Nightmare Country

by Marlys Millhiser

  “You sure do change fast. You were all steamed up about Jerusha coming from here and knowing this Roudan guy, and now—”

  “Russ, do you think there’s a possibility of Adrian’s being alive?”

  “After all this time? No, I don’t. Or Fred either. I think they’re both still in Iron Mountain and will probably never be found. I think it’s about time you faced up to it.”

  “You sound like Backra.”

  “And it’s no use running around badgering people here. They don’t know anymore about this whole thing than we do.”

  “I guess you’re right.”

  “But I sure would like to know why your girl and my night watchman are—”

  “Dead.”

  “And who filled in all the tunnels in Iron Mountain. Went in there with a state inspector. You can walk maybe a fourth the way down in the main tunnel, and then it’s limestone. Looks purer than anything we’ve dug in years. And if he ever reported what we saw, I never heard about it.”

  Tamara left him with his musings and went in to sit on her bed and stare at the wall. She couldn’t even cry.

  A rapping on the screen door caught her dozing sitting up. A gaily dressed man with the friendliest smile she’d ever seen stuck his head in. “Ready for da bug?” He stepped in with a canister and hose and started spraying clouds at the wood and thatch of the cone-shaped roof. “You leaf, okay? And I shoot da bug.”

  Tamara wandered out onto the long dock, where the water slapped with a hollow sound against the pilings below. She’d given Adrian up. But she wasn’t ready to feel it yet.

  When she returned to the cabana, Agnes Hanley stood surrounded by a scattered coating of bug bodies, tiny white bodies with brown heads.

  “Don’t make sense. Clean the place first and then spray for termites.” Agnes looked hot in her gathered housedress and oxfords. The trim of her petticoat showed where the skirt had wrinkled up in back. “Don’t make sense, me being here, neither. Fred’s not here,” she said helplessly. The circles under her glasses had darkened. “Can’t even eat the food. Nothin’ but fish.”

  Tamara felt again the extra weight of regret at her thoughtless haste in dragging this poor woman down here, holding out hope to her as a lure. Lunch was more fish, which Agnes picked at and Tamara ate without tasting.

  Russ came in picking at his teeth with a toothpick and sat down beside Agnes instead of lining up at the buffet table. He grinned and slid the toothpick to the other side of his mouth. “Found a place down the street serves hamburgers.”

  “But you can get hamburgers at home,” Tamara said. “This is fresh fish.”

  “Hamburger.” Agnes set down her fork. “Show me.”

  Tamara went with them because she couldn’t bring herself to sit alone with the strangers there. She and Russ left Agnes off at a little building with chipped tables in the sand and flies. They strolled on down the street, so familiar and yet strange.

  “Russ, why did I come here and make everybody else come too?”

  “You didn’t want to give up hope. Nobody does. ’Least you get a little vacation out of it.”

  “I can’t afford this any more than Agnes can. Broke my contract. No money. What am I going to do?”

  “You can always come to Colorado with me,” he said uncomfortably.

  “No I can’t. You’d hate it. I love fish.” She laughed and he chuckled, and then he stood in the middle of the sand street and held her. “She’s dead. Oh, God, Russ, she’s dead.”

  Tamara and Russ stepped into the dark bar of the Hotel de Sueños. “Alcohol is no answer for the way I feel.”

  “Have a Coke, then. I’ll try one of them Belican beers,” he told Seferino, and found them a corner table where she could look out the window at the sea.

  “You in love with this Backra guy?”

  “He’s gone, and I’ll never see him again. And, Russ, do me a favor? Don’t tell me everything’s going to be all right.”

  The two men from Alabama sauntered in and came over to their table. “Hey, Seferino, where’s Roudan?”

  “He takes the day off.”

  “Sure is taking a lot of ’em lately. Ain’t no way to run a business.” They coaxed Russ into a game of darts.

  “Sure do miss the Doc already,” Harry said, and his dart missed the board. “Can you beat that crazy vet? After all we been through together, and he goes off without even saying good-bye.”

