by Janice Weber
The ground crew rolled a staircase up to the aircraft as its internal temperature rose by the second. I said good-bye to the pilot, stepped into incinerating light and heat. After a moment’s shock, my skin began to weep in rebellion. Walked quickly to the terminal, only to discover it was the same temperature as the tarmac, minus the breeze. Tried to collect myself for the customs agent as the archaeologists in line chatted with the snorkelers. Easy for them: they all had legit passports. As the queue shuffled forward, I studied the whirring fans, rehearsed my smile. Finally I stood in front of a woman with red lipstick and skin taut and black as an olive.
“How long will you be staying in Belize?” she asked Cosima Wagner.
“Two days.”
Sweat poured past my ass, past my knees, as she peered at my immigration card. “You’re a journalist?”
“I’m writing an article on jungle medicine.”
A pause, then thunk went her stamp. “Enjoy your trip.”
Sure. I was already down a quart of water. I went outside, where the air was more active but no less crushing. Palm trees rustled beside a fraying strip of macadam. A dilapidated yellow bus, crammed with passengers and poultry, rattled past. Two more bumps and its gearbox would be road kill. I got a cab.
“Vacation?” my driver asked in soft, undulant Creole, tooting his horn at children on bicycles. Punta rock throbbed from the radio.
“Yes.” The car reeked of warm vinyl. Already I yearned for a shower, a Tom Collins.
“You wish a guide?” He passed a business card to the backseat. “I am Pablo.”
Minutest pressure on the accelerator produced thick gurgling from the vehicle’s underbelly. Heat and dust streamed through the windows as we passed wooden shacks on stilts and construction crews on perpetual coffee break. Once the cab entered Belize City, a shanty town in need of paint, sewerage, and perhaps another hurricane like the one that washed it away thirty years ago, Pablo tooted the horn every few seconds, signaling friends, policemen, other cabdrivers, children, dogs, fruit vendors, and women, none of whom moved an inch out of his way. Those who could honked back.
“You may rent my car,” he offered in that delicious singsong. “Very reasonable.”
“Sorry, I’ve already got one.”
He smiled, shrugged: no problem. “You are hungry? I know a fine restaurant.”
I dropped thirty bucks into the front seat. “Just get me to the car rental. Fast.”
Speed was relative in the tropics. Swishing around a few corners, Pablo crossed the narrow bridge at Haulover Creek. To my right, gulf water lapped at dinghies. We cruised past dull Caribes and dusky shops selling only sneakers. No ATMs, no bagels, cell phones, air-conditioning, yet the populace looked perfectly content. Soon the city petered out and we were back to shacks on stilts.
Already three o’clock. I rented a jeep, bought water, and headed west past halfhearted housing projects gouged from the brush. More vehicles stood, cannibalized, in front yards than used the highway. Every mile or so someone waited patiently for the yellow bus that would eventually appear. I passed dozens of tiny settlements whose inhabitants downshifted from slow to motionless in order to eyeball the jeep. Far ahead, the land heaved bluish mountains. I kept driving toward them. Sunlight became intermittent as the road began to rise. Just a few minutes from the Guatemalan border, I reached a steep, unpaved turnoff seamed not with ruts, but with gorges: slip into the gulch between two narrow bands of ground, kiss axle good-bye. I checked my map: fifteen miles on this moonscape, another five on foot, and no lingering sunsets at the equator. I wouldn’t get to Louis’s camp before dark.
First, I drank. Then I got the lug wrench from the toolbox. Killed the AC, opened the windows. As heat flooded in, my sweat glands mounted a ferocious defense. I shifted into four-wheel drive and left the last pavement I’d be seeing for a while.
The baseball-size rocks weren’t a problem until the road suddenly lurched downward, putting the jeep’s ass so high in the air that one good bump would pitch it over the hood. I fought to keep all four tires on the highest ridges. No help when the sun disappeared and shadows came alive, blurring width and depth. The wind shifted, red dust blew in. I looked at the speedometer and laughed: five miles an hour. I could have walked faster than this. Finally the jeep reached the bottom of the hill. The road evened out for a few revolutions of the tires before boomeranging upward again.
