Shooting Down Heaven

by Jorge Franco

  Through the news programs and the press, I learned the important bits. Or at least the bits I sensed were important for us. In all the chaos, everything was a jumble, and I even became infected with the country’s jubilant mood. I believed—I’d always believed—that without Escobar around, our lives were going to change for the better. I hoped Libardo would rethink his path, would have no choice but to go back to normal, by which I meant the way other people lived. But that was never in his plans, as he made clear that night when we finally came together, sitting around the dining room table.

  “We’re going to go on vacation like we do every December,” he said, not meeting our eyes. He was staring at his plate of food, which was a sad affair that night.

  “To the farm?” asked Julio, who loved spending vacations there.

  “No,” Libardo said. “We’re traveling a little farther this time. I’m arranging for us to go to the Dominican Republic, to one of those all-inclusive resorts.”

  “We’re coming back here, though?” I asked.

  He raised his head and looked at us in silence, his accustomed vigor and swiftness now gone. Libardo was forty-eight and kept himself in good shape, muscular and active, but over those three days he seemed to have aged twenty years. Fernanda was endlessly stirring her coffee with a little spoon, her eyes fixed on her plate too, as if she already knew what Libardo was hiding.

  “Of course we’re coming back,” he said.

  “I don’t believe you,” I said.

  “Why would you say that, Larry?” he asked with studied calm.

  “I think you’re trying to hide us.”

  Fernanda kept staring at the table; Libardo gripped his knife and fork and pushed his food around pensively. Then he spoke, but not the way he usually did—it was like he was reciting a speech.

  “I don’t deny they’re trying to scare us. It’s not enough for them to have taken Pablo down. They want to grind the ruins to dust and make sure there’s absolutely nothing left. Nothing that would support us and help us rise up.”

  Fernanda lifted her head and looked at him. Maybe she thought his tone sounded pathetic, inappropriate for explaining the situation to a couple of teenagers. He returned her gaze and blinked nervously, sweat beading on his upper lip.

  “Who’s ‘they’?” I asked.

  “In these situations,” he said, “nobody stands tough. They turn tail, they roll over to save themselves or to profit from it. Everybody else is shitting themselves, but you know me”—he looked at Julio and me and pointed at his chest—“you know I’m not one to run, much less roll over. I’m no rat.”

  Fernanda and Libardo started talking over each other. The dining table was big for the four of us. I was surveying them, even Julio, from an unbridgeable distance. It felt like they weren’t going to hear me unless I shouted. Even though my breath was catching in my throat, I stood up and drowned them all out, shouting at my father, “They’re going to kill us, and it’s all your fault! You don’t care about us! All you’re interested in is money—you don’t give a crap what happens to us!”

  Fernanda leaned her elbows on the table and covered her face with her hands. Libardo looked at me in bewilderment, his lip quivering. Julio interrupted me.

  “Shut up, Larry.”

  “Even if we never come back, even if we hide, they’re going to kill us,” I kept saying. “They managed to kill him, so killing us will be a cakewalk.”

  “We’re going to beef up our security and fight back,” Libardo said. “We’ve worked hard for years. We’re not going to let everything be wiped out just like that.”

  “That’s your war,” I told him, “not mine.”

  “Oh, sure, you little brat,” he said. “You’ll keep your mouth shut when it comes to your motorcycles, your nice clothes, your trips, your fancy watches, but when they come after us, you run.”

  “Libardo. Larry,” Fernanda said. “Don’t make things worse.”

  “Of course I’m going to run,” I said. “I’m not going to let myself be killed because of you.”

  A fist in my face knocked me to the floor. Fernanda screamed. When I opened my eyes, I expected to find myself face to face with Libardo, but it was Julio who’d punched me. On the floor I gasped for breath, and so did he, straddling me and hitting me every time I tried to lash out. Libardo lifted him up by the arms, and Julio kicked in the air, still trying to get at me. Libardo carried him off and ordered him to his room.

  I got up slowly, aching and dazed. I leaned against the chair and saw that Fernanda still had her elbows on the table and her head in her hands. I thought she was crying, but she was motionless and silent. Libardo was pacing around the dining room. He was agitated and snorting like an irritated animal. He wouldn’t look at me. I went to my room too. I heard them arguing for a good while. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but it was easy to imagine. Maybe the people who were after Libardo weren’t going to kill us. They already knew we would destroy one another without their help.

  7

  The explosions are going off more and more frequently and the sky is lit up with sparkle on a night full of low, swift-moving clouds. Pedro the Dictator sticks his head out the window, looks up, and says ecstatically, “God bless La Alborada.”

  “Where are we going?” Nobody answers me. I’m starting to believe they’re all tuning me out when I ask that question. La Murciélaga and Julieth are singing at the top of their lungs while Pedro is looking at text messages on his phone. A firework goes off close by, and La Murciélaga lets out a yelp of terror.

  “No,” she complains, “I’m never going to get used to this. Tonight’s going to give me a heart attack.”

  Julieth laughs and says, “I love fireworks. Let’s get some bottle rockets, Peter.”

