Blood Lake (39 page)

What did I expect? A certified letter with a return receipt for my RSVP?

Yet I feel let down.

No time for that. Keep moving.

I inch along the sheer rock face until I can drop down to the brush and climb down like a human rather than a mountain goat.

The clouds have held off for a while, but the condensation is so suffusive that water is dripping from the jutting rocks and the terrain gets squishy again. I follow the flowing water down to a narrow valley between the ridges, divided by a small stream that feeds into the Yanuncay. I squat for a moment, watching the clear mountain water flow, the tiniest capillary in a continent-wide network that eventually converges into the largest river system on earth.

My brief moment of reflection is shattered by the
heart-stopping bark of the great beast. I'm assuming attack posture as a hairy black body comes crashing through the wet, overgrown weeds and springs through the air at me.

I've already got the gun out and I fire. I had forgotten how a shotgun blast fills up the space in a high valley like this from mountaintop to mountaintop, proceeding in two successive wave fronts of sound and shock, followed by a dying cry, echoing away. They must have heard that one in the city.

The diffuse spray of blood-speckled pellets is not enough to stop the huge dog from flying into me with enough force to uproot a small tree and knocking me to the ground under his repulsive weight. But the little pellets have done their job. The dog is quite dead.

The ground beneath my back begins to vibrate. A horse's hooves. I push the bloody dog off me. No time to reload this moldy musket. I zing out my stiletto and saw through one of the broad radiating branches of a blue
penco
cactus and crouch down into spear-chucker position, one hand on the ground, both ears open.

As the rumbling hooves close in on me I spring up and launch the needle-tipped
penco
at the sergeant's uniform like a harpooner in a twelve-foot rowboat aiming for a sperm whale's eye.

He starts to say, “You are going to fight me with
plants
?” but the sharp tip of the yard-long
penco
shaft pierces his skin as he blocks it to keep from losing an eye. I whack him above the ear with my breech-loading flintlock, yank him from the saddle and knock the pistol out of his hands. There's an electrical moment of fumbling before I am able to grab the gun properly and point it at him. I smash his radio against a rock, then I leap onto the horse and turn it around, firing a few keep-away-from-me shots past the horse's butt that set the noble brute tearing off at a gallop across the narrow valley as if the Devil himself were chewing on her tail.

Nice switch, but I'll never get into Cuenca looking like a stagecoach bandit.

My best chance is to make for Soldados. If I had more
time I could trade in this blue steel semiautomatic for some hard currency. But I've got no time, no takers, a damn big horse, and the rural police will be on full alert within an hour, as soon as that guy makes it back to his command post. Otherwise, everything's going smoothly.

An eight-mile ride.

I tie the horse up behind a brake of scrubby trees and prickly bushes with bright red and yellow flowers, near some grass and water, turn my wretched poncho inside out to hide the dog's bloodstains, and slip into town.

I have no choice.

I sell my silver and gold.

I buy a used
pollera
, a stiffened-straw Azuayan hat and some cheap black shoes one cut above going barefoot. I find a dirty, dank place to strip off my muddy clothes and wrap them up in a bundle. Amid fecal smells and dripping water, I begin my transformation. The last step is braiding my frizzy hair on both sides, then I step out into the bright sunlight and join a collection of
cholas
piling onto a decrepit bus riding on a set of tires that look like they were retreaded the same year that Goodyear invented vulcanizing. It's heading for Cuenca.

I've only got a few sucres left, just enough to reach the city. So I freeze with disbelief when I hear the driver telling the women in front of me that the fare has gone up four thousand sucres and I'm way short. And way fucked. I can't wait for the next bus. Even if I went back and hocked the saddle, this town would be swarming with
rurales
by then and I'd be standing there with hot bridles dangling from my sweaty hands. Fifty cents short and it could be the end of the road for me.

I turn to a pair of round-faced
cholas
dressed in stiff orange
polleras
and red sweaters and beg them to help me.

