Jennifer Clement - Prayers for the Stolen

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.

You’re eleven.

No, I’m twelve.

No, you’re eleven.

She opened and passed a bottle of beer over to me. I drank it down fast just the way she did. The way I’d seen her do it hundreds of times. And that was the first time I got drunk. I quickly learned that all it takes is some alcohol to solve everything. When you’re drunk you don’t care if a battalion of mosquitoes bites your arms up or a scorpion stings your hand or if your father is a lying bastard and your best friend, with a broken face, turns out to be your half-sister.

Now I understood why my mother always liked to say how she had marched over to look at Maria after she was born. It was to see if that baby looked like my father, which of course she did. Maria looks exactly like my father and maybe this is also why Maria’s father left. Maybe it wasn’t the harelip that scared him after all. Maybe he thought he was not going to spend the rest of his life feeding the face of his wife’s lover’s baby.

When my daddy came home from work that night, full of songs, he found his wife and daughter passed out drunk.

The next morning I woke up to find my mother sitting on the kitchen stool by the window. I guess he took one look at us and, later that night, listened to my mother rant about what she’d told me and why. She must have said, Do you think we were going to lie to her forever? You think you’re Frank Sinatra out there in Acapulco serving people margaritas with those silly little plastic umbrellas.