The Boat by Nam Le

Automatically I leaned to the side of the bike. I tried to jump but my pants got caught in the chain. Then the bike pitched onto its right side and I began to roll down the grassy hill, my hands cuffed behind me. I heard a couple of gunshots. I kept rolling until the ground leveled off. My head felt like it had been stabbed at the back. Moments later I felt someone's boots roll me onto my stomach. I waited for the shot. All I could smell was earth, and grass, and it smelled richer than I had ever smelled anything before. I waited. But the gunshot did not come, and then I felt someone unlock and remove my handcuffs. Hernando helped me to my feet. Blood leaked from his right armpit. He led me up the hill to where my captor, the businessman, lay under the bike, one leg bent so far back the wrong way the foot almost touched the hip. Hernando handed me a gun.
    It is his, he said.
    And the policeman? I asked.
    Your corrupted friend is dead, Hernando said sternly to the man, as though it were he who had asked the question.
    The man groaned. The flesh around his mouth had gone loose. I did not know then – as I do now – that this was a sign of fear.
    You must do this, said Hernando. He looked at me like a brother. He said, Ron, you must do this so we are in it together.
    I took the gun, which felt unexpectedly warm and heavy in my hand, and which gave off a smell like a match being lit in a dark room. I pointed it at the man's head. His sunglasses were broken and bent around his ear and the fragments shone in the afternoon light. I aimed at the blackness in the middle of his ear and shot.
    After a while, I turned my back to the man's face and tried to lift the motorbike from his broken lower body. I felt filled with a tremendous lightness, as if every breath I took was expanding inside me. Then I remembered something.
    The policeman. How did you –
    Hernando let out a short, burp-sounding laugh. He bent his knees as though about to sit down on an invisible chair, then tipped onto his ass. He seemed suddenly drunk.
    The stupid puto stopped, he said, because the handcuffs were uncomfortable against his back. But he would not turn me around to face the same way as him – he said he did not want a faggot rubbing up behind him. Hernando burped again. So he handcuffed my hands in front. At the top of the hill, I stopped him like this.
    Hernando tilted his head backward and lifted his arms up, high up, arching them over his head. I saw the gashes in his right armpit that the policeman's fingernails must have made when the cuffs looped over his face and under his throat.
    I watched him and he laughed again. Inside, the light air filled me like sacol. Help me lift this, I said. But he did not look at the bike. He remained sitting on the grass, half naked, embracing his legs tightly.
    For me too, he said. That was my first time too. He frowned, looking straight ahead. His face was as white as a plastic bag. Then a change came over it as though he was going to be sick. Then his face changed again and he smiled, but now the smile only affected his mouth.
    Finally, I lifted the bike and rested it on its side stand. We have to go, I said. You ride behind me.
    He nodded. I helped him to his feet and onto the motorbike. All the way down the hill he gripped me tightly, like a chica on her first ride.

    ***

    AFTER THAT, OF COURSE, more things changed than just the fact that Hernando and I became friends. You do not kill a policeman and business leader and expect the streets to owe you protection.
    El Padre approached me – through a nero whom I knew but did not know to be employed by El Padre – and told me he would protect me. He would take me off the streets, like he took other kids off the onion farms, but he would raise me above these farm kids: I would be given an office job. There was strength in me, he said on the telephone. I could go back to my own barrio, where, with my new status, I would be safe. We are similar, he said. We are both