Missionaries

by Phil Klay

  Jefferson was short, blocky, and muscular, the body of a pit bull crouched to strike. His face was cold. Even when he yelled, the anger never reached his eyes. He stood in front of us and told us we had allowed something terrible to happen in our area, something that demanded his presence to protect the morality of the people and the justice of our struggle.

  Then we all gathered our weapons and gear and followed Jefferson’s paracos to a gathering outside a river town. On a small stage, a faggot was dancing in front of an audience of about fifteen or twenty. The dancing faggot’s jeans were cut open at the crotch to show his underwear, which was red. We surrounded the men, who looked scared, and Jefferson went on stage, where the faggot in jeans was frozen in terror. “Look, he’s got earrings,” he said. And then he hit him in the face with the butt of his rifle and stood over him and used pliers to tear the earrings out of his ears. I thought of the woman we’d helped, who’d been attacked by thieves.

  The red faggot shrieked, then cried. Jefferson walked to the front of the stage and began a speech about how the faggot life came from America and that for a man to fuck another man is to kneel to imperialism. “We must stay true to our Colombian identity,” he told the audience, “unblemished, unmixed, uncorrupted.” I had never considered my identity, Colombian or otherwise, but I would learn this was Jefferson’s way. Before doing violence, he’d talk nonsense to confuse and to justify.

  Jefferson also said that no women were allowed to wear miniskirts, though there were no women there to hear the news. Miniskirts, he said, began in Europe, which he made sound even more disgusting than America. Then we fired into the air and moved in, hitting the faggots with our rifles as they squirmed and crawled away. It feels good, to hit someone with a rifle, especially someone who is like a man, but not.

  One of the faggots in the middle of the pack, a skinny man with short hair and a rugby shirt tucked into his jeans, went down on his knees and began to pray to the Virgin Mary. This made it hard to hit him. So in the middle of squirming, shrieking bodies, groans and cries, there was this one little man, on his knees, reciting, “Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners . . .” with a circle of protection around him. When he reached the end of his prayer, Iván hit him before he could start again, and he fell to the ground with blood coming from a gash above his right eye.

  Once the faggots were beaten, Jefferson made a sign and we walked away in two single-file lines, Jefferson’s group and ours. But as we left the town Jefferson stopped and had us turn around. We found the men tending each other’s wounds, a sight that was disturbing to me, and changed my feelings about what we’d just done. Jefferson took the man in the red underwear and we marched him out of town, and Jefferson and two of his men raped him and then shot him in the head and left the body in the road. Osmin told us that the flame of war burns strong in Jefferson. It is what makes him such a powerful leader.

  * * *

  • • •

  About a week later, Osmin told me he never wanted to be a warrior, he wanted to be a civil engineer. “Let’s be builders, we two.” He told me this at night, by the river, when we were alone, and then he laughed, as if he knew it was ridiculous to want such a life and not to accept the only life we had. But here was a chance to change things, because after the killing of the man in red underwear Jefferson had taken Osmin aside and told him he would give him money to build a soccer field, and some one-story houses for the poor, so that it wouldn’t just be the ordinary people and the businesspeople who liked us for the way we handled crime and kept order, but everyone.

  “Jefferson says you start with fear, but fear is not enough.” Osmin sat close to me as he told me this. He was so different from his comandante. Osmin had long limbs and a soft face. Jefferson was shaped like a square. Jefferson’s hands were thick, with short stubby fingers. Osmin’s palms were calloused, yes, but the veins ran across the small bones on the back of his hands in a delicate way. These were builder’s hands, he wanted me to believe.

  I liked the idea of building, so construction became my special responsibility. “Because you are smart, and know mathematics,” Osmin told me. He even got me an engineering textbook, which we didn’t need. We had money to pay men who knew their work, and the textbook didn’t have anything to do with building simple houses or community centers or soccer fields. It had a dark purple cover, was titled Analysis of Structures with Dynamic Loads—Volume II: Systems of Multiple Degrees of Freedom, and seemed to only involve versions of math that I had never been taught.

