Orinoco

by Dan Pollock

  “Sam? What are you doing up there?”

  He glanced down. Jacqueline Lee stood on the starboard bridge wing immediately below. Her upturned face shone ivory between pearl-drop earrings, as a breeze fanned her black mane into the night sky. A downwash of light from the pilothouse further polished her alabaster shoulders and the pale swell of bosom above a black chiffon bodice.

  “Howdy, Jake.”

  “Howdy, yourself. Is there somebody up there with you?”

  “Doesn’t seem to be.”

  “Sam, are you drunk?”

  “I’d say that was a pretty fair assessment.”

  “I’m coming up.”

  “I don’t think that’s such a good—”

  But she’d already pivoted, heading for the nearest companionway. Sam followed the sound of her high heels drumming along the planking, and then, a moment later, ringing up the metal treads. There was no escaping her, except by an undignified scramble down the portside companionway, which he was in no condition to undertake. Anyway, this was undoubtedly as good a place as any to end things between them. No final clutches, no emotive speeches. Just straight talk. Bulldoze her with the bad news about Cerro Calvario and his smash-up with her father. That one-two punch ought to obliterate any amorous fantasies, unilateral or otherwise.

  “Sam?”

  He turned, as Jacqueline stepped upward out of shadows and into a spill of light from the masthead. In addition to the strapless gown, she wore a very purposeful look, Sam thought, as he experienced another bout of the wobbles. A plump champagne bottle dangled from her right hand, while her left palm cradled two crystal flutes. This was obviously not going to be easy.

  “A lovely gesture, Jacqueline,” he said, offering a small salute. “But, as you see, I’m already half-smashed, and I’m afraid there’s nothing to celebrate.”

  “I know all about it, Sam. I just heard.”

  “Heard what?”

  “All about Daddy’s big power grab—at the expense of Dr. Laya, and you.” She moved closer, with a rustle of fabric and a clink of stemware. “When you never came to see me, I went hunting for you—as soon as I could break away. And guess who I found outside Daddy’s office?”

  “Uh, let’s see. Could that be Conan the Archaeologist?”

  “Very good! Actually I saw Félix’s back, scuttling away down the corridor. I mean, he didn’t exactly look like he belonged at the party, not in a leather jacket. Inside Daddy and Ray Arrillaga had their heads together. Sort of like the Coneheads on the old Saturday Night Live, you know? So I basically started screaming, demanding to know what he’d been up to while I was playing dutiful hostess for a solid hour.”

  “And he told you?”

  “In his own infuriating, patronizing fashion. When I figured out what he was really saying, I called him a vile name and came looking for you.”

  Sam nodded sagaciously, covering his intermittent stupor. “So you know the worst. Then why the champagne?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? To drink a toast—a before-the-battle toast. Looks like we’re in this together now, Sam.”

  “Together? I’m afraid not. Maybe D.W. didn’t get around to this part, but he asked me to, uh, well, pretty much stay the hell away from you.”

  “Félix!” She plunked the champagne bottle and glasses down on the deck. “That fucking slimeball! I wonder what lies he told Daddy about us! What did you say? You didn’t agree?”

  “Of course I did.”

  “Sam! In case you didn’t notice, Daddy is busy being a shit-heel, and he is not my CEO, or lord and master. So, as far as your silly, chivalrous pledge to stay the hell away from his girl-child, namely me”—she reached and straightened his bow tie—”I hereby absolve you from it, Sir Samuel. Is that clear?”

  “Unfortunately, I happen to think your father’s right. For all kinds of reasons.”

  “Oh, you do? Well, name one.”

  “Jacqueline, you could make this a whole lot easier, you know?”

  “No way I’m making this easy.”

  “You want a reason? Okay. D.W. and I are about to go mano à mano to see who’s running this goddamned company.”

  “So I gathered. One guess as to whose side I’m on.”

  “Goddamn it, Jake, that’s the point. You can’t be involved. Hell, I told you that before—if it comes down to a fight between us, I don’t want you anywhere around. And now the battle lines are drawn.”