Beyond the hum of the engine, I heard a cacophony of insects and birds. Spooky, all that noise but nothing in sight. I disliked being the spied upon rather than the spy. Flipped on the headlights and inched skyward, chipping rocks into the wayside ferns. Did cougars pounce into cars if they were hungry enough? Maybe I should roll up the windows. Get a grip, Smith, you’re not even in the jungle yet. I went as fast as I dared. The jeep began to creak like a cricket. With each bounce, I half expected to see the transmission in the rearview mirror. The sun was dropping faster than I was climbing and the heat never quit. As the light waned, apprehension increased, I began to smell and hear with feral acuity.
My failing intellect fixed on the odometer. All this rutting around may have added a tenth of a mile to the reading. Max-ine’s map had directed me to a pile of stones at 15.3 miles off the highway: overshoot that and the forest would devour me. I slowed to a crawl. Had that little mess been a pile? Did three stones equal one pile? Each time I hit a bump, my headlights ricocheted into the trees, surprising birds, bats, beetles big as my fist. Light was draining from the earth like blood from a slaughtered bull. The sky was almost black when I saw the tiny stack of stones.
Hid the car behind high ferns and dug in my bag for insect repellent and flashlight, neither of which would protect me from anything here. I was checking out the pile of stones when a tarantula scuttled over my boot. Jesus Christ! Humans I could handle: animals were different. They’re more scared of you than you are of them. Bullshit! I didn’t have fangs loaded with venom or jaws that could tear a rabbit in half. I didn’t have wings to fly, legs good for forty miles an hour, ears bristling with radar. I didn’t have quills, talons, scales, or antennae. I was just open fillet, and this was dinnertime.
Glutinous fronds stroked me as I plunged into the forest. The path was slippery, littered with rocks and small bones. Odors of blossom and rotting entrail saturated the air. The blindness was nowhere near as terrifying as the noise. Each time I heard a nearby grunt or the heavy snap of twigs in the dark, I braced for a dozen teeth in my intestines. The chirring of cicadas hit me in huge, throbbing waves, as if I were amid an army of angry maraca players shaking their gourds inches from my ears. Add hoots, caws, screeches, and heat, always the goddamn heat. Sweat dribbled down the crease of my ass, joining the sweat dribbling down from my navel in a salty, musky confluence that drove bugs wild. Whenever I stopped to drink, they swarmed my ears, fed on my wrists. Maxine’s repellent had shot its wad about half an hour ago. I had slogged almost two hours when the flashlight went black.
Had I buried myself alive, the darkness could not have been more total. Raided my pack for matches, violently scratched one aflame. Ten seconds of feeble light convinced me I’d never find wood dry enough to make tinder, let alone a torch. I could either sit here and wait to be eaten or plug ahead. As the match sputtered out, I saw a footprint in the path. A second match proved I wasn’t hallucinating. Memorized the impression, sucking all possible hope from it. When the match died, I crawled slowly as a worm toward the next dip in the earth.
All thought melted into a sinkhole of adrenaline. Following less a path than an absence of forest, feeling for the footprints that miraculously recurred at fifteen-inch intervals, I proceeded a fingerling at a time, patting the dirt ahead of me so that snakes and rodents, hearing the vibrations, might flee. The insects stayed, and they ate. Flying things strafed my ears. After bumping into a dead armadillo, I began to go a little mad. If Barnard could do it, so can you. Crawled for ages in black, shrieking hell. Then the path tricked me and vanished. Suddenly I saw mil
lions of fireflies. Stars. Grass? I crept ahead, muttering as my knees sank into the sod.
A swish preceded blinding light. “Who are you?” a voice demanded.
I could only blink as the brain fast-forwarded ten million years along the evolutionary chain. I staggered to my feet, brushing compost off my knees with hands that looked like raspberry trifle. “Cosima Wagner. I’m looking for Polly Mason.”
The light didn’t move. “You came here on foot?”
No, in a Checker cab. When I tried to smile, my lower lip split. “On my knees, actually. Flashlight died.”
“You’re alone?”
“Yes.” I looked at my watch and nearly choked: one in the morning. This field trip was already half a day behind schedule. “Is Polly asleep?”
“Polly’s been gone for weeks.”
I tried to look shocked. “Where to?”
“I don’t know.”
