“What about weapons?” I asked.
“There will be guns for you two,” she said. “I will tell the guides. We will find out which men Hoffmann has used, and the jefe will talk to them. It will all be arranged. I will leave a message and you can come here ready to go. You must have good strong shoes that come up high, to support your ankles. The trail is all loose rock as big as this.”
She made a circle of thumbs and fingers big as a baseball.
“It will be steaming hot in there. You should wear clothing to absorb moisture, and maybe have a sweatband for your head and a light hat. We will need a great deal of water, so get something to carry water in. We will go in the afternoon and stay through the night. The guides will leave us there, wherever we decide. I will be the cat he has come to kill.”
“Bedrolls?” Meyer asked.
“A light blanket only. Boughs can be cut. Bring a knife.”
“Food?” I asked.
“I will arrange that. The guides will carry it. And a repellent for the insects. Each person should bring his own. And toilet tissue, and any medication you take … You would know what you need for an overnight hike, the same as when you were little boys.”
“Or little soldiers,” I said.
“You were military?” she asked me.
“A long time back.”
She went into a long brooding silence and held up a warning hand when Meyer started to speak.
“I think it will be possible to remove his rifle,” she said. “If the guides could take him to a very difficult place where he had to climb up or down, one of them might take his rifle and then just melt off into the brush like magic, the way they can.”
“Won’t that alert him?”
“By that time, it will not matter, will it?” she asked.
Meyer was very quiet on the way back to the Dos Playas. He moved a chair onto our small balcony and sat with his feet up, braced against the railing. I opened two beers in our kitchenette and took them out. He thanked me and drank half of his before putting it down on the floor beside his chair.
“She thinks we should just blow him away,” I said, turning to lean on the railing. “Did you see her eyes?”
“I did indeed. But she wants him to know why. They met. She is not a woman one would forget. If he gets a good look at her, then he’ll know why. But I think she wants the satisfaction of a few words. I have a very ugly image of things to come, Travis.”
“Such as?”
“I see us in a cave. Water is dripping. Cody Pittler is tied hand and foot. She is squatting beside him. She tells us to take a walk. We climb out of there and walk to where the guides are waiting. We all stand there and hear him screaming for a while, and then it stops, and she comes climbing out, looking tired but smiling.”
“Was that on NBC or CBS?”
“Listen, I do not have any affection for Cody Pittler, God knows. And I am pragmatist enough to realize we can’t get the law down here to do anything about him, and we can’t get him back to Eagle Pass. I have just never directly killed anyone.”
“This one should probably be indirect.”
“Just the same,” he said, picking up his beer and finishing it. “I don’t know exactly how to think about it. How have you thought about it?”
“In the past? There has never been enough time to do much thinking.”
“And afterward?”
“Kind of blah. Draggy. Tired and guilty and also a little bit jumpy. Takes about a week to go away. But the actual scene never really does go away. It’s sort of like having a collection of color slides. Some nights the projector in your head shows them all. Meyer, just don’t think about it. Let it happen. There is no little book of rules. No time outs. No offside. Just CYA. Cover your ass, because you can be certain the other guy will not feel that badly about you.”
Twenty-four
We waited a long time before we heard from her. We had a difficult time finding the kind of walking shoes she described. Everything else was easy. Meyer found shoes. I couldn’t find a pair big enough until finally I found a pair a size and a half too big and too wide. But with two pair of heavy white orlon athletic socks, they felt snug enough, especially with the laces pulled tight. We found liter canteens in a downtown supermercado, on long straps, and bought two apiece. The Texas straws were too big for jungle walking, so we found baseball caps with Velcro bands which said Y-U-C-A-T-A-N in red across the front. Tennis shirts and tennis headbands and wristbands were available, as were long lightweight cotton trousers. Small flashlights, repellent, waterproof matches.
