They led him back down the creaky old stairs. No weapons, no restraints, no need to even hold him. Oscar now saw that the woman was young, perhaps in her early thirties. Attractive in a European way with a short fashionably messy hairstyle that accentuated an impressive neck. Her eyes mesmerised him.
She moved down the stairs like a woman in love being taken out on a surprise trip, one that brought out the child in her; her male companion remained solemn.
Descending the steps was easier for Oscar, what with his uncommon heaviness coupled with the gravity of his situation. He didn’t know why, but he felt absolutely compelled to do whatever she told him to, while at the same time being aware that he should run as if Lucifer himself were chasing him.
Outside they loaded him into the back seat of a metallic green Jeep Wrangler whose upper half was all roll bars and windscreen. She had snatched up his broad-rimmed straw hat on the way out of the apartment, and now popped it on his head.
"There we go!”
Oscar sat watching placidly as the man counted out something like five hundred US dollars and handed it, shakily, to the Gonzalez boy. The urchin broke into a grin that surpassed the dimensions of his face. He waved the fresh stack at Oscar as the Jeep pulled away.
They drove him down Calle de Las Incas, past his local bar, where the friends he had made over the years as part of his cover sat outside enjoying cervezas and tererés―iced tea. They didn’t see him; they were too busy playing chequers in the shade on old wooden tables covered in flaking teal paint. He did think to cry for help, but that was as far as he got.
Whatever she had done to him―said to him―in his apartment, was effective. He understood now why it had been necessary for them to hold him there for those few minutes: it was so she could plant that seed of compliance in him. Funny, he thought, how he could be aware of all of this yet still be powerless to fight it.
They soon drove past Dr Marta Alvarez’s practice. He regretted not making that advance on her a fortnight earlier.
Oscar noticed that the setting sun cast the richest and most beautiful colours he had ever seen, either on this side of the planet or on the other. A tear ran down his cheek though his face remained emotionless.
"Are they really all dead?”
They sped through the sparsely populated back streets of the easternmost barrios.
"There’ll be two left...after you,” she said.
Wild dogs attempted a brief, ferocious and pointless attack on the vehicle.
"Where are you taking me?”
The composition of the buildings took on a higher percentage of corrugated tin and timber the further out they drove.
“To your past.”
There was more dust out there too.
The sky had dimmed to the colours of ripe peaches by the time they reached Oscar’s workplace―the Cinco Manos archaeology site. It was on an obsolete quarry just before the Ypacaraí lake, east of Asunción, where the countryside began.
His work colleagues and the state archaeologists had long since clocked out. Manuel the security guard had already shut the gate of the ten-foot high chain-link fence. Strangely, Oscar's chaperons didn’t even speak to Manuel, the guard just pulled open one half of the gate and they rolled in.
They drove straight over to the mouth of the pit, the one Oscar loosely had in mind for that bastard boy and his little rat. They had passed many other shafts that Oscar knew were not so suitable for various reasons; for example, some were too narrow, some were too shallow, and others were too crowded at the mouth with machinery. It was as if Oscar had told them about that one ideal pit, whose bottom his team had not yet found. Then he thought that maybe he had, but had just forgotten. Things weren't so clear anymore.
The mouth of the shaft hung open like a basking shark’s: deadly and inescapable. A ramshackle wooden frame sat over it with a slanted roof of corrugated tin.
The man exited the Jeep first then led Oscar out by the arm with a firm grip. The young woman plucked Oscar's straw hat off his head before he was out of her reach. She turned in her seat so she was positioned sideways with her legs dangling out, facing the imminent action. She spoke in that language again. Her words were carried away on the blustery wind…but brought back again, hitting Oscar dead on, as if guided by his body heat. He then felt paralysed with fear, instead of doped.
He pawed at his torso as if searching for a misplaced wallet.
"Are you…are you some kind of…witch?”
"Oh puh-lease…Oscar! Do I really strike you as a cliché? What’s your next guess…a teenage vampire?”
