by M. S. Karl
As usual, I was wrong. I watched in surprise as she handed the baby to the man and mounted one of the horses, then reached down, and took the child.
“We must give him three thousand pesos for the horses,” she said, with the faint implication that the price was too high. One hundred thirty-five dollars. Almost nothing. “But he has included the blankets, hammocks, machete, and one saddle.” Her voice showed final triumph.
I opened the briefcase and handed over the money, my back to the others so they would not see how much I had, or the big Magnum revolver. I tied the briefcase behind the saddle of the second horse. The man who had come with us handed the woman a shopping bag that contained several boxes of rice and other rations. Then the final surprise: the man took off his beaten straw hat and placed it on my head. It was small, but it would stay on. Without a word the woman nudged her horse’s flanks. I gave the man my hand and he shook it without emotion. I mounted and followed the woman and child.
We crossed a broad pasture and began to climb. The little trail had been hacked out of the jungle hillside, and I had to lie low on the horse’s back to keep the vines from hitting my head. The animals picked their way carefully, and now and again a rock, kicked loose, would go plummeting down the hillside and we would hear it for half a minute more, far below. The child cried out once, and the woman had to dismount to change the cloth used for swaddling. I held her horse and listened. There was only the sound of the jungle birds and the rustling of branches in the wind.
Half an hour later we came down the hillside and into another clearing. We passed by a hut, but no one seemed home. Midway through the valley I heard the motor and two minutes later it came into view, a Cessna—maybe the same we had seen yesterday—sailing in from the southeast, a dot growing larger against the sky. He came in fast and low, thirty feet off the ground and I instinctively ducked. The horses were startled and as I grabbed at the rope reins my hat flew off in the blast from the propeller. The horse made a half circle, its eyes wide in fright. I had to get the hat. With it, from the air, I looked like any other peasant. Without it …
The Cessna winged up and started the circle for another pass. I jumped from the saddle and grabbed the hat. A sudden, terrible realization shot through me: They could land here. The earth was flat and there were no fences. And he was making another pass—or was it a landing run? I watched the plane approaching, its wings wagging slightly. It was a hawk, with a spinning beak, growing larger. I pulled the horse around in front of me to shield me this time, and I saw the smiles on their faces as the plane passed over. Its wings wagged twice and it was gone. They had only seen a couple of peasants: there was nothing here.
We made the other side of the valley and I breathed easier. Now the terrain became a washboard of ups and downs. We had started the horseback journey at six; it was now nine. Two more hours and we stopped to eat the fried tortillas and bananas that the woman extracted from her bag.
“You’ve been to the salta del agua?” I asked.
“Once. A long time ago. I used to live in a village not far from here.”
“Why did you leave?”
Her eyes clouded and I saw that I should not have asked I touched her shoulder to reassure her, and then let the baby grab my finger. It smiled. I suddenly realized that I did not know if it was a boy or girl. I did not know either of their names.
At three o’clock, when I was wondering how much longer I could stay in the saddle, I heard the water and we halted on a ridge. “Over there.” The woman gestured, and I gratefully slid from my mount and felt my blistered legs. It had been agony the last three hours. But now we were there.
I went down the ridge and came out on a little plateau. There was a small waterfall a few hundred yards away, a white froth of clear water from the remotest hills of Mexico, cascading down a rock face. A spray hung in the air and my eyes blurred as I walked forward. The trail was slippery and I had to grab a boulder to keep from falling into the stream. The roar of the falls grew louder and was all around me. “Bassett!” I yelled. “Harold Bassett!”
The waterfall swallowed the words, and I yelled them again. I was about to go back when I heard it from just above and to my right. A voice, hoarse, and distorted by the sounds of the water, but a voice I recognized.
“Yes? What do you want?”
The man called Harold Bassett was sitting on top of the boulder, looking down at me.
