by M. S. Karl
“Guerrilleros. Bandits. Or whatever you want to call them. Been operating both sides of the river. Hit a town upriver from here yesterday. San Marcos.”
“San Marcos?”
He nodded and scratched under one arm. Gray curls of hair showed at the neck of his open shirt and a gold cross on a chain caught the glint of the sun. “A very strange thing. I met another American today, going to San Marcos. Right out there in the river. I told him about the trouble, but it didn’t seem to matter.” His eyes watched for a reaction and I don’t know if they caught one or not. “Not a good year to be here, Mr. Dennison.” He threw his cigarette into the brown waters and squatted down beside me. “Some years, it’s very good, you know? I take maybe three parties every two months, down to Altar de Sacrificios, across to Tikal. This year, there’s this bandit thing. No good for the damn business. I just took a group over to Seibal, but I’m glad, you know, I find out about this thing on the way back.”
“Your English is very good,” I said.
“Yeah, well, you know, I marry this American woman, my first wife. She’s from California. I work in Los Angeles a long time. But I’m from Campeche. I sail on a lot of boats, all over the world, but I decided to come back. Twenty years ago. I guide out of Palenque.” He looked up the hill at the horses. “You know, we used to make that trip on foot. From Palenque to Yaaxchilan, I mean. Now, you can fly in. Out of Palenque. Out of Tenosique. Out of San Cristóbal. Those your horses?”
“Yes.”
“If you’re crossing over, I’ll buy them from you. I mean, if you don’t have any plans. The man up there said maybe you’d sell them.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Well, maybe you want to think about it, you know.”
“Sure.” I got up and looked around me. “What’s the name of this place, anyway?”
“Here? No name. They just call it el crucero, you know, the crossing.”
We slung our hammocks at the edge of the clearing and the woman made a fire.
Upriver, I thought. Well, maybe it was poetic justice. Maybe the bandits would give him what he had missed in the city. That would be irony for you. All this way and now, for all I knew, his corpse was headed back to us in the river.
I was chewing a tortilla when Pedro Magana stepped into the circle of firelight. “If you rub alcohol on your skin it will keep the mosquitoes off.”
He handed me the bottle, and I rubbed the cold, camphor-smelling liquid on my arms and face and passed it to the woman. “Thanks.”
He waved a hand deprecatingly. “For nothing. I been in the Peten a week by myself. I just thought, well, here’s some people, maybe want to talk. I talk a lot, myself, you know.” He sat down with his back against a tree. “That’s a pretty baby, fat. All babies ought to be fat. Good health. She doesn’t talk English, does she?”
“No.”
There was liquor on his breath. I wondered who up at the settlement sold it. “I was married to an Indian woman once, too. Good women. My American wife,” he shook his head. “Man, we did not get along, you know?”
I didn’t know, but I nodded anyway.
He reached behind him and brought out a liter bottle of something clear. “Look, you want some of this? Aguardiente. Eat your guts out, but better than nothing.”
I looked at the bottle for a long second and then reached for it. He smiled as I lifted it to my lips and took a swig. It tasted like tequila with razor blades and it cut on the way down. Slowly, a warmth began to spread through me.
“Will the guerrillas come downriver?” I asked.
“You mean here? Who knows. I don’t think. I mean, the army should be on the way by now. Maybe they’re back on the other side. Nobody can figure them out.”
He took a drink from the bottle and handed it over to me.
“What did they do at San Marcos?” I asked.
“Killed a couple of soldiers. The government was looking for somebody, I guess. Sometimes they do that. Put a couple of soldiers where somebody might try to cross over. Only this time the guerrillas were there. Ambushed them.”
“Then, like you say, probably the guerrillas are gone.”
“Maybe. Maybe not, too. I mean, maybe it was a trap the guerrillas set to make more soldiers come, you know? Used to not be any of that here. A few bandits. But not bad. Just in the last year. There’s a man called Santos. I hear he’s the chief.”
Adolfo Santos. Sure. I had heard of him. Adrian Kestering had heard of him, too. And so had Paul LaCour.
