The Last Prisoner

"If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him."
--Jean-Paul Sartre


"This man knows something
about healing. That the heart
must be torn open again
in front of compassionate witnesses.
That the accused must also step up
and reveal themself.
That no matter how high-pitched
the shrieks, how barren
the voice, everything must be
heard, everything must be
held, in the same room."


--Ronna Bloom, "Truth and Reconciliation," from PERSONAL EFFECTS, Pedlar Press, 2000.

THE LAST PRISONER
(I am sorry about the poor formatting. I've been unable to copy the original paragraphing, but will gradually correct this. SBM)


A small train, an ancient rattling steaming thing, it barely held to a looping mountain track. The mountain dwarfed the toyish train till it became in Rodolfo's eyes a pink caterpillar inching over an elephant's hide. Rodolfo squinted, followed the movement, and felt throughout himself a sweating terror that the creature would peel away from the mountain and curl into space, a caterpillar shrugged free by a leviathan. Then the scene was Ximena. The prisoner, Ajacopi, lay naked on the floor, his body a brown stain on gray cement. He lay stinking in his sweat and Rodolfo sat atop him making the little man bear his weight, Rodolfo's butt over Ajacopi's mouth stealing his breath, Rodolfo's hands pinching the Indian's manhood, all the while the heat of the day thief to his own breath.

Rodolfo woke rubbing his mouth across the orange sofa's back cushion hearing the rattle and bang of the front door flapping three meters from where he lay. "Oh, the wind," he thought--his mind itself the weakest puff of air--and wiped the bloom of sweat from his forehead. The day was too hot for any comfort. The heat must have confined him in his sleep and bullied him into that dream. His head pounded and his mouth was sour from a paste of growing things that lay across his tongue. He sat and untucked his shirt which was badly twisted and soaked with perspiration and tore it off, angrily freeing himself as if from a winding sheet.

The dream had him working his last full day at Ximena Prison. In reality, a year had passed since that final week and a year plus three days had passed since the date that lived in his memory as the one the President died, murdered by thugs, changing everything. He heard Berta's footfall across the ceiling and cawed at her, "Where is my paper?" because he wanted to look at the reports on the dog fights and the cocks. His father had checked the fights every day at the same hour until the day he passed. His father was a man of great habits, Mateo his name. Mateo Hector was a man of military mind and he was Rodolfo's guide, his Southern Cross.

"Don't holler at me," the woman yelled back from above, hollering herself.

Her voice was sharp as if she were giving orders. That burned his ass, since up until one year before, giving orders was his job, and decent money came his way for it, as well as the honor of keeping his country as God intended. The Indians liked to ask his people, How do you know what God intended? But he and his kind did know, they knew down to the marrow of their bones and the Indians angered him with their insolent questions. When he went to church--going at times alone because his wife and son were shallow-minded and so they were restless sitting long hours in the pews--he prayed to be reminded and instructed about His order and not influenced or led astray by the arrogant ideas the Indians broadcast.

Still she was yammering. "We are lucky still to have a newspaper," she shouted down. Since the revolution, with everything turned on its head, every other sentence from her mouth was how they were lucky still to have this thing or that, whether a stove to burn wood or a three-legged stool or a simple newspaper. He did not feel lucky, especially when he saw the Indians greedy as infants as they snatched up everything, which was just what he'd predicted would come to pass if they got the control they wanted. They were the termites that gnaw apart a great tree, each one easy to swat or stomp, their strength in an army's numbers.

For him, that was a despicable image. He hated bugs and lived in a land overrun with them. He'd heard places exist where a man can recline on a bed of grass and nothing traipses over him but an ant or a spider no bigger than a thumbnail. But here, he needed to patrol the house nightly and flatten whatever insects he found. Now that his son, Daniel, was ten, he had him join in the campaign. The boy was squeamish still about crushing what he found, so Rodolfo took that job, laughing at the boy's frailty. Once they found a tarantula big as the boy's hand.

Berta tromped down the stairs and tossed the paper onto the floor beside the sofa, so he had to sit up and bend down to retrieve it.

"Thank you," he said. Only in his private thoughts did he say "female dog."

The headline was printed boldly today and read GOVERNMENT OFFERS AMNESTY. The large letters shouted, but he did not grasp their importance. Sleep and anger fogged his brain with a sense of confusion about what "government" this was. And what amnesty? Who was to be exonerated? For what offense? His eye went to the column, to the article there. The new "government of the people"--that was what they called themselves, the sons of bitches--was offering to review petitions for amnesty from all those officials of the criminal government involved in "crimes against the indigenous people." “All failing to come forward by October 10, sundown, will be subject to prosecution to the full extent and power of the law and to penalties up to and including a sentence of death by hanging. Amnesty is offered for the sole purpose of determining and publishing a truthful record of events, which is essential to the healing and reconciliation of the nation.”

A dense cloud can stop and stand atop a mountain peak. It holds its position and gives passage neither to air nor light. His mind settled upon these lines like such a mass. He knew there was good reason he should attend to the words but he did not. Nothing moved within him until he turned to checking the competitions and saw that his dog and his fighting bird both were losers in yesterday's events. His favorite bird was a muscular brown-speckled cock, Razorclaws. How many times had he won with that bird? Piss on it, PISS ON IT. His mind exploded and he threw the paper onto the round, peg-legged dining table and paced the room, then retrieved the pages and read again the words detailing the amnesty requirements.

Mary, mother of Christ. He should not have to think about this. He should be a hero to his country and a guardian of its future, but instead he was one of those they dubbed criminal. He could not believe the struggle had turned so far against him that they expected him with his own lips to betray his people by coming forward at the initiation of Indians, to an Indian tribunal. Who were they to hold a goddamned tribunal? They act as if they are Roman generals, great men of history, but they are the ones who kidnapped the young President and his wife--took them from their house, gagged and blindfolded, put them into the trunks of cars, then drove them up onto the altiplano and slit their throats, letting them bleed to death.
Only three days passed from that grizzly event to the fall of the government. His blood boiled sunrise to sunset through those three days. He was not himself at that time. It was the wrong time for Estefan, his Captain, to pressure him.

Estefan had called him into his office; it was a large room at the north end of the barrack, beyond the string of six tiny cells that the prisoners occupied. A second larger room at the opposite end of the barrack served for interrogations. Rodolfo looked at the Captain's small square window wishing the interrogation rooms where he spent his hours were open to the fields and sky like this, but only this room and the one at the other end of the structure had the luxury of a window where a man could look out onto some color, maybe lift his head and see a hawk sitting on the wind. Two bottles of North American whisky on the cabinet sparked his envy, but he consoled himself with the thought that another year at the job and he, too, might afford such indulgences.

"Look here," Estefan said and pointed to a vase on his government-issue metal desk. "Look at these dahlias, from my own garden, Hector. Perfection, aren't they? Look at the scarlet color and the rolled silk of each petal. Look. Come, look." He made Rodolfo lean closer so that Estefan could convince himself his detective was absorbing the full beauty of the scentless flowers. "That's what you can do with a little horse shit and highlands sunlight. And a gardener's heart of course." He prodded his chest with his thumb in self-acclaim.

"Magnificent," Rodolfo said.

"Look at that color," Estefan murmured, then shook his head. "Words can't describe it--the hue of the blood of kings." Then Estefan winced and Rodolfo assumed the Captain had heard his own words and thought of the blood of their President, shed three days before in that murderous attack.

Estefan lifted a hammered silver frame from his top desk drawer. "This is my wife," he said of the plump woman with orbs of rouge decorating her dark cheeks and a bush of black hair springing from her scalp like an obscenity. "Have I shown you before? My Sarita. She is a flower, too, the most beautiful of women, and a woman of culture as well."

A hundred times Rodolfo had seen that photo pulled from the drawer. He kept his mouth shut.

"I have a family a man can be proud of, Hector. I'm a man others envy--there's no reason to deny it. My beautiful wife, my home and gardens, my son who is a first rank soccer player. I am a luckier man than most, smiled upon by fortune."

"Yes," Rodolfo said, impatient to leave. "Who wouldn't envy you...your fine wife, the garden so beautiful, dahlias such as these--like silk?"

"All right. Enough," Estefan said, turning all business and leaving Rodolfo to wonder had he overstated his praise, giving it the ring of falsity, but no, these abrupt turns had always characterized the Captain's mental locomotion.

"What is your report today? What have you gotten from the sons of bitches this bloody week that you didn't have last week?"
Rodolfo rattled his throat. "Not as much as I had hoped for."

"We never get as much as we hope for," Estefan said, still buoyant. "We'd like to open them like zippered pouches wouldn't we and dump their guts onto the floor. That way we could sort through the innards like a man inspects for gold in his pan." He guffawed so hard he drooled and Rodolfo pretended not to see. Rodolfo thought of the time a prisoner spat at him--hitting him right in the eye--and he flushed at the recollection. That man had paid; that man had been a fool.

The Captain said, "You have something for me don't you, from at least one of them? You have something for your Captain, I presume, one shiny nugget, one gem at least?"

"I have a few things of value, Sir." Rodolfo injected confidence into his voice. "Cell D told us the north villagers have been using their young girls to set the pit traps the soldiers fall into, which causes them to twist or break their ankles--twice the Indians caught a man still in the traps and stoned him to death. The men dig the pits on and off during the work day and the girls cover them with vegetation when they go into the jungle evenings to collect firewood. We had to push him hard, but he also told us they use an old trick of sending information from town to town by way of strings knotted to tell a story. With the knotting, even the illiterates can get the message so the technique is crucial, it's important, I'm sure you can see that. Certain patterns of knots have known meanings--often marking locations--and come up again and again."

"They've been doing that since Inca times, Hector. There's nothing remotely new in that or crucially important, as you like to say. What else do you have? What about the spying they've done on our post? Which village is doing that?"
He was tempted to lie and pretend to know, saying Santa Margarita or Santa Rosita, but how long would the lie stand up? He had no way of knowing in that moment how shortlived his entire operation would be. He shook his head and kept his eyes subverted.

"Nothing? Shit. Nothing? I told you to pursue that."

"Nothing yet, Sir. D names one town today and a different one yesterday and tomorrow, so we have difficulty knowing what is true and what is garbage."

"Jesus Christ, Hector, you're supposed to know how to tell the difference. That's part of a technique you should know in your sleep. You're just a bullshitter, aren't you? You don't have anything to say. You bring me the same crap every damn report. And that crew you've put together, with that odd bird, Rubén. What is he? A Jew? Or a homosexual I've heard some say."

"No, the knots..."

"The knots are nothing, they're bullshit, I told you. I need something new, something substantial I can put into my week's end report to justify this damn operation. The army spends money to keep this place going, Hector. Do you want to lose your job when they say we're not worth the upkeep because we do squat here? Do you think they're interested in giving charity, in keeping your kids in shoes out of human kindness?"

"No."

"No one there is in a lenient mood since our President’s death. If you can't get the information, maybe we need someone else, someone with the balls for his occupation."

"I can do it, Sir," he said, torn between hurt and crackling anger.

"How much patience do you want from me? I've forgiven you enough for your endless mistakes and accidents."

"I'll take care of things, Sir."

"Then go at it again with that Ajacopi," he said, rising from his seat. "Breaking him would be worthwhile--there's information in that small head, I know it. Diamonds of information."

The flip reference to his mistakes, his accidents, stung Rodolfo. He knew what was meant. The Captain was reminding him of the time he'd roped a huge half-breed around the neck, just about hanging him but not to the point of breaking the neck because the man's toes reached the ground and held him up a little. Rodolfo had decided to let him sweat in that position a while so he'd gone out of the cell and told the pale woman, Lindy...Lindea..whatever the name, to leave the room, too--he wanted her in the hall so she wouldn't be looking at the fatboy with pity eyes. She went into the hallway and Rodolfo went outside to have a smoke where a few of the day laborers were wolfing down their lunches. They offered him some chips and a beer and he sat with them all laughing it up like school kids. He forgot about the big halfbreed inside, forgot altogether, intoxicated by the sun and the beer.

An hour or so passed and the others picked themselves up to get back to their work and suddenly, Oh Jesus! it came to him how he'd left the guy. In a blink, he was back to the cell, the woman sitting idly outside the door, and when he walked into the cell he knew it was no good. The guy wasn't dead exactly but might as well have been. He was unconscious and his color was black as an olive. The woman slipped in behind Rodolfo and he shouted at her, "You imbecile, why the hell didn't you call me--all this time goes by and you know he's hanging there--why the hell didn't you call me?" She looked at him oddly but kept her silence. He saw contempt in her eyes and turned from her and called Rafi in for help cutting the huge man down and lowering him to the rock hard floor. They watched over him, Rodolfo pacing for an hour, the door locked against passers-by, but it was no good, there was no return of consciousness and Rodolfo had no alternative but to report the incident as calmly as possible and let the man be trucked out to the infirmary an hour's ride from there. The fatboy didn't die but he didn't regain much function either and there was no question of them making further use of him.

Estefan blew into a rage at Rodolfo for his carelessness, his idiot mistakes, and for putting together such an inadequate squad with a feeble old man and a queer Jew, with only one of the four, the youngest, a half-decent specimen of manhood. After that Rodolfo bought a watch and he used it compulsively to track the time whenever he left an interrogation room with a session unfinished. But the whole thing lived on for him in shame and whenever something recalled him to it, shame crept into his skin; he had wasted a good informant due to stupidity. He recalled how his father raged when his mother burnt the tortillas; he wielded that same brand of fury against himself.

When he saw the seepage from Ajacopi's rotten head trickle onto the hard dirt floor, he knew this mistake dwarfed the other.

This one was calamity and might ruin him because Ajacopi had been prized by Estefan who bragged about the big cat he'd bagged, his head stuffed with gems for the taking. And once a man began boasting, he didn't want circumstance or its allies to prove him a fool.

Rodolfo rubbed his hand hard across his forehead, sensitive fingers tracking tiny cysts beneath the skin. That Indian's head, he thought. That soft, ill-formed, weakly head had been his downfall. He sat back on his spongy sofa--a boulder would have offered a more comfortable seat--and buried his own properly-shaped, close-cropped head in his hands. Jesus, Lord. What comes now? What next, with this accursed amnesty aiming to haul them into the streets in humiliation? He thanked God that

Mateo Hector was gone from this earth, eyes shut against these sights. He beat his head against the wall, not too hard lest the wall crack, too.

Since the collapse of the government, he had lived with the danger that someone in the new government might find him out as one of those whose hands had touched Ajacopi, a man to whose memory others of his type lit their vile incense. Berta said,

Father Lomas burns incense in the church but Rodolfo knew the Indian stuff smelled different. The stuff the Indians burned behind their houses, squatting over the dirt, made his nose twist in disgust. Now with this amnesty his danger multiplied tenfold because surely it would take only one man coming forward, seduced by safety, for those who kept their silence to hang, like chickens in the market. He would prefer the firing squad. He would. He would prefer the clean steel bullet to speed him to his maker.

If some tribunal, flush with new power, were to probe him about the circumstances of the stubborn bugger's death, he would have little to say. How could he speak about something that barely passed as an event to him? He thought of his father's death, the magnitude of that event, the grief of it. That was a moment writ in time, but this, no, never, and the idea he should see it as momentous reddened him with anger. Who was this Ajacopi? hero to a bunch of unscrubbed Indians, his skin rough as bark, eyes opaque, vastly shortchanged in beauty and balls compared with one of Rodolfo's spirited game cocks. Surely there was something wrong with the man's constitution that his skull could crack so easily--like the head of a child or a frail octagenarian, not a man in his middle years whose bones should be like iron.

He thought of Estefan, himself riled and confused by the recent discovery of their President's bloody remains, and how he had insisted the day before the Ajacopi incident that Rodolfo produce new information by the next afternoon. But the dwarf Indian lying in front of him with his head split could give him nothing, not a piss in a pot, and so Rodolfo could give his Captain nothing.

Berta reentered the room on bare feet and stood before him, her face set and serious. "Daniel is in trouble at the school."

"Again?" he asked. "In trouble again? Wasn't the little shit in trouble last week?"

"Two weeks ago...he hit Eduardo Meron with a stone."

"And now? What now?"

"They say he spoke with disrespect to Headmaster Perez. The headmaster is very angry, he's smoking mad. You are the father, Rodolfo. You straighten the boy around and put a stop to this, before we lose all respect in this town."

He laughed. "Yes, yes, I will speak to him but now I have other things to do." He tapped the newspaper and told her, "There's something here that is trouble--for me, your husband." In his mind, he called her 'my silken flower' and heard Estefan's guffaw.

"What will you do?" she asked.

"You’ve read it? You know about it?"

"While you rattled the air with your snoring. You think I just sit while you sleep?"

He thought of Galo--the worm, the puniest spirit in their group of four. Surely he would stumble over his own boot laces running to confess to this amnesty board. Rodolfo wanted no part of any confession. He wanted to bite back his own words, but wondered could he act without the others. He hung his head, pondering, forgetting his wife.

"What will you do?"

He shrugged. "Call the others, I suppose. We must get together, we must act in concert--otherwise it's no good."

"Yes. As always, act in concert. How you stick together, you four brave men, it's a sight to behold, it's like a religious vision."

"Don't be crude."

She spat on the back of her hand. "There," she said. "If you want crude, there, that's what my heart holds today and that is just the beginning."

He could not believe it. She spits. At her own husband's words, she spits. He shook his head. He had no words left but sank into thinking of the monstrous bad luck that let the Capitol give way to the Indian infestation the very next day after the interrogation soured and Ajacopi lost his wretched life. Had time divided the two events, the Indians would have forgotten Ajacopi. Some other red man of greater stature would have died in some other prison and the scrutiny would have fallen where that man dropped, leaving Ajacopi forgotten and Rodolfo free as a condor.

"You will speak to your son?"

"Yes, yes. Now. I'll go right now. Is now soon enough for you or should I do it yesterday, like a magician?"

He went slowly to Daniel's room without a single word readied. The boy lay on his belly, a handsome, sturdy, indolent lad his feet circling in the air as he read a comic book about aliens. He loved these books and saved his coins to buy them. "Daniel," Rodolfo said, from the head of the boy’s bed. "You threw a rock at Meron?"

Daniel rolled onto his back and arched his neck, his face glowing with pleasure at the sight of his father. "He's a lying cheat," the boy announced, proud of himself and happy to share his judgment of the matter. He flipped onto his elbows.

"You don't throw rocks in the schoolyard. Don't you know that? You've made your mother upset."

"That happened two week's ago, Papa. Meron's forgotten it. Mama should."

"Damn. But this week something too, something again. You disrespected your teacher?"

"Perez is a pig. He's half-Indian, Dad, and they expect me to listen to his mumbo-jumbo."

Rodolfo tightened his brow, confused. "He's your instructor, he's head instructor--will you bring shame on us all? Keep yourself out of trouble now. For one week. So I can have peace with your mother."

"All right, Dad," the boy said, grinning. "For you, I'll be good. I know how."

He wandered back to the front room, his mind returning to thoughts of the amnesty that sparked him to go to the phone and dial up the old man, Galo, however Galo's line was engaged. He dialed and dialed until the bleating became an intolerable squawk in his ear. Then he tried Rubén, but Rubén's telephone was out of order, the line dead, so he knew he must go around to the man's queer dwelling if he wanted to talk to him today, and he was not in a temper to wait. He could try reaching Rafi, their fourth, but Rafi was like a boy to Rodolfo and so he felt no urgency to confer with him. He didn't even have a number for the fellow, didn't know if he had a phone--Rodolfo thought he lived on some sort of boat.

He stalled off going into town to locate Rubén's place and tried Galo one more time but the old grandpa's line was still bleating so he started drinking with a swig of pisco to pass some time, telling himself he was entitled to fortification since he must go lay eyes on the odd creature called Rubén after a year of freedom from that frightening sight. Maybe Estefan had been right about him--a Jew was he? A homosexual? He'd said his family came from Paraguay. Certainly he was some sort of freak.

Soon Berta got on him about the pisco and Daniel started up whining because Rodolfo wanted to watch his futball match on television but the boy wanted cartoons from the States on the other station. He should have known better than to try and relax in that house, he thought, so he went out and untied Luci, their burro, from the eucalyptus tree, and lead her out of her shade and climbed on her splay back to head into town. He rode her even though Berta said he was too heavy and strained her back. Hearing the door slam a second time, he knew what was coming.

She'd come out of the house to shake the rugs and seen him mounted on Luci. She started her yelling. "For shame, you bastard, for shame."

'Then tell me why I feed her if not to ride her? What's the use of a goddam ass if not to carry weight on her back?" He shouted his words without turning his head to her reddened face, knowing the air between them would swallow his voice before it found its way to her. "Jesus protect me from the anger of women," he muttered under his breath.

The path into town was uphill and they moved at a pace so slow only Luci could achieve it. Everything from Rodolfo's house was uphill unless he traveled the long distance down to the lowlands and the broad stretch of jungle that led to the big river, then on to the coast. Anywhere within a half day's journey on foot or burro was up into the dry hills. The trip to town would take him an hour. Then he'd ask around for Rubén's place, maybe go there straightaway, maybe stop and eat or entertain himself awhile in one of the bars.

Rubén had moved his three dozen drawings from the front room to the bedroom because he'd lain awake brooding that the front room's bright light might yellow the paper or fade the good ink he'd traded a half-month's salary for. In the bedroom was a single window, a half-meter square. Its pane of wavy glass he could shade easily with a cloth, so the drawings were safe from concentrated sunlight. Just last winter, he’d replaced the old plastic with that glass, when his job had provided him with money enough for luxuries.

On the south bedroom wall, he hung as many of the pictures as would fit, hanging them edge to edge like tiles in a mosaic.

His project completed, he could lie on his back on the bed and look past his feet to the wall beyond finding it papered from ceiling to floor with his drawings. In hanging them, he'd tried to preserve the order in which he drew them so that a viewer might see the changes in the subject's muscle tone and skin and hair that occurred in rational sequence as the days of imprisonment passed. Then came the man's unexpected death. For all of them, it was a tragedy, but Rubén felt it was a tragedy for him especially because it brought an absolute and premature end to his best sequence of sketches, the one that turned out to be his last sequence.

Now he had leisure to study his drawings. He believed they were quite good but they would have pleased him more had he not missed certain moments in the flow of events, the fault mostly of his occasional days away from the interrogator's job. He wished he'd sacrificed those days off for the sake of his project. That opportunity lost, he sometimes lay in bed and rebuked himself for failing to honor sufficiently the work his pen had created. Each drawing contributed to the corpus of information about how the human body succumbs to pain and injury. The gaps in his record reprimanded him, but he told himself such gaps must exist for any great record of events. He thought for example of the Shroud of Turin--what an isolated fragment of history that was. Still, he regretted the breaks in continuity he'd allowed and found that they disturbed the beauty of the whole as a missing tooth distorts the set.

Rubén was an artist of pain, but only the suffering of the body engaged him. The mind's worryings did not arouse him except as they recorded what the body lives. And the philosophy of pain--the asking why and how--that did not excite his interest either. He was one who believed the physical body greater than the ideas we hold about it--those being no more than window dressing. The mind is derivative, the body essential. Like a scientist or an illustrator, he recorded what is. How do the limbs move, how do the muscles run under the skin, what cries emit from the mouth, what fluids slip from the body openings, and is the process different in man and woman, in old and young, in fit or frail? When do the eyes shed tears and when are they dry like bone? That constituted the entirety of what he wanted to know--the reality of pain, its phenomena. His desire, his hunger (he felt right in calling it that) was for data. He was the seeing eye, witness to the body in pain both as it resists and as it succumbs.

He would have liked to photograph what his eyes imbibed. He could have bought a camera from one of the shops or one of the tourists and put its sharp eye to work; then he might have made a book from the photographs. But photography was verboten at Ximena, where they worried about inquiries and reports. His own interest was apolitical, both then and thereafter. He was fortunate that one such as he, indifferent to politics, could keep a prison job and be left alone to make his observations. Though some of the men, and once even the thin woman with the ropy blonde hair, made rude remarks about his sketches, the sketches he valued so highly because they gave him the information for his final ink drawings. As long as he did his job in questioning the prisoners and applying the physical corrections, his position at Ximena felt secure. He did not care what information Rodolfo did or did not manage to extract from the prisoners, at the behest of Captain Estefan, though Rodolfo himself cared fiercely about it and went mad when too long frustrated. Rubén did as he was told in helping Rodolfo but only to keep his position and carry on with his project.

After the President was murdered, Rodolfo's fuse was clipped shorter still, but to Rubén that death meant nothing. Why should he care about a plump, pompous young man who liked to prance about before the television cameras? He was all noise and surface, all performance--Rubén could find nothing of real interest in him. His death?--well, that part was interesting in a way but there was little in the life that engaged.

Though done at Rodolfo's behest and surely never sought, the physical part of Rubén's work was a boon to him at times, because information existed that came to him with his hands laid on the skin, or pressed to the shortening muscle, that he could get no other way. And for that he withstood the unpleasantness of the manual work.

Once the prison shut down and the job was gone, his pleasures became fewer, though still he could study and arrange his pictures and savor his food, which he took care in preparing, and he enjoyed red wines as well. He bought himself a Tashica camera in a stall at the market and he would photograph the food dishes before he consumed them and that way he captured the colors, forms, and surfaces, whether glistening with juices or powdery dry. He was able to eat whatever he desired and gain no weight because his parents had passed him their tendency to remain lean. And he was lucky to have decent funds still because the prison job had paid well and he'd saved much of what he earned.

If he lay down, he would soon slumber though only an hour had passed since the sun’s sleep. He would sleep and he would find tranquility. Odd, he thought, to desire such a lackluster state, but yet he did. Lying on the pallet, he examined his naked feet as he waited for rest. He had never noticed how lovely they were, with the uniform coloring of the skin and the tight cords that lined the top like spokes. He was an artist of the body and yet remarkably he'd never noticed any of that. He was noticing now but already he was dozy and soon to sleep because his mind had lost itself, the whole body a spoke in a wheel and turning turning, his mind the soft ball of glass on the end of a glass blower's rod, pulling and stretching, his dream flow beginning and it was a knocking and legs walking, it was he, he was walking to the door, peering out through the peephole and behind the minute glass a woman's cameo brooch and a stretched face looking like someone he knew.

What!! He jumped. Someone banging down the door? Who could possibly??--he expected no one. It was a mistake, he was sure it was, a dreadful mistake to disturb him just as he set sail down the river of sleep. Someone beating on the wrong door, startling him when already he was drifting into dream. Now it would be hours before he-- "I'm coming," he shouted, his speech watery with sleep, angry with dislocation, "I'm coming." Flying flying, he lashed his robe around him on the run seeking the door to admit someone out of the night, though he wanted only to sleep the sleep he'd just sampled.

A face was framed in the minature oval of glass. His door held a peephole like at the wealthiest houses but only because he'd drilled the hole and inserted the tiny round of precious glass himself. The glass distorted like the convex of a spoon but he loved the framing. He knew this face but could not place it in such small scale. Still, he got a bodily flow of bad feeling as if his nervous system, in its wisdom, did know, did recognize and react. He'd come this far and so he opened the door and, with a full look at the man who stood in the apartment house hallway, the name filled him. Rodolfo. Oh, how sorry he was to see him, a monster of a man, a coarse brute who'd treated Rubén ill whenever he felt a need to kick at the world. And here he was, standing at Rubén's own door. How dare he come and present himself at his home like that and tear apart the lovely fabric of his sleep?

Rodolfo grunted, not offering even a cordial greeting. "It took me forever to get here on the damn ass." He motioned to the somnolent animal roped to a leaning utility tree. "You've read the paper today?"

Rubén shook his head trying to clear away sleep. The open door admitted the smell of oranges; he had eaten them for dessert and discarded the peels in the hallway trash. Without an invitation, Rodolfo proceeded into Rubén's front room. "Always the odd bird," Rodolfo muttered and resurrected for Rubén all his compatriot's cruel and crude ways. Rodolfo brought into the house a stink of alcohol that fought with the oranges' bouquet. He walked across the floor, his back to Rubén while he spoke.

"There's something in the paper you need to see."

"In the paper?" Rubén asked.

"That's right."

Rubén had never before seen Rodolfo in a drunken condition. His unsteadiness emboldened Rubén. "What? What's there that would matter to me, and in the middle of the night, Rodolfo?"

"More than you imagine...unless you weren't present when that son of a whore Ajacopi's head split top to bottom like a melon...if you weren't there, then you won't be interested. If you weren't present at Ximena Prison in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and ninety-nine, don't bother reading what's here in the paper, right under my finger."

Rubén could see the melon Rodolfo described. It falls from the back of a wagon and splits raggedly, colored flesh exposed, juice running to the ground, instantly disappearing. He nodded. "That crack-up ended my sketch sequence--in a miserable half-second."

"Oh, Jesus. I hope you've burned those fucking scribbles. You're like a child with your little pet project."

He clutched his heart with both hands and edged toward the entrance to his bedroom, flooded suddenly with gratitude that somehow he'd known to move his pictures out of the sun's light and out of the light of these blistering eyes. He blocked

Rodolfo boldly and told himself, Let him think a rumpled bed sheet brings me embarrassment.

"You're a lunatic," Rodolfo said, and Rubén obscured his fury behind the frozen face he'd learned at Ximena.

"Look," said Rodolfo. "This is the story. There's an amnesty offer come out, and we need to decide as a group what to do, whether to come forward to their so-called "truth commission" or not. Can you imagine? An Indian 'truth commission! Is that a joke?" Rodolfo sat down on the floor, his intoxication overcoming him.

