Blood Lake (48 page)

Certain moves hurt me. Like raising my right arm to wave good-bye to my dear, sweet lover man. And when he's gone, I turn around and head back into the wailing confusion.

A state of emergency was finally declared in Guayaquil now that one-quarter of the population has dengue.

Three Colombian hit men were actually arrested for the murders of Congressman Jorge Hernández and Padre Aguirre. There's no question that they were hired professionals. The only question is who hired them, and they're not talking about it.

Someone fired on a pro-Faltorra rally and killed two people. The police have no suspects.

A marauding gang of Trabajo, Familia, Patria devotees attacked a carful of pro-Canino
quiteños
and threw them off a bridge.

Canino's campaign manager slugged a reporter from
El Mundo
.

Otherwise reasonable people are saying they're going to vote for “that schoolteacher” Hector Gatillo because with the
sierra
firmly in Senator Faltorra's hands, “There'll be no one to stop him!” Stop him from what? Repaving the Panamerican Highway?

The twenty-four-hour moratorium on campaign propaganda begins at 12:01
A.M.
Saturday morning, but anything goes before midnight Friday, and each camp is preparing last-minute blitzes, free-for-all attacks that the opposition won't have time to refute before the votes are counted. Even Pancho la Pulga says he's got some juicy stuff he's saving for Friday evening, just before midnight.

Five international experts arrive to observe this Sunday's elections and monitor whether or not there are any incidents of fraud. You want to tell me how five people are supposed to keep an eye on a
country
?

“If Canino gets elected, all hell will break loose,” says Lucho.

“All hell's breaking loose anyway,” I tell him.

There is a minor tremor of the earth in Quito. The
Pichincha volcano starts sending plumes of volcanic ash two miles high and the whole city gets put on yellow alert.

“You're eating like there's no tomorrow,” says Marianita.

Maybe there isn't.

“Let's call Antonia.”

I stand knee-deep in blood.

And the blood's quickly rising to overwhelm me.

I'm sinking in a lake of blood along with thousands of native Ecuadorians, dark-visaged Shiris and Cañaris with eyes that saw the mountains being born.

It's a cutthroat competition.

We are swimming in a lake of blood, but it is not silent here. The cries and screams can be deafening.

I reach out.

Alone in bed.

My hand closes on empty sheets.

This mountain road is not for the faint of heart. A smooth wall of rock descends straight out of the clouds, stops for an instant on a ledge wide enough for a bus and a mule to pass each other if the mule sucks in its belly, then drops straight down into the green-and-black mist half a mile below.

And this twisty dirt road figures as a major artery on the Military Geographic Institute's definitive physical map of the entire country, a step above “summer roads” (impassible during the rainy season) and “bridle paths” (your mode of transport better be wearing horseshoes).

I have passed through the valley of the billboards, whose red-and-white letters boldly proclaim how each sand hill is part of this soon-to-be-a-major-textile-mill or that promised hydroelectric plant to be built by the president, who has clearly marked his territory with the words
PAJIZO DELIVERS
, and I have seen the hand-painted signs for Temik, a pesticide for potatoes that was banned in the U.S. (it causes cancer),
but which the big-hearted American corporations still ship here by the boatload.

I'm steering the battered red jeep through wind and dust, hoping to clear a twelve-thousand-foot ridge before descending into the sweltering jungle, and I have to stop to refill the radiator from a cool mountain stream every twenty minutes to keep the thing from overheating.

Then the cold
páramo
, and inching the deathmobile along the uppermost reaches of the ridge, where the slope is steepest, and the fog thickest. Visibility shrinks to twenty yards.

Ten yards.

Two.

I haven't shifted out of first gear in forty minutes.

Finally, a dark shape enveloped in mist. A grotto cut out of the rock with a shrine to the Blessed Virgin, and consecrated in her name.

Hallelujah.

The peak of the crescent.

Because it's a miracle I made it this far.

The front of the jeep takes a dip and points its dusty red nose down the eastern slope of the Andes Mountains, into the green tapestry that rolls along the vales to the misty edges of time.

Now comes the easy part for the poor overworked engine, winding seventy kilometers downhill, easing into the hairpin turns and tightrope-walking a one-ton vehicle across a series of “bridges” that are nothing more than a few old trees and some two-by-eights that were roped together about thirty years ago.

