Authors: Janice Weber
“What’s this all about?”
Ek tapped his sputtering flashlight. “The environmental conference.”
“It was in Belize?”
“The week after Louis’s birthday. Polly wanted to see the famous people up close, especially after the stories Fausto had
been telling us about them.” Ek pointed to Aurilla’s hideous mouth. “He said that this lady was in bed with her plastic surgeon
when her husband died.” He laid a brown finger on Paula Marvel’s billboard-size bows. “He said this lady sprained her wrist
punching the president.” Paula’s bandage attested to that. No need to ask why she had punched Bobby. Ek found the picture
of the woman bending into a backseat with Jojo Bailey. “Fausto said he had a video of these people making love on an airplane.”
I gushed sweat. “Fausto is full of stories. All bullshit.”
“Louis believed him,” Ek said defensively. “And he’s the man’s brother.”
I dropped the pictures into my pocket. “Did Louis go to the conference?”
“No. He was too busy.”
“Did Fausto?”
“He said he had enough of these people in Washington.”
Did a glutton ever have enough spaghetti? I slithered toward the light and heat at the entrance of the cave. Mosquitoes already
swarmed the screen. Several sucked my blood as I applied more insect repellent to flesh already smothered beneath a slick
of grease and guano. The gash on my thigh was oozing badly at the edges, so I got the sewing kit from my knapsack. Ek emerged
from the cave just as I was knotting it all up.
“What are you doing?” He watched in horror as I doused the mess with disinfectant. “That is not the correct medicine! It will
hurt!”
“It hurts already.” I choked the area in bandages. We were so far behind schedule that I’d need a time capsule to make my
plane. “What’s the best way to my car? Without another swim, if possible.”
“Over those mountains.”
Next time Maxine sent me here, she’d better pack a helicopter. As the sun continued its climb, I wished I had swallowed more
of that waterfall. Humidity weighted me like a lead jacket. The birds called it quits and soon even the cicadas dropped to
a monotonous shiver. We passed through bogs so thick that I half expected to see tyrannosaurs foraging on the other side.
But Ek’s machete kept whacking at the green and I kept following his rear end. We stopped only once, to bury our faces in
a stream high in the mountains. “Tired?” he asked.
Dizzy: Maxine’s uppers were beginning to clash with my sputtering endorphins. My thigh was screaming and I was hungry. In
the last twenty-four hours I had probably burned fifty thousand more calories than originally budgeted. “I’m all right.”
Ek refilled our canteens. “Why is it so important for you to find Polly?”
Several lies sprang to the tip of my tongue, squirmed, died. “She was like a sister,” I said, realizing too late that I had
used the past tense.
Stay sharp, Smith.
Ek had caught the mistake. “Louis would never have hurt her.”
I watched an iridescent blue butterfly skitter above the stream. Winged delight, if you were a human; winged death, if you
were a leaf. Perspective depended on your rung in the food chain. “Why did he run away?”
“He was afraid that people were looking for him. Once a man tried to follow us back to camp after we went to San Ignacio.
But we lost him.” After fishing a stone from the stream, Ek sharpened his machete with short, angry strokes. “When he returns,
Louis will explain what this is all about.”
After two grueling hours, we reached road. Clouds had shrouded the sun but the air remained miasmal. The jeep waited undisturbed
in the ferns. “Thanks,” I told Ek, tucking five hundred bucks into his pocket. “Go buy yourself lunch.”
“Maybe I should come with you.”
“Better not.” As I pressed the clutch, my bad thigh shrieked. Rainballs pelted the roof. “Am I going to get out of here?”
He touched my forearm. “I think you’d get out of anything, Cosima.”
Within minutes the rain turned ruts into lakes. I began to hallucinate that I was no longer on a road but on a huge, writhing
eel. Finally I chose a ditch, there to stare at my watch as the storm cleared the mountain, leaving steam and rainbows in
its wake. At noon I rolled into San Ignacio, a colorful wreck of a town lacking only posses and Mae West. Dogs, schoolgirls
in pinafores, and fossil-like Mayans thronged the main drag. The worst slobs, Caucasian tourists, congregated on the porch
of Koko’s, a rickety café wedged between souvenir stands. Barnard had ditched her surveillance gear
here?
I drove the filthy jeep past. No point shopping in this town unless you wanted crucifixes or rubber sandals. Thirty seconds
later, San Ignacio ended.
