When Mountains Walked, page 24
Maggie was glad she hadn’t killed anything, even a rat.
She swept the beam around the room and saw where the blast had hit the wall. There was a foot-wide, brown conchoidal fracture. The hole looked deep enough that with only a little digging she could surely have pushed the tip of her finger through to the outside. No holes in the roof, luckily, no ricochet. Lucky: she could have been blinded or killed. Shaking, she put the safety back on. How could she stay in this house now?
In the bedroom, she put on her jeans with no underwear and tucked in the huge faded T-shirt she used for a nightgown. A boxing-match promotion, it had been given to her in a bar one afternoon. She remembered vividly the day she’d gotten it, sitting on a stool at the Shamrock, drinking beers with Michelle Savitsky.
15
THE CLOUDS had disappeared. Everything was bathed in moonlight the color of mercury. A perfect night for a manhunt. The only invisible things were the blackish-purple flowers on the jimsonweed beside the road, so close to the color of midnight that she could barely see them even in daytime.
All three of the neighbors’ dogs were sleeping in the flower bed’s softer, turned dirt. No wonder Maggie’s flowers always died. The dogs looked like chiseled, oval stones, moonlight gleaming on their tight small bodies. Bobby, the biggest, opened one eye, then closed it again, curling himself more tightly, nose to tail. The river roared on, on, on. She walked onto the road, her steps crunching. She hoped that the big chain on the outside bolt would be a sufficient sign to Carson that she’d gone out. If she didn’t leave the road, she was sure to meet him.
Far ahead, the line of eucalyptus above Nasir’s retaining wall fluttered silver in the light. Maggie recalled Nasir’s one tale of moral self-doubt, how he’d stolen the seedlings from the government and they’d ruined the soil of that field. Now from under the trees a small pumping shadow emerged, running in her direction. A person, a man, but not Carson. She panicked—whoever this was, he must not see her. She ran thirty feet back to the door she never should have opened. Locked, locked! She fumbled with the numbers, tumblers, almost visible, not quite, cylinders and fingers the same ash gray. She slammed herself inside, bolted the door, and stood aside, thinking of Carson’s shotgun far off in the bedroom.
“Doña Maggie?” The warm, thin voice, by now she knew it well. “Soy Vicente. Estás bien?”
Her back flat against the wall, she said his name. Yes, she was all right. Again she slid the bolt and went out. Foolish, Liliana would say.
No hat, after all, but she should have recognized his silhouette, compact as a boy’s. From up close she hadn’t known how familiar the aura of his body already was to her, its power and weight far out of proportion to its size. This was why Quechuas called themselves Runakuna, stone people, because of their density, she thought.
“Qué te pasó?” Vicente said. What happened to you? He took both her hands, saying he’d heard gunshots, tiros, and had rushed here all the way from town. Was she okay?
Just one tiro, Maggie told him, at a rat that wasn’t there. She wanted to fall into his arms, yet the touch of his hands was simultaneously disturbing, too intimate. At her first move of withdrawal he pulled his hands back nervously, as if she’d been going to slap their backs.
They sat next to each other on the stone wall, facing the road. One by one, the dogs stood up and trotted down off the road, as if offended by human self-consciousness.
The dark mass of scrub on the other side sucked up the night’s luminosity so completely that it seemed to be watching them.
Vicente teased her that, indoors, it was considered more polite to attack rats with a broom. What had her mother taught her?
“Let’s not begin with what my mother thinks,” Maggie said.
“You can tranquilize yourself,” Vicente said. “The bandits are far away.” They’d chosen the full moon to run all night. Nor would they stop at dawn. Two hundred grams of gold was no burden, and coca gave them strength. In three days they could be anywhere. He began peeling an orange from Nasir’s grove, where several trees overhung the road. “Quieres?”
She took half. “Did you see Carson?”
“Yes. I promised him I’d find your refrigerator.” It had to be very near, hidden under a bush or a pile of straw, waiting for the right truck driver to pass by. Piedrasinos had stolen it, taking advantage of Carson’s absence and the commotion in town.
“Poor Nasir.” Maggie bit her orange half and saliva rushed painfully into her mouth. The fruit was juicy, but too sour.
