When Mountains Walked, page 41
She remembered to thank Marisol, who smiled shyly back at her. Now she looked over at Carson, cocooned in his own buzzing oblivion, elbows on his knees. His eyes looked red and weary. She’d have liked to slap him. She’d do anything to save him. “Ever hear of an animal with three toes?” She dangled the foot before him. “Besides a sloth?”
“Soon all wild animals will be extinct,” Carson predicted.
Maggie’s chest ached to hear his sad, didactic tone. She wished he’d shaved off his beard. It came to her that she’d never see the naked chin beneath it.
After eating, she excused herself. Outside, the rain spat down from a dim, roiling sky. Her clothes were still damp, but she had better pee before going to bed. She crawled over the logs at the back of the farmyard, climbed past the brow of a hill. This rank grass hardly needed her pregnant hormones. Beneath it, she recognized the softened edges of Inca terracing, forming an amphitheater behind the cabin.
She wished Vicente would come out and find her, but she knew he wouldn’t, yet. She’d seen him watching her, offhandedly registering her departure. By the set of his head as he’d turned back to the conversation, he’d told her he would not follow.
Here in a small pit in the grass she squatted and pulled down her pants. No one could see her here, not even the sky, which was hidden from itself by a thick cottony layer. She imagined orange muzzle flashes, burping out from the edge of the forest.
Unseen, unknown, she peed on rags and bones scattered and half buried in the grass.
Clambering back over the log wall, she accidentally rested one hand squarely on a large, cold mound of turkey shit. It was green, of a surprising integrity and diameter. Though she tried to wipe it off on the log, her pants, finally the edge of the cabin, she could not. Tears sprang to her eyes. She felt marked, culpable. She was a bit too shaky, that was clear.
Everyone else was still inside, eating soup and talking. She must rest, for the child’s sake. Her kneecaps were so sore underneath that she could barely climb the notched log ladder. The corn attic’s ceiling was too low to stand straight, so she pitched herself across the floor, zipped herself as fast as possible into her sleeping bag, needing its protective halo of goose down, its comforting stale smell. Wrapped in it, she lay listening to the men guffawing downstairs. Everyone was liking the mine director. He’d insisted on carrying the bottle of whiskey from his pickup truck. Bad whiskey, made in Peru, but still. Tonight, judging from the hilarity below, they would polish it off.
Boris came up, saying he did not drink. She was glad. He posted himself in the doorway, leaning against one jamb and hanging his feet outside, over the log ends. He stared back at the trail on which they’d come, his shoulder a gray cutout against the darkening sky.
“Why do stars fall, Doctora?” he asked Maggie. He’d heard that everyone had his or her own star, which fell just before that person was to die. Was this true or just a superstition?
She liked Boris. Sometime yesterday she’d decided that he bore a resemblance to the young Cassius Clay. When had he changed from Boris the delinquent into this sensitive, thinking young man? Horrifying as it was to consider, maybe his father’s death had been necessary to free him.
Now she tried to explain to Boris the enormity of the universe as described by science. Stars didn’t fall, nor belong to anyone. Everything was vaster than a person could imagine. She would have liked to adopt Boris, or send him off to a university, but he didn’t agree with her ideas. When she was done, he told her it was hard to believe that a falling star could be a random piece of dust, not aimed at anything. This contradicted his observations when, in the pallor of many mornings, he’d seen a star lose hold and come streaking down. “Not today,” he made sure to say.
They both fell silent, Maggie wishing she hadn’t claimed to know the reasons for things. It was too late to retract her explanation, but she took comfort, knowing that in their different ways she and Boris were thinking the same sad thoughts.
Past his shoulder’s shadow was the darker gray of the fog. Somewhere inside that fog was the trail they’d come down. Though Boris was watching for police, tonight there was no chance of being reached, now that mist was darkening the trail. Even for Don Sixto, that trail would be impassable in darkness. Tomorrow, the fear could start again, no earlier than noon.
