Donald Westlake - High Adventure

There were only five Cruz children, but at moments like this they seemed like 50, swarming around the plane, chirping with excitement, asking a million questions, demanding the right to carry some package from the plane to the house. “But I don’t have anything,” Kirby kept telling them, elbow-deep in kids. “Your goddam old man brought it all out in the truck.”

The pickup truck, in fact, was parked in its shed beside the chicken house, with the dishwasher still in it. The other boxes were gone, however, and Kirby was not surprised, on entering the house, to find Manny listing slightly, a happy smile on his face and a glass of red liquid in his hand.

Manny Cruz did love Danish Marys. Whenever Kirby was gone for a while to the States, he would bring back, along with clothing and toys and appliances and cookbooks for Estelle, a few bottles of aquavit for Manny. To mix with it, Estelle grew tomatoes year-round in the kitchen garden, and the necessary spices were for sale eight miles away in Orange Walk.

Four years ago, when Kirby had first met Manny, the skinny little man with the happy smile and the brightly shining eyes was one of life’s more cheerful losers. A subsistence farmer on rough land that had been stripped in the nineteenth century by the lumber industry, he was — like most of the other rural people in this comer of Belize — also a marijuana farmer in a very small way, tending his little field, turning over the occasional bale of really fine sinsemilla for some really fine greenbacks. To Kirby, then, Manny had been simply another Spanish/Indian local supplier in tom workpants, with gaps between his teeth, the only difference being that Manny Cruz tended to smile more than most people, so his tooth-gaps were more memorable.

But then the DEA, the Drug Enforcement Administration from the United States, in one of its doomed, humorless, arrogant, sporadic efforts to force the Belizean government to dry up the finest source of foreign exchange in the whole country, compelled the local authorities at least to make a gesture , arrest somebody , destroy some patch of marijuana plants, and poor Manny turned out to be the last one standing when the music stopped. The next thing anybody knew, his pot crop (and part of Estelle’s com crop as well) had been burned, his 18-year-old International Harvester step-in van (still reading Lady Betty on the side, under all the newer coats of paint) had been confiscated by the law as having been involved in the transportation of drugs, and Manny was sentenced to 20 years in Lynam Prison down by Dangriga.

Well, the whole thing was a shock to everybody in the area. The taking of the truck, the Cruz family’s only means of travel to and from civilization, seemed as Draconian to most people as the removal of Manny from his children for a term longer than their childhoods. They would all be married by the time he got out.

A kind of unofficial Cruz family welfare program started up among the other farmers in the area, as well as some of the merchants from around Orange Walk and some of the middlemen in the marijuana trade and even a few of the North American pilots who fly the stuff out, including Kirby. At that time, Kirby had been around the scene only about five months, and was still settling in. He had an unsatisfactory relationship going with a legal secretary in Homestead, he was beginning to be interested in Belize as a place rather than merely a cargo stop, and he saw a way he might both help the Cruz family and introduce a little stability into his own life.

Estelle Cruz, as short and skinny and brown and gnarled as a cigarillo, had at first thought Kirby was suggesting a sexual relationship between them during the term of her husband’s incarceration, and she was edging toward the machete before he managed to make his proposition clear. What it came down to was, he wanted a home.

There was a pasture in front of the Cruz house that could serve as a landing strip for Cynthia — better than some of the jungle strips he normally used — and a good grove of trees at one end in which to park her. A mule shed on one side of the house could be enclosed for a separate apartment for himself. Estelle could cook and clean for him, the children already knew better than to tell their business to strangers, and Kirby would have a real base of operations at the Belize end of his route.

What he offered in exchange was, in effect, the twentieth century. The Cruz family homestead was too far off the beaten track to tap into the public power lines, and they’d never been able to afford their own gasoline-powered electric generator. Kirby promised to supply electricity, and the appliances to be run by it. No actual cash would change hands between himself and the Cruzes, but he would provide them with things and they would provide him with a home.

It was a fine deal for everyone. While some Cruz and Vasquez (Estelle’s family) relatives built the addition onto the house, complete with a concrete floor and glass in the windows, Kirby brought in load after load of materiel. His southern flights had always been cargoless — except for wads of greenbacks, with which to pay for the northbound cargos — and money at that time seemed no problem (he hadn’t yet met Innocent St. Michael), so down came two composting toilets, an electricity-generating windmill, four solar panels, a gasoline-driven generator for emergencies, a washing machine, a television set, a refrigerator, three air conditioners, four blue-light bug zappers, assorted lamps, and a Cuisinart. And from a dealer in Belize City came the used pickup, which Estelle could use whenever Kirby didn’t need it, replacing the confiscated van.

Even without the Cuisinart, Estelle had been a wonderful cook, and modem appliances simply made her output more lavish. In Belize, Kirby ate better than ever before in his life, and when he looked out his window he could see the spot where his food had been growing until earlier that same day. The Cruz family was company without being intrusive (he was gradually learning rudimentary Spanish and Kekchi from the kids), his quarters and clothing were kept scrupulously clean, and during those extended intervals when he was up north he knew his goods were safe.

When, in the middle of all this, the Belizean authorities released Manuel Cruz from prison after less than nine months of his term — the DEA apparently at last looking the other way — it changed nothing. Kirby and Manny hit it off very well, Kirby teaching Manny cribbage while learning from Manny an Indian game involving small stones and a number of cups, and Manny sometimes helped out in small ways.

Bringing the pickup truck to town today, Manny had carried a shopping list from Estelle — cloth and thread for the girls’ school dresses, salt, filters for Mr. Coffee — so he’d spent the afternoon downtown while Kirby was off showing the temple. After dropping Witcher and Feldspan at their hotel, Kirby had given the pickup to Manny and gone to see a fellow about a shipment to be taken north on Friday. For security’s sake, they’d had their conversation in the fellow’s Toyota, driving around and about for a while, there being some disagreement about money. Finally, consensus having been reached, the fellow dropped Kirby at the Municipal Airport, from which Manny and the pickup and the dishwasher and the other goods had long since departed.

Feeling weary from his long day, and a bit cranky because of arguing about money with a man in an air-conditioned Toyota, Kirby had flown north and west, less than 60 miles, and when the familiar design of the Cruz homestead had spread out below he had smiled and relaxed, not even caring that Manny hadn’t yet had the pasture cleared.

Estelle, who was very short, always looked up at Kirby with adoration glistening in her eyes. For a while he’d been awkward with her, thinking her feelings toward him were sexual, but everything became all right once he understood her passion was religious. On the surface a rational modern woman, who enjoyed the Guatemalan and Mexican television stations as much as the kids did and who frequently talked back at the announcers during news broadcasts, somewhere in her deepest soul Estelle was still a pre-Columbian artifact herself, an unreconstructed Maya. Kirby was the creature who dropped out of the sky, bringing electricity and magic, bringing comfort and riches. What was the name of such a creature? Exactly.