She wouldn’t, she absolutely wouldn’t cry. The situation was humiliating enough; the gallina, the cheap yellow hen she’d stolen from the corner store snatched from her in turn by two ragged boys. She wouldn’t make the disaster worse with tears, wouldn’t show weakness. She’d seen what the kids did to the ones who showed weakness, the ones who stank of fear, seen how they made a small boy wade into the filthy river to escape hurled chunks of brick and concrete. She made her eyes as hard as stones and her lips like carved ice, but her mouth betrayed her, watering from the spicy smell of the meat. She licked her fingers greedily and wondered how to find food. And where. And when, most of all, when.
She’d need to widen her territory. And that scared her because the little square was the only space that felt safe. The kids called it the square, but the adults called it Engativa. There was a small fountain in the center of the square at the junction of three stone pathways. Sparse grass surrounded the fountain, blotched with weeds and patches of muddy earth. Three spindly eucalyptus trees grew skyward, but didn’t provide much shade.
The square was ringed by a concrete path, and then by cracked concrete roads edged with parked cars and the small busetas that chugged in and out at all hours. She liked the little buses. One had brought her here, and another could take her somewhere else, once she figured out where she wanted to go.
She’d been lucky so far. Oh, she’d been smart and quick, but she knew that a lot of it was luck, and she didn’t want to press her luck, not here in a strange city. Although this area, this Engativa, didn’t look like the same city at all, not like the skyscraper-filled Bogota she’d visited when she was a little kid. Maybe her memory was wrong. Maybe the city had changed.
Here in Engativa, packs of wild dogs roamed the streets. She’d taken to carrying a tree branch in case she had to fend them off or fend off the other packs, the packs of kids, mostly dirty-faced boys who played endless soccer games in the street. Didn’t they go to school, these kids? She’d considered turning up at a school because, at home, teachers were an easy touch, always loaning you money for lunch if you forgot it. If she could find a school, she could get something to eat.
She’d stepped onto the bus as though she were in a dream. The doors had yawned and she’d moved like lightning, the way you had to move when the volleyball flashed over the net and you knew you had to give it every ounce of energy and strength you had, and maybe a little more. She’d thrown herself onto the bus the same way she’d thrown herself across the floor of the gym during the final match of the season, but no one had congratulated her on her winning effort. People on the bus had looked at her like she was crazy.
Maybe she was. Maybe she should have stayed with Jorge and Ana. She’d have food, even if it was drugged.
Once on the bus she’d groped her way through the crowd, stepping to the back, hiding behind the tallest men she could find. What would Ana do? What would Jorge do? They’d grab a cab and follow the bus, follow her when she got off, grab her as soon as she was alone. If they came on board, she’d scream and cry and make a scene as soon as she saw them. She wouldn’t wait till one got close enough to stick a gun in her back, no way.
But what if they waited? What if they trailed the bus, and waited till she got off?
She’d started to settle down after the bus made first one stop, then another, and neither Ana nor Jorge appeared. Her heart had stopped trying to beat its way out of her chest. Maybe they couldn’t find a cab; maybe they didn’t know which bus she’d boarded.
“^Esta occupado este asiento?”
She was concentrating so hard on watching the doors she hadn’t even noticed the empty seat till the girl asked. Paolina shook her head— no, it was vacant—and the girl sank wearily onto the bench. She wasn’t much older than Paolina, still in her teens. She wore a worn blue ruana and her purse was strapped across her chest. Soon the man sitting next to her got off, and the girl tapped Paolina's arm.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Yeah, sure.” Paolina was surprised that her voice came out steady.
“Sit here.”
Maybe it wasn’t as steady as all that. The girl urged her into the window seat, almost as if she could tell Paolina was hiding from someone. She seemed concerned and friendly. After a while, Paolina dropped her eyes and confessed that she wasn’t really okay; she was upset because she was running away. She’d decided not to tell the truth. She’d told a story instead, about running away from her stepmother, about a big argument and a slap, and racing out of the house and forgetting to bring money. The girl was really nice, and Paolina wound up trading her jacket for the girl's faded blue ruana and ten thousand pesos, which sounded like a fortune. Paolina's jacket was warmer and newer; she’d had to work hard to convince the girl she’d be doing her a favor by switching. After the girl got off the bus, Paolina felt guilty. What if Jorge and Ana followed her friend, caught her? She tried to see out the small back window, but she couldn’t tell if any car was deliberately following the bus. All the headlights looked the same, like bright round cat's eyes.