I reach the cloud forest, rainy and muddy, with condensation dripping down the sheer stone walls, fertility clinging to everything.

Then the fog clears, and the whole stunning panorama is laid bare. High thin waterfalls are unveiled, cascading down bright green mountains above the beaten road, and dropping off into deep gorges cut by young rivers, all sloping east towards the hot misty air and deceptive verdancy that
grows thicker and thicker around you, every mile taking you deeper. Into the heat.

I save on gasoline and pump the brake the whole way down.

Down, down, down.

Heat sits on me like a layer of flies that I'm afraid to disturb because it will only attract a fresh swarm of vermin.

I keep checking the rearview mirror. I don't see anyone following me. But no one could follow you on a road like this without you knowing about it, so that's what I expect to see. And of course the cops gave me a fire-engine-red jeep that can probably be seen from the space shuttle.

The jeep produces a symphony of metallic sounds as we bounce along the muddy road. The wipers barely work and the blinkers are dead. The dashboard clock is broken, too, because every clock in this caper is broken. It's like time is standing still. Ruben's watch, my watch and—and—and some other watch … Peter's watch. What was that about? Why is that sticking out now? And how the hell did he find me so fast after he got out of the hospital? Oh, yeah. He asked my family. Right. I forgot about that.

Rooftops rise up from the shimmering forest floor. The interprovincial checkpoint.

My back is sticking to the hot vinyl seat.

They've got some eighteen-year-old guarding the border. I'm sure we all feel much safer knowing that he's there.

I sit still and sweat.

The papers check out. Two conscripts raise the barrier, and I'm free to pass into the vast Amazonian basin.

Do not feed the animals.

No littering.

You must be
THIS
crazy to enter.

I take the left hand of the only major fork in the entire hundred-and-seventy-kilometer trip and head northeast. The sun is starting to dip precariously low in the sky, casting huge shadows in the valleys, where the cloak of rising mist
conjures up a seductive and sinister power that clamps onto the pit of my fears like an iron fist.

I make for Limón, about twenty miles down the road.

Ten feet from the road's edge you're in dense jungle. Ten feet farther, and it's easy to get disoriented. You can get lost just a few steps from the path, and never find your way back.

And in the jungle, after sunset, you become part of the food chain.

From the activity downstairs, I'd say the place makes most of its money from twenty-four-hour-a-day trading of the world's oldest commodity. But they also take paying guests who don't want to be bothered with the attention lavished on guests in other parts of the world.

I'll say one thing for Limón: a humidity-saturated, broom-swept room with a single rusty bed costs two dollars a night. I strip down to the essentials because the temperature has plummeted to ninety-one degrees. And I'm so saddle sore from that hard-assed jeep it feels like I'm slipping into a king-sized bed at the Ritz-Carlton.

I'm sharing highballs with the ghost of Scotty Fitzgerald when a burning sensation in my leg pierces the bright bubble of this scene, whining for my attention. I throw off the graying sheet and examine the nubby red patches of a major spider bite numbing an area four inches wide and swelling on my upper right thigh. I must have been scratching in my sleep for several minutes.

Still, I'm pretty big compared to a spider. You can imagine what this much venom does to a fly.

The insects down here are otherworldly creatures, moths with wingspans the length of your hand, five-inch spiders, thick red roaches and those giant tarantulas that Hollywood imports for horror movies. And the fleas. Indestructable.

You know, some of us are still pissed off at the fleas for that whole plague thing.

I am not sleeping well. Every
thump
in the night leaves
me staring wide-eyed at the ceiling for half an hour, listening for the faintest evidence of an intruder in my zone. And there are a lot of
thumps
in the night in this hotel.

Finally …

White light.

I wake up with bright flashlights stinging my eyes, and three rifles plunging out of the darkness, taking aim at my face and body. The floor creaks as someone comes up behind them. They move aside just enough to let him through.

It's Johnny.

Scrawny. Haggard. Johnny.

“So. It
is
you,” he says.

You bastard
.

The first thing I say to him is, “You left me hanging in a room with a dead body and seven cops and
this
is how you greet me?”

“You got out of it.”

He doesn't see any reason to trust me.

Shuar faces surround me above the glowing lamps. Their cousins a few miles downriver still hunt heads.

The situation is volatile.

“What are you doing here?” he asks.