The valley opened up around us. Enormous terraces that had been built by the Incas stretched up mountainsides. Small villages huddled in the distance. At overlooks, a group of women with long braids sat on the gravel, selling weavings and jewelry. We didn’t stop to sample their wares.
We crossed the river on a temporary bridge that had been built to replace the one the water had washed away. It felt solid enough under the tires, but slick enough to freak me out. And the swollen water raced and roiled beneath us. I’d never seen rapids like that. Or heard them. The sound made me feel like I could come out of my skin.
The taxi dropped us off at the train station, near the ticket booth. Behind us, the river roared. Shops sold rain ponchos and corn and coffee.
Dad picked up tickets that someone had already bought and paid for. He steered us down the sidewalk, toward the gate to the train.
I swung my backpack over my shoulder and leaned close. “You want to tell me about Juan? He seemed scared.”
“He has a reason to be.”
Shootings. People missing. He sure did have a damned good reason. “Some people would say that bringing your teenager into this mess is dumb and dangerous.”
“Are you calling me dumb?”
“No.”
“Are you complaining?”
“No. I don’t know.”
He handed me my ticket. “I didn’t have anyone to leave you with.”
“I could’ve stayed with Amber.”
“Not with her mother sick.”
“So you’re saying I’d be a burden? Or that they couldn’t keep me for long? Because they would totally never say that.” They might think it, though. And it would probably be true. And then my only choice would be foster care, where I would rot because no healthy family would ever take me in. Hell, maybe I’d end up in one of those conspiracy theory internment camps.
He sighed. “I didn’t want to leave you.”
“Because if you did, I’d have never seen you again,” I said.
“It’s selfish. I know.”
“It’s human.”
He shifted the weight of his pack on his shoulders. Winced.
“Hand it over.” I reached out.
He made a face, but he gave it to me. “Anyway, I wanted you to see all this.”
“Broadening my education?”
“Ha ha. When else are you gonna have the opportunity to come here, Leah?”
There was something he wasn’t telling me. We both knew it. I let it go for now, mostly because we’d reached the gate and the train was boarding and if we didn’t move our butts, we were going to be left behind.
I threw the packs onto a luggage rack inside the door and got a load of the train car. Great big windows not only where I expected them, but also in the roof. Seats in groups of four, two on each side with tables in between. Which meant some people would be facing forward for the ride and some would be facing backward.
Like us, apparently. I settled in the seat beside Dad. There was nobody across the table from us. The doors closed. The brakes hissed and the car began to move. Canned announcements floated from speakers, first in Spanish, then English.
We left the town behind. Waiters dressed in smart outfits took drink orders and brought banana chips and chocolate. People made friends with their seatmates. Played cards.
Dad nudged my shoulder and pointed. Through the windows in the roof at the peaks of the Andes, wisps of clouds circling them like crowns. And through the side windows, at the river rapids surging over boulders and the bejeweled green of the rainforest. All of it so beautiful. I wished I could feel the beauty more.
The last of the blue faded from the sky. We arrived at Machu Picchu Station in the dark. The sound of the river and a crush of people welcomed us. The town of Aguas Caliente was built on a hill. We wove our way up, around market stalls and boticas, and found the hotel. Someone had made us a reservation for a room on the second floor. It was small and white, with two double beds. Even inside, the air felt damp and thick.
No notes on the floor.
We ate dinner at a restaurant at the bottom of the hill, on the other side of the train tracks. Dad ordered a kind of hot toddy made with Pisco and black tea and local honey and lemon zest. He let me have one, too. First time for everything.
A man grabbed a chair from an empty table and pulled it up to ours. Juan. In a fresh pair of jeans, hiking boots, and the same red thermal jacket. He ran a hand through his thick hair. He didn’t smile.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“Taking a roundabout way to meet you.”
“All this mystery,” Dad said.
Juan met his gaze. “I wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t necessary.”
“No, I guess you wouldn’t.”
I didn’t understand. I didn’t like it. I wouldn’t stand it. “What’s going on?”
“There’s people after a friend of your father’s and mine.”
“The shaman,” I said.
“Yes. The people are still looking for him.” He looked at my father. “You know what happened? With the guns?”
Dad nodded.
Our waiter stopped by. Juan ordered a bottle of Inka Kola. He waited until the waiter got well out of earshot before he continued in a lowered voice.
“Our friend is organizing resistance.”
I glanced from him to Dad and back again. “Against the mining company?”
The corner of Juan’s mouth quirked up. “What makes you think it’s a company?”
“I read some stuff.” Maybe the wrong stuff.
“The mining is illegal. It’s not a company. It’s a type of—how you say—mafia. The government has laws against this, but it happens anyway. The miners use industrial techniques. Machines. They pollute the water. Destroy the land. We are fighting for the land. And for what grows on the land. Do you know what that is?”
I shook my head.
Juan clasped his hands. “What if I told you there could be a cure in the rainforest that could help people like your father?”
I blinked at him. Remembered a movie in Dad’s collection. Something about finding a cure for cancer in the jungle.
