Green Ice (25 page)

She was about to shoot again when Wiley told her, “No heisting.”

Heisting was cheating by raising the shooting hand from the surface.

“Me?” Indignant.

“Just watch it, that’s all.”

“If you’re trying to distract me, forget it,” she said. “I’ve got the concentration of a laser beam.” As though to prove that she knuckled down and fired. Her shooter rolled like a bullying marauder, knocking a beautiful striped orange alley, perhaps the prettiest of all, out of the ring.

Lillian paused for a swig of wine.

Wiley had one too.

She went back to shooting and missed. Although she was four marbles ahead, she was disgusted with herself. “I should have cleaned the pot,” she said.

Wiley got down to try, took aim, was all set to let his shooter fly when Lillian removed her robe. She tossed it over the arm of a nearby
bergère
.

“That’s why I missed,” she claimed earnestly. “My arms and everything were restricted.”

Wiley saw he’d been wrong. She
was
wearing something beneath the robe. An underthing—a combination pantie and top in one, the sort they had called a teddy back in the twenties and thirties. Bright-red crepe de chine. It fit perfectly loose above, and below, at the leg holes, would be extremely easy to slip in or out of.

Now, the conspiracy of red mouth with red teddy with red sandals.

The illusion of lengthier legs. The lift, tension—a slightly forward thrust, offering of hips and pelvis. Again, but more acutely than ever before, Wiley realized why the last thing a really knowing woman ever took off was her shoes.

Lillian was just standing there. “Your turn,” she told him.

If her robe had affected her shooting, lack of it certainly affected his. He didn’t even come close.

She got down on her hands and knees again. Head down, back arched, buttocks high.

Wiley gulped wine.

She kept on shooting, intent on it and seemingly guileless about the various positions she assumed. No regard for his point of view, really.

Wiley lost all sense of competition.

She hit the final marble from the ring. “Skunked you!” she said.

“Shall we go again?” he asked.

She didn’t reply, went around to turn out all the lights except one weak one. She took the cushions from a sofa, placed them on the rug beneath the piano. Wiley helped. Removed the cushions from every bergère and sofa. What they had created was a sort of plushy bower.

She crawled in. Wiley right after her. They lay on their sides, pressed against one another, not too tightly, so they could feel more. Their preliminary kisses were so delicate their lips barely touched. Wiley wondered if she heard his breath as he did hers, shallow, difficult, like during a climb.

“You won,” he said, whispering now.

She undid his trousers.

He wanted very much to make the loser’s payment. To satisfy the debt. Oh, to satisfy it. He slipped the tiny straps of the teddy from her shoulders. She arched up so he could peel it down and off. She let him do it, even when the teddy caught on the heel of a sandal.

He kissed the nubs of her ankles, left and right, wide open kisses. Then the same to her kneecaps, and he was that much closer to losing himself in the lover’s land.

Whimper of pleasure from her. She took his head in her hands. He resisted but came up so they were again face to face.

They kissed mouths, their touches wandered and he found no reason why she had stopped him.

“I won,” she whispered.

She kissed his throat. One spot, various kisses. Then her cheek went down upon his chest, merely pausing, enjoying her influence on his heartbeat.

18

By midafternoon that day they were headed out of Bogotá on the Carretera Central del Norte.

Lillian was driving. She had borrowed the jeep. Called General Botero and told him she wanted to go sightseeing, and mainly old statue hunting, up in the high country. He had offered a four-man military escort, which she refused nicely by saying her bargaining power would be handicapped by such an entourage.

The General resisted telling her that with the escort along she would be able to name her own price—little or nothing.

When the jeep was delivered to the garage at the villa, first thing, Lillian painted out all its military identification.

“Otherwise it’ll look as though we stole it. Two civilians in an army jeep would surely get stopped.”

