Blood Lake Read Online Free

uncomfortably wealthy, a culpable accessory to their misery, with perhaps a dash of survivor’s guilt thrown in, too.
    â€œIt’s been really bad since the earthquake hit a few months ago,” says my cousin Azucena, who is called Suzie. “It cracked the trans-Andean oil pipeline. Ninety thousand people were cut off from civilization.”
    â€œLucky them,” I say.
    We pull back onto the road, cut in front of a few buses and survive long enough to swing onto the Avenida Quito, heading for the
barrio
Centro Cívico, the proud proletarian stronghold and indestructible pocket of resistance where so many of my family live and breed.
    The drab pastel walls of the city are covered with so many faded layers of overlapping posters and paint it all moves like a living skin, melting orange-and-yellow campaign posters hawking candidates with Spanish and Lebanese names for every office in the land, from alderman’s dog walker to the supreme office of
el presidente
himself, all tattooed with red-and-black verses expressing the radical opinions of the voiceless hotheads. Then a stretch of whitewash announces a truce between the warring factions to make way for a hand-painted mural of undisputed national martyrs and revolutionary heroes: Jesus, Rumiñahui, Espejo, Alfaro, Che, and a huge painting of Juanito Tres Ojos jumping through a glass window towards me, blood and all.
    â€œFilomenita, what’s the matter?” asks Suzie. Heads turns towards me.
    â€œOh, I’ll be all right. It’s just that flight must have really turned my stomach.”
    Antonia excitedly describes the air pocket in her unique hybrid of Anglo-Spanish as we stop at a light with the huge face glaring down at me.
    All I can say is, “That’s new.”
    Suzie agrees, then her daughter Charito asks, “Why is he called Juanito Tres Ojos?”
    â€œI don’t know,” says Suzie. “That’s your generation, Filomena.”
    So I explain that some say it’s because he was so sensitive to peripheral movement it seemed as if he had a third eye in the back of his head that allowed him to see police and soldiers sneaking up on him, and others say that he had the symbolic third eye of the true visionary, who will return one day to lead us to a better future. I don’t tell her that some say it’s from his preferred method of killing his enemies, by blowing a hole in the back of the unfortunate bastard’s head.
    Our charted course takes us past an ice cream wagon and nine voices scream out conflicting commands to Guillermo, who pulls a maneuver that would get my driver’s license
burned
in New York City, bringing the pickup to a halt in front of the rusty metal wagon. The kids effervesce over the rim of the pickup and converge on the vendor, euphoria personified, as he rings the rack of thick brass bells for them. Oh, to be that age again, where one hundred sucres buys the flavor of your choice and a brief taste of paradise.
    â€œWhat flavor do you want?” asks my uncle Lucho, pointing Antonia at the long list of flavors advertised in cracked paint on rotting plywood. She says, “Chocolate.”
    But the vendor’s out of chocolate. He’s also out of mint, cherry, and yerba buena (now
there’s
a flavor you can’t get in the U.S.), so Antonia settles for
babaco
. The man opens the top of the cart and starts digging out some off-white icing.
    Then a scream tears the moment in half.
    I turn in time to see a filthy teenager running up the block towards us clutching what can only be a purse he’s just snatched. Before my dull brain can fire up, Guillermo lunges for the kid’s legs and brings him down onto the rough concrete sidewalk, where they roll around like a drunken octopus flailing its legs spasmodically. I step in to help, and he kicks me in the face with surprising strength for such a skinny boy, as Uncle Lucho pushes in and gets an iron grip on the