by James Siegel
They’d captured one of them. Izod or Polo. Just one. The other one was still out there. He was probably lying low like them—being a needle.
The sound of the gunmen searching wavered in and out, like a faulty shortwave signal. Once Paul glimpsed a red Puma sneaker about ten feet from him—that’s it. He shut his eyes and waited for the bullet in his back. When he opened his eyes and peeked, the sneaker was gone.
He went back to the problem that had been dumped on his desk. Risk ratios had to be formulated, tabulated, and segmented for another potentially dangerous activity.
Plane Travel.
Driving a Car.
Construction Jobs.
Lying in a Swamp Being Pursued by Homicidal Gunmen.
“Tell you what,” one of their pursuers screamed. “Got a deal for you, bollo. You come on in now, we won’t kill you. How’s that?”
Bollo. Pussy. One of the Spanish words eighth graders taught themselves, snickering, between classes.
Okay, Paul wondered, why were they only concentrating on the other drug runner in the weeds? Was it possible they hadn’t seen Miles and him in the clearing? Was it?
Miles answered the question for him. “He must have the bag,” he whispered. “They want the drugs.”
The man with the high-pitched voice and lazy eye. Polo. He’d snatched Paul’s bag when the shots rang out.
The gunman shouted for the lazy-eyed man to come in, called him a bollo, an abadesa, a culo—all not-so-nice things, Paul imagined. He repeated his proposition. If he’d only stand up and walk toward them bag in hand, he’d get out of the swamp with his life—honest injun.
Still no answer.
Paul assumed Polo didn’t believe a word of it. They’d already put a bullet into his neck—if he wasn’t going to die of West Nile, he might expire from that.
“Okay,” the man shouted, “okay, that’s cool. How about some music while you think it over? For your listening pleasure.”
Someone walked back to the Jeeps and turned on a CD player. Or maybe it was the car radio. Latin samba came wailing through the cattails. Screeching trumpets and a good steady beat. Music, that’s nice of them. Only something seemed wrong with this music. It sounded shrill and off-key.
It took a minute or so for Paul to understand why.
At first Paul thought it might be a trick of the air, an aberration in sound waves caused by the thick cattails and even thicker heat. It wasn’t.
It was a man screaming. Izod.
They were torturing their prisoner in time to the music.
To cover up the sound. Or because it made it more fun. Or because they liked samba.
One, two, three . . . scream.
They kept at it for an entire song—the longest song on earth.
“American Pie” might be nineteen and a half minutes. This song was longer.
Finally, it stopped. “What ya think?” the man shouted. “Celia Cruz, mi mami. A fucking scream, no?”
Paul turned to Miles.
“Who are they?”
When the Jeeps had burst through the weeds and the men surged out with guns drawn and firing, he’d thought the police. Government agents. Narcs.
Not now.
Miles didn’t answer. Maybe because his hands were up over his ears. His eyes were closed as if he didn’t wish to see anything either. A long bloody scratch went from one side of his forehead to the other. He’d done Paul a favor, he’d extended himself beyond the call of reasonable duty, and now it was very possible he was going to die because of it.
“Julio.” Another voice now, thin and whispery. “Juliooooo . . .”
There was something pitiful about this voice.
“They broke my fingers, Julio. They broke my whole hand. My hand, Julio . . . You gotta come in! You hear me! I can’t . . . Please . . . They want the llello, man, that’s it. For fuck’s sake, come in!”
The torturer’s deal had fallen on deaf ears. They’d changed tack. It was Izod’s turn.
“Listen to me . . . They broke my fingers, all my fingers, Julio . . . every one of my fingers . . . Bring in the hooch . . . They’re killing me . . . Please, Julio . . . please . . . You hearin’ what I’m sayin’?”
Julio remained mute.
They gave it another song.
Another samba, played with the volume cranked down, so the man’s screams were louder, in your face, standing out even over the spanking rhythm and blaring horns.