I debated the choice of knives for a long time and at last bought two. They both folded. One went in a leather holster with a snap fastener on my belt, and the other went in the right-hand pocket. It had no case, and when I took it out exactly right, and flicked my wrist, the five-inch blade fell out and snapped into place.
Dressed for action, we looked like tourists waiting for a party boat. I got impatient and went over to her place twice, but she wasn’t there. Meyer said she was doubtless doing everything she could. But Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday went by. On Saturday, August fourteenth, when we went down to breakfast, there was a small sealed envelope in the box. Come here today at eleven this morning. B.
We dressed in our jungle best. I had the car gassed and the oil checked. She was waiting for us outside the entrance, sitting on a bulky blue canvas pack. She hoisted it without effort and put it in the back beside Meyer. She seemed both intent and preoccupied as she looked us over, and gave a small nod. She wore a cotton T-shirt in a pale salmon color, baggy oyster-white slacks tucked into what looked to be L. L. Bean women’s hiking boots. She had her black hair tied back and a white terry band around her forehead.
“You are late!” she said.
“By almost three minutes.”
“If they should think we’re not coming—”
“Don’t get yourself in a nervous sweat,” I told her. She flashed me a black and evil look out of the side of her eye.
“Have you got everything?” Meyer asked.
“Yes, but not in that pack. They have already taken some things out to where we are going.”
I turned on the air conditioning, and that ended all conversation. I kept them too busy hanging on to think of talk anyway. The tires were the best-looking thing about the pink rental, so I had the satisfaction of making her yelp with alarm when I darted between an empty southbound fill truck and a full one coming the other way.
Almost an hour later she yelled to me to slow down. She leaned forward, looking high into the trees on the left. She told me where to pull as far over as I could. There was some semblance of shoulder there, gravelly and badly tilted. When we got out, three small men appeared out of the brush. She introduced them quickly. Jorge, Juan, and Miguel. They wore toe-thong sandals, dirty khaki shorts which looked too large for them, faded cotton shirts, and ragged straw hats. Jorge and Juan also wore small-caliber rifles strapped diagonally across their backs and machetes in scabbards on belts around their waists. They were solemn and their handshakes were utterly slack. They did not inspire a lot of confidence. Miguel wanted the car keys. He got in, and when I began to object he went roaring away, turning out almost directly in front of a maddened tourist bus. It blatted around him and went fartingly on its way toward Tulum.
She caught my arm and said, “It will be brought back when this is all over. Now we follow the boys.”
And that was a very good trick indeed, following the boys and following her. It was a strange kind of jungle: scrub jungle. The soil could not support big trees. They ranged from sapling size to ball-bat size, and from ten feet tall to thirty feet. The cover was sparse. A lot of sun came down through the leaves. It was, as she had promised, a punishing trail. At first I tried to watch where I placed each foot, but that made the passage too slow. I finally decided to trust the ankle support of the high shoes and let the stones underfoot roll as they pleased. Rain had washed all the soil from th
e trail, leaving loose rock. On either side, the terrain looked a lot better for walking, but it was a wilderness of tough vines that dropped from above, sprang up from below, and were hammocked from tree to tree. One would have to chop through them all to make a path.
It was incredibly hot in there. Though you could see off into the scrub jungle for maybe forty feet, there was no breeze at all. The air was as thick as pastry. The sweat began to pour. Jorge and Juan set a very fast pace, schlepping along in their dumb little sandals. They did not seem to sweat. I began to hate them. I wondered if Barbara was sweating. I lengthened my stride and caught up to her for a moment. Yes, she was. She was the winner of the international wet T-shirt award. But she flunked Miss Conviviality. Meyer, with shorter legs than mine and in not as good condition, had it the worst of all. He was panting and blowing and streaming. I had brought some salt tablets. I stopped, and Meyer and I took a good swig of cool water and a salt tablet each. They kept going, out of sight around a curve far ahead.
