by Greg Lyons
Billy and I got on our hands and knees and looked down through the opening of our hideout at Todd. He looked up and waved at us to come down.
‘I heard it from my brother,’ he said, still trying to catch his breath. ‘There’s some local guy lying dead on the concrete slab at the back of the clinic. He said that there’s blood and guts and that it’s really gross. We gotta go and see it.’
I had seen one other dead body on that concrete slab before. He had been driving one of the big eighteen-wheelers hauling drill pipe to one of the rigs in the oil field when he lost control and crashed. The pipe had come smashing through the cab of the truck and went right through him too. That one was definitely gross. I doubted that this one would be as gross, but I knew that we just had to go and find out.
‘You sure?’ I asked. ‘I don’t want to go all the way home to get my bike and pedal all the way across the camp and find out that your big brother was just pulling your leg all along.’
‘No, it’s real all right,’ replied Todd excitedly. ‘Come on, let’s go.’
Chapter 2
The Dead Body
Stupid Monkey only got out a couple of screams this time as Mati and I ran past his tree. He didn’t even have time to squish out a couple of poops to throw at us. I squeezed through the barbed wire fence surrounding El Monte and started running across the mowed grass field to my house. Mati was already in the shade under the carport when I got there. My super special BMX dirt jumper bike was leaning up against one of the metal poles that held up the open carport. I called my bike Mamba since it was painted black, but mostly because it was such a cool name. My dad’s company car wasn’t there, so I knew he wasn’t back for lunch yet. I jumped on my bike and started pedalling like crazy down our gravel driveway. Our maid, Nelly, must have seen me because she showed up at the front door with a broom in her hand.
‘Querido, where are you going?’ she asked in Spanish.
‘To the clubhouse,’ I yelled back over my shoulder.
I had lied. There was no way she’d let me go to the clinic to see a dead body. I aimed the bike for a small dirt jump that I’d built off to the side of the driveway. I always went for it when I left the house and, since Nelly was watching, I decided to show off. I hit the jump, flew into the air, and then I took both feet off the pedals and stuck my legs out. My feet were back on the pedals when I landed.
‘No footer,’ I yelled back to Nelly after I’d landed.
I always told her the name of each trick I did when she was watching.
‘Fantástico,’ she yelled back.
I could do way neater things on the humongous jumps that Billy and I had built at the foot of Ocelot Hill. I practised on them so much that I was easily the best dirt jumper around, and everyone knew that I was the only rider in Campo Mata to safely land a backflip.
The playing cards that I had clamped down on the forks of the bike with clothespins started to clack faster and louder as the bike picked up speed. I pushed the lever of the round metal ringer on the handlebar with my thumb again and again, ringing it non-stop. I was on official business, so I was making it clear to everybody who could hear me. I was really moving, even though I had to dodge lots of squashed and flattened toads that had been run over by cars. They were slick as banana peels just after they’d been smushed by a car tyre, so I didn’t want to slip on one of them and end up in the clinic with a big scrape, or worse. Most of the toad-frisbees though were all dry and hard from being in the sun for days. I whooshed past the Fultons’ house and down the main street of the camp. I was the only one on the road. Since it wasn’t lunchtime yet the company cars were all in the parking lot of my dad’s office building. I saw them there when I went past it. My dad’s white Ford pick-up truck was in his parking space in front of the little sign that said, Reserved for Chief Engineer. I was not far from the clinic now.
I saw the tall whitewashed concrete wall of our outdoor movie screen up ahead of me, and the buildings of the club. We had a tennis court, a bowling alley and a restaurant in there. My dad told me that every piece of the alley and the court was made in the States, so they were like ones that you’d see there. At least I thought so. I wasn’t positive because I’d never seen any others. I passed the road to the commissary, which was where our parents bought groceries and stuff.
I was practically flying down the road; faster than anyone else on a dirt bike could go. By now the ninth green of our golf course was to my left and I saw the little red flag with the number of the green on it flapping in the hot breeze. Just up ahead, on the right side of the road, was the white one-storey building with the big red cross painted on the side – the clinic.
Way over to the right in the distance, I could see Billy and Todd on their BMXs racing across the golf course fairways, trying to reach the dead man before me, but there was no way they would. They still had to cross two more fairways and I was moving at top speed on the asphalt street. I jumped Mamba over the cement sidewalk and across the grass, making a beeline for the concrete slab. Just before I went around the corner of the building, I saw a Venezuelan police car in the parking lot in front of the clinic. I sure hoped that the local fuzz weren’t already standing next to the body. Luckily they weren’t.
I saw the outline of the dead guy on top of the concrete table. There was a white sheet pulled over the body, but I could see a couple of red spots where blood had seeped through. I jumped off my bike and leaned it against the trunk of the huge flame tree that shaded the whole area behind the clinic. It was the biggest tree in the camp and it was blooming with those bunches of super bright red flowers that covered all of the branches. There were flowers all over the ground, and there were even a few of them that had landed on the white sheet on top of the dead guy. It seemed like a massacre had happened with the body, the bloody sheet and all the red flowers on the ground.
