Avery McShane

by Greg Lyons

  ‘Aww, I wanted to hear more about the dead guy,’ I moaned.

  ‘That’s exactly why I want you to vamoose,’ replied my dad with that fake mean look on his face. ‘You keep your nose out of this, you hear me?’

  ‘I promise. Cross my heart and hope to die.’

  I didn’t go straight to the golf club. I went to Billy’s house first. It was actually a big trailer home. The families whose parents worked for the service companies lived in a trailer park on the east side of Campo Mata. My dad said they lived in them because the service companies moved around a lot after they finished their jobs for each oil company. It was easier to hook up the trailers and take them to a new job than it was to build brick houses like ours each time.

  I hauled down the gravel road on Mamba, past Todd’s white and pink trailer, and skidded to a dusty stop in front of Billy’s light blue trailer next door. I left my bike on the tiny grass lawn. I could hear the noise of all of the air conditioners in the trailer park, sounding like millions of hornets buzzing around their nests. I never had to knock on the door at the Hales’ trailer, so I just opened it and let myself in. As usual it was freezing cold. I’m not sure why they even had a fridge. It was cold enough in there to keep fish fresh for a year. I didn’t see Billy’s mom around, but I knew he was home because I had seen his old rusted dirt bike outside and his boots were on the front door steps. I walked on my tiptoes on the orange shag rug that covered the floor of the narrow hallway to his room at the back of the trailer. His door was closed, but I knew that he wasn’t asleep. It was almost two o’clock and though Billy always slept in late, I figured he’d be awake by now. I got to the door and put my ear to it to hear what he was up to, but I didn’t hear anything going on inside the room. My ear almost froze to the metal door. If I’d put my tongue on it, I’d probably have gotten it stuck, like sometimes happens with ice cubes. I grabbed the little round door handle and turned it slowly so as to not make a sound. I took a deep breath and then burst into the room yelling at the top of my lungs.

  ‘Banshee come to get ya!’ I screamed.

  Billy was in the top bunk reading a comic book. He almost jumped out of his skin and banged his head on the ceiling just above him. I laughed so hard I started coughing.

  ‘Oww! Avery, dang it,’ he moaned, rubbing the top of his bumped head. ‘Why can’t you just knock?’

  ‘That wouldn’t be any fun, would it?’ I replied. ‘Whatcha doin’?’

  Billy threw his comic book at me, but it missed. He was sitting cross-legged in his Spiderman underwear and nothing else.

  ‘None of your business.’

  I picked up the comic, a little surprised to see Thor on the cover.

  ‘So you’ve finally come around. Admit it, Thor’s greater than Iron Man,’ I said in my most taunting manner.

  ‘No way, Jose,’ he cried. ‘Thor can’t fly as fast as Iron Man and besides, Iron Man’s a lot smarter.’

  ‘Yeah, whatever. Wanna come and hit some balls?’

  ‘Sure, but I promised Mom I’d take a shower and brush my teeth,’ replied Billy as he jumped down from the bunk. ‘I’d better at least turn on the water and get the toothbrush wet so she’ll think I did.’

  While Billy went down the hall to try to fool his mom, I went over to the lower bunk and sat down. There was a rolled-up copy of yesterday’s newspaper with a chewed-up pencil on top of it. I opened up the paper and glanced at the front page. Normally I would just go to the sports section to see how my favourite soccer teams had done over the weekend, but when I saw a photo of the face of the dead guy that we had seen on the concrete slab, I stopped to read the article. I guess Billy had already read it because the article had been circled with a pencil.

  The body of Gustavo Muñoz was discovered yesterday morning at the end of the airstrip in Campo Mata. It was discovered by the pilot of a single engine Cessna loaded with supplies for the local commissary. He told police that he had seen the body as he approached the landing strip and reported it to the police shortly after landing.

  The Capitán of Police, Aurelio Gómez, confirmed the discovery. Señor Muñoz was shot twice in the chest with bullets from a .45 calibre pistol. Capitán Gómez estimated that the time of death was within twenty-four hours of the discovery and has launched an official investigation. A reward of five thousand bolivars has been offered by the family of the deceased for any information leading to the arrest of the perpetrators. Anyone with information is asked to contact Capitán Gómez.

