The guard kept coming along for a few steps, stopped, then raised his right hand to wave at Sam.
Sam imitated the gesture as exactly as he could, waving back at the man and assuming it meant that he was alert and all was well. He pretended not to be studying the man for his response, just walked a bit closer to the front of the truck and waited. If he was going to have an automatic-weapons fight, he was going to use the truck’s engine as a shield. He took a few breaths and prepared himself. The other guard turned and walked off along the perimeter.
Sam moved back to where Remi waited. They stayed low as they climbed over the gate of the truck to its bed, lifted the rear canvas cover enough to let them crawl under, then pulled it back down to hide. Once under the tarp, they moved some of the marijuana packages to build a cushioning layer beneath them.
Soon they heard footsteps and voices coming to where their truck was parked. Then Sam and Remi felt the truck sink on its springs a little as a man stood on the left step and sat in the driver’s seat, then another came from the right side and sat beside him. The doors of the cab slammed, the engine started, they began to move, and very slowly the truck joined a line of trucks on the gravel road.
Sam listened to the engines for a couple of minutes, then put his head near the canvas. He whispered, “It looks as though five leave at once.” The truck moved up about five lengths and then stopped again.
This time, Remi moved her head close to the bottom of the canvas on the left side. “We’re sitting beside a sign,” she said.
“Can you read it?”
“Estancia Guerrero.”
There was a sudden surge of movement around the truck, on all sides at once. Sam gripped the rifle, and Remi drew her pistol, and they faced away from each other. Men were climbing aboard, sitting on all sides of the canvas behind which Sam and Remi hid. The men laughed and talked, while Sam and Remi, only inches away, held their fire.
The driver shifted into first gear, and the truck moved ahead, gaining rpms, until it was time to shift into second. But, then, they could tell that other trucks were moving too. And by third gear, the workers on both sides had made themselves comfortable, with their legs through the wooden side gates and their backs leaning against the canvas-covered bales of marijuana.
Remi, then Sam, lowered the guns and lay back in uneasy immobility. The trucks kept gaining speed, bouncing along the gravel road, while the men spoke to one another in Spanish, happy that the day had come to an end. After about ten minutes, the truck stopped, and about half the men got off in the center of a small village. The truck drove on again and stopped after another ten minutes, when several others got off near a double row of buildings. Ten minutes later, more workers jumped down to the road.
Sam and Remi listened for another ten minutes or so before they were sure. Remi lifted the canvas slightly and looked out, and Sam lifted the other side. “Everybody off?” he whispered.
“Yes,” she whispered. “Thank goodness. I was afraid I was going to sneeze from the dust.”
“I guess the next thing is to get off the truck and make our way to a town,” he whispered.
“I can’t wait,” she said. “Let’s hope they don’t reach their unloading point before we can bail out.”
They pulled aside the canvas a little and watched the sides of the narrow road while the truck wound its way through heavily forested stretches and up onto plateaus, where, for brief periods, they could see sky above them thick with stars. The distance between trucks had grown greatly during the drive. Now and then, on a curving stretch going up or down a slope, they would see the next truck’s headlights a half mile or more behind them.
Finally, they reached a steep incline where the road wound upward for a long distance. The driver downshifted as the engine labored. Remi darted out over the tailgate and stared ahead, and said, “There’s a town up ahead, at the top of the hill.”
“Then maybe we’d better bail out before we get there,” Sam said. “Get ready to jump.” They got on the right side of the truck and looked out. There was the gravel road heading upward, and, by the side of the road, a covering of low plants and bushes that didn’t seem in the dark to be woody enough to be dangerous. They moved close to the back of the truck to be ready. The road turned, so the truck slowed, and the driver needed to be looking ahead, and Sam said, “Now.”
Remi jumped and rolled, and Sam jumped after her. They scrambled off the dusty road into the bushes, and watched the truck bounce and rumble upward away from them. At the top of the hill, they could see a church, with a pair of short, square-sided steeples on the front. When the truck reached that point, it seemed to level and disappear.
Sam and Remi stood up and began to climb. She looked down. “Your leg — is that blood?” She bent and looked closer.
He looked too. “I guess it is. I must have scraped it on something when I hit. I’m all right.”
They walked up the last few feet of the hill and around to the other side of the church and sat in the moonlight to look at Sam’s leg. The blood streak went from his knee to his ankle, but it was already drying. “No harm done,” he said.
They kept to the side of the church, sat down in the dark shadows by it, and watched the second truck make its way up to the level of the church, where the town’s main street began. The truck traveled along the street without slowing. At the end of the block of closed shops and restaurants, the road curved a little and went downward, and the truck disappeared.
Sam and Remi stayed at the back of the church building and waited while the other trucks climbed the road and passed through the town, one by one. Their small convoy had consisted of five trucks, but the Fargos stayed where they were as long as they could see headlights in the distance. They counted twenty trucks before the road was clear again. It was nearly dawn when they walked out of their hiding place and saw that there were people in some of the shops already. They passed a baker’s shop, where a man was firing up a big wood-burning oven behind the building. There were people in the yards outside their houses, gathering eggs, feeding chickens, starting fires.
