Esperanza

by Trish J. MacGregor

  She noticed he didn’t wear a wedding ring. Divorced? Widowed? “You don’t look old enough to have a twenty-one-year-old son.”

  He seemed flattered. “Forty-four last month. You have kids? Pets?”

  “No kids yet, no pets now.” But before law school and the FBI, she’d always had pets. Dogs, cats, birds, guinea pigs, gerbils, a regular circus. “What’re you doing in Ecuador?”

  “Vacation. You?”

  “Same.”

  A bus emerged from the fog, smaller, more compact, painted in festive colors, bright red, bold yellow, celery green. Large black letters across the side read: ESPERANZA 13. It didn’t shudder and backfire like the first bus. Piled high on its roof rack were bags, crates, packages. It stopped, the door sighed open, no one got off. But a young man with high cheekbones and a smile filled with teeth as white as a picket fence appeared in the doorway.

  “Esperanza.” His voice echoed through the fog like a cry to arms. “Número trece a Esperanza.”

  As Tess and Ian got up, the dog started barking, tail whipping back and forth, and tore toward the bus. The driver stepped out and threw open his arms, laughing. “Nomada. Caramba, perro.” The Lab leaped up, knocking the driver back onto the steps, and covered the man’s face with wet, sloppy kisses.

  “He’s got friends and a name. Let’s get outta here,” she said.

  “Can’t be too soon for me, Slim.”

  Slim. Yes, this guy intrigued her.

  They walked over to the bus, where Nomad now sat at the top of the steps, panting, and the driver was brushing off his jacket. “Esperanza, right?” Ian asked.

  “Sí, señor. Bienvenidos.” The driver took their tickets and they got on.

  “Is Nomad your dog?” Tess asked.

  “No, no.” He shook his head vigorously, still smiling, and replied in heavily accented English. “Nomad belongs to everyone. He often rides the bus to Esperanza.”

  The bus was completely empty and nicer than she had expected, tourist transportation, clean and spacious, with a restroom, and a TV screen mounted up front. She chose an aisle seat halfway down and slipped her pack under the seat in front of her. Ian claimed a seat across the aisle and Nomad then settled in the aisle between them.

  Through the window, Tess saw the American family huddled together, the mother stabbing her hand toward this bus, the husband pointing at the bus that had pulled up behind them. Beyond the Americans, slouched in the doorway of the bodega, was the drunken cop. Tess wondered if he was looking for her, for an official statement, to detain her. She turned away.

  “Are we it?” Ian asked. “The only people headed for Esperanza?”

  “There’s a second bus behind us. I talked to that family earlier.”

  Ian slid open his window, took a look, pulled his head back in. “Yeah, I did, too. They’re from upstate New York and headed to Esperanza.”

  The driver shouted out their destination again and when no one else came forward, he shut the door and turned to Tess, Ian, and the dog. “Amigos, welcome aboard.”

  “That bus behind us,” Tess said. “Is it going to Esperanza, too?”

  “Yes. But we are the express. My name is Manuel Ortega and I am honored to be your driver between here and Esperanza.” He spoke carefully, as if testing each word in his head first. “And you are . . . ?”

  Tess and Ian introduced themselves.

  “We have much room, and on the screen behind me, we will be showing one of my favorite movies. The Graduate. In the back of the bus you will find a cooler with cold drinks and snacks. No popcorn, I am sorry to say, but I believe I have included some delicious treats for our dog, Nomad.”

  Nomad’s ears twitched at the sound of his name. Manuel laughed and sat down. “And so, amigos—”

  Banging on the door truncated his announcement. Manuel pressed the lever, the door whispered open, and a man lurched up the steps, clutching an old duffel bag. An icy horror swept through Tess: he looked like the dead man’s twin, except he was taller and his braid was mostly gray.

  Nomad lifted his head, a low, feral growl issuing from him, and Manuel shot to his feet and shouted, “Vete, hombre. No hay bienvenido aquí para tí.”

