Blood Lake (24 page)

Padre Aguirre is being assisted by an ancient, decrepit priest, the kind who needs help breaking the Host in half, and a couple of Sisters of Mercy.

They spread a dark purple cloth with black fringe across the flat slab of the altar, and he gives a solemn Mass for the missing body and anoints the empty space with oil.

I clasp Antonia's hands in mine, and listen to Padre Aguirre's oration.

“I will say of the Lord, who is my refuge and my fortress: that He will deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisesome pestilence, and under His wing shalt thou find refuge. His truth shall be thy shield and buckler. Thou shalt not be afraid of the terror by night; nor of the arrow that flies by day—” He turns the page.

In mid-sermon, almost mid-word, the
padre
's voice wavers for an instant, then he proceeds.

“—Nor of the pestilence that walks in darkness; nor of the destruction that wastes at noonday. A thousand shall fall at thy side and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come near thee. Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold and see the recompense of the wicked. Because Thou, O Lord, art my refuge.”

After the service I sully the inviolable sanctuary with the mundane particles of dirt on my shoes, and beg to see the Bible. Padre Aguirre turns it around, and there, lying on the illuminated pages, is a copy of the last page of the human rights report, with a red line drawn through Padre Campos's name, and a red arrow pointing to Padre Aguirre's name—a watery red ink that drips down the page and bleeds through the paper.

A buena hambre, no hay mal pan.

When you're really hungry, there's no such thing as bad bread.

—Ecuadorian proverb

¡MIERDA!

Where is that shifty-eyed little runt? Where is that cloven-hoofed motherfucker? I'd like to rip out his trachea with my fingernails and show it to him before he drops to the ground and bleeds to death.

I go on like this, profaning this holy place with my desire to kill that yellow rat bastard, until my prefrontal cortex kicks in with the abstract rationality that I didn't actually see him today, and that it could easily have been a hundred other guys.

And what really pisses me off is that back in NYC this written threat would be a fantastic piece of evidence, covered with fingerprints, ink types, and all manner of forensic traces, but I can't do a damn thing with it here. I can't take it to the cops. It probably came from them.

I urge Padre Aguirre to call the Servicio de Investigaciones Criminales and have them take it to a lab for analysis, but even as I'm saying the words I know it's probably not going to happen.

It's pouring when we step out of church. The gutters swell with swirling rainwaiter, sloshing up onto the sidewalks, leaving faintly greenish semicircles in their wake.

Now I remember why I left Ecuador. And suddenly it seems like such a long way back to my aunt and uncle's hearth in the
barrio
Centro Cívico, a long way back through the murky whirlpool of time. The pull of the past is too strong here, an irresistible undertow that increases the weight of my sins. I'm already up to my knees in blood, and the level is rising. How high will it rise before this is over, I ask myself, since I left my wet suit at home, along with my Sanforized Wonder Woman costume.

I also have a life in the present, and it is undoubtedly not in this place. At least, that's how I feel until we get back to the Correas' house and the smoke from Aunt Yolita's open-flame
parrillada
seeps under my skin and subverts my thought processes, settling into that place within the primitive nerve centers of my brain where food smells live, fogging them with the aromas of memory and other diffuse sensations whose parting wisps reveal the core of a twenty-year-long hunger.

I'm halfway into my second plateful before I stop myself.

“You're eating like you just got out of jail,” Uncle Lucho noodges me.

“Is there something you're not telling us?” says Suzie. “Filomita's always been good at smelling trouble before it happens.”

Yes, the beast within me remembers, and the smell of flame-seared soul food transports me to the faraway barren mountainsides where we always survived on the run with the dense, compact fuel of rice and beans. But in the briefest moments of rapture, we would feed the fires of victory and toast each other with meat and maté, and prepare to strike out once again at the savage heart of capitalist imperialism.

Like the time we robbed a bank in broad daylight— Johnny could be pretty outrageous—and we were chased high into the mountains by the rural police, first in jeeps, and then on horseback. We galloped ahead, halfway up the south face of Runa Shayana, then holed up behind the high rocky outcropping we had supplied for a shootout with the
rurales
. They had the law on their side. We had vastly superior positioning, and brushed them back repeatedly, driving them away.

That was in Cajas.

Coffins.

Again with the coffins.

My reverie is broken when my cousin Carmita comes home looking pale and greenish. She's got muscle pain and fever, too. They send for the doctor, a shriveled man with thick glasses and a $900 toupee that wouldn't fool a nearsighted badger, who announces that she has dengue.

“It's spreading south through the city,” he says, writing out a prescription “It's hard to get the medicine. The Health Department won't classify it as an epidemic even though there are over two hundred thousand cases of it.”

Two hundred thousand cases is not an epidemic?

“Maybe they're waiting for it to turn into yellow fever,” says Uncle Lucho.

The doctor nods. “It's certainly true that dengue can lead to outbreaks of yellow fever. The same thing happened in Cuba twelve years ago, and again in Venezuela four years ago.”

“Sounds like it's making it's way down the coast.”

“It's a sign all right,” says Uncle Lucho.

“Anyway, the government's trying to prevent price-gouging by fixing the selling price of this medicine, but the shelves are still empty,” he says, raising his wrinkled hands in a futile gesture to the God of beggars.

Meaning the pharmacists who stocked up on the medicine two weeks ago at a higher price would rather keep it in the back room than dispense it at a loss or be closed down for selling it above the official price. We should sell this idea to Parker Brothers.

