The Lucky Ones

by Julianne Pachico

  After Lecture Time the recruits are taken up the hill for Training and Exercise. Explosives has been canceled because we don’t have any new materials, not out here, and I can’t seem to find the energy to organize a raiding party. Lots of things seem to require too much energy lately. Two scouts drowned in a river last week, searching for the escaped professor: the girl with her ridiculous hair bands, the boy with his smooth pudgy cheeks. Baby-faced, the pair of them. When the lieutenant informed me, though, the only thing I could think was What a waste we didn’t grab their weapons in time.

  The same lieutenant is here with me right now: shuffling his feet, clutching a notebook to his chest, ready to take notes as needed.

  “The escaped prisoner,” I say. “The professor.”

  He swallows hard as he informs me that there’s been no trace of him—they think he might have gone downriver. There’s a chance that the sentries posted at the narco-processing lab might be able to interrogate local Indians, find out if they’ve seen any trace of him.

  “And the other prisoner?” I say. “The American.”

  The lieutenant swallows three times in a row before he speaks: The guard who was left watching him is now officially listed as a deserter; the camp was completely abandoned. And as for the American…there’s no sign of him yet, but the rumor among the scouts is that he walked away into the jungle, talking to the trees, the sticks, the leaves. Some patrol members are even saying that they began to talk back….

  “Okay,” I say. “That’s enough.” Details are unnecessary; facts are enough. “Radio Martínez in town and get him to check the whorehouses. If he finds the guard, shoot him. When we get reinforcements we’ll double the search parties. Make sure you write that down.”

  His hands are shaking as he takes out his pen.

  “Evening orders: Wood needs to be gathered, more latrines need to be dug.”

  The glasses ride up his face from how hard he’s concentrating, moving the pen painstakingly over the paper.

  I never write anything down. Not anymore.

  I say, “We could use more cave deposits too. And send someone out with a machete to cut down some of the thick branches, build some benches. There’s no reason we should be sitting in the dirt all the time like animals.”

  He nods, writing in an indecipherable scrawl while I wiggle my finger through the hole in my sleeve and stroke the bumpy scars on my elbow.

  —You started coming over to my house after school. I showed you my complete collection of Asterix and Tintin comic books and you said, Cool, I like books with pictures. We drank malt soda, cold from the fridge. (My family never drank malt; the few bottles we kept in the house were for the maids, a fact I never told you.) You knew how to take the bottle cap off with your teeth, a trick I’d always dramatically applaud. Once you slashed your lip open and my hands froze in midair, never meeting, but you just laughed as though it didn’t even hurt you, as though nothing could hurt you, and kept laughing as you walked in circles around the kitchen, the red drops dripping on the white floor tiles and smearing beneath your bare feet, like you were ice-skating on your own blood. You have the highest pain tolerance of anyone I know, I said. Are you an alien? A robot? An alien robot? You smiled as though I’d given you the most extraordinary of compliments, as though I’d identified a secret superpower of yours that no one else had ever noticed. We’d eat packet after packet of plantain and yucca chips and get crumbs all over our school uniforms, eat vanilla cake from the Unicentro mall with our bare hands (I’d see the frosting stains on your shirt the next day). Sometimes we’d fall asleep on the squeaky brown leather couch on top of the empty packets, like we were street orphans sleeping in nests we’d built ourselves out of garbage. We snipped off locks of our hair, blond and black, which you then braided into a little voodoo person, just like you said they used to do at your village. We left it between the pages of Stephanie’s biology textbook. You really don’t like her, do you? you said when I immediately suggested her name, and I just pressed my lips together, not even bothering to nod. When she opened the textbook to the page about photosynthesis and saw the little figure, she let out a shriek that made the biology teacher almost drop his calculator, but we didn’t make eye contact or even sneak grins at each other from across the classroom, because we were that good at being undercover, that sneaky and wise.

  One Saturday the chauffeur took us out to my father’s country house in the mountains, a two-hour-long drive along endlessly winding roads with sharp curves that made our rib cages touch. Your eyes lingered on the collection of mountain bikes, the indoor fishpond with fat lazy goldfish, but it wasn’t until I pointed out the landing field for the helicopter that you said, Wow. You wanted to hang around and watch the keeper feed Carlitos, the ancient pet lion in his disgusting, meat-stinking cage, but instead I took you to my room, where we sat on my Lion King bedsheets and I showed you my complete collection of Transformers and ThunderCats action figures. You said, Damn. I introduced you to my pet rabbits, wiggling their noses frantically behind their chicken wire cage, and you wiggled your nose back and said, Cute, what are their names? You showed me weeds in the garden we could feed them and explained that when they pounded their little rabbit feet against the floor of the cage, it was a warning; when they rubbed their little chins against your finger, it’s like they were saying, You’re mine. You loved the swimming pool, dipping your toes into the clear blue water, gradually getting wet all the way up to the knee. When can we go swimming? you asked, and I said, just a little too quickly, Oh, I don’t have a bathing suit, maybe another time. Instead I snuck you into my father’s office to show you his collection of assault rifles and handguns and even a sword from the War of Independence. Your eyes got bigger and bigger as you stood in front of the glass case, your mouth twisting like it was hooked on something, and as you turned your body quickly away I said, What is it? and you said, Nothing. You rarely spoke to my father, kept your eyes lowered whenever he walked briskly through the living room, talking on his cellphone. What happened to his hand? you asked me once, and I said, Some kind of accident, I think. We climbed the mango tree in the garden so that we could design obstacle courses using the imported Italian angel statues and water fountains, using Xs to mark the spots where we’d bury treasure for future survivors of the apocalypse. You furrowed your forehead in intense concentration as you wrote it all down in my notebook. You asked, What does your father do for a living, exactly? I said, Business stuff.

