Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1
The Rosario was the deepest canyon in the world. Four
thousand meters, twice as deep as the Grand, cut by a
fast, north-flowing river of the same name which
eventually turned eastward to braid itself into the
Amazon. A chasm full of sky, too vast to think about.
Even those times when Maggie was actually standing on
the Rosario's top rim, she could never quite
withstand the sight of it. She always had the same
unbidden thought: This cannot be real. So much void,
full of so much hazy hanging light; and the opposite
wall striped like a tiger (Cretaceous limestones,
according to her grandfather, who had been the first
to map them); and past it, the black horizon; and
past even that, the rain forest, invisible on the
back slopes but sending up sweet white puffs of cloud
in the afternoons. The rain forest, full of ruins and
bones and gold but uninhabited, stretched endlessly,
the local people said, or anyway as far as the
Atlantic Ocean.
At the bottom of all this was Piedras, barely
clinging to the slim gravelly terraces of the Rosario
River, which was cutting all too quickly through soft
rock, rushing to attain the level of the sea. In
Piedras, where Maggie and her husband, Carson, were
living, all was airless heat and flies and bushes
coated in dust. Somehow it never seemed to have
sufficient reason for existing, let alone the
importance it had possessed in Maggie's imagination
ever since she was a child.
Back in February, when she and Carson had first
arrived, Maggie had known immediately that she would
never get used to the bus ride. Itwas near the end
of the rainy season, and the road from Cajamarca had
only recently been reopened after a section fell off
during a torrential December rain. Going over the
canyon's western lip, the bus had tilted like a
roller coaster, and her stomach had dropped away.
She could not see the bottom of the canyon,
just the road like a limp string flung impossibly far
across the dark shoulders of the mountains. The
canyon was vast, unexpected, a hole in the ground
bigger than any idea of it could ever be. Then its
east wall rose up, suddenly contradicting everything,
a frozen angry-looking wave of black stone. Distant
details were clear, grainy as in an excellent
photograph, so that Maggie felt she could have picked
out a fly on a cliff face.
"Cliff tombs," she said to
Carson, "waterfalls!" Her grandmother Althea had told
stories of the strange things hidden in the canyon's
folded cliffs. Tombs, waterfalls where you could take
a shower. Maggie could almost feel a rope of frigid
water shattering against her own skull, driving out
every thought; and how it would feel, then, to step
out onto the bare, bright, burning trail again:
clothing drying instantly, skin staying cool.
Carson was making a guess that the canyon
sides were about twelve miles apart.
Twelve miles, Maggie thought. How far was
that? How did Carson think he knew?
She started shivering.
A cold wind whistled through the cracked
window as the bus began threading its way down
through standing rocks that looked like a demolished,
or an about to be constructed, Inca fortress, of the
type she and Carson had visited last week in the
southern part of the country. They'd taken a
honeymoon in Cuzco and Machu Picchu before settling
down to a year of serious work, reopening Piedras's
medical clinic.
"So then don't look," Carson said as Maggie
gripped his thigh. But she couldn't stop. The chasm
drew her in; its emptiness exerted a suction. In
comparison, the road was too narrow. For the first
time she realized what defined the edge of any
mountain road. Nothing. Nothing was fine on its own
terms. That was exactly what was wrong with it.
The road here was slimy white mud with big
rocks in it and turns without protection, all causing
the driver to manhandle the wheel, hand over hand;
and to anticipate in the application of the brakes.
The bus was overloaded and topheavy, too, partly
because of Maggie and Carson's gear tied to a rack on
the roof. They had purchased a small refrigerator in
Cajamarca and had it reinforced with iron straps. If
only this refrigerator could be sacrificed, she
thought, they'd all have a chance to survive.
The road grew worse as it went down, mostly
because the mud got deeper. Though it hadn't rained
in a week, none of the mud had hardened. It did
change from white to red, and brown, and yellow. Some
places were as badly churned as if an army had
recently retreated along them, full of ruts and
hoofprints and the tracks of the heavy equipment that
had gone down to repair the bad section, which was
still ahead. Steering and braking would have been
difficult under the best of circumstances, Maggie
thought, but now the driver seemed desperate,
wrestling with the wheel. Likely this bus had things
wrong with it, such as thin brake shoes, loose tie
rods. Often she felt the wheels leave several feet of
muddy skid. What if another vehicle came at them
around these blind, unprotected curves? Fortunately,
the bus was going downward; because of this, it
stayed next to the mountain's body instead of the
edge. The road was barely wider than one lane, so the
bus would push any opponent off, but Maggie found
little comfort in that idea. One day she'd have to
leave, and it would be her turn on the outside.
