War by Candlelight: Stories

flood

I was fourteen when the lagoon spilled again. It was up in the mountains, at the far edges of our district. Like everything beautiful around here, no one had ever seen it. There was no rain, only thick clouds to announce the coming flood. Then the water came running down the avenue, pavement glistening, taking trash and rock and mud with it through the city and toward the sea. It was the first flood since Lucas had been sent to the University, a year into a five-year bid for assault. The neighborhood went dark and we ran to the avenue to see it: a kind of miracle, a ribbon of gleaming water where the street should have been. A few old cars were lined up, their headlights shining. Street mutts raced around us, barking frantically at the water and the people and the circus of it. Everyone was out, even the gangsters, everyone barefoot and shirtless, moving earth with their hands, forming a dike of mud and rock to keep the water out. Across the avenue those kids from Siglo XX stared at us like they wanted something. They worked on their street and we worked on ours.

“Watch them,” Renán said. He was my best friend, Lucas’s younger brother. Over in Siglo XX they still had light. I could taste how much I hated them, like blood in my mouth. I would’ve liked to burn their whole neighborhood down. They had no respect for us without Lucas. They’d beat you with sticks and pipes. They’d shove sand in your mouth and make you sing the national anthem. The week before, Siglo XX had caught Renán waiting for a bus on the wrong side of the street. They’d taken his ball cap and his kicks, left his eye purple and swollen enough to squint through.

Buses grunted up the hill against the tide, honking violently. The men moved wooden boards and armloads of bricks and sandbags, but the water kept coming. Our power came on, a procession of lights dotting the long, sinking slope toward the city. Everyone stopped for a moment and listened to the humming water. The oily skin of the avenue shone orange, and someone raised a cheer.

In the half-light, Renán said he saw one of the kids that got him. He had just the one good eye to see through. “Are you sure?” I asked.

They were just silhouettes. The flood lapped at our ankles, and the work was fierce. Renán was gritting his teeth. He had a rock in his hand. “Hold it,” he said.

I felt its weight and passed it to Chochó. We all agreed it was a good rock.

Renán threw it high over the avenue. We watched it disappear, Renán whistling the sinking sound of a bomb falling from the sky. We laughed and didn’t see it land.

Then Siglo XX tore across the avenue, a half dozen of them. They were badass kids. They went straight for our dike and wrecked it. It was a suicide mission. Our old men were beating them, then the gangsters too. Arms flailed in the dim lights, Siglo XX struggling to break free. Then their whole neighborhood came and then ours and we fell into the thick fight of it, that inexplicable rush, that drug. We spilled onto the avenue and fought like men, side by side with our fathers and our brothers against their fathers and their brothers. It was a carnival. My hands moved in closed fists and I was in awe of them. I pounded a kid while Chochó held him down. Renán swung his arms like helicopter blades, grinning the whole time, manic. We took some hits and gave some and swore inside we lived for this. If Lucas could have seen us! The water spilled over our broken dike but we didn’t care. We couldn’t care. We were blind with happiness.

We called it the University because it’s where you went when you finished high school. There were two kinds of prisoners there: terrorists and delinquents. The terrucos answered to clandestine communiqués and strange ideologies. They gathered in the yard each morning and did military stretches. They sang war songs all day and heckled the young guards. The war was more than ten years old. When news came of a successful attack somewhere in the city, they celebrated.

Lucas was more of a delinquent and so behaved in ways that were easier to comprehend. A kid from Siglo XX caught a bad one and someone said they saw Lucas running across the avenue back to our street. That was enough for five years. He hadn’t even killed anyone. They lightened his sentence since he’d been in the army. Before he went in, he made us promise we’d join up when we were old enough. “Best thing I ever did,” he said. We spoke idly of things we’d do when he got out, but our street was empty without him. People called us Diablos Jr. because we were just kids. Without Lucas, the gangsters hardly acknowledged us, except to run packages downtown, but that was only occasionally.

Only family was allowed to visit prisoners, but the first time, about a year before the flood, we went with Renán anyway. To keep him company, I suppose, or to gaze at those high walls. We had no older brothers except for Lucas, no one we respected the way we respected him. We thought of Renán as lucky. He could call Lucas blood.

