When Mountains Walked, page 23
Carson’s solid shadow was moving up the road, getting ahead. Maggie quickened her pace. She wanted to grab his hand, but in their year and a half together she’d learned, not to respect his wish to be left alone, but to wait until he looked ready to be touched. Defeat made the risk not worth taking. Staring up at the mountains, she tried to find their friendliness again, something to cling to that wasn’t him.
The clinic door was still ajar as she had left it, the transparent bulbs still glaring hellishly in their sockets.
Carson said, “What the hay?” He turned to her. “You left this open?” In Maggie’s head was a sound like a fist on piano keys. “I told you,” she said. “I told you. I tried to tell you. In the store.” Had she? She followed him past the bare shelves and counter, talking all the way. “The chain was locked when I came back. I thought you’d gone out and left the lights on for me. The fridge was gone, I swear! I ran out because I was scared they’d be hiding in the kitchen or the bedroom.” She felt like a liar. Now that she was with Carson, it was obvious that the clinic was sterile, empty.
“You must have left it open. No one knows our combination and there is no other door.”
But there was another door—the realization dawned on both of them at once. They walked swiftly into the kitchen, where everything was undisturbed except for the back door, open wide and unresisting on the night, the river’s roar. Carson found a key still stuck in the outside lock. “Well, now at least we have a key,” Maggie said. Foolishly, they hadn’t asked Don Zoilo to bar the door. They’d thought of it, just as they’d wondered how to chain down the refrigerator. Carson cursed under his breath. “Those punks, those rotten kids next door.”
“Don’t jump to conclusions.”
The bedroom was a tornado’s aftermath. The burglars had slid aside the mattress, thrown all the clothes and bedding onto the floor, and kicked in the bottom of the armario looking for a secret compartment. “They took my hiking boots,” said Carson. Luckily, when the burglars had torn the mosquito net from its hook, they’d tossed it onto the very floorboard where Carson’s pistol and shotgun lay hidden. He stomped on one end to lift the other, took out his weapons, and laid them on the bed. “Don’t,” Maggie said, but he ignored her.
Then he stood on the bed frame to shove his hand between the roof sections. The valuables were still there, duct-taped inside a plastic bag. Carson pulled the package open, strewed traveler’s checks, money, credit cards, passport, plane ticket across the mattress. “Your stuff’s missing,” he cried, then they both remembered that Maggie’s papers were zipped inside her jacket; she’d needed them for Cajamarca. She tossed hers on top of Carson’s, feeling simultaneous grief and elation to see the powers of flight that defined them in this place. “Thank God,” she whispered.
“Yeah, thank God they are so dumb.” What could they want with a refrigerator?
Tonight Carson looked old, standing in the middle of the room, the skin raw and wrinkled around his eyes. Maggie wished he’d shave his beard, so she could see unscathed flesh on his cheeks or upper lip. Clorinda’s idea that he looked like a conquistador was certainly important. Conquistadores were killers. Who wanted to be healed by a killer?
Carson kicked the chair upright, sat down on it to flatten and re-tape their valuables. Meanwhile, Maggie fixed the bed. The sheets were clean enough, despite being on the floor. Good thing she’d mopped before going to Cajamarca. “Who had our key?”
“Not Fortunata,” Carson declared.
Fortunata was just the person Maggie had been suspecting. “So why wasn’t she at the store with everybody else?”
“She wasn’t?”
“I didn’t see her.” Absence from a commotion was unlike their cook. She’d have found her way to Maggie in the crowd. A mad, disagreeable conviction swelled up in Maggie that this theft was Carson’s fault, one way or another. She watched him poisonously as he stood on the bed, pushed their valuables back between the corrugated sections, then stepped down. When he knelt to retie his sneakers, she knew he’d go back outside. “I’m coming,” she announced.
“Anybody else would have locked the door behind them when you came to find me,” Carson said.
“I told you, everything that’s gone was gone already.”
“I’m going out! You’re staying in! Isn’t it obvious! We can’t both go out!” Carson stalked from the room.
