Mara Salvatrucha

"No one thinks of how much blood costs" 

                               -Dante Alighieri

The alarm clock by my bed read 3am; I’d been in bed for almost 3 hours now, waiting, listening, counting backwards, and analyzing the cracks in the ceiling. I heard a rustle of footsteps from the alley way beneath my room, screaming and yelling pelted its way up through my window. The noise from the alley way grew hoarse and tired, and then stopped. I got up out of bed and began pacing the room. I stepped on my bootleg Legos, letting out a shy grunt of pain, I stumbled forward.

 Loud banging and screams came forth from the lower levels of our shared favela. I lived in an old house on the lower end of the slum; drug addicts lined the alley ways, most passed out, but others rode the buzz into the night. The home was a sickly two bedroom covered in unmanageable filth. My mom burst through my door, eyes meeting mine for a brief period; there was something boiling behind them. Tears began to rush down her face and she grabbed me and threw me under my bed. The floor was musty from the humidity in the air and caked with a thin coat of grime. My face kissed the ground as my mother hid me. She left my room and went into the hallway, the door swinging shut behind her.

With the banging and screaming growing louder, someone was coming up the stairs. It sounded like a group of men going from residence to residence. Screams from the stairway rung out,

“No, don’t, let him go! He’s just a boy” cried a voice from below.

I pressed my ear to the ground to hear more closely, the shouts were coming from the stairway to the rooms downstairs. A woman screamed, this time with a primal fear woven into her cry for help. I could hear men yelling something in Spanish. The sound of the door of our apartment bursting open showered my home in a flurry of aggression. My ear, still pressed to the floor, felt the vibrations of a group of people walking up into my home. I could hear the anger in the men’s movements. Sounds of things being thrown around and tossed aside filled the soundscape of my home.

“What do you want?! Please just go, there is nothing here for you,” she begged.

The door to my room was kicked in and three men clomped into the room, one of them dragging my mother by the hair. The three men all wore combat boots, each laced with menacing red laces.

“Please, please leave us, we having nothing you desire,” pleaded my mother once more.

There was a brief pause and one man let out a manic laugh.

“You say us, who else is here!” yelled one of the men.

My mother shifted ever so slightly as the man held her by the back of the head, her eyes darted to the foot of the bed, and then underneath it. One of the men met her eyes as she swept over the bed. The man ripped the sheets off the bed, exposing the room beneath; the space I was hiding. I clenched my teeth as I watched the red laces shift. My jaw grew sore in a matter of seconds. The man slumped down to look under the bed, but my mother kicked out at his legs. He stumbled for a moment, but regained his footing. He walked over to her and kicked her hard in the stomach, kicking her for several seconds. She started to gag from the pain. The men turned and left the room, my screaming mother being dragged across the grime plastered floor; a sense of terrible purpose overcame me. Why had they not looked under the bed for him? What were they going to do?

“You scuffed up my boot, what you think you’re doing?” said one of the men.

The man resumed kicking her, this time all three of them joining in; their red laces collided with her stomach. In between each kick there was a momentary pause, I could see my mother’s lungs crying out for air.

“You filthy whore, this is what you deserve,” Said the first man to kick her.

I could feel each kick resonate through the wooden floor, each gasp of air sent out vibrations through the floorboards. A call came from down the hall; someone was beckoning the men towards them, a sense of urgency in their voice. The men gave my mother one last kick, and then proceeded to spit on her; one of them went from grin to snarky declaration and said,

“We know you have a runt, we’ll be back, we’re not through with you,”

They left the room; I listened as their footsteps grew more and more distant. I left my hiding spot and ran to my mother. She lay curled up in fetal position, the grime of the floor rubbing against her bruised and swollen face.

“What do I do? Who do I reach out to? Mom I’m scared, what’s going on? Who were those men?”

I walked to the kitchen and grabbed cold meat from storage, wrapped it in plastic and then lay it over my mother’s bruises. She began to wheeze and weep, her voice stumbling across her words as they left her mouth

“Ganghh… theey… want youo,” my mother muttered between breaths.

