The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina (21)

It happened during an unusually dry summer when no one could catch a single fish. Not even Pancho Sandoval who’d been fishing in the same river since he was younger than Orquídea. Pancho was slender but muscular, the kind of body built by hunger and manual labor, his skin reddish brown from days under the equatorial sun. He was worried. They all were. No fish meant nothing to sell. No food. No food and no money meant sickness.

Everyone in the city felt the strain. Jobs were scarce. Isabela’s office cut her days. She took a job cleaning houses for a fraction of the usual wages. They ate white rice with a fried egg on top for every meal for weeks. Orquídea did the only thing she could. She skipped school and took that familiar road to the end of the pier.

The río Guayas was always clay brown, the rich earth giving it its color. Green weeds covered in thorns floated across the surface and always snagged her net. There was no breeze. There was no reprieve from the heat. Even the river was too warm to swim in.

“Pancho, can I borrow your canoe?” she asked, shielding her eyes from the sun with the flat of her hand.

“There’s nothing there,” he lamented. “Some of us are thinking of going a little ways south to scare up some luck.”

“Well, so am I.”

“You should be in school. I didn’t go to school. Now look at me.”

She did look at him. Pancho could weave hammocks faster than anyone. He could swim across the río Guayas like a fish. He could climb the mango tree with his bare feet. But no one needed hammocks, and there were no fish, and the mangoes were rock hard that summer. Some people just had a talent for things, but they were born poor or ugly or unlucky, and all they could say was “look at me” and try their hardest.

“I am looking at you,” Orquídea said. “I have a feeling. I need to be here. Let me take your canoe. I’ll split whatever I catch with you.”

Pancho mopped the sweat on his face with the front of his shirt. He wheezed his cracked beer-bottle laughter. “I don’t know if you’re the devil’s child or an angel’s.”

Orquídea shrugged. She’d already met her father and he was neither.

“Fine,” he relented. “I’ll go with Jaime and the boys.”

Ten and stubborn, she went out. Her arms hurt from the push and pull of the oars. Her head spun from sweating all the coffee and water she’d drank that morning. Guayaquil was laid out before her, an ever-changing landscape that was always at war with itself. It had the blood of fighters in its soil. Its rivers. And turmoil gives rise to monstrous things.

The time of myths was long gone, but there were still stories that lingered. Stories she overheard from the wrinkled mouths of women who had witnessed and survived more than the turn of the century. They spoke of water spirits that liked to play tricks on humans. To keep them in their place, groveling in the dirt with sand in their eyes.

In all her time fishing, she’d seen strange things. Inexplicable things. Fish with human teeth, a blue crab the size of a tortoise, a lizard with two heads. She’d hear the wind speak to her when she stood at just the right angle. She thought she’d seen a human face poke its head out of the water before swimming across the river to the shores of Durán.

“I know you’re there,” she said.

She couldn’t see the bottom. She could barely see the flat end of one of her oars because the river had so much sediment. She hoisted the oar up and over, laying it across her seat.

“I know you’re there,” she said, this time louder.

Orquídea stood up, her borrowed canoe bobbed on the surface of the river. A clump of leaves floated by, a plastic bottle tangled up at its center.

“If you tell me what you want, then I’ll find a way to help you,” she said.

Heat scorched her neck. She cupped a bit of water in her hand and splashed it on her skin. She sat, resting her elbows against her knees. Her mother had always told her not to sit that way, that ladies sat with their legs crossed and not open. But she wasn’t a lady out on the river. She was just like everyone else—someone who wanted answers and maybe a little bit of help.

The river grew increasingly still. The wind died. Even the ships and cars, whose sounds made the city feel like a constant scream, stopped.

A creature crept out of the murk and over the side of the canoe. Orquídea didn’t have a word for it, other than “monster.” But what was a monster, really? She remained where she was, showing neither fear nor revulsion at its crocodile face and reptilian humanoid body less than three feet tall. It had the patterned belly of a turtle. She noticed neither sex nor belly button. Its webbed hands ended in sharp yellow claws, but not as sharp as the toothy smile it flashed.

“What do you want, Bastard Daughter of the Waves?” the creature asked.

“My name is Orquídea.”

“You do not bear your father’s name. But he is of the sea. A sailor through and through.”

“I don’t claim him.”

“Ah, but the water claims you. Hence—your title. Now, what do you want?”

Orquídea decided not to argue with the river monster. “I want you to bring the fish back. People are starving.”

“What is that to me?” the crocodile monster said, pressing a clawed hand to its chest, as if indignant to the accusation. “I have lived in this river since before the time of men. Before iron and smoke polluted these waters. I have lived in this river since before it ran red with blood and your people set the coasts on fire. What do I care if humans starve?”