Prayers for the Stolen (8 page)

There was only one place on that mountain where our cell phones could get a signal from a tower that was twelve kilometers away. This was in a small clearing on the way to school. There was always someone there either talking on their phone or waiting to get a call from a relative in the United States. The clearing was our link to the world. It was here that good news and bad news reached us. My mother named the place Delphi, after a documentary she’d seen on Greek history.

The sounds of the jungle mixed with the noise from the cell phones. The sound of beeps, rings, songs, and bells that filled the humid air were accompanied by the high-pitch timbre of women’s voices.

At this clearing there were always women waiting to hear from their husbands and male children. Some sat there for days that became weeks, months, and years, and their cell phones never rang.

Once my mother was talking to my father, before he left us for good, and I heard her say, I could swallow this telephone I want you so badly.

It was strange to have a man hanging out there. The presence of José Rosa made everyone a little shy. We listened with fascination as he spoke to lawyers, policemen, and judges, and tried to get someone to come and investigate the disappearance of Ruth.

One afternoon, in order to comfort him, Estefani’s grandmother, Sofia, placed her hands on his shoulders.

A missing woman is just another leaf that goes down the gutter in a rainstorm, she said.

No one cares about Ruth, my mother added. She was stolen like a car.

The fourth event that defined those twelve months occurred in the last week of the school year, in July. It happened on the day before José Rosa left us to go back to Mexico City.

I was at the schoolroom to help José Rosa clean up and take down the posters he’d placed on the wall during the year. He was getting the room ready for the new teacher who would be arriving in the middle of August.

The poster of the world had been put away. Where I once looked at the shapes of Africa and Australia and stared at the deep blue of the seas and oceans there was now an empty brick wall.

The curtain we’d used to wrap Paula’s naked body had never been replaced.

I leaned against the wall that was once covered with a poster of a rainbow and diagrams of light entering and exiting raindrops.

I’m also sad, José Rosa said and walked toward me.

He smelled like black tea with milk and sugar.

He placed his hands on my shoulders and his lips on my lips.

José Rosa tasted like glass windows, cement, and elevators to the moon. His twenty-three-year-old hands held my thirteen-year-old face and he kissed me again. The skyscraper-kiss was mine.

Run and hide in the hole
.

What did you say, Mama?

Run and hide in the hole. Right now. Hush.

What? Hush. Hush.

My mother had been outside when she saw a tan-colored SUV in the distance. More than actually seeing it, she heard it. There had been a silence in the jungle as the insects and birds grew still.

Quick, she said, run. Run.

I ran out the front door toward the small clearing at the side of the house and under a small palm tree.

The hole was covered with dry palm fronds. I moved the fan-like leaves to one side and scrambled in. From inside, I reached for the fronds and pulled them back over the opening.

The hole was too small. My father had dug it up when I was six years old. I had to lie down on my side with my knees at my chest like skeletal remains of ancient burials I’d seen on television. I could see slivers of light peer in on me through the thatch of leaves.

I heard the sound of a motor approach.

The ground around me trembled as the SUV drove up to our small house and stopped in the clearing, right above the hole and above me.

My small space became dark as I lay in the shadow of the vehicle. Through the leaves I could see the SUV’s underbelly, a web of tubes and metal.

Above me the motor was turned off. I could hear the sound of the handbrake as it was cranked into place. The car door opened on the driver’s side.

One brown cowboy boot with a high but square and manly heel stepped out of the car.

Those boots did not belong to this land. No one wore boots like that in this heat.

As he stood with the car door open he looked straight at my mother. From the hole I could only see his boots and her red plastic flip-flops face each other.

Good day, Mother, he said.

The man’s voice did not belong to this land. The boots and his voice were from the north of Mexico.

Is it always this hot here? he asked. How hot do you think it is?

My mother did not answer.

Ay, Mother, put down that gun.

The other car door opened.

I could not swivel in my hole to try and look around so I just listened.

From the passenger side of the SUV another man stepped out.

Do you want me to shoot her missing? the second man asked. He coughed and wheezed after he spoke. He had an asthmatic voice from the desert, a voice of rattlesnakes and sandstorms.

Where’s your daughter, huh? the first man asked.

I don’t have a daughter.

Ay, yes you do. Don’t lie to me, Mother.

I heard a bullet hit the SUV.

The vehicle shook above me.

I heard the
bratata
explosion of machine-gun fire along with the sound of the bullets breaking up the adobe brick walls of our home.

Then it stopped. The jungle swelled and contracted. Insects, reptiles, and birds stilled and nothing rubbed against anything. The sky darkened.

The machine gun had fired the wind out of the mountain.

We were your best hope, Mother, the first man said.

I birthmarked the place, didn’t I? I heard the second man say through a shrill wheeze that became a whistle.

The two men got back in the car and slammed the doors shut. The driver turned the key and started the motor. When he placed his boot on the accelerator above me, my hole was filled with the vehicle’s exhaust fumes. I opened my mouth and breathed in the noxious smoke.

The car backed up and drove off down the path.

I breathed deeply.

I took in the poison as if it were the smell of a flower or fruit.

My mother made me spend the next two hours in that hole.