  A heated exchange ensued in Quechua. Nomad was now on his feet, snarling, lips drawn back, exposing his teeth, body hunched and ready to spring. The man gestured wildly at Tess and Ian. “You heard Manuel,” Ian said, moving up the aisle. “Get the hell off the bus.”

  The man’s expression didn’t bode well. Tess had seen it on the faces of other foreigners when dealing with Americans, a kind of, Who the fuck do you think you are?

  The man threw his head back, laughing. “What? A gringo tells me what to do?” He grabbed the front of Ian’s jacket, and even though the Quechuan was much shorter and Ian outweighed him by probably sixty pounds, he jerked Ian forward and spat at him. The glob of spittle rolled down his cheek.

  Ian wrenched free and pushed the guy away. The Quechuan stumbled back, Nomad charged, Tess leaped out of her seat, but already the man was falling out through the doorway, arms pinwheeling for balance, eyes wide with shock. He slammed into the ground and Manuel hurled his bag through the opening and shut the door. A heartbeat later the bus shrieked away into the fog and the gathering darkness.

  Ian gripped the backs of the seats, body swaying with the motion of the bus. The dog seemed frozen, body hunched, fur standing up along his spine. Manuel drove like a man possessed. Tess, feeling shaken, made her way toward Ian and Manuel.

  “What was that about?” she asked Manuel.

  He waved her away. “Not to worry. These crazies are everywhere.”

  “C’mon, that guy wasn’t a crazy. Everything he said and did seemed deliberate. And there was another man earlier, who grabbed my arm and told me I was an intruder and then ended up dead behind the store.”

  Manuel looked horrified. “He touched you, this man?”

  She turned her arm so he could see the bruise.

  “Dios mio,” he whispered, and crossed himself. “Mala sangre.”

  “Bad blood.” She could translate it, but didn’t know what it meant in this context.

  Ian said, “There were other Americans getting on that bus behind us. A family with two kids. Why did he target us?”

  “He is brujo,” Manuel spat. “He said you were not supposed to be on this bus.”

  Go home, gringa. You are an intruder here.

  “Brujo,” Ian murmured. “That means ‘witch,’ doesn’t it?”

  “Sí, señor, but no broomsticks, eh? They are crazy, like I say before.” Manuel now laughed like it was no big deal. Every day here in Ecuador, his laughter said, weirdness happened, it was a way of life. “You must not worry. Nomad and Manuel, we take care of things.”

  Tess pressed him. “Why would he want to take us off the bus?”

  “Quién sabe?” Who knows? Manuel made a dismissive gesture. “Please, watch the movie. Have something to eat and drink. In a little time, we will be in Esperanza.” Then he fiddled with dials on the dashboard and the screen in the back of the closest seat flickered and there was Dustin Hoffman, a young kid in The Graduate, dubbed in Spanish.

  Ian hesitated, then made his way back down the aisle, the black Lab following him. He sank into his seat. Tess continued to the rear, craving foods that were familiar, known, and discovered all of them. Gala apples, containers of yogurt, bags of Fritos, a brick of sharp cheddar. The situation wasn’t just strange. It had gone well beyond that when she was booted from the first bus. She now felt as if she had walked into The Twilight Zone.

  Three

  Hours later. Ian didn’t know how many hours, but Manuel had pulled off the road for a long time because the fog was just too thick to proceed safely.

  The Graduate had ended and his body felt sluggish, thick, welded to the seat, as if he had been onboard for weeks. Blackness pressed up against the windows. The bus’s headlights burned through a lighter fog now, glanced off trees. Here inside, the noise of t
he tires against the road seemed abnormally loud, deepening his concern that they were, including the dog, only four. His ears kept popping, a sure sign they were climbing higher into the mountains. The bus churned on through the darkness.

  Shortly after the movie had started, he had moved across the aisle to sit next to Tess and now she dozed with her head resting against the window, hair falling like a veil across the side of her face. Bacall in repose. Jesus, she was easy on the eyes. He found himself staring at her for long periods of time, his mind a merciful blank.

