtles or starfish with five rays wriggling and squirming in the dry air.

There is an American girl living in the town of Eden. Now that is a backward story, Mike told me. Who comes here?

He said that one of Mexico’s most important drug lords brought her back and she’s only about fourteen years old. She’s the man’s third wife and she likes to take care of everyone’s babies. She keeps to herself, Mike said. She likes to bake cakes.

The young American girl became a legend inside of me. I imagined her walking along our roads, drinking our water, and standing under our sun.

Mike told me that at Christmas the drug lord brought in fake snow and covered the town with mountains of the white powder to make the American girl happy. He also ordered the building of a huge Christmas tree, which was made out of dozens of pine trees that were delivered from a pine-tree nursery near Mexico City. The drug trafficker placed the tall tree in the middle of the main square and had it covered with Christmas decorations.

But that was not the best thing he did, Mike said. The best thing he did was to bring reindeer to the town. He flew them in on one of his private airplanes from a ranch in Tamaulipas.

Have you seen this? I asked.

Yes. Imagine, he turns a piece of Guerrero into the North Pole.

Surrounded by cement, far from the ocean and seabirds and my mother, I thought, How the hell did Mike know all of this?

My hand ached to slap him across the face.

I listened to his stories and never really listened. Now I knew why he had all this information and why I was in jail accused of killing a drug lord, the drug lord’s daughter, and having a package of heroin, worth a million and a half dollars, in my possession.

Where are you, Mike?

I thought, I am going to pray for you, Mike. I’m going to pray you remember me. I’m that deep line, from pinkie to thumb, in the palm of your right hand, Mike. The lifeline that gets full of dirt when you forget to wash.

In my mind I was talking to Mike, but in my eyes I was watching two dozen women playing football. One had
Chicharito
tattooed on her arm. Another woman had the full body image of the Virgin of Guadalupe on the outside of her right thigh.

They play football every day, Luna said. Even if it’s raining they have tournaments. The three teams are Rainbow, Liberty, and Barcelona.

The women ran and called out to each other. From here I could see Violeta who played with a lit cigarette in her mouth. She ran back and forth and never stopped puffing. The smoking butt sat in her mouth as she moved. When she approached a scuffle for the ball, she would throw her head backward, in a gesture that reminded me of a bird drinking water. She did this so that she would not burn anyone with the fiery tip of her cigarette. Her extremely long fingernails that were painted yellow yesterday now were green. From where I sat, only a few feet away, her fingernails looked like long parrot feathers coming out of the tips of her fingers.

Violeta is the captain, Luna said.

As we watched the game Aurora, who had finished fumigating our room, slunk toward us. She was still carrying the canister on her back. She sat down beside us.

You can go to your room now, Aurora said.

I squirmed a little from her odor. I had noticed her yellow fingertips but, outside in the daylight, I realized her skin and the whites of her eyes were also jaundiced.

No, we’re not going in for a while, Luna said.

Do you have any aspirin? Aurora asked.

Don’t tell me you’ve finished all yours again? You’ll get a hole in your stomach!

My head hurts.

Aurora lay down. She curled up on her side on the ground on the cold and damp cement. It seemed like the coldest piece of the planet on that cloudy morning. I wanted to touch her and caress her head as if she were a stray dog in the street. But, as with a stray dog, I was afraid to touch her because she might give me a disease. As she lay beside me, I even thought I could see mange on the side of her head, under her stringy hair.

If my mother were there she would have said, She deserves to be run over by a car!

The football game ended and Luna called out to Georgia to come over. Georgia walked slowly while Violeta followed behind, still puffing on a cigarette. When they reached us Violeta squatted down on her heels in front of me so that we were eye-to-eye. She rested her hands on her knees so that her nails were stretched out before her. Close up her nails no longer made me think of feathers. Instead, they were like the talons of hawks and vultures that swarmed above my house back in the jungle. Violeta’s nails looked like they could pick up a rabbit or a mouse and carry it off. The nails could tear at flesh. They could scratch someone’s face to pieces.

So this is Ladydi? Georgia said. She looked at me. Her blue eyes and my black eyes met. I knew she was thinking, So, this is the dark and ugly creature who has my beautiful princess’s name!

I wanted to say, I’m sorry, but I had never said I’m sorry to anyone.

