Catire
He sneaked out the metal door, carefully studying the concrete steps ahead of him, the rows of red block ranchitos on either side going up and down the mountain. In the distance, he could see the other cerros filled with shanties. Below was the old colonial town, swallowed in by the immensity of the city with its high-rise apartments and office buildings. He heard a gunshot, followed by machine-gun fire. He stopped and looked around. It was too perfect, not like the real thing, which was closer to the sound of firecrackers than the shots in the gringo movies. A TV flickered through the metal bars of a window. Another perfect gunshot echoed, then music and a deep voice talking about some product—a commercial. He shrugged and rushed down the steps.
They would be by the entrance, where the steps began, Catire thought, looking down the mountain at the steps, at the tin roofs with tires and bricks and rocks and garbage on them. He tightened the belt around his books, feeling his front pockets for the steel bearings, his back pocket for the slingshot. No rocks this time. They had no right calling his mother a slut. All their mothers were sluts anyway. All their brothers had different daddies. Only they hated him and pointed his out because he was indeed different. He was a catire, which meant blond hair, and he also had green eyes, like a cat. The only green eyes up their mountain, the only catire in the whole barrio, other than the peroxide whores in the bordello where the mountain met the street, by the entrance.
They wouldn’t be by the street, he reconsidered. They’d be hanging out a lot higher, away from too many eyes. He checked his other pocket. Shit, he remembered he no longer had his switchblade. One of them had it now. Ramón, the one he cut.
Catire stopped and undid the belt around his cuadernos and textbooks, moving his homework toward the middle, protected by the hardbacks that Doña Wilson had bought him since his mother didn’t make enough to buy all the books required by the school. Hell, Doña Wilson should pay for them since she didn’t pay his mother enough. Still, the old lady was like a grandmother to him. He even asked for her blessing, bendición, whenever he went to her house. “Dios te bendiga,” she always responded, with a slight accent. And she was the one who had him enrolled in that school, who paid the tuition, who kept pushing and pushing him. He felt slightly guilty. If only Doña Wilson knew what it was to live, to survive in their barrio, really less than a barrio—a slum. If she only knew this was another world, unlike the one down by the streets, with their tall buildings and houses, with their middle-class illusion and naiveté. No. Regular cops didn’t even come this high up the mountain. And when they did, they drove two to a motorcycle wearing riot gear and machine guns. Like they did when they came for Dengue, who had shot a cop who was part of a ring stealing cars and dismantling them for parts. The cops came up the concrete steps riding bikes and when they found his ranchito, they kicked the door down and wasted him while he was screwing one of the whores that was off duty. Too bad he didn’t belong to a colectivo militia. They never “apprehended” anyone up here. Whenever they came up, they took down a body bag.
Catire decided to descend a different way this time. He was no chicken. He could not avoid going down. Today his history report was due and he had to read it to his class. He was excited about it since he felt like Páez, the hero from the wars of independence, who came from the Venezuelan Llanos, the plains, and went into battle wielding a spear in each hand, halfway naked, steering his horse with his bare feet. Páez was a catire like himself, and a fighter and a Llanero like his abuelo. He really wanted to read the report, even though it scared him like never before having all their eyes staring at him, waiting for him to screw up. But this time it was different, not just because of all that he had found out about the battle, not only that he felt he was like Páez, but he wanted to impress upon those rich sons-of-bitches at school that he was not a dumb-ass from the ranchitos, a recojidito, the son of a maid who got banged by the boss. He was no coward. He could fight and he had fought, but that was of no use at that school. One more fight and they would kick him out, and then it would be back to the barrio’s school, with all the crackheads, thieves, gangs, and losers who didn’t want to learn anything anyway. He shouldn’t give a shit anymore. All he really wanted more than anything was to tell the class about what he had found out, more than their stupid book said. He could recite it from memory, loud and proud, as if he were Páez himself. As if he were the man who decided to face the baddest, most formidable army in the whole of Europe—the very army that had stopped Napoleon in his tracks and whipped his ass; the royalist army that thought it could finish off the riffraff in the Americas who dared to call themselves a free republic, like the gringos had done. That was what he had chosen for his paper because his abuelo, his mama’s father, was from right there and knew the Llanos like the palm of his hand.