I upended my water bottle over my head. By the time the water reached my shoulders, it was hot enough to percolate coffee. I waited as it dribbled down my back, my front, met at the lower fork, wept toward my ankles, fed the grass: still no invitation to stay. “Could I trouble you for some water?” I asked finally.
“What’s that in your belt?” he asked. I threw away the lug wrench. “I do not believe you have come looking for Polly.”
“I’m not out on a bird watch.”
“If you are after Louis, go back where you came from.”
The gnats had relocated my ears. “Listen,” I said, swatting futilely at nothing but humidity, “I don’t give a shit about Louis, whoever that is. I want to know what happened to Polly.”
The beam finally left my eyes. “Come with me,” he said. We crossed the lawn to a thatched hut. As my host lit a kerosene lamp, I saw a finely hewn brown face that could have graced a Mayan frieze. His feet matched the prints on the trail. Black hair, bright black eyes. The body of Tarzan, maybe twenty-five years too young to interest me. “My name is Ek. I’m the only one left here now.”
“Why are you sticking around?”
He looked surprised. “Because Louis will return.” Ek offered me a glass of water from a covered pitcher. “Don’t worry, we have our own well.”
I sank into the only available chair in a hut about the size of my shoe closet in Berlin. Wooden bowls cluttered a rough table. Mortars, pestles, and glass beakers crammed the shelf above a stone sink. An array of machetes hung on the back of the door. If Ek slept here, it was in the hammock suspended from two beams. Why would Bailey abandon a state-of-the-art facility in Virginia for this shack? “Could you tell me what happened to Polly?” I sighed. “From the beginning?”
Ek studied my filthy face. “You do not want to sleep?”
“I took drugs to stay awake.”
Rummaging beneath the sink, he found a bottle. “I’ll stay awake with you then.” He quaffed most of its contents with a shudder. “You are a brave lady.”
Brave? I was just a two-bit narcissist who wished to die recognizable. Ek settled into the hammock. “I have known Louis my whole life. Every summer he worked with my father, who was a country doctor. I helped them carry plants back from the mountains. Louis studied them under a microscope while my father made medicines for the villagers. They did this every year until my father died last spring.”
“Your village is here?”
“No. This is a secret camp. You are the first person to have found it.”
I wouldn’t be getting a door prize. A breeze wafted through the cabin, cooling nothing. Every second I waited, my body lost another few drops of precious fluid. “Polly came to study plants,” I said. “That’s all I know.”
Ek brushed a beetle off his shoulder, drank some more. Finally he spoke. “At the beginning of July, Louis came to my village in the middle of the night. He had come to Belize through Guatemala so no one would know he was here. ‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘I need you.’ We went into the mountains and built this hut. Day and night we gathered plants. Louis had brought some equipment and a computer that ran on solar batteries. No one bothered us for a long time.”
I went to the window and inhaled unseen, voluptuous blooms. “Then what.”
“One morning we heard chopping. We went toward the noise and saw a woman.” Ek paused. “She was tall with yellow hair.”
I wondered how long they had stared at her in awe and delight. Barnard had probably kept chopping, then spritzed water over her neck so that her blouse would cling to her breasts like cellophane over tomatoes. Maybe she’d sit on a log, lasciviously peel a banana. Better yet, she’d break her machete. Swear a little.
“She broke her machete,” Ek continued. “After Louis gave her his, she brought us to her place. She lived in a cave near a waterfall. Inside were her herbs and books. She even had pictures on the wall.”
I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear that Barnard had AC and track lighting. “Bet she and Louis hit it right off.”
“They were a good team,” Ek agreed. “He was a different man around her.”
All men were. “Did she move here or did he move there?”
“A little of each. But it was not what you think. They spent most of the night working.”
The ultimate erotic high, on a par with me playing the Brahms concerto with Furtwängler. No melding of flesh could compete with that. “Working on what?”
“Chemical analysis. We spent days searching for special plants. Once Polly brought back a branch with little black leaves. Louis was very excited. But the rain washed away the trails and she couldn’t find it again. Louis was angry. He said she remembered perfectly well where she had found it but was keeping it a secret.”
“What do you think?”
His calm eyes held mine. “I think Polly was a very clever lady.”
