Prayers for the Stolen (5 page)

I sat with Paula while my mother spoke to Concha about the corpse. At eleven, Paula was still thin and stringy, but her beauty was there. Everyone turned and stared at her wherever she went. Everyone could see what was coming.

After this visit, my mother and I walked to the highway and the store that stayed open late beside the gas station. She bought a six-pack of beer. This was the day that she stopped eating and only drank beer.

What did Paula’s mother say? I asked.

Not much.

Was she scared?

To death. She’ll be dead in the morning.

What do you mean?

I don’t know. Those words just came out of me.

The next morning my mother was still asleep when I left for school. I looked at her face. There was no mirror there.

We never told anyone about
the field of poppies.

We found the poppy crop a year before Maria’s harelip operation. I remember because Maria covered her mouth on that day when she said, I am afraid of flowers.

One day Estefani, Paula, Maria, and I decided to go for a walk. This was misbehavior, as we were never allowed to wander off and go for walks by ourselves. We left from Estefani’s house on a Saturday afternoon.

Estefani’s family had a real house. They had three bedrooms, a kitchen, and a living room. Estefani lived with her mother, Augusta, and two little sisters, Manuela and Dolores. On our mountain only Estefani’s father came back to Mexico from the United States every year. He also sent them money every month. Thanks to him there was electricity on our mountain as he’d paid someone a lot of money to get that done. Estefani’s father worked as a gardener in Florida. We also knew that he’d once worked in Alaska on fishing boats. In Florida, Americans hired him most of the time, but he also worked for rich Mexicans
who had fled from the violence. He said that many of these Mexicans were victims of kidnappings.

Estefani had many toys from the United States. She had a fairy watch that lit up in the dark and a plastic doll that spoke and the lips even moved.

In their kitchen there was a microwave oven, a toaster, and an electrical juicer. The entire house was fitted with ceiling lights. They all had electrical toothbrushes.

Estefani’s house was one of my mother’s favorite topics of conversation. After my mother had guzzled her third beer, I knew she would only talk about Estefani’s house or my father.

Their damn sheets match their bedspreads and their towels match the round rug on the floor. Have you seen how their dishes match their napkins? she said. In the United States everything has to match!

I had to admit she was right. Even the three sisters were always dressed in matching clothes.

Look at this dirt floor, she said. Look at it! Your father did not even love us enough to buy a bag of cement. He wanted us to walk with the spiders and walk with the ants. If a scorpion bites you and kills you, it will be your father’s fault.

Everything was his fault. If it rained, he’d built a roof that leaked. If it was hot, he’d built the house too far from the rubber trees. If my grades were poor at school, I was his daughter, as stupid as he was. If I broke something like a water glass, I was as clumsy as he was. If I talked too much, I was exactly like him, I never shut up. If I was quiet, I was just like him, I thought I was better than everyone else.

One day, when Estefani’s mother had a cold and had locked herself up in her room, Maria, Paula, Estefani, and I decided to go for a walk.

Let’s go exploring, Maria said. Her voice was muffled back
then because her hand was always covering her mouth and the exposed red flesh from her harelip.

Let’s walk in the direction of Mexico City, Paula said. She was always thinking about going to Mexico City. It was the one place we could all find instantly when we looked at a map of Mexico. Our index fingers could point it out right in the middle of the country. If Mexico were a body, Mexico City would be its navel.

We walked in a straight line away from Estefani’s house, through the iguana paths that took us deeper into the jungle overgrowth. I was at the back. Maria walked at the front, holding one hand over her mouth. Paula looked beautiful even though her mother had blackened her teeth with a black marker which had bled everywhere so even her lips were black. Estefani walked in front of me in a matching set of a pink T-shirt and shorts. She was already so tall she looked years older than the rest of us. Looking at my friends, it made me wonder, What about me? What did I look like?

You look just like your father, my mother said. You have brown-red skin, brown hair, brown eyes, and white teeth. (A teacher had once told us that the people of Guerrero were Afro-Indian.)

As Maria, Paula, Estefani, and I walked in the direction of Mexico City, climbing higher than our homes and up from the highway, we slowly felt the jungle lose its density and the sun began to burn the tops of our heads. We walked and looked down at our feet as we moved. We did not want to step on a snake or some poisonous creature.

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.