第 10 页

Mike.

I wanted to hold onto my mother as she faded and left the planet forever just as Maria’s blood baptized our piece of jungle.

Take me back to a minute ago; take me back to a minute ago, my mother said.

The clocks were turning backward in her mind. Rewind, she was thinking. Press rewind.

My mother had always told me that death was on time and never late.

The room darkened from a cloud moving overhead. I could hear the sound of a parrot outside.

As my mother sat down in a heap on the floor she said, She’ll be fine. It was just a scratch.

I wrapped Maria’s arm in a dishtowel and placed my arm around her waist. Together we stumbled out of the house and down our mountain.

There was no one on the highway. A few large passenger buses whizzed by. The black asphalt burned under our plastic flip-flops and the heat made the car oil on the road turn blue and green.

After standing in that devil heat for twenty minutes a few taxis drove past but it seemed to take forever to get a taxi to stop and take us to the hospital. No taxi drivers want blood in their cars. As soon as I said we were going to the hospital, they took one look at Maria’s face. When their eyes followed her face down to her arm, which was wrapped in a dishtowel, the taxi drivers hit the accelerator and took off. In Guerrero there are some taxis that have a cardboard sign on their dashboard that says No Bloody Bodies.

I kept looking at Maria’s arm and hoping the dishrag could contain or even stop the flow.

A taxi driver finally stopped and agreed to take us.

He looked at Maria’s arm.

No, I’m not bringing that in here unless you put it in a plastic bag, he said.

He reached over to the glove compartment, took out a plastic supermarket bag, and handed it to me.

Put the arm inside it.

What did he say? Maria asked.

Put your arm in the bag or you’re not getting in here.

I carefully took Maria’s wounded arm and placed it in the supermarket bag as if it were a leg of lamb.

Okay, her arm is in the bag, I said. Let’s go!

Knot it at the end.

Sorry?

Tie it up.

I took the ends of the bag and made a small knot with the corners of the plastic at the top of her arm. She let me do this to her without protest. It was as if, now that my mother had shot it, her arm belonged to my family.

So, who were you bothering? the taxi driver asked as we drove down the highway.

The only people in all of Mexico who knew what was going on in the country were the taxi drivers. If we wanted to know about something that had happened, we’d say, Take a taxi. It seemed to me that someone should get all the taxi drivers together, someone like Jacobo Zabludovsky (the old journalist who my mother swore was the very last noble person in the whole of Mexico), and ask them what the hell was going on in our country. My mother always said that there was a taxi driver out there who knew exactly what had happened to Paula and Ruth.

The drive to Acapulco took less than an hour. I wanted to tell Maria that she was my half-sister and that my mother had shot her because, in my mother’s drunken state, she thought that Maria was our father. But I had to keep quiet because I knew that taxi driver’s ears were standing on end to hear the news.

The man had a boxer’s hands: huge knuckles covered in scars. He gripped the steering wheel fiercely. The man even turned off his radio in order to hear any information that might come out of the back seat.

So, who were you bothering? the taxi driver asked again.

I decided not to answer and held Maria in the circle of my arm.

He looked at us in his rearview mirror.

You must have been a bad, bad girl to deserve a shooting, right?

He was a man with black curly hair shot with gray. He had deep smile wrinkles at the edges of his eyes.

It was an accident, I said.

An accident? That’s what everyone says.

Please.

She’s a bad girl, he said as if Maria were not there. He’s going to go to jail; you know that, don’t you?

Yes.

He’s going to go to jail. As soon as they see a gunshot wound in the emergency room the doctors there, you know, well, they have to notify the police. That’s a law.

It was an accident.

I bet it hurts.

I pressed my lips together. His face never stopped looking at mine in the rearview mirror. I had to keep looking away. He was observing me more than watching the road.

That must really hurt, he said.

It sure does, I answered.

Hey, doesn’t your friend know how to talk? I’ve always said if someone doesn’t talk then they’re hiding a thing or something.

Yes, it hurts, I said. She can’t talk because it hurts.

Why don’t you let me see your little boobies? he said. I’ll give you your money back if you show me. Your hurt friend doesn’t have to show me anything, just you.

Maybe another day, I said.

