Hazards (24 page)

“None deadlier,” I said, increasing my pace until we came to a couple of huge old trees. “We ought to be safe standing behind these.” I looked behind me, and saw that the Major and Cornwall were already standing back to back, each holding a pistol in his hand, and I could tell by the bulges under their coats that the Major had two more in criss-crossed shoulder holsters and Cornwall had one in his pants pocket and another tucked in his belt.

They agreed to take ten steps, turn, and fire, but they must have forgot how tired they’d get at this altitude, because the Major stopped at eight paces and turned, his gun blazing. But Cornwall must have got himself winded even sooner because he was already shooting.

Me and Diego hid behind our trees until they’d each emptied all their weapons.

“How can they still be standing?” he whispered to me as the last shots echoed through the thin air.

“Nobody provided ’em with chairs,” I said.

“I mean, aren’t they riddled with bullets?” he asked.

“Well,
something
must be riddled with bullets,” I said. “Let’s go take a look.”

So we did. The final score was 23 dead llamas, two dead donkeys, eleven dead birds, and a badly crippled tree. Diego arrested them both and carted ’em off to jail until he could wire the S.P.C.A. to pick ’em up for crimes against Nature, which differed from the usual crimes against Nature that make such interesting reading on hot summer nights.

As for me, now that my rivals were out of the way, I hopped the first llama I could find that was still breathing and intact, headed him toward the Baroness’s farm, and an hour and a half later I was walking up to her house.

A different young man answered the door.

“Are you here for the celebration?” he asked, and I noticed that there was a ton of cars, horses, and donkeys parked around the side of the house.

“News sure travels fast in these here parts,” I said. “So she heard already?”

“You misunderstand, my friend,” said the man. “This is her wedding day.”

“Right,” I said. “And I’m the happy bridegroom.”

He threw back his head and laughed. “You Americans have such a wonderful sense of humor!”

“We do?” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “She just married Julio half an hour ago.”

“Just how the hell many sides did this here triangle have?” I muttered.

“I don’t understand,” said the man.

But me, I understood all too well. I’d opened my heart to the Baroness, and instead of reciprocating by opening her bank account to me, she’d married this mere child what didn’t know nothing about business and was probably preparing to sell her latest crop to some soft drink company instead of certain select families what knew how to treat a negotiation with respect.

Once more the fickle finger of Fate had flang down its gauntlet, and once more geometry had triumphed over love. I stayed just long enough to fill my pockets with grub to last me five or six days, and then I proceeded on my lonely way to the lost kingdom of Macchu Pichu, where I figgered to overcome my broken heart by setting myself up as Emperor, corral a few naked High Priestesses, and plunder the treasury six ways to Sunday.

The Forgotten Kingdom

I’d been told that it was just a good stretch of the legs from La Paz over in Bolivia to Cusco in Peru. Upon sober reflection, it was probably the same guy what told me that Babe Ruth couldn’t hit the ball out of the park, or that Equipoise was just a great big brown milkhorse in disguise.

One of the problems with La Paz, which I related in my last thrilling narrative that I’m sure you’ve all read fifteen or twenty times by now, is that it’s a trillion feet high, even though the guide book claims it’s only eleven thousand feet above sea level. What it mostly was was about nine thousand feet above air level, so I didn’t make my usual sterling progress. Whenever I’d complain about this to one of the locals, he’d just shrug and make mention of Andy’s, as if some guy named Andy had a tavern or a boarding house and was using up all the air, which didn’t make a lot of sense to me.

Anyway, I’d come to Peru because I’d heard tell of this here lost city called Macho Something-or-other, which sounded just perfect for a manly man like myself, the kind of place what was filled with men of low character and charming ladies of easy virtue, and if you’re in the soul-saving business like I was, why, you got just to have a bunch of sinners to start the day with or you’re out of business almost before you begin.

The word on the grapevine was that this Macho city had been discovered by Pizarro. I figgered they was referring to Billy Pizarro, who’d been run out of Deadwood by Doc Holliday back in 1882 and wasn’t never seen again, doubtless because no one had thunk to look for him in a South American mountain chain. And if the town was discovered as recent at 1882, which was only 56 years ago, it might very well have indoor plumbing and running water and maybe even a tavern or two, all of which would be right handy when I finally built my tabernacle.

I was about 50 miles across the Bolivian border into Peru when I came upon a little village, so I stopped to see if any of ’em had a Willys Jeepster to trade for advance absolution for a month of serious sinning, but none of ’em had ever heard of one, and they wasn’t no better educated about the existence of the Dusenberg. Finally one of ’em offered me a llama. Well, it wasn’t no car, of course, but we negotiated a bit, and while I couldn’t absolve him of the mortal sin of murder—he was thinking of doing in a matched set of his wife and her mother—I absolved him of a batch of them little venereal sins. The llama was kind of dirty and kind of smelly and kind of foul-tempered, and I decided I wasn’t going to waste no good Christian name on him, so I made his first name The and his middle name Dolly.