You’re not coming out until I hear a bird sing, she said.

It was almost dark when she pulled the fronds off of the hole and helped me out. Our little house was sprayed with dozens of bullets. Even the papaya tree had bullet wounds and sweet sap oozed from the holes in the soft bark.

Just look at that, my mother said.

I turned. She was pointing at the hole with her finger.

I peered in and saw four albino-shell scorpions there. The deadliest kind.

Those scorpions showed you more mercy than any human being ever will, my mother said.

She took off one of her flip-flops and killed all four in beating blows.

Mercy is not a two-way street, she said. Then she scooped them up in her hand and threw them to one side.

When we lifted up the fronds in order to cover the hole again, we found a blue plastic asthma inhaler. It was on the ground where the second man had fired his weapon at my house and trees.

What do we do with it? I asked. I was afraid to touch it.

I bet he doesn’t come back for it, my mother said.

But that man won’t be able to breathe.

Just leave it there. Don’t touch it.

The next day, up the mountain at the clearing where the cell phones sometimes worked, we found out that those men had succeeded in stealing Paula.

Maria was sitting off alone under a tree pinching her harelip scar. Estefani’s mother, Augusta, was standing straight in the middle of the clearing with her cell phone held high above her head as she tried to get a signal. Estefani’s grandmother, Sofia, was talking frantically to someone.

Paula’s mother, Concha, sat and stared at her phone as if her eyes could will it to ring. Call me, call me, Paula, call me, she whispered into the phone.

My mother sat down next to Concha.

They came to our house first, my mother said.

Concha lifted up her face and looked at me. Did you get into your hole? she asked.

Yes. I was in the hole.

Paula didn’t make it. The dogs didn’t bark. We didn’t hear them coming. The dogs didn’t bark.

Concha had the meanest, scariest dogs anyone had ever seen. They were injured animals run over by cars that she picked up off the highway. She had at least ten dogs soaking up the shade in
the trees around her house. Mostly they were ugly inbreeds. My mother used to say that those dogs needed poison.

Concha held the cell phone high above her head.

I never heard them kill the dogs, Concha said.

They killed the dogs?

Paula and I were watching television, Concha said. We’d just finished bathing and we were wrapped in our towels, cooling off, sitting on the couch. I heard a noise behind me. He could have touched us. I didn’t hear him. He pointed a pistol at me. He used his other hand to curl his finger at Paula. You’re coming with me, he said but he didn’t really say it. His finger said it as it curled again and again. Paula stood, holding the towel around her body. She walked over to the man and they both walked out the door and into the SUV. She was still in her towel, only her towel.

Concha followed them outside and watched the SUV disappear down the road. The area around the house was covered with the bleeding bodies of her dead dogs. The television was still playing loudly inside.

Barefoot, wrapped in a towel, Concha said again and shook her head.

Under the lemon tree, at the edge of her small plot of land, was the hole she’d dug years ago for Paula to hide in.

I buried the dogs in there, Concha said. I just buried them one on top of the other in Paula’s hole.

That day Mike was up on the clearing. He chewed his gum rhythmically with only his front teeth. The white lump would appear and disappear behind his lips. I had not seen him for a few weeks since he spent most of his time in Acapulco. He always stood apart from everyone else with his arm held high, telephone in the air, searching for a signal. He had at least five phones spread out around his body, in all his pockets. He sounded like a music box of ringtones, vibrations, bells, and rap and electronic
music. He said he had a US telephone, Mexico City telephone, Florida telephone, and several Acapulco telephones. It was Maria who told me he was selling marijuana. This was the reason he had money. We didn’t care. Thanks to Mike it was Christmas on our mountain every month of the year. He was always buying presents for everyone.

If Mike was home, he spent his time up at the clearing. He’d receive calls from all over the USA and Europe. He even had a Facebook page and Twitter account. It seemed that everyone in the USA knew that Mike was the guy to buy drugs from in Mexico. Maria said that Mike was famous in the United States. During US holidays, tourists, especially kids on spring break, ordered their drugs from him before arriving in Acapulco. His nickname was Mr. Wave.

Mike was plugged into his iPod all day so it was impossible to talk to him. He listened to hip-hop and rap and was constantly skipping and moving to a beat. He even spoke with a beat to his words. If he’d had a dream, it would have been to be a hip-hop dancer in New York City. If he’d had a dream, but he didn’t. His life moved from weekend to weekend as if those seven days, from Monday to Sunday, were a season.

On the day Paula was stolen he switched his iPod to off and burrowed it deep in the front pocket of his jeans.

That day all anyone could hear was the silence of cell phones. That was it. It was the sound of Paula stolen. That was the song.

The next day was the first day
without Paula.

The new teacher had a completely different approach to his job. Mr. Rosa had been diligent and had followed the Secretariat of Public Education’s curriculum. Our new teacher, Rafael de la Cruz, didn’t care. All he wanted to do was to get his year of social service over and done with and go back to Guadalajara, his hometown, where his fiancée lived. Instead of having lessons, we’d sit in class and listen to music. He brought a CD player and two portable speakers to our classroom. We had never listened to classical music before.