LIME GREEN

It finally rained on the third saturday, coming down in an assault wave of hot, heavy drops that felt more like water balloons that had been filled with warm water. We got caught out in the street, mostly shirtless and sweating and filthy with sandy dust, and we smiled and held out our arms like victorious royalty returning to a grateful army.
Vela was far in the front, leading our ramshackle column past the long, flat fields, towards the smoky neighborhoods stuffed full of leaning concrete houses and two-or-three-story buildings looming up over the bustling sidewalk street vendors, and tiny banks and businesses.
He kept turning back, eyes wide and watchful, our silent protector, our young fearless warrior prince.
They had told us that afternoon that there was a river south of the bordello, no more than a mile and fresh and deep and welcoming. Vela and his friend had taken us; his friend who we had started to call 'Lime Green' because of the local team soccer jersey he wore everyday. It was rancid and wartorn, and looked as though it had been hole punched all over with an olive jar. We asked him once why he wore it so much, in the condition it was in, and all he said was,
"My deam."
The two of them enthusiastically led us from the old church towards the center of town, through the slums and the side alleys, and down past the taxi lanes and the shabby concrete outskirts that slowly blended into untended gardens and unused fields.
Vela and i had walked this area before, and even though i'd only been in the country for 23 days, it felt familiar; it felt like my feet were stepping in my own footsteps, head down, eyes unneeded.
The first time we had come this way, Vela had commented on the state of the fields, which had once been used for large weekly soccer tournaments, the competitors composed of everyone from old alcoholics to young boys who in any normal country would be in first or second grade. Vela spoke of these matches with a great, longing happiness, his words soft and round and warmly recalling only the pleasure; the way he talked reminded me of a boy casually thinking back on lost days with an ex-girlfriend, choosing to remember only the sweet things, forgetting the pain of the ending.
We would walk in silence after he spoke, always coming to a halt at the foot of the first field. The grass was overgrown and tired, and weeds that had climbed high several years ago had given up their endeavors and now sagged pathetically under invisible weights. A rusty bicycle lay on its side like a crashed fighter plane in the middle of the field, surrounded by broken bottles and the remnants of a goal-frame.
Vela always folded his arms then, and looking out he would shake his head.
"To me it is like an old woman, from the village i was born in." he said to me once. "Her hair, when she was young, was so straight and beautiful, long and black, shiny…." he kicked the ground, thinking. "… after many years it became dead, and white …. tangled with leaves and yarn, like a ball of weeds collected from a garden."
"What happened here?" i asked. He glanced at me, his face suggesting that he had forgotten i was there at all.
"There was a girl. Her brother…."
"You don't have to tell me."
"Thank you."
We had stood quietly then, for a long time, looking out onto it. Far beyond it, the tropical treelike was dark and foreboding, the trees tall and entwined and like a solid wall except for the small path that had been hacked into them like a doorway leading to a hidden world. Behind us, distantly, came the yelling of children and the congested, constant cough of traffic. I turned, and then turned back.
"Its strange," i said. "The edge of the town, its right back there." He cocked his head. "It just ends, abruptly, and then the jungle starts."
"Abroodly?" he asked in English.
"Very quick," i said in Spanish. He nodded and stared out at the field.
"I'm sorry i do not want to talk about this place," he said quietly. "I fear you will judge me for it, if i tell you about what happened in this place."
"You don't have to tell me anything. Pay it no mind."
"I have never spoken about the way she died." I turned to him as he cleared his throat. "Not to anybody."
"You don't have to."
Vela had tried very hard then to appear strong, his mouth folded and frowning, his eyes wide and serious. After a few moments he nodded, not to me, but to himself, and as he faced me he smiled, his face filled with new emotion, as if his face was made of several pages in a book that he could just flip.
"We'll go now," he said. And we never said anything else about it.
Now, as our soaking wet column trickled out of the field and entered the first neighborhood, i looked back, trying to decide what could've possibly happened.
Above me thunder roared suddenly, the sound like God and his buddies moving the furniture before a big game, so everyone could get a good seat.
"Yo know dith blace?" I turned, finding Vela's friend, Lime Green, standing shoulder to shoulder with me. He too stared straight ahead, the same way Vela had, his eyes giving me a tiny glimpse of the story his mouth wouldn't tell me. "Yo know id?" his english was thick, coming from his throat. His mouth hardly moved when he spoke, and i noticed he had scars on his neck and throat.
"I do not know it," i said in Spanish.
"Veda hat-not tell you?" His eyes squinted, and he grinned. From far back in the streets came the sound of a bus horn.
"No, he didn't tell me."
The rain poured harder. I turned to Vela's friend, his jersey stained and shredded and faded. He stared at the field for a moment, and then turned to me. He shrugged and smiled, and slapped my shoulder
"Come own," he now yelled over the sound of the rain. "Less go beck."
"You're not going to tell me?" i yelled back in spanish.
"No my blace," he said, shrugging and smiling his palms upturned. "No my blace to tell yo."
We stood there for a moment.
He grinned like a wolf watching the fawn stop to drink, and said nothing more, and led me into town.