  “Comandante,” the lieutenant says. “Just a few more things.” He coughs. “There’s rumors, ah, that one of the new recruits has a Bible hidden in his mess kit….”

  “Burn it,” I say, “and eighty trips to get wood.” He nods, the pen dangling from his hand like an extra-long black finger.

  “And before I forget,” he says, his mouth twitching, “what do you want to do about the deserters? They’ve been chained up for three days now.”

  I look at him without speaking. His eyes get big and the mouth under his mustache gets very thin.

  He says, “No trial?”

  I say, “Make sure you assign execution duties to one of their friends.”

  —On Sundays one of my family’s chauffeurs would take us to the mall. I’d use my credit card to buy us iced coffees with whipped cream towers tall enough to smudge our eyebrows white, and we’d drink them by the racks of flowers on display from holiday parades. The crowds of shoppers and the long food-court lines would make me hot and sticky, and the sweat stains in my armpits would spread toward my chest, but I knew that with you it didn’t matter, you wouldn’t pinch your nose like Stephanie and Katrina and say, Gross, Fatty, don’t your parents ever buy you deodorant? How much hair do you have there, anyway? Jittery from caffeine, we’d head into the music store and flip through the CD racks, the cases thwacking against one another, and listen to albums on the store’s giant headphones, which made us feel like air traffic controllers. I’d listen to the Smashing Pumpkins and the Ramones and Oasis, while
you chose compilations of local hits, vallenatos and cumbias wailing beneath strings and trumpets and accordions, the kind of music played on the radio stations I never listened to but my bodyguard did. One time you placed the heavy headphones around my ears and said, Listen to this, I just love the violin solo. It took me a second, but when I finally recognized it I started laughing hysterically. You idiot, I said, you know that’s originally an American song, right? I found you the Rod Stewart greatest hits CD and played you the original version, “Maggie May,” in English and said, See, this is the one that’s right; the one that you like is just a shitty Spanish cover. But you frowned and shook your head, as though you refused to accept what you were hearing, as if it weren’t possible for a single song to exist in two different languages at the same time.

  Then we’d head to the bathing suit section and you’d try on bikinis. Once the sales lady walked in on you in the changing room—how her mouth dropped open, round like a grape, and you said, At least I wasn’t trying on a sexy corset. At the end of the day the red straws of our coffee were so chewed up that the last sips we took sounded like phlegmatic wheezes. Then the chauffeur would pick us up, and back at my house we’d watch VHS tapes, Jurassic Park and Mary Poppins and Pixar films, most of which I could quote pretty much perfectly. To infinity and beyond! I’d shout, and this one time you asked, What would that be like? I said it’d just be black holes and stuff, but you said you wanted there to be infinite worlds, Narnia worlds, places like this one but not quite, almost the same but different. Different how, I said, and you said you didn’t need anything complicated; you’d be happy with something simple, something small, like a never-ending birthday cake that grew back a piece for every one you ate. Martin, I said, so beyond infinity, past the current borders of human understanding and within the depths of unknown parallel worlds, you want there to be cake? Still grinning, you said, Yes, Mariela, that’s exactly right, and even when I said, That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard, I couldn’t help but grin back. To the cake and beyond! you said. We were sitting next to each other on the floor, your arm so close to mine it was like I could feel secret signals being sent to me through your hair. You put the book down and rubbed your chin against me, just like the rabbits would, before leaning your head against mine—if only I could have seen it from a distance, blond against black.

  Dinner is oatmeal and cookies. “Man,” somebody says, someone who’s been out here almost as long as I have, “remember how up north we’d throw whatever we found into the oatmeal? Monkeys, macaws, palm hearts, hawks…”

  “Yum,” somebody else says, and there’s laughter. From the trees comes the sound of three gunshots fired in rapid succession; a couple of people look up, but not that many. I take my boots off and examine the fungus on my toes again, scratch my head to see how much dandruff falls off. I prod the rotting molar at the back of my mouth, think about the one time when all we had to eat was papaya bark, torn in strips from the abandoned farms. Those were the days we’d find fallen plantains in the mud and I wouldn’t allow anybody to eat them, wouldn’t budge from the rule I’d made about not eating food found on unknown lands, due to rumors of the army inserting explosive mines or poison into scattered pieces of fruit. A shard of bark is still stuck in my gums, which I can’t get out no matter how much I poke my finger around.

