Blood Lake (34 page)

The ladder creaks.

Someone who knows me would have whispered my name by now.

Come on, you worthless bastard, I'm ready for you.

Creak. Why is he taking so goddamned long? What, does he have to stop for breath on every rung?

Creak. I have to blink several times to clear a milky film that's clouding my vision, then I force my eyes to stay wide open and prepare to strike.

Don't get me wrong, there are nice parts of Guayaquil. I just never visit them.

Here he comes. A few more inches. And … a flash of pale white skin and dirty blond hair.

“Jesus!” I cry out, verbally releasing all that coiled-up energy.

Peter reels backwards and recovers. “Filomena! What are you doing?”

“Nearly breaking your skull,” I say, dropping the pipe and pulling him up. One of his arms is in a cast and his face is still deeply scarred and bandaged.

“Oh my God, look at you,” I say, my fingertips grazing his face.

He recoils. “Don't touch it!” he says, with some harshness.

“Sorry, I—it was just a reflex. What are you doing here? How did you know where to find me?”

“I was discharged a few hours ago. You've got to get out of here. There isn't much time.”

“I know. Did you find out anything about Padre Campos—?”

“He wasn't there. It was a false lead.”

“Damn it.”

“Yeah.” He checks his watch. “Every minute counts here.”

There's that
gringo
idea again.

“You've gotta see this,” he says, holding up the early edition of today's
El Despacho
.

I angle it towards the streetlights, and read that Padre Malta of Latacunga was wounded by an unknown gunman late yesterday, in the shadow of the snow-capped volcano of Cotopaxi, as he spoke with the paper's roving investigative reporter, Javier Putamayo. There's a photo of the reporter, a stern-faced intellectual type with a thick beard and glasses.

“I've seen this guy,” I say. “At one of the rallies.” Which one was it? I recall dimly that he was observing the mayhem, so it must have been the one that was disrupted by counter-demonstrators. Yes, I'm sure of it. “And now he's in the sierra.”

“Never mind that, Filomena. The cops are saying that they found a weapon and traced it to you. I heard it over the police band and hopped a cab to your family's store. They're saying it was a stolen .45-caliber military-issue semi-automatic, the same gun that killed two bank guards a week ago, taken from a group of terrorists ambushed this evening. Report said three of them were killed and one got away.”

Sirens are approaching out in the night.

Three of them were killed
. And I handed one of them over.

Shit.

And they've got my fingerprints all over the gun.

“They'll be watching the airports, the bus station, for all I know they'll be stopping cars on the street,” says Peter.

The sirens are getting louder. I keep waiting for the Doppler shift that will reassure me that the trouble is in some other part of town. It never comes.

I grab my backpack and stuff the notes into his hands. “Peter, this is what Ruben was working on when he was killed. I need you to investigate a man named Colonel Alboroto of the North Guayas Militia. I'm going after Putamayo.”

“Okay, get your stuff together and let's go,” says Peter.

“No. I'm going alone.”

“You can't go alone!” he yells after me. “They're controlling the provincial borders!”

“I know a way to get through.”

I drop to the ground. He tries to follow me. “How will I find you?”

“I'll find you,” I call back, running out into the street without looking back at the glare of red-and-orange lights bursting on the horizon ahead of the coming dawn.

I only have to bang on a few doors before one of them opens and the good people of Guayaquil see to it that I get food, a shower and a change of clothes. Praise God.

Sometimes femininity has advantages. I doubt that a strange man pounding desperately on doors in the middle of the night in this distrustful neighborhood would get much of a hearing.

I leave the kind Samaritans under a rosy early morning sky and seek out one of those thirty-seat low-riding motorized canoes that takes us across the river to Durán, the first major checkpoint for buses leaving the city. I can probably get a bus that will take me twenty miles inland to Boliche, the next place I might have to worry about being stopped and questioned. If I can slip off just before we get to town, there's a turnoff that'll take me south-southeast through the lush overgrowth to the fertile green slopes of the majestic and immovable mountains.

I've exchanged my all-terrain bad-grrrl jeans and
running shoes for a short, shiny aqua dress with a matching bandana and low black heels that make me look like every other housewife along the riverbank within a fifty-mile radius. I hope. I also took the time to put on makeup and curl-and-gel my steel-wool hair into strands of springy curls.

A pair of agile crewmen lend me a hand getting off the ferry, and I demurely accept, trying not to stand out. Demureness is easy. Walking is hard in the stiff, unsupportive shoes along these muddy streets and cracked sidewalks. I don't know how these women manage it while carrying a thirty-pound basketful of groceries. No wonder the men think we need help climbing three wooden steps.

I step over a pile of muddy lettuces and skirt purposefully along the market's edge until I come to a group of reasonably clean-shirted men loosely gathered in the receding shadows alongside the IETEL telephone building. I make an instant judgment and entrust one of these shady street bankers with my grimiest ten-dollar bill, telling him that my cousin Byron just sent it from the U.S., and about how my cousin Byron is the manager of a Footlocker in the Mill Creek Mall in Secaucus, New Jersey, and other meaningless gossip that the guy tunes right out like he's supposed to. Then he hands me more than ninety thousand sucres. I tell him he's made a mistake.

“Please,
hermana
, I don't make mistakes with money,” he says, and shows me today's
El Mundo
. In the two days since I've bought a newspaper, the sucre has lost nearly half of its value against the dollar.

