Bulletproof Vest (28 page)

“Where did you get that portrait in your living room from?” she asked when we were lying in the dark.

“At the secondhand store,” I said. The portrait was an oil painting of a small girl, four or five years old. She wore a green scarf around her chestnut hair, and a single tear had escaped from her large brown eyes and was running down her rosy cheek. I had purchased the portrait at the Salvation Army. It was on display in the window, and when I had spotted it from across the street, it had stopped me in my tracks. The next thing I knew, I was at the counter, forking over forty dollars for the painting.

“Does it remind you of anything?” she asked.

“No,” I said, thinking it an odd question. What was it supposed to remind me of?

“It doesn't remind you of when we left you in Mexico?” she asked. “You don't remember if after we left you felt scared, or sad?”

“I don't think so,” I said. “I don't remember.”

The wind outside roared and the plastic on my window ballooned with air. We lay in the faint white glow of the moon and snow, and then I heard her sniffling. I reached over to my nightstand, pulled a few tissues from the box, and handed them to her.

“I should have never left you,” she said, and it was then that I realized she was crying. “I wish someone had told me, ‘Don't leave this little girl. Take her with you. She's too young. If you leave her, you will never find each other again.' But I had no one to turn to for advice, and your father was of no help. He could have carried you. I was carrying Jorge, and he could have carried you.”

“Amá, it's okay,” I said. “You did what you had to do.”

“I should have never left you,” she said, turning to face me. “Can you ever forgive me?”

“Amá, it's okay, really.” I tried to explain that it was something that happened all the time, had been happening for centuries to immigrants and refugees around the world—parents and kids were separated for a year, or two, or ten—it was no big deal. So I thought, because back then I was unaware of what we had lost when we crossed the border.

“Look,” my mother says, turning and making her way to the blue wooden trunk near the entrance. “They call these antiques. These aren't antiques.” She picks up one of the irons. “When we lived in La Peña, I used to iron your clothes with these. I had about six or seven of them. When you go see your father, ask him to let you into that house where we used to live.” She places the iron back down on the trunk. “I bet those irons are still there.”

 

18

DUST DEVILS

 

 

ALL ALONG THE ABANDONED FIELDS
, they are already forming. It's as if men who fell on that very spot years ago now inhale the wind, rise up under its spell, and go spinning, kicking up dust, grass blades, and twigs—dust devils. One comes twirling over the field, crashes into the stacked-stone corral that surrounds the house where I was born, and sends the tin roof rattling above.

Across the dirt road, the green hammock I strung up when I first arrived three months ago is blowing around in the wind and getting entangled in the branches of the mesquite. I had come prepared to stay awhile, had brought a hammock, my laptop, my stovetop espresso maker, a stack of books, a guitar, and my running shoes. Every morning, I wake before the sun has cleared the distant mountain range, and while my father and Rosario milk the cows in the corral, I grab my iPod and go on a long jog along the dirt roads, my father's dogs panting and running by my side. Another gust comes flying over the wall, and I turn away from it.

I reach into my cargo pants and pull out the peyote button that I've kept stored in the refrigerator since the day I arrived. I wrapped it in a paper towel, stashed it in a brown paper bag, and then slid it under a pile of hard tortillas inside the vegetable drawer, hoping that neither my father, Rosario, or Alma would find it. When we stopped in Real de Catorce on the way down, Roselia had gone off into the desert the following day and picked two buttons, one for her and one for me. She had eaten hers right away, but I had held on to mine. Though I'd had several opportunities to try peyote while traveling around Europe, especially in Amsterdam, I had always known that if I was ever going to try it, I wanted it to be here, in Mexico, the place of its origin. Since I'll be leaving in a few days, it's now or never. I put the first wedge in my mouth and chew the thick, slightly bitter pulp. My sister had sort of coached me on what to expect, explaining that it was stronger than weed, but not quite as strong as mushrooms, and that I should take it on an empty stomach. She also told me that I must take it with a purpose—put an intention out in the universe—like making a wish.

