Source: Speak Up
Language level: Advanced
Standard: American
Author: Johnathan Edward Amacker
The Elysian Fields
Luck is with the Young reporter. Though traffic crawls in both directions, right away he finds a parking spot on Rio Branco, in the Campos Elíseos neighborhood. Just across the avenue some police and a small crowd are milling before an old apartment building. Nearby, two squad cars and a City Morgue van have stopped, while about twenty meters farther, by the corner of Duque de Caxias, a Polícia Militar first sergeant leans against a squad car, surveying all.
The young reporter gets out of his Fait and locks it. Motorcycles snake through the crush of vehicles and buses roar along their center lanes. The sunlight and din resonate off auto-parts stores and cheap hotels. He wipes the sweat from his brow and curses whoever it was for picking rush hour, of all times, on a day like today. The pollution turns his stomach, burns his eyes and lips. Heat, the concrete filth of the city, exhaustion.
He picks his way through the traffic, pausing at the median strip with its bus stop and trees. A commotion by the building’s entrance and the crowd fans out. Two wiry young cops sporting latex gloves emerge from the darkness, cradling the small, bloodstainded corpse of a boy – little more than a monkey face lolling from a scarecrow body, half the back of his skull blown away. They load him into the gray City morgue van and head back, making room for other cops to lug out a fat, dark-skinned, middle-aged victim clad only faded blue athletic shorts. Seen through the crowd, the guy’s butt barely clears the sidewalk and is enormous, blood-streaked belly quakes at each step. Hell of a job for the cops in this heat. They inch him into the rear of the gray van and shut the doors.
Soon one, two, three young corpses are lying nearby, on the sidewalk.
Through the air washes sadness burned out and second hand. Rubbernecks lean from windows in tall building up and down the avenue and the crowd presses close to the bodies – the dark Brazil seeing its own off.
The young reporter crosses to the other side as the guys from the City Morgue carry out the body of an apparently adolescent boy. They put him on the sidewalk next to another boy and a girl lying side by side like trash to be collected. Crack addicts from the looks of them: Two dark, shriveled boys and the girl skeletal light haired, almost blond. Their ages? From the bodies, maybe fourteen or so, from the faces, upwards of thirty – born old to die young.
Flies poke around the corpses; the young reporter catches a whiff of raw meat beginning to turn. Staring at the entrance to the building, at the glass-and-wrought-iron doors blocked open and the trail of blood leading to the absorbent darkness, he knows what to expect: an explosion of red and bodies splayed out as if they had no bones at all.
The heat presses down like a great fleshy hand. Clutching pen and notepad, the young reporter accosts the sergeant he’d marked on his arrival. The old cop’s eyes are cold and yellow. He basks in the flashing blue-and-red lights of the squad car, seeming to push back the mass of air surrounding him. “Estadão, huh? Big time. What can I do for you?”
“Just tell me what happened.” “In this neighborhood? Drug massacre. What else could it be? “How many victims?” “Eleven, far as I know.”
“Uh huh, and it took place when?” “Couple of hours ago, more or less.”
“The guys from the morgue got here fast. Someone important die?”
But the sergeant isn’t listening. A young cop from Polícia Militar is carrying out the body of a little girl who couldn’t have been more than three years old. Dark red blotches soak her dress and mat her hair, and her mouth is twisted as if she’d eaten something strange taste, try as she might, she could not identify. The young cop seems unsure of how to hold her. He sets her down at the end of the row of corpses and lingers as the hum of internal combustion engines leaches into the reddening sky.
The old man removes his gray service cap and runs his hand through his military brush cut. The soft breeze picking up brings no relief from the heat.
“Most of the ones that got it were users and dealers,” he says. “A crack den, know what I mean? My guess is a fight over territory or an unpaid bill. Two kids showed up on a motorcycle around six o’clock. No one got a good look ‘cause they pulled their fee shirts over their heads.”
“How old were they? “Hard to say. Late teens, early twenties – moreno claro. Super saw ‘em but got out of the way quick ‘cause he could guess what was coming.” “This shithole has a super?” “Sure, why not?” “Good, I’ll talk to him later so what happened?”
“What happened is the two guys walk to this ground floor apartment in the rear like they were paying a fucking social visit. Like I said. It’s a crack den and it’s filled –y’know, party time. And the assholes inside open the door, or maybe they forgot to lock it, and – pow! –the two gunmen just start blasting. We found twenty-six. 380 cartridge cases in the apartment and in the hall.”
“You think the people involved all knew each other?
“Could be. There’s no evidence the door was forced.”
“And what was the final score?”