Amnesty? The idea aroused him. "As a group?" Rubén never thought of them as grouped, as linked. His family--well, his parents--they were a group, to him they were the very idea of a group, something closed, encircled. They were all he knew of groups. "Come to the chair, Rodolfo." He offered his hand but Rodolfo shook him off, nevertheless climbing to his feet and settling into the chair. Rubén took the one beside him.

"It can't work to have one come forward and fart out some confession and the others not. We'll all of us have to meet somewhere and figure this out. Won't that be a pleasure, all four of us together again!"

Five, Rubén thought, because he had a recollection of that custodian, that woman, the quiet blonde whose eyes spoke often but her mouth, seldom, yet she was sassy if she did spoke. He used to wonder what she saw with her odd eyes that were sometimes fierce, sometimes somber, but always round and peculiarly flat if that is possible so that they seemed to him like slowly-panning lenses of a camera or a telescope and not like human eyes. He kept silent about his vision of that woman and turned his effort to hurrying Rodolfo on his way.

"It's that African, Tutu, who's started all this with his Truth and Reconciliation squads," Rodolfo complained. "Now it's a damned fat--fad.” He giggled, the alcohol whirling his brain and senses. “A fad."

"It's the fashion?"

"Yeah, sure, it's the fashion in revolutions. What a pile of crap."

Rodolfo went to the door and tottered out, his stance wide, dribbling contempt behind him along with instructions for a meeting they must have at the Boca.

He's gone, thank God for that, Rubén thought.

He was alone again, gladly, happily, so now he could lie back down across his bed, encircled by his pictures, and imagine this Truth Commission of which Rodolfo spoke. He had never heard of such a thing and couldn't grasp what it meant for them. Rodolfo had said the Commission was offering amnesty in exchange for the stories brought forward. To tell his story...hadn't he longed for just that? But not to gain any man's desculpation, no, only to explain how it was, how it is, with men and women suffering in bodily pain. Would this be his opportunity to put his works on display and walk attentive listeners through the process of destruction--destruction of resistance--he'd come to understand. His heart quickened with excitement, he even noticed a pulsing within his normally quiet penis.

He visualized the four of them approaching the Commission. Perhaps the Commission itself would be four men, darker complected than he, Galo, and Rafi; only Rodolfo of their four could blend among the Indians. He and the other three kneel like subjects before royalty, but on a floor that is cold cement. Suddenly he understands the Commission's task as kin to his own project of exploration and documentation; they must make a record of events and make it as true and complete as they can.

If they want to know exactly what happened to Ajacopi's body that final day--which way it twisted and turned, what his position was when he burped up the string of bloody spittle that swung from his mouth then settled to the floor, how his eyes seemed to float like dead fish in a pool after the blow to his head, then he, Rubén, would be the one to inform them. He'd captured it all with his eyes and recorded it with the bold movements of his pen. He had a beautiful drawing he'd made from a pose he captured on the man's last night, which ironically was their last night as detectives. The rebels marched into the capitol the next day and the prison staff fled to their houses and hid, hoping their longstanding disciplined silence about their surnames and the surviving five prisoners' eagerness to return to their villages would protect the staff from any retribution.

And till now they had been spared, though he never stopped imagining punishment--the four of them captured and hung, captured and thrown into a remote prison, captured and strung up from the wrists, captured and slashed to the bone or--worst of all--captured and circled in rope and set on a burning pyre and no one in witness to record their last moments as he did for the Indian who came to his death in their custody.

If the Commission asked him to testify to the minutest particulars, he would tell them that the smallest cell, the one Ajacopi often occupied after his arm healed from the break he'd come with, measured one meter twelve by one meter twenty. He might tell them how he considered the problem that such a space would create for the man trapped within, who must find a way to tolerate extreme bodily confinement for weeks or months. In the space the captive had, he could not lie down, not even on the diagonal could he stretch out to his full length. Oh, the builder had been a man who knew how to sharpen a man's agony. The prisoner could lie with bent knees, but he would long to force back the walls with his feet in order to lie flat. Often a prisoner lay rolled up on a side, or sometimes with shoulders and forehead pressed to the cold ground as if in obeisance.

An irony of the interrogators' job grew from the size of the interrogation room. Because it needed to be large enough to hold a prisoner and a group of interrogators, it was three times the size of the confinement cell, which meant that the woman's arrival at the prisoner's door to take him to interrogation promised him an opportunity to be out of his box. But where was he going? And what would occur in the other space?

Rubén wondered could you lose your mind just from the thought you couldn't lie your body flat on the floor. No matter how your muscles desired it, you could not do it; you were stopped by walls of stone. He imagined himself a prisoner and made himself a board running wall to wall on an incline; he could lay on the board and be the long leg of a triangle and in that way finally lie flat--feet above head, blood rushing to the head, or head above feet, feet swelling. At the moment of his discovery, he delighted in his cleverness.

One night, Rubén deliberately stayed long past his shift and into the hours of darkness wanting to observe how the men got through their nights. He had to go undetected in order to see them in their natural state, not posing for a sketch, so he slipped up to a small crack in the new prisoner Ajacopi's wall using the cover of a moonless sky. He thought he might see the man in agony, writhing, perhaps yelling in his native tongue, riveting Rubén's eyes and ears to the scene. But Ajacopi was sitting cross-legged, his hands open and entwined in his lap, his back flat to the wall, head rolled back so that his eyes--whenever they fluttered open--looked toward the join of the wall and the ceiling. He looked at that moment restful and untroubled and the sight of him taunted Rubén. He could not know the man's mind. Was he truly at peace? Or were his tangled thoughts only concealed from those who fixed him with their eyes?

"You have children?" Ajacopi one time asked when they were alone together awaiting Rodolfo's return to the interrogation room Ajacopi spoke then in his captors' language, of which he knew many words.

"No." Rubén gave an answer, because unlike Rodolfo he saw no point in denying the man conversation or cursing him each time he moved his lips in speech or sound.

Ajacopi nodded, his facial muscles sagging in disappointment. "You have only pictures," he said. "An artist's children." He surprised Rubén with his assessment. "Parents?" Ajacopi then asked. "You have parents living?"

"My mother."

"Parents who love their child, but maybe they don't know what the son does to put wine on the table."

Rubén felt unsettled, even tricked. "Her life is far from here. They were private, very private people."

"Their thoughts are veiled. Well, a man can choose that, can't he, unlike an animal. A man has to have trust to reveal his thoughts, unless he is a fool, which many are." Ajacopi chuckled.

"My parents never were people of great passion--that's all."

"That's a tragedy. Why live if you don't have passion for anything?"

Rodolfo's steps cut the air. Rubén knew the sound of those boots.

"That one's got passion," Ajacopi said. “Passion against others’ lives.”

He could offer the Commission recollections such as these. Maybe they would find some historical meaning in them. Rubén himself preferred pictures, not strings of words.

A long shadow bounced ahead of Rodolfo, cast by the full moon at his back. Luci's gait was so awkward carrying him homeward that Rodolfo couldn't hold his seat.

"Steady," he told her and slapped the back of her neck with his palm. He didn't care to end up face down in the road. He had a picture in his mind of that, and not a nice one, but he couldn't recall who it was he saw lying in the dirt, head rolled to the side, vomit circling the mouth like a clown's lip paint. It could be a man, or was it a woman in that memory-picture--who could tell what hid behind a clown's garish face paint?

Ajacopi said, I am a man. Rodolfo recalled those low-spoken words that came clear as water. The Indian said those words and Rodolfo was laughing both inside and aloud. Perhaps it was the same day the ugly little man cracked his head. Who remembered? Rubén, that queer duck--he'd just now managed to block Rodolfo's access to his back room, his bedroom it must be. What would Rodolfo find worth caring about in the man's bedroom? But never mind--he liked seeing Rubén nervous as a laboring insect. Hah! That was why Rodolfo kept crowding the pervert, forcing him back toward that room where his secret lay hidden--he wanted to watch him perspire. Did he have a lover concealed in there, another like himself, lying naked in the bed? Rodolfo would not want to walk in on that, or maybe he would--it would be a sight to behold. He'd probably be drawing queer pictures of his lover's ass or something, before they fucked one another. Thinking back, he was half-certain he'd smelled a stale sourness about that room that could only mean one thing. The man was disgusting. Just knowing him was painful.

Rubén likes pain, Rodolfo thought. How perverted that is! Me, I like results. Our work is like squeezing a pimple till it bursts. The work doesn't have to be pretty, it's not art, it's not Michelangelo or Diego Rivera. That sick bastard, Rubén, fancies himself a scientist. Once he told Rodolfo he was sorry they had no electricity machine that would allow him to apply a precise voltage and take its measure. He must have heard that some of the other interrogation units had electric shock machines. "Maybe you can rig one up," Rodolfo told him. "Write to the President and see will he buy you an electricity machine. Surely they have some in the capitol. You'd be helping out the cause." He added, "If you shock them hard enough, they have convulsions. They have fits just like epileptics. Did you know that?"

Rubén nodded. "But seizures disturb the memory."

"Oh, that won't do," Rodolfo said. "Hah--that would be a big fuck up, in our profession."
Luci's back was slathered with sweat, the sweat thickened with dust. The gunk soaked through Rodolfo's pants as they plodded homeward. They had no saddle for the animal. That might have kept his seat drier but Berta refused to buy one, saying, "We have to stop riding her." A picture flickered in his head of a bony guy they'd strung up by the wrists for two and a half hours, one shoulder already drawn from the socket and the guy growling with pain. Rodolfo let him down because the man's moaned and shouted words told Rodolfo he was ready to give him what they wanted, but Rubén was unhappy and reminded Rodolfo that the guy in the next cell had hung for three hours. He wanted a precise comparison, three against three and thought some sort of protocol existed to support that. He didn't comprehend that time doesn't mean shit. Each man is made of different muscles, different bones and a different mind, so saying one man can go three hours without caving doesn't tell you what three hours will do to the next man, it only tells you next time you want something from man number one you better have three hours to do your job. The other bugger might start shrieking and offer you anything you want before you've finished wrapping your cord round his wrist or he might hang there till he dies, moaning all the while, I am a man.

Luci's plodding carried him down the path which was dotted with sharp-edged moon shadows of rocks and scrub. He prayed to the Lord for some rain--told Him don't spend it all down in the jungle but save some for us on the high ground because the dry air burns the eyes and dries the nose inside until it bleeds along with the cracked lips. But the Lord as always was slow to give them water and Rodolfo would ask for it but he wouldn't make it his business to complain to the Almighty like the women did or spew nonsense about the Lord's tears watering the land.

Luci finally got him home, after two hours on the trail, and at home he found they were both of them out ... so good, he could relax. He'd done his job, hadn't he? He'd gone and seen that cretin Rubén. So now he was going to sit his ass on the sofa and have another whisky and in the morning call and roust Galo to go out to talk to Rafi on his floating tin tub. The green-back flies buzzed him there on his own sofa like he was food for supper. Dirty creatures, they agitated his mood. If he were a gringo, he wouldn't live in such a hovel. At least there would be screens on the windows, but who in this country had a screen to put on a window?

If a man had a window screen here, he would guard it like a treasure. A screen was a luxury, something only the rich would have. And where would you find a rich man here? Galo came closest of the men he knew. If Rodolfo had a screen he wouldn't fix it on the window and wait for some robber to rip it out; he would trek down to the river before dawn to pan for a chunk of gold. He was a man of imagination and not a worm like Galo, so he would think of something special like that.

He woke in a bed flooded with sunlight, Berta's rumpled nest already vacated. He didn't recall putting on his nightclothes or getting into the bed; he didn't recall her returning home or climbing in beside him. His head thrummed with pain, but he labored out to the living area to call the old grandfather. Still no dial tone. Good. Berta all the time said, We are lucky still to have the phone and lucky for the phone service given what money you bring in these days. It warmed the heart of a man to have a woman so full of lovingkindness.

Because Mary was asleep, Galo took off at a run, because he mustn't allow the phone's summons to disturb her. Already mid-morning, sun burning outside the window, and his dear Mary was sleeping. Curled under the gray quilt that her Grandy gave them for their wedding, she looked like a lamb. He couldn't allow the phone to wake her. So he ran like a man chased by lightning.

Always lately she would say, "Galo, I need my sleep, I must have sleep," and her words were so weary and impatient he did not disbelieve her.

"Are you sick, sweetest?" he asked her one time, because she had slept twelve hours and the sun had climbed far up one side of the sky and onto the top of it.

"No. I'm not sick," she answered, her voice slow yet live as electricity jumping between two wires. "I need to sleep. Can't you understand that? Just close the light."

"Of course, my dear," he said. Mary's Ma always said he was a gentleman, but his wife wasn't one to appreciate that in him, not these days. But never mind, he would cater to her as he'd always done.

So it is better, he thought when the phone rang, it is much much better that the phone not wake her and wake in her the irritation she seemed all the time to feel, poor thing. He was around the corner and would get to it before it rang a third time, the sound piercing the air more insistently with each ring, like a crying baby. Ach. Now he had hold of it. Ach. You can drop the receiver hurrying so. One time he did that, cracked it nearly in two on a metal box. And what a bad scene that was with the children, who were young then, yelling, "Look what Dad's done" and then months and months going by before they could get the phone company to replace it and Mary perturbed the whole time. Jesus--she could be a hard woman, she could crack a man's balls. But okay ... the equipment was okay now and pressed to his ear and Mary was sweetly sleeping.

"Galo here." Out of breath he was, like an old horse in the mountains, but he'd stopped the ringing at least. It rang so loud it looked like it wanted to launch itself from the carriage. Lord, I'm breathing so gaspy, he thought, and wondered, will whoever this is hear that gaspiness in my voice? At least they wouldn't hear his heart beating fists against his chest wall. That sound was saved for his own ears. "Hello," he said.

"Is that you, Galo? That's you?"

He heard a thick-tongued voice he did not recognize, yet the sound of it worried him. "Who is it? Yes, this is Galo. Mary's here but can't come to the phone."

"Doesn't sound like you, old man. This is Rodolfo Hector calling."
Oh my God. Rodolfo?? Rodolfo Hector?? Oh my God. Now he wished he had let it ring and taken the consequences with Mary. Because this was not a man he wanted to talk to, this Hector. He'd not seen him for a year, since they were both of them interrogators for the Police, Detectives Squad B, and his voice caused Galo to tremble.

"Go ahead and sound delighted to hear from me why don't you," Hector said. Sarcastic he was, always always sarcastic.

Nothing ever changed.

"Rodolfo," Galo said. "My good friend. Buen dia. How are you?" Always Galo was polite. Though his heart shivered like a man naked in a cold rain, he was polite and friendly and prided himself on that, though at times he wondered had that benevolence, that sensitivity and openness in his nature been the cause of his troubles because it left him at every hour worrying over his family, his community, his country and how they would fare in the hands of the Indians who were uneducated and backward and somehow just unpalatable--unpalatable, that was it, like something you took into your mouth and it left a bad taste. And his worries about keeping his loved ones safe and well-shielded from all that unpleasantness of those people and their strange and secretive ways led to certain affiliations and from there...nothing but trouble. He should have been more practical, he should have thought more about himself and his future years before he took on the prison assignment. He would have been better off to stay behind a desk another fifteen years, then retire. The things he saw at Ximena and had to touch and was obliged to participate in--God in Heaven! Mary never appreciated what such sights took out of a man like him whose nature was sensitive.

"We need to have a meeting," Rodolfo said, his voice the same bricked wall Galo remembered too well, though slowed and slurred by drink, from the sound of it. The thought of sitting in a room with him again...ach, he felt anger come and pull up a seat beside his fear.

A year ago they were the Detectives Second Squad trying to do right by their country and now what were they, and what was he, but a man who placed papers inside of files A through Z, and God knows what Rodolfo was doing but at least he was not in jail where all of them so easily could be, not as jailers now but as inmates. Just think of that. Prison! for a man like him who'd married a woman from a fine family and always been helpful and law-abiding to a fault. To a fault--one could ask Mary's mother who at least saw the gentlemanliness in him though in other ways her words for him were not kind. Now every morning, when he walked out from his house, his walk sprightly for fifty years, he thought of how a man like him, a quiet law-abiding family man, could end his days in a barred cell never again to see his own grandchild. He'd look up and down the street and wonder who among those he saw could be coming to drag him to prison, or maybe worse. Maybe a shot gun raised to his head and a shallow hole chiseled out of the dry dirt of the high plain. He feared prison would be worse than death--he was a delicate man, not a hard-boiled creature like Rodolfo who, as much as the coarse Indians, might stand up to such a life.

And all of this weighed on him so badly he would have liked to sleep away his hours if he could, like Mary who'd shut her eyes to the world since that blurred picture appeared in the paper nine months back showing an Indian named Ajacopi. It was printed right there that the man died in custody in the Ximena prison of the Northwest Department where Galo worked with Rodolfo and the younger two men who made up their Central Interrogation Unit Detectives B Squad. Mary didn't ask him about Ajacopi any more than she asked him about his days at work or the people with whom he worked but she handed him his glasses and held the paper up toward his face and looked hard at him with that withering look that was hers alone.

He wondered did God give Mary some special apparatus just for manufacturing that look. That would have been a poor plan on the Lord's part because that look could sear a good portion of His creation in a moment's time. He wanted to shout a defense at Mary and say, these things happen, the work we were required to do isn't a science--things go wrong. But another part of him said, Yes, my God, the whole thing came apart and came undone, the whole ghastly interrogation, and we did knock the man's head into the wall so go on and blame me, you're right to blame me, I am as guilty here as elsewhere. He imagined bending down before her, his forehead flush to the ground, and receiving her leather strap across his back.
From the day the photo circulated in the paper, he saw her giving more and more of her day to sleep as if she and sleep had entered into an intimate partnership.

"You’re saying that you and I need a meeting?" he softly queried Rodolfo. "I am surprised to hear that, my friend, when we have not met in all these many months." He silently regretted the telephone wires the government had strung from town to town, even into the rural districts high into the mountains.

"All of us need to meet. You, me, Rubén, and the kid. Don't you read the bloody newspaper?"

Galo didn't care to tell him he found the news of the day too frightening to read. When he saw how the Indians still were mourning their lost leaders and he knew that one of those they lamented died in front of him, practically in his arms, that put him in a panic. "Not so much--my eyes are weak," was all he could think to say.

"Well, there's something going on that concerns you, grampa. There's an amnesty offer from the fucking government--the Indian thug government--an amnesty for criminals which means it's for the likes of us, you and me."

Galo hated how Rodolfo loved referring to them that way, as if they were common criminals, but the man could not be influenced by softness or reason. Anyway, Galo felt too stirred by the content of Rodolfo's message to concern himself with its delivery. "An amnesty? An amnesty?" To him, that sounded good. That sounded very, very good. In fact, a feeling of lightness infused his being and his heart raced faster than an old man's heart should go. "That sounds good, Rodolfo."

"Why? Why so damn good? Why such a fucking relief? Are you still scared by the sound of your own fart as you walk down the street? So you can't wait to go in front of these bigass Indians and do your farting for them. Fart out the big confession you've got in mind?"

"Hah, hah, the sense of humor--but really, isn't it good about an amnesty, Rodolfo? It sounds good to me, very very good."

"We need a meeting. There we can talk about what's good and what's shit because if one of us is going to spill the Ajacopi story, then everyone's got to give it up. Understand? That's the way it has to be, for reasons even a lame-brain like Rubén could discern."

"Why not get a pardon if we can, Rodolfo?"

"Because what glitters isn't always gold. Especially in a world run by 'indigenous peoples.' How do you know they won't get the goods from us, then stand us in front of a pit and shoot holes in our heads, with plenty of backing across the countryside for their barbarism? Or maybe we have an 'accident' in their custody? Or this government crumbles and the next bunch to take over uses the amnesty agreement to wipe their filthy butts."

"I hadn't thought of that." Suddenly he was nothing but fear. Rodolfo would certainly be right. Rodolfo had the cunning of a wild beast.

"What they hope will pass as a government is a two-legged stool--at best. You can't trust it. So I want you to go and see Rafi because I've already visited that pervert Rubén which was no picnic believe me, going to that foul-smelling apartment where he's sequestering God knows what in his back room. Your visit to Rafi should be a joy relative to that, a goddamn joy. We need to all of us discuss this business and then whatever one man does, we all do--we march together, we march in a straight line--and that's how it will be, all will act together, and if you've got some idea you might want to go out on your own, remember what they called me in the prison. Remember what the prisoners called Rodolfo."

"Don’t worry, my friend. I'll telephone Rafi. I'll do it right away."

"Forget the telephone. You get off your ass and go see him face to face. I want you to look him in the eye. Tell him he must be at a meeting day after tomorrow, at one o'clock at the Boca. I don't give a good goddamn what else he's got to do. I don't care if he's got a date with some willing young flesh. Tell him this takes priority, even over his dick, his better half--hah!. I don't care if he's naked with a fucking movie starlet from Hollywood, California. He'll be there, and you'll be there trailing after him, ready to kick his ass or clean it if I tell you to."

"You've had a drink or two, Rodolfo. That's it."

"Yeah, yeah, you let me worry about what I put in my goddamned mouth."

Galo hung up the phone and was left in the quiet house and suddenly he wanted to jostle Mary awake and shout, What are you doing sleeping all day like royalty when your husband is in trouble? He pushed the thought away and figured he could wash the dishes now, then dust the living room and wipe down the windows with vinegar so Mary would see and smell his efforts when she woke. Maybe her attention to all the nice things he did to keep their house clean would distract her from asking about the call.

He began the cleaning and thought how Mary used to patter around the house straightening things in a loving way so that he got in the habit of calling her, "mother Mary." One day she snapped at him and said, "Galo, can't you see how that's not the thing to call me, not any more." Because they had had a loss, you see, of their third child, their son Manuelo only two months of age, and she was suffering mightily from that, which was what she meant when she made that sharp remark. This all happened ten years past but time had stopped somehow at that point, at least the time in which his life with Mary was marked. Since Ximena, things were worse still. Often he'd come home and find her propped up sick in the bed. When the prison shut, he became the one to tie the apron around his waist and clean the house, either he did or no one at all did because they no longer had money for a serving girl.

He went to the sink and picked up the dishrag and squeezed the pink liquid soap onto the cloth seeing in his mind the pink fluid spill from the Indian's mouth onto the floor where Linya, the woman attendant, would have to wipe it away. That sort of thing was part of her job, though often Galo saw disgust overtake her face. Oh. La fuerza, la fuerza. That was what they called Rodolfo, the force. He remembered now. Yes, that was it. He got a sick feeling recalling that burp of pink fluid because it was like with the baby, Mary's little baby, when she found him slate-colored in the cradle with the puddle of pink spit-up beside him on the nice sheet. What could a person do about something like that? You couldn't do anything at all. She said she wasn't angry at him, that would be unreasonable because what could a person do about bad fortune or being forgotten by the Lord? Nothing, nothing at all, yet Galo would never forget her screaming and screaming when she walked into the room and saw the baby dark like coal. She screamed and screamed like an empty container trying still to pour out its contents, screaming like the Indians sometimes did when their pain got too severe under the interrogations. But theirs was just bodily pain, nothing really, because all that was needed to end it was the cutting of a cord or the removal of a clamp from the tongue or a stick from the eye. Nothing would end Mary's pain because the child was dead. Even when the grandchild came, her suffering didn't abate.

"Don't worry, Galo," she whispered hoarsely months after the tragedy, lying in bed barely opening her eyes her lids heavy with the closeness of death. "Don't worry, I don't blame you, you must not blame yourself for this." In later months she said, "Please stop--please please please stop, you don't have to take responsibility for the child. Stop clawing at yourself, it helps no one, surely it does not help me." As time passed she seemed annoyed with him. "You needn't be in a panic. Stop running around in circles. I can't bear to be around you."

How could she say such a thing? he wondered. Even now, he could feel how he frowned at her words. Why did she have to demean him? Why did everybody wish to demean him? Was he born a punching bag? What person would want to be responsible for something as disturbing as a child's death? What person would want the whole world angry with him? Would another woman, another wife treat him so? He was an unlucky man.

He had put Manuelo down for his nap but he wasn't even in the room, not even in the room when she found him. The doctor at the clinic said no one was at fault, it just happens sometimes to babies, this sort of thing, it's Nature's way and Nature is pitiless to humankind. It happens, and no one but God knows why, the nurse said, but Galo couldn't let it go, no matter what they said. So now, when it came to Ajacopi's death, it made no difference to him if any tribunal understood what happened on the prison floor. It was Mary's understanding that he sought, oh his dear Mary, his angel, his lamb. He would make her a cup of tea after he finished the dusting.

The water heated on the burner. He sat to rest and remembered returning home the night the Indian died. Often after work he drove Rodolfo to his tumbledown house because otherwise the man had a long walk in the dark and even Rodolfo deserved some pity. But that night, spent by the accident and the hours of waiting that followed, he could not be with them any longer. As soon as the paperwork was completed and they were released by Captain Estefan, he muttered some goodbyes and hurried out.

He got behind the wheel with relief but soon was wretchedly stalled in a jam-up of several rusted cars and a turquoise pickup and a scattering of bony cattle. Marking time, he worried how to tell Mary. He tried in his head to mollify her saying, "Come now Mary, why do you trouble yourself so? The man was after all an untaught Indian and he wanted to bring down the society we know. Things had to be done, we couldn't let the government fall, could we?" But every time Galo got to the slaver of pink fluid on the floor, he gave up, because Mary would see Ajacopi as a helpless baby and would never understand the trouble men like him could make.

Galo felt a disquieting detonation of inner rage. He was angry at the Indians who would destroy a decent way of life and communalize all Galo had, letting anyone's grubby hands grab on and claim it as their own. What justice inhered in that? And what was wrong with Mary not to pity him in his dilemma? At least in his own mind he could ask, Don't I, Galo, have an obligation to stand like a man and take my part in the struggle? Should I leave it all to crude men like Rodolfo or boys like Rafi?

A Commission of Truth and Reconciliation had been formed, that's what Rodolfo said. Galo imagined the four from the Squad and four or five from this Commission, no table between them, just a number of seated men got up in uniforms to look official, but looking instead like children playing at being grand. They were lined up across from the squad in a bare room washed by light from two windows cut high in the walls. The Indians were unseasoned and dour. Of the four detectives, only Rafi was youthful. How could those young Indians understand what pressures would have conspired to lead them to such an accident? Galo shook his head and thought, What has our world come to that I must worry whether I am understood by Indians?


Galo recalled a towering young man with eyes yellow like a cat's escorted into the interrogation cell to watch a morning's work. The rumor was that Estefan was considering the visitor as a fifth interrogator for the Squad, since the Captain had been worried about their low productivity. They had their "morning man" strung up by the wrists. While pain wore away at the man, Rodolfo had his cup of coffee and a cigarette and entertained Rafi with stories of the cock fights his father used to take him to. Finally bored with waiting for the man to begin screaming--and judging his agony from his pallor and the set of his teeth, the roll of his eyes--Rodolfo ground out his cigarette and got up from the table to begin his questioning of the man, who never looked at Rodolfo or uttered a word, but hung, sweating rivers, concentration in the set of his mouth.

Galo's attention was on the visitor whose eyes darted between Rodolfo and the prisoner. His nose twitched rabbitlike every few moments and Galo wondered was he bothered by the smoke from Rodolfo's cigarette. After half an hour had passed, the yellow-eyed man looked to the officer who'd brought him, who’d stood expressionless and stiff through the proceedings. "No thank you," the tall man said to the officer and shook his head twice, quickly, and walked out.

Galo wondered would they nevertheless see him in uniform the next day, his neck squeezed by a collar, a glum set to his face.
But no, they never saw him again except in Rubén's sketches for that morning. Would those sketches now constitute evidence against them? Galo wondered. What if they passed up the amnesty offer and the sketches fell into the wrong hands? Sweat soaked his shirt below the neck.

He imagined the Indians demanding every detail. How would he respond? If they asked him when the Indian died, he would say it was when the pink drool ran from his mouth. That's when Galo said to himself, "God help us." God help them because they were in trouble again, again because there had been one other bad incident where a prisoner had been hung not to death but to where he was past interrogating and so he was useless. After the pink fluid splatted to the floor, Ajacopi again moaned and Galo knew this one was not quite dead either, but soon afterward the Indian fell silent and slack and Galo thought Rodolfo could order Rubén to drive a nail through the man's wrist and he would not feel it.

"Galo," Mary called from the next room. "What time is it?"

"Almost noon, Love."

She came into the room, her white gown rumpled, her face swollen with sleep. "Didn't I hear the phone?"

"Earlier," he said. "I've put water on to boil. Have some tea."

"Who was calling? Someone for me?"

He shook his head. "Look. I've cleaned a little."

"Yes," she looked about the room. "It's nice. You're thoughtful."

Her voice seemed mild. He was grateful. "I'll make you coca tea. I'll have a cup with you."

"Who telephoned? Someone for you?"

"Yes. Don't worry yourself."

"Who was it? You get so few calls. Usually it's one of my women calling."

"That's true. It's the women who do the calling, except when there are emergencies or business to transact."

"This was business?"

Galo sighed. "I suppose. It was Rodolfo Hector from the prison. My old squad leader. He's sending me on an errand."

"He calls you now, after all this time?"

"It might be a good thing, Mary. There's a commission formed for amnesty. Rodolfo's got me driving to the lake this afternoon to inform one of the others from our group. We're to have a meeting and talk it over, strategize."

Mary nodded and sat down at the table, her palms rubbing her scalp above the forehead, her fingers pushing back through her hair like two combs. "I'd been hearing rumors about a Commission on Truth. This is the commission, then, and the time to come forward with the truth. It's good, it's time for everything to be said."