If only I could go back in time and rescue myself from the silence that gripped me on the day my grandmother brought me back to this place. If I hadn't uttered a word to anyone for two weeks, then where had I gone? I must have been regrouping, because if it was possible for your parents to vanish, then anything in this world was possible. During those two weeks, I imagine I was assembling a shield, something that would protect me from ever being hurt again—my own bulletproof vest. And what was the point of going through life constantly guarded against love? Martin was right. I had gone to New York and never returned. If I could ask the universe for one thing, I'd want to be released. Surrender my shield—leave it here on the very stoop where it first gripped me. Before leaving Tito's house, I had asked my mother what it was like when we were reunited in Chicago.

“Don't you remember?” she said. “I wasn't there when you arrived. I was at work, at the hotel where I cleaned rooms, and when I got home, Maria Elena had already given you all a bath and changed your clothes. Everyone ran to hug me, but not you,” she said. “You stood off to the side, looking around, and you seemed so lost. It was like you had no idea where you were standing anymore.”

I put another wedge in my mouth, and a gust comes over the wall and sends the weeds in the front yard swaying. Hard to believe that my umbilical cord is buried somewhere beneath them. I feel that if I were to drop to my knees and start digging, uprooting weeds and clawing through the dirt, I would unearth my umbilical cord—guided to it by some deep intuition.

“What are you doing out here?” my father calls from the other side of the gate.

“Nothing,” I say, wrapping my hands around what's left of the button and sitting up straight.

“I'm going to bring the cattle down to the river for water,” he says. “Do you want to come with me?”

“Sure,” I say, though I had planned on spending most of the day on the hammock, closer to home in case the peyote made me feel sick, or worse.

He tells me to go get a satchel ready, while he saddles the donkey. I finish the rest of the button and make my way back to the house, walk past the mesquite where El Relámpago is tied. El Relámpago is the horse my father is breaking, and he's kicking at the ground with his front hoof, seems frustrated to be saddled up yet going nowhere. El Relámpago was born at the ranch, and ever since he was a colt he had roamed free around the four hundred acres with his mother, until recently when my father had brought him down to the corral to break him.

In the mornings, before saddling him up, he runs El Relámpago in circles, a few laps to the left, and then a few to the right. El Relámpago goes bucking and kicking up a dust cloud around my father, sometimes rising onto his hind legs, trying to break free of the harness and rope around his head before crashing back down like a lightning bolt—a relámpago. After he tires the horse, he saddles him up and ties him to the mesquite in front of the house for a few hours so that he will get used to having a saddle on his back.

I grab a leather satchel from the storage room, go into the kitchen, and shove an orange, a water bottle, and two ice-cold cans of Modelo into it. I rationalize that if the peyote gets to be too intense, an ice-cold beer or two might help blunt its effects. In the bedroom, which I'm now sharing with Rosario and Alma, I rub sunblock on my arms and face, throw on a long-sleeved white cotton tee, grab my straw hat, and head back outside.

My father takes the satchel and slings it over the neck of the wooden donkey saddle, which is identical to the one he gave me on my first visit. He holds the donkey still, as he always does, while I step into the stirrup and kick my leg over the saddle. He hands me the reins, and once he's on El Colorado, his other horse, we make our way around the back of the house and up the dirt trail that leads to La Mesa, the dogs trailing close behind. La Mesa is where he keeps the bulk of his herd during the dry season, and though the property no longer belongs to him legally, as long as he's alive, it will continue to be his land all the same.

We ride alongside the deserted cornfields, where nothing but a few dry cornstalks are reaching toward the blue sky, as if praying for a single drop of rain. The sun bites our shoulders, and the wind gusts and sends a dust devil twirling across the field; it collides with an abandoned tractor and explodes into a thousand particles. One at a time, they continue to materialize and go barreling across the expanse, as if taking turns, like men at a rodeo. My father rides a few strides ahead of me and doesn't seem to notice or care about the mini twisters. Then I notice one is coming right at us and watch it, thinking it will change its course. Instead, it seems to be gaining momentum, its funnel growing higher and wider as it approaches.