Sam said, “I’m hungry.”
“Me too. Did any of our Guatemalan Quetzales survive our swim?”
“I think so. I’ll look in the bag.” He opened the waterproof bag, shuffled around in it, and found his wallet. “That’s good news. My wallet survived.” He looked inside. “The money too. Let’s see if we can buy some breakfast.”
They walked toward the shop where the man was stoking the oven and saw two men heading for the same place. One wore a wrinkled seersucker suit and the other a priest’s black coat and collar. They strolled down the center of the street, chatting in a friendly way, as they approached the little restaurant.
They and the host had a quick exchange of greetings, and then the priest turned to the Fargos and said in English, “Good morning. My name is Father Gomez. And this is Dr. Carlos Huerta, our town physician.”
Sam shook their hands. “Sam Fargo. And this is my wife, Remi.”
“So,” she said, “the parish priest and the doctor together at dawn. I hope nobody has died during the night.”
“No,” said the priest. “A baby was born a while ago. The family sent for me to baptize the little boy immediately, so we thought we might as well begin the day here. Miguel Alvarez saw us coming. And to what do we owe the pleasure of your company?”
“We were hiking and camping north of Cobán and we seem to have wandered a bit and gotten lost,” said Sam. “We had to abandon most of our gear. But we found our way to a road, and here we are, safe and in a town.”
“Yes, you are,” said Dr. Huerta. “Will you join us for breakfast?”
“We would be delighted,” said Remi.
They talked while the restaurateur’s wife and two of his sons arrived and began to cook. They produced a feast of thick, handmade tortillas, rice, black beans, fried eggs, papaya, slices of cheese, and sautéed plantains.
After a few remarks about the area
, the climate, and the people, Father Gomez said, “You came from that way, beyond the church?”
“Yes,” said Remi.
“Did you stop at the Estancia Guerrero?”
Remi was uncomfortable. “It didn’t look to us like a friendly place.”
The priest and the doctor exchanged a meaningful look. Dr. Huerta said, “Your instincts served you well.”
Sam looked at Remi, then said, “I’m afraid we got a pretty good look at part of the place. The reason we had to abandon our gear was that some men were trying to shoot us.”
“This isn’t the only story like that I’ve heard,” said Father Gomez. “It’s a disgrace.”
Dr. Huerta said, “Father Gomez and I have been trying to do something about it for a year or more. First, we wrote to the woman who owns the Estancia, an Englishwoman named Sarah Allersby. We thought she would want to know that a part of her huge property was being used as a drug plantation.”
Sam and Remi exchanged a look. “What did she say?” asked Sam.
“Nothing. The response came from the regional police, who told us we didn’t know marijuana from sugarcane and were wasting everyone’s time.”
Remi said, “Do you know Miss Allersby?”
“No, we’ve never seen her,” said the priest. “But who can tell what she knows, far away in Guatemala City, or in London, or New York?”
The doctor said, “Meanwhile, heavily armed men roam the forests, and trucks full of drugs come through town every few nights. Lots of the villages around here have young men who work there. Some come home, others don’t. Are they all right? Who knows?”
“I’m sorry,” said Remi. “Maybe we can talk to the authorities in Guatemala City and pass on the story. Sometimes outsiders can seem more objective to the police.”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” said Dr. Huerta. “If the drug people saw you and shot at you, they might be searching for you even now. Just to be safe, we ought to get you out of here. I’ve got a car and I’ll be driving to the next town this morning. I’ll take you with me and put you on a bus to Guatemala City.”
“Thank you,” Sam said. “We would appreciate it very much.”
“Yes, we would,” said Remi. “Doesn’t the bus stop here?”
“Not anymore,” said the priest. “Santa Maria de los Montañas isn’t big enough. There are only two hundred souls, and few have any business elsewhere.”
Dr. Huerta said, “Let’s give it another half hour, just to be sure the drug trucks have passed, before we get on the road.”
“While you’re waiting, I’ll show you our church,” said Father Gomez. “It was made by the first generation of converts in the sixteenth century, under the direction of the Dominicans.”
“We’d love to see it,” Remi said.
They walked to the church with the priest. The front had a pair of low bell towers with a flat façade between them. There was a large pair of wooden doors, opening on a little plaza that ended at the road. It occurred to Remi that the style was similar to some of the smaller California missions. Inside were carved statues of Mary and baby Jesus above the altar, flanked by angels with shields and spears.
“The statues were imported from Spain in the eighteenth century,” said Father Gomez. “These pews were made by parishioners about that time.” He sat in the front row and the Fargos joined him. “And now all that history culminates in the town turning into a drug traffickers’ paradise.”
“You should try again for help,” said Sam. “The national police in Guatemala City might be more interested in this. As Remi said, we can tell them what we saw.”
“If you could get a message through to Sarah Allersby, the woman who owns the Estancia Guerrero, it might help even more. The doctor and I have hopes that she’s like a lot of absentee landlords. She doesn’t pay much attention, but when she learns what’s been happening on her land, she’ll react.”
Remi sighed. “We can try.”
“You seem doubtful. Why?”