The University was sunk between two dry burnt hills and surrounded by teeming shanties. The people there lived off smuggling weed and coke inside. Everyone knew this, which is why it was one of the safest parts of the city back then. Chochó and I waited outside and smoked cigarettes, looking up at the dull ashen sky. Every half hour or so a guard told us to move out a little farther. He looked uncomfortable with his gun, a little scared. Chochó saluted him, called him Captain.

We talked and smoked and the sky cleared, giving way to bright sun. The third time the guard shooed us away Chochó lit a smoke and offered it to him. Chochó was like that, friendly in his way, though he didn’t look it. I knew him well enough to know silence made him nervous. “Come on, friend,” Chochó said. “We’re good kids.”

The guard frowned. He checked the cigarette over suspiciously and then took a deep drag. He looked around to make sure no one had seen him.

Chochó cupped a hand over his eyes. “Our boy is in there visiting his older brother,” he said.

The guard nodded. His uniform looked like it could have been his father’s: a drab, faded green, too big in the shoulders. “Terruco?” he asked.

“No,” we said together.

“Those people don’t deserve to live.”

We nodded in agreement. It’s what Lucas had always told us.

“We’ve got them by the balls,” the guard said matter-of-factly.

“Really?” Chochó asked.

“Lucas was in the army,” I offered. “Like you.”

“And he’s in there on some bullshit.”

The guard shrugged. “What can you do?”

We were quiet for a moment, then Chochó coughed. “That gun works?” he asked, pointing at the guard’s sidearm.

“Yeah,” he muttered, blushing. It was clear he’d never used it.

“Tell a joke, Chochó,” I said, so the guard wouldn’t be embarrassed.

Chochó smiled, closed his eyes for a second. “Okay,” he said, “but it’s an old one.” He looked back and forth between us. “Listen: two soldiers downtown. Almost midnight, a few minutes before curfew and they see a man hurrying home. The first soldier checks his watch. ‘He’s got five minutes’, he says. The second soldier raises his gun and shoots the man dead.”

I felt a smile welling up inside me. In the sun, Chochó gleamed like a polished black stone.

“‘Why’d you shoot him?’ the first soldier says. ‘He had five minutes!’ ‘He lives on my street,’ the other one says. ‘He won’t make it in time.’”

Chochó laughed. Me too. The guard smiled. He stubbed out his smoke and thanked us before going back to his post near the visitors’ door. I’m sure he even told us his name, but I don’t remember it.

Renán came out awhile later looking beat. He didn’t seem like he wanted to talk. We wanted to know everything. The waiting had made us impatient.

“He asked if you were still the same pussies as before, but I lied.”

“Thanks.”

“No use making him feel bad. I mean, you were born this way.”

“Whatever.”

“You ask, I tell,” Renán muttered.

“What’s it like inside?” Chochó asked.

Renán lit a cigarette. “Crowded,” he said.

We walked back to the bus in silence. Standing outside did no one any good. It sapped my energy, made me feel helpless. Renán too. “My brother’s bored,” he said finally. “He’s got five more years to go and he’s already fucking bored.”

“Sorry,” I heard myself say.

“He says people start fights just to pass the time.”

“Imagine,” Chochó said.

Everywhere there was water and the muddy remains of the flood. The clouds broke but the water stayed. A pestilent odor hung in the streets. Summer came on heavy. Some people moved their furniture outside to dry, or set their dank carpets on the roof to catch the sun. They were the unlucky ones. The adrenaline of that night was what would stay, long after everything was dry and clean. My knuckles were still sore and Renán had been hit in the eye again, but it didn’t matter.

It was a couple days later when a cruiser pulled up to our street. Two cops got out and asked for the Diablos Jr. There was a mother in the back, a gray-haired woman, staring out the rolled-down window. She pointed at us.

“This punk?” one of the cops asked. He grabbed Renán by the wrist and twisted his arm behind him. I watched my friend crumple. The veins at Renán’s temples looked as if they might pop, and tears gathered in the corners of his eyes. “Is this him? Are you sure?” the cop said.

How could she be sure of anything?