Rodolfo knew the old man would go to Rafi and hold himself steady long enough to look Rafi in the eye, just as Rodolfo had instructed. Meanwhile, Rodolfo could place his head to the table and get some sleep because he'd drunk too much and needed rest, needed to close his eyes which burned relentlessly with the dust.

The wind was high and rocked the boat against the trunks of half-submerged trees that ringed the lake, but Rafi had habituated to the rhythm of life on the water and was unbothered. He prepared and ate his lunch of thick bean soup, which sloshed side to side in one of his mother's pottery bowls. He cleaned the dishes and laid them on a cloth, then stretched on his pallet on the deck and thought about the classes he would take finally in the state tourism program and wondered would they open doors for him.

Mid-afternoon, while he lay pacified by the sun and waves, who climbed up to his deck and brought him bolting from the pallet but the old grandfather from the detectives' group, hat dangling in his hand, his face gone green and sickish from the water's motion.

"I've found you resting," Galo said. "So nice to rest in the afternoon, like my Mary enjoys. Do you mind...?"

"No, come," Rafi said.

Galo righted an aluminum chair that was tossed on its side and perched on it. "Our mutual friend Rodolfo asked that I come and speak with you. I apologize for the disturbance of your peaceful thoughts."

Rafi felt suddenly ashamed that the afternoon found him inactive. What was he, an old lady like Galo's Mary? He stiffened his posture. "Do you want a beer? Water?" he asked Galo, noting the contrast between the man's flowery speech and the sick pallor in his face, but the old man did not seem to hear him. Rafi understood why his friend Rodolfo would send the old man as emissary because Rodolfo was their decision-maker, their man of action, he was the one who'd always known why it was important for them to go on working in that wretched toilet of a place, Ximena.

Though Rodolfo was his friend, Rafi felt no happiness at seeing the man Rodolfo had sent to stand in front of him in the cool air that smelled of rotting fish and pond weeds. In truth, he felt sick in the stomach himself upon seeing the old man, because he wanted to put everything from that place and business behind him like the wake that recedes back of a fast boat, the kind of boat Rafi could only long for, or captain in his dreams.

When the shutting of Ximena came so abruptly and booted each man back onto his own path, Rafi sensed he could no longer live cheerfully with Mama and with Ofelia and Teresa, his cherished sisters. He bought himself a cabin boat with the money he'd saved from that dirty job and fixed it up so it was gleaming and a bit showy and fine to live in, perfect for a young bachelor (though it wasn't yet fit to venture far across the lake). Ofelia and Teresa shook their lovely heads at him and said they never could live on the water and bounce all night on the waves, but he told them it's different for a man, for a man it's like rocking on the bosom of his beloved. His sisters blushed at that and flashed their eyes to each other because they were unaccustomed to hearing their baby brother speak about women in words like poems. He thought they might run off and chatter to Mama but that would be quite fine with him. He was an adult man entitled to such words. If he hadn't been altogether grown when the Detective Squad took him in, he was grown now.

So he stayed on his boat and motored it around the lake when fuel was available and not too expensive and the boat was not leaking dangerously. When he tied up to a tree by the shoreline, he liked to station himself on the deck and broadcast over the water the music he'd collected, most of which came to his country from the States when the North Americans replaced their old vinyl with CDs. He played Elvis and Tammy Wynette and newer stuff like heavy metal and hip hop when he could get it.

"Here, you can sit," he said again to Galo, and the older man settled his weight tentatively on the edge of the bench that ran down one side of the fifteen foot boat. When the water kicked at the boat bottom a bit, Galo sprang up and suddenly Rafi wanted to shout, "Sit! Just sit. Sit on my boat, goddammit," but he instead asked evenly, "How is Rodolfo? You've seen Rodolfo?"

Galo settled back onto the bench. "He's sent me because of something that's come out in the paper." He raised his eyes to Rafi. "Maybe you know already, something about an amnesty that's been offered us from the new government. That's why I'm here, I'm sent by Rodolfo to speak with you, about this amnesty."

"An amnesty?" Rafi put his hand on the wooden wheel and turned it a little, imagining a hard right and a leap out of the water, like a great whale's, as his boat spewed out a bold wake behind it. Light flowed into his spirit. An amnesty. Could that be the salvation he'd been needing?

"It's like a pardon, for the crimes they say were committed during the revolution. We must decide whether to come forward with our stories or take our chances with continuing in silence."

"I don't understand," Rafi said. "If there's a chance of pardon, why not take it?" Rafi was disturbed by the doubt in Galo's voice--he was tired of doubt. "What does Rodolfo say?"

"Only that we must have a meeting day after tomorrow and discuss it, and each of us put his opinion out on the table where the others can examine it."

"But I'll tell you my opinion now. We go for the amnesty, now, today, before the chance is gone. Don't you see, this is it, a chance for us that’s coming round again, like a winning number on a wheel." His skin flushed. He stepped closer to Galo. He looked at the old man and wondered how much of life was left for him.

Galo shook his head wearily but offered no words of explanation.

Rafi felt the weight of the other's desolation and panic wash through him. "What, man? You think it's wrong to go forward?

It's more dangerous? Tell me, please. Is that what Rodolfo's saying?"

Galo shrugged. "Rodolfo is saying, Come to a meeting."

The uncertainty agitated him. Anger bubbled within him. "Then it's not a sure thing, then forget it, let it alone--if there's doubt, if Rodolfo doesn't know, then let it be. Forget about amnesty. Just forget it. If there's no gain from a confession, who needs it. Damn it."

Since Ximena had shut down and whatever promise it held had melted away, Rafi had tried to get back on track with the government tourism school. Some of his friends from the high school--those with ambitions like his--were already much of the way through the program, and that put them miles ahead of Rafi. He heard from them that tourism is the future of the country because of its natural beauty and the cultural history as well. He knew about the cultural history: when he was a child, he started touring people around to help his mother, whose foot was so swollen with her disease she could not take opportunities to earn an extra dollar. He only wished that Ximena Prison had burned to ash like Sodom and Gomorrah.
Instead, the place swallowed him up, and took along his future as surely as the clothes on the back of a man whose fallen into a mine go down with him.

Rodolfo always said, ‘You are doing the decent thing laboring here as an interrogator, you are working for the cause of our people who are threatened by an evil force.’ Daily, he told himself Rodolfo had to be right, and believed himself that it was right and proper that they work to hold secure the future of the whole of their people and the coming generations, even though the work itself was disgusting to him, especially to his senses. The more Rodolfo talked, the more Rafi understood what was going on in their country and for a time he counted himself lucky, almost blessed or chosen, to be one of those who'd opened his eyes to the situation with the Indians. He saw how he could become one of the ones educated about the cause instead of one educated in tourism which, under Rodolfo's tutelage, came to seem like a fribblling thing and one too dependent on the outsiders from the North and from Europe who came to them with their pockets stuffed. The image of those bulging pockets flashed now and started Rafi’s heart racing.

Now Galo, already an aged and weak man, presented himself at Rafi's hideaway and offered his hand and took a seat on Rafi's bench to settle his roiling stomach and wanted to tell Rafi while he slid his hat between his thumb and forefinger that the Indians' government had offered them an amnesty and they must meet together at the old Rio Boca Club and discuss going forward to a tribunal for Truth and Reconciliation even though it might do them no good.
"Rodolfo says you must come, you must take part in the discussion."
Rafi wanted to whine like a child. "But we are living free," he said. "We are left alone. Look at my home here and how my life is coming back again, like the forest after it's burned." His life did not in fact feel like it was coming back to vigor but he couldn't grasp whether this amnesty would help it flourish or would it be yet another line of flames licking the tender growth. He couldn't bear that. He would be finished. "This is all about that one Indian who cracked his head?" he asked. "The stubborn one who died on the cell floor? The one of whom Rodolfo said, His skull was weak? All this is because of him?" He shook his head. "How can that be fair, that all of us lose everything over that one Indian?"

"The dead take up more space than the living. You die, you become a martyr, even if you are an Indian. But the head, the skull--the strength of it, the weakness, that I don't know. Rubén would know that kind of thing."

"Rubén! Not him again? I'll have to look at him? I don't want to, and Rodolfo will go crazy if he has to bear his sight. All for
one Indian old as the forest." He'd disliked Ajacopi more than he'd disliked the others, most of whom he had forgotten.

Ajacopi was smaller than most, hunched rather hideously in the back, and had a peculiar odor, as if he rubbed his skin with one of the oily dark medicines the Indians concoct from things growing in the jungle, then store in jugs for years, secured against spoilage by a spoonful of rum. "I never wanted this," Rafi said. "I wanted to be a guide and share all that I know of the city and its history?"

"What city?"

"Our city."

"This town? With one thousand people? This town needs a bureau of tourists?"

"They say it's growing very fast."

Galo thought the boy ridiculous but had little energy to dispute him. "So the recruiters forced you off your career track and had you take a job with the military instead?"

He shook his head. "I met Rodolfo in the bar one night. He told me the work was to be a very good thing. It would set us apart from others and put us above them. We would be like condors on the cliff."

Galo sighed. "Rodolfo was drunk when he phoned me, and had no patience. He said we must decide all together and move in unison, not each on his own like cats in the forest. If we move alone, we put each other at risk and this has become a life and death business."

Rafi turned away from him and hung his head. How profoundly tired he was of life and death business. All he'd wanted from that hideous job was the dollars, because the prison paid good money and let him have nicer things than most of his cohort. He'd bought several pieces of good furniture, all of it brand new, and the best radio he could find anywhere in the city. Rodolfo helped him tolerate the work saying over and over that even though he was still a young man he would be making a respected contribution to the cause of their people and he would soon forget about the dirt beneath his nails--his hands had grown grimier than a common laborer--and he would stop troubling his thoughts with the stench of the place and its peculiar Indians.

Despite Rodolfo's words, he often got a bitter feeling because he'd been sent to keep such close company with people he'd been taught were ignorant and dirty, like all the Indian peoples all over the world whom the Lord made early in his Creation before he knew what he was doing. We should hold ourselves separate from them. That was what he'd been taught, even when his own mother hadn't a coin in her pocket. He knew the Indians as dirt farmers or low class workers--they seldom had the ambition to rise above that. Why would he go voluntarily to a prison to work among them? Because of Rodolfo, he answered himself. Because of Rodolfo and how he touted the cause, until the tourist industry shrank to a less prideful purpose.

He was last to join the squad, which had been short one man until Rafi registered with the police unit at Rodolfo's urging and thus made himself available. To reach Ximena, he’d crossed open fields of scrabble leading uphill to a rocklike building full of wretchedness and panic that left him sick in his stomach. Only gradually did he learn not to regard the particulars. He kept his vision clouded and his nostrils pinched like you do if you meet with a pile of crap a dog or llama left on the street.
He began to preach to himself, telling himself that in this new and important job, he was like a surgeon or a dentist which means that the prisoner is screaming but you stick to your job. You don't listen to the noises or look at the streaming eyes to find the frantic heart inside the man's chest--you stay at your job and feel proud you can do that.

Knowing the prisoners were Indian made the work easier since he'd known them as silly, sour people empty of real feeling. As a child, one time he encountered an old Indian man squatting nearly naked beside a puddle. The man was digging with a stick for some silver foil in the mud under the water. Rafi thought the old man was looking for coins and he offered him a copper coin he had in his pocket. Later, in front of the family stove, he told his grandmother about the man with the stick. She slapped his hand and said, ‘Naughty boy, don't hand things to a dirty Indian or you'll soon be living how they live.’ That way he began to learn about the Indians and learned to be wary of them. A lick of memory told him he'd been angry briefly at Grandma and focused his eyes on the brown spots on the back of her hand as if she'd caught some contagion herself but the next time he saw that old Indian he skirted him widely and turned out his bottom lip.

'Do it like a professional'--that's what Rodolfo taught him as he explained at what point his new assistant should take hold of the rope that held a man's hands behind his back, wrist-to-wrist, and add another twist to it, till in some cases an arm might pull away from the hand. Rodolfo said he could not see his own son, Daniel, growing up with the fortitude to do the work they did there in Ximena. That was the word he used--fortitude--and at night, when Rafi felt desolate lying in his bed in Mama's house, he recalled the word and a warm feeling of pride spread through his body and into his skin and allowed him to sleep.

In time he learned to feel nothing at all during the long days he spent in the prison building--his heart had become a surface so smooth nothing could grab hold. He marveled at Rubén who hurried about in a state of fascination with the work at hand, as if he were a professional happily attentive to his duties.

Rafi's feelings would kindle when he left the prison after the work shift and made his way down the hillside and walked into Mama's house, recognizing suddenly then that he was dirty as a carrion bird and stinking with the odors of the place. A guy like him, good looking and amiable, shouldn't come home to his mother's house wrapped in a skin of dirt and sweat, at times even stained with splashes of blood and urine so gross that he flushed with shame for his sisters to encounter him before he'd bathed. He felt the dirt on his skin as a kind of powder that glowed in the light of their bright eyes. Shame caused him to change his habit and when he'd leave the prison he'd go to the lake and bathe, then sit on a rock with a calabash shell filled with soapy water and scrub his nails with a rag, on top and underneath, then oil his hands with cocoa oil till the skin was soft. Only then would he go home and drink coca matté with Mama. It was on those evenings that he came to think of the lake as a place of peace where he could live some day on a boat of his own.

The thought of such a boat gave him comfort after Ximena shut its door and he found himself without employment in a society that showed little sign of honoring him as Rodolfo had promised it would. He purchased the boat from an old man who could manage its care no longer and inch by inch he covered it in white paint (which the old man offered free), painting over the blotches of rust and the small rotten spots till it started to look grand. When he ran out of the white from covering too thickly, he had to finish up with a brown he bought at great expense from a red-spectacled man whose market stall boasted miscellaneous supplies for renewing and refurbishing things spoiled by time, sun and weather. From that red-spectacled man, Rodriguez, he also bought a cream polish to shine the wood surfaces of the deck until the rain water bounced off them like on the television ads for Turtle Wax and Thompson's Water Seal. The glass jar Rodriguez held up from his squatting position had no label, so Rafi didn't know whether his deck was to shed water like a turtle or a seal, but either way he was pleased when the first rain produced water drops bouncing off a slick surface just like in the ad.

On a fine day Rafi said good-bye to Mama and to Ofelia and Teresa. He reveled in pleasure cut with sadness when each in turn pulled his head to her breast in warm embrace. He toted his large basket of personal items to the boat. Fearing theft, he'd moored it as securely as possible at the north end of the small lake they called Argento. He wanted to give his boat a name better than just The Juliano, his family name, and so he called her Bachelor's Heaven as a joke, and he painted that name right on the side for everyone to see and laugh.

Once settled onto the Heaven he spent his days resting and pondering what step he should take next. He would have liked to meet some of the girls he saw strolling along the gravelly beach in their bikinis, stirring him to excitement. Sometimes a girl did stop and visit with him if he hung about on deck pretending to work or if he called out "hey, Chiquita" and gave a smile until she asked about the name he'd given the vessel and whether he was a man of the ladies and then she giggled and squirmed and teased him about no-way going on board a boat with such a flirty name. Of course he went right ahead and invited many of them onto the boat for coffee or a sweet biscuit and sometimes they accepted his invitation out of curiosity and talked with him and laughed and enjoyed his hospitality but in the end they were only coy and when he'd reach out a hand to place it on top of a delicate hand or knee, the woman would stand and leave him, her erect posture brooking no argument and warning of older brothers and uncles by the dozen.

He knew though from the bragging of his friends José and Pedro that if he would become a tourism guide and would tell the women of his occupation, likely his fortune with the ladies would improve, which kept him from despair. The one thing that worried him most was the change in the government, because something powerful like the tide and difficult to fathom had happened and the Indians now had the power of government in their hands and so he had to wonder would the tourism school be all that it had been in the glorious past or was its heyday behind it?

"You're living here on this boat?" Galo asked.

"Yes."

"All alone on a boat? A young man, with no family?"

"Why would you say that? No, it's silly to say I have no family. I have Mama and two sisters beautiful as the orchids in the jungle." He wanted to wail aloud when he considered going back within those prison walls, even in his memory. Finally, he'd washed the stink of that place from his skin and he could stand for Ofelia and Teresa to hold his face in their hands and kiss his cheeks. 'He's sweet as a puppy,' Teresa would always say. He wondered how he appeared in her eyes, because they had different fathers so they were only half related. She and Ofelia had one father, but he had another.

"Mary will not hear of any future plans."

He shook his head. "What do you mean?"

"If I tell her we'll go to the sea for a holiday or build a bigger house, she won't hear of it. Life is over, that's what she feels. She can be a hard woman, bless her."

"It's not right to drift through life.” Drifting had been his my father's way. “If you put one foot in front of the other, you will progress and people will see that and give you encouragment."

"You are a guide now, are you? Some kind of tourism guide?"

"Yes, I am becoming."

"I never saw many tourists in this town."

"Many many people will come, with money stuffing their pockets, because our country has so much more to offer than any other. The sea, the lakes and mountains, the history of Conquistadors, the beautiful women."

Galo nodded but Rafi could see the old man had blinders on his eyes. He would be left behind, like debris the wind pushes to the side of the road. Rafi's own future seemed to circle around the tourists but also around the women in his life. Ofelia his sister was always after him to find a wife though he was still young. "You want someone to lock me up and throw the key into the sea," he told her. "No, no," she said, but his words made her smile. He loved the way Ofelia smiled. Her husband was a lucky muchacho.

Rafi and Ofelia were deep friends from his earliest childhood. All through the long afternoons, they'd sprawl together on the ground--inside the house or out--and feel the heat of the day and listen to the radio. When he was eleven, he learned to be a ham operator and took her on fantasy trips with him all around the world. They saved up for postage then sent off postal cards to foreign stations and months and months later, when they had forgotten, replies would come in the mail with stamps from foreign places and these small treasures would stir them with excitement. Even now, when he was troubled, it was Ofelia he turned to for comfort, imagining his head on her lap, Ofelia lovely as the Virgin Mary, Ofelia running her sifting through his hair telling him he was always her favorite. And sometimes he'd had--what was the word?...qualms, he guessed that was it, qualms, uneasy feelings, about Ofelia, his sister, feelings to disturb him, but that was all long past when he was still something of a child.

"So you will be there?" Galo asked.

"Yes, yes." He wanted Galo to leave his boat so he could soothe himself. "I'll be there. Tell Rodolfo that Juliano, Rafael Juliano, his friend, will be there. Don't worry, okay, I will be at his meeting, now leave my house please. Please go, and let me be alone."

He was surprised how bold he was in sending Galo away, as if he were a general or a commander, like Rodolfo himself might be in some other land. So maybe he was getting to be a strong man now, but the fact was, Galo's relayed demand to attend this meeting made him feel like crying. He wanted to cry and wanted the old man gone before he broke down. God forbid

Galo should carry back to Rodolfo a picture of Rafi with a woman's tears running down his face.

With Galo gone, Rafi lay down on his stomach in the full sun but he could not relax. His distress was so great he hit his forehead against the surface and sobbed. When he had exhausted his misery, he lay quietly and thought again of his precious sisters. As they grew older, they began to take an interest in young men. Mama wouldn't let them be out with boys on the streets--they must come into the house and remain under her watchful eye. Sometimes though, she needed to be out working, doing the rich people's laundry, so she told him, 'Son, you keep an eye on your sisters, that will be your job while I am out doing mine.' And he did, he watched them closely with their young men. They laughed that he was watching and making disapproving faces, but did not stop their fooling.

If he got mad enough to defy Mama, he'd desert his sisters and go out in the street and squat in the gutter, talking to whomever came by, forgetting about the foolishness inside. If tourists came he would tag after them and point his finger to the sights and open his eyes with admiration and say, 'Look, see, this is our cathedral from the fifteenth century and the altar is covered in hundreds of layers of precious hammered gold leaves that shine brighter than the sun in the sky.' It bothered him when the Indians gathered round the attractions in their garish costumes and made pests of themselves with the tourists so that the sights looked less grand by their taudry presence, and he tried to let the tourists know there was nothing in common between the Indians and him.

On one occasion, he had little to do because his sisters had gone to the market and the other young children were off with their fathers helping gather thatch to reroof the houses, leaving him home with only Mama, who was resting her swollen foot, so he checked the mountain of scree down the street from his house for the lizards whose heads shone green. Whenever he found a lizard, he would pick it up by tip of the tail and carry it to a hole he'd dug behind the house where he could trap it awhile and watch it. He liked the jewelly look of their heads and the way they darted over the rocks and into their cool hiding spots.

After a while, his mother called him to the door and had him come in and meet a man and a woman whom she called the Andersons. She always turned up with strangers at their house the way some people turn up with stray dogs; he thought the strangers helped her put food in their cupboard. The Andersons were foreigners, from the United States, she with blonde, straight hair like in a magazine, he with a head bare as a stone in the river. "Rafael," Mama said, "walk these nice people into the town and take them to see the Cathedral. Take them inside and show them where we pray to the blessed virgin and to the Little Flower. Show them the saint of the dogs and the saint for the pigs. I would go but my foot is aching today, so you be their guide.' Mama had some kind of tumor that made her right ankle bend out and made her foot swell and hurt on most days.

He was glad for some activity on that hot, slow day. He thought of taking the Andersons to see his lizards but didn't know if that would please them or bring scorn--maybe they had larger, brighter lizards in the United States. He had heard of some called dragons and wondered where those were found. So he followed Mama's advice and marched Mr. and Mrs. Anderson into the town, only five minutes walk up the hillside road. He was surprised how they fussed over all that they saw and seemed delighted with him for the way he pointed everything out so knowledgeably including the four or five saints Mama had said to speak about and many others as well because he knew every saint in the cathedral and knew all their sad and miraculous stories. When they were done touring, Mr. Anderson shook Rafi's hand and gave him two silver coins for his service. Then he put his hand on Rafi's shoulder and said to him, trying hard at Spanish, “What's the difference between a South American potato and a North American potato?” “I don't know, Sir,” Rafi said, worried because he knew that the tourist guides he'd followed here and there always made a great production of telling the tourists their people had 100 kinds of potatoes or 200 kinds of potatoes they grew. Some even said over 500 kinds of potatoes though Rafi had seen only five or six types spread on cloths on the ground in their marketplace. “That makes two of us,” Mr. Anderson said, chuckling. “But if I find out, I'll let you know.” Mrs. Anderson said, “You're quite a little man,” her hair and her smile shining in the sun just like the gold leaves on the Roman Catholic statuary.

Outside the church were Indian women with dirty white llamas and small children costumed for photographs. The children stood holding the llamas' mouthropes, looking more miserable even than the dusty beasts. The children's mouths were sticky and pink from too much sugar candy which the tourists gave them even though their mothers needed money, not sweets. Rafi skirted around them, not wanting to get too close to the crying and the dirt and odors because he knew by now that the Indian people were not like his own--descendants of the Conquistadors-- and never washed their bodies, so that you must make them put on new clothes if they come into your house or they'll bring in their dirt and lice. He always remembered the day Ofelia had made him very mad when she was stroking his hair, which was black and straight, and she said to him, “Rafi, you look just like an Indian boy.” He sat right up and said, “You take that back'” but she just laughed and said, “Indian boy, my brother's an Indian boy, he must have had an Indian papa.” He hated that she demeaned him as an Indian and hated almost as much that she needed to remind him his father was not the same man as hers and Teresa's and had wandered away, probably off the planet. He openly favored Teresa after that and took a long time to forgive Ofelia and let her comb his hair again.

When the Indian in cell D fell back from the wall, his broken head bouncing off the floor, something drained from the man's mouth. Rafi hadn't noticed but Rubén asked him about the stuff, asked him disgustingly about the color of the junk draining from the Indian's mouth. Rafi's eyes had been busy elsewhere, because Ajacopi's hair had grown thick with blood soon after his eyes wheeled back in his head. Rodolfo said the head broke too easily and he seemed very angry. Rafi saw the blood climbing up through the hair and feared that he would be the one made to drag the fouled body off. He saw himself coming back to the interrogation cell with the goo all over his hands and clothes and resented that he seemed always to be the one with dirtied hands.

But Linni bless her led in two soldiers who carried Ajacopi away. Rodolfo, his eyes glaring, followed them out of the room and made the old man follow as well, leaving Rafi alone with Rubén who asked once and then again more loudly what was the color of that fluid dribbling out from the Indian's mouth. Rafi felt he might not be able to keep himself from closing his hands around Rubén's throat and choking him to death, this man who wanted to know this idiotic detail 'for his record,' he said, because the record absolutely must be accurate. Rafi shook his head and shrugged. “I don't know. I just saw some goo--what does it matter.” Then he fell to his knees and looked at the ground, knowing he wanted desperately in that moment to lay his head against the earth and sob. But he did not; he was a man and the thought of Rodolfo's resplendent word, fortitude, stopped him from placing his head to the ground as if it were Ofelia's breast, or Teresa's, or even Mama's.

Rubén must have found his answer from someone else, because he colored the stuff red in his drawing, pale red like blood thinned with water. Rafi saw the drawing because he stopped by Rubén's apartment to ask him did he have Rodolfo's address and there on the wall he saw it, in black lines and scribbles except for the reddish stain of puddled fluid by the mouth. Rubén didn't have Rodolfo's address because Rubén never had anything anyone else would want, only oddball things like his pictures, scores of them lining the walls, all of them gross to Rafi like everything born of that prison.

In the prison, Linni was his only bright spot, his only reminder of a young man's normal, nice life. The prison was not a place for socializing, it was far from being a club or beach where he might spend time with attractive ladies, but he often carried home a picture of Linnea standing with her back to the cool stone wall while she watched the proceedings through half-shut eyelids, as if her huge eyes could not tolerate the sight of things. When they'd finished with a prisoner, they'd pass him off to Linni for her ministrations and she would pull a rough brown hood over the prisoner's head and lead him back to his cell. Each cell was a short walk down the single long hall that made up the prison building, so there was no way of confusing a man about his whereabouts by blinding him, but Estefan required her do it that way, maybe as some kind of ritual or to pretend they worked at some grander prison or detention center than Ximena. At the end of a day, Rafi would leave the images of the prisoners and their squalor and carry Linni home in his head.

One time, after a session with an old man of sixty or more who'd screamed till the screaming got to their nerves and sharpened the slaps they directed across his face, Rafi said to Linni, "I can help you drag this one back to the cell--no way can he walk now." Usually their motivation to get out of there got them on their feet, no matter how exhausted they were or injured or dazed, but this one couldn't even get to his knees. She looked at Rafi and her eyes said words of contempt that were cutting like, "such gallantry," or "such a manly guy."

That year was consumed with nothing but work, nothing but Ximena Prison, so for that year Linnea was the only woman he had for solace. At night, he sometimes carried her to his bed and brought such a smile to her sad face with his entertainments that first she apologized for her rudeness that one day and then she forgot that grim place altogether and saw only him with those spherical eyes that had seen more years than his own. While he pleasured her, sitting astride her and moving within her, he sometimes boasted about the force he used to ensure the success of his interrogations. He did not tell her that Rodolfo instructed him daily on the correct, sub-lethal application of ruthless force, he let her think the mastery was all his. While he spoke of these things and kept a rhythm going inside her, her eyes lost their vacancy and shone, like paired moons, with inner light he had kindled.

His waterborne home was his refuge now from all his disappointments. He covered his walls with pictures of girls, always the most beautiful and tasteful pictures he could find. His favorite was the large black and white of Rita Hayworth as a young woman of maybe twenty, dressed in shorts and a white blouse half-transparent and open nearly to the waist, so that it showed a triangle of bare belly. It also showed her long neck, and her lanky legs and sunburned feet, but left a few things to the imagination. Her hair was silk and her smile as pure and lovely as Ofelia's smile of greeting to the day. When he looked at her, his heart swam free as a fish inside his chest.

When Rafi was a teenager, he got into a habit of abusing his body the way the church says you must not because doing so is an unfit use for your blessed hands and your spirit created of God. He had to take his sinful act to the confessional and the priest said that his behavior was wicked and he must purge such desires from his heart, so he forced himself to stop though it meant putting brakes to a locomotive barrelling down a track. Sometime later he heard boys talking about things they did with their hands and hearts and minds and, astonishingly, he discovered his corruption was no worse than theirs. He considered the fact that the priest his parish had was the European kind. Perhaps the Father didn't understand the Catholicism of Latinos. Rafi doubted the Europeans engaged in sins such as these even though they and Rafi's people had much the same blood running through their veins because of the Conquistadors. Because he shared them with other boys, he got a little easier about his sins and sometimes when he fell asleep at night and pictures came and went through his mind like water flowing over stones, there would flash an array of pictures of all the women he wanted carnally--one more ripe and delicious than the next, all of them together a feast--and then, as he crept close to sleep and dreams, Ofelia and Teresa would find their way into the current of pictures, but he was too restful by then to stop even that transgression, so they would enter his thoughts, naked and nubile along with the others and Rafi would let it all be.

II.
"Here, it's for you," Berta said, coming into the house, and handed Rodolfo a brown envelope with his name and house number penciled in blue. Excited because they rarely got a letter in the post, he turned from her and opened the envelope, unable to stop himself from thinking, Maybe some good news finally, maybe some recognition for the hours of devotion I've given to my people. He lifted the single sheet and unfolded it. First it seemed the letter had been wrongly delivered. His name was nowhere on the page. No form of address appeared at all, only a clumsy script sloping across the page, forming the words, “If you think what you said when you were spouting off the other night will be forgotten, you are dead wrong.” He had trouble reading the words that followed. His mind resisted them, kept searching for words of approval. “You are a fool, the writer said, you are a DAMNED FOOL to think we will forget you, to think my people will forget you knowing all that we know.” Those were the words that confronted and belittled him, that made him tremble coming to him sprawled across a page like faded skywriting, each loop of each letter so large and open you could write your name within and see the circle close around your name like a noose. All this coming from a stranger who'd watched him unseen, a dirty trick in itself, something he instinctively despised.

