Free Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcón Page A

real mountain peaks capped with snow. There was an azure sky and a meandering river and a cobblestone plaza with a trickling fountain. Lovers held hands on park benches, flowers bloomed in all the municipal flower beds, and the aroma of fresh bread filled the streets in the mornings. Rey’s hometown ended ten blocks from the plaza in any direction, giving way to dusty lanes and irrigated fields and small farmhouses with red-thatched roofs. Trini described a place Rey couldn’t imagine: a city of glamorous decay, a place of neon and diamonds, of guns and money, a place at once glittering and dirty. Everything here bored Rey’s uncle: the undulating countryside, the sharp teeth of the gray mountains, the scandalously blue sky. Most of all, the simple people, incapable of hatching plots against each other, or unwilling. Wholesomeand therefore disappointing. “Why’d you come back, Uncle Trini?” Here Rey’s beloved uncle always fell silent, as if under a spell.
    â€œThere was a woman,” he’d say, and trail off. He’d fiddle with the keys to his kingdom, that empty cell. “There’s always a woman.”
    Uncle Trini told stories and locked up the drunks that came in raving, the same ones who knew him by name, the ones who began all their confessions with the words: “I was minding my own business when…” It was part jail, part hostel for the hopeless drinkers, part psychiatric retreat for the colorful, if not criminal, elements of the town. And most nights, Rey rushed through his homework, walked the four blocks to the cramped little police station, and sat on the front step with his uncle. Together they waited for something to go wrong. The ordinary crimes of the countryside: purse-snatching was as common as the graceless theft of fruit from a market stall. Murders occurred twice each decade, usually the tragic finales to disputes over land, livestock, or women. The drunks. “Trini!” they’d protest when the sergeant brought them in, and Rey’s uncle, impassive, would throw up his hands and unhook the keys from his belt loop. “Welcome back!” he’d say and smile despite himself. “Trini,” the drunks would plead, but they knew it was no use, and Rey watched them hang their heads and stagger in, chastened. Later, after the sergeant left for the night, Trini would send Rey to the store for liquor, his nephew bounding through the empty streets to Mrs. Soria’s all-night bodega, where you had to knock a certain way— taptap tap tap tap —before she would open the window and show her wizened face, squinting in the dim light: Who’s there? It’s me, madam. It’s Rey. She’d hand him a bottle topped with a scrap of a plastic bag held tight by a rubber band, ah, the homemade stuff…Made in wooden vats and old bathtubs she kept in her courtyard, emitting odors her tenants grumbled about, the stuff that came out clear, stinking like poison, the stuff Trini drank, wincing, an involuntary spasm shutting his right eye. But Rey’s uncle was a magnanimous drunk. He described the warm sensation in his chest, liquor’s sweet embrace, described his mind under its influence as a tower built of loose, unmortared bricks, and he prattled on about the woman, the one who’d seduced him, whose ass was a most delicious thing, the one with blue eyes and a tiny scar on the side of her neck, which she covered with her curly, brown hair. She had ruined the city for him by getting pregnant.She’d sent her brothers after him. “They beat me, boy,” Trini said, still incredulous years later, “right in the middle of the street, in broad daylight. Me! A uniformed officer!” Rey listened, his uncle’s words losing their borders to drink, syllables bleeding into each other. And the drunks gathered at the rusty bars of the cell to listen, to offer their condolences, their slurred and pithy advice: