NORMALLY, THE UPHILL pedal took twenty-four minutes. I did it in thirteen. A wake of turkey vultures scattered as I launched my bike at them. Luckily, none had reached Papá.
I gathered a small pile of rocks and hurled them at the vultures. After I struck one in the neck, we established a fragile truce: the vultures wouldn’t come within my throwing range and I wouldn’t attack them. But if I strayed too far from Papá, they’d bob their purple heads and dart in with their hooked beaks raised high.
It was a hot, windless afternoon with blue skies and no cloud. I hadn’t seen Papá for two and a half hours. All that time, he’d been lying on his back in the blazing sun. His face was pale, although a crimson splotch extended from his right cheek to his forehead. His mouth had opened slightly, which made it look like his jaw had become stuck mid-sentence.
I stomped on a trail of ants and sat beside him. Mamá had arranged a chain of dandelions around his body and placed a rock beneath his head as a pillow. I adjusted the rock to force his mouth shut. But then there was the problem of his eyes.
I kept looking away because I couldn’t bear the sight of those eyes – dull, frozen, brown and unseeing – but neither could I stop myself from staring. I knew I should put two fingers over the lids and slide them down. I’d seen it done in movies. They always did it so gracefully, as though calmly and respectfully closing eyelids on dead people is a skill we’re all born with. But not me. Hours earlier, I’d hugged Papá on my way to a geography exam. Now, I could barely bring myself to touch him.
As long as my mind had been occupied with doing something, I hadn’t had to think about why I was doing it. And now, even with clear evidence in front of me, I kept thinking: This has not happened. Not to me. Not to my family.
I watched Papá for minutes on end, and he continued staring skyward with black wings reflected in his irises. I looked up. Above us, scores of vultures circled like a swirling black plague, waiting. Finally, I closed Papá’s eyes and rested my head against his chest.
The stillness and silence shrouding Papá was the most complete I’d ever experienced. The silence came from where his breathing used to be. But it wasn’t only his breathing that was missing. It was his presence.
Finally, I opened my eyes, sat up and listened for an approaching vehicle. But no one came. Not the police, not the army and not even Señor Muñoz’s man with a truck.
After an hour, my arm was sore from pitching rocks at the vultures. Fierce sun was beating down on Papá’s face. Reaching over the fence, I removed the scarecrow from Mamá’s pumpkin patch and twisted its wooden pole into the earth so that it cast a shadow over him. However, within a minute, a vulture landed on it, knocking it over.
I looked around for shade. Only ten metres from the fence line stood Papá’s favourite oak tree. Beneath it was a wooden bench he’d fashioned by hand, where he sometimes read to me while I looked out over Llorona. If I could move him there, we’d both be more comfortable.
However, I was afraid to cross Zorrillo’s dirt line or move Papá’s body. Straight after Papá was shot, I’d been willing to defy the Guerrilla. But my blood had now cooled. We have people everywhere watching you, Zorrillo had said. I was convinced that if I broke either of Zorrillo’s prohibitions, he’d find out.
So even when the phone began ringing at four o’clock and I thought it might be Camila calling, I didn’t dare go inside to answer. It might be the Guerrilla testing me. Instead, I stripped off my bloodied shirt and covered Papá’s face.
As time wore on, hunger and thirst cleared my thoughts. I began talking to Papá, asking his advice. Normally, I could approach him with any problem. Even if he couldn’t help me solve it, he’d always say something that made me feel better.
‘True, Pedro,’ he’d say, ‘you don’t know whether you’ll pass your exams, but you can only do your best. If you fail, you can always resit them.’
‘True, Pedro, you shouldn’t have crashed the Mazda. You’ll have to work hard to pay for the repairs. But luckily, it’s only a car, not a person.’
‘What if I don’t know what to be when I grow up?’ I once asked.
‘There’s no answer to that,’ he responded. ‘But that’s okay. Not knowing is an important part of life.’
He always said something comforting, but this time he didn’t. What do you do when the one person you’ve relied on your entire life suddenly isn’t there?
By half past five the sun had lost its sting and the temperature dropped. I was still in my school shorts with my shirt off, but even when I began shivering I couldn’t go inside for a pullover. Three hours had passed since I’d returned to Papá. The phone had rung numerous times, but I didn’t answer for the same reasons that I didn’t drag Papá down to the cemetery myself.
Fear was one reason, of course. But there was another, even stronger one: I still held out hope. The police or army would come. Buitrago would react to my messages. Uncle Leo would return, or Padre Guzmán would change his mind.
By then, the colectivo passengers would have spread the news throughout the region. Papá had friends with trucks. He had suppliers, contractors and buyers. He had fellow worshippers from church. All it would take was one adult to do what was right.
Even if everyone else failed, I knew Camila wouldn’t rest until she’d hired a truck driver. But when the sun dropped, my hope wavered like a kite in flagging wind. I also began to wonder what had happened to Palillo. Maybe he’d skipped geography and gone to Francisco’s Pool Hall. Then an even more worrying thought assailed me: Palillo had also been seen with the recruiters. What if something had happened to him or his family?
Darkness fell. Stars and a half moon emerged. I could make out the constellations of Orion and Capricorn. They were the same clusters I marvelled at most nights. Normally, they would have been beautiful, but the world had changed and everything now shone less brightly.
I talked to Papá again, telling him not to worry – I wouldn’t abandon him. I would bury him in consecrated ground so that he could enter heaven. I still had faith. And finally that faith was rewarded when Palillo appeared, pedalling uphill on his bicycle.