Those early days are all broken memories. After Osmin saved me I had thought he would keep me with him, like a pet. Instead he left me by the side of the road, vomiting blood. I remember rolling onto my back, coughing and gurgling, the trees above stabbing the sky. Later, I remember going to church and hearing the names of the dead, fourteen names, including the four names I was most afraid to hear. Then my animal days began. I remember hunger, and stealing food in Cunaviche. I remember being beaten and fighting back like a wild dog. I remember the twins, Rafael and Norbey, who ruled the wild boys who lived on the street. Then I remember the army soldiers coming to Cunaviche, after which the paras moved back to the other side of the river and we didn’t see guerrilla anymore. It was months before I saw Osmin again, walking through the town with a fat young girl on his arm. When he left Cunaviche, I followed him and he let me.
“I remember you,” he said.
He told me he could give me the revenge I wanted, and also good pay, but I would have to prove myself. I had spoken to him of neither revenge nor pay, but I nodded as if he had offered me everything I could desire. Then he took me on the back of his moto to a bar by the river. Outside, the honest faces were playing cinco huecos, laughing and smiling with their other friends, rifles slung across their bags. One of the honest faces—Iván, I would later learn—took the ball and threw it at the head of another, who ducked, and the ball went into the river and floated away. They laughed, and Iván took his rifle up to his shoulder. “Think I can hit it?” he said, aiming at the ball.
I didn’t want to go closer, but Osmin’s face became stern, and the same instinct that brought food to my mouth urged me forward. I knew showing fear would be dangerous. And Osmin laughed and said, “You remember Iván and Nicolás?”
He told them that I wanted to prove I was tough enough to join, and then asked me, “Which one? Iván? Or Nicolás?”
Iván had pimples across his face, and I wondered if I could pop them with my fists. Nicolás’s beard was coming in and it made him look tougher. “Iván,” I said. When he was in the dust, I looked down and saw blood on my knuckles. There was pain in the air around us. Some of it belonged to me, some of it belonged to him. I reached to Iván, and offered him my hand, and he took it, and stood up, and then Osmin offered me the gun.
“I’ll give you what you want,” he said. And he did.
• • •
We never saw the guerrilla. Once, we shot at trees, and trees shot at us. At the time I wondered about tall, thin Alfredo and short, ugly Matías, and the guerrilleros who took them. Was Alfredo still always sick? Was Matías still kind? Was he still short? Did they take part in the massacre? It didn’t matter, I thought. They were nothing to me.
Mostly we worked in the towns along the river, keeping order and delivering justice. We’d set up roadblocks to control who was coming in and out. When people tried to steal from the paisas, we would chase them off their land. Make sure their drug laboratories were safe and their shipments went through. If a town had a problem with delinquents, we would come and help with a cleansing. One time a woman came to us with bandages on her ears. Thieves had torn her earrings right off, skin attached, and when the police caught the thieves they threatened her if she made a formal denunciation. We went to the house of the mother of one of the thieves, waited until her son arrived, and Iván shot him, leaving a big red spot on his chest as he gasped out his life. The police waved to us as we left.
Another time a mayor told us about a butcher in his town who had been beating his wife. He was an older man, gray haired, older than my father, with a big red nose, big thighs, and a skinny chest, ugly like an insect is ugly. We went to his shop and held his arms and Osmin punched him five times in the face. Then we threw him to the floor and kicked him.
Osmin told us, “If a man has to beat his wife, it is because he is so weak that he can’t make her fear him.”
Osmin wasn’t married, but he was twenty-two years old and had almost that number of girlfriends, so I thought he must know something about women. As we were leaving, the man’s wife came down to tend to her husband’s wounds. She was short and fat and ugly, like her husband, and I felt like she should thank us somehow. I imagined making love to her. But she tended to her husband’s wounds without looking at us. We walked away.
• • •
I met Jefferson Paúl López Quesada soon after. He arrived with his men, paracos who had trained at Acuarela, who handled weapons with care, moved in formation, and wore crisp uniforms that contrasted sharply with our ratty T-shirts and Osmin’s bright-colored shorts. They came in pickup trucks, not on motos, and we all knew in advance to speak respectfully and carefully. Jefferson, Osmin told us, ran all the towns around La Vigia, the big town to the south. He gave orders to all the little gangs like ours, and managed all the money from the vaccine that people paid us to keep them safe.
Even before we saw him in person, I knew who he was. Seeing him in person, surrounded by his stone-faced paracos, was like standing before the burning bush.
Jefferson was short, blocky, and
