When Mountains Walked, page 2
Getting to Peru must be the greatest achievement of her life so far—the only deed, Maggie thought, that had ever flowed from her own true character. She hoped happiness would ensue, of course, though she knew happiness was often too much to expect. This trip was an experiment, to see what resulted from acting purely on the intuitions of one’s heart.
Her friends approved of her leaving Larry; they just thought she should have stopped there, rather than remarrying and running off to South America two weeks after the divorce was finalized. “Far,” and “away,” Maggie had argued, were relative concepts. Far from what? Away from what? In her own mind, she was running toward something. From the point of view of Piedras, it was the United States that would seem distant and bizarre.
Moreover, she loved Carson and he loved her, and she was pretty sure of both these things even though they’d known each other less than a year and had married mostly in order to satisfy Catholic Charities, which would not have allowed them to work together otherwise. Maggie hadn’t revealed this detail to her mother, for whom Carson’s willingness to marry her questionable daughter was his chief merit. Julia Goodwin believed that a wedding band was a woman’s first line of defense, all over the world, beginning in her own house. She’d even pushed for Maggie to take Carson’s name, Miller, but Maggie had refused, claiming she disliked the initials MM, which was true. She told Julia she’d do it the grand old Latin way, “Maggie Goodwin de Miller,” and left it to her mother to recall how good it was that Maggie had never let herself become “Mrs. Larry Fabularo.”
People made big changes all the time, Maggie thought. There would always be voices, inside and out, shouting reasons why one shouldn’t. If this venture didn’t work, she could always go back and make peace with a half-life, like everybody else. Until then, she couldn’t identify any one thing she had to lose. Until then, at the very least, she and Carson were in this together.
She jerked her head back, a reflex, for her window had come within inches of an outcrop. The bus had not ceased to fling its passengers violently about, lurching unpredictably on several tilt-axes at once, as if attempting to dislodge their vital organs. Carson turned away and stuck his long legs into the aisle to avoid crushing his knees against the steel back of the seat ahead of him. Absurd, under these conditions, to wish for him to kiss her. If she wanted a kiss, the back of his neck was available, but then she ran the risk of crushing her lips between Carson’s spine and her own incisors.
She picked out a dark spot on the opposite wall of the canyon, a cave, or maybe just a huge black spot of mildew that had dripped from the roots of the hanging vegetation. This scenery justified everything it had taken to reach it.
“Carson,” she said, turning to him again and finding, happily, that he was facing in her direction. She asked permission to lick a speck of mud off the corner of his eyebrow. “No,” he said, but he was tickled, she could see; he permitted her to rub it off with the ball of her thumb while with the other hand, invisible to the other passengers, she caressed his penis. He clamped her hand between his legs for a few seconds. “Dirty girl,” he said approvingly.
By now both of their clothes were dry. Halfway down, still before you could see the river bottom, the canyon had suddenly turned into a desert. A rain shadow, Maggie explained: the upper slopes took all the moisture. Cactus and mesquite grew here, just like in a western, but there were orchids in the jacaranda trees. Nothing smaller than trees grew from the bare yellowish dirt.
The road here was no less bad, except for being dry. All by itself, the mud on their jeans began cracking off and falling to the floor. Dust came in the windows until Maggie’s teeth were gritty.
She exulted when the bus finally rattled off the wall of the canyon onto the relief of the river flats. She pinched her husband’s biceps. “We’re here. I can’t believe it. I’m totally happy.”
Carson pinched her back, more gently. “Yeah, I know.”
