PRECIPICE

by Leland Davis

  Héctor entered a wide patio area with another larger palapa to the left where two women were busy cleaning up the first round of dishes while keeping breakfast warm over a flaming grill. The smell of eggs and beans reached out tantalizingly to Héctor’s nose. A square concrete house was situated to the right. He proceeded to the wooden door of the house and knocked politely, leaning his head under the thatched eave to keep the rain off. A few moments later the door swung open, and a lovely woman stepped backwards into the room allowing him to enter.

  “Hola!” She greeted him cheerfully.

  “Buenos días, Señora,” Héctor replied formally, showing proper respect despite the fact that she was several years his junior.

  The woman glided across the room, her long black tresses flowing behind her down the back of her simple yet elegant cream-colored dress. She rounded up two children—a boy and a girl of about four and six years old—and herded them toward the door. Héctor stepped into the room and aside to allow passage for the woman and children, who forged out into the rain and headed down the stone path toward the waiting SUV. Despite being sequestered here in a remote corner of the jungle, Estella Cardenas insisted that she and the children be driven more than forty kilometers over bumpy dirt roads to the nearest village for church each Sunday. Although this created a security nightmare for Héctor, it did afford him a few uninterrupted hours each week during which he could meet with his boss. Hopefully Estella and the kids would return to their compound in the city soon.

  Héctor pulled a two-way radio from his pocket and informed the men at the guardhouse nearly ten kilometers away that the truck with his boss’ wife and kids was coming out. After hearing confirmation, he replaced the radio in his pocket and walked across the spacious room to the left where a couch and several straight-backed wooden chairs were gathered near a picture window that looked over the edge of a jagged canyon. The world dropped away over one hundred feet on the other side of the glass. Outside the left half of the window, the trees and jungle plants growing from the cliff wall had been cut away, opening a view of a huge waterfall that raged over a precipice and into a cliff-walled bowl of aquamarine water in the depths below. The trees and fronds that remained outside the right half of the window gave the effect that the room was part of the jungle. He stood near the window and admired the breathtaking view.

  He turned at the sound of a door opening behind him and watched his boss enter the room. Vicente Guerra Cardenas was a fit man of medium height and build who despite his wealth and forty-plus years showed no signs of the softness or expanding waistline that characterized many of his peers. He carried himself with the athletic grace of a warrior, a carryover from his time in the GAFE—an elite division of his country’s special forces. His black hair was cropped short, and a thick moustache angled down sharply from the base of his nose on each side. He wore a large polo shirt that hung loosely with the tail outside his slacks and the collar turned up, and slip-on leather shoes with no socks.

  “Buenos días, Héctor,” he said with the tone of a superior calling a meeting to order.

  “Buenos días, Jefe,” Héctor answered.

  Cardenas strolled easily across the room and reclined comfortably on the couch. Mindful not to wet the cushions, Héctor took a seat on one of the uncomfortable wooden chairs instead.

  “Have you spoken to your cousin?” the older man asked.

  “Si Señor. He will speak to his boss again tomorrow, but he believes that we will have a deal.”

  Cardenas smoothed his moustache with the thumb and forefinger of one hand, showing no emotion while he paused for a moment in thought.

  “¿Cuánto costará?” he asked abruptly. How much will it cost?

  “He says this vote will probably end his jefe’s political career, so the price is a bit higher than we expected. We don’t have an agreement yet, but I think it will be seven million dollars American.”

  Cardenas grunted, frowning while he again smoothed his moustache. While higher than the cost he had expected, it would only take him a month to make that money back if the law passed. He thought for a moment more in silence before looking back up at his chief lieutenant.

  “Bueno.” Good. “And the other one?”

  “They are still in agreement,” Héctor answered. “This one will gain support in his party for pushing the bill through, so the cost is much lower. We don’t expect any problems.”

  Cardenas sat for another few moments in thought. “Would you like some breakfast?” he asked, waving his hand magnanimously toward the door leading to the patio.

