Luis in front of the fire

This is an excerpt from a Chile story I've been writing... just working on scene and character developement.

February 22, 2011- (three days into a 12 day trek, with 8 riders, headed toward Sollipulli.)

Firelight glints off Luis’ belt buckle. Every time he readjusts in the dirt, scuffling to find a comfortable position against the wood pile, light hits the metal on his hips and flashes. This flash is a warning, I think, the beam of a lighthouse signaling danger ahead.  I laugh to myself, remembering Mathias’ advice to riders: Chile only has one predatory wild animal: Luis. Mathias doesn’t laugh when he tells this joke.  If I ran aground on the rocks below this lighthouse, he would send me home.

 Again Luis wriggles. Again light glints and I follow it to his pelvis. I look away. The smoke rises to the clear southern sky. I love searching this foreign starscape for differences. Even cloudless, it’s hard to pick out any constellations because there is a smattering of tiny, distant stars filling the voids; it’s as if someone up there hung lamps in a meandering arrangement, and then flung glitter across the sky. It’s not the work of an artist’s steady hand, but of a child’s exuberance.

The mountain silhouettes slope down, jagged along the tree line, to our clearing on the edge of Laguna Geppinger. In the daylight, we look across the water to the peaks above. The mountains are literally before us. The riders click pictures of the lake and the slopes; I imagine our course through them in two days. I’ve set out from Geppinger before, tread these paths, the muddy switchbacks, and rocks slides, the bamboo thickets, but the sight is always daunting.

My hair hangs loose now, as I sit by the fire, the strands parting and soaking in the wood smoke. Luis wears a ponytail, his black hair gathered at the nape of his neck. Tomorrow morning, in the moments when he unbinds it before regathering and retying, it will exhale all the richness of burning lenga wood and roasting meat. He always smells of wood smoke and horse sweat.

He moves again, reaching into the pocket of his leather jacket and pulls out a flask. He swigs then pushes it to me. “Rum?”

I debate a pull. Here, tucked into the Andes, cold settles both low in the valleys and high in the mountains. Sun fries our backs and lathers the horses during these midsummer days, but at night the warmth in the dirt, the heat in the air, slips away. I hold my fleece open to the flames, hoping I can zip their energy up inside; the night is brisk and my pajamas are thin. I think of my tent, of the short walk to it, and the  hours ahead. “I don’t care how cold it gets,” Mathias had warned, before my first trek with Luis two years ago, “you sleep in your tent alone.”

Half a mug of pisco already buzzes my fingertips so I say no gracias. I unlace my hiking shoes and take off my socks. They are wonderful socks, a wool blend, and they dry quickly in my boots no matter how many puddles I slosh through. I lay them on a log near the fire and hope the smoke will overpower the worn-through-puddles-for-four-days smell.

“Aren’t you going to unsaddle your horse?,” I ask Luis. His gelding has been wandering unattended since we made camp four hours ago. It sucked water from a stream while I grilled fish in a disc over the fire, and grazed among the tents while we ate dinner. The horse now stands to the side of a picnic table, its head hung low, its eyes shut. The other nine horses are across the footbridge, also easing into sleep. It's nearing midnight- our riders long ago slithered into their sleeping bags- and the fire crumbles to embers; it seems a good time to relieve it of straps and weight.

               Luis leans back on the wood pile and closes his eyes. His mouth draws puckish and he answers, “Not yet, I have many amigas down the road I may still want to visit.” He stresses the feminine ending of “friends” and grins.

“Where? We’re an hour’s ride from any house.”

“Just down the road. Through the woods. I visit them often.”

I start to say that would be a long trek for his horse to make, getting there and back before dawn. But I remember his story, confessed tipsily, fireside, weeks earlier, of a nighttime trip to another amiga years ago: “I went forty kilometers in one night! Without a light or anything… I just let the horse take me. I got back just before breakfast…. nearly fell asleep in the saddle that day…. But that was years ago, when I did not behave as well as I do now.”

Tonight’s journey would be a short one, in comparison. I don’t protest.  I ask, “They won’t mind that it’s the middle of the night?”

“They are muy…buenas…amigas.” He savors each word and their collected implication. His face relaxes into a bemused look and I try not to imagine the scene of him knocking on a woman’s door, dusty and weary. I try not to imagine him rolling into bed with her. I try not to think about his sons, Luis and Carlitos.

“Well then, what are you waiting for?” I ask.

He shrugs and says, “Do you want me to leave?”

I poke the fire with a branch. I can play coy too. “Well they’re probably waiting for you. Lonely and pining. You should go, have some fun, in case we don’t survive Sollipulli.”

He smiles without opening his eyes and mutters, “Sollipulli is easy. Ningun problema. Lo crucé con ojos cerrados.”

I have yet to see Sollipulli’s uncharted terrain, but I cannot believe they are the easy rolling hills Luis suggests. Flask in hand, his body relaxes. He is falling asleep.

I love studying his face, the dark plains of his forehead, his heavy eyebrows and broad nose. Heavy stubble shadows his cheeks and chin; he hasn’t shaved since we left Antilco. It is not a classic face. Actually, close up like this, his eyes are too small, too close together, his jaw undefined. Where is the siren song that draws so many women to his tent and sends so many young guides crashing upon the rocks? I can’t find it in his face. But I can’t stop looking for it.

“You’re not going anywhere tonight,” I say. “It’s too late. You should unsaddle your horse.” He  does not move.  “Are you going to sleep out here?”

“Puede ser,” he says, “I’ve done it many times. Good board to lean against… warm fire. Es muy… muy… comodo.” He mumbles the words, one by one. The s’s after vowels disappear and the usually springy rolled Spanish ‘r’ lazily plods off his tongue. The fire snaps. For a moment, firelight fills the feathered wrinkles around his eyes.

I look away from his face, and back at the shrinking fire. I see my socks and shriek and curse in English. Shit. Luis sits up in shock. I lunge for the socks but it’s too late: they have melted into useless tubes, the heat searing the fabric apart at the toes.

Luis shakes with laughter now, the sounds spilling out of him gently and quietly. He tips the flask in his mouth again, shakes his head and smirks at me. He is entertained, but not surprised. I laugh with him and ask if much more could be expected from a gringa. He shakes his head: it could not. Gringos are a helpless cause, his silent chortling and noiseless head-shaking says, a ridiculous bunch of mistake-making simpletons.

“I’ll take some of that rum now,” I say, and draw long as we chuckle together. I am glad Luis lets me play cowboy with him, though I am really just a gringo.

With rum sliding to my belly and mourning my best pair of socks, I say goodnight to Luis. He’ll sleep here until he wakes in the night, his bad back aching, the fire dead and his body shivering. He’ll stumble to his tent and collapse until morning when the first whisper of sunlight rouses him. “I hope you sleep well,” he says, and I wish him the same.

I retreat to my tent. I crawl past the saddlebags of food, all five of them packed under the overhang, their leathery, smoky scent filling my small space. I struggle out of my jeans and into black sweats and slip into my sleeping bag. I stuff my heavy jacket into the clothes bag, mash it into a mound, and slide it under my head. I shut the overhang flap and inner door, zipping out the stars and brisk mountain air, and close my eyes.