The Mark on the Zinc

Bianca adjusted the satchel that was slipping off her shoulder before letting out a dry laugh.

"Sure, and tomorrow I'll go to the clinic for a certificate with a fake fever," she retorted. "What a great idea, Lisandro. Always so practical at sorting out everybody else's life."

Lisandro didn't smile. He dragged his left hand across his right wrist, brushing his thumb against the rough strand of raw wool red thread. He looked at her as if Bianca were a leak in the roof of a freshly painted shed: a domestic problem nobody wanted to fix in the middle of winter.

"It's no joke," he said, lowering his voice. "The Loncopáns didn't come up from Cerro Ceniza to drink mate with fried pastries. If you're in there when they call the roll, you're going to have to put the folder on the plank. And you know what that stamp means."

"Things I'm not doing tonight: 1. Staying locked up eating reheated noodles. 2. Listening to you. 3. Being scared of you."

Lisandro let out a dry huff, white vapor escaping between his clenched teeth.

"Always the last word, Pezoa."

"It's my best quality, according to mom."

She spun around on the hardened mud and set off walking before he could invent another solemn warning. The crunch of frost under her sneakers sounded like broken glass, an even, dry crunch that marked her pulse all the way to the power plant corner.

Pascual Meliqueo's kitchen smelled of toast on the iron stove and the old grease of day-before-yesterday's fried pastries, the kind wrapped in La Mañana newspaper with circular stains of transparent oil. The kettle water had already boiled twice, leaving a white, crunchy scale on the spout.

Pascual was sitting on a small willow stool, a fine piece of sandpaper in his hand and the handle of a hand axe resting on his knees. He didn't even look up when Bianca pushed the rickety door.

"Your mate is going to get cold," he said.

"It's already cold. It tastes like rotten grass."

"It's cheap Misiones yerba, don't ask the elm for pears. Did you see him?"

"He was on guard against the power plant wire like a dog with a new collar," Bianca said, tossing the satchel onto the flowered oilcloth table. She plugged her phone into the electrical-tape-patched charger hanging next to the counter, hoping that warming up would revive the battery that had died on her in the alley. "He told me not to go to the communal shed."

Pascual let a wood shaving drop to the floor with a puff of air.

"The kid's right."

"You too? Please, Pascual. If I don't go, they'll say I ran off to Bariloche with the papers."

"Nobody goes into the cage on purpose, except when the blizzard is biting hardest outside," Pascual dropped, wiping his fingers on his brown corduroy trousers. "And tonight the wind is coming straight off the ridge. Look at the sheets."

Outside, the woodshed's zinc roof creaked with a metallic, plaintive roar, bent by a gust blowing down carrying wood splinters of ice and dry coihue leaves. The sky had closed into a heavy leaden gray, flattening the peaks against the valley.

The afternoon slipped away from them in that freezing vigil, watching the murky light die against the curtains while the kettle water boiled once more on the iron. Just past ten thirty at night, the phone vibrated on the oilcloth with a single bar of signal and the dying four percent the patched-up charger had managed to give it. A short, feeble vibration.

Mom [22:41]: Did you stop by doña Elba's store to pick up the flour? It's going to blow hard.

Bianca pressed her thumbs against the touch keyboard, typed: Mom, there's a mandatory meeting about dad's thing and I don't know if I'm coming back to sleep. She looked at it for three seconds. She erased everything with quick thumb taps.

She typed: Yes ma, I'll be over there in a bit.

She didn't send it. She turned off the screen.

"Do you have matches?" she asked, rummaging through her pocket.

"On the shelf, next to the grease tin," Pascual replied without looking at her. "Don't touch the nail jar or it'll tip over easy."

"I'm not clumsy."

"Yesterday you knocked the washed-out mate over the gas bill, Bianca."

"That bill was already overdue anyway."

They fell silent. The only sound was the rhythmic screech of the sandpaper against the hard wood of the axe and the dull hum of the diesel heater in the adjoining room. Bianca looked at the folder sticking out of her bag's worn canvas: the black sealing wax looked like a blind eye pressed against the cardboard. The split-claw stamp. Her father always used to say that debts in the mountain range aren't paid with money because money gets damp and rots; they're paid with presence, putting your hide under the eaves when the icicles drop.

A yawn escaped her unawares. She rubbed her eyes, burning from the green firewood smoke.

"Pascual."

"What do you want?"

"Were you scared of my old man?"

Pascual stopped his arm. The sandpaper stayed motionless two inches from the axe's eye. A speck of sawdust floated in the thick air and fell on the thermos covered in cattle cooperative stickers and lubricant brands.

"Héctor was a guy who didn't know when to shut up," he said slowly, in a voice deeper than his own, as if borrowed from his grandfather. "That's not scary, Pezoa. That makes you feel sorry when it teams up with winter."

At eleven sharp, the power plant sirens wailed.

It was a sharp, long, heart-wrenching roar that cut through the roar of the white wind. The sheet metal across all of Cañadón Frío seemed to vibrate in unison, a lament of rusted metal calling the cattle before the great frost.

Pascual dropped the axe to the floor. He didn't say anything else. He stood up slowly, put on the heavy leather jacket with the shearling collar, and grabbed the big four-battery flashlight.

"Let's go," he said.

"I thought you were going to tie me to the chair so I wouldn't go."

"If I tie you, you'll break my chair. It belonged to my mother."

The street was a desert of mud petrified by the cold and patches of dirty snow. On the municipal corner, the four-wheel-drive pickups of the Cerro Ceniza commission were parked in single file, their engines idling roughly and the orange flash of the hazard lights dyeing the fog a dirty, rusted color.

Men in dark thermal parkas and traditional waistbands climbed down from the truck beds without speaking to each other, spitting on the ground and adjusting their berets with numb hands.

Bianca walked two paces behind Pascual. The cold soaked into the canvas of her old sport sneakers; the right one had a tiny slit on the toe through which the frost slipped like fine needles. She could feel her toes as hard as dry branches.

"You go in, stand against the back wall, and don't open your mouth until they ask three times," Pascual muttered without turning his head. "If Lisandro gestures to you, don't look at him."

"I wasn't planning on looking at him even if he sets himself on fire to keep warm."

"Better."

They reached the esplanade of the communal shed, the old municipal gymnasium. The double sheet-metal doors, painted an institutional green chipped by saltpeter and wind, were half closed to stop the Andean air from entering. Inside, the cavernous murmur of hundreds of throats could be heard, that thick rumor resembling an underground river about to overflow its drainage.

Bianca adjusted the strap of her crossbody bag over her chest. The folder with the black sealing wax rhythmically struck her ribs.

She took a deep breath.

The air burned her throat with the smell of burnt gas and wet wool sweat.

She pushed the metal leaf with her numb shoulder. The dull thud of the metal against the frame echoed across the shed and cut the conversations short.

At the back, next to the plank illuminated by fluorescent tubes, Lisandro raised his head.