Billy and Todd came flying into the shade of the flame tree and slammed on their brakes at the same time that they pushed their back tyres to the side. They kicked up a big wave of dirt and grass that covered me from head to foot. They laughed at me as they leaned their bikes against the trunk of the tree, while I spat out the pieces of grit that had gotten into my mouth.
‘Very funny, guys,’ I grumbled as I continued to dig out chunks of grass and dirt from under my T-shirt. I would have done the same thing to them if I’d had the chance.
‘I can see some blood on the sheet,’ said Billy in a whisper. It was as if he thought he’d wake the man up from the dead if he spoke in a louder voice.
‘How’d he die, Todd?’ I asked.
‘Don’t know,’ he replied. ‘But it doesn’t look like enough blood to be from some really gross accident. Let’s look.’
We approached the body on the cement slab until we were all three standing next to the end where the head was.
‘Go ahead, Avery,’ said Billy in his low voice. ‘Pull the sheet back.’
‘You do it,’ I replied.
‘No way,’ whispered Billy.
We both looked at Todd.
‘Hey, I’m the one who told you about the body,’ said Todd as he shook his head from side to side. ‘One of you’s gotta do it.’
‘All right . . . rock, paper, scissors,’ I said, turning to Billy.
We faced each other with our hands out.
‘One, two, three . . .’
My right fist pounded into the palm of my left hand at the same time that Billy’s flat hands slapped together.
‘Dang it,’ I muttered. Paper beats rock every time.
I reached out and grabbed the edge of the sheet with my forefinger and thumb, like I was about to pick a fly out of my soup. My heart started to beat fast again. I pulled the sheet down until the dead guy’s face was showing. Billy and Todd were bending over the body with their hands on their knees.
His dark brown eyes were still open, which scared the holy beejeebies out of us. I let the sheet fall over the dead guy’s neck and took a quick step back. Billy and Tod
d were right there with me. His mouth was open too. It looked like he had been surprised when he met his maker. The guy was kind of youngish, maybe about twenty years old. He had a nice-looking face. It was the kind of face with long Latin eyelashes and bright white teeth that the young maids in camp would have liked. His long black hair was pulled back tight in a ponytail and I could see the impression of the ring of a hat. I had seen that a lot whenever one of the local gauchos took his cowboy hat off before coming into a room. Normally dead men’s hats would be placed over their faces or on their chests when they laid out a body – at least that’s what they did in western novels – but this guy’s was nowhere to be seen. So far we hadn’t seen where the blood had come from.
‘Keep going, Avery,’ whispered Billy.
I stepped back to where I was before and reached out again to the sheet. This time I grabbed it with all of my fingers and ripped the sheet off the body. We stared at the wounds while the sheet fell to the ground. He had been shot twice, right in the middle of his chest. There wasn’t much blood on the blue denim shirt; just two half-dollar-sized splotches with dark holes in the middle where the bullets had gone in. He was wearing blue jeans, like the ones I was wearing. He had a thick leather belt with a huge silver buckle. The belt buckle had the image of a bucking bronco etched into it. The guy had been a gaucho – a real cowboy – that much was clear. He wore pointy-toed cowboy boots with silver tips that matched the belt buckle. He didn’t have spurs on, but I could see the rub marks in the heel of his boots which meant that he had worn them when he was on his horse. He must have looked pretty grand up there on his horse when he was alive. I’m not sure why – I didn’t know him – but I felt sad to see him like that.
‘Oye, muchachos,’ came a loud yell from behind us. ‘Vete . . . get away from there!’
All three of us whirled around to see Capitán Gómez running out of the back screen door of the clinic. He was wearing his khaki uniform and the tall knee-high black leather boots that he always wore around the camp. His eyes were hidden by his reflective aviator glasses, but we could see the angry expression on the rest of his face. His lips were now pulled tight in determination underneath his pencil-thin moustache. Without a word all three of us ran to our bikes, hopped on them and took off in three different directions. This was how we always did it. We always split up in opposite directions to confuse our enemies, and then we would get back together at the hideout. I looked back over my shoulder to see what Gómez was up to. He had stopped running and was just standing there with his hands on his hips, next to the two guns that he kept in the holsters at each side. He looked like an old western gunfighter, only without the cowboy hat. Just before I made it out of sight around the corner of the clinic, I saw his mouth turn into a smile and I could swear I heard him chuckle. I wasn’t going back to find out.
Chapter 3
Mata Pond
‘The man’s name was Gustavo Muñoz,’ said my dad without looking up. He was standing behind the bamboo bar stand in the atrium of our house, opening a couple of bottles of beer. He handed one of the perspiring bottles to Mr Slater, who was sitting on one of the matching stools on the other side of the bar.
‘Gómez said he was murdered,’ replied Mr Slater. ‘Young guy . . . I remember him coming into the clubhouse every now and then for a beer. Seemed like a nice guy.’
