Blood Lake (38 page)

I don't remember that.

From what they tell me, my limbs were stiff and shrunken and they squeezed and squeezed my fingers but
couldn't get any blood into them. Then they placed hot water bottles on my legs to help get the circulation going, but to me it felt like they were draining the blood out of me like vampires.

I always knew that hypothermia means your body starts shutting down the blood flow to the extremities. I just never knew my body considers my head an “extremity.” So my brain wasn't getting enough oxygen, causing me to have wildly paranoid hallucinations. Not the best defense mechanism under the circumstances.

“Your heart was beating very strongly,” says Francisco. “That's why you're still alive.”

So I wasn't exactly at Death's door, but I was definitely walking up his driveway. And I had just enough sense left to know I was losing my mind.

“You came through the Chiripungo,” says Hernando.

The Gate of Cold.

“Not many travelers come through there,” he says.

“
Huachacmama
, leave her alone,” says Norma. “Let her rest.”

The boys obey their mother.

The sun is just starting to stitch its golden threads along the tops of the green-gray hills when I wrap myself in a borrowed blanket and step outside. The two brothers are digging a grave for somebody under the bright cloudy sky. Not for me, I hope.

And of course their country shack has no big iron gate.

The distant rumbling of an airplane on its way to the big city in the valley beyond the hills rapidly crescendos until, with a roar that actually hurts my eardrums, the big jetliner tops the nearest ridge and thunders out of the sky above us almost close enough to touch it.

The two men stop digging, standing in the pit they've dug, to watch the jet fly over. When they see me, they leap out of the grave and invite me to share their breakfast.

Coffee with fresh cow's milk,
machica
with thick brown sugarcane syrup,
mote
. Bright orange country eggs straight from the chicken.

It goes right to my muscles.

When it gets to my brain an hour or two later, I ask them who the grave is for.

“Our father.”

“Miguelito.”

A piece of air gets caught in my throat. No way to hide it.

“I—I'm sorry …”

“It's time to bury him.”

“Where was he last night?” I ask.

“He's been lying in the barn for three days.”

Three days.

“What day is it?” I ask.

The brothers eye me, each other. Hernando gets up and leaves.

“Monday.”

Monday? It sure feels like I lost a day in there somewhere. But no, we definitely reached Cajas late Saturday, then my endless night of madness dragged on 'til Sunday morning. So it couldn't have been the same Miguelito, could it?

I start feeling around in my clothes for money. Cleaned out, except for a few soggy thousand-sucre notes in my shoes and a heel-worn credit card that's going to be pretty useless around these parts. My ring and silver necklace are still there.

“We also found these on you,” says Hernando, standing in the doorway, dangling the lighter, knife and sling from his outstretched hands.

He plunks my gear on the table, his eyes probing for a reaction.

“How long have you been away, sister?” asks Francisco.

“A great long while.”

Sparks float up into the inky blackness as a soul climbs the smoky ladder rising to the sky from the funeral fire.

All of their white clothing has been put away. The family will wear black for a year of mourning.

Doña Norma fans the embers to a bright red heat, then she stirs a quart-sized kettle of boiling herbs, while Francisco strums the guitar that I think is issued to every third male on the continent at birth. All the men seem to know how to pluck a few tunes on the curvaceous ol' wood nymph.

She removes the kettle from the heat, pours the rejuvenating liquid into glass jars with three fingers of cane alcohol already in them and passes them around.

Eulogistic words are spoken, tongues loosen, then begin to stiffen again as blood-warmed skin chills in the night air. I stare into the orange reflections of flame in my glass jar, spinning through space on the razor tip of this faraway mountain chain, fingers of frost feeling their way up my ribs, with only a tiny kernel of heat in front of me keeping them at bay.

The line between the two is so thin.

Doña Norma serves me a steaming plate of rice and beans with fried
yuca
, excusing herself for how poorly she is feeding me.

“Don't say that,
mamá
. It's delicious.”

“
Tía Filomena, maimanta canqui?
” asks Hernando.

“I'm from Solano.”

I can almost see their brains working on it. That may have been a mistake. But it's hard to lie to the people who just saved your life.

I stare at the full plates and the huge pot of rice, wondering how they can afford to eat so well. Norma looks at me through the flames, and says, “There are some kind rebels who steal grain and fertilizer and give it to the poor.”

