Arica

Arica, the port city. Shards of glass lined the beach up to a children's playground, where the sun was setting through graffiti-caked pillars and neon trellises. Kids were the kings of their fleeting plastic innocence, even if their parents put out cigarettes on their foreheads and forgot to come home most nights. Smoke-puffing barges dipped off the edge of the world, sinking with the sun and sucking down all the clouds. Coffee-break cranes and skeletal skyscrapers were frozen, poking up back in the east, an army of them about to creep up on the Pacific, to wade out and sink away.

Across the road, a little yellow tanker was pumping into a hose, and an old man held it steady with seagreen nitrile gloves. I waved to him lazily, but he just shrugged at me and kept hold, shouting numbers in Spanish to his crew over a fence. His phone started ringing, and he fumbled with one hand on the hose as he pulled his glove off with his teeth, swearing through saliva and nitrile rubber. He glanced at me warily, as I leaned on the hood of my stolen Toyota.

I had borrowed the car coming through Peru. I was taking buses and hitching rides until I saw an Indiana license plate parked near a shack in the outskirts of Moquegua. How does an Indiana Toyota find its way out here? No one was home to ask, so I let myself in, borrowed the keys, and left the miner his pickaxe keyfob behind. There was a loaded gun in the glove box, now keeping company with my own.

The old man talked a little into the phone. His eyes peered over 'TOYOTA' like an officer looking for drugs. He waved over to me. I shrugged back, lazily.

"Ven aca," he said, giving the last syllable a jolt of his chin. "Es para vos." As much as I could gather, he was surprised.

Fine. "Alo?"

"David." A curt address. A mole perched up into a dimple on the edge of his curled, stupid smile, the kind of smile you could hear when someone talked. Even if it was curt.

"Eddy. My loving hermano. Un momento."

"Cut the crap, David. Give me my money, or -"

It was hard figuring out which button to press to hang up the phone because they were all rubbed clean to the glossy plastic beneath. I held the phone out, offering it to the dazed man.

"Gracias."

"Que demonios?"

"Don't look at me. Your phone." Guess expecting freedom down here would have been a little too much to ask for.

The red Toyota sped off, flying along the curvy coast. The map showed it best: a tangled mess of lines that flattened out for paces at a time, like the heart monitor of a dying old man, until he promises you the inheritance if you'd just take that pillow, David, the red one, and make the ocean stay still for a while. You did it, and you got your money, and fuck Eddy, you buried the money in Moquegua and he can't ever have it or find out where you buried it. Not while you have two guns in your glove box.