Carson pointed out a wooden cross on the
shoulder. "Third World warning sign," he joked.
"Comforting, aren't they?" Maggie said
sarcastically. Grateful for an excuse to talk, she
told him how, when she and her sister were little, in
Mexico and in Colombia, they'd ritually crossed
themselves each time they'd passed a roadside
memorial, despite not being Catholic.
"The maids taught you how," guessed Carson.
"You know me well." Their Colombian maid,
Gloria, had sat in the middle of the back seat,
telling stories so enthralling that Maggie and Sonia
had never needed games, nor pinched each other.
The bus heaved up to the point of a curve
where a thicket of crosses surrounded a hutch of raw
cement. With her right hand, Maggie performed a
series of quick figure eights, fingertips swooping
just short of her lips. "Bad spots are a lot of
work," she said, though she couldn't remember any
place as bad as this one. A whole bus must have gone
off the edge here.
Carson leaned forward to peer at Maggie from
the front. She was doing the crossbar backwards, he
said. "That's Greek Orthodox or something." He ought
to know: he had been brought up Catholic. Gently he
corrected her, brushing his fingertips across her
breasts. Left to right, opening her heart like a
door - or closing it, depending on which side she
imagined the hinges.
She crossed herself Carson's way at the next
bend, kissing her fingertips at the finish, then let
her hand fall into her lap. Despite the dire
reminder, she was glad to see the crosses. They
returned her to herself. It was curious too, she
thought, how Carson saw them in reference to safe,
North American highway warning signs.
He'd grown up in Baton Rouge, in the same
house all his life. When he spoke, she could feel his
childhood inside him, a solid grid of hamburger
stands, summer lawns, blacktopped highways sticky in
the sun.
Maggie Goodwin had been born in Mexico. She'd lived
there until she was five, and then the family moved
to Colombia. She was ten and her sister Sonia
thirteen when their father's shoe factory had failed
unexpectedly. Calvin Goodwin's Colombian partner had
suggested to the authorities that they might inspect
the books, enforce certain laws that protected
against imperialism. Calvin's capital became the
fine. By coincidence, Sonia had caught typhoid in the
same month when Maggie's mother had begun firing the
servants, packing some things, selling others. Her
parents were euphemistic about what had happened, so
Maggie first blamed her older sister and then her
mother, Julia, for their departure. Julia kept
insisting she was overjoyed to go back to the United
States. She'd had it with the chaos, envy, and
dishonesty that ruled the rest of the world.
Then Maggie had known that her mother was
betraying herself, not to speak of everybody else in
the family. Julia had been born in Bengal, and
brought up in all the most unstable places, Peru,
Turkey, Chile, India, and Afghanistan, where her
father, a seismologist, had studied the world's most
grievous faults. Maggie's grandmother Althea could
always draw a protest from Julia by joking that
Julia's dark hair and fathomless eyes came from all
the Indian sun Althea had absorbed while pregnant.
Maggie's features were almost the same.
Maggie liked to think of India as an
explanation for her own thin ankles, and the way her
skin turned yellowish when she was tired, and for the
tiny hook at the tip of her nose, comparable to a
drop of water beginning to form under a faucet. Julia
wouldn't hear it, any of it. Her father, Johnny
Baines, had always attributed Julia's coloration to a
Cherokee great-grandmother of his. To the end of his
life, he'd called Julia his Indian princess, Princess
Oh-What-a-Part-o-Me.
Princess indeed: as soon as she'd reached
ninth grade, Julia asked to leave Ecuador, where
Johnny was inspecting the Cotopaxi volcano, and go to
a Swiss boarding school instead. Not long afterward,
arthritis and financial stress put an end to Johnny's
geological explorations. Despite his reputation for
eccentric thinking (he was determined to produce a
theory predicting earthquakes), he'd gotten a job
lecturing at Harvard, based on his work measuring
tension in stable rocks.
Maggie was the opposite of her mother. She'd
always been glad of her dark hair and eyes, jealous
that her parents had given Sonia a name that was the
same in Spanish. She blamed the United States for
causing her to be a foreigner in every place she'd
ever lived, including, eventually, itself.
