Prayers for the Stolen

1

Now we make you ugly, my mother said. She whistled. Her mouth was so close she sprayed my neck with her whistle-spit. I could smell beer. In the mirror I watched her move the piece of charcoal across my face. It’s a nasty life, she whispered.

It’s my first memory. She held an old cracked mirror to my face. I must have been about five years old. The crack made my face look as if it had been broken into two pieces. The best thing you can be in Mexico is an ugly girl.

My name is Ladydi Garcia Martínez and I have brown skin, brown eyes, and brown frizzy hair, and look like everyone else I know. As a child my mother used to dress me up as a boy and call me Boy.

I told everyone a boy was born, she said.

If I were a girl then I would be stolen. All the drug traffickers had to do was hear that there was a pretty girl around and they’d sweep onto our lands in black Escalades and carry the girl off.

On television I watched girls getting pretty, combing their hair and braiding it with pink bows or wearing makeup, but this never happened in my house.

Maybe I need to knock out your teeth, my mother said.

As I grew older I rubbed a yellow or black marker over the white enamel so that my teeth looked rotten.

There is nothing more disgusting than a dirty mouth, Mother said.

It was Paula’s mother who had the idea of digging the holes. She lived across from us and had her own small house and field of papaya trees.

My mother said that the state of Guerrero was turning into a rabbit warren with young girls hiding all over the place.

As soon as someone heard the sound of an SUV approaching, or saw a black dot in the distance or two or three black dots, all girls ran to the holes.

This was in the state of Guerrero. A hot land of rubber plants, snakes, iguanas, and scorpions, the blond, transparent scorpions, which were hard to see and that kill. Guerrero had more spiders than any place in the world we were sure, and ants. Red ants that made our arms swell up and look like a leg.

This is where we are proud to be the angriest and meanest people in the world, Mother said.

When I was born, my mother announced to her neighbors and people in the market that a boy had been born.

Thank God a boy was born! she said.

Yes, thank God and the Virgin Mary, everyone answered even though no one was fooled. On our mountain only boys were born, and some of them turned into girls around the age of eleven. Then these boys had to turn into ugly girls who sometimes had to hide in holes in the ground.

We were like rabbits that hid when there was a hungry stray dog in the field, a dog that cannot close his mouth, and its tongue already tastes their fur. A rabbit stomps its back leg and this danger warning travels through the ground and alerts the other rabbits in the warren. In our area a warning was impossible since we all lived scattered and too far apart from each other. We were always on the lookout, though, and tried to learn to hear things that were very far away. My mother would bend her head down, close her eyes and concentrate on listening for an engine or the disturbed sounds that birds and small animals made when a car approached.

No one had ever come back. Every girl who had been stolen never returned or even sent a letter, my mother said, not even a letter. Every girl, except for Paula. She came back one year after she’d been taken.

From her mother, over and over again, we heard how she had been stolen. Then one day Paula walked back home. She had seven earrings that climbed up the cupped edge of her left ear in a straight line of blue, yellow, and green studs and a tattoo that snaked around her wrist with the words Cannibal’s Baby.

Paula just walked down the highway and up the dirt path to her house. She walked slowly, looking down, as if she were following a row of stones straight to her home.

No, my mother said. She was not following stones, that girl just smelled her way home to her mother.

Paula went into her room and lay down in her bed that was still covered with a few stuffed animals. Paula never spoke a word about what had happened to her. What we knew was that Paula’s mother fed her from a bottle, gave her a milk bottle, actually sat her on her lap and gave her a baby bottle. Paula was fifteen then because I was fourteen. Her mother also bought her Gerber baby foods and fed her straight into her mouth with a small white plastic spoon from a coffee she bought at the OXXO shop at the gas station that was across the highway.

Did you see that? Did you see Paula’s tattoo? my mother said.

Yes. Why?

You know what that means, right? She belongs. Jesus, Mary’s son and Son of God, and the angels in heaven protect us all.

No, I didn’t know what that meant. My mother did not want to say, but I found out later. I wondered how did someone get stolen from a small hut on a mountain by a drug trafficker, with a shaved head and a machine gun in one hand and a gray grenade in his back pocket, and end up being sold like a package of ground beef?

I watched out for Paula. I wanted to talk to her. She never left her house now but we had always been best friends, along with Maria and Estefani. I wanted to make her laugh and remember how we used to go to church on Sundays dressed up like boys and that my name had been Boy and her name had been Paulo. I wanted to remind her of the times we used to look at the soap opera magazines together because she loved to look at the pretty clothes the television stars wore. I also wanted to know what had happened.

What everyone did know was that she had always been the prettiest girl in these parts of Guerrero. People said Paula was even prettier than the girls from Acapulco, which was a big compliment, as anything that was glamorous or special had to come from Acapulco. So the word was out.

Paula’s mother dressed her in dresses stuffed with rags to make her look fat but everyone knew that less than one hour from the port of Acapulco, there was a girl living on a small property with her mother and three chickens who was more beautiful than Jennifer Lopez. It was just a matter of time. Even though Paula’s mother thought up the idea of hiding girls in holes in the ground, which we all did, she was not able to save her own daughter.

One year before Paula was stolen, there had been a warning.

It was early in the morning when it happened. Paula’s mother, Concha, was feeding old tortillas to her three chickens when she heard the sound of an engine down the road. Paula was still in bed fast asleep. She was in bed with her face washed clean, her hair roped into a long black braid that, during the night sleep, had coiled around her neck.

Paula was wearing an old T-shirt. It hung down below her knees, was made of white cotton, and said the words Wonder Bread across the front in dark blue letters. She was also wearing a pair of pink panties, which my mother always said was worse than being naked!

Paula was deeply asleep when the narco barged into the house.

Concha said she’d been feeding the chickens, those three good-for-nothing chickens that had never laid an egg in all their lives, when she saw the tan-colored BMW coming up the narrow dirt path. For a second she thought it was a bull or some animal that had run away from the Acapulco zoo because she had not expected to see a light brown vehicle coming toward her.

When she’d thought of narcos coming, she always imagined the black SUVs with tinted windows, which were supposed to be illegal but everyone had them fixed so the cops could not look inside. Those black Cadillac Escalades with four doors and black windows filled with narcos and machine guns were like the Trojan Horse, or so my mother used to say.

How did my mother know about Troy? How did a Mexican woman living all alone with one daughter in the Guerrero countryside, less than an hour from Acapulco by car and four hours by mule, know anything about Troy? It was simple. The one and only thing my father ever bought her when he came back from the United States was a small satellite dish antenna. My mother was addicted to historical documentaries and to Oprah’s talk shows. In my house there was an altar to Oprah beside the one she had for the Virgin of Guadalupe. My mother did not call her Oprah. That is a name she never figured out. My mother called her Opera. So it was Opera this and Opera that.

In addition to documentaries and Oprah, we must have watched The Sound of Music at least a hundred times. My mother was always on the lookout to see when the movie would be programmed on a movie channel.

Every time Concha would tell us what had happened to Paula, the story was different. So we never knew the truth.

The drug trafficker who went to the house before Paula was stolen, only went to get a good look at her. He went to see if the rumors were true. They were true.

It was different when Paula was stolen.

On our mountain, there were no men. It was like living where there were no trees.

It is like being a person with one arm, my mother said. No, no, no, she corrected herself. Being in a place without men is like being asleep without dreams.

Our men crossed the river to the United States. They dipped their feet in the water and waded up to their waists but they were dead when they got to the other side. In that river they shed their women and their children and walked into the great big USA cemetery. She was right. They sent money; they came back once or twice and then that was that. So on our land we were clumps of women working and trying to raise ourselves up. The only men around inhabited SUVs, rode motorcycles, and appeared from out of nowhere with an AK-47 hanging from their shoulder, a bag of cocaine in the back pocket of their jeans, and a pack of Marlboro Reds in their front shirt pocket. They wore Ray-Ban sunglasses and we had to make sure we never looked into their eyes, never saw the small black pupils that lay there and were the path inside their minds.

On the news we once heard about the kidnapping of thirty-five farmers who were picking corn in fields when some men with three large trucks drove up and stole all of them. The kidnappers pointed guns at the farmers and told them to get into the trucks. The farmers were in the trucks standing pressed together like cattle. The farmers returned to their homes after two or three weeks. They had been warned that if they talked about what had happened, they would be killed. Everyone knew they were stolen to be field hands and pick a marijuana crop.

If you were quiet about something then it never happened. Someone would write a song about it for sure. Everything you’re not supposed to know about, or talk about, eventually turned up in a song.

Some idiot is going to write a song about those kidnapped farmers and get himself killed, my mother said.

On weekends my mother and I went to Acapulco where she worked as a cleaning lady for a rich family who lived in Mexico City. The family went to the holiday resort a couple of weekends a month. For years this family used to drive, but then they bought a helicopter. It took several months to build the helipad on their property. First they had to fill in the swimming pool with dirt and cover it up and then move the new swimming pool over a few feet. They also relocated the tennis courts so that the heliport would be as far as possible from the house.

My father had also worked in Acapulco. He was a bartender at a hotel before he left for the States. He came back to Mexico a few times to visit us but then he never came back. My mother knew that it was the last time when the last time came.

This is the last time, she said.

What do you mean, Mama?

Look at him hard in the face; drink him up, because you’re never going to see your daddy again. Guaranteed. Guaranteed.

She liked to use that word.

When I asked her how she knew he was not coming back she said, You just wait, Ladydi, you just wait and you’ll see I’m right.

But how do you know? I asked again.

Let’s see if you can figure it out, she answered.

It was a test. My mother liked to give tests and finding out why my father was not coming back was a test.

I began to observe him. I watched the way he did things around our small house and garden. I followed him as if he were a stranger that could steal something from me if I looked away.

One night I knew my mother had been right. It was so hot even the moon was warming our piece of the planet. I went outside and joined my father as he smoked a cigarette.

God, this place must be one of the hottest places on earth, he said as he exhaled the tobacco smoke from his mouth and nostrils at the same time.

He placed his arm around me and his skin was even hotter than mine. We could sear into each other.

And then he said it.

You and your mama are too good for me. I don’t deserve you.

I passed the test with an A.

Son of a bitch, my mother said again and again, for years. She never said his name again. He was Son of a Bitch forever after.

Like many people on our mountain, my mother believed in hexes.

May a wind blow out the candle of his heart. May a gigantic termite grow in his navel, or an ant in his ear, she said. May his penis be eaten by a worm.

Then my father stopped sending us a monthly stipend from the USA. I guess we were also too good for his money.

Of course the USA-to-Mexico rumor road was the most powerful rumor route in the whole world. If you did not know the truth, you knew the rumor and the rumor was always a lot, lot more than the truth.

I’ll take a rumor over the truth, my mother said.

The rumor that came from a Mexican restaurant in New York to a slaughterhouse in Nebraska, to a Wendy’s restaurant in Ohio, to an orange field in Florida, to a hotel in San Diego, then crossed the river, in an act of resurrection, to a bar in Tijuana, to a marijuana field outside Morelia, to a glass-bottom boat in Acapulco, to a canteen in Chilpancingo and up our dirt road to the shade of our orange tree was that my father had another family “over there.”

“Over here” was our story, but it was also everyone’s story.

Over here we lived alone in our shack surrounded by all the objects my mother had stolen for years. We had dozens of pens and pencils, salt shakers and eyeglasses and we had one large plastic garbage bag filled with little sugar packets she had stolen from restaurants. My mother never left a bathroom without taking the roll of toilet paper hidden in her bag. She didn’t call it stealing, but my father did. When he was still with us and they used to fight, he said he lived with a thief. My mother believed that she was a borrower but I knew she never gave anything back. Her friends knew they had to hide everything. No matter where we would go, when we returned to our home the stuff was going to appear from out of her pockets, between her breasts and even from her hair. She had a knack for pushing stuff into it. I’d seen her pull small coffee spoons and spools of thread from her frizzy mane. Once she had a Snickers chocolate bar she’d stolen from Estefani’s house. She’d pushed the candy bar up under her ponytail. She even stole from her very own daughter. I gave up thinking that anything belonged to me.

When my father left, my mother, who had never placed a lock on her mouth, said, That Son of a Bitch! Here we lose our men, we get AIDS from them, from their US whores, our daughters are stolen, our sons leave, but I love this country more than my own breath.

Then she said the word Mexico very slowly, and again, Mexico. It was as if she licked up the word off a plate.

Ever since I was a child my mother had told me to say a prayer for some thing. We always did. I had prayed for the clouds and pajamas. I had prayed for light bulbs and bees.

