Quick Spanish. Lisette only caught a word here and there. A fog. Pain. A sneaker lying two feet from her face. That’s mine. Agudelo’s voice. And another voice. A man’s voice, a pleasant voice, a jazz singer’s voice, deep and rough. Breathing hurt. She breathed. Sound faded. She slowed her breathing. Took it gentle. Shallow. So shallow she hardly got any air at all. Agudelo’s voice saying . . . something. The deep voice responding. “She works for the Sia.” Lisette wanted to laugh, it was funny, wasn’t it? Sia was a singer. And waves filled her head and pushed the sounds away, converted the sounds into incomprehensible bits of accent and intonation hovering somewhere beyond understanding. She breathed out, and in. She heard “the Sia” once again, and again she wanted to laugh. Sia wasn’t a singer. Sia was how Colombians said “CIA.” And it was funny, wasn’t it? And then sounds were directed at her, the sounds were liquid, a stream of Spanish punctuated by three syllables, “Liz-EH-tee.” Her name. She focused, but the words had ended, there was only the sound of the engine of the van, and the van slowly turning, going into reverse, then forward, turning slowly until it was heading back the way they came, back to La Vigia, and up above Lisette in the window of the van were the faces of the students, terrified, longing, and then blue sky and the sound of the van leaving her behind.
5
The previous winter Mason’s father took his eldest, Inez, and taught her how to fell a tree. He didn’t ask if he could, just left with Inez and an ax, a chain saw, and a peavey. When she came back, Inez showed Mason her hands, where the slow repetition of wooden handle rubbing against skin had raised blisters, and then ripped those blisters off. And as Mason treated her, Inez spoke excitedly of how to recognize the dangerous snags high in branches. How to tell whether a log should be cut from the bottom or top, how to handle a tree that hangs up on the way down, how to work your way around a large piece of wood by attacking the outer parts before sinking your blade into the core. How to pile a face cord four feet high and eight feet long with each end perpendicular to the ground so you don’t need end posts.
“You need to take care of yourself, Pops,” he’d told his father, who didn’t even bother to reply, to say he wasn’t dead yet, or some other cliché. He knew he should feel disapproval—his aging father had risked his health doing hard manual labor, risked his daughter’s safety doing a dangerous and unnecessary chore. But as his daughter babbled excitedly, he mostly felt jealous.
It snowed the next week, barely enough to dust the ground, but still enough to qualify as a state of emergency in Florida’s Panhandle. All the schools were closed, and there were forty-three road accidents in their county alone by 11:00 a.m. Natalia and Mason’s father took the kids mud-and-slush sledding, and instead of resting while they were gone, Mason put on work gloves and earmuffs and went out to the tree-line at the back edge of his property, where Inez’s face cord was sitting under a green tarp, waiting for the spring and summer to dry it out and make it ideal firewood, the kind of thing that saves you a damn bit of money getting through winters in Pennsylvania but is two hairs shy of useless in northern Florida.
Above him was a midsize black locust. He circled the tree, eyed the branches. There’s a way of seeing when you’re felling a tree that’s different than just sitting out in nature admiring the view. You judge the lean of the bole, the tangles in the upper branches, the side most weighted with limbs. The looking feels not so different from the doing, when you set the choke, yank the starter rope, tap the throttle trigger, hear the scream of the saw, and as you sink it into the meat of the tree, turn the screaming saw to a satisfied purr. Yellow heartwood spat out from the whirring teeth. Mason circled the bole, cut above the gap to make a hinge. The tree, severed from the earth, began to sway. He shut down the saw, rushed from the sounds now snapping through the air, felt the displacement of air, and then, with a crash, the tree hitting earth.
The cruel thing about the path Mason had chosen was that he no longer got to do the real work of his job, the work of the hands and the body. He sat in meetings. He wrote white papers. He discussed the economics of the drug trade, the adaptations of guerrilla units to high value targeting, the differing interpretations of human and signals intelligence. He watched the slow, amorphous cultural changes
