by Dan Pollock
Until Hector stamped his hooves, snorted and sidestepped. And suddenly they were grabbing their saddlehorns to keep from tumbling into the widening breach between them.
Which triggered much laughter and blew off accumulated tension. Which also gave Sam a chance to catch his breath—and Jake to retrieve her cartwheeling hat. But she accomplished this swiftly and wheeled around with a purposeful look in her eye. Sam knew he damn well wasn’t ready for what was going to happen next and ought to do something decisive and take advantage of Hector’s fitful interruption. Instead, he chose cowardice—and spurred his gelding into an abrupt canter.
But Jacqueline’s horse had a running start and in no time at all was loping alongside, while her rider posted easily in the saddle and threw Sam a look of complete nonchalance. She really was a skillful horsewoman—grasping the reins lightly as she pinched the Appaloosa’s sides with her legs and braced her feet in the stirrups. But Sam decided to test her further. He urged Hector into a gallop and was surprised to see the usually sluggish Esmeralda move right with him, while Jacqueline bent forward over her neck. For maybe half a minute they went hell for leather, pounding across the savanna, dodging and flashing between the scrubby trees. Gradually, then, they shifted down to an easy trot, letting themselves and their mounts get their wind back.
“Looks like you can’t escape me,” Jacqueline said, leaning back against the cantle and grinning over at him.
“That presupposes I was trying to escape.”
“Sam, aren’t you being a little childish?”
“I’m trying my damnedest not to be childish. What you’re being, on the other hand, is naughty. And you’d better be careful. If you’ll look ahead, you’ll see Cerro Calvario is just ahead. Félix could be up there somewhere, watching us at this very moment.”
“I don’t care who sees us. Anyway, it’s none of his damn business.”
“Hmm. Do I detect a little anger at Félix? That wouldn’t have anything to do with what happened today, would it?”
“That’s a really rotten thing to say, Sam!”
“I have this rotten streak.”
“If you ask me, it sounds like you’re jealous of Félix.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Jake.”
“And I really should make you pay for it—by teasing you unmercifully about him. But I won’t. Félix is a hunk, okay? Conan the Archaeologist. And, from what I hear, he’s a real stud, too. But alas, like a lot of beautiful boys, he’s been going steady with himself for too long. And it’s not exactly a secret love affair. Am I making you feel any better? Let’s see, what have I forgotten? Shall we discuss his mind? His cultural literacy—outside of archaeology and geology and bench pressing? Believe me, Sam, I’ve had several boyfriends just like him. Want to hear about them?”
“No, thanks. I didn’t really want to hear about Félix.”
“Liar.”
“Now, Jacqueline, you go easy on me.”
“Only if you promise not to bring up Félix again. And I’m just teasing about all the boyfriends. There haven’t been that many. I’m not really a wild child, Sam. I just talk big.”
“It’s not your talk that worries me, Jake, believe me.”
On the other side of the border fence, they walked their horses back toward the access road, sharing another long silence. An unresolved question hovered between them, looming larger—exactly as though they were two teenagers driving home after a first date. How would they say good-bye? Sam was disgusted to catch himself seriously pondering such a juvenile issue. When the time came, he would damn well handle it and stop all the foolishness. The trouble was, the tactile memory of their previous kisses kept replaying itself, undermining his resolve.
Luckily, the problem was solved for him. Halfway to the road, a bandito figure stepped out from behind a small tree. It was the old bearded man with the holstered sidearm—Arquimedeo’s uncle. He was grinning.
“Buenas tardes! Señorita Lee, here is the truck to take you back to the camp, and your supper.” He gestured farther on, and in the shadows beside the barbed-wire fence they saw the rusted hood of Felix’s old pickup, with a head and wide shoulders silhouetted behind the wheel.
Jacqueline glanced at Sam, and they dismounted together. She handed him the Appaloosa’s reins. They stood in silence a moment, while the horses nibbled sawgrass and swished flies with their tails. Then Jacueline smiled.
“Don’t worry, I’ll let you off this time.” Then: “So long, Sam. I had a wonderful afternoon.”
“So did I.” And he thought, a little too wonderful.
“See you tomorrow night, Sam.”
“Right. Hasta mañana.”
