Blood Lake (40 page)

“Sounds like you should have packed some hip waders, cousin.”

“Yeah, and a nose plug.”

He nods. I'm turning to go, back into the sweat and stink.

“Oh, and Lucho?”

“Yes?”

“You got running water?”

“The hills are full of it.”

I cross the central square of the Parque Calderón, where a spiritless statue holding a wilted flag depicts another moment of defeat from one of our many wars. At one edge of
the park stands a small pink marble pillar with a bronze flame on top, a relatively recent monument to Abdón Calderón (no relation), a believer in democracy who thought that winning a majority of popular votes would be enough to force the general-in-command to relinquish the power he wielded over a lost generation of
ecuatorianos
. The general had other ideas. Someone shot Calderón, and he took five weeks to die.

Cuenca is not as saturated with political propaganda as Guayaquil is, but there are still plenty of posters elbowing each other in the eye in roughly equal amounts of left-liberal yellow-and-white and reactionary red-and-white, with a few blue-and-white posters sprinkled about, covering up the cracks in the walls. Populist hero Hector-the-School-Teacher Gatillo hasn't got much of a following in the
sierra
. Yet.

Someone is pasting up the red-and-black posters of the left-wing Popular Workers Alliance party. Yellow letters scream:
DARWIN HERNÁNDEZ FOR NATIONAL DEPUTY. VIOLETA ESPOLAZO FOR PROVINCIAL DEPUTY.
There's only a photo of Hernández. I guess they don't have the money to print two photos.

I could use a quick cash loan myself, but everyone I know is nearly as broke as I am, and the International Monetary Fund stopped taking my calls after that whole Argentine meltdown thing. I'm a little hesitant about using my credit card in a cash machine, wondering if it's worth the risk of sending up that electronic flare. But Ecuador's still a little behind the U.S. in credit card surveillance techniques, so I figure maybe it's worth a shot.

Outside the bank a beggar in tattered rags looks around guiltily to see if anyone is watching, then starts pushing the bright blue buttons on the ATM to see if any crisp new bills come out. At least
someone
still values the sucre.

I take up a spot next to him like we've known each other for decades. How's it going, old man? How are the old bones treating you? Are you getting enough to eat? Good. I look around, slip my card in and punch in the numbers. Nothing.
Rejected. I try again, and enter the digital void.
Crap
. The machine swallows my card and nearly chokes on it, as far as I can tell from the audible grinding of wheels inside its satanic body. Then it gulps it all down and the transaction screen appears like a blessing from the gods of gold and silver and brass and iron. I punch in a polite request for a hundred dollars. The gods of gold think about it for a moment, then cancel the transaction and eject my card. Great. I may have just told them where I am and I'm
still
five cents short of a nickel.

I take my card out of the machine. The beggar holds out his hat to me, and I have nothing to offer him.

I walk a few blocks east and try to lose myself in the crowd at the 9 de Octubre market, circulating among the upland Indians in their mud-caked boots and the animal market smells, stepping over rotting oranges and unidentifiable vegetable matter in the gutters. It works for a while, though I almost give myself away when I nearly crack up in front of a hundred witnesses after coming across the cultural incongruity of a quiet old woman sitting there in a black sweater selling gaudily packaged bootleg American audio cassettes, calmly oblivious to the English lyrics booming out of the box next to her about a guy asking a girl to leave the dance floor and go back to his place for
a little boom-boom
, as he puts it. He ends up screeching,
Do it to me, baby!
over and over.

Globalization marches on.

I take my time wandering through the masses of people piling onto the buses leaving the market, meekly making my way past the mud-spattered whitewash and political graffiti towards Lucho and Marianita's store, when all of a sudden this overwhelming sensation creeps over me that someone's following me, close enough for me to feel them. I measure off the steps to the corner, gripping the handle of my knife as I walk slowly towards a store window, where on the pretext of examining some imported Chinese claw hammers, I check out what's going on behind me.

Nobody. Nothing.

That doesn't mean they aren't there.

I shower off a few festering days of grit and slip into a clean, dry pair of pants, telling myself that I ought to be able to walk around safely inside the city without being recognized and dragged off to a cell in leg irons.

“Pull up a chair,” says Lucho as I squoosh in between their sprightly brood of children aged eight, twelve, and sixteen— Fabiola, María Auxiliadora and Juan Carlos. “Where five can eat, six can eat.” It's a local saying.

The portions are small. A little vegetable soup with
mote
, extra bread and milk for the growing teens. Marianita asks me to forgive her for offering so little.

“Nonsense,” I say. “This is everything I could possibly ask for.” Though I notice the larder is emptier than usual. “What happened to that
quintal
of rice you got?”

