Bulletproof Vest

Shooting Guns (Zacatecas, Mexico, 2009)

Scattered stars begin to appear, one by one, glistening eyes against the cobalt sky. The sliver of moon doesn’t illuminate enough of the darkness. Out there beyond the courtyard, on the dirt road where the dogs have fused into a ball of claws and teeth tearing through the night. Out there where dust is already clinging to fresh blood. One dog breaks from the pack, runs towards the small adobe church which sits under the single light post on the ranch. A cloud of dust rises towards the light as the pack pounces on the one that broke from them, on the one that tried to get away. A log collapses in the fire, red sparks fly into the cool air; mingle with the growling, then vanish.

‘Should we do something?’ I ask my father.

‘About what?’ he asks, leaning back in his white plastic chair, his legs extended in front of him and crossed one over the other so that the soles of his cowboy boots are almost in the fire.

‘The dogs,’ I say. ‘Won’t they kill each other?’

‘Nah, they’ll work it out,’ he says, taking a swig of the rum and Coke in his nicked tin cup.

The battle continues out there where the distant mountains look like sleeping giants against the horizon. Out there where lights from other ranches are coming into focus. Where a pair of eyes could be watching the glow of the fire dance across our faces. I hook my index finger in the rubber band holding my ponytail and slide it off; my hair falls freely around my shoulders.

‘Why are they fighting like that?’ I ask my father who is now down on one knee, rearranging the logs in the fire. ‘Maybe it’s a sign,’ I say.

‘Yeah, maybe,’ he says. ‘Maybe la huesona is on the loose, desperate to take a few more souls before the year ends,’ he rolls a thick log into the fire. ‘Only a few hours left,’ he grunts as he centres it in the burning pile. ‘This log will last us all night,’ he says, ‘or at least until the New Year. Encino, great wood. I chopped it myself. It doesn’t burn as fast as the others.’

He sits back down, glances at me and follows my gaze out to the rumbling that is now moving around the back of the house.

‘I think one of those dogs is in heat,’ he says. ‘That’s why they’re all worked up.’

‘Really?’ I say and lean back into my chair, take a sip from my rum and Coke. The dry heat of the fire feels good on my bare arms.

‘You see those three stars?’ he asks pointing up. I look past the clothes line, past the electrical wires that hang above. ‘When we were kids,’ he says, ‘we used to call those the three kings, Los Reyes Magos.’

‘Over there,’ I say, ‘they call those the…’ The word eludes me. It’s like this sometimes. I can’t find the right word in Spanish and hesitate, stutter. ‘It’s like the small pot or pan,’ I say. ‘Or like the big spoon. See how the three stars are in a row? How they seem to form a handle?’

‘Uh-huh,’ he says, and though his face is still turned towards the sky, he’s giving me a sideways glance, a one-eyed squint.

The sky is filled with stars, thousands of stars sitting around the moon, waiting for the New Year to arrive. A small piece of raw meat clings to the clothes line above. A few days ago, a cow broke an ankle, had to be put down. Whatever didn’t fit in the small fridge was hung on the clothes line to be dried by the sun, raw meat hanging like laundry in the courtyard. He reaches up, plucks meat off the clothes line and throws it into the fire.

‘I made that rope when I was in jail,’ he tells me, motioning towards the clothes line, a yellow rope tied to an extension cord that is then tied to the water-well post. ‘That one and the pink one I tied to your saddle this morning,’ he tells me.

‘They teach you how to make rope in jail?’ I ask.

‘They teach you how to do lots of things in jail,’ he says. ‘If you pay attention, you come out knowing a lot more than when you went in,’ he says. ‘I gave those ropes to my father, when he came to visit me to tell me they had sold the house in the plaza and deposited the money in an account for the lawyer that was working on my case,’ he says, his gaze drifting off.

‘No, mijita,’ he says. ‘You’ve got no idea how much I’ve suffered.’

The dogs have worked their way around the corral and are now barrelling down the dirt road towards us, the snarling louder and louder as they approach.

‘Maybe we should go inside,’ I say.

‘Nah. If we go inside, we’ll fall asleep,’ he says. ‘It’s nicer here by the fire; we can have a few drinks, a bit of a platica. After the New Year arrives we’ll go inside, iron our ears out.’ He looks at my arms, my ripped jeans. ‘You want to borrow a jacket?’ he asks.

‘No, I’m fine,’ I say then take a gulp from my drink.

‘Do you really want to go inside?’ he asks.

‘Maybe,’ I say.

‘Well then, we should put out the fire,’ he says.

We sit in silence for a while. I stare out past the two-room adobe house where he was born, the same house where I was born – then sit up and face him.

‘What if someone shoots us?’ I ask.

His whole body turns towards me.

‘No, no, mijita,’ he shakes his head. ‘Que paso, don’t think like that.’ He reaches into the fire, grabs one of the logs and flips it. ‘No one is going to come bother us here, not at this hour, not just any pendejo would come near here,’ he says. ‘Besides, it’s a holiday. Everyone is too busy celebrating.’