And between now and then, Sam intended to do some hard thinking about what had happened between them. Think about it, savor it, then kill it dead.
Jacqueline set off toward the waiting truck, then swung around on the path and flashed her best little-girl smile:
“And thanks for the hat!”
Chapter Eighteen
Nearing noon of the following day, Oscar Azarias drove his dilapidated pickup south on Route 16 through watery chaos. He had hoped to complete his early morning business at Guri Lake and be back at Cerro Calvario before the rain clouds opened their dark bellies. Instead, he now wrestled his scrapyard 1950 Dodge half-ton through a swirling maelstrom, fighting to keep the slick tires from skidding off the flooded two-lane blacktop into the swampy shoulder.
To intensify his ordeal, the midday deluge not only hammered the cab’s tinny roof, but trickled steadily down through rust holes, soaking the back of Oscar’s neck, both pantlegs and the decomposing upholstery of the old bench seat. And this wasn’t the worst of it. The wiper motor had shorted out, so the pitted, two-section windshield was now a streaming silver curtain. Oscar was forced to supplement his dangerously impaired vision by cranking down the window and sticking out his grizzled head, drenching himself in the process.
Despite all this, he’d managed to catch up to a laboring Alcasa flatbed stacked high with aluminum ingots. CARGA LARGA warned the big bumper sign—WIDE LOAD. Oscar figured he’d tag along in its wake till the torrent abated. But the damn truck was crawling up easy grades, belching black diesel clouds and throwing spray from its rear duals.
Oscar waited till they’d crested a small hill, then popped his head out. The wide load completely blocked his vision of oncoming traffic. So he eased out little by little, peeking around, but the obscurity was impenetrable. Finally, in frustration, he yanked the wheel over, committing himself to pass. But the instant he was exposed, he thought he saw something out there in the murk ahead.
Hiya de la chingada!
Oscar stomped the pedal flat to the firewall, squeezing everything he could from the old flathead six to overtake the long flatbed, while his fate rushed to overtake him. A breath-holding eternity later, he swerved and skidded the Dodge back into the right lane, just as a Lagoven petroleum tanker thundered past, its wind-rip nearly buffeting him off the road.
Oscar sagged back against the exposed springs. Just then, out the window, a roadside shrine flashed by—a doghouse-sized capilla, chapel, topped by a cross. Venezuela’s highways were dotted with these macabre reminders, erected by family members to mark the spot where a loved one had been killed, and to provide temporary shelter for the departed soul. If that tanker had been a split second earlier, Oscar thought, somebody could plant three more crosses out there.
He glanced to his right. The Kamarakotas were both grinning and sipping their beers. They thought it was funny!
Chucho, the elder, was a squat-bodied elf, with scraggly haircut and perennial grin to match. He wore a traditional Venezuelan liki-liki shirt over untraditional pink-Day-Glo baggy shorts, and his bare, horny feet straddled the Dodge’s three-speed column shift. His younger half-brother, Angel, a massive head taller, was slumped against the opposite door in camouflage pants, flip-flops and a Ninja Turtle T-shirt. Thick black bangs hung to his eyebrows, and a smile split his usually
gloomy Mayan face as he compacted a beer can in his fist, tossed it behind the seat and reached for another. Oscar began to worry the supply of cold Polars he’d bought at the Guri Lake market wouldn’t last the day.
It had taken him an extra half hour to track the Indian brothers down. They weren’t waiting on the Hotel Guri terrace where they said they’d be. They were snoring under some oleander bushes across the road. It seemed they’d had a big night. They’d spent half of it turning over rocks with a flashlight and trapping inch-long toads, and the other half out on the lake, one of the world’s finest bass-fishing habitats, in an aluminum boat “borrowed” from Guri Bass Camp. No artificial lures and such for the crafty Kamarakotas. They preferred live bait, hooking the toads through the lips, then trolling and drift-fishing the shallows. Their odorous catch was currently wedged in the tool storage area under the bench seat, five plump peacock bass, all in the six-kilo range, iced and wrapped in newspaper.
Oscar was beginning to suspect he’d blundered in recruiting them. When the time came for desperate action, could he rely on these guys? Or would he find them flaked out under a tree or wrapped in a hammock, dead-drunk or zonked on native hallucinogens?