Almost reasonable enough, Wiley thought. She had made him promise not to slow them down with questions. He was satisfied with the fact that they were going somewhere. However, in his opinion the jeep looked even more stolen now. The khaki-brown paint she’d used was in the right color range but a few shades darker than the original, slightly faded finish. The spots she’d touched up really stood out. Also one coat didn’t cover adequately. The white-stenciled army numbers and letters showed through, vaguely, but they could be noticed.

Earlier that morning they had gone to Sears, bought a sleeping bag, other equipment and clothing. Also stopped at a gunsmith’s shop, where Lillian ran in for some extra nine-millimeter ammunition, as though she was picking up a last minute thing for dinner.

Now under way, Lillian swerved to miss the potholes when she could, but she seldom let up on the accelerator.

Wiley asked her what the hurry was.

She wanted to get there, she said.

He had asked where once and gotten only a change of subject. He assumed she had made arrangements. This trip was her response to his desire to get away from Bogotá, he thought. Was her change of heart a result of their good lovemaking?

They hit a hole that jolted to such an extent that for a moment they were weightless. For that moment she lost control of the jeep.

No, she still didn’t want him to drive.

She had on a peaked army cap, her hair up and concealed. He was reminded of the first time he set eyes on her. She was more like that now than she’d been at any time since, not only in appearance but in attitude. She seemed turned up and on, happy with herself.

He scrunched down, gave attention to the countryside. A small, poor house alone in a field. Several small, poor houses together, grouped for courage, he thought. Back from the road were the large haciendas, only glimpses of their main houses, situated in the gaps of the slopes. A few of the haciendas had walls along the road. Whitewashed walls that seemed to go on for miles, interrupted by a gate. Here and there, handpainted in red on the wall, was a hammer and sickle and the words
El gente es el poder
(The people are the power). A little farther on, workers, obviously some of those
gente
, were repairing and whitewashing that same wall for pay. In a day or two they would be covering over the red graffiti. Quite possibly one of them had inscribed it in the first place. And would again.

They passed through Chocontá and some even smaller places that barely qualified as places. More chickens than people. They’d been traveling over an hour.

“How far does this highway go?” Wiley asked.

“To Venezuela, the map says. But considering its condition, it might end any mile now.”

“We’re not bound for Venezuela.”

“Leiva,” she said.

“Where’s that?”

“About fifteen miles from Tunja.”

According to the many road signs he’d seen, Tunja might be the hub of the world.

“Ever been there?” he asked.

“Tunja?”

“Leiva.”

“No. It’s only a speck on the map.”

“So, what’s there?”

Her expression clouded with aggravation. “I hate this gear we bought.”

“Why?”

“It’s new. Bad for the image. If we’d had time we could have gone to a second-hand store.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Our boots, for instance …”

He put a foot up on the dash.

“… they don’t look as though they’ve been anywhere,” she said.

“Even the most vagrant have to buy new boots someday.”

“Not often.”

“Especially them.”

She didn’t agree. “As long as boots have good strong uppers, you can have them resoled and reheeled time and again. One damn good pair is all a person really needs for a lifetime.”

Was this his wealthy woman?

“Our backpacks, ponchos, even our long johns are new,” she complained. “Imagine the impression we’ll make. A couple of naïve gringos.”

He realized why she was annoyed. This was the hitchhiker Lillian, the Lillian in the tank top, who slept more peacefully on the floor of a nearly bare room because it was psychologically soothing. That explained the change in her disposition today, her lighter spirit.

“New sleeping bag, too.”

“A
double
,” he reminded.

Not even that offset her distress.

The town of Villapinzón, then Tunja.

They had to ask directions to Leiva. They got three wrong opinions before a boy told them, for two pesos, to keep going on the street they happened to be on. “Even if it appears impossible, keep going,” he said and eyeing the jeep, he asked, “Are you in the army,
señor
?”

The street soon became a dirt road, extremely gullied and rutted but easy compared to the trail it eventually reduced itself to. A trail that would have been impossible for a regular car, it was almost too much for the four-wheel-drive jeep in some places.