In the past, he hated all the boring stuff about history, all the dates, all the names, all the mumbo-jumbo crap, until Doña Wilson’s oldest son, Señor Jorge, who lived in a house replete with wall-to-wall books and artifacts and didn’t treat him like the maid’s son, told him that most history books had no fire. They had turned flawed men into perfect heroes, boring saints, and that was not the truth.
* * *
A mangy dog surrounded by flies followed him into a narrow alley between shacks. The alley widened and narrowed as it twisted like a labyrinth behind the ranchitos. It stank of piss and excrement. It was the perfect place for a trap, he thought. Fortunately, not many people knew the ups and downs of the alleys, since most of those guys came from the ranchitos below, the ones that had color TVs, satellite parabólicas, refrigerators, potable water, and real toilet seats instead of a hole with a pipe leading to the ditch in the alley.
He had practiced reading his report aloud. Señor Jorge corrected his grammar. They went through the details. The dates were still hard to memorize, but he knew the battle by heart now. Señor Jorge let him hold an authentic spear blade in his hands, cold and sharp even after all these years. He showed him how to load a musket. “Bang!” Catire yelled, jerking his arm up as if he’d shot it.
* * *
The mighty Spanish Royalists pounded Bolívar’s patriot army relentlessly with artillery. If they could get Bolívar and Páez, it would be the end of that little republic, of that band of outlaws and traitors who believed in a land without a King. Bolívar knew that he was outnumbered, so he was looking for favorable terrain to wage battle, but the Spaniards got their reinforcements and now had about sixty-five hundred men. Between them lay their only safety, the Arauca—a fierce and turbulent river carrying water from the Andes, practically unswimmable, even in the dry season.
Páez, who’d already had several skirmishes with the Spaniards and was tired of Bolívar’s pedantic order-giving, offered to cross the river. If he managed to stay away from the Spanish infantry and their sharpshooters, he could try to get to the artillery and that would allow them to buy more time. He selected a hundred and fifty of his best men. They stripped their horses of any additional weight. They strapped only their two spears, one short, one long, to the sides of the horses and prepared to cross the turbulent river in the middle of the night.
Catire remembered seeing the river with his abuelo when they went out hunting in the deep Llano. His abuelo taught him how to make a slingshot, how to pick the perfect branch from a guava tree, how to aim, how to shoot. Catire could pick between the head or the wing of a bird at thirty paces; he could get an iguana in the highest branches of a tree on his first shot.
* * *
His black regulation shoes almost slipped into a ditch full of sewer water. That was the last thing he wanted to happen: they would not even let him enter his class. A narrower path of the alley went straight down the mountain. He had to be careful—he couldn’t be in school smelling of the slum.
* * *
In the dark of night, a hundred and fifty Llaneros took their horses to the river. They slid into the turbulent dark waters and rolled off the backs of their animals, holding tight to their tails to keep from being swept away. The water rose and dipped and swirled as men and mares and horses were taken downstream like small ants. If they let go, they would not have enough energy to swim across; if they climbed on their horses, they would both drown. If they went back and the day was clear, they would be obliterated by artillery fire.
* * *
Several ball bearings clinked against one another in Catire’s front pocket. The slingshot protruded slightly from his back pocket. But what good would they be? He knew Mikal-Jordan now had a Glock, which he liked to show and flaunt, all-powerful, intimidating the rest of the gang, making them do his thing. This slingshot was a child’s toy in a world of automatic and semi-automatic guns.
The alley dipped down and from where Catire stood he could see the valley below: the old town with the colonial red roofs, the four-hundred-year-old church, the plaza in the middle and behind, tall buildings and the smog of the big city. If he could keep his uniform clean, he might be able to reach the street below without running into them. He might even have enough time to stop for an empanada before taking the bus to school.
* * *
Páez and his Llaneros reached the other side of the Arauca. They did not mount but walked quietly along the bank. Páez was aware that he was about to face a well-trained infantry. If they had the chance to form, his Llaneros would be doomed, picked off like flies. One man would aim at the horse, another one at the rider, while a third one reloaded. Six thousand, five hundred men awaited them, with guns, artillery, and cavalry.
They only had lanzas.
