She’d found him by the side of a narrow street back in Barichara after she left the French guy’s apartment. The streets were quiet. She didn’t want to take a chance waiting for a bus, especially when he might come looking for her after waking and realizing he’d been robbed. This guy was straddled over his bike, putting on his helmet, when Talia ran up to him and offered the Frenchman’s phone and everything in his wallet if he could get her out of town.
He inspected the phone and counted all the cards in the wallet slits as if he received such propositions daily. She’d already removed the cash and stuffed it into the crotch of her underwear. He pointed to a government ID. “Can I have this too?”
“Everything.”
“You shouldn’t pick tourists’ pockets. It will give the town a bad name. We depend on their money around here.”
“It’s not what you think. Take me out of here right now and I’ll tell you more later.”
He looked to be a few years older than Talia and not particularly dangerous. Unless he had a gun, but from her position as his passenger, she could feel every crease of his clothing, see down the seat of his jeans, and was pretty sure he wasn’t armed.
The girls in the facility said if you are ever attacked or need to kill a guy but have no weapon, shove your fingers into his eye sockets and twist them like corkscrews. Don’t be shaken if you take out an eyeball. Those things are not as well attached as one might think. Doing this will disable the guy so you can get in a kick to his scrotum. Once he’s doubled over, grab his penis and pull, and when you have him on the ground like a dying roach you can reach for a rock or some other weighty object to drop on his head. This is assuming you don’t have a knife. But if you do, it’s best to try to gash the throat instead of aiming for the body because between ribs and fat and muscle, wounding to kill with a blade is a gamble you’d better not take. It’s much more effective to bash his skull.
None of the girls were full-fledged murderers yet. Those kids were sent somewhere else, housed in a building with no prayer of escape. And should one get close to fleeing, they might be strangled or drowned in a bucket of water and have it labeled an accident or suicide. But some of the girls at the prison school were definite contenders for serious miscreant behavior. Not premeditated like a sicario, but potentially taking a life if sufficiently set off. A couple of girls had tried to kill their fathers, stepfathers, or uncles for molesting them, and who could blame them? One girl stabbed a teacher. She told Talia she couldn’t stand sitting in that class, listening to that arrogant perra lecture for another minute. But as the girls said, it’s not easy to kill by knife, so the teacher survived just fine, and the girl was sentenced to a year on the mountain.
The guy with the motorcycle didn’t ask Talia her name. He’d been calling her ni?a since they met. He said his was Andrés but everyone called him Aguja. She checked his arms and neck for needle tracks to see if that was how he got such a gross nickname but they were clean.
He leaned his head back and asked how far she wanted to go. He could leave her at the gas station up ahead or drive a bit farther if she wanted.
“Keep going,” she said.
“What’s your final destination?”
“Bogotá.”
“I can’t take you that far, but I can probably get you to Barbosa.”
They settled into the hum and pressure of the road. If she hadn’t doused Horacio with cooking oil, it would be just another school day for Talia. She was a good student, but the classes at the prison school were dumbed down and she refined her skill of keeping an alert face while falling into a trance, imagining her life once she got out of the country. Going to a new American school. Speaking En-glish. Enjoying life with her mother and siblings. She didn’t tell any girls on the mountain she had a ticket to the United States waiting for her. They’d gotten to be friendly, but some were rageful enough to sabotage the escape plan out of spite. Trust no one. That’s what her father always said. Trust only family, if you’ve got family to trust.
* * *
She didn’t remember much about her early childhood. It only came into focus around age four or five, when her father began appearing at Perla’s house more often, asking to see Talia. The rangy, sad-faced man, similar to the ones they found sleeping outside the doorway in the mornings before Perla opened the lavandería. Mauro always wore the same clothes and usually looked like he’d just woken up. Long unwashed hair. Walnut skin chafed by the highland winds. Still, there was something handsome about him. She hadn’t yet learned to be critical or judgmental. She looked at her father as a shining star, early inklings of what her mother might have seen in him when she loved him, before she let him go.