"Sons of bitches.” Lituma felt the vomit rising in his throat. “Kid, they really did a job on you.”
The boy had been both hung and impaled on the old carob tree. His position was so absurd that he looked more like a scarecrow or a broken marionette than a corpse. Before or after they killed him, they slashed him to ribbons: his nose and mouth were split open; his face was a crazy map of dried blood, bruises, cuts, and cigarette burns. Lituma saw they’d even tried to castrate him; his testicles hung down to his thighs. He was barefoot, naked from the waist down, with a ripped T-shirt covering his upper body. He was young, thin, dark, and bony. Under the labyrinth of flies buzzing around his face, his hair glistened, black and curly.
The goats belonging to the boy who’d found the body were nosing around, scratching around the field looking for something to eat. Lituma thought they might begin to gnaw on the dead man’s feet at any moment.
“Who the fuck did this?” he stammered, holding back his gorge.
“I don’t know,” said the boy. “Don’t get mad at me, it’s not my fault. You should be glad I told you about it.”
“I’m not mad at you. I’m mad that anybody could be bastard enough to do something like this.”
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