Blood Lake (9 page)

“Really? Who blessed it?” asks Lucho.

“Have you got a map of North Guayas in here?”

“What do I look like, a gas station attendant?” he says,
shutting the glove compartment. “But I happen to know the terrain up there pretty well, cousin. Ask away.”

“What do you know about the towns of La Trampa, Hacha, and Balzar?”

“What about them?”

“Where are they? What are they near? How far apart are they?”

“Balzar is about a hundred kilometers straight up the
Río Daule
, almost to Manabí. Hacha's just over the
Río Pucon
, halfway to La Trampa, maybe twenty kilometers west of Balzar.”

Close enough to fall within the territory of a single armed group.

“They're connected by a road?”

“If you want to go calling it a road, sure. Why?”

“Because last week Padre Samuel was in a town near Balzar and some punks with guns told him to stop preaching his message of the liberated Bible.”

“Which town?”

“I don't know.” And of course Padre Samuel doesn't have a phone. I'll have to go by later and ask him for more details. “And three days ago, two moderately left-wing politicians were ambushed and machine-gunned on the road to La Trampa. I'm inclined to think there's some serious nastiness coming from that part of the world.”

Lucho stops for a red light. “And you want me to analyze the paper that pamphlet was printed on.”

“Not so much the paper as the ink.”

“Why the ink?”

“Because it's more unusual than the paper.”

“Okay, cousin. Leave it to me,” he says, patting his shirt pocket, which is holding our only piece of evidence. “But I might not get to it until Monday or Tuesday.”

“That'd be great.”

He throws the truck into gear and eases forward into traffic. “You see a connection there?”

“I'm beginning to feel it, yes.”

“So what's your problem?”

Lucho knows my moods.

“Well, I guess I'm bothered by how easy it is to snuff out a life around here, and I'm worried that someone wants to do the same thing to that wonderful man. It's just plain sad.”

“Honey, sad doesn't even begin to cover it,” says Lucho, turning right and heading into the sun.

After a few short blocks we stop in front of a fortified compound with a mechanical gate and three parallel rows of barbed wire on top that looks like something out of one of those cheesy yet-another-secret-Allied-mission-behind-enemy-lines-that-will-change-the-outcome-of-World-War-II movies they rerun on TV after midnight. You'd think it was a munitions depot, but it turns out to be the wholesale rice distributor.

Private security guards with nightsticks and short-barreled shotguns are patrolling the warehouse entrance. They have to push open the gate to let us in, because the machanism's broken, I think.

Workers are loading dozens of
quintales
onto a big German-made transport with a wooden cargo bed that somebody painted bright orange. The license plates say AZUAY province, so this rice is also getting ready for the long, strange trip up to Cuenca.

Lucho spots the truck driver and goes over to shake hands with him. They've seen each other traveling the same hard roads every week.

“
Hola, compadrecito, ¿cómo é la cosa?
”

“
Bien mal, Don Luchito
. The price is in the clouds this week.” The guy's in his thirties, and already going marsh-mallowy from the driver's seat blues. His shirt is soaked with sweat and he's red-faced from the heat.

“Filomena, this vagabond calls himself Vicente.
Esta chica tan guapa es mi prima
.”

“
¿Ah? Mucho gusto
,” says Vicente, gripping my palm with a sticky hand and shaking it twice.

“My pleasure.”

“You both hail from the frozen plains,” says Lucho.

“Really? I'm from Cojitambo,” he says, which is too close to some other places, so I mutter something inconsequential about the harsh country around there and follow Lucho inside the cavernous warehouse. I'd like to say it gets cooler inside the place, but it only gets hotter under the big tin roof.

“Let me open a few,” says Lucho, waving his finger back and forth over a phalanx of upright sacks plopped in the middle of the cement floor. Three guys in dirty blue T-shirts look over and nod. I guess they know a rice man when they see one.

Lucho loosens the plastic knots and opens the coarse white sack, caresses the surface of the grainy mound and comes up with a few samples in his fingers. He bites into one and grinds it between his teeth. He repeats this taste-and-texture test five times before finding the batch he likes and buying it.

A couple of workers try to impress me by helping Lucho lift the
quintal
onto his wooden flatbed. It's only a hundred pounds, guys.

The big truck pulls out, and we pull out with it.

“They have a sale on orange paint, or did somebody get drunk and buy the wrong color?” I ask, as the bright orange monstrosity in front of us pitches on flaccid suspension like a caravel buffeted by the waves.

“Color? Hell, I'd spend the money on some new shocks. Those highland roads are tough on the ass,” says Lucho, and while we're both laughing, four masked men armed with handguns and a streetsweeper stop the orange truck and hijack it.

They get my
paisano
Vicente covered on both sides, then two of them climb in the back with the rice. They tell him to keep driving, and they head down the street and make a left at the sugar refinery.

Plans change.

We wait, then I tell Lucho, “Follow them.”

“Follow them?”

“Yes.”

It's not hard. They don't try to be elusive. The two men in the back have already taken off their masks and are making themselves comfortable, reclining on the sacks of rice. We're heading south. After we pass the free hospital, Lucho says, “They're heading towards the port.”

The port? That doesn't make any sense. Rice is shipped by the mountainload every day in such colossal quantities that it's actually priced
cheaper
for export than for wholesale. They're going to lose money on this deal if they try to resell it at the port. Of course they just stole it, so what do they care about losing a few pennies? But people here care about a few pennies. And those thieves looked mighty well fed.

“They're going to El Guasmo.”

Lucho looks at me, then nods.

It sounds crazy at first. But we know.

