The Lucky Ones

by Julianne Pachico

  “Don’t be an idiot,” her aunt says. “I know you’ve barely been eating. God knows he’s been a help—your uncle would have surely appreciated it.” Sofía looks away. Her aunt’s eyes have filled with tears, but with a shaky breath she’s able to keep talking. “But all I’m saying is pay attention to how he looks at you. And God help us if you end up catching what he has.”

  She spits out the blob of unchewed food into her palm. When she swallows, a lump of warm saliva burrows down her throat, pushing down the sentence Scars aren’t catching.

  —

  When she wakes that night, sweating and shaking, the disembodied arms and legs are still brushing against her forehead, as lightly as Ramiro’s leaves, flitting at her hair like birds. She gets out of bed and heads to the window. She can see over the shrapnel-pocked wall into his yard: the back porch and potted geraniums, the grapefruit tree and empty soap dishes filled with water for stray cats. The white plastic chair is sitting in the same spot, empty. The door is shut and no lights are on, so if she didn’t know any better it would look like nobody was home. She stands as close to the window as possible, pressing her bare skin against the glass.

  —

  The bruises don’t fade, but the leaves cause a prickly red rash to appear. “Maybe I didn’t rub it in hard enough,” she says in the kitchen the next morning as she shows him her arm. He doesn’t touch her as he looks, but all of a sudden she’s conscious of the sweat stains in her armpits, of how she’s holding her arm in the same position as Rose in the Titanic drawing scene. He drinks coffee at the table and listens to the radio as she washes the dishes. When she bends over to open the cupboard beneath the sink, she wonders how high her shirt rises on her back. She arches her spine slightly, feeling her hip bones push up against her jeans. It makes her stomach feel quivery, as if she’s drunk too much coffee. She almost starts swaying her butt, spelling out the letter A, but stops at the very last second, quickly reaching for the rags. When she stands up she tries to make out his reflection in the kitchen window, but in the glass he just looks like a ghostly blur.

  That day they go somewhere new: a house with metal sheets for walls, nearly a fifty-minute walk down the main road. The inside of the house smells like a mixture of must and salt and has a dirt floor. The furniture is four plastic chairs spaced evenly around a wooden table with a scratched surface. Each chair is occupied by a small child: three girls, and a boy with a shaved head. None of them can be more than ten years old. They swing their legs, staring at Sofía and the Armadillo Man as though they’ve been sitting there all morning just watching the door, awaiting their arrival. Their flip-flops are repaired with gray plastic threads she recognizes from sacks of flour.

  He surprises her by insisting on doing the cooking himself, untying the knots of the plastic bags they’ve brought along. “Talk to the children,” he says, slicing the plantains rapidly. As he drops the yellow circles into the spitting-hot oil, she kneels next to a girl cradling a gnawed corncob in her arms like a baby.

  “What a pretty doll!” she says, lightly touching the girl’s hair. Even from high up she can see the silver specks of lice eggs clinging to the roots.

  The girl says, “It’s a piece of corn.”

  Thankfully he cooks fast. She helps him spoon the food out evenly onto a stack of cracked plates that still have ancient grains of rice clinging to them. When the Armadillo Man passes her a plate, she quickly shakes her head, pressing her lips together.

  “Don’t worry, it’s not for you,” he says. “This way.” He jerks his head toward the scratched-up wooden door behind her, hanging halfway off its hinges. While the children eat, she follows him into a dark bedroom, where the musty smell is so pungent she nearly stops breathing.

  “Lunch, Gregorio,” the Armadillo Man says, and in the bed what she thought was a bunched-up pile of sheets begins to stir. It’s a man dressed only in shorts, propped up on a pillow, both arms ending in shiny pink stumps.

  “Here,” the Armadillo Man says, patting the edge of the mattress.

