by B. TRAVEN
I looked for my boots.
Why, they were not stuffed with paper and neither were they placed on a chair. Experience had taught me, when living in the jungle, to stuff my boots with balls of crumpled paper or something else, and to put them on a chair or box or hang them up. Otherwise, when you started to pull them on in the morning, you might find a scorpion or a small snake inside them. It had happened to me once; I still remembered the speed with which I got the boots off on that occasion, and since then I know that one can get his boots off just as quickly as a hat from one’s head. To have a little red snake in the lowest part of your boot while your foot is inside is not so very pleasant, because the snake, as terrified as you are, wants to get out, as do your feet. The worst thing about it is that you don’t know exactly what it is that’s under the sole of your foot. It drives you nearly crazy while your foot is still in, and makes you feel aghast with horror after your foot is out and you see what was, or still is, a tenant of your boot.
Anyway, my boots were not stuffed and they were not standing on the chair.
All of a sudden I remembered that I had dropped the boots rather carelessly last night, due to the fact that I was very tired when I turned in again after the Indian had left. I remembered, too, that while he had been in the room I had pulled out the paper from my boots and had put them on to go to the room where the bookshelves were. It is no sound practice, when living in the jungle, to walk with bare feet by night. A native can do so, but a white man avoids it. When I had come from the other room I had lain down immediately on my cot, not paying any attention to the boots or anything else, and had fallen asleep as soon as I had touched the pillow.
Had I really dreamed that or had I not?
One long jump and I was at the bookshelf.
The can was not there. I looked around and found it thrown on the table, open and empty. The paper in which I had wrapped the jewelry lay torn and in scraps about the floor. No sign of the ornaments anywhere, no indication where they might be.
The door was still locked and bolted, exactly as I had fixed it last night before turning in.
I hurried to the mound.
In feverish haste I cleared the pit of the stones, the earth, and the shrubs with which I had filled up the excavation last afternoon.
Nothing was on the bottom. No clue to where the ornaments might have been hidden.
Where, for all the foolish and silly dreams of mine, had I put those things while asleep? Or was I walking in my sleep? Impossible. It couldn’t be.
No matter how hard I worked my mind and my memory, I had not the slightest hunch to follow up. I searched the whole house, in every nook and corner. I moved all boxes and cases about. Every loose board was inspected. I opened sacks and investigated every pot in the house and in the yard. Nothing. Nothing in the house nor about the house nor around the house nor on top of the house. Nothing anywhere.
Perhaps … perhaps the hogs.
It was silly to think of the hogs in relation to the ornaments. I might try, anyway.
22
Two weeks later, the doctor returned.
My first question after he had seated himself was, “Say, Doc, have you ever noticed three hogs around the place here? I refer to particular hogs, two black ones and one yellow, all three practically the same size, the Indian kind, sort of hairy.”
“Three hogs, you say?” He looked at me, rather appraisingly, I thought. “Hogs?” Again he repeated his question in a queer tone, as if he had not heard right.
There was something in the tone of his voice and in the way he stared at me. It might have been a well-concealed, though firm, examination of my mental soundness.
“Hogs,” he said again. “Is that it—hogs? With some people it is mice. White ones. Sometimes green ones. With others it is ants. With some, strange kinds of mosquitoes or bats. With you, it is hogs. Something new in pathology. I am quite sure, old man, you mean dogs. D, D, D, and not H, H, H. Understand, Gales, it is D, D, D, dogs, dogs, dogs. Three dogs. Two black ones and one yellow, all nearly the same size, and hairy, too. Just mongrels, the sort the Indians have. I am positive, old chap, that you mean dogs. It is just the tongue sometimes which mixes up one letter with another. We know this trick of dropping words and taking one letter for another without realizing it. Apart from that, you’re right. I’ve seen about this place here, and at various times too, three dogs, two black ones and one yellow. I’ve even asked people to whom they might belong.
“Nobody seems to know them. What is more, no native around here seems ever to have seen them. Anyway, it’s none of my business to look out for stray dogs. To the devil with them. Dogs, or hogs, or pox, what the hell do I care about stray animals. Let’s talk about something else. Dogs. I don’t wish to talk about these three dogs, do you hear? Why did you have to bring them up right when I come home and wish to feel easy and happy again with the sun and the jungle and all the things I’ve missed during these last weeks. I’m happy to be back here. Why, for heaven’s sake, do you have to speak about dogs?”
“Why? See here, Doc—listen to what has happened to me and you will understand the why.”
I told my story, leaving out no detail.
I had expected to see him go wild over it. Since I had seen his library, I knew how much he would be interested in things like the ones I was so anxious to get off my mind.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” he said. “What is it you mean to tell me? A dead Indian—that’s what you’re telling me about? A dead Indian coming to visit you on two nights?” He shrugged his shoulders in a way to indicate that such affairs happened to him thirty times every month.
After awhile, though, he again began searching every line of my face with the piercing eyes of a suspicious doctor.