“Who is Santos?” I asked.
“Well, people say he was a storekeeper in Comitán. I don’t know. I mean, you hear lots of things, you know. They’re all fighting for something, mainly themself. Me, I try to live with everybody. It’s all you can do.”
We shared the bottle again. By now, I no longer cared about Santos. Or what he might do to the man called Bassett. The woman watched from across the fire. It was difficult to tell if she cared or not.
The jungle darkness swam around me, like the eddies in the river and I was falling down a long, endless tunnel, but it was all right because at the bottom of the tunnel were the answers, and so I let myself fall, enjoying the ride. LaCour, Santos, Bassett … I saw their faces against the walls of the whirlpool, and then I saw Leah’s but it wasn’t Leah’s; it was Laurie’s, and then it became a face I did not know, smiling, and then I remembered that I knew it after all, from a dream.
And this time, this night, the dreams made sense.
I was sitting in a darkened room, strapped to a chair, and in front of me was a gigantic screen. The chase had been filmed from the front seat of the car and it was almost as if I were there. I saw the traffic halt, pedestrians leap out of the way. A red sign said alto but the car sped through. The chase ended in front of a white wood house, and now someone was running up the sidewalk, for the camera was bouncing. A door loomed up and was kicked open. There was an explosion of fire and light and sound, then darkness.
For a long time I swam in a nether world of soft blue light with music floating in from somewhere outside and around and within. I was dead. A gauzelike glow appeared on the screen in front of my eyes, and I smelled fresh grass and pine cones. A tall, balding man was getting out of a Packard, coming toward me. He was calling me Davey and grabbing me in his arms, and when I turned around I saw my mother on the porch.
The woman in the white waitress uniform had tight little breasts and a pasty face. She was standing there, naked, inviting. She flopped down on the saggy bed. “Come on.” I saw the earnest young man dropping his pants, climbing on top of her, and watched the two writhing together as she locked her legs around the me on the screen. I watched myself stand and pull up my pants nervously as she washed up in the little closet bathroom. When she came out she said, “What’s your name, honey?”
“David.”
“You come back sometime, David. That was a lot of fun.”
I watched them all, scene after scene until the screen went black once more. I was floating now with soft lights and music all around. I was swimming inside the whirlpool and instead of drowning I was breathing in the soft, indescribably sweet air. Phantom hands were brushing my body, touching my face and neck. I was naked and a thousand tiny lips were kissing me all over my body. When I heard the voices it was of people speaking far below on a planet I had left and never cared if I saw again. But the voices interested me. They would never know if I listened in. I laughed in giddy delight. Was this how it was to be dead? Floating in the ether, in almost palpable joy, and dropping in on the lives of the still living? I opened my eyes and looked down. The man and the woman seemed to be arguing and I wished I could tell them how unimportant it was, how fleeting was that reality and how soon they would be above it all in the reality of the universe.
“For ten years,” the woman way saying. “And I’m not about to lose it all now.”
“You’ll lose it. You’ll shut it down right now,” the man said. He was bald and sat behind a mah
ogany desk.
“The other side won’t shut down,” she said. She was good-looking, mid-thirties, with long hair whose color was hidden by the shadows.
“They don’t have Congress,” the man said. “All we need is for this to get out. I don’t propose to have to go up there and testify.” He spoke with the broad Harvard a.
The woman said, “It won’t get out. It’s completed. We’ve finished. It will work, goddammit.”
The man behind the desk pushed back in his swivel chair. There was a globe on the shelf in front of him and he touched it lightly with a boney finger. “I have only your judgment to go by. That’s hardly a guarantee.” He shook his head and meticulously squared a thin stack of papers on his desk. “No, I’m afraid that simply isn’t enough.”
“And if I release the results of my findings, to Osborne, for example.”
The man’s lips pursed. “Osborne? Dear me. You’d leave channels and go over to another directorate?” There was a faint air of shock in his voice.
“You’re damned right I would. He’s a deputy director, too, and he knows about this research because I’ve been keeping him fully informed.”
