Blood Lake (32 page)

I need to keep away from the site for a couple of hours, so I strengthen my blood with a sinus-clearing cup of seafood-and-onion
ceviche
from a sidewalk cart and a few ounces of muddy coffee.

The streets are turning into canals. The only fashionable way to get by is with rubber sandals, knee-length pants, and not thinking about what you're stepping in or sloshing
through. I buy a clean copy of
El Despacho
and seek higher ground, climbing the steps of a public building belonging to the Ministry of Culture so I can drop anchor and dry out.

And there it is in big, bold letters:
WANTED BY THE SIC-G:

Me.

My eyes bounce along the columns grabbing clumps of information:

allegedly found the body of Sr. Ruben Zimmerman          witholding information about the murder          police are seeking Srta. Filomena          disappeared from last-known address without informing the National Immigration Police          in violation of          anyone with information regarding Srta. Buscarsela          1 million sucres reward.

It's me all right, and they just happen to have a photo of me taken in police custody the very same night that the body was found.

Aw, crap. All I need is for Sergeant Musgoso and Corporal Polillo to recognize me and those paramilitary creeps will be after me, too, if they aren't already. Maybe they don't read the papers. Maybe they don't read. Or at least make it so they get the papers a few days late, please.

I've got to get away from all this and slip out of the province. Not an easy task, with so few navigable roads out of here. After all the rain, this burg is practically an island connected to the mainland by half a dozen bridges, all easily patrolled and easily sealed.

I spend an anxious hour telling myself that the one-million-sucre reward for turning me in is only about $200 at today's exchange rate, so I can still offer any would-be tipster twice that amount, and there are maybe fifty thousand women in Guayaquil with dark frizzy hair, dark brown eyes, and olive skin who might pass for the tired face in the coarsely screened reproduction of a blurry Polaroid original.

Not that that's any reason to celebrate.

I take a few minutes to trade up to a bigger pair of sunglasses, a nondescript dark blue baseball cap, and a thin black band to tie my wiry hair back into a ponytail. Then I head back to the construction site, my pace steady, keeping an eye out front and back to convince myself it's safe to approach. When I show Bolívar the bad news, he tells me not to worry, nobody's going to turn me in. I'm getting a rep.

Yeah, but a few more weeks of this rice shortage and people will be hungry enough to chew each other's tits off.

But he's got something for me from Patricia, wrapped in a dirty rag. A stiff black leather sling.

It's time to break it in.

I used to hunt birds and rabbits with a slingshot, like a lot of mountain kids, since there was never enough food at home. And later, it came in handy when someone's gun jammed or when we just ran out of bullets completely and had to send people crawling along the ground looking for unexploded casings, then we'd lay down a cover of slingstones.

I select from the pile of smooth, round stones.

Then I scratch the chalky outline of a head and shoulders at eye level on a cement wall and practice, ignoring tired muscles, until I can hit it between the eyes three times out of five from thirty feet away. It should be nine times out of ten from fifty feet away, but I haven't got the time to retrain myself to that level of refinement right now.

The Mendezes watch me while they work mixing cement and laying bricks, fascinated. As the shadows lengthen, at that miraculous fleeting moment when the rooftops shimmer with elusory gold, they climb down the ladders, dusting themselves off.

I ask them to attack me.

“Yo, give it a rest, girl,” Ronny says.

“Sheee-it,” Bolívar editorializes.

“Okay, okay.”

We'll try again tomorrow when everybody's fresh.

It rains all night. The ground is so saturated, the puddles quickly spread until the rough piles of dirt and sand and rock stand isolated like a primeval mountain chain above the featureless, flooded world below. Soon the muddy water streaks across the sidewalk into the street and merges with the raging current, gathering momentum for its inexorable march to the sea.

It's time to gather up some supplies for my long trek to the
sierra
. But first, one more hour with my child.

I watch the trio of rubber-booted inspectors extract some money from a fruit tomato vendor because the prices on his rain-soaked cardboard sign are no longer legible, but they walk right past a sharp-toothed man selling a few soggy
quintales
of rice for three times the official price as if he were invisible.

