Bulletproof Vest (45 page)

“Your father had a lot of money in that house,” the man said. “Just two weeks ago, we were having a few drinks at his house, and he took me into the storage room and moved an old wooden trunk away from the wall, and in the wall there was a large hole that was filled with weapons and money,” he said. “He had a great deal of old silver coins, and he told me to tell you to look for them. To search the house, search everything.”

My sisters and I had ransacked his house but found nothing. Though by then, the only thing I wanted more than anything was to get out of town, thinking that whoever that stuff belonged to might come looking for it. For days after returning to New York, the minute I fell asleep, my mind raced back to his house and searched in vain for the hidden treasure. I climbed into the chimney, which led to a labyrinth of rooms from which there was no exit. Other times, the limestone floor would turn to dust beneath my feet, and I'd fall into a sinkhole that was infested with rattlesnakes.

Eventually, Rosario told me that those things belonged to my father. That he still owned several of the weapons he had driven down from Chicago, including a machine gun. If there was some hidden treasure, it's possible that Alma and Rosario found it. They had both come back for the funeral, and we told them they should stay and live in La Peña. Perhaps that was their inheritance—the house and the treasure—though my father also had a life insurance policy on which he had named Rosario as the beneficiary.

I poured myself another glass of wine and continued sifting through the documents, and stashed between the birth and death certificates there were old land deeds dating back to the late 1800s, along with several rough drafts of his corrido. Traditionally, a person doesn't write his own corrido. It's usually written to commemorate a life after the person has died, but my father had hired some musicians to compose one for him. It was titled “El Corrido del Cien Vacas,” and the final copy was inside a plastic sleeve—it had even been notarized. His corrido was incomplete, of course, as he had no way of knowing how his life would end. He may have known his days were numbered, may have even accepted his fate, but he didn't know what the last verse of his ballad would be.

When he died he had made the newspapers yet again, and I had stored a copy of the article in the backpack. According to the report, on Wednesday night, just before 9:00 p.m., a blue Suburban that had been traveling south on Rural 44 had gone off the road and rolled several times, killing all three of its passengers. Miguel García, forty, Rosario Bueno, fifty-eight, and Jose Venegas, sixty-nine. Ever since the first time he had made the headlines, when everything had happened with Joaquín, I never trusted the newspapers, as more often than not they only scratched the surface of the real story. I could still practically hear my father laughing.
Imagine? Killing a man over a goddamn beer?

There was a knock at Tito's door on the morning after the funeral. It was a man who had known my father since they were kids, and he had come to tell us the one thing the whole town must have been aware of but wouldn't dare utter. The fear the cartels had instilled had silenced the community. The man was good friends with a couple from Tejones, and on the night of the crash, they had seen that when the Suburban went flying off the shoulder, practically traveling on its tailwind were two Hummers. My father had survived the crash and one of the men in the Hummers had hit him on the back of the head with the butt of a rifle—that was how his life had come to an end.

I placed all the newspapers in one pile, court documents in another, birth and death certificates in another, as if by organizing everything, I might start to make sense of what was fact and what was myth. My father's life story was written within those piles of paper, and the stories they contained were my patrimony. This was what I had inherited from him—not the hidden treasure, his cattle, or his ranch, but his stories.

On the day we brought his herd down from the ranch, I stood on the plateau where I could still do a three-sixty and see the horizon all the way around. My mother was standing next to me and we were watching his cattle filter into the corral, and as the dust rose up around them, I could already feel his world receding from me. He was the doorway through which I had entered that terrain. Bringing his cattle down felt like the end of an era, like the mountain itself had been dismantled. He had no son to take over the livestock or the ranch. Chemel would have been the one, and now they both lay under the same headstone, under the same name, behind the gates of the cemetery that had haunted me for years. Where there was one cross, there were now four.

“Look,” I said to my mother. “That's Chupitos.” My mother had already heard all about the orphaned calf that had been adopted by La Negra. The last time I had spoken to my father, he had told me that Chupitos was pregnant. And now there she was in the corral, and trailing close behind her was a newly branded calf that looked just like her.

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

 

According to Virginia Woolf, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write.” In an ever-changing cityscape, coming across either of these has become increasingly difficult. Thus, I feel the need to acknowledge the two individuals who provided me with ideal living situations while I was writing this book. George Wanat, thank you for keeping my rent stable throughout the years, even as the towers on the Brooklyn waterfront went up, the rents soared, and the neighborhood shifted—you are the most generous landlord on the planet. Elspeth Leacock, thank you for sharing your cottage over the summers, and for saving me from the city (and often from myself).

This book would not have come to fruition without the encouragement and support of numerous friends and colleagues who read the manuscript and provided invaluable feedback along the way. Thank you to all at Hunter, especially Colum McCann, Vanessa Manko, and Peter Messina. I'm forever grateful to
Granta
and John Freeman for being the first to publish my work. My deepest gratitude to all at the Wylie Agency, especially Sarah Chalfant, for the guidance and all the hard work on behalf of this author. Many thanks to Kate Guiney, as well as to Gabriella Doob and everyone at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. I'm beholden to my brilliant editor, Eric Chinski, whose patience, encouragement, and keen edits made this a much stronger book.

In the end, no one deserves more recognition than my family, especially my mother and my grandmother, both of whom helped me fill in the gaps. I'm also deeply grateful to my siblings for being there while we were going through the trenches, and once again while I was rehashing our lives. Cualita, Nena, Chavo, Chela, Sonia, Jorge, and Yesi: it's your love and support that keeps me grounded. And finally, Chemel, my beloved brother, thank you for keeping watch from the other side. You may be gone, but your influence lives on.

 

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Maria Venegas was born in the state of Zacatecas, Mexico, and immigrated to the United States when she was four years old.
Bulletproof Vest
was excerpted in
Granta
and
The Guardian
. Venegas's short stories have appeared in
Ploughshares
and
Huizache
. She currently mentors students at Still Waters in a Storm, a reading and writing sanctuary for children in Bushwick, Brooklyn. She lives in New York City.

 

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

Copyright © 2014 by Maria Venegas

All rights reserved

First edition, 2014

Some portions of this book are adapted from material previously published in
Granta
.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Venegas, Maria, [year]

    Bulletproof vest: the ballad of an outlaw and his daughter / Maria Venegas.—First edition.

        pages    cm

    ISBN 978-0-374-11731-3 (hardcover)—ISBN 978-1-4299-4416-8 (ebook)

    1.  Venegas, Maria, [year]   2.  Children of criminals—Family relationships—Mexico.   3.  Criminals—Family relationships—Mexico.   4.  Fathers and daughters—Mexico.   I.  Title.

HV6248.V455 A3 2014

364.1092—dc23

[B]

2013038777

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Some names and identifying details of certain people and places have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.