Alan Foster - Exceptions to Reality

“That’s right.” The second man nodded solemnly. “Buck naked, they was.”

An irritated Covey watched as the three traversed the length of the bar like oysters escaping a buffet. “What do you suppose that was all about?” He looked back to the bartender. “You have naked women living in your jungle?”

“Rain forest.” The bartender corrected him without looking up from his work. “Maybe.”

Covey chuckled, reached for his glass, hesitated. Something in the younger man’s tone…

“It’s a joke, right? You’re goofing on me.”

“No joke, mate. It’s a woman and her daughter, fair dinkum. Eleven years they been out there. Live off the land, they do. So people say.”

Covey pushed his glass aside. “Why? Why would anyone want to do that? Much less a mother and daughter.”

The bartender turned away, hunkering down with the air of a man who had already said too much. “Their business. Why ask me? You’re the writer.”

“I’m a novelist, not a reporter.” There’s something here, he found himself thinking. Something in what’s not being said. Was it worth checking out? On the face of it, the story belonged near the top of the bullshit probability index. Doubtless the bartender had overheard the three clowns from Kansas as clearly as his customer and had improvised a good gag on the spot.

But the way Covey was feeling, anything was better than flying home to face the accusatory sameness of book twenty-five and the screeching inadequacy of his meager, overpaid talent.

“I don’t believe you, of course, but certain of my fellow travelers whom I’ve been unable to avoid keep insisting I ought to see some of the jung…the rain forest…before I go home. Assuming I decide to give it a try, how might I locate these antipodean naiads?”

“You don’t. They’re supposed to live way up in the backside of the Daintree.” As bartenders do, the young Aussie busied himself polishing a glass. “You don’t ‘find’ anybody in the Daintree. It’s a garden God planted and then forgot about and now it’s all overgrown. Nobody’ll take you into the back of in there.”

Digging into a pocket, Covey extracted a thick wad of traveler’s checks. Very slowly and deliberately he signed the one on top. “Nobody?”

Purple print caused the young bartender to waver in his better judgment.

“Maybe one larrikin. But he’s mad.” The traveler’s check vanished. “If you’re so flamin’ sure it’s a joke, why’re you suddenly so keen on checkin’ it out?”

Covey stared across at him out of eyes that could not see quite far enough. “Since my writing and I are something of a joke, I don’t see the contradiction in following up on another.”

Boris Schneemann didn’t act crazy, but he sure as hell looked the part. Covey found himself mentally recording the man’s vitals for future literary abstraction. Six-two, 210, crowned by a mat of scraggly black hair that glistened with some kind of internal ooze, Schneemann regarded the world unblinkingly while perspiring like an asphalt-layer working Phoenix streets in mid-July. Originally from a corner of Germany he declined to identify more than vaguely, he had migrated to northeast Australia fourteen years ago. Now he grew bananas and dogs when not running tourists into the Daintree.

A succession of short scars ran across his Roman bridge of a nose, fossilized evidence of some ancient battle in which an opponent had tried to remove the protuberance via amateur rhinoplasty. This and other aspects of personality and self suggested that in dear old Deutschland, Schneemann had been something other than a farmer of edible fruits and lover of dogs. Covey chose not to probe too deeply too soon into his guide’s hazy history.

The battered gray Toyota Land Cruiser was to cars what a professional wrestler was to a surgeon. It did not so much drive over the road as intimidate it.

“Ninety thousand new she cost me.” Schneemann railed against faceless bureaucrats as the Land Cruiser slammed contemptuously through a bottomless pothole, sending Covey’s brains ricocheting off the top of his skull. “Auschloch import duties! Can buy nothing reasonable in this country unless it’s made here.” He pointed to his right.

“See that tree? Tulga. Forty thousand dollars it’s worth, just standing there. Most places people poach animals. Here they try to steal trees.”

“Tell me about the women.” Covey’s fingers were white and numb from clinging to the handgrip bolted to the Land Cruiser’s frame above the passenger-side window. The so-called road they were careening down like a runaway Baja racer, the Inner Bloomfield Track, continued snaking its way through towering green walls. The roadbed was yellow-brown, the narrow strip of sky overhead shockingly blue, and the rest of the universe alternating shades of green hothouse gloom.

“Not much to tell, Mike Covey. They been back in here long time.”

“So you believe in them, too?”

Schneemann was silent for a while, concentrating on the road. “Ya.” He spoke softly for a change, scratching the back of his head. “Ya, I believe in them.”

“Any idea how old they are?” Covey was making mental notes.

“Mother and daughter. The girl, she would be about seventeen, I’d say.”

“And the local school authorities don’t mind that she’s not in school?”

The front end of the Land Cruiser went temporarily airborne, and the impact when it touched down stunned Covey’s sacrum.

“Oh sure, they mind. Every once in a while somebody go looking for them to bring in the daughter. School nannies, state social services. They never find them.”

“I was told that you could.”

The burly German laughed like a demented Santa Claus. “What fool bloke guy told you that? I can track them…sometimes. Naked footprints in the mud, two sets. You follow them.” There was a curious edge in his voice. “Over ridges, through trees, across streams. Until they disappear. Always,” he muttered more to himself than to his passenger, “they disappear.”

Covey began to worry that the bartender’s appraisal of the guide’s sanity was nearer the mark than he’d been willing to countenance when he had hired the man. He gazed out the window. One thing was already apparent. Any inspiration to be found out here would be heavily tinged with green.

“Yeah, sure. They ‘disappear.’”

Schneemann shrugged massively. “Maybe they go up in the trees, ya? Maybe they fly away.”

“How can they survive in this? I mean, what do they eat?”

“Mango, pawpaw, lychee, possum, snake—plenty für essen in the rain forest.” He gripped the wheel with both hands. “You hang on, Mike Covey. All the good road, she is behind us now.”

Covey swallowed hard and wondered what the hell he was trying to prove.

They spent the night on hard beds in a tiny youth hostel situated in the absolute middle of emerald nowhere. The ramshackle clapboard-and-metal structure squatted by the side of the track like a corrugated boil engulfed in broccoli soup. It was designed to serve backpackers, which excused Covey. The only backpacking he had ever done in his life was from shopping cart to car trunk. His idea of a nature walk was crossing Central Park from the Met to the American Museum of Natural History.

Eventually they abandoned the track entirely as Schneemann turned up a shallow stream, the Land Cruiser grinding and sloshing its way over a pavement composed of water-polished pebbles and punky driftwood. Eels and crayfish scattered from beneath the crunching tires.

As the guide explained, the unpaved Inner Bloomfield Track more or less paralleled the coast. No roads led straight inland, into the heart of the mountainous rain forest. There was nowhere for any to go, and no way for them to get there.