Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (S.F. MASTERWORKS) (21 page)

“Roseate spoonbills,” I tell her as three pink birds flap away.

“They’re beautiful,” she says in her tiny voice. They both have tiny voices. “He’s a Mayan Indian, isn’t he? The pilot, I mean.”

“Right. The real thing, straight out of the Bonampak murals. Have you seen Chichén and Uxmal?”

“Yes. We were in Mérida. We’re going to Tikal in Guatemala. . . . I mean, we were.”

“You’ll get there.” It occurs to me the girl needs cheering up. “Have they told you that Maya mothers used to tie a board on the infant’s forehead to get that slant? They also hung a ball of tallow over its nose to make the eyes cross. It was considered aristocratic.”

She smiles and takes another peek at Estéban. “People seem different in Yucatán,” she says thoughtfully. “Not like the Indians around Mexico City. More, I don’t know, independent.”

“Comes from never having been conquered. Mayas got massacred and chased a lot, but nobody ever really flattened them. I bet you didn’t know that the last Mexican-Maya war ended with a negotiated truce in nineteen thirty-five?”

“No!” Then she says seriously, “I like that.”

“So do I.”

“The water is really rising very fast,” says Mrs. Parsons gently from behind us.

It is, and so is another
llovizna.
We climb back into the Bonanza. I try to rig my parka for a rain catcher, which blows loose as the storm hits fast and furious. We sort a couple of malt bars and my bottle of Jack Daniel’s out of the jumble in the cabin and make ourselves reasonably comfortable. The Parsons take a sip of whiskey each, Estéban and I considerably more. The Bonanza begins to bump soggily. Estéban makes an ancient one-eyed Mayan face at the water seeping into his cabin and goes to sleep. We all nap.

When the water goes down, the euphoria has gone with it, and we’re very, very thirsty. It’s also damn near sunset. I get to work with a bait-casting rod and some treble hooks and manage to foul-hook four small mullets. Estéban and the women tie the Bonanza’s midget life raft out in the mangroves to catch rain. The wind is parching hot. No planes go by.

Finally another shower comes over and yields us six ounces of water apiece. When the sunset envelops the world in golden smoke, we squat on the sandbar to eat wet raw mullet and Instant Breakfast crumbs. The women are now in shorts, neat but definitely not sexy.

“I never realized how refreshing raw fish is,” Mrs. Parsons says pleasantly. Her daughter chuckles, also pleasantly. She’s on Mamma’s far side away from Estéban and me. I have Mrs. Parsons figured now; Mother Hen protecting only chick from male predators. That’s all right with me. I came here to fish.

But something is irritating me. The damn women haven’t complained once, you understand. Not a peep, not a quaver, no personal manifestations whatever. They’re like something out of a manual.

“You really seem at home in the wilderness, Mrs. Parsons. You do much camping?”

“Oh, goodness no.” Diffident laugh. “Not since my girl scout days. Oh, look—are those man-of-war birds?”

Answer a question with a question. I wait while the frigate birds sail nobly into the sunset.

“Bethesda . . . Would I be wrong in guessing you work for Uncle Sam?”

“Why, yes. You must be very familiar with Washington, Mr. Fenton. Does your work bring you there often?”

Anywhere but on our sandbar the little ploy would have worked. My hunter’s gene twitches.

“Which agency are you with?”

She gives up gracefully. “Oh, just GSA records. I’m a librarian.”

Of course. I know her now, all the Mrs. Parsonses in records divisions, accounting sections, research branches, personnel and administration offices. Tell Mrs. Parsons we need a recap on the external service contracts for fiscal ‘73. So Yucatán is on the tours now? Pity . . . I offer her the tired little joke. “You know where the bodies are buried.”

She smiles deprecatingly and stands up. “It does get dark quickly, doesn’t it?”

Time to get back into the plane.

A flock of ibis are circling us, evidently accustomed to roosting in our fig tree. Estéban produces a machete and a Mayan string hammock. He proceeds to sling it between tree and plane, refusing help. His machete stroke is noticeably tentative.

The Parsons are taking a pee behind the tail vane. I hear one of them slip and squeal faintly. When they come back over the hull, Mrs. Parsons asks, “Might we sleep in the hammock, Captain?”

Estéban splits an unbelieving grin. I protest about rain and mosquitoes.

“Oh, we have insect repellent and we do enjoy fresh air.”

The air is rushing by about force five and colder by the minute.

