Westlake, Donald E - Novel 43 (38 page)

 
          
Inside
the jungle the land is rich, almost black, fed over thousands of years of
growth and decay, well- watered and fertilized. The lower slopes of the
mountains are so lushly overgrown that a man with a machete is lucky to make
five miles a day through its tangle, and each day the jungle grows in again
behind him, so that a week or a month later he would still need his machete to
follow his path back out.

 
          
The
Espejo and Alpuche families had once lived in Chimaltenango Province, west of
Guatemala City, but that became in the 70s one of the hottest areas of the
revolution and the counterrevolution and the death squads and the army raids,
so when the owner of the land where they sometimes harvested crops offered them
a new life far to the east in the peaceful Peten, they accepted. They were
sorry to leave their people and their land, but life was too frightening now in
Chimal- tenango, so they got on the trucks along with nearly a hundred other
Quiche Indians, entire family groups, and drove for days over the rough roads,
northeast above Guatemala City, through Salama and north through Coban into Peten
Province, where they would live from now on.

 
          
None
of them had ever had any formal schooling, but from time to time they had heard
speeches on the radio about Belice, the province just to the east of the Peten.
Belice was the Lost Province of Guatemala, stolen a long time ago by the
British but some day to be recaptured by the brave young men of
Guatemala
. In the meantime, a state of not-quite-war
existed between Belice and the rest of
Guatemala
, though the Indians imported from the west
into the Peten were never actually aware of it.

 
          
The
war they were aware of was the war they thought they’d left. The landowners had
tried to get away from the revolution by moving into the underutilized and
almost unpopulated Peten, a plateau of good plains land just waiting for the
plow, but when they had imported workers from the west they’d imported the
revolution as well. After a while, some of the Indians disappeared into the
bush. Tourist buses heading up to the Mayan ruins at
Tikal
were attacked. Some Army jeeps were blown
up and some soldiers ambushed and killed. Soon the death squads were roaming
the area by night, as in Chimaltenango, savaging the innocent stay-at-homes
since they couldn’t find the actual revolutionaries.

 
          
Within
four years, it had all turned very bad for the Espejo and Alpuche families.
There were so few of them to service the owner’s land that they were worked
harder than at home. They were given no cash money, and less time than before
to work their own plots of land for food. They were separated from the support
systems of their families and their tribe. They were away from their ancestral
land, on some alien land they didn’t know or understand. They were worse off
than before they’d moved.

 
          
One
day the owner made everybody come listen to a speech by an Army colonel who
told them he intended to crush the revolution and slaughter every last
revolutionary. He told them that if any of them were even suspected of aiding
the revolutionaries they could expect no mercy. He told them to go on working
for the owner, to never complain, to keep silent, and to do their duty and they
would be safe. He told them that if any of them was thinking of running away to
Belice they should forget it because they would be shot down and left in the
jungle to rot if they tried it. Don’t even think about running away to Belice,
he told them.

 
          
On
a clouded night two weeks later the 27 members of the Espejo and Alpuche
families, 12 males and 15 females ranging in age from 53 years to three months,
left their two one-room clapboard shacks and turned their faces east.

 
          
A
27-year-old woman who had always been sickly died along the way. They buried
her.

 
          
They
ate fruit, nuts, berries, roots, flowers, sometimes fish, less often birds or
iguana or coati-mundi. They moved from the Peten plain into the
Maya
Mountains
, traveling as far as they could each day,
always frightened and always exhausted. They had no idea when they would leave
the Peten and be in Belice, so they just kept going. On the 24th day they found
a road ahead of them, crossing from north to south. While the rest of the
family waited, two of the young men— an 11-year-old Espejo and a nine-year-old
Alpuche—made their way to the two-lane blacktop road and hid beside it. Soon a
truck came by. Its license plate was black with white numbers preceded by a
large A and along the bottom it said
Belize
.
Both young men were illiterate, but the
11-year-old had seen “Belice” on maps and remembered it.

 
          
Three
automobiles went by over the next half hour, all with license plates having
black lettering on a white ground, starting with the letter C and with the word
Belize
along the bottom. The man and woman in the
third automobile, well dressed and laughing together, were quite obviously
black people, which was the final proof: in
Guatemala
, black people are not encouraged. The
scouts went back and reported their conclusion: they were in Belice.

 
          
The
families retreated a bit farther from the road, found a fairly level place in
the jungle, and cleared a small patch of land. The trunks and branches and
fronds they cleared away were used to make three huts. More land was cleared
and the seeds they’d brought with them were planted: corn, yams, beans.