“Hold it!” I roared into the thick buggy silence of this third-rate jungle. There was no answer. So on we trudged, thrown off balance by the stones as they rolled, waving our arms to catch ourselves. Meyer said a few words I had never heard from him before. I discovered that there is a certain amount of sweat that begins below the forehead band and runs into the eyes. The wristlets took care of that for a time until they became too soggy.
I began to wonder if Cody Pittler had hired Barbara to take us into the wilderness and lose us for good.
They stood waiting for us where the trail converged with the old Mayan trail from Cobá to Chichén Itzá. Jorge and Juan squatted on their heels. Barbara leaned against a small tree. She took a look at me and decided that whatever she was going to say would not be appreciated.
“Now this way,” she said. “Let’s go.”
“Can’t you slow those dwarfs down?”
“Wherever there is a choice of directions, they’ll wait.”
“And you too?”
She gave me her obsidian stare and said, “Of course.”
I had hoped that the old Mayan trail would be in better shape, but if anything it was worse. I finally settled into that hypnosis of physical effort which frees the mind to roam to better things. I stomped along until, not far ahead of me, I saw a better thing. Her baggy slacks had become as sopping wet as the T-shirt and clung to the alternate flexing and bunching of the round smooth musculature of her buttocks. Her hair was sweat-wet, flattened to her skull. I slowed and looked back. Meyer was out of sight. I stopped and saw him come around a bend. I caught up to Barbara, stopped her for a salt tablet and a slug of water. In the stillness I watched her throat work as she tilted the canteen. She exuded a warm murky scent of overheated woman. She smiled her thanks.
“You said it’s a rough walk. Okay, it’s rough. Do you have to be cross?”
“I’m not cross, Travis. Really. I’m just very very anxious that this works for us, that we kill him.”
“Have you ever killed anybody?”
Her eyes changed. “No. I saw a person killed. When I was very small. He broke the law of the village. Have you ever killed anybody?”
“Not in cold blood. Not by trapping him, like this.”
“Other ways, though.”
I shrugged. “Self-defense.”
“Many?”
“Not a lot.”
“I heard it gets easier.”
“I guess it depends on the person. From where I stand, you heard wrong.”
“After I saw that person killed I had bad dreams and woke up screaming, night after night. Maybe I will after this, too. I don’t care. I just don’t care.”
“When will he be coming in?”
“Tomorrow, earlier than we’re arriving. Maybe ten thirty.”
“Who brings him?”
“These same boys. They know this area. Miguel too.”
Meyer came up to us, sighed, settled down on the curve of a fat root. He took a short drink, capped his canteen, and shook his head at us, smiling a sad and weary smile. He looked as though he had been dipped in fine oil. He gleamed. We talked for a little while and then went on together, better friends somehow.
At last we turned off the rock-strewn trail and angled off through the brush. The boys had their shining machetes out, and they cut through the vines with effortless twists of the wrist. I had hoped that it would slow them down so that we could keep up with them. I had finally realized that it was a childish game with them, to effortlessly outdistance the heaving sweating Yanquis.
Then they showed us another trick. Meyer and I were following Jorge. Barbara was off to the side, following Juan. Jorge would get a little ahead and then go around a tree in an unexpected direction. Unless you noticed you would charge ahead and suddenly be wrapped in tough vines, held motionless. You had to back off and find where he had sliced through them. That took time. And by then he was farther ahead than ever, cutting tricky patterns through the undergrowth. So I roared at him with enough authority to stop him in his tracks. I told him that if he did not stay back so I could follow him, I would take his machete away from him, lop off his head, and kick it all the way back to the highway. He didn’t understand a word, of course. But he understood the meaning. And from then on he kept looking back nervously, making certain Meyer and I were keeping up.
