Blood Lake (15 page)

“I gotta go pee,” I tell them, figuring five minutes away from them is five minutes less time I'll have to spend fending them off.

“Yeah, time to go change the canary's water,” says Musgoso, rising unsteadily from the wooden bench.

I let him lead me out into the night air, which is a cool 89 degrees. He stops at the piss-befouled portal of the first hut, and points me two doors down. Giggling, I salute him, my arm as loose as a rag doll's, and wander towards the next hut. I glance inside. A cot and a nightstand made out of hand-cut cane. I look back and confirm that he's out of sight. Then I skip the latrine and feel my way to the next hut, which seems to be full of fishing equipment, then the next one, stumbling into a room stacked with bundles of identical documents, hot off the press, it appears. It's too dark to tell, but they look like the voter petition forms needed to register candidates for elections.

“Can't wipe your ass with those,” says Sergeant Musgoso, a dark shape blocking the doorway.

“Oh.” I stumble into his arms, pretending to be way more drunk than I am. “S-sorry, I thought you pointed over here.”

“No,” he says, helping me to the women's privy. “Use this one.”

It's a cement slab with a hole chiseled in the middle.

“I can't go with you watching me,” I say, cute as a kewpie doll.

He turns his back like a true gentleman, giving me fifteen seconds to plan my next move. Time to turn the amps up to eleven.

I come out of there having lost the ability to walk back to the steam room without the help of a big, strong man.

“Man, by the time you build the birdcage, the bird will be dead,” Corporal Polillo complains, seeing us.

“Let's cool off in the pool,” Musgoso suggests.

“Yeah, a pool,” I say. “Totally.”

He issues another harsh command, and the harried caretaker rushes to turn on the lights in a nearby bungalow that's big enough to hold a shallow cement pond. I willingly strip down to my underwear for this one, and slip into the grimy water.

“Eew. When was the last time this was cleaned out?”

“Have another drink and you won't care,” says the corporal, dizzily. I oblige. “Take a bigger one,” he insists.

“What do you think I am, a two-hundred-pound macho man?” I say. “Women have a much lower body density. The question is, which one of
you
can take the biggest drink?”

Down goes the gauntlet, an irresistible challenge for them to prove their masculinity to me. Or their stupidity.

Same thing.

They smile rakishly and eye each other with the sudden thrill of rivalry. Then they both present the glowing bottles in their hands as if they were saluting the flag, and I stand up, dripping wet, as motivation, and raise my arms, hold them up for a moment just to increase the giddy tension, then drop them, shouting, “Go!”

Both men start chugging down one, two, three-shot swallows, when the last one gurgles back out of the corporal's mouth and he coughs, then puts the bottle back to his booze-drenched lips, but the sergeant stops and declares, “No, no, I win.”

“No fair, I started coughing.”

And they start arguing like two kids until I tell them the only fair thing is to do it over. Ready. Set. Go!

And they're off, gulping down a full third of a bottle before the corporal's eyeballs start swimming and he spits out his last mouthful into the pool, gasping for breath.

“Ha-ha!” bellows the sergeant, triumphant.

It's a little victory for me, too. Even for guys this big, that ought to be too much liquor for their own good.

“So, doesn't the winner get a prize?” the sergeant says, quoting from the Book of Clichés.

I nod flirtatiously, wade over, and snuggle up against him. He's got a bulge in his boxers that would frighten the fish away on a sunny day.

“I'm staying at the Hotel Continental in Guayaquil,” I purr. “Do you guys ever get into the city?”

“Oh, yeah, sometimes,” he says.

“For business or pleasure?”

“Both,” he says, chuckling happily, while the corporal keeps on coughing to clear his throat.

“I can see that you're a real
montuvio
. You must be just as good in a canoe.”

“Oh, I am, baby, I am.” He gives me that serpentine smile.

“I mean as a fighter.”

“Oh, we're good on the water, too,
señorita
.
Somos hombres de esta tierra
, we know our way around every back stream in the gulf.”