Sometimes he screamed actual words.
Ayudi a mi madre!
Please help me, Mother!
The music stopped again.
Paul heard sniffling, a horrible mewling sound.
“Julioooo . . . my ear. They cut my ear off. It hurts . . . oh, it hurts, Julio . . . oh, it hurts . . . Come in . . . Please come in . . . Please . . . You GOT to . . . They cut my ear off, Julio . . . You understand . . .”
Julio might’ve understood—he would’ve had to be deaf, dumb, or dead not to understand. He wasn’t coming in.
Paul pushed his head to the ground. It stank like rotting vegetables. If he were an ostrich, he would’ve stuck his head into the ground and kept it there.
It was hard listening to a man being tortured. Even one you didn’t know. He knew him well enough to see him. Neatly pressed pants and a powder-blue Izod turned bloodred. There was a black hole where one of his ears used to be.
“No . . . no, please no . . . Don’t . . . No, not my balls . . . please, not my balls, no . . . Julio, don’t let them cut my balls off . . . Pleeeeease, Julio, no . . . Don’t let them do that . . . No—”
A bloodcurdling howl.
It was so loud one of the torturers told him to shut the fuck up. The man whose testicles he’d just sliced off.
The man did shut up.
For a while there was mostly silence. Just the insects, the slightest breeze rustling through the cattails.
May I have some water?
It was him again.
I’d like some water. Please. Some water . . .
Softly and politely, as if he were in a restaurant talking to a waiter.
As if they might politely answer him back.
Sure, still or sparkling?
Eventually, he stopped speaking. At least actual words. All verifiable human language ceased. He reverted to a guttural, indecipherable whimpering.
His tongue.
They’d cut out his tongue.
Paul couldn’t listen anymore.
He needed to stop hearing.
The odds of accidental death from being struck by lightning are 1 in 71,601 for an average lifetime.
The odds of dying from being bitten by a nonvenomous insect are 1 in 397,000.
The odds of drowning in a household bathtub are 1 in 10,499.
The odds of . . .
“Maricón, see what you made us do. Fuck—your boyfriend bled like a fucking cerado. All over my goddamn shoes. We gave you a chance, you cocksucking motherfucker.”
Their prisoner was dead.
Someone went back to the Jeeps. Paul could hear doors being opened, then slammed shut.
“What are they doing?” Paul whispered to Miles. But Miles still had his hands over his ears—his skin had turned the color of skim milk.
They were on the march again—one or two of them, slowly moving through the fields.
Paul smelled it first.
If Joanna were there, she would have sniffed it out minutes sooner, he knew. She’d have lifted her head and said how odd, do you smell that?
It was wafting in through the cattails. When Paul lifted his head again in an effort to make sense of it, he heard sounds of splashing.
“They’re making a line,” Miles whispered, his first actual conversation in the last half hour. He’d finally taken his hands off his ears—was all ears now, but he clearly didn’t like what he was hearing.
A line? What did Miles mean? What line?
“The wind’s blowing that way,” Miles said. First an enigmatic pronoun
cement about lines, now the weather report.
“They’re going to burn him out,” Miles said in a weirdly detached voice. “They’re going to make him run right to them.”
That smell.
Kerosene.
Okay, Paul finally understood. He got it. Much as he didn’t want to, much as he wanted to remain dumb and clueless. They were laying down a line of kerosene. They were making this line behind them, behind the wind itself, which was blowing away from them. Paul pictured it—a solid wall of flame. And he pictured something else—that house in Jersey City. What used to be a house in Jersey City. The place he was supposed to meet the two guys in the blue Mercedes, Polo and Izod. Only he hadn’t met them, because someone had burned down the house—reduced it to a dark primeval hole.
Who?
The same guys who were circling them with kerosene in their hands. That was the logical conclusion—what the empirical evidence would lead you to.
Paul had twice tried to deliver the drugs, and twice he’d been stopped by the same band of arsonists.
