We Eat Our Own (6 page)

ANDRES, EL PUÑO

Bogotá

T
here were four of them on the second floor of the house, and between them, they had twelve names.

Outside the walls, in the world beyond, he was Andres: seventeen and clean-shirted. It was the name his mother called him. It was the name that would be printed on the arrest record, if they found out—when they found out—where he went each day when he left his mother's house.

In the Patient's room, though, he was El Puño: a voice through the floorboards, the smell of garlic and ammunition and metal. The Patient had another name, too, and a life and a family and a post as the cultural attaché from Venezuela, but not while he was there—in the room they had built for him, under the bed, and the trapdoor, and the half meter of perfect darkness.

• • •

On nights when the Patient was brave, he asked El Puño for Bach. He stood as tall as the room allowed him to and raised his arm up over his head, knocked on the underside of the trapdoor as lightly as he could, just like they showed him. Three
times and a lull. His voice was a hesitant falsetto: Señor, are you up there?

It was a quiet sound, but still, Andres could feel it in the floor beneath him, hammering through the bone at the center of each heel. He put the butt of the rifle down on the ground and braced himself against it as he kneeled, tucked the edge of the hood under his chin to arrange the eyeholes better. There was a single bright crack between floorboards, and that light was the Patient. He aimed his whisper there.

Quiet.

But—

Andres hesitated, but El Puño stiffened his jaw. Don't make me tell you again.

The Patient paused, long enough that Andres had time to picture the man down there. The Patient would be on his feet, not quite standing, his neck craned at a painful angle, eyes up and studying the stripe of dark room between the boards. The room they kept him in was long and squat, two and a half meters by one and a half, not quite tall enough to stand upright. There was a shuffling and a hushed grunt; the Patient gave up, lowered to his knees. He listened as the Patient coughed an apology, addressed to no one, and Andres had to stifle the urge to say
It is all right
before the little light went out.

For ten full minutes, Andres knelt in silence in the dark.

This was how he always felt when it was time to leave the Patient's room: like a child who'd just watched his mother walk silently into a bedroom and turn the lock. He couldn't leave the room until the feeling went away, until it wouldn't show in his face anymore.

He couldn't let the compañeros see it on him.

Because if they did, they would ask him what was wrong. And what would he say? It was because of the Patient's silence.
It was because the Patient never asked where he was; where he had been taken by them. He never screamed or called them bastards, even the time Andres watched El Clavo push his rifle into the back of the Patient's soft palate and force him to bite down with all his teeth.

El Clavo had another name, too—Juan Carlos—but the Patient had never tried to ferret it out. The Patient thanked them for the food they brought him. He asked for Bach. He turned off the light when they told him to, and he lay down to wait for the hours to pass.

Andres wiped his nose with his sleeve and tried to focus on his breathing. In the next room, the compañeros were playing Toruro, yelling that the deck was stacked, there were too many fucking swords.

He summoned the strength to stand, crossed to the bedroom door and closed it quietly behind him. He yanked off the mask in one motion, sucking at the air, blinking at the light. He waited for the room to come back into focus and for a voice to start in his throat that was not exactly his own.

• • •

He wants the symphony again, El Puño said to the others.

Two of the compañeros were arguing, El Clavo and Matón. They gestured wildly with their cigarettes, curtains of smoke thrashing through the air. La Araña, though, was just ignoring him. She leaned way back in her chair and sucked hard on the neck of her beer bottle, her cheeks caving under the last pinch of baby fat.

El Puño swallowed. I said he wants the symphony, he pronounced, forcing his voice louder. We haven't given it to him in a week. What should I do?

You should sit down, asshole. La Araña glanced once toward the empty chair next to her and let her gaze settle on the pot again. It's your deal.

But he's going to get restless, Andres said, turning the deadbolt. We need to give him something.

The rules say if you're leading to the first trick, and you have the three
and
the king of trumps—

That's not true! El Clavo slammed his beer bottle down hard. You're playing with those fucking Santander rules, Matón.