“Ornaments? You mean ornaments and not something else? You are sure? Just ornaments? Ancient, too? Ancient Aztec craftsmanship? Ancient? And you, in person, have held them in your hands? Now they have disappeared? As if in thin air? And you don’t know where they are now? That’s something! That could almost induce me to take up practice again. I thought it was only hogs. I see now it’s worse. Well, well—and right here at my place, too. Well, well …”
His bone-dry irony made me furious.
I said, more harshly than politely, “So you don’t believe it, sir? So you don’t believe me? Perhaps you think my mind has snapped? Do you mean to say that? Well, Doctor, this time you’re mistaken. If you don’t believe me, I’ll show you the mound right now, hardly a hundred yards away. I can also show you the thirteen stone steps leading up to the top of that little pyramid. What is more, I can even show you the cave I excavated. What do you say now, my good friend?”
He had let me talk without once interrupting me. Now he only grinned.
He nodded in a fatherly manner, as if listening to the report of a patient whom he knew to be lying terribly, and slowly fumbled his pipe out of his pocket.
In a very dry, almost sleepy tone, he said, “I, too, can show you a cave which I dug, around here some place. More than just one. In fact, I can show you several of them. But it can’t happen to me any more. I am over it. I have been over it for a long time.”
Now it was I who looked at him with questioning eyes. But he said no more about his own adventures.
He lit his pipe and puffed at it a few times, then took it from his mouth and rested his hand on his knee.
“Well, old fellow,” he said, “here’s my advice, as a good friend and as a doctor. You’d better go down to one of the villages, any of the villages will do, and hire yourself a cook. See to it that she is a good-looker, a young one, and not so very dirty. I can assure you, old man, that with a good-looking cook about your place, no dead Indians will ever bother you again. And no ornaments, ancient or modern, will make you get up at night and put your boots on. No charge for this advice, Gales. It’s given free and out of long experience. Besides, I owe you something for minding my place while I was away. I brought you five pounds of the very
best tobacco I could find. Take it. You are welcome.”
23
“Welcome.” The word lodged itself strangely in my mind. It would not leave me. It went on and on, pricking in my head. Welcome? Am I really welcome?
No. I was not welcome. I was not welcome there any longer. Something had been destroyed, inside of me, or outside of me, or somewhere in the far distance. I could not tell what had been destroyed, nor where. I was no longer the same—at least not to me. I felt horror where before I had felt heavenly quiet.
And suddenly I longed for a change.
He had seen three dogs, of the hairy Indian kind, two black ones and one yellow. I had seen, positively, three hogs, of the hairy Indian kind, two black ones and one yellow. The worst thing of all, however, would be if I were to happen to see exactly the same three dogs he had seen.
Should that happen to me, I would not have the strength to survive the day. He had survived many such days. Of this I was sure. I could not. He was of another make, Doc was.
I asked him whether I might stay for another night with him in the bungalow.
This granted, I now asked him, “Listen, Doc, you’re a heavy smoker yourself, aren’t you?”
“Why—yes—eh—I don’t quite——”
“I wanted to make sure of that, Doc,” I said. “Good night. I’ll turn in. Time for the little ones to go to bed.”
“Good night,” he answered. While I was fixing the mosquito bar, I noticed that Doc was rubbing his chin and watching me with a strange stare in his eyes.
Next morning, while we had breakfast on the porch, I said, “What do you say, Doc? Could I maybe sell you four pounds of that fine tobacco which you brought me from back home?”
“Why, man, I gave it to you. What’s the matter with it? It’s very good tobacco. The best there is. Don’t you like it, or what?”
“You see, Doc,” I said, “it’s this way. I’d like to have you buy these four pounds for, let’s say, twenty-five pesos, cash.”
“Why, of course, if you wish to dispose of it that way and buy your native brand for the money, that’s absolutely okay with me. Fact is, I’ll be in dire need of good tobacco myself in a few weeks. I couldn’t bring much along. You know, the duty is awfully high.”
“I won’t buy another brand for the money, Doc,” I said. “It isn’t that, you see. I’m satisfied with just one pound for the time being. What I really need is the cash I asked you for.”
“May I ask what you need the money for, if it isn’t a secret?”
“No secret. No secret at all, Doc. It’s simply this way. I mean to clear out of here. I turned everything over in my mind last night. You see, Doc, that prescription of yours concerning the good-looking cook won’t do any good. It’s too late now. It might have worked six, even three, months ago. Now it wouldn’t work out. I know that. And no doubt about it, either.”
“Well, what about your farm? The money you’ve invested in it and all your hard work is worth more than the money you paid. You don’t mean to tell me that you’re leaving all that for nothing?”
“That’s about the size of it, Doc,” I said. “Yeah, I’ll leave it for nothing to anyone who comes along and picks it up. The bush may have it back. It belongs to the bush, anyway. Everything here belongs to the bush. I don’t. And the bush is welcome to it, and with my best wishes thrown into the bargain. And I hope the bush can keep it until the world’s end. Congratulations.”
“As you say, Gales. I certainly won’t persuade you to stay on and try just once more. You’re old enough to know what you want and what is good for you. You don’t eat green apples any more. Well, there’s your money. If you mean to go by rail, you can sell your pony down at the depot. Anyone will take it for a fair price. I’m quite sure you’ll get forty for it if you start asking ninety.”