“Any other Diablos?” the other cop yelled.

A crowd had gathered, but no one dared to speak.

Renán whimpered.

The cop fired a shot in the air. “Should I name names?” he yelled.

We rode in the back with the woman who had fingered Renán. The windows were up and the heat was a sickening thing. I was sweating against her, but she pulled away from me as if I were diseased. I folded my bruised knuckles into my lap and put on my nice guy voice. “Madam,” I asked, “what did we do?”

“Shame,” she hissed. She looked straight ahead.

They dropped her off in Siglo XX somewhere. She got out without saying a word. It made me happy to see her furniture was outdoors. One of her sons was seated on the drying couch, his feet up on a rotting wooden table. He snickered when he saw us and blew me a kiss. Fuck you, he mouthed silently.

We left Siglo XX and turned onto the avenue, down the hill toward the city. Our neighborhood faded. One of the cops smacked the grille that separated the front seat from the back. “Don’t fall asleep back there,” he growled. “We’re going to the University.”

I looked up. Renán snapped to attention. “What did we do?” he cried. It was an old tactic. They were trying to scare us.

“Don’t ask me what you did. There’s a dead boy in Siglo XX.”

“What boy?”

“The dead one.”

“You can’t take us to the University,” Renán said. “We’re too young and we didn’t do shit.”

We screeched to a stop. One of the cops barreled out, and then our door was open and Renán was gone. I heard him get hit, but I didn’t look: it was like the sound of wood cracking. They threw him back in, the side of his face swollen and red.

“Now shut the fuck up,” the cop said. We drove.

I remembered the water and the beautiful street battle. The dogs barking and the headlights from passing cars. We’d returned victorious to our flooded streets. No one had died. Even in the harsh disorder of it, I knew no one had died. The cops were lying. We passed neighborhoods that all looked the same: half-built, unpainted houses, every construction a bleached tawny color. The carcasses of buses and cars lined the avenue, the dirt beneath them oily black. Kids played soccer barefoot on the damp side streets, their feet and ankles stained with mud.

When we were younger walking was all we did, along the ridges of the dry mountains, scavenging for things to steal in the streets below. It was safer then, before the war got out of control. Neighborhoods like these stretched on forever, all the way to the city. Once, we climbed the hills above the University and looked over its walls. The delinquents and the terrorists had separate wings. I remember the terrucos standing in formation, singing and chanting at the guards that watched them from the towers. Rifles poked out from the turrets. We picked off the prisoners with our fingers, whispering bang bang, and imagined them slumping to the ground: shot, bleeding, dead. Lucas had done a tour in the jungle. He’d come with us that day. “The terrucos are animals,” he said. He blamed them for everything wrong with the country. We all did. It took a while to get used to killing them, he said, and he was scared at first. By the end he was a pro. He carved his name and rank in their backs. “Just because,” he said.

He had seven thin scars on his forearm, lines he’d cut himself, one for each kill. He hated the terrucos, but he loved the war. He came back home and was respected by everyone: by us, the gangsters, even Siglo XX. He wanted to start a business, he told us, and we would help him. We would own the neighborhood.

We sat in the hills while the terrucos sang in the prison courtyard, something incongruously melodic. “I’d kill them all if I could,” Lucas said.

“Think of all those stripes,” said Renán, holding out his forearm.

Now we turned off the avenue. “I’m thirsty,” said Renán. He looked at me as if for support.

“So be thirsty,” came a voice from up front.

They put us in a room stinking of urine and smoke. There were names and dates on the walls. In places the stone was falling apart. It was hot. The terrucos had scratched slogans into the paint and I could hear them singing. A cop came in. He said that a boy had been hit by a rock. That the rock had broken his skull open and he was dead. “Think about that,” the cop said. “He was a kid. Nine years old. How do you feel now?” He spat on the floor as he left. I swear I’d forgotten about the rock until that moment. The flood and then the fight — who could remember how it started?

“I knew it,” Renán said.

“No one knows nothing,” I told him.