“Knows? Indeed? You’ve really gone a bit far. You work for R and D. Osborne is Operations.”
“Don’t be a fucking hypocrite, Adrian. It won’t do you any good. You’re goddamn right Osborne knows, and if you cut my program he’s willing to make a hell of a stink with the director. Even the National Security Council, if it comes to that. There are people who’ll want to know why you decided to cut off a promising line of research.”
Adrian Kestering’s voice was sad now. “I see you’ve really covered all bases. There seems to be very little I can do. And this—” he gestured at a form I suddenly realized was sitting in the room with them—“this is the end result of this research that is so important to you. Doesn’t look very impressive. Shellshock, I’d say.”
“Reprogrammed,” the woman corrected icily.
“I’ve never really understood you people, you new breed. In my day, we invented new pistols and invisible inks. You new breed, you invent new people. Have you ever stopped to consider the morality of it?”
“Cut the crap, Adrian, and get off your high horse.”
“Just asking. People never seem to consider the fundamental questions anymore.” He reached for his brier, lit it, and looked at the form in the darkness. It was as if I were in the room with them now and I could smell the tobacco from his pipe and the varnish of his desk. “Very well. You realize that you are betting your future with the agency.”
“And don’t forget yours.”
He puffed. “That hadn’t escaped me. Very well, I suppose I am forced to give your theories a practical test.”
I saw the wetness on her lips and the pink end of her tongue, touching them. Adrian Kestering rose. “I’ll tell you when there’s a mission.”
“What do you mean, when? There are a hundred things—”
“Now, now …” He paused to suck on the pipe and breathed out a great wreath of pungent smoke. “I’m sure you’d want something that was a meaningful test.”
“Adrian, if you’ve double-crossed me, just remember Osborne is Ops and he schedules missions.”
“My dear Leah, how could I forget? As a matter of fact, it was Osborne who gave the approval. I argued long and hard for you, Leah, but he agreed: In the light of the, ah, shall we say, controversy, there should be a definitive test. What that will be, I can’t say. But I can promise you, it will come.” Her nostrils dilated, as if she smelled a trap, and her eyes narrowed like those of a cat. Adrian Kestering rose like a spring unwinding. “I’ll be getting back to you. In the meantime, you may take your prize pupil with you.”
The sweet music returned and I rose weightlessly on the smoke, drinking in its aroma and letting it waft me upward. I was in the whirlpool again and now other memories were dislodging themselves from the walls of the swirling mass, tumbling free and passing in front of my eyes. I was seeing a quiet college campus and a formaldehyde-smelling biology lab, hearing myself talk to rows of faces, whose hands scribbled in notebooks, seeing a red-faced, white-haired man angrily advance on me in my own book-filled office, and hearing the word rape, and then I was remembering the long highway, like an endless black snake with a white dash down its back through the dusty bean fields of south Texas, across the plowed wasteland, south of Kingsville, and then it—a sixteen-wheel rig—and I was suddenly heading for it, and I saw the look of horror on the driver’s face, and then I remembered the whirlpool and that I had been in it before.
I woke up. The sun was already growing hot in the sky and the flies were out. The man called Pedro Magana was shaking me and the woman was standing behind him.
“I think maybe you got a little bit of the paludismo, you know? You look like you were in the deliriums, talking to yourself. But you had a lot to drink, too.” He kicked the empty bottle. “Maybe you take a couple aspirin and you be okay, you know?”
“Yeah,” I said. “A couple of aspirin.”
I sat up in my hammock and looked around me. The sun-battered little group of huts was still there and the green-fire jungle, and the river—they were still there, too. But they were no longer real. What was real was the dream because it had all been shaken loose, come to the surface, and now I knew the truth. And the truth was too terrible to acknowledge. Yet it was all there, and the bits and pieces of the puzzle fit.
I looked out at the river and thought of the man who had left us yesterday and started up it in a dugout. Now I knew who he was and why he had killed Paul LaCour. I also knew who he wasn’t, and that was important, too. I did not know about San Marcos because there were still pieces missing from the puzzle, but I was damned sure going to find out. I was going upriver after him.