Paul turned to Miles once again to ask him something, but the question flew out of his head at the sight of Miles edging backward on elbows and knees. He looked . . . odd. Like a white person trying to dance black. Like he was doing the worm. He was doing it double-time; moving at the speed of panic.
Paul saw why.
The odds of dying from smoke or fire are 1 in 13,561.
The first flame had shot up into the air about fifty yards behind and to their right. It looked biblical—like a solid pillar of fire. The line of cattails would light up like briquettes soaked in lighter fluid, then be spurred forward by the wind. If they ran from the fire, they would only wind up facing another kind of fire, the kind produced by semiautomatic weapons. Miles, who’d been known to bet on a baseball game or two, was betting that he could go the other way—that he could go toward it. That he could make it out before the entire line lit. That he could race the fire and win.
By the time Paul caught up to him, Miles had turned himself around. They shimmied through the weeds on their bellies just a few feet apart from each other, noses inches above the pungent stink of the swamp, an odor still preferable to its alternative.
Burned flesh, Paul couldn’t help noticing, smelled sickly sweet.
The men had miscalculated—tried to get someone to run who was very possibly past running. The bullet in his neck, Paul thought. The man in the Polo shirt was dead.
They kept crawling.
Picture those half-fish creatures in the Pleistocene era, slithering out of the water onto dry land on their way to a better future. If they’d only known what awaited them, Paul thought, they might’ve turned around and gone back.
He felt only half human now. Covered in slime and mud, bleeding from the razor-sharp weeds and furiously biting insects. Breathing was next to impossible—sinewy lines of choking black smoke were already snaking across the ground.
He was traveling blind. His eyes were dripping—half from the smoke and half from the awful knowledge that he’d failed.
He could sense the fire to their left. How far away? Twenty yards? Close enough to feel the heat like a wave—the kind that tumbles you into the surf and just won’t let you go. Faint blisters were rising up on his forearms.
Faster. Faster. Faster.
What were the odds they’d make it now? The actuary in him said: Nil. Zippo. Nada.
Give up.
He couldn’t. Self-preservation vanquished self-pity. If his wife and child were going to make it out of Colombia, he had to make it out of the swamp.
Paul could see the first jagged slivers of fire flickering through the stalks. The cattails were crackling, snapping, literally disintegrating in front of his half-blinded eyes. It felt as if every bit of air were being sucked out of there. The men were screaming over the fire’s deafening roar like college students before a pregame bonfire.
Miles collapsed to his right.
He lay there on his belly, wheezing, desperately trying to gulp in air.
“Come on, Miles. A little further.” It took an enormous effort for Paul to get the words out of his mouth. They tumbled out half formed and garbled, as if he were speaking in tongues. They had zero effect. Miles lay there, unmoved and unmoving.
The fire was making a beeline for them. It was almost there.
“I . . . can’t . . . ,” Miles whispered between gasps. “I . . .”
Paul grabbed his shirt collar—hot and steaming, like laundry fresh from the dryer.
He pulled.
It made no sense. It was merely symbolic, since he didn’t have the strength to pull Miles from the fire, any more than he had the strength to stand up and take on the murderers who’d started it.
He pulled anyway.
Suddenly, Miles seemed to gather what little energy he had left. He moved. Just a foot or so. Then another foot. And after coughing up some black phlegm, a foot more.
It was too late.
They were in the mouth of the furnace. It was yawning open for them. They weren’t going to make it.
Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, my . . . My rod and my . . . My rod . . . Where were the words when you really needed them? He was down to crawling on bloodied hands and knees. He was doing what any atheist does in foxholes. He was mumbling the magic words he’d abandoned as a sad and lonely little kid.
Miles was there beside him. The fire lit him up like someone in a flash-frame.
Paul’s flesh began to sear—to literally burn off. He took one last lunge, then covered up his face, hoping it wouldn’t hurt.
