Blood Lake (6 page)

Lucho Jr., Antonia, and I walk down to the Calle Bolivia and wait for our bus, keeping to the shadows under the blocklong balconies which are supported by irregular pillars, creating an uneven shade the length of the street, another design adaptation necessary for survival in this sunburnt climate. Some of you may recall that Charles Darwin developed his theory of evolution while visiting Ecuador's Galápagos Islands. (There'll be a test on that later.)

The curbs and gutters are also uneven, shaped by the hands of men who will starve if they ever run out of curbs and gutters to make, and it looks like our bus is going to be delayed because a group of men and women in clean
guayaberas
and blouses are marching down the Avenida del Ejercito
and blocking off the street. They seem peaceful enough, and their demands are simple: water, rice, oil, cooking gas, government accountability. I didn't even know there was a shortage of cooking gas.

Buildings aren't fitted for gas pipelines, which would be disastrous in this geologically unstable region. You have to get an eighty-pound tank from a distributor and bring back the empties when it's time for a refill. Lucho Jr. says, “You have to wait a couple of hours on line, but it's not really a shortage yet.”

Oh, shi—

My heart beats faster when I see the white helmets. Two dozen of them. Then I realize they're stopping traffic so the protesters can get through. It's going to take me a while to get used to the sight of cops, even the traffic cops in their blue-and-white uniforms. It's the helmets. The provincial cops wear the same helmets with their military gray-green uniforms.

I stop squeezing Antonia's hand and explain to her what the protest is about.

“There's our bus!” she says, pointing to a dented blue-and-white-striped bus with a hand-painted sign in the front window saying La Chala in bright red letters.

We climb aboard. It looks like the driver bought the body used and built the rest himself. Hand-soldered metal seats are bolted to a boilerplate metal floor. There's a huge battery under the front seat that is also bolted
and grounded
to the metal floor, which has recently been cleaned with gasoline.

We sit down anyway.

Gutters, signs, bus seats—everything in Ecuador is handmade.

I notice Lucho Jr. isn't wearing his gold wedding ring. He tells me nobody wears gold on the streets anymore.

“So what do you do? Put it on when you go to bed?”

“Just about.”

We stop in front of an open market and the bus fills up with women carrying plastic shopping baskets overflowing with fruits and vegetables. No meat.

Two blocks later two men get on carrying enormous watermelons. My gut reaction is, that's a bit odd, the market was two blocks back, but I figure I've lost my sense of what passes for normalcy around here.

I should have listened to my gut.

A minute later four huge watermelon halves splatter to the floor and the two men are yelling at everybody not to make a fucking move while aiming two submachine guns at us that are dripping thick, wet watermelon juice all over their hands and onto the floor.

I'm thinking the guns must be awfully slippery.

And that a spark could cause an explosion.

I put my arm around Antonia, ready to protect her, ready to jump out the open windowframe.

It goes pretty quickly. They collect cash, jewelry, watches. They can have the damn Rolux. I'm unstrapping it when one of them gets to us but the other one stops him, points to Lucho Jr. and says, “Not him. He's a good dentist.” The partner nods and moves on without saying a word.

Lucho Jr. shrugs at me. I guess he gets some pretty tough customers down at the free dental clinic.

With such a good memory for faces, too.

Everything goes smoothly until the traffic cops notice that the bus isn't moving and start blowing their whistles. The desperados look up, close the loot bags, and turn to go.

Now
the driver panics, starts to pull the bus away to avoid a ticket, and gets caught in traffic.

We're blocking the intersection.

Two sets of whistles pierce the air. Traffic cops are trotting towards the bus down both streets, thinking it's a simple traffic violation that they can handle. I want to shout out a warning, but I'm voiceless for a traumatic split second as the first guy kneels on the top step and aims a burst of machine-gun fire at the cops coming up the cross street, who dive to the ground and roll for cover. Two more cops are jogging up behind us. The guy drops to the street and lets them have it from about fifteen feet away, hitting one and sending him
flying off his feet into the gutter. The two bandits run in front of the bus into the tangled knot of honking cars.

“Come on!” I tell Lucho Jr., pushing our way through the panicked crowd and jumping to the sidewalk.

Both cops are down. One's got a hand wound, the other's been hit in the left side of the chest, a couple of inches above his heart. I tell Lucho Jr. to help the guy with the hand wound.

My guy's bleeding all over his crisp white shirt. I tear open the shirt to get a look at the wound. Small caliber, bullet visible. He'll live.

Nothing sterile around here. I wipe my hand on his shirt and probe the wound. Then I reach in and pull out the bullet.

I look up.

Five cops are standing over me. Two of them go off in pursuit of the fleeing criminals. The others help me stop the bleeding, elevate the wounded cop's legs, and stabilize him 'til the ambulance arrives. His thin face is gray and bloodless, with a timid mustache clinging to the underside of his thin, mousy nose.

“What's your name?” I ask him.

“Carlos.” It's a cry of pain.

“Okay, Carlos, you're going to be okay. Are you hit anywhere else?”

“My legs hurt.”

“You scraped them when you fell.”

“Oh—”

“Don't try to talk.”

But he makes the effort: “What's … your name?”

I swallow. “Filomena.”

He says, “Thanks … Filomena.”

I let one of Carlos's buddies hold his head for a change. I stand up and hand over the bullet. One of the cops takes it and puts it in his pocket.

“Don't you have a plastic bag?” I ask. “Rubber gloves? Bandages? Jesus—!”

“Ease off, Mom, they're just traffic cops,” says the little voice of reason next to me.

“Can you describe the two assailants?” the cop asks.

