Prayers for the Stolen (9 page)

Every morning we’d get to school and sit down in our chairs and wait for Mr. de la Cruz to arrive. He was always late. When he’d finally arrive, sometimes up to two hours late, he’d walk into the room, take the CD player and the speakers out of a small suitcase, and say, So you’re all still here. I was never sure what that was supposed to mean. Where would we be?

He only played Tchaikovsky.
Swan Lake
floated out of
our schoolroom, across our jungle, over our homes, hills covered in poppies and marijuana plants, down the black oily highway, and across the Sierra Madre, until the sound of swans dancing covered the whole country.

He must be a homosexual! my mother said.

The new teacher had no interest in us. I liked him. He came to the school, played music, and went back to his little one-room house and never came out of that room until the next day. But, in that schoolroom, for four or five hours, he made us cross our arms on our white plastic desks and lay our heads down, close our eyes, and listen.

During these concerts, Estefani would fall asleep and later complain that the music actually made her feel cold. After she figured out this was all we were going to do for the year, she brought a blanket to school and covered her back and shoulders. As Estefani’s mother, Augusta, became sicker from AIDS, Estefani became colder. The mother was sucking the heat out of the daughter.

Maria, who was the best cumbia and salsa dancer around, didn’t mind listening to this music. As long as she didn’t have to do mathematics, she was happy.

On those mornings I laid my head on my arms and closed my eyes. Within Tchaikovsky’s music, I heard the earth quake below the ground. I heard tree roots spread under the land. I heard poppies open their petals.

I listened for Paula’s voice, but I heard nothing.

I was sure she was dead. We were all sure she was dead. So, when she came back, my mother said, Oh my, the coffin has been opened and she walked out of it.

That was the last year that we went to school. A Primary School diploma was a door out of childhood. The truth is some of us were twelve, thirteen, or even fourteen when this happened because it took forever to graduate. There were years when teachers simply
gave up and left halfway through or years no teacher ever even showed up.

The only reason we graduated was that Mr. de la Cruz didn’t care if we knew anything or not. He announced that there would be no final exams and he signed the diplomas and got out of there as fast as he could. I was sure he thought it was a great success to have left our part of the world without a bullet hole in his body.

Now that school was over we had to think about what we were going to do. Estefani knew she had no choice. She was going to spend these next years watching her mother die. Maria was going to wait and see. Mike was bringing more money home and was pushing for Maria and his mother to leave this mountain and move to Acapulco. He said he was going to buy them a house. Nobody even asked what Paula would do as she now lived like a baby and was locked up in her house all day.

My mother said to me, You’re not going to sell iguanas on the side of the road. You’re not going to go to the beauty parlor school in Acapulco. You’re not going to be a maid in Mexico City. You’re not going to work in a factory on the border. You’re not going to stay here doing nothing and you better not get pregnant or I’ll kill you.

One day my mother and I were up on the clearing when Mike came over and stood next to us. He literally seemed to hop to the music of the cell phones in all his pockets that rang and chimed and jangled and buzzed. He fidgeted and wriggled inside of himself as if his bones were strutting inside the clothing of skin. As a young boy he used to walk around with a pet iguana tied to a string. He was heartbroken when his mother stewed that iguana in a pot with carrots and potatoes.

From one of his pockets Mike pulled out a gold chain and gave it to my mother. I’ve always wanted to give you something pretty, Rita, he said. You’ve got enough ugly in your house.

Mike said he knew of a family in Acapulco who needed help with their small child and was looking for a nanny.

That’s perfect, my mother said. That’s perfect for you, Ladydi.

You’ll have to live in Acapulco most of the week, Mike explained. You’ll make pretty money. These people are rich, rich, rich. Mike punctuated the word rich by snapping his fingers three times: snap, snap, snap.

My mother stood up straight when she heard the family was rich. I knew she was thinking of all the things I could steal and bring home. In the mirror of her eyes, I was filling up my bag with a lipstick and a bottle of shampoo.