“Obvious? Don’t leave me here alone!” This was ridiculous. Awful. Carson kept on walking. The idea of being here by herself, obligated in some way to clean up, made Maggie feel clawing, desperate refusal. She twisted past Carson in the hall, stood in the clinic doorway so he could not get by her. He feinted left once but she matched him, then he raised his palms and took a quick step forward, pushing Maggie backwards so she tripped and fell onto the cement. “Hey!” she said from the floor. “That’s not okay.”
“You asked for it,” said Carson, stepping around her to the stool where he had left his satchel.
Maggie’s cheeks and forehead throbbed hotly. She picked herself up and jumped in front of him again. “You’re not going without me.
“Fuck,” Carson screamed, and shoved both her shoulders with his fingers, trying to knock her down again, but she ducked and rushed him, grabbed him around the waist with both arms. At this he went limp. She refused to let go of him, though she could feel his rage and disgust. She knew he was staring blankly over her head, toward the door. “Say you’re sorry for pushing me down,” she said, feeling quite unworthy of any apology.
“Let go of me,” he said. “I got to go. Got to go back downtown. The police are coming. They want my report. I’m the doctor.”
“You have time to say you’re sorry, Doctor.”
“Okay, sorry. Now will you let go of me?”
She did, and he stood staring at her. He said, “Anything else? Otherwise, I’m going.”
“Are you going to go start accusing people? There are murderers out there, don’t forget. Be careful. You never know who they are.”
Carson’s face was lurid, shadowed. “Don’t lecture me.”
“I want you to talk to Vicente first. He’s our friend. He knows who did it.”
Carson sneered, “He knows? Is he going to solve all our problems?”
“Yes,” Maggie said.
“He’s going to bring Nasir back to life, find our refrigerator, clean the lake, and get profit sharing from the mine?”
“Yes, yes, he is,” shouted Maggie.
Carson began to leave the room, but after two steps he turned and said, “When did you see him?”
“Two days ago, in Cajamarca.”
“He’s following you around?” He came back to her, put his hands on her shoulders, pushed her all the way down the hall until he’d sat her on the bed. “I hope you told Klaus Wechsler about this guy. I don’t like the smell of him at all. You get some rest. You’ve been on the bus all day. I’m just going to go up to town. I’ll talk to Vicente if that’s what you want. But I won’t believe a word he says. Now if you’ll excuse me, the Guardia Civil is coming down from the checkpoint and they need my report. It could take a couple hours. Look, I won’t go off the main road, I promise. I’ll just walk up and back. In between I’ll be at Nasir’s. Sorry I pushed you. But I am also very, very angry.”
“It’s okay.” Maggie’s brain cleared for a moment and she knew what she must ask. “Don’t mention Vicente to the cops?”
Carson swore, regretting having come to this hole, this armpit, Piedras.
“I’ll wait here for you,” Maggie promised. “What if they come back?”
Carson threw himself face-down across the bed to put the shotgun back into its hiding place; then, as he stood up, he pulled the pistol across with him. “On second thought,” he said.
“Don’t take the gun,” Maggie said.
“It’s only a pistol.” Carson shoved it into his belt and pulled his shirt over it, then zipped his jacket partway from the bottom. The pistol was invisible.
“Carson, please!” Maggie didn’t know what she was pleading for. She stood up and hovered behind him, rubbing her hands nervously on her ribs. “If you come back after the lights go out, how will you know it’s me? How will I know it’s you?”
“Same as any other night,” said Carson, smiling now. On second thought, he told her to keep the shotgun handy. Where there was one extra key, there might be two. “Promise you won’t kill me, and I won’t kill you.” He was cheering up. He made her get out the gun and hold it along with him, all of their four hands on it. He turned its nose away from both of them. “Rule Number One of the Gun. Never point it at anyone you don’t intend to kill.” Gently he took his hands away. Its barrel drooped toward the floor, ten times heavier than Maggie could imagine. “Guess you need a little lesson.”
They sat side by side on the bed, and as he showed her the shell and pump and trigger, the crude but foolproof operation, Maggie realized she had entered Carson’s reality at last. Here, there were consequences that mattered and that lasted. Irreversible, tragic time. A gun was like a baby, she thought. It allowed no turning back. She understood why Carson considered guns as the solution for certain types of problems. This shotgun could be very effective.
