by Lou Cameron
Once Captain Gringo was out of the valley and back in the clouds, it got worse. He couldn’t see where he was putting his feet. He had to feel his way. But the trail was smoother than the rocks to either side, and if he strayed too far, he got poked in the eye by a witch. It was still one long night. When it finally began to get lighter, he found himself in a goblin forest of stunted mossy trees, which was no surprise. But the trail seemed to be going downhill most of the time, which was an improvement. He knew he had to be making better time than Gaston and the girls. But they had a big lead on him. He stopped to listen from time to time. All he heard was the moaning wind through twisted, mossy branches.
Just as it was getting so a man could see a ways in any direction, the trail led down into another damned arroyo, this one facing into the trades and hence filled with mist blowing up at him. He kept going. Was it possible that Honduras was less than two hundred miles across? Not if he was walking in circles. But the trail hadn’t been his idea. It had to lead somewhere, and those Indian women had told him that it led to the mission. They could be wrong. Nobody else had told him the truth so far. But wherever it was taking him, Gaston and the girls had to be somewhere ahead.
He caught up with a girl before he caught up with Gaston. He heard crying ahead, eased in on it, and found the plump girl, Chita. When she saw him, she leapt up from the rock she’d been seated on and hung on to him for grim life, sobbing, “They left me behind! I did not think your friend meant it when he said that I had to keep up or spend the rest of my life with the ghosts up here in these terrible hills!”
He said, “You wouldn’t last all that long, alone. I hope you’ve gotten the message, Chita. I’m going on. Coming?”
She said, “Oh, si, I tried for to follow after I saw that they really would not stop as I demanded, but I kept falling in the dark, and I was just about to give up hope!”
The light was improving as the invisible sun rose higher. He didn’t want her dropping back again. He knew she did that a lot. So he made her take the lead. It still slowed them down. But not as much, and danger was more likely to overtake them from behind than it was to be waiting ahead. As he reconstructed her tale of woe it turned out that she hadn’t really been alone more than a few hours.
He knew Gaston could act pretty shitty when he had to. But the Frenchman was a good loser when it came to women. So when Chita said that she thought she’d been left behind because she’d refused to be vile with a dirty old man, Captain Gringo just laughed and said, “Keep walking. I thought he’d already had you back at that last camp. But that’s not our present problem. Can’t you move any faster, damn it?”
She complained, “These mossy rocks are so treacherous and my ankles have always been delicate. Pero what was that about me and that nasty little man at the last camp? Did he tell you I was a wicked woman?”
“Never mind what he told me. Just keep walking. It’s starting to get easier. Or it would be, if you weren’t so slow on your feet.”
The mist was now mostly above them as they seemed to be descending to clearer air. He still couldn’t see fifty yards up the slope to either side. They were walking down a twisty tunnel, shaped like an inverted V of mossy rocks and solid overcast. He found the footing sort of banana-skin too. Even digging in with his heels, it was an almost silent, squishy passage down the moss-covered trail. So when he heard a rock rolling loudly somewhere in the mists behind them, he hissed, “Chita! Down!” and found a big mossy boulder to hunker behind with the Maxim braced across it, trained back the way they’d come.
The girl crawled over to him on her hands and knees, asking what was the matter. He said, “Keep your ass and your voice down. Unless a rock just let go for the hell of it, we could have company!”
He was naturally staring up into the swirling mists where the overcast met the ground to drag its belly the rest of the way to the top. He had one buttock braced on a rock with his legs spread and heels dug in. He didn’t look down, he didn’t dare, but as Chita began to fumble with his exposed fly, he asked her, “Chita, what in the hell are you doing?”
She went on unbuttoning him as she whimpered, “I am frightened.”
He laughed incredulously and answered, “So am I. But for God’s sake, that’s not a baby bottle!”
She didn’t answer. She hauled out his limp shaft and proceeded to tease it with one plump hand and rosebud lips. He was about to tell her to knock it off when he heard something more important. Another rock rattled down the trail toward them, and a voice called out, “Madre de Dios, we’ll break our necks if we don’t dismount or, better yet, turn back!”