So what if I am?

Maybe that's how you goat farmers run it, but here in the city—

Can we just play? La Araña leaned her head way back and pinched the bridge of her nose with two fingers. Between you two fighting and El Puño playing babysitter in there, it'll take us all night to finish the game.

What did the Patient want this time? El Clavo asked.

Andres coughed. Symphony.

Fuck him, Matón groaned. Puño, write down your lulo from the last round. I'm not letting you forget.

The pot had seventeen pesos and an American revolver in it. Puño penciled a shaky three on the scratch pad and picked up his cards. I just worry about him going crazy in there, he said. What if he starts to think there isn't hope?

Matón laughed. So?

So what if he starts thinking there's nothing to lose, tries to get someone's attention?

Clavo flicked at the dog-eared corner of a card; it made a sound like Chinese water torture. So, fine, whatever, we'll play it for him again. Now deal.

Puño tossed a card in, sighed as he spoke: But it's still suspicious.

Why? What?

The symphony. What if someone hears it?

So?

The same symphony twenty times in a week? Won't they think—

Trump! Matón slapped the table. He looped the pot in with both his arms and kissed the revolver, his lips gushing over the barrel. Oh. Ohhhh. Get over here, gorgeous.

Araña tossed her hand back in the middle and clenched her teeth. Andres, she says, it's fucking classical music. No one can tell that shit apart but you.

Puño, he whispered, correcting her.

Pussy, she whispered, grabbing her beer, stomping into the bathroom and slamming the door.

Puño listened to the sound as the toilet lid closed, imagined Araña sitting down on it and raking her hair back from her face with both hands. He focused his eyes on the revolver on the table: it looked like an animal that had crawled out of an oil slick and died.

Can we play three-handed? Matón said. Puño, deal it out.

• • •

La Araña's real name was Marina.

Andres wasn't supposed to know it, just like she wasn't meant to know his real name was Andres and not El Puño. They had sex every day in the bedroom over the Patient's cell, on their shared guard shift, on the bed or against the wall, the ammunition on her belt tocking against the wainscoting. Andres never wanted to do it there, but she said they had to. She said, the Patient needs to hear this. To know who's in control.

And anyway, better the Patient hear than those horny com
pañero assholes out there, playing round out after round of Truco in the living room, jacking off to photos of that actress from
Los Ricos También Lloran
in the bathroom all quiet, like no one knows why they brought the magazine in there.

That day, she put on the Bach record to cover their noise. That day, she asked him to whisper her alias, over and over, as he pressed the side of his face to her sternum.

Afterward, they lay together on the bed, the bed pushed over the trapdoor, both of them staring into the pupil of the ceiling fan. Marina had taken off her mask as soon as they got in the room, and it hung limp over the bedpost now, breathing in the wind. Andres had told her to keep it on—what if the Patient managed to pick the lock somehow? What if he saw their faces?—but she told him to shut up. She kissed the fabric over his mouth until it was wet, ran her hands under the mask and fingered the trickles of sweat at the corners of his lips. The trapdoor locks from the outside, she said. She told him it would all be fine, kissed him with force and shoved him into the mattress.

Twenty minutes later, she lay on the other side of the bed, waiting for the heat to pass from her body so she could go. Twenty minutes: that's all it took. For a while now, Andres knew, Marina had been getting bored with him. He'd started to suspect that she only let him fuck her because she knew he'd never tell the other compañeros about it. And the bigger reason: unlike her, Andres' assignment wasn't stationary. Marina hadn't been allowed to leave the safe house in four months, while Andres went home every day, to his mother and his seven sisters and the outside world. He brought the world back in with him, too, the smell of street food and asphalt on his clothes, and Andres knew that Marina was this type of girl: a scent hound. She wanted to inhale this part of him, to feel it stick in her lungs and discard the rest.

Lately, though, something was different about her.

He reached out across the bed. He twisted the end of her braid around his knuckles and decided on how much he could say.

I went to Club Simón last night, he whispered to her.