Don’t ever pray for love and health, Mother said. Or money. If God hears what you really want, He will not give it to you. Guaranteed.

When my father left my mother said, Get down on your knees and pray for spoons.

2

I only went to school until the end of primary. I was a boy most of that time. Our school was a little room down the hill. Some years teachers never showed up because they were scared to come to this part of the country. My mother said that any teacher who wanted to come here must be a drug trafficker or an idiot.

Nobody trusted anyone.

My mother said that every person was a drug dealer including the police, of course, the mayor, guaranteed, and even the damn president of the country was a narco.

My mother did not need to be asked questions, she asked them herself.

How do I know the president is a drug trafficker? she asked. He lets all the guns come in from the United States. Why doesn’t he put the army on the border and stop the guns, huh? And, anyway, what is a worse thing to hold in your hand: a plant, a marijuana plant, a poppy, or a gun? God made the plants but man made the guns.

My school friends were the friends I’ve always had. There were only nine of us in first grade. My closest friends were Paula, Estefani, and Maria. We went to school with our hair cut short and in boys’ clothes. All of us except for Maria.

Maria was born with a harelip and so her parents were not worried that she would be stolen.

When my mother talked about Maria she said, The harelip rabbit on the moon came down from the moon to our mountain.

Maria was also the only one of us who had a brother. His name was Miguel, but we called him Mike. He was four years older than Maria and everyone spoiled him because he was the only boy on our mountain.

Paula, as we all said, looked like Jennifer Lopez, but more beautiful.

Estefani had the blackest skin ever. In the state of Guerrero we are all very dark but she was like a piece of the night or a rare black iguana. Estefani was also tall and skinny and, since no one in Guerrero was tall, she stood out like the tallest tree in a wood. She saw things I never could see; even far-off things like cars coming down the highway. Once she saw a little black-red-and-white striped snake curled up in a tree. It turned out that it was a coral snake. These are snakes that want to drink the breast milk of sleeping mothers.

When you grow up in Guerrero you learn that anything that is red is dangerous and so we knew that snake was bad. Estefani said the snake had looked at her straight in the eye. She only told this to Paula, Maria, and me, just the three of us (her three best friends) because she knew it meant she was cursed. And she was, of course, as cursed as if the snake had been the evil fairy godmother with a wand who said your dreams will never come true.

When Maria was born with the harelip everyone was shocked. Her mother, Luz, kept her daughter inside the house and her father walked out the front door and never came back.

My mother liked to tell everyone what they should do. She did not mind her own business. So, she walked over to Maria’s house to take a good look at the baby. I only know this story because my mother told it to me many times over. She looked at little Maria lying in Luz’s arms covered by a white veil of gauze. She lifted the cloth and looked down at the baby.

She was born inside out, like an inside-out sweater. You just need to get her turned back around, Mother said. I’ll go and register her at the clinic.

My mother turned and walked down the mountain and took a bus to the clinic in Chilpancingo and registered the birth of Maria. This was done so that the local clinics would know which children in the rural area needed these kinds of operations. Doctors came from Mexico City every few years to operate for free but the patients had to be registered at birth.

It took eight years before a group of doctors came to Chilpancingo. A convoy of soldiers escorted them so that they would be protected from the drug traffickers’ violent confrontations. Of course, by this time, we were all used to Maria’s face. Because of this, some of her friends did not want her to have the operation. We wanted her to be happy and normal but her inside-out face made us fear the gods, made us aware of terrible punishments, made us think that something had gone wrong in our magic circle of people. She had become mythical like a drought or a flood. Maria was used as an example of God’s wrath. Could a doctor fix that wrath? we wondered. Maria inhabited her myth and even began to look as if she was made of stone.

We thought Maria was powerful. My mother never thought it was power.

She’s looking for an accident and she’s going to find one, Mother said.

Estefani, Paula, and I felt that the worst had already happened to Maria and so she was not afraid of anything, like the snake Estefani saw in the tree. It was Maria who picked up a long stick and poked at it until the snake fell to the ground. Estefani, Paula, and I shrieked and moved away, but Maria leaned over, picked it up, and held it between her thumb and index finger.

She looked at the snake and said, So you think you have an ugly face, well, look at my face!

Stop it, stop it, Paula said. It’s going to bite you!

Idiot, that’s what I want, Maria said and dropped the snake on the ground.

She called everyone an idiot. It was her favorite word.

One day when I was seven years old Maria and I were walking home together from school. Usually we all left school together and would meet our mothers down on the highway and then branch out toward our different houses. This time, I can’t remember why, Maria and I were alone. The school year was almost over and we were sad because the teacher who had come from Mexico City for a year was leaving and a new volunteer would be coming in September. In the countryside the people depended on volunteers from the city. We had volunteer teachers, social workers, doctors and nurses. They came as part of their required social work training. After a while we learned not to get too attached to these people who, as my mother said, come and go like salespeople with nothing to sell except the words you must.

I don’t like people who come from far-away, she said. They have no idea of who we are, telling us you must do this and you must do that and you must do this and you must do that. Do I go to the city and tell them the place stinks and ask them, Hey, where’s the grass and since when is the sky yellow? It’s all just like the damn Roman Empire.

I didn’t know what she meant by this, but I did know she’d been watching a documentary on the history of Rome.

I had that walk alone with Maria in the month of July. I remember the heat and the sadness of losing our teacher. It was very humid and my body wilted as we moved forward. It was so moist spiders could weave their webs in the very air and we had to walk wiping the webs and long, loose threads from our faces and hope no spider had fallen into our hair or down our blouses. It was the kind of humidity that made iguanas and lizards sleep with their eyes at half mast and even the insects were asleep. It was also the kind of heat that drove stray dogs down to the highways in search of water and their bloody carcasses marked the black asphalt from our mountain all the way to Acapulco.

It was so hot that at one point Maria and I sat down on some stones, after checking to see there was no scorpion or snake there, and rested for a minute.

A boy is never going to want to love me and that’s that. I don’t care, she said. I don’t want anyone messing with my face. My mother said no boy will want to kiss me.

I tried to imagine the kiss, lips against her torn lips, a tongue inside of her torn mouth. I asked her if that meant she’d never have any children and she said her mother told her she would never get married or have children because no man would ever love her.

I don’t want to be loved, Maria said, so who cares?

Maria, I don’t want to be loved either. Who wants that? I think kissing sounds disgusting.

She turned and looked at me fiercely and I thought that she was going to spit on me or punch me but, at that moment, she fell in love with me.

Maria looked at me fiercely because everyone around here is fierce. In fact, all over Mexico it is known that the people who come from the state of Guerrero are full of anger and as dangerous as a white, transparent scorpion that’s hidden in bed, under a pillow.

In Guerrero the heat, iguanas, spiders, and scorpions ruled. Life was not worth anything.

My mother used to say that all the time, Life is not worth anything. She also quoted the old famous song as if it were a prayer, If you’re going to kill me tomorrow you might as well kill me today.

This was translated into all kinds of new versions of the same thing. I heard her tell my father once, If you’re going to leave me tomorrow, you might as well leave me today.

I knew he would not come back. It was just as well because then she really would have done it. She would have cooked up a stew of fingernails, spit, and shredded hair. She would have mixed it with her menstrual blood and green chilies and chicken. She gave me the recipe. Not on a piece of paper, but she once told me about how to do it.

Always be the cook, she said. Never let anyone cook for you.

That stew of fingernails, spit, menstrual blood, and shredded hair would have tasted delicious. She was a good cook. It was for the best that he did not come back. She kept her machete sharp.

My mother said that she believed in revenge. It was a threat over my head, but it was also a lesson. I knew she was not going to forgive me for anything, but it also taught me not to forgive. She said that this was why she no longer went to church, even though she did have saints she loved, but she did not like all the forgiving business. I knew that much of her day was spent thinking about what she’d do to my father if he ever came back.

I watched my mother cut the tall grasses with her machete, or kill an iguana by breaking its head with a large stone, or scrape the thorns off a maguey pad, or kill a chicken by twisting its neck in her hands, and it was as if all the objects around her were my father’s body. When she cut up a tomato I knew it was his heart she was slicing into thin wheels.

Once she leaned against the front door, pressed her body against the wood, and even that door became my father’s back. The chairs were his lap. The spoons and forks were his hands.

One day Maria came running over to my house. We lived only a twenty-minute walk from each other by crossing land overgrown with rubber plants and short palm trees where large brown and green iguanas lay in the sun on flat rocks. They could swivel quickly and bite especially if you were an eight-year-old girl running and skipping past in red plastic flip-flops. She came alone, as she was the only girl allowed out because of her harelip. We all knew that no one would want her, not even if she was given away for nothing. People instantly recoiled when they looked at her. When I saw her at my front door, I knew something important had happened.

Ladydi, she cried, Ladydi!

My mother had gone to the market in Chilpancingo. At that young age our mothers still let us stay home alone if we promised not to go wandering off. As soon as the smallest bumps showed up on our chest, that was it. From that moment on, if we were to go out, steps were taken so that we did not look pretty.

Maria walked toward me with her arms splayed open at her sides and hugged me. It was strange to see her like that since she always had one hand covering her mouth. Maria moved with her left hand over half of her face, cupped across her mouth as if she was holding in a secret or about to spit out something.

What is it?

She stopped, out of breath and panting a little. She sat down beside me on the floor where I had been cutting out images from a magazine to paste in a copybook. This was one of my favorite pastimes.

The doctors are coming!

I didn’t have to ask her anything. After eight years of waiting the famous doctors, the important expensive doctors from a hospital in Mexico City, they were coming to Chilpancingo to operate for free on children with deformities. Maria explained that the nurse from the clinic had appeared at their house about an hour after Maria had come home from school. She had drawn a sample of Maria’s blood and taken her blood pressure to make sure she would be ready for the operation. They had to be at the clinic on Saturday at six in the morning.

That’s in two days! I can’t wait to tell Paula.

It occurred to me that Maria might think that after the operation she could be as beautiful as Paula. Even when I cut up old magazines, filled with the faces of movie stars and famous models, I knew none of them would stand a chance against Paula. Even though Paula’s mother kept her hair short and even rubbed Paula’s skin with chili powder so it would have a permanent red rash, Paula’s beauty shone through anyway.

On Saturday morning my mother and I went down to the clinic to keep Maria’s mother company. Estefani and her mother had also come down from their house.

Maria’s brother, Mike, was there too. I realized I had not seen him for a while. He spent most of his time in Acapulco. At twelve he seemed grown-up to me. He wore leather cuffs, like bracelets, on his wrists, which I’d never seen before, and he’d shaved his hair off.

Three army trucks were parked outside the clinic and twelve soldiers stood watch. These soldiers wore ski masks over their faces. They were also wearing aviator sunglasses over the eye openings in the wool. The backs of their necks glistened with sweat. The soldiers’ machine guns were held ready as they surrounded the small rural health clinic.

On one of the trucks someone had tacked a sign that said: Here doctors are operating on children.

These measures were taken so that the drug traffickers wouldn’t sweep down and kidnap the doctors and take them off. The drug traffickers kidnapped doctors for two reasons. Either they needed to have one of their own operated on, usually for bullet wounds, or they’d steal the Mexico City doctors for ransom. We knew that doctors would not come to our mountain unless they had protection.

We tried to get past the soldiers but they would not let us in the clinic so we had to wait at Ruth’s beauty salon on the corner. We knew there was only one other child having an operation and this was a two-year-old boy who was born with an extra thumb. For two years this extra thumb was an important thing to talk about. Everyone had an opinion about it.

The truth was we knew the cause behind the deformities on our mountain. Everyone knew that the spraying of poisons to kill the crops of marijuana and poppies was harming our people.

In a fit of anger, the day before the operations, my mother said, Maria should just stay the way she is. And, thinking about that thumb boy, why don’t they just cut his hand off too! Maybe then he’ll stick around here when he grows up.

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.

The birds continued to soar above us as we reached our house.

Once inside my mother walked to the kitchen and took out four little bottles of nail polish from inside her sleeve. She placed a red bottle and three pink bottles on the kitchen table.

You stole nail polish from Ruth?

I didn’t know why I was surprised. Anytime we went anywhere my mother stole something. I just could not believe that she would steal from Ruth.

Shut up and go and do your homework, my mother said.

I don’t have any homework.

Then just shut up, my mother said. Go and wash your hands so you can get them dirty again.

My mother walked over to the window and looked up at the sky.