  “Gracias, Señor,” Héctor answered, reading this as a dismissal and standing to head for the door.

  Cardenas sat looking out the window in silence while Héctor closed the door behind himself, headed for the large palapa where breakfast was still warm. He knew it was a dangerous game he was playing, meddling with the American political system. He would need to use much caution now.

  “Todo por México,” he muttered softly to himself. Everything for Mexico. The words had been his motto in the Special Forces, but they still applied to his mission today. If this was what it took to bring America’s riches to his country, then so be it. He would take the risk.

  *

  Senator Sheldon Moore tossed the limp body of a dove onto the ground beside two others, turned, and settled his bulk carefully back into a creaking, fold-up hunting stool, taking care not to topple over as the chair legs sunk into the soft earth. He laid his Benelli Legacy 12 gauge across his lap and kicked his heels together in an attempt to dislodge the clumps of pungent, red Alabama mud that clung to the soles and sides of his boots. He picked up his cap with a thumb and forefinger and wiped beads of perspiration from his bald scalp with the heel of his hand before perching the hat back lightly on his head. It wasn’t a fantastic morning for a dove shoot, but it was the only one he would get this year. Wrangling over healthcare had kept him pinned down in Washington until Friday of the final weekend of the early dove season. Saturday had been a washout as tropical storm Katia battered Lookout Mountain with a deluge of rain and wind, breaking limbs from trees everywhere on the elevated plateau. Nothing was flying in that. That left only the final Sunday for hunting, but such was the price of vigilance against the insidious creep of socialism. After twenty-three years in the Senate, Moore was weary of the fight; if his financial ship came in, he would forego re-election and not miss any more hunting trips.

  Although the senator was a very large man at a thick-bodied six-foot-four, he was not overweight. He had kept a firm regimen of physical activity for the last five years after a minor heart attack in a deer stand at the age of fifty-five had scared him into a lifestyle change. His only daughter—now in her sophomore year at Stanford—called two or three times each week to make sure he was eating right and exercising. The last thing he wanted was to leave his little girl too soon, as his father had done to him at roughly Sheldon’s current age. In fact, she was one of the reasons he was still in the Senate.

  Sheldon Moore was a political legacy, his father having held the same Senate seat immediately before him. Colonel Howell C. Moore had been born to dirt farming parents in the wide valley between Sand Mountain and Lookout Mountain in northern Alabama. He had stormed the beach in Normandy at the tender age of nineteen and came home with a Medal of Honor. He’d gone on to fight again in Korea before retiring from the army as a war hero in 1963, settling his family back in rural northern Alabama. With military conflict reaching a new fever pitch in Viet Nam, the decorated Colonel had made a run for the Senate in ’66, when Sheldon was fifteen. The anti-war movement had little traction in Alabama at the time—segregation was the hot-button issue, and a white farmer-turned-war-hero was an acceptable choice.

  After four years in the army and four more at the University of Alabama, young Sheldon had attempted to revive the family farm. Having spent his early years on various army bases, his annual hunting trips with his father to the family land and the four years spent
there in his early teens had been the only geographic constant in his formative years, and he’d longed to settle in the familiar place. As large agribusiness moved into the South in the late seventies and early eighties, however, it became clear that running a small farm was no longer a viable living. In 1985, Sheldon had been forced to sell off most of the land to a large farming company to pay for a move to D.C., where he had gone to work on his father’s staff. Only three years later, Howell C. Moore had passed away suddenly from an extremely virulent cancer. The Governor, an old army buddy of the Colonel’s who had known Sheldon since he was a boy, had appointed Sheldon to serve out his father’s term in the Senate. Re-election had come and gone, and the people of Alabama seemed just as happy to have one Senator Moore in office as the other.

