Prayers for the Stolen Page 4

  As soon as I can I am going to leave this horrible jungle, Paula said.

  The rest of us knew that if there were anyone who could, it would be Paula with her TV commercial face.

  As if we’d crossed a border, from one minute to the next, we’d left our hothouse jungle world and reached a clearing. The sun was strong. We stood before the brilliance of lavender and black as a huge field, a bonfire of poppies appeared before us.

  The place seemed to be deserted except for a downed army helicopter, a mangled mess of metal skids and blades among the poppies.

  The field of flowers smelled like gasoline.

  Maria’s hand slipped into mine. I did not need to turn and look at her to know it was her small, cool hand like an apple peel. We would recognize each other in the dark and even in a dream.

  Nobody had to say, Be quiet, or Hush, or Let’s get out of here.

  When we got back to Estefani’s house, her mother was still asleep. The four of us went into Estefani’s bedroom and closed the door.

  We all knew the sound of the army helicopters approaching from far away. We also knew the smell of Paraquat mixed with the scent of papaya and apples.

  My mother said, Those crooks are paid, paid by the drug traffickers, not to drop that damn Paraquat on the poppies and so they drop it wherever else on the mountain, on us!

  We also knew that the poppy growers strung wires above the crops in order to down the helicopters or, in some cases, simply shot them down with their rifles and AK-47s. Those army helicopters had to go back to their bases and report that they had dropped the herbicide so they dropped it anywhere they could. They did not want to get near the fields where they would be shot down for sure. When the helicopters came by and got rid of the stuff over our houses we could smell the ammonia scent in everything and our eyes burned for days. My mother said this was the reason she could never stop coughing.

  My body, she said, is the army’s damn poppy field.

  In Estefani’s room we all promised that this would be our secret.

  Maria and I already had a secret. It had to do with her older brother Mike. He had a gun.

  My mother always said that Mike was a piece of shit who had been placed on this earth to break a woman’s heart in pieces. She said she’d known this ever since he was born.

  Maria was born with all the bad luck God had to give on that day, my mother said. God even gave her a brother who does not deserve to be a brother to anyone.

  Mike told us he found the gun down by the highway in a large, black plastic garbage bag that had burst open. The gun was there, the metal shining, among broken eggshells. It still had two bullets.

  I believed him. I knew you could find anything in garbage bags.

  My father could pick up a snake by the tail and twist it in two parts as if he was tearing a piece of chewing gum. His piercing whistle made the iguanas scurry away from the jungle paths. He was always singing about something.

  Why talk if you can sing? he said.

  He always had a cigarette between two fingers, a beer in one hand, and a straw hat with a short brim on his head. He hated to wear a baseball cap like everyone else.

  Every morning he’d walk down to the highway and take the cheap bus to Acapulco where he worked in the daytime as a poolside bartender. This was at the Acapulco Bay Hotel. My mother would place a clean and ironed shirt and pair of pants in a plastic supermarket bag, which were the clothes he would change into when he got to work.

  During the course of the day, I used to watch my mother. As the hours went by she became more and more excited. By eight o’clock she knew that the bus had left him down on the road and that he was walking up the mountain toward us. I watched her put on some lipstick and change into a clean dress. We could hear him approach before we saw him because he’d be singing and his voice came to us through the dark banana and papaya trees.

  When he finally stood at the door, he’d close his eyes and open his arms. Who do I get to hug first? he asked. It was always my mother. She’d step down hard on my foot, push me back, or even trip me before she’d let me get to him first.

  He would sit in our little side room off the kitchen, which was like a kind of living room where we could be inside away from the mosquitoes, and tell us about his day serving drinks and Cokes to tourists from the United States and Europe. Once in a while he served soap-opera stars or politicians. These stories were the most interesting to us.

  As the years passed my mother grew angrier and began to drink too much. I remember this was almost a year after Maria’s harelip operation. One night she talked too much.

  Your father has slept with Paula’s mother, Concha, and with Estefani’s mother, and everyone around here. Yes, he did it with every single one of my friends, every single one. And let me tell you whom he has been doing it to these days. It’s been Ruth, she said.

  My mother picked up another bottle of beer and drank back a great long swig. Her eyes seemed almost cross-eyed to me.

  So, Ladydi, she continued, you might as well know the truth about your sweet loving daddy. All of it.

  Please, Mama. Stop.

  Don’t ever say your mother didn’t tell you the truth.

  And then she burst into tears, hundreds of tears. My mother became a huge rainstorm.

  And you might as well know the whole truth, she sobbed.

  I don’t want to know any more, I said.

  Maria’s mother too. He slept with Maria’s mother too and, listen to me, that was the curse. I told your father that Maria’s harelip, that rabbit face, hare’s face, was God’s punishment.

  I became very still, still like when a white, almost transparent scorpion is on the wall above your bed. Still like when you see a snake curled up behind the coffee tin. Still like waiting for the helicopter to dump the burning herbicide all over your body as you run home from school. Still like when you hear an SUV turning off the highway and it almost sounds like a lion, even though you’ve never heard a lion.

  What exactly are you saying, Mama?