I thought of all the Ladydi dolls I had at home. To this day, the Lady Diana dolls my father brought me back from the United States were still in my room in their original cardboard and plastic boxes so the jungle mold would not destroy them. I had a Lady Diana doll in her wedding dress, a Lady Diana doll in the gown she wore to meet President Clinton, and a Lady Diana doll in riding clothes. My father had even given me a plastic jewelry set of Lady Diana’s pearls. These I wore until they broke. The white plastic pearls were kept in a cup in the kitchen.

I felt like counterfeit money, fake designer clothing at the Acapulco market, like a Virgin of Guadalupe made in China. I looked at Georgia and turned into cheap plastic. My mother had given me the biggest fake name she could find. How could I begin to explain to this British woman that my name was an act of revenge and not an act of admiration? How could I explain that my name was payment for my father’s infidelities?

Close up, Georgia was so pale I could see the blue veins under her skin. Her face was covered in freckles, even on her lips and eyelids. Her eyelashes and eyebrows were colorless and so her eyes were unframed and looked like two sky-blue marbles resting on her cheeks.

I hear you want my phone, she said.

Yes. Please.

I’m not going to charge you this time because we’re both British, right? And, after all, you’re a princess.

Violeta and Luna laughed at this. Aurora didn’t seem to listen. She was still curled up like a white-yellow centipede beside me.
I could smell the insecticide rise from her body in small gusts every time she took a breath.

Georgia reached under her sweatshirt. She took out a phone from under her clothing that was hidden in a seam. It was cloaked in a Cadbury’s chocolate bar wrapper. She gave me the phone and I could see her hands were also covered with freckles.

Good luck, Princess, she said.

And then she curtsied.

Georgia was liked because she was a foreigner and had money. But no one respected her stupid crime. Everyone in jail made fun of her and gave her shoes as presents on her birthday and at Christmas. There was always someone who would tease her and yell things like, Hey, Blondie, why don’t you bring some tacos or some guacamole to Mexico too?

Those of us who had killed were different. It was not exactly respect that we were given. It was like the respect for a rabid dog. People circled around us. Here no one wanted the killers to cook or handle food. The prisoners were superstitious about eating food touched by a killer’s hand.

Georgia and Violeta turned and walked away. Aurora stirred on the ground beside me.

I’m hungry and thirsty, Aurora said. Does anyone have any gum?

Aurora was just like Maria. Maria used to think that gum was a substitute for water and food. This unexpected memory of Maria made me want to cover my eyes with my hands and disappear from the prison into the dark skin of my palms. The last time I saw Maria, my half-sister, my sweet friend with her harelip curse, had been when they’d wheeled her into a cubicle in the emergency room at the Acapulco clinic with a bullet in her arm.

We’d better go back to our cell so you can make that call, Luna said. You don’t want to get caught, and they’ll catch you anywhere else.

We stood up and walked toward the building. Aurora stayed behind and continued to lie curled up on the cement ground.

Georgia teases everyone, Luna said. Don’t feel bad about that. She doesn’t give a shit about my arm. She’s always throwing things at me and yelling at me to catch. Sometimes she calls me Catch. That’s my nickname.

As we walked in the blue-and-beige chessboard world, my eyes longed for green plants, yellow-and-red parrots, blue ocean and sky. The colorless color of cement made me feel hot and cold at the same time. So, when I sat in my cell, which still smelled of insecticide, I didn’t only call my mother. I called the leaves, palm trees, red ants, jade-green lizards, yellow-and-black pineapples, pink azaleas, and lemon trees. I closed my eyes and prayed for a glass of water.

Luna sat beside me. She sat so close I felt her ribcage against me where she should have had an arm. Her face was full of anticipation and hope.

Oh, let’s pray someone answers, she said.

Luna pressed so close to me I felt she wanted to slip on my flip-flops, get in my worn jail uniform and into my skin. It was as if she were calling her own mother.

Of course my mother had been standing at the clearing all day and all night. She held her telephone up in the air until she felt the tired ache and burn of her muscles down from her fingers to her waist. I knew she’d been standing there pacing and pacing. No one was there. Everyone had left the mountain and she stood there alone and thought about how our world fell apart. Paula was stolen and then she and her mother left forever. Ruth was stolen. Augusta had died from AIDS and Estefani was living in Mexico City with her grandmother and siblings. I wondered where Maria and her mother were, but I knew they’d left our piece of land and sky. After everything Mike had done they must have looked for a place to hide. In the state of Guerrero no one wonders if someone
is going to come and get you, you know they
will
get you, so you don’t stick around.

My mother was the last living soul on our mountain. She stood alone with the ants and scorpions and vultures.