I was beginning to feel light as a firefly. My fingers shook as I rummaged through Maxine’s diminishing supply of uppers and
antibiotics. The needle felt like a grenade in my thigh. Swallowed another quart of water then located Yvette Tatal’s clinic,
little more than an inferno on a side street. Patients who made it up the rickety stairwell were detained in a room redolent
of skin and garlic. Only an occasional blink proved that the bodies occupying the chairs were not stuffed. On the wall hung
a photograph of Paula Marvel and an attractive woman on the steps of a run-down clinic. “Is that Dr. Tatal?” I asked a nurse.
She nodded. “Are you waiting for Dr. Llosa?”
“No, Dr. Tatal.”
“You’ll see Dr. Llosa or no one. You! Come here!” She yanked a boy behind the scuffed mahogany door.
Silence save the jangling of a woman’s bracelets as she fanned her cheeks. “Dr. Tatal goes to Xunantunich on Mondays,” she
said. “To dig. Everyone knows that.”
“Xunantunich,” I repeated. Sounded like a sneeze but I knew they were the Mayan ruins up the road. “Thank you.” Back to the
jeep. As the highway shriveled to a ribbon of dirt, it veered ever closer to the river running alongside. The water was green,
merry, seductive, only a Frisbee toss wide. I almost drove by the entrance to the ruins. The tip-off was a soda cooler next
to two mestizos selling stone carvings. I jammed on the brakes. “Can you take me across?”
They pointed down a slope. At its end floated a raft just a little longer than a horse. A little man beckoned me aboard. As
he cranked a greasy shaft, we began to pull toward the opposite shore. Whenever he stopped cranking to wipe his brow or admire
a fish, we stopped moving. Nine minutes later, landfall: I put the jeep in gear and tore up a rocky trail ending in parking
lot. Had to hike the last, steepest, quarter mile to the ruins. Leg loved that. The sun leeched all water from my vital organs.
Light burned down from the sky, up from the limestone. All my senses fried:
Keep together, Smith.
Passed souvenir shop, tool shed, outhouses. No one was charging admission and only bees ate at the picnic tables. One last
ridge and I stood in a plaza dominated by three gigantic mounds. Where their grassy skins had been scraped away, ancient stones
lay exposed to the sun: autopsy in progress. A couple stood atop the largest of the monuments. Fifteen stories below, I could
hear them conversing in Dutch. The man was pointing to a trough halfway down the face, explaining that if his companion were
still a virgin, that’s where Mayan priests would be tossing her. I circled the mound, searching for Tatal on the scaffolding.
Not there so I climbed the tiny stairs winding up toward the top. No guardrails, no warning signs: one slip and I’d be eating
rocks far below.
Nice and easy, Smith.
When I finally reached top, the Dutch were doggy screwing on a ceremonial slab. They wouldn’t have noticed a spaceship touch
down behind them.
Through my binoculars I saw Tatal tapping stones on the third mound. I watched her brush away the dust she had made, peer
at the limestone, tap some more. In an afternoon, she might clear off a few square inches. Epidemiologist, archaeologist …
she’d have trouble finding an interesting man: no wonder Louis Bailey topped her heap. I wanted to ask where they met, get
a reading on the state of their union. If anyone, she would know where he was now. Should I take the direct or oblique approach?
Direct always worked better with women of intelligence, but cancel all bets if she were in love with the guy. As I plotted,
the Dutch giggled and left. Finally Tatal headed toward the outhouse.
Nearly swooned when I saw the tiny stairs I’d have to descend. Below, a handful of tourists were nothing but pinheads drinking
beer in the shade. I hesitated, dreading my first step, wishing I were a rat, a roach, anything but a hobbled biped. Every
few seconds the wind took another heavy puff at me. My thigh oozed molten glass.
Go! Now!
Forever later, earth. Tatal had still not returned to her little dig. I loitered by her toolbox but began feeling cold inside
so I took her spade with me to the outhouse, a two-holer with, ludicrously, powder room. Vinyl roofing tinged my skin green.
Abominable stench. I couldn’t circumvent a cloud of happy mosquitoes. Tatal’s feet, in awkward rag-doll position, rested behind
a flimsy door.
“Tatal?” I whispered. No answer.“Tatal?” Inched open the door. The poor doctor, pants at her ankles, stared at nothing. Her
pubic hair moved and I saw, coiled in her lap, a fer-de-lance.
My life expectancy shrank to five seconds. Terror trickled up my back as the viper raised its triangular head.