Rodolfo flipped the page but the back was bare. What sense could he possibly make of this? "Spouting off?" What could that mean? He wasn't one to spout off, it wasn't in his nature. Then it came to his mind how he'd read the amnesty article in the paper and started fortifying himself with alcohol before making the miserable trip to see Rubén. By then, his mind was an angry blur. Lord, did he reveal what was in his mind and in his recent past? Had he thrown away his right to choose whether to reveal or to conceal Ximena? Or was this gambit meant as a blackmail by someone trading on his fear? His heart started to drum but then he thought, No, fuck it, he would not run scared, he would forget the damned letter. What were a few words on paper? They were no more than words breathed into the air which are no more than smoke that soon clears or fog that lifts--they leave no print, no cast unless something is written and published or something photographed or some object left behind. There must be evidence, solid like stone, for suspicion to persist.

Still, he felt shaken by the way this ugly letter had come to him in the mail soon after the amnesty announcement had grabbed him from below and pulled him under like a duckling plucked by a snapping turtle. Was there no safety for him anywhere? He folded the letter twice and tucked it into his breastpocket. He wanted a drink but then again, he did not because drinking recalled what had set him on course for this latest hideous surprise. He grabbed his hat from the table and yelled to Berta,

"I'm going to the village awhile."

"Now?" she called out as he pushed through the door.

'Yes, now, now,' he said in his head as he walked down the road, dusty as always so that a man could sooner walk through water without getting wet than walk down the road with clean shoes. He stepped inside the small Catholic church, felt with appreciation the cool pocket the limestone made, and covered the 30 paces to the altar to kneel a moment and cross himself before going to the second row of pews to sit. For a second he felt as though he hadn't sat to rest in weeks, as though he'd been bearing his weight the whole time, in the great heat, his feet swelling and swelling till they might burst. He was not sure why he'd come to the church except that he wanted to fill his spirit with a quieter air. He bent his head to his lap to relieve his shoulders of weight and thought of the Lord and all they did to weaken His spirit and how they put Him on the cross in the end because He believed in something with all His heart and would not be turned away from His cause, the cause of His Father. So why was his own cause so condemned when it was the cause of his father? All he'd harvested to this point was shame and soon there might be another brand of suffering heaped atop the shame, all because he wanted to preserve the order the Lord gave to His world, which his own earthly father Mateo had taught him to honor. The church calmed him and allowed him to return home for supper.

As the sun blazed at the horizon, then disappeared, he and Berta and the boy bent over their dinner of shredded chicken, rice, and green chili sauce. Then he went to the TV and Daniel left Berta still scraping at the dishes and came and plopped down beside his father so close that Rodolfo felt he couldn't breathe. "Give me some space," he groused, feeling he might burst from the day's tension and this crowding. "Please, I must breathe, this room has no air." Daniel got up with an angry huff and left Rodolfo alone in the room. The air still seemed intolerable. Why should a man have to breathe air thick like paste? He broke into a sweat and wondered why the calm from the church had no tenacity.

He stood to go outside and have a smoke but didn't make it to the door because the phone stopped him with its raucous demand. He was not unhappy to have a small task in answering the telephone. At least that he could do correctly. The voice was Galo's and this time Rodolfo was not peeved to speak with him and receive his news. He had done as he was told to do, he'd gone in person to the boat young Rafi talked of so proudly. Rodolfo's heart was mellowing some in his thinking toward the bunch of them. At least they'd stayed loyal to the cause until the prison shut its doors. Rafi especially was open to Rodolfo's words and sometimes more of a son than the indolent, moody lad who’d sequestered himself in the bedroom. He was sorry he had to see the boy at all tonight and sorrier still he must lay eyes on Berta and later lie beside her in the bed.

He had heard that North Americans think Latinos are animals who must pile into a single bedroom because they have no resources for a decent home. That is true of the poor, he thought. They are the ones who feel happy if they have a separate bed for old and young; some count themselves fortunate if they have any bedmattress at all other than straw or husks off the maize. We have never been that poor, he thought, though Berta liked to dramatize and say they're lucky still to afford the newspaper. With all its bad news, he said, they should pay us to read it.

Galo told him, "Rafi says to assure you, good friend, he will be at the meeting one o'clock on Monday. He says do not worry, he will be there at the Boca."

At least they treat him with some respect and address him as friend, he thought. "All right. Good. Then we are set to go."

"One thing more, Rodolfo, is it wise to meet in so public a place? Perhaps out of doors would be better. We might gather without notice by the ruins."

"The ruins? Never. Rubén would fear the vengeful spirits, the Indian ghosts. Hah. And it's nonsense to worry over where we meet. What, do you think they are watching us from behind the food counter, listening to hear what we have done? No. Ridiculous. No one is concerned with us. I wish we would go down in history as a band of killers fierce on behalf of our people, but no, I don't think so, why would you think we matter like that?" Rodolfo pulled the scribbled letter out of his breastpocket. He wanted to rip it up, but he stayed his hand.

"We'll follow your lead then. You're the one who knows best."

Rodolfo set down the phone but his eyes were riveted by the letter. He could not set that down. He imagined carrying it to the top of a mountain and launching it into the wind or tying it to a boulder and heaving it into the sea. But his eyes wanted to penetrate the penciled words and feel their way into the hand that wrote them, to know the words’ source in time and space and know the mind that conjured them. Fuck it, he thought, furious now at himself because he wanted to be like a towering forest tree unmoved by petty winds, but he was not.

He shouldn't have had so much to drink. How many times had his father warned him against liquor? But in that one thing he defied his father, because his urge was so great. Once--no, twice--he literally crawled into the house after a teenage drunk and made it only into the front room before his stomach cramped violently and gave back what it had taken in. Twice his father let him lie in his vomit. "You are too repulsive to touch." Those were the words Rodolfo remembered. Was it the first time or the second? Perhaps both. He had no idea. The chronology was a blur but the words were sharp as shattered rock in his memory. Mateo Hector wanted his son Rodolfo to wake in the morning his hair and cheek lying in his own filth so he would know what he'd done and remember it and carry a choking sensation of shame from the memory for as long as he lifted glass to gullet. His father had gotten his way--when had he not?-- because Rodolfo still could feel and smell the foul garbage--concocted of beer and bits of masticated carrot and fish--against his smoothskinned face when he woke, and the memory made him want to tear off the skin of that cheek with his nails.

Rodolfo wondered what else his father had said to him that his drunken stupor might have sealed from memory. It occurred to Rodolfo he might have briefly defeated his father with this forgetfulness and that notion brought him around shockingly to Ajacopi. What fury he felt toward that man for dying and thus escaping Rodolfo's grip. The Indian had lain so quietly on that floor after he retreated to death. Rodolfo could kick at him and kick at him--in the gut, in the head, even in the groin--and nothing. Rodolfo was glad of the possibility he'd escaped memory of some of his father's words. What he did remember was enough. Mateo Hector could be a hard man, though he was a man of honor and Rodolfo revered him.

Rodolfo's eyes returned to the letter. What kind of man had written this? Someone like Mateo, correct and exacting, his face
devoid of humor? A man like a general. The words that splayed across the page spoke of a weak hand though, maybe even a woman's. Surely nothing to fear here in these scribbles, no one to fear. Though the writer had said, 'Don't think we will forget,' he was probably a man as drunk as Rodolfo and what do drunks do but forget and forget, they forget with a vengeance. Forgetting was the very point of drunkenness.

Galo's worry sharpened and deepened. It was not just that Rodolfo insisted on meeting in public (Galo knew it was possible to hide in plain sight). It was the feeling he had of Rodolfo as a mad horse they all must sit astride though it propeled them toward a wall of rock. Galo wanted to go before the Tribunal and come clean, just tell it all, down to the details, and be purged. He yearned for that, felt it as an absolute hunger. It was the strongest sensation he had known this last year.

The meeting was to be at one, at the Boca diner, so Rafi had all morning to walk along the water under the sun's gaze and think of how to talk about his wishes. Rodolfo was Rafi's guide and yesterday Rodolfo had come in person to the Bachelor, acting drunk, sounding scared, and needing to know had Rafi leaked word to anyone of their involvement with Ajacopi. Someone had sent Rodolfo an anonymous letter in the post saying he knew their story and wouldn't let it be forgotten. Rafi told Rodolfo he'd kept his mouth shut--why would he blabber about something like that. Rodolfo's suspicion hurt the younger man’s feelings and quieted his voice. Could Rodolfo really think him so much a fool and traitor? He mumbled that question to Rodolfo who'd quipped, “I don't think much about you one way or the other,” and he laughed.

Walking along the beach, dodging the waves, frothy like petticoats, he thought that if the word were out on the streets, if Rodolfo really believed in that letter, they'd have to come forward and try to present the story in its best light. The thought depressed him immeasurably. He felt as though he was to be handcuffed and dragged back to the stinking place, its prisoner once again.

In his mind's eye, Linnea now lifted her caramel eyes from the stone floor and smiled as she'd never done, smiling with the warm gaze he'd seen not from her but from his Ofelia and his Teresa, and he found in himself a surprising, potent wish to be in the presence of this silent woman who was the only hint of femininity in that barren place, akin to a whiff of perfume in a littered alley. Though the others thought nothing of her and would never understand his yearnings, he wished not just to see her, but to brighten her eyes and raise the corners of her mouth in smiles. He wished she would be at the Boca meeting but knew Rodolfo would not have invited any woman to their deliberations. What possible reason? he would say. What bearing has she on our businesss?

The clouds and even the water shone pink this morning. They took their color from the rising sun. He saw God up above drawing the sun up through the sky on a line, like a fisherman hauling a great fish into his boat. Then he saw himself, Rafael--the name given him by his father-- drawing Linni's spirit up into her usually flat eyes so that he could see them shine. Though he'd taken his own cast and color from Rodolfo all through their Ximena ordeal, he knew now what his stated wishes were to be. Forward...he wanted to go forward only, never never back. The only fame, the only recognition the prison job might bring him now would be that of a notorious blackguard. The thought made him wish to tear off his face and stamp it into the dirt with his boots. Rodolfo might say, “Fine then, we'll embrace that blackguard's fate, it's our honor to receive it,” but Rafi wanted to weep with the thought.

Rodolfo sat under the jacaranda just outside the house where the air was cooler and read through the old paper again studying the article on the amnesty, searching for nuances, for extra bits of meaning. The meeting with the others would be later in the day; he needed to gather his thoughts. The article referred to a commission of four men but said their names were to remain secret. Were he to hear them, the names would mean nothing to him. He thought of every Indian as "Joe,” a name he got from the American TV, a name, he thought, for a plain man, or a dead man. They would be a bunch of Joes fancied up in suits.

Daniel came out from the house and stood before him, his hands and feet fidgeting. "Dad," he said. "Do you still have the TV thing?"

"I don't," he said. "I brought it home so you and your mother could fight over it again."

"Mama made you bring it back didn't she?"

"You could say that."

"She's tough. She says she has more balls than you."

"She does?" He colored. "What do you think of that?"

"It's funny, a funny thing to say, because you know, she's a lady, she doesn't have...."

"Yes, I get it. You think it's a great joke, a terrific laugh. Haha."

"I told Arsenio."

"Oh, Jesus Christ." He stood up. "Can't you just--just keep your mother's insults here, keep them at home? Or must the whole village hear them?"

Daniel's face puzzled. "Balls, Dad. It's funny."

Was his son an idiot? Had he spawned a cretin, an imbecile, an absolute fool? Or did the boy toy with him? He remembered when Dani was three, then five--a little man already and one who so admired his Papa. His dad's smile made the sun rise in the sky. Now he learned disdain from the mistress of the craft.

Daniel scampered away to find his cherished television remote. Rodolfo wanted to prepare his thoughts for the meeting but his heart had been inflamed by the boy's comments. He felt compelled to remember one particular day he'd spent in and out of the filthy prison cells and how he'd looked forward that afternoon to getting home to a beer and a seat on the sofa with his feet up on the table, his frayed mind delivered from the day by a futball match on the television, his own Vipers kicking ass.

When he arrived home, feet swollen and itching from the hot walk, he gratefully settled down to watch the match and guzzle his beer and he saw that his boys were going great guns, playing just like he loved to see. He was up out of his seat hollering when Daniel came in and interrupted Rodolfo's happiness yammering in complaint, wanting to watch his cartoon shows, whining away like a pissing baby. "I got to watch it today, Da," he appealed, practically on his knees begging. "I got to, Da."

Because the villain was going to go head to head with the hero so he needed to watch.

"That stuff is crap," Rodolfo told him. "Crap. North American crappola they send down to us, for us to chow it down like pablum. In this house, we'll watch our own football and our own teams and have pride in our own culture--your father's and your grandfather's." But Daniel whined on, telling Rodolfo he loved the cartoon show, he absolutely loved it and he had to see it, especially on this day because of the giant battle that would be like Armageddon. The boy didn't like futball, which Rodolfo couldn't figure because at his son's age he'd go sit at the grassy field at town's edge watching matches all day if his father would allow him.

Daniel fouled up his father's enjoyment of the match with his sniveling but Rodolfo stayed on his feet, using his six foot height to watch his match over the boy's head, and with the power of his mind he shut out his pestering sounds as best he could. The boy retreated to the armchair where he curled up like a dog so that Rodolfo could sit back down on the sofa. That was when Daniel jumped up, catching Rodolfo off his guard, and grabbed the black plastic remote control from the coffee table, punching in some numbers of his choosing, which flipped the screen to a ladies' makeup show of some sort.

"Jesus," Rodolfo said. "What are you doing? My guys were just getting set to defend. Damn you. Goddamn you."

"I don't like futball, I told you Dad," Daniel said, as if that should explain it.

"Well, I do. Your old man does. I am your old man, aren't I? Don't you give a rat's ass what I want?"

"Maybe you're not my dad," the boy muttered.

"Oh, what the fuck does that mean? Who is if not me?"

"One of mom's friends could be a better dad," he said. “Anyway, he wouldn’t talk like you do.” He threw in, "just kidding," when he saw Rodolfo's face purple.

"I'm not a good dad to you, you fucker? Is that what you're saying? Jesus, you're nothing but trouble." He worried what plays he might have missed already because Dani was fooling around trying to switch the station back but getting it wrong, so that now they were watching a program on piranha in the Amazon. He grabbed for the controller.

"Wait, Dad," Daniel said. "I'll do it." He swung it up and out of Rodolfo’s way. "Da, Da, Da, wait," he shouted. "I'll do it."

"Oh, so now I'm your da again, like when you were little and knew some respect," Rodolfo said. "You give me that thing."

Daniel swung it away. "I can fix the channel. I know I can. I can fix it."

Rodolfo made another lunge and tripped over his own foot and jammed his thumb into the top of the coffee table. "Oh, Jesus, goddamnittohell."

Daniel let the remote fall to the ground and Rodolfo bent and retrieved it with the throbbing hand and hurled it against the wall that Berta had painted the blue of the distant sea.

"Da!" Daniel shouted and Berta came running.

"What is it now?" she said. "Like two children."

"Nothing," Rodolfo said. "I'm just trying to watch my goddamn game."

"Well, I don't see anybody stopping you," she said. "And mind your cursing."

"The little bugger had the remote and was fooling with the stations and talking nonsense."

"Doesn't look like you could change a station with that," she said, picking it up from the floor with the battery and insides dangling free, holding it up to him from one corner to show off its disrepair. "I don't know where we'll ever get another of these. Grand how you use your head on things, Rodolfo, when we were lucky enough to have one in the first place."

"Give it here, I'll fix it. Goddamn piece of junk, shattering like that."

He forced the insides back in and tried it and it flipped the channel. "See," he said but she and Daniel had left the room. He skipped back to his futball and muttered a curse when he saw he'd missed a goal from his team.

Next morning, as he readied to go out the door to begin the trek to work just as the sun was rising, he saw the remote laying on the coffee table and a sharp angry feeling pierced his chest. He squeezed the remote into his front pocket, liking the laugh he got thinking of the boy or Berta scavenging for it.

During the day, the controller made a bulge bigger than his keys in his right pocket and felt awkward there, but he left it anyway while he was in and out of the interrogation rooms in the usual way. He had an afternoon interview to conduct along with the kid, Rafi--a better kid than his own queer duck, Daniel, he sometimes thought. They were questionning an obese, oily-haired Indian about a rumored plan against the President in the southern coastal area of the country. They had him wired to the cot by his wrists but his fat mouth was free. Most of the men kept civil with Rodolfo because they knew he would exact pay for their words unless they were words he'd asked for, but this pig Indian cursed him and he found himself jabbing at the 'off' button of the gadget that was stuffed in his pocket and he got a little starburst picture in front of his eyes as if he'd just detonated an explosive in the guy's fat navel and the freak had blown up like one of Daniel's beloved cartoon bad guys.

Rodolfo laughed aloud and the Indian cursed him a second time and Rodolfo pulled his hand out of the pocket and socked him in the temple.

"Better use some sense, moron," Rodolfo said, "before the three drops of intelligence you've got left in your fat head are knocked out of it."

The man shut up but turned down his lips in disdain.

"What were your plans for the President?" Rodolfo asked again. "Let's get it right this time."

"What President?" the man asked. "This country has no legitimate government."

"So I ask you again," Rodolfo said, his face pressing in on the Indian's, his hand in his pocket.

That night, he pulled off his trousers and left them in a pile because he felt a sudden urgency to get to the toilet. Finished in the bathroom, he settled on the sofa to read the paper. Within fifteen minutes, Berta came stomping down the steps displaying the remote on her open palm.

"What is this?" she asked, her mouth large and red as a wound. "Dani and I were looking all over for it and I find it when I'm hanging up your pants."

He looked at her directly and said, straining for defiance, "I took it to work. Serves the boy right for the crap he pulled with it yesterday."

"Took it to work?" she said. "You took it to work?" Her voice rose like a whistling wind. "What kind of a queer thing is that? To take the television control to work. Wait till I tell Isabel this one. My husband takes a television remote control to work so his son can't use it."

"Now cut that out," he said, getting to his feet, "or I'll slap your filthy mouth."

She wrinkled her nose and walked out, leaving him pacing. Next morning, he saw the remote lying on the coffee table and started marching the room again like a kept cat until he found himself thinking, fuck it, I do what I please in this house, I am the head of this family. That boy watches too much crap on that television and Berta, too. I do what I goddamn please here, in my own damn house. He pocketed the thing again, feeling fine about it, and through the day he ran his fingers over the buttons from time to time or punched them and punched up some sexy scenes he wouldn't mind looking at, or he "offed" a filthy prisoner or wise-ass guard. Once he zapped that woman guard because she was looking at him crosswise.

He kept the thing with him for days until Berta got after him again. Then he brought it home, but from time to time he'd take it, just because he could, and he liked the feel of it in his pocket and the pictures in his head when he zapped someone who’d been bothering him.

Now Daniel said he'd brought it home because Mom made him, which made Rodolfo want to wring the boy's neck. But he tried instead to concentrate on the meeting coming up, though all he could think of was that he wanted the others to fucking arrive at the restaurant on time. He didn't want to be left there waiting, pacing, checking his watch for the time, restless as a kid needing to pee. He wanted them there all ready and waiting when he arrived. Galo for one would be right on the hour if only because he was too chickenshit to keep a field mouse waiting. He would come down the street with that funny weak-kneed walk he had that always angered Rodolfo. Rodolfo wanted to keep the letter secret from the old man. He could already hear his anxious trilling if he found out about it. He dreaded listening to that because he wouldn't be able to think straight afterward and he wanted to think the matter through on his own. He wished he hadn't rushed to call on Rafi to ask him did he leak something about what they'd done at the prison. He'd thought of Rafi on that because he was a kid and kids like to be bigshots and don't stop to think of the consequences. Rubén and Galo were cautious and fearful. They'd keep their yaps shut.


III.

I'm always first, Galo thought, as he waited for the others at the restaurant, but he found it okay to wait. That day especially it felt okay because he got a chance to calm his jumping stomach. It was a cheery place Rodolfo had picked and that was surprising but thank God for that, oh yes, thank God, and thank God for the bit of space just inside the door to stand and wait without hovering over the people at their tables. He couldn't bear some dark cave today, not today, not on a day like this one. He liked the walls being yellow--they looked merry despite the grey that streaked through from what color was there before. Mary and he considered yellow for the child's room. It's funny, the things you hold onto in your head--he remembered the chart from the paint company that called the color custard. "It's like pudding, Mary, isn't it?" he asked. "Custard's like pudding, isn't it?" And Mary said, "Of course it is, it is pudding, Galo, it's the same thing." He wondered why she always had to be so sharp. Even then she was, though not like now. Well, right this minute, gay little restaurant or not, he couldn't eat a thing, not pudding or custard or cake, his stomach would turn inside out--his stomach was worse even than when he went to see Rafael on his boat and the world was tilting under his feet. He'd often had trouble eating at the prison. His mouth would be so dry the food wouldn't soften enough to swallow, especially on those days when Captain Estefan marched up and down the hall shouting orders or posted himself in the corridor tapping a foot impatiently, all to make his presence felt.

Estefan never bothered Galo directly but whenever he encountered Rubén, he'd lift the younger man with the power of his eyes and pound him to the ground. Galo used to take the sandwiches or pasties Mary packed and walk into the rocky scrub behind the building just to get something down his dry gullet. Otherwise, he'd get lightheaded on an empty stomach. He couldn't bear the thought of Mary troubling herself to make him a decent meal and he brings it home in the pail or leaves it in the sand for some wild creature to scavenge. So he forced it down.

"Just one for lunch, sir?" The slim waitress had seen him beside the door and come over to attend to him.

"Should be four of us, Missy, when the others get here."

"It's the rule that I can't seat you till you've got three. Sorry sir."

"I can stand in the corner, Missy. I don't mind." In truth, he didn't like standing out like a tower. He lowered his eyes to the floor and saw she had bow legs with a thin cover of wavy dark hairs.

The bell on the door jingled. Oh, this is Rodolfo, he registered. How long since he'd seen that face looking like an old shoe that's kicked too many walls. He could have handled Rubén better than Rodolfo. Rubén is offbeat, he thought, but at least he's cordial. He imagined Rodolfo would be shitface if Rubén brought along his drawing pad.

Rodolfo let go his bottom lip from his teeth. "You're the only one?"

Galo nodded. "It's nice to see you, my friend."

"Yeah, why not. Yeah, you too. Nice as hell to see you."

God, he was sweating already. How he would like to get out of there, like on that day at the prison when everything that could go wrong went wrong and he got on the road wanting to get away fast as a bird in the air but the traffic jammed due to some animals on the road and he was trapped. Then the next morning he had no choice but get in the car and drive right back there, not knowing it would be the last day for that job--thank God for that piece at least. He knew Estefan would be taking the hide off them all day, and he was. As soon as the four of them got there, just hanging around in the main interrogation room, drinking some coffee, trying to keep things normal, Estefan strode in.

He was carrying a huge purple flower in his hand and he tossed this perfectly-petaled flower onto the floor and sneered at the group of them, then began to grind away at the flower with his heel. Galo was shocked and stared at the proceedings until Estefan looked up, and locked his eyes onto Rodolfo--who lowered his own right away to the ground--and said, "That's what you make of my work, you see. You take my work and grind it into nothing, into garbage, with your stupid mistakes. How many mistakes is it now? You embarrass me, the bunch of you. Our association embarrasses me." He stormed out and Rodolfo left immediately, too, as if he were trailing the Captain, but Galo saw him out the window running off into the scrub and then he saw him, thirty yards out, drop to his knees and support himself with palms pressed to the ground while he vomited. He felt pity for Rodolfo in that moment and might not have minded putting an arm around him to give him comfort.
Galo thought suddenly that he might not make it through this latest ordeal. He might have to up and run out himself. His chest felt tight and he feared he might have a heart attack, as many men in his family had. Calm yourself now, he said, talking to himself like he was his young granddaughter. You stood it at Ximena for a whole year and home to Mary's sour puss every night, he reminded himself. But something still squeezed tight around his heart and kept him silent.

"Why do you hang here like a dick attracting attention?" Rodolfo demanded. "Why didn't you get us a table? Jesus--you know how many are coming."

"We need three present to be seated. That's what she said--it's the policy of the restaurant."

"What? We're in Paris France? We have to have a policy here in this craphole? That’s funny." He shook his head. "Fine, we'll just stand here and wait and let the whole world stare at us. If they'd be goddamned on time...."

"I could go outside and watch for--oh, here's Rubén." He had forgotten how Rubén looked. Tall and rigid in his walk with big clown feet pointing out in a V, stiff in the shoulders as if he had no joints, and always the brows creased pulling the eyes together, as if with a stitching cord, to sharpen their sight.

Rubén saw the two faces trained on him as soon as he entered the cafe. Pain appeared in both the faces but the pain differed. Rodolfo was a man with a bad tooth that angered him to where he was ready to take a pliers to his own mouth though that might aggravate the pain. Galo's was a wincing pain. He was a man expecting a smack from a wooden bat. That was how Rubén saw the picture and how he would draw it. He imagined with a spark of excitement a new direction for him. He would take the look on the face as a reflection of what the mind imagined the body must endure. Mind always led back to body, always to body. Rubén hoped this swell of excitement would carry him through the awful encounter that lay ahead. He heard the door swing open just behind him and turned and--oh, he saw it was Rafi, the one whose face was a blank slate.

"Hello," Rafi said to Rubén and in his heart he sighed because he was not missing the sight of that tall frame, that broad and bony face so unattractively wide he wondered what did the man's father and mother look like. At least the knobby knees were covered with long trousers today. He remembered those well from the hottest days couped up in the prison.

"You're huffing and puffing," Rubén returned. "You hurried up the hill?"

Rafi nodded and saw the approach of the young waitress, at whom Rodolfo glowered.

"Rodolfo," Rafi said. "Rodolfo. I am here."

"You're here," Rodolfo said. "Let's have a celebration. You're finally here."

Rafi thought the woman a pretty thing. Small, delicate like a bird. Delicious, he thought. Charming, even with her softly furred legs and her front teeth angled inward, one crossed over the other. He offered his hand. "Good to meet you." He smiled and the smile stayed on his lips. She glanced to Rodolfo awkwardly.

"She's the waitress," Rodolfo said. "She's going to serve us, if she will let us sit."

"Now, yes," she said and giggled abruptly, releasing the tension Rafi's gaze had sparked. "Now it's fine. Because the last one, this young man, comes. Hah-hah, he saves the day."

"Yes, I am here."

"One o'clock," Galo said.

"That's right, Juliano," said Rodolfo, "one o'clock. You were still in your bed pulling your pecker till noon?"

Coloring sharply, Rafi glanced at Rodolfo then over at the waitress. He looked down at the fine watch that had been his father's and casually held up his wrist so that the woman might notice the glint of gold. Though he'd had all morning for the trip from the lake, he spent too much time lingering at the shore, lost in the sparkle of the sun off the sand, jangly over what was to come. "I apologize for being late," he said.

They paraded behind the waitress to a tiny, round table in the far corner. Galo found comfort in the white cloth embroidered with sprays of red berries. He followed Rodolfo and Rafi in ordering a beer. Rodolfo wanted a small, rare steak as well. Rafi and Galo ordered omelettes and potatoes and Rubén asked for a salad and a glass of white wine.

"Their wine will be worse than piss," Rodolfo said.

Rubén shrugged. "I like wine, I don't like beer. He felt less afraid of Rodolfo since the man’s drunken visit."

Looking at the three who had answered his summons, Rodolfo thought, They always look to me, they're as empty and ready for filling as open sacks waiting for meal. That's the price of being the leader.

"Can we go ahead and discuss our issue...our problem?" Galo asked. "Time passes. Mary will miss me at home and then I've got to explain this all to her." The shake of his head said, It will go poorly with her--it always does.

Rodolfo had forgotten how much he disliked the old man. He spat into his dish. "We can do whatever we please."

"Do we talk here, right here?" Rafi asked, circling his head to the right to remind all of the other diners. Three tables of seven were filled though none neighboring them.

"We talk where we please as well," said Rodolfo. He waved his hand about, roughly designating the other patrons. "Wouldn't you think they have things to do, these people, like eat their food and read their newspapers?" He thought of the blue-penciled letter and let his eyes search the other tables. "We must all of us go before the Commission or none of us. That's how this is going to come down. Understand?"

"Go before the Commission and tell the truth?" Buelo asked.

"Tell whatever we fucking choose to tell. What we decide it's in our interest to tell." He tapped his head. "Get it? We use our heads. Anyway, everyone's got their own fucking version of what's true. The concept is overrated."

"If we come forward, they cease and desist from prosecution, that's what the document stated," said Rubén. "Cease and desist--that's the same thing in two different words. From that moment on, a surcease of hostilities toward us."

"So they say," Rodolfo clarified. "It's today's version of their truth."

"Tuesday's," said Galo. "That's when the paper came out."

"Whatever--." Rodolfo looked at Rafi. "Galo's our fount of aged wisdom."

"Why must you...?" Galo pled.

"What hostilities are they going to cease?" asked Rafi. "There's nothing going on now, so why give them our identities? What if they publish the accounts and then the people on the street read the story and know each of our names? How safe are we then? Some might take their own revenge. There's no official punishment but everyone will know our private business and some will despise us. I say we go on with our lives and give up this idea of squawking."

"Okay, so now we've got the measure of Rafi's stock of courage. Anyone else?"

"Courage may be inborn," Rubén said. "That's possible--each person born with his own threshold for mental pain and his own ability to withstand it."

