Blood Lake (8 page)

It's too early in the investigation for the police to be publicly theorizing about possible motives, but one of the articles from last week mentions the NDP candidates' accusations that the dominant interests in North Guayas are conspiring to defraud the people by rigging the prices of basic food essentials. But I do need to catch up with today's news. I'd also like to find out if Los Cuervos Rojos are playing somewhere, which seems likely on a Saturday, but somehow in all the confusion today's news got shredded and used as wrapping paper.

Rumors are walking through the neighborhood on a hundred legs that rice is going up again. Dozens of arms are thrusting through the iron bars, fistfuls of sucres trying to buy at yesterday's prices, and the shelves are emptying fast. They're also running low on sugar and cooking oil, and we ran out of bananas yesterday. No bananas! Our biggest export. Pretty soon we'll have to start chopping up the floor and selling the wood piece by piece. Then we can start on the pillars.

Suzie's folding up one-ounce packets of coarse salt in newspaper and speaking over her shoulder at me. “Lucho Freire's in town. He was asking for you.”

Yes, another Lucho. From now on, just assume that every Lucho in Ecuador is a relative of mine unless otherwise stated.

“Do you know where he is?”

“No. Try the car shop.”

Lucho and his wife Marianita kept me from starving after I ran away from home in a stifling mountain village where the schooling stopped in the sixth grade to go to Cuenca, where they had something called a high school. Lucho stakes his life on the family clunker every week, driving it down to
Guayaquil to score bulk quantities of industrial chemicals, which he then hauls up the winding dusty roads to the family store in Cuenca, high in the Andes, and cuts them up into pint bottles and two-ounce bags, and resells them at a tiny profit. He's originally from the coast, but she's from the mountains. Around here that's considered a mixed marriage.

He's also a chemical engineer who just might be able to tell me something useful about printing inks.

His brothers have a car repair shop a few blocks north of here. I let Antonia stay with her cousins, listening to music and practicing basic coquetry in Spanish. No need to drag her into the middle of another shootout, if I can avoid that.

I walk up the Calle Portete past a scrap metal dealer who's got a fifty-foot crankshaft from a chopped-up cargo freighter lying in the street, past besieged grocery stores where panicking people are hoarding whatever can be baked, boiled, swallowed, rubbed on, or rolled up and smoked, past a fix-it shop with five TVs running at once on a bench on the sidewalk for advertising purposes. The TVs are chained together with heavy gauge steel, and there's a knot of willing victims there watching, transfixed, as if expecting to absorb their daily nourishment from the cool glow of the cathode ray.

My eyes skip along the row of TVs. There's a Venezuelan soap opera about a rich guy's love for a poor girl, an American-made action movie dubbed into Spanish featuring Chuck Norris chasing after a departing airplane on what appears to be a motorcycle, and three screens full of men's faces and mouths. Some of them are the same faces from yesterday, and some are new, like economist Julio Verdín of the Conservative Freedom Party, who claims that the country's problems are economic, and that he is the man to solve them; and Remigio Desatino of the Radical Liberal Party, who's on a TV with reception that's too poor to understand what he is saying.

I don't see Jorge Hernández today. The mainstream media is probably doing its best to ignore the six-foot-tall black Communist whose eyes burn like rough diamonds. And suddenly up pops a man named Hector Gatillo, who has just
been chosen as the Socialist Unity Party candidate from his own hometown, Guayaquil.

The people on the sidewalk cheer.

“That's my man!” says a guy in a light blue T-shirt.

“
¡Ahora sí!
”

The pretty, young newscaster tells us that
licenciado
Gatillo is a social studies teacher at Rolando Aguilera High School, a clean, cash-poor school named after the beloved president we elected when military rule was finally lifted, and who died in a plane crash before he could keep most of his campaign promises.

Licenciado
Gatillo is being slapped on the back, getting hugged by schoolgirls in blue uniforms, and laughing into the camera. He invites us all to his victory Mass later today at the Church of the Sisters of Christ in the
ciudadela
Aguilera. He's shorter than some of his students, with a round, jovial face and medium-light skin.

Then the mike gets near his mouth:

“They said they'd create jobs,” says Gatillo. “They lied.”

“Tell it!” The people on the sidewalk cheer him on.

“They said they'd redistribute the land. They lied!”

“Yeah!”

“Tell those fucking
serranos
!”

“They said they'd build more schools—”

“They lied!” the voices echo his.

“They said they'd control food prices—”

“
They lied!
”

“
¡Eso!
”

“
¡Dilo! ¡Dilo!
”

“Hear that, you snotty
quiteños
? It means don't fuck with Guayaquil!”

Man, the only time a bunch of Americans get this excited around a TV is on Superbowl Sunday or when they're clustered outside the MTV studios in Times Square screaming for the VJs to play the latest video by some vapid boy band. Ooh! We love you, Carson! Woooooooo!

I don't know whether to be proud or frightened.

Suddenly all five TV screens fill with identical red, blue and gold horizontal bars and some canned trumpets blare as the presidential seal takes over the tube.

“Oh, maaaaaan!”

“
¡Chusa!
”

“
¡Hijo de … !
”

A brief formal announcement, and all five channels are now carrying the image of President Pajizo posing stiffly with the tricolor sash of office draped across his chest.

“
Ecuatorianos
,” he begins, amid a chorus of grumbles. “Several months ago, the trans-Andean oil pipeline was ruptured by an earthquake, an act of God, that drove up fuel prices, and with it the prices of some other consumer goods. The country is calm, and peaceful. Now is not the time for agitation—”

“Especially when it's directed against
you
,” someone in the crowd declares.