  There’s a scraping sound behind me and I turn my head: Somebody is walking slowly back from the trees, back from where the deserters were being kept. He drags the shovel against the ground with one hand and carries the execution rifle with the other. I keep my face turned away; I don’t meet his eyes. I don’t know his name—I try not to know anyone’s name anymore.

  Someone says, “I felt sick until I vomited, and then I felt better.”

  Somebody else says, “I never really got over how much a monkey arm looks like a baby’s.”

  —We were at my house, turning the pages of a Star Wars comic book, when you said, Oh, by the way, happy birthday. I said, It’s not my birthday, dummy, and you opened your mouth into a smile so wide I could see the yellow stains on your teeth, the same kind I’d see in the mouths of men selling peanuts at traffic lights. Well, you said, I got you a present anyway, and I watched you pull something out of your backpack with the same quick flick of your wrist as the street magician we once saw through the tinted car window pulling scarves out of a hat.

  I didn’t get any cake, you said, but I think you’ll still like it.

  I stared at the flowery bikini dangling from your hand.

  I picked it out myself, you said. Now we can go swimming!

  Your arms reached toward me, the straps hanging from your hand. The fabric pattern was yellow flowers against a black background. I didn’t touch it.

  I don’t think so, I said. Thanks but no thanks.

  Come on, Mariela, you said. What’s the big deal?

  I said no thank you. I touched the tip of my braid to my lips.

  I got size XL. You said it like it was the most natural thing in the world, as though it didn’t bother you one bit. I looked at you and your face looked nothing like Stephanie’s or the rest of them, but the words I said next still came out angry, like I couldn’t help it.

  Great, I said. Thanks, Martin. Why don’t you just write “Fatty” on the tag and get it over with?

  Somewhere at the back of the house the maid coughed repetitively, like a machine gun going off.

  And besides, I said, you’re the one who wears the girly stuff, not me.

  Your mouth stayed open in that same wide smile, but your eyes turned into small slits. The house suddenly sounded very quiet, as though we were the only ones home. I kept talking, thinking now that I’d let the anger out, it was going to fly around everywhere, smashing things, like a bat trapped in the house.

  Well, I said. At least it’s a change from me always paying for everything.

  You lowered your arm. The bikini fell to the floor.

  I’m tired, I said. The chauffeurs are on break today. Did you bring money for the bus? Or do you not have enough for that either?

  You didn’t answer.

  Don’t worry, I said, you can pay me back someday. Maybe when I’m in college in the U.S. Maybe your mother can send me the money.

  You looked at me very quickly, head snapping toward me like the rabbits when they became alarmed, and for a second there I felt frightened. I kept talking, like my words would be enough to make the feeling go away.

  Or maybe I can get you a job at my father’s business, I said. Maybe that way you can earn enough.

  Your father, you said suddenly, is a crook.

  Excuse me?

  You just looked at me. Your mouth didn’t move, but your eyes said it all. The way they flickered, narrowed. Even if the newspapers don’t say it, you said. Even if nobody says it at school. But everybody knows it. Don’t you?

  That’s what did it. The words kept coming out of me, thick and fast. I don’t know from where, as though I’d been saving them up for a long time and now they were leaking out, like Coca-Cola spilling over the couch cushions. You still didn’t speak, not even when I said, Well, you probably just shoplifted it anyway, or It’s a good thing the world always needs window washers, or God, do you have to keep sitting with that stupid common peasant expression? I stayed there on the couch, not moving, as you wandered through the house, looking for the maid so you could ask her to unlock the front door for you. If I’d gone upstairs to my room and looked out the window, I could have watched you when you left, walking slowly down the gravel driveway, turning onto the street, your shadow long beneath the lights that flickered from the moths banging against the bulbs. I could have waited to see if you dug your hand deep into your pockets, searching for small brown coins, or if you just kept walking, one slow step at a time, the first step of many for the long walk that awaited you, all the way to the other side of the city, past the condominiums and parks, up the steep hills to your aunt’s house with the tin roof and brick steps. But I didn’
t see, because I never looked.

  It’s getting dark now. The sky is the color of gunmetal, and in the distance is the rumble of thunderclaps. Somebody says, “All it needs is shrapnel and we’ll feel right at home.” I find a lighter in my pocket and flick it on and off slowly, almost pass my hand through the flame but at the last second shove it quickly away. Soon the bats will be flying in wide circles overhead.