Everyone is celebrating, I think. Celebrating and drinking; drinking and celebrating. All day long men have been knocking them back at the rodeos, the cockfights, las fiestas, the horse races, the hot sun beating on their eyelids, visions blurring, old conflicts floating to the surface. It’s during the holidays that tragedies seem to happen around these parts. It was on Christmas Eve, twenty years ago, on a ranch just up the road from here, that my brother was shot and left face down in the river to drown. Jose Manuel. The firstborn.

One gulp and I polish off my drink.

‘Is there any more left?’ he asks grinning at me, a glint of the fire in his eyes.

‘Yeah,’ I say taking his cup, ‘I’ll go make us two more.’

The minute I step away from the fire, the cold air grips me; night has fallen and so has the temperature. I make my way through the dark house, to the kitchen, hit the light switch; a single bulb covered with a layer of grease and dust dangles from a black cord that’s slung over a pine beam. The fried chicken I made earlier sits in a large green plastic bowl on the table, a cheesecloth draped over it, grease already seeping through the fabric. Since the day I arrived, he kept mentioning how he had a taste for that fried chicken from the other side, how he hadn’t had it in years, how he used to eat at the fried chicken place all the time, how even the side dishes weren’t bad. I went into town, downloaded the KFC recipe off the Internet, bought two pounds of chicken, two bottles of Crisco, a few potatoes and some spinach: fried chicken with two sides.

I grab the bottle of rum from behind the white rusty metal cabinet where I’d stashed it earlier and mix two more drinks. This was the deal we’d made when he arrived slurring and glassy-eyed, pulling his red truck right into the courtyard as I was finishing frying the chicken. I agreed to have a few drinks with him, celebrate the New Year, as long as he gave me the bottle, let me be in charge, monitor how much more he drank, make sure he didn’t have too much, black out, forget where he was – who he was with.

I finish mixing the drinks and make mine a double, his a bit weaker. I hear his truck door slam shut and expect a corrido to come blaring through the house, but that never happens. When I go back outside he is sitting in front of the fire, right where I left him, as if he never moved.

I hand him his tin cup and sit down; he takes a swig.

‘Ouh, this doesn’t taste like anything,’ he glances at me, then takes another swig. ‘It tastes like pura Coca-Cola,’ he says. ‘Did you put anything in here?’

‘Yeah,’ I say.

‘No parece,’ he grins at me, looks at the cup in my hand. ‘A ver,’ he says, ‘let me try yours.’

I hand him my cup.

‘A jijo!’ he coughs. ‘Did you put the rest of the bottle in here?’

‘There wasn’t much left,’ I say and watch as he takes another drink from my cup. ‘Are you sure you don’t have another bottle stashed somewhere?’ I ask.

‘No, that was it,’ he says. ‘And the only reason I had that bottle is because I ran into a buddy of mine in town and he gave it to me, wanted me to go with him to the cantina, but I told him one of my daughters was in town, that we were going to spend the New Year together.’

I take his cup and pour my drink into it, then pour it all into mine, mix the two together, then hand him his cup and sit down. Lobo comes up and nudges my elbow; I pet his head, run my hand down his neck; it’s wet, sticky. I set my drink down and run both my hands down his neck, then hold them to the fire.

‘He’s bleeding,’ I say, turning my hands for my father to see.

‘Se lo chingaron,’ he says looking at my hands. Then he gets up and walks over to his truck, which is parked right behind us, comes back with a flashlight, gets down on one knee and points it at Lobo. I hold his head still – there’s a gash about two inches long on his neck, oozing with thick blood.

‘They ripped his tumour off,’ he says pointing at the spot, being careful not to touch it, not to get blood on his hands. ‘Right there he used to have a bump and now it’s gone. That’s good,’ he says, standing up. ‘Now I don’t have to cut it off.’

I press my finger gently against the gash. Lobo yelps.

‘Should we take him to a dog doctor or something?’ I ask. ‘He’s bleeding a lot.’

‘He’ll be fine,’ he says grimacing at my hands, which are covered in blood. ‘You should wash your hands; there’s soap under there.’ He points the light towards the grey stone sink, a giant bar of pink laundry soap, Zote, sits underneath.

I walk over to the sink, grab the soap and adjust the green rubber hose between my knees, bend into the ice-cold stream of water while he holds the light over me.

‘This is the flashlight you gave me for Christmas last year,’ he says.

It’s a long black metal flashlight with adjustable beams. When we were kids he had one just like it, used to brag about how it was the same brand the cops used. I finish washing my hands, put the soap back and am still hunched over when we hear the first gunshots. Only a few scattered pops in the distance, then they seem to get louder and closer like an approaching thunderstorm, giant raindrops pounding the ground and soon they’re all around us. My father drops the flashlight into the back of his truck, goes into the house and returns with two loaded guns, hands me the bigger one, a .357 Magnum.

