Blood Lake (33 page)

“Nice one, Juanita,” she says.

I let it go by.

“I wish you hadn't alerted the entire neighborhood with your generosity,” she says. “Word moves fast.”

“Then you should have given me better instructions. Cigarette?” I ask, as a pretext for shoving one in my mouth and flicking open my trusty metal lighter so I can have a look at my surroundings, but she knocks the flame out of my hand quite abruptly.

“Don't do that again,” she says nastily.

“And don't talk to me like that,
hermanita
,” I say, feeling around for my fallen lighter. “I'm wanted in four provinces. If anything, I'm the one who shouldn't want anyone to see my face.”

There is a pause in the darkness. I wipe the mud off, spin the Zippo's wheel and hold it up again. My guide is a pixieish light-skinned woman with short straight black hair. She looks closely at my features, watching for suspicious signs of stress. I see enough of her to feel confident that she isn't carrying a concealed harpoon launcher, anyway, and get enough of a glimpse of the street receding behind her to convince
myself that nobody is going to try to lead me off a cliff or something cute like that.

I smile at her. She could be me at nineteen. I snap the lighter shut, drop my cigarette in the mud and let her do whatever her face muscles want to do while we're both seeing blue-flame afterimages in the darkness.

“You're not from this neighborhood, either,” I tell her.

Pause.

“I'm from Ambato,” she says, taking hold of my elbow and leading me away down the street.

“How'd you get me that message?”

No answer.

“I'm just trying to find out if it's legitimate or not,” I say.

“It's legitimate.”

We turn down a lane doing double duty as a drainage ditch, and I sink up to my ankles in mud and filth. We slog through this for a while, then come to a clearing with a darkened shack in the middle of it, isolated from the others by at least forty feet and perched on the edge of an incline that slopes off into unseen depths. If ever a spot was set up to be the end of the line, this is it.

My guide gives a few sharp syncopated raps on the door, pushes me against it, and disappears. A swish of air and a military-issue semiautomatic presses against the side of my head.

A flashlight stings my eyes.

Nothing else moves.

My heart waits for the next beat.

Apparently, I pass the test.

The door swings open and a masked man motions me in with a sudden deflection of his gun away from my frontal lobes towards the darker recesses of the shack. I step inside willingly enough, thus demonstrating my mental incompetence and establishing a case for absolving me of any illegal actions that I may happen to take within the next few minutes.

The interior wouldn't get much of a write-up in
House
and Garden
, but it might rate a sidebar in
Soldier of Fortune
. There's a propane lantern and single-burner camping stove, furniture made from cardboard boxes, and a small but worthy arsenal that might cut this group a few respectably sized blocks of territory in Brooklyn, but I wouldn't try to overthrow any governments with it. And there's two more people with old-fashioned outlaws' kerchiefs covering their faces from the eyes down pointing deadly weapons at me. The one who's working the door pulls my shoulder bag away from me and throws it into a corner.

“Thanks,” I say. “It was getting heavy. Mind if I sit?”

The three masks look at each other. I wait a few more seconds and decide that it's okay with them if I pull out a cardboard box and sit down.

They've been eating. There's a plate of
haba
beans on the table with some cheese and a bowl of
ají
.

“Why have you been trying to see us?” asks a woman's voice from behind the mask directly opposite me.

At least the presence of women confirms that they're leftists.

Leftists I can deal with.

“That watch you sent me—it shows you still have some friendly ties to the police. And I need to know what secrets the cops are keeping from us about who killed Padre Samuel Campos and Ruben Zimmerman.”

“Zimmerman was an apologist for the bourgeois media,” she says. “And Campos was a pawn for the
pajizocistas
who deserved to—”

“Campos saved my life, damn it.”

Guns leap closer on three sides, violating my personal space.

We stay like this for a while.

“Look,” I say. “My nerves are stretched pretty tight as it is without you folks pointing those things at me, so could we please stop wasting time like this? Sure, you've got a right to be nervous. So frisk me already and get it over with, but
stop
pointing guns at my head.”