“
Maiman rinqui?
” says the taller one, looking up at me.

“
Cuencamanmi rini
. I need four thousand sucres. I'll pay you back as soon as we get to the city.”

“
Mana imata charinchicchu
,” says the other one, turning me down.

“It's only a few thousand sucres.”

“Oh, is that all? Try dragging a bucket full of cow's milk all the way into town if you want to make a few thousand sucres.”

“I'll give you back five thousand. What am I saying? I'll give you back
ten thousand
—”

“
La plata se apega a la plata
,” says the shorter one. My money's just sticking together. Or, a bit more generously, it takes money to make money.

But the other one takes my hands and turns them over, feeling their smoothness, studies the color of my eyes, and decides to lend me the bus fare.

“
Diussulpagui
,” I say, thanking them with genuine gratitude for their kindheartedness. God will repay you.

We climb aboard and grab three seats together. They figure they've bought the rights to my story, and I'm somewhat ashamed to say that I invent something. They tell me their names are María Natividad and María Esperanza, and they're heading to the sheep market to buy some wool to knit into ponchos.

We rattle along just fine until we round a bend in the river outside Sustag and run into a roadblock. It's the army, not the
rurales
. It could mean anything. Two brown-skinned conscripts in green fatigues carrying bulky wooden-stocked rifles step up inside the bus. One stations himself at the front, the other walks slowly down the aisle, looking directly at our faces.

María Esperanza giggles and covers her blushing cheeks with her poncho. I don't want to draw attention with any suspicious behavior, forgetting for a moment that such excessive humility is “normal” behavior for a
chola
. The kid with the rifle stares at me. My features aren't quite as Indian as my companions, and he's coming closer, gazing down at me. But I have walked through rivers of mud, I haven't bathed in days, and the overpowering smell of manure and earth convinces him that I spend most of my time among farm animals. What a victory for our side.

Fifteen harrowing kilometers later we pull into the
animal market and the relative safety of anonymity. I tell my newfound sisters to come with me to the center of town so I can pay them back, but María Natividad dismisses me with a wave of her hand and an aphorism:

“
Cuando mucho, mucho. Cuando nada, nada
.”

A sentiment so simple it's hard to render into English, but basically, When you've got it, you've got it. When you don't, you don't.

I tell her once again God will pay them back. His credit's better than mine, anyway.

I need to find a phone. I need to call Antonia and talk to her and tell her I'm all right, and remind her to keep praying for me, and tell her that I miss her and I'll see her soon. But there's a good chance some unseen ears will trace the call back to me in Cuenca, and it can be hard to make a quick exit from a town like this, all snug in a basin eight thousand feet above sea level, rimmed by mountains that climb several thousand feet higher still. Cuenca didn't even have a paved road connecting it with the outside world until the 1970s. The city's first automobiles were taken apart on the coast, carried up the mountain on the Indians' backs and reassembled here so they could putter around the bumpy streets of the old center with no particular place to go.

Now the paving stones and spun-sugar colonial stylings and the unfinished cathedral are awash in the orange-tile-and-white-cement sea of the new neighborhoods. But there are still only two real roads out of here, and they're both guarded by military checkpoints.

It can get cold enough to grow frost on your bones when it rains this high up. But right now the sun is out and the center is hot, close and bustling like something out of a Dantean fever dream. Although in some ways it's more like Sherlock Holmes's London. Social stratification is so ingrained here, you can deduce a person's rank, profession, and personality from three blocks away. See that guy? Light skin, confident walk, European-style business suit? He's a well-made banker with connections, married, with two
children and a maid. That woman? Company-issued uniform, harried look, rushing to attend to urgent tasks? Office underling, single, lives at home with her mom and her five sisters. That guy who's been wearing the same set of grimy clothes for half a lifetime and doesn't particularly feel like rushing anywhere? He's a day laborer, and he'll never be anything
but
a day laborer. And the ones on the bottom rung are identifiable by their tribal clothing, which may be decorative and colorful or soiled by thirty harvests, their faces dark and angular as the mountains that nurtured them, many of them walking with a stoop that has been shaped by five centuries of fire and fraud, also known as “civilization.”

