MY ASS WAS PRESSED AGAINST THE EDGE of a cardboard box marked “Doritos: Extra Spicy.” My knees were pressed against my chin as the truck heaved over potholes and moaned up the hill toward Barrio de Concepción. There was a stink of rotting meat. The truck must have had an earlier life, running from the slaughterhouses before being commandeered for the Liberation. The liberation, it turned out, of fifty boxes of assorted corn chips and something called Tosties.
Our destination was the shantytown where my mother’s maid lived, with its rutted dirt roads, open sewers, and ragged children with festering eyes.
“Fucking Rafael, steer the fucking vehicle around the fucking holes!” someone whispered.
The amateur guerrillas had filthy mouths. With each lurch my stomach curled another notch into itself, a caterpillar prodded by a stick. I drew the cuff of my shirt over my nose to filter out the godawful stench. What smell was outside, and what was inside the truck, our own nervous sweat blending with rotting cow. Night, especially the night which slinks into dawn, was dark and treacherous. My sister and father and mother were fast asleep in their beds, aware only of the silent progress of images across their eyelids.
None of the men spoke, except to utter casual profanities. Yet no one was still for more than a few seconds at a time: we drummed on the boxes with our fingertips, stretched our legs to create little surges of circulation. And as we lumbered along up the hill we were waking up the dogs, ownerless, of no fixed address, who lingered in fitful sleep wherever a doorway could be found. Their yelps were sickly and half-hearted, nicking some memory of lost dog passion.
Our leader and fellow student, A, crouched opposite me. He held his arm out, bracing himself against the panel so he wouldn’t be pitched forward. He was so skinny that the top of his arm was the same thickness as his forearm. He wore a striped shirt with a boat neck, a reference to the Resistance fighters of the Second World War. A red bandanna, not a beret, covered his head. His lean hips propped up a pair of faded American jeans. When he saw me looking, he allowed a brief smile and showed his crooked teeth. I tried to hold that smile with my own, but he was too intent on our progress, on the changing noises outside and the groan of the vehicle as it climbed.
To be here I had forsaken my family. It suddenly hit me that it was too late to return, that this heroic episode had scooped me up and no one would care why I was here, only that I was here, that I had followed A without question. My fingers were clasped with white knuckles tight over the box, knuckles which would have to be painfully unbent in just a few moments so that I could do my work, so that I could toss these boxes out the rear door to waiting hands.
A called it, “the Work.”
It was nothing like our usual work, sprawled in lecture halls taking notes while our professors drone on, or drinking rum in someone’s apartment. The truck stopped, farting out pebbles of undigested gas. There was a pause when I listened so hard my ears ached, then there was a tap on the back panel. Guardedly we rose, six young men, flexing our hands, not sure what would be on the other side of that sound.
Three stout women appeared out of the darkness, unsmiling, whispering, “Dése prisa! You are late!”
I heaved the first box to a pair of waiting arms.
Luckily corn chips were not heavy. It could have been sacks of flour or beans.
She took one, two, three boxes and piled them in a tower. Behind her was a cinderblock building, half completed, rusted iron support bars stretching out its sides. Under her feet was parched dirt with ancient rivulets carved through it, remnants of a dozen rainy seasons. This hillside, only twenty years ago, was filled with trees and pasture. We had to lift the boxes quickly to keep up with these women. All of us were anxious to be done. I listened for the sound of a siren, or any vehicle noise, or the hard thud of a man’s boots.
“What is this shit?” The woman I had been working with stopped suddenly. She was studying the label on the outside of a box.
“Chips?” she read. She turned to A. “You brought Doritos to us? This is what you have risked all our lives for — Doritos Extra Spicy?”
The apron tied around her middle was decorated with a picture of Mickey Mouse lifting his paddle hands in the air.
I felt myself shrink into my clothes, at the same time as I was awed by the depth of her contempt. A, sweating hard, pitched another box to the ground then stood, balanced on the edge of the truck-floor, and cleared his throat. To my surprise, he didn’t answer her immediately.
