ALSO BY PHIL KLAY
Redeployment
PENGUIN PRESS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
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Copyright © 2020 by Phil Klay
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Klay, Phil, author.
Title: Missionaries / Phil Klay.
Description: New York : Penguin Press, 2020.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020016830 (print) | LCCN 2020016831 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984880659 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781984880666 (ebook)
Subjects: GSAFD: War stories.
Classification: LCC PS3611.L4423 M57 2020 (print) | LCC PS3611.L4423 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016830
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016831
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover design and illustration by Alex Merto
pid_prh_5.6.0_c0_r0
For Jessica, my love,
And for our children,
Adrian Felipe and Marcos Andres
CONTENTS
Cover
Also by Phil Klay
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Part I
Chapter 1: Abel 1986–1999
Chapter 2: Lisette 2015
Chapter 3: Abel 1999
Chapter 4: Lisette 2015
Chapter 5: Abel 1999–2001
Chapter 6: Lisette 2015
Chapter 7: Abel 2001–2002
Chapter 8: Lisette 2015
Part II
Chapter 1: Mason 2004–2005
Chapter 2: Juan Pablo 2016
Chapter 3: Mason 2005
Chapter 4: Juan Pablo 2015–2016
Chapter 5: Mason 2006
Chapter 6: Juan Pablo 2015–2016
Chapter 7: Mason 2007
Chapter 8: Juan Pablo 1987–2005
Part III
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Part IV
Acknowledgments
About the Author
I
report us fairly,
how we slaughter
for the common good
—Seamus Heaney, “Kinship”
1
ABEL 1986–1999
My town sat on top of a small hill by the side of a river whose banks held only sand. At noon you had to walk quickly so as not to burn your feet, but when it rained the river would overflow and turn our central street to mud. All us children would go out, slipping and pushing each other, playing in the mud before the sun baked it hard and the wind carried it away as dust.
To talk about this part of my life is to talk about another person, like a person in a story, a boy with a father and mother and three sisters, one pretty, one smart, and one mean. A grandfather who drank too much and beat everyone at dominos. A teacher who thought that boy had talent. A priest who thought he was wicked. Friends and classmates and enemies and girls he watched with increasing wonder, like Jimena, who had thick curly hair and fair skin and who got pregnant with the baby of one of the local guerrilleros. Most people think that a person is whatever you see before you, walking around in bone and meat and blood, but that is an idiocy. Bone and meat and blood just exists, but to exist is not to live, and bone and meat and blood alone is not a person. A person is what happens when there is a family, and a town, a place where you are known. Where every person who knows you holds a small, invisible mirror, and in each mirror, held by family and friends and enemies, is a different reflection. In one mirror, the sweet fat boy I was to my mother. In another, the little imp I was to my father. In another, the irritating brat I was to Gustavo. A person is what happens when you gather all these reflections around a body. So what happens when one by one the people holding those mirrors are taken from you? It’s simple. The person dies. And the bone and meat and blood goes on, walking the earth as if the person still existed, when God and the angels know he doesn’t.
So let’s not talk about this boy as if he and I are the same person and not two strangers, one who walked in this body before the burning, and one who did after. Let’s talk about this boy, whose memories and face I share, as the dead child he is. We can call him Abelito.
Abelito was a fat, well-loved child. Every day he would walk to school in another town, a school run by men from America who taught math and reading but also about the personal Jesus and how a group of priests called Jesuits had stolen the Bible and changed the words to make men follow the devil. The Lord would overcome and save us if we had faith, they said, and faith was a moment when the Heavens shined down and we knew we were saved. The mean sister, Mona, said that she had been saved and that it felt very, very good, but that Abelito hadn’t had the feeling because he was going to hell. Two weeks later Mother took him two towns down to the church in Cunaviche to get confessed, and when Abelito told Father Eustacio about Mona’s salvation, the old priest had scowled and said it was stupidity, that only a cruel God would condemn and save in such a foolish way, and that God was not cruel, but was, in fact, a terrible and frightening love. And he took that little boy out of the confessional to see the skin-and-bones Holy Christ above the altar, a wooden Holy Christ in agony, with muscles straining and a bloody wound in the side like a mouth come to devour. The statue gave Abelito nightmares, but Father Eustacio said to look on the suffering and know the love of God, to do such a thing to His child. God is love, Father Eustacio said, and He does not hand out salvation to be worn like a crown. And Abelito said, My sister,
