Nightmare Country

by Marlys Millhiser

  When Thad sat down, one approached him with a raised eyebrow. “You want food?” He hunkered so Thad could reach the plate closest to his shoulder.

  “Two dollars, B.H.” The waiter lifted his arms so Thad could slip the money into one of the many pockets in his apron and take silverware wrapped in a paper napkin from another.

  Juicy curried chicken, cornbread seasoned with bacon drippings, and a peculiar mixture of rice, beans, and peas in a sloppy sauce. He had the plate half-empty before beer arrived to wash it all down. For a time in that street he’d considered the possibility that he’d never eat again.

  “Hey, you’ll bust that skinny gut eating like that.” The reporter, Ralph Weicherding, pulled out a chair across from Thad for a woman a head taller than he and took another for himself. “There’s another course, you know.”

  Thad stared stupidly from the woman to Ralph and back again, chewing the last of the chicken. “Thought you were in Guatemala City.”

  “Was. They sent me back.” Weicherding put his hand on his companion’s light-chocolate arm. “Want you to meet Romana Guerrero, friend of mine on a short vacation from Belmopan. Honey, this is Thad Alexander, the crazy vet I told you about who chases dogs around in cemeteries.”

  “How do you do?” Romana’s voice came honey-soft and deep. Her half-smile left a suggestion of coolness in her eyes, and polite disinterest. Too large-boned and plump for conventional prettiness, she was gorgeous by any other standard. Voice, size, bearing, and dress—she was all of a piece. Black hair pulled back in a bun, gold-loop earrings, simple white blouse over a full chest and above a dark peasant skirt—she neither wore nor needed further artifice or makeup. What did she see in Weicherding?

  “Yeah, got back to find snipers horsing around in Guatemala City and the bureau sending dependents back to the States. Me they send here to cover impending storm on the cays. Wouldn’t you know? First blow-up that could be news, and they kick me and family out of the country. In different directions. So Romana and I decided to have a last little fling. She used to live here before they moved the capital to Belmopan. Works in a government office.”

  Ralph was a small man with a large tuft of hair that stood up over his forehead and looked impossible to comb down. He always seemed interested in the tiniest of details while appearing world-weary. Thad liked him, but for no conventional reason. Nondescript-baggy might describe his clothes and body, but there was a spark in him Thad envied.

  “You look terminal,” Ralph said. “We saw you come in, staring like you just had another fun experience in the Metnál. Let you eat before we came over.”

  While Ralph and Romana enjoyed a coffee-and-chocolate-flavored pudding, Thad worked his way through another platter of the main course, leaving only the cornbread. He explained his reason for being at Mingo’s.

  “Hell, you don’t want a boat. You’d get caught in the middle of things. Best way is by plane. Get out there in forty-five minutes, before the storm hits, if it’s going to.”

  “I tried. Mayan’s not flying. Probably wise to wait it out on the mainland now anyway. Might even be through here and gone by tomorrow.”

  “I gotta be out there when it hits, so I can describe all its fury in fantastic prose which some chickenshit’ll reduce to two sentences anyway.”

  “How’re you going to get a plane?”

  “I’m going to bribe Roger, that’s how. He’s got a plane and no sense at all.” Weicherding’s smile grew cherubic. “Supposed to meet him here, but it looks like he’s gonna pull a no-show, which is not unusual for Roger. So, children, the three of us are going to hunt him out of his drunk, sober him up, and fly into the very tooth of danger.” Ralph laughed, and his irrepressible forelock bobbed like a chicken’s comb.

  An uncomfortable odor, a little too thick even for jungle, a little too sweet. It wafted back and forth on the wind. Tamara waited to see if anyone else would mention the smell. Everyone seemed intent upon ignoring it.

  “Way I figure,” Harry Rothnel said, looking up at the odd-shaped hill, “is that used to be a good deal higher, but it has gradually sunk with time, until what we are seeing now is just the topmost part of one of those Mayan pyramids like you see in Tikal or Chichén Itzá.”

  “But those pyramids have temples on top, and stairs going up the sides,” Don said.

