by Lou Cameron
“You can’t do this to me,” he protested.
The girl got to her feet, an odd smile on her face as she walked over, opening her torn dress. She spit on the wounded man and asked Captain Gringo, sweetly, “Would you please take me again, my toro? I want this animal to watch!”
It was tempting, but there wasn’t time. He settled for putting an arm around her waist and saying, “Later, in the jungle, querida. Let’s leave him here to play with himself until the Indians find him, helpless.”
As he untied the horses Don Diego pleaded, “Leave me my gun, at least.”
Captain Gringo helped the girl up, giving her a playful pat as he did so. Then he mounted beside her and said, “As you said before, ‘fuck you’.”
They were both laughing as they rode off together. Then, as the trees closed in around them again she said, “I only said those terrible things for revenge. I hope you don’t take me for a bad woman.”
“We’ll worry about it later,” he suggested, adding, “if we don’t put some distance between here and there before the sun goes down we might not get to find out.”
“But you said he was powerless now.”
“It might take him a day or two to find that out. I figure his hired guns will have to think about it a bit before they turn on him.”
“Ah, but in the end, do you think they will?”
“I wouldn’t have left him alive if I didn’t know it. He doesn’t strike me as a very nice guy. Sooner or later they’re going to wonder why they have to take orders from a man with a nasty mouth, no brains, and no way to fight back.”
“Brrr. I almost feel sorry for him now.”
“Don’t. He had more coming, but it was all I could think up on such short notice.”
Chapter Twenty-One
They never found out what happened to Don Diego. If anyone ever trailed them farther through the jungle, his trick with a spot of back-tracking must have thrown hem off.
They rode all one night. Then made camp off the rail between the buttress roots of a towering quinine tree. They made no fire. Captain Gringo spread a blanket on the forest duff and said, “We’ll lay low here until it’s safe to move on. I’ll cut a hole for your head in this blanket before we leave and you can fasten it around your waist.”
She threw herself down with a sigh of relief and aid, “Oh, I never want to move again. I feel like I could sleep forever.”
He sat beside her on the blanket. He said, “We’ll take turns on watch and sleeping. You go first.”
“Then you do trust me, at last?”
“After watching you spit on that poor bastard bad there? I don’t know which of us he wants to torture to death more. At the least you’ve convinced me you didn’t have a very happy marriage.”
“I hated him. Thank God I seem to be getting my period. Every month since he forced me to marry him I’ve prayed to the Virgin not to let me bear a child related in any way to that monster!”
“All’s well that ends well. Where will you be goin now?”
“I don’t know. My people know of my shame. I can never return to them after what happened. Where are you going, and do you have a name?”
“Just call me Dick. Don’t any of you ladies ever go home after you lose a little virginity?”
“It is not a laughing matter among my people, Deek A woman who has been shamed is considered dead by her father and brothers. If I were to attempt to return there would be remarks, and my father—”
“I know. I know. Gunfight time at the O.K. Corral.”
“Your words are strange. I don’t understand much o: what you say. Your Spanish is not bad, but you mix it up with funny English words.”
“Let’s just say I understand. I’m trying to read Tehuantepec. I don’t know what I’ll do in Tehuantepec but getting there seems to be half the fun.”
“Then I, too, must go to Tehuantepec.”
“What is it with you girls down here? I know you’re all religious, but is the only part of the Bible you ever read the Song of Ruth?”
“This I understand. ‘Wither thou goest,’ no?”
He noticed the way she was breathing and though he read the expression in her dark almond eyes. He lay down beside her, cradled her head in an arm, and kissed her. She responded warmly. So he ran his hand down he half-exposed body until she turned her mouth aside to whimper, “Stop. What are you doing?”
He ran his nails through her pubic hair and replied, “What do you want me to do, querida?”
“I can’t. Not now. I told you, I’m about to have my period!”