I rode The Dolly Llama across what passed for the countryside, stopping here and there to grab a few fruits and berries—I knew they was safe because any poison would just naturally have to lose its punch at 94 billion feet of altitude—and finally we stumbled into a sleepy little Spanish-looking town called Cusco that didn’t stay sleepy for long, because we hadn’t been there two minutes before the bell in the church tower rang six times and because I knew there wasn’t enough air for there to be no wind at this altitude it had to mean it was six o’clock, and since I hadn’t et since four o’clock I’d worked up a powerful appetite.

I stopped at a restaurant called Rosario’s. Now, there’d been a Rosario’s back in La Paz, too, so I figgered either there was a pair of twins and the mother couldn’t tell ’em apart so she named ’em both Rosario, or else one was really called Russell or Rossellini but flunked spelling in school. It didn’t make any difference, though, hungry as I was, so I just sat down at a table and a minute later a little feller wearing a stained white jacket walked up and shot me a great big smile.

“Greetings, Señor,” he said. “May I offer you a llama steak on an uncooked potato?”

“I’m more in the mood for a T-bone, or maybe some pork chops,” I said. “You got any?”

“Yes,” he said. “Provided that you won’t mind if it looks and tastes like llama steak.”

“I suppose your lobster looks and tastes like llama steak too?” I said.

He smiled and nodded.

“It all costs the same too?” I asked.

“Yes, Señor.”

“Then shoot the works!” I said. “I’ll have pheasant under glass.”

He saluted, went back to the kitchen, and brung out my pheasant about twenty seconds later. It looked exactly like llama steak on an uncooked potato.

“And now for the
pièce de résistance
,” he announced, holding an empty beer mug over the plate.

“What in tarnation are you talking about?” I asked him.

“The glass,” he answered.

Well, I proceeded to dig in. The pheasant needed to have some of the hair removed from its wings, but I could see where all that dead hair might have been a fire hazard, so it was probably just as well that nobody’d thought to cook it. Finally I’d had my fill—one mouthful pretty much did the trick—and I looked around at the other diners, and I finally spoke up and said: “Anyone here got any notion of where I can find this Macho place?”

Two flighty young men wearing a lot of satin got up and walked out with their noses in the air, but an old geezer at the next table said, “Are you perchance talking about Machu Picchu?”

“My name ain’t Perchance,” I said, “but beyond that you hit it right on the button.”

“Why are you looking for it?” he asked me.

“I hear it’s a forgotten kingdom, and that means it ought to be in serious need of spiritual comfort,” I told him.

“Are you a preacher man?” he said.

“Sure as hell am,” I answered. “And meaning no offense, you don’t sound like no Peruvian, or Perimander, or whatever these here people call themselves.”

“Actually, my name is Jasper MacCorkle,” he said. “Iowa born and bred. And you are…?”

“The Right Reverend Honorable Doctor Lucifer Jones,” I replied.

“What religion do you preach?” asked Jasper.

“One me and the Lord worked out betwixt ourselves of a Sunday afternoon back in Moline, Illinois,” I told him.

“Why, we’re practically neighbors!” he said.

“And what brings you to Peru?” I asked.

“I got word of Machu Picchu back when I was laying tar on a road just outside Jackson, Mississippi, and I figured that if I was ever going to become emperor of my own kingdom, this was as good a time as any,” said Jasper.

“So you just dropped everything and came on down?” I said.

“Well, I had to get out of my leg irons first, and to lose that damned striped suit, but yes, as soon as I could I made a beeline for Machu Picchu.”

Which was exactly when I knew we were gonna hit it off.

“I can’t see no reason why we shouldn’t go plunder this here forgotten kingdom together, can you, Brother Jassper?” I said. “I mean, there’s got to be more gold and precious stones than one man can carry, no matter how hard he tries.”

“I can always use a partner who’s got a head on his shoulders,” said Jasper. Suddenly he frowned. “But it’s got to be understood on the front end that
I
get to be king.”

“That don’t pose no problem for me at all, Brother Jasper,” I told him, which was true, since I figgered that being a white god was probably higher on the employment ladder than being a king, and so long as he didn’t try to stake no claims to no gorgeous half-naked High Priestesses we’d get along just fine.

“I suppose we can set out for it right now, if you’re done with your”—he stared at my plate—“whatever it is.”

“So is Machu Picchu far from here?” I asked him.

“About fifty miles as the crow flies,” he replied. “Of course, crows can’t fly at this altitude. They mostly crawl and gasp for air a lot.”

Now, if we’d been on foot, that would have been a perfect description of us after the first two hundred yards, but I was riding The Dolly Llama, and Jasper was atop a donkey he called Man o’ War but which should have been called Equipause, because he paused to nibble every single green thing he could find at roadside, which was a lot of green things since there wasn’t hardly no road at all.

“Who lives in this here forgotten kingdom?” I asked as we made our way out of Cusco.

“Mostly a bunch of Indians, and a few professors from Yale,” he told me.

“Indians?” I said. “You mean like unto Geronimo and Sitting Bull and that whole crowd? You know, I was wondering why I never ran into them back in Illinois.”

“No, you’re thinking of the wrong kind of Indian, Lucifer,” said Jasper.

