Westlake, Donald E - Novel 43 (17 page)

 
          
Gerry
plodded manfully along, can rying his heavy bag, snapping the fingers of his
free hand in some sort of rhythm, nodding his head metronomically to the sound
of Kirby Galway, in his earphones, saying, “A lot of Americans are coming down
here, because there’s just so much available land.”

 
          
The
worst part of travel is travel. To get out of
Belize
, there was so much red tape to overcome:
forms to fill out, lines to stand in with other passengers, documents to
display, questions to answer. And all taking place without benefit of air
conditioning, among bodies that could only have been improved by a flash flood.
Gerry just suffered through it all, remembering to nod his head and tap his
toes, following Alan’s lead as he listened to his own voice say in his ears, “I
had an aunt in
New Jersey
once, but she went to
Florida
and died.” We’re going to
Florida
now, he thought. What does it all mean?

 
          
As
Kirby Galway had suggested might happen, their luggage was given a
quite
extensive search by a large and
menacing Customs person, who made them put their Walkmans on the counter with
their suitcases and then took a positively unhealthy interest in the contents
of their luggage. Some of the more stylish garments produced from this
individual various grunts and snarls absolutely out of a
zoo.
“What you call dis?” the fellow demanded at one point, holding
up an object from Gerry’s bag between thumb and finger.

 
          
The
indignity of it. “It’s called sachet,” Gerry said, enunciating carefully,
reminding himself it’s best to be gentle with the lower orders. “It’s to keep
the bag sweet^smelling, you know.”

 
          
The
Customs man held the small sealed packet to his nose and noisily sniffed.
“Could be dope,” he said.

 
          
“Certainly
not.” Stomach churning, mind rattled, Gerry struggled to remember the contents
of sachet, saying, “It’s—Oh, rose petals, cloves, lavender ...”

 
          
“Passports,”
said a sudden harsh voice from a new and unexpected quarter; that is, from
behind them. Gerry and Alan turned, in some surprise, to see a short impatient
scowling woman standing there, holding out her hand for their passports.

 
          
Was
this right? While Alan briskly turned over his own passport, Gerry had to
search himself like a policeman frisking a suspect, having no idea what he’d
done with his passport, not expecting to need it at just this juncture . . .

 
          
The
roar of the descending plane was heard. The woman was actually snapping her
fingers. Gerry, third time through his shirt pocket, found the passport and
handed it over. In lieu of a
thank you,
the
woman said, “Tickets.”

 
          
Well,
that
was all right; Alan had them
both. He turned them over to the woman, who barely glanced at them before
shaking her head, saying, “Not this flight.”

 
          
“What?”
Gerry thought he would die, he actually thought he would die.

 
          
But
not, apparently, Alan, who did some barking of his own, telling the woman, “Of
course it’s this flight.”

 
          
“SAHSA
flight,” the woman said.

 
          
“That’s
right,” Alan told her. “SAHSA is exactly what it says on those tickets.”

 
          
“Not
today.”

 
          
“Oh,
really
,” Alan said. “It is our
flight, it is this airline, it is today.”

 
          
Gerry
moaned faintly, hoping no one would hear. The plane was waiting outside.
Passengers behind them on line were getting upset. Off to one side, a stout man
being disgusting with what seemed to be a gold toothpick appeared to enjoy the
show.

 
          
Then,
all at once, it was over. With one last firm nod, as though she’d solved a
knotty problem for them at last, the woman handed the passports and tickets
back to Alan and said, “You can go now.”

 
          
“I
can
go
now? After you’ve—”

 
          
“The
plane is waiting,” the woman said, with urgent shooing gestures. “Hurry,
hurry.”

 
          
The
plane was waiting. The other passengers were waiting. The Customs man had
finished pawing through their personal possessions and sent their luggage on to
be loaded. Their Walkmans and carry-on bags awaited them on his wooden counter.
Over by the door to the plane, a uniformed man gestured urgently at them,
repeating the impatient woman’s, “Hurry, hurry.”

 
          
They
hurried, out of the building and into the blinding sunlight, Alan jogging ahead
across the tarmac. Jouncing along in his wake, head and stomach both terribly
upset, Gerry couldn’t get the Walkman back on his belt until they were actually
going up the steps and into the plane. The stewardess pointed Alan toward their
seats, and Gerry followed, adjusting the earphones and fiddling with the
Walkman’s controls as he trailed Alan down the aisle. Ahead, Alan was also
still setting up his Walkman.

 
          
Then
abruptly Alan stopped, and Gerry almost ran into him. Alan turned about as
though to run back off the plane; he stared wide-eyed at Gerry, his mouth open
in shock. The aisle behind them was full of boarding passengers. The stewardess
was closing the door. It was too late.

 
          
Gerry
also at last had turned on his Walkman, and now he returned Alan’s horrified
stare as, “I can’t get no,” Mick Jagger wailed in his ears, “no no no.”

 
          
“The
map is not the terrain,” the skinny black man said.

 
          
“Oh,
yes, it is,” Valerie said. With her right hand she tapped the map on the
attache case on her lap, while waving with her left at the hilly green
unpopulated countryside bucketing by:
“This
map is
that
terrain.”

 
          
“It
is a quote,” the skinny black man said, steering almost around a pothole. “It
means, there are always differences between reality and the descriptions of
reality.”

 
          
“Nevertheless,”
Valerie said, holding on amid the bumps, “we should have turned left back
there.”

 
          
“What
your map does not show,” the skinny black man told her, “is that the floods in
December washed away a part of that road. I see the floods didn’t affect your
map.”

 
          
Valerie
was finding this driver very difficult. He had a mind of his own, and an almost
total disregard for Valerie’s opinions. He drove rapidly and rather recklessly,
and from the beginning he had disdained Valerie’s maps and charts and
directions and suggestions and
everything.
He wasn’t her driver so much as she was his passenger, the excuse for him to
take his Land Rover out for a spin.