“Eight in the apartments. Mostly kids. Three from other apartments. No survivors. Some of the victims had an entry wound at the base of the skull and a missing forehead – misericórdia, unjacketed bullets. We’ll give you a list of the names and ages. The crack heads were all holding on to each other – real lovey-dokey.”
“They didn’t return fire?” looks like one of ‘em tried to. Got off a couple of rounds, anyway, but I don’t think he had much of a chance. We found two cartridge cases and two 32 caliber bullet holes in the ceiling above the door, so God only knows what he was aiming at. If we find a gun, we’ll see if the prints on it match those of any of the corpses.”
“You think you’ll find a gun?” “The 32, maybe – unless someone in the building already stole it or the killers took it with them. But we’ll took for it. The point is, whoever wasted those creeps did us all a favor
“Can I quaote you on that?” “Be my guest.”
“Sergeant, I saw the cops from the morgue put a middle-aged fat guy into the van, who was he?”
“Super’s brother. Everyone says he was a decent sort, but a real fuck-up, if you ask me. Hears sreaming and gunfire and pops out to have a look. Man, some people got a dry hole where their brain ought to be.”
“What can you tell me about the little girl?”
A shout from the entrance to the building. Two cops charge through the crowd and rush inside, barreling out in a flash with a couple of street kids. “Lemme go, you old son of a bitch, lemme go! Onolookers scurry as the cops send the boys flying – one tumbling, skinning his hands and knees on the sidewalk. He scrambles to join his friends at the end of the block. Shrieking, they tear across the avenue, narrowly missing an oncoming bus, and take off in the direction of Paissandu Square.
“See that?” Demands the sergeant. “Most of those kids are nuts.”
“O.K., but what about the little girl? Anything you can give me, I’d appreciate it.”
The old man’s eyes take in the shimmering, bloodied landscape. He fishes in his shirt pocket and comes up with a pack of Ministers. The young reporter declines, so the cop extracts one for himself and, with some difficult, lights it with a match, puffing out a big cloud of smoke. “She was coming downstairs to play. Got caught in the crossfire. Bullet entered her back and punctured her heart. Blew a big hole…”
The young reporter scratches his pen across the paper.
“Anything else? Her name? How old she was?”
“No, that’s about it.” The sergeant takes another shaky drag on his cigarette. Loses interest, and flicks it to the sidewalk. “Fucking pollution,” he says, wiping his eyes. Can’t even see.”
For a moment, only the soft swirl of the hot wind and the white noise of idling motors. The sergeant pulls out a handkerchief. “Give me a minute, will you?
Take your time.”
He’s not the policeman you’d want interrogating you. No trick to imagine the games he’s been involved with, especially in the old days, in some precinct station’s truth room. Now he stands broken down on this crummy street in Campos Elíseos.
What am I doing here? The young reporter asks himself. For three years mixing with the sewage of São Paulo – how time flies when you’re wasting it. He imagines that he’s falling through the circles of the metropolis, little arms opening to him as he plummets. Before him the broad avenue stretches past the old apartment building past the dusty public square sprawled beneath the equestrian statue of the Duke of Caxias, then curves over the Rudge Viaduct to meet the northwest horizon glowing beyond the distant roofs of the factories near the mountains. And suddenly, for no reason at all, he’s thinking of his sister in New York, the one who got luck and won’t be coming back. And he wonders vaguely whether she feels about the heat, whether it makes her sad sometimes, makes her feel empty and tired, makes her want to run away from the earth and from memory. New York…it’s like a dream. But where would she go to escape the cold?
“Sergeant?”
What do you want?
Who was she?
Patches like sweat like shadows spread across the old cop’s gray uniform shirt. His face ha collapsed. Taking on the color of smoke. His gaze wanders to rest on the tiny corpse, and his voice comes out thin, from the other side of the world: “A kid from the neighborhood. Who else could she be?”
“She was a pretty little thing, “says the young reporter. “Someone must’ve been taking good care of her. Didn’t she have a mother?”
“Why? Do you want to meet her?” “Yes – for the record.”
The sergeant’s breath reeks of cigarettes and garlic. He looks as if a gun, pressed against his gray temple, were about to leave a warm, red hole.
“The guys from the morgue can show you the body. Talk to that corporal lover by the van. Nivaldo. He’ll fill you in on any details I may have missed. Go on. Tell him I sent you.”
He fumbles for another cigarette, but ends by crumpling and throwing away the pack. And that’s it.
Neither man – not the weary young report, not the ruined monument of a sergeant – has more to add, no truth to tell, no confession to make. Besides, maybe what happened really was just the usual crap among a bunch of scumbags who are better off dead, and the girl got in the way is all. It’s impossible, but not much of an epitaph. She got in the way. In event, she’s out of this way now.
Complete the sentence. Write the correct past form of the verb. Good Luck!