“Why don’t you try to get some sleep,” he said.
Maggie laughed through her nose at this.
“Nothing’s going to happen, so why not?”
“Wait just a second.” She pulled the gun toward her, feeling its weight, heavy as the heart of a white dwarf star, and slid down under the covers. “Let me just pretend.” She touched the wooden stock, whose smoothness almost made her fall asleep, and put her fingers on the trigger. Carson was telling her to try. She forced her eyes open to aim the gun at the door.
“Move your foot, for God’s sake! No, just shoot right through the blanket.”
“I don’t want to ruin it.” The blanket was her favorite thing in the house, a synthetic Chinese pile job, brown, depicting tigers stalking in tall grass.
When she was dead, for her there would exist no blanket, Carson told her. Now he had to go. She should chain the front door from inside. He’d use the back door, now that he had a key. He’d call her name outside until he heard her answer, and only then come in. If anyone showed up without announcing himself, that was what the gun was for.
Carson carried the pistol as they walked all around the house, locking the front door and checking the window bolts, even lifting the lid of the Jewel of Piedras. Maggie felt glad to have a witness to the fact that the house was empty. Otherwise she might go back on her own perceptions, wondering whether she’d seen something and someone where she’d seen nothing and no one. This was a confusing night in general.
The air sealed inside the house began to throb. Carson rehung the mosquito net and let it float down around her. Blurry through its yellow haze, he promised once more nothing would happen. She wished he could explain to her again (had he ever?) why she had to stay here, but she didn’t ask. “Vicente’s wearing his white cowboy hat tonight,” she reminded him.
At the door of the bedroom Carson looked sardonic, attractive. “Want me to turn off the light?”
“No thanks.”
Seconds later, she heard the back door click. “Okay, bye!” Carson yelled from outside. “Can you hear me?”
“Yes!”
“Okay!”
A lock was not a limit, nor could stony limits hold love out, Maggie muttered as she settled back on a high pile of pillows. She laid the gun on the side of the bed where Carson usually slept. It was almost heavy enough to simulate his weight.
He loved her after all, she thought. He wanted to protect her. This idea was powerful enough to make her get up and fold all of Carson’s clothes and put them back in the armario—a gift to him, which he would not appreciate. Then she lay down again. Sleep, sleep, she thought, but her mind would not sink. It was too hot. She threw off the blanket but then felt exposed. So she got up, turned off the light, returned to bed, repeating aloud his promise: “Nothing’s going to happen.” Her voice traveled from wall to wall, scary in the dark. A bandit could come in, turn on the light, and see her. There were voices inside her head, besides her own and Carson’s: Liliana’s, Julia’s, and Althea’s. Had Althea ever learned to shoot? She had the gaze for it, blue-gray eyes that were scarily steady.
It was the gun that kept Maggie from sleeping. If she trusted Carson, nothing was going to happen, so she didn’t need to sleep with a shotgun, right? What if she rolled over on it and blew her own head off? She clicked the safety back on, dropped the gun into its slot between bed and wall. Her fingers came up covered with sticky cobwebs which she wiped on the bed leg, glad that the darkness hid the egg sacs and sucked-dry fly bodies that accumulated so quickly here. Spiders were friends, she reminded herself, and good luck; they ate mosquitoes, prevented malaria. She shoved the blanket below her feet, tucked her T-shirt around her thighs, and lay waiting in the heat for sleep with her hands folded on her breastbone.
No air moved. She rolled onto her right side. Sweating, covered with sweat, she snaked her upper body out from under the netting and lit a mosquito coil from the box they kept under Carson’s side of the bed. Coils were for nights of love, when the mosquito net was in danger of being damaged or pulled from its hook. The smoke was pesticidal but it reminded her a little of sandalwood, and by now it had developed erotic associations. As soon as the room was sufficiently toxic she stood up, twisted and knotted the mosquito net, and stabbed it onto the ceiling hook.
She lay down again. Nothing was left to rearrange. Why hadn’t she insisted on going out? Carson’s Spanish had improved, but he still missed half of what was said.