It’s a dog, she said. Those are just too many damn vultures for it to be a dead mouse.

3

We lived off my mother’s wages as a cleaning lady. Every Friday after school my mother and I walked down to the highway and waited for a bus to take us an hour’s drive to the port. She had no one to leave me with at home. Everywhere she went I had to go too.

Before the Reyes family arrived from Mexico City, my mother had to mop the house, make the beds, and put insecticide everywhere in order to kill ants, spiders, and especially scorpions.

When I was a child, she let me be in charge of the insecticide, which came in a spray bottle. As my mother cleaned, I sprayed the insecticide in corners, under the beds, inside closets, and around the sinks in the bathrooms. It made my mouth taste strange for days, as if I’d sucked on a piece of copper wire.

We had a servant’s room behind the garage. My mother used to tie me to the bed with a rope. She did this so that she could get her work done and not worry that I might wander off and fall into the swimming pool. She’d tie me to the bed for hours with a loaf of white bread, a glass of milk, and some crayons and paper.

Sometimes she would bring me books to look at from the house. These books were usually architecture books on the world’s great mansions, or books on museums.

Of course my mother also stole from the Reyes family. On our way back home on Sunday night I’d see what she’d taken. As the bus hurtled over the burning asphalt toward a land of red insects and women, she’d slowly take things from her pockets and look them over.

In the darkness of the bus I watched as tweezers came out of her blouse and three long red candles were removed from her sleeve.

One night as the lights from cars coming in the opposite direction lit up the inside of the vehicle, my mother handed me a small bag of chocolate eggs.

Here, I took these for you, she said.

I ate them in the bus as I looked out the window and into the dense jungle that lined the side of the highway.

After Maria had her harelip operation everything changed. If it had not been for Maria, we might not have noticed the vultures circling above our house as we walked back from the clinic.

I’m going to go and investigate what’s dead, my mother said, moving away from the window where she was looking out at the sky.

You stay here, she said.

I waited for about an hour listening to music on my iPod, which she’d also stolen from the Reyes family, before she came back.

She looked worried and she’d been pulling at her hair on the left side of her head. It was sticking out in a great frizzy clump. I pulled the earbuds, and the sound of Daddy Yankee, out of my ears.

Ladydi, listen, she said. There’s a dead man out there and we have to bury him.

What do you mean?

There’s a damn corpse out there.

Who is it?

He’s naked.

Naked?

You’re going to have to close your eyes and help me put him in the ground. Go get some spoons, the big one, and get out of those clothes, I’m going for the spade out back.

I stood up and took off the clean clothes I’d worn to go to the clinic in the morning and changed into an old pair of jeans and a T-shirt.

My mother returned with the spade that we usually used for digging up anthills.

Okay, she said. Follow me.

I followed my mother. I counted five vultures above us. My mother made a breathless sound, like panting, as we walked. We reached the corpse in a few minutes.

This is too close to the house, I said.

This is too damn close to the house. You’re right.

Yes.

He was dumped here.

Who is he?

Does he look familiar to you?

No.

In this land one can go out for a walk and find a huge iguana, a papaya tree covered with dozens of large fruits, an enormous anthill, marijuana plants, poppies, or a corpse.

It was the body of a young boy. He looked about sixteen years old. He was lying on his back looking up into the sun.

Poor thing, my mother said.

The sun will burn his face.

Yes.

His hands had been cut off and white and blue veins threaded out from his bloody wrists into the dirt like bloated worms.

The letter P was carved into his forehead.

There was a note pinned to his shirt with a large safety pin with a pink plastic clasp. It was the kind of pin used for diapers.

Does that note say what I think it says? my mother asked as she began to dig. Does that say: Paula and two girls?

Yes, that’s what it says.

You, get over here! Start digging. We need to hurry.

As the vultures circled above us we dug using the spade, the large spoon, and our hands.

Deeper, deeper, my mother said. We need to dig deeper or the animals will pull him out in the night.

We dug for over two hours and the ground produced transparent worms, green beetles, and pink stones.

My mother scraped at the earth and looked over her shoulder every so often in a panic. I feel eyes are on us, she whispered.

Wouldn’t it have been better to just let the jungle take care of the body? I asked. But even as I said this, I knew the answer.

The police and drug traffickers kept an eye out for vultures. My mother said that the birds were the best informants around. She did not want anyone to come snooping around, looking at her daughter.

After the hole was deep enough we pulled the body into the hole and covered it over with dirt.

I looked at my hands. The dirt had been pushed way deep under my nails and no washing was going to get it out. Not for weeks.

When we finished my mother said, I never thought you were born to bury a dead boy with me. That was not in the prediction of my life.

Once, when my mother was about twenty years old, she went to Acapulco and paid a fortune-teller to tell her about what was going to happen in her life. This was a fortune-teller who had a small space that she rented between two bars on the main street in Acapulco. My mother told me that she’d been attracted to the woman’s sign, which said: You are only unfortunate if you don’t know your fortune.

My mother used to watch tourists from all over the world pay money to hear what this woman said. She knew she had to go. It took my mother years to get up the courage to go inside and pay to have her fortune told.

I was just an Indian from the countryside, my mother said. But that woman kissed my money and whispered to me, Money has no country or race. Once the money is in my pocket I don’t know who gave it to me.

My mother always brought up this experience. That fortune-teller predicted nothing. Anything that happened to my mother was always punctuated with the words: This was not a prediction in my life. As the years went by the disappointment grew deeper as my mother realized that nothing the woman said had come true.

Mark my words, Ladydi, my mother said. One of these weekends when we’re in Acapulco we’re going to go and find that fortune-teller and I’m going to tell her to give my money back.

After the last pile of dirt had been thrown over the dead boy’s body my mother said, Let’s say a prayer.

You say it, I answered.

Get on our knees, my mother said. This is serious.

We both knelt on the white worms, the beetles, and pink stones.

On the happy day that Maria had her mouth fixed and the little baby had his extra thumb removed, this young boy appeared. We pray for rain. Amen.

Then we stood up and walked back to our house.

As we washed our hands in the kitchen sink, my mother said, Yes, Ladydi, I’m going to tell Paula’s mother. I have to. She needs to know.

My mother stood at the kitchen sink. She took out the note that had been pinned on the corpse from her pocket and lit a match to the paper. Paula’s name turned to ash.

Paula never knew her father. To think that there was a man out there someplace who did not know he’d sired the most beautiful girl in Mexico!

Paula’s mother, Concha, never told anyone who Paula’s father was but my mother had her own theory. Concha used to work as a bedroom maid at the house of a rich family in Acapulco.

On the day Concha was fired, she came back to the mountain with two things: a baby in her belly and a wad of pesos in her hand.

There’s nothing worse than a fatherless daughter, my mother said. The world just eats those girls alive.

After we’d washed, my mother and I went over to Paula’s house, which was a short walk down to the edge of the highway.

I sat with Paula while my mother spoke to Concha about the corpse. At eleven, Paula was still thin and stringy, but her beauty was there. Everyone turned and stared at her wherever she went. Everyone could see what was coming.

After this visit, my mother and I walked to the highway and the store that stayed open late beside the gas station. She bought a six-pack of beer. This was the day that she stopped eating and only drank beer.

What did Paula’s mother say? I asked.

Not much.

Was she scared?

To death. She’ll be dead in the morning.

What do you mean?

I don’t know. Those words just came out of me.

The next morning my mother was still asleep when I left for school. I looked at her face. There was no mirror there.

4

We never told anyone about the field of poppies.

We found the poppy crop a year before Maria’s harelip operation. I remember because Maria covered her mouth on that day when she said, I am afraid of flowers.

One day Estefani, Paula, Maria, and I decided to go for a walk. This was misbehavior, as we were never allowed to wander off and go for walks by ourselves. We left from Estefani’s house on a Saturday afternoon.

Estefani’s family had a real house. They had three bedrooms, a kitchen, and a living room. Estefani lived with her mother, Augusta, and two little sisters, Manuela and Dolores. On our mountain only Estefani’s father came back to Mexico from the United States every year. He also sent them money every month. Thanks to him there was electricity on our mountain as he’d paid someone a lot of money to get that done. Estefani’s father worked as a gardener in Florida. We also knew that he’d once worked in Alaska on fishing boats. In Florida, Americans hired him most of the time, but he also worked for rich Mexicans who had fled from the violence. He said that many of these Mexicans were victims of kidnappings.

Estefani had many toys from the United States. She had a fairy watch that lit up in the dark and a plastic doll that spoke and the lips even moved.

In their kitchen there was a microwave oven, a toaster, and an electrical juicer. The entire house was fitted with ceiling lights. They all had electrical toothbrushes.

Estefani’s house was one of my mother’s favorite topics of conversation. After my mother had guzzled her third beer, I knew she would only talk about Estefani’s house or my father.

Their damn sheets match their bedspreads and their towels match the round rug on the floor. Have you seen how their dishes match their napkins? she said. In the United States everything has to match!

I had to admit she was right. Even the three sisters were always dressed in matching clothes.

Look at this dirt floor, she said. Look at it! Your father did not even love us enough to buy a bag of cement. He wanted us to walk with the spiders and walk with the ants. If a scorpion bites you and kills you, it will be your father’s fault.

Everything was his fault. If it rained, he’d built a roof that leaked. If it was hot, he’d built the house too far from the rubber trees. If my grades were poor at school, I was his daughter, as stupid as he was. If I broke something like a water glass, I was as clumsy as he was. If I talked too much, I was exactly like him, I never shut up. If I was quiet, I was just like him, I thought I was better than everyone else.

One day, when Estefani’s mother had a cold and had locked herself up in her room, Maria, Paula, Estefani, and I decided to go for a walk.

Let’s go exploring, Maria said. Her voice was muffled back then because her hand was always covering her mouth and the exposed red flesh from her harelip.

Let’s walk in the direction of Mexico City, Paula said. She was always thinking about going to Mexico City. It was the one place we could all find instantly when we looked at a map of Mexico. Our index fingers could point it out right in the middle of the country. If Mexico were a body, Mexico City would be its navel.

We walked in a straight line away from Estefani’s house, through the iguana paths that took us deeper into the jungle overgrowth. I was at the back. Maria walked at the front, holding one hand over her mouth. Paula looked beautiful even though her mother had blackened her teeth with a black marker which had bled everywhere so even her lips were black. Estefani walked in front of me in a matching set of a pink T-shirt and shorts. She was already so tall she looked years older than the rest of us. Looking at my friends, it made me wonder, What about me? What did I look like?

You look just like your father, my mother said. You have brown-red skin, brown hair, brown eyes, and white teeth. (A teacher had once told us that the people of Guerrero were Afro-Indian.)

As Maria, Paula, Estefani, and I walked in the direction of Mexico City, climbing higher than our homes and up from the highway, we slowly felt the jungle lose its density and the sun began to burn the tops of our heads. We walked and looked down at our feet as we moved. We did not want to step on a snake or some poisonous creature.

As soon as I can I am going to leave this horrible jungle, Paula said.

The rest of us knew that if there were anyone who could, it would be Paula with her TV commercial face.

As if we’d crossed a border, from one minute to the next, we’d left our hothouse jungle world and reached a clearing. The sun was strong. We stood before the brilliance of lavender and black as a huge field, a bonfire of poppies appeared before us.

The place seemed to be deserted except for a downed army helicopter, a mangled mess of metal skids and blades among the poppies.

The field of flowers smelled like gasoline.

Maria’s hand slipped into mine. I did not need to turn and look at her to know it was her small, cool hand like an apple peel. We would recognize each other in the dark and even in a dream.

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.

5

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.

I had a large collection of those colorful cocktail paper umbrellas, which my father had brought back for me over the years. He also brought me glow-in-the-dark cocktail stirring sticks. He helped me paste these all around my bed so that I could watch them glow in the night. He also gave me dollar bills every now and again, which were given to him by tourists from the USA. I’d saved up thirty dollars. I kept this money in an Archie comic book in my bedroom.

Knowing that Maria was my half-sister also made me feel differently about Mike. It gave me sisterly feelings toward him. From then on, I always bought him a birthday present.

Shortly after this, my father went to the United States to look for work. He only came back a few more times and then he was gone for good. All we had to remember him by was the satellite dish attached to the tallest palm tree on our small plot of land and a large flat-screen television and, of course, Maria.

I should be skinned in a butcher’s shop and hanging from a hook, my mother said.

That was the first time my daddy left. He didn’t even wake me up from my drunk, new-drunk sleep to say goodbye.