“Ah,” I nod.

“Bullets cannot harm them.”

Hernando disagrees: “Mother, the police kill rebels are all the time.”

“Not when they are doing the work of God. Then they cannot be harmed.”

“Even the police know that,” says Francisco.

They talk about the local rebels, some of whom have become living legends, known only in the highlands of Ecuador, mostly for snagging a few head of cattle from the biggest ranchers, or a truckload of grain from the big
haciendas
, and occasionally smashing the windows of some chickenshit bank in a small town and tossing fistfuls of grubby money to the people outside. But a little rebellion goes a long way in a nearly medieval system that a revolution should have wiped away centuries ago.

It's probably too late now, since we're all working for a bunch of multinational King Midases whose power would have been the envy of any of the absolute monarchs of old.

“There is one that I have not seen in a long time,” says Norma. “
El carihuahua
.”

Babyface.

His Indian name, before he became known as Juan Tres Ojos.

“His spirit walks these hills,” she says.

The brothers become animated.

“He could steal the saddle off a galloping horse,” claims Francisco.

“He could steal the spots off a leopard.”

“He could skin the Devil and sell it back to the old goat by the square yard!”

“And there was one who was with him,” says Norma. “She had a good heart, and a proud heart. In Llacao they tell how she arrived before the soldiers came and warned the villagers, and every one of them saw how the rain did not touch her. They could see the thick, wet drops spreading across her captain's cloak, but her head remained dry.”

Silence.

“But I see you have a long way to travel, daughter,” she says. “You need your rest.”

The morning comes gray and rainy, which is actually good for me. The police are generally undermotivated enough about
combing the back woods for uncooperative undesirables like me, and the lousy weather ought to just tip the balance to my side.

My hosts outfit me with a poncho and an oversized woolen hat that makes me look like somebody's grandfather. I'm okay as long as no one checks too closely for a cheekful of gray beard stubble.

I'm about ready to leave when Francisco tells me not to go yet, that he has a
carabina
he can lend me. I say good, I might need it. He rummages around behind his bedroll, and brings out what he has been calling his
carabina
. But the language variation between our two sides of the mountain is enough to cause a bit of a misunderstanding. Where I come from, a
carabina
is a rifle. What Francisco calls a
carabina
is clearly a duck hunter's scatter gun, which is going to be about as useful over mountain-range distances as a fistful of sand.

But it'll have to do.
Mamá
Norma wraps up a midday meal for me, and it takes me nearly twenty minutes to convince them to accept the money I am offering. They finally give in when I explain that this is not a charitable donation: I am taking their gun, and I may not come back with it.

Hernando says, “It's almost eight-thirty, you'd better be going.”

I've noticed that nobody has so much as a wall calendar around here. I ask him how he knows it's almost 8:30, and he just grins at me.

Francisco runs back inside and gets some more ammunition. He says ammunition, but what he's talking about is wadding, black powder and hollow lead pellets, the kind of antiques you see under glass in museums in the U.S. I don't believe I'm taking this stuff, but I stow it all under my poncho anyway. All I need now is a chewed-up cigar and someone playing a bamboo flute on the soundtrack and I'm ready to take on any varmint who crosses my path.

“
Chulla vida
,” says Francisco.

We only get one life.

But I'm beginning to feel like I've had more than that.

Distant drums echo down through the valley, and my feet start falling in a proud rhythm across the
pampa
, squishing along towards the Filo de Ladrones. Thieves' Ridge. I'm getting my stamina back, and my lungs are handling the thin air much better this time. I wonder if it's all that stuff I coughed up. If indeed that really happened …

The ground starts to harden as I head up the ridge. I stand and breathe awhile, sucking in the brisk mountain air, my brain clearing with each passing gasp like a dirty window being wiped clean with a squeegee. Once I'm up there, I'll slip down the slopes to the Río Yanuncay, the back way into Cuenca.

We held this ridge for months.

Inside the cave, I find evidence of visitors within the past year. There are traces of a campfire and a garbage pit which I dig up to see how recent it is. I sift and sift, looking for a special clue, but come up with nothing. Of course. There's a big black cross on one wall, drawn with a crumbly piece of charcoal, but anybody could have done that.