  “I will learn this by heart,” I told Osmin, and I believed it at the time, but then I only got three or four pages in before giving it up. “I need the first volume, then it’ll all make sense,” I said.

  My first project was a soccer field in La Vigia. The contractor I found was a kind man who liked me because I was young. He let me stay by his side, and taught me how to keep books for a project, how to invoice correctly, and how to know when workers were taking advantage. For the next project, the housing, I found ways to save and didn’t use all of the money—returning the leftover to Osmin, who gave it to Jefferson, who seemed confused and pleased by what I’d done, and asked for my name and then put his large hand on my shoulder, put his face too close to mine, and smiled. His breath reeked of chinchurría. My knees shook and he noticed. His smile grew. He said, “Good boy.”

  After that, other projects quickly followed. I loved two things most of all, watching the workmen breaking ground, and then coming back long after the project was done to watch what I’d made in use. It was like the feeling I had the first time I held a gun, but it didn’t fade. There was something about seeing children playing on a field I’d leveled, or seeing a family eating dinner in a one-room house I’d built.

  One night I walked through the section of poor homes we built on the edge of Cunaviche, simple, ugly houses with misshapen bricks made of sand and cement, and corrugated metal roofs that might blow away in a strong wind. Children ran through the street in front of me, shrieking. Around a corner I saw a small fire where they had tossed their scavenged things—an old tire, broken branches, a wet cardboard box pouring thick curtains of smoke into the sky. I looked through a window that was really just a hole, no glass. The mother inside cooked on a kerosene burner, and a little boy played in the corner, picking up scraps of paper and moving them from one spot to another. I stepped closer to the window, my eyes on the mother’s face. She looked Motilon—there were some markings on her nose. Possibly, she was here, cooking in a home for the poor, because of us. Jefferson had made a deal with a group of guerrilla to carve up some Motilon lands in the north, lands that grew opium but which the Motilon had tried to keep from both of us, wanting to stay out of the conflict. Between the two groups, guerrilla and paramilitaries together, the tribe was crushed, and many fled.

  I felt warmth toward the woman, and happiness that she had shelter. During my animal days, I had seen women like her, begging with their children by their sides, squatting on colorful rags they brought from wherever they’d come from, and I knew that to the whole world a homeless mother is prey. She turned to look out the window, and I ran. Dealing too closely with the people we helped frightened me.

  Jefferson was different. He would make people come and beg him if they wanted to live in the houses he built. Undoubtedly, that woman had come with her children and offered him prayers. Undoubtedly, she kissed his hands, maybe even his feet. She’d made her little boy do the same. Jefferson always made them grovel in front of God and all. “They need to know,” he said.

  I never needed any kisses or prayers. I had the building itself.

  * * *

  • • •

  Jefferson liked the way I worked, and he liked that I was quiet, respectful. So he told Osmin I would work with him more often, handling some of the civic work for our bloc, and he had one of his men give me a uniform like his paracos wore. He also told me my wage would go up, fro
m four thousand pesos a day to eight. It was a promotion.

  There were only six towns within the area of Osmin’s responsibility, but Jefferson had a much wider area, where he didn’t just hand out money for charity projects but also money for roads and schools, for neighborhood associations and local candidates. These were cities and towns that our bloc had firmly in control, a control coming from far more than fear or even love, which was the point of Jefferson’s little projects. We wanted them to think our money paved their roads, educated their children, healed them when they were sick, gave them everything that the state was supposed to but never had, and everything the guerrillas promised but never provided. That’s why when the government money came in we’d meet with the mayors and let them know they could not do anything without us. We would protect the projects as long as we received compensation and as long as the people were told the projects came from us. For the people in those towns, betraying us would thus seem like betraying themselves, removing us from the community like removing one’s own backbone.