He didn’t say goodbye to you because he couldn’t look you in the eye! Frank Sinatra just slunk out of here like an old street dog that’s ashamed to be a dog, my mother said.

She let every one of our friends know that he’d left home without even saying goodbye to his daughter.

Two months later we heard from the USA-to-Mexico rumor mill that he’d gone to the border and managed to get across the river in Tijuana, at the San Ysidro port of entry, hidden in the back of a truck under a false floor between the wheels and the bumper. Then he went down Interstate 5 and into the United States.

It got back to us that the minute he crossed the border and was heading deep into the state of Texas, he had started to sing songs, one after another. This was all the proof my mother and I needed in order to confirm that these rumors were true.

After my father crossed the border he went to Florida where he was working as a gardener. This made my mother spit on the ground and say, A gardener! That lying son of a bitch does not know anything about gardening.

We both tried to imagine him carrying a spade or a rake and planting roses. He could seduce and sweet-talk himself into anything.

When he finally wired us some money, about three months after he’d left, my mother was speechless. It took me a while to figure out what had slapped the words out of her mouth and left her empty. The money my father had wired did not come from one of those glamorous-sounding places in Florida like Miami, Orlando, or Palm Beach but from a town called Boca Raton. This was just too much for my mother.

She said, He left this place to go to the Rat’s Mouth?

6

The following school year we had a teacher called José Rosa, from Mexico City. He was doing his social service and had been sent to teach at our school. We tried not to become too attached to these strangers who came and went, but sometimes it was hard.

José Rosa was a handsome twenty-three-year-old man who was sent to our world of women.

Paula, Estefani, Maria, and I watched as our mothers fell in love with this young teacher. Every morning our mothers sent him treats in our lunch bags or just hung out around the school.

This was also the time when Paula, Maria, Estefani, and I first protested against being made unattractive or dressing like boys. We wanted José Rosa’s eyes to look at us as women.

The only person who resisted him was Estefani. She was the first person who saw him walking up the path to our one-room school in the jungle under the dying orange tree. She saw him walk his city-walk in his city clothes and haircut and then she heard him talk his city-talk.

Who’s going to get his city-kiss? Who is going to get his skyscraper-kiss? Estefani asked.

Estefani was the only one who had been to Mexico City. In fact, she’d been to Mexico City many times. Her mother was sick and they had to go and see a doctor every few months. Estefani’s mother had almost died. We were all very worried about this because Estefani was only nine at the time. Estefani’s father had left to go and work in the United States on the fishing boats in Alaska and was not around to help. Estefani said that her mother just kept getting skinnier and no matter how hard she tried to gain weight, she couldn’t. Her mother’s dark skin began to turn a silvery color.

But the truth of the story was that Estefani’s father did not bring back the smell and taste of Alaskan king salmon, rainbow trout, or Arctic char. He did not bring back a bag of pine needles or photographs of grizzly bears or an eagle feather. He brought back the AIDS virus, which he gave to Estefani’s mother, like giving her a rose or a box of chocolates.

In Chilpancingo, next to the canteen that had so many bullet holes in its door the dark bar could be looked at through the round wounds, there was a clinic where for twenty pesos you could get an AIDS test. The men came and went to the United States and the women, year after year, walked down past the canteen for an AIDS test. There were some who did not want to know. Those women prayed.

When Estefani’s mother was diagnosed with AIDS, her husband left. He slapped her across the face three times back and forth and back again and called her a whore. He said if she had AIDS it was because she’d been unfaithful. We all knew this was impossible. There were no men on our mountain.

After this, Estefani’s house, which we had so admired, began to fall to pieces. The appliances stopped working, but Estefani’s mother still kept them. The toys broke. The matching towels and rugs frayed.

Estefani boasted that she’d seen many city men, because she’d gone to Mexico City with her mother, and so she was not at all impressed with our new teacher. In fact, she used to say that our teacher, José Rosa, was not as handsome as other men she’d seen.

When José Rosa walked into our schoolroom one hot August morning we could still smell the city surrounding him. His odor was of cars, exhaust fumes, and cement. He was very pale.

He looks like a glass of milk, Maria said.

No, like a movie star, Paula said.

No, Estefani disagreed. He looks like a worm.

He introduced himself to each one of us and shook our hands. His hand in my hand still belonged to the city. It felt cool and dry. It had not peeled a mango or torn into a papaya. He also wore a straw hat. Later he told us it was a panama hat, which we thought was elegant. Other than my father, he was the first man we’d ever seen who did not wear a baseball cap. José Rosa had very curly black hair and light brown eyes with long eyelashes that curled upward toward his eyebrows.

When my mother saw him she said, Well, Ladydi, we’d better start digging a hole for him too!

On the first day of school, we’d arrived with our mothers to register and officially meet the new teacher. This was a routine that we followed at the beginning of the school year. On that first day we just looked like ourselves. We were messy and born from the jungle so we were like the relatives of papaya trees, iguanas, and butterflies.

After having seen José Rosa in his straw hat, there was a massive rush to Ruth’s beauty salon. We watched as our mothers had their hair washed and trimmed. The mothers who had curly hair wanted straight hair and those with straight hair wanted curly hair. It was only my mother who insisted that she wanted her black hair colored blond. Ruth was pleased because she was always trying to get everyone to change their hair color.

We watched Ruth fix up our mothers as we spun around and around in the hair-salon chairs or watched the huge passenger buses pass by from the beauty parlor’s bullet-riddled window. We longed to have our hair done and our nails painted, but we were not allowed.

When Ruth took the towel off my mother’s wet hair, her black frizz had been transformed into yellow frizz. There was a sudden quiet in the beauty salon as we stared at her yellow cotton-candy hair.

On the second day of school everyone looked like they were dressed for Christmas. Our mothers’ brown faces were covered with makeup and lipstick. Estefani’s mother was even wearing false eyelashes, which looked like antennas coming out of her worn, sickly face.

When José Rosa arrived it was as if a large mirror had fallen into the jungle. When we looked at him, we looked at ourselves. Every imperfection, our skin, scars, things we had never even noticed, we saw in him.

My mother was the first one to invite him over for dinner. He’s not going to believe it when he sees I knew about grammar. I knew about onomatopeia and hyperbole, she said. I do. Right?

She spent the day sweeping our dirt floor and cleaning the dust off of everything. Ever since my father had left, she’d never done any housecleaning.

I could understand why my father left our home, the jungle, and my mother (even though she wasn’t yet the angry drunk she became), but I could never understand how he could have left me.

When José Rosa came to our clean house, we sat outside, under the papaya tree; my mother and José drank beer and I drank a Coke. When my mother handed José Rosa the bottle of beer, she did not hand him a glass. In Guerrero we all drink straight out of bottles.

José spent his visit with us complaining about our mountain. He didn’t understand why we never used drinking glasses or why we had houses, but almost always slept outside at night. We listened quietly as he complained that everyone had appliances like televisions, satellite antennas, and washing machines, but that we had no furniture and still lived on dirt floors.

José Rosa discussed the way we had our light wired in, which was actually illegal since we took it from the light posts down on the highway, and threaded the wires up along the paths and through the trees. He could not understand why we ate beef so often and so few fruits and vegetables. He went on and on. José Rosa even said that the large toads near the school were the ugliest things he’d ever seen. He could not stand the enormous black ants that had taken over his small house and, of course, the heat was unbearable.

My now blond mother listened to all this as she drank one beer after another. Her makeup seemed to slip off her face from the sweat and melt down onto her neck. By the time her lipstick had stained the opening of five beer bottles and José Rosa expressed that he had to wear socks even in this heat since, after all, he’d been raised to wear socks, she was upset.

And then he said it.

He said, How can you all live like this, in a world without any men? How?

My mother took in a breath. It seemed that even the ants on the ground stopped moving. José Rosa’s question stood in the hot wet air, as if spoken words could be suspended. I could reach out and touch the letters H and O and W.

Do you ever watch television, Mr. Rosa? my mother asked in that too-slow tone of hers that she’d get into when she was angry.

She placed her empty beer bottle on the ground beside her.

I counted six empty beer bottles on the ground beside her. Big black ants were already going in and out of some of the bottles.

You men don’t get it, yet, do you? she said. This is a land of women. Mexico belongs to women. If you’ve watched any television then you’ve seen that show about the Amazon.

The river? José Rosa asked.

She told him about the female warriors and how the word Amazon means without breast.

My mother had television-knowledge. That’s what she called it.

No, no, I don’t know this story, José Rosa said.

You have to watch the History Channel, Mr. Teacher. We always watch the History Channel, right, Ladydi?

José Rosa did not want to talk about the Greeks or to let it be known that he did not know anything about the Amazons.

Yes, that’s interesting, but where are the men? he asked. Do you know where they all are exactly?

Oh yes, we know. They’re not here.

My mother stood up and walked into our two-room house. She didn’t really walk but slithered with her feet slipping too far forward in her plastic flip-flops so that her toes curled over the front of the sandals like talons.

Wait here, don’t move, she said and disappeared into the black shade of our hot, raw cement home.

This was the first time that José Rosa and I were alone. He looked at me kindly and asked in his city-voice, which always sounded exotic to me. Does she always drink so much?

I knew my mother had gone inside and passed out from the beer and heat. I could tell from her walk that her blond frizzy mass of hair was now pressed down into the pillow on a small cot in a corner and that she would not wake up until late that night.

Come with me, I said. I want to show you something.

We both stood and my teacher followed me around the small house to the back.

There, I said, look. This is the beer-bottle cemetery.

José Rosa stood still and breathless at the sight of my mother’s mound of hundreds and hundreds of brown-glass bottles dumped in piles and lying under swarms of bees.

To the right of the beer cemetery was our laundry line that was tied between two papaya trees. My mother had cleaned the house but she’d forgotten to take the clothes off the line. José Rosa looked at our yellow and pink underwear hanging limp in the windless air. These panties were filled with holes and the crotch on some was brown and worn thin from my mother over-scrubbing her menstrual bloodstains.

How old are you exactly? José Rosa asked me as we turned and walked back around the house. He used words such as exactly and quite, and they seemed like well-mannered, proper city words.

I’d better go now, he said.

Everyone wanted to leave once my mother had had too much to drink. I was used to it.

Yes. She’s asleep now. I’ll walk you down to the highway.

He was relieved to have me walk with him. I knew that city people were frightened by the jungle and he seemed more frightened than most.

Why did you come here? I asked as we walked down our steep hill toward the highway. He lived in a small room above Ruth’s beauty parlor.

I watched him as he moved trying to avoid stepping on the big red ants in his black leather lace-up city shoes. He looked down at his feet and up to the trees, back and forth. As the day turned to dusk dozens of mosquitoes lit on his neck and arms. He tried to wave them away. The jungle knew this city man was among us.

At the highway I told him I was not allowed to cross and had to go back home.

You know not to go out at night, right? I said. Someone did tell you this?

The night belongs to the drug traffickers, the army, and the police just like it belongs to the scorpions, I said.

José Rosa nodded his head.

No matter what, you don’t leave your house, not even if you hear the sound of gunfire or someone screaming for help, okay?

Thank you, he said as he took my hand and leaned over and kissed my cheek.

No one in the jungle holds anyone’s hand or kisses anyone’s cheek. This is a city custom, or a custom that can only exist in a cool climate. In our hot land touching is just more heat.

When I returned to my house my mother was still passed out. It took me a few seconds to recognize her form in the bed. I’d forgotten that she’d bleached her hair. The blond mop covered her small pillow.

My mother’s hands were lying across her stomach. As I approached I could see she was holding something shiny gripped between her fingers.

The next morning my mother seemed upset. She would not even look at me.

So when did José Rosa leave? I didn’t notice when he left, she said.

You just passed out, Mother. What were you thinking? He’s my teacher!

My mother paced and pulled at her bleached blond hair. I didn’t know if she was angry or sad.

Finally she said, I was just turning inside out, turning inside out so that my bones were on the outside and my heart was hanging here in the middle of my chest like a medallion. It was just too much and so I had to lie down. Ladydi, I knew that man could see my liver and my spleen. He could’ve just leaned over and plucked my eye off of my face like a grape.

What are you doing with a gun, Mama?

My mother sat and was quiet for a moment.

What gun?

What are you doing with a gun, Mama?

Some men need killing, my mother answered.

I sat down beside her and began to rub her back gently.

I have to go to school now, Mama, or I’m going to be late, I said.

Why the hell can’t this place have a bar full of men so that you can get drunk and get yourself kissed?

I’m going to school by myself. I have to go, Mama.