I noticed that his face changed while he was talking, and now he moved his lips as he usually did when he was thinking hard.
He turned around and walked over to the corner of the porch and gazed down over the jungle ocean.
He took a deep breath, then said, “I wish I could go with you, Gales. I wish I could leave as easily as you can. Yet I can’t. I can’t any more. I’m bound here, damn it. I’m buried here, bone, soul, heart, flesh, everything. Only ashes it is that you see. All of me is buried here. Only the mind is still alive. Sometimes I think that even my mind has gone to sleep, too, and only my former thoughts are still lingering about. I must stay here where my bones and my soul are resting. I can’t leave them behind and all alone. You see, the thing is that I’m buried here in more than just one way. Well, what I was going to—was going to—to——”
He stared out into the far distance as if he were looking beyond the world. And as I had thought several times before in the earliest days of our acquaintance, so I thought at this moment again: He has died long, long ago, the doc has, only he doesn’t know it. And that’s the reason, the one and only reason, why he is still hanging on.
He turned to face me. “Of course, I’ll lend you a mule to carry your few things to the depot. Leave the animal with the Straddlers until I call for it. Well, if the Lord only would have mercy and grant me that I could go with you, be free and easy like you, going where you wish and where your lucky star will lead you. Well, Gales, it was a great pleasure to have known you. I mean it, old chap. Since it has to be this way, good luck and good-bye.”
24
It was the next day, late in the afternoon, when I bounced ten pesos silver upon the narrow board over which a hole in the wooden wall signified the ticket-seller’s window.
“Which way does the next train go?” I asked. “West or east?”
“Oeste. West, I mean,” the man behind the window said.
“A ticket for ten pesos, please. Second class.”
“What station?”
“Just a ticket for ten pesos anywhere west. It doesn’t make any difference.”
The stationmaster looked up the list.
“There’s one ticket for nine eighty-five and the next one is for ten seventy. Which will it be?”
“Make mine nine eighty-five, and that will be good enough for me any time now or tomorrow.”
“There you are,” he said. “Fifteen centavos change. There she is, pulling in, right on time. Rare thing, if you ask me.”
I did not look at the station’s name printed on the ticket. One station was as good as another as far as I was concerned. If you are to find a gold mine, you may as well wreck your house and dig up the ground below the basement. The place is as near to your fortune as any other if you’re the guy to get what you want or what is meant for you to have.
I boarded the train. The conductor came up to me. He took my ticket, glanced at the name of the station, shook his head as though somewhat bewildered, stared at me for awhile without saying a word, and then crossed something out on the ticket with a thick blue pencil. He put the ticket away in his pocket and handed me instead a slip of paper on which he, with the same thick blue pencil, had written something in Chinese. When he saw me helplessly fingering that slip he pitied me with a deep sigh, took it away from me and pushed that slip into my hat ribbon. “That’s your hat, mister, isn’t it?”
I nodded.
“I’ll call you in time to get off the train,” he said. “Don’t worry. Just keep quiet, take a nap, and don’t worry a bit. Did you understand what I said?”
“You said something about worrying.”
“The other way around, mister. I said you should not worry a bit. I’ll see to it that you get off at the right place. So take it easy. Everything will be all right.”
He gave me an assuring smile, nodded in a fatherly manner as if he were dealing with a little boy riding for the first time on a train all by himself, and went his way.
The coach was poorly lighted. There was nothing to do but doze off.
After I had slept what I thought must have been sixty hours or more, I was pushed on the shoulders and I heard a voice. “Next s
tation’s yours. Got five minutes. Better shake out of it and get ready. We don’t stop there, and if we’ve got a passenger the engine only slows down a bit. Far as I can remember … well, as long as I’m in service on this line … we’ve never had a passenger get off there. And neither has one ever got on. You’d better hurry, mister, and take care not to drop under the wheels. That would be just too bad. I’ll throw your bags out of the window. You just pick them up once you’re off and outside. Good night.”
“What time is it, conductor?” I asked.
“Twelve. Middle of the night, you know. A clear beautiful night as far as I can judge. All the stars are bright like diamonds. Well, mister, there you are. Good night. Buenas noches.”
The train slowed down. My bags were already out. I jumped off, keeping clear of the wheels.
Before I had come to my full senses and had realized what had happened and that I had jumped into darkness, the last car of the train had already passed by, and a few seconds later I could see only a little flicker of the red taillight.
Looking around from where I stood, I saw no building, no house, no shed; nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Nothing except a post with a piece of board nailed to it.
I went close, lit a match and looked at the board. There were a few blots which, a hundred years ago, might have been a name painted on the board.
No light other than that of the stars could be seen anywhere, near or far.
I picked up my bags and sat down on one of them.
Less than fifty feet from either side of the track stood the wall of the bush.
A wall, dense, dry, dreary, greenish-gray, now looking black, looking in the darkness as though it were stooping slowly though irresistibly upon me where I sat, threatening to suck me into its fangs, intending to swallow me, to swallow all of me, bone, flesh, heart, soul, everything.