Onward from this cabin, the boy now told her, the trail wound southeast along a terrible hillside, far above the Rio Huacatinti. Except for the ease of falling, once they’d left this clearing the danger was behind them. No soldiers or police could come from ahead, for it took three weeks to get in from the other side. There was a second trail leading to this cabin, starting from where the Inca highway passed a little town farther north, but as soon as the kidnapping party had moved onward, a warning could be sent if soldiers appeared. Every settler family had many children, so one would not be missed. Anyone above the age of seven was familiar with the forest, able to hide and run faster than any soldier, old enough to be trusted with a message. Even a five-year-old settler child could run in an hour a distance that took outsiders half a day. No army unit could ever traverse this forest secretly. Anywhere beyond this cabin, a settlers’ ambush could kill the first patrol.
Don Sixto’s head appeared at the top of the ladder. Then Ignacio’s, then Limbert’s. Ignacio giggled drunkenly as they tied him, leg and wrist, to the logs of one wall. Boris, Don Sixto, and Limbert would share a blanket, sleeping jammed together at the doorway. Carson flung his sleeping bag between Limbert and Maggie, and said, “Move over.” Tipsy, he stumbled on Limbert’s feet, then zipped the bag up over his head. “G’night,” he said from inside.
Vicente loomed over them and said, “I must guard the outer wall. Move over.”
Maggie closed her eyes, which were filling with tears of gratitude, and rolled sideways, making room. Vicente settled himself between her and the wall. Pretending to be a good wife, in case anyone was noticing, she turned toward Carson and pressed her nose against his sleeping bag. His arm was like cement. Now she felt Vicente turning too, quietly pressing his chest against her back, his loins against her buttocks. She pressed back, felt his penis harden. She came two seconds later, quietly, ecstatically, breathing through her open mouth.
She knew Vicente knew. Surely Carson hadn’t noticed. She felt sorry for Ignacio, chained alone while the other six lay touching one another. Limbert fell asleep first, snoring a little. The sound of everyone else’s listening to him, wishing for the boy’s protection, was a kind of buzz in the room, softening and deepening the heavy, stiff noise of the rain.
They slept into the morning. As the men began to stir, Maggie struggled, unable to open her eyes or bring herself to the surface. For one long moment she couldn’t tell which man was which.
…
Even under this galvanized roof, Maggie wondered how corn ever dried here. All night and into the morning it rained, and this was considered the tail end of the dry season. In the cabin the air was swollen, full of humidity that condensed, coating every solid object, greasing skin. Roosevelt laughed at Maggie’s complaints. This was not rain! It was only a sign of rain. When it proposed to rain, it would rain in earnest. The true rains were coming soon, in a few days or weeks, and then everyone would be trapped, unable to cross the raging streams. All trails would be drowned, waist-deep. The mountainsides would collapse under their own weight, leaving bare cliffs like teeth exposed in the greenery.
They ate corn kernels fried with pork rinds. At ten the clouds suddenly parted, and shafts of sun strafed the clearing. More dark clouds were pressing from the west, though, so departure remained unwise. Tomorrow without fail. No one was looking forward to it.
The sun was Maggie’s chance to get out of the cabin. She told the men she wanted a bath, as they’d had yesterday. She would go down to the river.
“You could be seen from the high trail,” Don Sixto told her.
The high trail, the Inca highway, was a hairline in the trees, miles across the valley, but Maggie remembered how easily Luz and Vicente had spotted Liliana’s black Jeep. She promised to take a circuitous path, hiding herself among the rocks, and then bathe in the north-south stream instead of the Yatiri. “I deeply need a bath,” she said, hoping to scare Don Sixto a little with the specter of female filth.
“Believe her, Sixto.” Carson raised his eyebrows at her.
“Lo autorizo,” said Vicente nonchalantly.
…
Silence under the loud roar from the purest stream water falling over limestone.
Maggie’s legs were so sore she could hardly slither down the bank. Behind a huge log she’d found her own still place, a pool where the mountain stream wouldn’t carry her off or crush her, and where the people in the cabin could not see her, nor anyone who might be looking with binoculars. The log had fallen sideways; its diameter was as tall as an ordinary house. It held up an even more enormous, tilting slab of rock, hiding her completely except from the eyeless cliff face directly across the stream.
