Blood Lake (52 page)

Wherever they'll take me in without asking too many questions.

Antonia squeezes my hand and we board the plane that takes us to our second home up North.

The mess I get into when I get back there is a whole other story.

 

 

A fe mía
—by my faith

aguardiente
—firewater; strong cane-sugar alcohol

Alfaro
—Eloy Alfaro, led the Liberal Revolution of 1895, president of Ecuador 1895–1901 and 1906–11. Assassinated in 1912.

almuerzo
—major midday meal

altiplano
—high plains

audentes fortuna iuvat
—Latin: fortune favors the bold

A veces me siento así
—sometimes I feel like that

bandolera
—female bandit

barro de la selva
—mud, clay from the jungle

buen provecho
—good appetite; eat and enjoy

cadena nacional
—national TV network, used for official pronouncements

cagatintas
—literally, ink-shitter; figuratively, newspaper reporter, columnist

cajas
—boxes, coffins

campesino
—country person, farmer, peasant

canela
—cinnamon, a light brown color

canelaso
—drink made with warm
aguardiente
, sugar, and cinnamon

carajo
—“hell” in meaning; closer to “fuck” in terms of vulgarity

cédula
—national identity card

centavo
—cent, one hundredth of a sucre

challashca
—Quichua: bastard

chipa huahua
—
Quichua: son of a bitch

cholo/a
—mountain Indian, with some mixing or
mestizaje
suggested

ciudadela
—neighborhood

cochino
—piggish

cojones
—Look it up. What am I, a dictionary?

CONAIE
—Ecuadorian Confederation of Indigenous Peoples

CONFENIAE
—Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of the Ecuadorian Amazon

consejero
—provincial politician, equivalent to a state legislator in the U.S.

cordillera
—mountain ridge

costeño
—someone from the tropical coastal region of Ecuador

culino-erotic
—sex crimes involving kitchenware

curandera
—wise woman, healer

esmeraldeño
—someone from the province of Esmeraldas, known for its large Afro-Ecuadorian population

Espejo
—Dr. Eugenio de Santa Cruz y Espejo (1747–1795), of native Ecuadorian descent, the foremost essayist writing in favor of Ecuadorian independence from Spain. Died in prison.

la familia Miranda
—the Miranda family; the root word is
mirar
, to look at; code meaning “we are being watched” (or listened to)

fulana
—common woman; in this context, whore

gringa
—feminine form of
gringo
, North American, European, or any non-Ecuadorian person

grosero
—coarse, obscene

guayabera
—all-purpose shirt of light material often worn partially open, but which also serves as semiformal attire in a climate where a suit and tie would be extremely impractical

guayaco
—someone from Guayaquil

hermano/a
—
brother, sister

huachacmama
—Quichua: Hail Mary full of grace

huaricha
—the lowest-quality whore

huasipichana
—Quichua: housewarming

indígena
—indigenous, native person

Inti
—the Incan sun god

Juanita Calle
—a common “Jane Doe”–like name that could be poetically translated as Street Jane

Juanito Tres Ojos
—Johnny Three Eyes (which is such a cool name, it was actually the working title of this novel at one point)

licenciado
—formal title for someone with a bachelor's degree

machica
—toasted corn flour, a traditional food from the province of Cañar

machista
—from
macho
, male; literally “male-ist”

maté
—
ilex paraguayensis
, mild stimulant drunk in tea form

mestiza
—mixed; person of mixed European and Indian origins (the majority of Ecuadorians)

mierda
—shit

mi hija
—my daughter

mono
—a
costeño
, literally “monkey”

montuvia
—person from the coast's swampy back country

mote
—white hominy corn, a traditional sierran dish

mulato
—a person of mixed black and white heritage

muñeca
—doll

narcotráfico
—drug trafficking

noodge
—American Yiddish: related to “nudge,” only more so

oriente
—east; Ecuador's Amazonian region

padre
—father

páramo
—high, flat land; bleak, windy wilderness

parrilla
—barbecue

pena
—pain, difficulty

peña
—traditional folk music club, bar

pollera
—brightly colored traditional skirts worn by many Indian women of the sierra

puchica
—mild curse, “darn it”

pueblo
—town, village; also people

pulga
—flea

puñetera
—bitch

quintal
—a hundred-pound sack

Rumiñahui
—the last Incan general, led the failed resistance against the Conquistadors in 1534; burned his capital city (Quito) to the ground rather than lose it to the Spanish invaders; eventually captured and killed.

Runa Shayana
—Quichua: standing man

rurales
—rural police

santo país
—literally, sacred country; figuratively, darn country

serrano
—someone from Ecuador's mountainous region

SIC-G
—Servicio de Investigaciones Criminales del Guayas, the Service of Criminal Investigations of the province of Guayas

sierra
—mountain range

socksucker
—bootlicker, literally from the Spanish,
chupar las medias
, to suck the socks (of someone)

soroche
—altitude sickness

sucre
—Ecuadorian unit of currency, named after Antonio José de Sucre, general commissioned by Simón Bolívar to liberate Ecuador from Spain, who won the final, decisive battle of the war for independence, May 24, 1822. (After years of hyperinflation, Ecuador officially adopted the U.S. dollar in 2000.)

