Gold Teeth
When I wrote this story for class nobody believed it was true. But it is.
c 2007 Gennaro Brooks-Church
My mother bought me cowboy boots one size too big, allowing space for the money to fit. In each boot she placed a wad of bills, carefully wrapped in brown paper so that it looked like an insole. She helped me put the boots on, and when I said they fit, she rubbed my head and said, “You’re a good son. Only thirteen years old and you’re helping like a man. Your father will be proud.”
My mother and I boarded a plane in Canada, and flew direct to Peru. We drove to the hotel where we recounted the money: Thirty-five thousand dollars, all laid out on the bed in one hundred-dollar bills. She repacked my boots and the next day we went to the prison.
It was in a shantytown on the outskirts of Lima and I had heard that the prison was a world of its own, a cowboy town with no rules. Some people had been jailed so long that their records couldn’t be found any more. They had gone crazy a long time ago and nobody remembered what they were in for. We stood outside the main gate with hundreds of other people, mostly women. Some were there to see their male relatives and others were vendors who had come in hopes of selling food. On the way there, I had seen the official lunch rumbling along in barrels on the back of trucks. Some of the containers had no lids, exposing what looked like watery lentil soup to the shantytown air. Inside, nobody ate the prison food if they could afford to buy their own. But I had overheard from my father that the vendors not only sold food; they sold their bodies too. He had said that plenty of womanly men were available inside, and the inmates were allowed dogs, cats and chickens- in my father’s compound one dog had become such a popular sex toy that the owner rented it out. But if they wanted sex with a woman, they had to buy it from the vendors. I looked at the women in the crowd. The ones with modest clothing and somber faces had come to visit relatives, but I suspected those with short, tight dresses and heavy make-up would visit anybody who could pay. I wondered if my father ever slept with them. The way he talked, he probably did.
We entered the prison much faster than the rest of the people because they were Peruvian, and my mother, using the power of our white skin, moved to the front of the crowd and through the gate with ease. We walked past tables and guards who searched the food that the women brought, using bits of wire to rake through cooked rice and soups, checking for concealed weapons or drugs. We passed the chief guard who looked my mother in the eyes but did not say hello. He peered dreamily at me with calm, pale gray eyes. His lips drooped and the corners of his mouth were wet. My mother whispered to me that he was the one who had agreed to get my father out. For ten thousand dollars he was going to dress my father in a guard uniform and walk him out of prison during the midnight shift. The rest of the money was for fake passports, traveling and bribes.
We walked into one of the female body search booths. My mother joked with the woman guard who frisked us. She had no reason to suspect us, being white foreigners. My feet hurt, but I showed no signs of it. I was good at hiding my feelings. Kids at school said I was too serious, and sometimes I burned to tell them that my family dealt drugs and my father was in jail, but I couldn’t trust anybody. The silence hurt me badly.
In the concrete courtyard I met my father. Tall and handsome with a bushy moustache, a suntanned, bare chest and tight jeans. My mother said that he looked healthy and he said it was because of all the time he had to do push-ups and jog around the courtyard. When he said this, I was hardly listening. Something about his mouth gripped my attention. As he opened and closed it, and especially when he smiled, which he did often, he revealed a mouthful of gold. All his teeth were made of gold! Noticing my wonder, he said, “Like my teeth?” He spread his mouth wide to reveal gold as far back as I could see. He explained that he got them after the guards did a cell search. They dragged the men out of bed and lined them up in the courtyard. The authorities were looking for the owner of a knife that had been found in somebody else’s ribs. Since nobody confessed, they made the inmates lie on the concrete face down, naked, and went down the line, kicking people at random. My father was one of those picked. They kicked the back of his head, ramming his down turned face into the concrete. “After it happened the fuckers didn’t give me a dentist for three fucking days, man. Finally I got some money to the right guy, and voila! The Peruvian Special!” He smiled sarcastically.
We sat and talked in the courtyard. I hadn’t seen him for a year and I wanted to cry. I could not speak and felt sick. The hot sun hurt my eyes. The sun, that’s why my eyes watered, I said. He told me about the prison. The foreigners had one section of the prison to themselves, much cleaner than the rest and on the first floor nearest the courtyard. Four-storied buildings surrounded the courtyard on all sides, and on the upper floors, I saw people peering down through iron bars. Contrasted by the bright sun, they were in darkness, muted figures with bright eyes that reflected the outside glare. Seeing me look up, he said, “One of my Peruvian friends lived up there, he escaped last month, killed three guards…yeah, a mean mutherfucker. His name’s Raul, one of the best bank robbers in the country. A mean mutherfucker. Last year, he got a price put on his head because he beat somebody at poker. That night a bribed guard left Raul’s cell door unlocked so that people could get to him. He had his own cell; all the murderers and terrorists are kept alone at night. One by one they came…with knives, shards of glass, sharpened bed legs, pieces of brick.” Again he slowed down, speaking very quietly and close to my face, “But he fought like the devil, and the next morning there were eight dead bodies around the door. After that, nothing happened to him, his reputation scared even the guards, and they’re the meanest fuckers of all. He escaped a while later… Did I kill anybody? No. Once, I caught somebody stealing my dollars, and I beat him so hard that my knuckles bled, but that’s the worst. I’m a fast talker, I use my mouth to get out of trouble.” He smiled at this, his teeth glittering, and added as an afterthought, “Having friends like Raul doesn’t hurt.”
After a while, the sun hurt my head and we went inside to his communal cell. It was a large room, as big as a basketball court that housed about two hundred men in partitioned sections. He shared his cubicle with three men, and they left to give us space. I took off my boots and handed him the money, which he put into his own cowboy boots. I felt proud.
“Yep, here’s my money to freedom, brought to me by my very own son. Soon there’s going to be a very rich guard and a very happy gringo,” he said quietly with narrowed, sparkling eyes.
After that, I left with one of his cellmates so dad could have sex with my mother. They didn’t tell me but I knew. This took up the rest of the visiting time. Before leaving he gave me a tooth bracelet from a recently killed monkey, but I didn’t wear it once I got back to Vancouver. The teeth still had blood in them, and I knew this would gross out the girls at school. I never wore the boots again either. I hid them in the closet with the monkey-tooth bracelet, the bullet, the arrowhead, the tiger tooth and all the other stuff my father had given me. Over the years, my collection grew. The chief guard never kept his promise.
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