Westlake, Donald E - Novel 43

by High Adventure (v1. 1)

  Valerie struck off northward, moving as quickly as possible in the uncertain light over the uncertain ground. A half moon shone with increasing brilliance off to her right—giving her a guide to move north by—but its light wasn’t really much use.

  Half an hour from the shack, Valerie all at once came upon the Land Rover. Her feet, seeking out the path of least resistance, had all unknowing found and stuck with the trail she and the driver had taken up from where the little dirt road had ended. And here she was back again, the Land Rover looking more nautical than ever in the watery moonlight.

  Had he left the keys? Certainly not. Frustrated, unhappy, wishing she hadn’t had a useless brother like Robert Edward Greene V but a real brother who would have taught her how to jump ignitions, Valerie sat in the driver’s seat, resting from her exertions and trying to think what she could possibly do next. All at once she heard a racket headed this way, a crashing and muttering as of some ogre in a fairy tale, lumbering through the woods and telling himself about the children he would eat.

  The driver!

  Valerie hopped out and hurried away into the darkness, tripping over roots and rocks, falling once, skinning her knee, and deciding at last to wait right here and not injure herself any more out of panic.

  She lay in deep darkness, amid shrubbery and low twisted trees. The Land Rover sat in a moonlit open space. Valerie was close enough to hear what the driver said as he too entered that moonlit space and paused to search himself with quick anger for the keys, and what he said was:

  “Oh, no, not me, not Fred C! You don’t put Fred C. in one of those jails, oh, no, no you don’t. She’s gone, she’s gone, she gonna raise the alarm, everybody can go to jail but not Fred C., no, sir. Fred C. is gone! Down to Punta Gorda, sell this damn vehicle, go on down to Colombia, down where they got no law at all. Fred C. is out of this story! Where’s the damn keys? Here they are.”

  With that, he hopped into the Land Rover, a second later the starter made its grinding noise, the engine caught, and headlights cut the night into the quick and the dead. The Land Rover jolted backward in a halTtum, those bright beams swinging this way, then it roared off, bouncing like a toy down the road, soon out of sight, then out of hearing.

  Valerie stood. She had the night to herself. But at least she had that road. By morning, she would be back in her room at the Fort George, enjoying a wonderful shower, and Kirby Galway and Innocent St. Michael and Vernon Vernon would all be in jail, right where they belonged.

  If it hadn’t been for the headlights, everything would have been all right. Valerie had been walking almost two hours when she saw them slowly advancing, jouncing along, the beams first looking up at the sky then ducking down to stare at the road immediately ahead then snapping up to gaze at the sky again, and her first thought was: Rescue!

  But her second thought was: Maybe not.

  She was alone in a strange land. So far, the people she had trusted—Innocent and Vernon and to a lesser extent the driver—had proved false. So she should think very carefully before attracting the attention of whoever was coming this way.

  Could this be the driver, panic over, realizing Valerie wouldn’t get far at night on foot, coming back to do the job after all? It could.

  Could this be Vernon, returning to make sure his orders had been carried out? It very well could.

  Could this be some other friend or ally of those people, who would smile at her and promise to take her straight to the police, but who would take her to her death instead? It most definitely could.

  The headlights jerked closer. Valerie wanted to believe she could just stand here, wave her hand, and be rescued, saved, returned to Belize City. She wanted to believe it, but she turned and hurried away from the road instead, up a rocky slope where she kept feeling too exposed, because of those headlights flashing around all over the place. So she kept going, up over the top, and down into a shallow basin, and waited.

  Some sort of truck engine. She couldn’t see the lights any more, but she could hear the straining engine, hear it approach, become briefly very loud, then recede, then fade away.

  She waited a while longer, mostly because she was very tired, her muscles very sore. Then she made her way back up the slope, and it took much longer than she’d expected to reach the top. When she finally did, there were no headlights to be seen anywhere, so she made her way down the other side and found nothing but a narrow ravine with a little quick stream running through it.