“I bet you do.”

“Swallow too much water, Corporal?” says a fortyish man coming out of nowhere and strutting along the edge of the pool in a pair of knee-length camouflage swimming trunks.

“Yes, sir, Major,” says the corporal, still hocking up loogies. The sergeant straightens up and salutes.

“At ease, men,” says the major, lowering himself into the water.

“Thank you, sir.”

This is both a blessing and a burden. The major's presence should help me extract myself from this tangled web, but I'm probably not to get anything else out of the men now, either.

“Looks like quite a party,” he says.

“I was just leaving,” I say.

“So soon?” asks the sergeant, crestfallen.

“Yes, I've got tickets for a three-day cruise that sails
tomorrow morning, and if I'm not there I don't get my money back. You understand. But give me your name and number, and I'll call you as soon as I get back, or you can look me up the next time you're in Guayaquil,” I promise him.

“Okay,” says Musgoso, drawing it out into about five syllables. He grabs his pants, rummages through the pockets, and scribbles something on the back of a dog-eared military document. “Because tomorrow, if I've seen you before, I don't remember it.”

I climb out of the water, swinging my rear for them, and start toweling the slime off my body.

“Gotta go wring these out,” I say, picking up my shorts and top and heading for the safety of the changing room.

I close the partition, remove my bra, and try to squeeze as much moisture as I can from it. It's barely worth the effort.

“How are you doing, sir?” I hear the sergeant say.

“I've got spit in my throat and hair on my balls,” answers the major, and the men laugh dutifully.

“More than I can say for that bastard—”

Someone shushes the corporal.

I'm wringing the water from my panties, cursing under my breath. Just when they were ready to open up to me.

“It's those fucking newspaper reporters,” says the sergeant.

“Yeah. Someone should cut them open and pull their tongues out,” says the corporal.

“Quiet.”

“What? Everyone's got their own way of killing fleas,” says the corporal, quite drunk.

“Fleas and other animals,” says the sergeant.

“Like a great big lion,” says the corporal.

“He won't be much of a
león
after we castrate him,” says the sergeant.

I'm pulling my shorts on, zipping them up, my ears burning.

“He's still wagging his tail, boys,” says the major.

“Sure he is. But one nail knocks out another, eh?” says the
sergeant. “
Hay más de una manera de transformar los campos en camposantos
.”

There's more than one way to turn fields into graveyards. But they have the same root word: Campos.

I step out from behind the partition, fully dressed and smiling sweetly for my appreciative audience. The major gallantly orders the caretaker to drive me to Balzar, where I can get a bus to the city. The sergeant tries to convince me to spend some downtime on the cot with him, but I give him an excuse that never fails with his kind.

Why does telling them it's your period always work with these creeps? What's so scary about getting a little woman-blood on their dicks? God knows they've spilled enough of it themselves. But I better get out of here before he realizes I was sitting in the pool the whole time without any pad protection at all.

These are the costliest scraps of information I've gotten, as far as my stomach and liver are concerned, but at least I got a piece of what I was after: They admitted that they control the roads, including partial credit for the ambushes, they claimed familiarity with the system of estuaries down to the city limits, they are very likely involved in printing fake documents, and they made credible threats against newspaper reporters, with oblique references to harming Padre León. I'd better warn him, first thing tomorrow.

Now I get to slowly sober up during the bleary ride home, staring into the unfathomable darkness and thinking there's worse things than psychos in these woods.

Namely, psychos with power.