Sounds like another job for the almighty dollar.

“I'll get the medicine,” I say, grabbing the prescription before Uncle Lucho can beat me to it.

But it's not that easy. The local pharmacies are closed down or mobbed with people who are desperately scrambling
for the same thing while their loved ones are lying on a bed of nails because they can't find the medicine.

Hard to carry off a nice, discreet bribe under these circumstances. So I head uptown towards the fancier stores, and find myself planted in the middle of a sidewalk standoff between a barefoot guy in ragged cutoffs and a backwards baseball cap, his white shirt open and flapping, in a tug-ofwar with a supermarket employee and a guard who's keeping one step back wondering who he should shoot first.

The barefoot man is fighting for a ten-pound sack of rice, yelling that the only thing his family has eaten for days is a watery soup of boiled green plantains that he managed to grow in a garbage-filled strip of dirt behind his shack. No breakfast or dinner.

He yells at them: “What are you gonna do? Shoot me over a bag of rice?”

Somebody should know you're on the brink of serious chaos when people are willing to die for food. And I can't get involved. If I'm arrested again, they'll deport me.

But I sure feel like kicking off this civilized veneer and raiding this food conglomerate's warehouse and scattering brightly colored bags through the air into the joyfully upraised hands of needy men and suffering women and hungry children.

But no.

If they arrest me again, they'll do a lot more than just deport me. And there are worse places than jail they can take you to. Hell, yeah.

So the conglomerate gets to keep on profiting from people's desperation while I slink away in shame.
Cada uno sabe donde le aprieta el zapato
, we say here. Everyone knows where their own shoes pinch them. And right now my own personal pinch is getting anti-dengue medicine for my cousin Carmita.

It costs me a couple of hours and thirty dollars, an absolute fortune down here, half a month's wages for a working man, but I get it, after verifying that the label is clearly printed, the expiration date legible and the seal unbroken. Yes, I've done this before.

I get back to the Correas' flat and my Aunt Yolita makes me a nice restorative cup of
paraguay
, the only wake-up herb named after a country, although in Paraguay they call it yerba maté. It's bitter.

“Any sugar left?” I ask.

“Not even enough to help the medicine go down.”

It takes several tries to get a dial tone. I'm three blocks away from my current home base, using a public phone, which in this part of town means someone who can afford to buy a phone and get it connected sets it up on a crate outside their door and sits there charging people 500 sucres a minute to make a call.

But it shouldn't be tapped.

I finally get through to Ruben and arrange to meet him in the hotel bar.

It's still raining when I get there.

Ruben is sitting at the dimly lit bar with his back to me, watching the end of a soap opera on a wall-mounted TV and waiting for the news to come on. He doesn't hear me come up behind him.

“You ought to watch your back more carefully,” I say.

He gets to his feet and lightly kisses my cheek, our custom in these parts, and gestures to the empty stool in front of him. I sit there facing the door.

He orders another whiskey and soda and offers me whatever it is I'm having. I stick to the “and soda” part. Sheep can't afford to get buzzed when they're passing through wolf country.

After the usual barfly small talk about the history of oil exploitation in Ecuador's Amazon, he returns to his second favorite subject, his theory that President Aguilera was assassinated.

“Why?” I ask. “He was the most popular president we've had since—”

“Yes?”

“Since Alfaro.”

“Who was also assassinated.”

Hmm.

“He had the broadest backing among the indigenous groups of any president since
el viejo luchador
himself,” he says. “And he was carrying a sealed draft of the most radical land reform legislation in the history of the republic on the plane with him when it went down.”

“How do you know what was in a sealed piece of legislation?”

“There is another copy of the draft in the presidential archives—yes, it's a wonder it hasn't been destroyed yet. And a careful reading of the legislative records clearly shows that he was working on it at the time of his death, and that he intended to submit it to Congress within two to three weeks. Then his plane crashed.”

I have to think about this for a while. There's an ad on TV for an Ecuadorian credit card asking me, “What are you thinking of buying?”

A rocket launcher, actually.

“Aguilera's plane was a twenty-seat propeller-driven craft operated by the military,” I say.

“Precisely. The military.”

“The ink may still have been wet, but the new Constitution was already in force. What were they planning to do? Whack Vice President Andrade also? What for? Another takeover?”

“I believe that they were acting on orders from a higher authority.” But there's no one higher than
los militares
in this country.

“Outside the country,” he says, following my unspoken thoughts.

The rain falls heavily outside the windows. Cars hiss by, sudden cones of light transforming the raindrops into a thousand luminous daggers plunging into darkness.

“It was a long time ago,” I say. “But the word might still be around in the military.”

“Yes,” he agrees. “But so far all I've got to show for it is a nice set of brick marks on my forehead from smacking it
against the big green wall of military culture,” he says, bringing the tumbler to his lips.

“Well, don't look at me.”

The news comes on. Tonight's top story is the food riots, and it's all on film. Nothing I don't know already, until
licenciado
Hector Gatillo's face pops up and he's asked to comment:

“The people are handcuffed to old ideas,” he says, tapping both index fingers on his forehead. “The policeman can smack them over the head, the speculator can make them crawl on their knees and beg for a bowl of rice, but they will not rise up against them. No, they pull out their machetes and turn on each other, just as their fathers did before them, as their children do in the schoolyard, and as they have seen in so many
gringo
movies on TV, which is exactly what our oppressors want.”