The Salt Wind

Chapter One: The Shortcut

The Ancoma began where the world ran out of colour.

Arturo Vargas stood at the tailgate of the lead truck with the last of the afternoon on his face and looked west into ninety miles of white. Behind him, the gravel shore climbed in brown steps toward the cordillera, and the sun was going down red behind a bank of cloud that had no business being there in January. In front of him, the salt started as abruptly as a shoreline. One pace of grit, one pace of crust, and then nothing at all but flat brightness running out to a horizon that shimmered and lifted and pretended to be water.

He had crossed it eleven times. Never this late in the season.

"Eleven days," said César Ocampo, coming up beside him with his hands in the pockets of a town coat. "We are eleven days behind, Vargas. You know what that costs."

"I know what it costs."

"Two hundred dollars a day after the fifteenth. The company does not have two hundred dollars a day."

"The company has a fleet of three trucks on a salt flat," Vargas said. "That's worth more than two hundred dollars."

Ocampo smiled the way a man smiles when he has already won the argument in an office somewhere and is only repeating it out loud for politeness. He was thirty-eight, lean, clean-shaven in a place where nobody shaved, and he had ridden out from the coast with a sheaf of papers and a sealed consignment that he did not let anyone touch. Company agent. On the manifest he was listed as cargo supervisor. In the yard at Cerro Pintado they called him the Auditor, and not kindly.

Vargas walked the length of the convoy one more time, because that was what a road boss did and because it postponed the decision.

Three Bedfords, overloaded, riding low on their springs. The lead truck carried tools, the radio set, the tent canvas, and the drums of diesel. The middle truck carried Ocampo's crates — eleven of them, banded with steel, stencilled TURBINE SPARES — and the water: four drums lashed against the headboard, two hundred and forty litres, because on the Ancoma water was the only cargo that mattered. The third truck carried the kitchen, the surveying gear, the people who had no other place to sit.

Nine of them, all told.

Bruno Roldán, the mechanic, was under the middle truck with a lamp, tightening something that did not need tightening, whistling. He was a big soft-bellied man from Potosí who could braze a cracked block with fence wire and a prayer and who had never in his life been in a bad mood where anybody could see it.

Matías Trujillo, twenty-two, sat on the running board of the second truck eating bread and looking at the salt with the frank hunger of someone who had only heard about it. He drove well and too fast and was saving for a motorcycle.

Rosa Valverde had the cookfire going already, a tin of stew, coffee in a blackened pot. She was fifty and built like a fence post and had buried a husband in the Cerro Pintado galleries nine years ago. She fed the convoy and she made no distinction between an agent from the coast and a boy with salt in his boots: everyone got the same ladle.

Her son Joaquín had the lead truck. Nineteen years old, licence three months in his pocket, and he had polished the bonnet that morning as if the salt cared. He caught Vargas looking and grinned and slapped the door panel.

"Don Arturo. She's ready."

"Nobody's ready," Vargas said. "That's the first thing."

The grin did not falter. That was the trouble with nineteen.

At the third truck, Isabel Montoya had the chart case open on the bonnet and was weighting the corners with stones. She was twenty-six, the mine's junior surveyor, and she had spent two seasons on the north shore mapping brine ponds for a potash scheme that never came to anything. She had come out with the convoy to re-peg the cairn line and map the west margin, and she had said perhaps forty words in three days, most of them numbers.

Donald Pearson stood beside her with his hands behind his back. The Canadian. Fifty-six, thin hair, a nose burnt raw, a slide rule in a leather case on his belt like a pistol. He had been the company's geologist for nine years and looked, that evening, like a man who had slept badly for several of them.

And apart from all of them, at the very edge of the crust, Pedro Mamani was on one knee with a length of rebar in his hand, tapping.

Vargas went to him last.

Mamani was Aymara, from the salt villages of the north shore, fifty-something, with a face like cut leather and a hat that had been through four owners. He hauled block salt for the Tambillo cooperative nine months of the year and he had been hired for one reason: he could hear what the crust was doing. He tapped the bar, listened, moved a metre, tapped again.

"Well," said Vargas.

"Here it is good," Mamani said. "Here it is always good."

"And out there?"

Mamani stood and looked west with his eyes half shut. He did not point. He tilted his chin at the sky instead, at the towers of cloud standing over the mountains behind them, flat-bottomed, purple underneath, piling.

"Out there is January," he said. "And that is February, come early."

They ate at the tailgate with the salt going grey and then blue. Vargas spread the chart.

The surveyed route ran south-west from the shore in a long shallow curve, cairn to cairn, thirty-one cairns of stacked block salt, each one an hour apart in a loaded truck. It was the road everyone used because it had been augered and proved and because it followed the thick crust where an old shoreline lay buried. It was also fifty miles longer than a straight line, and fifty miles was two days.

