Donald Westlake - High Adventure

These were not marijuana buyers. And if they were, they would meet Kirby in Florida, not here.

Pocketing his toothpick, Innocent went inside to chat with the Immigration man who’d checked the pansy-boys’ passports. They were named Alan Witcher and Gerrold Feldspan, they lived at the same address on Christopher Street in New York City, and each listed his occupation as “antique dealer.”

Innocent went back outside, frowning slightly, feeling a bubble of gas in his stomach. The pickup was gone. He wished he could fly. Not with a plane or a helicopter, but just by himself, like Superman. Except that he wouldn’t like that foolish posture with the arms over one’s head, as though diving. Arms folded, perhaps, or hands casually in jacket pockets, he would like to be able to lift into the sky like an airship, like a dirigible, and float along behind Kirby, unknown, unseen.

What was Kirby’s business with those two? Where was he taking them? To his land? “There’s nothing there, ” Innocent grumbled aloud.

He should know.

“Sweeeeeeeettt,” said the tinamou.

“Kackle-icker- caw ,” said the toucan.

“Bibble bibble ibble bibble bibble,” said the black howler monkey.

“Sssssss, sss,” said the coral snake.

“This way, gentlemen,” said Kirby. “Watch out for snakes.” He thumped his machete on a fallen tree trunk, which said throk. “The noise keeps them in their holes,” he explained.

Witcher and Feldspan, having long since abandoned their earlier pretense at heterosexuality, had been nervously holding one another’s hands since before Kirby’s little six-seater Cessna had landed. Now, at talk of snakes, they pressed shoulders together and gazed round-eyed at the deceptively peaceful green. Well, it gave them something other than the law to be nervous about.

“I bought this land as an investment,” Kirby explained, which was true enough. “Good potential for grazing, as you can see.”

Witcher and Feldspan obediently looked about themselves, but were clearly still thinking more about snakes than about grazing land.

(A fer-de-lance slithered by, unnoticed.) Nevertheless, at the moment, at this particular moment, the land was very plausible indeed. It began on the east with the fairly level grassy field where Kirby had landed, the slowing plane shushing through knee-deep grasses and clover, the whole area just crying out for a herd of beef cattle. Westward toward the Maya Mountains was the jungly upper parcel into which he was now leading them; at the moment it was rather too overgrown with trees and vines and shrubbery, but a person with vision could imagine it cleared, could visualize the trees themselves being used to build a barn just over there , could just see the white sprawling manor at the top of the ridge, like something out of a Civil War novel, commanding a view of all this rich grazing land below.

It had been just this time of year when Innocent St. Michael had shown Kirby this land, and when Kirby had scraped together every penny he could find or borrow to buy it. Just this time of year, two years ago, and Kirby was still struggling to get out from under the mess he’d made of things. But he’d do it, he’d make it. He had the system now.

A self-assured and easygoing fellow of 31, who made his living mostly by flying marijuana bales from northern Belize to southern Florida, Kirby had always thought of himself as pretty sharp. In Belize he had seen the growing influx of American immigrants, attracted by the good climate, the stable government, the cheap and plentiful land. In Texas, where he had worked for a while flying bales of feed to cattle on a ranch which was itself rather larger than the entire state of Delaware, he had seen how the combination of good grazing land and herds of beef cattle could provide its owners incredible wealth.

Texas land, of course, had all been gobbled up well over a century ago. But here was Belize, and here was Kirby in on the ground floor, and the vision of himself as a cattle baron was a pleasing one. (Satin shirts; he’d learn to ride a horse.) Not bad for a boy from Troy, New York, who had been taught to be a pilot by the United States Air Force, but who was of too independent a mind either to stay with the military or work for one of the commercial airlines. His Cessna, which he had named Cynthia, had been bought used from a dealer in Teterboro, in New Jersey, and flown south in easy stages, Kirby finding different temporary jobs along the way. He had met some sharpies, and had dealt with tough guys on both sides of the law, and had never been stung. He was a sharp bright boy, and proud of it.

And then he met Innocent St. Michael.

“A lot of Americans are coming down here,” he told Witcher and Feldspan, leading them deeper into the jungle, “because there’s just so much available land. Here we are in a country the size and shape of New Jersey, and there’s a hundred fifty thousand people here. Do you know how many people there are in New Jersey?”

“No one I know,” said Witcher. He was recovering from the thought of snakes.

“I had an aunt in New Jersey once,” said Feldspan, “but she went to Florida and died.”

“There are seven million people in New Jersey,” Kirby said. “And only a hundred fifty thousand here.” He throkked another tree bole, to punish them for being flip, then chopped his way through some dangling vines. There was a well-worn path he and the Indians used, but the customers found it more dramatic if Kirby hacked a fresh path for them through the jungle to the site. And the customer is always right.

“This is awfully wild country, isn’t it?” Witcher said, clutching Feldspan’s elbow with his free hand.

“Just unpopulated,” Kirby said. “Human beings haven’t lived here since— Well, you’re about to see it, aren’t you?”

“Are we?” They looked around again at the increasingly dense flora, seeing nothing but shiny green leaves and ropy vines and tree trunks still garbed in their green rainy-season mold. Kirby had led them the long way around through the thickest part of his personal jungle, and now he pointed the machete ahead and slightly to the left, saying, “Just through there. Wait; let me clear some of this stuff out of the way.”

Chop; slash; whack. Vines and branches fell away, creating a window in the bumpy wall of green, through which the partly cleared hilltop could be seen, rising steeply upward another 60 feet or more from where they stood. Stippled with a stubble of grasses and brush and a few twisted dwarf trees, the slope ended at a bare conical top. “There,” Kirby said, stepped back, smiled, and let the boys have a look.

They looked. They stared. All thought of snakes was forgotten, all thought of the laws they were here to break was swept clean out of their heads. Hushed, Feldspan said, “Is that it?”

Kirby pointed again with the machete. “You see there on the right, about halfway up?”

They saw; they had to. “Steps,” breathed Feldspan.

“The temple,” breathed Witcher.

“Let’s have a closer look,” said Kirby.

“Oh, do let’s!”

Kirby laid about himself with the machete, enthusiastically clearing a path up through the thicket to the clearer part, where he paused, tinked an artfully casual foot-square stone with the machete tip, and waited for the city boys, a bit out of breath, to catch up. “Like I told you in New York,” he said, “I’m no archaeologist, I don’t know much about this kind of thing, but what I guess is, the temple probably starts right around here.”

Feldspan was the first to notice the stone. “Look!” he cried, excitement quivering in his voice. “A paving block! This has been shaped! ”