  Where was the road? She kept looking around, but in the moonlight every hill and boulder and shrub looked the same. Still, the road had to be very close by.

  She never found it again. The moon had risen higher in the sky, giving marginally more light but no longer marking the east. The road was gone. It occurred to her to worry about wild animals.

  She remembered from something she had read that the best way to be safe from wild animals in the wilderness was to sleep in a tree, so she chose a rough'barked thick-trunked tree near the crest of a hill and with some difficulty climbed up to a crotch about seven feet from the ground, where she did her best to become reasonably comfortable, and to sleep.

  No wild animals found her in the tree, but many mosquitoes did. They kept her awake a long while, until at last nothing in the world could keep her awake any longer, and she slept, crumpled up in the tree crotch, being fed on all night by nasty little flying things.

  In the morning she was so stiff, and so hot, and so itchy, and so dry, and so hungry, and so uncomfortable, she thought she would die. She thought it would be more comfortable to die. Twisting around in the tree crotch, every movement an agony, she searched from her vantage point for the road—for any road or any other sign of human existence—and saw nothing but woods, forests, jungle growth, high mountains to the west and south, a broken tumbled landscape untouched by man. Sighing, she made her creaky painful way down from the tree and plodded off northward, guided now by the sun.

  At first her spirits weren’t really low, because she was distracted by her training. Her studies in archaeology and her interest in the ancient Mayans had led her to Belize in the first place, and now here she really was, in conditions as primitive as anything the Mayans ever faced, crossing broken barren ground they had crossed a thousand years ago.

  They had survived. She would survive. In the meantime, were there discoveries to be made in this wilderness, finds of archaeological interest and importance? She surveyed every rut and arroyo, frowned at every rock.

  And yet, the distraction wasn’t total. In the back of her mind, she already knew this wasn’t an adventure of the kind she’d dreamed of while half dozing over her textbooks. She had imagined a life of purpose and work with some limited hardships—nothing a sturdy pair of boots couldn’t handle—but not all this, this, this . . .

  Danger.

  Confusion.

  Trouble.

  She had come out to find the world, knowing she knew nothing about the world, and was this it? A hot and stony place, alone, with no comforts and no certainties. All her old beliefs seemed to flow out of her with her perspiration, leaving her miserable and confused and dizzy. Plodding along, walking because there was nothing else to do, she soon forgot to look at stones for significance, holes in the ground for meaning. Here was the meaning: There was no meaning.

  She hadn’t wanted to know any of this.

  The next three days were terrible. In the middle of the day she would rest in whatever shade she could find, while all morning and all afternoon she walked northward, seeing no one, never finding any road. Each night she slept in another uncomfortable tree. The occasional quick cold stream provided water for bathing and drinking, and on the morning of the third day a brief torrential downpour did her laundry, but she never did find anything to eat. Berries, she thought, but there were no berries. Roots, she thought, but had no idea how to recognize an edible root nor where to dig for it nor what to dig for it with.

  I could die out here, she thought, getting lightheaded f
rom the sun and the lack of food. The thought was frightening, but what was even more frightening was that the thought was also tempting. To give up the struggle, to lie down and rest, to stop being hungry and itchy and tired and stiff. She fought off that temptation by thinking about Innocent St. Michael, and Kirby Galway, and Vernon, and Fred C. She would not die. They would not get away with it. She would live through this experience somehow, and bring those devils to justice! Thus thinking, while her shoes disintegrated on her feet and her sunburned skin peeled and her empty stomach begged for something more than cold water, Valerie soldiered on.

  It was near sundown on the third day when, coming up along another stream, starting to look for tonight’s tree, she had stumbled into this little Indian village, where a great fuss had been made of her and where the head man, Tommy Watson, had announced, “It’s Sheena, Queen of the Jungle!”

  And so that’s who she was, and who she had been for a week. The tribespeople had fed her and given her a place to sleep, and the next morning had treated all her many cuts and scratches and abrasions; not with ancient tribal remedies but with mercurochrome and Unguentine and Band^Aids. “From the mission,” they told her.