  “Not before they were all dug out and fixed up, they didn’t. Looked just like this one. All kinds of ’em still in the jungles on the mainland that haven’t been excavated.” Harry put his hands up to his nose and said between them, “Let’s face it, folks. There’s something dead around here.”

  Agnes Hanley gasped and looked down at the glasses bow in her hand.

  “Oh, Agnes, he didn’t mean … Probably just some animal.” But Tamara had a sinking feeling.

  “Yeah, last time I smelled a smell like that was when somebody’s pig got caught in a drainage pipe.” Don Bodecker looked at the other men uneasily, stretched the tendons in his bull neck until his chin pointed heavenward, and relaxed them. “But I suppose we ought to look around.”

  “What if it’s Adrian?” Tamara followed them, almost afraid to look at the ground. Russ tried to motion her back.

  “It’s a animal ah some kind, all right.” Harry poked a stick at the ground on the far side of the clearing and held a handkerchief over his nose.

  Tamara had to breathe through her mouth as she came up to a grave tortured by scavengers. Something black and white where it wasn’t torn and pulpy. At first she thought it was a frigate bird, but just before she swerved her eyes from the stick swiping at a moving mass of flies and maggots, she saw a small hoof, cloven.

  “Alice.” She tried to block the image imprinted on her brain, knew she only drove it in deeper. Knew it would come back again and again when her guard was down. “Alice is … was a goat,” she explained, and rushed back to the other side of the mound, where Agnes waited.

  Agnes had pulled the front of her dress up over her nose, and a triangle of limp petticoat showed below. Her glasses had slid to the lump end of her nose. She looked a little like an Arabian caricature. “Is it Fred?” she asked through her dress, and it puffed out between buttons with her breath.

  “No. Alice. Jerusha’s goat. Alice didn’t come here on a plane.” A welcome wind shifted the air, and the men crossed the clearing, all of them in a curious loose-legged gait. Russ Burnham was green-tinged. The other two gulped at the new air.

  “’Nother grave over there,” Harry said in a deadened tone. “This one ain’t an animal, but they sure got to it.”

  42

  Edward P. took the engineer back along the beach toward San Tomas, the girl’s imagined body bobbing and floating along behind. He knew no direct route to the pyramid. “How are you going to repair this terminal thing?”

  “Simply try to shield it against outside energy waves.”

  “With what? Metal? Some fancy plastic?” Might as well play this dream for all it was worth before he awoke.

  “Native rock has been surprisingly effective.”

  “That’s why it’s in the mound? That rock had to have been shipped here. Damn little rock on a cay.”

  “This was once part of a landmass, and will be again.” Water ran off Herald’s amazing suit. Dirt clung to it only for seconds, and couldn’t seem to stain it. Wading through shallows, crawling over mangrove roots, Herald and his suit remained bandbox smooth and tidy.

  The sea continued to wash, the trees to move with the wind, while the few creatures they encountered appeared locked in an absence of motion. A hermit crab stilled in the process of crawling out of one shell seemed to be reaching for the abandoned home of a larger snail. A man-o’-war bird with wings about to fold, caught in midair, as if about to land.

  “Why are the creatures stilled, but not the wind and the sea? Because the wind and sea are timeless? And creatures aren’t?”

  “I’m astonished at your reasoning, old man. You must be well advanced for the species of your
time.”

  “Told you, my name’s Edward.” He was increasingly put off with this guy’s manner, a surface sophistication he’d met in some people when awake. A veneer that scratched up when rubbed. “Why astonished?”

  “Because I was wondering the same question even as you asked it. Have you also noticed the weather since we left our beach, old man? Edward?”

  “Cloudy, cool. On our beach, is it still sunny and hot?”

  “I’m sure of it.”

  “And the bird, the iguanas on the exposed coral when you landed … or whatever, are they still moving?”

  “Yes, and I suspect they are finding this world as odd as we are. Remember, this is merely a moment in time.”

