Blood Lake (11 page)

Their names are Gilda and Nelson. The furniture a couple of benches last seen at the bus station and some empty banana crates. We're sitting in her one-room shack eating take-out hamburgers with beer and soda. My treat.

The rain is heavy, the street deserted, as the police watch the bulldozer loading the wreckage of Padre Samuel's life into a pickup truck while a hundred eyes watch them from the shadows.

“That boy was always trouble, I tell you,” says Gilda, the words coming out wet and juicy.

“Padre should have known better,” says Nelson through a mouthful of pickles, bun, the works.

“He always liked other people's stuff,” she says, wiping the ketchup from her lips. “The Padre tried to help, but you might as well dump seeds in the ocean. That Ismaél, give him a hand and he grabs your elbow.”

“You actually said that to the police?” I ask.

“What good would that do? He knows how to act like a dead fly. You could watch him 'til your eyes turn blue without catching him in the act,” says Gilda, snapping her greasy fingers. Nelson nods in agreement.

“Now, I want you to tell me what happened, in your own words—”

“Ha! Ha! Ha!” She thinks this is funny. “Will you listen to her? In my own words?”

Nelson starts nodding like a bobble-headed doll with its neck on a spring.

“Of course they're my own words! What do you think? You're gonna hear
someone else's
words from
my
mouth?”

They both laugh, wide-mouthed food-filled laughs.

I look at Guillermo.

Back to them: “Just tell me what happened.”

“Well, all the lights went out. Then Ismaél came out screaming that the Padre was dead.” I'm spared the extra epithets because she's too busy munching on her second burger and washing it down with some Cola Tropical.

“When did the power go out?” I realize it's a pointless question even as I'm saying it.

“At night.”

“I mean what time?”

“Late.”

“Ten? Eleven? Midnight?”

“Yeah.”

“Which one?”

“The last one you said,” she says, as if my slowness on the uptake is starting to annoy her.

“Right. How soon after that did Ismaél come running out?”

“Right after.”

“Five seconds? A minute? Two minutes?” I ask. I know I'm not supposed to be feeding her answers like this, but what else can I do?

“Two minutes,” says Gilda.

“How do you know?”

“Well,” she says, taking a break from masticating, “all the lights went out, so I went to the window to see if it was just my house or the whole block or maybe even the whole
barrio
, you know? And I could hear the Padre
's
radio playing the Pancho La Pulga show. The Padre always listened to that show on Saturday nights, he said it gave him ideas for his sermons the next day, which is such a shame before God, that Pancho is such a
grosero
—”

“Anyway—”

“Anyway?”

“How did you know it was two minutes?”

“Oh, that's easy. It was after the second chorus of ‘
A veces me siento así
,' Ismaél came running outside shouting, ‘
¡Socorro! ¡Ayúdame! ¡El padre está muerto!
'” Help! Help me! The Padre is dead!

“The second chorus of what?”

Gilda looks at me wide-eyed. “The hit song. Don't you know
anything
?”

I let that go unanswered. The two-minute time estimation sounds reliable enough. Maybe I can get a match from the radio station.

“I always knew something bad was going to happen there someday,” says Gilda.

“They say he plays for the other team,” says Nelson with a nudge and a wink.

“Other team?” I ask.

“He's saying Padre Campos was gay,” Guillermo explains.

“Not the Padre,” says Nelson. “Ismaél.”

“But you never know, do you?” says Gilda.

“There's
no way
Father Samuel was a
maricón
,” I say, speaking their language.

“How would
you
know?” says Gilda, looking me up and down.

“He was always doing the Padre's dishes,” Nelson continues, knowingly.

“And washing his clothes, scrubbing the floors, sweeping the stairs,” says Gilda. “All that women's work, you know? And doing women's work makes you turn gay.”

I'm about to say, Gee, that's nice, now why don't you both crawl back into your caves for a few millennia, I'll call you when we harness fire, but:

“I have my own idea,” says Nelson, chomping on his burger.

“And what's that?”

He takes another bite of his ground beef and bun. The
pieces of beef and bun go into his mouth, where his jaws mash it and water it with salivary secretions until it becomes a thick, pasty mass, which then slides down his feeding tube to his stomach where it founders in a sea of acidic gastric juices. Then he wipes his mouth, turns to me and says, “It was those punk kids.”

Gilda agrees. “Thieves and pickpockets. Bunch of lazy good-for-nothings with long fingernails and the blood of a thousand bedbugs in their veins—”

I interrupt: “If they're a bunch of lazy good-for-nothings, why would they want to kill the Padre?”

“Just to see if they could get away with it,” says Gilda.

I don't believe that, but I should talk to the kids just the same. Padre Samuel said they were threatening him, and throat slitting is a junior gangland method, all other weapons being prohibitively expensive.

It's time to go.

I didn't stay to talk to anyone in the church, I just came straight to La Chala. But now it's haunting me that my old friend and mentor was murdered the night after he spoke to me, by somebody who may have seen me talking with him. Who the hell could it have been? There are no friendly faces among the provincial police milling about outside.

Guillermo offers to wait for me all afternoon if necessary, and he scurries uphill through the thickening mud to take refuge inside his pickup truck, assuming it's still there. I watch him go. The police take a look, couldn't care less about a solitary figure running through the rain, and go back to their work.