 
          
Four
months after arrival they were a going village, 28 people strong, two of the
women having made the trip pregnant. They were harvesting crops, they were
hunting successfully. Having found a few similar tiny settlements around them
in the jungle, they had done some trading and now had two piglets, one male and
one female, which were guarded with great care.

           
One day a pair of strangers came in
from the road, bouncing in a Land Rover up the rough trail the people had made.
They were a man and woman who spoke a crisp kind of Spanish, hard to
understand, and who said they were from the government of
Belize
. Seeing the fright this caused, they
promised not to make any trouble, but said they had come only to find out if
the people needed help in any way. No, the people said, they needed no help.
Well, if they ever needed anything, the man and woman told them, medical help,
for instance, anything like that, all they had to do was go out to the road,
turn right, and about 11 miles south they would find a town with a police
station. “The police don’t have guns, and they aren’t mad at you,” the woman
said, smiling.

 
          
The
people didn’t believe the man and woman, but on the other hand these strangers
seemed to have no ulterior motive, so they smiled and nodded and thanked them
for the information. The man and woman said the town also had a weekend market
if they ever had excess produce to sell, and had a Roman Catholic church, if
the villagers were interested. (They were.) And a school for the children.
(Maybe later.)

 
          
Cautiously,
after that, the people broadened their contacts with this new land. A few
occasionally went to the Catholic church, though they weren’t yet ready to talk
to the priest, who was nothing they’d ever seen before, being neither Indian
nor black nor Spanish. A sale of yams in the market had produced cash; crumpled
pale-green Belizean dollars with Queen Elizabeth II on them and frail-seeming
Belizean coins, which they kept in a sack in one of the huts, not sure yet what
to use them for.

 
          
The
man and woman, in the meantime, having returned to the capital at
Belmopan
, had entered this new settlement of
refugees onto a map. The two families by chance happening to be of equal
strength there, the man and woman named the settlement Espejo-Alpuche.

 
          
“Valerie,”
Innocent said, “what do you expect us to do about it?”

  
 
          
The
false Gurkhas, irritated and uneasy at the disappearance of the tall American
woman, hacked their way northward through the jungle.

  
 
          
“There
isn’t
time
to radio for help!”
Valerie cried.

  
 
          
No
one in the van noticed Vernon moaning and shaking his head and punching his
thighs as he drove, because Scottie was telling a story involving female
Siamese twins, an Israeli Nazi-hunter and a one-kilo package of. uncut cocaine
in a box marked
Baking Soda.

  
 
          
Kirby
stood frowning westward, thinking hard, brooding at those tumbled dark
mountains. “It’s worth a try,” he said.

 
          
The
false Gurkhas came to a gravel road and boldly crossed it. A British Army jeep
went by as they did so, bluish gray, and the two uniformed Brits inside it
waved as they passed, the false Gurkhas waving back.

  
 
          
“Tell
me what to do,” Valerie said.

 
          
Kirby
said, “I need thin cloth, cotton, the thinner the better, and a lot of it.”

 
          
Tom,
the American photojournalism called out, “
Vernon
, how the hell much farther is this damn
place?”

 
          
“Oh,
twenty-twenty-twenty minutes, no more,”
Vernon
told him, showing an agonized smile in the
rearview mirror.

 
          
Innocent
stared at the dancing leering Zotzes: “What
are
those things?”

 
          
“Devils,”
Tommy told him.

 
          
Halfway
up the slope, Kirby stopped to look back. Valerie and Rosita and Luz Coco were
cutting and hacking the sheets into squares or rectangles or ovals, a foot and
a half or two feet across. None of them were making the circles he’d asked for,
but it didn’t really matter. Half the village was running in and out of huts,
looking for string.

           
Tommy and Innocent came together out
of one of the huts, each carrying a cardboard carton; they started this way.

 
          
Kirby
nodded, and hurried on over the hill to start Cynthia.

  
 
          
One
of the young men of the village came into the clearing. “Soldiers coming,” he
announced.

 
          
Everyone
stopped what they were doing to stare at him or move closer to him or ask, “Who?
Which soldiers? What kind of soldiers?”

 
          
“Gurruhs,”
said the young man, which was as close as they’d come so far to the word
Gurkha
.

 
          
Twice
in the last several months Gurkha patrols had moved through here, short
black^haired men who held their shoulders proudly and handled their strange
severe weapons confidently and yet smiled with amazingly bright teeth. The
Gurkhas were a different kind of soldier, without the sullenness and fear and
cruelty and tendency toward petty crime—and sometimes major crime—of the
soldiers of their previous world. When the young man said, “Gurruhs,” they all
smiled and relaxed.
That
kind of
soldier. Fine.