Blood Lake (4 page)

“Easy!” shouts Guillermo, grabbing my wrist. He looks at the watch, taps the face with his fingernail, and shakes my wrist. The second hand starts moving again, and Guillermo lets out a puff of air. “Careful with it,” he says.

“I will be.” I'll also keep my other watch around.

“We've got a barrel of rainwater on the roof,” says Uncle Lucho. “You can use a couple of pitchers of it to shower.”

“
Thank you
.” Two quarts of germ-free rainwater and I'm ready to get down on my knees and sing God's praises. Funny how your values change when you're away from your safe and constant home.

“Now let's get you gals settled in upstairs.”

César says, “Watch out by the stairs. We broke a bottle of soda.”

“Yeah, there's all this sticky red crap and broken glass on the floor,” I observe, feeling a tingling in my veins, and in an eyeblink it's gone. “Careful, Toni. The floor's all sticky.”

Antonia says, “Okay, so don't go licking the bottom of your shoes.”

“That's a good plan under normal circumstances, but—”

“But? You got a but to go with that?”

“I just don't think we should be ruling anything out at this point.”

“Mom?”

“Look, I'm just tired and a little freaked out now, okay? I'll feel better after I shower and change.”

“
¿Qué significa
‘freaked out'?” Suzie asks.

“That's what I keep asking her,” says Antonia, poking me. “Some expression from the Paleolithic era, I think.”

“
Neo
lithic, please,” I correct her.

We lug our bags up three flights of cement stairs to the upper floors, which the family built by hand under Uncle Lucho's supervision. Upstairs, we unpack the essentials. Suzie sneaks a friendly peek in my handbag. “You carry a lighter?” she asks.

“Sure. You never know when you might need to set something on fire.”

The rich rhythms of Afro-Colombian
cumbias
float through the air like high-grade opium. A turkey my aunt raised on the
terrace is slowly roasting over a homemade barbecue crafted from a fifty-five-gallon steel drum cut down the middle and laid on its side, and the flat rooftop terrace is filled with the hot bodies of bronze and brown-skinned family and friends. Some of my relatives would be considered black in the U.S.

I refuse drinks, have others, dance with cousins I haven't seen since Antonia's first communion, and with one of Luis's classmates, who has obviously seen too many American movies where the actors end up in bed after knowing each other for ten whole minutes of screen time, because he comes right out and says he wants to tickle the taco with me. I tell him I've got stuff in my fridge that's older than he is, and to come back when his voice stops cracking.

Then I ask Luis about his own career plans, and he tells me he's going to law school mainly to keep his brothers out of jail. Ronaldo, Victor and Bolívar are good hard workers, but they don't take any shit in a world that demands that
everyone
has to take a certain amount of shit.

I survive some very physical dancing with them, then remove myself and lean against the low wall, looking out over the corrugated tin rooftops on this hot winter's night. (Now there's a phrase you don't hear in New York.) The warmth, the music, the food, the family.
Why
have I been away so long?

Luis leans over and asks me, “So what's it like to live in a country with a stable economy?”

“I'll let you know as soon as I find out.”

Uncle Lucho comes over with an open bottle of raw
aguardiente
and fills a glass for me.

I hold up my hand: “Please, that stuff's only good for killing tapeworms.”

“So let's kill some tapeworms,” he says.

I knock it back and shiver, which makes the men laugh. Uncle Lucho slaps me on the back and pours one for Luis and then himself. They both shiver, too.

Uncle Lucho advises me, “Never drink unless you're alone or with somebody.”

I beg off a few invitations to dance. I need to take a
breather, so I entrust myself to a hammock made from an old canvas sack, lean back and watch Antonia chatter and flirt with a swarm of budding teens she hardly ever sees, although they share various recessive strands of DNA and Aunt Yolita's dark velvet eyes. She got the gift of being self-assured from me. Unlike her girlish cousins, my daughter prefers functional faded jeans and cargo pants, and even gets her sandals from the boys' section, although I can't complain, since they are cheaper and more practical: the girls' styles this year are—
shudder
—platform sandals. At least we got over that I-want-to-be-a-boy stuff when she was a preteen. I talked to her about it and discovered that she just wanted to have all the fun that boys seem to be having on the TV ads: running around outside, playing, jumping, building, while the girls sit around indoors and comb Barbie's hair. When I told her she could do all of that and still be a girl her face lit up like the arctic sun rising to warm the world.

Now she's at the age where she thinks that phrases like “frog barf” are
hilarious
.

Another one of the law students takes a look at my legs, all the way up to the hem of my dance skirt, and remarks, “If that's what the provinces are like, I'd like to see the capital!” Apparently he's at the age where he thinks phrases like that are hilarious.

It's been a long day. I flop down happily in bed next to Antonia. Suzie sits on the next bed, kicks off her shoes, and starts unbuttoning her blouse.

“So is Raúl helping you with her?” she asks.

“Yeah, we're splitting the responsibilities. I'm taking care of the kid the first eighteen years of her life and he's doing it for the second eighteen years of her life.”