  They came to the beach in front of the Mayapan Hotel. Dixie Grosswyler stood between the bar hut and the main building. Even at this distance and with the shapelessness of her dress, Edward could see she’d stopped in midstep. But he turned suddenly to the man behind him and pointed out to sea. “Out there, inside the reef, a boat disappearead, and one rumor has it that it reappeared for a time and was gone again. And when it reappeared, the family was still alive. They hadn’t known they were gone. That machine of yours could have done that?”

  “Possibly caught between time, as we are. As I said, there are mechanical malfunctions if the shielding material is removed or—”

  “If someone ate scrambled eggs … food, sustenance, on a boat that disappeared and reappeared, where does the renewed sustenance come from if it’s been consumed before the boat reappeared?”

  Herald strode up into the compound to study Dixie. “Time is out of frame here. If only I could get back and tell the world.”

  Edward ran after him. “But the eggs … sustenance … how can it replenish? Can it replenish? Just don’t wake me up yet.”

  Herald bent down to peer into Dixie’s face, then straightened and focused on Edward. “It doesn’t seem possible that sustenance once consumed could replenish just because the consumer reappears … yet, if the reappearance is at a point before the consumer took nourishment …” A crease in the perfect brow? “If the people were living before they consumed … would then the sustenance also exist? Because it had not yet been consumed?”

  Edward danced on the sand like the phantom Adrian. “Well? Tell me. Once consumed—what?”

  “I don’t know, but I find that a superlative question.” He circled Dixie. “This is a female. Younger than you. But older than Adrian.”

  “Superlative deduction.” Edward couldn’t hide his disappointment. “You really don’t know?”

  “No, but I’ll work on an answer for you.” Herald studied the Mayapan’s buildings. “Strange form of construction.”

  “Tourist-gimmicky.” Edward realized that he’d been aware of a noise for some time now but hadn’t allowed it to sink in. It seemed to come from the bar hut. They found the source to be a group of men at the bar, their mouths pursed in a one-note song, a perpetual “owwwwww.” The mixture of timbres and keys reverberated like a drawn-out death rattle.

  Edward was startled by the expression of intense scorn with which the black bartender surveyed the merrymakers. But that long-expected fear finally caught up with him. And not because of young Aubrey behind the bar. He looked closely at the face of each singer; there were six of them. He turned to the lone woman in the hut. She sat at a back table. “I don’t know any of these people except Aubrey. I was in here just last night, and the people were all different. I remember Dixie telling me—”

  “Speak in words as you are used to, old Edward. Your thoughts are such an untrained jumble they pain my brain.”

  “—that most of the cabanas were empty, that she had many guests coming in over the next few days, but that this was a ‘dead’ week. She had about four couples, a family or two, and a single. And that all the adults were in the bar, while the kids played outside. Some of these faces should be familiar, but none of them are.”

  “I find something else even stranger. Look at that.” Herald forgot his repugnance at touching an aging primitive and pulled Edward around one of the bar stools so he could see what Aubrey was doing with his hands.

  Aubrey was pouring the contents of a bottle of Coca-Cola into a tall glass that already contained a half-inch of clear fluid which was sure to be rum. But part of the dark cola hung suspended in mid-pour between bottle and glass. “And yet the wind blows and the ocean rolls. And sound … these awful voices of the males here still exist. We have a mystery, Edward.”

  “But this can’t be the same moment you say we’re caught in,” Edward persisted. “The people are different.”

  “Known theory can explain the suspended fluid. But not the movement of wind and water outside, not the presence of captured sound.” Herald was definitely aspark now, even without expression. “There should be no sound. I so wish I could return and tell them.”

  Edward left the bar hut, passed Dixie without a glance.

  Four white women played cards in the dining room. None of them had a face Edward knew. The three women in the kitchen all wore familiar island faces. But one of them was his own Rafaela. “What are you doing here? Always said you wouldn’t come to Dixie unless I died.”

  Rafaela held a knife above a chopping block with an onion on it and stared at the floor across the worktable with a dreamy but bored expression he’d never seen before.

