“Margarita two for five dollar,” he persisted. “Coke five dollar.” He pointed to the price on the menu, where Cokes were listed. Margaritas were not. Interesting.
“Coke,” I said. He shrugged and left, finally bringing back a can of Coke and a bowl of chips and salsa.
“I open it for you,” he said. I nodded, took the Coke, nibbled some chips, and sipped, first wiping off the top of the can with a napkin, as I gazed at the thugs. There were also a few other people present. Most were probably from the ship—I couldn’t pick out anyone who looked like a local. Probably too expensive for the locals. Most of the people who lived here probably ate on five dollars a week or less. They certainly couldn’t afford five dollars for a Coke.
It was relaxing, even with the thugs watching me. Sure, I knew the waiter was trying to cheat me and would probably charge me a fortune for the Coke and chips, but that didn’t bother me.
My feeling of peace wobbled.
The room flickered in and out of existence, and suddenly became more crowded.
Now there were twenty thugs at the same table—and fifty or so other patrons, all with a Margarita in each hand. I looked down at the five Cokes in my five right hands.
I watched the room curiously, my mind twisting in my skull, thinking about everything but concentrating on nothing.
The room spun once more, and I tumbled to the floor, immersed in darkness.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“Hello.” The accent was strange, but I could understand the word. In front of me sat an old man wearing a white robe. In his hand was a walking stick, twisted and bent with age, as was he.
I tried to speak, but words failed to come. My mouth was dry. Somehow, he knew this and handed me a cup of tea, steam curling up from it. My mind recalled my last experience with a drink from a stranger, and I shook my head.
He insisted, pushing the cup toward me. The steam boiled up in my nose, making me sneeze violently. He smiled at my sneezing, and when I paused, he grabbed my nose and poured some of the hot liquid down my throat, spilling most of it on my lap. My tongue recoiled from the strong taste of the little I swallowed, but the liquid felt good going down, so I drank it all. In addition to wetting my throat, it eased the throbbing in the back of my head.
“H—hello,” I managed to stammer. My tongue wouldn’t cooperate at all.
“Tusik,” he smiled.
That was the last thing I remembered for a while.
The next time I encountered consciousness I noticed that I was lying on a blanket-covered pallet in a thatched hut about fifteen feet square. There was a second pallet on the far side of the dirt floor and instinctively I knew that the old man lived here. He was not in sight at the moment, however, and I tried to sit up. An ice pick stabbed my brain. I collapsed in agony, black streaks washing across my vision, the sunlight dimming.
He suddenly appeared at the door. “No, no. Tusik.”
I couldn’t understand the second word—but I knew he was speaking what little English he knew and filling in with a language I didn’t recognize, his native tongue. And I knew what he was instructing me. Any fool knew that. I obviously I wasn’t ready to sit up.
“Where the hell am I?” I muttered.
“He’lel, he’lel,” the old man said.
Somehow, I sensed that he was telling me to rest, so I rested, closing my eyes, and after a few minutes the agony eased, and my vision cleared. I felt a little better until I noticed that every bone and muscle in my body ached, particularly my right forearm. With a great deal of effort, I lifted my left arm and felt the right, to find it wrapped in cloth with a board running inside the wrapping.
What had happened? I probably had been poisoned, then beaten up.
I just didn’t understand where I was. This obviously wasn’t a hospital and the old man in front of me wasn’t a doctor. Not in the traditional sense, anyway. And, for better or worse, I wasn’t dead either.
“Where am I?” I repeated.
“No ingle sob,” the old man replied.
In sixth grade I had tried to learn Spanish, rather unsuccessfully, and now I searched for residual fragments of that language. They were buried deep.
“Coma esta usted?” I asked.
The old man smiled, shook his head. “No Española,” he said.
That, at least, was clear. I wondered if it were true. I had no reason to be suspicious, but I was always suspicious. It kept me alive.
As I recovered over the next few days, other people visited me. All were short and usually weathered looking. I wondered how old they were. Maybe they weren’t as old as they looked, but they obviously had lived a tough existence, something I discovered when I was finally able to walk.
The thatched hut I was in was not unique. I was in a small village of huts, perhaps fifteen, lined along what was more of a rut than a road, though a four-wheel-drive vehicle could traverse it. The road drifted into the village from the scrub forest to the north (judging by the sun) and disappeared into a similar scrub forest to the south, passing through the village farmland. Crops surrounded the village, and most of the land was planted in corn, the majority of which was almost ripe, with stalks close to six feet tall. There was also a small field just east of the village where shorter plants lurked close to the soil, but I wasn’t a farmer, so I had no idea what they were.
About thirty to fifty people lived in the village, and they all had one thing in common, as far as I could tell: they spoke neither English nor Spanish. I had already concluded that the old man was Mayan, so when my mind cleared after a few days, I came to suspect that I was in a village of pure-blooded Mayan Indians. After a few days, I thought I had figured out a couple of words. “He’lel” meant rest, “tusik” meant listen.