In the San Félix cantina the other night, under the influence of a great many cervezas and a form of raw cocaine called basuco, the brothers had seemed formidable. They had boasted of extensive criminal pasts and an eagerness to undertake dangerous things. Little Chucho claimed they had worked briefly for the Ochoa brothers of the Medellín Cartel in Mérida state, where Chucho had been a courier and Angel an enforcer. With seeming modesty, Angel pantomimed how he had once cut the throat of a Guardia Nacional soldier. Their prison tattoos tended to authenticate their boasts. Chucho explained he had done five years in Sabaneta Penitentiary in Maracaibo for minor trafficking (arrested after having swallowed cocaine-filled condoms), while Angel spent three years in Tocuyito in Valencia (for beating up riot police after a particularly exciting soccer match).
But alcohol-fueled boasts and jailhouse credentials were not enough to remove Oscar’s doubts. Could the Kamarakotas follow instructions? Could they even remember instructions? Could they, if the situation called for it, act on their own, without specific orders? These were the qualities of a good soldier—whether in the Cartel or the Guardia or the revolutionary cadres of Oscar’s youth. And one had only to glance at the brothers now, giggling together and stamping their feet on the truck’s broken floorboards, to be deeply concerned.
The old joke Venezuelans told on themselves was that God had endowed their country with every conceivable form of natural wealth—gold, silver, diamonds, pearls, oil, iron, bauxite... the list was truly staggering. Then, as a final and delicious irony, He had created inhabitants too indolent to exploit those riches. This complacency was typical of most Venezuelans, in Oscar’s opinion, including himself, but Indians most of all. For them, idleness seemed always the natural state, and work a temporary aberration. They might labor terribly hard on a specific task—making a boat or a blowgun, hunting monkeys or clearing land so their women could plant manioc—but they never let it become habit-forming.
On the other hand, the brothers came cheaply and knew the Sabana. They told Oscar that they had grown up in the Kamarata Valley, east of Auyán Tepui and inaccessible except by small plane or dugout canoe. There, besides their native Indian language, Pemón, they had learned Spanish from the Capuchin friars at the nission school and picked up bits and pieces of a half dozen other languages from adventure tourists who sought out their spectacular valley. A tribal dispute caused the brothers, while still teenagers, to leave their village—forty families dwelling in thatch-and-adobe churuata huts near the Kamarata Mission—and paddle a canoe down the Río Caroní to Canaima Camp. There they joined the Indian community, making and hawking souvenirs, driving trams and barbecuing chickens for tourists. Most of their native brethren seemed quite content with this existence, but Chucho and Angel, for whatever reasons, were not. It was at this point that their future career path suddenly opened. They left Canaima hurriedly one afternoon, vanishing into the bordering jungle with a plastic bag full of watches and wallets entrusted to them by a planeload of Italian tourists who had been about to walk under a waterfall.
Oscar had been intrigued by their history, and particularly by the idea of simply vanishing into the jungle. He had peppered the brothers with questions about the Gran Sabana—how long they thought one might remain undiscovered there; how far and fast one might travel undetected over the network of rivers, depending on the season, rainy or dry; how many people and supplies could be carried in a large curiara, or dugout canoe; and so forth.
The practical applications were obvious enough. Of the various plans currently revolving in Oscar’s mind, all required a method of escape and a place of retreat. And the Kamarakotas, whatever their shortcomings, obviously possessed considerable skills in both these areas. With them as accomplices, Oscar could start out with his getaway, then tailor the crime to fit.
But all that would have to wait. At the moment, he was fully engaged in keeping the ancient pickup on the road with its battered nose plowing ahead through the downpour. The Indian brothers, meanwhile, had started to chant in Pemón, gradually drowning out the storm with their roaring, plaintive choruses.
Oddly enough, Oscar found the primitive noise comforting. After a few moments, he began to bellow along.
Chapter Nineteen
A hundred kilometers north in Ciudad Bolívar, Sam Warrender was also watching the downpour, watching it churn the sliding surface of the Orinoco into slate gray froth. The rain was almost heavy enough to qualify as a real Oklahoma frog-strangler, he decided, easing the stifling heat with a brown-bottled cerveza.