  Billy came back into the room dressed in his green jeans and checked shirt. His hair wasn’t even the least bit wet and I didn’t smell any mint on his breath. He sat down next to me and pulled on the same holey socks he had taken off and thrown on the floor last night.

  ‘Looks like it was no hunting accident, huh?’ said Billy, looking at his socks.

  ‘Yeah, my dad and Mr Slater were talking about it today,’ I replied, scratching my head. ‘They say the guy was murdered and they think it probably had something to do with a jealous boyfriend or something like that. Anyway, it’s none of our business. You ready?’

  ‘Yep.’

  When we got to the eighth hole, the one where you had to hit the ball over Mata Pond, we stripped down to our underwear for a quick swim. It wasn’t anything new. We always took a dip in the pond when we got there. The pond wasn’t very big, but it was bigger than the pool at the club and there weren’t ever any girls hanging around it, like at the pool. It was ringed with tall reeds and cat’s tails. Since it was between the tee and the green it was always full of golf balls that hadn’t made it across. I had lost a bunch in it myself, but I had found lots more in there than I had lost. At the beginning of every summer Billy and I would cut a path through the reeds to get to the cool clear water in the middle. That’s why we had brought our machetes in our golf bags on this round. It was our first round of the summer. Since those machetes were so heavy, we had borrowed our dads’ pull carts instead of carrying the golf bags on our backs like we normally did.

  So there we were. Two skinny pale kids in comic book underwear, each hanging on to huge machetes. We started hacking our way through the reeds, like berserk Vikings tearing through a helpless army. We were sweating pretty good by the time we broke through to the open water. We stabbed the pointed ends of our machetes into the mud in the shallow water next to us and swam out to the middle of the pond. We floated on our backs in the cool water, watching the clouds drift by above.

  ‘That one looks like a capybara,’ I said, pointing up.

  ‘Yeah, I see it,’ replied Billy. ‘That one over there looks like a pig . . . see the snout?’

  ‘Sure do.’

  We messed around for a little while longer before we decided to get down to business.

  ‘Let’s find some golf balls.’

  We dived down at the same time and started looking for the white treasures. My dad paid us a US quarter for each golf ball we found in good condition, and a dime for the ones with cuts in them. It was our main source of spending money, which went mostly on ham and cheese sandwiches and Fanta at the clubhouse. Even so, we’d managed to save about forty dollars. We kept the money in our secret hiding place in the pipe yard. We did pretty good that day. When our underwear was chock-full of golf balls we swam back to the path through the reeds, picked up our machetes and walked out of the thicket.

  We almost walked straight into them – Scott Barnett and Chris Sanders, the meanest bullies in the camp. When they saw us come out of the reeds, with our comic book underwear full of golf balls and our machetes half as big as us, they doubled over laughing. Scott pointed at me and looked over at Chris.

  ‘Look at these weirdos,’ he said with a not so nice smile. ‘You guys been laying eggs?’

  I hated these guys. They were fourteen years old and a lot bigger than Billy and me. Their parents had moved to Campo Mata from Dallas a year or so back. They had been best friends before they moved here. Their parents told my parents that they were real
ly mad about leaving the big city for Campo Mata and that was why they were so mean to everybody. I didn’t buy it. I think they were born mean and would always be that way. I was thinking of something mean myself; at least I was thinking of something mean to say.

  ‘Leave us alone,’ I said. ‘We’re just finding golf balls.’

  It was a pretty lame thing to say, especially because I had wanted to say something mean.

  ‘Da widdo boys wookin’ fo’ balls?’ laughed Chris.

  These guys really got under my skin.

  ‘Better than just walking around picking our noses, like you two do all the time,’ I replied.

  The taunting smiles disappeared from their faces and were replaced by nasty looks.

  ‘Give us the golf balls or we’ll just have to kick your butts,’ growled Scott. ‘We’ll probably kick your butts anyway.’