  But his show of anger only incited her own: “You’re telling me I can’t take a stand?”

  “No, I don’t mean that exactly. I mean—oh, goddammit to hell!”

  “You mean you’re afraid to be seen with me, isn’t that it? You think maybe Daddy’s going to spread nasty little rumors about you, claiming you’re trying to seduce his precious daughter?”

  “No, I don’t think D.W. would do that. But let’s just say the timing here is not exactly, uh…”

  “Propitious?”

  Sam laughed. “Yeah, that’s the word. Even if I’d remembered it, believe me, in my present state, I’d never have pronounced it.”

  Jacqueline closed in, till her face was just inches away. “Okay, Sam. I understand the corporate politics, and I’ll accept them—for now. But I’m not letting you off the hook that easy. I want to hear it straight from you, not from my father’s ultimatum. Do you want me around or not? I mean, aside from the obvious fact that I belong in a playpen.”

  “I never said that. I only said—”

  “That I’m too young. Okay, what else? Am I too whimsical for you? Too tall, perhaps? Too collegiate—or post-collegiate? Or maybe too incredibly Eurasian?” With her forefingers, Jacqueline tugged her eyelids, narrowing their almond shape. “Or maybe I’m just not your type? After all, we know you favor hot-blooded Hispanics.”

  Sam merely chuckled at her antics, but Jacqueline frowned back at him, then folded her arms in no-nonsense fashion below the velvet notch of decolletage.

  “Well? I’m awaiting your answer.”

  “Jacqueline, I think you already know the answer to all that.”

  “I want to hear you say it.”

  Sam turned away from her gaze. “This isn’t exactly going the way I planned. But I guess that shouldn’t surprise me, since everything else has been out of control lately.”

  When he glanced back, she was right there, her face shadowed, but her eyes large and luminous. “Sam, you’re fighting everybody. I can see that. But don’t fight me anymore, okay? I want to be with you on this.”

  She ducked down, gurgled out champagne, rose up again with an overflowing glass in each hand.

  “Jake, hey, I’m barely coherent as it is.”

  “Just have one sip with me. It’s Veuve Clicquot.”

  “Well, hell, why didn’t you say so?” Outside of Dom Perignon, Sam didn’t know one brand from another, but he accepted the fizzing glass. She was right in his face now, twining her forearm and glass around his.

  “Here’s looking at you, kid,” he offered with a grin.

  “Right back at you, old-timer,” she murmured, then gulped, never taking her eyes off him.

  Sam knocked it back, felt the bubbles explode in his mouth. The world skipped another beat then, creating a sensory blur of fantail salsa with swimming river lights, and Jake’s floral perfume with a sweet trace of citrus blossoms borne on the Orinoco breeze. When he refocussed, Jacqueline was leaning against him—on tiptoe, bringing them eye to eye.

  And then they were kissing.

  This time there were no horses and saddles to get in the way. Steering his hand with one eye, Sam managed to abandon his champagne glass safely on the teak rail, before surrendering his full attention to the moment. Below the passionate kiss, they maneuvered jointly into the tightest possible embrace. Sam spread his palms across the warm, satin planes of her bare back, while Jacqueline kept squirming forward, face and torso, hips and thighs, till Sam nearly lost his balance. He caught himself against the railing, while somehow maintaining
the sealed kiss, just as she released a warmed spurt of champagne deep into his throat.

  The surprise of it nearly buckled his knees. He came up gasping. “Why you little vixen!” he said when he caught his breath.

  “What are you going to do about it, cowboy?” she said defiantly, from only an inch away.

  But Sam was already snaking a hand down for the neck of the Veuve Clicquot, while keeping Jacqueline tightly corraled in his other arm. “I guess you’ll just have to wait and see,” he said, then swigged straight from the bottle, storing the effervescent ammunition as he lowered his face to hers and stifled a delighted giggle with his lips.

