of sight in both directions; a closed gate on which hung a sign-“Simon Poultry Farms”; a gatehouse with a motorcycle parked inside; and a man standing in the road with an automatic weapon over his shoulder and a shotgun in his hands. He approached the truck.
The man spoke in Spanish. “Late,” he said.
“You drive in this piss,” the driver told him.
“Try standing in it all fucking night,” answered the man with the guns. He opened the gate, backed into the shadows. The truck rolled through.
The truck mounted a long, low rise, turned right off the main road, came down in a clearing. In the changing angles of the headlights, Eddie picked out an old two-story farmhouse, a barn, outbuildings. The truck passed the barn, turned toward the house, slowed. The door of the house opened, framing a short, round man in a yellow rectangle of light. Eddie hopped off the truck, slipped on wet grass, came up running. A fruit tree, gnarled and bare, grew between the house and the barn. Eddie crouched behind it.
The short, round man unfurled an umbrella and walked to the truck. Julio and the driver got out. The driver was a big man, perhaps six and a half feet tall. The short, round man went as close to him as the umbrella would allow.
“You’re late,” he said. He spoke Spanish, but Eddie recognized his voice: Senor Paz.
“It’s the weather.”
“And you’ve been drinking.”
“Just one beer on the way.”
Paz reached up from under the umbrella and slapped the driver’s face with the back of his hand, the way he’d slapped Eddie.
“Sorry,” said the driver.
Paz wasn’t listening. He had moved in front of Julio. “You too,” he said. “I can smell it.”
“Not me.”
Paz spoke to the driver. “Hit him.”
The driver threw a punch at the ponytailed man’s head, knocking him down.
Paz said, “Now get busy,” walked back into the house, leaving the door open.
The driver helped Julio to his feet. “Did it have to be that hard?” asked Julio.
“Just doing my job,” the driver replied.
The driver went around to the back of the truck, climbed up, began hoisting off the rear slatted sections and stacking them to the side. Julio went into the house, returned with an empty cardboard box. The driver opened one of the cages, tossed the chicken and the newspaper flooring onto the ground, picked up the cage and dumped it out into the cardboard box. The chicken skittered across the grass and into the barn.
The driver opened another cage and went through the same routine, tossing out the chicken and the newspaper, dumping what was left into the cardboard box. He kept doing that until Julio said, “Enough,” and carried the box into the house. He came back with an empty one, and they did it all again.
And twice more. The last time the driver followed Julio into the house and closed the door. Eddie came out of the shadows.
He made a wide circle around the house, approached it from the back. Lights shone through the windows on both floors. Eddie dropped to the wet ground and crawled to the nearest one, raised his head above the sill.
He looked into a big kitchen, saw a cozy rural scene. Julio and the driver sat in front of a stone fireplace, roasting marsh-mallows over a snapping four- or five-log fire. A glossy German shepherd lay beside them, staring into the flames. At one end of the long table in the center of the room sat Paz, reading a newspaper and eating vanilla ice cream; pure white against his olive skin, his red tongue. Three old women in kerchiefs and shawls sat along the far side of the table, facing Eddie, chatting to themselves.
While they talked, the old women busied themselves with the cardboard boxes Julio had brought in. The first two emptied them, spilling paper money across the table. Then they sorted it into piles by denomination, banded the bills in stacks, dropped the stacks into a canvas bag. The third woman made entries on a laptop and called to Julio when the bag was full. He got up from the fire and added the bags to a mound of others near the door. The women filled three canvas bags while Eddie watched; their knobby hands never stopped, working together like giant inhabitants of an insect colony.
Suddenly, the dog’s ears rose. Eddie sank down, listened, heard nothing. He crept along to the next window, looked in.
A bedroom. The only light came from a TV on a corner desk. On the screen a hideous man with four-inch nails was tiptoeing toward a car parked in a lovers’ lane. The only viewer was a dark-haired boy of about ten or eleven lying on the bed, but he wasn’t paying much attention to the show. He was more interested in the gun in his hand.
It might have been a toy, but to Eddie it looked just like the nine-millimeters worn by the C.O.s in the towers. The boy spun it around on his index finger like a quick-draw artist, jabbed it at the man with four-inch nails, at a teddy bear against the wall, at the window where Eddie watched.
Eddie dropped to the ground. He was quick, surely too quick for the boy to have seen him. But the next moment came an explosion, and the window blew out over Eddie’s head. He scrambled away, dove among the nearest trees.
Voices rose from the house. Shadows made wild gestures in the blue light of the boy’s window. Then Paz poked his head out, peered around. Rain fell steadily and the night was quiet, except for the beating of Eddie’s heart against the earth.
“It’s just his imagination,” said Paz in Spanish, holding his ice-cream spoon. “All that TV.”
“That’s not the point,” said one of the old women in the room behind him. “He shouldn’t be playing with guns.”
Then came the high voice of the boy. “It’s mine,” he said. “And I saw someone out there, whether you believe me or not.”
“What kind of someone?” asked Paz, turning back to the room.
“All white. Like a ghost.”
Paz sighed. “Bedtime,” he said. He glanced outside again, picked a shard of glass out of the frame, withdrew. “Back to work,” Eddie heard him say. “And one of you get this fixed.”
The shadows moved out of the blue light. Eddie stayed still. The boy’s head appeared in the window. Eddie recognized him from the photograph on the wall of El Rojo’s cell. Simon Cruz, known as “Gaucho”-a fine boy and a dead shot, according to his proud papa.
Gaucho aimed his gun at the forest and said, “Pow, pow.”
Julio taped a piece of cardboard over the window. The farmhouse grew quiet, the lights went out. Rain began again, just a drizzle at first, then harder. It dripped down off the leafless branches onto Eddie. He circled the house, crawled under the truck and waited, listening to the rain.
It was still dark when he heard the door of the farmhouse open. Eddie rolled over, saw the glare of a flashlight, its beam zigzagging over the ground on an unsteady path toward the truck. For a moment it rested on Julio, carrying canvas bags over his shoulder.
“When is this rain going to stop?” he said in Spanish.
“All you do is complain,” answered the other man; Eddie recognized the voice of the driver.
“I hate this country.”
“So go home.”
Julio snorted.
The driver pointed his light at the truck. Eddie stayed still. With a grunt, Julio slung the canvas bags over the side, into the cargo space.
“I mean it,” he said. “What’s so good about this country?”
“The women,” replied the driver. They started back toward the house.
“The women? Are you joking?”
“They fuck like crazy.”
“So?” said Julio. “They hate men. At least our women like men. The women here piss me off. Sometimes I feel like just taking one, you know? One of those cool ones.”