Suzie knows what I mean, having also had experience with men who believe that their paternal duties end at conception. “And what's this I hear about you having some
gringo
boyfriend? When do I get to meet him?”

“Stan's a really nice guy. He promised to come visit us as soon as he can get a week off.”

“If he's such a nice guy, why are you down here by yourself?”

“To see you,” I say.

“Well, here I am,” she says, unhooking her bra and shaking herself out. Then she reaches for a pale blue nightshirt.

I listen to the noise of the traffic flowing by, sharp diamonds of light streaking across the bare cement ceiling, and I begin to explain: “I also need to spend a little time in the mountains. The air is supposed to be good for me.”

“Of course the mountain air is good for—” Suzie stops pulling the hair from her comb. “Wait a minute. What do you mean?”

When I don't answer, she reaches across the gap between our beds and puts her hand over mine.

“What is it? Is something wrong? Filomenita, you must tell me.”

“It's okay, Suzie. I'm all right.”

“
Gracias a Dios
.”

“
Sí, gracias a Dios
.”

She waits.

Then, quietly: “So?”

“Well, everything's fine for now, but they removed some benign precancerous tissue from my lungs a while back, and I need some time to recover.”

“Lord have mercy. Then maybe hiking around the timberline isn't such a good idea.”

“I was thinking about taking something called a bus.”

“You going to head up to Cuenca?”

“Sure. Sometime.”

“Solano?”

I have to think about that.

“Maybe.”

“So what are your plans?”

“I don't know. I wish I could stay for a couple of months and just relax, but I had to promise my bosses a pint of blood every seven days just to shake a three-week stretch out of them.”

“Private investigators don't normally get long vacations, I guess.”

“It's a lot better than being a cop, but the work never stops. Twenty-four/seven, as they say. Not like here, where we practically invented the
siesta
.”

“We didn't invent it, we just perfected it.”

I smile. “And I wish Antonia could go to high school here for a few months and learn more about her other culture. Does Padre Campos still give Mass in La Chala?”

“He's still shaking it, all right. He even made the papers a few weeks ago.”

“How did he do that?” I ask innocently enough.

“He helped organize a conference of a dozen priests and bishops who wrote a human rights report accusing the government of illegally funneling support to the paramilitary hit squads up North and in the jungle that are responsible for hundreds of killings and disappearances that had been blamed on the rebels. They said most of the victims were simple Shuar
indígenas
who don't support either side.”

“They just had the bad luck to live near the oil fields.”

“He got some death threats. They all did.”

I feel a sudden twinge of trepidation.

“How'd he take it?”

“Like a priest.”

I lie here. Up for twenty-nine hours straight and I can't sleep. Things are always a bit more intense here, but I didn't count on this. Not my first day, anyway.

I no longer live these events, they're only memories. And my memory's been wrong before. All I have left are fleeting images of Johnny. The wondrous glow of our first hot food in days searing in a pan, his arms around me, cuddling up next to a crackling fire on the high, windswept slopes, a
canelaso
warming my teenage belly.

And I remember the day Padre Samuel Campos saved my life.

We were cut off from the ragged mountain pass to our refuge, on a flat grassy plain with no cover. So we took up defensive positions behind the low walls of a ruined farmhouse. We were low on bullets, but we held out with a fairly steady volley that kept the rural army at a distance.

But they knew we were scratching in the dirt looking for empty casings to refill with pebbles and powder.

Johnny wasn't there, so El Pibe was in charge. We never had the luxury of keeping our women away from the fighting, but El Pibe suddenly ordered all the
compañeras
to fall back inside the farmhouse and shoot from there. It was better protection, but not for long. I got in a few good shots, but they saw what he had done and knew what it meant, and in a moment they charged. Through the broken window I saw five of us go down on the first volley, smearing the stones with our blood.

I will never forget—El Pibe was a good friend and cadre lieutenant who helped keep the others off me. In what seemed like seconds they had him surrounded.

“Drop the weapon now!” they ordered. “Drop the weapon now!” They said it at least five times. “
Now!
”

They made out like they wouldn't shoot him. “Come, come with me,” the sergeant gestured to him with an open hand.

So he dropped the gun. And they all opened fire on him.

Helluva time to learn rule number one:
Never
give up your weapon. I resolved to kill as many of them as I could before they got me.

They broke open the door and I was standing right there, shoving my pistol into a young soldier's face.

That stopped everything.

We hung there for a moment. He really was young. A draftee whose eyes could not hide the fear. They didn't even try. We should have been playing jacks together, but now I was going to blow him to pieces. He knew it and I knew it and the other soldiers knew it because they started moving again, slowly, and they were raising their rifles.

Then Padre Samuel called out to the sergeant, told him to stop the killing right now. He walked right up to both of us, put an arm around me and took my pistol away. And he walked me out of there, hugging my body close to his for protection. Then he spirited me away from prosecuting eyes and into a school a hundred miles away where he gave me sanctuary.

I was still a teenager, a runaway, a kid. Padre Samuel helped make me a person.