She’d fallen asleep then, her head lolling against the side of the bus, and the next thing she remembered was the driver, huge and hairy, yelling at her that it was the end of the line, and she’d have to get off. The end of the line was the square called Engativa. Getting off the bus had been scary, but Ana and Jorge were nowhere in sight.
It was seriously weird, she thought, the stuff you could get used to. If kids at home ever told her she’d be willing to sleep outdoors and pick through trash bins for old clothes and half-eaten fruit, she’d have laughed, or maybe gotten angry. But there was something about this place, the colors, the Mexican-style music that blared from the corner cafe, something about fitting in. She felt strangely safe, like a book hiding on a bookshelf or a stamp hiding in a stamp collection. The weather was beautiful, the breeze as soft as puffs of cotton. Plus there was something about being on her own, living by her wits, that attracted her.
She wasn’t the same person. Nobody knew her story, so she could make it up as she went along. Lies sprang easily to her lips: She was an orphan; she’d grown up in Argentina. For a while it had been scary, and now it might be okay, because she had a skill, a valuable skill. She was a drummer.
She’d been too tired to think at first, too tired and scared even to sleep. She’d hung out in the square, but whenever she saw anyone—and the square was a lively place—she’d slip into the alley between the church and the bicycle repair shop. It turned out the church had a small bathroom, and the discovery filled her with delight because the church was almost always open. The bathroom wasn’t even filthy, just really old with yellowy tile and a warped board floor. The single tiny window was set too high for any pervert to peer through, the toilet flushed reassuringly, and the sink filled with rusty water if you waited long enough. There was no lock on the door, so she’d shoved a heavy bench in front of it, moving it back when she was done. She was careful.
She’d slept most of the first night in the bathroom of the church. The next morning, she’d gone outside to look around, and it had been like what that stupid teacher was always saying: Today is the first day of the rest of your life. Today was nothing like yesterday, or any other day.
She’d sat on benches and stoops, listening to people talk, watching the buses dump their human cargo in the square, refill, and leave, pleased by the sheer number of people who traveled anonymously through the square. She was a speck of sand on a beach, unremarkable, unnoticed. A cow wandered the streets, tying up traffic. Too hungry to resist, she’d spent over a tenth of her fortune on gallina criolla, a small roasted hen, the specialty of one of the small shops that ringed the square, sort of like a Store 24, and sort of like a butcher shop. It reminded her of stores in Boston's Chinatown, because the chickens and ducks dangled by their necks from a kind of awning in front.
She’d joined a soccer game. The kids didn’t ask questions as long as you made a real effort to score. She’d slept behind a cantina, wrapped in her blue ruana, hidden behind stacks of concrete blocks.
The second morning, she’d heard the band rehearsing in the square, a kids’ band. They traveled other places, and begged and passed the hat, but the square was their home base. The way they played they couldn’t earn much. Right off, she’d known that the trumpet was good, the guitar was bad, and the drummer was terrible. The guy on the accordion was amazing, good enough to front any band, but really ugly.
She’d started by hanging out, listening, not dancing like almost everybody else. The dances were amazing, with intricate footsteps. The music wasn’t salsa, that was for sure. She thought people called it cumbia. The melodies were different than the stuff she usually played, but the basic rhythm was a simple four/four beat. There were waltz beats, too, but those were called pasillo. After a while, she’d offered to pass the hat, which required both selflessness and courage; selflessness because she had to give the money to the band, courage because she had to keep other kids from stealing the pesos that made it into the hat. Then she’d found the top of a garbage can, round like a cymbal, and she’d started tapping, just tapping with her fingers. The accordion had noticed right away, and why wouldn’t he? They really needed somebody to keep the guitar steady, and their drummer wasn’t up to it.
The drummer and his pals were doing their best to drive her off. Last night, they’d waited for her in the dark, threatening her and laughing, telling her about the bad things that happened to girls on the streets. She hadn’t even joined the raggedy band yet, but the drummer could tell which way the wind was blowing. When the kid who played accordion tossed her some pesos from the hat last night, it was a declaration of war. The gift hadn’t even been enough to buy the gallina. She’d had to steal it. And now the drummer's friends were eating it.