I sat beside her and played with her hair while she wept, it was the only thing I could think to do. I grabbed a pillow from my bed and put it under her head, her hair clung limply to it. Walking to the entrance of the apartment, I looked out and down into the stairwell, I saw the three men exit another household, this time they were dragging a young boy by the hair out with them; he looked near my age, must’ve been 14 or 15. A woman came screaming out of the building, lunging towards the men and the boy. One of the red-laced men grabbed a machete out of the hands of one of his fellows and thrust it into the arms of the boy they held. Another grabbed the older woman and held a knife to her throat. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but I saw his lips moving as his hands made sweeping motions with the machete.

One of the men caught my eye; he peered up at me from their position. Our eyes were locked onto each other just long enough for his mental process to tick and issue a response to my appearance.

“BOY!” he yelled.

I darted back into our home, tumbling towards my mother; I slid beside her and tried to shake her. She didn’t respond. I tried to drag her to my bedroom, but I could hear the footsteps coming and she was too heavy.  I left her where she was and scrambled to the bed. I pressed my ear to the floor to listen for their footsteps. I could hear them as they climbed the staircase, as they rounded the hall, as their fingertips reached the front door; their vibrations told a story. The three original men burst into my room, kicking down the door and walking into the center of the shabby rug.

“Boy, come out now, or we kill your mother.”

I watched from underneath the bed as the speakers red laces shifted in their position.

“Don’t make me ask twice, boy” said the man again

Sheepishly I nudged my body forward, and I writhed my way out from underneath the bed, and shakily gained footing. I looked up into the speaking mans eyes. My eyes went from my baseball bat in the corner, back into this man’s face. His face was wrapped in tattoos, I could make out an “MS” on his neck and a “13” in old style handwriting tagged onto his face, just below his brow. They adorned matching clothing, loose fit pants that had shown wear, and a shirt that clung loosely to their bodies. The clothing they wore looked as aged as the menacing looks in their eyes.

“Do you know who we are, boy?” said the man in the front

One of the men proceeded to remove his shirt, exposing a torso completely covered in ink. There were devils, angels, and symbols all lining his entire torso.

My mother let out a whimper from the other room and that tattooed man turned in response, exposing a very large dagger tattooed onto his back. Directly above his breast, below his neck, hung a bold tattoo that read “MS13” in large prolific ink and old style font heading. I gazed at the shirtless man’s chest, his tattoos told a story, and they were more than just ink. Yet, nothing in that moment could have been more menacing than the snakes eyes on the pommel of his dagger. It was maintaining perfect eye contact with me; it stared down from his back and watched my every movement. I felt their feet shift as I stared in sheer terror at the men before me.

“Grab him and let’s go” said the man behind the tattoos.

The man in front grabbed me by the nape of the neck and forced me forward in front of him, pushing me out of room, out of my house, away from my unconscious mother. Once of the men peered down to me and whispered into my ear,

“If you don’t do exactly what we fucking say, I am going to come back and crush your mother’s skull with that baseball bat.”

I nodded; tears began to stream down my eyes. I tried to cock my neck backwards to see my mother, but all I could see was her outstretched hand on the floor, as if reaching towards me. They yanked me back to where they held the other boy. He was smaller than me, but thicker in his build. The door to his apartment was wide open, I smelt something metallic in the air. I tried to locate the scent and my eyes fell upon a mass of limbs beyond the doorway of this boy’s apartment. A woman was sprawled out on the floor; a large gash of skull was missing from her head as it lie in a pool of blood. A stale scent of blood charmed the air.

“If you don’t do as we say, you’ll both end up like his mother,” said the man who had removed his shirt.

There were four men, against us two boys. There was no hope for escaping, they even said it themselves. If I don’t listen to them, they’ll kill me and my mother. I have to protect my mother; I swear I’ll do anything to keep them away from her. The four men took us out of the building and out into a courtyard. Grabbing me and the other boy by the shoulder, they forced us in between the four of them. They all looked excited at something, but our faces bore confusion.

