The Wind Through the Fence

— 3-

That night even the booze wouldn't put me out.

I lay on my cot, too tired to swat mosquitoes. Feeling sick, feeling like shit. After lunch we'd gone back to work, and Ruiz didn't say a single word to me all day. Wouldn't meet my eyes, didn't sit with me at dinner. I felt bad about it, and that surprised me. I didn't think I could feel worse than I did. I didn't think I much cared about anyone else, or about what they felt.

Fucking Ruiz.

But I did feel bad.

Some of the guys sat by the campfire and swapped lies about what they did when the world was the world. Ruiz sat nearby, the firelight painting his face in hellfire shades; but his eyes were dark and distant and he didn't look at me. He stared through the flames into a deep pit of his own thoughts.

I went to my tent, chased the palmetto bugs out from under the blanket and lay down. Someone was playing a guitar on the other side of the camp. Some Cuban song I didn't know. I didn't like the song but I wished it was louder. It wasn't, though. It couldn't be loud enough.

The dead moaned.

The wind from Hell breathed out through the mouths of the hungry dead.

Fuck me.

I closed my eyes and tried not to hear it. Tried to sleep. Drifted in and out.

It wasn't Ruiz's whispered voice that woke me. It was the feel of his callused hands closing around my throat.

I woke up thrashing.

I tried to cry out.

I had no voice, the air was trapped in my lungs.

Ruiz was a strong kid. Bigger than men, less wasted by the months on the fence. Made stronger by the sledge than I ever was. His hands closed tight and he leaned in close, his face invisible in the darkness, his breath hot and filled with spit against my ear.

"Say you're wrong," he growled. "Say you're wrong."

I tried to. I wanted to take it back. I wanted to take it all back. What Preach had said. What I'd said. I wanted to unsay it.

I really wanted to.

I could feel the bones in my throat grind and crack. Ruiz was a strong kid. I thrashed around, but he swung a leg over and sat down on my chest, crashing me down, bending the aluminum legs of the cot, pinning me to the ground.

The breath died in my lungs. It used itself up, burned to nothing.

"Say you were fucking lying! " His voice was quiet, but loud in my ear.

And, just for a moment, the sound of it blocked out the moans of the dead; for a cracked fragment of a second it silenced the wind from hell.

"Say it," Ruiz begged, and the words disintegrated into tears. He sagged back, his hands going slack as he caved into his own grief.

I tried to say it. With the burned-up air in my lungs I wanted to say it, just take back those last words. But my throat was all wrong. It was junk. The air found only a tiny, convoluted hole in the debris. I could hear the hiss of it. A faint ghost of a sound, a wind from my own hell.

Ruiz was crying openly now, his sobs louder than anything in the world. In my world.

I'm sorry, I said. Or thought I said. I take it back.

Ruiz didn't hear me. All he could hear was the moan of the dead.

But me?

I couldn't hear it.

Not anymore.