You remind me of my daughter. You’re a marzipan.

I looked over at Maria who was pale. She mouthed the word asshole.

I squirmed forward in my seat. Then I reached around my back and lifted up my skirt. I peed deep through my underwear and into the black cloth seat of the taxi. I felt the wet heat from my urine surround my bare thighs. My mother had taught me about revenge. I knew this would have made her proud of me.

I turned and held Maria’s arm and tried to stroke her head a little, which was hard because of Maria’s stiff, onion-bun hairdo. I looked at her arm in the plastic supermarket bag but it was not filling up. Maria gave me an intense look and tilted her head toward the side of her body. The blood was not going into the plastic bag. As she was holding her arm, it was being pulled backward and down, through the tie in the plastic supermarket bag, down the side of her body. I could see that the red, short-sleeved blouse above her ribs was drenched.

At this point Maria’s head lolled backward and her eyes closed.

I thought she had died.

Maria, wake up, wake up, I whispered.

The taxi driver turned around and looked at us. Missy, she better die so I can leave you both at the side of the road.

She’s not dead.

If she dies, I’m leaving you both at the side of the road. I hope she dies because I want to get rid of both of you.

When I saw the enormous gray bay surrounded by a wall of hotels and condominiums and smelled the salt, I knew Maria was going to live. She was curled against me, under my arm. I kissed the top of her head, which smelled like greasy coconut hair oil, with love because she was my sister and she was going to know about this very soon. While I still had the secret, I could love her.

When I saw the bay I remembered coming to Acapulco for the first time. My father was still living with us and we’d come to visit him at work. He was a bartender at a small hotel at that time. I remember my mother got dressed up in a white dress that had a halter top so that her back was exposed. She wore high white heels and bright red lipstick. She also dressed me up in a red sundress and combed my hair into two braids.

We’re going to surprise your father and we have to look pretty, like girls, for the surprise, my mother said.

She carried her heels in one hand and walked in her flip-flops down to the highway to catch the bus.

On the bus ride she checked her lipstick in a small mirror that she carried in her purse. Her arms were still slightly red in places, as she’d spent the whole morning plucking the black hair out of her forearms with tweezers.

From the bus station we took a taxi to the hotel where my father worked.

The hotel faced the bay. My father worked at the bar that was outside, beside the swimming pool and under a large thatched roof of palm fronds. The sunlight broke through small spaces in the roofing and made the glass of the liquor bottles shine. I had never seen a swimming pool before. The afternoon sunlight glittered off the water as if it were full of crystals. The sound system was tuned to a local radio station, which filled the air with the sound of cymbals, bongos, and tambourines.

My father was leaning against the bar dressed in white trousers and a pearly-white guayabera shirt. He was smoking a cigarette. The tobacco smoke mixed with the sun and salt.

When he saw us he placed his cigarette in an ashtray and opened his arms to me. He lifted me up. He smelled like lemons and Alberto VO5, which he creamed into his hair every morning to smooth it down.

He put me back down and gave my mother his arm and walked her over to the bar where we sat on stools and looked out at the bay. He made my mother a margarita with a rim of salt around the glass. He stuck a small, red paper umbrella in her drink. My father concocted a fizzy pink drink with ginger ale and orange juice for me and placed a plastic stirrer inside the glass in the shape of a mermaid.

My parents looked handsome in their white clothes, which accentuated their dark skin. I thought that had been the happiest afternoon of my life until my mother and I got back on the bus to go home.

I knew it, she said as she rubbed her lipstick off with a couple of squares of toilet paper. Your father is having an affair with that waitress!

I knew exactly whom she was talking about.

My mother was very skinny. When she described herself she’d hold up her pinkie in the air and say, Skinny like a pinkie.

Her little finger would always be a symbol of her body to me.

The waitress had been wearing very tight clothes so her stomach bulged over her jeans and her thighs rubbed together as she walked. She was a beauty. My father always said a woman needs to be full. No matter how much my mother tried to fatten up, she couldn’t. My father said that holding a skinny woman was like holding gristle and bone. He said that a real man wanted a body of pillows.

He never said, You, Rita, are gristle and bone, or You, Rita, need to fatten up, or You, Rita, are like a chicken wing. He was never that obvious in his cruelty.