  “Don’t touch her.” Herald was right behind Edward, with Adrian at his heels. “This is our moment in time. They are merely passing through. I don’t know the consequences if we should disturb anything.”

  “Just how much do you people really know of this ‘time’ you’re fooling around with?”

  “Less than I thought, apparently. But I’ve learned something of time I should have known from birth. There is never enough of it.” Herald almost ran from the room, calling over his shoulder, “Let us hurry to see if we can save this poor child and see more of this world before we must repeat.”

  43

  My Lady followed the others along the trail away from the sea, falling back if the female growled warning at her, moving in closer when she dared. She’d never been this far into the trees before. She didn’t want to lose sight of the others. She was a village dog, a beach dog, and this was a wild place. But My Lady had sensed even before the others that the beach would not be pleasant soon.

  The male appeared to know where he was going, and the two females followed. My Lady could identify the people smell along this route. Perhaps they would come upon some who had food to leave.

  There were other smells, too—on the air, drifting up off the ground, each one distinct from the others. The fear smell from the two ahead of her, and her own. The smell of the giant plants and trees looming over her and the creatures who lived hidden among them. And the faint but growing smell of death coming from far ahead.

  “You sure this thing’ll stay in the air for forty-five minutes?” Thad yelled over the clamor that reverberated around the cabin of the antique four-place Stinson.

  Roger, one of the Mayan Airline pilots who thought he’d gotten a day off because of the weather, wrapped a long white scarf around his neck and threw both ends over his shoulders a la Snoopy. He studied Thad for a moment. “No.”

  The Stinson was still on the ground, but the wings sort of waved in the wind that tossed the palm fronds around like salad, as if the old craft wanted to fly like a bird instead of a plane and couldn’t wait to get on with it. Outside, Ralph Weicherding was trying to drag Romana Guerrero on board. Her bun had blown out into a modified bush, her peasant skirt was wrapped around her thighs, and she outweighed Ralph.

  “That lady shows good sense.” Roger flicked at a gauge with the nail of a forefinger. A sticky needle moved cautiously to the right. There were a fair number of empty holes in that instrument panel, a few cut wires hanging down from behind. This was the pilot’s own “recreation” plane.

  Thad was half-scared and half wondering how danger could frighten him so muc
h after the eyeball in the Metnál. He’d missed Vietnam, however narrowly, because somebody in Washington decided veterinarians were too scarce in Alaska and because Thad’s name had appeared on a proposal to save wildlife in a projected refuge that had never been heard of since. Mostly, Thad treated big dogs and little cats and their winter-weary owners. He thought the eyeball had been his combat service, but it made no difference now. He’d watched his mother die, and his son, and would have expected this experience to matter less. “Hope this thing doesn’t have the original engine.”

  “Only fifty hours since last overhaul.” Roger flashed a set of Hollywood teeth. “Many bucks and new stuff put in this old baby.”

  “How’d Weicherding talk you into this, besides money?”

  “What’s besides money?” Roger stuffed some padding back into the pilot’s seat. “Almost everything’s fixed up but the cabin.”

  “It’s the cabin that keeps us in here and the ‘almost’ that keeps this thing in the air to Mayan Cay.”

  “You got it.”

  The door opened and the UPI reporter crawled into the seat behind Thad. “She won’t come. And the first wise-off on that remark wins a free broken jaw.”

  A crony of Roger’s released the tie-downs that weren’t doing much to hold the Stinson at bay, and it taxied around one of the corrugated lean-tos that served as hangars in this demented place. The nose of the plane sat up so high it filled the windshield, and the pilot had to look out the side windows to navigate. Thad stared up at the haze of whirling propeller and tried not to think about how much he wished he’d had good sense like Romana Guerrero. The Stinson picked up speed. It crabbed sideways in the wind, and he caught a glimpse of marginal runway, mercifully empty.

  “Don’t you have to radio for clearance or something?”

  “What radio?” And pitching palms and a few houses and a choppy sea and the surface of the earth dropped out from under them. They rose in a wind-zagged course and leveled off, clearing most of the windshield of Stinson nose.