Luz said, “Do what?”
“Steal,” Tommy explained. To Kirby he said, “So what do we do? Hold them off?”
“We’re not talking about General Custer,” Kirby told him. “We’re talking about policemen, reporters, photographers, archaeologists, government officials—”
“The whole shmeer,” Tommy finished. “Too bad; Custer we could have handled.”
Kirby looked about, shaking his head. “I hate this,” he said, “but we’ve got to dismantle it.”
“Shit,” said Luz.
Everybody looked concerned. Tommy said, “Forever?”
“Christ, I hope not.” Kirby sighed, gazing upon his masterpiece. “But at least until the fuss dies down. She’ll come back here with a lot of people, she’ll point, but there’s nothing here. With luck, everybody says she’s crazy.”
“It’s her period,” Luz suggested.
“Exactly,” Kirby said. “We wait a while, it blows over, we start up again.”
“Maybe,” said Tommy.
Adversity made Kirby philosophical. “Maybe’s the the best we can hope for in this sad world, boys,” he said.
25
The Sapodilla Narrative
“The alternative,” the skinny black man said reasonably, “was to let her tell everybody about the temple.”
“So you brought her here?” Vernon demanded.
Here was a small loggers’ cabin above the Sibun Gorge, a deep narrow winding groove through the Maya Mountains, gouged out over the millenia by the busy Sibun River. The cabin itself, low and slant- roofed, like a lean-to, was 30 years old or more, rank with mildew and the sweet smell of rotting things. Dirt-floored, lacking any furniture, it was built of horizontal pine-slabs nailed to upright posts pounded into the ground. Apparently it had once been half its present size, just one room, but then a second room was added, making the original front wall a dividing wall. There were no windows in either room, but plenty of air circulated through the uneven cracks between slabs. From the outside the place looked like the log cabin on a maple syrup label, but inside it looked like the attic in your grandmother’s house after she moved out. The logcutters who had built this rough shelter had long ago departed, on to other parts of the forest, and in the intervening years it had been occupied only rarely, by hunters or fugitives or lovers. And now by kidnappers and their victim.
“Where else?” the skinny black man demanded, giving Vernon a challenging look. Clearly, he had expected praise for his initiative, not all this carping. “Not to my house,” he went on. “Should I have taken her to your place?”
“She can identify you anyway,” Vernon pointed out.
“Not if she never sees me again. I can just disappear for a while, it’s happened before.”
“Well, I can’t,” Vernon said. “I have a job to protect.”
“Tied down by things,” the skinny black man commented, with the smug superiority of the ne’er-do-well.
“All right, all right,” Vernon said, struggling to subdue his fury. The thing to do was accept the situation, he told himself, as he paced back and forth past the open doorway, where gnats and dust motes practiced football plays in a shaft of orange sunlight. Lord, give me the strength to change that which can be changed, he thought, the patience to live with that which cannot be changed, and the wisdom to tell the difference. Lord, he thought, I’m up to my ass in shit, Lord!
Too many things going on, too much happening. Now he was somehow responsible for the kidnapping of an American woman, which would probably become an international incident, with the Sixth Fleet making a show of strength off St. Georges Caye and U.S. Marines walking around Belize City giving people chewing gum.
(Earlier in this century, after the world market in mahogany faltered, chicle, being the latex sap of the sapodilla tree, used in the making of chewing gum, became for a while Belize’s primary export to the United States.)
There was no furniture in this place, no objects but an unlit candle stuck in a beer bottle in one corner, nothing to kick but the pine-slab walls. Punching his own thighs, Vernon paced back and forth, thinking many different thoughts, until the skinny black man said, easily, “If you’re that worried about her, we can always...” He drew a line with his finger across his throat.
That was it, that was the thought Vernon had been avoiding and denying, circling around and around. In his mind and in his heart, he had committed many, many murders over the years, both of individuals and of groups, but out on the griddle of reality he had never even hit anybody very hard. Was this what a decisive man would do at this juncture? Just shoot the woman right off the—
He didn’t have a gun.
All right, stab her just as quick as—
He didn’t have a knife with him, either, except his imitation Swiss Army knife (imitation! how that galled!), which might eventually do the job, but not with one clean quick slice.
All right, all right, strangle the goddam...
He looked down at his hands. He imagined a face between them, gargling. The eyes get bigger and bigger, red veins standing out on the whites. The tongue protrudes from the begging mouth, growing thicker, flopping like a red fish. The feeble fingers grope in agony at his hands. Drool pours from the mouth, snot oozes from the nostrils, the eyes bulge as though they would explode like grapes, the flesh turns mottled, purple...
Vernon thought he might be sick.
“Well?” said the skinny black man.
Vernon swallowed, looking out the open doorway at the heavy jungle and the fading day. “Uhhhh,” he said. “We’ll decide that later. First I have to question her.”
“About what?”
“About the temple!” Vernon spun around, furious again. “Was that really and truly Galway’s land?”
“Looked that way on the map. She seemed to think it was. And the temple was there.”
“You saw it. You saw the temple.”
“I told you already, I saw a hill with some rocks on it. Come on, man, make a decision.”
The loneliness of command. Vernon bit his cheeks, he punched his knuckles together. All at once, it occurred to him, like a light shining from heaven, that he wouldn’t actually himself have to do the, uh, crime personally. Leaving here tonight, he could simply say (out of the comer of his mouth), “Take care of her,” and his partner, untroubled by conscience, unaffected by imagination, unthinking of consequence, would do the dirty deed.
“What do you want, Vernon?”
Vernon looked at the closed door to the inner room. The partition having originally been an exterior wall, it was still covered with bark, and the pine-slab door itself was thick and solid. It opened inward, but there was a rusty old hasp lock fixed in place with a broken-off piece of branch. “I’d better go question her now,” he decided, and sighed.
Taking the pillowcase from his pocket, he slowly and deliberately unfolded it, then slipped it over his head. It was a yellow pillowcase with a large sunny flower design; the eyeholes so he could see had been cut into the center of two daisies.
“Take the candle,” the skinny black man advised. “It’s dark in there.”
So Vernon lit the candle in the beer bottle, the skinny black man undid the hasp and opened the door — a scurrying sound came from within — and Vernon stepped through into the other room, peering through the damn eyeholes, stumbling a bit because he couldn’t see his feet. Behind him, the door was closed, the hasp lock rasped.