by Rusty Young
‘Tell me what you think! Honestly!’
‘I think you look absolutely stunning, baby. I think you’re the most beautiful creature in the solar system.’
‘Really?’ Camila blushed and looked down. ‘But which shoes match best?’ She held up two well-used pairs, crinkling her nose at each.
‘I’ll buy you new shoes.’
‘Are you sure?’
Camila’s parents were humble storekeepers. They’d brought her up to believe expensive gifts were an unnecessary extravagance. But I wanted to give her not only the things she needed, but also the things she desired.
‘I’ve been working hard.’ I kissed her. ‘Who else am I going to spoil?’
She kissed me back. ‘Carolina will be so jealous. Her new boyfriend never even takes her out.’
It felt good seeing Camila so happy and knowing I was the cause. It even felt good to make her friends envious. None of their boyfriends had jobs. Of course, giving Camila presents didn’t make up for the months I’d been away. Nor would it compensate for our future separations. But while I was there I wanted to treat her like a princess.
We smothered each other with kisses. This time, when I launched a follow-up attack on her hemline, she didn’t resist.
We spent all afternoon making love. Afterwards, beaded with perspiration, Camila traced a fingernail over the skin of my shoulder blade, circling the snake tattoo.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow after school, and on Saturday we can look for those new shoes. This party is going to be amazing! Important people are flying in from Cali, Medellín and Bogotá. They’ll have caterers and they’re hiring a famous band.’
‘Who is?’
Camila reached across me into her satchel and flipped a green cardboard invitation onto the pillow with a smile of satisfaction. Our names were written at the top in silver calligraphy. The date was next Friday and the invitation was signed:
With Compliments, Javier and Fabián Díaz.
I stared at the invitation, feeling as though I’d been tricked, even though it was no more than a misunderstanding. Not for a moment had I imagined Mamá and Camila were referring to the same party. But Camila was so excited she didn’t notice my frown. Her parents had also been invited.
‘Papá was so honoured. The Díazes have always ordered their groceries from our store, but he never expected an invitation delivered in person by Javier. My mother’s been dieting to fit into her formal dress. And no one else from school is going. You should have seen Carolina’s face.’ Finally, Camila noticed I hadn’t said a word. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘I’m not sure we should go.’
‘But I’ve already accepted.’
‘You go with your parents. Tell them I’m sick.’
‘What?’ Camila sat up in bed, not even bothering to cover her breasts with the sheet as she normally did. ‘Why would I go without you? I’ll hardly know anyone.’
‘I just … I don’t know.’
I couldn’t understand why Camila and I had been invited. The Díaz brothers were much older than us and from a completely different world. And it seemed even stranger that they’d invited Camila’s parents, who they’d probably never spoken to. Rather than feeling flattered by their attentions, I felt pressured. It was bad enough being indebted to them for looking after Mamá, but now they were making it impossible for me not to attend their party.
Camila assaulted me with a barrage of reasons for attending: she’d already bought the dress, it would be rude not to go, and my mother would be disappointed.
‘This is important to me,’ she pleaded. ‘And they’re nice people. Look!’ She produced a second green invitation. ‘They even invited Palillo. You know what everyone thinks of his borracho stepfather. But they didn’t want Palillo to feel left out.’
Camila always thought the best of people, but I doubted Palillo would agree with her assessment of the Díaz brothers’ motives. Last time they’d invited me to a fiesta – while barely deigning to look at my best friend – Palillo had told me I was naïve; they were cultivating me because I was an Autodefensa commander. However, I had no valid reason to refuse Camila.
She pestered and begged and even sulked a little until I was on the verge of capitulating. Then her cell phone vibrated. It was her father. I expected her to lie about who she was with – Señor Muñoz was a strict Catholic; she was fifteen years old and naked in a cheap hotel room – but to my surprise she said proudly, ‘Yes, he’s right here next to me.’ She covered the mouthpiece and turned to me. ‘Papá says hola.’
‘Say hola back.’ I rummaged through my suitcase and held up a bottle. ‘Tell him I brought him some palm wine.’
