When she tried to waken Jason, he groaned and resisted. “Leave me alone, dammit,” he muttered and turned over on his side.
She kept at it, however, and at last got him to his feet and helped him down to where the bed was laid. “You’ll be glad when it starts to rain and your friends all wake up in the cold mud,” she told him.
They lay down fully clothed, and she pulled the oilskin up over them. “Oh God, I’m drunk,” he announced thickly, then was still for a time. When he spoke again, though, his voice was almost normal. “Ah, it’s bad for you and bad for me, love. I mustn’t do it. Don’t let me do it, Robbie, promise? Promise you won’t let me...” She never found out what it was she mustn’t let him do, for he fell asleep then with his head on her breast.
The next morning as it was getting light she felt sorry for him. Whatever that Indian liquor was, its wallop as a hangover seemed to be as great as its wallop as a drink. Jason was pale and fumble-fingered, with the preoccupied expression of a man who badly hurts somewhere.
“We’d better cast off,” he said. “Somehow I have the feeling they will be in an ugly mood when they waken. I don’t want them to see you in daylight anyway. Too bad we couldn’t have gotten any food from them, but Feliciano told me it was only two or three days to La Presa, so we’ll make out somehow.”
She decided not to tell him right now that she had taken the pork; she was sure his stomach was in too delicate a condition to contemplate anything as rich as roast pig. They pushed off the boat, and soon the long Beach of the Swallows, Playa de Golondrinas, lay behind them. As Feliciano had predicted, they passed Colorado de la Mora, where men with circular hand nets fishing in the river watched them pass in astonishment. They came to a string of mountain ridges called Espinazo de Diablo, Devil’s Spine, and by sunset arrived at the junction of the Santiago with Rio Huaynamota.
“We should make Vado or even Tambor tomorrow, and La Presa by the middle of the following day,” Jason said with satisfaction.
Roberta felt a cold chill. That he could be so glad to be coming to the end of their journey hurt. She had known all along in her heart that it couldn’t last forever, that she had to savor each moment, but the end was coming frighteningly fast.
“Let’s go swimming,” he said, his hangover apparently outlived. “Tomorrow we’ll be in mosquito country and won’t dare.”
They shed their clothes and dived into the sunset-colored water, roiled where the currents of the two rivers came together. They splashed each other and gamboled like children, Roberta noting with panic each moment that passed. Then she forgot and threw herself into the water play wholeheartedly. No need to spoil what little there was left. Jason picked her up in his arms to drop her with a splash in the water, but instead suddenly stood still and let her slide slowly until she stood facing him in water to her waist. His eyes looked black in the dying light. All at once they were in each other’s arms, clinging together desperately as the water swirled about their legs on its way down to the sea.
*
“There’s nothing but a little dried fruit left,” he said sadly later as they sat in front of a fire.
“Not to worry.” She rummaged around in the pack on the boat until she found the pork and bananas buried at the bottom. Triumphantly she carried them to the fire and began to lay the plantains in the coals at the edge. When he realized what she had, his eyes lit up and he pulled her down on his lap.
“With that pork you could almost get me to marry you,” he laughed and kissed her.
“That’s the only thing I wish you wouldn’t joke about.”
“Ah, Robbie, don’t. It would never work.” He got up and put more wood on the fire, which snapped protestingly. Handing her a sharpened stick, he put a piece of pork on his and held it at the edge of the flames to heat.
When they had finished as much as they could eat, they still had almost half the meat left and more than half the fruit. They sat in front of the fire staring into the flames.
“I wish we had a little of that brandy right now,” she said.
He shuddered. “I’m glad we don’t. I’d probably pass the cure, as they say in Spanish, and be unhappy tomorrow all over again.”
“Whenever I think I know what goes on inside you, I’m fooled.”
“About my not wanting a drink?” he asked, surprised.
“No, about your getting drunk last night to begin with. I really didn’t think you would.”
“Sometimes, not very often, it’s as if I have to. And then I’m always sorry because it never works.”
“Is it as bad as that?”
“Bad enough. I keep seeing Alarcón’s dead face. It’s left a hole in me large enough to swallow a clipper ship.”
“You’ve never said a word.” She should have known that he would never get drunk over love of her.
“Why should I have made you miserable too?”
“That’s part of it as well, isn’t it? That every time you look at me you think that if you’d never met me, he’d still be alive.”
“That’s not true.” He had been absently drawing in the sand with his sharpened stick, but now he looked up at her. “I’ve thanked God for you every mile of this river. Without you I’d have lost my sanity, I feel it. That’s part of my trouble too. It’s just that I can’t really believe what I’ve been told. In my mind I suppose I believe it, but I love him and miss him all the same, and I just can’t bring myself to think of him like that. There’s a part of me that will never believe it.”
“Would you believe it if you had been able to see some of what he’d done?”
“I don’t know. That same part of me may not care what he’s done. You don’t stop loving people because they’ve done something you don’t like.”
“Not even sending you to your death by torture?”
He was silent.
“Well, at least you’ve put Toby to rest.”