  The mission. If she were to go to the mission, surely she would be safe? But then she thought again about the man she was dealing with, Innocent St. Michael, an important government official, a rich and powerful man, and she realized two frightening things: First, he must know she had the evidence to bring him down. Second, he must know his henchman had failed to silence her.

  Wouldn’t a man like Innocent St. Michael have spies all over the country? Even assuming the absolute probity and integrity of whatever priests or doctors or nurses might be at the mission, wouldn’t there be other people there as well, locals who could betray her? And how safe from Innocent St. Michael would she be in a small and isolated mission deep in the jungle?

  The same fears kept her from telling the truth to her benefactors, the Indians of South Abilene. At first she claimed to be suffering amnesia, but that piqued their curiosity too much, so at last she let them understand she was a rich girl who was running away from a marriage arranged by her father. She had been flying her own small plane when an unexpected storm had dashed her against a jungle mountain. The rest they knew.

  They were delighted by that story, and made her tell it over and over, with more and more details. She added yachts, a severe limp to the elderly wealthy groom, a dipsomaniac mother helpless to save her daughter from being sold to the highest bidder. (Her Kekchi improved and improved.) They lapped it up, wide-eyed, loving every minute of it, and agreed the best thing she could do was stay here in South Abilene until her father would be so amazed and relieved to see her still alive that he would allow her to call off the wedding.

  “And you’re a pilot,” Tommy Watson said.

  “That’s right.”

  “We got a pal who’s a pilot. Nice fella. You and him, you’d get along terrific.”

  “Wait a minute,” said one of the young women, whose name was Rosita Coco. “Just wait a minute, okay?”

  Her brother Luz told her, “Just for friends, that’s all.” (Luz and Rosita and Tommy were the only ones who talked to Valerie in English.)

  “That’s right,” Tommy told Rosita. “They could talk pilot talk together. ”

  Instead of which, in the days ahead, Valerie and Rosita talked girl talk together, and when Valerie heard the story this pilot had told Rosita she was just outraged. Wasn’t it like a man, every time? Valerie put Rosita straight on that fellow, and though Rosita didn’t want to believe her pilot was lying, the evidence was pretty clear.

  Generally speaking, Valerie got along with all the South Abilenos, male and female, young and old. They accepted her at once, shared their small bounty with her, and—encouraged no doubt by her knowledge of their tongue—allowed her to enter at least as an observer into their social lives. What an ideal position for an idealistic young archaeologist!

  The one fly in the ointment in all this was marijuana. The whole village appeared to be addicted to it, and spent most nights puffing themselves insensible. In order not to appear prudish, Valerie begged off by claiming a respiratory disease that prohibited her from smoking in all its forms. “Poor Sheena,” Rosita said, “I make you some pot tortillas some day, blow you right out of the tree.” Valerie managed a smile and an expression of gratitude, but so far, thankfully, nothing had come of the offer.

  Actually, for Valerie these days marijuana would be superfluous. She was high already, high on just being alive and high on this wonderful village in which she found herself. Her initial fears that she might be sexually mistreated faded rapidly when she saw how thoroughly this was a family village; life here was too open and monogamy too ingrained for any hanky-panky. (Had a few of the boys first met Valerie away from town it might have been a different story, of which she remained happily ignorant.)

  But the point was, these were Mayas, true Mayas. Unlike the other archaeologists Valerie had known, her teachers and her contemporaries, she had gone through the time barrier, had actually entered into the ancient civilization the other scholars only studied. It is true these people were no longer temple builders, were merely the decayed remnant of a once flourishing culture, but their clothing (apart from the inevitable blue jeans) bore echoes of ancient themes, ancient designs, ancient decoration. The faces of the people were the same as the faces on bowls and stelae a thousand years old.