‘Truenala,’ he tells me.

I look at the fire reflecting off the silver grooves in the revolver, the long slick barrel, the mother-of-pearl handle; I turn it over in my hands, taken by how beautiful it is.

‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I’ve never shot a gun before.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he says, a huge smile flashing across his face. ‘Just point it up and shoot it.’

I look at it again. Hesitate. If I shoot the gun, I feel as if I will have crossed some line, a transgression. All around us guns are going off. He points his at the sky and shoots it three times, one right after another, the way he used to do when we were kids in the Chicago suburbs, four or five bullets following each other into our front lawn, into the night sky, across the hardwood floor in the living room.

‘See,’ he tells me. ‘Just point it up and shoot it.’

‘Bueno,’ I say. ‘No puedo pensar en que otro lugar seria mejor, um, estaria mas bueno para truenar una pistola como…’ What I’m trying to say is that if I was ever going to shoot a gun, I can’t think of a better time or place, but again my Spanish fails me and I’m slurring and now he is looking at me like maybe he’s regretting having handed me a loaded gun.

‘Truenala,’ he says again, his smile fading.

I turn around and point the gun straight up, hold it over my head with both hands. Looking towards the small church in the distance, I press gently on the trigger. I’m surprised by how hard it is. It’s as if gravity itself has reversed its course and is pushing back up against my finger. The pressure releases and a high-pitched ringing sound fills the air as red sparks rain down. I hear my father yelling something, but he sounds far, far away; it’s as if I’ve slipped into a tunnel, or have fallen into a well, my ears slowly filling with water and muffling the world around me. The only thing I hear with utter clarity, inside this space I have cracked open, is the loud ringing. Its steady pitch sounds like an om.

Instinctively, my hands move to cover my ears, my elbows bend and for a split second I forget I’m still holding the gun.

‘Do you hear that?’ I yell to my father over my shoulder.

‘Que?’ he sounds like he’s shouting at me from the top of a mountain.

‘That ringing sound,’ I yell back at him, ‘do you hear that?’ I turn around and he’s ducking behind his truck.

‘Cuidado con la pistola,’ he says, looking at my swaying hand, the gun pointing slightly in his direction. ‘Empty it out,’ he says. ‘Point it straight up and shoot it fast, one right after another; it sounds prettier that way.’

I turn around and hold the gun up with both hands, point it at a slight angle away from me, from him. There is nothing but the stars and the sliver of moon above and though there is no music playing, I swear I can hear the tamboraso coming down the mountainside, the drums and horns blaring all around me – his music, his drinking, his guns – they all go hand in hand. I aim at the moon, convinced I can put a hole in it. Fire shoots from my fingertips as four bullets follow each other into the night sky.

I hand him the gun and he hands me a heavy blue square-shaped glass bottle.

‘What is it?’ I ask.

‘Tequila,’ he says.

‘Tequila?’ I say. ‘I thought you didn’t have another bottle.’

I take a sip, hand it back to him. He takes a long pull.

‘Are those the same guns you brought down from Chicago?’ I ask.

‘Ouh, no, I sold all of those,’ he says. ‘Except the rifle; you know the one that’s hanging over my bed?’

‘Yeah.’

‘That’s the only one I kept,’ he says.

‘What about your bulletproof vest, do you still have it?’

‘Who knows what happened to that vest,’ he takes another gulp, hands me the bottle. ‘I think I sold it, or maybe I gave it away. I don’t remember.’

I lean into his truck, prop my foot up on the tyre.

‘How did you know Thomas wanted to kill you?’

‘I don’t know, I just did,’ he says. ‘There was something about him, he was a little too friendly,’ he says and glances at me, then at the bottle in my hands. ‘That night he had patted my back, acting like we were best buddies,’ he says, ‘but I knew he was checking to see if I had my gun. We were playing cards and I said I was running home to use the bathroom, and I did. I used the bathroom and then I grabbed my gun, the .45,’ he says turning the revolver over in his hands, inspecting it.

I take another sip and hand him the bottle.

‘Then when I went back outside, he proposed a toast, a brindis, and with one hand he held up his beer and with the other he buried a kitchen knife in my neck,’ he says choking down another gulp. ‘But the bullet turned on that son of a bitch.’

‘You know the papers the next day said it was over an argument about who would drink the last beer,’ I tell him.

‘Apoco?’ he asks. ‘That’s what the papers said?’

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘you didn’t know that?’

‘No,’ he says chuckling a bit. ‘Imagine that, killing a man over a goddamn beer,’ he says, laughing a bit harder.

‘I know, but that’s what the papers said,’ I tell him and he’s laughing so hard now that it makes me start laughing and soon we’re both howling with laughter and leaning against his truck.

In the distance, three fireworks race into the sky, their tails trailing behind like comets, like shooting stars that crash-landed in the mountains years ago, metal carried down with the rains, washed into the rivers below and now returning to its home in the universe.