  “They’re illegal around here,” says Pedro. “You have to go to Envigado or who-knows-where.”

  “What?” I ask. “So where did everybody get the ones they’re setting off right now?”

  There’s another boom very close by, La Murciélaga shrieks again, and nobody answers me. Fireworks are going off around us, and according to Pedro, the tempo will increase as midnight approaches. Medellín is going to explode again, just like it did when Escobar and his thugs, Libardo among them, blew it off its foundations and left it turned ass over teakettle.

  “Do you like setting off bottle rockets, Larry?” Julieth asks.

  “I’ve never set one off in my life,” I tell her.

  What I don’t mention is that I’ve fired plenty of guns: Colts, long Colts, Smith & Wessons, and even assault rifles, all before my fifteenth birthday. Not because I wanted to, but because from the time I was born, Libardo insisted we needed to learn to defend ourselves, and set up a shooting range on the farm. Whenever we went there on vacation, he made us practice. Fernanda never said anything either way, but she always started at every shot, resigned, knowing deep down that we really were going to need to defend ourselves, but tormented because we shouldn’t have been shooting real weapons at that age. I could load a nine-millimeter with my eyes closed before my voice even changed.

  Afterward I forgot everything, all of Libardo’s instructions, every recommendation about how to aim, inhaling and then holding your breath as you fire. I even forgot the applause when I hit the target and the twinkle of pride in his eyes when he bragged about his sons’ bravery, marksmanship, and spunk. I forgot it from the day when, in the middle of a party, Libardo decided to show off our shooting skills and ordered his men to untie a two-month-old calf, one that didn’t even have any meat on it yet, and release it real far away, more than a hundred yards off, and then had them bring him his arsenal and announced that the night’s meal was going to be on us—on me and Julio, I mean—because we, he declared, were going to shoot the calf dead with a single bullet in the head.

  He handed Julio a semiautomatic shotgun; I was better with handg
uns, so he gave me a Glock. He’d never asked us to shoot an animal before, or a bird, or even a tree—nothing that was alive. We’d always shot at people-shaped targets, sure, with a black bull’s-eye on the head, but never an animal.

  I started shaking from the minute they released the calf. Julio would shoot first because he was the oldest. Lucky for me. I prayed he’d hit it so I wouldn’t have to go next, but he was shaking too; his smile was nervous, and he was sweating. He liked animals more than I did, especially livestock; it was like he was made for the farm ever since he was a kid, built for barns and corrals. Libardo was putting him to a test that he was bound to fail. Even so, he adjusted his stance and took aim at the calf, which was fidgeting restlessly, anxious to return to the pen and be with its mother.

  “Right in the head, son,” said Libardo, belching rum, and then, to top it off, “Blow its head off—the body’s going on the grill.”

  Julio couldn’t hold still, not because the calf was moving, but because he was thinking the same thing I was, and wishing, like me, for that calf to take off for the horizon, run into the brush, and disappear amid the vegetation, saving itself and saving us from doing what we didn’t want to do.

  “What are you waiting for?” Libardo asked, exasperated, because Julio kept aiming the gun but couldn’t make up his mind to shoot, and the guests were starting to jeer and laugh.

  He looked at me very seriously, as if to say, get ready, if this kid can’t pull it off, you’re my other card, the ace up my sleeve. But he said again, “Go on and shoot, dammit—we’re all getting bored.”

  Fernanda was watching quietly, but when she saw how Julio was shaking, she slowly walked over. She must have been planning to intervene, to face Libardo down, and she knocked back the rest of her drink in one go. But before she could confront him, the shotgun went off and she jumped, as usual, at the bang. Libardo, for his part, hopped up and down excitedly, though his delight faded when he realized that though the calf was dead, the shot had torn one side of its body apart. Despite the mistake, the guests applauded, and to restore the festive mood, Libardo said, “It’ll be chicken after all, ladies and gentlemen—the kid’s wrecked our beef.”

  Anyway, that was the last day I ever held a gun.

  “I like shooting bobble rockets,” says Julieth. “You never know what they’re going to do.”

  “This one night,” Pedro breaks in, “she set off two bottle rockets in two different apartments. They had to take one poor old lady to the emergency room with heart palpitations.” He chortles and continues: “She was watching TV, and the bottle rocket came in the window and went off on her bed.”

  Julieth and La Murciélaga crack up. Julieth tries to say something, but she’s laughing too much to catch her breath.

  “We had to run so hard,” La Murciélaga says, “our legs almost gave out.” She points to Pedro. “This asshole ditched us—he got in the car and took off.”

  “I wasn’t about to get myself caught,” says Pedro.

  Julieth, finally able to speak, says, “It was in the papers.”

  “Did they catch you?” I ask.

  “No, the two of us got out of there.” She gestures at La Murciélaga. “We jumped down a gully and got away, but it was on Teleantioquia and in El Colombiano and they said the old lady almost died of fright.”

  “Is it always like this, or just today?” I ask.

  “What?”

  “Huh?”

  “La Alborada?”

  “Medellín,” I say. “Is it always like this or just today?”