  Billy hadn’t said a word, hadn’t even moved a muscle. He might have been just a little whip of a kid, but he had an ornery streak in him. As for me, I never backed down from anything. I had Thor and even Iron Man to answer to. I wasn’t going to let them down; not now, not ever. I lifted my machete and pointed it at the two bullies. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Billy’s machete come up too.

  ‘You want ’em? Come and get ’em,’ said Billy in his best West Texas gunslinger drawl.

  The two bullies just stood there staring at us. They couldn’t believe it.

  ‘You wouldn’t dare,’ spat Chris.

  ‘Try us,’ replied Billy in that same slow drawl.

  I saw a car slowly pull off on to the shoulder of the main road directly behind the bullies. I recognised Capitán Gómez’s police car and saw him sitting behind the steering wheel looking at us. Chris and Scott heard the crunching of the gravel under the tyres and turned around to look. They waved politely at the police chief and then turned back to face us.

  ‘It ain’t over,’ whispered Scott. ‘Not by a long shot.’

  They turned away from us, waved once more at Gómez and began walking towards the eighth green.

  I looked back at the police chief. It was hard to see his face through the reflection of the sunlight on the windshield of his car, but I thought I saw a smile on the lips beneath the pencil-thin moustache. He put the car into gear and drove off in the direction of the clinic.

  Chapter 4

  Silver Spurs

  It was Saturday, the day we always got together at the hideout at the stroke of noon. We called ourselves the Machacas because we made all kinds of paths through El Monte, like those big ants did. We also liked the idea of being fierce and super protective of our hideout, just like the ants were when someone messed up their volcano mounds. My dad got rid of the ants by pouring gasoline into the hole at the top of each mound and then tossing a burning match into it. Huge flames would shoot straight up out of the tops of each of the mounds, like real live erupting volcanoes. It was especially cool when he did that at night.

  I was always the first to the hideout on Saturdays. Since I was the President of the Machacas, I had to make sure that the hideout was ready for the meeting. First thing I did before climbing up the tree was to go around to each of the paths that led to the tree house and make sure that no one had invaded our territory. We had strung up black sewing thread across the six different paths that we had made leading to the hideout. We usually tied the thread to a branch or tree trunk next to the path and then stretched it across to another branch. One of the knots was always really loose so that the invader wouldn’t know they had triggered the alarm. We called them ‘threat threads’.

  I screamed past the stupid monkey on my bike so fast that he barely had a chance to yell at me, much less throw anything nasty. I skidded to a stop right in front of the first threat thread and saw that it was still stretched across the path. I pushed the bike under it, stooped below it myself and then went on to check the other ones. None of the other threads had been tripped either, so I knew that the coast was clear. When I got to the mango tree, I leaned my bike against the trunk and climbed up.

  Billy and Todd got there ten minutes later.

  ‘OK, the meeting is at order,’ I said presidentially. ‘Billy, you go first, then Todd and then me. What’s the mission gonna be?’

  Billy scratched his red crew cut and put a look of fake concentration on his face. It was fake because we already knew what each of us wanted to do for the weekly mission, but we always acted like we’d just thought of it.

  ‘I say we build a huge jump on the banks of the river down below Ocelot Hill,’ said Billy. ‘We could start from the top of the hill and get up enough speed to jump across the river.’

  Todd and I looked at each other with raised eyebrows. The river was about thirty metres wide and there was no way we’d be able to fly across it to the other side. Even if we did, we’d end up crashing when we landed.

  ‘That’s loco,’ replied Todd. ‘I say we sneak into Pablo Malo’s banana field and steal some bananas.’

  Todd always seemed to do what little thinking he did with his stomach. Some of his other ideas had been to sneak into the commissary at night to steal a case of orange Fanta, sneak into the Charles’s house and put pairs of our underwear in Denise and Cathy’s dresser drawers and once he suggested that we sneak into Chris and Scott’s trailers and put monkey poop in their beds. His ideas all had something to do with sneaking or food or both. I sure hoped that he wouldn’t grow up to be a criminal and end up in jail.