Lillian fought it, slapped the gearshift into low-low, avoided the jags of large rocks that loomed right in the middle of the way, kept at least one wheel in contact with the ground at all times. It was a continual but inconsistent climb. The trail properly respected the steepness of some slopes, traversed back and forth to the tops. On others, even steeper, it went directly up at such an angle that the jeep was as close as possible to being vertical, causing the sensation that any moment the jeep would flip over backward. Lillian clung tight to the steering wheel. Wiley hung on to anything with both hands.

There would be seventeen miles of that to Leiva.

With about five to go, they came to a short level stretch. Lillian stopped for a breather.

“Let’s have an apple,” she said.

He reached back into her pack. Just before leaving she had appropriated a few things from Argenti’s larder. Because her pack wasn’t quite full was her excuse. Romanoff beluga caviar, Carr’s water biscuits, shelled pistachios, supercolossal ripe olives, Oreo cookies and two apples.

Wiley felt for and found one of the apples. It was large, hard, with a green waxy skin. The Granny Smith variety. Had there ever actually been a person named Granny Smith? Probably only a merchandising gimmick. Who could dislike a granny? And Smith was certainly inoffensive. A Granny Weinberg or a Granny Lopez would be another matter, Wiley thought.

He used his sheath knife to cut the apple, handed half to Lillian.

“Do me a favor?” she asked.

“Want me to peel it for you?”

“No. Do me a favor.”

“Sure.”

“Promise me no matter what happens up here you won’t mention that I have money. You can tell them anything else but that.”

“Them?”

“It’s important.”

“Okay, I promise, but …”

“Your absolute word.”

“You’ve got it.”

“Break it and from then on I’ll look right through you.”

She meant it. “Mind telling me why?” he asked.

“As far as you know, I’m the same girl who had that house in Bethel, New York. Five years older, but the same girl. Just forget everything else I’ve let you in on.”

“I think you ought to let me in on this.”

A young fellow by the name of Miguel Contreras. Lillian had met him in Washington, D.C., during an antiwar demonstration. He was about nineteen at the time. She got to know him over a period of three years.

Miguel was Colombian, born and raised in a small Andean village in the Central Cordillera a hundred miles northwest of Bogotà. However, at the time Lillian met him his home was in Queens, New York. About eighty thousand Colombians lived in Queens—Jackson Heights and Woodside. Many were
indocumentados
—people without papers, always on the alert for “Emilia,” which was their name for the United States Immigration Service. “Emilia,” one Colombian would whisper to warn another in the subway. The word that Emilia was coming was enough to half empty any theater or restaurant along Eighty-second Street in Queens.

Miguel and his family were
indocumentados
. Family of five, including two younger sisters. His father had served with the Colombian army in Korea.

Miguel had become part of a student leftist group in Bogotá when he was thirteen. While at the Universidad Nacional he was extremely involved. He had cried from tear gas more than anything else in his life. Thus, when he came to the United States, he fit right in with the antiwar movement. He often referred to it as merely “a sort of revolution,” as though it lacked much by comparison. He had angered Lillian a number of times with such talk. However, he made up for it with energy and courage. It was always Miguel in the vanguard of a demonstration, stirring it up, taunting the police lines, challenging the hardhats. Miguel could be counted on for any action, the more agitating the better. A bit of a show-off actually.

For instance, once he had walked right into draft-board headquarters on Whitehall Street. With a fresh short haircut, he got past the guards by including himself among government workers who were returning from lunch. Assumed an air of belonging there, exchanged automatic hellos with strangers to enhance the impression, appeared to know where he was going, finally reached it—the heart of, and reason for, the place. The files. Miguel, with yellow pencil between his teeth, yellow pad in hand, appeared intent on work, opening, looking into and closing a file here, another there. In each file, far in the rear, where it was less likely to be discovered and surely would do the most damage, he placed a small incendiary device. Delayed action. Then, with the same unhurried civil-servant attitude, he walked out of the building.

As a result of Miguel’s daring that afternoon, some ten thousand young men were saved from the chance of being lost in Vietnam. Miguel also thought of it as doing the Vietcong a favor.