I left her there on the floor and walked out of the house.

As I moved down the hill an army of ants was marching in several lines down the mountain toward the highway. Lizards were moving in the same direction, moving very quickly. The birds above me were also disturbed and flying away.

That morning everything on the mountain seemed to be pushing down toward the black asphalt river.

And then I knew why.

Way off, far off, I heard a helicopter.

I ran toward the school as fast as I could.

At the schoolroom everyone was already inside and the small door was closed.

Let me in, I cried.

José Rosa opened the door. I pushed past him and ran over to Maria and Estefani who stood at the window looking up.

Where’s Paula? I asked.

My friends shook their heads.

José Rosa was confused and bewildered. Maria explained that the helicopter meant the army was coming to dump Paraquat on the poppy fields.

Everyone is running for cover, she explained. You never know where the herbicide might be sprayed.

We could hear the helicopter getting closer until it finally passed over our little one-room school and moved away.

Do you smell anything? Estefani asked.

I don’t, Maria said. No.

José Rosa sat down and took out a small box of white chalk from his leather briefcase and walked toward the blackboard. He wrote out four columns with the subject headings History, Geography, Mathematics, and Spanish Language.

We took out our copybooks and pencils from our school satchels and began to copy down what José Rosa had written.

As I wrote the word History I could smell it. By the time I’d written the words Spanish Language there was no doubt in my mind that I was smelling Paraquat.

The three of us knew it. José Rosa did not.

We also felt the absence of Paula.

As the scent grew stronger we could sense the poison creep in under the schoolroom door.

At the moment when Maria squirmed and was about to stand and insist that we had to get out of that room, Paula pushed open the door and entered panting and crying.

She was drenched in the poison.

Paula was crying with her eyes closed and her lips pressed firmly together.

We all knew that if you got any Paraquat in your mouth you could die.

In her race to outrun the helicopter she’d lost her flip-flops and her satchel. Her dress was drenched and her hair dripped with the stinging liquid. Paula kept her eyes firmly shut. The herbicide can blind you too. It burns everything.

Maria was the first to jump up out of her chair.

In order not to touch her, Maria guided her by pushing Paula with her notebook into the small bathroom built at the back.

Estefani and I followed them. In the bathroom Paula tore off her dress. We tried to clean her off with tap water, but it came out much too slowly, so we also scooped water out from the toilet bowl. We washed her eyes and mouth over and over again.

I could taste the poison. Where some had rubbed onto my skin, I could feel the burning, which could turn a radiant poppy into a piece of tar the size of a raisin.

José Rosa watched in silence. He peered into the room from outside, and covered his mouth and nose with his arm, holding the white cotton shirtsleeve against his face.

We washed off the poison, but we knew much of it was inside her already. Paula did not speak or cry, as she stood naked and trembling in the small bathroom.

It was Estefani who had the idea of wrapping her up in the frayed cloth curtain that hung in the schoolroom.

We walked her through the jungle, down to the highway, and back up to her house. Even though we offered her our own plastic flip-flops, Paula said no and limped on her bare feet. She was afraid there might be Paraquat in the grass along the path to her house and we would be burned by it.

We handed Paula over to her mother who could only say, It was only a matter of time.

We knew she would not be able to reach a sponge into Paula’s body, as if she were a bottle, and wash the poison out.

At home my mother was sitting on the ground at the back of the house overlooking the beer cemetery. Her hair stood up in the air like a yellow halo. The brown-glass bottles and silver cans gleamed and shone under the late-morning sun.

I sat down beside her.

She turned and looked at me and then looked up at the sun and said, What are you doing here so early, huh?

I was still shivering.

Oh my, Ladydi, she said. What happened?

She leaned toward me and placed her arm around me. I told her the whole story.

Daughter, my child, this is, of course, an omen. We have been distinguished. The worm will turn, she said.

She was right. Later, when Paula was stolen, I knew this day had been an omen. She was the first to be chosen.

That night Estefani, Maria, Paula, and I menstruated for the first time. My mother said it was because of the full moon. Estefani’s mother said it was because of the poison triggering something bad inside of us.

But we knew what had really happened.

José Rosa had seen Paula naked. He saw her dark skin and her breasts with their large, brown areolae and soft, black-red nipples and the black hair between her legs. He saw her young, teenage beauty. At that moment, we became one woman and it was as if he’d seen us all.

7

I promised my mother that I would never tell Maria that she was my half-sister.

I don’t want to shake the leaves out of the trees, my mother said.

I won’t tell her.

As Maria grew and the scar from her harelip faded, she looked exactly like my father. If he’d seen her, he would have thought he was looking in a mirror.

My mother noticed it too. She would stare at Maria in a quiet way, studying her face. She was struggling between wanting to take Maria into her arms and kiss her and wanting to slap her hard across the face.

I loved Maria. Out of everyone in that godforsaken-godforgotten-hottest-hell-on-earth place, as my mother liked to call our mountain, she was the kindest person of all. She would walk around a big red fire ant before she’d step on one.

The year that José Rosa was our teacher I remember as a series of events.

The first event was the day of his arrival, combined with the visit at my house when I showed him our beer cemetery. The second event that stands out is the day that Paula was rained on with herbicide.

That year was also measured by watching my mother’s blond hair grow out. By the time the school year was over, her black roots reached almost to her ears. She never dyed it over black, touched it up blond again, or even trimmed it, because Ruth’s beauty salon had closed. And this, the closing of Ruth’s salon, was the third event of that year.

No one saw a thing. No one heard a thing. Nothing was left behind.

We never heard from Ruth again.

Estefani’s grandmother, Sofia, who ran the OXXO convenience store down the block from Ruth’s salon, had risen earlier than usual to go and open her place. It was December tenth. Sofia was expecting the swarms of pilgrims that would pass by her store, and march down all of Mexico’s dirt roads and highways, to get to Mexico City for the Virgin of Guadalupe’s day, on December twelfth.

Sofia walked past the beauty salon as she did every day. The door made of corrugated transparent green plastic was swinging wide open into the street. She peered inside and called Ruth’s name, but there was no answer.

Later she would explain that she could never tell if those bright red spots on the floor were blood or drops of red nail polish.

Nobody did anything as stupid as calling the police. Instead we waited.

When we walked past the beauty parlor that still had its sign The Illusion over the front door, we’d peer in and hope to still see her there. Instead, we only saw two standing hairdryers that our mothers used to sit under and the two empty sinks where Ruth used to wash our hair. The menorah on the windowsill was still there in front of the window that was starred with bullet holes.

We all knew she was stolen.

There are so many dead people out there we’re never going to find them alive, my mother said.

José Rosa was so disturbed by the disappearance of Ruth that he spent two months trying to get someone to come from Mexico City to investigate.

There was only one place on that mountain where our cell phones could get a signal from a tower that was twelve kilometers away. This was in a small clearing on the way to school. There was always someone there either talking on their phone or waiting to get a call from a relative in the United States. The clearing was our link to the world. It was here that good news and bad news reached us. My mother named the place Delphi, after a documentary she’d seen on Greek history.

The sounds of the jungle mixed with the noise from the cell phones. The sound of beeps, rings, songs, and bells that filled the humid air were accompanied by the high-pitch timbre of women’s voices.

At this clearing there were always women waiting to hear from their husbands and male children. Some sat there for days that became weeks, months, and years, and their cell phones never rang.

Once my mother was talking to my father, before he left us for good, and I heard her say, I could swallow this telephone I want you so badly.

It was strange to have a man hanging out there. The presence of José Rosa made everyone a little shy. We listened with fascination as he spoke to lawyers, policemen, and judges, and tried to get someone to come and investigate the disappearance of Ruth.

One afternoon, in order to comfort him, Estefani’s grandmother, Sofia, placed her hands on his shoulders.

A missing woman is just another leaf that goes down the gutter in a rainstorm, she said.

No one cares about Ruth, my mother added. She was stolen like a car.

The fourth event that defined those twelve months occurred in the last week of the school year, in July. It happened on the day before José Rosa left us to go back to Mexico City.

I was at the schoolroom to help José Rosa clean up and take down the posters he’d placed on the wall during the year. He was getting the room ready for the new teacher who would be arriving in the middle of August.

The poster of the world had been put away. Where I once looked at the shapes of Africa and Australia and stared at the deep blue of the seas and oceans there was now an empty brick wall.

The curtain we’d used to wrap Paula’s naked body had never been replaced.

I leaned against the wall that was once covered with a poster of a rainbow and diagrams of light entering and exiting raindrops.

I’m also sad, José Rosa said and walked toward me.

He smelled like black tea with milk and sugar.

He placed his hands on my shoulders and his lips on my lips.

José Rosa tasted like glass windows, cement, and elevators to the moon. His twenty-three-year-old hands held my thirteen-year-old face and he kissed me again. The skyscraper-kiss was mine.

8

Run and hide in the hole.

What did you say, Mama?

Run and hide in the hole. Right now. Hush.

What? Hush. Hush.

My mother had been outside when she saw a tan-colored SUV in the distance. More than actually seeing it, she heard it. There had been a silence in the jungle as the insects and birds grew still.

Quick, she said, run. Run.

I ran out the front door toward the small clearing at the side of the house and under a small palm tree.

The hole was covered with dry palm fronds. I moved the fan-like leaves to one side and scrambled in. From inside, I reached for the fronds and pulled them back over the opening.

The hole was too small. My father had dug it up when I was six years old. I had to lie down on my side with my knees at my chest like skeletal remains of ancient burials I’d seen on television. I could see slivers of light peer in on me through the thatch of leaves.

I heard the sound of a motor approach.

The ground around me trembled as the SUV drove up to our small house and stopped in the clearing, right above the hole and above me.

My small space became dark as I lay in the shadow of the vehicle. Through the leaves I could see the SUV’s underbelly, a web of tubes and metal.

Above me the motor was turned off. I could hear the sound of the handbrake as it was cranked into place. The car door opened on the driver’s side.

One brown cowboy boot with a high but square and manly heel stepped out of the car.

Those boots did not belong to this land. No one wore boots like that in this heat.

As he stood with the car door open he looked straight at my mother. From the hole I could only see his boots and her red plastic flip-flops face each other.

Good day, Mother, he said.

The man’s voice did not belong to this land. The boots and his voice were from the north of Mexico.

Is it always this hot here? he asked. How hot do you think it is?

My mother did not answer.

Ay, Mother, put down that gun.

The other car door opened.

I could not swivel in my hole to try and look around so I just listened.

From the passenger side of the SUV another man stepped out.

Do you want me to shoot her missing? the second man asked. He coughed and wheezed after he spoke. He had an asthmatic voice from the desert, a voice of rattlesnakes and sandstorms.

Where’s your daughter, huh? the first man asked.

I don’t have a daughter.

Ay, yes you do. Don’t lie to me, Mother.

I heard a bullet hit the SUV.

The vehicle shook above me.

I heard the bratata explosion of machine-gun fire along with the sound of the bullets breaking up the adobe brick walls of our home.

Then it stopped. The jungle swelled and contracted. Insects, reptiles, and birds stilled and nothing rubbed against anything. The sky darkened.

The machine gun had fired the wind out of the mountain.

We were your best hope, Mother, the first man said.

I birthmarked the place, didn’t I? I heard the second man say through a shrill wheeze that became a whistle.

The two men got back in the car and slammed the doors shut. The driver turned the key and started the motor. When he placed his boot on the accelerator above me, my hole was filled with the vehicle’s exhaust fumes. I opened my mouth and breathed in the noxious smoke.

The car backed up and drove off down the path.

I breathed deeply.

I took in the poison as if it were the smell of a flower or fruit.

My mother made me spend the next two hours in that hole.

You’re not coming out until I hear a bird sing, she said.

It was almost dark when she pulled the fronds off of the hole and helped me out. Our little house was sprayed with dozens of bullets. Even the papaya tree had bullet wounds and sweet sap oozed from the holes in the soft bark.

Just look at that, my mother said.

I turned. She was pointing at the hole with her finger.

I peered in and saw four albino-shell scorpions there. The deadliest kind.

Those scorpions showed you more mercy than any human being ever will, my mother said.

She took off one of her flip-flops and killed all four in beating blows.

Mercy is not a two-way street, she said. Then she scooped them up in her hand and threw them to one side.

When we lifted up the fronds in order to cover the hole again, we found a blue plastic asthma inhaler. It was on the ground where the second man had fired his weapon at my house and trees.

What do we do with it? I asked. I was afraid to touch it.