“You expect us to feed our children corn chips for breakfast?” The woman waited, hands on hips, while the other two women stopped working and matched her pose.
A stiffened. “We got the wrong truck,” he mumbled at last.
“Como?”
“We got the wrong truck,” A repeated and made himself look at her. “It was supposed to be like the last one, full of meat.” He tilted his head and sniffed. “You can smell it.”
“He smells the meat.” The woman turned to her friends. “Smells don’t fill our stomachs.”
“If they did we would be very fat!” another laughed.
The first woman did not laugh. Instead, she drew nearer to A and began to talk in a low whisper, forcing him to crouch so he could hear.
“Listen to me, University Boy, this is not a game. For us it is life or death. And quite often it is death.”
“I know this.”
“So next time…”
“We will succeed.”
“Good.” She spoke to her partners. “Let’s haul this stuff into the building. Maybe we can sell it at the market on Sunday.” She turned back. “Next time, University Boys, make sure you steal the right truck. If I am going to be shot, I want it to be for something more noble than this.” She slapped a carton.
A grunted then signaled to the rest of us. “Vámonos.”
I was starting to shiver. “What do we do with the truck now?”
A ignored my question, as he’d ignored all my questions since picking me up on the back of his scooter an hour earlier, though two days ago he’d been my instant best friend, thumping me on the back. “Hey man, we’ll have a coffee, talk things over.”
There was no place to turn the beast around so we backed down the hill at an infuriatingly slow creep. This time everyone was jabbering in the cavernous interior, not about what we’d just done, our humiliation, nor about the possibility of being picked up by the police and tossed into jail or pitched into the river, but about last night’s soccer game.
“If it wasn’t for Ortiz…” A said, shaking his head.
“The goal was shit,” another interrupted, drumming on his knees.
I crouched stiffly on the floor, waiting for the brutal stupid faces of the Special Task Force to pull up in front of us.
Suddenly the truck stopped.
“Get out!” A hissed. “Scram!”
And we were off like a shot, leaping into the darkness with no idea where or what the ground was until we hit it, a sigh of dry grass and braced flesh. Riderless, our truck sailed into the dawn, its wheels cleaving through weeds and crushed pop cans.
I didn’t put any of this in my memoir. I had almost stopped writing, and every time I tried, it made me sick. They thought that they wanted my story, but it was not true. They wanted their own story of me, in their own words. When I touched Rita I made her sick. And later, when I touched myself, I made myself sick.
I crossed the campus to visit The Hub because I couldn’t stand to spend the night in my cramped house with Rashid’s disapproving glances. Ever since that evening with Rita it was all he could do to wish me “good morning.” He’d heard us, of course. Lovemaking was an activity on an order with pig-eating: both were wet and noisy. My friend The Hub bartender with the earring acted oddly when he spotted me entering that basement chamber. Instead of raising a hand in greeting, he began to vigorously towel down the counter. I waited on my usual stool for a long time before he uttered a word.
“Sorry friend, you’re cut off.” He whipped the towel in the air. “Not my call. It’s the highers up.”
So it is God who speaks to him? I stared at him hard. “A beer, please.”
He began to slide glasses one by one from the overhead rack and polish away imaginary dust. “Don’t make it hard for me, man.”
Why should I not make it hard? “One beer, please.”
“You want me to lose my job?”
“What I want, my friend, is a beer.”
Finally he stopped his invented work and set his elbows on the bar so that his earring, tonight a tiny silver airplane, dangled and caught the light. Behind him the television played a music video with the sound turned off, and I watched a woman dance through a garbage-strewn alley, her mouth gaping in silent song.
“You’ve been running a sky-high tab and hassling the girls. Maybe this isn’t the best place for you, Carlos, my man.”
I nodded, contemplating his wise words, then rose from my stool, walked behind the bar, reached into the cooler and plucked two beaded bottles of Labatts from the icy interior. I slipped these into my pockets and left the establishment, forever.