His clothes were ragged and hung on him like a clown’s suit. One sleeve had been ripped off to make a bandage for his arm. A week’s beard formed a dirty mask over which his eyes squinted, magnified by the heavy glasses.
“Do you remember me?” I shouted up at him.
“I remember. How did you get here?”
“The woman brought me.”
For a second there was silence, and then he hauled himself to a standing position and stood swaying. “The woman? She’s here?” He looked out over the little canyon, almost fell, and caught the cliff face.
“Yes. We’ve come to help.”
He nodded, and slowly picked his way down. A minute later he was standing beside me. I noticed with surprise that he was the same height I was; somehow, I had thought of him as smaller.
“I was trying to figure what I should do next,” he said. “I figured once I got here, I was safe for a while, but I couldn’t stay here forever.”
“I’m surprised you got this far.”
“Well, I was lucky,” he said, as we walked down the little defile to the place where I’d left the woman. “I waited for you to come back, you know. Two, three days I waited. You never came.” He let the accusation sink in before he went on. “Then, when the goons took me out, I knew it didn’t mean anything good. I remembered what you’d said.” He gave a bitter little laugh. “I don’t know how I got up the courage, but I did. Somewhere after Emiliano Zapata where they have all those detours, around bridge washouts. I waited until we were coming up on one, and then I reached over the back seat and grabbed the wheel and jerked it. We went off on the other side of the road, down the hill. You should’ve seen the bastards’ faces! There were three of them and it knocked ’em all senseless. The car was on its side, hidden from the road, on the other side, see? Well, I went through the pockets of the one next to me. A real goon. Smelled like he swam in cheap perfume. Almost crushed me when he fell on top of me. One of those fucking north Mexicans. Big. I got the keys to the handcuffs and was going through his wallet for his fucking money when I heard one of the others stirring. So I climbed out. It was my fucking luck I was halfway up the hill when one of the bastards got off a shot.” He raised the dirty strip of cloth to look down at his wounded arm. “Doesn’t seem to be bad, though. Anyway, the fucker must’ve broken his leg or his head or something because he didn’t come after me. I got my ass out of there and just by luck saw a cargo truck coming down the road. Said they were headed up to Limonar. I gave the driver fifty pesos, and here I am.”
“How far are we from the road?” I asked as we came into the little clearing where the woman waited with the horses.
“Four hours. If you get off before Limonar, like I did.”
He stopped then and looked at the woman, sitting astride the horse with the baby in her arms.
“So you came. Jesus Christ. You remembered what I said about this place, did you?” He gave her leg a pat and chuckled, then turned to me and said in English, “When you’ve got a fucking Indian woman, you’ve got her for life. Faithful as the day is long. Not like American bitches.” He stood where he was while she laid the baby down and began to work on his arm. “She’s Tzeltal, you know. Never could find out what made her leave her village. Just showed up one day, looking like a fucking whipped dog, baby and all. The kid’s a boy, by the way. Can’t help but wonder who his old man was, but it isn’t any of my business.” He gave me a wink.
I took a seat on a rock and watched him devour the tortillas and fruit. “Can’t stay here,” he said, mouth half-full. “If that trucker talks, the
mother-fuckers’ll know where to start. We’ve got two more good hours of traveling. We’ll have a chance then.”
I watched him chew like a famished animal. He wasn’t guilty. But only the two of us knew it. I would never convince Obregon, even less the federates on his trail. He was right. We had to keep going. A sudden realization chilled me. These hills led nowhere but to Guatemala. We were not provisioned for the jungle, for a march over the highlands. My God. If that was what he was thinking …
“Well,” he got up stiffly and beat off the dust. “Might as well make use of the daylight.”
It was what he was thinking, of course. There was nowhere else to go. I refilled our drinking gourds and looked over at the woman. As usual, her eyes gave away nothing.