* * *
Catire’s foot slipped into a ditch full of dirty water and muck. He cursed. Not today. God, not today. He could not afford to just be a bad-smelling charity case from the slum. Not today. Names rolled in his head. Notes were not even necessary for him to recite his paper. They were so clear in his head, he could smell the river, the grass, the dust. The Llaneros were soaking wet, caressing their battle-trained horses, holding their reins, listening to the furious river as they moved stealthily toward the Spaniards. In the distance, the Spanish began feeding their troops, confident that their enemy could not take several days of cannon pounding, that soon they would try something stupid, that soon they would be squashed and end that illusion that the North Americans had started, that the French with their revolution and then Napoleon had tried to spread like a wildfire. But soon, in the name of their king, it would be over, the way the English tried on the north in 1812, but this time they would win.
* * *
Catire had misjudged how long the alley went. It ended in a ditch and a dirt trail, which led back to the main stairs that cut through the middle of the mountain. As he descended, he looked in between the red-block shacks, hoping to find another alley. A silhouette of a person came up the steep slope, holding several bags. It was Doña Esperanza, who lived even higher up the mountain than his mom. If she suddenly looked around, that would mean Mikal-Jordan’s gang were there. His shoe sloshed but he continued walking.
* * *
Dusk, light, morning dew, a dissipating fog, and soon the Spanish artillery would be able to see their target across the river. They loaded the cannons. How stupid could these Criollos be? They had no cannons, their infantry had no discipline, and unlike the history books indicated, most of them didn’t even have uniforms. Morillo, the Spanish general, had plotted several traps and dreamed of returning to Spain soon with Bolívar and Páez in shackles, or better yet, their heads.
Páez moved stealthily along the bank, trying to avoid their scouts, moving from thicket to thicket, crossing ponds with chiguires, dog-sized rodents, and the occasional snouts and eyes of babas, the alligator of the plain. He kept worrying that if the infantry had the chance to form a cuadro contra caballeria, their sharpshooters would tear his men to pieces.
But this was the Llano, the plains, a place where the sky was so big it might swallow a man, and the rules of war had not been written yet.
Señor Jorge told Catire, while coming down from a shelf with books, that the Llaneros, unlike the Europeans with their pointy spears, used a wide, sharp blade. Their objective was not so much to puncture and pull back, but to cut along a path. That allowed them to move in a sea of men inflicting blow after blow by the mere movement of their blade without having to slow down. Some Llaneros went into battle with two spears, the long flat one and then a smaller one they used for stabbing in close proximity or to throw at a target. They were even more effective than Alexander the Great’s phalange because they were on horseback.
* * *
The cannons began pounding the ground. That was their signal. Their loud blasts would mask their advancement. They would have only one chance to achieve the madness that they had set out to do.
* * *
Catire dried his shoe with his own socks and ditched them. They might notice in school, they might send him to the principal, but he could make up some excuse, something they would believe as long as they didn’t smell anything.
Down the trail, behind the woman, several kids ran across the ranchitos. It didn’t look like they were hiding from him or waiting or anything. If he was a little closer he could aim, he could get one, but he wasn’t sure it was them. These kids were too carefree, as if they were just playing. Catire walked along the side of a wall filled with graffiti and political posters. The boys passed the woman carrying the plastic bags. They kept coming in his direction; then they disappeared between some ranchitos.
Catire swiveled his books around making sure the belt kept them together. He needed to be able to run fast, switch hands. He could not lose his paper. This was too important. He increased his pace but he didn’t want to look alarmed.
One of the kids popped his head out from behind a wall. Then all three of them came out.
“Catire, they’re waiting for you before the abasto,” one of them said.
“You cut Ramón on the face,” another one said.
They came out in the open and ran past Catire up the mountain.
* * *
A mirage of horses emerged from a thicket, pounding the ground, galloping into the open toward the artillery. Infantrymen ran in their direction. Where had they come from? How did they get so close? The Spanish general ordered his cavalry to go and squash them. They mounted and unsheathed their swords.
Páez and his Llaneros found their target, the artillery, and hit it swiftly, wielding their ten-foot spears as if they were handheld knives. Artillerymen ran away. In the distance the infantry tried to organize their formations, covering the plain with their bright red uniforms, their gallant flags, the bugle calls and lethal muskets. One chance to shoot and Llaneros would be annihilated. Páez also noticed the cloud of the Spanish cavalry. It was time to finish the job and go into the second part of the plan.
