Shooting trip of a lifetime, Delta Flight 101 out of Hartsfield, non-stop to Buenos Aires. Easy flight, eat supper, stretch out, drift off, wake up speaking Spanish.
Five thousand some-odd miles at 700 some-odd miles-per-hour at 26,000 some-odd feet.
But it’s hard to slip St. Expedite.
Never heard of St. Expedite? Gather round me hearties and I’ll spin you a yarn you won’t likely believe.
St. Expedite was a Roman Legionnaire trudging across Europe in olden times, the story goes, puzzling over the Gospel message. He wanted to convert but couldn’t quite get up the gumption. All the while, the column was being buzzed by flocks of ravens, which called cras-cras instead of caw-caw the way they do now, significant, as “cras” translates in Latin as “tomorrow” or “later.”
Finally, the soldier had enough. He snatched a raven out of midair, threw it to the ground and crushed the poor bird beneath his sandals, then raised the little cross he had secreted beneath his tunic and hollered, “Hodie!” “Today!”
Thus, he became a Christian and a saint, a perfect patron for our Impatient Age.
Instant grits? Ready in three minutes if you can stomach the results. Instant scratch-off lottery tickets and instant microwave popcorn you can buy with your instant winnings right at the Quick Mart till? We even got instant no-fault divorces if there ain’t enough money involved for the lawyers to drag it out to the Second Coming. But for things that take a little longer when you might wish they would not, we got St. Expedite. The bus is late, the plane is too, the boy says no, the girl says maybe, the check won’t come? You pray up St. Expedite.
I made the mistake of doing it once, when a voodoo priestess led me to her shrine in New Orleans. She was a looker, for sure, and her uncle owned a fish camp way down in the delta. I got a hug, a kiss, a belly full of gumbo and some sweet memories, but not much else.
I tried to forget but St. Expedite never did.
Doves and ducks outside Santiago del Estero, a colonial city in north-central Argentina—music, food, fetching dark-eyed senoritas in the plaza major most evenings and the cantinas do not close till after it is long past time to go home.
But you got to get from Ezeiza Internationale outside Buenos Aires to Santiago del Estero first. Highways are deadly, trains are sketchy, buses impossible, so once in the country, you fly Aerolinas Argentina or LAN Chile out of Jorge Newberry, the regional airport.
But don’t get on that plane just yet! Buenos Aires is a world-class city—Naples, Charleston, Paris rolled into one volatile high-test mix. Guitarists and tango dancers on the street corners, wool, leather, silver, gemstones, wine, lamb, shrimp the size of lobster, the best beef on earth and an Argentine chef who can make goat taste like the finest venison. It would indeed be foolish, after coming so far, to press on without sampling local delights.
So, the outfitter hires a guide, always female, always bi-lingual and lovely. She meets your plane, gets your firearms through customs, keeps the money-changers from skinning you, books a hotel for as many nights as you desire, drives you around the town.
Norma, muy bonita, bright eyes and a quick smile.
“Senor Royer, do you wish to see a tango show? Do you wish to visit Evita’s grave?” I did. She left me at the tango but held my hand at the grave.
Evita Peron ultimately became a saintly figure to many Argentines.
Evita. Eva Duarte was an actress and radio hostess, of illegitimate birth and questionable repute, but after a whirlwind romance with a rising colonel twice her age, she suddenly became wife of el presidente Juan Peron. She embraced lepers, kissed the syphilitic, laid her hands upon open wounds, and threw her Gucci shoes at the feet of barefooted peasants who thronged by torchlight by the thousands to her window in hopes of catching a glance of Evita, surely a saint.
When Evita died of cancer at age 33, she was embalmed and put on public display like Lenin. Eight dead and 200 injured in a stampede at her funeral. After Peron was overthrown, the junta could not abide the enduring “Cult of Evita.” They secretly shipped her remains to Italy and buried them in Milan under a stone bearing a fictitious name. And there, they remained lost for 16 years while back in Argentina, the possession of a photo or even mention of her name would land you in jail. A quarter-million went to prison for sundry offenses and, once the junta was finally overthrown, they were more than 30,000 prisoners short.
To this day, the mothers and wives of “the disappeared ones” still hold daily vigils at the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. Meanwhile, Leftist guerillas assassinated a former puppet president, held the body ransom and proposed a swap: Body for body, el presidente
for Evita.
Evita was buried in the Duarte family crypt and 10,000 pounds of concrete were poured atop her remains. She was home, presumably for good, and the guerillas unceremoniously dumped the ex-presidential corpse on a street corner in Buenos Aires. Both lie in the Ricoletta cemetery, not 200 feet apart. And the Cult of Evita remains.
I left my offerings amongst the flowers, three silver coins, heads up.
Norma got me on the plane at Jorge Newberry, caught up with me in Santiago del Estero. I shot birds for three days, shot till my gun got too hot to touch, shot till my eyes crossed, shot till my ears rang and my gun shoulder looked like a double pepperoni pizza.
Norma kicked together deadfall fires for field lunches each day, with white wine, white tablecloths, dove breast fondue, dove breasts pounded into pancakes and dredged in egg and cornmeal batter and frittered in olive oil, dove breasts wrapped in bacon with half a jalapeno and a dab of cream cheese inside. And when we could eat no more, we fed 200 ninos at the local elementary school.
This Antonio Zoli Columbus Gold High Volume Game Gun was deadly on Argentina gamebirds.
Ducks one morning on a shallow bay of a vast hydro-electric impoundment, a 50-bird limit, Andean teal, mostly, no decoys, no blind, just hunker behind a driftwood snag, birds called to the gun by guides who whistled through holes punched in bottle caps with nails.
No shooting that last glorious day. Norma and I sat on the piazza, me with expresso and Norma with her beloved bombilla of mate, the jungle juice they drink down there.
“What’s it like, Norma, is it like tea?”
Norma rolled her beautiful brown eyes and smiled. “No Senor Royer, it is not like tea.”
We spoke of many things, knowing we would likely never see one other again. I chanced to ask if she had ever heard of St Expedite.
Long pause, her eyes widened with astonishment, a deep breath, “Oh you know of San Expedito?”
She rummaged through her handbag and came up with a picture the size of an old-time baseball card, the kind that came with bubblegum when you were a kid. And there he was, his foot on that poor croaking raven and the cross held aloft. On the reverse was a prayer in Spanish which I translated as best I could.
Saint Expedite, you lay in rest.
I come to you and ask that this wish be granted.
Saint Expedite now what I ask of you. Saint Expedite now what I want of you, this very second.
Don’t waste another day. Grant me what I ask for.
I know your power, I know you because of your work. I know you can help me.
Do this for me and I will spread your name with love and honor so that it will be invoked again and again.
Expedite this wish with speed, love, honor and goodness. Glory to you, Saint Expedite!
But alas, St. Expedite was resting. One embrace and I was gone, over the Andes to the rest of my life.
When got I home and unpacked, there was St Expedite tucked in among my socks.
I propped the picture up on my nightstand and there it remained eight months. “Don’t waste another day. Grant me what I ask for. Oh St. Expedite, send me back to Argentina!”
He heard me this time and I shot birds the very next year, an estancia outside of Cordova adjacent to the largest dove roost in Argentina. Ten million birds? Twenty? Nobody knew. They were far too many for any man to ever count. In the half-light of dawn, all those birds gently cooing, it sounded like the very earth was breathing.
But no Norma. This time it was Gilda.
I knew better than to mention St. Expedite but I prayed to him again once I got back home. I am still waiting on another trip to Argentina.