Blood Lake (25 page)

A man in the street, a scarf tied around his face to mask his features, has another opinion: “They tell us our demonstration is illegal! That we have to get a permit first! Well, let me tell you, Fernando Pajizo, there are going to be
a lot more
illegal demonstrations, and your attack dogs won't have time to crack down on them all!”

Store owners complain about the damage, and women cry for their sons who have been arrested.

And, oh yes, an American fighter pilot was shot down by guerrillas in the
oriente
. The U.S. government says that they never saw the guy before.

“Listen,
compañero
Zimmerman,” I begin. Ruben turns away from the TV. “When are you going to get me the name of the reporter who filed the stories on Padre Samuel Campos's murder? What's happening with that?”

“I'm sorry,” he says, “but I haven't had the time to find out anything yet.”

“What's the big deal? I mean, he does work at the same paper as you, doesn't he?”

“I'm just a stringer at
El Despacho
. But don't worry, I wouldn't be much of an investigative reporter if I couldn't track down one lousy crime columnist for you.”

“Be careful.”

He lets out a
humph
, kind of a strangled chuckle. “You think that nasty little mess is more dangerous than trying to expose an international conspiracy to assassinate three presidents?”

When you put it that way—

“I guess not.”

The phone in the bar doesn't work.

They tell me I can use the one at the front desk, but I'd rather not.

Outside, the rain is coming down in heavy sheets of gray lead. I ask Ruben if I can use the phone in his room. But when I pick up the receiver, I get nothing but dead air.

I press the button several times, get plenty of clicks and static, but no line out. I hang up and try again. And again. And again.

Finally, a dial tone. It's a rotary phone with a loose dialing wheel, so I have to hold on to the cylinder with one hand and dial slowly with the other, the old-fashioned way. At least I don't have to crank up the battery first.

Alberto's voice.

“Is that
la familia Miranda
?” I ask. It's code for “Someone might be listening.”

“No. But I'll take a message.”

“I want to know if there's been any progress.”

“No. Nothing so far.”

Nothing so far. Well, at least nobody's turned up dead.

Today.

I actually get up early enough to see my second-floor cousins Ron, Vic, and Bolí Mendez before they head off to work at their construction gig, which pretty much starts at sunrise and ends at sunset, six days a week.

Then I spend the morning with Antonia, teaching her
how to make
humitas
. It's a simple dish. All you have to do is carefully strip the corncobs and set aside the leaves; cook the corn whole in boiling water; scrape the hot kernels into a bowl; mash them and mix them with eggs, butter, cheese, baking powder, sugar, salt; spoon out some scoopfuls; wrap the scoopfuls in the leaves you stripped from the corn, and steam them. It only takes a couple of hours. They're a little like tamales, and making them is no more trouble than baking your own bread, starting with threshing the wheat and hand grinding it under a millstone until it turns to flour, all by yourself.

They're good with hot cocoa on a cold day.

Guayaquil has no cold days. It's a mountain dish.

I put three on a plate and bring them downstairs to Suzie in the store, and see that we're running low on rice again.

There's nothing more in the papers about Padre Samuel's murder. A little news, quickly forgotten.

But on page four, it says that a speeding truck overturned on the Panamerican Highway while carrying six thousand pounds of unregistered rice in hundred-pound sacks. According to the driver, who was arrested for reckless endangerment, the truck had no point of departure and no destination. He was just taking the rice for a nice drive in the country.

Suzie turns the radio to some dance music (note:
all
our music is dance music) and I help her take inventory of the half-empty shelves. It's a quick job but a hot one, what with the dancing, and soon all that butt-thumping leaves me lying flat on the beer cooler, catching my breath.

I don't even budge when the radio starts playing “
A veces me siento así
.” I just need a break from being Ms. Goddamn Superhero all the time. Who needs that kind of pressure? But don't worry, I've got my afternoon all planned out, starting with going down to the newspaper office to get some answers.

Oh, I've been getting plenty of answers. It's just that none of them are any good.

From the corner of my eye I see a dark-skinned, sweaty casualty of President Pajizo's economic policies approaching
the store, trying to maintain his gyroscopic equilibrium but staggering as if he just might slip and fall off the planet. His ribs are sticking out like a bony xylophone with a thin layer of leathery skin stretched over it. He asks for a bottle of Coco Loco, one of the many available cheap, hard, machine-made alcohols. Suzie makes the sale, and this insignificant statistic five figures to the right of the decimal point on the gross domestic scale wanders away with it, heading for that sixth column, the millionths.

“How is that stuff?” I ask, nodding towards the diminishing row of Coco Loco bottles on the shelf.

“Dreadful,” she says. “It's all chemicals. You can catch the same buzz from drinking mimeograph machine fluid.”