"Please, Rubén. Let's stay on the subject," Rafi said. "What are the consequences, all the big and small consequences, if we come forward? That's what we have to figure out. Laugh at me if you want to Rodolfo, but that's what I say."

Rubén was looking around, as if he were mapping the small restaurant in his mind.

"Pretend you're paying attention," Rodolfo said. "Pretend you're on the same planet as the rest of us." He turned to Galo. "So, what are the damned implications then?" Rodolfo asked. "What's the answer to your big question?"

"My question," said Rafi.

"Protection under the law," Galo said. "Today's law is what's important, as you point out, Rodolfo. No prosecution, if someone should put up our names to the Commission and want to hang them out to dry."

"Us," said Rubén. "Hang us. Leave us twisting in the wind."

"Like who, for example? Who the fuck would do that?" Rodolfo asked. "Some blue blood--oh fuck, forget it." He stood up for a moment, then made himself sit back down.

"Do we know any of the ones they put on the Commission?" asked Galo.

"Which way does the wind blow?" Rubén said. "That's what you want to know, Galo, right? I see just how your mind is working."

"They're not going to advertise which Joe Indians are on that committee," Rodolfo said. "They'd have to be morons."

Rafi's eyes fell on a pair of bare-bulbed lamps set close by the wall. He wanted to flee where he was, get lost in the simple light. "If this government should fail and we've made ourselves known, that's where we have a problem."

"And our families," Galo said. "If it all comes out, I hate to think of my sensitive Mary. Yet I crave the purification."

"Oh, Jesus," Rodolfo said. "Then go take a bath."

"What about you, Rodolfo?" Rafi asked. "Does your wife know? Your son?"

"What the fuck's the matter with you all?" the answer came. "We were doing a job, fighting for a cause. Our only failing was that we lost the war, we screwed that up. And my fucking wife will criticize whatever I decide to do--if you must make that your business--so her opinion makes no damn difference to me. Got that? None." He stood up.

"Sit," Galo said. "Please, please sit." He leaned to the middle of the table, his face flushed. His words came, slow but emphatic. "They'll publish our names Rodolfo and everyone will be talking--just like Rafi said, they'll be talking, up and down the street and in every stall in the market."

"And half of them congratulating us for what we did," Rodolfo said. "Don't you get that? We should be heroes--we would be if we hadn't screwed it up."

"And the other half?" said Rafi. "Will we have to walk around hanging our heads?"

"I never will," Rodolfo said. "I swear on my father's life. And you, old man, just get off the goddamned fence. You're arguing both sides of the case, dammit."

Galo determined to ignore Rodolfo’s ridicule. What differnece did it make now? Just one more person to abuse him. He asked,

"Might we make it a condition of coming forward that they not publish the names? Send someone to the committee and request that?"

"We're not going to be in a bargaining position," Rafi said. "We take their offer or leave it, that's all they'll give us for options."

Galo looked at Rodolfo. "We had better go over it, hadn't we? Who did what, I mean."

Rodolfo nodded. "Get the stories straight, lest one of you get confessional on me."

"Equally shared responsibility is the way for us to go," Rafi said. "Don't let them pin it on one man more than another."

"Jesus, what difference does it make?" Rodolfo asked. "They're giving amnesty, aren't they? Just tell them I was the one struck the fatal blow. You two just weakened him."

"And tell them it was a mistake?" asked the old man.

"What?" Rodolfo erupted. "You want to tell them I killed him by mistake?"

"But you did--we did," the old man said.

"You were distraught afterwards. When Estefan confronted us, you threw up."

"NO."

"They should know all that. It could be very important to our case."

"He's right," Rafi said. "Please Rodolfo, don't deny it when it could help us. As soon as we saw the man was dead, you were thinking Estefan would have your neck."

Rodolfo had looked at the Indian's jaw, fallen open like a marionette puppet's. A mouth wide open, but no more words would come from it and the Captain demanded a steady stream of information, so where was that to come from now--clearly not from this wretched source. Rodolfo kicked the dead man in the ribs and his jaw bounced shut then gaped again. Rodolfo knew that his job had been to push him far enough to get information, but not to kill him. Killing him defeated their purpose entirely. This interrogation was the worst kind of failure. The Indian had bested him.

"You're saying it was all you," Rafi said, "but that's not how it went. Remember, Rodolfo. You must remember."

"I shoved his head into the wall. His skull cracked. I call that killing a man."

"We all shoved his head into the wall," Rafi said. "We all had hold of him. Anyway, that's a better story. It gives each one a piece of the responsibility. Who's to say who pushed harder or ran faster?"

"This is about amnesty," Rodolfo said. "It's not supposed to matter why we did what we did and whether it was deliberate or whether we tripped over a fucking chair and all fell into the wall like a bunch of morons." In the morning, before the accident,
Estefan had called him to his office again. He didn't want to go. It would be nothing good--when was it ever? Estefan didn't ask him to sit. Rodolfo stood there, trying to be still, while the Captain paced in front of him. Rodolfo clasped his hands behind his neck and wished he could march up and down, too. A drum tapped urgently in his head as he listened to Estefan. You need to get something for me Hector, something real this time, something we don't already have, and not the piddling bits of information you've been serving up. Get something today. Not next week, not tomorrow, today is when I need it.

Rafi said, "I took hold of him first. I was hoping to leave that day at five and you said none of us was to go anywhere if we didn't first get something from the Indian. Don't you remember, Rodolfo? Remember. I asked you what line of investigation you wanted to pursue? I was going to help in any way I could and try and get out of there."

"And Rodolfo said, 'I want his friends, his associates,'" Galo contributed. "Then someone started in on Ajacopi's friend, Mateo, a man we'd already heard something about because he was involved with the booby traps in one of the towns to the north."

Rodolfo recalled looking at him in all his miserable filth, rashy bumps crawling across his forearms that hadn't been there before, which might be something contagious, Rodolfo thinking, Who would want to be friends with this, but he said to the others, "Okay, let's get on with it" and to the Indian he said, "This is going to be a long day for you, friend, unless you get in the mood to talk to us about some of your compatriots. You do that and suddenly your day gets shorter. Maybe you even get a smoke and a piece of beef. Maybe you need the vitamins in the meat to clear up that ugliness on your arms."

"You go ahead then and talk to us , why don't you," Buelo had said, in that wheedling tone that annoyed Rodolfo from the first time he heard it.

"You don't need to sweet talk him," Rodolfo barked. "He'll do what we want, it's just a matter of when, whether it's sooner--saving him some pain--or later. It makes no difference to me, only to him. It's his hide. Oh, and to young Rafi here, who wants to go home to his ladies."

The Indian's eyes went to the old man, whose eyes went to the floor. "You go ahead and talk," Galo said. "Go along to get along. That's what we all do."

The Indian moved his mouth as if he were moving spit to his lips, but he said nothing. His lips bled a little from a row of vertical cracks. Too much dryness, Rodolfo thought, from living out in the sun like thick-hided animals do.

"You can tell us about your friends in Santa Domingo," Rodolfo said. "That will be a place to start." In Santa Domingo two weeks before, three soldiers were beaten--one to death--after they fell into a line of three pits the Indians dug and obscured with a thin netting covered with dried leaves.

He turned his head away from his captors and eyed the filthy wall, then lifted his umber eyes to where the wall joined the ceiling, then higher still, to the ceiling itself.

"You can't escape here through your eyes," Rodolfo said. He had seen that look before, on so many faces, that prayerful glance to the ceiling as if the roof would fly off and the man fly up after it and be delivered from his predicament. It angered Rodolfo to think of them imagining they could evade him like that. "You're here with me," he said, "just me and you--forget the others--and you're going nowhere. Don't expect the vault of heaven to open, friend. You just look at me. At me."

He turned his head toward Rodolfo and shut his eyes and kept them closed as if they were stitched, and then Rodolfo could swear he yawned.

The others hadn't noticed Rodolfo's attention drift. "You grabbed his arm," Galo said to Rafi. "I remember. You twisted it up behind his back till he winced, like they taught us in the basic course on physical control."

Rodolfo sat up. "But I put my hands on his head," he said, confused, because he had not registered all of what had been said.

"That's right," Rubén said. "Like a priest, I thought. I remember thinking that. You took hold of the crown of his head like you
were a priest. I took note of it because it was an interesting detail--I can see it right now in my mind's eye."

"No," said Rafi. "Galo's right. I grabbed his arm first, before you took his head--I remember because he had a hideous skin eruption, like a leper, and I touched it and wanted to wash my hands, but I couldn’t. Then you took his head--after."

Galo said, "Ajacopi made a face when Rafi got hold of his arm. I thought, what a sour puss he has. I was surprised by that face and that's when I put my hands on him, taking hold of his shoulder. I don't know about you, Rodolfo, when you--"

"--it doesn't matter exactly how it went," Rodolfo interrupted. "I ran him into the wall and that's what killed him. That's what they'll want to know about and that's on me."

"But all of us did it," said Galo. "We ran him into the wall like we were charging with a battering ram. We all had hold of him. Each one of us. All four. No one stayed out of it, except for that woman guard, who was watching."

"Just a minute," Rodolfo said, shaking his head. "Just a minute." He got up to go to the toilet. The restaurant had its own toilet outside through the back door.

He went out into the sun and knew the direction of the toilet by the stink. An old Indian stood outside it, a filthy brown hat protecting his head from the sun, a bucketful of brackish water beside him. This is our plumbing, Rodolfo thought. This is how it is here, even now, in the so-called modern age. While other countries move ahead, we flush our toilets with buckets of water. And with the Indians in charge now, how will we amount to anything as a people? This is all on them, because they've held us back for years, sucking the vitality out of our culture. He noticed that the old man had that smell they all had, though sometimes you couldn't detect it.

The outhouse was so small that when he turned to pee his backside practically scraped the bright green painted door. The toilet seat was made of roughly cut mahogany, which struck him as a typical waste of valuable materials that could have sold for good money in the North, another stupidity the Indians could take credit for.

He wondered what they were talking about waiting at the table. Probably they just waited, their heads in their beer. He hated how the Indians at Ximena always kept him waiting and waiting for scraps of information--half of it bad. For days on end he waited, sometimes for weeks. He'd had enough of waiting in his early days. Waiting all the time for his ma to come home, left alone with three green rubber soldiers and a bucket of wooden building blocks.

He remembered the time he gave Ajacopi a long strip of paper and a blue ink pen and told him to write the names of his comrades in Santa Rosita, one of the towns he frequented. The man seemed to admire the pen with his eyes as if he'd never seen one before, but when Rodolfo returned to take the list, the man had drawn butterflies floating up vine-covered trees and a small monkey in mid air, leaping between branches. Rodolfo crushed the paper in his right hand and dropped it on the floor, then he spat on it and left the cell. Butterflies! The thought of Estefan’s eyes on that paper quickened his pulse.
He shook his dick dry and zipped, then pushed through the door, his eyes straying to the old man who would pour the bucket of water into the toilet. Hell of a job, he thought, even for a shrivelled old Indian.

He got back to the table and found them sitting silently, all staring into their cups and glasses as if they were studying the light on the liquid's surface. "What the hell," he said, his upper lip twitching. "You can't carry on with the conversation while I take a piss?"

"What's the woman going to say?" asked Galo. "We have to think about that. She could get us into trouble."

"Nothing," Rodolfo said, sitting, and dragging his chair forward across the rough floor. "She'll say nothing. She never said a damn thing the whole time she was there."

"I'm not worrying about her," Rafi said. "Why would she want to come forward? And nobody knows she was there, so no one can make her talk about us."

"What about the Captain?" Rubén interjected. "He knows everything. He even saw some of my pictures and made remarks about them."

"Estefan?" Rodolfo gasped. "Estefan?? The head of the whole goddamned operation? He's going to come forward and betray his own men. You're insane. You're absurd."

"Don't get excited," Rubén said. "Don't get emotional. Take some deep breaths. That Captain didn't like me. That’s why I’m worried."

"Oh, fuck," Rodolfo said. "Who likes you, Rubén? You're a moron. Just go ahead and worry about the woman if you want to worry. She's a woman after all so maybe she will turn around and do us in, but don't talk to me about the Captain--that's too ridiculous."

Rafi remembered how he'd looked at that woman, Linnea, as her face strayed between vacancy and gloom. His own dear sisters were so much prettier, so much fresher and brighter than this woman Linni who looked like grass that had dried to straw in the sun and bent in the wind. He thought of polishing her face with a cloth the way you'd polish tarnished silver to return clarity to its finish. But the face he saw before him--the face he remembered--shifted toward irritation as he caressed it, or maybe illness was what he saw. Perhaps her gut bothered her as she recalled the rotten food they served there at Ximena. He'd always brought decent food Mama had prepared but the woman ate the prison grub. She might have needed a cup of tea to soothe her stomach. He would never have dared though, not with Rodolfo hovering by his side.

Rodolfo felt he could take this bunch no longer. They agitated his gut. He needed to go to the toilet again. He stood up. "I'll work out the order of events," he said. "Then we'll meet again and I'll tell you how it went and then you can forget any other pictures you've got in your mind--that includes you, Rubén, you visualize only what I relate until it's the only reality that ever was--got it?--till it's Mother Mary's blessed truth. Then we'll make a decision and we'll hold to it, regardless of what any woman may do. And we'll talk no more about the Captain ratting, which is madness." He debated whether to go into the toilet again. It would embarrass him to have the Indian see him using it again so soon.

"I don't know," said Rafi. "A phony story seldom holds up. I've always heard that."

"Now you're going to be an old lady, too?" Rodolfo said. "If that bullshit tub of yours can hold tight, our story can hold." He pulled his knit cap onto his head watching Rafi's hurt pride go to his face, his eyes go to the ground. "And another thing--we don't meet here. Not at this idiotic place where it takes four men standing at a table for a woman to give you a seat and a warm piss of beer."

"Where then?" Rafi asked. He thought of his boat but wanted to protect it from this company. In his mind's eye, he stroked the wood deck of his boat with a cloth as though stroking an animal whose skin had been lacerated.

"In the open," Rodolfo said. "At the ruins. At the north end. Who will look for us there? Hah! We’ll meet among the Indian bones."

Rodolfo hurried out ahead of the others pleased with the idea they would use the Indians' sacred site for their own purposes. He had two days until the meeting to divine the right course for this motley group. He would keep Berta and Daniel from getting under his skin and disturbing his focus. He would train his mind on the problem as Mateo Hector did when he was determining a winning gamecock.

The first night of his period of contemplation, he lay in his cot, his mind in the prison. After he'd understood that it was no good with the Indian--his head cracked, his mouth seeping-- he prodded a quivering Galo to go get the desk sergeant to contact Estefan. He, Rafi, and Rubén held their scared silence. He supposed the female with the sallow hair and skin was there, too, her silence habitual, nothing to note. Rafi finally sank down onto the floor and hid his head in his hands.

"I hope to hell you're not crying," Rodolfo remembered barking at him. Maybe he'd been too harsh. He wanted to cry or scream himself.

Galo rejoined them and said they had to wait for Estefan, who was not in the prison, meaning they stayed well into the afternoon locked up with the stiffening body and the extra stink the Indian had made because he'd dirtied himself with the blow to the head, or maybe with death itself.

"I can't stand the smell," Rafi said. "I've got to get away."

"You don't have to do anything but stay right here," Rodolfo said.
He groaned, remembering the slow hours of tension that comprised that day. He rolled onto his belly but was not comfortable, so he turned again onto his back but could not be comfortable that way either. Some deep muscle beside the spine was sore and needed rubbing. His eyes burned but would not tear. He rolled back to his stomach. Berta muttered beside him in her sleep as he drifted down through a melange of garish images and found a passage into his own sleep.

He woke before light infused the sky and woke for once like a lucky man who has in his possession something of value: a dream had come to him that told so clearly the course he must take that the certainty made his spirit gasp. From this dream he understood without further question what a terrible mistake it would be to point the finger of culpability in their own direction. The dream showed Daniel and two of his older classmates gathered around an enormous book, a book made of mahogany and steel with words carved into its surface. The boys roared and jumped with laughter, and underlined with pointing fingers different lines in the book that seemed to them absurd. Daniel sniggered along with the others and then a headmaster entered and the boys fell quiet, their faces blank and open as they received the headmaster's words: "That book is your history, boys, it is the story of your people, your own people." Daniel's face registered puzzlement, then anger, then shame because what the book recorded displeased him so.

When Rodolfo awoke, everything was plain to him. He'd been forgetting history. History--that was what mattered. What did he care what they did to him now, in this life that held so little moment and so little joy?--He was not a coward, and anyway his life was ruined already, it was reduced to the scum of salt that remains after a puddle has evaporated. But history still must speak on this matter of the Indians and he would not have his name fingered and derided in a book boys would study in school, all because he'd crawled forward on his knees to confess the most significant deeds he'd performed in all his life. He didn't know what they'd say about the Indian in the years ahead. Maybe they would lionize him, or maybe society would regain its senses by then, but either way, he knew his course.

Despite his certainty, Rodolfo feared the magnitude of his decision. Stiff with sleep, he climbed from his bed and turned to the other book that held importance in his life. As he had on other occasions, he opened it randomly and dropped a small pebble on the pages and let it come to a stop so he could read what it marked. The great book told him:
Know, then, that it is not for any virtue of yours that the LORD your God is giving you this good land to occupy; for you are a stiffnecked people. Remember, never forget, how you provoked the LORD your God to anger in the wilderness....[deuteronomy 9:6 p341]

A curtain of red anger dropped within him and he jammed his fist into the table. Why would the Lord repudiate him in this way, at this crucial moment, naming him unvirtuous and stiffnecked, denying his claim to the land? His assurance curled and died like a shot animal. He paced the room for five, ten, fifteen minutes, until the haze in his head began to clear and his eyes began to see again, so that he understood suddenly and fully that the Indians were the stiffnecked people who held the Lord's land without virtue. Again he could breathe and so he expressed remorse to the Lord for his quick and thoughtless reading. He returned, bolstered, to his Bible and took the pebble in his hand and cradled and shook it a moment like a die, then cast it onto another page and read:

Remember the long way that the LORD your God has made you travel in the wilderness these past forty years, that He might test you by hardships to learn what was in your hearts....
These words spoke to him without question, they spoke to him because surely The Lord had tested him like Job to see could he hold fast to his convictions and could he persevere and put the book of history before the story of his earthly suffering. He would. He was determined. He would not disappoint his people or his God by abandoning his quest to return the Lord's rightful order to society. At that moment, he wanted to cry and run to the church to give praise, and he felt no longer dispirited or spurned.

He lay back down next to Berta and pressed his side to hers because the morning air was chilly. His eyes scanned the bare wall until his father came into his thoughts and stood propped against the wall like a doll cut from wood. Father was part of the relief that had entered him because wouldn't his father have been ashamed, and raging in his shame, had Rodolfo skulked into the Indians' court whimpering mea culpas. His father had kept them in the middle class through all his life. They never sank to poverty like so many families did. They were better off than those with dirt floors whose pigs and chickens and barefoot children wandered in and out of the house; for those families, indoors was no different from outdoors, except for the roof giving shelter from sun and rain. Father made certain they had a decent house and clothes enough for school.

Six children were in the family and his mother complained she didn't have time for all the caretaking required, so they always had an Indian girl who came to them on splayed feet that carried along red dirt from the road. If she had her own babies and so she had milk, the Indian girl helped nurse Mother's babies and young children. Mother always said God did not grant her enough milk, "especially for Rodolfo with his monkey's appetite." She liked to tell the story of him sucking her dry, then patting her and saying, "more titty," when no more was left. He wished she would shut up with that stupid story but it always came up one more time when they were gathered around her after a meal, she so fat she seldom stood, just sat like the queen bee of the hive. He'd butt in and try to stop the story before she got to the part about his having a fit.

The Indian girls seldom lasted long in the Hector household. If they were not already mothers, they got boyfriends and then got pregnant and were tending their own children in their own houses, most of them huts of adobe. One girl named Felicia stayed with them all through her pregnancy until he feared she would drop the baby right in the house and never leave and Papa would have one more mouth beseeching food. When she was not working at their house she'd join the other women down by the cathedral where they'd dress in traditional costumes and adorn one of the children, too, to try to press the tourists to dig into the pocket for a bit of change for a photo of mother and child beside the family's sickly, grayed llama.

One day Felicia took him along to the Cathedral, though he did not want to go, and Felicia's sister Juanita approached her telling that the third sister, Esperanza, was ill with stabbing pains in her stomach and couldn't work for coins. She urged Felicia to change into the traditional clothes and try to bring home some money for the evening meal. The Indian women could never say no to their kin. Even though Felicia was meant to be working for his mother that day, she changed into clothes garish as a parrot's feathers and right away started to prance and prattle as if all the color had ascended to her head. She looked at him and her eyes widened and she said, "Rodolfo, little bird, we'll dress you, too. Come, it will be fun."

"No," he said, pulling back from her, scowling. "I'm not an Indian boy."
Her expression sobered. "You are mestizo, like most."

"Ladino. Pure."

She shook her head.

Then what did she say? Something horrid that angered him. She said it was lucky he was not Indian because he might not be able to learn their language which was difficult and took a strong mind. He answered back that he could learn it any old time but why would he want to talk like a dumb Indian. She shrugged and rolled out her bottom lip while already borrowing clothes from the other women to dress him right there behind the church, against his wishes, tying a silly hat beneath his chin so he was certain the rope would leave a mark to last all night long and blaze like a burn even when Papa came home from work. He was hot in the face with anger, and white in the fist.

"Look at you now," she said, when she was finished and was dragging him around to the front of the church to find the family's ancient llama and start up the little show that seemed to him like begging, something his father despised and disdained. "You could pass for an Indian boy for certain."

"I'm not dirty," he said to her. "I'm not like them."

She laughed sharply and said, "How young you learn your lessons. But today you are an Indian boy and people will take your picture and give you sweets. Come," she said, forgiving him, "you'll see, it will be nice."

He didn't remember what was next. He didn't remember people taking his picture, thank God. If ever he found one of those photographs, he would burn it. All he remembered of the dregs of that day was a dusty wind that whipped along the ground and disturbed the blankets on which the women had set their trinkets. It flew Felicia's skirt up to her face making her laugh in delight.

Too many memories ambushed him as he lay in bed beside Berta, who snored awhile then fell silent, then snored again. A tear drained down from his eye to the mattress. For solace, he reminded himself of the gift that had come to him in the night, which returned him to his understanding of the natural order of things. Even as a child, even before his father explained it all, he saw many things. He saw how the Indians were different from them, their clothes dirty and the color of their skin--like something rubbed red by the earth's scum. They greedily desired what wasn't theirs even though they lacked any notion of how to use things properly.

After Felicia left, another Indian girl Rosaria came and stayed with them and later in his teen years a young woman named Tina Maria would come and stand in their kitchen and knead the bread doughs for the family. Before she touched the food, she was expected to wash up and change clothes into a sack-dress Mother provided. When Mother left the kitchen, Tina Maria, who was not much older than he, would tease him and make jokes he told her were stupid. He remembered a time she got a heavy dusting of flour on her chest and her hands were covered in sticky dough. She held her hands over her head and fluttered her fingers and said to him, "dolfo, help me, please, I've covered myself with flour. Brush it off for me." She had him brush off the flour while she stood at attention. He got a penis hard like rock looking so directly at her breasts, because he was at that age. When she glanced down and saw the bulge in his pants, she blushed and laughed. "Oh, Dolfo," she said. "Look at you, a man now." She giggled and blushed and mortified him more with her teasing until he wanted with all his heart to slap her but instead he wheeled around and strutted from the room. How many years now had he tried to forget that humiliation and failed?

Rodolfo got up from the bed and went to the front room to mix some coffee from the instant Nescafé powder. So much good coffee was harvested in their highands, but most went to the North while the government brought this garbage down to its own people. The old government had done that, his own government. A twist of misery snaked through him but he reminded himself that his government's path had been predominately correct. The Indian government would keep the coffee here but it surely would go to the Indians. The country would soon be bankrupt from lack of exports and they would all starve.

He thought again of the note that came in the mail threatening to reveal his crimes. Berta sighed beside him and he looked at her and saw that her eyes were moist at the edge of the closed lids. She rolled toward him, crushing his fingertips under her back till he slid them free and shook his fingers in the air to lessen the hurt, then saw in his own hand a picture of something that had bothered him once. An ancient Indian in the village had a stretch of scarred skin along his hairline. The man had stopped him in the street the week Ximena shut its door. He'd stepped in front of Rodolfo, inches separating them. Rodolfo tried to sidestep him and keep on going but the man flattened a hand against Rodolfo's breastbone and thrust his chin at him and said, "Now you will get what you deserve--you and your kind. Wait, and keep your eyes to your back. You think because you are six feet tall you are a powerful man?"
"Who are you? Get your hand off me." Rodolfo sucked back his chest. "You had better be careful. I warn you."

"No, I warn you," the man said and shook his hand in Rodolfo's face as he backed away from him, then he turned and flew from sight. Rodolfo felt sick to his stomach, thinking, of course I'm sick because there's some rank quality in those people that causes it. Sometimes they cause an actual nausea in a person--his father knew that and told him of it, as soon as he was of an age to understand.

Today he wondered was that scalp-burned man the one who'd scribbled the blue note. Yet the handwriting seemed somehow wrong--wasn't it feminine?--plus it was hard for him to believe an Indian had command enough of Spanish to read and write it.

After the day the Indian had waylaid him, he heard people talking in the streets about Ajacopi, and later Ajacopi was in the paper. Comments were printed about his heroics, as well as photos of him in his village, with his children and his grizzled parents. Suddenly Ajacopi was everywhere and Rodolfo would think, What about the men who held him when he was disgusting to be around, who questioned him and got the vital information needed for the defense of their culture? What about them? Didn't they deserve even a glance? Someone in the paper referred to them en masse and called them "bit players" in the anti-revolutionary movement. Is that how it was? Were they no more than bit players? Did he have to be Estefan, with a wife like a silk flower, to count for something? He looked over at Berta, still deeply asleep beside him, and suddenly felt sorry for her, for the life that was theirs.

Rodolfo had asked Galo to remember, remember what they'd called him in the prison. La Fuerza, the force, that was it, and he loved it and it was true. Those men did what he told them to do. Except when it came to giving information, they obeyed like barnyard animals, seldom even protesting. Grandfather or young turk, whoever a man had been in his home village, it did not count. In the world Rodolfo ruled that man was nobody. If Rodolfo told a man to bend over so he could stick a cut branch up his ass and twist it inside his guts, the guy was going to do it. He would not so much as lift his eyes in Rodolfo's direction, knowing things would only go worse for him. When the pain intensified, the man would sweat and moan. Some would scream like lunatics or women giving birth. He used to wait for the point where they'd break into screaming as a sign he was doing his job, but some never got there and he'd have to stop or otherwise kill them. It became a curiosity to him--why some screamed berserkly and others never ever screamed. One day, he realized that some could not scream. Their throats were paralyzed and incapable of any sound when the pain was severe. Those men could only hang on and clamp down against the agony of sensations.

He was the maestro, he directed the production. He did whatever he desired with them. Except that he must not kill them--that part he understood. To kill them was failure, failure in the extreme, because then they carried their dirty secrets to the grave. To kill them was like beating to death the horse that would carry you eventually--perhaps late in the day--to water.
By dying at his hand, the last prisoner enraged Rodolfo and defeated him. Death was the man's escape, his triumph even. Others triumphed through escape to madness, but those few lunatics seldom occupied his thoughts. They were never equal to the game, while Ajacopi was.

Leaving the meeting at the Boca, Rafi needed Ofelia. He needed her comfort and needed it that instant. His feet pounded the clay road, tripping once and dropping him to a knee, but he didn't stop to examine the knee he'd scraped. He continued running toward the house and threw back the door and flew in to find his sister was not at home. Mama's house was empty entirely. He tried to conjure a picture of Ofelia in a physical space. He saw her in the church. She might have gone there to escort some visitors. Mama might have sent her on such an errand because Rafi wasn't available to help. In his picture, Ofelia knelt in prayer on the stone floor of Our Lady Santa Catarina. He needed to believe her knees were bent in prayer for him, because he felt himself in such trouble. A great tangle occupied his mind and he saw no thread to pull and release it.

He left the great familiarity of the house and ran to the church, a run of half a mile that left him glistening with sweat, appearing to the eye like a man buttered with tanning oil. At the heavy, carved mahogany doors, he slowed his step and blotted his face with his shirt tail, then entered. His eyes moved slowly among the worshipers scattered among the pews, most of them alone with their prayer. Seen from behind, none boasted Ofelia's luxuriant braid. He saw it in his mind's eye as a rope to pull him to safety. He made his way to the altar, then turned and scanned the pews to be certain Ofelia was not among the worshippers. Then he lifted his face to the massive crucifix holding Christ above the altar. His thoughts went to Rodolfo because the man often talked of their sacrifice for the nation. Rafi teared. Lord, he did not want sacrifice, had never wanted it. He wanted to live, but he knew nothing about life. He entertained this thought while his eyes fed on Jesus's torn body. He knew himself to be a person complete only in ignorance.

A man approached the crucifix and stood a yard from Rafi, his eyes on the image of Jesus, his hand tracing the sign of the cross. His thin black eyebrows arched like terns' wings. Rafi imagined them lifting from the man's taut brow and flying free. The man was familiar to him, known from some other place. Rafi's mind retched as he placed him at the Ximena Prison, seen there one time only, on the day of the accident. Surely the Lord was tormenting him with this man with the winged brows, when his heart longed only for Ofelia.

