<
id="heading_id_48">The Escape</
>
I
“Dainty” Domiciano de la Gándara was in a fix. But he’d recalled an Indian who owed him a favor. Slowing down so as not to arouse suspicion, he walked through the Portuguese Mothers Arcade and out onto the Rich Peruvian’s Plot.
II
Zacarías San José had a gash on his face so everybody called him Scarface Zac. His shack was in an enormous waterlogged stretch of reeds and dunes that was known as the Rich Peruvian’s Plot: turkey buzzards—the auras of the Andean plains and the zopilotes of the Mexican estuaries—pecked the muddy banks. Horses grazed on the banks of waterways. Meanwhile Zacarías was busy fashioning Chiromayo and Chiromeca tribal funeral deities out of mud. The reeds and dunes seemed to float in the early-morning mist. Pigs wallowed in the mudflats behind the shack. The squatting potter wore a pineapple-leaf sombrero and a long shirt, and he was painting chocolate-brown motifs on pitchers and pots. Taciturn under a cloud of flies, he stared at a dead horse on the far side of the reeds. He felt afraid: a buzzard had got into the roof space, battering it with its black wings, an ill omen. Another ill omen: the paint had run—yellow, meaning bile, and black, meaning jail, or death, had dribbled into each other. And now he remembered: last night his chinita put out the fire and found a salamander under the grindstone...The potter moved his brushes methodically, trapped between thought and action.
III
At the back of the shack, the chinita stows her tit in her loose smock and pushes away the child who lies bellowing on the ground. She spanks him. She pulls his ears, lifting him as high as the roof. She stands next to her husband, intent on the brushstrokes he paints on the pot.
“Zac, you’re so quiet!”
“What do you want?”
“I haven’t got a cent.”
“I’ll fire the pots today.”
“And in the meantime?”
Zacarías smiled sarcastically. “Don’t nag! You’re meant to fast in Lent.”
His brush hangs in the air. Colonel Domiciano de la Gándara stands at the entrance to the hut: finger at his lips.
IV
The barefoot Indian scurries over to the little colonel. Tentative words by the tentacular agave: “Zac, will you help me in a tight spot?”
“Boss, no need to ask!”
“There’s a smell of gunpowder in the air. Santos Banderas has turned against me. Can you help?”
“Your wish is my command!”
“How do I get hold of a horse?”
“I’d say there are three ways, chief: buy, borrow, or steal.”
“I don’t have any money and I don’t have any friends. So where do I lasso me one? And there’s a posse after me. So tell me, can you take me to Potrero Negrete by canoe?”
“Let’s go, chief. My canoe’s in the reeds.”
“You know you’re risking your skin, Zac.”
“For what that’s worth, boss!”
V
A dog sniffs around the agave’s tentacles; the little kid stands next to his mother under the palm fronds. He’s whining. He wants some tit. Zacarías waves at his wife to come over. “I’m going with the boss!”
Her voice piped, “Is it a big deal?”
“Looks like it.”
“Remember, if you’re held up, I’m dead broke.”
“What am I supposed to do, baby? You can pawn something.”
“Like the blanket off our bed!”
“Pawn your watch.”
“They won’t give me nothing for a watch with a cracked face!”
Scarface unhooked a nickel pocket watch on a rusty chain. Colonel de la Gándara interjected: “Are you that broke, Zacarías?”
Zac’s chinita sighed. “He blows it all on cards, chief! His stupid bets cleaned us out!”
“I’m sure it’s not worth a boliviano!”
The little colonel dangles the watch on its chain. With a raucous laugh, he flings it into the marshes, by the pigs. “A real friend!”
The chinita nodded meekly. She’s seen where the watch fell. She’d go and retrieve it later. The little colonel took off his ring. “Here. This might help.”
The woman threw herself on the ground. She kissed her savior’s hand.
VI
Scarface went to put his pants on along with his pistol and machete belt. His other half follows after. “What a shitty trick it’s gonna be if that ring’s fake!”
“Yeah, a shitty trick and then some!”
The chinita shows him her hand, making the pinchbeck ring flash. “The stones are shiny. The hockshop might give me enough for a little grub.”
“If you only try one, they might trick you.”
“I’ll try a bunch. If it’s the real deal, it’s got to be worth a hundred pesos—or more.”
“Tell them that if it’s worth anything, it’s worth five hundred.”
“I’ll take it now, right?”
“And if they pay a lot?”
“Yeah, go on hoping!”
VII
From the doorway, the little colonel surveyed the Rich Peruvian’s Plot.
“Hurry.”
The Indian was on his way, with his kid in his arms and his chinita at his side. She lets out a meek sigh. “When will you be back?”
“Who knows? Light a candle to the Virgin of Guadalupe.”
“I’ll light two!”
“Good idea!”
He kissed the child goodbye with a sweep of his mustache and stuck him in his mother’s arms.
VIII
The little colonel and Zacarías walked along the bank of the big waterway to the Soldiers Well. A feeding trough was stuck in the silt. Zacarías pushed it into the water, and they continued upstream beneath a canopy of tall reeds and blossoming lianas.