At one edge of the muddy bazaar, a group of highland women wearing bright orange-and-magenta
polleras
are selling
mote
corn and ground
machica
to the quiet men from Cañar who have come looking for work in the vast, alien city. I hang out near these unassuming people, watching and waiting for the warm, kindly woman taking her grandniece shopping. Eventually they appear, and Aunt Yolita brings my beloved Antonia to me so I can explain to my worldly eighth-grader that I have to go to the mountains.

“Is it cold in the mountains?” she asks.

“The way I'm going? Yes. Very.”

“Are you taking your earmuffs?” she says.

I smile and tell her when she was little she used to call them “earmuffins.”

“I don't want you to die,” she says, unexpectedly meeting my gaze and sounding very mature.

“Well that's good because I don't want to die, either,” I say, trying to keep it light. But I can't hold back the bodily surge of emotion, and pretty soon there's nothing left to do but hug her, tightly.

“You pray for me,” I say, suddenly having a hard time swallowing. “God listens to you.”

I turn to Aunt Yolita, who makes me lean forward so she can bless me, pressing her quietly suffering fingers to my head and heart.

Angry shouts pierce the air. There's a scuffle over by the grapefruit stands, sending a few oranges flying upwards. Apparently thievery is involved. I stay out of it this time. And when the police inspectors show up to investigate, I'm a distant memory.

I struggle to keep my balance on the wobbly wooden boards, grab hold of the slippery, wet ladder and climb up to the relative safety of my hideaway, looking forward to a night's rest on my cement-sack bed before I make the journey.

A sigh of relief.

Then I—
ick
! A mess of those two-inch roaches scatter as I lift my backpack. I better empty it out and make sure none of those nasty creatures are in there laying eggs. The bundle of Ruben's notes has a thin layer of cement dust clinging to it, which I brush off. I'll have to slip it to the boys tomorrow morning, and tell them to keep it in a safe place 'til I get back.

Clunk
.

Out falls a watch.

It's not Ruben's watch.

It's the broken “Rolux” watch Guillermo gave me, which I haven't seen since I was arrested.

There's a note taped to it:

Juanita:

Lomas de Mapasingue. Calle Cuatro y Zapatero.

22:30.

Under the bloodred glow of the gel-covered lights in the back room of a
cantina
where the only other women are a pair of sagging, dead-eyed professionals, I call up the offices of
El
Despacho
and ask if I can speak to their ace crime reporter, Javier Putamayo.
Buzz. Click. Buzz. Beeeep
.

“Hello?” Click. “Hello?”

I finally get connected to a petulant twenty-three-year-old who tells me with lazy authority that
señor
Putamayo is on assignment in Cuenca for the next two weeks covering the political violence there.

In Cuenca?

“Didn't you hear? Governor Segundo Canino was speaking at a rally for the Trabajo, Familia, Patria Society when someone in the crowd shot at him. Canino's brother was hit in the leg. He's in the hospital now.”

A flesh wound. And the wrong guy. My, my.

The killers in this country don't seem to have any trouble missing when they're going after my friends.

Mapasingue. A spattering of glowing pinpricks in the night trace a sparkling trail of human habitation on the inky black hills that separate the fashionable suburbs from the industrial zones and the highway west to the oil fields of the Santa Elena peninsula. Finding the intersection of Fourth Street and Zapatero is going to be quite a challenge among the nameless mudslides that pass for streets on these Hooverville-laden slopes. Of course it's only a matter of time before some real estate magnate realizes what he can get for hilltop property this close to downtown.

“
Hágame el favor
, which way is Calle Cuatro?”

“
Por allá
.”

That way.

Well, that narrows it down to one of the four cardinal directions.

People don't give out much information, and even when I try to buy some, there is little agreement as to the actual location of things.

“Keep going—”

“Over there—”

“Further on—”

“Up that way—”

At this rate, I'll never find the place in time. But somebody is out looking for me, and news of a strange woman wandering around the squatters' shacks alone at night asking for directions travels as fast as the news of a governmental collapse. Possibly faster. After all, governments collapse with some frequency down here. Unfamiliar women handing out five thousand sucres at a touch are not quite as common.

I'm tramping slowly up a steep incline, trying not to lose my footing and slide down the mud-lined trail to the bottom of the hill, when a hand reaches out and a woman's voice offers to help me up. I seize the hand, lodge a foot against a welcome hard place—I think it's a buried log—and lift myself up to the next level of steep, muddy ground.