"The northern flat," said Ocampo, putting one finger on the blank part of the chart, "saves us two days. Two days is four hundred dollars. Mr Pearson, tell him."

Pearson cleared his throat. He did not look at the chart.

"We augered the northern line in October," he said. "Twenty-two holes. Crust between fourteen and nineteen centimetres over firm salt. That carries a loaded vehicle with a margin. I filed the report."

"Fourteen," said Vargas.

"At the worst hole. And that was a single soft spot near the middle. It's in the report."

Vargas looked at Isabel Montoya. She was reading the chart upside down and frowning at it.

"You've walked that ground," he said.

"I've walked the shore of it," she said. "Not the middle. The north flat is where the pond water comes off the Tambillo side in a wet year. There are ojos out there." She said the word the way the salt people said it. Eyes. "Brine eyes. A lens of slush with a crust roof. You cannot see them from a cab."

"Fourteen centimetres of crust is fourteen centimetres of crust," Ocampo said.

"If it is fourteen," she said.

There was a small silence that Vargas would think about, afterwards, for the rest of his life.

Pearson took his spectacles off and polished them on his shirt. Nobody pressed him. Ocampo talked about penalty clauses and sailing dates at the coast and the consignment that had to be at Antofagasta by the twenty-eighth, and Rosa poured coffee, and Joaquín asked whether it was true that a man could see the curve of the earth out in the middle, and Bruno Roldán said that what a man saw in the middle was his own mother-in-law, which was why he had never crossed sober.

Vargas walked out onto the crust alone, thirty paces, and stood with his hands in his pockets.

The truth, which he told nobody, was this: he wanted the shortcut. Not for Ocampo's four hundred dollars. Because he was forty-four years old and he had been a road boss for eleven of those years and every season the company took one more thing away — a truck, a man, a week — and asked him to do the same work with what was left, and he had kept saying yes, and saying yes had become a kind of pride. He could get through. That was what he was. Vargas gets through.

He came back and said, "We run the north line. But we run it at night."

Mamani looked up.

"The salt is hardest at night," Vargas said, to all of them. "Cold shrinks it and dries it and locks it. We start at midnight, we run slow with a man walking ahead, and we are across the bad ground by dawn. Thirty kilometres an hour, no more. If the guide says stop, we stop. If the bar sounds wrong, we back up. Nobody argues with Don Pedro out there. Not you either," he said to Ocampo.

"That is acceptable," said Ocampo.

"It wasn't an offer," said Vargas.

They slept four hours on the gravel. At eleven Rosa woke them with coffee so strong it was almost a solid, and at ten past midnight, in a cold that turned breath to smoke, the three Bedfords rolled off the last of the gravel and onto the white.

The crust rang under the tyres like a struck drum. Not a bad sound. A sound like a floor.

Joaquín drove the lead with his window down and his elbow out, and Vargas rode beside him with the door open and one boot on the step, and for four hours it was the best driving in the world. The headlights threw two yellow roads across a surface patterned in hexagons, tile after tile of salt with raised white seams, a floor that a giant had laid and forgotten. Mamani walked ahead of them at times with the bar and the lamp, a small hunched shadow, and when he waved they came on, and when he crossed the bar over his head they stopped and waited while he tapped and listened and spat and waved them round.

The cold got into the cab and Joaquín sang under his breath to keep awake, some huayño about a girl in Challapata, and Vargas let him, and watched the stars go down the sky ahead of them, and did the arithmetic. Fifty-five kilometres done by three. Another hundred before the crust softened. It was going to work.

At three in the morning the lamp ahead stopped swinging.

Vargas got down and walked up to Mamani. The salt was different here — not the clean hexagons but a smoother, duller surface, faintly grey in the lamplight, with a texture like old soap.

"What is it?"

Mamani tapped. The bar made a sound Vargas did not like, a flat dead knock with nothing under it.

"Bad?"

"It is thin here." Mamani walked twenty metres north and tapped again. The note came back higher, harder. He walked back, tapping all the way, drawing a line with his ear. "Go along here. Then north a little. Then west again."

"How far along?"

"Until I say."

Vargas walked back to the lead truck. He could have climbed in. He was two steps from the running board with his hand on the mirror bracket, and Joaquín leaned across and said, "Which way, Don Arturo?" and Vargas, because he wanted to watch the wheels, because he wanted to see the crust take the weight with his own eyes, said:

"Stay in my lamp. Come on slow."

He stepped back and lifted the lamp and waved the boy forward.

That was all. That was the whole of it. Half a second of judgement, made by a man who had been awake for twenty hours and who believed, on the authority of a report with a signature on it, that there were fourteen centimetres of salt under everything.