Invisible, someone else replied, “Keep going, you coward. It does not matter whether we catch up with the cabron or not. What matters is that we chased him out of our montana. Have you no sense of honor?”
The lead rider said, “Si, within reason, Luis. Pero this path is most treacherous, and that hijo de perro has an automatic weapon!”
“Keep going. He has no doubt run all the way to the lowlands by now. Honor requires that we chase him at least as far as high noon.”
Captain Gringo armed the Maxim as softly as he could and growled, “Chita, will you cut that out or do it right?” He’d expected her to take that as an order to stop. But she took it as criticism of her technique. It sure felt weird to get a fine blow job as one spotted ghostly riders coming your way at a walk.
There were at least half a dozen. He couldn’t make them out so hot. One called, “Hey, the fog is thinning out ahead.” So, before they could make him out, he opened fire.
The nice thing about automatic fire up a rocky gulch was that every slug got more than one chance. Hot lead bouncing off wet rock made ghastly wounds when it spun into man or beast. Most of his rounds, of course, went right where he aimed them. He saw the ones he could see going down. From the screams and thuds coming out of the cloud cover he could tell that he was doing a job on the others. Then the Maxim choked on the end of his last belt, and it got very quiet as Chita continued to do a job on him. He’d almost forgotten that in all the excitement. But his pecker had been paying more attention. It was about to come even as he unslung his carbine and braced it across the rock beside the now useless machine gun. He clenched his teeth and groaned, “Jeezuss!” as he ejaculated between her tonsils with her rubbing her snub nose in his pubic hair. She gulped it down and slowly drew her tightly pursed lips along the full length of his shaft before she grinned up at him to ask, “Do you like me better now, even if I am slow?”
He chuckled down at her fondly and replied, “If you call yourself slow, it’s just as well that I didn’t run into anyone faster than you. You sure are a friendly little thing, Chita.”
She said, “Si, that is what my husband always told me. Who were you shooting at so much just now, with you gun, I mean?”
He said, “Bandits, I think. I’m not about to stick my nose back in the fog to find out. I smoked up the same bunch last night. I wonder what they could be smoking. Real pros should have known better.”
“What shall we do now, Deek? I would know exactly what to do if there were no bandits around. You have a lovely gallo, y my bacalita wishes for to enjoy it too. Perhaps if we moved farther down the trail?”
He started to ask if she ever thought of anything else, but that would have been a dumb question, and for some reason he was feeling sort of horny this morning. He said, “We’ll never find a better spot for an ambush if they haven’t had enough. But speaking of having enough, I’ve got an idea.”
She protested that his idea was unromantic, but she let him place her belly down across the rock beside the machine gun, her head aimed the same way, so he could drop his pants and stand behind her, holding the carbine in one hand as he hoisted her skirts with the other, braced his palm against her big, bare behind, and proceeded to dong her doggie-style while he kept an eye on the silent trail above them. She liked it better after the first few thrusts. By the time he was ready to come again, it was hard to keep his mi
nd on both things at once. But nobody seemed to be coming but them. So what the hell.
They just had, together, when Captain Gringo heard a voice behind him shouting, “Eh bien, Chita. Come out, come out, wherever you are.”
Captain Gringo whipped out of Chita and managed to get his pants up just as Gaston came around the bend, stopped, and sighed. “Merde alors, can’t you get your own girls, Dick?”
Captain Gringo continued to button his pants as Gaston approached, saying, “I didn’t know you’d be coming back for her. What’s the story on the others?”
Gaston shrugged and said, “At the mission, of course. It’s less than five miles, and the monks have taken them off our hands in a très tedious way. One gets the distinct impression that they do not approve of what you and Chita have just been up to.”
Captain Gringo followed Gaston’s gaze to see that Chita was still over the rock, bare behind still exposed. He said, “Won’t you join us, Chita?” But she had her face buried in her hands and sobbed, “Oh, I cannot face the two of you now. Whatever must you think of poor little me?”