Well, I've said my piece. If I'm not dead within the next two minutes, I might make it into tomorrow. Hey—maybe I'll get lucky and see the middle of next week. I cross my hands between my knees and while I'm in that position some bizarre impulse compels me to take my pulse. It's relatively normal, which will make it easier to count off two minutes, if nothing else.

Opinions are divided. The woman seems to soften, but the men are hard as igneous rock. The guns stay trained.

“I'm also interested in finding out who killed Mishojos,” I say.

“Who?” says the woman.

“Enough of this! What are you
really
after?” says the man behind me.

What am I
really
after?

“Mind if I have a bean?”

“Sure, go ahead,” says the woman. What a country: even the
guerrilleros
know how to feed a guest.

I reach for a steamed
haba
and dip it into the
ají
.
Very
spicy.

“That's good
ají
,” I tell my hostess.

“We heard you were looking for Juanito,” says the man in front of me.

“So why should we help you find him?” says the one behind me, leaning close enough for his hot breath to stir his mask and raise the hair on my neck. “Maybe you want revenge.”

My knife's in my pocket, but I'd be dead before I got it out. I have a second bean, and my casual munching allows them to relax their grips on their guns for a moment. I slide my feet a little closer under me, knees bending, and start slowly shifting my weight forward.

“I don't think he can be found,” I say. “I think he's been dead for nearly twenty years. But I've got to know.”

“What kind of mother abandons her daughter to answer a twenty-year-old question?” says the woman.

“A rotten one,” I admit.

“Oh, boo-hoo,” says the man in front of me.

I reach for another bean, dip it into the
ají
, seize the rim of the bowl between my thumb and forefinger and toss it into the man's eyes. Almost as good as pepper spray.

The woman's gun flies up as I spring up and ram my head into the guy behind me, butting his jaw like an Argentine soccer player and quickly spinning around and getting him between me and the guns. This guy has spent more time arguing over petty changes in the wording of some subversive pamphlet than learning how to kick some bastard in the balls and take his gun away from him, which works out to my advantage in this instance.

Before his two
compañeros
have time to steady their weapons on the two of us, I've got the guy pinned in front of me with his gun pressed to
his
head for a change.

“Now
listen
to me, you stupid assholes!” I instruct them. “I am about to give you the only proof I can give you that you ought to be able to trust me.”

Before they can react to that, I raise their comrade's handgun up into the air, let it dangle freely from one finger, and fling it onto the floor at the masked woman's feet. Then I shove the guy away from me, leaving myself completely open to their fire.

“There,” I say. “I could have killed the three of you and gotten myself a medal for it if I wanted to. Do you believe me now? Sorry about your eyes,
amigo
.”

I think the woman smiles behind her mask. She lowers her gun to go wet a rag and wipe the
ají
out of her
compañero's
eyes.

“What should we do with her?” he asks.

The woman turns to answer him. She never gets the chance. The air crackles with a bunch of nearby bursts and a row of enormous holes tear through the cardboard wall looking like they come from a .45-caliber machine gun.
Shit
. My first reflex is to dive onto the floor behind some cardboard boxes—like they're
really
going to protect me against a hail of spinning .45 slugs, but there you have it, instinct in its purest form.

“
¡Maldita!
” The guy I disarmed curses me. “Fuck! She led them to us! Kill her!”

But the other two are already down. Maybe hit. The guy reaches for the pistol I just forfeited, but a cascade of bullets rips up the cardboard between his outstretched fingers and the silent gun.

The bloody woman lifts herself up like a vampire rising from the grave, her shell-shocked eyes already a dead weight. She flops her gun heavily on the table and starts shooting at me, through me, past me to the invisible targets outside.

Whoever's out there responds by directing a discharge of throat-level fire so dense that it cuts completely through what remains of the walls, and the roof falls in on us as we both dive for his handgun. I reach it first and when he grabs the gun with both hands I get a forearm around his throat and roll out through the collapsing wall and into the mud outside, hitting the night air on bent knees with a gun pointed at this guy's head for the second time tonight.