It was five-thirty when we finally stopped to make camp. For over two hours we had climbed, and the clouds that had at the start been hanging over the distant hills now rolled by just over our heads. I took the machete and cleared a space, and then slung the two hammocks while the woman gathered firewood. My legs were stiff and raw and I had walked the whole afternoon, letting Bassett ride. Now he sat on the ground watching me, his hand rubbing his left shoulder.
“Got to bear more east tomorrow,” he said. “We keep south we’ll end up in fucking Comitán, or worse luck, Cristóbal. That’d be a hell of a note.”
“How will you get into Guatemala without papers?” I asked.
“Crossing’s no sweat. There isn’t a border station till Sacrificios. Now staying, that might be a problem. But I’ll worry about that when I see the last of Mexico. Anyway—” His eyes crinkled under the glasses and I saw the beard crack into a smile. “I’ve had such good luck so far, who the hell knows what else is in store?”
The sky began to flicker with heat lightning as we ate around the little fire. It was cooling and the night would be chilly. From far away thunder rumbled in like a growl from inside the earth. The woman ladled more rice from the cookpot into Bassett’s open bowl.
“Woman’s smart,” he said. “She knows. Rice on the trail. You try beans and you’ll be there all night, trying to get ’em soft enough to eat.” He leaned back against a tree, the fire giving a yellow cast to his face, and plucked at the sleeve of the shirt I had given him. “Lucky thing, us being the same size and all. You know, you and I’re a lot alike.”
I did not answer. Perhaps he saw my revulsion because he smiled.
“You know, you never explained just why the hell you’re doing this? Who the hell are you?”
I gave him the tired old lie and half believed it. “I’m a writer. I came here to do a story. Or a couple of stories. On oil and tourism.”
“What magazine?”
“I’m freelance. But if I do a good job, I hope …”
“On your own money then, eh? I told you we were alike. But that doesn’t explain why the hell you care what happens to one American more or less.”
“I heard about the case from a woman named Whitcomb. It got my interest. That’s all. I started asking around. I decided you were innocent.”
“And went on a one-man crusade to help me. That’s why you browbeat me in prison, tried to make me admit I killed LaCour. All for a fucking story. And you got in just by slipping the cops a few pesos.”
“That’s right.”
“All for the ends of justice. You know what, Dennison, or whatever the hell your name is? I don’t believe you. You’re a goddamn liar. And you know what else? I don’t give a fuck. You’re on my side and I don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.” He laughed at my chagrin and put his plate aside. The woman reached out of the shadows to take it. “But let me ask you one question, my friend. What the fuck would you do if it turned out I had killed that son-of-a-bitch LaCour?”
“But you didn’t.”
“No? Who did?”
I took a deep breath. “Alexandra Whitcomb.”
“The Whitcomb woman?” He laughed. “Well, she wouldn’t have been my choice. But I won’t argue.”
“That’s good.” I got some more wood and put in on the fire. “I’ll take a couple of blankets and sleep on the ground,” I said. “You and the woman can have the two hammocks.”
Once more, for an instant, her eyes met mine and I tried to fathom what she was thinking. But then whatever it was dissolved and her eyes fell away.
For a long time after they had taken to their hammocks, I lay beside the coals of the fire and looked up at the sky. They were the same stars as always, only here they went by different names, Indian names, names I did not know. They belonged to another universe, a universe we had entered, a world of forest and shadow and hunters and hunted, where there was no illusion of civilization to confuse the basic issues.
The wind stole in silently, building from somewhere in the east, in the direction we were going. The wind was soft and caressed, but it was a killer, too. Malaria was the name of the death it had brought civilizations, literally, “bad air.” Here, it was called paludismo, but even though the mosquito vector was known and recognized, the air was still evil. I had read it all somewhere in a book. Now I wished I knew the name of the book and had brought it so I could find out what else we would be facing in the days to come.