  Two dark specks appeared over the trees to the north, flittering in a straight line over the field where Moore sat waiting on the southeast edge, the morning sun at his back. He lifted the shotgun slowly off his lap and leaned forward, readying himself without any sudden moves as the specks grew to distinct silhouettes of doves in flight. As they drew to about twenty yards away he raised the gun quickly to his shoulder, sighting along the barrel and leading the first bird by about two feet. He was startled by the sudden sound of a tinny marching tune blaring from the cell phone in his chest pocket, the volume turned up to counteract the decades of gunshots which had left him hard of hearing. He jerked in surprise and fired the Benelli, the pellets flying high of their mark as the two doves weaved out of sight over the tree line.

  Moore set the shotgun back across his knees and fished in his breast pocket for the phone with his left hand. He eyed the caller ID, seeing that it was his chief of staff on the line.

  “Dammit, Ortiz! I told you not to bug me while I’m huntin’,” he drawled, his voice as deep as the Alabama mud his forefathers had farmed. “You made me miss my shot.”

  “I thought you would be finished by now,” came the reply with only the faintest hint of a Hispanic accent discernable. “It’s ten-thirty already.”

  “It might be ten-thirty in Washington, but it’s nine-thirty in Alabama and the birds are still flyin’. Shouldn’t’chew be cookin’ huevos rancheros or sump-n?”

  An American born to Mexican parents in Houston thirty-seven years ago before spending several years of his childhood back in Mexico, Juan Ortiz was accustomed to these not-so-subtle barbs about his ethnicity—it had become a standard, if tiresome, joke between him and his boss. He played along, affecting a much thicker Hispanic accent, “I was cooking tacos and working on lowering my Monte Carlo when my cousin called. I didn’t want to interrupt you while you were making love to a pig in your pickup truck, but it’s very important news.” Turnabout to redneck jokes was fair play and part of the usual banter. And Sheldon did drive a pickup, while Ortiz had an Audi.

  Moore grew more serious. “What’d he say?”

  “He’s pretty sure that the international trucking bill will come up next month. He really hopes it will pass.”

  “How much does he hope?”

  “He hopes a lot,” Ortiz replied, emphasizing the amount. “He knows it won’t be popular with your party or your constituents, but he’s very intent on having you push it through your committee and then vote for it. With the balance this close in the Senate, your vote should decide the whole issue.” Moore was chairman of the Senate Transportation Committee.

  “I’ll be back in Washington tomorrow afternoon. Let’s talk about it more on Tuesday.” Moore could see the way out clearly now.

  “You need me to pick you up from the airport?”

  “Naw. It was only three days, so I left my car there.”

  “See you Tuesday.”

  After twenty-three years of public service, Sheldon Moore had little to show for it other than the house he had built here on the rim of the Little River Canyon. His father had bought the land decades ago with his military pension, hoping to someday build a mountain vacation home up here. He’d had no idea that one of the deepest canyons in the eastern US would one day be made into a National Park, turning his piece of property into a unique inholding sandwiched between the park and the Little River Wildlife Management Area. It was a national park view with prime hunting right out the back door. Sheldon could hear the booming echo of the hurricane-swollen river thundering through the bottom of the canyon even from where he sat a half-mile away. Aside from his slice of Alabama paradise, though, Moore had little to show other than the mortgage, an even more expensive mortgage on the spacious house that he thought of as his wife’s place in D.C., and his daughter’s fifty-two thousand dollar-a-year tuition bill from Stanford—which didn’t include books, travel, or spending money.

  Unlike most senators, he hadn’t come from money and had no law degree or qualification for any other kind of work. His resume before senator listed only Army grunt and farmer. He’d fallen into politics and felt as though there was no graceful way out. It wasn’t that he was stupid; it was just that growing up on a string of army bases with a Colonel father had not encouraged him to think outside the box. He had lived his life doing exactly what was expected of him with minimal complaint, and he’d gone about being a senator in much the same way. He didn’t dislike being in the Senate and was actually quite good at politics—if there was one thing he had learned growing up in a military family, it was how to work a system without seeming to buck it. What troubled him was the daily grind of being a poor farmer living amongst the wealthy aristocracy, a reality which had worn all of the glow off the power and prestige of his position. Unfortunately, it wasn’t in his nature to actively seek more than his lot in life. However, now faced with the choice between money and power, he’d decided to take the money. Every year at tax time he was embarrassed when the reports were released listing him among the congressmen with the lowest annual incomes. Enough was enough.