I bet he doesn’t come back for it, my mother said.

But that man won’t be able to breathe.

Just leave it there. Don’t touch it.

The next day, up the mountain at the clearing where the cell phones sometimes worked, we found out that those men had succeeded in stealing Paula.

Maria was sitting off alone under a tree pinching her harelip scar. Estefani’s mother, Augusta, was standing straight in the middle of the clearing with her cell phone held high above her head as she tried to get a signal. Estefani’s grandmother, Sofia, was talking frantically to someone.

Paula’s mother, Concha, sat and stared at her phone as if her eyes could will it to ring. Call me, call me, Paula, call me, she whispered into the phone.

My mother sat down next to Concha.

They came to our house first, my mother said.

Concha lifted up her face and looked at me. Did you get into your hole? she asked.

Yes. I was in the hole.

Paula didn’t make it. The dogs didn’t bark. We didn’t hear them coming. The dogs didn’t bark.

Concha had the meanest, scariest dogs anyone had ever seen. They were injured animals run over by cars that she picked up off the highway. She had at least ten dogs soaking up the shade in the trees around her house. Mostly they were ugly inbreeds. My mother used to say that those dogs needed poison.

Concha held the cell phone high above her head.

I never heard them kill the dogs, Concha said.

They killed the dogs?

Paula and I were watching television, Concha said. We’d just finished bathing and we were wrapped in our towels, cooling off, sitting on the couch. I heard a noise behind me. He could have touched us. I didn’t hear him. He pointed a pistol at me. He used his other hand to curl his finger at Paula. You’re coming with me, he said but he didn’t really say it. His finger said it as it curled again and again. Paula stood, holding the towel around her body. She walked over to the man and they both walked out the door and into the SUV. She was still in her towel, only her towel.

Concha followed them outside and watched the SUV disappear down the road. The area around the house was covered with the bleeding bodies of her dead dogs. The television was still playing loudly inside.

Barefoot, wrapped in a towel, Concha said again and shook her head.

Under the lemon tree, at the edge of her small plot of land, was the hole she’d dug years ago for Paula to hide in.

I buried the dogs in there, Concha said. I just buried them one on top of the other in Paula’s hole.

That day Mike was up on the clearing. He chewed his gum rhythmically with only his front teeth. The white lump would appear and disappear behind his lips. I had not seen him for a few weeks since he spent most of his time in Acapulco. He always stood apart from everyone else with his arm held high, telephone in the air, searching for a signal. He had at least five phones spread out around his body, in all his pockets. He sounded like a music box of ringtones, vibrations, bells, and rap and electronic music. He said he had a US telephone, Mexico City telephone, Florida telephone, and several Acapulco telephones. It was Maria who told me he was selling marijuana. This was the reason he had money. We didn’t care. Thanks to Mike it was Christmas on our mountain every month of the year. He was always buying presents for everyone.

If Mike was home, he spent his time up at the clearing. He’d receive calls from all over the USA and Europe. He even had a Facebook page and Twitter account. It seemed that everyone in the USA knew that Mike was the guy to buy drugs from in Mexico. Maria said that Mike was famous in the United States. During US holidays, tourists, especially kids on spring break, ordered their drugs from him before arriving in Acapulco. His nickname was Mr. Wave.

Mike was plugged into his iPod all day so it was impossible to talk to him. He listened to hip-hop and rap and was constantly skipping and moving to a beat. He even spoke with a beat to his words. If he’d had a dream, it would have been to be a hip-hop dancer in New York City. If he’d had a dream, but he didn’t. His life moved from weekend to weekend as if those seven days, from Monday to Sunday, were a season.

On the day Paula was stolen he switched his iPod to off and burrowed it deep in the front pocket of his jeans.

That day all anyone could hear was the silence of cell phones. That was it. It was the sound of Paula stolen. That was the song.

9

The next day was the first day without Paula.

The new teacher had a completely different approach to his job. Mr. Rosa had been diligent and had followed the Secretariat of Public Education’s curriculum. Our new teacher, Rafael de la Cruz, didn’t care. All he wanted to do was to get his year of social service over and done with and go back to Guadalajara, his hometown, where his fiancée lived. Instead of having lessons, we’d sit in class and listen to music. He brought a CD player and two portable speakers to our classroom. We had never listened to classical music before.

Every morning we’d get to school and sit down in our chairs and wait for Mr. de la Cruz to arrive. He was always late. When he’d finally arrive, sometimes up to two hours late, he’d walk into the room, take the CD player and the speakers out of a small suitcase, and say, So you’re all still here. I was never sure what that was supposed to mean. Where would we be?

He only played Tchaikovsky. Swan Lake floated out of our schoolroom, across our jungle, over our homes, hills covered in poppies and marijuana plants, down the black oily highway, and across the Sierra Madre, until the sound of swans dancing covered the whole country.

He must be a homosexual! my mother said.

The new teacher had no interest in us. I liked him. He came to the school, played music, and went back to his little one-room house and never came out of that room until the next day. But, in that schoolroom, for four or five hours, he made us cross our arms on our white plastic desks and lay our heads down, close our eyes, and listen.

During these concerts, Estefani would fall asleep and later complain that the music actually made her feel cold. After she figured out this was all we were going to do for the year, she brought a blanket to school and covered her back and shoulders. As Estefani’s mother, Augusta, became sicker from AIDS, Estefani became colder. The mother was sucking the heat out of the daughter.

Maria, who was the best cumbia and salsa dancer around, didn’t mind listening to this music. As long as she didn’t have to do mathematics, she was happy.

On those mornings I laid my head on my arms and closed my eyes. Within Tchaikovsky’s music, I heard the earth quake below the ground. I heard tree roots spread under the land. I heard poppies open their petals.

I listened for Paula’s voice, but I heard nothing.

I was sure she was dead. We were all sure she was dead. So, when she came back, my mother said, Oh my, the coffin has been opened and she walked out of it.

That was the last year that we went to school. A Primary School diploma was a door out of childhood. The truth is some of us were twelve, thirteen, or even fourteen when this happened because it took forever to graduate. There were years when teachers simply gave up and left halfway through or years no teacher ever even showed up.

The only reason we graduated was that Mr. de la Cruz didn’t care if we knew anything or not. He announced that there would be no final exams and he signed the diplomas and got out of there as fast as he could. I was sure he thought it was a great success to have left our part of the world without a bullet hole in his body.

Now that school was over we had to think about what we were going to do. Estefani knew she had no choice. She was going to spend these next years watching her mother die. Maria was going to wait and see. Mike was bringing more money home and was pushing for Maria and his mother to leave this mountain and move to Acapulco. He said he was going to buy them a house. Nobody even asked what Paula would do as she now lived like a baby and was locked up in her house all day.

My mother said to me, You’re not going to sell iguanas on the side of the road. You’re not going to go to the beauty parlor school in Acapulco. You’re not going to be a maid in Mexico City. You’re not going to work in a factory on the border. You’re not going to stay here doing nothing and you better not get pregnant or I’ll kill you.

One day my mother and I were up on the clearing when Mike came over and stood next to us. He literally seemed to hop to the music of the cell phones in all his pockets that rang and chimed and jangled and buzzed. He fidgeted and wriggled inside of himself as if his bones were strutting inside the clothing of skin. As a young boy he used to walk around with a pet iguana tied to a string. He was heartbroken when his mother stewed that iguana in a pot with carrots and potatoes.

From one of his pockets Mike pulled out a gold chain and gave it to my mother. I’ve always wanted to give you something pretty, Rita, he said. You’ve got enough ugly in your house.

Mike said he knew of a family in Acapulco who needed help with their small child and was looking for a nanny.

That’s perfect, my mother said. That’s perfect for you, Ladydi.

You’ll have to live in Acapulco most of the week, Mike explained. You’ll make pretty money. These people are rich, rich, rich. Mike punctuated the word rich by snapping his fingers three times: snap, snap, snap.

My mother stood up straight when she heard the family was rich. I knew she was thinking of all the things I could steal and bring home. In the mirror of her eyes, I was filling up my bag with a lipstick and a bottle of shampoo.

I knew what it would mean to leave. I knew my mother would fall asleep with her jaw dropped and her mouth agape. The television would be tuned to the History Channel and words about castles in France or the history of chess would fill the room. She would be surrounded by empty beer bottles. Long black ants would crawl in and out of her mouth and there would not be a daughter around to flick them away.

Yes, I said to Mike. Yes.

As my mother and I left the clearing and walked back home together we moved past the tree where we’d buried the corpse years ago before Paula was stolen. We never found out whom that young man belonged to. No one ever came around asking. The jungle has ears all over, my mother said. There are no secrets here.

That afternoon I found out what had happened to Paula.

I was walking down the path that led to the schoolroom, when I ran into Paula sitting under a tree. She was sitting on the ground, which we never did. On our mountain we always placed something between our skin and the earth.

She was wearing a long dress that covered her like a tent. I knew that insects were crawling up her bare legs under the cloth.

I felt the warm, black earth under my feet.

The ground had brought us together.

I wanted to hold her hand. Her face was bent over as she looked at something in her lap.

I walked slowly toward her, the way I had learned to walk when I wanted to catch a small garter snake or a baby iguana. As I approached, my body came between her body and the sun and I covered her with the eclipse of my shadow.

She looked up and I sat next to her on the ground. I knew I’d be brushing black and red ants off my skin within a minute. Paula’s dress was covered with black ants swarming all over. A few had already migrated up her clothes; crawled around her neck and behind her ears. She did not flick them off.

Don’t you feel so sorry for Britney Spears? Paula said.

The long sleeves of Paula’s dress were folded over and pushed up. On her left arm, the inside where the skin is pale and thin like guava skin, I could see a row of cigarette burns, circles, polka dots, pink circles.

You know, Paula continued, Britney has many tattoos.

Yes? No, I didn’t know.

Oh yes. She has a fairy and small daisy circling her toe.

No, I didn’t know.

And she has a butterfly and another flower and a small star on her right hand.

Oh. Really?

Yes. Her body is like a garden.

Do you know who I am? I asked.

Oh, yes, of course. You’re Ladydi.

I brushed a few ants off her legs and arms. Get up, I said. The ants are going to eat you alive if you sit here any longer.

The ants?

Does your mother know where you are?

I took hold of her wrists and helped lift her up. I will take you home, I said.

Let me be with you for a little longer. I like you, Paula said. You’re nice to me.

I held her hand and walked with her toward a log a few steps away.

We can’t sit on the ground, I said.

We sat down, side by side, looking forward as if we were on a bus heading down a highway. I took her hand in mine and looked at the pattern of cigarette burns on the inside belly-skin of her arm.

I’ve seen tigers and lions, she said. Real ones. It wasn’t a zoo.

Tell me.

At that place there was a garage for the cars and a garage for the animals.

You can tell me.

Paula described the ranch. It was in the north of Mexico, in the state of Tamaulipas, right on the US border. An important drug trafficker, who was known by the nickname McClane after Bruce Willis’s character in the movie Die Hard, lived with his wife and four children. McClane had been a policeman.

I was his slave-mistress, Paula said.

Slave-mistress?

Yes. We call ourselves that. All of us do.

At one end of the ranch there was a garage that housed McClane’s cars, which included four BMWs, two Jaguars, and several pickup trucks and SUVs. Next to the garage there were cement rooms that contained a lion and three tigers. Paula learned from the caretakers that the animals had been bought from zoos in the United States. The property also contained its own small cemetery with four large mausoleums that were the size of little houses. Each mausoleum even had a bathroom.

It wasn’t a zoo. Every day the lion and tiger excrement was picked up and wrapped into drug shipments bound for the United States. This practice kept the drug-sniffing border dogs away from the shipments.

Paula’s job on the ranch was to sleep with McClane every now and again and to help pack the lion and tiger excrement around the drugs or rub a small film of the excrement on the outside of plastic packages.

Someone told me they were fed human meat, Paula said.

The sky began to darken as we sat on the log holding hands. In the dusk, small clouds of mosquitoes began to surround us, but since Paula continued to talk I sat there and let them bite. She didn’t seem to notice the feeling of insects crawling or biting her skin.

I don’t need to tell you that along the way I was a plastic water bottle, right? Paula said. I was something you pick up and take a swig of.

I shook my head. No, no.

Those guys who stole me were from Matameros. They took me north to that party. It was McClane’s daughter’s birthday party. She was fifteen.

A whole circus had been rented for the party. Several large tents had been set up in a field to one side of the ranch house. A man walked around giving away clouds of pink cotton candy on long wood sticks. There was a band and a large dance floor.