“He is at peace,” said Vicente, “leaving us with all the problems.” Nasir was laid out now, in the back room of his store, with candles at his head and feet. Most of Piedras was in with him, except Carson, who sat in the restaurant drinking gaseosas with the Guardia Civil.
“I asked him not to mention you,” said Maggie, answering Vicente’s tone of blame.
“So he said.”
“Anything else I should know?”
“I asked your husband not to file a denuncia of the robbery. They’d start the investigation by beating Fortunata. Who knows where it will end.” Tomorrow, Vicente repeated, he and his friends would find the stolen objects. The loot could not be far away. He already suspected who had stolen it.
Maggie could well imagine what Vicente’s gag order had sounded like to Carson. “So who did it? Who had our key?”
“You will laugh.”
“Not Fortunata, I hope.” The cook had often proposed putting the refrigerator to use, to store cold drinks for sale to passing traffic. Customers who didn’t feel well could ask to be examined by the Doctor.
“No, no. You are paying her too well.” And Vicente recited a proverb about appreciating the teat one is given to suck upon. Fortunata was among the few who did.
“Did Carson agree not to file charges?”
“Quizás,” said Vicente. Maybe. He couldn’t tell.
“I’ll talk to him myself.” Maggie slid down from the wall.
Vicente said he’d walk her to the store, but excuse himself before coming in sight of the door. He must not let the police see him, especially tonight.
As they walked up the road together, Maggie felt safety on her left side where he was, but also on the right and at the bottom of her belly, because Vicente was there. A radio seemed far from necessary. Liliana was afraid of remote places, that was clear. As Maggie relaxed, a plan formed in her mind. She’d go to Cajamarca, promise Julia ten days at Christmas. Even that was a concession. Carson’s idea was not to leave Peru until the end of their first year of work. They’d arranged a week off in January, with a government-service nurse filling in, but January was summer and they’d planned to visit the Pacific beaches.
She almost didn’t want to look at Vicente, then did, after all. He’d gotten a haircut in Cajamarca from some incompetent barber who’d left him looking like an eighth-grader, with a cowlick that made his half-inch bangs grow straight up from his forehead. His profile was completely Indian, though, his cheekbones cruel and sentimental as a tourist carving.
They stopped at Nasir’s grove to pull two more fruits from the lowest branch. The Incas would have executed them for stealing, but they agreed that in this case the owner would not mind. “So you have a gun?” Vicente said.
“My husband has two,” Maggie told him.
“Good,” he said, “Very good.” She waited for more, the reason for all this goodness, but Vicente didn’t say it.
She walked into the store knowing he watched her from the outer darkness. At the center of the room, under the bare light bulb, Carson and the two policemen sat like actors in a play. Even Maggie knew they should never sit so in the light, not on a night like this. Anyone could shoot them from outside and run off without being seen.
Someone had thrown buckets of water across the places where Nasir had bled. The brick-colored rinse had flooded out the front door, off the step, and into the packed dirt outside, which had sucked it up. Maggie wondered whether the clinic floor had ever been bathed in blood. The three men waved at her curtly without welcome, so she walked past them to the glass counter where the boy helper had fallen asleep, his head on his crossed arms. When had he returned? Why had Albita permitted him to stay? He was not her son; she’d bought him from a family uphill, to replace her boy who’d drowned.
Coin-sized bald spots gleamed in his buzz cut. Ringworm—it must have been the reason they’d shaved him in the first place. When he lifted his head, she bought from him a yellow Inka Kola and her favorite soft, sweet yeast bread, covered with large grains of sugar. Flies walked on these all day but they’d never yet made her ill. She gobbled the roll in three bites, paid for another, and walked with it over to the table.
“Buenos noches.” She pulled up a chair. “Permiso?” The two policemen accepted before Carson could demur. “St, claro, buenas noches, Señora,” they said. One was young, with a tender Indian face. The other, slightly older, had enough Spanish blood that he should have shaved four times a day, to prevent grizzle, which of course he didn’t. This older man’s face had a hooded, shut-down look around the eyes, and Maggie judged him best avoided.