He didn’t have it in him to be a killer. If he was thinking about his brother, he didn’t say it. I was. I wondered how close Lucas was to us in that moment. In the year since that first visit, I’d written him almost a dozen letters. I wrote about the neighborhood, about girls, and most enthusiastically about joining the army. It’s what he might want to hear, I figured, and he would know I hadn’t forgotten. It was easy to talk to people who couldn’t respond. Renán said they wouldn’t give Lucas pen and paper. I knew the truth, though. He’d never learned to write so well.

I put my arm around my friend. “Fuck Siglo XX,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, but he sounded defeated.

“Chochó, tell us a joke,” I said.

“Ain’t nothing funny.”

“Fuck you then,” said Renán, and we were quiet.

I don’t know how long we were there. Every hour or so, a voice would yell that they were bringing new prisoners in, that we should make room. We sat together in one corner, but the iron door never opened. The terrucos were chanting in the prison yard. Occasionally, a loudspeaker announcement would make threats, but these were ignored. The air was hot and dank and hard to breathe. We dozed against the dirty wall. Then a man in a suit came in, carrying a stool and a clipboard. He placed the stool in the center of the cell and sat with his hands on his thighs, leaning forward, looking as if he might fall. His black hair was shiny and slick. He introduced himself as Humboldt and asked for our real names. He scanned the papers on his clipboard and coughed loudly into his closed fist. “There are family members outside, you know,” he said finally. “Family members of a young man who is dead. They’re begging me to let you go so they can kill you themselves. What do you think about that?”

“Let them try,” said Chochó.

“They’ll tear you limb from limb, I promise you this. You want to go out there?”

“We’re not scared,” Renán said. “We have families too.”

He looked at his notes. “Not so far away, eh?”

“My brother,” Renán said, “was in the army.”

“That’s nice,” said Humboldt, smiling. “How did he end up here?”

“He’s innocent.”

“Incredible. How many kills did he have?”

“Seven,” said Renán.

“How many do you have?”

We stared at him, silent.

“Pathetic,” Humboldt said. “I’ll tell you. You have one between the three of you, that is, until I figure out who threw the rock that killed an innocent nine-year-old. Then I’m going to string you up. You want to know what he looked like? You want to know his name?”

We didn’t want to know. Our inquisitor didn’t blink.

I had the sickest, emptiest feeling in my stomach. I strained to feel innocent. I imagined a boy sprawled out, down as if struck by lightning, never having seen it or expected it or imagined it: the flood waters of the lagoon running over him, dead, dead, dead.

“You think you’re neighborhood war heroes, don’t you?”

“We didn’t kill anyone,” I said.

“What happened to your knuckles?”

I hid them between my legs. “I didn’t kill anyone,” I said.

Humboldt softened into something like pity. “Do you know that? Who threw the rock?”

“There was a fight,” Chochó said.

“They came at us,” said Renán.

“I know about the fight, and I know you throw rocks like cowards.”

“That didn’t happen,” Renán said.

“You couldn’t muster the strength to do it with your hands, like a man would.” Humboldt coughed and looked up. “Just like your brother over there. The whore of Pavilion C.”

Was he talking about Lucas?

“He’s a veteran? What’s his name? Your brother? Oh, you didn’t know? No wonder the war goes so well, with faggots carrying guns.”

Renán tried to lunge at Humboldt, but we held him back. Lucas was a killer. He was brave and made of metal.

Humboldt watched impassively from his stool. “Young man,” he said to Renán, “I’ll explain something to you. They put common criminals in uniform and call them soldiers, but it never works out. They’re only cut out for their little neighborhood scuffles. Men like me win wars.”

“Don’t listen to him, Renán. He’s a suit,” Chochó said. “A tool.”

Renán glared.

Humboldt smiled coldly at Chochó. “I like you, fat boy. But you don’t know dick.”

Then he left. “I’m going home to my family,” Humboldt said before the iron door shut behind him. “If you ever want to do the same, you should start talking.”

We were there a night and another day while our families came up with the bribes. I dreamed we were killers, assassins by chaos, murderers without design. Our city was built for dying. The terrucos Lucas fought in the jungle were descending on us. They were in the prison with us, singing their angry songs. We were surrounded. They had their own neighborhoods, places where the cops wouldn’t go without the army, and beyond that, places the army wouldn’t go at all. Bombs exploded in shopping centers, dynamite attacks assaulted the power grid. Terrucos robbed banks and kidnapped judges. Back then it was possible to imagine the war would never end.

