“How is that?”

     “Your only problem is to get rid of Luis. And it happens, the way he's been acting, people are lining up for the chance.”

· 28 ·

Next day the sun unloaded on the canvas. The wet floor cooked with an odor of compost. A guard stood outside, a silhouette on the fabric. Lito and I sat pouring sweat, inhaling the miasma, motionless except to shift our cramped arms.

     We spent the whole day this way, then another night. In the afternoon of the second day—Saturday—the rain came again, a few minutes of thunderstorm that soaked but did not cool.

     The camp seemed sluggish until evening, when we heard more movement, shouts that sounded like orders, the click and snap of magazines and firing bolts, the squeak of cartridge belts. They were leaving the camp; from the sound of it, by squads, about ten at a time.

     Not long afterward our guard and another rifleman came down. They had been in twice during the day, to loosen the ropes and hold rifles on us while we drank water and ate some rice and voided into a bucket. Now they came and pulled us to our feet.

     “We're out of here,” Lito said.

     They sent us up the steps.

     “I want you to know,” he said when we were outside, “when you get to the States, you should do what you have to do about the insurance.”

     “I will.”

     “So. What are you going to do?”