This was confirmed about a week after I discovered my consciousness. For six days my routine had been the same. Wake up, take a walk around the village, eat breakfast consisting of a corn mush similar to grits without any salt or butter, then take a nap, watch the villagers collect corn, mash the corn, then eat the corn. There wasn’t much else to do, but then I didn’t feel much like doing anything more.
Dreams continued to haunt my nights. I don’t know whether it was something hallucinogenic in the tea, or just the locale, or something else, but every night was an adventure, though quite different from before.
Tired from trying to get back in shape, I would pass out quickly once I hit the pallet. But when the darkness deepened and the fires of the village faded, I would usually wake up to find a shadow over my bed. Usually it looked like a woman, but sometimes it was more nondescript.
The shadow would be leaning over me, eyes full of a dark fire that burned to the depths of its soul. I could see into the eyes all the way past eternity, infinite wells of evil, bottomless and devouring. There was the hint of a smile on her face, a strange face that I couldn’t identify but that looked very familiar. A knife was in one hand, and it often was thrust into my chest or back. I felt pain but saw no blood. Sometimes the shadow twisted the knife and I experienced the true meaning of agony.
On the seventh day, a visitor came to the village. In a car. At least it ran like a car. It looked like an old dark brown Volkswagen Beetle, with all four fenders missing and the roof replaced with two overlapping umbrellas. I wasn’t quite sure how he prevented the umbrellas from blowing away at high speeds, but then realized that high speeds weren’t possible with this car. Particularly in this terrain.
The man was small, skinny, and bald, and walked with a bowlegged waddle. His name was Manuel. I couldn’t tell how old he was, though I would have guessed about forty if anyone had asked me. He wore a pair of brand-new Levi’s with the bottoms rolled up almost to his knees and a Chicago B
ulls T-shirt. His left eye was brown and the right one was black. The black eye looked straight at me, the brown one looked upward at all times.
I liked him at first sound since he spoke English, at least to a degree.
“Doin’ okay?” he asked.
“You speak English?” I asked, stating the obvious.
“Some.”
“Where am I?”
He motioned to the old man, who was sitting with me in the hut. The old Mayan rose and brought both of us a cup of tea. “You in small village few miles from Progresso.” He sipped the tea and waited for my questions. I sipped mine as well. I still wasn’t overwhelmed by the flavor but was beginning to tolerate it better.
I wasn’t hesitant about obliging him. “All I remember is feeling like I swallowed a cup of bugspray.”
“They poison your drink. ’Mazing you live.”
“How did I get a broken arm?”
One step at a time I pulled the information from him. He didn’t volunteer much, but he answered every question. He was walking along the street outside the restaurant when I came stumbling out the door, looking completely bewildered and confused, followed by the group of thugs. One of them grabbed my arm and twisted it but I then pulled away; my arm must have broken then. A Mexican cop also saw what happened, so while the cop chased the thugs, Manuel dragged me into a friend’s home down a nearby alley, nursed me a little, and finally drove me here, where the village inhabitants agreed to keep me until I recovered.
“Why did you help me?”
“Didn’ like the other guys. Thought I’d give you a chance. Knew they’d never find you here. Nobody comes here. ’Cept me. I bring supplies. Lots of small Mayan villages in Yucatán. Most bigger than this. Most very isolated—nobody speak English or Spanish, only Mayan. You safe here.”
I thanked him profusely but wondered if money was somehow involved. I had spent a lot of time over the last few days thinking about my attackers, wanting revenge but knowing that my primary goal was to prevent them from doing anything to Eme. I had survived by the fluke event that this little, probably greedy, man happened to be walking by when I had been poisoned. And only being brought to this isolated village saved me. Anywhere else, including a hospital, I would have been found and finished off.
I was thankful, but anger flushed through me as well. I needed to move on, find Eve and Eme, maybe Carolyn too, and try to discover who was trying to kill me in every life, and maybe also Eme in this one.
“When can I leave?” I asked him.
“Not yet. You not ready. When you ready, then you leave.”
I started to argue, then realized he was right. I wasn’t ready to leave. I couldn’t even walk twice around the village without having to rest. If I was going to return and try to take my revenge—or whatever I wanted to call it—against those thugs and the waiter, then I was going to have to get in better shape. I was also going to have to escape from any hunt still going on in Yucatán. I had some resources, but I still hadn’t recovered enough. If nothing else, my arm had to heal. That would take another three to four weeks.
It was hard to be that patient, and I was particularly anxious to find the waiter, though I suspected I would never see him again. The thugs must have paid him quite a bundle of money. Or maybe not. Why shouldn’t he poison me for just a few bucks? I was probably just another rich American in his mind.
Now that I had a purpose, I spent most of my time exercising back into shape. I couldn’t use my right arm, but my legs were fine. I began to take longer and longer walks. By the end of another week, I could walk most of the day without tiring. I began to slowly jog, and by two more weeks, I could easily run about five miles at a reasonably brisk pace. I didn’t have a watch, so I had to use my innate sense of time to try to calculate my exact jogging speed, but I’m sure my estimates weren’t too far off.
