Something Fierce Read Online Free PDF Page B

rest of the Austrians were pointing at the scenery, putting their palms to their hearts before clicking away with their cameras.
    The Austrians feasted at the table while the Indian family squatted around a bonfire, sucking on corncobs and drinking chicha morada and chicha amarilla, liquor made from purple and yellow corn. We’d pitched our tent close to theirs, and when Mami said it was time to get water from the stream at the bottom of the abandoned city, Bob stayed behind, sharing cigarettes and jokes with the Indian family.
    There was a full moon lighting our passage, and my knees were wobbly from excitement as we clambered down the steep stone stairs: one of the boys from the Indian family had been peering at me across the fires. His skin was like copper, and he wore an alpaca sweater with little llamas frolicking on it. He carried himself as if he might break into a cumbia at any moment. His eyes were so black you could see the fire reflected in them, two little bonfires blazing away. Halfway down the steps made by his ancestors, I looked back, and sure enough, there he was, standing at the top, hands in his pockets. When his eyes met mine, I smiled and leaned into one of my hips, just as Olivia Newton-John had done after John Travolta collapsed at the sight of her in Grease.
    But I’d leaned too far, because now I was rolling down the stairs. My head made knocking sounds against the stone. I tried to stop myself, but it was no use. I remembered what my father had told me about gravity: sometimes you just had to give in and let it pull you down. Hikers came running toward the steps from all over the abandoned city, yelling in a variety of languages. I landed like a flopping fish, then leapt to my feet, brushed off my knees and resumed my Sandy stance. I looked for the boy, but he was no longer at the top. I never saw him again. He left with the other men in his family the next day before dawn, carrying the furniture in order to get a head start.
    THE TRACKS WE were following led to Quillabamba, a jungle town on the edge of the river. The Urubamba River was brown like chocolate here, and banana trees lined its shores. We’d started out on the train, but when it broke down and nobody came to fix it, we climbed out the window and started to walk. Hours passed as we trudged along with our backpacks. Bob kept the wild dogs at bay with sticks. We still made it to town faster than the train, which arrived so late at night that we’d already eaten, bathed and gone to bed. But one of the passengers from the train started running through the streets, yelling that the Sandinistas had just won the revolution in Nicaragua, so we got up again and went out to a local bar. We ordered Inca Kolas and beer and then sat without uttering a word so Mami and Bob could hear what people were saying. The Sandinista National Liberation Front had been fighting for almost twenty years. They’d named themselves after Augusto César Sandino, leader of the resistance against the U.S. occupation in the 1930s, and they’d finally overthrown the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza. Against all odds, another socialist revolution had won in Latin America—the second, after Cuba, in the twentieth century. Mami and Bob could hardly contain their joy. When we did a secret toast, their eyes were filled with tears. “To the Sandinistas,” my mother whispered. “To bread and dignity for everyone.” I beamed with pride to be part of it. Ale yawned over and over again.
    We boarded a train back to Cusco the next afternoon. I figured all these different stops had been to throw the secret police off the scent. There had been no meetings or hushed conversations in the middle of the night since Ayacucho, so the road we were following must have been mapped out then. The smell of rotting onions, chickens and sweat was so familiar by now that I liked it. It was the smell of Peru. Poor Peru.
    The four of us were crammed