They galloped one last time through the cannons, setting fires, turning wagons, scaring horses and mules away. The Llaneros could slice a man in two without blinking, but they didn’t have the heart to kill a horse. The ground rumbled again, louder and louder, and the cloud moved closer to them. It was time to move out, to balance the numbers, and use the open Llano, hot and merciless and dusty in the dry season, full of mirages, deceiving. They galloped away from the fighting. The cavalry pursued: they would exterminate this miserable band of half-breeds, runaway cowards.
* * *
They were by the abasto—six, maybe seven of them. Any other day, he would have confronted them, but today he couldn’t skip school or mess up his uniform. Today he was going to read his report. Today he was going to show them that he was not a dumb-ass, even though he was scared of how they looked at him every time he got up to give the teacher an answer.
There was no way to avoid them, go around them. Even if he climbed behind some of the ranchitos, they would see him the moment he hit the street, and then they really would think he was a coward. He was going to walk through them.
Maybe he should not have wasted so much time with Señor Jorge reading history about old battles and stuff that didn’t improve his chances or give him any idea as to what to do in a situation like this. They had a gun, so now they thought they were in the big leagues, like Dengue and his buddies. And now that Dengue was gone, Mikal-Jordan wielded that Glock like a dick, seventeen bullets in your ass, hijo-e-puta. He should have paid closer attention. But Ramón was the one who couldn’t control himself.
He did what he had to do. Catire slowed his pace as he reached the last step into the street.
Ramon and Mikal-Jordan and their gang stood by the corner, making jokes, posing on their own stances.
“Hey, hey, Catire,” one of the gang yelled.
“Long time no see,” another one said.
They walked across the street, forming a wide circle around him. Ramón moved into the open. In his hand he held Catire’s switchblade, closed, playing with it between his fingers. The scab on his face was still fresh. Mikal-Jordan kept to the background.
Catire slowed down and switched his bundle of books to his left hand. He took a ball bearing from his front pocket and inserted his hand into the back pocket to make sure that the round ball of metal fit inside the pouch of the slingshot. He held tightly to the pouch with his fingers but let his arm relax as if he was just keeping his hands there. It would take him about three seconds to drop his books, take out the slingshot, pull with the other hand, aim and shoot.
“Look at you in your cute little uniform, going to that sifrino school. What happened? Your real daddy finally felt guilty? Or is your Mama giving him good head now?” Ramón said, smiling, cocking his head up, waving the closed switchblade.
That hijo-e-puta. He could put the bearing through his eye before he could even open the blade. Control. Control. Don’t show your anger. Señor Jorge had told him that the key to any battle was understanding your enemy better than understanding your own self.
“You know something, Catire?” It was now Mikal-Jordan talking, walking toward him, his hand resting on the gun in his belt as if he were holding his dick. “What happened to you? Huh? Ever since you started that school you turned on your own. We asked you to at least provide a little service. Make some dough along the way. But no, you’re too good for us now. So don’t be so fucking naive, Catire. They do the stuff. Some of your good classmates are trusted clients—coke, pot, you name it.”
Ramón moved even closer and stopped swiveling the switchblade. Mikal-Jordan kept fondling his pants, where the gun rested. They were all around, watching, some silent, some laughing, but keeping some distance.
“What you got there?” Ramón asked.
Catire heard the click of the blade.
It was now unavoidable.
“You still playing with slingshots?” Ramón said, moving toward him with the blade ready to strike, then slashing the air several times. Catire ducked, flushed the slingshot deeper into his pocket, and shielded the blows of the blade with his books. He noticed a glitter of light as Mikal-Jordan pulled the gun into full view.
Catire threw his bundle of books at Ramón and ran away. Ramón followed him.
“I’m going to slice you, come mierda!”
“Get out of the way. Get out of the way,” Mikal-Jordan screamed, trying to aim but avoid hitting Ramón.
God, his paper was gone. It was in the middle of the street. He could still recite word by word the rest of the battle. He could ask after class to have the chance to redo the written part, even though they would nail him on typos. He could still prove to them that he knew his stuff, that he was not a recojidito, a charity case.
He ran as fast as he could. His heart pounded. Then, as if some strange force had hit him, as if a revelation of some kind or some spirit had inhabited his body, he whispered to himself what Páez told his men when they were deep into the open plain with the complete Spanish cavalry behind them.