  When she pressed her stocking feet up against the chair in front of her and yawned, stretching her arms over her head, he looked quickly away from her to the dog, snoozing and snoring on the floor just up the aisle. Tess raised the armrest. He hoped it was an invitation to intimacy. But it might be nothing more than what happened on airplanes sometimes, when you and the stranger next to you acknowledge that the sardine space you share might be improved, however slightly, by raising that armrest. So he probably read too much into it.

  But as their arms brushed, he felt the electrical connection like a series of shocks throughout his body. It was then he knew his first impression was correct. Intimacy, not just more stretching-out space.

  “Where are we?” she asked.

  “Beats me.”

  Tess leaned toward him. “Just curious. But do you get the feeling that something is wrong with this picture?”

  His eyes pinned her, an insect under glass. “Which picture?”

  “The whole damn thing.”

  “I get the impression that nothing here is what it appears to be.”

  “Most of South America feels that way to me. It’s like the myths are alive, reaching out to us, and if we find a story that resonates for us, we get to stick around and explore it.”

  “What do you do?” he asked.

  “You mean, like, for a living?”

  He nodded.

  “I’m . . .” She laughed. “I want to say that I’m a woman who hides out in South America when stuff goes wrong in her life.”

  It sounded like something Bacall would say, he thought, and waited for her to continue.

  “I work for the FBI. I’m tracking a counterfeiter who is supposedly in Tulcán. What about you?”

  “I teach journalism at the University of Minnesota. I also write a weekly column in the Minneapolis Tribune. This week’s column is on empanadas in Ecuador.”

  They cracked up, snickering and snorting like kids who had just heard a fart joke. Ian reached for her hand and turned it over, looking at the ugly bruise. He liked the softness of her skin. “It looks like a neon sign of fingerprints.” He withdrew his hand. “You said the dead guy was covered with blood, Slim. But what’s that mean? Had he been shot? Stabbed? What?”

  She had explained in more detail during the movie. “He looked like he had bled out. Not exactly empanada material, is it?”

  “Why do you use that term? Bled out? How do you know that’s what happened to him? Do you have medical experience?”

  “My mother’s a nurse. When my dad was dying, he bled out—not exactly like the dead man, but similar. I know what it looks like when someone bleeds out, Ian.”

  He heard the defensiveness in her voice. “Sorry, it’s the journalist in me. I seem to have this obsessive need for objective proof. When I suspected my ex was having an affair, when everything pointed to that, I hired this private detective to follow her, take pictures, document it. He did. Pictures don’t lie. I filed for divorce.”

  Divorce. Why did he tell her that? Why divulge it? Well, that was easy. He’d said it to let her know he was single and available.

  “Actually, pictures do lie,” she said. “Any image can be altered. But if we know there’s something really wrong with this picture, how come we’re still on this bus?”

  He tapped his knuckles against the dark, frosted window. “Hey, I don’t have any idea where the hell we are. It’s dark and cold out there. In here, it’s warm, we have food, a restroom. We even have a dog. And the company is great. That’s why we’re still on the bus.” He didn’t know what her quick smile meant.

  “When we get to this town,” she said, “I think we need to consider how to proceed. How I can get to Tulcán. How you can get to the Galápagos.”

  You go your way, I go mine. “Sounds like a good plan.” The thought that they would head in different directions depressed him. He broke eye contact and stared at the snow-filled TV screen.

  Then he astonished himself by looking at her again, touching her chin, turning her head toward him. Their eyes locked, the air crackled with sexuality, and he brought his mouth to hers. The kiss was light, exploratory, a scene from one of the old black-and-white movies that they both loved. But in those movies, he thought, it didn’t go beyond this kiss, not on screen. Ian pulled back.

  “Hey, if your counterfeiter can wait a few days, how about if you take a detour to the Galápagos with me?” he suggested. “Are you allowed to do that?”

  “Allowed?” She seemed to nearly choke on the word. “The last time someone asked me that, I was maybe six years old, allowed to walk here but not there, allowed to do this but not that. Fuck the Bureau. I can do whatever I want to do, whenever I want.”

  “What about the counterfeiter?”

  “Hey, if I don’t find him, so what? The world won’t end. The Bureau won’t collapse. Sure, I’m allowed, I’m a grown-up.”

