Shooting Down Heaven

by Jorge Franco

  “Uh-huh.”

  She gets into bed. Maybe it’s me, but something about her isn’t right. The sparkle and mischief in her laughter from before has gone. “Take off your shoes, Larry.”

  She runs her hands over the part of the bed where I’m going to lie down. She fluffs my pillow.

  “Turn off the light,” she instructs me, “and leave the one in the hallway on for Julio.”

  I see it’s too late to tell her I’d rather sleep in the other room. It doesn’t matter. Sleeping is what counts.

  “Are you cold?” she asks.

  “No.”

  “I am.”

  I float adrift on fatigue; my legs are aching. She whispers, it’s so nice to have you here. I don’t have the energy to respond. She presses against me, and her breathing lulls me again. I feel her trembling, and just when I think I’m finally going to slide into the abyss of sleep, Fernanda says, don’t fall asleep, Larry, don’t leave me alone. I stop, take a couple of steps back to hover right there, on the threshold where the fireworks are still booming. Don’t go to sleep, she says again. I’m begging you, she says in anguish, stay with me, honey. Crying, she beseeches me: please, talk to me.

  29

  Nobody said anything. Not a single grumble or sob or murmur of a prayer to be heard. Only the engines sucking in the cold air of a night that had gone, in an instant, from turbulence to calm.

  “It’s over,” Larry whispered in her ear, though his heart was still lodged in his throat.

  There was a need to confirm that they were still flesh and blood, that the stillness and silence weren’t part of a new state of being, another life. It would only take a couple of seconds to verify, but the disbelief, the loss of any sense of time, the fear of another bout of turbulence had destroyed the certainty that they were still alive.

  Charlie still had her head buried in his chest.

  “The sky does that sometimes,” Larry soothed her.

  “Before I boarded this plane I wanted to die,” she said, “and just now I pleaded with my dad to save me. It’s weird. That’s the first time I’ve talked to him since he died.”

  Larry tried to check whether she was crying, but her face was hidden behind her hair. So he kept murmuring to her: “Those first conversations are hard because you refuse to accept what’s happened, but you’re going to end up talking to him a lot. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Sometimes you’ll complain, you’ll ask for something, you’ll imagine how he would have reacted to something you’ve achieved, or a goof-up, the birth of a child, another death.”

  “Will he hear me?”

  “Of course, always,” Larry said. “Though sometimes it’s a conversation through feelings, communicating an emotion, an image, something that can’t be expressed in words, like when you try to describe a dream.”

  Larry fell quiet, and Charlie sat up to look at him. She was a mess. Her hair was disheveled, and her nose glistened and dripped.

  “Don’t stop talking,” she said.

  “I was thinking.”

  “What about?”

  About how the dead can surprise us when we get an answer. It’s not just physical signs—the picture frame that topples over, the painting that crashes to the floor, the book that leaps off the shelf with a title that offers the answer we’re seeking. It’s something deeper than that, invisible, like when you feel like someone’s looking at you, a rush of energy that makes us believe there is such a thing as a soul . . .

  “I was thinking it’s great to talk to the dead,” Larry said.

  Charlie leaned back in her seat and surveyed the chaos left by the turbulence. The tipped-over glasses, the little bottles scattered over the floor, the blanket tangled in the seat. She looked around and saw everybody was as uncomfortable as her, as one another.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” she said, “but I don’t dare.”

  “You can’t anyway,” Larry said, pointing to the illuminated seatbelt sign.

  “Is it going to start up again?” Charlie asked.

  “You never know. Better safe than sorry.”

  Feverishly, she grabbed his hand again. Finally a flight attendant appeared, pushed the curtain to one side, and walked down the aisle, looking from side to side. She smiled as if nothing had happened, as if the fear was something they’d made up.

  30

  We lost count of the cars Escobar blew up once he started terrorizing the country with bombs. One a day in Medellín alone, or two or even three, not including the random bombs that went off in other places. I was consumed by fear thanks to what I saw on the news, apocalyptic images that made me squeeze my eyes shut, and because I’d often pass by the site of a recent explosion and shudder at the wreckage, the dried blood. Anything might be a piece of leg, an arm; a pile of something would look like a heap of guts, and there was always a lone shoe somewhere, loose sneakers, flip-flops, boots amid the rubble.

  Fernanda and Libardo weren’t too worried about Escobar’s bombs. I assumed it was because the man was still alive. On the run, but alive, and they must have agreed with his battle strategy. But I didn’t understand why they weren’t concerned that Julio and I might be nearby when a car bomb went off. Or that one of them might. At first I believed nobody was exempt from the terror, but I discovered there was one privileged group: Escobar’s inner circle. They got warnings, were told the time and place. And we were among those privileged few.

  Nobody came right out and told me, but at school people talked about how some people weren’t allowed to go outside at particular times, and I realized we were always at home when the bombs went off. I felt a wave of dizziness when I figured it out, a shudder, an urge to vomit, to run, to cry. I asked Libardo about it that night.