It was just the flicker of a smile, but it betrayed her. I remember that stupid place, she said. The pornos on the walls?

It's disgusting but the drinks are cheap.

It's the only place I could
get
drinks for years.

You're a pretty girl. Come on. You never had that problem.

She snorted.

And anyway, you'll be eighteen when you get out of here.

Nineteen! She laughed, punched him in the ribs. I'm eighteen already! Hey, I earned that year, hijueputa. Don't take it away.

You did. Andres pulled her in to him, put his cheek on the top of her head. You did, big girl, I'm sorry.

That's what it was: those little silences that slipped into their conversations like splinters, his need reaching out through the air and finding her, cold. That's what had changed between them.

Marina rolled over onto her back, tried to laugh it off. Hey, tell Jul he's a pervert for me, she said. Hesitated; remembered. Just tell him he's a pervert.

The fucked-up thing is, I saw my
sister
there. Andres picked up her braid again and chewed the ragged ends, faked a grin to show he was still relaxed. The thirteen-year-old, he said. Luz. She must have followed me there with all her little friends. She saw me talking to Alexander.

Another silence cleaved the air.

He wasn't supposed to say any names in this room, not loud like that. He remembered as soon as the words left his mouth. The Patient could overhear and use it to identify them later, when he was nestled under a medical blanket in a police interrogation room, when he'd had time for his ribs to heal and
his memory to sharpen. Andres felt Marina stiffen, a change surging through the whole electric field of her body. He braced himself for the quick push out of bed, the crazed eyes and the furious whisper.

But she stayed, leaning on the crook of his outstretched elbow. But when she spoke, her voice was thin and eager.

You mean Alexander the dealer?

Yeah.

Were you doing a drop?

No, he said, stroked her neck. I gave him something. To trade.

What?

Andres sniffed deeply, rubbed the place on the mask just beneath where his nose jutted up. Oh, you know. Just a little something.

She bit her lip to fence in a laugh. She crawled on top of him.

An eight ball?

Maybe.

Tell me you saved some.

No, but I could next time.

What did you get for it?

Andres smiled even though he knew she couldn't see it. He pantomimed holding a grenade to his mouth, pulled the invisible pin out with his teeth and hurled it over her shoulder. She cackled as he pulled her into a barrel roll, whisper-screaming,
Blaow! Blaow! Soldiers! Take cover!

• • •

It was not like acting: pretending to be El Puño, pretending he would not care if Marina left him.

It was not like acting, because acting was about taking some
thing true and small and secret inside you and carving it out, working it like canvas until it was as wide as your entire skin.

What he was doing was lying.

Andres left Marina and La Araña together in the bed, two women napping under a ceiling fan, in one body. He threw his mask on the card table and went to wash up. A clean shirt was hung over the shower rod to steam out the wrinkles; he kept it there so when he went downstairs and out of the house, he wouldn't smell like the compañero's hashish or Marina's sweet, strange filth. They all had to take turns showering, so the water bill wouldn't look suspicious. Marina tasted like a papaya slice that had fallen in the dirt.

As he did the last buttons under his neck, Andres tilted his chin up and caught his own reflection in the mirror. He looked skinny and handsome and weak. He looked like a boy who had never held a gun, and Andres couldn't decide if he liked this boy in the mirror better. The shirt was a light-gathering green that rhymed with the hazel in his eyes. He swallowed once, ran a comb through his hair until it was soft.

Andres had just picked the last flake of tobacco out of his teeth when he heard it: a thump and a jingle, a door opening and the wind chime on the porch beyond it. A woman's singing Hello, hello. Alguien está en casa?

The voice was coming from downstairs.

Andres pivoted through the bathroom door frame and charged across the outer room, grabbed the messenger bag full of textbooks on the way and threw the door to the stairwell back. He closed it, paused to check the lock, rushed on. The stairs were dark but he tripped down them expertly, two at a time. It was the first Sunday of the month, the day the landlady always came to collect the rent. But today she was an hour early.