All That Followed by Gabriel Urza

Author:Gabriel Urza [Urza, Gabriel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature & Fiction, Literary, United States, Hispanic, Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, Thrillers & Suspense, Suspense, Literary Fiction, Hispanic American, Teen & Young Adult
ISBN: 9781627792448
Amazon: B00S52AQ5O
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2015-08-04T05:00:00+00:00

24. IKER

After we burned the bus in Bermeo I began to keep my distance from Asier and Daniel. I made good on my promise to the American, met him directly after school to review the extra homework he had assigned me. I was grateful for the extra work, in a way; it allowed me to separate myself, just a little, from these things that seemed to threaten a different life that was slowly emerging: Gorka and his political manifestos, the cans of black spray paint, the bus driver holding his small box with the afternoon fares.

The bus had been a tipping point—everything before the spark of Asier’s lighter was anchoring me to Muriga, while everything since was in preparation to leave it behind. In my mind, I was now only waiting to be away at the university, to leave behind the rotting smell of the harbor and shake the last of the sand from the beach out of my shoes. The only bit of Muriga I wanted to take along with me was Nere.

This is a revisionist history, you might say. After all, the Councilman is dead, and I have spent the last five years here in the Salto del Negro, as far away from any universities or books or women as a person can be without leaving the surface of the planet. But isn’t history always revisionist? Doesn’t the truth lie somewhere between?

* * *

“WHOSE IDEA was it?” Garrett said once, in the middle of a practice examination. “The bus, I mean. I’ve always wanted to know how those things come about.”

I put my pencil down. The old man was sipping at a paper cup of coffee from the teachers’ lounge, a finger tapping on the empty envelope of sugar on his desk.

“You don’t have to tell me, of course.”

But there in his office, the radiator filling the room with a sleepy warmth, over our cups of coffee, I found myself more comfortable, safer, than I had in a long time—the old American and I were friends, I realized.

I told him about the visits from Gorka Auzmendi, the way that the bus bombing had really been his idea, but presented in such a slow, suggestive way that it soon began to feel like our own. I recounted every bit for the old man, the way we’d filled the bottles with gasoline, the way the fat bus driver had retrieved his box of fares after Asier had thrown it out the bus door. And as I spoke I began to see them in a different way.

“It sounds stupid, doesn’t it?” I asked the old man. Rather than answer immediately, he sat back in his chair, as he often did when I asked his opinion on something.

“No,” he said. “I don’t think it does. It’s what I miss most about being young. The ability to believe in something despite all evidence to the contrary.”

It wasn’t until my second year here in the Salto del Negro that I began to understand what he meant.

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