  Most of these projects were handled by civilians, but Jefferson wanted to change things so that a uniformed paraco would always be involved, even if only to be seen. “With you there, in uniform,” he said, “they will never be able to pretend the money comes from somewhere else.”

  This became my responsibility—to remind people of what they owed us. I would stand by Jefferson and take notes as he met with mayors and businesspeople and ranchers. Together we would determine what the town needed—assigning people to houses of collaborators who’d been pushed from their land, making judgments on disagreements over land, or reducing the delinquents and the viciosos. If there was money for building, Jefferson would send me out to handle all the details, to meet with the builders and suppliers, to negotiate prices, and to keep track of the construction. Jefferson was often not around—he traveled back and forth to Venezuela constantly—and even when he was around he didn’t care at all about the projects except to make sure he was there when they finished, and that everyone knew he had paid for them, so handling all this quickly became a large undertaking.

  I managed well. The men I worked with were decades older than me but they knew I had Jefferson’s trust and Jefferson’s money. They were honest with me, and spoke to me with respect, especially as time went on and I showed that I was good at the work, and attentive to the details, arriving at a site and complaining about poor foundations, or demanding refunds for a failure to complete projects in the agreed-upon time. I kept careful notes, and I often thought with gratitude about the missionaries who had supplied me with enough knowledge to be able to handle the task.

  At one meeting with milk farmers across our area, an older rancher with a white mustache complained about a coming tax. Jefferson’s comandante had arranged for New Zealand milk-farm technicians to come share their knowledge, and he was also importing milking machines from Argentina. In return, the milk farmers would have to pay more.

  The trade representative, a lazy and stupid man whose election we’d supported, should have handled the issue beforehand, ensuring all understood they had no option. But instead of saying this without saying it, he hissed, “What are you doing? Jefferson will kill you!”

  The rancher, a proud man named Rodrigo Serrano, puffed up, mustache twitching. “I don’t have any fear of Jefferson,” the rancher said, his pride speaking instead of his brain. “I fought the guerrilla twenty years before Jefferson came here, and I didn’t—”

  “Jefferson does not want you or anyone to fear him,” I said, lying. Of course, Jefferson did want fear, but he didn’t want that fear to be tested. Threatening rich men is dangerous, and killing them can lead to real resistance. From the milk tax we wanted money, not problems.

  The rancher scoffed. “I—”

  “You fought the guerrilla twenty years ago?” I leaned forward, trying my best to look eager and curious. “I didn’t know anyone here had the guts to fight them before the autodefensas came.”

  “Yes,” the rancher said, surprised and unsure of himself, but also looking pleased. “It was a dangerous time.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “I don’t think we have time—” the trade representative began.

  “Shut up,” I said. “The guerrilla killed everyone in my town except for me. I want to hear how the man defended his community.”

  The trade representative, who did fear Jefferson, turned white. I had never spoken like that to a man in a position of power. It had never occurred to me, before then, that I could speak to a man in a position of power like that. It changed the atmosphere of the room. Instead of the trade representative and me against the rancher, it became the rancher and me against the trade representative.

  “Well,” he said, “it started when they kidnapped Nelson Pérez . . .” And then he launched into a story about how his father, who had socialist sympathies in his youth and used to help import weapons from Medellín to sell to the guerrilla, had fallen into a rage after the kidnapping. Using the same contacts he’d used to get weapons for the FARC, he’d gotten weapons for himself and a few other men. They’d waited until the guerrilla came for payment of the vaccine, they ambushed them, and they killed them.

  I acted amazed, asked questions, urged him into more and more detail as the trade representative became increasingly frustrated. And then I told him, “Given your history, I think we could come up with something different. Instead of the tax, you could contribute to security. There have been kidnappings on the road north of your lands and Jefferson was intending to post some of our men there. But it is always best to have local people.”

  The rancher gawked at me.