The woman was wearing red flip-flops that were made with a plastic, two-inch heel. We would never forget those shoes.

I knew my mother was right. That woman was too nice and that’s a sure sign if there is any perfect sign at all. I was expecting her to pull out a piece of candy at any moment. Of course my father denied it.

As the bus rolled through the dark mountains along the windy road away from the bay and toward our house, I could feel the orange juice burn in my stomach and I began to feel dizzy. When we got off the bus, the high heels from my mother’s shoes sank into the hot black asphalt that was like a lake of chewing gum. She had to lift her legs up high to pull her shoes out of the ooze.

That day marked the beginning of her anger. Her fury was a seed and it had been planted on that afternoon. By the time she shot Maria that seed had grown into a large tree that covered our lives with its shade of bile.

When my father came back home that night, he found that his clothes had been thrown out the front door and lay in a small pile on the damp, warm ground.

I lay in bed listening to them speak to each other in low whispers that were like screams.

You were something, my mother said. I thought she said.

Don’t spill yourself, my father said. I thought he said.

Their angry whispers made broken words and sentences.

I will speak to God, my mother said. I thought she said.

In the morning my father was drinking his coffee by the stove. He was not wearing a shirt because all of his clothes were dumped outside. I knew his clothes would be covered in tiny black ants by now. He would have to shake the insects out and pluck them off.

Good morning, Ladydi, he said.

There was a huge welt on his shoulder surrounded by indentations. It was a human bite.

From then on my mother could no longer listen to love songs. Before that night she’d been a songbird. The radio was on all the time and she’d sway, twirl, and spin to Juan Gabriel or Luis Miguel’s songs as she cleaned the house, cooked, or ironed my father’s white work shirts. From then on the radio was turned off and she just might as well have turned her happiness to off.

Love songs make me feel stupid, she said.

You’re not stupid, Mama, I said.

The songs make me feel like I ate too much candy, Coke, ice cream, and cake. The songs make me feel like I’ve come home from a birthday party.

Once, when we were at Estefani’s house, the radio turned to a love song. The melody filled the rooms. My mother panicked and ran out of the house to get away from the song. She threw up under a small orange tree. She threw up the melody, chords, the waltzes, and drums of love. It was pure green love bile on the green ground. I ran after her and held her hair away from her face as she vomited.

Your father killed the music for me, she said.

Being in Acapulco also made me think of the fortune-teller who told my mother the wrong fortune. Did her fortune include this event? Did the teller let her know she was going to shoot her daughter’s sister?

I looked out the taxi window as we moved through the crowded streets toward the hospital. I looked out on T-shirt shops, taco stands, and restaurants.

Acapulco also reminded me of the time we had my mother’s wedding band cut off by a locksmith. Most people in Guerrero did not wear rings. Hands and fingers swelled in the heat and, once a ring was on, it might never slip off.

After my father left us, my mother did not take her slim, gold wedding band off. It grew into her and became part of her finger, lost in the swollen flesh. On cool evenings, I could sometimes see the glimmer of gold in the lumpy skin as she cut up tomatoes or onions.

One day I watched as she spent most of the morning trying to remove the ring. She tried soap and cooking oil to make her finger slippery, but nothing worked.

After a few hours she said, We’re going to go to Acapulco and get this damn ring cut off.

Yes, Mama.

If they can’t cut it off, I’m cutting off my finger and that’s that.

It wasn’t until we were on the bus heading to Acapulco that I found out why she’d made this decision. Her biblical logic didn’t surprise me. She’d had a dream.

My mother listened to her dreams as if she were Moses. She said most problems people had these days were because they did not listen and act on their dreams. If she’d had a dream that locusts were coming we’d have moved off of the mountain years ago. It’s too bad that dream never came to her.

I’ve had a dream about my ring, she said again.

The dream contained an important revelation.

If I don’t get my wedding band off my finger, the birds will stop singing, she said. In the dream she was standing in the dark and parrots, canaries, and sparrows were standing on the branches of one orange tree. They all had their beaks wide open, but no sound emerged as the birds strained their necks back and looked up to heaven.

The locksmith cut the ring off of my mother’s hand with a sharp file. It only took a second.