  “How do you figure I’d know that stuff when I don’t even know where the man is?” he answered.

  “But is it true?” I said.

  “We’re at war, son. Anything goes.”

  I asked Fernanda too.

  “I do what your father says.”

  “Which is?”

  “He decides how we need to look after ourselves.”

  “What about the other people?” I asked.

  “What other people?”

  “Everybody else.”

  Fernanda’s face took on the appropriate expression, a subtle grimace in response to my naiveté. The expression that people adopt in relation to others. An expression to alleviate one’s own guilt. That’s what my unease was, after all: guilt at my privilege in the face of death.

  Then Fernanda said, “Everybody else is a lot of people. Understand? We can’t be responsible for all of them.”

  So it was true. Death was sending out emissaries to its friends. I also learned that the members of Escobar’s group weren’t the only ones who enjoyed death’s favor; a lot of Medellín’s elite did too. All of them must have felt the same way I did whenever an early-evening bomb went off and caused hundreds of people to die and many more to be grievously injured. Relief and guilt—that’s what I felt.

  But then death changed sides. That became clear when it left Escobar sprawled on a rooftop and sent harassment, persecution, and fire after us.

  Four months in, they burned one of Libardo’s farms. It was called El Rosal, and it was one of his favorites. The funny thing was that, despite the name, it didn’t have a single rosebush; they wouldn’t grow in the Magdalena Medio region’s torrid climate. Even the cut roses we brought from Medellín to decorate the house didn’t last more than a couple of days. By the third, they’d already dropped their petals and were drooping from the heat.

  One morning the boys woke him up to let him know that El Rosal was burning. What happened?, Libardo asked the caretaker, because in the fifteen years he’d owned that farm, nothing had ever caught fire, not even during the driest summers. Not a single paddock or tree or outbuilding.

/>   “They burned it, Don Libardo, they came and set it ablaze.”

  “Who?” Libardo asked mechanically, already knowing who had done it.

  “They left you a letter, Don Libardo.”

  “What does it say?”

  “I can’t read, boss, but if you want I can take it to my brother—he knows how.”

  “No need,” Libardo said, and hung up the phone before they could tell him that the arsonists had slaughtered forty head of cattle on their way out. They riddled them with bullets so they couldn’t even be sold for meat.

  Libardo kept to himself for two days. In the mornings, supposedly, he was still sleeping; in the afternoons he wasn’t around; and at night he’d come home after we’d already gone to bed. Until one morning we found him sitting in the living room, with his eyes closed and an empty glass in his hand. He told us about the fire and the cows. His voice scratchy, he said, “I always wanted to have a daughter, a little girl, after you two, but Fernanda didn’t want any more children. You know how vain she is. She said you two were enough and left me still wanting a little girl.” He sighed, cleared his throat, and said, “I even had a name for her. Rosa. And I had her farm. El Rosal.”

  He swallowed hard and couldn’t go on. He brought the glass to his lips, not noticing there was nothing in it. Julio and I, who always used to look at each other in these situations, didn’t. We stood stock-still, frozen, with our heads bowed, until he said, go on to school, boys, don’t be late, and remember you’ve got to be the best. What’s going to happen, Pa?, I asked him. He blew a long puff of air, staggered as he got to his feet, adjusted his pants at the waist, and said, they’re going to be sorry.

  A little while later, another crime rocked the country, and when I started gathering up the shards of this story and gluing them together, I fit Deputy Attorney General Diago’s murder side by side with Libardo’s warning. Libardo already had Diago in his sights for his failure to fulfill his promise to Escobar. But those realizations came later. When the murder happened, I didn’t want to—or simply couldn’t—think about everything that was happening; all the deaths and bombs and scares left me unable to think clearly.

  Fernanda and Libardo started thinking again about leaving, but every conversation ended in an argument. She’d say we should go, but all of us as a family, and Libardo would insist he couldn’t, saying he wouldn’t be able to defend himself in court from abroad. He suggested the three of us leave with our grandparents, and he’d come and go as needed.

  “I’m not staying over there all by myself,” Fernanda would say.

  “You won’t be by yourself,” Libardo responded.

  “You won’t be there to make decisions.”

  “Well, you can just call me.”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “It’s only for a little while.”

  “How long?”

  “However long it takes to finish these bastards off.”

  Fernanda hesitated. Though the decision involved us and was being made to protect us, they never asked us what we thought. When Fernanda looked at us, I realized she’d been wavering not because of us, but because of Libardo. Finishing off his enemies was going to require annihilating an entire country that celebrated when the capos’ farms were burned or the capos themselves were captured or killed. She refrained from calling him out at the time, but a few days later, during another disagreement with the grandparents present, Fernanda exploded.

  “I can’t believe how stubborn you’re being about staying here so you can wage war against the entire world. If it were just Los Pepes, I’d get it, but the whole world . . . it’s madness. People hate us, Libardo.”

  “They’ll calm down eventually,” he said. “It’s money that runs the show here. If we can hang on to our cash till everybody settles down a little, things will go on as normal.”

