“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.”
20
The Lost City
“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 attaché 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.