Free Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcón Page B

leave her, forget her, drink. Rey and Trini smiled. Trini’s confessions, like those of his jailed charges, presupposed a circumstantial innocence, a helplessness, a purity of intent. He had a son—“I have a son,” Trini shouted at the sky—somewhere in the city he’d been chased out of. After a few hours, Trini let his nephew take a shot—a small one—or pour a little in a plastic cup for the locked-up drunks, who had been stirred by the ammoniac smell of the stuff. Rey saw that the captives loved him in those moments. They took the drink with the reverence of the devout accepting Eucharist. He made them promise to be good. Rey made them swear. “Trini,” they called out, “tell your nephew to quit torturing us.” They drank, and the hours passed like this, until it was early morning. Rey’s head spun, and he played with the radio until he got a scratchy signal, news from the capital or old Cuban songs or a show of weather predictions for Indian farmers. Eventually, everyone fell asleep, woozy, in their assigned places: the drunks on the cool floor of the cell, Rey and his uncle on the steps of the jail, the sky creeping toward orange, and day already breaking on the other side of the mountains.
    And then, when he was thirteen, there was an explosion at the mayor’s office, and, on the same night: the windows, the stones, the school. Rey and his friends had donned bandannas to cover their faces, nascent guerrilla tactics, like in the papers that came from the capital. Just that week, an arrest had been made, a man caught in a house full of weapons. He would spend a few years in prison, take advantage of an amnesty, and be released. Later, he would consolidate five disparate factions and form the IL, but no one knew that then. It had been big news in Rey’s town, because the arrested man had spent part of his formative years there, before moving to the capital.
    But really, who could worry about such things: wasn’t there always someone trying to start a war in this country?
    Under cover of night, Rey and his friends set out to prowl the streets. Stray dogs, here and there a bum resting in a doorway, the town asleep,the four boys raced down alleys. Rey and three friends—“Who? Which ones?” his father asked later on, but Rey wouldn’t say. It didn’t seem right to give them up. The town at the hour had seemed abandoned. It was easy to imagine that you owned it: every corner, every low-slung house, every park and park bench. The steps of the cathedral, the palm trees that listed gently west, the fields at the edge of town where the hungry mice scurried and stole grain. The whole of it—yours. It was easy to imagine you were the only ones in the streets, but you were wrong.
    The school. There were no watchmen, only a wrought-iron fence held together with an ancient padlock. Easy to climb over. Later, “What did you do,” his father asked him, “and why?” Rey’s arms were bruised where the crowd had gotten hold of him, the tight clasping of hands and fists.
    â€œI didn’t do anything.”
    â€œAnything?”
    Rey choked on a cough. Outside, the crowd clamored for justice. “I didn’t do that ,” he clarified.
    â€œExplain,” his father commanded.
    So he did: the boredom that had led to setting small fires in the field behind the clinic, the flames that had cast orange shadows over the gravelly earth, the smooth stones that had glowed in the firelight, and then, the target shining and obvious, calling them from the other side of town. The evening was clear and cool. It felt good to run with a pocketful of rocks. They stopped at Mrs. Soria’s bodega— taptap tap tap tap —with coins they’d pooled together, and the liquor burned but they choked it down, closing their eyes as they swallowed, everything emerging jagged and blurry. “Why?” his father asked again, but Rey