Blood Lake (31 page)

It is shockingly easy to purchase a gun here, and it doesn't take long to spot the man I want.

“So what do you need,
mamacita
?” he asks.

“I need someone who can keep quiet.”

“And what does this quiet person have to offer?” he asks, directing me towards his all-American products.

“Not guns.”

“What, then?”

“Knives.”

“Any particular kind?”

Sure.

“Thick-bladed front-opening lock-back stilettos with good balance and throw weight. Preferably.” A shiv, the kiss of death, as they say.

He takes a moment.

“They come twelve to a box. How many boxes do you want?”

He thinks he's going to sell me a gross of pocketknives with pretty-colored handles. Right. But I need the real thing.

We find a discreet storeroom, and he brings plenty of samples. I reject a few paint scrapers immediately as obvious crap without even touching them.

“Come
on
…”

I spring the McDonald's Happy Meal blade out of one and chuckle, toss it on the table. “I wouldn't open letters with that.”

He begins to open his eyes to the light of reason. Several heavier knives clunk down on the table. I test them for solidity, sharpness, heft, set aside my top four picks, choose one, sheath it in my pocket, and face him.

“Come at me,” I say.

“What—?”

“Come at me.”

I hand him a yard-long piece of splintery packing crate
lumber and order him to run at me while swinging the jagged club at my head.

“Uh …”

“
Do it
.”

He does it. I block his upraised arm, twist it behind his back and bring the open blade to his throat.

“Too slow,” I say. I leave the knife quivering in the table-top and pick another. “Come at me.”

The guy gulps.

“Come at me.”

We go through it again. A little better this time. I flip the knife around, seek out its true center, wind up and lodge the thing in the far wall. I try another. Too heavy. The last one's sprightly and sharp. I painstakingly eliminate the finalists, sifting them down from three to two to one, and test that one again and again to make sure. It's probably one of the tougher sales this guy's had to make this week.

I give him some money the cops didn't find, and tactfully remind him of a simple truth: “You don't know me.”

A lonely dinner in a greasy hole, a few quick prayers in the last row of a sleepy church, and I slink back to the construction site under cover of darkness, only to spend a rough night full of whacked-out parasomniac visions and wake up to find a debauched tribe of flies doing the conga dance around my gamy flesh. Two days without a shower and it's as hot as the branch office of hell.

Hell itself is
much
hotter.

My punishment perhaps for letting a couple of killers drop three victims in my pathway. Now I've got to reach across the mortal divide and make it up to them the hard way. Which shouldn't surprise me, I guess, because in Ecuador,
everything
has to be done the hard way. It's taken this country a hundred and fifty years of constant struggle, but we've finally reached a state of perpetual crisis, jerked around like a manic skeleton on
El Día de los Muertos
, All Souls' Day.

Actually, a skeleton would be an improvement over the current state of this enigma. All I see is a few bone fragments, and there's a lot of connective tissue missing. Putamayo filed some carefully scripted police reports for the same newspaper, and Ruben didn't know him. But Ruben did know his killer. That was practically the first thing he said to me, “Not
you
people again.” Which sounds like it must have been a branch of the National Police, the same guys who waltzed me around the floor while somebody was doing the dance of death with poor old Zimmerman, because those two slime bags could have tossed me in the river and instead I was left standing. And the only reason I can think of for that surprising condition is that they think Johnny's still alive, and they want me to flush him out for them, even if it means quitting the oily, piss-warm waters of the Río Daule for the wind-whipped ice lakes of the far Andean provinces. Because in Ecuador, the power is concentrated in such a small segment of society that one person could significantly shift the balance of that power with a handful of explosives and a penchant for deviant behavior.

First I have to find a better place to hide. I have to get out of here before the mosquitoes penetrate my protective layers of filth, find out I'm vulnerable and send for reinforcements.

Because there are places that I
can
get answers, places that lie nearer to my natal terrain in the lichen-filled niches high above Cuenca, where all my kinfolk hail from, up near the timberline where I am still known as the wandering child, and of course our refuge. The deep hideout that no one
ever
found. I wonder. The police will be controlling all the major interprovincial roads, and I'd be spotted in an instant if I tried to enter my old hunting grounds from the Cuenca basin. But they probably wouldn't be expecting me to come at them from the
other
side, hiking ten thousand feet up from the coast, hugging the banks of the Río Norcay all the way up to Cajas, since that's so fucking crazy.