  And they still made the old artifacts! When Valerie first stumbled on their little factory, where stone whistles and bone statues and terracotta bowls were being manufactured by men and women alike, they seemed almost embarrassed at having her know, as though wanting to practice the ancient crafts in secrecy and privacy. But when she extolled their abilities, when she spoke knowledgeably of their sources and their craft—hurriedly inventing an archaeologist boy friend in college, to explain the rich girl’s sudden expertise—when she expressed her true admiration, they lit up, smiled together, almost shyly showed her examples of their work.

  “But this is wonderful!” she said, over and over.

  “Do you really think so?”

  “But yes, yes! Why—” turning a bone statuette of a leaping jaguar “—you could put this on display in any museum in the world, and no one would guess it was anything but a thousand years old!”

  “I’m really glad to hear you say that, Sheena,” Tommy said. “That makes us all feel really good.”

  What charming people. What a delightful simple lifestyle; except, of course, for the addiction to marijuana. Civilization with its medicine and information was as near as the mission, and otherwise their lives were idyllic. I wonder how long I’ll stay, Valerie thought from time to time, and every reminder that she must eventually leave this Eden saddened her, made her turn her mind to something else.

  But now Kirby Galway had appeared! Out of the blue, quite literally out of the blue.

  Earlier today Tommy had come by to say, “Listen, Sheena, there’s a guy coming today to pick up some stuff. We make some goods for market, you know, tourist stuff.”

  Valerie could imagine: glossy mahogany statues of Maya priests, cheap pieces of decorated cloth. The sort of thing primitive people do all around the world, debasing their culture for currency, hard cash.

  “Probably,” Tommy had gone on, “you ought to stay here in town. You don’t want this guy spreading the word there’s a white woman hiding out in South Abilene.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” Valerie said, and stayed out of sight when the plane first came over. Then some time later she heard it leave, and came out of the hut, and was walking around waiting for everybody to come back when all at once there was the plane again, diving right down at the village! Into the nearest hut she had run, the image of the plane burned into her mind, and at once she remembered where she’d seen that plane before. It was Galway, Kirby Galway.

  Which Rosita confirmed, when she came back: “You know Kirby?” she asked
.

  “Kirby Galway,” Valerie said, excited, “that’s right, that’s his name!”

  Rosita’s eyes got very wide. “You know him, Sheena?”

  Oh-oh. The implications could be very bad. Kirby Galway’s relationship with these Indians could be simple and benign—merely flying their tawdry commercial gewgaws to town and no doubt cheating them mercilessly—but nevertheless Galway and the Indians were aligned. Did Valerie at this point dare tell the truth?

  No.

  Thinking fast, she said, “I certainly do know him, Rosita, and let me tell you, he’s a very bad man!”

  “Oh, I thought he was,” Rosita said. “You bet I did. He rape you one time, did he?”

  “No, no,” Valerie said, then wished she’d said yes-yes; it would paint him blacker in Rosita’s eyes. Instead, she said, “He used to work for Winthrop.”

  Rosita was impressed. “Wintrop Cartwright?” she asked. “The man your papa gone make you marry?”

  “Yes. He worked for Winthrop and cheated Winthrop very badly. This was a few years ago,” she added, not knowing how long the Indians and Galway might have known one another.

  “Well, ain’t that something,” Rosita said, and gazed away sharpeyed at the empty sky. “Next time he come around here,” she said, “I think I give him a spider in his ear.”

  “You mean a flea in his ear,” Valerie said.

  “Oh, no, I don’t,” Rosita said.

  5 BOOTS AND SADDLE

  It was embarrassing at first, but also rather funny. Gerry winked at a boy in Sheridan Square who then turned out to be a girl, who gave him such a glare. Giggling to himself, Gerry walked on through the slushy snow toward home, waving at a friend in the window of the bar called Boots & Saddle, continuing on his way, wishing he could share the funny moment with Alan—“I winked at a very nice hunk in Sheridan Square who turned out to be some awful dike in full drag”—but Alan would think the point of the story was his winking rather than the sexual confusion, and there’d just be argument and upset and wild talk about disease, and Gerry just didn’t think he could face it, so he decided not to mention it at all.