I knew what it would mean to leave. I knew my mother would fall asleep with her jaw dropped and her mouth agape. The television would be tuned to the History Channel and words about castles in France or the history of chess would fill the room. She would be surrounded by empty beer bottles. Long black ants would crawl in and out of her mouth and there would not be a daughter around to flick them away.

Yes, I said to Mike. Yes.

As my mother and I left the clearing and walked back home together we moved past the tree where we’d buried the corpse years ago before Paula was stolen. We never found out whom that young man belonged to. No one ever came around asking. The jungle has ears all over, my mother said. There are no secrets here.

That afternoon I found out what had happened to Paula.

I was walking down the path that led to the schoolroom, when I ran into Paula sitting under a tree. She was sitting on the ground, which we never did. On our mountain we always placed something between our skin and the earth.

She was wearing a long dress that covered her like a tent. I knew that insects were crawling up her bare legs under the cloth.

I felt the warm, black earth under my feet.

The ground had brought us together.

I wanted to hold her hand. Her face was bent over as she looked at something in her lap.

I walked slowly toward her, the way I had learned to walk when I wanted to catch a small garter snake or a baby iguana. As I approached, my body came between her body and the sun and I covered her with the eclipse of my shadow.

She looked up and I sat next to her on the ground. I knew I’d be brushing black and red ants off my skin within a minute. Paula’s dress was covered with black ants swarming all over. A few had already migrated up her clothes; crawled around her neck and behind her ears. She did not flick them off.

Don’t you feel so sorry for Britney Spears? Paula said.

The long sleeves of Paula’s dress were folded over and pushed up. On her left arm, the inside where the skin is pale and thin like guava skin, I could see a row of cigarette burns, circles, polka dots, pink circles.

You know, Paula continued, Britney has many tattoos.

Yes? No, I didn’t know.

Oh yes. She has a fairy and small daisy circling her toe.

No, I didn’t know.

And she has a butterfly and another flower and a small star on her right hand.

Oh. Really?

Yes. Her body is like a garden.

Do you know who I am? I asked.

Oh, yes, of course. You’re Ladydi.

I brushed a few ants off her legs and arms. Get up, I said. The ants are going to eat you alive if you sit here any longer.

The ants?

Does your mother know where you are?

I took hold of her wrists and helped lift her up. I will take you home, I said.

Let me be with you for a little longer. I like you, Paula said. You’re nice to me.

I held her hand and walked with her toward a log a few steps away.

We can’t sit on the ground, I said.

We sat down, side by side, looking forward as if we were on a bus heading down a highway. I took her hand in mine and looked at the pattern of cigarette burns on the inside belly-skin of her arm.

I’ve seen tigers and lions, she said. Real ones. It wasn’t a zoo.

Tell me.

At that place there was a garage for the cars and a garage for the animals.

You can tell me.

Paula described the ranch. It was in the north of Mexico, in the state of Tamaulipas, right on the US border. An important drug trafficker, who was known by the nickname McClane after Bruce Willis’s character in the movie
Die Hard
, lived with his wife and four children. McClane had been a policeman.

I was his slave-mistress, Paula said.

Slave-mistress?

Yes. We call ourselves that. All of us do.

At one end of the ranch there was a garage that housed McClane’s cars, which included four BMWs, two Jaguars, and several pickup trucks and SUVs. Next to the garage there were cement rooms that contained a lion and three tigers. Paula learned from the caretakers that the animals had been bought from zoos in the United States. The property also contained its own small cemetery with four large mausoleums that were the size of little houses. Each mausoleum even had a bathroom.

It wasn’t a zoo. Every day the lion and tiger excrement was picked up and wrapped into drug shipments bound for the United States. This practice kept the drug-sniffing border dogs away from the shipments.

Paula’s job on the ranch was to sleep with McClane every now and again and to help pack the lion and tiger excrement around the drugs or rub a small film of the excrement on the outside of plastic packages.

Someone told me they were fed human meat, Paula said.

