TWENTY-ONE

It should have occurred to them that by the time they’d arrive in Chiquinquirá it would be dark and cold and they’d be hungry and need a place to sleep, but it didn’t. The basilica was closed for the day. Aguja would have to wait till morning to visit the Virgin. They didn’t have enough money for a hotel room. It was Aguja’s idea to return to the town boundary, to a pedestrian bridge suspended over a thin river. Talia followed as he lowered the motorcycle down the ridge, resting it under the bowed branches of a roble tree. He lay beside it and made a pillow of his jacket.

“We’ll freeze if we sleep out here,” Talia said.

“Our bodies were made for this climate. Do you think our ancestors had electric heaters?”

“They had fire.”

“Keep complaining. The sun won’t come up any quicker.”

She sat beside him, knees pressed tight to her chest, felt the chill of the grass through her clothes.

“You can let your back touch the ground,” he said. “Nothing will happen to you.”

“I’m cold.”

“Lay next to me. It will warm us both.”

She leaned back, settling against him as their bodies aligned. “If you touch me the wrong way I’ll dig out both your eyeballs.”

“I don’t know why you want to leave the country. You’re obviously a guerrillera by nature.”

It occurred to her that if he smelled this badly, she must smell bad too. Their odors comingled from being pressed together through exhaust clouds, behind trucks and buses on highways and country roads. Self-conscious, she tried to tilt herself away, but he pulled her in closer. She felt his bones against her shoulder. He adjusted his arm to cradle her neck and set his palm against her side.

“Are you going to tell me the truth of how you ended up so far from home?”

“I told you. I was trying to get away from a bad guy.”

“But what were you doing in Barichara of all places?”

It had been only days since she’d fled from the prison school, but Talia felt she’d been lying for a very long time, maybe her whole life. She decided to give him as much honesty as she thought he could handle without being tempted to turn on her.

“I ran away.”

“From where?”

“A place they sent me for not being good.”

He laughed. “I believe that.”

“You wouldn’t make a joke if you knew what I did to be sent there.”

“Did you slap some other girl at school?”

“I hurt a man badly. I burned him and scarred him for life.”

“How?”

“With hot oil.”

He was quiet. She heard the chime of the river current. Above, starlight refracted, the moon cloud-narrowed to a bullet.

“Does your mother know what you’ve done?”

“No.”

“So you’re a fugitive.”

“I suppose.”

“You know what happens to fugitives when they flee the country? You can never come back. If you do, the police will be waiting to send you to prison.”