Jennifer Clement - Prayers for the Stolen

As we were standing outside the beauty salon we heard a far-off noise that was like a cattle stampede or an airplane flying too close to the ground. It only took a second for us to recognize that it was a convoy of SUVs.

The soldiers who guarded the clinic moved quickly and took cover behind their trucks.

We ran inside the salon and rushed to the back of the room as far from the windows as we could get. I dove under a sink.

Then the world was quiet and still. It seemed that even the dogs, birds, and insects stopped breathing.

No one said hush, hush, hush.

We expected bullets to start flying.

Every wall, window, and doorway on the main street, which was also the highway that ran through the town, was filled with holes. In our pockmarked world no one bothered filling up bullet holes or painting walls.

Twelve black SUVs drove past going at a great speed, way too fast, as if they were having a race. The windows were tinted black and the headlights were turned on even though it was daytime.

We could feel the whiz of speed and the ground shook around us. The large machines left a wake of dust and exhaust fumes behind and stirred up our minds with only one thought: Don’t stop here.

Once the last SUV had passed there was a moment of silence, of listening, before Ruth said, Okay, they’re gone. So, who needs to get their hair done?

Ruth smiled and said she’d do everyone’s nails for free while we waited to hear the outcome of the operations.

Ruth was a garbage baby. She must have been born from a big mistake. Why would someone throw their baby in the garbage like a banana peel or a rotten egg?

What’s the damned difference between killing your baby and throwing it into the garbage, huh? my mother said.

I wondered if this question was a test.

There’s a big difference, my mother said, answering her own question. At least a killing can be merciful.

Ruth was one of Mrs. Silberstein’s garbage babies. Mrs. Silberstein was a Jewish woman from Los Angeles who had moved to Acapulco fifty years ago. When she’d heard the rumors about babies being thrown away in the trash, she spread the word out to all the garbage collectors in Acapulco, and let them know she would be willing to take care of the babies. In the past thirty years she’d raised at least forty children. One of these babies was Ruth.

Ruth was born from a black plastic garbage bag that was filled with dirty diapers, rotten orange peels, three empty beer bottles, a can of Coke, and a dead parrot wrapped in newspapers. Someone at the garbage dump heard cries coming out of the bag.

Ruth painted our nails and fed us potato chips right into our mouths so that the nail polish could dry without being smudged. She had trimmed my hair many times, but this was the first time I’d ever had my nails painted. It was the first act in my life that defined me as a girl.

Ruth held my hand gently in her hand as she painted the red enamel over each one of my oval, infant nails. When she painted my thumb, I thought of the boy who was only one block away having his thumb removed.

Ruth blew on my hands to dry the polish.

You blow on them too, she said, so that they dry, and don’t touch anything.

She swiveled away from me and took my mother’s hand in hers.

What color, Rita?

The reddest color you have.

My hands were miraculously beautiful to me. I held them up to my face in the mirror.

What a world, my mother said. It’s a nasty life.

Out the window, through glass shattered from bullets, we could watch the masked soldiers guarding the clinic. They were patting the dust off of their uniforms. The SUVs had created a small dust storm. I imagined what lay beyond the clinic’s front door and had a vision of Maria lying on a white sheet, under a strong light bulb, surrounded by doctors and with her face cut in two pieces.

My mother’s voice started up again behind me.

Sometimes I just think I’ll grow the poppies too. Everyone else does, right? You’re going to die no matter what so you might just as well die rich.

Oh, Rita!

Ruth spoke softly and slowly so when she said Rita it sounded like Reeetaaah. It made me happy to hear someone speak to my mother with such sweetness. Ruth’s voice could heal and soothe.

What do you think? my mother asked.

The voices in the beauty parlor quieted down. We all wanted to hear what Ruth was going to answer. Everyone knew that Ruth was smarter and better than anyone else around here. She was also Jewish. Mrs. Silberstein raised all her garbage orphans to be Jews.

Imagine, Ruth said. Imagine what it’s like for me. I opened this beauty parlor fifteen years ago and what did I call it? I called it The Illusion . I called it this because my illusion, or my dream, was to do something. I wanted to make all of you pretty and surround myself with sweet smells.

Because Ruth was a garbage baby she could never get the smell of rotten oranges, the smell of someone’s morning glass of juice, out of her mind.

Instead of making you pretty, what happened? Ruth asked.

Everyone looked down at their painted nails in silence.

What happened?

No one answered.

I have to make little girls look like boys, I have to make the older girls look plain and I have to make pretty girls look ugly. This is an ugly parlor not a beauty parlor, Ruth said.

No one had an answer for this, not even my big-mouthed mother.

Maria’s mother peered in the window of the beauty parlor. They’ve finished, she said through the shattered glass. Maria wants to see Ladydi, she said, pointing her finger at me.

You’re not going anywhere until that nail polish is wiped off! my mother said.

Ruth pulled me toward her, sat me on her lap, and removed the nail polish. The acetone fumes filled my mouth and left a taste of lemon on my tongue.

In the small two-room clinic, the front room had been turned into an operating room. A nurse and two doctors were putting things away into suitcases while Maria lay on a cot under a window. From a bundle of white gauze bandages, her eyes peered out like small black stones. She looked at me with such intensity that I knew exactly what she was thinking. I’d known her all my life.

Her eyes said: Where is the boy? Did he have his thumb removed? Is he okay? What did they do with the thumb?

When I asked Maria’s questions for her, the nurse answered that the boy had left an hour ago. The thumb was removed.

What happened to the thumb?

It will be incinerated, the nurse answered.

Burned?

Yes, burned.

Where?

Oh, we have it here on ice. We’ll take it back to Mexico City and burn it there.

When I returned to the beauty parlor everyone’s nail polish had been removed. It was clear that no one was going to risk going out into our world where men think they can steal you just because your nails are painted red.

As we walked home my mother asked me what Maria looked like. I said I couldn’t see her because of the bandages but that the nurse said the operation had gone well.

Don’t count on it, my mother said. She’s going to have a scar.

We carefully crossed the highway that joined Mexico City and Acapulco and headed up the path to our small hut, which was shaded by an enormous banana tree.

As we walked a large iguana moved out from the underbrush and crossed our path. The movement made us look down at a long line of bright red ants marching toward the left of the path. We both stopped and looked around. On the other side of the path there was another stream of ants going in the same direction.

Something’s dead, my mother said.

She looked up. There were five vultures circling above us in the air. The birds flew around and around, dipping down close to the earth and rising up again. The smell of death was in their wings.