Sure: The first guy looked like a stalk of burnt sugar cane—thin, dusky complexion with tight skin and a sharp nose, and a good memory for faces. The other guy had thick black eyebrows, round nose, dark eyes. Everything about him was darker, heavier,
harder
. They both looked hungry.

“No,” I say.

The bus driver wants to know if we're getting back on, since there are no refunds. I tell him no. I need to sit down, clean up, and make sure my daughter is able to handle all this.

Ah, who the hell am I kidding?
I
can't even handle all this. Antonia's just my excuse, my weather vane, my warning track, my canary in the mineshaft. When she freaks, I'll know I'm next in line.

They've got dozens of witnesses. They don't need me.

The ambulance finally comes to take Carlos to the hospital. Lucho Jr. takes my place in the gathering crowd while I slip away, which I would never be able to pull off in New York, especially after removing a bullet from one of their cops. But this is Guayaquil, and the margins are always a little more bendable here.

Once we are safely out of sight, Antonia and I walk a couple of blocks until the numbness wears off, then find a small café so I can step into a tight, smelly bathroom to wash the blood off my hands with a liter of bottled water. I come back out a little bit cleaner and order my little girl a hot chocolate to help bring the color back to her cheeks. I could use a double shot of firewater myself, but I'm still chasing away the last dog that bit me. I look around. It's a quiet café with comforting photos of blue water, white sand and palm trees swaying in the breeze. I start to tell Antonia that she might suffer some kind of post-traumatic stress, and I end up admitting my own anxieties about her safety and my worries that in a few short years she'll be on her own, an undeniable signal of my own irreversible aging and the fragility of life in general, and she's the one who breaks it off, uninterested, over and done with, next topic please. Maybe she's more resilient than I thought.

Guns inside watermelons. I'm going to have to remember that bit for my next jailbreak.

And my shoes still smell of gasoline.

Padre Samuel's school was built on top of a garbage landfill, surrounded by rotting cane shacks that barely rise above a sewage-clogged estuary that smells like a gastrointestinal disease. The backwater is best accessible by canoe, but that doesn't stop the women living there from going off to work wearing tight, splashy dresses, with their hair styled and faces made up as if Hollywood talent scouts cruised the area daily from passing speedboats.

A few rooftops away, on drier land, stand the church and the parish house, a worm-eaten cloister made of mud, straw, wattle and daub, plaster, reeds, old bones, and probably anything else that happened to be lying around unguarded when they threw the place together. The people say the structure's still holding up because gravity is weaker on the equator. I figure it's because God Himself wants the building to remain standing, since only such a miracle could be responsible for it.

He's got no phone, and the electricity comes from a community-supported linkage of household extension cords that runs into a network of illegal cables siphoning live juice from the hydroelectric power lines four hundred yards downriver.

Service is unpredictable.

I divide a handful of sucres between the beggars squatting on the bottom steps of the rickety staircase up to the second floor. The stairs bow under our weight as though another ounce or so would send the two of us into the marsh in a shower of splinters. The covered balcony offers a dazzling view of the mountainous ridge of the Andes off to the east, my home territory. If the air were a little clearer, Antonia would be able to see the snow-covered dome of the Chimborazo volcano glinting in the sunlight.

There are no closed doors here. The Padre is not a great believer in personal security.

A dozen people huddling dangerously near the edge of poverty's bottomless abyss are waiting to see him, but the Padre's assistant, Ismaél, a gangly
mulato
kid who must be all of sixteen, sees two relatively well-dressed strangers and sends us in ahead of everyone. I tell him we'll wait our turn, but Padre Samuel looks up from the piles of municipal paperwork littering his table and sees us, his arms fly wide open, scattering some pages, and he shouts, “
¡Ave María, mi Filomena!
” and he comes around the makeshift desk to give me a bear hug that nearly lifts me off the ground.

“Careful, Father, you're losing your papers,” I say.

“Nonsense,” he says, dismissively. “That's just some rigamarole the city makes me go through to try to slow me down.”

He pats my shoulder several times, as if he can't get over how big I've gotten.

The empty-handed people seeking his advice feel our profound closeness, and not one of them utters a peep of complaint about us going ahead of them.

“How are you,
mi hija
?” he asks.

“Good, good, Father. And you?”

“
Todo bien, gracias a Dios
. And this is the little princess?”

“Well, I don't know about the princess part—”

“
No soy una princesa, soy una reina
,” says Antonia. My God. She just said, I'm not a princess, I'm a queen.

The Padre laughs, big and loud, shaking the liver-spotted skin that's hanging from his thin, aging cheekbones, a quivering reminder of how old he's getting. He asks Antonia how she likes Ecuador, and she politely answers that she likes it very well, Father, even though I know that the whole showering-in-a-pitcher scene and constant mayhem in the streets is no trip to paradise for an Americanized girl who's used to—well, America.

I dwell for a moment on the uncomfortable fact that Padre Samuel's kind, open face is showing much of the wear of a life devoted to the needy, but don't think I haven't seen him raise the roof off the church when six hundred peasants are listening.

“You've had a rather busy month,” I begin.

He smiles. “Not as busy as you used to keep me.”

Padre Samuel lives an ascetic life. He has to. Any frivolous embellishments would have been stripped from his chapel long ago, along with the nails that held them in place. In a place this poor, nothing even remotely useful ever sits around very long. I've seen demonstrators block the roads with burning tires, and afterwards, while the cool gray ashes scatter,
campesinos
come with blackened fingers from gathering up the charred steel strands to sell them, after a bit of work, as homemade barbed wire.