One day Fernando rose well before the sun. In the premorning dark he went about fetching water from the well, milking the ornery old she-goat, and chopping and carrying in wood. At the first light of dawn, his grandmother stirred awake from her deep, death-like sleep, as though waking from a spell. Sitting on the edge of his cot, Fernando peeled and trimmed the last of the dried bulbs. His grandmother frowned at him. Peering around, she shook her shimmery head.

“What am I supposed to do with

Since Fernando’s grandmother wasn’t keen on him doing her chores for her—and since it hadn’t proved a fruitful tactic in wheedling more information out of her—he took to working on her shack instead. She protested this as well, saying that everything was fine as it was. Fernando ignored this. He needed something to do with his time. And if tacking scrap boards and sheeting onto the walls might mean a few less critters crawling over him at night, then that was all the more incentive.

Fernando

The old woman’s bony brown hand seized Fernando’s elbow like a claw. It was as if he’d been about to stroll blindly through the gates of hell, the way she was restraining him. If she wasn’t so clearly distraught, Fernando might have laughed at the absurdity of it. Instead, he kept his face calm and neutral.

“I’m just gathering palm fronds, Abuela.”

His grandmother slashed her chin so hard to one side Fernando wondered how her skinny neck didn’t crack. “You should not have

If Fernando was going to make a proper pen and shelter for the goats, he was going to have to buy the materials to do so. His money had run out about the time he’d arrived in Cortez. He could send word back to Bogotá for more, but he found himself reluctant to do so. His life in Bogotá felt like another life to him. He didn’t want to mix these two worlds.

He took some extra goat cheese, wild roots and exotic jungle fruits he’d scavenged to market. In addition to these, he brought along

Chico turned out to be the heavy-browed, sharp-eyed youth who’d questioned Fernando earlier. The other three churlish young men were called Tito, Pepe and Lalo. Pepe was very skinny, Tito was very ugly, and Lalo was very stupid. Chico, being the meanest of the bunch, was naturally their leader. All four of them glared at Fernando as he approached them across the workyard.

Fernando wasn’t discouraged at this show of unprovoked hostility in the slightest. He was used to getting along with people

By the end of the workday, Fernando wasn’t sure what he’d accomplished besides busting up himself and everything around him. Chico seemed impressed with him, however. Onto a shaded beam Fernando collapsed, chugging water from an old milk jug and trying to catch his breath. Grinning, Chico clapped Fernando on the back where he sat.

“Nice work, city boy. I did my best to break you, but you’re a tough bastard, I’ll give you that. Come have a drink with us.”

Fernando went over with them

A sudden hush fell over the clamoring crowd. Like a tide they receded before the advance of a man whom Fernando would have readily believed was half Neanderthal. His crude features sloped downward into a blunt, trollish scowl. The chair opposite Fernando groaned like it was dying as the man sat himself down on it. He plunked his elbow onto the table, hinging up his arm. It was like watching a thick, gnarled tree-trunk being winched into shape.

The seething crowd closed back around them, no longer

Fernando spent his summer days working at the construction site. He spent his summer nights roving about town with Chico and his mongrel crew. Smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and drinking cheap booze. Playing soccer under the flickering lamplights. Getting themselves into and out of scrapes.

It was a bit surreal, if Fernando paused to reflect on it, just how swiftly and seamlessly he’d folded himself into the grungy mix of Cortez. It was almost as if, like Chico had said, Fernando had always been

With the five of them working together on it, Fernando and his friends got the goat pen built in what seemed like no time—fencing, lean-to, water troughs and all. Fernando hadn’t recruited Chico and the others to the task, just as he hadn’t recruited them to scrounge materials for him. When he’d said what he was doing, they’d just followed along.

Fernando didn’t doubt his friends’ curiosity about his old witch of a grandmother had something to do with it. As their work wound down

Fernando and the others spent the rest of the day herding goats. This was both easier and more difficult than Fernando had anticipated. He’d constructed the pen in what he considered to be the optimal location based on the geography of the landscape and his observation of the goats’ grazing habits. It was a place he felt the animals would naturally gravitate toward.

He was right on this count. The old nanny goat and her latest batch of kids, who were always hanging about close to the shack