Bulletproof Vest (4 page)

El Cojo had tried to make a run for it. His two brothers were waiting in a car nearby, engine running, lights off. But the feds had caught up to them that same night. They arrested El Cojo and threw him in prison, and now, not even a year later, he was already a free man. So be it, Jose thinks as the bus pulls into the station. If he's no longer behind the protective gates of the system, then he's out there somewhere. He will keep the word on the street. Knows it's only a matter of time before that handicapped bastard turns up.

The first thing he does upon returning to town is track down la licenciada Barcena. He hires an attorney and files a lawsuit against her. His photo appears in the papers the following day, and in it he's wearing a white cowboy hat and sporting a full black beard. The caption reads:
Jose Manuel Venegas, forty-five years of age, files a lawsuit against la licenciada Guadalupe Barcena for having aided in the escape of a murderer.

 

3

WITNESS PROTECTION PROGRAM

 

 

“SO, WHAT'S GOING ON?”
Norma asks as she slides onto the bench next to Fabiola and adjusts her orange tray in front of her. I considered not saying anything. Let them figure it out when Monday morning rolled around and I didn't show up for school, not that day—or ever again. But it's too late now, I've already told my friends I have something to tell them, and now they're all sitting across the lunchroom table from me, waiting.

“I'm moving,” I say.

“What? Why?” they ask, in unison, practically. They're all here: Frida Chávez, Mirna Escobar, Fabiola Huertas, Maribel Torres, Juana Moreno, Norma García, and Araceli Ortega—this is my group of friends, or my “gang” as Mr. Kauffman, the principal, had referred to them on the day he called me down to his office. He sat eyeing me from behind his wide, wooden desk, his plump fingers crossed and resting on the smooth surface. “What's the name of your gang?” he asked. “What gang?” I said, thinking, what a jerk. I can't believe he called me out of class to ask me this. “Don't play games with me, Venegas. I know you're in a gang. I know you're the leader. I want the name.”

Even though I wasn't the leader of a gang, in the four years I'd been at his school—fifth through eighth grades—I probably had spent more time serving in-school suspensions and detentions than in the classroom. At one point, the school had even placed me in a program for “at risk” kids, though I never understood what exactly we were at risk for. I was assigned to a mentor, a retired professional football player. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” he asked at our first meeting. “A famous fashion designer,” I said. “Okaaay,” he said, “and just in case that doesn't work out, is there anything else you might want to be?” he asked. “A supermodel,” I said, without thinking twice.

“Is it because of your neighbor?” Frida asks.

“Yeah,” I say.

They all know about the neighbor and his two brothers. Frida, Mirna, and Fabiola all live on my street, had heard the gunshots on that night, and every other night, when my father came home in the wee hours, blaring his music and unloading his gun into our front yard. At first, the neighbors used to call the police and report that they had heard gunshots, but eventually, they got used to it, and no one bothered calling the police anymore. I had once gotten into an argument in the library with Marcos, one of the boys who lived up the street. “Well, at least my father doesn't come home in the middle of the night, shooting his gun and waking up the entire neighborhood,” he said. “Well, at least my brothers aren't drug dealers,” I shouted, because word around the neighborhood was that the high school kids bought weed from his older brothers. The librarian shushed us, but still, the sting of his words lingered. Why did we have to end up with a lunatic for a father? Why couldn't we have had a normal dad like my friends and cousins had? It was a relief that he was gone, and gone for good.

“Where you moving to?” Mirna asks.

“I can't tell you,” I say. My mother had warned us not to breathe a word to anyone—it was our own makeshift witness protection program.

“When?” Norma asks.

“This weekend,” I say.

I pull out a notebook, have them write down their addresses and phone numbers, and promise to call and write. Over the next year, I keep in touch with several of them, though eventually we stop corresponding, except Frida and I. She'll keep me updated on everyone: Maribel was not going to high school because she had gotten pregnant, and soon after high school began, Araceli had also gotten pregnant and dropped out. After high school, Norma had landed in rehab. Eventually, I lost track of all of them, including Frida, though years later, I heard that she had gotten into drugs and that one day she had driven her car deep into the forest and slit her wrists.

