Амброз Бирс - Flight or Fright - 17 Turbulent Tales

If there was anything in the world that could make Ryan cross himself and utter a prayer, it would be the thing in his bag, but not because he believed in magic. Smuggling a kilo of uncut Colombian shouting powder might net thirty grand before it got stepped on. For the two pounds of handcarved hardwood in his bag, Ryan might take twice that amount, but if he got caught down here, extradition and federal time in the states would be the best he could pray for.

Ryan Rayburn III never set out to create the life he lived. He casually baited the lines and let it come to him. He blew his trust fund on a BA in art history, then trashed all remaining parental goodwill by bumming around South America instead of getting a job. After three years of misadventures and hard-won discoveries in the darkest corners of the earth, he finally learned the one lesson that his parents had tried to teach him, back in Palo Alto. Being poor sucked.

Back in California, Ryan resolved to convert his impractical degree into a career. He trawled the gallery scene and started picking up contacts for private art collectors and stumbled into the hothouse sub-culture of pre-Columbian artifact freaks. He did shopping trips from Mexico to Tierra Del Fuego, cutting out layers of middle-men until he had a dozen dot-com millionaires in his client list. Half the antiquities in South American museums were fake, and archaeologists worked in secret to keep looters at bay. The UN and US Customs had cracked several rings that operated around Palo Alto and Stanford, but Ryan didn’t move in show-off circles. His clients didn’t flash their grave robbery trophies at charity galas, and he didn’t trade in the crap you’d see in National Geographic .

The Xorocua lived in the high alpine valleys of the Cordillera de Talamanca, less than two hundred miles from the capitol, and yet a day’s hike from the nearest navigable road. They were initially believed to be a virgin Stone Age tribe until 1950, when they were documented by a Smithsonian photographer.

His photographs of the Xorocua harvest ritual told a tragic story of prior contact buried in the bizarre ceremony. A man in a crude bull costume rampaged around the huts of the village all night until just before dawn, when a procession of masked guardian spirits arrived to defeat the bull by spitting blood upon it until it weakened and died. The guardians in their carven masks drank corn liquor mixed with various poisons to summon into their bellies the diablitos , who repaid in kind the torments and genocide that decimated their tribe and drove the survivors into the most remote cloud-forests of Talamanca.

The Xorocua were primitive by any standard, having struggled too long and hard with basic survival to devise any elaborate cultural treasures. Their greeting to strangers was a formalized plea for food. But the harvest festival masks in those photographs were a revelation.

Each mask was “mouth-painted”—airbrushed using paint spat through a reed—in livid, smoldering colors and elaborate motifs more like runes than abstract motifs. Despite their hostile rejection of the outside world, the Xorocua masks inspired a collectors’ frenzy in the 70s. By 1982, the last Xorocua had died from influenza. But the neighboring tribes still feared their masks.

With no analog anywhere in the region, they were stranger and more elaborate and fearsome than any Maya or Aztec deities, almost Polynesian in their fusion of human, insect, floral and animal features, and imbued with a feral malevolence that made the most severe Gothic gargoyles look like Care Bears.

From what he could find in print, he gathered they were a nasty variant on the Latin American fairies, known as duendes . The word came from the Spanish duenos —or owners—because they were the true owners of any habitat they shared with humans. But the neighboring tribes’ Spanish name for them, and for the Xorocua themselves—was more fitting for spirits never quite seen, but keenly feared— diablitos , or “little devils.”

Ryan had scored some incredible Moche burial charms on a sweep through Colombia and Peru and successfully posted them to his drop contact in California. He flew to Panama City, drove a jeep into the Cordillera de Talamanca just to hike Cerro La Muerte and chill out. He didn’t expect to find any remnant of the Xorocua in the rudimentary museums and tourist traps in the nameless mountain villages, and he didn’t. Fakes and pastiche trash chiseled out of balsa wood and haphazardly airbrushed with acrylics by mestizo hillbillies who knew less about the Xorocua than Ryan’s dumbest clients.

Ryan Rayburn III never got anywhere by forcing success. That way lay madness and ulcers; just ask Ryan II and Ryan I. He simply let good things gravitate to him, as they always had. An old blind woman outside a hut with a cooler full of blood-warm Fanta had made a strange gesture and coughed into her hand when he asked her granddaughter about the Xorocua. Coughed into her arthritic claw and opened it up and a red butterfly took flight from her hand.

The girl played mute, but while he was drinking his third Fanta, Ryan poked around the compound. All the men were off hunting or logging, and nobody saw him except a naked boy whose testicles had yet to descend. The huts were huddled in an octagon around a well beside a waist-high soapstone idol, weathered and worn until its chiseled features were only vague dimples in the stone.

Ryan nearly shouted and threw his soda in the air. It was a Xorocua village, or the revival of one, which was highly unlikely. Many tribes in the region buried their dead under their homes, then moved far away. The site of a tribal extinction would be like a stone age Chernobyl.

The old blind woman appeared, then, and sold him the mask for two hundred dollars. That was what he would tell anyone who asked. He’d told himself the story enough times by now, that he almost believed it. What really happened was hardly the worst thing he’d ever done, and there was simply no point in reliving it.

The mask was authentic. It looked like it weighed a hundred pounds, but was carved of some unidentified purple-black jungle softwood that weighed less than water. The paints were indigenous pigments; the deep indigo derived from azul mata , the pale, liquid gold extracted from onion skin, the fiery orange from achiote fruit, the lurid violet extracted from the glands of an endangered mollusk called munice . The unexpected splash of deeper, duller red on the inside of the mask looked less like an accident than a savage signature, and would probably only increase its value.

He had a standing buyer on the line—two, actually, and fiercely jealous competitors. When his plane touched down at LAX, he could unload the mask for fifty thousand, maybe double that, if he held it long enough for discreetly seeded rumors to spark a bidding war.

The exhausted purser at the gate held the door open for him without checking his papers. Stepping out onto the tarmac was like walking into a whirlwind of animal breath. The jungle closed in on all sides of the runway like walls of emerald fire. The Pura Vida Air 727 idled as the last straggling passengers hustled up the rolling stairway and into the hatch.

The flight was just over half full. About fifty passengers, two-thirds American. Most of them had already turned out their lights and were trying to go to sleep, huddled under thin nylon blankets against recycled paper pillows.

He groaned as he found his seat. 11A, by the window, just aft of the wing, beside a longhaired Caucasian beardo and a buxom Asian lady snuggling and tinkering with the faulty fans set into the ceiling. Perking up alarmingly as they got up to let him squeeze into the window seat, the man introduced himself as Dan, his wife Lori. “Need something to read?” he asked, holding out a paperback. “I wrote it myself.”