Donald Westlake - High Adventure

The upper slopes of his land were, in their way, even more terrible, having become a landscape from Hieronymus Bosch. Gnarled and twisted trunks produced leathery sharp-edged leaves. Yellowish grass in long razor-sharp clumps stubbled the rise. Nasty fork-tongued creatures that only a luggage maker could love moved in and out across a landscape of rocks and boulders and scaly dry dirt. Birds cawed in derision as they flew westward, toward the verdant hills, the blue shapes of the Maya Mountains, lush with rich dark soil, fecund with greenery. “Fuck you,” Kirby told the birds.

They went on, their laughter fading, and in the silence he could almost hear the land as it dried, as new seams and cracks opened in the dead skin of his ranch. Cynthia, baking in the sunglare down below, looked ready to fall into one of those lesions and disappear into the baked dry bowels of the Earth. Kirby was of half a mind to join her.

Movement attracted his attention down the opposite slope, where he saw half a dozen wiry-haired Indians making their slow way up toward him, little dust-puffs rising from each step. Good, he thought, now I’m gonna get killed for my watch.

He put his watch in his pocket. Too bad he couldn’t put his boots in his pocket. Put his whole self in his pocket. Maybe he could trade them; they’d let him go, and he’d give them Innocent St. Michael. They could rend him down for a lifetime supply of lard.

The Indians, squat tough-looking men with hooded eyes and gleaming machetes, reached the hilltop and stood gazing at him. One said, “Hello.”

“Hello,” said Kirby.

“Nice day.”

“If you say so,” said Kirby.

“Cigarette?”

“No, thanks,” said Kirby.

“I meant for me,” the Indian said.

“Oh. Sorry, I don’t smoke.”

The Indian looked disgusted. Turning, he spoke to his friends in some other language, and then they all looked disgusted. Shaking his head at Kirby, the spokesman said, “It used to be, the one thing you could count on from Americans was a couple of cigarettes. Now you all quit smoking.”

“They want to live forever,” suggested one of the other Indians.

Was that a veiled threat? Kirby said, “I’ve got some gage in the plane, if you’re interested.”

“Now, you’re talking,” said the spokesman. The one who’d made the possible threat translated for the others, who all managed to perk up while remaining essentially stoic; it was like seeing trees smile. Meanwhile, the spokesman told Kirby, “We’ve got some home-brew back in the village. Make a dynamite combo.”

“Where is this village?” Kirby asked. He was thinking, maybe they’re on my land, maybe I could charge rent.

“Back that way,” the spokesman said, negligently waving his machete, not quite decapitating any of his friends.

“How much shit you got?” asked the perhaps threatened

Kirby said, “How big’s your village?”

“Eleven households,” the man said seriously, as though Kirby were a census taker.

“Then I’ve got enough,” Kirby said.

The spokesman smiled, showing a lot of square white teeth. “I’m Tommy Watson,” he said, extending the hand without the machete.

“Kirby Galway,” Kirby said, taking the hand.

Nodding at the alleged threatener, Tommy Watson said, “And this is my cousin, Luz Coco.”

“How you doing?”

“Sure,” said Luz Coco. “Let’s go get your stash.”

They all walked down the hill together, and Kirby got the two Glad Bags out of the pocket in his door. “I don’t have enough papers for everybody.”

“That’s okay,” Tommy said. “We’ll get some toilet paper from the mission.” He spoke to his friends again, and a disagreement took place. Hefting the Glad Bags in his palms, Kirby leaned against his plane and waited it out. What the hell, there was no hope anyway.

Kekchi is a language containing a lot of clicks and gutturals and harshnesses even when people are being friendly with one another; when they’re arguing about who has to go over to the mission for toilet paper and therefore miss the beginning of the party it can sound pretty hairy. But eventually two of the group acknowledged defeat and went sloping away, glancing mulishly back from time to time as they went, and Kirby joined the rest of them in a walk over his sun-bleached hill and halfway up the next slope and around into a green and cheerful declivity in which the 11 wood-and-frond huts were placed higglety-pigglety on both sides of a swift-moving, clear, cold, bubbling stream. “You bastards even have water,” Kirby said. They were by now well away from his land.

Tommy looked at him in wonder. “Jesus God,” he said. “So that’s what you’re hanging around for. You bought that swamp.”

“Desert, you mean,” Kirby said.

“You haven’t seen it in the rainy season.”

“Hell and damn,” Kirby said.

But there was little time for self-pity. Kirby had to be introduced to all the villagers — fewer than a hundred people, none of whom had more than a smattering of English — and the party had to be gotten under way. The home-brew, which came out in a variety of recycled bottles and jars, was a kind of cross between beer and cleaning fluid, which in fact went very well with pot.

Tommy said the village was called South Abilene, and maybe it was. Most of its residents were actually very shy, prepared to accept Kirby’s presence — and his donation — but otherwise staying well within their stoic dignity, though they did express amusement when their two friends came back from the mission all out of breath, carrying rolls of toilet paper and pamphlets explaining the Trinity.

These were the descendants of the people who had built the temples. Their relationship with the world had narrowed since those glory days; now, they were farmers, jungle dwellers with only a tangential connection to the modem age. Small villages like this were scattered through the Central American plains and jungles, their Indian residents clinging to a simple self sufficiency, almost totally separate from the technological civilization swirling around them. They had given up both temple building and war; they neither fought nor praised, nor even very much hoped; they subsisted, and survived.

Tommy Watson and Luz Coco were the only South Abilenians fluent in English and, so far as Kirby could tell, the only sophisticates in the crowd, whose conversation and manner betrayed a wider knowledge of civilization. With their half-mocking existential hip form of the traditional Indian fatalism, they were like a couple of Marx brothers wandering through a Robert Flaherty documentary. They were so total a contrast, in fact, that Kirby would have loved to know their story, but they insisted he tell them first how it happened that he had bought the farm.

“It looked great when I saw it,” Kirby said. “St. Michael was just representing the real owner, some big aristocrat up in Mexico. The aristocrat couldn’t take back a mortgage on account of taxes, so the price was right because I could pay all cash.”

“Fat man?” Tommy asked. “Happy with himself?”

“That’s Innocent St. Michael,” Kirby agreed.

“It was his land,” Tommy said. “He’s been looking for a first-class fish for years.”

“I appreciate that information, Tommy,” Kirby said.

“So you’re a rich man, right?” said Luz. “You can afford a mistake.”

“Rich men,” Kirby told him, “don’t risk their ass and twenty years in jail flying pot to the States. That’s how I got the money. Oh, Jesus,” he said, remembering.

Tommy swigged home-brew and puffed pot and said, “Something else, huh?”

Kirby swigged and puffed and swigged and puffed and said, “I just gave the rest of my money to a guy in Texas for some cows.”