I'm trying to get the stoop just right, to take a few inches off my height and not stick out in any way.

I have a lot of family around here, but I haven't warned them I'm coming—that is, they might be expecting
me
, not a
chola cuencana
who smells like a she-goat. My best bet is my cousin Lucho Freire, the guy with the poison gas operation, who works a second job in a hardware store near the Diez de Agosto marketplace. There's a man sitting in the shade under the arches near the open square with a manual typewriter set up on a low table, typing out the words spilling from the mouths of the unschooled parents of emigrés for whom the letters of the alphabet might as well be the arcane and sinister symbols of some deranged medieval alchemist. The professional letter-writer. How lucky I am that I don't need
his
help.

I cross the Calle Mariscal Lamar, named after a hero of the War of Independence who later attacked Ecuador from the south with an army raised in Peru, which comes about as close to encapsulating Ecuador's blighted history as any single example I can think of. I mean, the guy's a traitor
and
a national hero at the same time.

Lengths of hanging chain of various weights dangle over the doorway like strings of beads in a Moroccan bazaar. I spread them apart, and they clickety-clack together behind me as I step inside. The store has not altered its muted rustic
interior in decades. Worn wooden compartments keep the fax machine and the ultraviolet counterfeit banknote detector out of plain sight. Varnished shelves rise to the ceiling crammed with such must-have items as chunks of sulfur by the pound, pitch and nitre for homemade gunpowder, vegetal and aniline dyes for hand-loomed cloth, square-headed horseshoe nails, spools of hatband ribbon for the local straw hat trade, brittle slabs of tar to be melted over a fire and brushed on for waterproofing wood, and lumps of black bees' wax from the Amazon jungle for strengthening cheap twine, all weighed out on brass balances so venerable and true they just might be the ones St. Peter uses when it comes time to weigh our souls against that feather. Even the pope looks down approvingly from his vantage point high up among the carefully stacked packets of antimony and multicolored layers of tissue paper.

The crowd of
campesinos
jostles me with market day urgency. Eight members of the Mejia clan attend to them, weighing an ounce of cloves, breaking off chunks of solid tar with pick hammers, measuring out combustible powder for fireworks, and occasionally knocking a few sucres off the price of bulk orders.

“
Sí, señora?
” Lucho Freire asks me. “It's
señorita
.”

Eyes widen.

Opening a wooden gate worn as smooth as a saint's nose by ten generations of passing pilgrims, he invites me to step under the yards of hanging hatband ribbon to the rear of the store while the customers watch the tallying pencils closely. I once gave them a calculator as a gift. They said they couldn't use it because the country folk don't trust them.

Safe from prying eyes, I slide the rural patrolman's 1911 semiautomatic out of the folds of my
pollera
and ask Lucho if he can sell it for me.

It's shiny and blue-black against his sturdy palm. He flips it over and looks at the serial number etched above the grip. This ain't no duck hunter's gun.

He looks at me.

“It's worth a couple of hundred dollars,” I say. “I'll take fifty.”

“I don't have that kind of money, Filomena.”

He smells the barrel.

It's been fired, and he knows it. He checks the clip. Three live bullets, one in the chamber. I guess I should have dumped those.

He waits for an explanation.

And waits.

“You got a place to stay?” he asks, then answers himself: “No, of course not. Why don't you come by tonight and eat with us and we'll sort this all out. Okay?”

“Thanks, Luchito.”

“You'd do the same for me.”

“Yes, I would.”

He looks around to see if anyone is listening and asks what's going on with me. I tell him it's something that I can't explain right now.

“You're not acting like your usual self,” he says, understating things a bit.

“I know. I really stepped into a whole bunch of shit that I wasn't expecting. A bunch of shit I thought was over and done with.”