Wiley found him immediately likable.
They sat around the only table. The light was from two kerosene lamps with round reflectors. There were three votive candles in red-glass containers on the shelf next to a small crucifix. Lucho placed four enameled tin cups on the table and a half-full pint bottle of aguardiente. He poured some of the clear liquid into each cup, equal measures, careful not to waste a drop. Wiley read the label. Aguardiente meant ardent water but translated literally another way it was “to water the teeth.”
Lucho grunted for a toast.
They tossed back their drinks.
A gulp that was like a blue-hot coal going down let Wiley know precisely where his stomach was and stopped his breath for a moment. It must have been two-hundred proof. After a while he could taste what he swallowed, anise flavor. He glanced across at Lillian. Her fixed smile was supposed to offset her watering eyes.
Miguel told Lucho, “According to the boundary markers we are camped outside your line.”
“Thank you,” Lucho said.
“And there will be no weapons on your property, as we promised, not even a machete.”
The old man nodded.
“If troops come and there is trouble you are to say we forced you to cooperate.”
“How long will you be here?” Lucho asked Miguel.
“Are you nervous?” Miguel asked.
“A little.”
“Four days, perhaps five,” Miguel told him, “depending upon how it goes.”
“I thought a week or two.”
Lucho smiled. His front teeth were worn down, upper and lower, Wiley wondered if it was from ardently watering his teeth as the bottle said. Actually it was from gnawing corn.
This was the best chance Wiley had had to study Miguel. He was smaller than the man Wiley had pictured. About five eight, and thin. Not weak thin. Tensile, sinewy, as though capable of springing at any moment. He had the blackest black hair, thick and tight. Full lips and a slightly broad nose. Quick eyes, a dark brown that made the whites appear whiter. His voice was deeper and he spoke more slowly than one would anticipate.
“Let us discuss the split,” Miguel said. “How much do you want?”
“I have thought much about that,” Lucho said.
“Half?”
Lucho drew his brows together. “No. It would not be good for me. I thought it would be good, but already I am uneasy.”
“How much, then?”
“I will take help. One cannot be killed or go to prison for receiving help.” Lucho said.
“Explain what you mean.”
Lucho gazed upward as though to read the ceiling. “Most growers have children and many grandchildren to help with the picking. I have to hire from the village.”
“We are not farmers,” Miguel said.
“Anyone can pick a bean,” Lucho said. “I will give up my share for five-hundred hours’ work. You have people, do you not?”
“Yes.”
“Ten hours a day, five people for twenty days,” Lucho said, “that is what I want.”
Miguel lowered his head, shook it slowly.
“I will take four hundred hours,” Lucho bargained.
“It is only that I find it incredible,” Miguel said. “I tell you what. If everything goes right, we will give you two thousand hours.”
That delighted Lucho. He wanted to pour another round of aguardiente. He poured into the cups of Miguel and Wiley till the bottle was empty. It was the thing to do. Lucho shrugged at the empty bottle. Wiley pushed his cup to Lucho and said, “I have an ulcer.”
Lucho didn’t believe him.
Wiley had to drink it. He found this second shot not half so bad.
Lucho turned out one of the lamps.
He and Miguel shook hands to close the deal. Lucho was unsure about shaking hands with the norteamericanos. Wiley extended his hand and Lillian offered hers. Lucho, embarrassed but pleased, gave them each a single shake.
They returned to camp and Lillian made some Red Zinger herb tea. They sat near the fire. “Where are you from?” Miguel asked Wiley.
“Originally?”
“Yes.”
“Connecticut. How about you?”
“Pensilvania,” Miguel said.
Kidding, Wiley thought.
Miguel spelled it for him. “It is a small mountain town about a hundred miles west of here. The people there are mostly Piajos Indians. I am at least three-quarters Piajos.”
Evidently it was something to be proud of.
“The Piajos fought the Spaniards for over a hundred years, long after most of the other tribes had given up. They are still known as fighters. It helps to be a Piajos.”
