Sometimes Jefferson would make me and a few other paracos sleep in one of his fincas, a beautiful place on the river where the sound of the water both calmed me and stirred memories that risked flooding my emptiness with sorrow. We’d watch movies, especially American action movies like Marked for Death or T2 or Lethal Weapon. There were always women around Jefferson, but in the morning he wouldn’t let them cook, and he’d make blood sausage and eggs with hogao and feed it to us and demand I tell him how good it was. He’d mete out discipline in the mornings, screaming at those who’d failed him, announcing how he’d dock their pay. Several times he had men beaten. Once he tied a man to a chair and then had his right arm flayed, the skin sliced down the inside of the arm and then peeled down to the wrists to reveal muscle and bone. Each day we would eat our breakfast, unsure of who had displeased him, and what they must suffer. Nervous times, but I was always glad to be there. Jefferson was no great cook, but with him the flavors were sharper, and life felt important.
Sometimes after breakfast he’d take me aside, his strange, uniformed paraco who handled business and politics but not war, and he’d talk to me or have me sit in his house while he conducted business. He was a strange man, wise, filled with advice and knowledge about the outside world. He read newspapers and watched television news and listened to news radio, and was friendly with some journalists, and would answer any time they called, eager to show up, to be photographed, and heard. “You have to be more than a power, you have to be a famous face,” he told me. “There is power in fame.” I learned to please him by tying each project I was doing to some spectacle, some festival. Journalists will not often show up to the opening of a soccer field, but if you open housing for the poor on Good Friday, it becomes, as one reporter who was in our pay told me, “a story that writes itself.” Jefferson began smiling when he saw me, and he started calling me “my boy.” And even the other paras, Jefferson’s hard, well-trained men, they began to speak to me with respect.
In this way, I found a place in the world. From the animal life of Cunaviche to the family of Osmin’s front was the first great step. A life with purpose, and a leader to obey. With Jefferson, though, I became a person on my own. People in the towns came to know me as more than just a paraco. Workmen, ranchers, shopkeepers, and mayors, they greeted me when they saw me. Their smiles were unforced, unafraid. They knew my talents. My eye for details.
One day I went into a small town on the north edge of our area called Rioclaro with a group led by a former soldier named Javier. He had a reputation for cruelty, and as we entered I could see the life of the town dying around us. First, the movements of the adults stilled or turned mechanical, like bad actors on a stage. Next, the children stopped their play and stared at us curiously before catching the mood and freezing in place. All of us gripped our weapons, peered into windows and dark alleys. I wondered what Javier had done here, and whether there was any point in what I did, any way to win the people’s love. And then I saw the old rancher with the white mustache sitting at a little table, eyes fixed on a dominoes game. He looked up, a furtive look, and saw me. Recognition. He grinned, stood, and waved. I walked over to him and clasped his hand. In that moment, we were the only two living souls in Rioclaro. Oh, I thought, surprised. I matter.
6
LISETTE 2015
In theory, home was Pennsylvania. And in theory, you’re obliged to go home, to pay obeisance to the household gods. To lie to your mother not in word but in deed, because going home is like saying that this place, Fourteen Burnham Street, still has a hold on you, that your roots there haven’t withered, that maybe you would go back even if she didn’t demand the visits. My mother has a sense of place, a sense of the value of land, of belonging, of community. It’s one of the things that helped me develop a feel for Afghans and for American soldiers, who have their own version of tribalism. Being fixed in a community is one way of living, of knowing exactly who you are, why you are, what you are doing. Which is why betraying your family and your hometown by leaving feels like flying.
So any trip home means taking care that you don’t get your wings clipped, don’t let your mother or your sister or your crazy Uncle Carey love you back down to earth. Which is why the first thing I always do when I’m back home is run. Run until I’m purified. A long, long early morning run through western Pennsylvania. Miles and miles and miles. The cold early morning air, me with nothing but running shorts and a thin shirt against the cold, knowing I’ll be freezing for the first half mile or so until the exercise warms my body as fast as the wind steals the heat away. It’s my ritual of return, down the hills of Cambria County, down past the businesses and restaurants on Old Scalp Road, down past the camp my mom sent me to in the summers, where I caught my first fish, kissed my first boy, and, more importantly, met Rhonda, the camp counselor who wanted to be a reporter and introduced a thirteen-year-old me to Ernie Pyle and Martha Gellhorn and George Orwell. Rhonda has three kids now and
