Blood Lake (50 page)

Peter starts jogging after me.

“Get away from me!” I warn him.

“Where are you going?”

“Back to Limón. I can get a bus to Cuenca from there.”

“It won't do you any good.”

“I said keep away from me! Why not?”

“By tonight, half the coast will know. By tomorrow, the whole country.”

I stop and look at him. “How?”

“You don't need to know that.”

“Sure I do.”

He shrugs off a little tension, and steals a glance at the jeep, mired in mud.

The radio's playing.

Hot music and late-breaking news.

Who's the biggest voice on the radio?

Pancho la Pulga.

Who's supposed to give a big announcement tonight? Pancho la Pulga.

I turn back towards the southwest and start walking. Behind me, Peter calls out:

“All right, Filomena: Hold it right there.”

There's a cross-cutting tone in his voice that makes me freeze. I turn around. Peter is aiming a well-oiled .22-caliber pistol at my face. He must think I'm wearing body armor. I look from his eyes to the gun and then back to his eyes again.

“This all part of the job, Pete? Or whatever the fuck your name is.”

“I can't let you go, Filomena. You know that.”

“
Fuck you
. And stop calling me Filomena.”

We're about ten feet apart. Suddenly I feel very small and lost in the continental rain forest. My mind telescopes to an imagined aerial panorama. Can you spot me? No. This is that part of the world where they keep stumbling across
cities
that have been lost for a thousand years. Nobody ever finds half of the airplanes that crash here, either. Rescue crews are sent out but they never find anything. And suddenly I realize that he is every bit as small and lost in this plutonian vortex as I am. No one would know. No one would notice. No one would ever find
him
.

He is tense. The situation is not in his control and he's tense. This wasn't planned.

“We might be going after the same people who killed your brother,” he says.

“Oh, that's really reaching,” I spit back at him.

He's fidgety. There's a rustle in the jungle, and I watch his reaction.

He's not tense. He's scared. Good. I want to see him shitting bricks—the special kind that are embedded with big, hot shards of broken glass.

I say, “I should have let them kill you back in Cuenca.”

“Nah. That wouldn't have stopped things.”

Yes, but things are going to stop now. My knife is within reach this time.

Take it slow. Do it right.

“It's not like that, Filomena. I'm just keeping you from interfering with the country's politics for twenty-four hours. You might as well accept it. My backup will be here any minute.”

“No, your backup got taken care of.”

“Oh.”

A faint breeze stirs the palm leaves.

He goes on: “Well, we figured we might need a bargaining chip to prevent you from acting contrary to our interests.”

Oh my God. Antonia.

“Exactly,” he says, smirking. “Your family tried to hide her. You'll never guess where she is.”

“Tell me.”

“Give up?”

“No. Now tell me.”

“It's perfect. Secured front and back.”

The snake of aggression seizes my spinal cord and coils to strike.

You only get one chance to castrate a bull.

The roots of my hair start to prickle, and I open myself to it, to the powerful life force of the trees rooted around me, and it surges through my feet, and the power of the plants and air flows in through my hands, my eyes, my every pore. They say the Amazon is the lungs of the world. I breathe in, and the strength of the jungle fills me. Hah. Breathe in, and it sustains me. Haaahh. Breathe in, and it lifts me. And I grow stronger and stronger with each deep, cleansing breath. Until I have enough strength.

Then—

A swish of movement. His eyes flit for an instant to the lush green jungle.

I lunge.

“You were always sharp as a knife, Filomena.”

Johnny's standing in a gap between the trees.

“Are you going to start preaching kindness and compassion to me again, O Priestess?” he taunts me, as I wash the blood off my knife. “And I thought you needed help.”

“I still do,” I say, wiping my hands on my pants. “They're going to accuse Faltorra of being an accessory to murder—”

“I don't really give much of a shit about that, Filomena. But when I heard him talking about your daughter … I decided to help you.”

“Thank you, Johnny. Thank you.” I'm trembling with aftershock.

“Is she as pretty as you?”

“Yes.” I'm taking deep breaths.

“Good. This ugly world needs it.”

“The thing is—
huhh
—I've got to get to Guayaquil by ten o'clock tonight.”

“And you need a change of clothes, too.”

“Yes.”