They were entering a mango grove, surely the same one her grandmother had talked about. You could hear the river even in the bus. These crumbling buildings must belong to the hacienda, maybe the same one where Althea and Johnny might have taken shelter after their raft broke up in the whirlpool, back in 1932 or so—her grandmother was bad at years. “Piedras, Arenas, Aguas, Piedras. Yes,” Althea had said. Did Carson remember hearing about the raft that had the live cow tied to the back of it? He did not, even though Maggie was sure she had mentioned it, high among the marvels of her grandparents’ trip. What could have distracted him? The cow’s fate had worried her deeply as a child. Which was worse, she had kept trying to decide: drowning tied up or having your throat slit by someone who had taken care of you all your life? She’d asked her grandparents about it again and again. Sometimes they didn’t remember. Other times they just said whatever came into their heads—that they had sold her to someone before they reached the whirlpool, that they had eaten her somewhere downstream. Even today, with a fervor strong enough it could almost alter the past, Maggie still hoped that the cow had swum to shore.
“Points for spotting our first patient. See that guy on the verandah?” Carson pointed out. The man, about sixty, was staring at the bus. His clothes were so old they had turned the color of river water.
“Why is he our patient? What does he have?”
“Cataracts!”
“I didn’t see them,” Maggie said. “What could we do for him? You can’t operate, right?”
“We’ll get a doctor down here. Line up all the cases, guy comes down for a few days? The surgery’s easy.”
“Great. I’ll write the letters, translate the interviews.” Maggie saw herself in the modest dark skirt she’d brought for formal purposes, persuading the Cajamarca health officer, a fat bureaucrat in aviator sunglasses, to disburse some tiny amount of funds.
“We’ll do it,” Carson promised.
Satisfied, Maggie went back to inspecting the hacienda, which consisted of several buildings and many walls. A trio of ragged children stood in a doorway. They might have been the same children who appeared in all villages. Maggie waved at them. The littlest one balled up a fist and lifted it halfheartedly to her mouth.
This hacienda must have been abandoned by its owner in the agrarian reform, then taken over by local families. Its stuccoed buildings still showed decrepit remains of grace. Through the trees, Maggie glimpsed the chapel where Grandma Althea had looked into the glass eyes of the saint.
Here was an iron bridge, the only means of crossing the river for many days’ travel in either direction.
They crossed, the bus tires loud on dusty planks, and almost immediately passed a low adobe building with a corrugated roof. It stood far from its neighbors, between the road and the river, and was painted a thick, shabby government-green with a blood-red cross. “That’s it,” Carson cried, “that’s our clinic!” Shuttered for years, the building didn’t offer any encouragement.
“Looks pretty well closed,” Maggie observed.
It had been shut down five years ago, due to generalized subversive activity in rural Peru. Maggie had checked carefully, finding a few bombings and assassinations in Cajamarca, the nearest big city, but nothing in the Rosario area. Piedras was remote from everything, including terrorism.
Now most terrorist leaders were in jail, and even the worst parts of the mountains had been officially pacified. After years of internal warfare and lack of foreign investment, the new government couldn’t afford to run its rural health care system, so international organizations had stepped in. Carson and Maggie had a one-year contract with Catholic Charities. If things went well, it would be renewed, but eventually the goal was to replace the gringos with Peruvians.
Now they were arriving in what they would soon call downtown Piedras. On the left side of the road, against the mountains, were more mango groves, and cane fields and corn and some low leafy stuff, probably vegetables. All this must be irrigated from the river. The first houses were half hidden behind a long fence of living cactus and hibiscus plants that were choked with road dust. No one came out to wave. One woman was trudging alongside the road. She stood aside, turning her back and putting her hand over her face against the bus’s passing.
So this was Piedras: two dozen houses crammed between the river and the east wall of the canyon. Call them adobe or mud brick, they were of mud plastered together with mud, most of them unpainted, with corrugated roofs, shaded by mango trees and papaya trees with fruit like giant milky breasts. The stringy road ran in one end of town and out the other along the river’s terrace. Skinny dogs slept curled up in the soft dust at the bottom of potholes. If a truck or the bus came (all year, there would be only one car), the dogs got up leisurely, inches ahead of the oncoming wheels, and sauntered off not looking back. At the center of town was the general store, with a small area of beaten earth in front of it, the main arena for Piedras’s social life. On that first day, as on most days, the store owner had set out a lawn chair and collapsed into it, so relaxed that when Maggie first caught sight of him, she had felt with a little thrill of fear that he must be the local AIDS patient.