“Apá!” I yell, but he doesn't hear me over the roaring wind. “Apá!” I yell again, as it draws near. It looks like it might have enough force to send us both flying over the distant mountain range.

“¿Quiubo?” He stops and turns his head sideways, shoulder bracing against the wind.

“Mire.” I point in the direction of the approaching twister, and the minute he sees it, his hand flies to his hat.

“¡Cuidado con la gorra!” he hollers back, and I grab my hat just as it crashes into us—a single blast of dust, like someone has slammed a door on the side of the mountain. The gust whips my hair and the pink linen scarf I keep tied around my hat into my face. The scarf is my own safety net—from a distance, anyone can see that the person riding with him is a woman. Even if he has enemies out there, they tend to leave women and children out of it.

When we reach La Mesa, the dogs are the first to enter, crouching under the barbed-wire fence that surrounds the property, like they always do.

While rounding up the cattle, my father waves me over to a patch that is overgrown with weeds. He points up at the sky where three vultures are circling.

“Do you know what they're doing?” he asks. I shrug, and he motions at the tall weeds, where two calves are curled up next to each other and sleeping. A cow stands watch over them, while the other cow is napping nearby. He tells me that the cows take turns resting and watching over their young so the predators won't get them. Just two weeks ago, the coyotes had killed a calf. He didn't seem surprised, said the cow was always leaving her calf behind, was more concerned with keeping up with the herd rather than staying near her young.

We round up the last of the cattle and soon we are trailing behind the herd as it makes its way toward the river. Their hooves kick up the loose dust in the field, sending it rising like brown smoke. The cows with calves stay in the back of the herd. My father had explained that they do this to keep their young from being trampled. We are about halfway across the field when my left knee starts hurting. I pull my foot from the stirrup and stretch my leg—an old childhood injury coming back to haunt me.

When I was nine years old, we were on a family outing in the park, and while my mother and aunt flipped tortillas and skirt steaks on the grill, my father and the other men hung out in the parking lot, drinking beer and blasting ranchero music from his truck. I was playing soccer with the other kids, and a boy who was easily twice my size and I went running for the ball at the same time. He collided into my leg, pinning my foot under his weight as we both went crashing down. I felt things twisting, even thought I heard something crack as my knee was wrung out and the sky shifted. Through the tall grass blades, I saw my mother running toward me, her brown, floral-printed dress flowing in the breeze.

“It's broken,” I yelled. “I heard something snap.”

She helped me to my feet, helped me limp to the picnic table, and handed me an ice-cold can of beer, told me to hold it to my knee, which was already swelling.

“What happened to you?” my father asked when he came down from the parking lot. I explained what had happened. “Does it hurt?” he asked, reaching into the cooler, grabbing a beer, and cracking it open. I nodded. “Well, if the pain doesn't go away,” he said, looking at the can in my hand, “drink that beer and you'll soon forget about it.” He turned and made his way back to his music.

The next day, my knee was about five different shades of purple and had swelled to the size of a softball. When my father came home from work and I was hobbling around the house like an injured bird, he had driven me to see an old man that he knew—a curandero. The old man had sat me down on a wooden chair in his kitchen and, after squeezing and prodding my knee with his long fingers, he had determined that nothing was broken, that it was only my nerves and tendons that were twisted over and under each other. He grabbed the bottle of Crisco off the fridge, rubbed some on his hands, and then reached for my knee. His hands were warm, almost soothing, until he started digging, kneading, and rubbing with so much force that it felt as if my knee were caught inside a meat grinder. My father stood on the front porch, on the other side of the screen door, turning away from my cries, and then he was in the kitchen offering me a Blow Pop.

My knee fully recovered after that, and had never given me problems until after I moved to New York. I had an MRI taken, and when the orthopedic surgeon looked at the results, he asked if I had suffered a knee injury when I was a child. He explained that I had a bit of extra bone mass on the side of my knee, and often if a bone sustains a fracture or a break, it will go into trauma and generate more bone mass in an attempt to heal itself.