“We have our raincoats,” the girl adds cheerfully.

Well, okay, ladies. We dangerous males retire inside the damp cabin. Through the wind I hear the women laugh softly now and then, apparently cozy in their chilly ibis roost. A private insanity, I decide. I know myself for the least threatening of men; my noncharisma has been in fact an asset jobwise, over the years. Are they having fantasies about Estéban? Or maybe they really are fresh-air nuts. . . . Sleep comes for me in invisible diesels roaring by on the reef outside.

We emerge dry-mouthed into a vast windy salmon sunrise. A diamond chip of sun breaks out of the sea and promptly submerges in cloud. I go to work with the rod and some mullet bait while two showers detour around us. Breakfast is a strip of wet barracuda apiece.

The Parsons continue stoic and helpful. Under Estéban’s direction they set up a section of cowling for a gasoline flare in case we hear a plane, but nothing goes over except one unseen jet droning toward Panama. The wind howls, hot and dry and full of coral dust. So are we.

“They look first in sea,” Estéban remarks. His aristocratic frontal slope is beaded with sweat; Mrs. Parsons watches him concernedly. I watch the cloud blanket tearing by above, getting higher and dryer and thicker. While that lasts nobody is going to find us, and the water business is now unfunny.

Finally I borrow Estéban’s machete and hack a long light pole. “There’s a stream coming in back there, I saw it from the plane. Can’t be more than two, three miles.”

“I’m afraid the raft’s torn.” Mrs. Parsons shows me the cracks in the orange plastic; irritatingly, it’s a Delaware label.

“All right,” I hear myself announce. “The tide’s going down. If we cut the good end off that air tube, I can haul water back in it. I’ve waded flats before.”

Even to me it sounds crazy.

“Stay by plane,” Estéban says. He’s right, of course. He’s also clearly running a fever. I look at the overcast and taste grit and old barracuda. The hell with the manual.

When I start cutting up the raft, Estéban tells me to take the serape. “You stay one night.” He’s right about that, too; I’ll have to wait out the tide.

“I’ll come with you,” says Mrs. Parsons calmly.

I simply stare at her. What new madness has got into Mother Hen? Does she imagine Estéban is too battered to be functional? While I’m being astounded, my eyes take in the fact that Mrs. Parsons is now quite rosy around the knees, with her hair loose and a sunburn starting on her nose. A trim, in fact a very neat, shading-forty.

“Look, that stuff is horrible going. Mud up to your ears and water over your head.”

“I’m really quite fit and I swim a great deal. I’ll try to keep up. Two would be much safer, Mr. Fenton, and we can bring more water.”

She’s serious. Well, I’m about as fit as a marshmallow at this time of winter, and I can’t pretend I’m depressed by the idea of company. So be it.

“Let me show Miss Parsons how to work this rod.”

Miss Parsons is even rosier and more windblown, and she’s not clumsy with my tackle. A good girl, Miss Parsons, in her nothing way. We cut another staff and get some gear together. At the last minute Estéban shows how sick he feels: he offers me the machete. I thank him, but no; I’m used to my Wirkkala knife. We tie some air into the plastic tube for a float and set out along the sandiest-looking line.

Estéban raises one dark palm.
“Buen viaje.”
Miss Parsons has hugged her mother and gone to cast from the mangrove. She waves. We wave.

An hour later we’re barely out of waving distance. The going is purely god-awful. The sand keeps dissolving into silt you can’t walk on or swim through, and the bottom is spiked with dead mangrove spears. We flounder from one pothole to the next, scaring up rays and turtles and hoping to god we don’t kick a moray eel. Where we’re not soaked in slime, we’re desiccated, and we smell like the Old Cretaceous.

Mrs. Parsons keeps up doggedly. I only have to pull her out once. When I do so, I notice the sandbar is now out of sight.

Finally we reach the gap in the mangrove line I thought was the creek. It turns out to open into another arm of the bay, with more mangroves ahead. And the tide is coming in.

“I’ve had the world’s lousiest idea.”

Mrs. Parsons only says mildly, “It’s so different from the view from the plane.”

I revise my opinion of the girl scouts, and we plow on past the mangroves toward the smoky haze that has to be shore. The sun is setting in our faces, making it hard to see. Ibis and herons fly up around us, and once a big hermit spooks ahead, his fin cutting a rooster tail. We fall into more potholes. The flashlights get soaked. I am having fantasies of the mangrove as universal obstacle; it’s hard to recall I ever walked down a street, for instance, without stumbling over or under or through mangrove roots. And the sun is dropping down, down.