“We are hiking tomorrow,” he said. “You will see. Six o’clock, yes?”
The waiter arrived with the bottle of Kola. Juan laid some coins on the table and took the bottle with him. He crossed the tracks and climbed the steps to the opposite sidewalk, weaving among the members of a band busy unpacking instruments. How anybody could play music at a time like this was completely beyond me. But then, maybe those people had normal lives.
Dad drained the last of his drink. He kept his eyes on the musicians.
I watched him for a minute. Wondered what he was thinking. “Is that guy for real?”
“Never been anything but.”
“And your shaman friend?”
“If your mother and I had asked anyone to be your godparents, it would’ve been him and his wife.”
They’d had another life. With friends and experiences. Before I came along. Before everything got so screwed up. This felt worse than Juan at the airport. Like I was a stranger in my own family.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. Which made me feel like I could scream. Not that he noticed. He just pointed to the band, who struck up some folk tune about someone named Pachamama.
“The earth mother,” Dad said.
That startled me so much I forgot to yell. “So they’re, like, hippies?”
That earned a laugh. He ruffled my hair.
He slept like the dead. I thought those exact words. I spent half the night mourning that I’d thought them, and the other half curled up in the fetal position like a candidate for a nervous breakdown.
Six in the morning arrived along with a not-so-Continental breakfast and a chill in the air. We met Juan in the dark on the street. I thought we’d be heading out immediately, but instead we went straight to a tiny corner botica whose w
alls were lined with toys and candy. A twenty-something girl in a pink sweater yawned behind the counter.
Juan told her how bad Dad felt. Described his symptoms. She sold us painkillers that would have required a doctor visit and a prescription back home. Dad bought a bottle of water, too, and swallowed his first dose as we walked down the street, past the soccer pitch and under the gray watchful eye of a shrouded mountain.
The restaurants in the main plaza were full of tourists trying to be the first to visit Machu Picchu. The smell of eggs and bread and coffee carried to me. My stomach had a ton to say about that. Juan steered us toward a particular place, one with tables out on the walk. Gestured for us to sit at an already occupied table. As in occupied by an old man with thick, black hair in long-sleeved red flannel over a black t-shirt, jeans, and sandals.
Dad hugged the guy the way he’d hugged Juan at the airport, only tighter.
“It’s okay.” The old man patted my father’s back.
Dad pulled back a bit. Shook his head. “No, it’s not.”
“It will be.”
With that, my father calmed. He sat, which I took as my cue. “Leah,” he said, “this is Daveed.”
It took me a minute to figure he meant David, only pronounced differently. I needed coffee. David insisted on a cup of coca tea for everyone instead. And a quick breakfast.
He looked at me. No, he looked through me. Into me. It made me squirm in my seat. He seemed satisfied with whatever he saw.
Dad had brought us to this place in search of his friend the shaman. This guy with the magic eyes had to be him.
“Does she know?” the shaman asked my father.
Dad hesitated. I could tell he wanted to tell me the thing he’d been hiding, but didn’t really have a handle on how.
I didn’t care about how. I cared about now. It’d been him and me against the world for so long. Before I knew it, it would just be me against the world. I didn’t want to think about that. I had no choice. Neither did he.
Choice being the operative word. What would happen to me after he died? He had no friends at home left to leave me with. No one had stuck around. Okay, fine. Or not fine. Whatever.
“We’re almost broke,” Dad said.
I touched his arm. “I figured. You spent what was left of our money to get here. The tickets cost a fortune.”
“Not as much as you think,” he said.
I started to say there was no discount site that could make much of a difference. Stopped myself. “You bought one way tickets.”
He didn’t say yes. He didn’t deny it.
“Even mine?”
He held my gaze, steady. “I wanted to leave you with a little money for after I’m gone. It’s better I’m here than at home. My memories are here.”
“But not mine.”
“Leah.” Just my name. Nothing else.
I thought about how I’d seen all the memories in the house before he brought up the crazy idea of coming here. Had I known I’d never see the house again? Had I been storing up all those scenes in my mind and my heart so I could replay them later? Hell, no. I’d been acting like any girl whose dad could kick it any minute. I could imagine anything I wanted. Anytime. Anywhere.
He was my memory.
“You were going to leave me here?” I asked.
“With David.”
My voice rose with each word. “With guns and danger?”
Dad lifted a hand. Pressed it down. “Lower your voice.”
Not fair. I laid my head in my hands. Only for a second. I looked at Juan. “Last night you said there’s a cure for my dad.”
“For people like your dad. It’s too late for him.”
“What kind of shitty cure is it if it’s too late?”
“The kind that researchers are investigating. They’re testing plants in the jungle. Making progress. If the miners with machines come in, the plants could be lost. We could all be lost.”
Saving them—us—that was worth braving guns and danger. It wouldn’t be enough. Not for my father. Could it be enough for Amber’s mom? For the rest of the world? Maybe.