No time to move through the jungle. It's got to be the open road. In spite of how we have changed and grown apart, he is willing to risk himself for me and my cause. He whistles for reinforcements.

Some of them look like kids to me, especially the round-faced young women.

As for Peter, he's the one who won't be interfering with my country's politics anymore. Like I said, it's a relatively small country, but there are still an awful lot of places to get lost in it.

We drive the jeep to a hidden place beneath the palms and exchange it for a few supplies and a one-way trip to the salty shores of Los Esteros in south Guayaquil. Possibly the bargain of my life.

Johnny puts his hands on my shoulders. “Come back to the jungle. Ride with me one more time.”

“Next time.”

He pulls me towards him and kisses me, hard. He tastes of sweat and mud and jungle,
barro de la selva
. He tastes of Ecuador.

I have to push him gently away.

God, sometimes I hate doing the right thing.

“Twenty years since we met, Filomena,” he says. “It's our
bodas de plata
.” Our silver anniversary.

“That's twenty-five years,” I tell him.

“Oh. So what's twenty?”

“I don't know. Pewter?”

“Let's go!” My ride beckons.

“Since you know my real name, Juanito, what's yours?”

He smiles, and does not answer.

“Well, well,” says the cop's voice. “Jorge El Puma and El Chino Rojas. So, what have you got in here
this
time?”

They pull back the tarp to reveal all the bright, new hardware. A German-made air compressor, half a dozen shiny pickaxes, crisp bags of cement, trowels, hammers, boxes of freshly oiled carriage bolts.

Then they pull back the other tarp to reveal me, a cracked mosaic after a ten-hour ride over two mountain ridges. Loose tiles tinkle on the metal as I sit up.

“She
needs
to get through,” explains Jorge El Puma.

“And that?” The cop cocks his head in the direction of the flatbed full of equipment.

“That?” says Jorge. “We were supposed to drop that right here.”

Jorge defends the cops' honor by pretending to flip through a stack of purchase orders and packing lists before confirming that this spontaneous police checkpoint twelve kilometers from the Puerto Nuevo is indeed the scheduled delivery point for a small fortune in missing tools.

I even help them unload it all.

Might as well sit up front now.

“Told you we'd need that stuff,” says El Chino.

“I owe you guys.”

“Yes. You do.”

And they will collect someday.

The canoe knifes silently through the black water. Night protects me, and the sounds of life.

They've got some low-rent local talent watching the front, but the back's all mine. They must have figured that farty-smelling water, slippery submerged roots, and a chain-link fence would be enough to keep an old mountain girl like me away.

I tie the canoe to a dead tree and quietly splish through knee-high water garnished with gloppy things I'd rather not think about. I grab on to the fence and haul myself up, but my
shoes are all squishy and I can't get a foothold.
Slap!
Nothing but the noise of rattling metal and a slimy residue left on the chain link. Damn. There's nothing left to do but ignore every rule of hygiene I ever learned and reach down and pull my shoes off. It's a balancing act, but I get them off and toss them over the fence onto the cement court. I wipe my hands, and climb the fence hand-over-hand, grasping the links with my toes in wet socks.

I drop down the other side and pad across the court.

Ground floor, rear.

Sister Cecilia startles awake.

“It's me,” I say, to stop the alarm.

Antonia's sleeping upstairs, but the light's on and anybody going up the open-air stairway can be seen from the street.

“We'll just turn off the light,” says Sister Cecilia.

“No, there's two men watching out front, and that would tip them off immediately. Just put on your habit and go check on her.”

“Oh, dear. Two men watching? Maybe you'd better go?”

No, I've worn enough disguises on this trip. A nun? I don't think so.

Sister Cecilia goes up and comes back downstairs with Antonia half-hidden under the folds of her cloak. Wouldn't fool a blind bat.

“Come on, doll-face, let's get out of here.”

But the guys out front know something's up, and the front gate's only good for about three seconds. I help Antonia jump the fence and slough through the muck. I'm fumbling with the scummy-wet bowline as footfalls slap the cement soccer court.

By the time they reach the fence, we're loose, but not moving fast enough. I'm running on fumes and hauling an extra body. One guy gets hung up on the vines, but the other comes sploshing towards us.

He's whipping the water, drawing near.

The canoe's too wobbly to ready the slingshot.

I get my knife out.

White water foams up at me.