She began to hear the river rapid. The dangerous, haunted river, full of whirlpools, currents, drownings, secrets. The river that drew you back if you drank it. Its sound got louder and louder as the burning red tip of the espiral moved slowly, circling inward.
A brushing noise. She thought she heard it. Yes, there it was. Again. Someone sneaking into the house, trying to be quiet, swishing his feet. Barefoot. Soft cold skin on the clinic floor: she could almost feel it on her own soles. Or maybe she’d started falling asleep and the sound of movement was part of another dream.
She’d been trying to ignore the sound for quite a while now.
Then came a sound like a voice, not Carson’s lovely deep rumble, but higher, between a whisper and a squeak, a woman or a child. There had been women and children in the Shining Path, Maggie had read about them. She held her breath and wished her thudding heart would stop interfering. The sound stopped abruptly.
She let her arm hang down between bed and wall, fingers touching the gun. A bullet could hit her in the back right now. At this thought, her shoulder blades snapped shut. She quickly hauled up the gun, pulled it under the blanket, thinking she’d made too much noise. But she couldn’t stop yet. She set the gun down on her belly and fumbled for the safety, gripped the grip, rested the barrel on her knee, and moved her foot aside. In that direction was the door, at that height was a person’s head.
Go ahead, she thought, make my day.
Ten eons passed in uncreated silence before she dared relax her leg, which was slick with sweat, getting stiff. She could move a tiny bit: better for an intruder to think she was shifting in sleep than being unnaturally quiet.
Why had they not sold the refrigerator long ago? How had she let herself get locked into this house? The silence went on and on, deepening, as if she were walking down and down into a swamp whose bottom never leveled off. She grasped her crotch for security, the hard, immutable pubic bone. Holding this in one hand, she slid the gun off her slick belly altogether, sat up, touched her bare feet on the gritty floor; then grabbed the gun again. Clamping it under her arm, she stood up, knees bent and shaking. No sense leaving it behind, or someone would find a way to get around her, grab it, bring a foolish end to her life.
The mosquito spiral had burnt out. There was no light whatsoever in the room. On the way to the door she kicked her own shoe by mistake. The rustling sounds began again. Thieves, startled, or conferring, going through the remaining medicines in the clinic—looking for opiates? How had they gotten inside this time? Maggie must have slept for a second and not heard the snick of the back door lock. Had they been watching outside, waiting for her to be alone, to fall asleep? Vicente had surprised her in the plaza of Cajamarca. Was he waiting for her once more, in the darkness of her own house, to kill her? Her belly flickered.
She crept down the hallway, guided by her fingers against the wall, the gun dragging at her arm. Her ears like a bat’s tried to judge the origin of a noise that wasn’t there.
At least she wouldn’t die in bed, she thought.
A crash came from the kitchen. Maggie ran to the doorway and stood the way Carson said, with her legs apart. She pulled the trigger nervously, once, but it didn’t move. Harder, she thought, both fingers, squeeze. She closed her eyes, pulled as hard as she could.
At the last second she remembered the stove’s fuel and jerked the barrel up.
Blast of noise—she’d never known how loud a gun could be, or how it would swerve and kick her. “Ow!” she shouted, and had the stupid thought that now she had spoken she could be aimed at, killed.
The kitchen was empty.
Empty of life, anyway. A corpse was the definition of stillness. If she’d killed a person, she didn’t want to see the body. It was certainly a man’s. She could imagine herself walking out into the road and begging the first person she met to please remove a cadáver from her kitchen. Yet she could not walk out; she was still locked in. Locked in here with whatever she had done. Carson, save me, she thought. She said “Hey?” but there was no answer. She switched on the light which fizzed loudly and went out. It did this often. Nasir had promised to renew the wiring. Now he never would. She stood for half a minute before taking the few steps back toward the clinic to get the flashlight from its predictable nail. In its beam she walked the hallway like the axis of a drowned submarine. There was the kitchen crime: garbage can on its side, the day’s food scraps strewn across the floor. Rats. They came in through the sink drain. Fortunata failed to burn the garbage every night. Carson had blocked the drain hole outside with steel wool and flattened cans, but rats with strong teeth and muscular legs pushed and chewed through every barrier.