  She spoons the rice into Gregorio’s mouth while the Armadillo Man hovers nearby, chatting cheerfully about that morning’s news. The government is offering a cow and barbed wire to everyone who uproots their coca bushes and plants lulo trees instead, and the Soldier for a Day program will soon be coming to town, so children can go and get camouflage makeup painted on their faces. Every once in a while he reaches out to brush off the grains of rice that have fallen on the sheet. Gregorio’s face, chest, arms, and legs are covered in raw red sores shaped like cockroaches, some of which are bleeding. She alternates between holding her breath and breathing through her front teeth, which makes a faint whistling sound she prays no one can hear.

  “Anything else, Gregorio?” the Armadillo Man says when the plate is empty.

  Gregorio opens and closes his mouth. “No,” he finally whispers.

  When they walk out the door (“See you next week,” he tells the children, who don’t look up from the last grains of rice they’re shoveling into their mouths), she can’t help herself. She takes a deep breath and rubs her hands up and down her arms, as if suddenly chilled despite the bright sunlight.

  “Do you want to know what happened?” he says after a few minutes.

  “No.” It’s true too. She couldn’t be less interested.

  While they are walking along in silence she amuses herself by picturing the second half of the Armadillo Man’s story. One scene follows another in her head, almost comfortingly, like images from a bedtime story, or a soap opera on TV. The Armadillo Man, escaping his kidnappers by throwing himself off a cliff. Crouching in a riverbank hole for days before deciding that his only way out of the jungle was following the river. Meeting illegal loggers who helped lead him back to town, how Dr. Ortiz barely managed to save the last of his skin from falling off his face. Her uncle told her the story, waving his cigarette around as if painting pictures in the air with the smoke; he not only made it seem as if it had happened to him personally but as if he’d enjoyed it.

  “That Professor,” her uncle said, flicking the ash of his Marlboro into the grass. “He’s seen it all. Lived through it too.”

  She knows they’re getting close to town when they pass a row of recently abandoned houses, the ones with no roof tiles or windows, the street crisscrossed with mossy electric cables. On one of the house walls, someone’s spray-painted the initials of a paramilitary group in black capital letters. On another wall, the letters are separated by two painted hands with clawlike fingernails, each cupping a skull. Underneath the hands it says IN DEATH WE ARE ALL EQUAL.

  —

  That night in the dream she’s able to spit it out. She’s made it as far as the church door, her hand hovering over the wooden handle, when it falls from her mouth and hits the tiles with a squelch. The air is still smoky and sulfurous but she’s able to see what it is without kneeling. A man’s finger, the dark knuckle hair flattened by her spit, a crescent of black dirt beneath the bitten yellow nail, skin the color of egg white.

  She stays in bed for a long time that morning, neither awake nor asleep. Her aunt enters the room without knocking. “Go away,” she says without raising her head. “I think I have a worm.”

  “The things you come up with.” Her aunt opens the curtains with a quick flick. “If you actually ate something besides coffee you’d feel fine.”

  “I mean it. My asshole is burning.”

  “My God, Sofía!” Her aunt’s earrings, enormous silver hoops, swing as she shakes her head.

  “I can feel it down there. Poking around.”

  “Then I guess we’ll have to take you to Dr. Ortiz and have him take a look.”

  “Good luck with that.” Ortiz was one of the lucky ones. Instead of getting him in the church three months ago, they left him on his doorstep, wrists tied behind his back with a shoelace and a slice in his torso from the base of the neck to the belly button.

  The way her aunt’s face crumples, it makes her wo
nder for a second if she had really forgotten—or if she hadn’t wanted to remember.

  “Okay, okay,” Sofía says. She uses her hand to steady herself against the mattress as she swings her feet onto the icy floor.

  In the kitchen, she stares at her wavering reflection in the cup of coffee before slowly walking over to the sink and pouring it down the drain. Her tongue is fat and hot in her mouth, squished behind her teeth. Her aunt remains seated, calmly peeling an orange with her sharp fingernails.

  When she picks up the bucket of cleaning supplies, her aunt says, without looking up, “Make sure you get rid of that ass-face before you head over there.”

  “This is my normal face,” Sofía says. “Is my normal face an ass-face?” She pulls the mop roughly away from its resting place against the wall.