  Russ Burnham’s last dart hit just outside the bull’s-eye, and he leaned against the bar to give Don a turn. The parrot turned upside down and said, “Jeeroosha!”

  Russ turned around and blinked. “What about Jerusha, birdie?”

  Chespita squawked and fluttered her wings. A livid-green feather floated silently down, to rest on the shiny bar top.

  “Doc’s a loner. Probably go back to Alaska and be a hermit in the wilderness. Which—the way things have been going—ain’t all that bad an idea,” Don said. “I gotta be getting back too. Or I’ll lose my job. Been gone too long, the way it is.”

  “Your uncle fires you, boy, and your daddy’ll foreclose on his mortgage on that car lot,” Harry said when his friend had won the game. “That turkey never played darts in his life till he came here. Now he cleans up on everybody but Roudan.” He sat down with Tamara. “Not like Roudan to be gone so much. Maybe he’s sick.”

  Russ and Don had joined them at the table in the corner when Rafaela stomped in, still angry but without her broom. She accosted Seferino. “Donde está Stefano?” She was so short the bar’s rim came up almost to her neck, but she raised her fists to beat on it and castigated the bartender in mixed dialect.

  He answered her so rapidly Tamara caught only the words “Roudan” and “diablo,” and something about poor souls high up somewhere, and he motioned toward the ceiling.

  “You guys been here long enough to catch the language?” Russ drained his second Belican. “We’ve been trying to talk to people all day.”

  “I don’t know what she said, but I think he said Stefano comes when Roudan goes and she’d better clap her trap or old Stefano’s going to get mad because they gotta help hungry people in the attic.” Don beamed at Harry.

  “You may have picked up the game ah darts, but your translatin’ is pee-poor. She is pissed-off because she can’t find her husband, who is sharing some kind of high-up work with Roudan. Probably taking turns knocking down coconuts from tall palm trees. And she thinks it’s all loco—which means crazy—and that they are doing the work of the devil.”

  None of which made any sense to a grief-drugged Tamara until that evening when she was out pacing the water’s edge in front of the cemetery with Dixie. Or rather Dixie was already there when Tamara decided she couldn’t abide happier people in the bar hut or the lighted compound. Nor could she stand another minute of listening to Russ Burnham and Don Bodecker try to outdo each other in creative swearing. Tamara and Dixie had fallen in step, each quiet with her own thoughts. They shared at least one common sorrow, even if Dixie didn’t know it—Backra.

  Dixie stopped suddenly as a shadow figure emerged from the village street next to Backra’s house and slid into the side door of the Hotel de Sueños. “Wonder what old Stefano’s up to. Rafaela’s hopping mad at him.”

  The major discussion at dinner had been the fantastic improvement in the food. “Same things are in the kitchen as always, but now Rafaela Paz is in there with them,” Dixie had explained. “With Edward P. and Thad gone, she’s finally consented to work for me. I don’t know if she makes the sign of the cross over the stove or what, but her cooking’s becoming a legend.”

  “Seferino said Roudan and Stefano were doing some kind of work with poor people,” Tamara said now. “And that Stefano would come home when Roudan left.”

  “You know, I’ve always found those two highly suspicious. But I could never decide just why.”

  Stefano came out of the hotel and walked to the house next to Backra’s. Even at night Tamara recognized the old ma
n who didn’t want her to have Backra’s cruel parting gift.

  Agnes Hanley trudged across the cemetery in her oxfords to join them. “Nothing but sand in my shoes since I got here,” she complained, and then sighed and then sniffed. “Mrs. Whelan, I want to go home. I don’t like this place, and Fred ain’t here.”

  “I’ll check with Sahsa for a return seat first thing in the morning.” Dixie turned to Tamara. “How about you?”

  “I might as well go.” I’m giving up, Adrian, baby. “Russ probably will too. There’s nothing here for us.”

  “May take a few days. Radio’s predicting bad weather on the way.” Dixie started pacing again.

  “What’s that?” Agnes stepped up past the empty grave of Maria Elena Esquivel and bent over. “Always did wonder what could make them funny markings in the sand.”