I looked over at the blanket-wrapped form in the hammock. What the fuck would you do if it turned out I had killed that son-of-a-bitch LaCour? I saw his face leering at me from the embers. He had scarcely greeted the woman who had come so far to help him—just accepted her ministrations as his due. And the woman: she attended him as if he owned her. I thought of three nights ago and the strong warmth of her body, and the memory of it began to ache inside me. Then, almost as if in answer to my thoughts, his hammock moved and I saw him leave it and go to where the woman slept. He bent over it and I heard whispers, and then their shadowy forms melted together and the hammock began to shudder in the darkness.
I turned my face away from the fire and looked into the night.
I dreamed …
The room was bare except for a calendar on one wall. The calendar had stopped counting time four years before and no one had ever taken it down. On its pasteboard face was the picture of the world outside with trees and lakes and rivers. I was afraid to touch it for fear that it would be what it seemed to be, a calendar painting instead of a window. The mattress stank and a cold slime seemed to ooze up through the concrete floor from the river. How long had I been here now? One day? Two? A week? Someone must know I was here. Someone must be coming to get me. They had not even told me why I was here. It was wrong; it did not happen. To others, maybe, but not to me. A sudden thought: the woman knew. She had been there, had watched them take me away. She would do something, go to somebody. Then the terrible, sickening realization: Who cared? Who gave a single solitary fuck?
Jesus! No! My scream echoed off the walls and came back to mock me. I screamed again and again and soon the cell was filled with the maniacal laughter, played back at me by the walls.
Then I heard footsteps outside and the horrible echoes stopped. The door opened and a man stood looking down at me. He was my own age, mid-thirties, longish face with lines across his brow. It was not an unkind face, but his eyes bothered me: Their blue emptiness was like the ocean, a deepness in which nothing human could live.
“Why did you kill Paul LaCour?” he asked in a quiet sort of voice, as if he were asking the price of bread.
I screamed again, but he did not seem to hear the sounds. Instead, he asked the question again. I pounded the wall with my fist, tasting the salt in my tears. No one would believe it wasn’t true.
“We believe you,” the voice said, and the wall moved. The wall was a thin sheet, and two men were lifting it and carrying it away. The other three walls vanished the same way.
“Jeez, you’ve convinced us,” the voice said, laughing. “Remember, the walls are plywood.” I looked around me. There were bright floodlights and cameras. A man whose face I couldn’t see stood just off-stage. “Next scene,” he said. “We cut to Highland Chiapas.
” I knew his voice from somewhere.
Chapter Fourteen
The dream haunted the days that followed, staying with me like a bad taste in the mouth, as we struggled over the mountain trails, higher and farther into the jungle. Around us was a green maze, with dark, sodden stretches where mahogany and cypress grew, rising into green hills. Now and again we stopped at tiny Indian settlements. For a few pesos we bought coffee beans, cakes of chocolate, tortillas, and black beans.
On the fourth day we came to a small clearing with two Lacandon houses. A barefoot old man came out and listened impassively as the woman spoke to him. When she was done he ran a hand through his stringy, shoulder-length hair and nodded. He pointed to a distant hill with a halo of cloud and spoke again.
The woman turned to us, “He says that the river is over that hill. A day’s travel.”
Bassett sighed. “Always a day’s travel,” he said in English. He said to the woman in Spanish, “Ask him if we can camp here for the night.”
The woman shook her head. “He says that the soldiers came through here a few days ago.”
“How many days?”
“A few.”
“Hell.” Bassett spat. “That could be last year.” But I knew that the word soldados had hit him like it had hit me—a sharp, sinking feeling in the belly.
It became acute with her next words: “He says they were after some bandidos.”
We left the old man scratching under his dirty white robe and pushed on, but now every turn in the trail seemed to hold a threat.
“People think of the jungle like a swamp, a barrier,” Bassett said as we sat by the fire that night. “Something that sucks you down. Isn’t. What it really is, is a network of trails.”
I looked across the fire at him. Yes, a network, I thought. A friendly network for those who knew it. But for the stranger, a house of mirrors. Was he a stranger or did he know where he was going all along?