“I’ll take my clothes off and this jungle is supplied with all the running water in the world.”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I’ll get you all messy.”
“I don’t mind. Besides, it’s the one time you don’t have to worry about consequences.”
She giggled and said, “That is true. I never thought of that. But you are a truly wicked man, Deek.”
He didn’t argue. He peeled out of his sweaty cottons and threw himself between her open thighs. She gasped as he entered her, for her buttocks were against the hard earth and her pelvic bone met his with a solid wet smack. She moaned, “Oh yes, but I feel so hot and wet down there. Are you sure this isn’t going to disgust you?”
“I’ll be the judge of that. My God, you’re tight, considering.”
“It is because you are so large. I didn’t know it would be so big, but I like it. Do you like my … gatita?”
“Baby, I love it. It’s the nicest little gatita in the world.”
She chewed his collarbone and growled, “Then it is your gatita, my toro! I want you to have every bit of it, forever!”
He didn’t answer. He was busy. And while forever seemed a bit more than he’d bargained for, he sure wanted this to last for a long, long time.
El Camino Real de Tehuantepec was the old highway between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean that you wanted to call a rutted jungle road more than a wide trail. Captain Gringo and Consuela made it without any trouble. But since she might have a jealous husband chasing her and he knew everyone south of the Canadian border was after him, they avoided the few towns as they rode south toward the Pacific seaport of Tehuantepec City, living off the country.
This was easy for two reasons: The trade-windswept Mexican waistline was a classic tropical paradise, and Consuela was a real bargain. Aside from being pretty as a picture and a fantastic lay, she was jungle bred and knew the country. She rode beside him in her belted poncho with Don Diego’s gunbelt around her shapely hips. But the occasional Maya peons they encountered were more impressed by the way she’d fixed her hair.
As he got the story, Consuela was from an important Maya-Spanish clan and she could let people know it by the way she braided the green metallic feathers of a certain jungle bird they shot into the blue-black tresses on either side of her fine-boned face. When she told him that a real ancient Mayan princess would have worn a jade plug in her nose, he said he was just as glad her people were now Catholics. He’d thought, before meeting her, that the ancient Maya were of the remote past, like the Egyptians of the Bible. She explained that the Spanish had only destroyed their civilization. The people were still very much alive and only semi-Christian. She spoke both languages and prayed to both sets of gods, depending on who was around. Since she could be sized up at a glance as high-born Maya, they were not molested by Indians who might be watching from the trees. Since he was most obviously not Maya, the puzzled Indians simply let them pass without comment.
Consuela told him Los Rurales were supposed to patrol the jungles, but tended to stay in the towns. He’d assumed as much from the high-handed behavior of Don Diego. These lowlands were lawless even by Mexican standards. Diaz and the highland clique in power were uneasy about the lowlands and tended to leave them to the mosquitos. The plantation grandees paid their taxes and ran things as they saw fit or were tough enough to manage. There were villages where whites or mestizos had neve
r been seen. There were stretches of jungle where even Maya feared to tread. Consuela explained that there’d been “wild Indians” even in the days of the Maya Empire and that some of them were still there—small brown people who flitted naked through the rain forest with a rather murderous attitude to any stranger, Indian or otherwise.
In the semi-cultivated lands near the road they were safe from poison arrows, however. As they traveled casually, enjoying a jungle honeymoon, her greatest help to him was her ability to educate a North American. In the end he’d know more about the tropics than many whites who’d lived in them for years.
She was almost a witch in her grasp of ancient lore the missionaries in their well-meant ignorance had destroyed in the name of Western civilization. He’d known about bananas and papayas, of course. He’d known they got chewing gum and quinine out of these woods some damned way, but that had been about it.