* * *
As the Llaneros ran away from the Spanish cavalry, Páez told them to spread out and form a single line. A new order was passed, “Vuelvan caras”: turn around, face them. They stopped, turned, and now, instead of running away from an army ten times bigger, they were going to embrace it.
“Vuelvan caras,” Catire whispered, as he pulled the slingshot out of his pocket. He aimed at a charging Ramón. He could get him in the eye, finish him. He shot and Ramón bounced backward and hit the ground. He grabbed another ball bearing and when he aimed he could see the gun pointing at him. He heard a shot as Mikal-Jordan’s hand recoiled. When the hand went back into position Catire released the pouch, whispering “second finger.”
Mikal-Jordan jerked his hand as if removing it from a fire. The gun flew away, landing across the street almost underneath a tire.
“Hijo de la gran...” Mikal-Jordan said. Catire had already loaded his last bearing. He aimed the slingshot at the others, then he let go of the handle and lifted the hand holding the pouch higher. They moved around the sidewalk, behind a car, but none came into the open. Catire walked to where Ramón lay on the ground. He picked up his switchblade, folded it by pressing it against his pants, then helped Ramón to his feet.
“You almost killed me, you son-of-a-bitch,” Ramón said, blood gushing out from a ball forming on top of his eyebrow.
“If I wanted to kill you, you would be dead,” Catire said, giving Ramón his regulation school handkerchief. He walked toward Mikal-Jordan and stopped by his books, now slashed up and down, but his notebook was all right. Mikal-Jordan, still groaning, edged toward his gun, keeping his eyes on Catire.
Catire lifted the hand holding the pouch slightly but did not hold the mast of the slingshot. Mikal-Jordan leaned down and picked up his gun—by the barrel. He lifted it and then placed it in his belt. Catire lowered his hand, still holding to the pouch. Mikal-Jordan cocked his head and smiled at Catire. With his head, he motioned to the others to move away, to let him go.
* * *
“The battle of Las Queseras del Medio,” Catire said aloud, looking around the classroom at all the eyes staring at him, some with curiosity, others with a mid-afternoon ambivalent boredom. They had probably all whispered about his lack of socks, or that he had blood on his shirt, or that something smelled. Catire realized then he had a lump in his throat. His hands quivered, and for the first time he was absolutely scared shitless. But he began to say the words, and every detail of the battle came out as if he had been there and understood the meaning of life and death.
He got to the point where Páez told his Llaneros, “Vuelvan caras” and, taking a deep breath, he continued. The men turned and faced the incoming cavalry that outnumbered them ten to one. The Llaneros let go of their reins and steered their horses with their bare feet. In one hand, they held the long lanza with a flat blade, like a machete on a long pole, in the other, a short one. Sword and musket and gallantly uniformed horsemen met the almost-naked, shoeless, shirtless men, with only straw hats and knee-high pants. They were all savages, Criollos, Llaneros, half-breed Indians, Negros, and Mulatos, all fighting together for a crazy idea about a land for the people, with no king. The long line split in two and moved to both flanks of the coming cavalry. Soon, the Spaniards realized that, in the deep Llanos, the rules were different, for the savages did not stop to engage them; nor did they give them a chance to use their superior sabers. Instead, they galloped through them, shredding everything in their path. A single Llanero could cut down ten well-trained horsemen. The cavalry retreated in disarray, only to be shot by their own infantry as they reached the Spanish lines, giving the Llaneros the cover necessary to overrun the infantry. The Spanish retreated out of the Llanos. It became the turning point of the war, proving that the Spaniards, with their guns and cannons, were no longer invincible and could be overrun by savages with primitive weapons and a taste for independence. Five hundred Spanish soldiers perished that day, while of the one hundred and fifty men who went across the Arauca River, only two found their final fate.
* * *
All eyes were fixed on Catire. The lump in his throat felt bigger. The teacher cocked her head to the side, still staring. But, for the first time, he felt it was not the you’re-wasting-my-time type of look or the you-shit-for-brains-from-the-barrio dismissive stare, but something else, something new, maybe good, if he could only figure it out.
L. VOCEM
L. Vocem is a Venezuelan-American writer whose work has recently appeared in Carve, Tulane Review, riverSedge Journal, and other publications. He received the Editor’s Choice Award in the Raymond Carver Contest, was First Finalist for the Ernest Hemingway Flash Fiction Prize, and made the shortlist for London Magazine’s Prize. Read more at lvocem.com.