Those few carelessly thrown coins had practically burned the palm of her hand. The two-hundred-peso coin was the same size as a quarter. Quarters could be slotted into a pay phone and used to call home. Even if she didn’t have enough change, there had to be some kind of system, like collect calls in the States. But she hadn’t seen a pay phone. Ana and Jorge could be watching the pay phones. More than that, if she called home, someone would come, right away, right now. Carlotta would come, for sure, and that made her feel happy at first, safe and warm, but it also meant she wouldn’t be able to stay in Colombia. She wouldn’t be able to find her father.
Ana and Jorge had told her so many lies, but what if that part were true? What if her father really had been wounded? What if he were dying, waiting for her to come to him, to meet him before he slipped away? If she called home, she’d never get the chance to find him.
In one direction was the humedal, the marshland near the river. No shops there. She’d heard there was a military base in another direction. One of the nasty boys had advised her to go there and earn money like girls were supposed to earn it, pulling down her pants for the soldiers. She’d steal the money to phone home before she had to do stuff like that. She’d go to the American Embassy. She knew there was an American Embassy in Bogota. But Engativa didn’t look like Bogota. Maybe the bus had traveled farther than she thought. She’d been asleep. It was possible.
As soon as she entered the shop three blocks northwest of the square, the clerk started following her. When she didn’t immediately choose something to buy, he told her to get lost. It was like he could smell her hunger, see inside her empty pockets.
She’d thought ten thousand pesos would last, but it wasn’t very much money at all. The gallina cost more than a thousand pesos all by itself. How long could you go without eating? She trudged back to the square, heading for her place of refuge, the tiny bathroom in the rear alcove of the church. She didn’t need the toilet so much as she needed the privacy. She needed to count her small cache of pesos, decide whether she could pay for food or whether she’d have to go farther afield. She was feeling lightheaded and woozy, like she might be getting sick. Maybe it was hunger, but maybe it was the water from the fountain, or the strawberries she’d picked early in the morning, real strawberries growing wild on the other side of the river.
One thing about her foray into the shop, she was getting some idea of what stuff cost, of what was available. There wasn’t any packaged mac and cheese. Rice came in big sacks, not boxes. There were fruits she’d never seen before. Dammit, her mouth was watering again, and really she shouldn’t spend a single peso on food. She needed an instrument, some kind of drum. No way would they let her join the band if all she had to offer was a garbage can cover. What she wouldn’t give for her trap-set now, for the high-hat cymbal, and the deep bass drum.
Once she’d blocked the bathroom door with the bench, she found she needed the toilet after all. She had some kind of wicked diarrhea, a sudden, urgent need to void, and her stomach hurt really, really bad. She counted her pesos, only a thousand left. A thousand was nothing; if Engativa had a McDonald's it wouldn’t buy a single Big Mac. She’d have to try the church. Maybe there were nuns. Nuns wouldn’t molest you or anything. Maybe they had a bed where she could sleep, with a warm, soft blanket. Maybe there were musical instruments for the congregation, a tambourine, like in a Salvation Army band.
She ran water into the sink, dipped her hand into the rusty stream, patted water on her face and neck. There was no mirror in the bathroom and she was glad. She must look like hell.
The knock on the door was sharp and staccato, a drumbeat.
“I’ll be out in a minute.” She’d gotten so used to this being her own place that the knock startled her, but there had to be other kids who used this place. The cafes sure didn’t want the kids using the bathrooms. The boys just peed in the river; no way would she drink from the river.
Maybe it was one of the priests, and he’d yell at her. But maybe it was a nun, a motherly smiling nun who’d ask her to share dinner with the sisters, give her some soup to settle her stomach. When she shoved the bench out of the way, the door burst open and the boys who’d stolen her dinner were inside in a flash.
“No,” she yelled. She threw the tin bucket in the corner at the biggest one, and she kept screaming. Always make noise. Keep screaming. It was like she could hear Carlotta's voice in her ear. Scream and scream until someone comes. Never stop screaming.
“Fifty thousand pesos,” one of them shouted.
The sum confused her.
“Here! We got her,” the other yelled. “We got her over here!”
Ana smiled tremulously as she walked in the door.
“Sweetheart,” she said, “your father and I have been so worried.”
The funny thing was, Paolina thought, even as she kept on screaming, Ana said it as though she really meant it. The woman's face was haggard, her eyes red. No way anyone would buy Ana as a kidnapper instead of a genuine mom.
She kept screaming until Jorge twisted her arm so hard that all she could do was gasp in pain.
“Shut up or I’ll break it,” he murmured lovingly in her ear.