“How many Indian tribes are there in Colombia?”
“Close to four hundred.”
“That must cause problems.”
Lillian reached around and sharply punched the back of Wiley’s arm. He assumed that was for getting too close to politics.
“Colombia has had nine civil wars,” Miguel said. “Not revolutions—civil wars, the people fighting the people. Meanwhile, Bolivia has had seventy revolutions.”
“Seventy? I thought it was more,” Wiley said, sounding knowledgeable.
“What this country must have is an incident,” Miguel said.
“Like Pearl Harbor.”
“In effect. Something that will demonstrate to the people that those who hold the dollar over their heads are not invulnerable,”
The dollar over his head, Wiley thought. “Che didn’t accomplish much in Bolivia.”
“Che Guevera was stupid,” Miguel said. “The only thing Che could do at that point was die. He was sold out.”
“Tania was a double agent.”
“Or a triple,” Lillian put in. “Probably she was also working for IT and T.”
Miguel laughed, a rather involuntary laugh, sharp and cut short. He was mourning his girl friend and Professor Santos, and although he was functioning well, dejection was just below the surface. “Che didn’t fit in any place after the fighting was over in Cuba. He was an embarrassment to the Russians and to the Cubans,” Miguel said. “They knew guerrilla warfare in Bolivia was not feasible, but they did not even try to convince Che of that. Actually, they encouraged him. Besides,” Miguel added, “Che was not a good guerrilla fighter.”
“That’s not how the legend goes,” Wiley said, not disagreeing.
“For one thing, Che was sick. He had asthma, was constantly in need of drugs. That handicap had to be taken into consideration along with every tactic. Also, Che didn’t keep his foco, cell, on the move. Maybe he couldn’t because he was too old.”
“How old?”
“Forty.”
Lillian pinched Wiley again, to keep him from making any rash, defensive comment.
Miguel turned his head aside, gazed out into the darkness. “An incident is needed,” he said, nodding, agreeing with himself, “a great incident with a hero rising out of it.” He got up, kicked dirt onto the fire to put it out and said good night. He was the jefe (leader) and they were dismissed.
No matter, Wiley and Lillian were ready for bed. They crawled into their shelter, undressed as fast as possible and were shivering when they got into the sleeping bag.
Against one another, drawing warmth, causing it. They rubbed feet and put their hands between each other’s thighs.
After a while her hands went limp and he heard her breathing change, and he knew she had gone to sleep. He closed his eyes, started to drift off. Something hard in his pack was uncomfortable beneath his head. He reached in to rearrange it. The Llama pistol. Lillian had given him one. Kept the other. He shoved the pistol deeper into the pack and covered it with a sweater. Still, when he put his head down, he knew the weapon was there, believed he could feel it.
At dawn everyone was up and about. For breakfast, coffee and crackers. Then they went up to the farmhouse. Lucho was waiting outside for them with the burros. He had a shovel and an ax on his shoulders, and a p
iece of quarter-inch wire-mesh screen. Miguel offered to carry them, but Lucho wouldn’t have it. Miguel’s two comrades, Tomas and Jorge, took up other shovels, a pick and some rope.
They climbed. It was about a forty-five-degree slope. Lucho led the way. Wiley was amazed at the old man’s agility and energy. Lucho was used to such effort. His property covered four acres and not a foot of it was naturally level. It was notched with many terraces, which were planted with coffee trees, about four hundred trees to the acre.
The uppermost section of Lucho’s property was their destination. A number of the coffee trees there had lost all their leaves, appeared dead.
Lucho led them to one tree in particular. He knew exactly which it was, had spent hours contemplating it. For this tree the burros would not be needed. The tree had been pulled from the ground a week ago but had been set back into place immediately and the ground around it tamped by Lucho, so it appeared as though it had never been disturbed. At the time, Lucho had thought his best day had come. However, as he turned it over in his mind he realized the complications. If word got out, as it usually did, he would lose his land. It had happened to others for the same reason. His land would be taken over. He would have to accept whatever they offered, which would be little. Otherwise, he would eventually face a departmental judge, and the matter would end the same anyway. They would pull up all his trees, his great-grandfather’s trees. He owed the trees better than that.
