“You like Rafael. He’s my friend.” Still pressing his tough little hands to my face, Miguel glanced to either side, then leaned closer in. “You live here long enough now, you see strange things. Okay? Not like your old home. You see another strange thing now, maybe. Monjito? I trust you. You never show us to the policía, right? I trust you.”
I gripped his wrists, thin as broomsticks. “I’d never turn you in. Never worry about that.”
He released my face and dropped to all fours, scurrying into the mouth of one of the hovels they’d tacked together in half an hour’s time, if that. I followed, struck by the sudden reek of sweat and blood inside the six-foot crawlspace. Miguel pushed aside a scrap of burlap coffee bag used for a curtain and we crowded into a miserable little chamber in which one couldn’t even stand up, whose only decor was pictures I’d taken of the kids, over time. It was lit by half a dozen candles of various colors, and I tried not to think what would happen if one of them tipped against a wall, unnoticed.
“Rafael,” he said, pointing.
He was a curly-haired boy near Miguel’s age, maybe a year or two older. It’s so hard to tell sometimes. Rafael lay barechested and trembling along one rough-hewn wall, a pallet of rags for his mattress. He was covered to the waist by a thin blanket; the bloodstains atop the grime looked fresh.
Rafael opened his eyes, looked at me without emotion, with neither fear nor relief. I was simply there. He did not shut them until Miguel squatted closer and stroked the boy’s shoulder.
I quit praying three years ago, but for this I resurrected the act. I slowly drew down the blanket until I saw that his naked hip bore the swollen red pucker of a bullet wound. It was obvious that Rafael had shat himself, but not here. It was only a few smears.
Although he would have to be kept warm, I couldn’t leave that filthy blanket on him. Maybe Miguel could run back to my place for a clean one. I tugged the worn cloth off him, to toss it aside —
And I stared at what lay beneath the rest. Beyond acceptance, beyond rejection. What I saw? It simply was.
The boy’s feet and lower legs were not human, but some kind of canine or lupine form, bristling with dark fur and matted with his blood. As Rafael twitched, a claw extending crookedly from between a pair of toe-pads scratched incessantly at the wood. They bent strangely, these haunches, the underlying bone structure consistent with animal origins. The feral hide and muscle melded gradually into his skinny thighs.
“He looks some more normal than he did when I leave for you,” said Miguel. “Soon, he looks like same Rafael again, no different. You help him, okay?”
“He’s been shot,” I murmured. “He needs a doctor, he needs to go to a clinic.”
“No doctor, no clinic. They don’t fix him so good, maybe, they see him like this.” Miguel was very firm. “The bullet, out already. Don’t worry, Monjito. I did a good job.” He pointed at a bloody lump of misshapen lead and twiddled his thin fingers like pincers. He’d dug it out with his fingers.
I worked, trying not to think what I was working on, because it wasn’t the time for questions. All I could try was to keep uppermost in my mind that there was a young boy who’d been shot, and whatever else he may have been didn’t matter. I irrigated and cleaned out the wound, and while swelling had cut off most of the bleeding, I still had to attempt a crude job of stitching closed the hole. I packed it over with a thick bandage, fed him a dose of antibiotics, then resigned myself to the fact that it was the most I knew how to do.
After which I leaned trembling against the hovel’s frail wooden wall. Rafael had dropped into fitful slumber, while Miguel sat on his haunches and, in the warm glow of the candles, watched us with a strangely affectionate pride.
“You did a good job, I knew you would,” he said, smiling, and he must have seen all the questions in my eyes. It was one of the most awful moments of my life, the way he regarded me with not just understanding … but with pity.
Miguel squirmed slowly across the cramped room, lifted aside the clean blanket he’d come back with while I doctored. Rafael’s strange legs looked even more like a normal boy’s than they had earlier, mended by some creeping transformation. Miguel traced a slow finger through the thinning patches of fur.
“Happens now, to some of us,” he said dreamily, with neither sadness nor joy. “Few months, must be, maybe, that’s all. Was a long time before we could do it any time we want. I can do it now for you, but I think you don’t so much want to see me … so, no, right?”
I almost laughed, softly. “No. Not … not now.” I thought back to what I’d seen a few nights before in my alley, how it had seemed so out of place, and yet so right. It may even have been Miguel himself, thinking to come bring me a bloody gift the way a housecat will deliver a torn mouse. “Miguel? Do you … the rest of you … do you kill?”
“Some try killing us,” he said solemnly. “Some pay, and some, they look for us. Not wrong, fighting back, okay?”
“No,” I whispered. “You have to protect yourself. And the ones you love.” I closed my eyes against the threat of tears summoned by my failures. And I knew where these candles had come from, which shopkeeper no longer had need of them, had no need of anything, not even the policías he reportedly paid to rid himself of pests. Oh, I believed rumor. Pedro’s word was gospel.
From beyond the makeshift walls came the soft sounds of movement, of careful feet shifting with more stealth than tender years should be forced to acquire. I heard muttering throats and clicking teeth, and breath in hot feral sighs. For a moment I wondered if they’d come to silence me, a witness to their camp.
Miguel sat at rapt attention, head tilting up as he sharply sniffed the air, a movement so unchildlike it was like seeing the instinctive animal within ripple beneath his brown skin.
“They want in,” he said. “For Rafael they feel sad.”
I shrank against the wall as Miguel drew the burlap curtain aside. The smelly den could accommodate no more than two at a time, but they were patient, waiting their turn. I just watched them, saying nothing as ragged boys and girls and slinking beasts came in to nuzzle the sleeping Rafael. Among those I didn’t already know, their interest in me was minimal, some looking over me with flat eyes, some smiling shyly, others seemingly unaware of my presence. They curled next to Rafael, to warm him with their body heat. They tugged the bandages away to lick his wound. Rafael’s ribs rose and fell with a smooth new rhythm. Two by two they came, as if they all could give of themselves to restore the life that had almost been taken from him, taken because he was … what? A scavenger?
They must have numbered close to thirty.
After they left, drawing back to their own junkyard dens, and even Miguel fell prey to exhaustion, I cradled the wounded boy in my arms. In his adolescent body I tried to feel the bones a younger child might have grown into, a son I’d not held for three years, a son who, for me, would forever remain five. I wondered if he had a sister somewhere, and if she still loved him, or if she too lay buried somewhere, like that five-year-old’s big sister, nothing but unfulfilled potentials and precious memories.
They kill children here. But I suspect it’s the same all over.
I held Rafael until late the next morning, long after I had looked at his legs and saw that he was only a kid again, just a bruised and wounded kid who needed so many things, but of those things, had only time.
*
My hair is gray, but sometimes I want to be older still, very very old, so old that nothing new can surprise me, because I’ll recognize that it really isn’t new at all. If I live that long, I will welcome it, but until then I’ll have to content myself with friends like Pedro Javier.