Consuela showed him there was more to the pretty sapodilla tree than its chewing-gum sap. Its purple fruits were better than any plums he’d ever tasted. Its wood was hard as ebony and took hundreds of years to rot, even in the jungle damp. She showed him tree barks better than the more familiar quinine for fighting off fevers. She rubbed both their bodies down with leaves that kept away mosquitos. When he asked her why her people had never shown the Spanish how to keep from being tormented by the clouds of lowland insects, she laughed and said,
“They never asked. They said Jesus had all the answers. Besides, the mosquitoes keep the priests and tax collectors out of our hair.”
The fruits and nuts of Tehuantepec were obvious to anyone, although she pointed out what looked like a lush red apple on a roadside branch and warned, “Manzachila. One taste and you are dead. The leaves are worse.”
“Shouldn’t we cut it down?”
“For why? No Maya would go near la manzachila, Nobody else was ever invited to pass this way.”
Her treatment at the hands of Don Diego and her inability to return to a once-ordered existence had done something to Consuela’s half-Maya soul. Although he’d gathered she’d been raised an ever-so-proper Catholic, she was reverting with a vengeance to a primitive, and enjoying it. When her period overtook them on the trail she ignored it and made sticky jungle love until it passed. She chewed herbs she’d half-forgotten to make it happen comfortably without the cramps and vapors of her more civilized sisters. As they continued their journey she found other jungle plants she said would keep her from becoming pregnant. She explained with a wicked grin that the outside world considered the remaining Maya a placid people with a low sex drive because of their low birth rate. He was willing to vouch for the earthy enjoyments of at least one Maya lady. She was almost too much for one man to handle.
When they weren’t making passionate love or ducking travelers on the camino, she educated him further on less obvious jungle foods than the fruits and nuts one expected to eat there. There were roots higher in nourishment than the starchy bananas and plantains they kept passing. She showed him how the Indians removed the deadly cyanide from wild manioc, converting a poisonous plant to something like mashed potatoes. He gagged the first time she offered him what looked like a bowl of mush covered with red ants. But, what the hell, red ants were a pretty good substitute for salt and pepper.
She taught him how to gather wild honey without getting stung. Under a swaying palm, she smeared their bodies with honey and they went nearly crazy licking one another off.
Another time she rubbed his erection with a certain crushed leaf and he thought he’d have a heart attack before he’d managed to get rid of the resulting hot and cold hard-on. Her love skills owed more to witchcraft than acrobatics. When she explained she’d never seen fit to use her weird skills on the hated Don Diego, he wasn’t sure whether he should pity or envy the son-of-a-bitch. She was terrific as a simple lay. Her Maya tricks were wearing him to a frazzle.
As all things must, their journey ended at Tehuantepec City on the Pacific. Since they were far from anyone who might be after them in hot pursuit, now, Captain Gringo decided to chance simply riding in. The town was a typical tropical seaport, painted with more enthusiasm than taste in pastel rainbow colors. He had his share of the bank robbery left, so he left the stolen horses in a livery and checked them into a hotel. The hotelkeeper was a fat woman with a mustache who didn’t ask them to register and who didn’t seem at all interested in their possibly odd appearance. If Consuela looked a bit like the people who’d met the first Spanish galleon, Captain Gringo could have passed for a member of the crew. His clothes were tattered and he sported a blond piratical beard that didn’t match the ends of his hair. After looking at himself in a mirror for the first time in weeks he decided they’d better buy some decent clothes and find a barber, soon.
Consuela bounced on the bed experimentally and said, “Let’s make love first. I’ve never done it with you in a bed.”
He said, “Later. That old woman downstairs may be a police informer. This place is just a ruse. I’m not going back for the horses. After we change our appearances we’ll check into a better place, and if they trace us this far—”
Then he saw she’d shucked off the poncho and was kneeling on the edge of the mattress, head near the wall, presenting her lush, rounded rear to him. He laughed and said, “Oh well, since you put it that way—”
He stepped over to the bed and dropped his pants. He stepped out of them, took a hip bone in each palm, and entered her dog style with his booted feet on the floor. She liked it. She bounced the bed springs, laughing, and said, “Oh yes. Drive it like a man tapping sapodilla trees and I will be every tree in your grove, my toro!”