Sometime in the middle of the night, Renán woke us up. He was sweating and held a piece of the crumbling wall in his hand.

“Look,” he was saying. He ran the sharp edge of it against his forearm, the skin rising in red lines. “I’m going to tell them.”

“Go to sleep,” Chochó said.

There was no talking to Renán. “They can put me in with Lucas,” he whispered. “They can all go to hell.”

I wanted to say something, to offer my friend some part of me, but I didn’t. My eyes shut on their own. I slept because I had to. The damp floor felt almost warm, and then it was morning.

Humboldt came back in to tell us about ourselves: how we were scum and all the slow and painful ways we deserved to die. He was angry and red-faced. “The human rights people expect me to defend this country with one hand tied behind my back!” he yelled. He said we’d be back when we were older, that he’d be there. Renán hadn’t slept. He watched Humboldt, and I knew he was waiting for him to mention Lucas. And I knew if he did, Renán would kill him. Or try to.

But Humboldt seemed to have forgotten Lucas altogether. Somehow, this was even worse. Renán twisted on his haunches. Humboldt rambled on. He spat on the floor and called us names. Then he let us go.

Outside it was sunny, the sky a metallic blue. The earth had baked once again to dust. Our people were waiting for us, our mothers, our fathers, our brothers and sisters. They looked ill. They thought they’d never see us again. They smothered us with kisses and hugs and we pretended we’d never been afraid. And enough time passed for us to forget we had been. Renán took a few weeks off and then went back to see his brother like he had every Sunday for a year. I wrote Lucas a letter and said I was sorry we hadn’t seen him, having been so close. I asked him if he knew Humboldt and which Pavilion he was in. Only four years left, I wrote hopefully, but I scratched that out before I sent it.

I didn’t get a letter back.

The rumor around the neighborhood was that there’d been no dead boy that night. People said our rock had struck and killed a dog — a pure breed. It made sense. Two of our neighborhood dogs were poisoned, and then everything was normal again.

Four months passed and the riot started on a Thursday afternoon, on the terrorist side. It was the beginning of the end of the war. Chairs and tables from the cafeteria were set ablaze in the yard. The terrucos smoked the guards out of the watchtowers and took some administrators hostage. Weapons had been smuggled in. There was a shootout and black smoke and singing. The terrucos were resigned to die. Families gathered outside the University, praying it all ended well. We were there too, learning how to ask God for things we knew we didn’t deserve. The terrucos burned everything they could and we imagined shooting them. They demanded food and water. The delinquents were starving too, the killers and the thieves and Lucas. They joined the rioting and there were more fires and the guards were killed one by one, their bodies tossed from the towers over the walls of the prison. The authorities surrounded the place. The city gathered on the hills to watch, the smoke twisting black knots in the sky. The terrucos hung the flag upside down and wore bandanas over their faces. Whenever anyone moved to retrieve a body, a terruco sniped them from the towers. It was on every television, on every radio and newspaper, and we saw it. We sat in the hills. Renán wore his brother’s medals pinned to his threadbare T-shirt. His mother and father held pictures of Lucas in uniform. They murmured prayers with hands clasped. Poor son of mine, his mother wailed: Was he hungry? Was he fighting? Was he afraid? We waited. We were there when someone, at the very highest level of government, decided that none of it was worth anything. Not the lives of the hostages, not the lives of the terrucos or the rioting thieves, or any of it. The president came on the television to talk about his heavy heart, about the most difficult decision he’d ever had to make. All the hostages were young, he said, and would die for their country. If there were innocents, the president said, it was too late for them now. The moment called for action. There would be no future. And this is how it ended. This is how Lucas died: the helicopters buzzed overhead and the tanks pulled into position. They weren’t going to take the University back. They were going to set it on fire. They began the cataclysm. Renán didn’t turn away. The walls crumbled to ash and the tanks fired cannon shots. There was singing. The bombs fell and we felt the dry mountains shake.