But I also come away convinced that they're not the full answer. You'd send your sharpest minds to blot out the name of Padre Samuel, not the kind of apes who would tap dance on a man's skull 'til they heard it crack, like this hard-partying bunch of part-time rapists and full-time assholes. Whoever did this evil thing were skilled assassins, near the upper echelons of this or any of the other organizations that practice killing as a form of crowd control, like the national riot police
or the School of the Americas-trained operatives from the Asociación de Seguridad Nacional. I'm going to have to—

A nightmarish vision materializes in the middle of the dark forest, an offensive line of uniformed men signaling for the driver to stop. Five of them board the bus, yank three people out of their seats, and accuse them of aiding the leftist rebels who just bombed an electrical tower thirty miles east of here. The three lost souls are taken off the bus and into the waiting arms of the night, while a couple of heavily armed men pace up and down the aisle, scrutinizing our faces. I don't see any official insignias on their arms.

One of them turns towards me, and I become a crumpled scrap of human flesh, clutching the sergeant's note tightly to my pounding chest, hoping that my future doesn't come out of the muzzle of a gun.

Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

—Thomas Jefferson

“
WHERE ARE THE OTHERS?
”
shouts the man in the green uniform.

Slam!
A hard crack on my cheekbone, which must look like a burnt ham by now.

“There are no others,” I croak. I plead.

The dragon's teeth sink into my guts, spearing my right kidney like a bolt of lightning.

“Where are the others?”

No. Not the spike.

No more, no more recoil cringe No no no naaa
aaah
!

Slam!

My eyes fly open. I jump awake, ready to get hurt some more.

Uncle Lucho is searching for some lightbulbs in the darkened storeroom, loudly demanding, “Where are the others?”

Holy Mary, mother of God. Phantom pains slowly fade. But they were so real.

Yesterday is catching up with me. It was a very long day and I was so toasted I zonked out on that bus and—and— and for a moment I'm really not sure if it was all real, or if I dreamed a part of what happened. But it happened, didn't it? One thing's for sure, I'm staying off buses for a while.

I soap up, shower off in a pitcher of cold water, then stumble down to breakfast.

And back to reality, where there's still a gas shortage and it's going to take about forty-five minutes to get a fire going, boil a pot of water, grind the beans, and make coffee. Uggh. I cough up some ugly stuff and spit it out in the dry toilet, feeling suddenly old and vile myself.

I lean against some empty banana crates and listen to the soothing patter of the rain, while gently massaging my sides 'til the needles in my kidneys dull. Aunt Yolita is in command mode, directing the men shlepping the fifty-five-gallon-drum barbecue to a dry spot under the eaves of the terrace so she can cook with wood, a hard commodity to come by in a town where there's no such thing as scrap. At least we've got plenty of packing crates.

“Just like in the country,” she says, ever a source of light and hope. “Remember?”

“Yeah, I remember.”

Antonia's waiting to use a pot so she and her cousin Priscilla can boil the milk and make some instant pudding in five minutes. Kids today! In my day, instant pudding took
ten
minutes. But we still have to boil the milk.

She tells me they went to the movies last night. Not downtown, with its first-run movies and orderly lines, but in this beat-up neighborhood, where the cashier opens up her iron-barred window, everybody piles up in front of it like wild-eyed refugees trying to withdraw their money from a failing bank before enemy tanks overrun the city, and whoever jumps on top of the others and stuffs his money in the cashier's face first gets the tickets. The picture was so old, Stallone got beaten up by the lead actor and
didn't
retaliate.

“You done with the paper yet?” I ask.

“There's no more paper,” says Uncle Lucho, wrapping some plantain flour with one of the last scraps of newsprint from what was once a big pile.

“You used up
all
the newspapers?”

“The plastic bags haven't come in yet. Rain delay.”

“Even the ones I separated?”

“I don't know. Check the desk.”

I go over to the desktop and find it as bare as a bone.
Damn it
. That's what I get for acting as if I were on the job. This amateur detective nonsense is for the birds.

The biggest newsstand is four blocks away, in front of the Civic Center. I trot maybe fifty yards through the rain before the blood starts pounding in my cranium like a squad of Marines hammering tent stakes into New Hampshire granite, so I slow to a fast walk and get thoroughly soaked while passing a huge modern apartment building
without
a second-floor balcony for protection from the elements. There's progress for you.