Matthew di Paoli

In the Underworld, when asked if he was satisfied with his life of fame and glory, Achilles replied, “I would’ve rather been a farmer.”

July 26th, 1968

The sky above Arenal Mountain was pink, freckled with stars. Clouds had begun gathering at the peak of the mountain even on clear nights, like an old man’s night cap. There weren’t many streetlights, just a few gas lamps trembling along the farmhouses below the mountain. The wind blew cool and dusty in the evenings. Pastor groomed his cow, Sofia. She was his favorite. He had 2 other cows but had failed to name them, because he knew he would have to sell them as some point. He scratched Sofia behind the ear, and she cricked back her head, letting out a soft, agreeable moo.

“I think it will rain tomorrow,” Pastor whispered to Sofia. The other two cows, the twins, were already asleep, standing in his small field, protected by a creaky wooden fence. It was July, the wet season. Pastor told Sofia before bed so she would not be caught off guard. As he was finishing off the spot between her ears, a low rumble vibrated through the ground and through Pastor: A new kind of thunder, thought Pastor. He’d felt it for the past few days.

He patted Sofia and placed the brush in his back pocket before peeing in the field and heading to bed.

July 27th

The next day, it did indeed rain. The droplets were dark and filmy. Pastor tended to the coffee plants and allowed Sofia to wait out the storm in the barn with him while he played solitaire. He wondered if the other two cows grew jealous. The cards had yellowed with fingerprints and earth.

In the afternoon, Pastor heard a horse glopping through the mud around his barn. The rain had not let up, so it was odd to have someone visit. Besides, he thought, he didn’t have many friends aside from Sofia. Even the twins were more of acquaintances.

Vaquero hitched his horse and walked into the barn. Everyone who farmed the land around Arenal was a cow-boy or cow-man. But they called him that because he was the most cowboy of any of them. Vaquero wore a floppy white hat and high leather boots. He’d engraved two long horns on his bronze belt buckle. He carried a knife and a pouch of chewing tobacco on his belt loop. And he always wore three buttons unbuttoned to show off his sun-leathered skin. His bulbous chest resembled a dried mango rind.

“Tired of playing by yourself?” Vaquero asked.

He pulled up a barrel and sat across from Pastor, shuffling the deck in one hand and dealing out five card stud.

“Who’s watching your herd?” asked Pastor.

“They wouldn’t dare leave.” He revealed three 4’s.

“You win.”

“Nothing to win anyway.” He shuffled again. “Hear anything strange the past few nights?”

Pastor thought about the last few nights. He looked at Sofia. “Thunder has gotten pretty bad.”

“Doesn’t seem odd to you? Thunder getting worse?”

“Thunder does what it’s going to do,” said Pastor. “I don’t judge it.”

Vaquero dealt out a new hand. He peeled off his sopping hat and shook it dry.

“You like being a farmer, Pastor?”

“I never thought about being anything different, I guess. Can you like something you never weren’t?”

“Never? Nothing?” asked Vaquero. He swept up all the cards with one sun worn hand.

“Between the cows and the stars and the mountain, I never knew there was anything else,” said Pastor.

Vaquero handed the deck back to him. “Don’t stay up too late. And pack up a little bundle just in case. Something don’t feel right.”

July 28th

7:00 AM

The turkey vulture who lived in the surrounding trees beat their wings and squawked, their red-ridged heads like drops of blood in the sky. Trogans, scarlet macaws, and resplendent quetzels, usually surreptitious in their movement, all flew east and away from the mountain. The forest vibrated with sound, screeches, bleating. Some dogs barked. The cows knocked themselves against the fencing. That’s what awoke Pastor.

He opened his eyes to an overcast day, more than overcast, and the ground shook a little underneath him. He blinked. His mouth tasted like old coffee. Sweat pooled on his body. He scratched his arms. When he got up, he felt a little shaky. Then he saw it, there was a hole in the fence. Sofia and the two cows were gone.

7:15 AM

Pastor laced up his pants, grabbed a satchel of berries and coffee beans, and set out east in search of Sofia and the twins. Something felt thick and uneasy in the air. It smelled of sulfur and salt. His legs shook, even in the grass. The tremors had gotten worse in the last few weeks.

Pastor knelt down in the mud, dipped his finger into a set of tracks in the mud. They were fresh, so a crust had not set at their lip. He knew Sofia’s tracks better than anyone’s because she’d chipped her back hoof on a rock when she was a calf, and it never grew back right. The weather darkened. Pastor found it hard to breathe, so he wrapped his shirt around his mouth and neck, following the tracks further, hoping they hadn’t gotten far.

8 AM

            Pastor sat down in an open meadow, frustrated and a little sad. She’d never left before without saying anything. Then, a screech, something whistling from above. Pastor craned his neck up toward the mountain and a speck of black in the sky approached. It screamed through the air, growing larger and hurdling with such speed that by the time Pastor realized he should move, it had already slammed into the meadow ten meters away and created a deep, steaming hole in the ground as if God had just passed a kidney stone.

            He cradled back and flung himself away. This was not of this world, he thought.

9 AM

            Something like a bellowing cannon shook in Pastor’s chest and a tall, dark plume of smoke and ash shot into the heavens from the tip of the mountain. The ash settled to the earth in inky flakes. He coughed, covering his mouth with his arm. He continued to walk toward the mountain in search of Sofia and the sisters.