Camila relayed my message and then came back with an invitation. ‘Papá insists you help him drink it. Lunch on Sunday after church? What time should he pick you up?’
I hesitated before accepting; Sunday was market day in Puerto Galán. ‘One o’clock.’
‘My father really likes you, you know?’ Camila said after hanging up. ‘Please don’t let him down.’
As far as she was concerned, once I’d said ‘yes’ to lunch, I was definitely going to the Díaz fiesta. But in my mind, I hadn’t technically agreed.
Camila left me with a lingering kiss. After she departed, Trigeño’s warning about family echoed in my mind. I’d already put Mamá in danger. By dining with Camila’s family, would I be endangering them too? However, I quelled my concerns. They didn’t affect my plans for the following day while Camila would be at school.
I turned off the lights at 8 pm and set out at four o’clock the next morning, heading towards Puerto Galán to begin my preparations against Zorrillo.
78
THE RISKIEST PART of the journey was the fifteen-kilometre bicycle ride from Garbanzos to Llorona. If I were caught by the Guerrilla with the fully-loaded Galil and binoculars in my sports bag, it would be all over for me.
Few people were awake that early, but, just as the Autodefensas had puntos posted in dwellings along the road to La 50, the Guerrilla would have twenty-four-hour lookouts with two-way radios safeguarding their newly claimed territory. Instead of taking the main highway, I pedalled along dirt tracks and through privately owned fields I’d known since childhood.
At the rope-swing tree, I unchained Papá’s dinghy and quickly attached the Galil beneath its hull using the nails and rope from Uncle Leo’s hardware store. Once out on the river, I began to feel safer. It was still dark but I could make out the silhouettes of fishermen, lit from below by candles flickering inside plastic bottles. I lit my own candle, waved to them, cast my rod and began drifting south with the strong current pulling me towards Puerto Galán, five kilometres downstream.
Surrounded by fishermen, the risk of being caught was lower. The Guerrilla had boats for searching river traffic, but I hoped they’d be watching for motorised army patrols, not a lone boy in old clothes fishing from a rowboat. Besides, if anyone stopped me midstream, it was unlikely they’d demand I flip the dinghy.
By the time the sun began to rise, my disguise was complete. I’d caught, scaled and gutted three sierra fish. My hands were grimy and bloody, and I was wearing a broad-brimmed hat. I now relaxed and even reminisced about long, happy Sundays out fishing with Papá.
Finally, I spotted the old wooden wharf jutting out from the empty Puerto Galán food market – a sloping concrete floor bordered by ten wooden pylons supporting a corrugated-iron roof. The market operated on Sundays, selling fruit and vegetables, river fish and fresh meat from the adjoining cattle market and abattoir. I rowed towards it and pulled the dinghy up onto the riverbank. Then I recast my line from the bank and stood fishing with the early morning sun blazing into my eyes and the sprawling village behind me.
My knowledge of Puerto Galán was vague. I’d visited as a boy when helping Uncle Leo with deliveries during school breaks, but most of my trips had been in the company of Palillo, who’d grown up there. Forty years earlier, this area had been virgin jungle. Settle
rs had simply arrived; each cleared a plot with axes and machetes, erected a dwelling on stilts, constructed a chicken coop and declared it his own.
Papá had often herded his cattle here to the saleyards – it saved on trucking costs to Garbanzos – although he never let me accompany him. The men who lived here worked as raspachínes, like Palillo’s stepfather, or as cocaleros, who produced the barrels of cocaine base I’d witnessed being traded at Flora’s Cantina. Floods of illicit cash meant that in a village of only two thousand inhabitants, there were three whorehouses, six cantinas and four nightclubs that pumped out music all Sunday afternoon.
In time, electricity and phone lines were extended from Llorona. But Puerto Galán remained a lawless, forgotten village with pot-holed roads that turned to mud in heavy rains, no hospital, no bank and not a trace of government.