  A vote for allowing Mexican tractor-trailers and their drivers to cross freely into the US didn’t seem like a big deal if it meant he could comfortably retire. He would lose a lot of campaign money from the party over it, and probably a lot of votes—which would make it a natural choice to not seek re-election next year. He would simply claim that his Mexican-American chief of staff had talked him into a foolish vote. It was better to look weak than duplicitous when breaking the law to this degree. Plus, guys who got caught were using the money to maintain power, not to leave office—and there wasn’t much political hay to be made from investigating a guy who was on the way out. He wouldn’t miss the Senate, and he’d finally have the time and the funds for another hunting trip to Alaska—maybe he’d shoot a moose or at least a big elk.

  Moore dropped the phone back into the chest pocket of his vest, lifted the shotgun from his lap and stood, taking care not to topple the stool. He bent and collected the three doves in one large hand, slipping them into the oversize pouch in his hunting vest at the small of his back. He tugged the stool free of the mud and folded it, slinging the strap over his left shoulder, and leaned the top of his shotgun back against his right. He trudged across the muddy field toward the trail to his house, his feet feeling like oversize clown shoes with the huge gobs of red mud clinging to their soles.

  *

  Exhausted and with his spent arms feeling like jell-o, Chip paddled up to a beach on the right at the end of the river. Harris looked over and grinned from where he and the men were already rolling up the raft near the SUV. It had been a harrowing twenty-six miles. Called the “Marathon” by Gauley River regulars, combining the Upper, Middle, and Lower sections into one grueling day was not for the faint of heart or weak of body. The SEALs had flipped the raft three more times but had required no rescue assistance from Chip. They were almost inhuman in their swimming ability, and they absolutely never lost their cool in water that would have scared many hardened river guides.

  Chip stood slowly and stiffly from the tight confines of his kayak, and Harris tossed him a cold beer from a cooler in the back of the SUV. These guys were all
business during the day, but they cut loose nicely when the work was over. It turned out that the same lust for adventure that attracted many guides to the river also attracted people to the SEAL teams, and Chip found himself surprisingly similar to these guys in some ways. Unlike most military types, their hair was grown long enough to part. A couple also wore beards, lessening the stark physical contrast between themselves and average Americans, or average dirty river guides. Like many adventurers, they unwound with intensity directly proportional to the intensity with which they focused when the action was on. In fact, they had unwound pretty hard last night on the guides Chip worked with, leaving a rubble of spent beer cans and passed out rafters around the campfire when they finally turned in during the wee hours of the morning. High water meant the river was too dangerous for commercial rafting, so the guides weren’t working today; and drinking was one of the only pastimes available in rural West Virginia on days when there was no work. The SEALs had been up to the challenge, but you would never know they’d won the party last night by the way they paddled today.

  Chip cracked his beer open as Harris walked over and toasted him. They fist bumped with their other hands as they gulped their beers, splashing the cool barley juice sloppily down their chins to mingle with the river water that still coated them. They weren’t that different in build, although Harris was about two inches taller at just over six feet and a couple years older having passed thirty. Both were lean and hardened from heavy physical activity, but Harris’ hair was dark while Chip’s was bleached sandy from a full season of river sun. Both were scruffy, neither having shaved for the past four days. Their faces could not have conveyed their divergent lifestyles better. Chip’s features held a round, jovial softness, while Harris had a seriousness to his chiseled chin and cheek bones that conveyed the might of a primordial war god.