“We met her recently, and I think she might take a letter or a call from us. But our personal impression, and what we’ve heard about her, tells us that she won’t help anyone unless she gets some personal advantage out of it.”
“You think she’s aware of the drug smuggling?”
“We can’t say that,” said Remi. “Just because someone makes a bad impression on us doesn’t mean she’s a criminal. But she struck us as a very spoiled and selfish young woman who didn’t care much about rules.”
“I see,” said Father Gomez. “Well, please try. Having these bandits patrolling the area is a terrible thing. If the drugs disappeared, so would they.”
“We’ll try to talk to her,” said Sam.
“Thank you. We’d better get you to Dr. Huerta. He has patients waiting in the next town.” They got up and strolled down the aisle of the church behind Father Gomez. He opened one of the big doors a couple of inches, then said, “Wait.”
Sam and Remi followed his gaze and saw a small squad of heavily armed policemen had arrived in a personnel carrier. They had stopped Dr. Huerta’s car on the street, and their sergeant was talking to him. He said little and seemed to be annoyed by the intrusion. Finally, he got out of his car, walked across the street with the sergeant, and opened a storefront door, then stepped aside.
The sergeant and two of his men went inside and looked around and then came out. The doctor locked the door again. Then he walked back to the car with the sergeant, who directed him to open the trunk. He opened it, they looked inside, and he closed it. The sergeant nodded to the doctor, and got into the passenger seat of the personnel carrier. His men climbed aboard, and, at his signal, they drove off in the direction of the Estancia Guerrero.
Huerta walked into the church. “That was the same squad of police who came after we wrote to Miss Allersby about what’s happening on her land.”
Father Gomez said, “What did they want with you?”
“Today they’re looking for two people they say are involved in drug smuggling — two strangers, who may be Americans, a man and a woman. They were seen a few miles from here, and when the police raided their camp, they found a large amount of cocaine in their backpacks.”
Sam looked at Remi. “That’s quite a story.”
“I think we’ve got to get you out of here,” said Father Gomez.
“Yes,” said Dr. Huerta. “Come, I’ll take you now.”
Remi said, “We don’t want to endanger you. If they’ll frame us, they’ll frame other people too — maybe you.”
“They’ve given me their message and that will be enough for now. And the sergeant knows even with his friends the drug men, he might be the one who needs a doctor someday. I’m the only one for many miles.”
Remi said, “Father Gomez, we’ll try to let you know how our talk with Sarah Allersby works out.”
“I hope it does. God bless you in your travels.”
They got into the doctor’s car, and he drove them in the direction the trucks had traveled in the night. Almost as soon as the car reached the end of the short main street, the pavement gave way to gravel again. The road wound down and away from the town into a forested valley.
Huerta said, “The town of Santa Maria de los Montañas was a late Mayan settlement. It was built a couple of hundred years after the great cities were abandoned. As you can see, it’s high up, approachable only by one steep road on each side. It was probably a place of refuge after the collapse of the larger society.”
“It must have been a tough place for the Spanish to conquer.”
“They couldn’t do it,” said Dr. Huerta. “The Indians in the area were very warlike. What happened was that Dominican missionaries, friars led by Las Casas, came and converted the Indians peacefully.”
“Bartolomé de Las Casas?” asked Remi.
“Yes,” said Huerta. “He’s a national hero. He founded a mission at Rabinal, pacified the Indians, and baptized them one by one. That’s why this region is cal
led Las Verapaces. It means ‘Lands of True Peace.’”
Sam noticed the doctor’s expression as he drove on. “Is something wrong?”
Dr. Huerta shook his head. “I’m sorry, I was thinking sad thoughts about Las Casas. His dream of a Guatemala where the Mayans had equal rights never came true, even now. The Mayan people have suffered a very long time. And during civil wars in any country, the ones who suffer most are the poorest.”
Remi said, “Is that why you practice medicine way up here?”
He shrugged. “Logic would dictate that I work with the people who need me the most. Whenever I want to leave, I think of that.”
“What’s that up ahead?” said Remi. “It looks like one of the marijuana trucks.”
“Get your heads down,” said Dr. Huerta. “I’ll try to get rid of them.”
Sam and Remi ducked down in the backseat. Sam lay on his side on the floor, Remi lay on the seat and covered him and herself with the blanket Dr. Huerta had on the seat so it looked as though she were sick and the only passenger.
Dr. Huerta drove ahead. The truck was stopped in the middle of the road, and the driver and the guard were out of the cab, waving Huerta’s approaching car to a stop. “It looks like they have engine trouble. They want me to stop,” Dr. Huerta said to Sam and Remi.
“You don’t have much choice,” said Sam. “Do it.”
Dr. Huerta stopped behind the truck, and the driver walked up to his window. He addressed the doctor in Spanish, and the doctor replied, waving his arm in the direction of Remi lying on the backseat. The man quickly stepped back two steps from the car and gestured to the doctor to keep going. Dr. Huerta drove on.
Remi had been listening. “What is parótidas?” she asked.
“It’s a common viral illness. In English, it’s called mumps. I told him you had a case at its most contagious stage. In adult males, it can cause impotence.”
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