The bumpy paved road becomes a bumpy dirt road leading into the heart of a slum more crowded than our third-largest city. As the truck approaches a central square, several unsmiling men wearing light-colored suits and carrying bullhorns jump onto the truck. They quickly pin four handkerchief-sized red-and-white flags—the Centrist Coalition party colors—on the back of the truck and start announcing to all within earshot, “Fellow
ecuatorianos
, friends, men and women, children and grandparents, come see how
candidato
Segundo Canino keeps his promises! Free
quintales
of rice for the first fifty families! Only one per family, please! No pushing! Share! As Segundo shares with you!”

The two gunmen stay on the flatbed with the rice. The other two step down from the cab and take up positions on either side of the rice, to ensure order. Nobody bothers with Vicente, who stands there scratching his head, waiting for the gunmen to let him have his truck back.

He hopes.

“Well, what do you know about that?” asks Lucho.

Plenty. We used to do it ourselves. I was quite a problem child. Not your typical teen rebel getting suspended for
smoking in the girls' room or shoplifting a six-pack of beer. I was a feral, acrobatic seventeen-year-old panther pouncing fearlessly onto the tops of moving trucks, landing on a day's shipment of bananas to hijack for “free” distribution to the poor. But everyone knew the stuff was stolen.

I've seen enough. Lucho wants to stick around and make sure his friend gets back on the road okay.

I walk back to the main road and take a bus with real windows to the center of town.

I'm sitting there watching the hand-embellished buses and cannibalized autos rattle and smoke past my window, thinking about why President Pajizo's Centrist Coalition would steal rice in the name of their chief candidate, Segundo Canino, since the government controls the state distribution sources and could easily arrange as many free giveaways as it wanted to, one of the many advantages of incumbency.

I know what you're thinking: It's some nasty people who are trying to make Canino
look
like a thief. You know, smear him three weeks before the election. But the flaw in that otherwise brilliant theory is that the only apparent witness is a truck driver who's too scared to come forward.

Maybe they're just some exceptionally motivated campaign contributors.

Unless they've deliberately emptied the state warehouses to drive up prices and profits. But why fake a shortage? We have real ones often enough. You want to raise prices, all you need is to wait for a bad year, with El Niño flooding the roads and wiping out entire villages and rice paddies.

Of course the key word is
wait
…

I've got to ask Lucho Freire to check into this. If it's about rice, he probably knows the answer.

I'm thinking about all this and admiring some of the odd bits of 1920s Art Deco and pre-Columbian motifs churned up by the city's turbulent bricolage of warring architectural epochs, when the bus driver throws on the brakes, opens the door, and barks, “Everybody out.”

What now?

My shoes crunch against the gritty pavement as I approach the main avenue and the parade of office workers who have sacrificed their Saturday afternoon for the cause of higher wages and benefits. I join the supporters on the sidelines as legions of sun-washed women proudly place their manifestos into our receiving hands.

I collect a bunch of handbills from smiling young women and stern young men, then I slip into the shade, keeping my back to the wall and trying to blend in, trying not to attract the attention of the police, so I can look over the pamphlets. Most of them are routine calls for the government to roll back the recent price increases. Others are sprinkled with jokes and unflattering caricatures of leading government figures, then—like an annunciation—I feel it before I see it. Same texture paper. I hold it up close to make sure. It's the same typeface as the false pamphlet implicating Padre Samuel. Who gave it to me? I scan the sea of dark-haired souls. He's gone, of course, indistinguishable among the eddies and crosscurrents of kindred ethnicities and facial features, all the eyebrows, lips, birthmarks, and beards.

I look at the slick black letters and the unholy words they form. They call for agitation, for uprising, for indiscriminate destruction.

And suddenly the world's a big picture tube that someone's kicking in. Heavy sheets of glass explode, raining deadly diamonds down upon the scattering chorus of innocents, who suddenly metamorphose into survival-mad beasts, tearing at each other's clothes and the flesh beneath, plunging in the battery smoke, each pressing to be the first to get out through the narrow escape routes.

I can't see it all, but there seem to be at least two groups of six or more men walking towards us on opposite sides of the street, smashing windows with iron bars and going after people in the crowd, too. Some of them are well-fed guys in white
guayaberas
, and some are callow young men with angular faces and bulging eyes, working together, covering each other's backs. This is not a random group of irate
counter-demonstrators. They've all got the same haircut, for one thing.

Now I'm part of the human tide rushing away, stumbling, and I'm pulling a few people off a fallen blood relation when a big blue wall of police closes in and I try to flatten myself against a pillar as they slap people facedown on the cement sidewalk, but their nets are too fine and I get swept right up.

So much for not attracting the attention of the police.

It smells like shit in here. Or, more accurately, a mixture of shit, piss, vomit, sweat, and some things even fouler than that.

And somehow I'm hungry.

You have to bring your own food to an Ecuadorian jail, because the swill they pass around will cramp you up for six hours of diarrhea and dry heaves. It's an efficiency thing. And my family doesn't know I'm here. The cops don't give me a phone call, so if Lucho told them he left me in the middle of El Guasmo, God knows what they're thinking, what Antonia must be going through.

At least I'm not alone. I get to sit on the cracked cement floor and swap recipes with a few dozen other newly arrested “looters.” But soon I withdraw to a neutral corner and lean my head against the wall. The cops confiscated everything I had, including the incendiary flier calling for extreme random violence. I'd almost like to thank them for saving me from being beaten up by
agents provocateurs
and ask them if they have any ideas who those guys might have been, since at this point my list of suspects includes members of the North Guayas Militia, secret agents of the National Police or the ASN, mercenaries who could be working for practically anybody, or even city cops getting in some double overtime.