This man had entered the cell as the four of them--five, with the sallow woman--waited with the murdered Indian. The man had entered looking official and no one questioned his right to be present. He examined the body with care, then knelt and lifted the hands, palpated the wrists, squinted at the skin on the neck, his eyes noting every detail. Rafi guessed the visitor was sent to pronounce the Indian dead. He imagined the man impressed with the totality of the destruction the group had worked on their charge.

His examination complete, the man stood up, his clipboard braced at right angles against his rib cage, and asked, "What methods did you use on him?"

"To get him to talk?" Rafi asked.

"To get him to die."

Rodolfo shrugged. "What difference? He's dead. Our methods for that worked. That you can see."

Rafi knew Rodolfo was agitated about the death, but knew as well that Rodolfo was proud and would not let the inspector see his shame.

"I can explain more to you, if you want to know," Rubén said to the man, stepping forward, glancing at the blue ink on the man's report.

"You should have had me come in beforehand," the man said.

"What?" Rodolfo asked. "Like to a show? That's what you wanted?"

The man frowned and the frown passed onto Galo's face. "Best not to provoke...." Galo muttered.

"Not a show," Rubén said, with a suggestion of authority. "A scientific experiment. Some of us take interest in the human experience of pain."

"Some of us are sick," Rodolfo said.

"Use some caution," Galo murmured. "We are together in this."

Rafi wanted to say, You've come to the right place to see pain but he felt suddenly young and shy and could not speak. He coughed again and again until Rodolfo stared at him and Linni turned her eyes--pools of gray water--in his direction.

"Get out of here, would you," Rodolfo said to the man. "Your job is done." He kicked the Indian in the side, barely shifting the dead weight.

The man lifted a hand and rubbed his cheek with his knuckles.

"You have ink on your cheek," Rubén said, staring, "or is it a spot of some sort?"
The man shook his head and jotted another word or two on his paper before leaving.
Rafi lowered his eyes from Jesus and turned them to the man with the vaulting eyebrows, uncertain now of his identity. The man backed away from the altar, tears below his eyes, and lifted a hand to wipe his face.

IV.
His eyes nearly shut by the beastly sun, Rodolfo overshot the narrow turnoff to the ruins, then backtracked, cursing the extra steps required. He journeyed on foot because Berta had forbidden him to take Luci in the heat of the day and his nerves were too chafed to allow argument. He saw a cloud of dust snaking toward him. When the dust settled, he saw Galo's car. Beside Galo, a second figure. He assumed it to be Rubén and spat into the dust, awaiting them.

Rafi trailed in by a bicycle that inscribed a meandering path through the dust. The car and bike were deposited beside the road and the four men gravitated on foot toward the base of the largest of three monoliths and stood in the pocket of cool air within its shadow. There they could remove their hats and lift their shirts to pat dry their brows and scalps. A tour group of five middle-aged women distracted Rafi as they crisscrossed the sight, stopping here and there to imbibe short lectures about the Indian past from an impeccably dressed young man who spoke proudly of the Indians' cultural and engineering achievements.

Rodolfo did not wait for the chitchat to cease within his small assembly. He took command of Rafi's eyes with his own and said, "I know the answer. I've thought it over carefully. It's a mistake to confess to anything at all. We're not going forward to yap to that Tribunal."
Galo appeared stricken and blurted out, “No! Why not go forward, Rodolfo? Why not? I don't think that's the proper decision for us--maybe for you it is but not for us."

"There is no me and you now," Rodolfo told him. "There's us and this decision is right for us. You should all of you be grateful you've got me willing to think this through when I could be doing something better with my time."

What? Rubén wondered, knowing how empty his own hours were.

"I know now what's best and know it with certainty," Rodolfo said. "I'll explain it if I need to, if you can't see it yourselves. It concerns history, the book of history and how it will be written, which matters more than the trivialities of today. Look around you. What here is of importance?"

Rubén had been peering up at the top of the ruined structure, which had broken over time into a molar's rough surface. His eyes dropped to the ground and he traced the sharp line that divided the monument's black shadow from the surrounding ground, its colors invisible in the sun's drenching light. He passed some gas and the breeze brought the odor to his nose, causing him to marvel at the body's ability to produce such stench in a small bubble of gas. "The written record of history," he said, nodding to Rodolfo. "The written record can be a thing of beauty."

The man stinks, Rodolfo thought. He is an animal.

Rafi saw a mental picture of old paper, covered with indecipherable words. He glanced at his forearm and thought the skin, dried by the sun, could peel off like paper. It looked like an old man's skin. A line of yellow butterflies wafted by. He knew some of them arrived this time of year from summer grounds far to the north. Those are pretty, he thought. Everything should be lovely like that, then life would be better.

Rubén saw the butterflies as if they were an artifact of his vision, like floaters before the eyes.

"Quiet," Rodolfo said. "Who needs your help? This is about the history of our people, my people. My people, do you understand?" He touched the center of his chest, felt the hairs beneath his shirt stir. "I am part of the history of a proud people. I'm not shaming myself by going forward like a scared old women. For me, it's out of the question."

"I want to keep everything secret, too," Rafi said. "But the woman, what about her? She doesn't care about history. She'll be walking around out there." His mind ached when Rodolfo spoke of history, giving the impression their lives had already gone past.

"Puh!" Rodolfo spat. "She cares about feeding her children." His lip twitched. "Nothing more. She sees two inches from her face."

"The Captain," Galo whispered. "The Captain. You're forgetting the Captain. He knows everything. Just think of what he knows."

"My God," Rodolfo said. "The Captain is our captain, our chief, do you forget that? This was his fight, too. He's allied with us, not them."

"This is a terrible mistake," Galo said, shaking his head. "We must go forward. It's the only safe thing to do. You are forgetting they are vengeful. We've all known that, all our lives. Weren't you taught that by your parents? Rafi? Rubén? Weren't we all?"

"Safe?" Rodolfo sputtered. "Safe? Is that what we're about now? But I'd expect no different from you. You sicken me, you have no balls, old man, you are castrado, less than a woman. But I don't worry about you, you'll do what the group decides."

"Calm yourself, Rodolfo," Rafi said. "I vote with you. I want this over with. It's buried so long, let it stay buried and let's get on with our lives."

"What's buried doesn't always stay buried," Galo said, "and it's better if we are the first to speak of our guilt--don't wait and let them come to us with it."

"As long as I can keep my record," Rubén said, his right hand scribbling in the air, "I'll go along with forgetting the story. But I won't bury the record--it's my piece of history. Others might value it some day."

"Like who?" Rodolfo demanded.

"I don't know. I have family. I have a sister, Lisel."

"Just keep it in your fucking apartment and don't go waving it about," Rodolfo said.
Galo spoke again. "Once he said to me, 'I am someone's child.' That's what he said: 'I am someone's child, amigo'--he called me amigo, in our tongue."

"Fuck," Rodolfo said. "He didn't speak Spanish, he spoke no decent language. None of them do. They're not like us, they're animals, beasts of burden, but they want to lord it over us because their numbers are greater and they occupied the land back when all men were animals. But we're the ones who were chosen to rule it decently. Occupying. What does that signify?"

The old man infuriated him. He wished he could remember the words of the Bible passage that spoke about the stiffnecked people given the land, so he could quote it to them.

"He did say it in Spanish," Galo said. "I remember, because I was startled."

"None of you ever understood our purpose."

"Except me, Rodolfo," Rafi said, batting his chest. "I did. I learned from you, but things are different now."

"Enough talking for today," said Rodolfo, because he felt a whirl of uneasiness in his gut.

"But we aren't resolved," Galo said.

"Oh God, just like last time," said Rodolfo. "We are, we are resolved. It's finished." He hurled that back at them as he walked toward the path exiting the site.

Rafi loped behind Rodolfo, quickly closing the gap between them. "Wait," he called. "Please, Rodolfo. You must wait."

Rodolfo slowed his step. "We've talked enough. We get nowhere."

"Rodolfo," he said. "Please."

"Alright. Speak, then."

Rafi was out of breath but dared not delay speaking. "There's one thing I worry about. I want to be quiet about all this but there's one thing that worries me."

"So say it then. What is it? What worries you so damn much?"

Rafi frowned. "It's what I said before, it's the woman. The more I think of her the more I see her in the corner watching everything with those eyes. She was there that day. She was right there watching when everything went wrong."

"She was always there, every day."

"I remember her gasp when his head hit the wall--that awful bonk it made, it made her gasp. And I turned to look at her and saw her face--she was distressed, I know it--and then she covered her eyes with her hands like she didn't want to look any more. Don't you remember her hands, Rodolfo--how thin they were, thin like paper and all the veins standing out."

"Why would I remember her hands?"

"I went to the fortune reader last evening because I was restless and he said to me--this is just what he said to me--he said, 'Young man, you must beware a beautiful big-eyed woman.' Do you see, Rodolfo? Do you see?"

"You take your counsel from a fortune teller?" He shook his head. "She's not a beautiful woman. She's plain as straw." He visualized the scalp-burned Indian who'd accosted him on the street, threatening him.

"Only because she was always sad, so her face was dark."

"Oh, Jesus," Rodolfo said. "That is nonsense. A plain woman is a plain woman. That woman was a producer of babies, a sow, nothing more. She was there, so what? Why do we have to worry about that?"

"She would want to tell the story to the Commission."

"Why would she want to tell? Anyway, why would they listen to someone like her?"

"She's a woman, yes, a woman--" His eyes shifted off to the side.

"Oh, my God," Rodolfo said and shook his head and said to the surrounding air, "He has fallen in love with her. My God, is there no one this young man won't fall for?"

Galo was first to reach his home though his was the most distant from the Indian site. His transit time was short because of the car, the black Ford sedan that was Mary's father's until the old gentleman died ten years before.

Mary sat in the front room, the sun across her chest, her feet resting on a hassock. She was knitting a loose ball of brown wool, her eyes closed. "Where did you go this afternoon?"

"No place. A little meeting, my dear. Don't concern yourself."

"With those men. You met those men. When do you make your confession to the Commission? I should know when I can expect the village to begin its talk, so I can be ready for more shame, for another round of it."

"Another...?" But he stopped himself because he knew and didn't want to hear--that would only fan his anger. When a healthy child dies there are always those who wonder, who scrutinize the parents, study their faces, their hands, as if to say, were those hands clutching a pillow, was that face bent over the child in rage, or was some other awfulness committed inside their walls?

"Rodolfo has convinced himself it's best we not go forward." He floated his words.

"What!" She fixed her eyes on him and smacked her hands to her breast, where the sunlight bleached them. "That's lunacy, Galo. You will go forward. There is no other possibility.
None." She got up and left the room and he heard her clattering in the kitchen, preparing the supper.

After eating in silence the simple dinner Mary had prepared, he sat in the front room on the cushioned chair.

"You're clucking your tongue like an old hen, Galo," Mary said to him. "What's the matter?" Her white hair stood up spikily in every direction as if it were escaping her head.

He shook his head. "It's Rodolfo. He's decided. He says we must not accept the amnesty. He will not hear of another course."

"And you would listen to that man?"

" How can I go one way and he goes the other? He's dangerous, Mary, you don't know him."

"And those roaming the streets, with their torches and their fire bombs and their fury about what's been done to them, they're not dangerous?"

"Rodolfo is an angry fellow."

She bunched her lips.

"Your family was wealthy. You were above it all. You didn't need to compete with them like the rest did."

She turned away.

"Now you are angry. Everyone is always angry at me. What is it I do to deserve such reaction?"

"When am I ever angry at you, Galo? You are who you are. The Lord above made you a delicate man. What responsibility have you in His creation?"

Galo shook his head and groaned. "You hate me for what happened at that prison, but you forget that people do certain things that aren't nice during war."

"Hate? On the contrary. I am glad for you. Maybe these wretched events will finally give you your happiness."

"How could this make me happy? Why would you say that?"

"Who was he, Galo, this man whose life you all took?"

"I don't know, I don't know, just an old Indian--a quiet man with a funny odor. There was a woman there, right in the room. She accepted it all just the same as us."
Mary shook her head. "Were we always such cowards, Galo? What will our grandchildren think?"

"How could this make me happy? Why would you say that?"

"You have been so busy for so long trying to put on a heavy coat of guilt about the child that there is nothing left of you but the coat. Certainly, there is nothing left for sorrow. So now you are truly guilty and deserving of your warm coat, so you are entitled to keep it to warm you wherever you go."

"What are you talking about, Mary?" He didn't like their conversation. "I am suffering with the guilt over these events, especially the child. You don't know how much I've suffered over that."

"Indeed. You are indeed a suffering and guilty man, as much as Job in the Bible. And now at this prison it seems you have finally behaved like a truly bad man, so from now on you are most correct in feeling guilty and you can busy yourself with it as fully as you like while the rest of us settle for sorrow and remembrance."

Rodolfo walked back to his house slowly so that it took him most of an hour, but he was hardly registering the time. He was thinking about the woman. Flat-eyes, they'd called her, her eyes like television cameras, open wide, tracking right, tracking left. He couldn't believe she would want to speak to this newformed Commission. Such a silent sort, when did she speak to anyone? Yet Rafi was worried and he was the only one of the three with even a shred of sense so his worry infected Rodolfo. He walked into the house and Daniel ran up to greet him waving a paper and flashing a broad smile. "Dad," he said. "An A. An A on the memorization test."

"Good, it's about time," Rodolfo said as the boy sped on out the door going who knew where. To himself he muttered, "Hallelujah. My seed produces a crop."

The phone started up ringing. Berta must have run off to her flirty friend Cecilia's again because she was not there to answer it. They all strayed, the wives from their husbands, the children from their parents, leaving the men to make their own meals after a day's work, to answer their own telephones. "Hello," he said.

"Rodolfo, it's Galo. After Mary and I had our supper, I was thinking."

"About...?"

"The woman, Linsi. Why would she not report us if we don't go ourselves to the Commission? Maybe we are okay about Estefan, because of all you said, but why not her? What if she holds resentment toward us?"

"Shit. First Rafi, now you...everyone quaking with worry, a bunch of old ladies. Maybe Rubén is the stand-out--haha--the intrepid one." Yet he wondered, Could she have written the note, the big-eyed woman? The hand was weak, a woman's hand. He'd thought that before he remembered the Indian who'd accosted him on the street. "If you are all so damned scared, I'll go trek up to her house and talk to her and make certain she'll keep her mouth closed. Will that satisfy you?"

"It's a generous offer, Rodolfo. But can we trust her words? People don't always speak the truth."

"Just let me talk to her. I'll motivate her a little if I have to. Remember, old man, I can do that."

"Be careful, Rodolfo, times are different now."

The man was whining, Rodolfo thought. He wondered how did Mary live with such a loser? A woman carrying the name of the Blessed Mother, paired with a weak link like this one.

"Maybe I will go with you--wouldn't that be safer?--though my Mary says we have no alternative, we must go forward, no matter what this woman says."

"Mary says! Now I must hear her opinion, too? I don't need you as nursemaid in order to make a visit. I will go alone, and that's enough talking." He pushed the receiver onto the cradle and held it down as if it might start up speaking on its own if he did not suppress it with his hand.

Daniel came back into the house and stood beside Rodolfo, his school paper clutched in his hand, wrinkled. "Do you want to see it, Dad? See the A? Right here." Rodolfo looked at the simple letter, large, straight and balanced like a nice structure of logs. Suddenly, tears rimmed his eyes and he grabbed Daniel around the neck and hugged him to his chest and pressed his wet cheek to the boy's.

"Dad," Daniel cried. "You're suffocating me."

But Rodolfo kept hold until the feeling passed, then he released the boy and turned away and slipped over to the television in embarrassment.

V.
It took him one and a half hours swaying atop the burro to climb to her place on the shoulder of the mountain. He saw two schoolage boys and a younger girl scuffling in the dirt, and what seemed like a dozen dogs, most of them puppies. From the disarray, he concluded she had no husband. She wasn't much to look at and with those odd eyes she would be wearying, so no surprise she had no man in her bed. Rodolfo knew her name was Linn or Linya but they'd never used it, just calling her "guard" to her face and privately using their nicknames for her.
He batted the dust from his clothes and kicked his shoes against each other before entering the yard that held her adobe, tin-roofed dwelling. Corralled with the young creatures, he felt a peculiar calm, like a child might, having been wrapped tightly in a blanket and pressed to the chest. He could not explain it and did not entirely like it.

She must have seen him before he knocked, seen him stopped in the yard, surveying the children and the half-planted fields that came so close to the house she could bend out from the kitchen window and tear off an ear of corn. She occupied the doorway before he reached it. The children had dropped back and were staring and silent.

"Hello," he said from outside the door, which stood warped and gaping.

"Oh," she said--her look, he thought, more stunned than usual. "You. Hector. From that stinkhole."

He laced tight his brow. "From the prison...Yes, ma'am." Linn? Linya? What was the name?
How am I "ma'am" to him now? she wondered, when before I wasn't even Linnea, the name my mother gave me, just that woman who took the prisoners to the questionning room and stood like a blind eye till the detectives were ready to have them hooded and led back, which often took the help of one or more of the detectives dragging what was left of the man. Beyond that, her job was to wash the floor and when need be the walls or ceiling. The stone felt peculiar to the touch when she lightened its stains--her hand was used to adobe.

"I was in the area, ma'am, the neighborhood. I thought we might share a cup of coffee." He knew that the ones who lived this high up in the mountains had no money for land, so they took the land they could grab and tried to grow what they could. Those who managed a crop of coffee made a living. Others half-starved.

A cup of coffee? You were in this neighborhood--what neighborhood? There are no neighbors for half a mile. "I have some tea if you want it." It was better for her, living out here, away from the village. There was less talk.

"Of course," he said.

She sneered at his delicate turns of phrase and his fake casualness in stopping by her house, as if he were stopping by to chat, as if they had something in common they might want to talk about all of a bright sudden, though they'd not once thought to set eyes on each other for the year since their jobs, which had thrown them together like loose change in a pocket, tossed them out onto the road.

He followed her into her kitchen which was barely big enough to hold two strangers, and the children followed him in crowding the boards of the floor, each board warped and separated from its neighbors, and blackened past cleaning. "Can I wash my hands?" he asked. "They're dirty from the road and the burro." She nodded and he went and turned the faucet and held his hands under the twist of cool water for half a minute, then he dried them on his pants though she’d held out a rag.

At first, she was surprised enough to be half-courteous, though the boys were underfoot, and the puppies, too--Terra'd had a litter only four weeks before and all eight she had, one per teat, had their legs under them now. But after he started turning his head this way and that to look things over, all she could think was, Who do you think you are to show up at my house like you're some pal of mine?

Of the four, Rodolfo was the one she least welcomed seeing. Just her luck that he was the one to come. She never could stand that conceit he had about himself. What he found in himself to crow about she didn't know. But then he was a strange man. What other man would keep the control gizmo to a television set stuffed into his pants pocket, something she discovered only by accident when it popped out one day in a tussle with a man he was throttling, a man who'd lost his mind enough to lose his temper.

When the gadget tumbled to the ground, Rodolfo let go the cursing, spitting prisoner and grabbed for it, but she was squatting on her haunches--she was on her period and that made her legs dead tired--so her hand got first to the thing and when she looked up to meet his eyes, her hand covering the contrivance, the blood shot into his face and colored it, even though it was Indian-dark to begin with. She set the remote in his hand and he couldn't make it disappear into his pocket quickly enough. He held her eyes with his and stared her down--he wants to threaten me, she remembered thinking--but his reaction was so extreme it made her curious enough to risk asking, "What is the thing?"

That's when he said, "a remote," but that didn't help her any.

"To control the televison," he said.

She handed him a cup of tea and he sat and queried her about the names of the girl and two boys sitting on the floor studying his shoes, and he admired her male dog, Sailor, and even the bitch, though Terra was bony and her teats dangled. He didn't say a word though about the pups that gnawed the toes of his shoes and dragged at his pants legs even after she clapped her hands to stop them. He kept his temper as the pups pecked at him and she thought how odd that was, together with all his nicey "ma'am"ing. Her eyes lingered on his damp hands, which rested near her pups and her kids--those same hands that could smack a prisoner's cheek rapid-fire. When she glanced at his face, she found him looking so hard at her hands she pulled them from the table and buried them in her lap. He nodded his head a couple times as if agreeing with someone who must have been talking inside his head.

He was asking about the children but she was smelling fear; that skill was one of the few she learned at that place. The air there stank of it even more than of piss and vomit.

"Got any names for our puppies, Mister?" the older of the two boys asked.

Rodolfo shrugged. "I don't know. How about Popeye for one of them? That could go with Sailor." Suddenly he said, "Maybe the children want to go out and play," and he started tapping the table with his middle finger. "I want to talk to your mother about her fine work at the prison."

The kids looked to her face for guidance. "Go on out," she told them. "Stay close to the house and don't go off running in the fields." Her thoughts strayed to the fields , only half-planted this year--what harm would it do for the boys to play in the unplanted dirt? Still, she'd just as soon have them in shouting range.

He clinked his spoon against his tea mug, his eyes to the table which the kids had scribbled with crayon. "So, ma'am," he said, "Do you take the Daily News?"

"Maybe you don't recall my name. Linnea. Say it's odd if you want to. I'm part Swedish is what I'm told."

"Do you read the paper?"

"Once in a while I pick it up in town. When I'm down there and I've got change in my pocket. Why do you care?" She would have called him "Mr. Manners" or something snide but she was afraid to test his temper.

He glanced at her faded blue housedress and nodded and configured his comment carefully. "Have you heard then about the amnesty?"

Now she had her hint of why he was sitting at her table, drinking her tea, scattering polite words about her children and mongrel dogs.

"Some," she answered him. "From the old lady who's up the road. She says everyone's jabbering."

"It doesn't concern you?"

She shrugged. "It doesn't have to do with me."

"No, of course not," he said, glad for her indifference, but still he pushed on. "What about others you know, ones you knew in the prisons? Perhaps there's something you witnessed that occupies your thoughts?"

She shrugged again. "Do you need to be so roundabout in your talk?"

"Have you thought about the day soldiers come knocking here, asking questions, putting names in front of your face?--names, maybe dates, maybe pressing you hard for answers." Though her insult hadn't missed him, he liked the gist of what she said and kept his calm. "Ajacopi, for example, there's a name you might hear some time in the future. I'd say it's likely." He lifted one side of his lip to show a wet white tooth then unthinkingly picked up a cigarette that lay on the table and lit it from the book of matches lying beside and ignored her squint and the fact that the smoke made the puppies sneeze.

"That name should scare me or something?"

"How about you think about this right now, consider what you might say to them? About me--he tapped his breastbone--and Rafael Juliano and the other two."

She noticed his gilt wearing off fast. She shrugged. "I wouldn't have any idea."

"No? Well, suddenly I don't like the sound of that. You had better think about it, because four men choose not to go forward and spill their guts and they have to have assurance of your loyalty."

"To what?" She got up and pushed open the door so the two dogs could go out into the air, the puppies piling after.

His face darkened with anger and he saw the cigarette in his hand and frowned and rubbed it out. "To a just cause. To committed men and a worthy cause. To your own future, too, because you're just as culpable in the eyes of the law."

She startled. "No," she said. "I don't see how that can make sense. That’s absurd. Go now, why don't you, because my children will be back soon and they'll need some food on the table."
He was up then and out of there without a second wasted, and she felt the air in her house get better for his leaving. She took the cigarette he'd left on the table and threw it in the toilet and walked back into the kitchen, wanting to go out and check on her children, angry that this man thought he would get her to swear some kind of allegiance to him and his kind just because he sweet-talked her and complimented her on her house and dogs and the "fine work" she'd done back at the prison. As if anyone who had the stomach couldn't have dragged those men back and forth between their cells and the interrogation rooms and tied on the hoods and wiped down the rooms between sessions. Only when his flattery didn't produce did he start with the threats. The kind of man he was, he might carry them out.

She walked out and made sure she could spot each child off in the field, then sat in front of her door on a boulder her husband had dragged there way back when. She settled in to think back and try to remember the name Hector said. He must imagine she remembered everything she saw in that sewer, like that man Rubén who sketched it all on a pad of paper. At least Rubén had half a smile to offer every once in a while as did the young one whose name began with R.
There were fifteen or twenty male prisoners through that prison in the two years she worked there--only once a woman to beat on. No one man stuck out in her memory, she remembered them as a group trickling through. In Ximena one was no different from the next, all of them stripped of what made them stand apart in the world outside. They were all the same, too, in the dregs of order they tried to keep in their miserable lives, folding and stacking the apparel they had on their backs when caught, scrubbing themselves clean as a person could with the cloths and bowls of plain water she gave them (so they'd not put too much strain on the detectives' noses).

She was the one to go to their cells and take them the short distance to the questioning room. They never knew whether their fate was to be half a day of hell or just a few dumb questions from Rodolfo and that young one, then back to the cell. Rati, she'd called the young one in her head. That much she recalled. He liked to ape Rodolfo, the biggest rat of the pack. Rodolfo might string a man up by the arms till the arms uprooted from the sockets or he'd tie the arms behind the back and pull higher and higher until the joinery inside started to tear. It was a gruesome thing to watch and gave her nightmares. Some of those men would be crippled for life after the treatment they got from those detectives. Rodolfo said they deserved it for being dirty swine Indians, and Rat, who studied her eyed sometimes till she wanted to squirm, liked to parrot him.

From the prisoners she heard the same defamation about the captors. They caught her eyes when they could and hissed a word or two--"criminals" or "animals"-- making sure it was Spanish for her ears, then a wad of spit to the ground that she'd sooner or later get to mop.
If she found one sleeping when his time with the detectives had come and she shook him or called to him, he'd wake with a start of fear and sometimes a scream that stopped short when his eyes flew opened. She was the one their eyes hit at that moment, before those eyes fled to the ground and shut, whether in shame because of the man's terror or in a wish to flee back to sleep.

What kind of sleep, what kind of dreams could these men have? They lay on quarter-inch pallets on the cold floor, always knowing she could walk in with her torch, scattering cockroaches and rats and dragging them off to an indeterminate time in hell. Between sessions, they got just enough food and medical care to keep them alive so the detectives had a chance of extracting something at the next interrogation.

Linnea liked nothing about standing waiting all day inside that building listening to moans and whimpers and shouted prayers, but she didn't spend her energy pitying those men. She'd had too much trouble served up on her own plate to worry much about another's misery, especially when it came to these Indians who the detectives said were responsible for every kind of mischief against the young men of her community. Her own boys would be men some day. She didn't want their lives cut short by thieving Indians. That thought sometimes got her keyed up for her work.

When once a woman came in as a prisoner, Linnea wondered how she'd hold up compared with the men. Would she whimper more or less, bleed more or less, soil herself more or less, plead to God more or less? Would the fear of rape drive her mad? What she learned was, they’re all the same. If you watch cattle herded through to slaughter, you don't think of which steer is the more frightened, which one slower or quicker off the truck. It's all the same, man, woman, young, old, animal, human it's all the same, the same pain and piss and unanswered prayers.
She didn't remember Ajacopi by name, but it occurred to her which one he was. Though she had no special image of a man's face or body, she wasn't going to forget they'd killed the last prisoner who came into that place, so he was the one, he was Ajacopi. She remembered the fear that spilled through that group of useless men when they saw what they'd accomplished. God knows it wasn't the first time she'd seen blood sprayed across the floor and walls, but for once she wasn't asked to clean it while the detectives waited like useless children amidst the horrid mix of odors. Official people trooped in and out to view the calamity; they turned up their noses and hissed curses at Hector and his bunch.

She remembered Ajacopi the way she remembered the one Hector left hanging in the cell. He tried to blame that on her because she was standing outside the cell, exactly where he’d ordered her to wait. She had to admit she heard that man moaning, she heard him whining for a long time, more than an hour it must have been. But she was thinking about other things that day. And how did they expect her to know they'd left him by mistake? She couldn't read Hector's mind. Now that would be a filthy job, filthier even than the one she had.

Rodolfo couldn't stand another second in her house. She had nothing of use to give him and the place had a stink to it from all those mutts and whatever man lived there once and left his stench--possibly an Indian or mixed-breed for all he knew. When he made it down the hillside and back to his house, he was famished so he ate a bowl of rice and corn and tomato before he sat down on the sofa and picked up the phone to call Galo.

"It's no damn good," he said, when Galo answered. "She's a stubborn cunt and wouldn't agree to a thing."

"That leaves us no choice, Rodolfo," Galo said, "We'll go forward and give the story. We'll have to, like Mary said. There's no choice, don't you agree now?"

"Agree? No. There's another way. I just haven't seen it yet."

"With the woman out there as a loose cannon? There's no other way. We've got to face up to that, my friend, right away, I believe, before it’s too late."

"We've got to rein her in. You're right on that much. You and Rafi had that--I'll give you that, okay now, so you'll be satisfied. But she's a woman, Jesus, I can make this work. I'm not done with her, I just got fed up. I'll turn right around and go back there and persuade her this time, whatever it takes. She's not a match for me." Rodolfo thought of the sunbaked journey back to the woman's place and felt his determination falter, then he thought of his father and his disciplined ways and all he'd taught Rodolfo of the value of persistence.

"Tomorrow," he said. "That's when I go back to that bitch. Tomorrow, at sunrise." He saw the house littered with children and mongrels and the endless, twisting road to take him to a miserable destination and he thought of Galo's father-in-law's car, which could carry them there and quickly away. "Come with me, if you want," he said. "If it'll make you feel better."

Galo brought a basket of eggs and the children ran ahead announcing visitors with food, so she opened the door less reluctantly this time. "Oh," she said. "Eggs." The consideration of a smile passed over her eyes.

"For you," Galo said. "For the children. Growing children need protein."