My mother isn't there when we move. She's in Mexico taking advantage of our recent status as temporary residents to visit her mother. We had been granted temporary residency under President Reagan's amnesty act—except for my father, who had already had one too many run-ins with the law; his application was the only one denied. Though he was still allowed to stay in the United States with his work permit.

Between Friday night and Sunday afternoon, my siblings and I take what seems like fifty truckloads from our old house to the new one. We strap chairs, tables, mattresses, and bicycles down with rope in the back of a borrowed truck, and load boxes packed with dishes and garbage bags filled with linens and clothing into my eldest sister Mary's car. Back and forth we go all day Saturday and all day Sunday, until our final trip on Sunday afternoon. We step outside and Mary closes the front door—the sound of it hitting the frame sends an echo through the empty house. It's a relief to be leaving that house for good, not only because of the threat of the two brothers, but also because it feels like by moving away we are leaving the past behind us. The last time I ever saw my brother he had been standing in that doorway, one hand resting on the doorknob, the other holding a duffel bag. He was wearing a light blue Windbreaker, jeans, and a brand-new pair of white leather Nike sneakers.

“I'm leaving,” he said, pausing at the door and looking at me. I was sitting on the couch, under a blanket, watching a rerun of
The Greatest American Hero.
My father had asked Chemel if he'd go back to Mexico to help my grandfather—who had recently been diagnosed with diabetes—with the livestock. It would only be for a month or two, just long enough for him to find and train a responsible cattle hand to stay on permanently.

“You promised to pay for my gymnastics lessons,” I said, crossing my arms tight, even though I had already taught myself how to do just about everything from a back walkover to the splits. A few years back, we had lived near a gymnastics studio, and I used to ride my dirt bike to the studio and stand in the doorway, observing the classes. Then I'd ride home and practice in our front yard until it grew dark. The following day, I'd practice during recess, doing countless backbends over the blue rubber seat of a swing, pulling my right knee up and over the way I'd seen the girls in the class doing, until eventually I no longer needed the swing to spot me.

“I will,” he said. “When I come back.” He lingered in the doorway, waiting. He was the one who had told me to observe the classes and practice on my own, because that way, when I did start lessons, I'd be at a more advanced level. That's what he had done with karate. He had watched back-to-back Bruce Lee movies, observing and practicing before enrolling in classes, and he'd become a black belt in no time. “Aren't you going to give me a hug?” he said, his hand still resting on the doorknob.

“Why?” I said. “It's not like you're going to be gone forever.” He stood in the doorway for a bit longer before turning and walking away, the light of the television reflecting off his white sneakers as he went.

Mary locks the door and we make our way to her car. It's spring and the icicles that hang from the white gutter in front of the house are melting in the afternoon sun, dripping and sending small streams down the driveway. I climb into the passenger seat, wedge myself next to a pillow, and place the box I'm carrying on my lap. Inside the box are my alarm clock radio, my coin collection, and the letters Chemel had written me from Mexico. After he'd been gone for six months, I had sat down and written him a letter, asking when was he coming back, and what was taking so long. I had already memorized the three chords he had left me practicing on the guitar and was sick of playing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” Also, I told him that his ex-girlfriend Leticia Jiménez had gotten married, and so had Anna Sánchez from down the street, and Lucy Hurtado from my mother's church said to say hello to him. I signed my name, licked the envelope, and placed four stamps on the upper right-hand corner. I wrote the address my mother had given me on it. There was no zip code, no street number—not even a street name—how was it possible that he was living in a place where the streets had no names? I sent the letter, convinced it would never reach him. Still, I checked the mailbox every day after getting off the school bus, until finally, about a month later, there was a letter from him.

