When Mountains Walked Read online

  Contents

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  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

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  Author’s Note

  Connect with HMH on Social Media

  First Mariner Books edition 2001

  Copyright © 2000 by Kate Wheeler

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Wheeler Kate, date.

  When mountains walked / Kate Wheeler.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-395-85991-3

  ISBN 0-618-12701-1 (pbk.)

  1. Americans—Travel—Peru—Fiction. 2. Medical personnel—Peru—Fiction. 3. Married women—Peru—Fiction. 4. Earthquakes—Peru—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3573 H4326 W47 2000

  813'. 54—dc21 99-051324

  Part of this book was published as “Future Shock,” in Granta 54 (The Best of Young American Novelists), Summer 1996.

  eISBN 978-0-547-56171-4

  v2.0518

  For my father

  Acknowledgments

  This book could not have been written without the help of the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation. Their support meant far more than just the money over five years of writing. Similarly, Ian Jack and other writers associated with Granta called me a novelist when I wasn’t sure.

  My writing group—Pamela Painter, Jim Mezzanotte, and Tom McNeely—gave freely of their ideas, suggestions, and encouragement. Their ideas are built into every chapter. In particular, Pam helped me selflessly and incisively throughout. Her honesty and insight rescued this work from abysms of various kinds. Janet Silver, my editor at Houghton Mifflin, saved the second half. Without her help and that of Heidi Pitlor, her assistant, who held my hand through one or two difficult moments, this book would not exist. Thanks also to Denise Shannon, my agent and my friend.

  My father, Charles B. Wheeler, proposed changing Johnny Baines from a volcanologist to a seismologist because more people would be interested. My sisters, Margaret B. Wheeler and Jan Krissy Wheeler-Mclnvaille, gave medical information and devised health-related plot twists. David Guss suggested the name “Black Rainbow Movement,” renamed characters, tolerated my writing schedule and the desperate or elated moods associated with it. I’ll never forget sitting on a French train listening to Sharon Salzberg and Anne Millikin work out Maggie’s name and the details of her life. Brian Rawlins and Martha Bardach helped at, and with, the ending. Joseph Olshan and Margaret Edwards helped early on.

  Wolfgang Schuler of La Paz kept me on track. Wendy Weeks, Adela Arenas, and Adolfo del Alamo, of Ollantaytambo, Peru, gave me a home away from home when I was starting to write. Some of the stories they told found their way into my imagination and this text. Peter Yenne, Jesús Briceño, and, again, David Guss got me to places I needed to be. I wish I could thank personally all of the friends whose cariño, humor, and encouragement have meant so much to me during this writing.

  My parents, Charles B. and Jan M. Wheeler, and their parents in turn, brought me to South America and gave me geologic antecedents. Katherine R. and Orby C. Wheeler’s lives were a central inspiration, though altered quite a bit. My lost grandmother, Mary Margaret McCullough, provided one of the mysteries that fuel the narrative. May she be well, wherever she went.

  Thank you all.

  Only fools get out alive.

  —Wolf Zimerman Lustik

  “El Lobo”

  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. It was 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 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 mo
untain 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.