Blood Lake (41 page)

I dig down to last Wednesday's paper, throw it on the table and sweep the pages aside until I find Javier Putamayo's picture. It's a little blurry, as if their file photo were taken at the paper's Christmas party or something. He's holding a drink, and wearing a striped polo shirt that emphasizes the expanding gut of a guy who's starting to go soft around the middle years. His thick beard and glasses add to the general impression of bodily roundness. I cut the photo out, slitting the paper with a razor blade.

I tell Marianita I'm going to have to send her a check to pay for all these calls. My tab is off and running.

I fold up the photo, put it in my bag and head to the center, where I spend a good part of the morning canvassing the high-end hotels, showing them the photo and trying to grease my way past their unresponsive security chiefs, but you can only bluff your way so far with an empty hand.

I widen the circle to the midrange hotels, and an hour and five hotels later something finally goes my way as I find
myself in the lobby of the Hotel Gran Colombia staring at a fresh-faced desk clerk who just opens up and says,

“Oh yes,
señor
Pena. He's staying in room five-oh-eight.”

“Is he in now?”

“No, he went out about half an hour ago. Sorry.”

“Did he say where he was going?”

“No, he didn't invite me to the party,” he says, feigning disappointment.

“A party? How do you know he was going to a party?”

“Honey, there's always a party going on somewhere in this town.”

“Yeah. Where grown men drink like high school kids.”

That makes him laugh. “You know, he did say something about how he hoped they had decent food, or at least good booze, but you never know these days.”

“Did he say who
they
were?”

“Why would he tell me that?”

“It was worth a shot. But he did say, ‘You never know these days'?”

“Sure. Or something like that.”

Meaning money's short. So it's probably not a business affair.

“Maybe it was some kind of political fund-raiser.”

“You know, he did seem very interested in politics. He has all the papers sent up to his room.”

“Thanks, I'll remember that. Mind if I leave him a message?”

“Be my guest.”

As I'm leaving, he says, “Good luck, sugar. Hope you find what you're looking for.”

“You too.”

I'm only a couple of blocks from the provincial headquarters of the Popular Workers Alliance. I figure it's worth a visit. If they haven't heard from Putamayo, maybe someone there knows a sympathetic clerk in the Firearms Registration Bureau.

It turns out there's a party busting out at their offices
in celebration of Violeta Espolazo's twenty percent margin of victory in yesterday's poll. I scan the crowd for Putamayo, but I don't make him.

There's also food, and nobody stops me from serving myself a plateful of rice and vegetable stew. I've been pounding the pavement all morning, and I devour my portion in about a minute. A high-spirited fortyish woman in a navy blue blazer and skirt is passing through the crowd, pouring shots of
aguardiente
into everyone's plastic cups. From what I hear, she is apparently Ms. Espolazo herself. When she gets to me, cup and bottle meet, our gazes lock.

I knew her as Adelina Díaz. The Grenade Girl.

Pretty good with a rifle, too.

All I can say is, “Congratulations, Violeta.”

All those years of tepid, predigested American politics must have atrophied part of my brain. Of course I knew that ex-revolutionaries are running for political office. Still, one of my former “comrades” could have told me about the possibility of this connection. It would have saved me a lot of BS. It sure feels like somebody's titrating information out to me drop by drop, and I'm starting to get pissed off about it. But I've just been reunited with an old friend, so let's not spoil the mood here.

Violeta brushes aside my ignorance, telling me that Darwin Hernández is the son of Afro-Ecuadorian congressman Jorge Hernández, and says we should have a get-together with a bunch of our old buddies. But I tell her that has to wait, making no effort to keep the desperation out of my voice. She excuses herself for a moment and shuts out the party. The two of us have a small back office to ourselves. It's piled high with posters and other campaign supplies. I show her Putamayo's photo.

“Yes, I've seen him around. Someone said he's staying in Cuenca for a few days to cover the big rallies. What's the problem, Filomena?” she says, taking a moment to get my name right.

I tell her a fair slice of it. She congratulates me for making it this far on my own, and suggests that amnesty is possible for me, too.

So as long as we're on this forbidden topic, I bring up Johnny.

“I've heard rumors, of course,” says Violeta. “But I don't know anything. He never tried to contact me. What about you?”

“No. Nothing. But from where I was standing, it sure looked like he got hit. The cops swore it, too.”

“All that does is add to his legend,” she says.

Lucho finally gets through to the Correas and tells them, “There's someone here who wants to talk to you.”

I keep it anonymous, asking them to get “the little girl” so I can tell her that I'm all right, but I miss her terribly, and for her to keep praying for me—believe me, I need it—ready to hang up the phone before my ninety seconds are up in case someone's trying to trace the call, when Suzie cuts in and says, “We've been trying to reach you! Your boyfriend called a few days ago. He's flying into Guayaquil tomorrow.”

But there are things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark—that sort of make everything else seem—unimportant.

—Stella Kowalski

THERE ARE ONLY
two main streets in La Troncal. One goes east-west, the other runs north-south. At night, from the mountains above it, the town looks like a huge, glittering cross lit up and spread out across the flat, tropical plain.