  A lizard, perhaps a foot long from its head to the end of its tapering tail, scuttled across a sandy grave and into shadow. Its narrow body left the spine and its four legs the rib shapes of the leaf-skeleton pattern that had long mystified Tamara too.

  But something else still mystified her. “What kind of poor people do you suppose those two could be helping? Rafaela told Seferino that they were doing the work of the devil.”

  “People on Mayan Cay are relatively well-off.” Dixie stared at the Hotel de Sueños. “There’s real poverty on the mainland. But if I know Roudan Perdomo, he’s helping Roudan Perdomo. Stefano I’ve always found inscrutable.”

  The side door opened again, and this time a tall figure stepped out. He swung a cloth sack over his shoulder, threw back his head in a wide yawn, and started toward the village.

  “Roudan,” Dixie whispered. “Can’t believe he’s leaving the bar to Seferino at night. It’s their busiest time.”

  “Apparently off to do the work of the devil.” Tamara started across the cemetery. “Let’s see where he’s going.”

  “It don’t have anything to do with us,” Agnes protested.

  “We spent all this money to come down here. We should look into anything that seems strange.”

  “That’d be everything in this place.” But Agnes was right behind her, and Dixie too.

  Roudan moved ahead of them with a relaxed stride, apparently unworried about being followed. He headed straight for the generating plant and slipped into the jungle near the chain-link fence.

  “We can’t go in there.” Dixie stopped. “It’s full of sinkholes.”

  “You’ve lived here for years,” Tamara said. “Haven’t you ever been in the jungle?”

  “Not very far in. Then I almost got lost.”

  “I’ve been in this way.” Tamara stepped over to the break in the growth. “It’s passable if you stay on the trail.”

  “When … how? You’ve only been here two days. Besides, it’s too dark.”

  The moon was almost full, but it was watery rather than bright. There seemed to be a vapor between it and the earth, and the air seemed to cool even as they talked.

  “Agnes, you don’t happen to have that little flashlight in your purse? The one you use to find the bathroom at night?”

  Careful Agnes was never without her purse, and Tamara had guessed right—never without her flashlight either. She withdrew it, handed it to Tamara. “Shouldn’t we go back and get Russ?”

  “There’s no time. We’ll lose him.” Tamara hurried down the trail she’d traveled twice. Once in a dream.

  39

  Again the smells of the sea receded and the smell of jungle took over. She tried not to think of stinging insects, crawling things that could twine like vines in the branches overhead. The air seemed thick, and though cooling, oppressive. The flashlight was too small to do much good. The tangle of fallen palm fronds, coconut husks, and wet grasses littering their path made it difficult to move quietly or quickly.

  “Do you think Roudan has some connection to your daughter or Agnes’ husband?” Dixie asked behind her. “Is that why we’re doing this?”

  “I don’t know. But you said yourself that Roudan was behaving oddly. Won’t hurt to look into it.” And Backra’s father had claimed Roudan was the key to some mystery. Maybe it was all the same mystery. “And it was in here, Agnes, that I saw Alice’s shadow.”

  When they came to a place where the trail was confused by several paths that could be drainage depressions, Tamara had merely to follow her nose. The sickly, exotic scent of the night-blooming cereus dictated their direction. Agnes had a squelchy shoe from stepping off the trail. She reached out to touch a blossom, and put the other hand over her mouth.

  “Night-blooming cereus,” Dixie said. “I think they stink. Bloom every night, close up in the day.”

  “Only bloom once a year in Iron Mountain,” Agnes said sadly.

  Tamara looked through the vine wall and saw patches of things. Of light and of dark. Pieces of a stone building she didn’t remember, on stepped rises and coated with vines and jungle plants. And she thought she heard again that sound of far-off traffic, the distant engines and the angry buzz of tires.

  “What’s that whirring sound?” Dixie whispered. “You hear it? Like wind … moving through a pine branch or …”

  “Sounds like a bunch of bugs to me,” Agnes said. “Don’t see that Roudan fella anywhere.”