“Give ‘em a stick,” a voice behind me chuckled.

“Let ‘em have your knife,” another spoke while reaching out his hand.

“No,” a man hissed. “They will do this with their own bare hands.”

The four men towered over the two boys and anger crept up my neck and into my gaze.

“I bet the bastard with no mother wins, he’s got nothing to lose,” whispered one to another.

“You, boy, you have to fight this one to the death, using only your fists. You win, you come with us. You lose, we take your mother back to the boys,” he spoke, leaning toward me with a menacing smile.

They all watched us, waiting. We stood on the gravel, feet bare, the boy next to me ground his feet into the stones until they bled. Then, he looked at me.  His eyes screamed as he started circling me, a look of menace stretched from one to the other. His jaw locked. What the hell is this? Why should I have to fight this kid to death? Why should I? But, my mother, I can’t let them break her like the body downstairs.

“If he dies, does my mother live?” my voice cracked.

“Sure,” a man responded, turning to smile at the others.

We met eyes, his just as dead as mine, and began to feel each other out as I could feel the blood in my body start to flow again. My footsteps reached a tune with his. The only sound was the stones he kicked when he lunged at me, diving for my left leg. I threw my body backwards and collapsed on top of him as he shot for my legs. I was on top of him, I could work with this. He bit my thigh and I wrapped my arms around his waist and thrust him into the ground. His head slammed against the gravel but I was too scared to let him go.  My fear became rage. I could feel his fingers digging into my calf, so I took my elbow and slammed it into his skull. His teeth released me but his fingers wouldn’t let go. He was fighting to avenge his mother, I was fighting to save mine, but whose will was stronger? He released me entirely and jumped to his feet, knocking me back to the dirt. I looked up at him, his body slightly hunched and his eyes locked onto mine. I watched as he bent down to the ground to grab a fistful of gravel, and my body moved on its own. I lunged for him, grabbing his left leg and lifting it high into the sky.  I swept his right leg out from under him and threw my fists at him as he fell. He hit the ground – hard. His head forced his mouth shut as he hit the ground, but his tongue didn’t have enough time to hide. Did he bite his tongue off? His mouth was bleeding profusely, but I continued to hammer his face with my fists, until suddenly, someone lifted me up from the ground.

“That’s enough; you two aren’t strong enough to kill each other. You will have years to learn how to kill a man with your bare hands soon enough. Sit,” said a voice.  I’m not sure who it came from; I couldn’t see their faces anymore.  All I could see was the battered body of the boy in front of me.  Did I do that to him?

A tattooed hand unraveled my fist and placed a knife within my palm.  It was heavier than I expected.

“You held your own against him, but if you don’t kill him, your mother is as good as dead.”

I no longer saw the boy as the boy he was. I saw a goal with an end reward. I looked down at the knife, back to the man, and then back to the boy. He was still holding his jaw as blood pooled out from between his fingers. I looked back at the knife again, this time I thought of the dagger that was tattooed onto the one man’s back. I pushed towards the boy.  I couldn’t hear what they were saying anymore, but they were cheering.  We were their sport, I was their sport.

The other boy rose from the ground, his hands clutching the blood flowing from his mouth. My steps forward matched his steps back; soon my steps forward would engulf his steps back. I kicked dirt into his eye and rushed him.  I held the knife to his throat and froze; my heart felt like it was caught in my throat.

“Do you want her to die, boy?!” snarled a voice from behind them.  I can’t kill him, can I?  But I remembered my mother’s fear as she shoved me under the bed.  I remembered her eyes from beneath the blood.  So, I pulled my hand.

I pulled down with all the anger and rage I could muster.  I didn’t see a boy anymore; I saw the faces of the men who choked my mother. He let out a guttural squirt, coughed up blood, and then crumpled to the floor, the knife still lodged in throat. I watched from above as this boy that I never knew died by my hand.

“Good boy.”