The Banana Wars by Alan Grostephan

Author:Alan Grostephan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The Banana Wars
ISBN: 9781950539949
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 2023-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

25.

Orejas woke in the dark to realize he was alive still. He touched the vein on Gloria’s neck and felt her pulse. She was smiling in her sleep, her arms extended above her chest and her hands rubbing together as if to apply lotion. He slipped out of the mosquito netting around their bed and walked across the tilted cement floor. Everything on his farm stood at a slant—the cows, the plantains, the fences, and the pot of water he set on the stove to boil. He breathed in the sour, swampy air of the bedroom, smelling his work clothes across the room.

He carried a machete into the field beside the farmhouse, watching for snakes in the wet, shin-high grass. The chickens were up, marching at him, and he kicked at the rooster to leave him alone.

“Mamá will feed you,” he said.

He counted the heads of his cows—three white, the one bull black and skinny, old, barely able to do his duty—and checked on one that would calve any day. Would he see it? He checked the fencing around the pigs and circled the house, as he did every morning, touching the cement blocks and the windows covered in green mesh, the plastic tank that collected rainwater off the roof. A gray cat crawled out of the plantains. He caressed her head and let her rub against his legs. She had splintered claws and a mound of trapped pus on her forehead. He listened to the high creek clicking against its banks below, the neighbor calling in his cows. He waited for the footsteps of his compañeros ascending in the dark with covered faces, and he would say, “I am Orejas,” and they would execute him.

“Bury me right here,” he had said to Gloria one night, pointing to the corner of the pasture, and she told him to stop. A relative of hers had joined the paramilitaries in Córdoba, and she wanted him there. The guerrillas had no future in Urabá.

He drank his coffee standing by the stove. He looked in at his youngest boy Nórton in his crib, a cloth diaper pinned to his waist, the sheet tossed off his body. Even asleep, he seemed too curious, a kid who spent the day talking to the trees and staring at the texture of the soil, satisfied to look wherever you set him. Francisco, his older son, a serious, friendly kid, was fast asleep on a little cot by the door. Gloria sat up in bed, pulled on a T-shirt, and asked where he was scheduled to go.

“Finca la Bella,” he said.

They had a shipment and no manager. If he was not home by dark, she should go to her uncle’s in Necoclí, tell the neighbor to watch the cows. If it looked bad, she should drive the box truck to Montería and wait at a friend’s hotel.

“I know,” she said.

He pushed his motorcycle down the hill and started it on the flat road. The surplus was not a physical

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