I was now deep inside enemy territory. Nevertheless, I felt calm. There wasn’t a single uniformed guerrillero in sight, only ordinary people going about their morning business. Of course, I didn’t doubt the Guerrilla had milicianos disguised among the civilians. But the only visible evidence of their presence was a prohibition painted on a wooden board:
NO PUBLIC DRINKING
NO DRUGS
NO LITTERING – PROTECT THE ENVIRONMENT
BY ORDER OF THE REVOLUTIONARY ARMED FORCES OF COLOMBIA
Besides, if anyone stopped me and asked what I was doing, I had a good excuse: I was visiting Palillo’s family. They lived in a shack along the riverbank five hundred metres to the north, which was the cheapest area to rent because of mosquitos and flooding. I found the door broken off its hinges and Palillo’s mother kneeling with her back to me at the small iron stove, blowing coals to boil a pot of coffee. Before I could knock, Palillo’s eldest sister stepped in front of me with one index finger pressed to her lips and the other pointing to a single bed where her stepfather, Diomedes, slept. He was snoring in his underwear. His gigantic belly, glistening with sweat, heaved up and down with each strained breath, and his hand gripped an empty bottle of rum.
Palillo’s mother turned and looked anxiously from me to her husband. She tiptoed across the dirt floor to the doorway, pulling her hair down across her face in an attempt to hide two maroon bruises below her left eye.
I wanted to stay and give them news of Palillo, but knew it would be dangerous for them if Diomedes awoke and found me whispering outside. He might beat Palillo’s mother again, and he’d probably find the money Palillo had sent, which she took from me and hid inside her bra. Mother and daughter both hugged me, and I slipped away.
I returned to my dinghy and dragged it south through knee-deep water, scouring the bank for an optimal vantage point. I found a thick tangle of scrub one hundred metres from the market with no dwellings nearby. I didn’t know how Zorrillo would arrive – by road from Puerto Princesa, by foot or by boat – but from my position I could cover all three approaches. I’d have a flat, clear line of sight into the market and would be camouflaged by the scrub.
I scanned the plaza and food market a final time before digging a small trench with my hands. Then I flipped the dinghy and unhooked the Galil. It was a hardy rifle and would still fire properly after immersion in water, but I cleaned it with a rag and oil to remove grit from the barrel and firing mechanism. Then I dried the bullets, wrapped everything, including the binoculars, in a hessian sack and buried it. Finally, I covered the spot with leaves and rowed steadily back upstream, arriving at my residencia in time to phone Camila during school recess. I was satisfied by my practice run and by what I’d seen in Puerto Galán and confident that on Sunday I would be ready for the real thing.
79
ON SATURDAY I bought Camila her shoes and then we spent the entire day in my hotel room. I would have liked to visit my old friends and shoot billiards at Francisco’s Pool Hall, but the fewer people who knew I was home the better.
On Saturday evening, I prayed with Mamá at the Garbanzos church. It wasn’t the same as Llorona, but Colonel Buitrago had recently lost a twelve-man squad in an ambush near Puerto Galán and could no longer justify sending two soldiers to accompany her, especially not after the threat letter from Zorrillo. Mamá would have preferred us to attend Sunday morning Mass, but I’d lied and told her I had plans with Camila.
On Sunday, I followed the same routine as I had on Friday: cycling to the dinghy at 4 am and rowing downstream while fishing. To avoid suspicion from Camila, I’d been deliberately vague about my plans. I hadn’t told her about having gone to church on Saturday night – instead, I told her that on Sunday morning I intended to sleep in or go to Mass with Mamá in Garbanzos, which would give me an excuse for leaving my phone switched off.
I’d have plenty of time to get down to Puerto Galán, eliminate Zorrillo and be back for her father to pick me at 1 pm as planned. Since Camila would be attending Mass in Llorona, I doubted she’d call before midday anyway.
By 6 am I was in position on the western riverbank next to the buried Galil. The sun rose, revealing clear blue skies. In the marketplace, campesinos were already arriving, their backs bent under sacks of corn and potatoes. After shedding their burdens, the men set up wooden stalls. Their wives laid out tomatoes, bananas and onions on colourful cloths and hung strips of dried meat from overhead strings.