He was momentarily alone at a table under the large circular shelter of the Mirador Angostura lookout along the Paseo Orinoco, the old city’s riverside promenade and arcaded shopping street. Despite the deluge, post-nuptial festivities were in full swing around him—the dozens of tables filled, the dance floor congested. Loudspeakers pumped out Eydie Gorme and the Trio Los Panchos’ “Sabor a Mi,” accompanied by what sounded like a continuous ovation as rain sheeted across the roof. Sam gave the midday monsoon another fifteen minutes. Brassy light was already starting to leak through the gray.
Through the crush, he caught a glimpse of a wiry man in the throes of a cha-cha. It was Enrico, dancing with one of his sisters-in-law. Sam marveled at his friend’s all-night stamina. Then, estimating the extent of Enrico’s imminent dehydration, he signaled a passing waiter for another round.
The partying had started the evening before at the Hotel Río Orinoco a mile and a half west, after a steambath of an afternoon wedding in Ciudad Bolívar’s colonial hilltop cathedral. The groom was one of Enrico’s countless local cousins, and Sam had decided to attend only at the last minute, in hopes of blotting out persistent, cloying thoughts of Miss Jacqueline Lee.
So far the plan had worked. It wasn’t easy, after all, to slip into romantic reverie with a percussive hangover and less than three hours sleep. Not that Sam had worked at stupefying himself the night before. It had come about quite naturally. He had made the slight mistake of dancing with one of Enrico’s female relatives. The next he knew he was being dragooned onto the floor by one after another, gyrating and perspiring before the amplified shriek like a tormented soul, then staggering back to Enrico’s table and more rum punches.
And now, while this fiesta was finally winding down, it was already time to begin girding himself for the next one—D.W.’s shipboard bash a hundred kilometers downriver in Ciudad Guayana this evening. Sam hung out for another half hour with Enrico’s family, watching the rain dry up and the afternoon sun come steaming out. Then he lifted a last toast to the bride and groom, danced a final rumba with Enrico’s hefty but nimble wife, Romalda, and negotiated a tipsy gauntlet of Venezuelan good-byes—smooches and squeezes and man-to-man abrazos.
Enrico had tossed him a set of keys to some poor fool’s black Alf
a-Romeo Spyder convertible. Sam found it and fired it up, was momentarily intimidated by its pantherine growl, then decided it was just the animal to chew up all those boring kilometers between Ciudad Bolívar and Ciudad Guyana—and maybe clear his throbbing head in the process. He put the top down, let out the clutch and rocketed back to the hotel. After a cold shower—a good idea made compulsory by a hot-water shortage—he dressed in slacks and sport shirt, grabbed his leather satchel and rented tux and buckled himself back into the black Alfa.
Once safely beyond the city’s impoverished outskirts, where the Avenida Perímetral merged into the four-lane route 19 highway, he let the Alfa have its head. Suddenly it was like barreling through the American West, across rolling, scrub-dotted rangeland under high-wide blue—except over his left shoulder, where the usual afternoon cloud drift traced the Orinoco. Seeing a cassette protruding from the tape deck, Sam chunked it in, and the Gipsy Kings washed over him with their Spanish guitars, rhythmic hand claps and flamenco passion. Sam yammered along and slapped the wheel. He felt, for the moment, unassailable.
But forty-five minutes later, as the shining river reappeared on his left and the highway descended into Puerto Ordaz, numbing fatigue had overtaken him again. It would be a hell of a long day, and night, Sam knew. He slowed the Alfa to a sedate snarl through the city’s industrial parkland, past turnoffs and distant pluming smokestacks marking the various giant metallurgical enterprises.
Ciudad Guayana was one of the world’s fastest-growing industrial centers. It was also, like Brasília, a planned metropolis. And the site had compelling advantages. Within a hundred-kilometer radius were the mines of Cerro Bolívar and El Pao to supply iron ore, and Guri Dam upstream on the Caroní supplying cheap hydroelectric power. Easy access and egress were provided by the Orinoco; with steady dredging, the river was navigable by large oreships from here to the Atlantic. The laying out had begun in the early Sixties, with the new commercial districts marching westward from the old port of San Félix at the confluence of the Caroní and Orinoco.