"Come in, then. Both of you, I suppose." She squinted at Rodolfo but held open the door, its cover of paint long ago peeled away. "I thought we had our conversation yesterday," she said, her arms tight around the basket of eggs, cradling them to her ribs. "I told you, I don't remember anything about that man, Ajacopi."

"Don't remember?" Galo asked, his voice hihg-pitched with shock. "The man who died with his head cracked against the wall? You don't remember?"

She motioned them to two wooden chairs across the small table from her and turned her back to them, setting the eggs on the sink counter. "No, I don't," she said. "All of them were half-dead when I dragged them out of there."

"Sit," Galo said to her. "Please, sit." She pulled out the chair opposite them and sat down, two feet back from the table.

Rodolfo turned to Galo. "You see what I mean? This is what we're going to trust?" Suddenly he was shouting, "This burns my ass. I want this settled, and I don't want a goddamned woman blocking my way." He jumped up and grabbed the near edge of the table and leaned over toward her. "Don't think about it any more," he said, pressing his fingernails into the wood. "Just remember what I tell you to remember, and remember who I am."

Her eyes fled right and left and she calmed her breathing a while. Her voice was small and halting but her words were big. "I've got to think of me, and think of my kids--what's best for us."

Galo sighed. His eyes roamed the simple, unadorned room, the base of its walls crumbling, and looked through the single pane of glass. He commented gently, "You could use some help here."

Rodolfo sucked in his chest and stopped his breath, and looked with a puzzled scowl at the older man. Then he glanced toward the woman and saw a hint of brightness enter her dull face. She turned from them a moment and looked into the egg basket she'd set beside her sink, then turned back and trained her eyes expectantly on Galo.

"We could help you, perhaps, with the little farm here. And maybe the bit of rest you could get would allow you to--"
"--recover my memory," she said in a whisper.

"Yes," Galo said. "Yes, something like that."

Rodolfo watched their exchange and kept silent.

"That's possible," she said. "That can happen."

Rodolfo came to life, shaking his head. "No," he said. "No. Why do we need her to remember?"

To Galo he said, "You want her to remember our cracking the Indian's head against the wall so she can go to the Commission, or answer their questions when they come to her? Is that what you're saying?"

"No," the woman said, glancing at the troupe of puppies that circled her feet. "He thinks I might remember that nothing happened there other than the man got dizzy and fell against the wall, nothing but that. That's what he thinks I'll remember if those goons approach me."
"Oh," Rodolfo said, quieted. "You are prepared to remember that?"

She bit her bottom lip. "You're ready to help me plant the rest of my field?"

"That wouldn't be difficult," Rodolfo said. "My son will help--he's an A student--and we'll get it done. We know how to work."

She nodded to him, then to Galo. The two men stood, Galo bobbing his head to her slightly.
As they climbed into Galo's car, the woman came flying out her door waving a piece of paper. She handed it through the driver's window to Galo. "Here," she said. "This is what I need. This is what I really need." She retreated to her house, and did not allow them to respond.
"What is it?" Rodolfo asked.

Galo examined the note. "Two kinds of seed," he said, "for her field. A kind of corn and a bean seed." He slid the note into his chest pocket and moved the car onto the road.
Rodolfo grunted. "Well, you showed some sense in there."

Galo shook his head. "I don't know. I'll never rest easy."

"What's the problem? We help her with her little field and she's grateful and beholden and keeps her mouth shut and if they approach her, she knows nothing that incriminates us. What's not simple about that?"

"I don't know," Galo said. "Things happen, things get said, things get out." He followed the turns in the packed dirt road at a careful speed.

"Let me see that paper she gave you." As his eyes fell on the woman's handwriting and the way she distributed her words across the page, he found them familiar and suddenly he felt keyed up with certainty that she was the one who'd written the note of threat. Forget that Indian on the street, here was the source of that feminine hand. Rafi and Galo had sensed the danger in her and Galo sensed it still. He calmed himself with the idea that the deal they'd struck might still hold, even if she'd written that note. The old man had come through. Rodolfo felt a flow of gratitude toward him, as if Galo suddenly were a small miracle of wisdom. "You did a good job," he said. "You handled things right with that woman. So just let it lie."

Rodolfo lay in bed beside Berta. He rested his hand on her long thigh and moved it bit by bit upward, then let it lie atop her eddy of hair. She rolled toward the wall, displacing his hand, leaving it to slip over her buttock and onto the mattress. His eyes followed her movement, stretching in their sockets till they ached. He turned his back to her, his hands clasped and held against his forehead, and directed his thoughts to the visit he and the old man, the surprising old man, had made to the woman. The threat she posed had become more real to him since he made the connection to the angry note. Still, when he thought of tilling her field and laying down the seed, Daniel hanging behind uselessly, the thoughts angered him. Him slaving for this limp-haired, sunken-cheeked woman to placate her--it was wrong. Yet, it would let them preserve their silence and in silence, their pride, and that was the important thing. The rest was passing and inconsequential.

Then, in his mind's eye, he saw her smile softly--a Mona Lisa smile like he'd seen in a book. She smiled and began to turn her back to Rodolfo and Galo, her eyes and her chuckle hidden. He saw through her as if she were literally transparent. He saw through her and discovered on her averted face, not the soft smile she'd worn seconds before but a delighted grin. He understood entirely, in one magical second of revelation, that this arrangement of tit for tat, their farm work for her cooperation, was no good, not right nor reliable. She would use them and then afterwards she would betray them, and locked in prison or under the earth, they would have no power to redress her treachery.

VI.

As he walked down the beach toward the water, Rodolfo saw Rafi cross-legged on his deck, his eyes intent on a book open on his lap. When he reached the dock, with its rotted wood smell, Rodolfo called across, "Looks like you're busy there, Einstein."

"Rodolfo," Rafi called, springing up in delight. "You've come to see my home--I'm reading for my classes that will start soon. I want to get a head start on the other students."

"I can come aboard? You're not too busy?"

"Of course not, come on board."

Rodolfo perched on a three-legged stool. "We made a visit, the old man and I. Another visit to the woman, Linya. Because Galo was uneasy she would turn us in."

"Tell me. How was she?"

"Stubborn at first, refusing to remember a thing about Ajacopi but she suggested she might suddenly recollect something at some future moment and make use of it against us. The cunt. I have to hand it to the old man, though. He conned her. He called her attention to a thing or two, then hinted we might help her with the wretched farm she's got--she's got no husband to do the heavy work. In exchange, she remembers our version, my version, of what happened, which means we've got no culpability for the Indian's death."

Rafi looked at his hands, at his fingernails, clean now after a year free of the filthy prison work. "A little farm work. If it would get us off...."

Rodolfo shook his head. "Forget it. She can't be trusted. Forget the deal. The old man had a good idea, but forget it--it won't wash."

Rafi saw her leaning against the prison wall, so dispirited, her grey-blonde hair falling like curtains on either side of her eyes. "You're certain? You know that for sure, Rodolfo?"
"I know her character. I know she'll play both sides and seek her advantage and in the end she'll sell out to the high bidder. They, the Indians, are.. now, the high bidder. You get it? For as long as they hold the government. So your books....you might as well throw them into the lake if we let her blab, that's how much use you'll have for them."

Rafi's head fell to his chest, as if sliced at the throat. "No," he insisted and pounded his fists to his thighs. "That's unjust, it's unjust. I'll have nothing then, and where is a way out for me, if taking the amnesty is not to be trusted?"

"It's not to be trusted," Rodolfo said, "and it's the coward's way as well. We will not do it--no matter what Galo says, or Mary--now his wife is in it, she dishonors her name."

"There's Estefan, too, he knows it all. And others--who knows who's out there."

"Oh, stop. I've told you a hundred times, you don't need to worry about Estefan. He'll stand firm."

"Yes, you've told us. You've told us many things."

"But the woman is a real problem--that's where Galo had some sense and I give him his due, and you, too. And we picked up a connection between that threatening note I got and the woman."

"So there's no solution, so we choose between bad and bad. We're at the end of the rope."

"I don't plan to till her fields," Rodolfo said, "like a common laborer, and have my son see that--no."

"Then we go forward and watch our reputations unravel?"

"Why are you so stupid? Our reputations might soar from what the people learn of our devotion, but still we won't go forward--that's because I don't plan to spend my days in prison in shame, my son seeing me locked behind walls."

"Then what, Rodolfo, what solution is there for such a mess? If we can't go forward and we can't hold back, where is the solution?"

Rodolfo slowed his speech. "Why couldn't the woman go away, why couldn't she disappear the way some people do? It happens all the time, such disappearances. Think of the Indians and how many vanished during the conflict."

Rafi looked at him with total interest, his eyes bright with astonishment. "What?"

"You're so surprised? This is obvious, and nothing so out of the ordinary."

"What are you saying, Rodolfo? We kidnap her and all those children, take them out into the jungle or something, leave them with the forest Indians?"

"The children? Forget about the children. The authorities will handle them, they'll sell them to some barren couple in North America where they can lead the rich life. The woman is our only concern and with her we'll make no mistakes."

"We kidnap the woman? Cart her off and hide her somewhere?" He saw himself literally carrying the woman over his shoulder like bundled wheat.

"Did I say anything about kidnapping? What good would that do? We're going to keep guard over her forever the way she guarded our prisoners? If we steal her away, then she stays away, we make certain of it. Do you understand? She stays away permanently. There are no alternatives."

Rafi stood and blinked .and hit his palms to his forehead. "Rodolfo, what are you saying? What are you saying? Now we are to commit a murder? A murder? She's one of us, Rodolfo, not one of them. We take her life and what future will there be for us? Oh, no, Rodolfo, you terrify me."

"She is not one of us. Think of how she lives--she is closer to them than to us. And this is necessary, it's necessary and that's the salient point here." He stood. "I'm going. Think about what we've discussed--think for a while and you'll be surprised how simple it is." He held his hands out in front of him, side by side, and studied their smooth surfaces as if he were contemplating them as weapons. "If we need it, I'll get a pistol," he said. His eyes were calm. "You're not a bad kid," he told Rafi. "You showed fortitude at that stinkhole. You'll figure out what's what."

Rafi pulled at the back of his hands. "No. You can't just go. You always do that, leave me with something that's impossible and go, leave me with nothing and go."

Rodolfo laughed at the display of emotion. "Oh, you'll figure it out."
He left but Rafi did not sit and think as he had been exhorted to do. He slept. As soon as he could and as deeply as he could, he slept and rocked on the waves and when he woke he felt sore and old and sick in the head and without even a thumbnail's worth of wisdom to light his path. He had figured nothing out and had no hope of doing so. All he could do was what he always did in moments of despair, he thought of the beautiful things he knew. He thought of Ofelia and Teresa and from that he thought of the women that strolled the beach and of how they would take his arm and walk beside him and visit him on his boat, all of that if ever he could end this life that imprisoned him and be what he was meant to be. Then of course Linnea came into it--she had to because of Rodolfo's grim plan. She'd been the only spot of softness in that hideous place and so he did, he admitted it, he loved her a tiny bit, though Rodolfo had contempt for him. Some comfort came to him from knowing she'd stood there and looked at all that happened and led the hooded, broken bodies back to their cells. She didn't shrink from it, didn't close her eyes or flee screaming I can't stand this. No, she stood and watched and heard the shrieks as much as he, so if a woman could, a delicate woman, then it must be bearable what happened there and, like Rodolfo said, they stood for a cause that was just, that was noble, even heroic, and the Indians were dirty and stupid and truth be told not quite human like them, more in a way like livestock. So he'd redoubled his efforts with the lash and taken off his shirt and let her look at him, at the sweat that snaked down his chest as he exerted himself for the cause. And he imagined her admiration, because he was young and smooth-skinned and heavily muscled and he was resolute and devoted to the fight, only he tried not to look at her eyes.

But now it seemed she was going to betray them, Rodolfo was sure of it. And that made his heart cramp because hadn't he loved her and looked after her a little, but she would betray him and take away his tiny hope for the future if he allowed her, and then what would his life be, like his father's life, a restless vagrancy without purpose. He thought of that and a kind of terror overtook him and a thought such as he had never had before, of taking a knife to his own wrist to end what life he had. The thought seized him and panicked him and he had to shake his head to throw it off. He thought of the President then and of how Rodolfo howled about the bleeding death the Indians had made for him, so that Rodolfo could not stop pacing in the cells those last few days, after the President's death.

To Rodolfo, who stood before him in his imagination, he said dully, 'Yes, all right, Rodolfo,' then he repeated his words more resolutely, his fortitude mustered, 'I'll go along with you. I'll stand at your side and be a good soldier. Like you always told me, Rodolfo, that's what we are--you and me. And sometimes good soldiers must do bad things.'

When he went to Rodolfo's home the next day to tell him his decision and found him curled on his sofa with the radio on across the room (Rodolfo didn't get up but told Rafi to turn the thing off), he concluded in some confusion that Rodolfo must have expected more resistence than Rafi was giving because he listened to Rafi's capitulation, then grunted and said, "One more chance--we give her one more chance. We'll have a last meeting and this time she's invited--I'll go, I'll invite her--so she'll have a chance to prove herself one last time, but if she fails, then that's the end of it and we go ahead with my plan and no whining."

Rodolfo stood up and incongruently laughed and said, "Do you listen to the radio, kid? They had a story of a woman who worked at the zoo in the capitol, she was a bigshot administrator there. She was touring the exhibits after hours and it happened that the tiger's cage was open when she was shown that building and the tiger walked right out in front of her--must have shocked the hell out of her--and laid a massive paw on her shoulder and knocked her to the ground. And the last thing she recalled before he took a bite from her scalp was the thought that, in that tiger's eyes, she was dinner. It was like she had this split-second of seeing herself through the eyes of that beast and saw, 'I'm his dinner.'"

"She must have survived to tell it."

"Luckily, he didn't dig her taste too much. It was hysterical, the way she told that story. You should listen to the radio. It would sharpen your mind."

"Sure. I should do that."

"A sharp mind is important. Otherwise you could end up someone's dinner yourself. Hah. That's how the world is."

VII.

Rubén tied easel and pad to his back and cycled five blocks to the town square on a bike too small for his limbs. He hoped to make some money drawing portraits of the few tourists who wondered through town, then buy himself a bottle of wine to accompany his supper. Before setting up to attract business, he laid his bike on the ground and sat down to rest and observe the life of the village from a wooden bench across the square from the stone courthouse, the largest building in the village, built in the eighteen hundreds over an Indian foundation. He watched the traffic of people and animals move across the square and form small knots when people met up with friends or neighbors and stood to talk. He watched the movement up and down the courthouse steps, steps so narrow he had to place his feet obliquely when he climbed them. What brought these people to this place? Did the amnesty account for any of their visits? He looked at faces, scanning for tension in the muscles of eyes or mouth. One man entered, his mouth pursed like a sphincter, then half an hour later descended the steps in a scamper leaving Rubén to wonder what had transpired to relax him so. Had some concern washed away? Had the man rid himself of secrets, or fears of retribution, and his load was lightened? Rubén took out a pencil and a small razor blade he'd taped to his drawing pad and shaved the pencil to an excellent point thinking of other artists who might have performed this same task over the years: Van Gogh, Picasso, Diego Rivera or his wife, Frieda Kahlo. Man and wife. A couple creating art. How did they do that? Did they work in harmony or did Diego wrest from his wife the pencils and paints, try to send her back to the kitchen leaving her screaming about her desires to create art, not omelettes. He rotated the pencil in front of his left eye, the stronger eye, and sharpened the eye's focus to see that the slope was uniform. Frieda took the implement from Rubén's hand, turned to Diego, inserted it deep into his eye until he screamed and fainted and Rubén winced but paused at the sudden flight of his imagination.

Onto the square came a man wearing an ankle-length black coat that seemed heavy for the weather. His black hair was pulled back from his forehead. It was shiny with oil and long enough to tie, yet it fell untamed. Could this man be one of the judges sent to hear the amnesty cases? The man looked hurried and purposeful and tense as a fiddle string. Strain showed in the man's thick mouth. He turned his back to Rubén as he climbed the steps and disappeared into the courthouse. Rubén put pencil to pad to draw the mouth, the mouth alone, wired tight. Next he drew an open mouth, a howling mouth side by side with the tightened one. He studied the two as a pair and felt satisfied with the sharply expressive lines he had made. His mind traveled back to the greasy-maned man. The building had swallowed him like the whale took Jonah. Rubén imagined Jonah after the whale expelled him, slimy and foul, flung like a birthed baby onto the shore. He could draw that scene, too, but--though picturesque--it interested him less than the scenes before him. He wanted to see that judge again, to determine from his muscles what had transpired inside the blank-faced building.

Up the stairs rushed four men, taking the stairs by twos and threes. Would that be he and Rodolfo, Rafi, Galo some day? Would the Commission summon them all together, as if they were one organism with four limbs, or would it take them one by one, isolated each from the others? He imagined himself alone, standing before the seated Commissioners, each of them clones of the long-haired, black-coated figure with the agonized mouth. The officials formed a compact half-circle as he stood addressing them--tired, his feet swelling from the long testimony, but given no chair. He was explaining to these men what had transpired with Ajacopi, trying to explain how of all the ones who passed through their custody, he was the one to die. Serendipity, was it? No, he resisted that idea. Rodolfo wanted this one more, wanted him to surrender what he held because Hector suspected something essential to his future.

It occurred to Rubén to mention aloud Rodolfo's rage at the man and Rodolfo's general violence of mind, but the image of the top of the man's head was what dominated his thoughts because Rubén could see then and now the scalp with its delicate skin and pink hue in the one bald area on the crown and he was certain the skull was weak there congenitally--and said so later to Rodolfo--so when they forced it against the wall, surely. But after the collision with wall, the head struck the floor--Rubén suddenly wondered which had been the killing blow--with the slack mouth lying just over the floor, drooling something onto it, making a puddle.
The judges were becoming angry with him, they were getting edgy because his careful analysis of the physical facts was not what they wanted to hear. So Rubén offered them more about Rodolfo's fury and Galo's nervous clucking as tension in the room built so high that something had to blow. Talking to the audience of black coats, he remembered something the Indian did after Rodolfo and he had grasped him by the head and Rafi and Galo by the shoulders. The man made a low sound in his throat--a gurgle or even a growl--and his teeth locked as he struggled to turn his head and wrench it from their hands. One of Rubén's own hands had hold of the man's ear and his fingers noted the rubbery feel. After the wall happened and the floor and drooling, the eyes of the pallid woman beside the wall clouded over and rolled into her head like when someone has a fit, so he was certain she saw nothing, which meant that these lusterless commissioners would have no success in trying to learn through her what transpired there. She was a blind woman in the corner, that was all.

On fire with imagining, he drew several crowded sketches of these scenes then packed up his materials--lacking the confidence today to sell his skills in portraiture-- and cycled home to a cup of good tea. As he sat, relishing the mug's heat suffusing the thick skin of his palms, a knock called him to the door and he went with cup in hand, the blue glazed surface requiring care, hot enough still to scald. His eye at the peep hole found in cameo a prettily painted woman's face. He didn't know her. Still, he opened the door and found a face even comelier undistorted.

"Rubén? Rubén?" she said, frantically eager but unsmiling from the moment of meeting his face with hers. "Rubén, you don't recognize me?" Anger and panic competed in her expression.

Still in the doorway, she took his shoulders in her hands and lightly shook them. "You don't know your own sister?"

"Lisel? No. Lisel? How can that be?"

"Yes. Of course. I'm so hurt Rubén. You, who always stared so long at my face, you don't know me. Have I aged so hideously?"

"Of course not, Lisel. You're beautiful--I was just thinking that--but I haven't seen you for how many years--five maybe?--and I'm shocked, I'm shocked seeing you here at my door." He stood in front of her, somehow frightened to move aside and let her enter his apartment, but she surged past him regardless.

"This front room is nice, Rubén, and full of light. How many rooms? Two?"

She darted across and opened the door to his bedroom, peering in, covering the walls with her eyes, and said, "What are these pictures?" She walked in, Rubén behind her. "They look so strange. The terrible positions. The ropes and chains and suffering. And the face, Rubén--" she turned and her eyes consumed him--"the face is Papa's."

"What are you saying? It isn't the truth. It can't be."

"But look at it. It is Papa's face. Why have you drawn these studies, Rubén? They are from your dreams? You are having nightmares? With Papa's face contorted in a fit of pain? This is not the way to purge nightmares. You should go to a doctor. You are eating the wrong food. Too much spice, Rubén, or too much wine. You have to remember Papa before his illness."

"Stop, Lisel," he said. "You are talking lunacy. This is nothing to do with Papa. These are documents from my work at the prison. They were very carefully made and the subject is an Indian so how can it look like Papa?"

"What work were you doing to draw this kind of thing?"

"When did you get so hysterical, Lisel? You were always a quiet person like me. You know I was working in a prison, so why are you shouting? You come to visit me for the first time in years and pace and shout at me. You behave worse than my last visitor--I didn't think that was possible."

"Who? Who visited last?"

"A man named Rodolfo Hector. From that same prison. From the place I made the studies. He was the one who directed the uh interrogations."

"What were you doing in a place like that, Rubén? Hurting people like that?"

"No, Lisel. You don't have the picture. I was not part of them and what they did. I was the recorder, don't you understand. I only made the drawings, the record. It's important to have a record of events."

"You never laid a hand on this man, and the others?"

"Well, of course, occasionally, because I had to, I was made to. But I wasn't in it, Lisel, with my spirit. I was in the drawing. It was only my hands on them, just the flesh, only the flesh, nothing of my will or wishes."

"The flesh is your flesh, your hands, hurting the man."

"You are so literal in your thinking. Sometimes the body acts apart from the rest, because there are requirements. This was just the body, Lisel, only that. I, your brother, I was painting."

"Painting?"

"Drawing."

"You confuse me, Rubén."

"It's simple, it's all so simple. It was only about the pictures and nothing more. I did so much drawing in that job, since then my hands hurt." He rubbed one with the other as if they were arthritic.

"You did other things with your hands."

"I made the studies. Study after study."

"Studies? You call them studies like they are scientific, Rubén? A man looking like Father, his face in awful pain, a man made to suffer like a beast and you think of it as science?"

"He was not suffering," Rubén said, though he could not tell from where in him such an idea would shoot forth, but his words rang true. His words reflected thoughts he’d never before formed. "He was filled with emotion, it was a rare kind of ecstacy. If only you could understand that. It's a place where the body and mind are one and there is no mind apart from the body's emotion. It's a place of true emotion, pure emotion and it doesn't matter if it is pleasure or pain. The emotion exists in pure culture, as beautiful as crystal, like childbirth or religious ecstacy."

"What nonsense you’re talking, Rubén. What about when Papa died from the cancer? That wasn't pain, Rubén? Pain, not rapture."

Rubén walked away from her and peered out the window. "I haven't thought about that, not for a long time." The memory gave him a disordered, disturbed feeling as it touched on a sick spot in his memory of his father.

The sick spot grew out of a night long passed when his father came to him, a young man of fourteen, and asked him for a moment of his time. Father's friend had died of a skin cancer. The condition was common, a result no doubt of the searing tropical sun. "Look over my back, Rubi," his father had said. "See the places I can't see. Be my eyes and look carefully for spots that might be pathological." His father dropped his robe and stood with his skin bare to Rubén. Rubén was taken aback by the sight of his father's nakedness. So much skin and many places dotted with galaxies of small spots. "There are so many," he said. "Look at all of them?"

"Just look for any that appear odd, son, look for the ones that don't look healthy. Maybe they are too shiny or too black." His father seemed frightened and small of spirit and Rubén felt repelled.

He began to scan his father's skin--crossing first the skin of the broad back and shoulders--and saw hundreds of spots similar but for their sizz. But when he dropped his eyes to the narrow of his father's back, beside the spine, there was one he saw--his eyes kept reclaiming it--that was larger and purpler and pimply on the surface. His eyes stopped there and wanted to study it minutely. Yet to his father he said nothing. He could not explain why, but he said nothing of the rough plum-colored spot beside the backbone. He would speak when he was done studying.

"Okay, son?" his father asked after the silence grew long. "All is okay?"

"Okay, Papa," he said.

"Good," his father said, and the nervous intimacy disappeared from his voice. "Good"--he was matter of fact now. "I'll go tell Mama."

"Papa?"

"Yes?"

"What if there were a spot?"

"I would go and see the doctor."

"Papa."

"Yes, son...let me go now and tell Mama--she has been worrying. What is it?"

"Nothing." Rubén shook his head and clamped his teeth. After that he heard his parents' door close and heard what he always heard--the grunting and moaning, the occasional yip or yell. Was it celebration? Was that it? Papa had been worried and opened his robe and heart for a split of time and then, afterward, the familiar shut door and symphonietta of sounds. So perhaps it was celebration each time it occured, though often it sounded primitive and painful, a pen of animals wrangling.

After that evening the fascination began. He had forgotten all this, forgotten how he imagined himself a doctor and sketched on small pieces of paper the spot he'd seen on Papa's back--over and over like a man perfecting his signature, he made his sketches and waited. He waited for the symptoms, for the trip to the doctor, for the diagnosis and for the illness. Mostly he waited for a day when he might hear Papa--from across the room or behind the shut door--yell out when he learned of it, of cancer, the word like a weapon.

When it finally began, he hovered close to Papa and watched the progression. Then he began waiting for Papa to ask him the inevitable question: What did you see, Rubi, when you looked at my back that day? Do you remember? But Papa never asked. He just went in the room with Mama and shut the door and they talked about whatever concerned them and gave each other comfort.

When Lisel rushed out into the night in the company of a sober young man who'd come for her, she left him shaken, the relationship to his art disturbed. He twisted off the electric light in the bedroom and lingered in the sitting room till near dawn, then crawled into bed without the lamp. He didn't want to look at the faces his hand had drawn, which covered his walls, and see Papa's face there as Lisel had. He raged faintly at her for tilting his world thus, because his drawings were who he was and he felt fear as well as fury at the thought of losing his love for them. The next day, he roamed aimlessly, in the house and on the street. Late in the afternoon, he returned to his pictures and traced with his forefinger some of the lines he'd penned. He wanted to shed the impressions Lisel had left with him. Layer by layer, he peeled them away and handed them off to an imagined wind.

What he could not shed was his wondering about not speaking up about the cancer on Papa's skin. Why had he held his tongue and waited to see the purply spot spread and root deeper and work its deadly craft? Perhaps he did not believe in the connection between that body and the man who was Papa, so it would be safe to let the spot grow and overtake the flesh--the man would not be affected, not really, because flesh and spirit were not much allied. Who was Papa actually? He was a man who seemed to live fully only on the other side of a shut door, where Mama lived too, the two of them sequestered there, squealing and shouting and laughing out in pain.

All this thinking wearied him, and he faulted Lisel for her hit and run attack on his tranquility. But why should Lisel be different from any other? Women had given him little pleasure in life. There was the young woman, Carlita, who lured him to the door of her bedroom, then--laughing--shut it against him. Now it was Lisel, bringing her beautiful face to his door, then sweeping in and through his home but spreading only malice.

VIII.
In the dream, his father pointed a long finger to a black box and demanded he open it, but Rodolfo--a boy of perhaps ten--could not. Mateo pranced like a show pony while orating his disgust, but Rodolfo continued unable to open the slick-surfaced chest and no tool he tried helped him. There seemed to be no lid, no fault line to utilize. In frustration, he heaved it at the wall and it smashed and shattered both box and contents. Pulling his fingers through the rubble, he had no idea what the box had contained. He knew he had to hide its brokenness from his father, he saw himself like Adam in the Garden of Eden, because he had eaten from the forbidden tree. He imagined his father's voice reproaching, "You've broken my heart." Then the rubble on the ground was the television remote the insides of which had spilled out in intestines of colored wire when he dashed it to the wall. His father walked in and--thinking himself alone in the room--viewed the rubble and considered it carefully and, looking pleased, said, 'oh, the big bang.'

In the morning, Rodolfo atop Luci rocked his way to the woman's place a third time, determined this trip would be the last. When he stood at her door, he wanted to conduct his business quickly and turn round and trek back without breaching her space. His rap at the inner edge of the door brought nothing in response. He turned and walked off a bit and paced and waited and returned and knocked again, and again he was greeted by silence. The idea he'd made this trip in vain inflamed him. He knocked peremptorily as if his demand would conjure her presence and indeed he heard hesitant footsteps. In his anger at the woman approaching he flashed on the dream and the remote, and the words "zap her" flashed in his mind but he didn't welcome them at that moment--they unnerved him. The door cracked open and a sour face appeared in the breach.
"I don't need to come in," he said. "I just need to deliver a message. All of us from the prison, from the B Squad, will have a meeting on Thursday, at three o'clock, at the north end of the black Indian site." They all knew the site by that name because several of the structures were made of stone that had an ashy, black surface with deep striations. "You need to be there. The rest of us had two meetings already. This time, you need to be there."
She took a length of stringy hair from beside her face and twisted it. He thought she would put it in her mouth and suck it like a child would. "It's a long way. I have no time for that."

"I know it's a long way," he said. "I've made the trip." He remembered his own mannerliness the first time he'd visited but now could not summon it, then remembered Galo's ingenuity in enticing her with favors. "You expect us to help you with work around this place but you can't make that trip once and come to an hour's meeting? That's no good." He shook his head. "That won't work."

Her eyes flickered with life. "You're still thinking of helping here? I figured that would be over before you and the old man got to the first turn in that road." She pointed to the road he’d traveled.

"What do you take me for? I do what I say."

