William Lashner - Bitter Truth

“Any word,” I asked, “of a foreigner who has set up a ranch in the jungles nearby?”

“Not someone who hasn’t come through here. Most of the ranch owners take lodgers and use us to help book their places. But it’s a big jungle, mate. If you wanted to get lost you’d have no problem getting lost here.”

After Eva’s, Canek left to make arrangements to stay with people he had in the area. I had hired him as my guide, at ninety-five dollars a day for as long as I was in the west, and he seemed pleased by the arrangement, as was I. A friend in foreign places is rare, and one you can trust, as I trust Canek Panti, is even rarer. And who better to guide me through these jungles than a Mayan? Alone now, I took a walk around town. There were few beggars in San Ignacio, no one on the street trying to peddle me dope, and I enjoyed the walk despite the heat. I showed my photograph to storekeepers, to passersby, to the old folk sitting in the town circle at the mouth of the bridge, but no one recognized the man I am hunting. I asked the mobs of taxi drivers I saw on every corner with no better luck. I even thought to check out the waiters at my hotel. There is a restaurant overlooking the pool and it is a rather nice place that is rumored to serve the best steaks in Belize and if someone wanted to slip out of the jungle for a cocktail and a hearty meal this is where he would slip, but they all examined the picture, one after another, and shook their heads.

While on my walk, a car with speakers on top trailed a huge colorful placard through the city’s streets. The placard was advertising the Circus Suarez, in town for one night only, with its prime attraction: “7 Osos Blancos Gigantes.” The lady at the hotel told me that people were coming from all over the Cayo to see the circus and that children were being asked to bring in stray dogs to feed the seven polar bears. The circus tent was raised just up the hill from my hotel and I walked the grounds before the circus was to start, searching the waiting mob for the face of a killer. I searched until the crowd surged madly through the tiny entrance of the tent. I didn’t go in myself. I felt enough out of place in Belize as it was; I didn’t need to see seven polar bears doing tricks in the heat of Central America.

As I walked back down the hill to my hotel, walking along a shallow open sewer, I saw something sitting in the thin stream of excrement. I stepped closer. It was a frog, a huge frog, muscular and still, as big as a head, sitting silent, breathing darkly, staring back at me with deep menace. I spun around quickly, filled with an urgent panic, certain I was being followed. There was no one there.

The next day was market day in San Ignacio. Canek had volunteered to go off to the outlying farms to show around the photograph, so I strolled the market alone. It was set up in the middle of a dirt plaza not far from the river. Ragged trucks from the outlying farms were displaying their fare, forming an alley in the shape of an L, and buses had come bringing shoppers from all over the Cayo. Men in hats, cowboy hats or dirty baseball hats, were sitting on the covered beds of their trucks or sitting on plastic pails or standing before sacks of rice, sacks of beans, piles of cucumbers, boxes of tubers, cartons of eggs, melons and onions, peppers and carrots, black beans, pumpkin seeds, shoes, cabbages, more shoes. Women sat on the ground in front of herbs spread out on empty canvas bags. The men and women were talking Spanish or the strange language I had heard Canek speak with the ferryman, Mayan. Across a stone wall were stretched yards and yards of used clothing. I stared at everything as if my eyes were hungry, the fruits, the people, the blazing colors, showing the photograph, getting smiles but no positive response. Until a handsome young man with a round face and a mustache nodded his head in recognition.

He wore a wrinkled white long-sleeved shirt and grayed jeans and sandals and tightly slung around his shoulder was the strap of a bag, with only a piece of sheepskin to keep it from digging into his shoulder.

“You recognize him?” I asked.

He answered in Mayan and nodded his head.

“Where did you see him?”

He answered in Mayan and nodded his head.

“Do you speak any English at all?”

He answered in Mayan and nodded his head.

“Can I buy you a Belikin?” I said, stressing the name of the beer and lifting my hand as if I was chugging.

He answered in Mayan and nodded his head and smiled warmly. He walked with me to Eva’s, where the owner served us up two beers and brought his cook from the back to act as my translator. His name was Rudi, the man from the market said, and his story was intriguing as all hell.

He had been working on his family’s farm when a man, not a foreigner, came up to the house in a truck and said he needed to buy a great deal of supplies. Rudi sold the man what he could from his farm and went with him in the truck to the other farms in the area to purchase the rest. For what he couldn’t buy at the farms he went to the same market where I had found Rudi and bought sacks of rice, sacks of beans, crates of chickens, piles of assorted vegetables and roots. When the whole load was put into the truck the man offered Rudi one hundred Belizean dollars, about fifty dollars American, to help him deliver the produce. Together, Rudi and the man drove the truck to a spot on the Macal River, just past one of the jungle lodges, where an old wooden canoe with a motor was beached and tied to a stake. Rudi and the man loaded up what they could on the canoe and began to motor south, up the river. It was a long trip upriver and often Rudi and the man had to get into the water and walk the canoe through mild rapids. Finally, the man guided the boat to the riverbank beside a pile of big rocks and beneath a giant kepak tree, bigger and older than any Rudi had seen by the river before. The man told Rudi to unload the produce onto the bank while he carried it, load by load, up to the site. Rudi was ordered not to leave the river under any circumstances and when the man gave the order he fingered the intricately carved handle of his machete. The man then hefted a sack of rice and disappeared up a path into the thick jungle. He was gone for twenty minutes before he returned for another load. It took an hour to unload the first boat and three boatloads to take the entire contents of the truck up the river. On the last of the three trips upriver, when the boat was approaching the pile of rocks and the giant kepak, Rudi saw a man staring out at them from the jungle, a foreigner. He was there for just a moment before he disappeared but Rudi had seen him clearly. And the face he had seen peering out of the jungle, he was sure, was the face in the photograph.

Canek and I spent the next day making arrangements, finding a canoe, getting together any supplies we might need. Tomorrow we are going onto the river, searching for the pile of rocks and the great ancient kepak tree that will lead me to my quarry. Canek tells me that kepak is the Mayan word for the cottonwood tree and that the Mayans believe that when the last of the cottonwoods die, all life in the rain forest will be destroyed. The tree seems a fittingly dire symbol for the man I am hunting. He bought the destruction of Jacqueline Shaw and Edward Shaw for his own vile purposes and now it is time for me to start making him pay. He’s there, I know it, on the river, and I know he knows I know it. Of the people to whom I showed the picture, someone knows someone who knew to get in touch with him, I am sure. He could have killed me had he wanted to long before I arrived in San Ignacio, but he wants me to come. Maybe his new jungle life is lonely and he wants the company. Or maybe he needs someone to whom to crow. He is expecting me and I won’t disappoint him. I am very close now to collecting my fortune, I am sure. And if he has other ideas, if he intends for me to be another victim, I figure I’ll be perfectly safe as long as I’m with my friend, my guide, and my protector, the honorable Canek Panti.