James Siegel - Detour

He went back to the problem that had been dumped on his desk. Risk ratios had to be formulated, tabulated, and segmented for another potentially dangerous activity.

Plane Travel.

Driving a Car.

Construction Jobs.

Lying in a Swamp Being Pursued by Homicidal Gunmen.

“Tell you what,” one of their pursuers screamed. “Got a deal for you, bollo . You come on in now, we won’t kill you. How’s that?”

Bollo. Pussy. One of the Spanish words eighth graders taught themselves, snickering, between classes.

Okay, Paul wondered, why were they only concentrating on the other drug runner in the weeds? Was it possible they hadn’t seen Miles and him in the clearing? Was it?

Miles answered the question for him. “He must have the bag,” he whispered. “They want the drugs. ”

The man with the high-pitched voice and lazy eye. Polo. He’d snatched Paul’s bag when the shots rang out.

The gunman shouted for the lazy-eyed man to come in, called him a bollo, an abadesa, a culo —all not-so-nice things, Paul imagined. He repeated his proposition. If he’d only stand up and walk toward them bag in hand, he’d get out of the swamp with his life—honest injun.

Still no answer.

Paul assumed Polo didn’t believe a word of it. They’d already put a bullet into his neck—if he wasn’t going to die of West Nile, he might expire from that.

“Okay,” the man shouted, “okay, that’s cool. How about some music while you think it over? For your listening pleasure.”

Someone walked back to the Jeeps and turned on a CD player. Or maybe it was the car radio. Latin samba came wailing through the cattails. Screeching trumpets and a good steady beat. Music, that’s nice of them. Only something seemed wrong with this music. It sounded shrill and off-key.

It took a minute or so for Paul to understand why.

At first Paul thought it might be a trick of the air, an aberration in sound waves caused by the thick cattails and even thicker heat. It wasn’t.

It was a man screaming. Izod.

They were torturing their prisoner in time to the music.

To cover up the sound. Or because it made it more fun. Or because they liked samba.

One, two, three . . . scream.

They kept at it for an entire song—the longest song on earth.

“American Pie” might be nineteen and a half minutes. This song was longer.

Finally, it stopped. “What ya think?” the man shouted. “Celia Cruz, mi mami . A fucking scream, no?”

Paul turned to Miles.

“Who are they?”

When the Jeeps had burst through the weeds and the men surged out with guns drawn and firing, he’d thought the police. Government agents. Narcs.

Not now.

Miles didn’t answer. Maybe because his hands were up over his ears. His eyes were closed as if he didn’t wish to see anything either. A long bloody scratch went from one side of his forehead to the other. He’d done Paul a favor, he’d extended himself beyond the call of reasonable duty, and now it was very possible he was going to die because of it.

“Julio.” Another voice now, thin and whispery. “Juliooooo . . .”

There was something pitiful about this voice.

“They broke my fingers, Julio. They broke my whole hand. My hand, Julio . . . You gotta come in! You hear me! I can’t . . . Please . . . They want the llello, man, that’s it. For fuck’s sake, come in!”

The torturer’s deal had fallen on deaf ears. They’d changed tack. It was Izod’s turn.

“Listen to me . . . They broke my fingers, all my fingers, Julio . . . every one of my fingers . . . Bring in the hooch . . . They’re killing me . . . Please, Julio . . . please . . . You hearin’ what I’m sayin’?”

Julio remained mute.

They gave it another song.

Another samba, played with the volume cranked down, so the man’s screams were louder, in your face, standing out even over the spanking rhythm and blaring horns.

Sometimes he screamed actual words.

Ayudi a mi madre!

Please help me, Mother!

The music stopped again.

Paul heard sniffling, a horrible mewling sound.

“Julioooo . . . my ear. They cut my ear off. It hurts . . . oh, it hurts, Julio . . . oh, it hurts . . . Come in . . . Please come in . . . Please . . . You GOT to . . . They cut my ear off, Julio . . . You understand . . .”

Julio might’ve understood—he would’ve had to be deaf, dumb, or dead not to understand. He wasn’t coming in.

Paul pushed his head to the ground. It stank like rotting vegetables. If he were an ostrich, he would’ve stuck his head into the ground and kept it there.

It was hard listening to a man being tortured. Even one you didn’t know. He knew him well enough to see him. Neatly pressed pants and a powder-blue Izod turned bloodred. There was a black hole where one of his ears used to be.

“No . . . no, please no . . . Don’t . . . No, not my balls . . . please, not my balls, no . . . Julio, don’t let them cut my balls off . . . Pleeeeease, Julio, no . . . Don’t let them do that . . . No—”

A bloodcurdling howl.

It was so loud one of the torturers told him to shut the fuck up. The man whose testicles he’d just sliced off.

The man did shut up.

For a while there was mostly silence. Just the insects, the slightest breeze rustling through the cattails.

May I have some water?

It was him again.

I’d like some water. Please. Some water . . .

Softly and politely, as if he were in a restaurant talking to a waiter.

As if they might politely answer him back.

Sure, still or sparkling?

Eventually, he stopped speaking. At least actual words. All verifiable human language ceased. He reverted to a guttural, indecipherable whimpering.

His tongue.

They’d cut out his tongue.

Paul couldn’t listen anymore.

He needed to stop hearing.

The odds of accidental death from being struck by lightning are 1 in 71,601 for an average lifetime.

The odds of dying from being bitten by a nonvenomous insect are 1 in 397,000.

The odds of drowning in a household bathtub are 1 in 10,499.

The odds of . . .

“ Maricón, see what you made us do. Fuck—your boyfriend bled like a fucking cerado. All over my goddamn shoes. We gave you a chance, you cocksucking motherfucker.”

Their prisoner was dead.

Someone went back to the Jeeps. Paul could hear doors being opened, then slammed shut.

“What are they doing?” Paul whispered to Miles. But Miles still had his hands over his ears—his skin had turned the color of skim milk.

They were on the march again—one or two of them, slowly moving through the fields.

Paul smelled it first.

If Joanna were there, she would have sniffed it out minutes sooner, he knew. She’d have lifted her head and said how odd, do you smell that?

It was wafting in through the cattails. When Paul lifted his head again in an effort to make sense of it, he heard sounds of splashing.

“They’re making a line,” Miles whispered, his first actual conversation in the last half hour. He’d finally taken his hands off his ears—was all ears now, but he clearly didn’t like what he was hearing.

A line? What did Miles mean? What line?

“The wind’s blowing that way,” Miles said. First an enigmatic pronouncement about lines, now the weather report.

“They’re going to burn him out,” Miles said in a weirdly detached voice. “They’re going to make him run right to them.”