As for her father, Calvin Goodwin, Maggie had
always understood how hard he had fought to escape
from Connecticut. Through all her childhood, he'd
seemed a foreigner in the family, paler than his wife
and daughters, the red-haired gringo Julia married.
They'd seen him as if from a distance, slurping his
dinner cold long after the girls and their mother had
eaten, alone in the dark kitchen, late home from his
factory. He'd sit worrying over his papers on a
Sunday in his study, his presence defining the
farthest room in every house. She'd been shocked to
realize that it was Calvin who had held them in
particular places on the surface of the earth; when
he'd lost his grip, the rest must lose theirs, too.
He'd been happiest in Colombia, but in the end he'd
been lucky to get a job in his family's hardware
distribution business, outside Bridgeport. His snake-
proof boots grew mold in the closet.
Around noon, the bus reached the bad section of road:
even softer mud than elsewhere, nothing but a few
tons of new dirt dug out of the hillside and pushed
together. Carson said, "Maggie, look." There was the
old road, a small landslide spilling down for about a
hundred yards before it reached the edge of a cliff
and disappeared.
To Maggie's relief, the bus got stuck here,
in an awesome slough where some kind of quicksand
lurked at the bottom of a puddle twenty yards long.
The driver and his helper donned rubber boots and
first tried tossing some cabbage-sized rocks under
the wheels. Soon they had to ask all of the men to
get out and push. Maggie would have liked to help,
but she was told to sit inside with the other women.
At least, she thought, there was little
danger of the men's pushing the bus too far. She
watched as her new husband took off his hiking boots
and rolled up his jeans as far as he could, revealing
calves as pale as fish and covered with long, dark,
fine French hairs. She told him she was worried that
he'd cut his foot on something sharp.
"Pfft," said Carson, stepping into calf-deep,
murky water.
Despite twenty men's heaving, the bus rocked
only slightly. The driver's boy stuck his head in to
announce that the women must get out, too, in order
to lighten the burden. Maggie declined his offer to
be carried piggyback across the puddle, but the other
two women accepted. She took off her shoes and waded
through the opaque brown water. The bottom was silky,
safe, the water cold.
Oh, it was grand to stand on solid ground
again. Soon the bus was high and dry, a matter of
rocks and ropes and grunting. Several men celebrated,
sipping from a flat bottle. Carson had a slug, then
came up to where Maggie stood on a tussock of muddy
alpine grass that seemed to have been chewed down by
sheep.
"What was it?" she wanted to know.
"Anisette. Pure sugar. It's coated all my
teeth." He wiped one hand across his beard. His
forehead already bore a streak of war paint. "Whew,
that was rough. You okay? You look kind of pale."
"I wish I had an excuse to walk the rest of
the way."
"Want to go home?"
He meant it, she saw. "No."
"Good!"
Maggie didn't speak to him again until they
had sat down and the bus had begun to roll. Then she
said, in a carefully quiet tone, "I can't wait to get
to Piedras. It's just that I hate being trapped
inside this box. I'd rather be in a truck I could
jump out of."
"If we die, we die, that's my attitude,"
Carson said.
"If?" Maggie said. She returned to gazing out
the window.
How dare he think he belonged here more than
she did! She had no home, unless it was ahead of her.
Even if she hated the road, she already loved the
canyon. Its immensity drew her into a focused,
particular joy, so that she felt she had discovered
it herself. In fact, she had rights over it, at least
compared to Carson. Her uncle had been conceived in
Piedras, according to an intricate and perhaps
unreliable story of her grandmother's. That was why,
when she and Carson had been searching for a place to
do health work together, and the name of Piedras had
scrolled down the computer screen in white letters on
royal blue, Maggie had stood up and looked for an
atlas, then phoned her grandmother. First thing the
next morning, she'd called up Catholic Charities,
begging them to modify the job to accommodate two
North Americans: a physician's assistant and an
administrator-trainee. They agreed, perhaps because
the post had gone begging for so long, or because
Maggie had insisted, as her grandmother Althea was
famous for doing, that two could live on the salary
of one.
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 his 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 and walls
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, money 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.
The bridge had not existed when Althea was
here, Maggie was sure of that.
Copyright (c) 2000 by Kate Wheeler. Reprinted by
permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.