  Tamara moved to another peek hole, and she could see the mosscovered stela with its corner sliced off. Embarrassment, longing, betrayal.… From here the temple mound merely looked like a cone-shaped hill with a few trees and lots of plants angling up its sides, and several droopy palms on top. No stone building on stepped rises.

  “I vote we go back to the village.” Dixie slapped at an insect buzzing her cheek. “He’s got an entire jungle to lose himself in.”

  Agnes still peered through vines. “That hill looks something like Iron Mountain, only smaller.”

  A misty cloud made rings around the moon, dimmed its light even more as Tamara led her companions to the place where Backra had shown her a passageway through the vine. She avoided looking at the stela. She did notice the odd shapes along the mound that sleeping shadow weeds could make. If she were the imaginative type, she could see gargoyles and hunched lions and—

  Dixie’s startled yip had the effect of a gunshot in the stillness. She leaped and danced into the clearing. “Get away from there!”

  Tamara played the flashlight on the ground, where the earth moved in a continuous line, angling from the vine wall out into the clearing for as far as the small light could follow it, a flow of tiny bits of jungle debris that seemed to have no end and was about four inches wide.

  Dixie stripped off her sandals with a frenzy to match her dance. Tamara knelt well to the side of the tiny river to see a swarm of ants in a procession carrying the bits of leaves and grass on their heads and backs. There must have been a million of them.

  “Parachute ants.” Dixie brushed at her legs and skirt. Tamara took the flashlight, and jumping over the busy ants, walked to the base of the mound Backra had called a Mayan temple.

  She stepped carefully around the edges of the clearing, looking for a continuation of the trail, but found nothing that wouldn’t require a machete to get through. The light flashed over something at her feet, and she bent to pick it up. The flash had come from a metal hinge on the end of a bow to a pair of eyeglasses. The earth was disturbed around her, but she could find no trace of the rest of the glasses. They would definitely have to come back here in daylight.

  Tamara forgot her caution and stumbled as she ran back to the two women waiting by the stela.

  “Find anything, Nancy Drew?” Dixie asked dryly.

  Agnes made a little choking cough and traced the flesh-colored earpiece hanging from the bow with a hesitant finger, touched the tiny transistor inset. “It’s Fred’s.”

  “Now, Agnes, lots of people wear glasses with hearing-aid devices.” But a treacherous hope had ignited in Tamara too.

  Thad Alexander tried to sleep sitting up in the air terminal in New Orleans. His S
ahsa flight from Belize City had arrived without incident and he’d cleared customs shortly before noon, only to find his connection to Los Angeles, Seattle, and on home canceled by an airline strike.

  There were many good things about being out of touch with the rest of the world, but they all ended abruptly when you tried to reenter. The motels nearby were booked. He was promised the possibility of a seat on another airline if he was present for standby anywhere from now to eternity. He waited in line for a hamburger for lunch; and steak, rare, for dinner.

  Even the longed-for juicy red meat didn’t do it. Takes a while to get back into the swing, he told himself, and found an uncomfortable plastic chair molded for humans under five-foot-five. He read a complete New York Times and two local papers. That took up most of the afternoon and evening. No mention of weird stuff going on in the Caribbean, just the usual hurricane watch for this time of year. The rest of the world was cracking up as per usual, but nothing like what he’d just lived through.

  Eventually he found a padded chair, still plastic, which relieved the wait a little. He scanned the Times again, down to the tiniest of items. Nothing even going on in the Bermuda Triangle. Well, so much for reality. He dozed, slept, shifted, began to ache in places he hadn’t known existed. And then he began to dream, but just in snatches, which was the way he slept. The dream woman, Tamara, looked at him with My Lady’s limpid amber eyes—sullen now, accepting death.

  “There are always hurricanes in the Caribbean this time of year,” he said to the young woman in the chair next to him, who was nursing a baby, and realized he was awake but had been dreaming.

  “Really?” She tried to shift herself without shifting the baby. “What do people who live there do in a hurricane?”

  He looked at the exposed breast and thought of Martha Durwent and the blood streak running from her head down across her breast in the dive boat. “I don’t know.”