  There were several more point-blank, liquid salvos before a mutual surrender was proclaimed and they slid down behind the sheltering windscreen to occupy themselves with more serious intimacies. Jacqueline kicked off her pumps and deposited herself more or less in Sam’s lap; while he, with stripe-trousered legs splayed out upon the deck, explored alternately her delicious face and the jungly precincts of her hair. He could savor now to the fullest those commingled scents he had encountered first during the rainstorm on Cerro Calvario, when Jacqueline had brushed past him in the tent.

  Sam’s alcohol-induced disorientation had by no means lifted. It had, in fact, been augmented by Jacqueline’s intoxicating presence, as well as by the recent infusions of Veuve Clicquot. But if Jacqueline was in part the cause of his vertigo, she was also its nearest remedy, an adorable anchor to be clutched, while all of Ciudad Guayana pinwheeled past, trailing a skyful of equatorial constellations in its wake.

  And while nothing very much resembling thinking was going on amid this sensate whirl, there were some erratic conjectures. Sam wondered, for instance, just how it was that a girl—almost, but not quite a woman—could appear so suddenly on his personal horizon and proceed to convince herself and him of the preposterous notion that she was exactly what was needed to make his life complete.

  The damn thing had started, Sam was sure, in the front seats of his Cessna, when he had taken rather furtive and frequent delight in Jacqueline’s girlish exuberance. Again and again that glorious morning he had glanced away from Angel Falls or some other cinemascopic marvel to scrutinize the detailing of his lovely seatmate—the exquisite ear, peeking out behind her cheek curls; the baroque curve of her smile, cunningly echoed in a recurrent dimple; her tapered golden fingers working the palmcorder; the dark brown firelights in her satin black hair. Once begun, the infatuation had obviously been both insidious and cumulative, building into the fever that had now burst upon them. The only hope for sanity, of course, was that the fever would quickly pass—leaving them both in depleted puzzlement.

  But, for the moment, it was irresistible. Jacqueline’s face was everywhere he looked, and her kisses voracious. No longer able to endure anything between her flesh and Sam’s caressing hands, she tugged impatiently at her bodice, spilling her breasts into his grasp. She moaned as he palmed them, then slid her fingers beneath his cummerbund, probing the extent of his desire.

  Well, now, Sam thought, she certainly wasn’t going to be disappointed. Nor was she. Her eyes widened as she encountered the battle-ready hardness that had been there, lying in wait and addling his brains, almost since she’d tweaked his bow tie.

  But this, finally, triggered an alarm too strident for Sam to ignore, despite his condition. With great reluctance he backed off, then took her firmly by both wrists, restraining her from further erotic mischief.

  “Sam, what’s wrong?”

  “I’m calling time-out here, okay?”

  “Okay, okay. You’re absolutely right.” She leaned back from him as he released her hands, and they faced off, still seated and breathing like two boxers pried loose from a late-round clinch. “We can use my stateroom,” she said, tugging the fitted bustline back into place. “It’s on the starboard side—”

  “No, Jake, we can’t.”

  “Okay, what about the Intercontinental? We’ll take your car, but I drive, okay?”

  “No, dammit.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I said so.”

  “Sam, I don’t believe this. You’re still afraid, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah, could be. I mean, D.W. does have one hell of a gun collection.”

  “I’m not talking about Daddy. You’re afraid of me. Of us.”

  Sam let that one penetrate his benumbed skull. “Maybe I am, Jake. Whatever it is, I’m just not ready for whatever comes next. So we stop right here.”

  “With your virtue intact?”

  “I know, it sounds weird to me, too.”

  “Well, the part about not being ready certainly does.” She giggled. “I mean, there’s some awfully hard evidence to the contrary.”

  “Jake, just hush a moment, okay? And stay over there.” She had begun to lean toward him. “Look, I don’t know what all this adds up to. But yes, dammit, it scares me. All of it—you, me, D.W. And for sure I’m too snockered to know what the hell I’m doing. All I’m proposing is that we pull the plug—until this whole mess is resolved, between me and your father, and you and your father. I mean, who knows what kind of dynamics are operating here? Maybe this is all part of your rebelling against him—”

  “Come on, Sam! You don’t really think that’s what this is about?”

  “I honestly don’t know, Jake. I admit the thought certainly occurred when I watched you corral that prime hunk of Latin beefcake.”