Trabajo, Familia, Patria
—Work, Family, Country

trago
—liquor (diminuitive:
tragitos
)

tres reyes
—three kings

el viejo luchador
—the Old Fighter;
see
Alfaro

Yunay
—slang term for the United States

zafrero
—sugarcane worker

Thanks to Kelley Ragland, editor of the hardcover edition of this novel; to Gila May-Hayes, CFI, for teaching me how to shoot a Glock Model 17 9mm properly; to Captain John Maldonado, whose memoir,
Taura: lo que no se ha dicho
, about his experiences in the Ecuadorian Air Force served as the basis for Captain Ponce's confessional monologue in
chapter 10
; to the gang at PM Press, who managed once again to take a bit of time off from fomenting revolution to publish this book; but most of all, thanks to my loving wife, Mercy, for putting up with my special brand of lunacy, which lesser beings would have fled.

“Dissed” first appeared in
Politics Noir
, edited by the one and only Gary Phillips (Verso, 2008). It brings my intrepid detective, Filomena Buscarsela, well into the twenty-first century, which is quite an accomplishment considering that we first meet her in the early days of the Reagan administration. So the story arc of the Filomena novels and stories chronicles the thirty-year assault on working people that began in the early 1980s and has yet to let up. Cheers.

DISSED

One may smile, and smile, and be a villain.

—
Hamlet

One may smile, and smile, and be a doss wee cunt.

—Irvine Welsh's
Hamlet

I ALWAYS KNOW
it's some seriously annoying bullshit whenever they start off by getting my name wrong. It's either a telemarketer, or some charity calling me for the hundredth time because I once gave them a few bucks, or someone from the hospital's billing department telling me that, thanks to the latest health insurance screw-up, my last visit isn't covered and I'm responsible for the full fee of 350 bucks for a ten-minute consult. Either way it usually spells trouble.

So when the call came for
Ms. Flomeena Buscarella
before I'd even had my coffee, I let the answering machine handle it. (
Latino
names are pronounced just the way they're written. Mine's Buscarsela. That's Bus-car-se-la. Not so hard, right?)

The call turns out to be a pre-recorded message from the Board of Elections telling me that my polling place has been changed from the junior high school I've been voting at for years to some address on Elmhurst Avenue that I rush to scribble down on a paper napkin.

Something doesn't sound right about that, but I'm not
really awake yet. My daughter went to that school, and I still remember the first time I voted there because it was the year the presidential race came down to a couple hundred hand-counted absentee ballots in Broward County, Florida, New York elected its first woman senator, and a dead man won the senate race in Missouri. And if the first movie wasn't bad enough, then we had to sit through the lame sequel,
President Bush, Part II: It Lives
.

So all over the country, the opposition is gearing up for the long march towards retaking control of the House and maybe even the Senate that begins with today's primary elections. But around here, everyone's watching the contest between the challenger, Vivian Sánchez, a Dominican mother of four from the “heartland” of Queens who's running on milk money, matching funds from the Campaign Finance Board and a small army of volunteers, and James A. Rickman Jr., son of a longtime party leader and a polished product of the well-oiled party machine, for City Council member from District 21, which is made up of parts of East Elmhurst, Jackson Heights, and Archie Bunker's old neighborhood of Corona. But times have changed since Bunker's day, when conservative hardhats ruled the blocks of row houses along 108th Street. Nowadays, the district is more than two-thirds
latino
, but so many of them can't vote legally that it's actually a close race.

After two cups of Ecuadorian coffee so strong the International Olympic Committee ought to ban it as an illegal performance-enhancing drug, I'm willing to brave the November breezes of these northern latitudes and walk to my tiny storefront office, conveniently located just off Roosevelt Avenue and out of the shadows of the number 7 train tracks.

I spend the first hour or so reviewing the case file on my newest paying client, a scrap metal dealer who's being charged with receiving stolen goods. He claims he didn't know the stuff was stolen, and his lawyer wants me to dig up evidence to support that defense (scrap metal is one of the few businesses where it's pretty hard to tell the genuine article from the illicit kind). So far I've interviewed a demolition
crew that specializes in salvaging scrap metal, studied police reports on a pattern of recent thefts and other criminal behavior involving copper plumbing, and helped traced the stolen goods to a construction site on 106th Street where the streetlights are always out at night. The
modus operandi
points to a couple of industrious but drug-addled schmucks after some easy money. I mean, the thieves had to climb a steel mesh fence topped with a few hundred yards of razor wire, chisel through an eight-inch cinder-block wall and rip out the porcelain bathroom fixtures just to haul away twenty pounds of copper tubing worth about forty dollars in today's market, when they could have easily spent the day flipping burgers and making kissy noises at the women for the same money. Maybe their night work comes with a better benefits package.