That was all.
TWENTY-FOUR
Nothing had been said to her. But she knew just the same.
Galina might’ve told her it was going to be all right, but it wasn’t all right.
It was monotonous and deadening and endless.
Every moment, at least, that she wasn’t holding Joelle in her arms. Those moments, by contrast, were achingly life-affirming.
She got to experience those moments only twice a day—for morning and evening feedings. Galina would bring her to another room in the farm—she was fairly sure it was a farm, since she could hear roosters and chickens and the bleating of cows and sheep. She could smell them too—mixed in with the unmistakable odor of freshly turned manure. She’d been born in Minnesota, farm country, and her olfactory senses had been honed on those earthy smells.
When she asked Galina what happened—whether Paul had delivered the drugs like he was supposed to—she shrugged and didn’t answer.
No answer was necessary. He had or he hadn’t, but Joanna knew that she needn’t be packing her bags anytime soon.
It was the routine that saved her—those morning and evening feedings, waited for with a tingling anticipation. It was routine that was murdering her too, bit by bit. The sameness, the torpor, the sense of unyielding and unbroken siege.
Her emotions, raised to the sky by Galina’s whispered assertion, were all dressed up with nowhere to go.
She was losing weight too—she’d become familiar with certain bones in her arms and rib cage she hadn’t known were there.
One night she heard a furious slapping from somewhere in the house. Followed by someone moaning—a man.
She sensed Beatriz and Maruja awake and listening next to her on the mattress.
“Who’s that?” she whispered.
“Rolando,” Maruja whispered back.
“Rolando,” Joanna echoed the name. “Who’s he? Another prisoner?”
“Another journalist who’s become the story,” Maruja said.
“Like you?”
“No. Not like me. Bigger. His son . . .” And her voice trailed off as if she’d fallen back asleep.
“His son. What about his son?”
“Nothing. Go to sleep.”
“Maruja. What . . . ?”
“He had a son . . . that’s all. Shhh . . .”
“What happened to him? Tell m
e.”
“He became sick.”
“Sick?”
“Cancer. Leukemia, I think. He wanted to see his papa one more time. Before he died.”
“Yes?”
“It was in the newspapers,” she whispered. “On the television. A big kind of national soap opera. They let Rolando watch. The talk shows. He saw his son on TV speaking to him, pleading with them to let him go.”
Joanna tried to imagine what it must’ve been like for a father to witness his dying son on TV, but gave up because it was too painful to contemplate.
“People came forward—how do you say . . . los famosos. Politicians, actors, futbolistas. They volunteered to take Rolando’s place. Take us, they said, so Rolando can be with his son. He had a few months to live.”
“What happened?”
Maruja shook her head—Joanna’s eyes were getting used to the dark, and she could make out the vague outline of Maruja’s pointy chin.
“Nothing happened.”
“But the boy . . .”
“He died.”
“Oh.”
“Rolando watched his funeral on TV.”
Joanna wasn’t aware she’d begun crying. Not until she felt the wet mattress against her cheek. She’d never been much of a crier. Maybe because she spent most of her workday getting other people to stop, even as she secretly resented their public displays of weakness. But now she thought it was both terrible and wonderful to cry. It made her feel human. Knowing that she was still capable of being moved by someone else’s tragedy, even in the midst of her own.
“Rolando?” Joanna asked. “How long has he been here?”
“Five years.”
“Five years?”
It didn’t seem possible. Like hearing about one of those people who’ve survived for decades in a coma, kept alive in a kind of suspended animation.
“When his son died, Rolando became very angry with them. He doesn’t listen. He talks back,” Maruja said, as if she were snitching on another child. Joanna wondered if Rolando’s defiance made life difficult for Beatriz and Maruja. Probably. “He ran away once,” Maruja whispered. “They caught him, of course.”
Ran away. The very sound of it caused Joanna’s heart to quicken—what a mysterious and exotic notion.