No sudden movement.
With infinite care, atom by atom, I faded from the cubicle. Sweat wept down my jaw more quickly than my legs moved my body.
I had reversed only halfway out of range when I heard a laugh, a thud: the Dutch.
As she burst into the powder room, the fer-de-lance struck with horrifying speed. My optic nerve traced the motion of the
viper’s head, my brain ran a billion calculations, mounted an instantaneous defense: instead of hitting my wrist, the snake
slammed into Tatal’s spade. Tiny
ping
as fang met iron. I hacked off its head while Gouda Ball sailed into the next cubicle. As she pissed over rocks, I saw the
mesh box on the ledge above my head. No birdcage, that.
The corpse and I were finally alone again. Tatal had nothing in her pockets, poor thing. I arranged her with spade and two
pieces of fer-de-lance in a tableau of mutual assured destruction, then strolled behind the outhouse. A head moved too quickly
in the bushes so I went after it. Thorns, rocks, fronds, tore at my pants and face. Took a while to realize I was chasing
someone on a mountain bike. Its wheels were still spinning when I caught up with it at the riverbank. The water had widened
to a good hundred yards here; on the opposite shore, women stood knee deep in laundry. I stared dully at the green current.
Finally, far downstream, a head surfaced, a figure waded toward the woods. White male. He turned around. For a horrifying
moment, our eyes met.
Sank to the mud. Didn’t dare stick a hand in the water: typhoid and diphtheria there. My hands looked as if they had been
kneading barbed wire. The gnats found my eyes. I began to cry because the jungle never quit for one fucking second. It was
a seething, insatiable maw that came at you with snakes, bugs, water, plants, heat, microbes, light, dark, belching death
with such polymorphic virtuosity that you finally let it eat you.
Hang on, Smith. You’re almost out of here.
Oh? Where was Aladdin and his flying carpet? I sat watching centipedes twiddle the mud. I spun the wheel of the mountain
bike, counting clicks as it decelerated to a standstill. But I didn’t get up.
Two boys, tired of watching their mother scrape rags against a washboard, swam over. I impassively watched their brown, bright
faces bob above the water. “Is that your bicycle?” one of them asked.
Humanity: riddles: something sparked inside my head. “Get me to the ferry and you can have it.” The boys returned with a farmer’s
barge and rowed me to the ferry landing. I dragged myself back to the ruins. Still no action at the outhouse: poor Tatal and
the fer-de-lance would rot before anyone discovered them. That was the up side of the Third World.
Another day was quickly fading so I drove straight to Koko’s. The bar was jammed with riffraff cheering a three-month-old
NBA playoff. Elsewhere, chubby mestizos stuffed their cheeks with tortillas. Two waitresses brought margaritas to a table
of backpackers. Men in jungle fatigues laughed it up beneath a flag of Belize. I sat in the corner with a fan. My elbows stuck
to the grimy vinyl tablecloth, my pants to the chair. By the time I ordered a bowl of chilemole, all twenty tables were full.
Placed end to end, the bric-a-brac on the walls, the dingle-balls hanging from the chipped ceiling, the booze and stemware
in the bar, and the keepsakes for sale by the cash register would circle the globe. Instead of paying for their meals, generations
of customers had perhaps left a small memento—value not to exceed fifty cents—behind. Overhead fans made every ounce of trash
flutter spasmodically. Bravo, Barnard: there was no better place to hide a camera, no less likely place to stumble upon one,
than here.
The waitress brought watery black soup spiffed up with the rib cage of a fowl. I studied the room as I ate. Two corners wouldn’t
work for surveillance: plastic flowers blocking view. Television blared in the third corner: I was probably sitting beneath
Barnard’s equipment. An excellent vantage point … if the gear functioned, of course. Heat and humidity had fried everything
else she had brought to Belize. I checked the wall behind me: posters, menus, crowded flypaper, dolls. On the top shelf, plates
and Christmas ornaments. When I saw a plastic angel playing the violin, I stopped looking.
I was chomping on a rubber egg when a white male in fatigues came to the table. Crew cut, hoop earring, muscles, beer: if
he couldn’t join a fight, he’d instigate one. “Name’s James. My mate and I have a little bet,” he said, taking the chair opposite
me. “I hope you don’t mind settling it for us.”
East London accent: were the Brits still here? They had run a jungle training camp up the road when Belize was still British
Honduras. “No problem.”