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soldier came to the gate and talked to Mana. She didn’t let the soldiers in and they didn’t make her, but they were coming around. Maybe they thought she had a few guerrilla fighters hiding in there, but I went all over that orphanage and I never saw any guerrillas. And the kids were wrecks. They screamed in their sleep. Several of them, every night, started screaming when they fell asleep. Some screamed most of the night. You could wake them and hug them and be nice to them and tell them stories or sing a song, but when they went back to sleep, they would start screaming again. You had to just let them scream, otherwise they wouldn’t get any sleep and would be tired and cranky the next day. You slept with shooting going on outside and a child next to you screaming.
    Mana was young. She must have been under thirty. She had an education. She could have gone to the States, left that war country. What was she doing there? Was it courage? Loyalty? Hope? It’s possible that I’ve never known any of those, but you’d think I’d at least recognize them.
    *   *   *
    We had the argument about the bra, and that night I walked into one of the bedrooms and demanded of the girls, “Where in the Bible does it say you have to wear a bra?”
    They looked up, wordless, their faces like searchlights.
    â€œWho says God says you have to wear a bra?” I said.
    They said nothing. They looked afraid.
    That was it. Mana kicked me out. The paro was over by this time. In fact it had been over and started and over by this time. The weekly man came and drove George and me away from the orphanage. He dropped us off on an empty road and left.

OH BROTHER
    This might be the place to note that there are fifty-three mountains over fourteen thousand feet in Colorado. I don’t know why fourteen thousand feet in particular is an interesting number, but George and his brothers wanted to climb to the top of them all. The brothers had a rather unoriginal nickname for the mountains. They called them “fourteeners.” Some of the “fourteeners” had never been climbed before or some such—but that can’t be right. How could they know how high a mountain was unless someone had been to the top? But I figured that had to be the case because why else would they want to climb it?
    George had taken me up a few fourteeners. The climb took all day, sometimes two days, and there were blizzards, and we’d run out of water, and we’d pass the tree line and not be able to breathe, and still we’d have hours and hours to go. When we reached the top, we’d leap around the boulders up there until we found a metal tube with a pen and a list of names inside. Gasping and freezing, we added our names and then we hurried back down. So that was why people climbed up these things, to write their names down on the list.
    Later, when someone would ask what kind of a dumb idea that was, going to El Salvador during the civil war— their civil war—I’d think of that.

ON THE ROAD
    â€œWell,” I said. “We better figure out how to get out of here.”
    George and I had on our backpacks. The orphanage driver had driven away.
    â€œHow can you be fired from a job that doesn’t pay?” George was marveling at this.
    A rack of low hills. Prairie pulled out of a sack.
    â€œWhich way do you think we should go?” I squinted down the road.
    â€œDidn’t you do any babysitting in high school?”
    â€œIt wasn’t my fault.”
    â€œOkay. Whose fault was it then?”
    â€œI never said I wanted to come here.”
    â€œOh, I see.” He was really working himself up. He was throwing his arms out and shouting. “I see. It’s my fault.”
    â€œThat’s it,” I said. “I’m leaving.”
    â€œWell, we can’t stay here, now can we.” He gestured to here: a bowl of blue, a spill of meadow, a road running