Paula was taken to one of the tents that had been placed very far away from the party. She could hardly hear the band play. Inside this tent there were a few men and over thirty women. Rows of plastic chairs were set up at one side of the tent. In the middle of the open space there was a table with Cokes, beers, plastic glasses, and paper plates piled high with peanuts covered in red chili powder. The women in the tent had been stolen. The drug traffickers, who’d killed Paula’s mother’s dogs and had stolen her wrapped naked in a white towel, were now going to sell her.

McClane was in the tent. He looked at the women and asked them to smile. He wanted to see their teeth. But he didn’t look into Paula’s mouth.

McClane picked Paula. He picked the most beautiful girl in Mexico. She should have been a legend. Her face should have covered magazines. Love songs should have been written to her.

On the log beside me, Paula continued to look straight ahead as she spoke. When she seemed to grow tired she continued to tell her story only as a mix of impressions.

You don’t need to know about the sun rising and setting, she said. You don’t need to know what I ate or where I slept. You need to know that McClane had over two hundred pairs of boots. They were made from every kind of animal and reptile that was in Noah’s Ark. He had a pair made from donkey penises. One pair he liked to wear on Sundays. These were a pale yellow and everyone said were made of human flesh.

Paula’s impressions tumbled out of her as if they were a list she’d penciled down on a paper. She said that McClane’s daughter had over two hundred Barbie dolls. One doll had been dipped in gold and had real green emeralds for eyes. McClane had a box filled with feathers from the cocks he raised for cock fights. McClane had a scar across his belly as if he’d almost been cut in half by a magician. The sons all had their own toy cars. These were real cars, but miniatures, that even ran on gasoline. The ranch had a miniature gas station and a miniature OXXO store beside it.

The women that Paula met in the tent, and saw at other times at parties, were Gloria, Aurora, Isabel, Esperanza, Lupe, Lola, Claudia, and Mercedes.

Who are those women? I asked.

Oh, girls like me, she said. And the daughter had a small house to play in with toilets that flushed.

How much did you cost?

Oh, I was a present.

Why do you have those cigarette burns on your arm?

Oh, but we all have them, Ladydi. She looked down at the inside of her arm, stretching it out before her as if she were showing me the page of a book.

If you’ve been stolen, you burn the inside of your left arm with cigarettes.

Why? I don’t understand.

Are you crazy? she asked. Are you stupid?

I’m sorry.

A woman decided it a long, long time ago and now we all do it, she said. If we’re found dead someplace everyone will know we were stolen. It is our mark. My cigarette burns are a message.

I looked at the pattern of circles on her arm as she continued to hold her limb, stretched out like an oar into the jungle air.

You do want people to know it’s you. Otherwise how will our mothers find us?

It was almost dark.

We have to go now, I said. Come with me. I’ll take you.

Her mother was standing at the front door waiting. She held a baby bottle filled with milk in one hand.

It’s time for my baby to go to bed, Concha said. What on earth were you doing out in the jungle?

Paula didn’t answer and went straight into the house.

Her mother walked me out to the edge of their property.

Did she say anything to you? Concha asked. Don’t say anything to anyone, Concha said in a panic. How did they know she was here? Who watched and knew a beautiful girl lived up here? They came for her. They knew what they were coming for. If they know she’s back, if they find out, they’ll come back and get her. We have to leave. There’s no time. In a day or so. I’ve been planning. Ladydi, we’re escaping. What did she tell you?

She told me about the cigarette burns.

Did she tell you that she did it to herself? Did she tell you that all the women who have been robbed do this to themselves?

I nodded.

Do you believe her? Concha asked. I don’t believe it at all. I can’t even imagine burning myself. That’s impossible.

Yes. I believe it.

At that moment Paula appeared behind her mother. She was like a white vaporous creature. She held a baby bottle in one hand. She was naked. In the dark, under a river of moonlight, I could see the nipples of her breasts, the black hair between her legs, and the constellation of cigarette burns all over her body. I could see the cigarette-burn stars that made up Orion and Taurus. Even her feet were covered in the round burns. Paula had walked through the Milky Way and every star had burned her body.

10

Concha turned and picked up Paula in her arms as if she were a four-year-old girl and carried her into their house. That was the last time I ever saw Concha and Paula.

We knew they were gone when Concha’s three dogs appeared near our house rummaging for food. They were stray dogs Concha had picked up after her other dogs had been slaughtered the day Paula was stolen.

Why didn’t she kill those damn dogs before she left? my mother said. We’re not taking care of them. Don’t give them anything to eat Ladydi, do you hear?

We went over to Paula’s house to see if they’d left or not.

As we reached the small two-room house everything looked as if Paula and her mother were about to return.

Yes, my mother said. This is how you disappear: as if you’re going to appear.

There was a fresh and full carton of milk on the small kitchen table and the television was turned on. The sound of the news from Acapulco filled the room: there’d been a shootout at a bar. Two new morgues were being built. A severed head had been found on the beach.

My mother started to poke around that house and it was that kind of poking around that I knew too well. She picked up a half-full bottle of tequila, an electric coffee maker, and a large bag of potato chips.

You go and look in Paula’s room and see what she’s left behind. Maybe there’re some jeans or T-shirts you can use, she said.

Her small bed was there. It was raised up from the ground on a pile of bricks. This kept her away from the mouse-sized cockroaches that crawled around the floor at night. The wall was covered with dozens of huge, thick nails on which she’d hung her clothes so that her wall looked like a collage of cloth. I could see several pairs of plastic flip-flops and a pair of tennis shoes lined up in a row under her bed. There were two empty baby bottles lying on the pillow and a shoebox on her bed.

I opened the shoebox.

The jungle heat filled my mouth. Ants and spiders were running through my blood.

There were a few photographs in the shoebox. I looked deep into the small black eyes of the man who had squeezed the sweet girl out of Paula’s body. The photos were of a man and his family. The man was dressed in a red-and-white checkered shirt, jeans with a wide leather belt that had an oval silver buckle. He was also wearing black, high-heeled cowboy boots. These people were from the north of Mexico. Their clothes told that story. It was McClane.

I took the photographs out of the box and stuffed them down into my jeans. At the bottom of the box there was a small notebook, which I placed into my back pocket.

My mother appeared in the doorway.

It’s horrible to think, but someone must have been watching Paula for years, my mother said. They were just watching her grow up.

She was holding the bottle of tequila in one hand and the bag of potato chips in the other.

She’d been picked out a long time ago, my mother said. She’d been watched the way we watch an apple on a tree: we watch it grow until it’s ripe and then we pick it.

As we walked home, I could feel the dry, thin cardboard photographs tucked down the front of my jeans as I moved. My mother had left her flat, white plastic sandals behind and was wearing Concha’s bright green plastic flip-flops that had a red plastic flower attached to the front straps. My mother followed my eyes and looked down at her feet.

Well, Ladydi, she said, Concha’s not going to use them anymore, right?

My mother was carrying the bottle of tequila and the bag of chips.

We walked in silence for a while and then my mother suddenly turned her head and spat on the ground.

If anyone wants to create a symbol or a flag for our piece of earth on Earth it should be a plastic flip-flop, she said.

When we got home the front door was open and Mike was sitting inside our house waiting for us. It seemed strange to me that he would wait inside. People did not do that. They did not go inside a house and sit down when there was no one home. Our house even smelled strongly of his cologne, which had a minty smell, like chewing gum.

He sat in the kitchen with the refrigerator door wide open the way people sit in front of a fire. Two telephones rested on his thigh. I could see that Mike had begun to grow out his hair, which he had shaved off a few years ago, so that it looked like small bushy tufts of black grass all over his head.

So, you were confused and thought this was your house? my mother said to Mike.

She placed the tequila and chips on the kitchen table.

Shut that door! she commanded.

Now don’t get angry, Little Mother, he said, standing up quickly and closing the refrigerator door with one swipe of his hand.

Mike called all the older women on our hill Little Mother. Even my mother, who didn’t take sweetness from anyone, seemed to like it. I knew she was about to scream at him for coming into our house, snooping around and opening up the fridge, but the words Little Mother stopped her. It was as if the words caressed her and could make her purr.

On our mountain a refrigerator was our most important appliance, piece of furniture, or whatever one wanted to call it. It was our door to the North Pole, polar bears, seals, and glaciers. On a hot day everyone sat around it with the door wide open. During the day we kept our pillows inside to cool them. The cotton pillows rested among cans of beer, a box of eggs, and packets of cheese wrapped in plastic. At night, for an hour or so, our heads would rest on cool cotton. When one side of the pillow warmed up, we’d just flip it over. The pillow cooled down our minds and dreams. My mother was the inventor of this idea. Everyone on the mountain did it.

The refrigerator was one of the main things my mother prayed to. She said that a cold beer could make you love a refrigerator.

My mother poured herself a small shot of tequila and opened the bag of chips with her teeth.

So, what’s up? she asked Mike.

Mike explained that he would meet me down on the highway on Monday morning, which was in two days, and that we’d take the bus together to Acapulco. I had an appointment to meet the family I was going to work with at eleven in the morning. I should pack a bag and be ready to stay there.

I left my mother drinking in our little house and walked Mike some of the way down to the highway. I wanted to ask him about Maria. Now that we no longer went to school, I rarely saw Maria. I didn’t like to go to Maria’s house because it was hard to face the fact that her mother, Luz, had been my father’s mistress. Everyone on the mountain knew the scandal, and Mike knew, of course, as he knew everything about everyone. The only person who did not know who she was, was Maria. The only person who did not know that her harelip had been God’s curse was Maria. I wanted to tell her she was my half-sister and wanted her to love me even more as her sister, but I was so afraid that she would hate me if she knew who she really was.

I told Mike to tell Maria that I wanted to see her. I asked him to tell her to meet me at the schoolroom late that afternoon.

Mike skipped down the mountain to a tune of three cell phones all suddenly ringing at the same time. It was as if the reception dead zone had opened in the air and a phone signal came down on him like lightning.

When I turned to walk back to my house, I remembered the photographs that were still stuffed down the front of my pants. I reached in and took out the square photos printed on soft cardboard.

There were six photographs. One was of a man, who I assumed to be McClane, standing on an airstrip next to a small plane. Two other photographs were of women standing against a wall in groups. Paula was in both of these. Another photograph was of McClane standing in front of a row of medieval suits of armor. It looked as if he was inside a castle.

The last two photographs in the group were of a large red horse trailer. It was a small unit capable of holding two or three horses, the kind that can be pulled by a pickup truck or an SUV. One of the photographs had been taken with care to show the blood spilling out of the door.

When I got back home, my mother was in a frenzy killing flies with a flyswatter. The weather had been so hot over the past month there was an epidemic of flies. These were the fat, juicy kind of flies, with spiky fur on their backs. When this fly bites it leaves a big red welt that hurts for days. There were black, bloody specks all over our kitchen table and floor.

Get down on your knees and pray for the flyswatter, my mother said. Who left the goddamned door open?

You know, I said.

My mother gave me a look, a nasty look, and continued to swat at the flies. I recognized the flyswatter she’d stolen from the Reyes’ house at least two years ago. Pray for the flyswatter, she said.

My mother hated those flies but she loved to kill them. It was a happy bloodbath in that small kitchen.

She knew, what we all knew, the flies always win.

I ran past my mother and the dead black-and-red flies, and hid Paula’s photographs in my room under my mattress.

When I walked back out to the kitchen, my mother was sitting at the table with the flyswatter lying across her lap. Bloody pieces of squashed flies were embedded in the plastic netting. She was taking a deep swig, almost half the bottle of beer, in one great swallow. Then she pulled the bottle from her lips. It made a hollow sucking sound.

I sat down in the middle of the massacre.

I am so angry, my mother said.

What happened?

On the television they were talking about a magazine that is publishing an issue about what it is to be a woman!

So?

I’d tell them the truth.

What’s the truth, Mama?

A woman’s world is in her panties.

Yes?

Do you think those Mexico City women writers are going to write about the sadness? Yes, the sadness when you find there is blood there and this means one thing. You’re beginning to lose your baby!

What are you saying, Mama? I asked.

Between the fly massacre and the rant about panties, I was worried about her. The look in her eyes reminded me of the look she’d had on her face when our mountain was hit by a bad earthquake. Later, after the earthquake, after it was all over, she said we should have known.

Two weeks before the earthquake our little two-room house had been invaded by every creature around. Black widows, red tarantulas, and white transparent and brown scorpions began to show up everywhere. Red ants were crawling all over the ceiling. We found a nest of snakes, like a knot of black ribbons, behind the television.