They fell forward weakly as they climaxed quickly this time. He started to roll off her back, but she said, “No, stay as you are. Stay forever, my love.”
But he insisted, “This is a dumb way to be found by the Rurales. You just he there and wait a few minutes. I’ll be back as soon as I get a shave and haircut and pick up some clothes. What’s your favorite color?”
“I like green. Why? Can’t I come with you?”
“Dressed up like some sort of pagan priestess? You’d better take those feathers out of your hair, too. If they don’t see you at the dress shop they won’t remember you. I’ll get you some civilized clothes and when we leave by the back door we’ll look like a pretty Mexican girl who’s picked up a gringo tourist. With all this talk about a canal there must be a lot of foreigners in Tehuantepec, and we want to lose ourselves among them.”
He left her pouting as well as naked on the rumpled bed and went down to the street. He decided the barber would be most likely to remember him. So he went across the plaza to a barber shop first. As he expected, the fat little barber was amazed by his gunbelt and tattered clothes.
As he sat in the chair the barber went to work, saying. “The señor has come in from the jungle, eh? You must be one of those European engineers surveying for the canal.”
Captain Gringo answered, “That’s amazing. How did you know?”
“One learns to know people, in this trade. Your Spanish is very good but you do not have a Mexican accent. You learned it in Madrid, eh?”
“Paris. My instructor was Castilian.”
“Ah, a Frenchman. I knew it. You French did a grand job on the Suez Canal a few years ago. How did your hair get such red tips? It looks as if it had been rinsed in henna.”
“It’s iron, I think. I was working in this wet tunnel and the water kept dripping on us red as paint. I can’t seem to wash it out. You’d better give me a short haircut as well as a shave.”
The barber seemed to buy it. He was a friendly little gossip, and the American pumped him as he worked. By the time the American got up, clean-shaven and once more blond, he’d established that Tehuantepec was lousy with all sorts of odd-looking people and that Los Rurales didn’t seem interested in their job as long as they were paid. The port was a rat’s nest of whorehouses and clip joints. The Rurales were probably planning to retire rich.
>
He paid and tipped the barber and went down the arcade to a little shop the latter had told him of. They sold everything from steamship parts to little boxes of wax matches. They had clothing for men and women at a reasonable price. He bought himself a planter’s hat and a linen suit with a pale blue silk shirt. He picked out two dresses for Consuela, guessing at her size, or, rather, knowing every inch of it. One dress was green because she said she liked green. The other was flame red, in case she wanted to look like someone else in a hurry. They were so pleased with the sale they threw in a big brown paper bag.
As he started back to the hotel, feeling safer, he passed a sidewalk cafe. As a voice called out his name, Captain Gringo stiffened, then turned-with his free hand hovering over the gun on his hip.
Gaston Verrier laughed from the table he shared with a larger man and called again, “Where have you been all this time, soldier? If you promise not to shoot me, I want to buy you a drink!”
Captain Gringo smiled as the butterflies settled in his stomach and he walked over to the sidewalk table. Gaston signaled a serving wench and as the American sat down, nodded at the man across the table and said, “I want you to meet General Romez. He is recruiting officers, and machine gunners are rare treasures.”
Captain Gringo nodded, uncertainly, at the bored-looking Romez. He said, “Recruiting? You mean you and me, in the federales, for God’s sake?”
Gaston laughed and answered, “Merde alors, non! We’re talking about Honduras. By the way, a friend of yours is already on his way to Honduras with his men. Major Martinez says you are a son-of-a-bitch with a cannon, too. Is there no end to your talents, my young friend?”
General Romez chimed in, “We have a battery of those new Armstrong field guns, but nobody who car work them properly. The looting is poor in the field artillery, but we can guarantee a thousand pesos a month, plus expenses.”