Carson put his hand on her thigh while she explained, in Spanish, that she’d been frightened, all alone, on such a night, and had decided to come here. At the end she said to Carson, in English, “Can we talk for one second?”
“I’m finishing the medical report.” He pointed out the coat of arms of Peru atop the official report pages, long pulpy sheets filled with the older man’s handwriting, dense, florid, and full of interlocking curlicues. Glancing at it, Maggie deciphered the word “desventura,” misadventure.
“Please,” she insisted. “It’s really important.” She excused them both from the policemen. They turned their chairs away and she leaned on Carson’s shoulder, whispering into the whorl of his left ear, “Ease-play, on’t-day omplain-kay about-yay the idge-fray.”
Carson pushed her back from him. “They say it’s a civil denuncia and can’t be filed till Monday. I think they want a payoff. So on’t-day orry-way, ove-lay. I’m sorry you got scared. Want to hang out here till I’m done?”
Just then the older cop cleared his throat.
“Go pay your respects,” Carson said. “Catch you later.”
Behind the counter, to the left of the kitchen door, the storeroom was full of gently shifting yellow light and murmuring sounds. Maggie excused herself with meek propriety and went to see.
Nasir was laid out under a blanket, on a wide bier made of wooden crates. At each corner was a thick, flat river stone with half a dozen candles on it, melting into pools, radiating the guttering golden light that had defeated the glare from the ceiling’s single bulb. The room smelled of kerosene from several lanterns that also had been placed on top of sacks and boxes. A surprising number of people sat on chairs or stood against the wall. The atmosphere was hushed, charged. Men gripped unlabeled bottles of cloudy, bluish cane liquor; their faces were already greasy with sorrow and drink. Doña Albita shared a chair with another woman, shoulder to shoulder, leaning on each other. In a little while she noticed Maggie standing in the door, and she waved, inviting her to come in, sit down. When Maggie hesitated, Doña Albita waved more insistently, then got up and came toward Maggie. Her face was soaked and shattered, large tears rolling down her finely wrinkled cheeks. No, no, Maggie wanted to say, don’t take care of me, but instead she gave both hands to Doña Albita, the same hands she’d given to Vicente half an hour before, and offered whatever lame consolations came into her head until Albita collapsed against her, sobbing, “Era tan bueno ” he was so good. Maggie helped her to sit down again. Albita crunched her black shawl against her face, and her friend put both arms around her shoulders.
Someone gave Maggie a glass of cane liquor and she took it, raised it toward the dead man as she saw others do, and drank it all at once. She went to lean against the wall on the women’s side of the room. Women refilled her glass, touched her shoulders. She thought of Liliana saying, “We women need each other.” These women embraced her in their presence. Perhaps the way they stood tightly at her sides, accepting her, was part of Vicente’s effect upon her life. They explained that this velorio would last two days and then would come the burial. Maggie thought that if she had not been married to Carson, she might have stood there that whole time.
She was about to ask for Fortunata when all at once she heard chairs scraping and the policemen’s voices gruffly bidding goodbye. “Hasta mañana,” she whispered to the women. On the way out she paused at Nasir’s feet and crossed herself, hoping to be understood by something, someone. Anything, anyone.
Carson put his arm around the small of her back and they walked out into the night together. Facing the same stretch of road, it seemed to Maggie that she’d walked it a thousand times today. Carson scolded her a little, saying she’d make a bad detective. She should be more suspicious of Vicente’s offer to bring the refrigerator back. Was Maggie becoming his mouthpiece? They argued about Vicente all the way home, and even, for a while, in bed afterward, until Carson announced self-righteously that he had to get some sleep, rolled on his side, and promptly began snoring. Maggie lay awake talking to him out loud, hoping to disturb his rest, but also regretting the many other loving and important things she could have told him.
…
Eleven A.M. The clinic was stale, sealed, hot as the inside of a clay bread oven. Still Carson slept, the sharp wing of his shoulder blade turned toward Maggie. She crawled up his damp back wondering if she really wanted to make love or whether she was trying to acquire concessions, forgiveness, reassurance. Yes, she decided when Carson curled miserably away, muttering that he wanted to be left alone for half an hour.
