Bulletproof Vest Read Online Free PDF Page B

next year, we wrote a few letters. He always inquired about how I was doing in school, and always asked me to say hello to the gang, which is how he referred to my siblings. He asked me to give my parents a hug and kiss on his behalf, but I never did, as I never gave my parents hugs or kisses even on my own behalf. Both my parents kept him busy that year. My father wired him money so that he could add on a new room to my grandparents’ house in La Peña, and my mother sent him enough money for him to build her a house on a small plot of land she had purchased. The plot sat on a low hill in the outskirts of town, next to the cemetery. When he had completed the jobs, he called my father and asked him to wire the money he would need in order to get back to Chicago, but my father convinced him to stay, just a little longer. The holidays were only five months away, and since my father would be going to Mexico in December, they could drive back together. He agreed to wait for my father, to wait until the holidays.
    I felt like one of the lucky ones because I had not gone to Mexico for the holidays to witness any of the things I’d later hear about from my two older sisters who had been down there. After my father pulled Chemel from the river, a few men had helped him hoist the body onto the back of his truck. My brother had been wearing his white sneakers and his feet dangled over the back of the truck bed, bouncing along as his body absorbed every bump on the dirt roads. Back in La Peña, they had laid him out on the limestone floor on top of a wooden plank, and while they waited for the coffin to arrive, my grandmother had cleaned away the mud that had dried around his hairline, ears, and nostrils. By the time my mother arrived from Chicago, they had already placed him inside the coffin, which was a simple wooden box.
    â€œWhere is your God now?” my father asked, taunting her. Wasn’t He the God of miracles? The one who brought people back from the dead? Why didn’t she pray to him now and ask him for a miracle. But there would be no miracle, and on the morning they were to take the body to the cemetery, in a sudden fit of desperation, my father had thrown himself on top of the coffin, opened it, grabbed my brother by the shirt and practically pulled him from it, demanding that he get up, get up, get up.
    My father had had a corrido composed for Chemel, and when he returned to Chicago, he spent countless hours kneeling in front of the speaker, his back shaking violently as he listened to that corrido over and over again, as if the music might deliver his firstborn back into his arms. My brother seemed forever trapped inside that song, caught somewhere between the drums and the wailing horns. If I was lying in bed, the minute I heard the first note I pressed my pillow to my ears, cranked up my alarm clock radio, and soon either Madonna or Prince were drowning out the story of how my brother had been killed. I refused to shed a single tear, convinced myself that my brother was still alive, still in Mexico, forever riding his horse on that distant mountainside. Though at night when the house was dark and everyone was asleep, he started showing up in my dreams. I’d see him standing on the edge of the woods that lined the school’s playground, and I’d run to him, desperate to throw my arms around him, but before I could reach him, he’d turn, walk into the woods, and vanish.
    Mary hits the radio switch before reversing out of the driveway, and the beats of a cumbia fill the car as we make our way down the street. It feels good to be leaving that house for good, to be leaving the past in the past. Soon we are flying down Silver Lake Road, the lake on one side and Paradise on the other. Paradise is a wooded hill at the end of an asphalt parking lot, and when I was younger, my friends and I used to ride our dirt bikes to the hill and play in the woods, pretending that we had discovered