Oscar ignored her facetiousness, and her sardonic pronunciation of the name they all knew he was not born with; there was a more important matter at hand.
"Forget whatever mission you are on! I have money!”
"Oscar…” she crooked her neck forward a touch and locked her gaze with his, “…I’m happy for you, money is always a good thing to have. More important though is to have a future in which to spend it. You…don’t.”
It was his last option, and he felt its ineffectiveness as if it were a death blow.
“So this…is personal?”
“Very. Familial, in fact. That’s why your last thought has to be of the crimes you’ve committed. It’s important to us that you pack the right image for your trip to Hell.”
The man stood nearby staring intensely. Arms folded.
Oscar stumbled backwards and crouched, struck by the double whammy of his imminent future and his distant past. His lungs greedily craved more air than they could ever process, forcing his chest past its usual dimensions. He crumpled to his knees.
“I feel…I feel so… so heavy.”
The woman regarded him without pity.
“Yeah? Well that’ll be your guilt, Oscar,” she said matter-of-factly, “weighing you down.”
He glanced up at her and actually forgot about everything else for a second. She was like a child to him in that fleeting time, the way she had innocently spoken the absolute truth…and didn’t even know it.
“What? You were hoping it was some sort of ‘special ability’?” She waved her hands palms out to represent the supernatural. “I had an auntie that knew when it was going to rain from the pain in her hip…but she never considered herself to be Wonder Woman.”
Oscar wasn’t listening. He knew the time was near.
The woman took a deep breath, as if she had no choice in what she was about to do and sincerely regretted that she had to do it.
“Off you go then,” she said in the middle of a sigh, “heavy or not.”
She turned her back to Oscar and the hole, looking instead to the rich oranges and pinks lying on the other side of Asunción. She then spoke―as he expected―in a language he didn’t understand.
The scream that grew in Oscar’s gut also had another origin, its true birthplace: Cambodia, 1972. He wore a uniform and committed what NATO referred to as ‘atrocities’.
The old man struggled to his feet, watched attentively by the silver-haired one. Oscar was the only one trembling now. His hands squeezed invisible orange-sized objects to pulp. Veins pumped on his temples. Eyes watery and wild. Then he ran, with a single rising yell, towards the black mouth...and leapt cleanly into the opening of the vertical shaft.
As he plummeted in the dark, bouncing off sections of rock that jutted out, his thoughts were indeed of those who had suffered the same fate at his hands. But his very last thought, just before his skeleton smashed to powder at the bottom of the shaft, was to wonder how his life had been so neatly turned upside down, through mere speech.
*
For once, as deadly serious as her companion, she climbed into the seat next to him. She took in the atmosphere they had created, frowned and said: “That was the right Guy…right?”
She didn’t last long before bursting out laughing. She was alone in that.
A balmy wind played in the expansive space around the duo. She rested one arm across the top edge of his seat, while the other fixed the apparent suicide victim’s straw hat on her head. Her booted legs were crossed under a short khaki skirt. A bright white vest and large Jackie O sunglasses topped everything off. The sheen of sweat from the afternoon’s heat still glistened all over her.
He buttoned up his Denim jacket and held himself tightly, rubbing his upper arms. Shuddering.
Now she turned genuinely serious. “It’s unnecessary for you to suffer like this. I know you feel guilty about Cambodia, but this self-punishment is ridiculous. With a few words I can ease the…”
He raised his hand swiftly, as if swatting away a fly, halting a conversation they’d had many times before. He then seemed to realise something, and softened. He brought the same hand down a lot slower than it had gone up, resting it on top of hers. She tapped it gently and looked away, seeming to rub dust out of her eyes.
When his trembling subdued a little he drove them back to the entrance where she handed the security guard a roll of cash. He opened the gate for them.
“So,” she perkily said to her companion, “Moscow?”
The silver-haired man glanced at her. He shoved the stick into first gear in a manner which, if it could be read, would say: Damn straight, Moscow.
And they left the site behind them in a trail of dust.
Review item
Add to faves
Ratings & Rankings