The dip in the road is already filling up with water.

I need to talk to the nuns who run Padre Samuel's school. But first, I set off in search of someone who knows the lives and miracles behind every doorway on this street. I'm treading lightly, since the raised walkway is made up of nothing but loose lengths of driftwood running from pillar to pillar, with considerable play in the middle. Coarse, splintering wood, pilfered and cast-off, this ain't no pressure-treated
thirty-year all-weather two by eight from your local Home Depot.

More shacks, same results. Nobody knows what really happened, but everyone has five different theories. Some say they heard a radio playing music, but none of them can confirm that it was the Padre's.

One last shack. It's got four fishing lines in the water, and the smell of frying fish wafting out the door. Someone's self-sufficient in here.

I knock.

It's dark inside. I stand there letting myself be seen, my eyes getting used to the darkness surrounding a faint blue glow near the floor.

“
Entra
.” An old woman's voice. Raspy.

She's got a thirty-pound gas tank feeding a single burner perched on a flimsy banana crate that's currently doing its best to keep a frying pan sizzling on top. She leans forward to test the fish with a sharp sliver of cane, and a drawn face with dark, sun-dried skin clinging to old bones advances out of the gloom, glimmering with an eerie blue opalescence around the edges.

I disengage my leg and step forward, gingerly testing the matted cane for solidity before I go through the trouble of falling through the floor and ending up in the marshy tide-waters below. There's a queasy springiness, like walking on soggy rice paper, and a feeling that if I'd had that second muffin for breakfast, I'd be exceeding the floor's weight limit.

I introduce myself as a friend of Padre Samuel's, and ask what her name is.

“Sit down,” she says, as if the solution to that problem were obvious. The dark corners of her hovel reveal nothing to sit on.

I take my time finding the floor with my hands, squatting down with my legs crossed under me to distribute my weight as evenly as possible so as not to put too much stress on the rigging. Gravity is very real to me right now.

“
Me llamo Filomena
,” I say. “What's your name?”

She pokes her dinner again with the piece of bamboo, using the precise, careful movements of a surgeon demonstrating a problem for a dozen eager med students, and after much internal discussion with herself, it seems, finally agrees to answer.

“Alicia,” she says.

I tell her that Padre Samuel was a gift to the people he touched, keeping a lot of mountain folks alive until he came down from his hilltop perch to help this starving community, and I'm trying to find out what happened to him, and since four eyes see better than two, I've been asking people what they saw and heard last night.

She doesn't answer.

We sit in silence while I consider how to put it into words, without revealing too much, that Father Samuel was the author of my days, long after the pages in my book of life should have been bled white, and thereafter remained silent and blank.

Then, as if revealing an eternal human weakness, Alicia says, “Whoever talks a lot is wrong.”

I nod in agreement. There's a wavelength out there somewhere that we both seem to be wavering near. Sometimes silence reveals a lot, more than Gilda and Nelson's torrent of useless words, which would have to be boiled in a pot and filtered through cheesecloth to produce a nugget of truth.

I have come at mealtime, so she cuts her fish in half and serves me some on a metal plate. I refuse, but she insists. I'm not hungry, I feel bad taking her food, and I don't particularly feel like eating anything that was swimming in this water, but she will not hear me.

I know when I'm beaten.

“
Buen provecho
,” she says.

I eat part of what she gives me, listening to the patter and splishing of the rain outside, then lay the rest aside.

She eats slowly. I wait until she finishes.

She washes the dishes in a plastic basin full of dirty
water and dries them. Then she sits down, and lights a murderously strong hand-rolled cigar. Good thing the place is well ventilated.

“The city wanted the land back,” she says, after a few puffs. “He wouldn't give it up.”

“How do you know that?”

She puts two fingers up to her left ear, smoke hovering around her, as if she were listening to the walls breathing.

“I see.” It would certainly be a valuable slice of waterfront in the burgeoning
ciudadela
La Chala, with a high resale value down the road, if there's any way to corroborate the statement. “And what can you tell me about Ismaél?”

After a pause:

“He'll get into heaven,” she says, flicking some ash into the water through a hole in the floor. “Heaven was made for those who've messed up in this life.”

Hallelujah! If that's true, then I've got a reserved seat right next to the choir.

“
Los provinciales
took him away,” I say.

“Not the city cops?”

“That's what I heard.”

“Umm. You want me to tell you what I heard?”

“If you would.”

“Shots, little girl. I heard shots.”

“Are you sure?”

She looks very disappointed in me.

“I mean, are you sure they came from the parish house around midnight last night?”

“Yes. They came from that way.”

“Because the police seem to have told some bystanders that Padre Samuel's throat was cut. I guess I'll have to wait for the autopsy.”

She considers this. She takes a deep puff on her dark, gnarly cigar and blows the smoke out the wide-open door.

“Don't you go counting the tiger's stripes,” she warns me.

I stand under the eaves of Alicia's shack and survey the scene. A few cement-and-cinder-block houses rise above the rusty red tin roofs of the humbler dwellings, their split-cane walls lashed together with spit, twine, and Hail Marys.

The rain washes away some of the smell of death, but I wonder what these people are going to do when the water starts rising.

Padre Samuel's school is only a few hundred feet downwind, at the water's edge, but it's several blocks away by the overland route. It's time to check in with the nuns.