  “I’m not going to any country where they don’t speak Spanish,” my grandmother said.

  “That’s no problem,” Libardo said. “It can be Spain or Argentina or wherever you want.”

  “I need a nurse,” my grandfather said.

  “He doesn’t need anything,” my grandmother said. “He just likes the massages.”

  “It helps with the pain,” my grandfather said.

  “That’s enough,” Libardo broke in. “We can decide on a place later. The important thing now is to be on the same page about what we’re going to do.”

  “What about my nurse?” my grandfather asked.

  “Shameless,” my grandmother said.

  “Enough!” Libardo shouted.

  Nobody said anything after that. I wished I could think of something to change the subject. Julio seemed indifferent to the conversation. In the silence, I heard the rattle of ice cubes tumbling into a glass. Fernanda was making herself another drink. Libardo was visibly annoyed. Then came the sound of liquor filling the glass.

  “All right,” Libardo said. “Let’s leave this for another day.”

  As he moved to get up, Fernanda spoke: “I know why you want to stay, Libardo.”

  “I’m not staying,” he said, impatient. “I’ll be coming and going.”

  “I know why you don’t want to leave for good,” she said.

  We all fidgeted in our chairs, except my grandfather, who was looking back and forth between them like a lost bird.

  “Fernanda,” Libardo murmured.

  “You want to stay here to be with that woman,” she said, her voice rising with each syllable, spattering each word with fury. “That bitch must have persuaded you to get rid of us, because you know full well you’ve already lost this war . . .”

  “Shut up, Fernanda.”

  “If Pablo couldn’t win it, you certainly aren’t going to pull it off with fewer men and less money.”

  “I’m going to shut you up, I’m warning you.”

  “You’re not going to shut me up, not before I tell you a couple of hard truths.”

  “The two of you are setting such a great example for the boys,” my grandmother commented.

  Fernanda ignored her, took a swig of her drink, lifted her chin dramatically, and challenged Libardo: “Why don’t you come out and say it? Why don’t you just tell me you want a divorce? Is your hoochie not satisfied with that apartment you gave her?”

  Libardo reached out to cover her mouth with his hand, and she turned her face away. Julio leaped up to put himself between them, my grandmother let out a high-pitched shriek, my grandfather shouted, what a goddamn mess!, and I covered my ears and curled up in a ball.

  In the commotion, Fernanda’s glass shattered on the floor. My grandmother shrieked again, and I don’t know what happened after that.

  When I looked up again, they’d separated. Libardo was huffing, sitting in the armchair; Fernanda was sobbing wearily on the floor; Julio paced back and forth, breathing heavily; my grandmother, shattered, was fanning herself with a magazine; and my grandfather, with short, slow movements, was pushing the shards of glass with his foot.

  It was exactly six in the evening, and in the silence, the phone rang as usual. It was them, exulting in the chaos. Libardo let it ring four times, then picked up the handset just to silence the noise and gently set it back down. He got to his feet and said, “I’m going to the kitchen. Anybody want anything?”

  31

  What are you thinking about?” Larry asked her.

  He expected to hear anything but what she said: “About you.”

  Charlie noticed Larry’s surprise. Her tongue was already in a tangle, or the tangle would be the secret she was about to reveal.

  “I was sent to London for rehab,” Charlie said, “because I was drinking alone and hiding it.”

  She looked at him, expecting a reaction, but his face remained impassive. Charlie waved her hands. Something in her had changed. A spark of rage, a defiance, a refusal to c
onform.

  “So we fucked up,” Larry said.

  “What?”

  “We drank. We’re drinking. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have accepted the invitation.”

  “I would have done it anyway,” Charlie said.

  “How long had it been since you’d had a drink?”

  “Nineteen months and twenty days.”

  She told him she’d already suspected that as soon as anything tough came along, she was going to lose all the effort she’d put into recovery. They’d warned her and even prepared her for just such a moment. But it hadn’t worked.

  “I feel guilty,” Larry said.

  “No,” she said.

  She told him she’d never needed friends or parties to drink an entire bottle, to get falling-down drunk alone in her house, shut up in her bedroom. She drank by herself, and that was her downfall.

  “But maybe today’s drinks were just because of what you’re going through,” Larry said.

  “I don’t know and I don’t care,” she said.

  “I’ve always believed,” he said, “that a person’s death either brings those who are still alive together or it pushes them apart. Grief unites people, guilt divides them, loneliness unites them, and maybe fear does too, though I think uncertainty sometimes divides them.”

  “The thing that really divides people is arguing about the will,” said Charlie. Larry laughed, and she sat looking at him and finally said, “I know why you’re here. Maybe you’re the one who needs company.”

  Larry gulped a mouthful of air, leaned his head back, and started moving his feet in circles. The atmosphere had grown strained. It was all having an effect: the drinks, the long hours of the flight and those that still lay ahead. He was exhausted by the confinement and sleeplessness of an artificial night.