A stream of diesel trucks began arriving too, spewing black exhaust into the air, their brakes squealing as they rolled to a stop at the cattle yard beside the food market. Their doors were thrust open and the cattle driven down ramps into holding pens. By 7 am, both the food and cattle markets were awash with the first wave of buyers.
Slowly, I scooped away mounds of soil and unwrapped the Galil. I had yet to see any Guerrilla soldiers, but to a distant observer I wanted to look like a fisherman lying on his back, lazily dangling his line in the river. I dug the handle of the fishing rod into the ground next to me at a forty-five degree angle and put my shirt on back-to-front. I removed my boots, placing them near my feet with their toes pointing skywards. Then I lay flat on my stomach with my hat pulled down low over the back of my neck.
Looking along the Galil’s sights, I had a clear view into the market. The bright sunlight streaming from directly behind me would give me an advantage when Zorrillo arrived – casting light onto him while making me difficult to spot. Nevertheless, I affixed two cardboard toilet rolls to the binocular lenses and wrapped the sack around the rifle to prevent reflections that could reveal my position.
By 8 am, the market was full but Zorrillo hadn’t arrived. At 9 am I imagined Camila entering church with her parents. By 10 am, I calculated that getting back to my residencia in time for her father’s pick-up would now be difficult.
Finally, a green SUV with tinted windows pulled up beside the vegetable market. My heart began to pound.
Through the binoculars, I could see Zorrillo perfectly as he emerged from the vehicle. He was dressed in the same camouflage as ordinary guerrilleros, but I would have recognised his thin moustache, sloping shoulders and arrogant swagger anywhere. I’d been studying Zorrillo’s file for weeks and thinking about him for months. Seeing him in person, however, I felt a surge of anger and had to remind myself to stay calm.
Heart still racing, I switched from the binoculars to the Galil, lining up its single front sight between the two-pronged rear sight. Immediately, however, three bodyguards emerged from the SUV and another eight surrounded the vehicle. They formed a ring around Zorrillo, blocking my shot as he strolled casually into the market.
I raised the binoculars again and watched in frustration as he weaved among the shoppers and stall keepers, joking and patting their backs like a benevolent feudal lord checking on the good health of his peasants. But their unsmiling faces and his accounting logbook told a different story: he was there to levy taxes. Pen in hand, he moved from seller to seller, noting down takings and inspecting cash tins and even pockets.
Then Zorrillo zigzagged his way to the gate adjoining the cattle yards, where trade was now windin
g down. He signalled to Don Mauricio, the cattle yard owner. Mauricio nodded and then handed over a bulging plastic bag, which must have been filled with cash – a vacuna on the day’s combined sales. When Zorrillo signalled for more, Mauricio displayed his open palms until Zorrillo pointed his finger sharply in his face, forcing Mauricio to pay more, this time from his own wallet. As Zorrillo pocketed the cash and disappeared back into the market, Mauricio leaned against the metal rail and remained motionless for a long time, staring at his boots.
Witnessing this made me furious. I imagined Zorrillo doing the same thing to Señor Muñoz on the day he’d sold Papá’s cattle – stealing fifty per cent of the money that Mamá needed to survive. I also remembered Zorrillo banning me from burying Papá and then banishing us from our land.
My hands were shaking and I could no longer calm my breathing. Unfortunately, shooting Zorrillo in the knee in order to capture and interrogate him would be impossible. Not only would it be ineffective – at my first shot some of his bodyguards would throw themselves over him – but it would also be suicide. Even if I made every bullet from my thirty-round magazine count, how would I defend myself against eleven guerrilleros sprinting towards me, firing?
No! I would not rush the job and risk my life. Instead, I’d forget the interrogation and kill Zorrillo while I had the chance. It pained me that he would die without knowing who’d brought him to justice or why. But it was better to shoot him while I had the opportunity.
I rowed across the river and lay in a new position on the opposite bank. I was now one hundred and thirty metres from my target but still confident I could make the shot. After all, the Galil was accurate up to four hundred metres and I’d shot men from two hundred metres. I’d take a single shot and then escape into the jungle, with the water between us buying me valuable time.