“Gone,” says Lucho.

“The whole family needed it,” says Marianita, who has nine brothers and sisters, including one in the U.S.

“This is the only thing left on the shelves,” says Lucho, opening a bottle of
aguardiente
and pouring out a couple of shots. He slugs it back and shudders (this is a chemical engineer who makes his own ammonia, mind you) then gestures for me to do the same. I beg off. I've done enough messing with my blood sugar for one week.

We try to call Guayaquil, but the interprovincial phone lines are damaged due to flooding.

“Maybe tomorrow,” says Lucho, relaxing by the window and opening up the newspaper.

Marianita tells me they found a trunkful of my grandfather's things in an old toolshed in Solano, and it's still there if I want to go through it. I tell her I don't have time right now. Someday, maybe.

We're talking about the bygone days in that dusty old town halfway up a cliff-hugging drive into southern Cañar
when a truck lurches to a halt in front of a shuttered building across the street and a cop gets out and stands guard in the feeble circle of light from a streetlamp while four workers dressed in dark blue coveralls prepare to unload a shipment of sacks marked
POTASSIUM NITRATE.

“They're working late,” says Lucho.

“What's that stuff?” I ask the chemistry expert.

“Fertilizer.”

“They need a cop to guard some fertilizer?”

“People will steal anything these days.”

Sacks fall.
Whompsh! Whompsh!

Lucho stops talking. His fist tightens around the newspaper.

“You hear that?” he says.

Whompsh!

“Yeah. What about it?”

“That's not fertilizer. Those are sacks of rice.”

I know better than to ask, “Are you sure?” This is a man who can judge the freshness of a
quintal
of rice by grinding a single grain of it between his teeth.

“Who owns that building?”

“The Central Bank,” he answers, his throat constricting.

It takes them nearly forty-five minutes to carry it all inside and shut and lock the big double doors. When they're gone, we go downstairs and have a close look at the street in front of the empty doorway. The cracks between the cobblestones catch a bit of light, revealing a few scattered grains of bleached white rice.

“There must be room for thirty or forty thousand
quintales
in there,” he says, looking up at the darkened windows.

In one warehouse, on one street, in one sleepy neighborhood in an isolated mountain town two hundred kilometers from the nearest rice paddy.

Normally, I'd say the big rice producers are hiding the stuff to drive the price up. Simple, right? But Lucho says this is a government-owned building. What's
their
angle? Besides taking their cut, I mean.

To drive up desperation.

The easiest way to turn decent folks into killers is not to feed them for a couple of weeks.

Lucho is shaking his head. All that rice.

We have a saying in Spanish: What good is a gold chamberpot when you're pissing blood?

“Filomena, wake up!”

Jesus Christ, won't anyone let me finish a dream in this country?

“I looked into selling that gun for you,” says Lucho. “We'd have to file off the numbers, engrave new ones, and match them with a registered owner's permit. It could take a couple of weeks.”

Legally, yes.

Unless you have the money to bribe some civil servant to forge the documents, which of course we don't. That's the whole problem in the first place. Or else you sell it directly to the scum of the earth, but I don't feel like placing a weapon of this quality into their undifferentiating hands.

Lucho's got the early shift across town, so I help Marianita push up the big steel shutters. Light floods the family chemical supply store, revealing a yellow-and-white poster proclaiming
FALTORRA: THE PEOPLE'S CHOICE FOR PRESIDENT!

“You really support this guy?” I ask her.

“Well, he's a good man, in his way,” she says deferentially. “But some of the people around him are not. And one day three men came by carrying those posters and said they were taking a poll—”

I finish the sentence for her, but probably not with the words she would have chosen.

I sit down and go through the top third of the stack of newspapers they use for wrapping powdered chemicals, checking the headlines in
El Mundo
and catching up on the local gossip in Cuenca's
El Mensajero
. There's nothing about a rural sergeant being assaulted on the pampa near the Río Soldados.

I observe all the early morning activity in the street, and when a swarm of eight-year-old newsboys comes through, their faces sculpted by streaks of dirt, I get Marianita to buy me a copy of Guayaquil's
El Despacho
and right there on top of page three is an article with Putamayo's byline saying that in his capacity as governor of Guayas, Segundo Canino is launching an investigation into a series of extremist threats against priests who won't “collaborate” with the government.

Dateline: Cuenca.

I've got to find this guy.

Cuenca's not that big.

I call a few of the major downtown hotels and get nothing. So I call a few more. The same as nothing.

It takes me twenty minutes to get through to the offices of
El Despacho
one province away and ask if they know where in Cuenca Javier Putamayo is staying. I get nothing squared with a fucking cherry on top. Ever since he was attacked, they have to think of his security.

Of course.