Matías returns with the bucket. “Today, my friend, we make the paste.”

Paste, Jack thinks. What did that even mean? He remembers, as a kid, helping his mother hang wallpaper. Using a brush to apply the soupy vanilla-colored liquid with tiny lumps in it, slathering it on the back of the paper and pressing it to the wall. Maybe this paste can be viewed as the base, the beginning that will meld everything they’d be doing together.

Carlos emerges from one of the structures across the yard. He wears a stretched-out yellow shirt and a faded Yankees ball cap. With him walks a young man in his late teens or early twenties. He came from the two-story barn that was constructed beside Carlos’s place, carrying a green plastic bucket covered by a towel. The young man nods at Jack and Matías, then offers the bucket to Jack. Taking it from him, Jack nods and says, “Gracias, señor.” He pulls the towel back. Inside are potatoes and some kind of meat. It is warm.

Carlos speaks to Matías in Spanish. And Matías turns to Jack. “That’s our food before we start our morning. Today, we learn to make this white colored pasta.”

The word sounds so foreign, so odd.

“We eat; then we smash the leaves. That’s all he tells me. Like you, I’ve never done this. I drive a truck for a living.”

They sit in the courtyard on a makeshift bench constructed of old closet shelving and tree stumps, the bucket between them. The meat is dry and sparse. Jack picks it from the tiny bones and chews it with the little potatoes he pulls from the bucket, skins still intact. Eating with his fingers, he feels like a wild animal.

Matías, who is less squeamish, chews, spits bones, and licks his fingers, his cheeks full like a chipmunk’s. He asks Jack, “You like?”

“When a person is hungry, no judgment about the food you are placing in your body. So long as it nourishes and replenishes, it is a good thing.”

“It’s guinea pig.”

Jack controls his gag reflex. He is eating a fucking hamster. He wonders how many of these little furry critters it takes to produce this meal. But it is protein. It will sustain life. He swallows and takes another bite.