St. Pablo

Fernando tipped his head to watch the clouds come into the town of Retiro over alto San Miguel and thought about money, the rain, and drowning. Which were really one and the same, these days. He had grown up loving the way that the rain washes over Columbia with the same frequency and urgency as a farmer showering himself after the fields, but those things were changing, now. Less farmers, and more rains, unpredictable ones that disobeyed nature’s celestial timing, blatantly disregarding proclamations of balance that ought to be undefiable. Now, the rain sometimes disconcerted him. The way it rolls in, so sudden, and sweeps away goodness and hopes in a thoughtless flood. The way it can submerge you.

He was out in it now because his daughter Lisa had tried to save a bird she’d found on the driveway, to much heartbreak and no success. He’d comforted her as best she could, as she had it, but it was no use, it stopped opening its beak and its eyes and its feathers were stuck together with the dense, wet mud, and she’d run to her mother’s room in tears and curled up at her feet on the bed in a huddled little mass like a soaked alley cat. Her mother spent most of her time at home in bed these days, off the feet which Lisa clutched. She couldn’t bear to bury it herself, the gentle querida, just hugged her mother’s legs and howled. So of course, Fernando tugged on his boots and grabbed the shovel by the door and glowered at the sky. And of course, while he stared into the heavens, the rains began.

As he dug, he thought about money, and then how, as a child, he and his friends would go digging for Pablo Escobar’s lost treasure in the fields behind their primaria. They said there were millions hidden in the rich Columbian soil, paper that was just rotting away, gold that was just waiting to be uncovered, life changing miracles just a few meters under the surface. If only you knew where to place your holes. That was the trick he’d never seemed to learn, wasn’t it? The right place to bury himself.

His wife Maria had given him two beautiful children. Lisa, just two weeks past nine, who wanted to be a wildlife biologist. She was proud to know the term, prouder to tell anyone who would listen about her dream. Fernando had started a university fund for her, and then a pipe burst in their basement of the house, and it carved his heart out of his chest, how quickly and easily it was washed away. Jose was eleven, and wanted to be a football star. There were days when that improbability seemed more likely to Fernando than being able to send Lisa to the private university she had set her heart on. He believed deeply in his children, in their capacities to beat the odds, but he felt like a failure for not being able to provide them the tools to do so, and he felt worse about Maria. The doctors said she needed to have all her lady parts scooped out like a melon. Not in so many words, of course, but there had been complications in both pregnancies, and she had been suffering for years, making ends meet as a waitress for white tourists who lauded the existence of the country’s public healthcare without having the vaguest notion of what it actually entailed. Which for Maria was waiting. And pain. And a husband who couldn’t afford to get her on the prepagata, who couldn’t send their daughter off to the education she deserved. And yet they loved him so, his bella chicas. Didn’t they see what a disappointment he was? He should have started dealing narcotics instead of going to school to become a banker. Like Pablo. Maybe then he would have something worth-

His shovel struck something hard. Another rock, surely. He hadn’t meant to dig very deep, had gotten lost in his melancholy ruminations, he hadn’t even grabbed a hat or a jacket before coming outside, and now the rain was slipping down his brow and curling trails of water down behind his ears, showing him the path it wanted him to take, down, down, down. He rubbed it out of his eyes and tried a different angle with the shovel. This time, Fernando heard a distinctly hollow thud. There was something buried here.

His heart leapt, stupidly. Imbécil. And yet, for a moment, he couldn’t help but imagine it- himself, rich as a king, his family, all financial woes forgotten, and he a hero in their eyes, a reckless yet daring figure the likes of which hadn’t been since el Patrón. A moronic, fleeting dream. He was crouched on his knees in the mud before he had even consciously chosen to be, the dirt and the wet seeping through his pants. He could see it now. Lisa at her private university, glowing like the sun while stretching her legs out underneath it in the perfectly manicured grass, Jose in a new uniform, cow leather cleats and all, Maria’s hysterectomy and sore feet both long-gone, phantom pains. If he cried there for a moment, in the backyard he felt he barely owned, behind the house that was slipping through his fingers, it was only a tear or two, and no one would know it but himself and the villainous ghost he whispered to when he said,

“Oh, demonio. ¿Qué voy a hacer?”

The spirit did not answer him. The sky did, rumbling. He thought maybe the thunder said Keep digging, or perhaps that was simply the only answer that he had ever been told.

He did. He dug out the rock with his hands, and then gave it a vicious drop kick with his boot, and yearned for a moment to break a bone in his toe as penance of some kind when he did, but then was immediately grateful he hadn’t, because he could hardly justify taking the time off work to be a sadder excuse than he already was, when he couldn’t even do the same for his wife’s hypothetical recovery. Everything was out of his reach. He slammed the shovel down again.

Thud.

Through the milky red-brown dirt, there gleamed a bright, artificial blue. The color of chemicals, and the Columbian midday summer sky. Fernando crouched again, and clawed with his fingers. It was an oil barrel. He could never remember the next few moments, how he dug out the top, and pulled off the lid, but he must have been frenzied, like an animal tearing into the month’s first kill. Inside it were bundles, shrink-wrapped, the size of encyclopedias. He was afraid to touch them, and he couldn’t stop himself. He felt nothing, he only had to know. He had to know. It took forever to peel the layers back, an eternity, and he wished for a knife but in a very distant way, the same way he felt sometimes when he was driving a car and yet wasn’t quite there while doing it, and it scared him, but not enough to bring him back to himself. Then for a long time, he didn’t move. He might not have breathed. He thought about calling out, but he wasn’t sure what to say, or who to say it to.

Jesus, he thought. But that felt wrong. Pablo.

He didn’t remember going upstairs. He knew only that he was in more danger now than he had ever been close to in his life, and that the retribution for his inadequacy and the gift that he had been given was the weight of his silence. He sat on the edge of he and Maria’s bed, feeling like a puppet whose strings were being pulled off stage. Lisa had fallen asleep with her cheek pressed against her mother’s hand on the red-checkered quilt that was thin and soft from the years of washing and love.

“¿Estás bien, mi amor? You look pale.” Maria used her free hand to feel his face, and for a moment, she was a line connecting the three of them together. “You shouldn’t have been out there without a jacket.”

“I’m alright,” Fernando said, mechanically, although he was actually quite dizzy, and elated, and afraid. He took her hand in his. “We’re going to be alright,” he told her, as purposefully as he could, looking into her wide, lovely brown eyes. “I promise you.”