It took me a long time to explain to the woman. In the end, she could only accept the fact that I made a judgment and my judgment must be taken at face value. I asked Pedro Magana to go upriver with me, but he refused.
“I got a group of tourists waiting for me in Palenque, want to go to Seibal. I agreed a month ago to take them, you know.” He thought I was sun-crazy and it showed in his eyes. “You go up to San Marcos, you might run right into Santos. You get killed out here, nobody ever is going to find out what happen to you.”
“Not for five hundred dollars, Pedro?”
“Not for a thousand. Look, Mr. Dennison. I like you, you know? Not everybody I like. Some of the people I take out here, I as soon let them stay here.” He gave a little laugh. “But I like you. I don’t want to see you get shot up. You not dressed for the jungle, you got no food. I don’t know how you come this far. I got to give you credit. But you can’t press your luck. I like myself, too. I seen lots of things in the jungle. Lots of kinds of people. I know better than press my luck.”
In the end he agreed to take the woman and child back to Palenque, and I let him have the horses.
The man who had brought Magana downstream was a toothless old Indian trader who had plied the river for twenty-five years, making the run up and down on both sides between the little shacks that had a few board shelves stocked with an odd assortment of goods. Magana picked out a few supplies for me and gave me the bottle of rubbing alcohol. I shook his leathery hand, and then stood facing the woman.
“Luisa, he will take care of you and the child. Here is some money. Go with him to Palenque. I’ll come back when I’m finished.”
“I have money, the money you gave me,” she protested.
“Take it anyway. I’ll be back for you. I promise.”
And we both knew it was a lie. But it was the only thing I could say.
I sat in the bow of the dugout and watched her figure grow smaller as we pushed out into the turgid river. A thousand years ago it had been the main avenue of Indian commerce. In those days invading Chontals from Tabasco had swept up it, conquering the Maya sites on both sides of the river. Trouble always traveled upriver.
A cluster of br
ight butterflies dipped down low over the surface and I watched them. I looked behind me, and the boatman smiled a toothless grin.
“Muy bonita, las maripositas,” he said.
They were pretty, I thought. He had done a good job with them, too. I wondered how many books. But then he had done a good job with everything.
“You are a lawyer,” the boatman said in the fast Peten Spanish I had trouble catching. He smiled again.
“No,” I told him. “A professor.”
“Archaeologist?” There were a lot of archaeologists, real and psuedo, that came into his jungle.
“No. Entomologist,” I said.
He did not understand the term, but he smiled anyway. I looked down at the little swirls in the water and thought of the vortex in the dream. Was a professor. That was more accurate. I wondered how much he knew about it all. Probably very little. A dossier of facts to memorize, and, just like David Dennison, a mission. The rest of it was his own improvisation. His own ability. And he was damned good.
I wondered where he would rest when this was over. Where do you forget a lifetime and slip back into your self? Malibu? Miami Beach? No. I caught myself. He would not be going north.
“How far to San Marcos?” I asked.
“Four hours,” my guide said.
We had been going three hours already. Noon now. That would put us in at four. In where? What did I expect to find at San Marcos? Was I just going for more pieces to the puzzle? Partly that, but partly something else. It was something I could not now explain, especially with my head pounding with every throb of the motor. I took another swig of water and tried to wash the bitter taste out of my mouth. It would go away, of course. But I did not know if the rage inside me would ever abate. The rage over what they had done.
I could imagine the rest of the scenario, the followup to the dream, and Kestering’s rueful smile as he gave her the mission. I could hear his Harvard accent as he told her that, by a strange coincidence, a chance had occurred for the definitive test. And I could imagine the look on her face when she realized the trap had been sprung.
Leah had not wanted me to go. Leah had hated Adrian Kestering for what he had done. Leah had threatened to leave me. I thought about my agony, and the wanting, and the softness of her body and the brittle coldness of her eyes, and I understood now. I understood about the trap and how she had been beaten by Kestering. There was that consolation.