“Yes, I’ve done that all right, haven’t I?” he replied bitterly. “I suppose I should thank God for Salazar, shouldn’t I?”
She held him that night until he slept, but she herself was wide awake for a long time.
The next day they made Tambor, where they bought green lemons and tortillas from an Indian woman who spoke Spanish and apologized because the tortillas had been made that afternoon and weren’t fresh. They went on past the town to camp, leaving behind a gaggle of small children who ran along the bank beside them, pointing and asking shrill questions. They noticed that the minute they stopped at Tambor the air was very warm and humid, and now as they made camp they had to fight off swarms of singing mosquitoes. They finally sat in a smudge of green wood while they rubbed each other with the cut side of lemons, which helped but hardly deterred the more voracious of the insects. In the end they took the pork and the unheated tortillas to bed with them, but a few bothersome creatures even got under the oilskin that seemed ready to boil them, holding the heat and moisture as it did.
The next day they beached the boat as soon as they could see La Presa on the one side and Ixcuintlan on the other, and walked into town, each carrying an oilskin pack of the goods on the boat. They felt very self-conscious in their boots and hats and riding cloaks, but their clothing beneath was so soiled and wrinkled and, in the case of Roberta’s shirt, torn, that they didn’t dare take off the mangas.
Roberta had the money belt. “It's your money, after all,” Jason pointed out. “It was you Olmedo wanted to have it. Just give me some onzas to buy horses or mules.”
There was no arguing with him, so reluctantly she took it. While he was looking for the animals, she bought shirts, pants, matches, some cigars for Jason, and a few other items she thought they might need.
“Mules it is,” Jason said when they met as agreed. “The horses I saw would never have made it to San Bias, and with the mules we got a good deal on the saddles and tack as well. The man who sold them to me said they would also be less likely to be stolen. It seems there are plenty of bandits on this road too. Here
,” and he handed her back two gold onzas.
Roberta wanted to ask him if they couldn’t stay the night in La Presa, just one more night before the end, but she found that she didn’t have the nerve, and they rode off in company with a burro train until they were well out of town, when they kicked the mules into a canter. It wasn’t long before they began to pick up the familiar crosses raised to the victims of armed gangs of robbers.
Though they kept the mules at a sharp gait as long as they could, they saw no one in either direction. “I was told that people are afraid to travel except in large groups,” Jason explained. Before long they came to another cross all by itself. They hadn’t seen one for quite a while.
“Let’s rest the mules a bit,” Roberta said as she dismounted. She untied from her saddle a shovel like a trenching tool that Jason had wanted to ask about but decided not to. He had become more morose and preoccupied with each mile they traveled.
He didn’t say anything even when she began to dig in the road. The soil was wet and turned easily. She hadn’t dug a foot or so before she came upon a muddy piece of cloth, then a partially decomposed body so drenched with mud that it was at first hard to tell what it was. Without speaking, Jason took the shovel from her. He dug a shallow trench in the shape of a cross. As he dug, he came across more and more remains, some no more than rotting discolored bones, others more recently dead. At last he unearthed the body of a child of perhaps three or four, and stopped there with the sweat running off him in streams and stared at where the shovel had turned up a piece of cloth, and they could discern still the anchor on the collar of the small corpse’s sailor suit.
“Now do you see why he had to die? Better the way it was than a public hanging. It wasn’t Pepino, Jason, who told them about Toby and what he used to call you, it was Alarcon himself. I only wish he had taken Zaragoza with him.”
Still without a word, he began to cover it all up again.
“Perhaps you’d better leave it that way. Maybe people ought to know what’s going on.”
“If they found this the way it is,” he said in a dead voice, “we would be dragged back to La Presa and hanged.”
“But we could prove we didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“In places like this, it’s always the outsider who’s at fault. Don’t you suppose the officials must be among — or at least in the pay of — the outlaws?” He went on covering over the grisly remains.
Roberta put her hand on his arm. “Remember, Jason,” she said gently, “that he tried to save you with that elaborate improbable scheme to send you away, a scheme that nearly worked at that, before he gave you over to Zaragoza.”
Jason stopped working and looked at her, his face pale and drawn. “Did he really think I would turn on him?” he asked despairingly. “Did he really know me as little as that? Hell, I didn’t care about the damned bandits, all I wanted to do was stop a war.” He smiled wanly. “I didn’t even do that, did I?”
“He may have known you better than you think. You see, he must have thought you had a good idea of what was going on, that you were the one who put me up to talking about a possible organization behind the outlaws. After all,” she reminded him dryly, “in Mexico women aren’t considered capable of thinking. If you had seen that child in his sailor suit six months ago, can you really say you wouldn’t have made any effort to stop it?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said in a low voice.
“As for stopping the war,” she went on, “you did what you could, and that’s all anyone can do. It’s asking quite a bit, after all, to think that one man, even Alarcón, could put a halt to what everyone else seems determined to do. Who knows what would have happened if he’d gotten in power? Bigger men than he have succumbed to the glory of fighting wars. But Jason,” and here she took his head in her hands and made him look at her, “don’t ever because of all this stop fighting for what you think is right. For a long time I thought you were a fanatic, but now I’ve come to see that if it weren’t for men willing to die for what they believe, men like you and Cristiano, we would all be back in the Dark Ages. Don’t ever think that what you tried to do was in vain. The important thing is that someone cared enough to try.”