But he was only Don Nasir, the Syrian. As Maggie would soon learn, he was a person who did not rise to occasions unless rising was profitable.
The bus shuddered to a halt. So this was the center of town. Maggie spied a man sprawling face-down in the sun next to the door of the general store, inert as death.
Suddenly she felt a gut-sinking certainty that, having confirmed the existence of the canyon, river, hacienda, chapel, and mango grove, she had already done all that was possible for her here. The bus would leave, and she and Carson would stay, and there was nothing for them. No school, no phone, no post office, no movie house. No doctor other than Carson, and Carson was only a physician’s assistant, though he’d worked for twenty years overseas and knew more about wounds and tropical diseases than many M.D.S.
“Oh, God, I’m sorry,” she whispered, almost involuntarily.
“What?” Carson was watching the drunk struggle to his feet, revealing a face half covered with bright fresh blood. He turned. “What did you say?”
“Nothing.”
The passengers were crowding into the aisle all at once, pulling bags and boxes with them. The drunk fell down onto his hands and knees.
“Terrible,” Maggie said.
“He’s the reason we came.” Carson began pushing forward through the struggling passengers. Maggie wondered whether she should follow, translate, but he’d left her with all their hand luggage. Besides, he hadn’t asked for help. Before coming here, he’d requested that Maggie not hover excessively or worry about translating for him. He knew how to make himself understood; he’d done it in Thailand, India, Angola.
The drunk struggled to his feet again and zigzagged toward the bus, each step correcting a severe mistake made by the previous foot. He laughed at the disembarking passengers, who insulted him in return. A short, barrel-shaped, brown, indestructible-looking person. Maggie didn’t like to think this way, but his face looked coarse and corrupted. His lips were purple, turned inside out. His forearms covered with blurring tattoos—one was a tick-tack-toe.
He and Carson met at the bottom of the bus’s stairs. Maggie saw Carson step down onto the ground and raise his right hand tenderly toward the drunk man’s cheek, indicating the bleeding wound. The drunk pulled his head back like a boxer and said something that gave his face an ugly look. Carson gathered a couple of supporters who seemed to be trying to explain to the drunk that he was offering help. At some point the message reached the drunk man’s central nerve ganglion and he made an even uglier face than before. He put out his hand, insolently begging for money.
At this, Maggie slung all of the hand luggage about her body and squeezed forward through the aisle, straps catching, bags banging against the seats.
Carson had given up and gone around the back of the bus to unload their larger bags. The drunk was gripping the handrail at the bus steps, swaying as if a wind were blowing from the opening of the door. Clearly he intended to climb the steps and was only waiting for Maggie to start down them.
She waved at him to get on and he did. His smell was complex, shocking.
The bus driver explained to Maggie that this man was a minero and had spent the weekend drinking in Piedras. He had drunk, and fought, and slept, and his paycheck was gone, and now he wanted a ride back to La Tormentosa, the gold mine eight hours uphill, but he had no money left.
“This man is from Huancayo,” the bus driver concluded. “He is not from our zone.”
“Here you don’t drink like that?”
“Oh, no, here we drink until we crawl home on all fours! Get on,” he said to the drunk. “Sit down, you man without a conscience.”
Maggie thanked the driver and got off. She found Carson standing behind the bus, trying to slow the boy helper, who was flinging their bags and boxes from the roof of the bus directly onto the ground. Three men struggled to lift down the refrigerator, but having completed this task, they disappeared.
The bus drove off, leaving Maggie and Carson standing amidst an immense amount of stuff. Together, they dragged their suitcases and boxes closer to the store. The refrigerator was a small one, but very heavy with its lockable iron straps, so they left it in what, now that the bus had pulled away, had again become the middle of the road.
The man in the lawn chair watched them, still immobile. A boy with a shaven head was fanning him with a folded glossy magazine.