The Mayans thought I was crazy for spending half the day running around their village, particularly the old man, though he continued to bring me food. Luckily, I liked corn-based dishes. Occasionally some meat appeared. The village raised chickens, letting them run wild, of course, so I hoped the meat was chicken, but I was never sure. My suspicions were elevated because the meat was darker and greasier than chicken, tasting, in fact, like nothing I’d ever eaten, but I felt that the best approach was to simply ignore those facts, insisting to my mind that I was eating chicken. But whenever I saw an iguana run through the bushes, it made me wonder.
Once a week Manuel visited me to judge my progress. I was glad to talk with someone, but he really didn’t tell me much. I did all the talking. He nodded often, grunting with his nod. I never did learn much about him. He didn’t learn much about me, either, for I was used to lying about my identity and pretending to be someone I wasn’t. To him, I was a furniture salesman named Scott Remington from Newport News, Virginia. That was what the driver’s license and credit cards in my wallet said. My wallet, of course, had not made the trip to the village with me and I suspected that Manuel had it, but I didn’t mention this. I wasn’t going to use the name Scott Remington after I finished my present adventure, and though I hated to lose the thousand dollars in cash that was in my wallet, it was a small price to pay for my life. Manuel was probably my only ticket to survival, and until I thought things out, I didn’t want him to know I harbored any suspicions.
Six weeks after my arrival, the old Mayan unwrapped my arm and took away the board. When I tried to flex my wrist, which had been rendered immobile that entire time, I rediscovered the true meaning of pain. I flinched and clamped my teeth together hard, but didn’t scream. The old man grinned, exposing his almost toothless gums, but patted me heartily on the back, obviously impressed with my pain tolerance. I wasn’t as impressed. I came close to throwing him across the room.
Now I could work on my right arm. The pain from its immobility vanished within a couple of days. I began to pursue range-of-motion exercises first, then gradually began to lift and throw small rocks, then larger ones. The Mayans kept away from me while I was throwing, but chuckled and gabbed behind their huts when they thought I wasn’t looking. They weren’t as happy when one of my errant throws caught a rooster between its tiny eyes and made him dinner. It was a miraculous throw, and one I certainly couldn’t have made if I had been aiming for him.
Two weeks later I felt that my arm was adequate for whatever stress it might encounter, and I was impatient to leave. A two-month-old trail would make it hard to track down Carolyn and Eve—and the thugs.
I mentioned my desire to leave to Manuel the next time he came.
“You look ready. Maybe time to go.”
“If I stay here one more day, I may deliberately kill all the chickens.” I knew that the Mayans had squawked at Manuel about my throw. I suspected that he had paid them off to hide me, no doubt with my money. There was only one possible reason for that, which supported one of my original hypotheses—that he was somehow trying to make money off me.
“No kill more chickens!” he exclaimed. I could see worry in his eyes as he calculated how much that would cost him.
“I won’t if you get me out of here.” I decided to be proactive. It might keep him off balance. “Now, I suspect you’ll need a few dollars in expenses. I’ll be glad to pay whatever it takes for me to leave Yucatán.”
“You no have money now.”
“I can get money.”
I was glad I didn’t have any more on me when I saw the flash of greed dart across his face. Then he clamped down on his emotions and it was gone, replaced by a feigned interest in my welfare. He scratched his dirty chin. “Probably needs bit of money.”
“How much?”
“Oh . . . maybe a hundred thousand pesos.” His eyes appraised me hungrily and I felt li
ke a fly sitting in front of a frog.
I mentally calculated that he was asking for about six thousand dollars. I tried not to let my relief show. He was a small-time kidnapper, the future boundaries of his ambition limited severely by his lousy imagination.
I let my head sink against my chest and shook my head slowly, playing the barter game.
“I can’t get that much. I’m not rich, you know. Not every American owns a Mercedes and lives in Hollywood. I drive an old Toyota and I work in a furniture store.”
The gleam faded slightly but stayed in his eyes. “Then can’t do. Need to bribe lots of people. You have no passport. I go to jail with you if they catch me.”
You little weasel, I thought. Sure, it’s not for you. You may give a few dollars to some officials, but most ends up in your filthy pocket. “I believe you,” I told him. “But what can I do? I can only pay you what I can get. I know you deserve more”—well, he did save my life— “but like I said, I’m not a rich man. Maybe twenty thousand pesos.”
“Maybe get to Cancún with that. Got to buy plane ticket, passport. Squeak by with eighty thousand.”
I had been exercising all day and what I really wanted was to say yes and send him on his way to plan the trip, but I knew I had to put up the pretense of dickering this one out.
“Maybe I can get forty thousand—I don’t know.”
“No! No! Too dangerous to take chances for nothing! I could mail you away if want to go cheap. Better plan. Need more. I take nothing. All for Customs, Immigration, plane ticket. None for me.”
I didn’t bother to point out that no one ever checked you when you tried to leave Mexico. Getting back into the U.S. was the hard part. I suspected that his price didn’t include any help with that.
I knew I was close. I decided to play my highest trump. “Fifty thousand plus boat,” I said.
“Boat?” he asked, intrigued.
The Hauntings of Scott Remington Page 9