  “How many men do you have?” I asked. “Men who can handle themselves? There will be fighting.”

  The rancher smiled, looked around for support. “I think those days are behind me,” he said.

  “Are you sure?” I asked. “You’d avoid the tax.”

  “No,” he said. “No. The tax is fine.”

  The rich, I thought, are foolish and vain. It was strong knowledge to possess.

  * * *

  • • •

  Jefferson gave me a raise, from eight thousand pesos a day to twelve, and I began working with all the paramilitary groups under Jefferson’s control, from little bands of beggars like the one I had come from to more professionalized groups who spent less time managing cities and towns and more time on the border, working the trade of coca out and gasoline in. It gave me a sense of the world, to see the range of things a man like Jefferson was involved in, and to see how unimportant a little band like Osmin’s was to him.

  As a child, I thought there were guerrilla, and there were paracos, and they were at war with each other, but with Jefferson I learned that it was so much more complicated. There were cocaleros, like I had been, working the fields and sometimes organizing into little self-defense unions. And there were narcos, who bought and transported coca. And there were police and army. But within each group were different factions. Narcos who worked with us, but not the guerilla. Narcos who worked with the guerrilla, but not us. Narcos who worked with both. Guerrilla who would work with us against other guerrilla. Paracos who would work with narcos against us. Cocaleros who protected the guerrilla. Army officers who asked us to do the work they could not. Police who worked for everyone and no one. Sometimes it seemed like it was all a great game. Sometimes it seemed like hell. And always, it seemed so much bigger than I had imagined. Those days, I would sometimes think with wonder at how little worth I had possessed in the world, and how easily I could have been erased from the earth, and how even a whole town, like the one I had come from, could be destroyed without changing the calculations of the powerful.

  But now I mattered to the powerful. I moved into an apartment in La Vigia, far from Osmin and the family he had provided me. I had my own bed. I had a little table and a lamp. I drank beer and soda in peac
e whenever I wanted. I even got a TV, and started watching Las Juanas, which would be my favorite show for years, until I eventually fell in love with Catalina Santana in Without Tits, There’s No Paradise. I kept the television on while I slept. The noise helped me.

  Sometimes Jefferson would make me and a few other paracos sleep in one of his fincas, a beautiful place on the river where the sound of the water both calmed me and stirred memories that risked flooding my emptiness with sorrow. We’d watch movies, especially American action movies like Marked for Death or T2 or Lethal Weapon. There were always women around Jefferson, but in the morning he wouldn’t let them cook, and he’d make blood sausage and eggs with hogao and feed it to us and demand I tell him how good it was. He’d mete out discipline in the mornings, screaming at those who’d failed him, announcing how he’d dock their pay. Several times he had men beaten. Once he tied a man to a chair and then had his right arm flayed, the skin sliced down the inside of the arm and then peeled down to the wrists to reveal muscle and bone. Each day we would eat our breakfast, unsure of who had displeased him, and what they must suffer. Nervous times, but I was always glad to be there. Jefferson was no great cook, but with him the flavors were sharper, and life felt important.

  Sometimes after breakfast he’d take me aside, his strange, uniformed paraco who handled business and politics but not war, and he’d talk to me or have me sit in his house while he conducted business. He was a strange man, wise, filled with advice and knowledge about the outside world. He read newspapers and watched television news and listened to news radio, and was friendly with some journalists, and would answer any time they called, eager to show up, to be photographed, and heard. “You have to be more than a power, you have to be a famous face,” he told me. “There is power in fame.” I learned to please him by tying each project I was doing to some spectacle, some festival. Journalists will not often show up to the opening of a soccer field, but if you open housing for the poor on Good Friday, it becomes, as one reporter who was in our pay told me, “a story that writes itself.” Jefferson began smiling when he saw me, and he started calling me “my boy.” And even the other paras, Jefferson’s hard, well-trained men, they began to speak to me with respect.