They walked into the store wondering who was responsible. The air smelled edible, thick: motor oil, cheap perfume, dust, rancid flour, sunlight, cigars, and last night’s frying onions. Voices could be heard from the back room. This was a restaurant, too: it had two long tables covered with plastic, with vases of dirty plastic flowers and napkin holders stuffed with sharp triangles of wax paper. A couple of used tumblers remained at the end of one table, with two related chairs pushed back at careless angles. A poster of a fat, garish baby decorated one wall. Carson said it looked like an ad for contraception.
They leaned over the glass counter, peering into the kitchen. It seemed deserted. Under the counter they saw wax matches and cigarettes, sold one by one from an open box. Carson pointed out a tiny brass scale, a miniature of the one used by blindfolded Justice; soon they’d learn that it was used for weighing gold dust. Maggie liked the dried piranha, apparently not for sale; and the loops of PVC joints, faucets, and machetes clipped to nylon ropes, festooned diagonally under the ceiling. Shovels, pickaxes, and hoes leaned in a corner. There were stacked boxes of yellow and blue batteries, hinges and chisels, open sacks of rice and flour and coarse gray salt, and a small shelf of items where the beautification of women commingled with good and bad sorcery: jasmine soap, bleaching cream, Florida water, myrrh, envelopes smelling of sulfur with dollar signs on the front, love soap, lucky soap, soap to get rid of devils.
Carson called out, “Hey! Hola!”
Eventually a woman came out. She was about four feet tall, stout, and her face had a kind expression. She wore a green-and-white-checked pinafore.
Maggie explained in her best voice that this was her husband, a doctor, el Señor Doctor Miller, and that she was his wife and assistant and trainee, Señora Margarita Goodwin de Miller. They were here to open the clinic. They had brought many things with them but would purchase more. Just now they needed transport. Was there a taxi, any kind of vehicle for hire?
“Nasir!” the woman howled, and went back into the kitchen.
At last the man unfolded from his chair. He smiled, showing incisors rimmed in silver. His shiny skin and small mustache reminded Maggie of a card shark; in another life, he would have worn a Panama hat. “Nasir,” he said, offering his hand to Carson, but not to Maggie. She stepped forward and put her own hand out. With some surprise, Nasir took it.
While she repeated their introduction, Nasir smiled and actually rubbed his hands together. At the end he said he had a truck that he would rent to them for fifty soles.
“Fifty!” Maggie said. This was almost twenty dollars. The clinic was a thousand yards away.
“Tell him we expect a discount,” Carson said. “Tell him we’ll be buying all our food from him for a year. And tell him we may need to rent his truck at other times. Maybe, you know, we’ll have some emergency and we’ll have to drive someone up to Cajamarca Hospital in it. Oh, and ask him if we can borrow a crowbar and a hammer.”
“You’re so smart,” she told him. Yesterday, the Cajamarca health officer had announced that there was no longer a key for the Piedras clinic.
“The padlocks are Chinese,” Nasir told them. Taking one from under the counter, he showed where to strike it so that the lock sprang open.
“Descuento,” Maggie reminded him. “On the truck.”
Nasir said he paid to have all of the gasoline trucked here from the city. Surely they appreciated his difficulties.
“Ten soles,” Maggie said, wondering why Nasir didn’t drive the truck to Cajamarca and load it with barrels of fuel.
They agreed on fifteen.
The truck was stoutly chained into its own dark shed, a monster rarely allowed to emerge. When it did, it was so enormous that Maggie almost understood why Nasir had wanted fifty soles. He could have charged five just to look at it.
Its rust-brown cab had a tall oval grill like whale baleen. Its windshield was two dull eyes separated by a piece of metal, shielded by a narrow aluminum eyebrow. The gas cap was a petroleum-soaked rag that converted the whole thing into a rolling bomb. Tent cloth had been draped over part of its back platform, which was wood planks, surfaces white and eroded soft as suede. The planks were so long that Maggie was sure Nasir had stolen them off the bridge, which, she recalled, had been missing several.
