Donald Westlake - High Adventure

“Rosita,” she said.

“You’re right. You’re absolutely right.” He remembered her now. She was as short as the rest of them, but skinnier, with the wiry spareness of the born neurotic. Her eyes were large and liquid brown, cheekbones strong, mouth broad and sensual, skin like warm cocoa. She moved like a puma.

While Kirby watched the way moonlight silvered her earlobe, she took the joint from his fingers, made inhaling sounds, put the joint back where she’d found it, leaned down over him, kissed him, and exhaled smoke into his mouth.

It took a major effort of will neither to throw up nor bite her tongue in half, but he managed, and when he obediently inhaled while she exhaled, then exhaled while she inhaled, it turned out the moon was making those slow revolutions inside his head.

After a while, she lifted up and said, “You sleep out here all night, the bugs gonna bite you to death.”

“True. True.” It was a sad thought.

“So come inside,” Rosita said.

So they went inside, and soon it was morning and his body and brain were in terrible difficulties. He had a rash like poison ivy on the surface of his brain, he knew it, he could tell. He felt as though he were being digested, his whole self shriven and melted by the gastric juices inside the whale that had eaten him.

He crawled out to a sun that had approached much closer to Earth overnight, was now about 11 feet from the ground. He peered around and was not surprised to see that the rest of the human race was as stricken as he. Was there hope for mankind?

Some. Coffee, bacon, more coffee, tortillas, more coffee, a joint, and a brief retirement with Rosita all helped. The villagers doctored themselves in similar fashion, and in the afternoon the party started again. Rosita explained to Kirby how she’d always felt maybe she’d left the States a little too soon, before she’d really experienced the place, given it a chance. She was just a kid, really, when she came back. She’d always thought, she told Kirby, it might be nice to go back there some time, spend a while; with the right companion, you know. “Uh huh,” Kirby said, and went off to wander around town.

He found Luz and Tommy together, and joined them, and that was when the conversation turned to the heritage of the Maya Indians, and the mystery of their past. “At least,” Tommy said, “you fucked your own self—”

“With Innocent St. Michael’s help,” Kirby said.

“Still, you were there. We were screwed out of our rights by our ancestors. A thousand years ago, our people lived in some really class cities. Duded themselves up with gold and jade and all that stuff.”

“Human sacrifice,” Luz said, and grinned like a wolf.

“Then our people left,” Tommy said. “Property values went to hell. You got to maintain a temple, or pretty soon it’s just a pile of rocks.”

“Especially in the jungle,” Kirby said.

“That’s right. The dirt piles up, things grow, die, rot, more dirt, more things grow. Rain eats out the mortar between the stones, the whole thing goes to hell. Used to be a temple, now it’s just a hill, you can’t even see it any more.”

“Listen,” Kirby said, “you guys both used to live in cities, you gave all that up, remember?”

“Madison,” Tommy said, with curled lip. “Houston. I’m talking about our cities. Lamanai. Tikal. Colorful places.”

“Colorful ceremonies,” Luz said, with that grin again.

“I don’t know,” Kirby said. “Not to insult your ancestors, but I don’t think I’d like to live in places where they do human sacrifice.”

Luz frowned at him: “Why not?”

“I’m a human.”

“Hmmmm,” Luz said, and they grew quiet for a while, silently comtemplating the various functions of spectator and participant.

The next day, Kirby sobered himself up and kissed Rosita and flew away to become a cargo pilot again and start to dig himself out of the hole Innocent St. Michael had walked him into. And two weeks later, eyes shining, he had flown back to his dried-out land and carried two more Glad Bags up into South Abilene, and told Tommy and Luz his scheme.

“Rosita says hello,” Tommy said, tired of waiting for Kirby to catch his breath. “She says is your wife any better,” he added solemnly.

“Alas, no,” said Kirby. “She had two more violent spells, they had to put her in the strait jacket again. It’s looking pretty bad.”

“I’ll tell Rosita,” Luz said, straight-faced. “She’s very interested in the condition of your wife.”

“Yes, I know.”

Tommy said, “Those two customers from yesterday; they making trouble?”

“No, no,” Kirby said. “They bought the story all right. I’ll see them this afternoon, make the final arrangements. The problem is the next guy.”

“Yeah?”

“I got a message yesterday. He isn’t due till next week, but all of a sudden he’s coming in today.”

Tommy translated this for the others, and everybody looked distressed. Luz said, “Asshole.”

“Exactly,” Kirby said. “But it’s too late to stop him, he’s on his way. So I’ve got to stall him somehow in Belize City, and keep him from meeting the other two, and then bring him up here tomorrow. So you’ve got to get the place ready by then.”

“Not much to do,” Tommy said. “The last guys didn’t dig around a lot, like some of your people. Just the jaguar stela, basically.”

Luz said, “They didn’t even find the stone whistle.”

“The main problem is the field,” Kirby said. “The place shouldn’t look as though it gets a lot of traffic, but you can really see Cynthia’s landing tracks there.”

“So we’ll mush them up a little,” Tommy said.

“Right.” Kirby looked serious. “And, Tommy,” he said, “don’t do your little peeking-out-of-the-bushes number any more, okay? If one of those guys had seen you yesterday, he’d have had a heart attack right there. It’s bad business to kill the customers.”

“I never have any fun,” Tommy said.

“Do you like the conch?” Innocent asked, pronouncing it conk, as in conk on the head, and Valerie said, “Very much.” Innocent smiled. “I take all my girlfriends here,” he said. “Before sex, after sex. They always like the conch. They like it better after sex.”

Valerie didn’t quite know how to answer that, nor did it seem possible to eat the firm white conch immediately after such a remark, nor drink some more of the Italian white wine, so she filled her mouth with salad instead.

Delicious salad. Very nice restaurant at the back of a private house, more outside than in, the widely spaced white tables surrounded by the flowers and plants of a nursery, that being the proprietors’ other business. Hanging plants, lengths of tall picket fence, moist dirt floor beyond the tiled part, areas roofed with sheets of translucent plastic.

Tropical flowers are so much more blatant than the flowers of southern Illinois. In southern Illinois, the flowers aren’t all in hot, hot oranges and yellows and reds, and they don’t all look like human genitalia. Idealized male and female parts hung in the air and protruded from clay pots and peeked with false modesty out of veils of shiny green leaves.

The waitress came over to see how they were doing, and Innocent put an arm around her hips, his hand caressing her leg. “So you’re working here now, huh?” he said.

“Just for a little while.” She was short, plumpish in a jolly way, with a very pretty face and reddish-brown flesh. She seemed not to mind Innocent’s hand on her leg. “I got tired being cooped up in an office all day,” she said. “Maybe I’ll go back to Belize.”