Even so, she bathed modestly, in a T-shirt and underwear, luxuriating for one instant in the frigid water combing down over the rocks, already filtered through mats of moss, from trees and slopes and rocks no human being had ever seen. Looking at her belly, she thought how deceptive were appearances, for it was as flat as ever.
She had not said anything to anyone. She had not had a moment of privacy with anyone, let alone Vicente. Carson, preoccupied, had not touched her, hadn’t noticed her hot, hard breasts.
Her white legs were like grubs underwater, her toenails rimmed with mud. With the water so cold, the rocks of the streambed hurt her feet. Looking back, she could see the cabin’s smoke falling to the ground in the thick, wet air. The trail they’d all walked in on was invisible in fog.
She’d loved Vicente’s stories about this homestead. The place where he’d slept in a ruin, where he’d heard the sweet whistle of the bird and had known that the earth was a seamless, living presence. He’d never been the same since. So he’d told her during their sun-blasted afternoons at the shepherd’s hut. It was the same for Maggie: ever since arriving here, she’d felt the forest invading her, dissolving her ever more deeply into itself, herself, Vicente.
Vicente’s bird was supernatural, surely. Since entering this forest, not a single bird had spoken. Everything felt suppressed and stifled by the fog. Perhaps even the birds knew enough to be afraid, to still their songs right now.
Waiting for him beside the stream, she knew he was bound to come to her. She and Vicente were one, not only in flesh. He would come out to her, and honor all his promises.
She pressed her mind against him. Now, come out to me, come now. She looked up, hearing his footsteps swishing in the rank, wet grass above the bank.
He was there, above her, sliding down to be beside her, just as he’d done on their first day together, by another river. She wanted to embrace him, but a curious, resonant shyness hovered between them, as if their magnetic poles had been reversed. She stood up, instead, to greet him. He’d come with his pistol. She could see it hanging inside his canvas jacket.
“I’m pregnant,” she told him right away.
His head snapped back. “Estas segura?” Are you sure?
“Yes. It’s yours.”
“Are you sure?”
“I took a test.”
He looked sideways at the ground. He lifted his hand toward her shoulder, and let it fall again. There were tears in his black eyes. He made a small sound, Mmh, then said, “Our life has changed.”
“I’m prepared to leave Carson,” she told him.
He laughed. “But am I?”
The enormous, tilted rock sank a little lower over both their heads.
“Coward,” she said, and he turned his back on her.
Looking up, over the edge of the bank, she could see the tips of the messy forest trees and the smoke from the cabin spreading a little before being pressed down toward the earth. There was the trail into which they would fling themselves tomorrow. It started as a log across the stream, rose from the bank as a swath of cow-trampled mud leading to another ragged hole in the vegetation on the opposite bank. The door to the elf world, the door of no return.
Vicente shoved the toes of his rubber boots under the gravel of the stream, releasing a cough of reddish silt into the water. “Don’t you see where we are? You’re crazy, a crazy gringa. Why did you come here to tell me a thing like this?”
“I thought you’d want to know.” Maggie swayed on her feet beside him. They were two separate columns of flesh and thought, the space between them glowing, frigid, ionized.
Vicente kicked the silt again. Yes, claro, he did want to know. “But why didn’t you tell me before we left? You understand why we are here? That we cannot stop?”
“Yes. That’s why I came.” She could have listed a thousand reasons why she was standing beside Vicente, beginning with rain, wind, and sun. “When was I supposed to tell you? In front of everyone?”
“You are en estado, you cannot continue,” Vicente announced.
“Why?”
“With child?” he said. “You want both to die? Forgive me, but how do you know it is ours?”
Based on feeling, mutual feeling and knowing, based on promises and intentions. “We wanted it, remember? You said! Pues, after that I stopped protecting myself.”
“I never thought a gringa would maneuver in such a way.” He turned his back on her and crossed his arms, and from that position he said No. No, no, no and no. That was it. Ya. He had decided. Maggie was not thinking clearly.
“Maneuver! How dare you use that word!”
“Did you not make love with your husband?”
