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.