  “Oh, Sofía,” her aunt says, placing the last of the orange segments on the plate as Sofía heads toward the door. “Try asking yourself sometime—are you acting in a way that would make your uncle proud?”

  The harder she presses her lips together, the less chance there will be of it all coming out. Spilling everywhere. Splattering.

  —

  Instead of following the usual route to the Armadillo Man’s door, she keeps walking down the mountainside until the grass becomes knee-high. When she comes to a wooden bench she sits down heavily, letting the bucket drop and roll across the dirt. Her uncle built the bench as a place to sit and sharpen his machete before heading into the forest below to clear away the underbrush. When she was little, she used to sit with him in the evenings as the sun set, and he’d point out the fireflies. There used to be hundreds of them before the pesticide sprayings, they would light up the dark silhouettes of the surrounding mountains. “Do you think they’re more like stars?” he once said, gesturing expansively at them, as if he could sweep them all up into the palm of his hand. “Or Christmas tree lights?”

  “They’re like the eyes of angels!” she answered. “Or the lights of alien spaceships!” Her uncle stared at her for a moment before beginning to reverently applaud, as if awed by the scope of her imagination.

  If he were to ask her now, she knows exactly what she’d say. They’re bugs, Uncle. It’s silly to pretend that they could be anything else.

  When she sits here now, what she often sees are the lines of people draping over the mountain as they walk the winding trails. Pulling wagons, pushing wheelbarrows. Mattresses balanced on heads, cows and pigs in tow. Horse carts moving at a fast clip, people clutching baskets with legs dangling over the rims, entire families crowded onto a single motorcycle. Heading out, moving forward. Medellín, Bogotá, Cali—anywhere but here.

  She exhales. The smell of rotten eggs is back, filling the back of her throat. She turns her face away from the bench and vomits up a thin stream of brown liquid—it’s always brown first thing in the morning, but by evening it will be pale, transparent, the color of nothing. She wipes her mouth off with the back of her wrist. “There, there,” she says. Wraps her arms around her rib cage, pulls herself close into a hug.

  When she finally feels it, she doesn’t need to open her eyes to know what it is. Scratchy and rough, like the back of a new sponge. The Armadillo Man’s hand, resting on her forearm. She opens her eyes and looks at him. He looks right back, the peeling skin beneath his eyes trembling.

  “Let’s go,” he says.

  —

  She’s never sat in his living room before. Mopped and dusted it, yes, pushing a broom beneath the couch and running a wet rag over the windowsills, wiping the dust from the fogged-up frames of his university diploma and teaching certificate from Bogotá. Until now, though, she never actually dared to lower herself into the leather armchair, the cushions sighing beneath her as they release high-pitched exhalations of air.

  He brings her a mug of steaming-hot water from the kitchen. Without his stick he walks stiffly, swinging his knee as though it is an ax chopping the air. When she brings the mug close to her face, she sees dark green coca leaves swirling at the bottom.

  “Have you had any lunch?” he says, lowering himself into the plastic white chair. “If you’re not careful, the wind’s going to blow you away any day now.”

  “You sound like my aunt,” she says, in a voice that’s meaner than she intended. The curtains are wide open; anybody walking by in the street could look through the window and see them, stop and stare. She has a crazy, shaky feeling inside her chest, as though she’s swallowed a tiny animal that’s now frantically dancing around. She checks the water in the mug to make sure her hand isn’t trembling.

  He reaches for the brown paper bag sitting on the table, slowly turns it upside down, and pours out the remaining leaves. “You know,” he says, picking up a leaf and twirling it around, “when I was in the jungle, I used to count these.”

  “The jungle?” It takes her a second to figure out what he’s referring to: the Armadillo Man, who back then was the Professor. A chain around his neck and rubber boots on his feet, a tiny speck in an ocean of green.

  He holds the leaf between his index finger and thumb. “I’d start with the ones on the ground, the brown ones. Then I’d move on to the tree branches, the green ones. Last of all would be yellow—there were never that many yellow ones.” He brings the leaf to his face and touches it to his lips, as if smoking it.

  “That sounds…awful,” she says. She almost says boring, but manages not to.