Captain Gringo saw that Gaston had brought his own carbine. He told him about the shoot-out. Gaston said he’d heard the sound but had taken it for thunder on the mountain. Captain Gringo said, “Yeah, it did sort of echo. Cover me from here and I’ll go up a ways and see how we made out.”
He did so, carbine at port. He found the first bandit dead, under a horse that was still breathing, staring up at him with one hurt eye. He said, “Sorry about this, horse,” and put it out of its misery before going on. Another bandit lay sprawled beyond. Blood-spattered jade-green moss indicated that his horse had made it, at least a ways. He found another dead horse with its rider facedown farther up the trail. He spotted more blood, followed it a ways, and then, when he saw that he was well out of .30-30 range, he stopped and muttered, “Shit, that was piss-poor shooting, even if the visibility was lousy.”
As he retraced his steps he helped himself to the ammo and pocket change of the three dead bandits. Nothing else they had was worth salvaging. Even their guns were out-of-date and rusty.
He went on down to find that great minds had run in the same channels. Gaston was covering the trail from behind the same rock, in Chita’s same channel. He went on humping her from behind, saying “I told her she would feel less embarrassed if we got our amusing situation out in the open. You’re next. Just as soon as I... ahhhhh!”
Captain Gringo laughed and said, “I think she’s had enough for now. Let’s go.”
Gaston said, “Mais, Dick, once we get her to the mission, neither one of us will be allowed to do this to any of them.”
Captain Gringo insisted, “Let’s go, damn it. I never want to see these mossy hills again, and if we don’t see the girls again, tough.”
They saw a bit more of Chita by the time the ground smoothed out and the rain forest started to grow more reasonably. Gaston insisted on laying her right, in a bed of ferns, and Chita didn’t seem to mind, now that she’d gotten over her first shyness. Captain Gringo didn’t take them up on their offer for sloppy seconds. He was in a hurry.
The trail widened to an easier passage between the trees. Just as a troupe of howler monkeys began to throw things down at them, they left the trees to follow the red dirt path across open corn milpas. From time to time a shaft of sunlight swept across them. The overcast was thinner this far to the northeast. Gaston pointed to tin roofing off across the mission fields and said, “That is it. The stream beyond is white water. Mais the monks say they can get the girls down to the coast from here one way or the other. I got another map from them. It disagrees a bit with the ones Hakim gave us, mais that is only to be expected when one must guess about unsurveyed territory, hein?”
Captain Gringo asked, “What did you tell the monks about us or our mission?”
Gaston replied, “As little as possible about us and nothing at all about any mission, since I thought we’d agreed to just give it the skip. Why do you ask?”
“I’m still trying to figure out what the fuck Hakim had in mind. You say you probably have a more accurate local map. I picked up a good hundred and fifty rounds off those bandits, and we know how to live off the jungle, so what do we need with more complications?”
Gaston walked on, holding Chita’s hand as he thought. Then he said, “Eh bien, we may as well let that Maxim find its own way from here on as well. Traveling light, we could make it to Comayagua long before our recent girlfriends are halfway to the coast, non?”
“Maybe. What’s so great about Comayagua? I’ve never been there.”
“That is one of the great things about the town. We have neither friends nor enemies there to worry about, and from Comayagua it is soup of the duck to reach the Caribbean, the easy way. Comayagua sits on the bottom of the Great Honduran Rift. From there to the coast it is all flat country, avec stage lines, cantinas, and other advantages of civilization.”
Captain Gringo thought for a few paces, reluctantly tossed the bullet-hungry machine gun into a clump of trail-side shrubbery, and said, “Okay, we’re not wanted here in Honduras, I hope, and Hakim’s not likely to have agents waiting for us in a town we never said a thing about visiting. Which way to your Great Rift?”
Gaston pointed due south, across the corn, and said, “That way, if we wish to kiss Chita adios right here and take a cut of shortness. It might save needless discussion with très tedious Dominicans.”
