Blood Lake (10 page)

There's little doubt in my mind that whoever printed those fliers are the same people who've been threatening Padre Samuel, and nobody's got to assign me the job of
watching out for him. I'd do that for free anytime. He's got too much left to do to sacrifice his life for the cause, like so many before him who jumped over the wall and out of my life forever.

Eventually I stretch out on the excretion-encrusted slab of concrete for a couple of hours of parasomnia, so it feels like a few weeks after midnight when they clang open the cell door and lead me to an interrogation room that's so bright it stings my eyes.

A man who is being addressed as Captain Verdugo is standing with his back to me, drying off his hands with a rough towel, under a wall clock that reads 02:37. Without turning to face me, Captain Verdugo starts talking.

“You are aware, are you not, that it is strictly forbidden for foreigners to participate in acts of civil disobedience?”

I don't say a word.

“Answer the captain!” says the corporal, who is probably there only to ensure that the captain doesn't kill any prisoners without dividing the jewelry and gold fillings equally among the subordinates.

“I was not participating in the demonstration,” I say.

“No? Then how do you explain
these
?” says Verdugo, spinning around and brandishing a fistful of political handbills at me, but I don't get to look at them closely.

Some water drips onto my head from the ceiling. I hope this isn't a harbinger of things to come.

“I'm just here as a tourist.”

“Oh? There doesn't seem to be anything about that here in your passport.”

The captain shows me my passport, and I see that the page with my entrance visa is missing, having been rather crudely torn out.

The corporal sniggers. I'm watching the captain closely, but his face doesn't change. He spends the next half hour accusing me of trying to overthrow the government with subversive politics, even mentioning at one point his personal belief that rich American Jews and Argentine-Jewish
terrorists are plotting the downfall of Western capitalism sometime around 10:00
A.M.
next Tuesday, if I followed his logic correctly.

By the time they lead me out of there, I'm thinking that I may never see my daughter again, and the clock on the wall
still
says 02:37.

But I'm released the next morning. And as I'm collecting what effects they returned to me (my necklace and watch are missing), my fingers find a crumpled piece of paper in my right shoe that wasn't there before. I open it up. Two words:

Gracias. Carlos
.

I look at the guards milling around me, wondering which one is the friend.

It's early Sunday morning, and the streets are silent and empty. The Correas' store is shuttered, and I have to pound on the iron door to get them to let me in. You'd think I'd just risen from the dead by the way they react to seeing me on their doorstep.

I tell them most of what happened, then I take Antonia aside, over by the ice machine, and reassure her that the police made a mistake. “If they ever take me away from you like that again, don't worry, I'll get word to you.”

“It's okay, Mom, I'm kind of used to your disappearances. But they were really starting to upset me with all their—you know—”

“I know, honey, I know,” I say, clutching her precious form to mine. “I promise you I'm not going to disappear from your life. I'll always come back for you.”

“Sure you will,” she says.

We hug each other close. There's a sudden
ka-chunk
inside the ice machine that makes us both jump a little. Relief and laughter masking the echo of a whimper pass between us.

Now we all have to celebrate Mass together, but I choose the place. The cops didn't acknowledge the importance of that inflammatory flier, but I know someone who might. Padre Moisés Aguirre, a.k.a. Father Moe, just another name on the endangered species list. He works the Sunday gig at the church of La Merced, Our Lady of Mercy, a rising white monument to the straight line, edged in cool light green verticals reaching towards the sky.

We take our places on the hard, narrow pews, and I pray for the health and safety of my family and friends during these troubled times.

“God knows your name,” declares Father Moe. “God knows the number of hairs on your head and the number of sins in your heart. When you are standing at the gates of heaven, if you try telling God that you are a bank president or an executive, do you think that will impress him? No. Because God knows who you
really
are and what you've done.” He starts pointing at the Christian bodies cramming the aisles, saying, “God knows
your
name, God knows
your
name, God knows
your
name—”

He points near us. I look over and recognize Jorge Hernández, the fiery black congressman who strikes fear into the hearts of corrupt lawmakers, but who can apparently be found on Sunday mornings kneeling submissively before the altar of the Almighty.

When the time comes, Padre Aguirre ends his sermon: “
Oremos
. Let us pray for the travelers who are facing danger at this very moment. Let us pray for those who are willing to help others in the face of adversity. Let us pray for the strangers among us, that they should understand our misguided ways. Let us pray for the mothers who are having difficult pregnancies and who lack decent health care. Let us pray for the children who do not have enough to eat. And let us pray for the soul of Padre Samuel Campos, who was murdered last night in his private chambers at the church in La Chala.”