For the next year, we wrote a few letters. He always inquired about how I was doing in school, and always asked me to say hello to the gang, which is how he referred to my siblings. He asked me to give my parents a hug and kiss on his behalf, but I never did, as I never gave my parents hugs or kisses even on my own behalf. Both my parents kept him busy that year. My father wired him money so that he could add on a new room to my grandparents' house in La Peña, and my mother sent him enough money for him to build her a house on a small plot of land she had purchased. The plot sat on a low hill in the outskirts of town, next to the cemetery. When he had completed the jobs, he called my father and asked him to wire the money he would need in order to get back to Chicago, but my father convinced him to stay, just a little longer. The holidays were only five months away, and since my father would be going to Mexico in December, they could drive back together. He agreed to wait for my father, to wait until the holidays.

I felt like one of the lucky ones because I had not gone to Mexico for the holidays to witness any of the things I'd later hear about from my two older sisters who had been down there. After my father pulled Chemel from the river, a few men had helped him hoist the body onto the back of his truck. My brother had been wearing his white sneakers and his feet dangled over the back of the truck bed, bouncing along as his body absorbed every bump on the dirt roads. Back in La Peña, they had laid him out on the limestone floor on top of a wooden plank, and while they waited for the coffin to arrive, my grandmother had cleaned away the mud that had dried around his hairline, ears, and nostrils. By the time my mother arrived from Chicago, they had already placed him inside the coffin, which was a simple wooden box.

“Where is your God now?” my father asked, taunting her. Wasn't He the God of miracles? The one who brought people back from the dead? Why didn't she pray to him now and ask him for a miracle. But there would be no miracle, and on the morning they were to take the body to the cemetery, in a sudden fit of desperation, my father had thrown himself on top of the coffin, opened it, grabbed my brother by the shirt and practically pulled him from it, demanding that he get up, get up, get up.

My father had had a corrido composed for Chemel, and when he returned to Chicago, he spent countless hours kneeling in front of the speaker, his back shaking violently as he listened to that corrido over and over again, as if the music might deliver his firstborn back into his arms. My brother seemed forever trapped inside that song, caught somewhere between the drums and the wailing horns. If I was lying in bed, the minute I heard the first note I pressed my pillow to my ears, cranked up my alarm clock radio, and soon either Madonna or Prince were drowning out the story of how my brother had been killed. I refused to shed a single tear, convinced myself that my brother was still alive, still in Mexico, forever riding his horse on that distant mountainside. Though at night when the house was dark and everyone was asleep, he started showing up in my dreams. I'd see him standing on the edge of the woods that lined the school's playground, and I'd run to him, desperate to throw my arms around him, but before I could reach him, he'd turn, walk into the woods, and vanish.

Mary hits the radio switch before reversing out of the driveway, and the beats of a cumbia fill the car as we make our way down the street. It feels good to be leaving that house for good, to be leaving the past in the past. Soon we are flying down Silver Lake Road, the lake on one side and Paradise on the other. Paradise is a wooded hill at the end of an asphalt parking lot, and when I was younger, my friends and I used to ride our dirt bikes to the hill and play in the woods, pretending that we had discovered paradise. We drive past Shady Lane, the street where we lived when we first arrived from Mexico. My parents had come first. They had left us with Tito, my maternal grandmother, and had crossed the border, found jobs, and saved money, and two years later they had sent for us.

My tío Manuel, my mother's older brother, had taken the three-day bus ride to the Arizona border with us. When we arrived at the border, three days later, he met up with a woman who would go through customs with us four younger kids—we all had loaned birth certificates. But Chemel, who was fourteen, and Mary, who was twelve, had no documents, and so my uncle had taken them across the river with a coyote. My father was waiting on the other side, in Yuma, Arizona. He had driven out from Chicago, and in the camper of his blue pickup truck he had packed a foam mattress, pillows, blankets, and a cooler filled with soda, packages of bologna, American cheese slices, a jar of mayonnaise, and two loaves of white bread.