Suddenly we hit a ledge and fall over it into a cold flow.

“The stream! It’s fresh water!”

We guzzle and garble and douse our heads; it’s the best drink I remember. “Oh my, oh my—!” Mrs. Parsons is laughing right out loud.

“That dark place over to the right looks like real land.”

We flounder across the flow and follow a hard shelf, which turns into solid bank and rises over our heads. Shortly there’s a break beside a clump of spiny bromels, and we scramble up and flop down at the top, dripping and stinking. Out of sheer reflex my arm goes around my companion’s shoulder—but Mrs. Parsons isn’t there; she’s up on her knees peering at the burnt-over plain around us.

“It’s so good to see land one can walk on!” The tone is too innocent.
Noli me tangere.

“Don’t try it.” I’m exasperated; the muddy little woman, what does she think? “That ground out there is a crush of ashes over muck, and it’s full of stubs. You can go in over your knees.”

“It seems firm here.”

“We’re in an alligator nursery. That was the slide we came up. Don’t worry, by now the old lady’s doubtless on her way to be made into handbags.”

“What a shame.”

“I better set a line down in the stream while I can still see.”

I slide back down and rig a string of hooks that may get us breakfast. When I get back Mrs. Parsons is wringing muck out of the serape.

“I’m glad you warned me, Mr. Fenton. It is treacherous.”

“Yeah.” I’m over my irritation; god knows I don’t want to
tangere
Mrs. Parsons, even if I weren’t beat down to mush. “In its quiet way, Yucatán is a tough place to get around in. You can see why the Mayas built roads. Speaking of which—look!”

The last of the sunset is silhouetting a small square shape a couple of kilometers inland; a Maya
ruina
with a fig tree growing out of it.

“Lot of those around. People think they were guard towers.”

“What a deserted-feeling land.”

“Let’s hope it’s deserted by mosquitoes.”

We slump down in the ’gator nursery and share the last malt bar, watching the stars slide in and out of the blowing clouds. The bugs aren’t too bad; maybe the burn did them in. And it isn’t hot anymore, either—in fact, it’s not even warm, wet as we are. Mrs. Parsons continues tranquilly interested in Yucatán and unmistakably uninterested in togetherness.

Just as I’m beginning to get aggressive notions about how we’re going to spend the night if she expects me to give her the serape, she stands up, scuffs at a couple of hummocks, and says, “I expect this is as good a place as any, isn’t it, Mr. Fenton?”

With which she spreads out the raft bag for a pillow and lies down on her side in the dirt with exactly half the serape over her and the other corner folded neatly open. Her small back is toward me.

The demonstration is so convincing that I’m halfway under my share of serape before the preposterousness of it stops me.

“By the way. My name is Don.”

“Oh, of course.” Her voice is graciousness itself. “I’m Ruth.”

I get in not quite touching her, and we lie there like two fish on a plate, exposed to the stars and smelling the smoke in the wind and feeling things underneath us. It is absolutely the most intimately awkward moment I’ve had in years.

The woman doesn’t mean one thing to me, but the obtrusive recessiveness of her, the defiance of her little rump eight inches from my fly—for two pesos I’d have those shorts down and introduce myself. If I were twenty years younger. If I wasn’t so bushed . . . But the twenty years and the exhaustion are there, and it comes to me wryly that Mrs. Ruth Parsons has judged things to a nicety. If I
were
twenty years younger, she wouldn’t be here. Like the butterfish that float around a sated barracuda, only to vanish away the instant his intent changes, Mrs. Parsons knows her little shorts are safe. Those firmly filled little shorts, so close . . .

A warm nerve stirs in my groin—and just as it does I become aware of a silent emptiness beside me. Mrs. Parsons is imperceptibly inching away. Did my breathing change? Whatever, I’m perfectly sure that if my hand reached, she’d be elsewhere—probably announcing her intention to take a dip. The twenty years bring a chuckle to my throat, and I relax.

“Good night, Ruth.”

“Good night, Don.”

And believe it or not, we sleep, while the armadas of the wind roar overhead.

Light wakes me—a cold white glare.

My first thought is ’gator hunters. Best to manifest ourselves as
turistas
as fast as possible. I scramble up, noting that Ruth has dived under the bromel dump.