Sometimes rumor is the most reliable truth.

—Paco Ignacio Taibo II

OUR WHEELS
brake to a stop, churning up dust.

Our car doors slam.

The smell of death is drifting off the murky waters of the estuary.

We walk along the dusty streets, blending in with the mud-spattered cane.

The sky closes in with dark, heavy clouds.

The dirt under our feet grows wet.

We hear a noise, a long animal howl of heavy machinery.

The wet dirt is now mud.

We reach the edge of a cane wall, what passes for a corner around here. Beyond it, the road dips, and slides headlong into the marsh. The noise issues from somewhere deep within the exposed radiator of a blackened bulldozer grating its scab-encrusted gears together.

I tell Guillermo to go back and keep an eye on his pickup truck. He refuses.

A dozen shacks trail off to our left, walking off the land on thick cane stilts, a swaying walkway of mismatched boards connecting them.

A group of maybe twenty people ring the solemn scene,
rain darkening their speckled clothes, turning the dirt back to mud.

Between their shoulders and shiny black hair, I see flashes of yellow and tan.

Yellow is the soulless machine; tan, the uniforms of the provincial police.

They are bulldozing Father Samuel's church and parish house to the ground.

They have told the people that it's a “hazard.”

The sum of a humble man's life is wiped out in minutes. I stand and mentally record it for posterity—the cracking ribs, the sharp snapping of brittle fingers of cane, the plaster dust rising from the mangled lath reaching up to heaven, the lonely stilts supporting nothing but the sour breeze. A soundless voice calling across the cold vacuum of space.

The hateful black-and-yellow-striped machine heaves forward, pulverizes another wall, nearly slips off the mossy edge, then pulls back from the riverbank leaving three support canes standing, tipping to the left and to the right.

“
¿Qué pasó?
” I ask, elbow to elbow with the witnesses.

“The power went out last night,
hombre
.”

“Motherfucker cut his throat.”

“Wait a minute—” Voices all chime in:

“They took away Ismaél.”

“The power went out in the whole goddamn street.”

“From ear to ear.”

“With a kitchen knife.”

“A switchblade.”

“A freakin' machete.”

“They found him lying in a pool of blood.”

“Hold it, hold it,” I say. “Who found him?”

“Ismaél,” says the loudest of them all.

“Ismaél? How do you know?”

“I live right here,” she declares, pointing to the second shack from the corner. She's a little older than me, heavy without being well-fed, and has been chattering away since I got here as if this whole spectacle were a welcome form of
entertainment. “He came running out screaming like the hounds of hell were after him, I tell you, he was red as a shrimp and nervous as a turkey on Christmas Eve and he couldn't have run any faster if he had a chili pepper up his ass—”

“And they arrested him? They didn't just take him in to make a statement?”

“They don't take you away in irons to make a statement,
chiquitina
,” says a man in his midforties with oily reddish-brown skin, his face and belly bloated from too much bread and soda, cheap filler he has eaten to fool his stomach, but the stomach knows better.

“They say he did it for the money,” says the woman.

“What money?” I ask.

“A collection box full of sucres,” she says. “Loaded with sucres, more sucres than you ever saw in your life.”

“At least a million sucres,” he says.

“Maybe even two million,” she says.

That's only about four hundred American dollars, but it's a small fortune around here, and there's no way Padre Samuel kept that kind of money in this old tinderbox on stilts.

“Wait a minute, who said this?” I ask.

“Who said what?”

“Who said he had all that money on him?”

“The police,” she says, shouting over the shrieking and wailing of the bulldozer, and another motley gathering of cane support beams splinters and flattens in the mud.

The sanctuary is gone.

The site is measured and marked off, and forbidden to all curiosity seekers. I go up to one of the construction workers who's dusting himself off and getting ready to have his noon dinner.

“Who told you to do this
today
?” I ask.

He gives me an answer I could have heard on any corner in Brooklyn, New York: “Who the fuck knows? Orders are orders.”

Oh, Filomena, just go home
, says a voice inside me.
Go back to the mountains and hike to the source of the Río Tomebamba twelve thousand lofty and frozen feet above the sea, fish for trout
at four in the morning knee-deep in the ice-cold water of a running stream, or head for the Santa Elena peninsula and squirt sunscreen all over your naked body and soak up those equatorial rays on the beaches near the sleek and seedy hotels of Salinas. Just stay out of this, for once in your life
.

Then I look at the smug faces of the police, their pudgy jowls jiggling like raspberry Jell-O as they defile this site, swaggering back and forth astride the fallen, defenseless flesh of the truth.

And God's rain falls down on me from heaven.