Bulletproof Vest

Bulletproof Vest (Chicago suburbs, 1987)

The first gunshot snaps me out of my sleep. I lie in bed and stare at the two blinking red dots of my alarm clock. 12.35 a.m. Thursday night and my father has been playing cards with the neighbours. I can almost see the eye of the gun following its target, locating it, and then the second and third shots ring out. Something is different. Whenever he drinks and fires his .45, it’s in rapid succession, four or five bullets following each other into our front lawn or out at the night sky.

My older sister Sonia is the first out of bed. She hears someone coughing, as if choking, right beneath her bedroom window. When she goes on to the porch, there is a red streak running down the white aluminium siding. My father is sitting below it.

‘Escondela,’ he hands his gun to her. It is still hot to the touch. She takes it and helps him to his feet, helps him inside.

When I step out of my bedroom, he’s standing in the middle of the living room, appears to be slightly swaying. He’s looking right at me but his gaze feels distant, as if he’s looking at me from a mountaintop.

‘You’re bleeding to death. You’re bleeding to death. You’re bleeding to death,’ my mother presses a towel under his chin. Thin red streams run down her arm and on to her white slip. She pulls the towel away and readjusts it. There is a gash under his chin. Blood runs down his neck and chest, over his wife-beater and on to his jeans. On the hardwood floor beneath him, there is a dark pool forming, a dark pool that’s creeping closer to my mother’s bare feet. She presses the towel back under his chin. He’s mumbling something about that pinche pendejo. How he knows someone put him up to this. Paid him. How, with him, all those cabrones go in circles, like dogs chasing their tails. How he’s not going to rot in jail because of that son of a bitch.

‘Salvador!’ he yells for my brother as he pushes my mother’s hand away and stumbles towards his bedroom shouting orders for Salvador to pull his car around the back. By the time he returns, red and blue lights are already flickering through the front-porch windows and dancing across his face. He goes out the back door, hops the chain-link fence and crouches through the neighbours’ backyard. Salvador is waiting in the car, engine running, lights off. My father climbs into the back seat, lies down. Salvador drives to the end of the block.

We hear screeching car tyres all around the house.

‘Dios nos tenga de su santa mano,’ my mother prays out loud.

Five police cars have barricaded the end of the street. Officers squat behind open doors, guns drawn and pointing at Salvador. He hits reverse, but instantly there’s another police car behind, shining a blinding light on him.

‘Put your hands up and step out of the car, sir,’ they instruct him through a megaphone.

He does as he’s told. Four police officers close in on him.

‘I’m driving my father to the hospital,’ he tells them as they pat him down. ‘He’s lost a lot of blood.’ They shine their flashlights into the back seat and there he is, semi-conscious and covered in blood. A police escort takes them to Good Shepherd Hospital.

About an hour later, my younger brother and sister and I are outside. Police cars with flashing red and blue lights snake from our driveway all the way up the street. It’s so bright; it feels like the middle of the day. We’re leaning against Rocky’s doghouse and watching as eight police officers walk around our front yard pointing flashlights; looking beneath the wooden picnic table that sits under the mulberry tree, searching the bushes along the side of the house, scanning the chain-link fence that separates our driveway from the small wooden house where five little blonde girls live with their parents. They’re all outside and lined up beside their mother, gripping the fence and staring at us. The Colombian woman who lives across the street stands on her stoop, hands resting on her daughter’s shoulders, her son next to her. The old lady who lives alone in the three-storey white house next to them watches from behind her screen door with her arms tightly crossed around her waist. Javier and Cornelio, who live up the street and are in my class, stand on the other side of the yellow tape. Javier waves at me; I wave back. Salvador ducks under the yellow tape and is stopped in our driveway by a man with a huge camera strapped around his neck.

One of the police officers makes his way over to us, pointing his flashlight along my mother’s zucchini and tomato garden, which separates our house from the small blue house next door where eight Mexican men live. We watch as they are questioned by police and re-enact the scene; how Thomas came at my father with a knife, was pushed away, came at him again, swinging from left to right, finally lodging the knife under his chin. How my father pulled out his gun and shot him, Thomas stumbled back, fell down, got up and lunged at him again. He was shot two more times.

‘Hola,’ the officer says as he gets down on one knee, points his black metal flashlight into Rocky’s doghouse and peeks inside.

‘What kind of a dog is it?’ he asks as Rocky starts growling.

‘A Dobermann,’ Jorge tells him.

‘Is he friendly?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘What’s his name?’ He turns off his flashlight and stands up.

‘Rocky.’

‘Is Jose your father?’ he asks.

‘Yeah,’ we nod our heads.

He picks blades of grass off his pants, then looks up at us, presses his lips tight.

‘Is he nice to you?’

‘Yeah,’ I shrug.

‘Except when he’s drunk,’ my sister adds.

‘Yeah,’ my brother says. ‘Then he can be kind of mean.’

He glances at him, then at my sister, then back at me.

‘Does he ever hit you?’

‘No…yeah…sometimes,’ we overlap.

‘Only when we’re bad,’ my sister tells him.

He looks at her and crosses his arms, inhales through his nose; nostrils flare.

‘You wouldn’t happen to know where his gun is, would you?’

He follows us into the house, where other officers are searching under the couch cushions, behind the television, inside the china cabinet, under the dining-room table.

‘Ni se les ocurra decirles donde esta la pistola,’ my mother tells us through clenched teeth.

‘Ama, ya saben,’ we tell her.

‘No digan nada de las otras pistolas,’ she mumbles under her breath.

‘What did she say?’ the officer asks us.

‘Nothing,’ we tell him as he follows us to Sonia’s bedroom.

He looks through her closet, behind her dresser, under her bed, then picks up her pillow and there it is: my father’s .45 resting on the paisley sheet.

‘Murder weapon has been located,’ he says, pressing down on an orange button on the walkie-talkie that’s strapped to his shoulder.

Soon there are other officers in the room. One of them is wearing a white rubber glove. She picks up the gun and drops it into a clear plastic bag. We follow them back into the living room, where other officers are standing around, murder weapon has been located leaping between the static of their walkie-talkies.

‘Does your father keep any other weapons in the house?’ one of them asks us.

‘Nope,’ we tell him though the closet next to the dinning-room table, right behind him, is filled with rifles, handguns and machine guns.

The newspapers the next day read: Argument over beer leaves one man dead, another critically wounded. But we knew it had nothing to do with beer. My father had created a lot of enemies before leaving Mexico; had unsettled business that followed him from the dirt roads of Zacatecas to the quiet streets of the Chicago suburbs. Salvador is quoted in the article and is described as a neighbour, not related to Jose Venegas. I never trusted anything I read in the newspapers after that.