 
          
He
wouldn’t even tell her his name. “Hi, I’m Valerie Greene,” she had greeted him
back in the lobby of the
Fort
George
. “I’m your driver,” he’d responded, then
had turned on his heel and marched outside, leaving her to follow as best she
could, carrying all her own gear. Hurrying after him, she’d been aware of some
man over by the house phones staring at her, probably thinking she must be a
very silly woman to let her driver—her
servant
,
technically, provided by the Belizean government itself—treat her like that.

 
          
The
vehicle, this peach-colored topless Land Rover, was a perfect match for the
driver. It too was all hard edges and businesslike bluntness. What the driver
lacked in politesse, the Land Rover lacked in springs. The driver’s absence of
small talk and common courtesy was echoed in the Land Rover’s uncushioned gray
metal seats. The driver’s skinniness and blackness found their counterpart in
the Land Rover’s metal and tubing, painted the colors of an aircraft carrier’s
corridor. Peach and gray, heavily rusted, rough to the touch.

 
          
Valerie
felt unwanted emotion rising within her. She wasn’t exactly sure why it was
that girls weren’t supposed to do things “like a girl”— throw a ball like a
girl, cry at every little thing like a girl—but she did know that was the rule,
and so she fought down the tremulousness that frustration had built within her.
Only the tiniest bit of it showed when she said, “I thought we could stop for
lunch along that road. There’s supposed to be a really beautiful little stream
there.”

 
          
“That’s
what flooded,” the driver said. “Besides, there’s no stores down that way.”

 
          
“I
have food.” Valerie gestured back at her canvas bag, now bounding around like a
basketball in the storage well. “I had the hotel make some sandwiches,” she
explained. “Plenty for both of us.”

 
          
“You
still have to buy beer.”

 
          
“I
don’t want beer,” Valerie said.

 
          
“I
do.”

 
          
Valerie
stared at him, while several sentences crowded into her brain, beginning,
Well, I never
— and,
Of all the
— and,
If your
superiors
— What kept all those sentences incomplete and unspoken was the
driver’s absolute self-assurance. He wasn’t being calculatedly arrogant, or
deliberately hostile toward her, or playing testing games with her, or actually
behaving toward
her
at all. He was merely
being himself, which Valerie understood,, unfortunately, and which kept her
from wasting breath trying to get him to be somebody else. You might as well
tell a cat to turn around and walk the other way.

 
          
And
this was who she’d picnic with; what a waste.

 
          
They
rode on in bumpy silence, Valerie thinking about all the reasons she had left
southern Illinois in the first place, all the vague hopes and dreams inspired
by her determination to see the great world, and the unpleasant contrast
between all that and this reality. Here she was, flopping about in this
hard-edged biscuit tin beside a self-absorbed and utterly unappealing man, and
not even going to have the
picnic
she’d planned.

 
          
So
far, in fact, the great world really wasn’t showing Valerie Greene very much.
Yesterday’s encounter with Innocent St. Michael had certainly been enjoyable,
but there’d been very little of the romantic in it; the mode of that scene had
been mostly comic. And this driver today was as much a washout as (according to
him) the road they weren’t taking.

 
          
All
her hopes now were pinned on the lost Mayan city. It would be there, it
must
be there, where she and the
computers had decreed (and despite the nay-saying of Innocent’s man
Vernon
), and from the instant of her discovery of
it everything in her life would change. Archaeologists would write her
respectful letters, asking for details of her methodology. Reporters would
gather for news conferences. Governments would take her seriously. She herself
would lead the expedition to clear away a millenium of jungle and free the
ancient city to thrust its towers once again into the air.

 
          
A
buzzing sound caused her to lift her head. A small blue-and-white plane was
flying by, rather low, not much faster than they, and heading in the same
direction. Probably it was actually following the same road, there being very
few landmarks in the jungle. Valerie found herself eyeing that plane wistfully,
envying whoever was in it, no matter what their purpose or destination.
There
was romance, soaring above the
jungle, sailing through the sunlight.

 
          
An
airstrip beside the lost city spread its scythed green carpet in her mind, and
she smiled after the plane. But then, before it was out of sight, she was
recalled to earth by the driver abruptly braking hard, the Land Rover bucking
to a stop.

 
          
Valerie
lowered her gaze and looked around, as the dust of their passage caught up with
them, making a gray-tan haze in the air. They had stopped at an intersection,
where their oiled gravel “highway” crossed a meandering dirt road. To their
right, a small building was covered with tin soft drink signs. “Coca Cola,”
said one, and beneath that in Creole, “quench yu tus.”

 
          
The
driver switched off the engine. In the sudden silence, dust slowly settled.
Valerie said, “What’s this?”

 
          
“You
can get the beer in there,” he said.

 
          
“I
get the beer?”

 
          
Pointing
to the left, he said, “Then we take that road. There’s a place to stop and eat
down a few miles.”

 
          
“In
a swamp, no doubt,” she said, becoming irked.

 
          
He
looked at her with mild surprise but calm willingness: “You wish to eat in a
swamp?”

 
          
“No,
no.” Even sarcasm was lost on this creature. Looking at her map, as an excuse
to regain her poise, she said, “I can’t tell where we are.”

 
          
“That’s
all right,” he said. “I know the way.”

 
          
Valerie
sighed, realized how inevitable that answer had been. Acknowledging defeat, she
opened the attache case and stowed her map in it, then put the case back in the
storage well with her canvas bag. Beer, she thought in fatalistic irritation,
as she clambered out of the car. And she might as well get beer for herself,
too; this place wouldn’t have white wine.