Jonathan Nasaw - Twenty-Seven Bones

“Does anybody know you’re here?” Dr. Phil Epp, gaunt and bearded, turned around in the passenger seat. The beard was one of those mustacheless Abe Lincoln affairs. He looked a little like Lincoln, too, but even more like photographs Andy had seen of mad old John Brown-especially around the eyes. “Anybody see you waiting?”

“Negative and negative.”

“What did you tell your boss?” Dr. Emily Epp, a heavy-bosomed woman in her early forties, a good two decades younger than her husband, with gingery hair, gray eyes, a wide sensuous mouth, and a nubbin nose, was behind the wheel.

“Didn’t have to tell him anything. Monday and Tuesday are my regular days off.”

“How about your girlfriend? You have a girlfriend?” She adjusted the rearview mirror so she could see Andy’s face. He could see only the reflection of her slightly protuberant eyes, lit spookily from below by the green dashboard lights.

“Nobody in particular.”

“Bet you get a lot of pussy, being a bartender and all,” said Phil.

Andy had done his share of barroom boasting in his time, but for reasons he couldn’t quite pin down, he found that discussing his sex life with these two made him feel a little… icky, was the unlikely word that popped into his mind. “So where are we headed? You can tell me now, can’t you?”

“Here, you tell me.” Phil handed him the famous map-or rather, a xerographic copy. Andy had been shown the original only once, last week, and then only the back of it.

“Looks like-okay, it’s definitely St. Luke. Of course, I could have guessed that by the fact that we’re not in a boat.”

“Go get ’em, Einstein,” said Emily.

“Okay-well here’s Fred’ Harbor…” With Phil leaning over the back of his seat, Andy traced the coast north, then east with his forefinger. “And here are the Carib cliffs…so that must be…Smuggler’s Cove?”

“And that’s all you need to know for now.” Phil snatched the map back with a hairy hand, refolded it, and slipped it into one of the many pockets of his long-sleeved safari shirt.

They drove on in silence, following the clockwise coast route Andy had traced with his finger. It was a moonless night, but the stars were Caribbean bright. Andy slid the bucket he was sitting on over to the left side of the van (which in accordance with St. Luke law and custom was proceeding on the left side of the two-lane road), parted the curtains over the side windows, and pressed his nose to the glass. Looking straight down, he could see the thin white line of the surf out beyond the base of the Carib cliffs, so named because four hundred years ago the last survivors of that fierce, ill-fated tribe, men, women, and children, had jumped to their deaths from these bluffs rather than be enslaved by the Spaniards and sent to work in the Dominican gold mines.

“Have you guys ever done a dig at the bottom of the cliffs?” asked Andy, closing the curtain again. The Epps were a husband-and-wife team of anthropologists and/or archaeologists-Andy had never been exactly clear what the difference was, if any.

“Oh yes,” replied Emily, grinning at him over her shoulder, displaying a chipped front tooth. “It’s a boneyard down there.” She made that sound like a good thing.

“Honey, you don’t keep your eyes on the road, our bones are gonna be down there with ’em,” Phil cautioned.

“And won’t that complicate the archaeology in another four hundred years!” said Emily cheerfully. Then, to Andy: “We originally came down to St. Luke to study the Caribs. Know what the best thing about ’em is? They’re completely extinct: no MLDs-Most Likely Descendants-to make trouble over the bones.”

The highway descended from the heights in a series of switchbacks. Bennie didn’t seem to have any trouble keeping his balance, but Andy’s bucket kept shifting under him. He stood up, bent almost double, with a foot on either side of the transmission hump and a hand on the back of each front seat, and surfed the curves the rest of the way down to sea level.

A few minutes after they passed Smuggler’s Cove, a broad star-lit lagoon ringed by poisonous manchineel trees, Emily slowed the van to a crawl. Phil stuck his head out the passenger window. “There!”

A feathery, wind-sculpted divi-divi tree on the right marked the turnoff. Emily jerked the wheel; the van left the highway and began following a faint set of tire tracks inland, then west again, back up into the rain forest hills.

The tracks petered out shortly after the forest canopy closed above them, shutting out the starlight. Emily turned off the lights and switched off the ignition. After a moment the jungle sounds started up again-mongooses and their prey rustling in the underbrush, nocturnal black witch parrots screaming in the high forest canopy-but Andy waited in vain for his sight to return.

“Smell that?” whispered Phil.

Andy took a sniff. “Smells like…Juicy Fruit.”

Phil laughed and tapped him on the nose with the stick of gum he’d been dangling only inches from Andy’s face-that’s how dark it was.

Bennie broke trail with his machete. Emily and Phil followed. All three were wearing miner’s helmets with state-of-the-art lamps that allowed them to switch between red laser and white LED beams. Andy hauled gear and brought up the rear. Before they set out, they had smeared themselves with insect repellent, but the insects didn’t appear to be repelled at all, thought Andy-they weren’t even vaguely offended.

Within a few hundred yards, the stars began to wink into view again. This was second-growth forest, low and tangled. The entrance to the cave complex was only three feet high, set into a bluff hillock, camouflaged with brush and creeper vines. Phil and Bennie cleared the mouth of the hole. Phil switched his helmet lamp from LED white to laser red and crawled through first, followed by Bennie. Emily motioned for Andy to follow them. He got down on his hands and knees, stared down the sloping rock-floored tunnel, then looked up over his shoulder at Emily, shielding his eyes from the glare of her helmet lamp.

“I don’t think I can do it,” he told her, backing away from the hole.

“You said you weren’t claustrophobic.”

“I’m not-I mean I never was before. But it’s like there’s something deep inside me screaming don’t go down there.”

“A hundred thousand dollars,” she said. “That’s what your share could come to.”

“What’s the holdup?” yelled Phil.

“We’ll be right down.” Emily took off her helmet and got down on her hands and knees in front of Andy. The first few buttons of her safari shirt were open, revealing an impressive, if pendulous cleavage barely contained by an industrial-strength underwire brassiere. She swayed forward, pressed her forehead against his. “You’ll never forgive yourself if you don’t do this,” she whispered.

He looked up. Their eyes met. For Andy it was a little like looking into that tunnel. Don’t go down there, he thought, as she touched her lips softly to his.

Monday morning, seven o’clock. Holly Gold flung out a bare arm and slapped the alarm clock into silence. I’m back in my own bed, she told herself-it was a little game she liked to play some mornings. Laurel is still alive, the rest was all a dream. If I listen closely I can hear the waves crashing against the rocks at Big Sur, and when I open my eyes and look out the window, the trees I see will be windblown cypresses and Monterey pines, and beyond them the sky will be cool and gray.

Then the mosquito netting rustled, a small warm body crawled into bed beside Holly, and she was reminded again that her new life on St. Luke had its compensations too.

“Good morning, baby doll,” said Holly.