  When he kissed her again, an image bloomed in his head of the odd angle of the dead man’s feet, out there by the outhouses.

  Inside the greenhouse, Dominica followed the peasant woman beneath the soft lights as she pruned strawberry plants, plucked ripe papayas from the trees, picked weeds from a garden of herbs. She loved the certainty with which the woman’s fingers moved, how she hummed quietly as she worked, patting the rich, black dirt with her hands and talking to the plants, urging them to grow more quickly. But what was she doing alone in the greenhouse at this time of night? Even in the countryside, the locals knew the dangers.

  She contemplated seizing her just to sample the details of who she was, the flavor of small-town rural life. But she felt a disturbing rift in the web that connected the brujos of her tribe, and was compelled to follow it. She thought herself toward the disturbance and it led her to a narrow, twisted road high in the mountains. A lone bus chugged upward through the starlit darkness, the bright glow of its headlights glancing off the sheer faces of the peaks. Puzzled by why a bus would cause any disturbance in the brujo web, she drifted in closer and read the words on the side: ESPERANZA 13. A tourist bus?

  She drifted alongside it, peered in through the dark windows. Except for the driver, it looked empty, yet she sensed three other bodies inside, probably asleep. Dominica hovered over the roof for a moment, moving right along with the bus, then drifted down through the packages and bags strapped to the top, down through the metal and into the twilit interior.

  A man lay on his side, body stretched out across three seats, jacket pulled over him, head resting on his pack. On the other side of the aisle, a woman sprawled across three other seats, long blond hair hanging over the edge, jacket bunched up under her head, arms clutched tightly against her body. Tourists who had caught the last bus out from wherever? But why would these two draw her here?

  Dominica moved in closer to the man, intrigued by the shape his body assumed as he slept—a lightning bolt. It meant that he attracted the unforeseen, that he himself was a lightning rod. She liked that. She also liked that he was as handsome as a movie star. Could she take him? Could Ben? Wouldn’t these two make ideal hosts for her and Ben?

  She considered assuming a tenuous human form, something any brujo could do north of the Río Palo, so that she could follow his breath, the smell of it, back through time. She wouldn’t be able to hold the form very long, but it would provide her with temporary sensory ability—more than what she had as a bruja, yet pitifully short of what physical life offered.

  The problem
was the driver. If she assumed a temporary form, she would be visible to him. And he had a flamethrower tucked nearby. Fire was the preferred weapon against brujos when they were in their phony human forms. Or in their natural forms. It didn’t matter. It could obliterate her. So she satisfied her curiosity by leaning in closer to the man—and suddenly wrenched back, shocked to realize he wasn’t physical. His body was elsewhere, dying, in a coma, at the brink between life and death. You’re a transitional. The first in five centuries.

  Impossible.

  Dominica stared at him, unable to wrap her mind around it, around him. She finally moved closer to the woman and realized that she, too, was a transitional, nearly dead in the physical world. It meant that both were in deep comas in their respective physical bodies, perhaps on life support machines, and what she saw here were their souls, the essence of who they were. Two in one day.

  Would Esperanza accommodate their illusions? Of course. It already had. They looked as solid and physical as any human being and would be seen as such by any people with whom they came into contact. They would believe they were alive, that their encounters with people and everything they experienced and felt were real. Their cell phones would respond to conditions of altitude and weather, just as they did in the physical world. Reception would be spotty, but when their cells had signals, they would be able to send and receive text messages and would be able to leave and receive voice mails, all of it based on their own memories and expectations. They wouldn’t be able to have actual conversations with loved ones, but everything else would be like physical life. They would be able to touch each other, make love, converse, eat and sleep, even dream.

  But how had they found their way here? Five hundred years ago, when Esperanza had been brought into the physical world, it had been closed to transitionals. So who had thrown open the gates? The chasers? If so, why? What did it mean? And if two transitionals had gotten through, then perhaps more would, too, and the feasting days of the distant past would return. Her hope soared at the thought. But caution instantly intruded. It may be a trick, a ploy by the chasers.