by Janice Weber
Then my brain flashed to a cheerful, tinkling fountain. I floated back to a moon-drenched night, again transfixed by—God, what was it—something lithe and wonderful … music. Ah. Yes. A woman’s low laugh. I had envied her. The log lurched another foot downstream, losing height as well as position. As water rose to my neck, the laugh grew more radiant. I began clawing toward shore, toward one more time. Some primordial beast made the final yank and I rolled onto rock.
Lay staring like a dead fish at the slash of red at the horizon. A while later, Ek found me rubbing ointment into the gash in my thigh. “That pack was heavier than I thought,” I said, tossing over his clothes.
He took a long time tying his sneakers. “Is there something special in it?”
“I told you. Insect repellent.”
“Are you a soldier?”
Buttoned my filthy shirt. “No. I’m just athletic.”
“Like Polly?”
“Yes.” To prove the point, I stood up. My thigh nearly split in two. “Tell me something, Ek. Did anyone ever see the three of you together?”
“Just the fat man. Fausto.”
I had to sit down again. “Fausto was here?”
“You know him?”
“Not well.” But well enough to know that he wouldn’t endure this green hell unless his life were at stake. “I thought you said no one visited the camp.”
“We had lunch in Belize City. To celebrate Louis’s birthday.”
Louis came out of hiding, Fausto flew two thousand miles, to blow out a few candles? “How sweet,” was all I could say.
“Everyone drank a lot of beer. Fausto asked Polly to run away with him. He said they wouldn’t have to spend much time together and she would be rich. I think he was not joking, though he pretended to be. Louis swore that Fausto would live to be one hundred.”
What drivel. “When was this?”
“The middle of August.”
Think, Smith. Something else had happened around then: a bundle of loose ends caught fire but my brain couldn’t penetrate the smoke. “Did Louis see Fausto after that?”
“No.”
“Did Polly?”
“I don’t know.” Ek stood. “We should continue before the sun gets too high.”
I followed him up the third mountain. Conversation impossible: not enough oxygen to make myself heard over the warbles, caws, and trills. Any creature lucky enough to have outlasted the night was trumpeting its survival. The noise was kaleidoscopic, literally dizzying … how useless my years in cities had made me. With daylight came more heat. My clothes steamed. Ek followed a thin path, frequently slipping on the steep grade. Near the peak, he stopped. “Here we are.”
In the rock I saw a hole the diameter of a kettledrum. Barnard had the balls to crawl through that? “To keep the snakes out,” Ek said, removing a screen from the aperture. He found a flashlight like mine, only in working order, at the threshold of the cave. “Put the screen back after you.”
We wriggled into a damp tunnel. The floor ended at a ledge overlooking a cavern about twenty feet high and wide. Three thousand years ago, Joe Mayan’s castle. Now it smelled like an apothecary. I saw why as Ek’s flashlight played over piles of leaves, roots, dozens of jars … rectangular glass. “What’s that?”
“Louis’s spectrograph. It worked better here.”
Of course: the temperature and humidity of a cave were constant compared with that of the open jungle. Barnard had probably hooked up the solar panels for the batteries in a clearing nearby. Ek and I slid down a rope to the cavern floor. I was shown Barnard’s bed, her books and clothing; even here, she’d look soignée. Silk panties hung on a string, still trying to dry. “She was here gathering plants a month before we met,” Ek said.
I saw no weapons, no communications gear: either Barnard had taken everything with her or Ek was the most accomplished liar in Belize. Next to the spectrograph lay drawings of leaves, bark, twigs, berries, all with their chemical and pharmaceutical properties. Nothing here smelled like grilled pineapple. I found cures for constipation, impotence, insomnia, parasites; douches to induce birth and prevent conception; unguents, powders, infusions … this was saintly, painstaking work. If only Barnard had been a saint! “They didn’t put any of this into a computer?” I asked.
“It was always breaking down.” Ek lifted the spectrograph. “Would you like to see Polly’s pictures?”
I stared at the snapshot of Senator Perle in that whopping yellow suit. She stood at a microphone, catechizing with the humorless vehemence that American voters always mistook for leadership. Next picture she was kissing Jojo Bailey’s flushed cheek. That poor sod looked either drunk or heavily under the weather, but speeches had never been Jojo’s rush; he preferred parades and talk shows. I leafed through a few more photos of puffy dignitaries, then Jojo getting into a cab, arm around a woman’s rump. The last picture was of Paula Marvel dancing with schoolgirls in dark pinafores. Her dress, white with a dozen orange bows up the front, would have looked more professional on a clown.
“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 whee
l 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.