Free Burn by Bill Ransom Page B

homemade harness and pulled his rickety cartful of treasures over the tree trunk half-buried in the muck. Though the light of dawn was just now making his way clear, Manuelito had been wrestling his cart through this thick red mud for several hours. He would beat everyone to the generous bounty of the flood. His sister, Lupita, and the two deficientes walked ahead, choosing the easiest route for him and his fat-tired cart.
    “Yours will be the only cart up here,” Lupita called back. ‘The others have the bicycle tires and they cannot challenge this mud.”
    Manuelito grunted. He was proud of his cart with the “Mitsubishi” chrome strip along the side. The automobile tires were heavier, truly, but they never went flat and they never got stuck. Well, except for that time in the river, but he was young then and knew nothing of the weight of fast water. He could not fault his cart for that.
    Manuelito’s cart had a bucket each for broken glass, bottles, plastic, aluminum, steel, iron. He had three buckets for brass, but he didn’t fill these as often as he used to since the army went to caseless ammunition. And he had his caja with the German padlock nailed underneath his cart for his very important finds and his money.
    Up ahead, howler monkeys raised their morning ruckus in an uprooted ceiba tree. The deficientes pointed out something in the mud to Lupita. She stepped up for a look, then jumped back. Whatever Roberto had in his hand she slapped out of it, and her wave to Manuelito was an urgent one.
    He slipped out of the traces of the cart, and for a moment he felt like cottonwood floating on air. He trotted up to join his brothers and sister, who gathered around several clumps of hair twisted up with sticks and mud.
    “Have you found the deads already?” he asked. “You knew they would be here.”
    “No, skinny one, not the deads. Just the hair of the deads. And look, Roberto picked these up because they shine in the light.”
    Manuelito knelt close to Lupita’s feet and flicked at the pile of shiny scales with a stick. They were shiny, truly, but they were not metal, not plastic, not scales of the fish.
    “Fingernails,” he whispered. He placed the end of his stick under the nearest clump of hair and flipped it over. “A scalp.”
    Other clumped scalps, fingernails, teeth and bits of bone led up-valley, towards the great farm at the foot of the dam.
    Manuelito and Lupita found bodies in the streets of La Libertad almost daily, many with their hands cut off or their tongues cut out or the ones he didn’t like for her to see with their penises jammed in their mouths, but never had they found something like this.
    “It must have been the weight of the water,” Manuelito said. “Truly, as I have learned, the moving water has a great weight and a great force. We will find the rest of them up there.”
    He pointed up-valley with his chin, his face displaying a confidence for his sister that his belly did not feel.
    Roberto pointed at something else shiny in the mud and snatched it up.
    “Careful, quiet one,” Manuelito said. “Remember what the mines look like. The tigres.”
    Even Manuelito was startled when the U.S. soldier leaped out of the bushes at them.
    “Halt!” the figure ordered in Spanish. “You are not authorized to proceed. Go back the way you came. Your identity has been established and you will be arrested if you proceed.”
    The soldier repeated his message in English.
    Roberto and Ricardo hid behind Manuelito and Lupita, who both laughed nervously behind their hands.
    “It surprised me again,” Lupita said.
    “Me, too,” Manuelito said.
    His attention turned from the larger-than-life figure in front of them to the tree trunks nearby.
    “There!” Lupita said, pointing at the base of a small ceiba tree. “I saw it first. It’s mine!”
    Manuelito smiled. No matter who found the Sentry; their whole family shared in all profits. Yet it was a point of pride. Manuelito himself had only