Free Prayers for the Stolen by Jennifer Clement Page A

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.