President Pajizo ignores the man's comment and goes on to list all the public works his government has undertaken, the roads he has built, the bridges.

“Six million five hundred thousand people enjoy the benefits of modern electricity,” says the president. “That's two out of three Ecuadorians.”

Boy, there's an accomplishment. One-third of the country still lives in a permanent blackout, and he's
bragging
about how small that number is.

“We can do no more because of insufficient funds—”

“Where'd it all go? Check his pockets!” another man suggests, but the president refuses to listen.

“—And you people have been quick, like little children, to protest an increase in your electric bills.”

The spin boys cut in with some prepared footage of a couple of stoop-shouldered Indian women in faded ponchos flicking on switches to fire up the single bare bulb that brings a feeble light to their crumbling adobe dwellings.

Pajizo accuses the people of “protesting against nature,” and announces new service cuts, new taxes, new price increases.

You can imagine how well that goes over.

One woman sums it up: “
La misma mierda con distintas moscas
.”

Or, as they say in Queens, Same shit, different flies.

Callused hands grab me, rough men jab me, I get squeezes, hugs and pecks on both cheeks as my cousins Lucho, Efraín and Fernando welcome me back to their plain cinder-block storefront, piled high with used air filters, tailpipes, drive belts and every other oil-soaked thing that can keep a car going long after the odometer has turned over its last zero. I turn down shots of
aguardiente
, because it's two in the freaking afternoon, for crap's sake.

Lucho's brothers reluctantly get back to work fixing a miscegenated jeep with a Datsun 1200 engine in a top-heavy Suzuki body. The engine's got plenty of punch and the body's solid, but the two were joined together by a couple of guys who wipe their asses with straw, according to Efraín's expert testimony, because every week another part falls out. This time it seems there was a bump in the road the size of a raw pea and the universal joint separated from the driveshaft, and the heap barely made it in here with the joint held together with a thick screwdriver and some half-inch hemp.

Lucho Freire is shorter than me, medium dark, with short black hair and a thick black mustache. Before I can ask what he knows about printing inks, he tells me he's come up with a new way of scraping together the difference between hunger and starvation. It's a homemade gas transfer system, and he proudly walks me through the details of his new operation. He buys tanks of cheap supercooled ammonia gas, straight off the boat, hooks them up to the entrance valve of a refitted fifty-five-gallon drum, clamps down the metal lid and releases the deadly gas into the drum, where it dissolves
in water. Then he taps the drain valve and bottles the liquid ammonia-water to sell in Cuenca.

It looks exactly like an illegal moonshine operation, and if the entrance valve ever fails, the whole garage fills with poisonous ammonia gas in about three seconds. But it allows him to undersell his competitors by a few pennies and keep his customers.

“Okay, Lucho, you're used to working with hazardous materials. Take a look at this,” I say, holding out the flimsy pamphlet.

“What is it?”

“It's a forgery. Too crude to be effective on the literati, but somebody wants the faithful masses to rise up against Padre Campos.”

“Padre Campos?” says Lucho, his light tone vanishing. Carefully he begins unfolding the sticky pages as if three fingers of nitroglycerin might drop from them. He reads part of the first page, flips it over to get to the punch line, and declares, “This is the opposite of everything he believes in.”

“Right. But there are some really sheeplike fools out there who just might fall for it. And it doesn't take much to shear some of those sheep.”

“Hey, watch what you say about us,” says Fernando, wiping gritty oil from the jeep's underside off his face and neck with a rag.

“These docile people have no natural defenses against the printed form of lying,” I tell Lucho. “And if someone's trying to strong-arm Father Samuel, I've got a vested interest in finding out who it is and giving them fair warning.”

“Fair warning? You mean like smearing the lintels over their doorposts with goat's blood?”

“No, I keep telling you, that's for the people you want to
protect
.”

Lucho smiles for a second. “Does Padre Samuel have any ideas who might be doing this?”

“He thinks it's someone from outside the
barrio
.”

“That's a mighty big group of suspects.”

“Someone connected on the national level.”

Lucho looks at the typeset words as if each period were a pistol shot aimed at the tender places on his body.

“And what do you want from me, exactly?”

“I'd like to know what you can tell me about the ink and paper.”

He checks his watch. “Nothing. The industrial labs are closed 'til Monday.”

“Don't you know anybody at the university?”

“Sure. The University of Machala, four hours south of here. Listen, Fil, I've got to pick up a
quintal
of rice before it gets too late or we'll end up paying a hundred sucres a pound more for it by tomorrow.”

“Hang on. I'll go with you. Guys, can I borrow the newspaper?”

“Just make sure you leave us the comics and the sports pages, okay?” Fernando shouts over the heavy metal thunder of the pneumatic wrench. I shout back my thanks.

Lucho used to work in a rice-processing plant forty miles upriver, surrounded by the paddies, and he knows more about rice than Uncle Ben and the Minute Rice folks combined. So we get into his pickup and drive a few blocks east towards the waterfront, then take a right and join a stream of like-minded pickups heading south with their cargo beds full of supplies, like an urban cattle drive through the pulsing heart of this marginally modern city. Dozens of these mechanical mules are branded with red-and-white bumper stickers supporting Governor Canino's candidacy for president.

We ride on in rhythm with the herd while I check the papers for the latest on the double murder. But there's nothing more besides a few lines indicating “rebel activity” near the towns of La Trampa, Hacha, and—

“
Holy shit
.”