“Yum yum,” I say. “So you realize you're part of the problem.”

“I didn't see you stopping me.”

Girlish laughter bursts from the storeroom and spills over to where I'm lying. Antonia and her cousins Priscilla and Marjorie have captured a member of the illustrious race of giant Guayaquil waterfront cockroaches and put it in a jar. It's nearly two inches long. I ask them, “Are you going to study it or use it for breeding?”

“But Mom, it's only one cockroach.”

“There is no such thing as ‘only one' cockroach,” I say, as the oily creature scampers around the glass walls searching for an exit. “And if those suckers ever get organized, we're all in big trouble.”

The music is interrupted by a paid political ad for Governor Segundo Canino promising free breakfasts for elementary school children, cheaper medicines, and a sound monetary policy. The voice trumpets: “His decision not to build the Gulf of Guayaquil oil platform saved the country
one hundred billion sucres
!”

“Right. And his decision not to build a rocket to Neptune probably saved the country one hundred
trillion
sucres.”

“Better be careful what you say in this neighborhood,” says a familiar voice in American-accented Spanish.

I sit up. Peter's standing at the iron-barred window, watching me cross my legs on the beer cooler.

How the hell did he find me here?

“Ruben told me where you live,” he says, anticipating my question. “I hope that's okay with you.”

“Sure, I guess. What's on your mind?”

Suzie's giving him the eye.

“You wanna go to the bullfights this afternoon?” he asks. “I've never seen one, and I'm dying to go. How 'bout it?”

Bullfights? They're not really my idea of fun. “They do them differently here, you know. Bulls are expensive, and they can't afford to kill one every day.”

“No kidding? So what do they do?”

“Chase it around until it gets tired,” I say.

“Well, I'd still like to go. Interested?”

Suzie's giving
me
the eye.

Wouldn't you know that a needlelike itch chooses this exact moment to sting my upper thigh? Heat and sticky shorts, dammit. I can't scratch now with my crotch forming a flying V in front of this man's gaze, so I stand up and give my hem a discreet tug. That's better.

What the hell. I need to spend
some
time with my daughter, and I'll still have time to run over to the newspaper office afterwards.

“Give me five minutes to change into some long pants,” I say.

And some good running shoes.

Three inches of last night's downpour still lie stagnant in the gutters. The storm drains are full, and the sky is heavy with dark, portentous clouds. We tiptoe between the puddles like a trio of ballerinas on our way to the coliseum.

“I didn't realize you were so, like, Ecuadorian,” says Peter.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“Well, I thought you were an American like me—”

“I am an American citizen.”

“I don't mean that. I mean, uh, I didn't realize your family lived in such a—oh, crap. I'm sorry. You must think I'm a jerk.”

I'll give him points for that.

“No,” I say, making the effort to flood my voice with warmth and understanding, “just typical. You've grown up with only one side of the story.”

“Story … ?”

Hoo-boy.

“Okay. Like when a big U.S. corporation builds a factory down here, Americans are all told it's such a risky proposition that it's practically an act of charity, so the Department of Commerce waives all duties and taxes and even rent sometimes. And when the workers get four dollars a day, you're told that's more than most other jobs pay in Ecuador.”

“But it's still a sucky wage,” he says, shaking his head.

It is indeed.

“I mean, like Americans are so fat and complacent, you know? But when you see what really goes on down here, how poor people are and stuff? You just feel so fuckin' powerless. Know what I mean?”

“Yeah. I know what you mean.”

“But hey, listen,” he goes on, “I've been looking for a way to like impress you, okay?”

“You've been looking for a way to impress me.”

“Yeah. Well, Ruben told me you were trying to find out about this, you know,” his voice drops, “this murder case?”

Sounds like Ruben's been telling him an awful lot.

“Well, I had to flash the cash, but I finally got this provincial cop to say that he heard that your friend's body was snuck out of the police morgue to the morgue at that Social Security Hospital.”

The free hospital. But—

Sure. It makes sense. Hide it among all those nameless bodies.

He stands and faces me. “I bet I can get inside the place.”

Chalk one up to the big, dumb American. He may come in handy after all.

“Are you any good with a camera?” I ask.

He smiles.

We spend an hour watching them irritate a bull. (Hey: in Peru they use dynamite.) Antonia recoils at one heart-fluttering moment when the bull dodges the matador and gores one of the horses and spatters its gray-white rump with blood. But it's only a flesh wound, apparently, and the show goes on. I buy my starving adolescent some homemade coconut candy from a chipped enamelware tray carried on the head of a roving salesman, a shirtless young
esmeraldeño
with steady eyes and quick hands, doing some of the only work a poor Afro-Ecuadorian male can get in this big, indifferent city.