During the day and close up, it's miserably hot and dirty.

I watch him through the passing shapes flashing along the streets on their way to somewhere else where they belong and I don't. I watch him while the sun becomes a brilliant orange ball igniting the atmosphere with its rapidly fading glory, accepting his mounting anguish as the price of making sure he's not being followed.

I can't take any more risks.

He is a stranger to the sights and sounds of this squalid steam bath they call a town. My boyfriend knows no Spanish, even though he works in a New York City hospital. I've scolded him often for this.

Now he's lost, and getting frustrated. He starts looking around for a place to put down his bag, to sit and watch out for me. Eventually he notices the spot on the bench next to the Indian woman selling woolen ponchos. He sits down and
scans the faces in the busy market. After a few moments, I tap his shoulder. He turns. “Don't say my name.”

He stops himself from saying my name, and a lot of other things, too, like, Why am I wearing a disguise?

“What is it?” he says.

“I'd rather you didn't know, but I'm kind of wanted for some crimes.”

“Major crimes or minor crimes?”

“They'll decide that after they arrest me.”

“Great. Other couples worry if they brought enough sun-screen. I have to worry about being deported for being an accessory after the fact to—to what, exactly?”

“Stan, someone killed my godfather.”

“Oh. I'm … sorry.”

“We'll talk about it later.”

I gather up my wares and trudge through the crowd to the fork in the road where the buses gather for Cuenca. I've got a
cédula
courtesy of some cooperative clerks in the Civil Registry that says my name is María Vizhñay, that I come from Cojitambo, Cañar, that I can neither read nor write, and absolutely nothing else to distinguish me from a million others passing through the interprovincial checkpoints.

“Couldn't we have taken a plane?”

“No, they check your ID much more closely when you're boarding a plane,” I explain.

Someone notices that we are speaking. I hold up a poncho, gesturing for Stan to feel its 100 percent woolen softness.

“
Pura lana, patroncito, pura lana
,” goes my sales pitch. “Once we get to Cuenca, we can pass as a tourist couple,” I whisper, “but now you better mix with the crowd. Sit next to me, but don't look at me and don't say nothing to me out loud in English.”

“Sounds like you're forgetting your English already.”

“Sorry, I'm code-switching. Double negatives are grammatical in Spanish.
Buen precio le doy, patroncito
.”

Later, our fingers secretly intertwine beneath my
poncho. We lose ourselves in darkness as the
buseta
weaves up the crumbling roads towards the high
sierra
. The tropical mist lifts, and for a moment the stratosphere sparkles with the miraculous clarity of rarefied ether. I gaze out the window, unable to see the place where the earth stops and the sky begins, or to distinguish between the low-lying stars and the stray pinpoints of light scattered across the thick darkness of a distant mountain.

It sure beats walking.

In the middle of the wooded highlands, the wheels stop rolling and a lively discussion ensues up front, with the mountain folk getting up to look excitedly out one side of the bus. The driver backs up a few yards as sleeping Indians throw off their blankets to join in the search, pressing their foreheads against the dirty glass to stare out into the darkness.

A happy shout of affirmation arises from two separate sources. A pair of foxes has been spotted, and nearly everyone gets a good look once the sharp-eyed hunters point them out. Then they all return contentedly to their seats and the driver throws the bus into gear and we're on our way again.

Amid the temporary turmoil, Stan whispers, “What was that about?”

“Foxes. They're supposed to be good luck.”

“What—?”

“Shh.”

I squeeze his hand, and cherish his fingers. He squeezes back, touching my leg. Then he starts exploring my thigh, carefully masking his movements, and slowly glides his hand down past the hem of my
pollera
to my bare skin. A shiver of delight. My God, I feel like a high school girl again, thrilling to a boyfriend's forbidden touch on my kneecap.

I'm leaning back, eyes closed towards the ceiling. Breathing. Tingling. Contracting. Secreting.
Ooh!

The jolt sends us flying forward. I get two arms out to stop me. But Stan smacks sideways into the seat in front of him, and everybody wakes up.

The lights come on, piercing my eyes.

Acch! Another fucking checkpoint.

We have to get off so they can search the bus for “contraband,” and we stand shivering in the harsh sidewise glare of the lights while a pair of police officers work their way along the pitted asphalt, inspecting us.

Stan's five people away from me. They demand to see his identification, and when he hands them a U.S. passport they practically shit with delight and pull out a dazzling document decorated with stamps and seals and signatures that they claim is an official order that all U.S. citizens must pay a forty-dollar “drug tax” as part of an international agreement to help Ecuador's antidrug effort.

They quickly extort the money and keep moving. I'm holding a scarf to my nose and mouth to ward off the cold. One of the officers yanks the scarf away from me.

They study my face.

“
Cédula
.”

They look at it, back at me, and smile.

It is not good when these guys smile.

“You're awful tall and pretty for a
machicapussun
.”

It's a Quichua word meaning “
machica
eater,” someone from Cañar.