  The three of them exchange puzzled glances. There’s no need for them to reply. It’s hard to say what I mean by “like this.” Looking back, I recall that it’s always been like this; Medellín has always bobbed on the waves of a restless sea.

  “Let’s go buy the hydroponic weed,” says La Murciélaga. Julieth hops excitedly and Pedro says, “In my dictatorship, ladies, drugs will be a staple good.”

  The other two clap and burst with pleasure, like the fireworks booming outside.

  8

  The flight map on the screens showed the plane leaving Europe behind, poised over Portugal, about to enter the Atlantic. But to them the large blue blotch was much more than an ocean. It was a zone of oblivion into which Charlie and Larry had each tossed their histories when they left Medellín years earlier. The pasts they dropped are still lying there on the seafloor, and there they’ll remain until the ocean dries up.

  Charlie found him with his eyes closed, as if he were sleeping, though he denied it afterward. Standing in the aisle, she asked, “Did I wake you?”

  “No,” he said.

  “You had your mouth open,” she said.

  “How long have you been there?” Larry asked her.

  “A little while. I wanted to thank you.”

  The passengers on either side of Larry grumbled in irritation.

  “I didn’t do anything,” he said.

  “Of course you did,” said Charlie, and fell quiet, as if she was still in shock from the news, or waiting for him to say something else. They looked at each other in silence, and then she said, “Come with me.”

  “Where to?”

  “Up there. Come on.”

  Larry lifted his legs to climb over the woman dozing beside him. Charlie led him to the first-class galley and wordlessly poured two glasses of gin at the bar the flight attendants had set up. He asked about the flight attendants, more to say something than to find out where they were. “They’re probably napping,” Charlie said.

  “As long as the pilot’s awake,” he said.

  “Yeah, right. The only people awake on this thing are the two of us.”

  Charlie smiled for the first time, though the smile was shot through with sadness. He took the opportunity to ask her name, and she looked at him in silence, thinking, or hesitating, and finally said, “María Carlota Teresa Valentina. But don’t worry,” she added, seeing Larry’s expression. “You can call me Charlie.”

  He told her his name while she downed her drink. Larry wasn’t even halfway through his. She poured herself another and asked, “Why are you going to Colombia?”

  “I’m going to my dad’s funeral.”

  Charlie opened her eyes wide, very surprised, as if she couldn’t believe the coincidence. Larry explained: “He didn’t just die now. It was years ago, but they found his remains a few days back.”

  Charlie cleared her throat awkwardly. She didn’t understand. A flight attendant suddenly appeared and asked to get by them so she could open a door and pull out a folder full of papers. Still smiling, she told them they were welcome to anything they wanted, but they needed to take their drinks to their seats. Larry knocked back the rest of his gin to prepare to return to coach, but when the flight attendant left, Charlie told him, “The seat next to me’s empty—come and sit with me.”

  “But . . .”

  “Come on, man,” Charlie insisted. “Everybody’s passed out.”

  Larry couldn’t help smiling when he dropped into the puffy chair and felt the cool leather against his skin.

  There are some things you don’t forget . . .

  Charlie’s eyes were glittering from all her crying, or from the two gins she’d downed. She tucked the blanket around her legs, reclined her seat a little, grabbed the full glass she’d brought with her, and said to Larry, “All right, tell me the story.”

  9

  Libardo watched Escobar’s funeral on TV. He’d made up his mind to go to the cemetery, but when he learned that other close associates wouldn’t be going, he was overcome with fears and doubts, and on the day of the funeral he stayed away.

  “If anybody was going to be there, it should have been me,” Libardo sobbed.

  “In the coffin?” I asked, distraught.

  “No,” he said, tenderly ruffling my hair. “No, son, I
mean the funeral—I should have been with him till the very end.”

  He was tormented by that guilt day and night. He cried in front of the TV when he saw the casket and the crowds chanting Pablo’s name and waving hundreds of white handkerchiefs. When he saw the mother, the musicians playing the dead man’s favorite songs, and when the casket sank into the earth.

  That weeping was also a symptom, a warning about the fragility of the moment. I felt vulnerable even in my own home, as if the walls were gradually disappearing or the doors no longer closed, as if the roof had suddenly blown off and everyone was an enemy. I didn’t say anything; I swallowed my fear in silence, though I was sure it was obvious. I could see it in Libardo, in Fernanda, in Julio, in the staff and bodyguards, in everybody who came to visit us, so why wouldn’t they notice it in me? But it was better to keep quiet; anything I said could be misinterpreted and lead to an accusation or an argument. After the dining table incident, I kept my opinions to myself and let them make the decisions. I’d said what I had to say that night: because of Libardo, we were going to be killed.

  As he’d planned, we spent Christmas in the Dominican Republic. It was the four of us plus our grandparents—Libardo’s parents. Julio and I got more gifts than we had in years past. It was Libardo’s way of assuaging his guilt and trying to convince us not to return to Medellín. Julio wanted to spend the rest of our vacation on the farm, and Fernanda already wanted to go back, even though she’d been enjoying herself at all of Santo Domingo’s biggest casinos.