She shrugged. "I don't take you for anything. Not the old guy either, the one with the eggs. Do you have any more? They were good eggs." She dropped her eyes to his hands as if hoping another carton would materialize, then glanced past him to the field beyond. Anyone would notice how she could use help. Anyone would see the field cleared of scrub trees and burned but never planted. It was overgrown now with this and that thing seeded by the wind. Carlos leaving with the field unplanted was why she had to work at that prison in the first place even though it meant a hike each day into the valley and the kids left free to roam like wild goats after school. Her only other choice would have been to raise her kids like her mother raised her, harvesting a few calabash or brazil nuts or figs out of the forest and selling them for the necessities, like salt and fuel oil. Mother used to talk about the poor, dirty Indian children, but those children had a schoolhouse painted bright green and they had beautiful woven clothes while she had faded teeshirts her mother traded for in the village. The season after Carlos deserted them, she got the field half planted on her own, so when the prison closed, at least she didn't go begging.

"You're going to help?" she asked. "Or give me some money?"

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, we'll help or do something for you." You may not need the help, he thought, if you don't play ball--we'll have other plans for you. "Just be at the meeting. At the black rocks, the north end, at three o'clock on Thursday."

"Yeah, okay," she said. "Okay, I'll get there."

He started back toward Luci who he'd tied by the rangy eucalyptus tree, then turned his head to her. "If you don't come, you'd better be thinking of another place to live. You won't be living here."

Though his tone seemed to say something else, she thought he meant because her crops were so poor she'd never make it without the help. She nodded, ashamed of how little she'd accomplished on her own.

He rode away thinking they would give her the one additional chance to prove her loyalty, but expecting she'd never come through--he'd seen that in his premonition. He'd told Rafi he could get a gun, but he wondered was that the best way to do what he had to do. He didn't like the image of a body spilling its insides. Once he saw a movie of a man who suicided--shot himself in the head--and his brains sprayed across the wall like mud spun up by a tire. The thing was vile to watch. Suffocation would be cleaner, with nothing splattering onto him in the process.

Rubén got a call from Rodolfo with directives concerning yet another meeting. The call, the "invitation" were profoundly unwelcome. Of course the meeting was the next day--Rodolfo didn't care about giving them any notice, he didn't concern himself that all of them were out of work and trying to generate a little money. He lay in bed visualizing the place they would convene the next afternoon. Black rocks forced up out of dry ground, showing white stripes that looked like lash marks across a dark skin. People debated their provenance.

Rafi lay awake the night before the meeting. He tried to feel rocked and comforted by the water beneath him, but instead he felt shaken like a drink made in a jar. Meet at the soot-colored rocks, Rodolfo said. Rafi knew the place. All the guides gathered their tourists there and told them stories about the strange markings on the stone. Most of the stories had the rock being carted from faraway places, because no source of black stone was known to exist close by. The scratches might have been made by whatever bound or carried the rock during its transport, or they might have been deliberate as some sort of code or artistry. Others said the rocks were extraterrestrial but Rafi thought those went too far in their speculations.

Galo could not sleep peacefully. His dreams were tying him in knots. He got up and tiptoed around the house, his mind consumed with the effort not to wake Mary. In truth, he had no desire to hear her voice, to learn her thoughts about the meeting to come.

The four men arrived within ten minutes of each other and gathered in the abbreviated early afternoon shadow of the rock. Rodolfo hadn't told the others he'd given the woman a time an hour past their own time of meeting. He wanted a chance to instruct the men, before the woman's arrival, that they would make their deal with her only if she agreed to a version of things in which the Indian had slowly gone mad and he was panicked by a hallucination and fled headlong and battered himself. They could hope no one would turn them in and send the authorities after them, but if someone did--he remembered that foul, scalp-burned Indian in the street--this would be their story of how the man got hurt through no fault of theirs. If they went for the amnesty, they would stand up and say they rammed the man into the wall, aiming to leave him stung with pain and motivated to talk, but if they withheld their story and later got corraled, they were going to need a story that left them looking innocent. A madman can do that, Rodolfo thought, a madman can ram himself into a wall, pursued by his demons.

She shocked Rodolfo arriving in a car driven by a man, the vehicle massive and moss green, like a living thing. The man let her out a couple hundred yards from the site and she walked across the scalding sand, her progress toward them over the open ground like an arrow's toward a target.

Rodolfo hurried to intercept her but would not run, no matter what his eagerness. His legs felt stiff and jointless and disengaged from his brain. "What were you thinking?" he snarled when they stood face to face. "To get somebody to drive you like that, without checking."
"I didn't have a bunch of time to get here," she said. "What did you want me to do? He'll just set in the car and wait."

"You should have checked with me."

"You could have said you'd give me a lift in the old man's car--so I'd have a decent way to get here."

"I'm not your sugar daddy. Just come. Let's get this over with." He walked ahead of her to the others.

Rafi felt his heart hurry as she came close.

"We're happy you came," said Galo.

"Yes," Rafi said. "Me too. Happy to see you."

"How are you? You're well?" Galo asked.

"Oh, Jesus," Rodolfo said.

"Sure. Sure," she said. "What do I have to agree to? I've got a friend of mine waiting."

"That's his problem," Rodolfo said.

"To a blank slate," said Rubén. "There's nothing on the page, the page of 'Ajacopi, sad Indian who died in Ximena prison.'" He moved a finger through the air as if underlining text. "You look but you see nothing. It's all blank. Nothing is recalled."

"You idiot," Rodolfo yelled. "That's not it. You weren't listening just five minutes ago? We are going with the madness story. Didn't you get that?" He spoke only to the woman now and spoke slowly and instructively, as if planting his ideas directly into her brain. "No one here had anything to do with that death, so there's nothing for us to report to any asinine commission and nothing for you to report, not a word--that's where Rubén's got it right, that's where you're blank Where it changes is if you're forced in to testify before them. Then and only then do you tell them Joe Indian had steadily been losing his mind, like some of them do, and he'd been frantic over some horror he hallucinated. He tried to escape it and ran headlong into the wall. The demon in his head was more real to him than the stone wall. That can happen. That's the story. You got it? You agree to that and we--"

"--we'll help you in any way we can with your farm," Galo said. "Labor. Money perhaps. The pleasure will be ours."

"They're going to believe a fairy tale like that?"

"What's wrong with it?" Rodolfo asked. "We're not going to be dealing with a bunch of geniuses."

"You're going to help out on my land? All of you?"

"Sure," said Rafi. "Help on the farm--that's a good idea. Plow the dirt. Whatever's needed."
Her eyes moved between Galo and Rafael, ignoring Rodolfo. "Okay," she said. "Fine. Good. I'll remember about the vision, if somebody asks me." Her eyes stayed with Galo and Rafi, glancing once or twice toward Rubén.

Rodolfo shook his head. "No. I don't trust this." He looked at her then and said, "You give us something that puts you at risk the same as us. You give us some information we can use where you'll feel the weight of it if you screw us over."

"Like what?" she asked. "What kind of information?"

"Something about your past. Maybe something about your kids."

She shook her head. "I don't know about that. No, I don't know about that. That doesn't sound good. And I got to go now. My friend's been waiting too long in the heat."

"Look," Rodolfo broke into a shout, "You're fucking with us. I want this settled, do you understand, and I don't want some dogfaced cunt fucking with us." He sprung toward Linnea and grabbed her upper arms and pinched the skin at their sides.

"Hey, hey," she yelled. She glanced around to the green car but the man would not have heard her at that distance.

"Forget that asshole," Rodolfo said. "Forget going home with him to think things over for a week. Just sign on, right now, right here, right now, now, now. You've got no choice if you want to get out of this thing alive."

She took a step back and in a small voice she said, "I do, too, have a choice." She had a picture in her mind of playing cards. She remembered playing with her cousin Estrella and two of the big boys when she and Estrella were little still. Estrella sat cross-legged right beside Linni and taught Linni the moves you could make in the game. Linni was quiet, her cards in a fan, and Estrella looked at what was in her hand and whispered to her, full of buzzy excitement, 'Linni, you have cards to play--see, you've got to set out the red jack now--that's your move.'

Linnea glanced back to where her ride waited. To the men circled around her, she said, "I'll think about me, and my kids--what's best for us, not for you." She screwed up her eyes against Rodolfo. "Why should I give a shit about you?"

When she left the meeting with Rodolfo and the others, she knew just what cards she held. She felt a kind of thrill in that, because trapped with all those men at that prison, watching their comings and goings, turning her head from the ugliness they made with their business there, she was nothing and nobody to them. She should have been a chalk outline of a person drawn on the floor--that's how much space she occupied there. But now, whether they knew it or they didn't, she knew what was in her hand. 'Cause if I say "go forward," they've got to, or I can let them hold silent then give away their secret on my own and never look back.'

With Linni swallowed up by the car that had carried her there, Galo argued to the others that she'd keep quiet in the end--he felt quite certain of it despite her bit of bluff. But still, agreeing with his Mary, he believed they should go forward to the Commission. "I'll go with the group, though," he said. "I'll do that. I'll do what's right."

"She wants us working on her farm?" asked Rubén. "I'll give money from my drawings instead."

"The work is nothing," Rodolfo said. "We could do it, or send someone. That's a detail, nothing but a detail. But there's no way I trust that woman, no matter what we do for her."
Rafi raised his eyes to Rodolfo and studied him. "What are you thinking?"

"Don't play with me. You know the plan."

"I think you're right," Rafi said, his eyes tucked under the earth. "I've come around to your thinking."

"You surprise me, but good. Hallelujah."

"Say it. What?" said Rubén.

Rafi and Rodolfo held their silence.

"Don't shut us out for God's sake. We're not children, don't make us guess at it if it's important."

"We're going to remove the problem," Rodolfo said, tredding carefully on each word, digging a bit in the dirt with his shoes. "If you can't contain a problem you remove it, like men. I don't want her even as a footnote to history here. Let her be gone and not leave a vestige."

"Of evidence," Rafi said.

"What?" Galo gaped, turning from one to the other. "I can't believe what I'm hearing. "This one, too? Another? Another body?"

"It gets easier," Rodolfo said.

"No. I have no stomach for this. Not another."

"Then get your Pepto Bismol, old man. We've got a job here."

"The other was an accident," Galo shouted. "You're forgetting. It was an accident."

"Hey, hey, stop," Rafi said, softly popping the striated rock with his fist. "We have to do this. You think I like it? I don't like it, I hate it--do you understand? I hate it, I hate it--but I'm certain we have to do it, because we've got to look ahead and secure what's left to us--that's the important thing. Remember, please remember, that's the important thing."

"Why are you in on this?" Galo questioned him, still shouting. "When you came in with us, you were just a boy--you could have been my son--and all you talked of was getting back to your young life of fun. You were chattering of beaches and barbecues and bikini-clad girls you'd seen in the magazines and of meeting foreigners and getting to guide them around and get paid for it. And now this, now talking about this. How can it be? Maybe I'm losing my mind."

"Maybe you'll run yourself into a wall, then," Rubén said.

"Look, it's her doing," Rodolfo said. "If she hadn't always been staring at every damn thing we did--God damn her, God damn her eyes."

"But you can see something and not speak about it," Rubén said in a hush. "You can just keep it to yourself even when developments take place. Why wouldn't she do that? Why would she have to say something about it to those judges?"

"God, Estefan must be right about you," Rodolfo said. "Do you think people are so passive? Do you think they just take things directed against them and don't say a word, don't do a thing? Normal people aren't like that."

"But he's right," Galo said. "She'll keep quiet. There's no reason for her to talk. And I'll forget about what Mary said if you want, I'll just bury it and forget she ever said it. We won't go forward. We'll keep it to ourselves and no one will know--the woman won't speak. I'm sure of it."

Rubén rubbed the whole of his face, over and over, then pressed his thumb into one eye, his forefinger into the other. "What did I see?" he muttered. "The whole thing, the whole damn thing. And I drew it and made a good record. A historical record, Rodolfo. If we have to do this thing, then I have to bring my paper and make the record. But then I'll just keep it to myself, I won't show it to anyone or let anyone see it. Even if they ask. Even if they torture me."

Tears came into Rafi's eyes and he paced a circle around the group. "I want the prison forgotten," he said. "Don't you understand? I want it forgotten. If we do the thing, it's to forget everything, not to make a record, not to be in history. Oh, Jesus, God, how am I going to survive this. How? How?"

"You won't survive it," Galo said. "Not another killing. Don't climb on board with him, Rafi. He's not your father."

"Oh, it's easy for you to say," Rafi countered, still wiping tears from his cheeks. You're old. You've had a life. What future will I have in a prison, when the woman turns us in?"

"So we'll go and talk with her again, all of us," said Galo, "and we'll let her know she's playing a dangerous game in blackmailing us. And we'll let her know we see her intentions in her eyes--Rodolfo does--and we'll tell her to rethink anything she's planning, we'll warn her, very sternly, and she's sure to listen to us if we speak as a group."

Rafi lowered his head and shook it and shook it. "It's the time to act. If she turns us in and we are in prison, what can we do against her? Nothing, and she'll see that right away and know we have nothing to threaten her with, even if we're hard about it."

"Though we'd have friends still, on the outside," Rodolfo said. "We can let her know that. And she has children. That's her weakness, all those children. Like a rabbit, she's made so damned many."

"Threaten the children?" Rubén muttered. "Is that it?"

Enlivened, Rodolfo said, "All right, old man. We'll do it your way. We'll go see her, en masse, and maybe that will intimidate her. That's what we'll aim for. Tomorrow."

"Tomorrow!" Galo moaned. "This matter is critical. We want time, more time, before we act, time to think, time to ground ourselves."

"We are not acting," Rodolfo said and looked again at his manicured hand. "We are talking, making simple words--harmless as making water! hah!--and we go tomorrow and you have no more to say about it, old man."

Galo feared going there, to the young woman's house, even to talk. He feared Rodolfo's temper. Where there is a temper like that, there can be accidents and he had had enough of accidents. He went home to Mary pecked at by the fear of Rodolfo's tomorrow but knowing he had tried to be a man in the meeting, he had tried to speak, to stand firm. After a dinner of sparse words in the light of candles, he stood and walked to Mary's side of the square table and from behind placed his hands on her shoulders. She remained quiet and shortly he bent down and kissed the back of her neck, then the side of it, then slid his hands down over her breasts feeling his excitement stir as it hadn't in many months. His thoughts doted on Mary, remembering her beauty as a young woman, her delight growing their first child and later holding her to a pearl-like breast.

"Go, leave me," she said in a voice low and tired.

He flushed with anger. What use is any of it? What use is it trying to hold the line against a man like Rodolfo? Mary didn't know Rodolfo, didn't know the difficulty of their dealings, didn't appreciate how he had tried and how he was tired.

First Lisel and now Rodolfo wanted to jeopardize his peace. Rubén had offered himself as the seeing eye, content to record Rodolfo's action if it should come, but he wasn't in fact content. His thoughts of the visit Rodolfo demanded were restless and dark. First Lisel had degraded his work. She had inflicted on him her hysteria over the images of Papa she found in his pictures. She doubly destroyed his relationship with his work. He could no longer look at it with pride and pleasure, nor could he look without Papa's face advancing to return his gaze. Nor could he place himself calmly at the scene of the event Rodolfo proposed to engineer.

In the morning he and the other three assembled and piled into Galo's car--the old man's face was bloodless as death--and they headed off to the female's house under the force of Rodolfo's intention to tell her in one voice what was to become of her if she betrayed their secret. And while they talked, dolfo slid a thin pair of gloves out of his pocket and slipped them on without a sound and when she turned her head away to scold one of the puppies by tugging its tail his hands circled her neck and in a single motion sudden as a falcon's dive he snapped it. His cohorts' mouths gaped--then froze in circles of astonishment. He spoke to them saying, "That was not an accident" and then he said it again and a third time. He stirred from his daydream more relaxed, the knot in his stomach dissolved, ready for the drive in Galo's car.



IX.

Rodolfo says I am the least equipped for this job, as for most others, and Mary, my own Mary, wherever she is in this world, would share his view. But who else but me could do the telling? Had he the chance, Rubén would only scribble it in pictures like clouds and Rodolfo would blow it out in curses. And Rafi, him I barely know though he and I and the others have traveled this long way yoked together, but Rafi seems to me a man unformed as yet, not much more than a child or a duckling who follows where he's led.

I wonder do our jailors know what punishment it is to confine us together here in their Alta Vista prison which is no more than a handful of adobe huts like the ones most of the Indians use? We are high on the altiplano, a land so broad and elevated you feel you might walk until you find an edge to it and tumble off into the sky. Of the four in our group, only Rubén escaped a long term of punishment. They made him witness the torching of his pictures and his heartbeat spiraled out of control until his heart seized up. I think the Court understood somehow that had they preserved the pictures in a museum commemorating those who died in the uprising, had they accepted those odd depictions as a record of acts against their people, doing so would have gratified Rubén. Incinerating the drawings like trash with him forced to witness their burning, that destroyed him. Whatever Rubén's record might have meant to history--always Rodolfo's obsession--the Court was willing to sacrifice that gain to deprive the man of his life's great passion.

Mary hung on through the trial. But as soon as they convicted us, she let me know our life together was done. I wonder what she would have done had they acquitted us. It seemed our marriage was over either way. There were times--God forgive me--I even suspected her of turning us in, because she was so disgusted we did not go forward (I wanted to, how I tried to persuade Rodolfo) and make our confession.

For several months, imprisoned here in the poorest of company, the drabbest of conditions, I felt certain I would die from the loss of Mary. They might as well have yanked out my intestines or the bones of my spine. It mattered little to me then whether I was in their prison or home in my bed--but I tell a lie, because Mary's absence made prison the kinder of the two. Some months passed and winter's cool and sunny days were upon us when it dawned on me that I was living still and would continue to live, would not explode like Rubén stripped of his pictures. After that, the pain washed from me like dye washes from a cloth in the fast water of a river and, from that moment, what I had left of life was my own--unshared with anyone--like when I was a young man not yet wed to Mary. I would never have thought I deserved such grace, but I received it and started quite strangely and unexpectedly to feel more content in my daily rounds.

Some might want to know do I feel regret for my part in the whole Ajacopi matter. And how do I feel now about the dead man and about all that followed, now that I have little to do with my days but reflect. I will tell you that some mornings when I wake my heart is a spasm of regret-- for all that was lost, for Mary, for the country the way it was, the way it should be, for the mess and stink of Ximena, for all we let slip away. And other days regret claims my attention no more than the thinnest veil of cloud passing over the sun calls to be seen. Sometimes on those days my hours pass with thought after thought of a scrap of flavored food, a bite of meat or yellow squash or corn. We are not hungry here in their "high prison" as they call it. We eat whatever quantity of food we desire, but the fare is gruel or paste--of rice or bread or quinoa. What I crave is flavor not mass and I can spend an hour thinking of the juice I could draw from the smallest threads of meat grabbed between my teeth or a mouthful of potato with sauce.

Ajacopi and his type fade to nothing then. I try to see him, to remember something of what he was like--one Indian who turned so many lives upside-down--but I can't. If guilt crosses my mind at all, I tell myself a war of sorts was waging and people do what they must in times of war. The guilt I felt toward the child seems lost and forgotten too. Without Mary, what point is there to it.

Because they call this village of plain houses their "maximum security" prison, I asked one of the guards where the security is. He pressed his chin to his chest to point to the rifle he held diagonally across his body, then said, "mines lie in the ground to blow off your feet if this"--meaning his gun--"is not enough for you."

"I have nowhere to go, nowhere I wish to go," I said.

"Better for you," he said. "With no wishes you have nothing to lead you into my sights."
When I lie down to try to sleep at night, I do not know if I will sleep, because inactivity during the day leaves me restless after dark. And I do not know where I will find myself in the morning if I do sleep and dreams separate this day from the next. I picture the clothes drying machines they have in the village that carry the clothes up and let them slowly tumble down, each time in a different arrangement. The movement is random and you never know which article will fall where. My thoughts and my emotions seem to tumble like that. We all three tumble like that, aimless and random.

The day of the trial, the commission members called us before them and began in turns to make speeches as if to pupils in a history class. They lectured us about our own country, only it was their country, their view of it. They told us as if we were visitors here that ours is a Catholic and Adventist country with Indian roots. They explained the theology of condor, puma and snake, the landscape I'd known all my life of rock and dust, light and shadow, of red dirt and thin air and sharp contrasts of light and dark. They talked of mountain heights--treeless except for the eucalyptus brought from Australia after the silver mines destroyed the few native highland trees--and of mercury in the streams from greedy panning of gold. That last I did not know. I could see Rodolfo twisting in mental pain over the cultural history lesson. Rafi hung his head and I imagined him grieving his future once again. That boy had such illusions.

If I have to fault someone or something for the course that led us here I would point to Rodolfo's miscalculations. We went with him that day, to the woman's house, taking my vehicle. Rodolfo had backed off from his plan to kill her. He said we would only warn her. I think he wanted to stare her down like a dog stares down a sheep to establish command. But I was afraid going there. I was so fearful I trembled and could not stop. I believed I was transporting a live grenade that could explode at any moment and blow away my leg or face.

You might think now that you know what happened--that a criminal act was committed and we were held to account--but often things do not go as we expect or even as we fear. We drove up the mountain to the woman's farm expecting the animals and children to be shooting back and forth over the road and the fields like billiard balls, but the woman was not there, nor were the children though several dogs wandered in the field. We had not even considered the possibility of her absence. Rodolfo seemed stunned. We made two subsequent trips in the following week, each time with the same experience, until we had to conclude that she had moved out, with her children, and abandoned the place. Rodolfo set Rafi the task of asking around town to see if we could learn what became of her--perhaps she had gone off with the man who delivered her to the meeting at the black rocks and waited to fetch her home. Despite Rafi’s efforts, we never learned her whereabouts.

Since she seemed to have left the area, we gradually became comfortable going on about our lives. I don't know that we ever made a final decision not to step forward with our story, but the deadline date of October 10 came and went and all of us knew it. We drifted apart again, each back to his own life.

I never stopped fearing betrayal. Whenever I was in town, I watched witnesses and those with stories to tell traipse up and down the narrow Courthouse steps to present themselves to the Commission. Our names never came up though, nor were we subpoenaed.

Then on a day more than two months past that deadline, each of us was visited in his home by the brown-suited police and taken to the jail and arraigned. In the jail, we encountered each other again and talked bitterly about the woman who couldn't let us live but had to intercede and ruin our peace when she had nothing at all to lose from letting us be.

When we shuffled into the courthouse for the official arraignment, shackled at the ankles, wrists cuffed behind our backs, we were astonished to hear from the lawyer making his presentation to the judge that our names had been given to the Court by Captain Estefan. I looked immediately to Rodolfo and imagined I could see him blanch with this discovery. For the rest of us, the news meant little except that it betrayed Rodolfo's miscalculation. What difference did it make to me or Rafi or Rubén--still with us then--whether the woman or the Captain betrayed us?

Gradually in the jailhouse we heard more of the story. Among the twenty men jailed with us--caged four to a cell--was a man of seventy-some years who shared Estefan's army rank and knew him from the officers' club. This man had also held his tongue and been reported by a group under his command for executions of many Indians, including women and children in one village. He took pleasure in reporting to us Estefan's building fury, in the days after Ajacopi's death, at the dimwits in his detectives squad who had bashed the head of a prisoner critical to their enterprise. He apparently didn’t mention that, by then, the initiative had little time left to run.

After the government fell and the prison shut its operation, Estefan's drinking increased and his talk intensified so that he couldn't be silenced about the homosexual Jew his chief detective had been fool enough to hire. Soon he got to speculating that his unit head, Hector, was himself a homosexual or a crude traitor who'd deliberately undermined their cause. So you see, in the end it had nothing to do with the woman--it was all the drunken Captain's wagging tongue.

Six months have passed since our imprisonment. I have stopped dreading torture--they look at me with hatred but do me no harm. I've begun to relax and accept what life there is here in this place. I am able to watch the sun rise in the morning and watch it set in the evening. When it stretches its rays across the horizon, I sometimes think of Mary’s arms, as they once were. But I keep those thoughts contained. This morning Rafi comes up to me laughing when they let us into the small yard to relieve ourselves.

"Here is a joke Rodolfo told me," he says, eager to pass it along. "The North American president, the Brazilian president and our new president all die and go to hell. Each wants to make a phone call to his capitol city. The North American gets a whopping big phone bill and complains to the Devil. 'Why 300 dollars US for one call?' Satan answers: “Hey, it's a long distance to call--Hell to Washington, D.C. What do you expect?” Brazil's president calls Buenos Aires and gets a pretty large bill, too, though not as large as the American’s. When he grumbles, the Devil gives him the same explanation. Then our new president calls home. “Fifty cents, US”' the Devil requires him to pay. “Suddenly, the other two are griping. Why so cheap for him? How is that fair?”
“So what was it?” I ask.

“'Are you kidding?’ the Devil says, chuckling. 'From Hell to his capitol city...that's a local call.'”

Rafi laughs as I've never heard him. He can't stop laughing even when his abdomen cramps and doubles him over. "You'll be sick," I say to him. I think he may be losing his mind. He used to have such pride in our country.

"I can't help it," he says. "Hell to our capitol, a local call. Don't you like that? I do.

A hell of a lot, because it's true. It's goddamn true."

A guard looks over to us, his eyes sharp, "You make your own hell," he shouts, then turns his back.

X.
No one asked to hear from me, but I am telling my part anyway. I got my children and animals and got away from there--not knowing how I’d feed any of us--because chills passed through me when I thought of Rodolfo and what he said could happen to me (and what I’d seen him do). Worthless men, the whole lot of them, even down to the young one, Rafi, and usually I take pity on the young. I’m glad to see them locked up while I try to make some kind of life for myself and my kids, living now in the hot lowlands with my sister Elena and her family.

The whole chapter at Ximena prison haunts me to this day and maybe it always will. I would tell any of my children to run from a place like that, a job like that. Even if hunger is the alternative. You never get the crud of a place like that out of your system. Even if you’re not laying hands on the prisoner yourself, you’re part of the ugliness and have to bear its burden. You may try to call yourself innocent and say that the men who did the actual torturing, the actual killing, hold all the guilt, but your heart is not going to believe you, not deep down where the spirit lives. So do yourself a favor and stay away from a place like that, even if the pay is decent.

When I wake in the morning and watch the sun rise and feel my freedom, I don’t feel sorry for the men trapped up in the prison, high on the altiplano. They deserved what they got. Each one of them. I’m not sure I deserve the privilege I’ve got here, but they deserved what they got. The world isn’t a soft place. That’s for sure. And each of us has to claw to make our way. But then you’ve got to bear the marks of whatever clawing you did, and I’ve got mine to bear now, maybe till the end of my days.

Because of my kids, I can’t say I’m entirely sorry for what I did. The one thing I know I love in this world is my kids, who had to eat. And I’m not that sorry about the Indian either. Truth is, I didn’t feel a thing for him and I don’t much like his kind. Maybe that’s rotten and makes me more like Rodolfo than I care to be, but it’s the truth of my heart. But though I didn’t care about the Indian, I didn’t like any of that cruel and ugly business there. And I laugh at the idea Rodolfo and the Captain had that they were mining some kind of valuable information that would help the cause of their people. What idiots they could be, so full of their own importance. So though I didn’t care about the Indian--except one time I saw him quietly weeping--I wished I’d never known that place. Since I left there, every time my mind gets idle I get an urge to wash myself. No one needs to tell me what that means.

Elena asks me will I go forward to the Commission. She feels I have a story to tell. No is my answer and I’ll stick with that. My story adds nothing to what they know already and I won’t chance anything going wrong that might land me with those four monkeys (three now, because of Rubén). There’s a joke that’s been going around that has the Devil telling the presidents of three countries that it’s only a local call from Hell to our capitol. If I were to land in the AltaVista with those three goons, I’d be in Hell itself, no phoning necessary. Besides, I don’t care for the idea of standing humble before a panel of Indians. What did Rodolfo always call them? ' Joes,' I think. No. I’ll live my life with my kids and put all that behind me.




************************************
INDIGO ROSE, a novel, published by Bantam Dell, 2005

From Booklist
Indigo Rosemartin is lured to America by the prospect of earning money to send home to Jamaica and provide advantages to her daughter, Louisa. So Indigo leaves behind her young daughter in the care of her disapproving mother. When the little girl is killed by a hit-and-run driver, Indigo is lost to grief and guilt, losing her bearings with her family and the family for whom she works. She is a domestic in the household of a university professor, tending to his three daughters after his emotionally unstable wife abandons the family. Indigo is angry and resentful of the girls' neediness. Restless and troubled by her dreams, she wanders the streets at night until a friend introduces her to a private gambling den owned by a fellow Jamaican, Brother Man, which promises to distract her from her woes. Instead, she is pulled into a new nightmare that eventually pushes her back into life. Miller's mesmerizing first novel, reminiscent of the work of Jamaica Kincaid, slowly uncoils as Indigo journeys from a crippling grief to peace. Vanessa Bush
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Amazon Review, By James Meyer - See all my reviews

Indigo Rose is a beautiful story, seamlessly written by Ms Miller. It is a tale of the mingling of two very different worlds; of despair, that which comes from the loss of hope, and of the possibility of healing. The characters are vivid, so much so that it's impossible to detect which world, if either, is Ms Miller's. The book is written in dialect, which only adds to the veracity of the story. The subtleties of the characters are carefully drawn out, their motives are gently revealed. The narrative moves forward at a quickening pace, by the end it is certain that something must give, and it does. Ms Miller has blended these two worlds, the suburbs and the inner-city, such that the interplay between them makes a compelling, believable story. It rings true. How Ms Miller managed to do this given the diverse nature of the characters is the question. Without even hinting at the ending--the reader comes away with the knowledge that they have experienced something real, even heroic. This book is written by someone who loves to write.