Dad read my thoughts on my face. Not with shaman eyes, with dad eyes. “If you want, David has offered to teach you what he knows about the plants. About how to make medicine.”
As bribes went, that counted for the worst and the best rolled into one. I could help. I could make a difference. I could give people hope that didn’t stink of lies.
I’d left most of my luggage, including some of my best clothes, in a hotel room in Cusco. I’d never see Amber again. At least not for a very long time. Unless, of course, they had WiFi in the jungle. I’d never gotten to hang out with Vince.
I was only sixteen.
I’d never been only sixteen.
I looked at David. “Where were we supposed to go hiking today?”
“To my village,” he said. “It’s a long way.”
“My dad’s coming with us.” Not a question. A demand.
David nodded. “We’ll go slow. As long as it takes. I’ll carry him if I have to.”
I shook. All over. I didn’t think I’d ever stop.
We set off from Aguas Caliente as the sun rose. The dawn lit the faces of the people we passed on the road. Buses honked at us as their tires kicked up plumes of dust. They headed up the mountain to the lost city.
We took a different road.
Introduction to “The Red-Stained Wishing Tree”
Eric Stocklassa lives in Germany in a “cramped apartment filled with tomes of forbidden knowledge whose bizarre secrets would drive any sensible person to madness.” I’m pleased to note that “The Red-Stained Wishing Tree” marks Eric’s first professional sale.
About this strong story, he says, “Writing it felt like sitting in [this guy]’s passenger seat.” Reading it feels that way too.
The Red-Stained Wishing Tree
Eric Stocklassa
Sam usually loved driving, but the storm was mean. The black sky was bleeding from several open wounds, gushing on the ash-gray hills, the pathetic excuse for a road and Sam’s windshield in opaque crimson. Lightning ripped up from the charged earth, to the suffering sky. Bright flashes of light, ear-splitting thunder and an echoing moan, as the shivering sky suffered another wound.
A hollow bumping noise told Sam that the passenger in his trunk had finally woken up. It was time to find a dry spot.
This was the Inbetween. People assumed that the notches on a ruler were evenly spaced, but they weren’t. There were wrinkles in reality. Hidden pockets where skeletons danced and swarms of intelligent rats gnawed the flesh of unwary wanderers. Between two yellow-green cornfields in Iowa, blood rained from the sky.
The cave was alight from glowing veins of ore. Walking around his silver Mercedes the copper smell of blood grabbed his nostrils and held on tight. Had Sam been human, he would have had to fight a gag reflex by now. Good thing Sam was not. Not really anyway.
***
The taste of cigarettes had almost faded from his mouth, so he lighted up again. It didn’t give him a buzz. Never had. It was one of his bastions of normalcy. A way he could fit into a society that had the ability and need to eat, sleep and drink once in a while.
Sucking in the blue smoke, he opened the trunk.
He expected a hand to shoot out and grab him. Instead he got complaints.
“Your driving is shitty, you know that?”
The boy was fourteen at the most. He already had tattoos on his arms and hands. The fingers on his hand proclaimed F-U-C-K and O-F-F-!.
“And what the fuck is in this bag? That thing has been poking me for over an hour.”
“Bones,” he said.
Naturally the kid opened the ancient brown burlap sack. Even in the dim-light, the skull shone brightly. It was acid-cleaned and well-preserved. Sam had personally waxed every single bone. The kid picked it up and examined it from all sides.
“Was that someone you killed?”
“My father,”
said Sam. He finished his cigarette and stumped it out. “And yes.”
He took the skull from the boy’s hands and gently placed it back into the bag.
“To business then?” said the boy.
Sam nodded and gestured to a wall.
“That’s where you are going to shoot me?”
“I don’t need guns.”
Sam took off his right glove revealing the black nothingness underneath. It was absence of light, far below the freezing point in temperature and still vaguely hand-shaped.
He could see the kid’s breathing accelerate. He gave him credit. That was normally the point where they screamed.
“There isn’t any hope, is there?”
Sam shook his head.
There were things in the world people did not get better from. There was AIDS, stage four leukemia, there were bullets to the head, plane crashes and napalm. And death warrants from the Powers That Be. In other words, him.
“Up against the wall and I make it quick.”
The boy shook his head. Slowly.
“I’m fine where I am.”
“Very well.”
Sam pushed his hand on the boy’s chest and it sunk right in. There were gaps in every piece of matter, even diamonds. Between the air molecules that people breathed was nothingness, an invisible abyss. That was what most of Sam’s body was made of and that was the reason why he could slowly wrap his fingers around the boy’s still beating heart, The truth was, the glass was always going to be half-empty, no matter how much water you poured into it.
“It’s OK anyway,” said Sam. “I was lying when I said I was going to make it quick.”
The boy’s body cringed. He was holding his breath now.
“This is a special occasion, you see. It’s the big one-triple-zero.”
The boy was thrashing now, hitting Sam’s arm. He stopped when he realized what Sam held on to. He held on to Sam’s coat instead.
Fiction River: Fantasy Adrift Page 4