  “I was not trying to corral Félix. I just flirted with him!”

  “Well, that’s what I figured you were doing with me, just flirting. I mean, why would you want to do anything more with a sun-wrinkled coot older than your dad, for God’s sake?”

  “Sam, this is stupid. What am I supposed to do now, sit here and try and convince you that I’m really serious, and not trifling with your manly feelings? Well, I could. I could write you a whole gooey Hallmark Card about how I love your sun wrinkles and your stubbly jaw and overgrown eyebrows... and the shape of your big hands and the sound of your laugh... and the way I know just how to get under your skin and tease you—and elicit one hell of a rise, if I do say so myself. But I refuse. So there.” She folded her arms and glared at him. And, when he didn’t immediately respond, she prodded him angrily with her bare foot. “Damn you!”

  “I’m sorry. I’m a complete and thorough bastard.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re just a damn, sun-wrinkled, snockered old party-pooper. The party is pooped, right?”

  “I’d say that’s a safe bet.” Somewhat shakily, he levered himself upright, then extended his hand and helped her to her feet. Jacqueline treated him to a long-suffering look as she stepped into her pumps and adjusted her little chiffon dress. Then, as Sam began fiddling ineffectually with his own dishevelment, she slapped his hands.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, let me.” Sam obeyed, looking somewhat sheepish as she tucked in his dress shirt and straightened his cummerbund and jacket. “Voilà,” she said, with a final and unnecessary upward tug on his zipper, “you could pass anywhere for a respectable captain of industry. No one would guess what unspeakable things you’ve been up to.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  “Jacqueline”—he tilted her chin up to look into her eyes— “I’ve got to go up to New Orleans tomorrow and fight for my position, and incidentally for Dr. Laya and a bunch of old buried bones. But it’s going to be very hard for me to get my mind off you, for a long while, you know that. But, dammit, I’m going to try. And I expect you’ll do the same. And if this was my only chance here, and I blew it, well, I’m sorry. It’ll have to rank right up there with some of my other damn-fool blunders.”

  An ensuing interval of silence was marred by the sudden sounds of a drunken argument below, apparently lurching in their direction—and imparting an unwanted urgency to their leave-taking.

  “That’s a nice speech, Sam. And I guess it lets you off the hook. Temporarily. But we will be allies. Beca
use you know where I’ll be, don’t you? Back on Cerro Calvario, shooting a film. I hope it’s about archaeology, but maybe it’ll be about bulldozing history and other nasty things. Who knows? But whatever happens, you haven’t seen the last of me, Big Sam.” She paused. “And you better be thinking about me—a lot.”

  “Believe me, Jake, I will.”

  She went on tiptoe to give him a butterfly-light kiss on the lips. “Buenas noches—darling.”

  Then she was gone, clattering down the companionway.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Sam’s plan was straightforward. His leather satchel and the car keys for the Alfa Spyder were in the guest cabin below. He would retrieve them and get the hell out of here. He had enough residual judgment to realize that, in his present condition, there was no plausible way he could drive the hundred kilometers back to Ciudad Bolívar. But with any luck, given the Venezuelan police’s laissez-faire policy toward vehicular behavior, he should be able to steer a safe course two or three kilometers to the Intercontinental Hotel in Puerto Ordaz.

  Sam could sleep off his stupor there for a few hours, then get a wake-up call up in time to gun the Alfa back to Ciudad Bolívar for the morning Avensa or Aeropostal jet to Caracas and connecting flights to Miami and New Orleans.

  Now, to implement his plan. He oxygenated his lungs, oriented himself with the constellations and harbor lights, then began descending the companionway to the upper deck.

  Halfway down he realized it wasn’t going to work. The moment he had set himself in motion, the world around him had launched into a reciprocal movement—and on several axes simultaneously, very much like a rotating and tilting carnival wheel. As a result, Sam found himself grabbing the railing to avoid being hurled centrifugally into space. Had he been behind the wheel of the Italian sports car during such a planetary perturbation, he could easily have killed himself—and possibly taken an innocent victim or two with him.