The brilliant blue eyes looked into and through her at some distant private vision. “I’d like to think you’re right,” he said at last, but his voice carried no conviction.
*
At the village of Navarrete they were in luck and managed to trade their lathered mules for two small mustangs that looked reasonably tough. It wasn’t long before they rode along a causeway through marshes filled with incredible wildlife. Clouds of duck, teal, pelican, and white and blue egrets took to the sky, with strange harsh cries. The marshes gave way to mangrove swamps where unseen birds shrieked and ominous splashes and gurgles came from water black with rotting vegetation. At last they forded what looked like a small river that seemed to define the last of the swamp, for on the other side they climbed onto a sandy track that led through a jungle of unfamiliar trees, some red with scabrous peeling bark, some golden-trunked, some with roots that seemed to grow from their crowns, and all interspersed with tall coconut palms.
In place of the thriving port town she expected to see, San Bias proved to be little more than a jungle village of stick houses with palm-thatched roofs. On the whole, the only real buildings seemed to be connected with the wharves, such adjuncts of a harbor as a warehouse, a Chinese customhouse on whose roof basked a number of large iguanas, a British consulate, along with a rundown inn and a palm-thatched tavern. Out in the bay they saw a barkentine riding at anchor and numerous fishing boats. Gulls mewed and wheeled over the wharves, and there was a tang of sea and fish and tar.
Jason went into the inn to inquire about rooms and came out saying testily, “He says he's got only one, and that one not made up yet. We’re to come back in half an hour or so.”
They wandered through the village, bought some candy-sweet finger-sized bananas, found a seamstress willing to make up two local-style skirts and two blouses and underclothing by the next day, and a sandalmaker who would make a pair of sandals for her. Jason explained that the things were for his friend’s sister.
“You won’t be a fashion plate when you arrive in San Francisco, but with all that money you won’t need to be,” Jason said.
She didn’t believe the pain that shot through her. “When I arrive in San Francisco! Aren’t you going that far at least?”
“Nope, as Eph would say. You see that barkentine anchored out in the bay?” He pointed to the ship riding easily at anchor in the calm water.
“What about it?”
“Well, while the sandalmaker was measuring your foot, I was talking to his wife, remember? She says that one’s going directly to the Sandwich Islands and then on to Manila. She’s due to sail tomorrow, and I’m going to be on her if I have to stow away. There’s one due in tomorrow that later will be going on to Guaymas and California. That’s your ship.”
The whole world seemed to darken for a moment, but she would never give him the satisfaction of knowing it. “I think that room must surely be ready, don’t you?” she said evenly, and began to walk blindly toward the inn.
After insisting on payment in advance, the innkeeper gave them a key, stared at them curiously, and pointed across the wild, overgrown patio toward a room door. “That one third from the left. Supper’s at nine. You’ll have to get any drinking done at the tavern over there, I won’t have anything to drink in the place with all those sailor men about.”
“Do you boil your water?” Jason asked sweetly.
“If the water’s good enough for me, it should be good enough for the likes of you,” the innkeeper said sourly, “but likely you won’t be needing it anyway.”
They walked around the patio under the overhang held up by adobe pillars, through a jungle of coconut palms and riotous flowering vines. When Jason inserted the key he had to fiddle with it for a moment before he could get the bo
lt shot. He threw open the door and gestured for her to go first.
“Golden lads and girls all must,
“As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
“Isn’t that right, my dears?”
Zaragoza, dressed to the teeth in the latest Parisian fashion, sat in a chair that faced the door, a long-barreled Colt pistol resting negligently in his lap, but quite obviously pointed at them.
CHAPTER XXVII
He waggled the gun impatiently. “Come, come, there’s no good your trying to run. I won’t shoot to kill, you know, if that’s what you’re counting on. We have an appointment, remember? I thought you’d never get here.”
Jason was at his haughty best. “I’m curious; how did you know we would come here.”
“A guess, my boy, only a shrewd guess,” Zaragoza replied modestly. “You see, the roads were already being watched due to the imminent rebellion. Unfortunately, due to a slip, the road to Tepic was the only one unposted, for which the culprit suffered, believe me. It occurred to me that in your place I would think it a good ploy to escape by way of San Bias.” He ignored Jason’s laugh. “I came as hard as a relay of horse would allow me, and I must have overrun you on the road somehow. What took you so long?”
Jason was genuinely amused. “Why, Armando, you ought to have pinned a medal on that culprit instead of shooting him as you undoubtedly did. If it hadn’t been for him, you’d be looking for us come Christmas. You want to know why we took so long? We came down the Santiago River, that’s why.”
“That’s impossible!”
“Oh, we didn’t ride down it, Armando, we boated down it. You thought you'd sucked Olmedo dry of information, but not quite. You see, he had a kind of raft boat all provisioned and hidden just below the bridge on the Zacatecas road.”
A Masque of Chameleons Page 34