Donald Westlake - High Adventure

Luz laughed. Tommy tried to look sympathetic, but he was grinning. Kirby swigged and puffed, and then he too laughed. “Well,” he said, “I guess I’m not as smart as I think I am.”

“Nobody is,” Tommy said. “But what the hell, we can still enjoy ourselves.”

They enjoyed themselves. Various anonymous foods — some animal, some vegetable — were consumed, all liberally laced with hot peppers and other explosive devices. The home-brew cooled the throat while the marijuana cooled the brain. A plastic radio picked up a salsa station from Guatemala, fading in and out while the sun went down and the breeze whispered funny stories among the leaves in the upper branches, to which the stream chuckled and giggled below. Various people showed what they looked like dancing on uneven ground while both drunk and stoned. Night fell, and so did many of the villagers. Fires were started; in the orangey-red light, black ghosts whipped by, and people spoke to them in their native tongue.

Kirby lay on the cooling ground, head propped on an empty inverted clay stewpot, half-empty jug in one hand and faintly smoldering joint in the other, as he watched the moon come up over his mountain. Seated cross-legged beside him, dark face stony and rough-sculpted in the moonlight, Luz Coco told his story: “I was a kid,” he said, “my Mama took up with an oilman.”

“Rich oilman?”

“That’s what he said.” Luz spat at the fire, which spat back. “Just a ragged-ass geologist, is all, wanted somebody with him in his sleeping bag. Looks for oil in these hills around here, works for Esso. They called it Esso then.”

“There’s oil here?” Kirby was trying to find his mouth with the unlit end of the joint.

“Lotta good it does,” Luz said. “Oil’s got to be in lakes, down underground, or it’s no use. This limestone around here, the oil’s just in millions of little bubbles, not worth shit. Cost too much to pull it up.”

“You know all that, huh?”

“I grew up with it,” Luz said. “That’s the story. The village threw my Mama out, we went to Houston.”

“Back up a little bit,” Kirby said. “I don’t think you touched all the bases.”

“These assholes around here,” Luz said, waving an arm to indicate each and every resident of South Abilene, “they’re very strict, man. Specially about sex. You fuck around the wrong place, you’re in trouble .”

“I get it,” Kirby said. “Your mother was sleeping with this geologist—”

“And my Daddy wasn’t dead yet,” Luz pointed out.

“So the tribe threw her out.”

“The village threw her out.”

“Okay,” Kirby said. “I buy that.”

“She took us kids along,” Luz said, “mostly because she was pissed off. I was nine, Rosita was one.”

“Rosita?”

“My sister. You met her before.”

“Okay.”

“So we went to Houston, and Cary’d forgot— Did I tell you? His name was Cary Smith.”

“Really?”

“He was John Smith,” Luz said, “my Mama’d never found him. But she got him. We went up through Mexico, we tracked into the States, got to Houston, and old Cary’d forgot to mention Mrs. Smith.”

“Whoops,” said Kirby. “So then what?”

“Mama signed on as the maid. Lois didn’t give a shit.”

“That was Mrs. Smith?”

“She was okay,” Luz said. “Had three kids of her own, older than us. We all grew up together, big fucked-up family. Tommy come to visit a couple of times—”

“Wait a minute. Tommy Watson?”

“Yeah, he’s my cousin.”

“He came up from South Abilene to visit? ”

“Naw,” Luz said, “South Abilene didn’t want to know about us. Tommy was in Madison, Wisconsin.”

“Wait a minute,” Kirby said. Surging to his feet, he reeled away into the darkness. He propped himself against a tree for a while, listening to the splash, then found another jar of home-brew and came back and fell on the ground again beside Luz. “Madison, Wisconsin,” he said.

“You from there? Cold, man.”

“Tommy was there.”

“Sure,” Luz said. “His old man was with the college, the scientists took him up. He knew all that carving stuff, you know, the old arts and crafts baloney from the old days, he taught it and, uh... What do you call it when you say this thing’s okay, this thing’s a piece of shit?”

“Validate?”

“That’s cars.”

“Authenticate,” Kirby decided. “Say if it’s real or fake.”

“That’s it. Tommy’s old man did that. Tommy could do it, too, but he’s like me. We’ve seen the world, man, you can have it.”

“How’d you both wind up back here?”

“Tommy’s old man died, is how with him,” Luz said. “Tommy brought the body back, he was nineteen, he felt relaxed here, he never did like that snow shit, he was home again.”

“Same with you?”

“Naw. I’m sixteen, Rosita’s eight, Mama gets mad at Cary, we go off to L.A., get into some very weird scenes. Mama’s dealing, we’re into all this heaviness, Chinamen, Colombians, I took it three years, I said, I got to get out of this. I got in the car, head south, turns out Rosita’s hiding in the trunk, she can’t stand that shit either. So we go down to San Diego, sell the car, come on down south.”

“Where’s your Mama now?”

“Alderson, West Virginia.”

“That’s a funny place to be.”

“Not that funny. It’s the Federal pen for women.”

“Oh,” said Kirby. He thought a few seconds, and then he said, “Luz?”

“Present.”

“If these people here are so moral...”

Some time went by. Luz said, “Yeah?”

Kirby woke up: “What?”

“So what’s the question?” Luz said. “If these people here are so moral, what?”

“Well,” Kirby said, taking a hit as an aid to thought, “to begin with, how about all this pot?”

“What’s immoral about pot?” Luz wanted to know.

“Good point,” Kirby said.

“You go on south,” Luz told him, “you got people down there, all these mushrooms, these button things, they got peyote coming outa their pores, man. You got people down there, nobody’s seen their eyes in years. ”

“Okay,” Kirby said. “Okay.”

“Pot and brew, now, you just relax. Sex, now, that’s family, it’s property, people’s feelings, it’s, uh, it’s, uh, it’s politeness.”

“Got it,” Kirby said. “Sexually conservative, makes sense.”

“So your question is,” said Luz, “how come these simple, conservative, primitive assholes put up with spoiled goods like Tommy and Rosita and me. Right?”

“I guess so,” Kirby said.

“Everybody’s cousins,” Luz said. “That’s number one. And our Mama, Tommy’s daddy, they took us away, and on our own we came back, that’s number two.”

“Okay.”

“Everybody knows we’re different, cause we were out there , but we’re still family.”

“That’s nice.”

“We just lay back,” Luz said. “Tommy and Rosita and me, we just coast with it.”

“Go with the flow,” Kirby suggested.

“You got it. Where else we gonna do that? Play by our own rules and they accept us, man. Listen, I’ll be right back.” Luz rolled over, and left. On all fours.

Kirby slept, or maybe not. Maybe those weren’t dreams. The white moon rolled slowly across the blacktop sky. Then a form slid between him and the moon, and collapsed in a flutter of skirts. “Hello,” she said.

This was the sister of Luz, Kirby remembered that now, and if the moon weren’t revolving in those slow circles up there he’d probably even remember her name. “Harya,” he said.