I take my empty basket and reenter the marketplace to do some ordinary grocery shopping, hoping to board a bus and pass for a local woman who is only traveling a few miles from home. I get some onions, dried beans,
plátanos
,
achiote
, green peppers and other sundries at nearly twice what they cost yesterday morning, but rice cannot be had at any price. It has vanished from the shelves, leaving nothing but dry maggot remains. Well, almost: one tin-hearted gouger holds up a three-pound bag of rice and tells me I can have it for twenty dollars or, if I prefer, he can take it out “in trade.”

I almost tell him, Sure, just give me a minute to sharpen my gelding shears. But no, we want to fit in. Play along. Survive.

I walk away.

Because I can. But if my children were starving?

The carnival-colored buses move slowly through the crowded market street, young boys serving as figureheads come to life, trumpeting their destinations with sirenlike voices for the benefit of those who cannot read the distinctly painted signs over the high windshields. Baroque red lettering on a yellow background spells out Cañar; the green-and-yellow
busetas
of the Cooperativa Sucre are bound for Cuenca. And I'm the luckiest woman in the world when I spy a dusty new bus rolling along with an orange-on-white sign spelling out
NARANJAL
in plain, thin brushstrokes. That's southeast of here and right on my route.

The bus is already full, but the driver is a rambling man who always has room for one more grateful woman in a slinky dress. I squeeze between several other grateful women who have come to do their shopping. I see onions, parsley,
plátano
, tomatoes, peppers. No rice. No milk. No meat. I wonder what it would cost them.

The teenage girl on my left is recently married, because her virile, black-haired husband has got her wrapped in the crook of one muscular arm and there's no sign of kids yet. The woman on my right is only a few years older, but the baby-a-year system has already started to wear her out. She's got a roundish face with a sharp nose, a true child of the coast and the
sierra
. It must have been hell growing up with her mixed origins written on her face like that for all the narrow-minded world to see.

The nicer interprovincial buses have big, clean windows, opened wide to let in the hot coastal breezes. A deliciously sweet aroma from the chocolate refinery fills the air as we pull up to the tollbooths that mark the entrance to the big two-lane highway east. The police check for overcrowding and other blatant disregard of safety standards, and we're on our way.

I look the part pretty well, and I can keep it up as long as no one looks past my grocery basket and asks to see what I've got in my other bag, which is basic mountaineering survival equipment: jeans, hiking shoes, extra socks, high-energy food, thin woolen blanket, toilet paper. Pretty suspicious stuff for a swamp angel to be carrying.

Not nearly as suspicious as the two weapons stashed underneath.

But no gun. If they catch me with a gun, I'm finished. Of course, I might be finished no matter what they catch me with.

We pick up some more stragglers and leave the industrial zones behind, and the gray roadside opens up like a flower into lush green vistas that reach from one horizon to the other. Wide blanketing groves of palm and banana trees sweep across the rich, volcanic soil, promising to feed us and replenish our depleted souls. Providing we live to see the next harvest.

Shacks on cane stilts line the edges of the fields. I stare out the window at them, then my eye flits over to the young husband, who curls up the corners of his mouth and blows a kiss at me. His wife jerks her head at me with hawklike precision, but I'm already averting my gaze, looking out the other window, contemplating the words of the famous explorer Alexander von Humboldt, who had already climbed Chimborazo and surveyed the equator before Lewis and Clark stumbled across Montana. When he saw the vast deposits of unrealized wealth on this “new continent,” he remarked that Ecuador was like a beggar seated on a bench of solid gold.

Things haven't changed much.

The driver keeps stopping to pick up more paying passengers—a couple of old men with caged chickens, a young worker with two sacks of cement, a pair of real
montuvias
carrying a head of mature, yellow
plátanos
between them, kids selling candy and chewing gum and soda in plastic bags, because the reusable bottles are worth more than the soda inside them, until the bus is overcrowded with animals and
people exuding the strong smell of the country and clucking, laughing, talking while they rest their tired bones. The woman to my left is broadcasting amplitude waves of hostility because her young husband won't stop looking at me, and the whole idea of this disguise thing is not to be looked at, so I turn away and start talking to my weary-eyed seatmate.

“Would you believe this shopkeeper wanted me to lift my skirt up for three pounds of rice?”

“Oh, y'mean Magrato. He's alwayspullingthat,” she says in that unbelievably fast littoral dialect. “Somewomendoit, y'know.”

I try to show mild shock, surprise.

“You're notfromroundhere, are ya?”

“What do you mean?” I say, my heart pounding.

“Justsomething 'bout ya.”

“We just moved from Milagro.”

“Longwaytogotodoyershopping, eh?”

“Well—”

“I know. With prices th'waytheyarenow, it's cheaper t'ride allth'waytotheport and buy what ya need there. Paininth'butt, though,” she jokes.

I smile. “It sure is.”

“Howmanykids ya got?”

“Two. But one died.”

“Ay ay ay,” she says, nodding. “That's hard.”

She tells me her name is Ernestina, and she has four of her own plus her husband's parents, an aunt and three little cousins to take care of. I wonder how she does it, what she gives up to feed eleven mouths. I mean besides her sanity.

A thick, sweet smoke is rising from the fields and depositing bits of black ash on my tomatoes and my eyelids. It's burning time for the sugarcane harvest. I rub the filthy particles from my eyelashes as we pass truckloads of soot-covered
zafreros
, sinewy sugarcane workers standing shoulder to shoulder in the cargo beds of carbon-coated industrial transports, with white eyes and streaked, dark faces looking hopeless, hungry and glum. An army of machete-wielding
day laborers envying the poor women one notch above them. If only someone would organize them …

Then we get stuck behind some heavy equipment, and thick, black clouds of truck exhaust billow in through the windows tasting of underrefined, lead-based diesel fuel, which is good, 'cause I haven't had a carcinogen all week.