Pacazo by Roy Kesey

no canned milk or bottled water, no rice or sugar, no candles, no plastic sheeting, no concrete or tar or lumber. There was beer, however, for a time. It was brought by army helicopters which were scheduled to return but never did.
    South now, through Miraflores and Castilla and down into the Sechura, a strip of desert that holds the Pacific and the Andes apart for twelve hundred miles. Two tiny patches of it are my central texts. Marks in the sand are the sentences, their meanings unstable, altered daily by wind or rain, by footsteps including my own. I read looking for patterns, the better to see what does not fit them—traces of what was written one night ten months ago.
    Of course I do not know if any traces still exist. Stunted algarrobo, thorny scrub, a single candelabra cactus spread-armed in a clearing. The coastal plain is Peru’s cholo present, and the mountains are its indio past, and the ocean its future: this is something I have been told many times, usually by drunks in bars. To the extent it is intelligible, it is as much false as true, but there is rarely any point in disagreeing.
    Mariángel stands in my lap, plays with the barrettes of the girl sitting in front of us, pulls her hair. The girl turns and smiles. I fight off a wave of nausea, and smile back.
    A pacazo on the bank—I will have to remember to tell Reynaldo. I think about the odds of walking beneath one just as it began to defecate, about coincidence. It does not take long to pull up another, the taxi’s license plate starting with the first letter of Pilar’s name and ending with her age, and when mistaken for causes they can waste years of your life. Even worse, yes, the unrecorded cause that distorts a chain of events like buried ore misleading a compass, and still worse that despotic distance between lacunal source and referential past, between evidence and the act itself, and Mariángel grabs my beard, pulls my face down, forces me to look at her, and at the string of mucus she has extracted from her nose.
    The barrette girl has seen and laughs. I catch Mariángel’s hand. I hold her finger up to the light. I acknowledge that as mucus goes this is an excellent specimen, wipe it from her finger onto my own, lower the window and flick.
    Still half an hour away. No need for sunscreen yet but once I remembered too late and it was two bad days and nights. I take the tube from my knapsack, cover her face and neck. She does not like the smell of coconut, smears as much as she can on my pants. My own face and neck, my arms, more pointing and looking at things in the sky. She cries for a moment, the reason unclear. Then she settles, closes her eyes.
    Often Reynaldo accompanies us into the desert. He hopes to find an unknown species of plant or bush or tree, has never yet found one but sometimes finds other things of interest. This weekend he is reforesting somewhere to the east. The university’s Outreach Office runs several such programs—solar panels, health clinics, rural education for the poorest. Most weekends they invite me along. I always agree to participate and no one is surprised when I do not.
    The foothills are not far away but cannot be seen though the gray-brown haze. In a sense this haze ensured Pilar’s death. If the air had been clear she would have seen the Andes and known she was walking the wrong direction.
    Here the highway parallels Pizarro’s route to Cajamarca. One hundred sixty-eight soldiers, hundreds of enslaved porters, a few interpreters, a few guides. In my first years here I was certain that what was needed to finish my thesis could be found in Cajamarca. Later it was simply a location where work could be done. My last visit, a few months before the wedding, and as we check into our hotel Pilar tells me she has never seen the Ransom Chamber.
    The tourist board calls it the city’s sole remaining Inca structure: a chaos of old ashlar blocks and new cement. I have already been twice and it is small and bare and