The second cenote we inspected looked about right. One wall had collapsed into rubble, so it was easy to clamber down to where the small stream flowed. It flowed through an area of flat rock. The flat rock extended into the mouth of the cave, with another flat shelf about three feet higher. It was astonishingly cool in the mouth of the cave. A breeze came blowing gently out of it. There seemed to be a kind of camping place on the higher flat rock, and just outside the mouth of the cave there was a big rusty iron kettle. Barbara explained that this had probably been a place where the chicleros met to boil down the gum they had tapped from the chicle trees. Juan had been carrying the blue pack. He put it down beside Barbara and went off to retrieve the stores they had brought in the previous day. While he was gone, Jorge made three fast trips off into the jungle, returning each time with a huge armload of boughs. Juan came back overburdened with goods. There was a small Primus stove, canned goods, a jug of water, bread, blankets, and two rifles wrapped in plastic and tied with twine.
He handed me one with a polite bow and smile. I undid it and found myself the proud possessor of a single-shot Montgomery Ward .22-caliber rifle. A friend of mine had had one just like it when I was a kid. It had been made by Stevens Arms up in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, back in the thirties. The front part of the foregrip was painted black. The blueing was pretty well gone. It was called a Frank Buck model, I remembered, but I couldn’t remember who Frank Buck had been. I had the feeling he had gone to Africa to capture wild animals for American zoos. My friend’s little rifle had been chambered for shorts. This one came with a small leather pouch tied to the bolt in which I found nine long-rifle shells. My face must have shown great dismay. He explained something very rapidly to Barbara and she said, “Juan says it is a very good gun. Very accurate. It belonged to his father. He treasures it.”
I made myself smile. Meyer unwrapped the other one and handed it to me. It was a Remington 410 shotgun with four shells. All birdshot.
“We are a veritable arsenal of democracy,” I said. “I think it would be useful if he left us his machete.”
She took me seriously, and he did. And then they were gone. They disappeared without a sound.
“What are their orders?” I asked.
“They will bring Hoffmann here, but around to that side, where he cannot see that this is the easy side. It is steep, so one of them will go down first and ask Hoffmann to hand down the gun. The moment he reaches the bottom, the one with the gun will run over and up this slope and away. And the other will run back from the top of the slope. They will go down to the trail and wait there until we call. That will leave Hoffmann there at the foot of that steep
slope. One of us can be here and another up over there where the brush is thick, looking down from hiding.”
“Then what?”
“Where can he go? What can he do? If he tries to climb back out, you can shoot his leg. You seem to want to talk to him. That is all right. It won’t matter by then. We can talk to him and you can hand me the gun and I will shoot him. I will walk closer to him and shoot him. Show me how to work the gun, Travis.”
Meyer hitched himself back on the rock shelf, more deeply into the cave, folded his arms, and, with his back against damp rock, went to sleep. She had laid out the provisions and made the three blanket beds. I walked the area, climbed the steep slope, came around and came down the rubbly slope. I checked out the hiding place she had pointed to and I found a place that looked a little bit better. It was outside the smaller cave, at the opposite side of the cenote, where the water flowed in and disappeared. There was a jumble of big rounded boulders, some of them the size of sedans, with a good place of concealment behind them. I was about to suggest it as an alternate until I looked up and saw, about twenty-five feet overhead, how the land was undercut, tree roots hanging down. It looked as if the whole thing would come down. It was probably a lot more solidly set than it looked.
I hated the weapons, but the plan seemed reasonable. We ate some canned beef stew without much appetite. I stretched out and went to sleep. It was dusk when Barbara awakened me. “You must see this,” she said. “Dear God, I have never seen anything like it.”
The bats were leaving on their evening rounds. They had hung upside down all day and they were letting go and catching the air and darting out with that curious shifting tilting flight of the hungry bat. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them, long columns against the pale sky of evening. Meyer was watching in awe.
Bugs did not come into the cave in any great number. Barbara extracted a flat bottle from her pack, a pint of tequila. We passed it back and forth and moved toward the front of our cave and watched the stars come out. In the black velvet sky of full night, there was an incredible number of them. We finished the pint. She sat close to me and said, “You are so good to help me.”
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