Scott Smith: The Ruins

"Twenty dollars," he said.

Jeff shook his head, waving this aside. He had no idea what a fair price would be, but he sensed that it was important to bargain. "Six," he said, picking a sum at random.

The driver looked appalled, as if Jeff had just leaned forward and spit onto his sandaled feet. He handed the map back to him, started to walk away.

"Eight!" Jeff called after him.

The driver turned to face him but didn't come back. "Fifteen."

"Twelve."

"Fifteen," the driver insisted.

The bus was leaving now, and the other passengers were drifting off into the town. The yellow pickup was the only cab in sight big enough to accommodate them all.

"Fifteen," Jeff agreed. He sensed that he was overpaying, and felt foolish for it. He could see that the driver was having difficulty hiding his pleasure, but no one else seemed to notice this. They were already moving toward the truck. It didn't matter; none of it mattered. This was only a stage in their journey, quickly finished. And Mathias was beside him suddenly, opening his wallet, paying the man. Jeff didn't object, didn't offer to contribute. Mathias was the reason they were here, after all. They'd be half-asleep on the beach right now if it weren't for him.

There was a small dog in the rear of the pickup, chained to a cinder block. When they approached the truck, the dog began to throw his body against the length of chain, growling and barking and drooling great strings of saliva. He was the size of a large cat-black, with white paws and a shaggy, greasy-looking coat-but he had the voice of a much larger dog. His anger, his desire to do them harm, seemed almost human. They stopped walking, stood staring.

The driver waved them on, laughing. "No problem," he said in his heavily accented English. "No problem." He lowered the tailgate, waved toward the dog, showed them how its chain only reached halfway down the truck bed. Two of them could sit up front. The other four could arrange themselves in such a way as to remain out of reach of the fierce little dog. Most of this was communicated in hand signals, punctuated with a steady recitation of those two words: "No problem, no problem, no problem…"

Stacy and Amy volunteered to sit in front. They hurried forward, yanked open the passenger-side door, and climbed inside before anyone could protest. The others warily pulled themselves up into the back. The dog's barking rose in volume. He threw himself with such force against his chain that it seemed possible he might break his neck. The driver tried to soothe the dog, murmuring to him in Mayan, but this had no apparent effect. Finally, the man just smiled, shrugging at them, and swung the tailgate closed.

The truck needed three attempts before it managed to start; then they were in motion. They swung out onto a paved road, heading away from town. After a mile or so, they turned left onto a gravel road. There were fields of some sort-Jeff couldn't tell what was growing in them, but one had a broken-down tractor in it, another a pair of horses. Then, abruptly, they were in the jungle: thick, damp-looking foliage growing right up against the road. The sun was in the center of the sky, directly above them, so it was hard to tell which direction they were heading, but he assumed it was west. The driver had kept the map. They just had to trust that he knew how to follow it.

The four of them sat with their backs flat against the tailgate, their feet drawn into their bodies, watching the dog, who continued to lunge toward them, growling and barking and slobbering without pause. It was hot, with the thick, slightly fetid humidity of a greenhouse. There was the false breeze of the truck's motion, but it wasn't enough, and soon they were sweating through their shirts. Now and then, Pablo would shout something in Greek at the dog, and they'd all laugh nervously, though they had no idea, of course, what he was saying. Even Mathias, who otherwise rarely seemed to laugh, joined them in this.

After awhile, the gravel road turned to dirt and became heavily rutted. The truck slowed, bouncing across the ruts, jostling them against one another. The larger bumps lifted the cinder block briefly into the air before slamming it back down against the truck bed. Each time this happened, the dog managed to drag it an inch or two closer to them. It seemed like they'd gone farther than the eleven miles the map had demanded. They drove more and more slowly as the road became worse and worse, the trees crowding in upon them, hanging over them, brushing against the side of the truck. A cloud of bugs gathered overhead, following their slow passage, biting their arms and necks, making them slap at themselves. Eric dug a can of mosquito repellent out of his backpack but then fumbled it, dropping it to the truck bed. It rolled toward the dog, clanged against the cinder block, coming to rest there. The dog sniffed at it briefly, then resumed his barking. Pablo was no longer shouting, and they'd stopped laughing. Time was stretching itself out-they'd gone too far-and Jeff was beginning to suspect that they'd made an immense mistake, that the man was taking them into the jungle to rob and kill them. He'd rape the girls; he'd shoot them or stab them or smash their skulls with a shovel. He'd feed them to his little dog; he'd bury their bones in the damp earth, and no one would ever hear of them again.

Then a turnaround appeared on the right-hand side of the road, and the truck pulled into it, stopped, idled. A path led off into the trees. They'd arrived. The four of them scrambled quickly over the tailgate, laughing again, abandoning the can of repellent, the dog still lunging at his length of chain, growling and barking his farewell.

Stacy was sitting by the window, which was shut tight against the day's growing heat. The truck's air conditioner was on high; she'd begun to shiver as the ride progressed, her sweat drying, goose bumps rising on her forearms. It hadn't seemed like an exceptionally long drive to her. She'd hardly noticed it, in fact, her mind floating elsewhere, fifteen years back and two thousand miles away. The color of the pickup truck: that was what triggered it. A legal-pad yellow. Her uncle had died in a car this color. Uncle Roger, her father's elder brother, caught in a Massachusetts spring downpour, trying to ease his way through a flooded patch of road. A creek had overflown its banks; it snatched the car, spun it downstream, flipped it over, then cast it aside on the edge of an apple orchard. That was where they'd found Uncle Roger, still with his seat belt on, hanging upside down, batlike, in his yellow car. Drowned.

Stacy and her parents and her two brothers were in Florida when they received the news. It was spring break, and her father had flown them to Disney World. They were staying in one room, all five of them together, her parents in one bed, the two boys in another, Stacy on a foldout cot between them. She was seven years old; her brothers were four and nine. She could remember her father on the phone, hushing them with his free hand, while he said, "What…What…What…" It was a bad connection, and he'd had to shout, repeating, in a questioning tone, everything that was said to him. "Roger…A rainstorm…Drowned…" Afterward, he'd started to cry, bent into himself, eyes clenched shut, fumbling to replace the receiver on its hook, thumping it against the night table, missing again and again, until finally Stacy's mother took it from him and hung it up herself. Stacy and her brothers were sitting on the other bed, staring in astonishment. They'd never seen their father weep, never would again. Their mother gathered them up, took them for an ice cream in the hotel restaurant, and by the time they returned, it was over. Their father was himself again, busily packing their bags. He'd already booked them seats on a plane home later that evening.