  Oh my God, my mother said, holding her hand over her mouth.

  She seemed to spit the words into the palm of her hand as if they were olive pits or a plum seed or a piece of tough meat she couldn’t swallow. It was as if she tried to catch the words in her hand before they came out into the room and traveled into me.

  When the words came into me it was as if they traveled from a coiled spring. My body was a pinball machine and the words hit like metal balls banging and rushing down and up my arms and legs and around my neck until they fell into the prized hole of my heart.

  Don’t look at me like that, Ladydi, my mother said. Hey, and don’t act all high and mighty like you didn’t know any of this gossip.

  But she knew perfectly well I didn’t know anything about my father’s ways, or not these ways. What she did know, because she was a drunk and not a fool, was that she’d just killed my daddy for me. She might as well have shot a bullet through his Daddy-loves-only-me heart.

  My reaction was to say, Give me a beer and don’t tell me I’m too young.

  You’re eleven.

  No, I’m twelve.

  No, you’re eleven.

  She opened and passed a bottle of beer over to me. I drank it down fast just the way she did. The way I’d seen her do it hundreds of times. And that was the first time I got drunk. I quickly learned that all it takes is some alcohol to solve everything. When you’re drunk you don’t care if a battalion of mosquitoes bites your arms up or a scorpion stings your hand or if your father is a lying bastard and your best friend, with a broken face, turns out to be your half-sister.

  Now I understood why my mother always liked to say how she had marched over to look at Maria after she was born. It was to see if that baby looked like my father, which of course she did. Maria looks exactly like my father and maybe this is also why Maria’s father left. Maybe it wasn’t the harelip that scared him after all. Maybe he thought he was not going to spend the rest of his lif
e feeding the face of his wife’s lover’s baby.

  When my daddy came home from work that night, full of songs, he found his wife and daughter passed out drunk.

  The next morning I woke up to find my mother sitting on the kitchen stool by the window. I guess he took one look at us and, later that night, listened to my mother rant about what she’d told me and why. She must have said, Do you think we were going to lie to her forever? You think you’re Frank Sinatra out there in Acapulco serving people margaritas with those silly little plastic umbrellas.

  I had a large collection of those colorful cocktail paper umbrellas, which my father had brought back for me over the years. He also brought me glow-in-the-dark cocktail stirring sticks. He helped me paste these all around my bed so that I could watch them glow in the night. He also gave me dollar bills every now and again, which were given to him by tourists from the USA. I’d saved up thirty dollars. I kept this money in an Archie comic book in my bedroom.

  Knowing that Maria was my half-sister also made me feel differently about Mike. It gave me sisterly feelings toward him. From then on, I always bought him a birthday present.

  Shortly after this, my father went to the United States to look for work. He only came back a few more times and then he was gone for good. All we had to remember him by was the satellite dish attached to the tallest palm tree on our small plot of land and a large flat-screen television and, of course, Maria.

  I should be skinned in a butcher’s shop and hanging from a hook, my mother said.

  That was the first time my daddy left. He didn’t even wake me up from my drunk, new-drunk sleep to say goodbye.

  He didn’t say goodbye to you because he couldn’t look you in the eye! Frank Sinatra just slunk out of here like an old street dog that’s ashamed to be a dog, my mother said.

  She let every one of our friends know that he’d left home without even saying goodbye to his daughter.

  Two months later we heard from the USA-to-Mexico rumor mill that he’d gone to the border and managed to get across the river in Tijuana, at the San Ysidro port of entry, hidden in the back of a truck under a false floor between the wheels and the bumper. Then he went down Interstate 5 and into the United States.

  It got back to us that the minute he crossed the border and was heading deep into the state of Texas, he had started to sing songs, one after another. This was all the proof my mother and I needed in order to confirm that these rumors were true.

  After my father crossed the border he went to Florida where he was working as a gardener. This made my mother spit on the ground and say, A gardener! That lying son of a bitch does not know anything about gardening.

  We both tried to imagine him carrying a spade or a rake and planting roses. He could seduce and sweet-talk himself into anything.

  When he finally wired us some money, about three months after he’d left, my mother was speechless. It took me a while to figure out what had slapped the words out of her mouth and left her empty. The money my father had wired did not come from one of those glamorous-sounding places in Florida like Miami, Orlando, or Palm Beach but from a town called Boca Raton. This was just too much for my mother.

  She said, He left this place to go to the Rat’s Mouth?

  The following school year we had a teacher called José Rosa, from Mexico City. He was doing his social service and had been sent to teach at our school. We tried not to become too attached to these strangers who came and went, but sometimes it was hard.

  José Rosa was a handsome twenty-three-year-old man who was sent to our world of women.

  Paula, Estefani, Maria, and I watched as our mothers fell in love with this young teacher. Every morning our mothers sent him treats in our lunch bags or just hung out around the school.

  This was also the time when Paula, Maria, Estefani, and I first protested against being made unattractive or dressing like boys. We wanted José Rosa’s eyes to look at us as women.

  The only person who resisted him was Estefani. She was the first person who saw him walking up the path to our one-room school in the jungle under the dying orange tree. She saw him walk his city-walk in his city clothes and haircut and then she heard him talk his city-talk.