Red fiery rock cascaded down the mountain as if the sun and the stars had lost themselves on its cliffs. Pastor had never seen something so beautiful. He thought of nights as a child and how he and a neighbor girl found themselves marooned on another farm, directionless. All they had were small, waxy wheels of cheese and they held each other for warmth as the sun faded. He never thought of anything but her hands around him and her little arm hairs that prickled in the night wind. In the morning, a young cowboy found them and brought them home.

A film of hazy ash descended. He thought of the underworld. He thought of sacrifice. Of those who had come before him, and maybe he was that sacrifice. The world came into focus as flaming rocks whistled from the mountain and pounded the soft, wet mud.

His father had a book he would read to him before bed. He had told him the story of the titans. The beings even the Greek gods feared. He loved those stories and would tell them to Sofia around the fire, though she was never very interested. She enjoyed Roman mythology more. The Titans lived underneath the mountains. When they attacked the gods, the mountain would erupt.

He enjoyed Typhon the best. He imagined him as a gargantuan ox of a man, the largest monster who ever lived. Bigger than the mountain itself. It was said that fire spewed from his eyes and he spit smoldering rocks. Even Zeus feared him. He was the one trapped under Mount Etna. As the veils of smoke engulfed Pastor, he thought of Typhon and if he might have the mercy to spare Sofia and that might make all this all right. But he was afraid for himself. He felt ashamed for it. Pastor never thought about death much because life had a way of consuming him from morning until night; but he now wondered that if the blackness engulfed him, he would cease to be, to feel, to ever crunch another coffee bean against his teeth or smell the way the stars fall after the rain. He would be nothing, consumed by the earth again as if he’d never existed at all. He lay down in what looked like snow beneath him, wet and ashen. He smeared his hand through the stuff as small meteors crashed and blasted through the tree line, setting fires all around him as if the sky had finally reached him, or he the sky.

“You look very silly,” said a familiar voice.

Pastor strained to look up, shielding his eyes. He saw the brim of a hat.

“Why are you here?” asked Pastor.

“Better question. Why are you? The town is that way.” He pointed back from where Pastor had come and toward El Burio.

10 AM

Vaquero led Pastor back toward the town. Pastor craned over his shoulder, hoping to see through the snowy haze.

“Do you think this is how people saw things in the old days?” asked Pastor. The ash muted his hair and the sky the birds and the grass. It settled on Vaquero’s brim. “I don’t want to see in black and white,” coughed Pastor.

“I guess you should never trust new thunder,” said Vaquero. He led Pastor to a clearing, trying to gain his bearings over the land, but all that he could see was darkness. Fire and stone spread down the mountain in a claw. It was the only thing Pastor could see anymore, burned into his vision, the only thing lighting his way was the darkness.

Pastor thought of a beach he’d seen once in a poster. He’d never been to the beach. The sun above was yellow and flaky like cornbread and there was a girl in a yellow bathing suit with heart-shaped sunglasses. Pastor wondered what it felt like to sit next to a girl like that. He felt the sun on him, closing his eyes, his organs simmered inside his ribs. What if he let the water take him? Could he always be just right here? He peered into her double hearts, and in the reflection, he recognized a familiar shape.

Then, as the clouds and pops and singing thuds of rock consumed them, another faint sound broke through. A moo. Pastor knew that moo well, it lulled him to sleep at night. He stuck out his hands, and felt Sofia’s familiar, brushed snout.

            Pastor, hardly able to breathe, slumped himself over Sofia’s back as she clanked her way through the spitting ash. There were two towns, each split by a fork: El Burio and Tobacon. Vaquero slapped Sofia’s rear, driving her and Pastor toward Burio. He split off, heading toward Tobacon.

            “There’s someone I can’t leave,” said Vaquero.

            Pastor could only cough as Vaquero’s hat drifted off, landing in the mulch and flame.

In the center of the town, a chapel crested its crucifix above the coffee-thatched housing. As a child, Pastor’s mother would take him there in his whitest slacks which were never as white as she’d intended. He would clench his hands together—scent of pine, lacquer, and psalm. The pages always smelled like fingerprints. She would sing along and leave her lips on the rim of the blood cup. The kneeling stand creaked beneath him as he watched. Now, as the winds picked up and pushed against him, the only thing that skulked through the ash was the church steeple. It slowly faded into the distance, along with Vaquero.

Afternoon

Pastor awoke with a gasp. Sofia addled into El Burio. The lava, as if by divine intervention, had split into two flows, circumventing El Burio and its two thousand souls. Pastor imagined Typhon’s monstrous hand, wondering if he’d spared them. Pastor dismounted an exhausted Sofia, sidled her next to a trough where she drank furiously. Tobacon’s cross was the only thing hovering above the carnage, still erect, though tilted, and he thought of Vaquero and the twins. He wondered if they were part of the earth once again, but they weren’t nothing. They weren’t forgotten in the destruction, and he would tell people about them, even though no one would know the pain of the ones who could not be buried, molten and liquid under the cross, and Pastor would live to see El Burio become La Fortuna: spared from the titan’s wrath, at the heel of the mountain, surrounded by holocaust and the night stars that would shine again one day.