And Ek was a very clever assistant. “Researchers are competitive. Not trusting.”
Ek shrugged. “One day Louis told me he wanted to go to San Ignacio. He had a favorite café there named Koko’s. We went by canoe. Polly wanted to meet Dr. Tatal so I took her to the clinic while Louis went to Koko’s.”
“Who’s Dr. Tatal?”
A nearby bullfrog belched eight times before my host regained his tongue. “Louis’s friend. She comes to her clinic in San Ignacio once a week.”
“Why’d Polly want to meet her?”
Ek looked surprised. “Because she’s famous.”
Brrrripa. Brrrripa. “Was the visit a success?”
“No. Dr. Tatal wasn’t in.” Several drops of sweat fell to Ek’s shorts, leaving dark spots near his fly. “Polly and I went back to Koko’s. Louis was not there.”
“Where’d he go?”
“I have not seen him since that day.”
Brrrippa. “What did Polly do?”
Ek looked at me with annoyance, as if I were insulting his intelligence. He was probably right. “She went looking for him. I never saw her from that day, either.” His eyes followed a spider, or a fuzzy golf ball with six legs, across the table. “Polly was not really a botanist, was she.”
My pulse clunked, forehead wept: misjudging the assistant was such an elementary, costly error. “She went to medical school.”
A tiny iguana zipped over the windowsill as Ek took another swig from his bottle. “One night after I had gone to bed, Polly stood by me for a moment, like my mother used to. I pretended to be asleep. She went to the clearing and began walking in circles with something against her ear. I heard her say ‘Max’ a few times.”
“Maybe she was calling her boyfriend.”
“We have no phone here.”
I sniffed. Something burning: my nerves. “Did you tell Louis?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I did not wish to trouble him. He was already agitated that his experiments were going so slowly. I kept a close watch on Polly after that. She never called the man Max again.” Ek smiled to himself. “I never found a telephone.”
My knees creaked as I stoo
d. “Could you take me to her cave? I’m a little pressed for time.”
Ek filled our canteens as I sprayed fresh repellent over my insect bites. He lit a torch and, without a word of instruction, handed me a machete. We returned to the shrieking, shuddering forest and began whacking the green stuff. Heavy going, complicated by the shadows streaking from Ek’s flare. Hemorrhaging water, I kept as close as possible to the light as we followed a trail of notched trees. Once I heard a snap, a deep grunt, inches away: big, whatever it was. My nervous system ratcheted into hyperspace.
We crossed two mountains. Finally, stumbling down a ravine, I heard water. The forest fell away and Ek stood at the edge of a torrent. His flare reflected white, rabid tiers of froth. He ignored my dismay, or maybe he just didn’t understand it. “The bottom is slippery,” was all he said. “Can you swim?”
Thunder downstream: even in a barrel, chances of surviving that mother were zero. “No problem.”
We stripped to our underwear. “I can take the machete or the flare,” Ek said. “Not both.”
“Take the machete.” I balled our clothing into my backpack.
“You’re bringing that?”
“I can’t live without my insect repellent.”
He finally smiled. Maybe my lies were beginning to humor him. “Aim there.” He pointed upstream and slid into the liquid death.
Warm at the fringe but it quickly went cold and malevolent as the bottom dropped away. My backpack was heavy as a Siamese twin. Swam like a banshee but I was drifting toward that distant thunder. Felt bottom for three accelerating seconds then pow! over the edge of the first falls into choking, pummeling darkness. I let the whirlpool spin me above and below the surface; third time up, I kicked with all my strength. Broke free of the maelstrom but the current was dragging me downstream again. Something pulled my thigh as I was swept over a second falls: Wake up, Smith. Quieter in this pool but that was because the bottom would drop out of it any second now. I thought of Maxine and, strangely, of Fausto: I had wanted to play a concert with him. Steeled for a bone-crushing end then my head hit a log. Comets behind my eyes as I embraced it. The torrent sucked lasciviously at my legs. As the snagged trunk shifted toward the thunder, my optic nerve picked up a thin line of red at the horizon. I’d be going over the falls at dawn, the hour of love: how that would amuse the mischievous gods. One free fall in the mist, maybe in a rainbow, and I’d be out of this wretched jungle forever. I almost surrendered.