  “Oh, you know,” he says. “It could have been worse. They never blindfolded me.” He lowers his hand back to the table. “You’d always hear things—stories and rumors from the guards. Apparently there was an American prisoner in another camp somewhere. He started talking to the trees as if they were people.” He stares at the leaf for a moment before slowing closing his fingers over it.

  “I’m glad you escaped,” she says, saying the words carefully, as if they’re water she’s afraid of spilling.

  He makes a fist, and she hears the leaf crunching.

  “You’re not going to believe this from an old man like me,” he says, “but I’ve been very fortunate. And so have you.”

  His face is close enough for her to touch, if that’s what she wanted. If she asked him about that night—the time he watched her through the window—what would he say? Did he care? Remember, even?

  “I’m going to Cali,” she says abruptly. “As soon as my aunt lets me.”

  He looks at her.

  “I’ll work in a house there,” she says. “I’ll be good at it—don’t you think?” She can picture it too, like something that’s already happened. Her sandals in the hallway, propped up beside the door. A brand-new washing machine and a shiny modern kitchen. Giant TV screens to dust, DVD films to organize, shelves of brand-new American toys. She’ll do the dishes every evening, the ones stacked in the sink and crusted over with lentils and rice; she’ll scrub them clean with bright yellow gloves and sponges that are constantly replaced. She’ll sweep the floors, punch the pillows to fluff them up, take out the garbage and cook things like lasagna, food from places like America or Italy, recipes she’s only ever seen on TV soap operas.

  She can’t wait.

  “Sofía,” the Armadillo Man says in a careful-sounding voice, as though afraid his words might break something, “you’re good at more than just that.”

  “Like what?” She abruptly pulls her hands into her lap.

  He whispers something, mouth barely moving, so she has to lean across the table in order to hear him.

  “Teach,” he’s saying. “You could be a teacher.”

  She stares at him like it’s the stupidest thing she’s heard in her life. “Professor,” she says, and it’s only when she says the words out loud that she realizes it’s the first time she’s called him that since he escaped. “I can’t even read.”

  He looks down at the leaf pieces in his hand, the shredded fragments. “I could teach you.”

  She shakes her head.

  “I could marry a narco trafficker,” she says.
“Or an army general. Which do you think my aunt would prefer?”

  His lips twitch strangely and it takes her a second to realize that he’s trembling. The cracks in his face look deeper and darker than ever. He leans forward and sprinkles the leaf pieces on top of her head.

  “Well,” he says. “A crown for your wedding day. You say what you think at the moment you think it, don’t you?”

  “My aunt says it’s because I never helped out at the altar when I was young.” She can feel the leaf pieces resting lightly on her hair, trembling like insects clinging to grass stalks.

  “You mean,” he says, “you’re not young now?”

  She slips her foot out of her sandal and places her bare foot on top of his leg, near his inner thigh. He stares at it.

  “You’re not old,” she says. “Not really.”

  He doesn’t answer.

  She blows her nose on her shirt, a loud honking noise. “You’re the same age as my uncle,” she says. “Do you remember my uncle?”

  He looks at her. She starts coughing so hard it almost turns into a gag.

  “I keep thinking I can feel the pieces,” she says when she is finally able to speak, “in my mouth.”

  She presses her fingers against her lips.

  “Everyone was splattered,” she says. “Everywhere.”

  She wants to tell him that in the morgue three months ago, her first thought was At least chain saws make burials easy. The laughter came out of her in a high-pitched burst, and both her aunt and the mortician turned slowly toward her, half-bewildered, half-appalled. Why couldn’t people just disappear? Vanish into thin air, leaving nothing behind but shoes in a hallway, shirts in a closet, a dusty framed photograph on a bedside table? Wasn’t it better to not have an explanation, a clear cohesive picture of what happened? Nothing like what the morgue had. Not at all.

  He stands up abruptly, pushing the chair back behind him so hard it topples over. Her foot slides off his leg and smacks loudly against the tiled floor.

  “Do you know,” he says, “the best way to cook a chicken?”