Mr Slater was a huge, tall man. He was the biggest man I had ever seen, but he was also just about the nicest guy I had ever met. He was like a big, gentle bear and he always seemed to have some time for me, which was more than I could say about most of the adults in Campo Mata. The only times I ever saw him get mad were when I caddied for Dad on the golf course and he’d hit a bad shot. His face would get all red and he’d usually pound his club on the ground or sometimes even throw it into the air. One time he threw his club further than his golf ball went. Mr Fulton, who was the captain of the golf club, had even taken to collecting all of Mr Slater’s busted clubs and had put them up on the wall of the clubhouse bar. Main reason he got so mad was that he never could beat my dad at golf even though it seemed like they played almost every day. My dad was the camp champion, and I was pretty good too. I had been playing golf ever since my dad gave me my first set of clubs on my fifth birthday.
‘Good-looking kid like that probably got on the wrong side of some girl’s boyfriend,’ added my dad. ‘Local boys always seem to get a little hot-headed about that kind of thing.’
Mr Slater took a big swig of his beer and then grabbed a handful of cashew nuts from the bowl in front of him. We had picked the nuts from the cashew trees in the backyard last weekend and then roasted them over the grills of the big barbecue pit. Most of the families in Campo Mata had come over for the roasting party.
I could see the bamboo bar through the open doorway from where I was sitting on the kitchen counter. Nelly had just fried up some arepas with cheese in the middle for us to snack on. Arepas were like really thick corn tortillas and pretty much the best thing ever invented in Venezuela. I had stolen one from the pile next to the frying pan when she wasn’t looking. Of course, she knew that I’d be stealing one, just like I did every day. She even turned her back on purpose for me to grab the arepa. It was delicious; my favourite food in the whole world. Just like my dad and Mr Slater, I had a sweating bottle of my favourite drink next to me too, only my favourite drink was orange Fanta. I tried a sip of beer one time about a year ago and almost threw up on the spot. I did throw up a bit later when I saw the cigarette butt in the bottom of the glass.
I could smell the familiar stinky odour of my dad’s cigar drifting into the kitchen. The cigar smoke smell almost totally covered up the smell of Mr Slater’s cigarette. I guess it was an oilfield thing because it seemed like most of the adults in camp smoked something and drank something with alcohol in it, mostly cold beer. I guess because it was always hot in Campo Mata.
I was still waiting for Nelly to act like she was mad at me for stealing the arepa, but she hadn’t said a word. I pivoted my butt on the yellow Formica counter and looked at her as she kept on frying. She was looking down at what she was doing and her long black hair covered her face, so I couldn’t see her expression, but I knew something was wrong. She was just sort of pushing the arepas around in the pan with the wooden spatula and I could see that they were burning. Nelly never burned anything.
‘Qué pasa, Nelly?’ I asked.
‘Nada . . . no te preocupes,’ she replied in a whisper without looking up.
‘Las arepas estan quemando,’ I said, pointing at the smoking pan.
Nelly turned off the burner, picked up the frying pan and dumped it in the sink. She turned on the faucet and the water hissed into a cloud of greasy steam. Then, she turned off the water, wiped her hands on her white apron and walked out of the kitchen in the direction of her room at the back of our house. She disappeared into her room and I heard the door close with a click.
What the heck? I could swear that she was crying. I just didn’t get adults sometimes. Only time I would cry is if I got hurt from falling off my bike, or when my mom put some super stingy medicine on a cut. But adults would sometimes cry for no reason at all that I could see. My mom would even cry when she was happy, like the time my dad gave her a pearl necklace. I couldn’t be totally sure, but I think I saw a tear in my dad’s eyes too. Adults are so weird sometimes.
Mr Slater sometimes came over to our place for a drink after a weekend round of golf with my dad. To the adults, this was just another weekend, but for me it was the start of a three-month-long weekend. School had just let out for summer break. Some of my friends had already gone back to the States, but most of them would be staying in Campo Mata for the break like me. It was my dad’s turn to stay for the summer in Venezuela to make sure that the wells were drilled and the oil kept flowing out of the ground.
Last summer we had gone back to California on vacation. We stayed with my mom’s parents and got to go to Disneyland. I liked a lot of things about the States
, especially Disneyland and most especially Peter Pan’s Magic Ride. It was so cool to sit in that magic ship flying over London at night time. There were lots of other things I liked too. Like A & W root beer and burgers, Orange Julius and all of the cool cars. My favourite car was a Ford Bronco because it was named after the kind of horse cowboys ride and also because it was really good off-road, like my BMX.
There were lots of things I didn’t like about the States too. For starters there were too many buildings and freeways, and everybody seemed to be way busier and more stressed out than folks around here. And most of the time, when I told people in the States that I lived in Venezuela, they didn’t ever seem to know where that was. They’d say things like ‘Is that in Mexico?’ or ‘What language do they speak there?’ It made me wonder if they’d ever looked at a map of the world.
I jumped down from the kitchen counter and walked into the atrium with my Fanta in my hand. I was going to mosey up to the bar and join my dad and Mr Slater. I was almost an adult now, so I didn’t see a problem.
‘Avery, we’re having an adult conversation right now,’ said my dad. ‘You run along now, OK? Maybe go to the club and hit a practice ball or two for the junior tournament next Saturday.’