Captain Gringo agreed. Chita was confused when they both kissed her good-bye and left her on the red clay to follow it on as best she could. If she got lost in sight of the mission, she deserved to be lost. But she was still yelling after them as they crossed the field and vanished into the line of trees beyond.
They hadn’t gone far when they came to a ribbon of white water Gaston said was the same stream that passed the mission they’d decided to avoid. They crossed it easily enough. It was only waist-deep. As they climbed up the far bank Captain Gringo observed, “That creek runs into the Ulua farther down, right?”
Gaston said, “Oui, almost everything does, sooner or later. The Rio Humuya, the Rio Jicatura, all sorts of rios avec droll names meet the sea via the same estuary. That is for certain the Ulua. Which channel is the main one, farther inland, depends on whose map one reads. As a matter of fact, drainage from the Great Rift runs into the Caribbean near the seaport our recent sweethearts may be leaving from. Whether they or we arrive there first will depend on how friendly the girls in Comayagua may be, non?”
“No. I don’t want to hang around that long. The faction we were fighting for won the last round here in Honduras as I recall, but they could be pissed at us for not hanging around for honorable discharges.”
“Piffle, a mere technicality. Who signs up for a second hitch avec any army that pays so poorly? None of these banana republics take desertion seriously. If they did, they’d spend all their time rounding up the A.W.O.’s of L.”
“Maybe. I want to get back to San José and see if we can cash those deposit slips before Hakim figures out that we could still be alive.”
“Mais, Dick, surely you don’t think he gave us our advances in good faith?”
“That’s what I just said. He didn’t expect us to make it. But the paper has to be good. Hakim might be able to get away with murder, but fucking with the Bank of England can get a guy in more trouble, and they look like genuine deposit slips. How far is the Great Rift from here?”
Gaston laughed and said, “Hardly over the next rise, my hasty youth. We shall no doubt spend the next few nights in this rain forest. May I interest you in some trumpet fruit? I see some ahead.”
After a couple of buggy and muggy days in the jungle, Captain Gringo warned Gaston never to accuse him of being hasty again. Some flour and beans back at the mission might have been worth sitting through a mass after all. There was plenty of insipid fruit, and the monkeys were only too happy to throw nuts at them. But jungle fare failed to stick to the ribs like meat and po
tatoes. There were no potatoes at all in the soggy woods, and after Gaston had missed a couple of howlers, Captain Gringo told him to knock it off. Even if he’d wanted to eat what would look like a broiled baby with its fur off, the sound of gunshots made people nervous, and they didn’t know the local Indian situation.
They couldn’t see far ahead, of course, but the land kept taking them lower, and now there were gaps in the cloud cover above, when they could spot some sky through the canopy above them. The sun and prevailing winds agreed that they were headed in the general direction of the Great Rift. No map could be that far off. Like the fault-block valley they’d crossed in the cloud forest, the Great Rift was a strip of once higher ground, albeit a much bigger one, that had dropped in one long chunk when the volcanic countryside had given one big shudder. Gaston said Comayagua was one of the older Honduran towns, built by the Spaniards when they’d used the Great Rift to move inland and bring peace and joy to the original natives. The lowland route across Honduras had once been considered, as a matter of fact, for a canal route between the Caribbean and the Pacific Gulf of Fonseca. But the heat and bugs had driven the smart-money Spaniards up to the cooler and drier highlands around Tegucigalpa on the far side. Outside engineers who’d surveyed the Great Rift had decided that a canal across Panama or even Nicaragua would be cheaper.
The flat strip was still a good way to get around, though. Gaston said that once they got to the now local capital of Comayagua, they had a choice of stage lines to either coast. Captain Gringo voted for the Caribbean, anyway. He wanted as much territory as possible between them and Hakim until they could cash those deposit slips. He figured by now that Hakim would think them dead, and since he was still up to some skullduggery this far north, they had a chance of surprising the hell out of him at the San José branch of the Bank of England. When Gaston pointed out that that was likely to make Sir Basil very cross, Captain Gringo shrugged and said, “I’m pissed at him too. What’s he going to do, stand us in the corner? The old fart tried to kill us, and look where it got him.”