“Yes, but . . .”
There was a need for cruelty now, he said, still turned away from her. Delay was death, so he had no time to sit pondering this and that alternative. If she did not leave voluntarily, he would drive her away like one who throws stones at a dog to make it return home. How could she stay here? She needed other tests. She’d been drinking the same water as all the girls of Piedras, no? What if something was wrong with the baby?
“I sent my hair off in the mail. Look, I’ll go out, I’ll wait for you in town.”
Some town full of police? She’d bait their trap. “No gracias.”
“Then I’m staying. I don’t care if we all die. I’m staying.”
No. He was the father of Lady Maggy. He had a woman in El Mirador, another in Cajamarca—and that one also had a child of his. Two in fact. His destiny as a guerrilla had made it impossible to marry. Now destiny had caught him again. He was beginning to understand his life. He’d die in prison, or from a bullet, and so he must say the same to Maggie now as he’d said to all the others. You must understand me, I cannot be a father, I have a greater destiny.
She heard him breathing, hard, through his nose. “You lie,” she said, experimentally. Sounding just like a woman to herself, she told him she hated his destiny. She didn’t believe him when he spoke about his destiny. Destiny did not exist in advance. Destiny was adopted by each person. It was a series of decisions. Vicente did not answer, so she went on experimenting. “You’re lying. I know you want to live. You want to be with me. I want to be with you. We could live here, in the forest.” She liked the idea, but still he didn’t answer. “Or somewhere else, like France, the United States, Bolivia. We could hide in Bolivia, or anywhere, anywhere you want to go. I love you.”
“Bolivia!” Vicente sneered. Their destinies had parted. She could not stay with the fugitives, and that was all. She must return home to the United States.
“Don’t insult me. Home? My home is not the United States.”
“Well, then, where is it?”
“In you,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry I was married.” She might have fallen had he not caught her. Into his ear she murmured crazy things, begging him to let her wait for him in Cajamarca, at Liliana and Klaus’s.
“Loca, I never believed that you were married,” he said, kissing her neck. “Never, jamás. Why are you trembling?”
She was, her thighs and jawbone shivering uncontrollably, though not from cold.
Even Vicente’s strength was not enough to resist the earth’s whole gravity, which was pulling Maggie to the ground. He sank down with her. “Perdón,” he said. The hollow in his throat was golden, throbbing.
“Hey, asshole!” Carson’s voice.
Vicente slid his arm out from under Maggie’s shoulders.
Carson stood up on the bank, his legs and arms jerking. “Hey! Asshole!” He had the flat gray pistol in his hand. Maggie tried to rise, thinking to run up the bank and stop him from shooting Vicente, but Vicente pressed her to the ground behind him.
Carson said, “What are you doing with my wife?”
He doesn’t care to know what I am doing, Maggie thought, the last strand of her love for Carson breaking.
“Don’t move,” Vicente told her. He stood up slowly, addressing Carson. “Would you like to shoot me? Go ahead and shoot me, gringo. You don’t care. Claro, the sound will bring the police directly to us.”
“I want to kill you,” said Carson, and he pulled the top half of the gun back, to cock it. After the first shot, Maggie knew, he’d have nine more in succession. “Carson!” she cried. “Don’t!” This only caused him to pull the trigger prematurely, shooting up into the cliff’s face. The shot reverberated everywhere, circling the valley, rolling up to the clouds and back again, like a flock of birds. A fistful of shattered limestone sifted down into the water.
“Estamos fritos,” Vicente said.
“Shit,” said Carson. “Shit, goddamit, mierda!”
“You guys had better leave,” she told them.
…
No longer bothering to hide herself, Maggie wandered back toward the cabin alone. The two men had run ahead, to begin the urgent process of departure. Halfway across the field of slaughtered, rotting trees, she traipsed into the ruin. Its ceiling had fallen, but three of its walls were intact, six feet high with the regularly spaced keyhole openings that marked it as an Inca structure. Some openings were windows, others had been closed with narrow stones to form handy storage niches. The keyhole design resisted earthquakes. So Johnny Baines had told her, and Vicente too.