Ha ha ha
.

The cloudy sky lightens with the approaching dawn,
but stays heavy with rain and impending bleakness. I look around the site. There's not much to work with here besides rusty wheelbarrows full of stagnant water, piles of sand, and big round stones for laying foundations and stretching the cement, which is very expensive.

Big round stones.

Old as the mountains.

So primal. So quiet. Not to mention a cheap, plentiful resource around here.

The morning activities slowly unfurl, spilling out onto the pavement, but I've got to stay still, lurking among the thick cane pillars propping up the moist, primordial ooze of the third floor, which is taking days to dry in this weather. The cement is watery, spread a little thin. They're trying to keep costs down on this humble project, a narrow house for a working family who have put aside every cent until they could throw something together that's better than a cane shack on the water. But it's unreinforced cement with no superstructure. This is how they stretch the sucre. One crack and it all comes down, which is why all those Third World earthquakes do so much damage.

My cousins finally arrive, dressed for dirty work but still cleaner than me. I whisper their names and suddenly no one cares about dirt as I am swept up with an ecstatic devotion usually reserved for visions of the Virgin Mary appearing in the clouds. They exalt me as a cousin by blood and for spitting in the face of authority. No higher praise is available from them.

Bolívar wants to go tell the family right away but I say, “No. Go home at lunchtime like you always do. And bring back Patricia.”

Ronaldo and Victor nod.

“What's the most durable fabric?” I ask my cousin's wife.

“Leather or canvas,” says Patricia. “But you need a special needle and thread.”

“If I buy the materials, can you make it for me?”

“
Claro que sí
.” Of course I can.

“Oh, Filomena,” says Bolívar, enticingly, “look what else we brought you.”

“Mommy!”

Time to work on my skills. I hand Victor an apple and tell him to throw it at me from ten paces off. He flings it underhanded. It arcs towards me, transformed into a swelling red hand grenade, then I chop it in half in midair.

“So?” says Vic. “That's pretty friggin' easy.”

I pick up one of the halves, brush some of the gravel off, and toss it back to him. He throws it back at me and I chop it in half. We do it three more times before I miss.

Not good enough.

I practice all afternoon with Antonia helping me until I run out of fruit.

Then I ask the boys to take a break so they can take up scattered positions around the site, Bolí perched on the third floor, Ronny behind the rock piles, Vic roaming wherever he chooses, me standing in the muddy arena between them while they take turns pitching a mixture of objects at me. I spear the wood chips, duck the pebbles and stones and flinch at the handfuls of flying sand. At least there's no roofing tar involved. I tell them to mix it up more, and instantly regret it as a big chunk of cement slams into my shoulder blade.

“Ow!”

“Sorry,” Ronny apologizes.

“My fault,” I say, rubbing my sore spot.

I train through mist and drizzle until the sky starts paying off in big wet quarters like a high-rolling slot machine, then I huddle with Antonia under the rough cement pillars while the men go foraging for food. Yes, I've regressed to the social roles of the Paleolithic era.

Again.

I ask Antonia if she remembers the time we got caught
in a cloudburst on a rocky bluff high above Solano, and the only shelter we could find was the tiny hilltop shrine with about six square feet of roof protecting the dull green wooden cross, and we crouched under it together sharing our warmth for nearly an hour watching the half-inch hailstones roll to a stop at our feet before it was safe to leave.

“No,” she says.

“Oh?” And I remember it so vividly, hugging her for so long. I thought that would be one of the memories that we shared.

“Aunt Yolita says it always rains on Good Friday,” she says.

“It usually does.”

“But it's been raining all through Lent.”

“Well, God is very religious,” I say.

Slick velvet leaves flutter to life. Flush purple lips split by a trickle of water, thick concentric rings of wetness gathering towards a slippery reddish brown bump that gurgles and swallows as I approach the black canal that puckers and slurps as if it were trying to speak to me, filling me with wondrous premonitions and obscure sensations and dreadful nightmares that my mind resists, my hands push away, and then—

My hand's on the knife.

Three brothers stand over me, shaking me and telling me I have to clear out for a while because the contractor is coming by to inspect the site and check on their progress. Is it me, or am I having more than my share of ultraweird dreams lately?