  ‘We’d never get past the dogs,’ replied Billy, shaking his head. ‘Even if we didn’t get our legs chewed off by Loca, they’d raise a racket barking at us and Pablo Malo would come a-runnin’. I don’t want to mess with him.’

  ‘You believe everything you hear?’ said Todd. ‘I just think you’re chicken.’

  ‘My parents told me to stay away from him,’ replied Billy. ‘That’s good enough for me.’

  ‘Well, I don’t think Todd’s is such a bad idea,’ I said. ‘Our missions aren’t supposed to be easy, but they are also not supposed to be impossible. Jumping the river’s impossible, so I think Todd’s idea is better than yours.’

  Todd looked at Billy with a smug expression. It was my turn.

  ‘I say we go to the airstrip and race the supply plane when it takes off at two o’clock,’ I said. ‘We’ll hide in the bushes at the end of the strip. When the Cessna turns around to take off, we’ll sneak up behind it and race it.’

  I thought it was a great idea. Billy and Todd didn’t.

  ‘We’ll end up getting chopped to pieces by the propeller,’ cried Billy. He was really worried because he knew that I was the President of the Machacas, and I had a little more sway than he and Todd had.

  ‘Let’s vote, and you can’t vote for your own idea,’ I said. ‘All in favour of racing the Cessna?’

  Todd and Billy didn’t say anything. All I heard was the loud piercing noise of the cicadas in the jungle.

  ‘All in favour of killing ourselves trying to jump over the river?’

  Only the cicadas voted for that idea.

  ‘Well, I guess we’re going to go and steal some bananas.’

  We hid behind a thicket of tall bamboo trees. Our bikes were behind us, leaning against the trunk of one of those huge spiky trees, ready for us to jump on when we made our escape. The red dirt road that ran along the barbed wire fence that defined Pablo Malo’s farm was just a metre in front of us. It was full of potholes with muddy red water in them from the big rainstorm the night before. If you went down the road to the left for about a mile you’d end up at the trailer camp where Billy and Todd lived. If you went to the right for a couple of miles you’d come to the washed-away bridge that used to go over the river. The rows of green banana trees started just on the other side of the barbed wire fence across the road. There were banana trees as far as you could see to the left and right. We knew that Pablo Malo’s adobe farmhouse and storage barn were right smack in the middle of the orchards, and we knew that no one would be in the orc
hards working because it was Saturday. Since it was Todd’s idea, he was the one who had to carry the machete that we’d use to cut down a banana stalk.

  ‘OK, looks like the coast is clear,’ I whispered. ‘Now all we have to do is go to the nearest bunch of bananas that looks ripe, cut it down and get the heck out of Dodge. Got it?’

  ‘Yep . . . ready.’

  ‘Roger wilco.’

  We were just about to step out from the cover of the jungle when we heard the sound of a truck engine coming from the right of us.

  ‘Hold it,’ I said, putting my fist up in the hand signal – universally known in military sneaking language – meaning freeze.

  As the engine noise grew louder and the truck got closer, we crouched down lower and lower. The beat-up, army green jeep came around the bend, bouncing and splashing through the potholes. A cloud of bluish smoke poured out of a muffler that wasn’t doing a good job of muffling anything. The canvas top had been taken off and we could easily see who was driving. It was Pablo Malo.

  He had a battered straw hat on his head and his stringy black hair was flying around his neck in the wind. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, which was pretty smart given how hot it was. A cigarette was stuck between his yellowish teeth and the smoke from it blended in with the burning-oil smoke of the old engine behind him. As he got closer I could make out the face I had only seen a couple of times before in my life. The whites of his eyes were bloodshot. Not exactly like the ones I’d see in some of the parents in Campo Mata when they’d had too much to drink, but more like when someone’s been in the sun too much without wearing sunglasses. The hollow parts of his sunken cheeks were chock-full of pits and bumps, and so was his neck just under his sharp jaw. Seems he had had a bad case of acne when he was young. Guess that’s what would happen to Chris Sanders’s face when all his whiteheads finally oozed out and went away.