The sky began to darken as we sat on the log holding hands. In the dusk, small clouds of mosquitoes began to surround us, but since Paula continued to talk I sat there and let them bite. She didn’t seem to notice the feeling of insects crawling or biting her skin.

I don’t need to tell you that along the way I was a plastic water bottle, right? Paula said. I was something you pick up and take a swig of.

I shook my head. No, no.

Those guys who stole me were from Matameros. They took me north to that party. It was McClane’s daughter’s birthday party. She was fifteen.

A whole circus had been rented for the party. Several large tents had been set up in a field to one side of the ranch house. A man walked around giving away clouds of pink cotton candy on long wood sticks. There was a band and a large dance floor.

Paula was taken to one of the tents that had been placed very far away from the party. She could hardly hear the band play. Inside this tent there were a few men and over thirty women. Rows of plastic chairs were set up at one side of the tent. In the middle of the open space there was a table with Cokes, beers, plastic glasses, and paper plates piled high with peanuts covered in red chili powder. The women in the tent had been stolen. The drug
traffickers, who’d killed Paula’s mother’s dogs and had stolen her wrapped naked in a white towel, were now going to sell her.

McClane was in the tent. He looked at the women and asked them to smile. He wanted to see their teeth. But he didn’t look into Paula’s mouth.

McClane picked Paula. He picked the most beautiful girl in Mexico. She should have been a legend. Her face should have covered magazines. Love songs should have been written to her.

On the log beside me, Paula continued to look straight ahead as she spoke. When she seemed to grow tired she continued to tell her story only as a mix of impressions.

You don’t need to know about the sun rising and setting, she said. You don’t need to know what I ate or where I slept. You need to know that McClane had over two hundred pairs of boots. They were made from every kind of animal and reptile that was in Noah’s Ark. He had a pair made from donkey penises. One pair he liked to wear on Sundays. These were a pale yellow and everyone said were made of human flesh.

Paula’s impressions tumbled out of her as if they were a list she’d penciled down on a paper. She said that McClane’s daughter had over two hundred Barbie dolls. One doll had been dipped in gold and had real green emeralds for eyes. McClane had a box filled with feathers from the cocks he raised for cock fights. McClane had a scar across his belly as if he’d almost been cut in half by a magician. The sons all had their own toy cars. These were real cars, but miniatures, that even ran on gasoline. The ranch had a miniature gas station and a miniature OXXO store beside it.

The women that Paula met in the tent, and saw at other times at parties, were Gloria, Aurora, Isabel, Esperanza, Lupe, Lola, Claudia, and Mercedes.

Who are those women? I asked.

Oh, girls like me, she said. And the daughter had a small house to play in with toilets that flushed.

How much did you cost?

Oh, I was a present.

Why do you have those cigarette burns on your arm?

Oh, but we all have them, Ladydi. She looked down at the inside of her arm, stretching it out before her as if she were showing me the page of a book.

If you’ve been stolen, you burn the inside of your left arm with cigarettes.

Why? I don’t understand.

Are you crazy? she asked. Are you stupid?

I’m sorry.

A woman decided it a long, long time ago and now we all do it, she said. If we’re found dead someplace everyone will know we were stolen. It is our mark. My cigarette burns are a message.

I looked at the pattern of circles on her arm as she continued to hold her limb, stretched out like an oar into the jungle air.

You do want people to know it’s you. Otherwise how will our mothers find us?

It was almost dark.

We have to go now, I said. Come with me. I’ll take you.

Her mother was standing at the front door waiting. She held a baby bottle filled with milk in one hand.

It’s time for my baby to go to bed, Concha said. What on earth were you doing out in the jungle?

Paula didn’t answer and went straight into the house.

Her mother walked me out to the edge of their property.

Did she say anything to you? Concha asked. Don’t say anything to anyone, Concha said in a panic. How did they know she was here? Who watched and knew a beautiful girl lived up here? They came for her. They knew what they were coming for. If they know she’s back, if they find out, they’ll come back and get her. We have to leave. There’s no time. In a day or so. I’ve been planning. Ladydi, we’re escaping. What did she tell you?