Then something strange happens. A well-equipped team of provincial cops stands perfectly still in the hot night air, lit up by the chilling ice blue aura of a couple of portable tungsten arc lamps, ready to shoot anyone who comes out of the shack, but some phantasmal quality about the two of us spotlit like this, one held prisoner by the other one's gun, momentarily spares us the indignity of reddening the mud with our entrails. Orders can come from too many sources to be fully reliable, and something about our perverse dumb-show tableau has the officer in command wondering if perhaps something he should have known about has gone very wrong, slapping his ass down on the line right next to mine. Am I one of them? I can't very well be the enemy if I'm holding a gun to the other guy's head.

I don't give the commander time to double-check with headquarters. I pull the poor bastard to his feet and walk him in front of me, keeping the gun pressed to his temple.

But there's no opportunity for negotiations. The police grab him from me, seize the gun, immobilize the two of us
and poke gun nozzles into the impressionable flesh of my neck and ram one just under my left breast. There are too many people with guns in this town. My inner spiritualist automatically forms a prayer, and sometime between “forever” and “amen” a voice steps out of the clouds and says:

“Fine work, Sergeant. But we'll take it from here.”

The hot bodies pushing close to me stop pushing. There's some debating in lowered voices, some paper rattling under a flashlight. Then all of a sudden I cease to be a pincushion for loose gun barrels and the bodies withdraw, shrinking away as if in awe of the unearthly powers of the man in the blue camouflage fatigues.

He steps into the light and the glowing face of Captain Ponce looms above me.

In a second I'm walking again with Captain Ponce's support. He takes me down the muddy slope and away from there.

“Relax. It's not your turn to die yet,” he says, with that curious twinkle highlighting his feline smile. “But we're even now.”

La muerte a mí me escribió

Yo la carta aquí la tengo,

Lo malo no sé leer

Y la letra no la entiendo.

Death wrote me a letter,

I've got it right here in my hand.

Too bad I can't read his writing,

All those words that I don't understand.

—Traditional Afro-Ecuadorian
décima

(Province of Esmeraldas)

MUDDY, BRUISED AND SHAKEN,
I crawl up to the second floor to gather my things and make myself missing before anyone else shows up to spoil the party. I'm about to grab my backpack when I stop myself. The radicals knew where to find me, and one of them seems to have tipped the cops to make it look like I betrayed them.

I rummage around for a stick of scrap wood, then, crouching behind the rough-edged wall, I risk my left arm to carefully poke my backpack. Nothing happens. I gently lift the flap and ease the stick inside. I poke around enough to satisfy myself that it's not going to blow up in my face, anyway, then I get up and take a quick inventory of the contents. Leather slingshot, money, notes. Everything's still here. Great. I'm out of here.

But first, I take a minute to cross the bare cement floor to the half-finished bathroom to relieve myself. The toilet isn't hooked up yet, but what can you do? There isn't a door, either, just a few staggered boards hastily nailed up, the cheap kind
that are cut from laurel with the bark still on them. I piss without paper, and my underwear has to absorb the remaining wetness. A minor discomfort, considering.

As I'm lowering the seat cover out of habit, through the gaps between the boards, I hear someone creeping around down there, in the dark.

Fight? Flight? Fight? Flight?
Fight
.

I've got a knife in my pocket, but this calls for something heavier. My eyes flit around, settling on the two-foot slab of porcelain covering the toilet's reservoir. Naah, too bulky. Not when there's a pile of copper pipes lying at my feet, tailor-made for the occasion. I carefully lift up a four-foot length of it, trying not to make the telltale clanking sound of hollow metal tubing, and position myself behind a flimsy barrier of laurel, figuring that if he's armed with anything like what everyone else who's after me is armed with, half an inch of dead wood won't make a difference.