Fraternizing

Writing out of breath, heart beating fast. Scared, I guess. Must be close to dinner time but Julia hasn't come back with our rations from the Senoras de los Frijoles cooking fest. Airplanes just flew low, buzzing us, three small olive planes painted to blend into foliage. The Camp wants to terrorize us and I am terrified. After the planes buzzed us, I put away the laptop and the cruzer in the duffel bag hidden deep in the leanto Julia,Taina and I share now that Machi and David built a second tarp house alongside our first. I needed to move and set out to walk the maze of the Encampment in a direction I hadn't taken before. Most times I walked to the beach, or to the hills. This time I walked toward the Camp. Those were the earliest shacks, built so close together it was hard to find paths among them. Hard to tell when I was indoors, in someone's space, or outdoors in a common. I stopped and turned back and started again, at one point my breathing got heavy, rapid. I could feel myself begin to panic. I had never before realized, stopped to think, that it had to do with David that Ori and I broke up (the affair with Liam had spun off his rescue of the boys; my reconciliation with Ori spunoff David's walking through the glass. He was a catalyst. ) I was thinking about that, standing in a spot I wasn't sure was a path. I looked to my right and made out that the wooden shack less than a foot away from where I stood was a bar. I stared and made out small tables close together and in the rear a counter. Mostly men in jungle green leaf pattern fatigues. A few young women danced together close to a speaker. I stared at them and saw who they were dancing for, a table of men in uniform from the Camp, and sitting with them Machi and David. I walked away. Now my eyes made out the path. What were they doing fraternizing with the enemy? Pumping them? Getting confused by them?
I watched by the door a few minutes and was setting off toward the Camp when I saw Machi and David getting up and heading toward me. My first thought was to run away, keep them from seeing me but it happened too fast. They stepped outside and saw me there. I smiled and said hello as if I belonged there, wasn't spying on them, which mostly I wasn't. Machi cocked his head and pointed his chin at me and then shrugged.
“Wanna beer?” He laughed. “Ma don't drink.” He was talking to David and to the thin, dark skinned, buzz cut young man in a green leaf pattern fatigue uniform who said, “Gotta go clock in,” and walked off toward the Camp.
After he was gone, Machi and David set off in the same direction. Machi waved to me so I followed.
“You wanna know why I'm fraternizing?” He laughed.
I said nothing, waited. He and David were walking fast between leantos so close together I could barely see a path. David cut in. “Those guys are doing a sick out. Rafa was due to clock in hours ago. They boycott a day a week.”
Machi talked over him, “Showed him a picture of Pa. He thinks he's seen him but very skinny so he wasn't sure. You won't like to hear this. A few prisoners are on a hunger strike and Pa might be one of them. He took the picture. He promised me he'd find out.”
I asked where they were heading and they asked me the same thing. I said I wasn't exactly sure, but probably, I wanted to see the Camp up close. In all this time here, other than the wade-in I'd never gotten up close to the camp.
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