  Who’s going to get his city-kiss? Who is going to get his skyscraper-kiss? Estefani asked.

  Estefani was the only one who had been to Mexico City. In fact, she’d been to Mexico City many times. Her mother was sick and they had to go and see a doctor every few months. Estefani’s mother had almost died. We were all very worried about this because Estefani was only nine at the time. Estefani’s father had left to go and work in the United States on the fishing boats in Alaska and was not around to help. Estefani said that her mother just kept getting skinnier and no matter how hard she tried to gain weight, she couldn’t. Her mother’s dark skin began to turn a silvery color.

  But the truth of the story was that Estefani’s father did not bring back the smell and taste of Alaskan king salmon, rainbow trout, or Arctic char. He did not bring back a bag of pine needles or photographs of grizzly bears or an eagle feather. He brought back the AIDS virus, which he gave to Estefani’s mother, like giving her a rose or a box of chocolates.

  In Chilpancingo, next to the canteen that had so many bullet holes in its door the dark bar could be looked at through the round wounds, there was a clinic where for twenty pesos you could get an AIDS test. The men came and went to the United States and the women, year after year, walked down past the canteen for an AIDS test. There were some who did not want to know. Those women prayed.

  When Estefani’s mother was diagnosed with AIDS, her husband left. He slapped her across the face three times back and forth and back again and called her a whore. He said if she had AIDS it was because she’d been unfaithful. We all knew this was impossible. There were no men on our mountain.

  After this, Estefani’s house, which we had so admired, began to fall to pieces. The appliances stopped working, but Estefani’s mother still kept them. The toys broke. The matching towels and rugs frayed.

  Estefani boasted that she’d seen many city men, because she’d gone to Mexico City with her mother, and so she was not at all impressed with our new teacher. In fact, she used to say that our teacher, José Rosa, was not as handsome as other men she’d seen.

  When José Rosa walked into our schoolroom one hot August morning we could still smell the city surrounding him. His odor was of cars, exhaust fumes, and cement. He was very pale.

  He looks like a glass of milk, Maria said.

  No, like a movie star, Paula said.

  No, Estefani disagreed. He looks like a worm.

  He introduced himself to each one of us and shook our hands. His hand in my hand still belonged to the city. It felt cool and dry. It had not peeled a mango or torn into a papaya. He also wore a straw hat. Later he told us it was a panama hat, which we thought was elegant. Other than my father, he was the first man we’d ever seen who did not wear a baseball cap. José Rosa had very curly black hair and light brown eyes with long eyelashes that curled upward toward his eyebrows.

  When my mother saw him she said, Well, Ladydi, we’d better start digging a hole for him too!

  On the first day of school, we’d arrived with our mothers to register and officially meet the new teacher. This was a routine that we followed at the beginning of the school year. On that first day we just looked like ourselves. We were messy and born from the jungle so we were like the relatives of papaya trees, iguanas, and butterflies.

  After having seen José Rosa in his straw hat, there was a massive rush to Ruth’s beauty salon. We watched as our mothers had their hair washed and trimmed. The mothers who had curly hair wanted straight hair and those with straight hair wanted curly hair. It was only my mother who insisted that she wanted her black hair colored blond. Ruth was pleased because she was always trying to get everyone to change their hair color.

  We watched Ruth fix up our mothers as we spun around and around in the hair-salon chairs or wa
tched the huge passenger buses pass by from the beauty parlor’s bullet-riddled window. We longed to have our hair done and our nails painted, but we were not allowed.

  When Ruth took the towel off my mother’s wet hair, her black frizz had been transformed into yellow frizz. There was a sudden quiet in the beauty salon as we stared at her yellow cotton-candy hair.

  On the second day of school everyone looked like they were dressed for Christmas. Our mothers’ brown faces were covered with makeup and lipstick. Estefani’s mother was even wearing false eyelashes, which looked like antennas coming out of her worn, sickly face.

  When José Rosa arrived it was as if a large mirror had fallen into the jungle. When we looked at him, we looked at ourselves. Every imperfection, our skin, scars, things we had never even noticed, we saw in him.

  My mother was the first one to invite him over for dinner. He’s not going to believe it when he sees I knew about grammar. I knew about onomatopeia and hyperbole, she said. I do. Right?

  She spent the day sweeping our dirt floor and cleaning the dust off of everything. Ever since my father had left, she’d never done any housecleaning.

  I could understand why my father left our home, the jungle, and my mother (even though she wasn’t yet the angry drunk she became), but I could never understand how he could have left me.

  When José Rosa came to our clean house, we sat outside, under the papaya tree; my mother and José drank beer and I drank a Coke. When my mother handed José Rosa the bottle of beer, she did not hand him a glass. In Guerrero we all drink straight out of bottles.

  José spent his visit with us complaining about our mountain. He didn’t understand why we never used drinking glasses or why we had houses, but almost always slept outside at night. We listened quietly as he complained that everyone had appliances like televisions, satellite antennas, and washing machines, but that we had no furniture and still lived on dirt floors.