My mother’s reaction to this was to watch the television all day and all night. She didn’t cook and I had to rummage around for a dry tortilla and cheese and even open up a can of tuna fish, which we would normally never eat because she decided one day that it tasted like cat food. My mother watched television because it was the only way out of our mountain.

As I killed as many insects as I could and ate dried mango strips, she traveled to Petra and visited a family of Bedouins who had been expelled from their cave and were now living in Bedouin Village, which was cement government housing. Their camel lived in their cement garage. My mother traveled to India where she watched medical tourists have cheap operations. She watched the Miss Universe contest. On the History Channel she sat through six episodes on Henry VIII’s wives.

During one of those pre-earthquake days a stray sheep appeared at our doorway. I had gone outside to get away from the television and my mother and there it was, sitting on the ground in the shade of a papaya tree.

When I went inside to tell my mother about it, she just looked through me and said, Next thing you’ll tell me is that Mary and Joseph are outside and need a place to sleep.

These were the first words she’d said in days. But then she turned away from me and looked back at the program on the objects that have been found in the bellies of dead sharks. A man was cutting open the shark’s belly on the deck of a ship and pulling out a wedding ring.

I went outside and gave the sheep some water. The animal lapped it up with its small tongue. It was the first time I’d seen blue eyes in real life and not on television.

When I went back inside the house, the sheep followed me in.

My mother turned and looked at it and said, That is not a sheep, Lady, that’s a lamb, just in time for the slaughter.

I was not exactly sure what she meant by that. It could mean that we were going to kill the lamb and eat it for supper or maybe she was into biblical sayings now that we had become the Noah’s Ark for insects.

Since I had looked into the animal’s blue eyes, I knew I could not eat it. I ended up shooing it out of our house and down the mountain. I hoped a large silver passenger bus on the way to Acapulco did not run over it.

The reason for all that craziness on the mountain was the earthquake. On the news, we heard that the epicenter had been just outside the port of Acapulco.

That’s us, my mother said with excitement. We live outside the port of Acapulco! Of course it was right here, under us!

That earthquake hit at seven thirty that morning. We were having breakfast when our two-room house began to shake. Outside we watched the ground move in waves as if it were made of water.

On the day my mother killed the flies, ranted about praying to panties, and was drinking too much, I felt scared. She was breaking. I could see the shards.

What are you trying to tell me, Mama? I said. Be clear.

My mother threw her head back and rolled her eyes.

Yes, yes, yes. Some days I pulled, tore with my teeth, the skin around the sides of my fingernails and gave them to you to eat.

Are you saying this?

You were not even a year old. I mixed it in the rice. What did you want me to do? There are women who have cut off slabs of skin from their bodies to feed their children. I heard about that on TV.

Shit, Mama, I said.

What’s the difference between that and mother’s milk? You tell me?

No, Mother, I said. Those fancy Mexico City writers are not going to write about that!

God only knew if any of this was true. My mother placed lying in the category of stealing. Why should one tell the truth about something, if you can lie instead? This was her philosophy. If my mother took the bus, she said she took a taxi.

It was going to be a long afternoon until she passed out. The tequila bottle from Paula’s house was empty. My mother stood and took another beer from the fridge.

I killed them, she said, so you can clean them up.

I grabbed an old rag by the sink and started to wipe the dead flies off the chairs, tabletops, and walls.

A few hours later when I left to meet Maria at the schoolroom, my mother was on her fifth beer. She was lying on her bed fanning herself with a piece of cardboard she’d ripped off the side of a cornflakes cereal box. The television was on full blast. In her stupor, she was watching a program about wild animals in the Amazon.

Why doesn’t NatGeo come here and film our mountain? Mother asked.

As I walked away from my house, I stopped and looked back. Our small two-room structure had long rusty girders sticking out toward a second floor that was never built. All the houses on the mountain were like this. We built with the dream of a second floor. But, instead of second floors, we all had parabolic antennas. If our mountain were seen from space, it would look like a white land made of thousands of opened umbrellas.

Maria was at the schoolroom. She was sitting at her old desk and looked like a portrait of our childhood. Her hair was fixed up in a round bun at the top of her head. We called this her onion hairdo. It was pulled so tight she could not blink properly.

Every time I looked at her, and saw my father in her face, I had to stop myself from telling her the truth. Sometimes I even thought that the only reason I could remember what my father looked like was because Maria was there to remind me. When my mother found out that my father had another family over there she burned all his photographs on the stove, just like tortillas. One after the other they curled and toasted on the stovetop until they turned into black, gray ash. I watched his Sinatra smile and my birthday cakes and birthday balloons float out the door in smoke.

The scar from Maria’s harelip had faded. But when I looked at her I always saw the old face, the vulnerable old face that was mythical and painful. The scar had gone, but that harelip still made her who she was.

I sat down at my old school desk right next to hers. We had sat like this for years. Our dry, scratchy, little-girl elbows used to touch as we practiced our penmanship and numbers. In this room we had been able to leave our homes and the jungle and dream about a different kind of life.

Maria told me that Augusta, Estefani’s mother, was running a high fever and that they were leaving tomorrow morning for Mexico City where there was an AIDS charity that gave her the pills she needed. Augusta had been sick with AIDS now for over six years and these trips back and forth to the city had become routine.

I told Maria that Paula and Concha had left the mountain forever.

I told Maria about the photographs. When Maria heard about the photographs she stood up.

Ruth? Maria said. Did you ask about Ruth?

On the mountain everyone was sure that the disappearance of Ruth and the stealing of Paula were related.

I shook my head.

I didn’t ask. I’m sorry, I said.

I watched Maria rub her finger over her harelip scar. The day of the operation I watched my mother and Ruth smoke a whole pack of Salem cigarettes. The menthol smoke filled the beauty parlor. As little girls Maria and I used to steal the butts from Ruth’s ashtray and suck on the filters as if they were a Halls Mentho-Lyptus. I could taste the mint filters as I looked at Maria’s face.

Did you look at them carefully? Did you look and see if one of the women in the photos was Ruth?

No.

Let’s go.

We stood and marched out of the schoolroom toward my house. We walked quickly, almost skipping, filled with the hope of finding Ruth’s face in the photographs. In our foolish dream we ran through the jungle filled with a silly joy.

It was that fast, fast like an arm that becomes a snake. Her arm moved. I saw the shadow on the wall and then, so fast, like when a scorpion lifts up its tail or an iguana zaps its tongue out into a hive-like vapor of gnats. That fast. My mother had the small silver pistol in her hand and everything was ready. It was as if the whole Sierra Madre grew still. I heard the sound of crushed bone and that was a sound I’d never heard before.

I heard the sound of crushed bone as that bullet went into Maria, into my half-sister, into my father’s other daughter, into the daughter that looked just like him.

This can happen after ten bottles of beer mixed with tequila. If they’d drawn my mother’s blood into a syringe, her blood would have been yellow. If her blood had been placed in a test tube and held up to the light it would have been pure Corona. But no one would do a test or call the police on our mountain.

Calling the police was like inviting a scorpion into your house. Who does that? my mother always said.

What happened to my mother that afternoon? The light held that moment between afternoon and dusk. In that light, that is almost not light, who did she think was at her threshold?

I knelt beside Maria and looked into my father’s face. I looked at her face and it was like looking into a lake. Under the surface, as if I could see a lakebed of stones and silver fish, I could see her torn face, the stitches, and the scars of the harelip.

I could feel the warm blood in my hands as I opened her clothes to look at the wound.

When Maria opened her eyes we looked at each other.

What was that? she asked.

Where the hell did you get that gun, Mother? I spat the words at my mother as I placed my hand around Maria’s waist.

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.

I’ve done this thousands of times, the locksmith said as he placed the ring, now cut into two pieces, in the palm of my mother’s hand.

She looked down at the two commas of gold.

What the hell am I supposed to do with this? she said.

That locksmith did not know he had saved the songbirds of Mexico.

At the emergency room Maria’s arm was sewn up and bandaged. The doctor said she’d been very lucky. The bullet had only fractured her arm.

It was my mother’s unlucky lucky day.

As the doctors were taking care of Maria, her mother, Luz, arrived. This could only mean that my mother had told her.

I could not look at Luz.

I stared at the linoleum hospital floor.

I knew this was retribution. Luz was not going to press charges against my mother. Luz had it coming. How dare she fool around with her friend’s husband? It was payback time and Luz was lucky her daughter was alive.

In the movies, my mother would have had a huge realization after shooting Maria, which would have made her quit drinking. In the movies, she would have dedicated her life to helping alcoholics or battered women. In the movies, God would have smiled at her repentance. But this was not the movies.

11

At home my mother was lying in bed under a cotton sheet. The television was off. For the first time in years, I heard the deep, loud jungle silence. I heard crickets and I heard the mosquito swarms buzz around the house.

Her form under the white cloth looked like a boulder. On the floor, beside the bed, were three empty beer bottles. The brown glass of the empty containers looked like gold awash in the band of moonlight that came in from a window.

I sat at the edge of the bed.

I thought it was your father, my mother whimpered from inside her sheet-cave.

Go to sleep, Mama.

I really, really thought it was your father, she said again.

In the silent room I wanted to reach out and pick up the remote control and turn the television on.

I did not know what to do with this kind of quiet.

The sound of the TV had made me feel like we were having a party or it felt like we had a large family. The sound of the television was aunts and uncles and brothers and sisters.

The silence of a mother and daughter alone on a mountain where a crime has been committed was the silence of the last two people on Earth.

I left my mother and went to my small room. I took off my T-shirt. It had Maria’s blood on it. I took off my skirt and underwear that were stiff from dried urine and lay on my bed.

The notebook I’d taken, along with Paula’s photographs, was still in the back pocket of my jeans that were laid out at the foot of my bed. I reached for it and sat on the bed and began to read. The handwriting belonged to Paula.

The notebook contained lists of things written with a blunt pencil. The first pages had lists of animals and animal parts. The rows itemized: two tigers, three lions, and one panther.

The next few pages had lists of women’s names. Some of the names had last names and some did not. The list read: Mercedes, Aurora, Rebeca, Emilia, Juana, Juana Arrondo, Linda Gonzalez, Lola, Leona, and Julia Mendez.

The rest of the notebook was blank except for the last page where Paula’s address was written: Chulavista, Guerrero, outside Chilpancingo, house of Concha.

I closed the notebook and placed it under my mattress with the photographs. Then I lay down on my bed and went to sleep.

The sound of the television woke me up. A bullfight was being broadcast from the great bullring in Mexico City.

I lay in bed listening. I could not understand why my mother was watching a bullfight as she’d sworn them off years ago. She’d seen a documentary where she learned that horses have their vocal cords severed and that is why they do not neigh, nicker, or scream during a bullfight. On our large, flat-screen television, we also could see that the bulls cry. On our mountain we saw their tears roll out of their eyes and fall on the sand that was stained with blood and sequins.

I stretched and walked out to the kitchen. My mother was at the kitchen table drinking a beer. She had a plate of toasted peanuts and garlic dusted with orange chili powder in front of her.

She looked up at me. I was afraid. I wanted to see the change. What was it going to be like? Who were we? Yellow beer tears stained her cheeks.

Paula was gone. Estefani was moving to Mexico City so her mother could get better medical care. Maria would never speak to me again. Ruth had been stolen forever. My father was over there.

That morning the mountain was empty.

I closed my hands into fists so that I would not start to count up the amount of people we had lost on my fingers.

My mother looked at me and took a swig of her beer. She looked different. If I could have sucked on her finger, as I used to do as a baby, it would not have tasted like mangoes and honey. Her finger would have tasted like those chicken wishbones turned from white bone to purple, which she used to place in a glass jar of vinegar so I could see how the brittle bone turned into rubber.

At the front door every insect on our mountain was still feeding on Maria’s blood.

I knew if I walked out the door that trail of insects would lead me straight down the highway.

Mother, you didn’t clean up, I said. You let the ants do it?

My mother looked at me with her new face.

I don’t clean up blood, my mother said. It’s not my thing.

After this day, my mother’s neck was always bent to one side with her ear craned upward, listening for something. I knew she was listening for his Made in America cowboy boots to step out of a bus, step onto the boiling highway of asphalt, and swagger up the mountain to our home. He was going to say, You shot my daughter!

My mother sat at the kitchen table and looked at me.

Ladydi, she said, all this just proves that Maria came out of a goddamn Xerox machine!