She got up, put on her ragged kimono, and stood over him insisting that she had many more things to tell him. Walking into the kitchen, she was glad to see her bullet hole first and by herself. Not as bad as it had seemed last night: it had ruined a lot of Carson’s plaster, but the hole was hardly wider than her two spread palms and fingers. She felt almost proud of it. A few handfuls of mud would fill it in; Fortunata must know how.
She sat on the small, hard chair waiting for the water to boil, feeling too rough and weary to bustle around the clinic flinging windows open and assessing damages and loss. From where she sat she could see the heavy cable securing the front door’s inside bolts. Was the empty clinic waiting for the smell of an alcohol swab and the voice of a patient enumerating his complaints, as other rooms in other houses waited for the rattle of plates and children’s laughter? Perhaps this building would prefer for a peasant family to come and live in it instead.
She lifted the kettle’s lid. Bubbles the size of seed pearls clung to its bottom, detaching themselves slowly, one by one. The surface was just beginning to rumple when the raw electrocuting sound of the front door buzzer sounded, like an alarm inside a prison. She ran down the hall to wake up Carson, but he already had his pants on and was raking a comb through his hair, ducking before the mirror. “I got it,” he said. She dressed quickly, pulling on her filthy jeans, stiff from last night and yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that.
It was neither Vicente nor the cook but a woman and a child. Fouryear-old Wilmer’s face was swollen and miserable. Obligingly he coughed his wet, rattling cough, then lost control of it. His mother said many people had fallen ill from the cold last Tuesday night, a night Maggie and Carson remembered as slightly cooler, almost tolerable. Carson sat Wilmer on the table, made him say “Ah,” and questioned the mother in Spanish that was halting but so competent that Maggie intervened only twice before she smelled the kettle burning dry. On her return, Carson was unlocking the aluminum trunk to offer aspirin, and advice about boiled liquids in quantity. Their lack of patients had a silver lining: the reserve stock of medications was intact.
“Upper respiratory infection (viral),” Maggie noted in the log.
“Tienen bultos afuera,” the mother said, you have packages outside. There sat two black fiberglass sacks of the kind used for harvesting potatoes. One held the refrigerator and the other the medicines, all jumbled and dirty and with only the cough syrup missing. Carson said he felt sorry for anyone who’d drunk all ten bottles, especially since the syrup was not opiated. They dragged the sacks by the necks indoors, threw away the ruined vaccines and snake antidote, and shoved the refrigerator under the counter.
“What was it you had to say to me?” Carson wanted to know.
Maggie invited him into the kitchen. She apologized for the hole, explained how Liliana and the rats had scared her. In the clear light of morning she felt much more sanguine, only a little hung over emotionally. After she’d finished telling him everything (leaving out only her attraction to Vicente, which was distracting and irrelevant, even to herself), Carson declared this was one of those times when you began to wonder.
“Wonder what?” Maggie asked.
“Whether you should leave a place,” he said.
At this moment Fortunata rang the buzzer, having come to announce that they were expected at Nasir’s. “Array!” What happened! She’d been kept home all last night by her five-year-old, who had Wilmer’s flu. He’d coughed to the point of throwing up. “Why didn’t you bring him?” Maggie asked, hurt, despite knowing that last night she could easily have gunned them down. Oh, only a cold, said Fortunata; her child was strong and would get better by himself. Carson, who had never cared whether Fortunata brought her children to visit the clinic or not, rummaged out some aspirin from the filthy sack. “Don’t worry,” the cook said, pocketing the pills. “You’ll see, Vicente will occupy himself with your problema.”
They locked the clinic and walked to the wake together. Mourning had resumed, or never stopped; the road was blocked by staggering, drunken men and women. Doña Albita had opened the blue fifty-gallon drums of cañazo in the storeroom and was siphoning them out without charge into any empty bottle, even waiting mouths. This liquor was made in Piedras Baja, at a farm where a donkey ceaselessly turned a wheel that crushed the cane, and the resulting juice spilled into a drum set over a fire, evaporating into a system of car radiators. The resulting brew combined the oiliness of kerosene, the smell of an electrical fire, and pubic funk. It delivered a numbing occipital blow.