“What kind lives here?” I asked.

“Inca.”

“You’re welcome,” I said. “But you didn’t answer my question.”

“Inca,” he said again.

“You got something caught in your throat, Brother Jasper?” I asked.

“That’s the name of the tribe,” he said. “Inca. They live in the forgotten kingdom.”

“Yeah?” I said. “I notice that the Indians around here are little bitty fellers. It shouldn’t be no trouble tossing ’em out of our city and all the way back to Cusco. How many of ’em are there?”

He shrugged. “Thousands. Maybe tens of thousands.”

I frowned. “You know about it. I know about it. Folks in La Paz know about it. Everyone in Cusco knows about it. A bunch of Yale perfessors know about it. Tens of thousands of Indians know about it. Just who the hell was this kingdom forgotten by?”

“Well, let’s hope the answer to that is fortune hunters,” said Jasper, and I sure couldn’t argue none with that.

We passed the Los Portales Hotel, which was about the only hotel in town back in those days, and he asked me if I wanted to stop and pick up my suitcase and possessions, since we figured to be a few days pulling gold and diamonds and stuff out of Machu Picchu, and he even offered to distract the desk clerk so I didn’t cause him no undue consternation by checking out and making him think I disapproved of my room.

“Thanks for the offer, Brother Jasper,” I said, “but the truth of the matter is that I ain’t got no room yet. Me and The Dolly Llama just blew into town about an hour ago.”

“So where’s your goods?” he asked.

“Us men of the cloth travel light,” I told him.

“So they ran you out of your last town too?” he said with a smile.

I denied it vigorously, mostly because no one could run at this altitude, and we kept heading for the forgotten city, passing a bunch of Indians who were walking to and from it and didn’t seem to have no trouble remembering it at all.

Along the way Jasper told me the long, tragic series of events that had ended with him working on a Mississippi chain gang, and I allowed that his little problems with the bank and the grocery store and all them poor innocent bystanders could clearly be seen as a series of misunderstandings, but even me and the Lord had some trouble buying his excuse about how he wound up with the fourteen-year-old Siamese twins.

Then he asked me about myself, so I briefly told him about my adventures in Africa and my exploits in Asia and my encounters in Europe, adding only a few poetic flourishes.

“That is a
lot
of land masses to be told never to come back to,” he said and I could tell, one man of the world to another, that even he was impressed—and that was before I told him he could add North America to the list.

It took us two days of traveling—llamaback and donkeyback ain’t the quickest way of getting anywhere—and finally we came to this big river.

“Urubamba,” said Jasper.

“I think he used to play right tackle for Notre Dame,” I said. “Or maybe I’m remembering the drummer for Xavier Cugat. What about him?”

“No,” he said, pointing to the river. “
That
is the Urubamba, and Machu Picchu is on the other side of it.”

Now, as far as I could tell, neither The Dolly Llama nor Equipause came equipped with wings or fins, and it sure looked like they were going to need one or the other to get us across the river, but Jasper didn’t look distressed. He just pointed about half a mile upstream, and sure enough there was a rope bridge across the Urubamba.

Now, if you ain’t never walked across a river on a rope bridge, let me tell you that it ain’t the steadiest way to get from one place to another, or even the forty-third steadiest now as I come to think about it. But somehow we managed, and suddenly we stepped around a corner, which Jasper insisted on calling a bend, and there was the forgotten kingdom of Machu Picchu laid out in all its glory.

“See that big building?” said Jasper. “That’s the Temple of the Son.”

Since I didn’t want to sound ignorant, I asked him to point out the Temple of the Daughter, but he just stared at me for a minute and then began pointing out the other sights, like the Room of the Three Windows, which was in what they called the Sacred District. I asked what was so sacred about it, and he explained that that was where they sacrificed warriors and virgins, occasionally at the same time when they caught ’em doing something that I planned to reserve only for gods just as soon as I set the kingdom straight on a few matters.

We moseyed over to the Temple of the Son, which I later found out was really the Temple of the Sun, which sounds alike but has a whole different set of false doctrines attached to it. Nobody paid us much attention, and I didn’t see no college types at all, unless they’d shed their clothes and taken to wearing loincloths, which in my broad and vast experience is not something college types are really inclined to do, and then we were inside the Temple, and truth to tell it didn’t look a whole lot better from close up.

“These here folk are even more backward than I thunk,” I allowed. “What kind of religion ain’t got a half-naked High Priestess or two roaming around the temple, or at least some Heavenly Handmaidens what are dressed for extremely warm weather?”

“Keep your mind on business, Lucifer,” said Jasper.

“I’m a man of the cloth and half-naked High Priestesses
are
my business,” I told him.

Well, we explored every corner of that temple, and couldn’t find a single gold nugget, let alone any ten-carat diamonds, or even any paltry little five-carat ones, and I began thinking that maybe there was a reason everyone went out of their way to forget Machu Picchu. By the time we’d examined the Room of the Three Windows I was wondering why anyone would come all the way from Yale just to look at this place. I’d been in a
lot
of rooms what had more than three windows in ’em, and no one was racing to make
them
into national shrines.