He had been tempted just to forget about it, literally cover it over. But he found he could not. For advice he went to his only living male relative, his cousin Franco in Bogotá. Cousin Franco worked as a janitor. He lived in the Las Brisas barrio, where he shared one of his walls with the foco. On hearing Lucho’s dilemma, Franco took Lucho next door.
Now, there was Lucho at that trouble-making tree. Its death had seemed to be an omen. He would be glad when all the dead trees in that section had been removed, replaced by little young ones. It would take five years for the new trees to bear coffee beans, but that would give Lucho something more to look forward to.
He grabbed hold of the dead tree, pulled. It gave some. Tomas and Jorge helped, and the tree came down and out at the roots.
Miguel squatted, and Lucho was on his knees at the hole. The others gathered close around. Lucho dug away some of the loose earth and brought up a stone. He rubbed it on his sleeve, spat on it and cleaned it more on his sleeve before handing it to Miguel. It was about three quarters of an inch by half an inch, hexagonal, with well-defined planes.
“La materia verde,” Lucho whispered, rather reverently. The green stuff.
It was an emerald of fairly good quality with some kelly in it. Its skin was dark, nearly black in places, and one end was irregular, attached to a hard white substance, part of its matrix.
The stone was passed around. Wiley took a good long look at it.
Miguel found other stones in the hole and some within the clump of the roots. As though the roots, like fingers, had reached down and brought the emeralds up in a fist.
Perhaps this was a small isolated pocket of emeralds. They pulled down other dead trees with the rope and the burros, shoveled and used the wire mesh to sift the earth along those terraces. They found no emeralds here, found several there, and that was how it went.
They went at it for two hours. Miguel decided it was best that they work only during the very early morning, to lessen the chance of being seen. From where they were they could look across to several hillsides. Anyone over there had an equally clear view.
Back at the campsite, the emeralds were washed and placed on a bandana. Twenty-four stones in all, some smaller but none larger than the first they’d found. Sunlight came through the breaks in the leaves overhead and played on the stones, which played back with hints of glowing green.
Wiley wondered how much they were worth. He guessed from what little he’d gathered about emeralds that what was there totaled about 350 carats. Allowing that they weren’t the finest grade of rough, say they were in the $200-a-carat class, that came to … $70,000.
Just for scratching around for a couple of hours!
It brought Harry Galanoy to mind. Harry from L.A. who had so envied the guys who discovered Silly Putty and Hula Hoops. Wiley hadn’t given Galanoy a thought in years.
In the afternoon Miguel made up another batch of locro de choclos. This time he dropped a whole chicken into it. While it simmered, Miguel, Tomas and Jorge napped. Wiley suggested a walk. Lillian just wanted to read and be lazy. She’d brought along a paperback edition of Stendhal’s Le Rouge et Le Noir and was already into it. Wiley lay with his head in her lap for about a quarter hour. Then he took off on his own.
He made his way down to the dirt road and walked the two and a half miles to Leiva. It was an attractive village with some very old well-kept buildings. Wiley played the sightseer for an hour. There was a church. At its gate, vendors were offering tiny silver replicas of arms and feet, lungs, livers, eyes and especially hearts. To be taken inside and pinned on the skirt of the Virgin as a cure for the appropriate affliction. A woman came from the church carrying holy water home in a Roman Cola bottle. On that same street, Wiley bought four quarts of Blanco del Valle aguardiente, double checked the label to make sure it was right. As an afterthought he stopped in at a shop that sold religious statues. Plaster of Paris saints in every size and color. He was reminded of the cheap painted-plaster statues of horses and dogs and Hawaiian hula girls that were prizes at carnivals for throwing baseballs or darts. Once he had spent ten dollars of his sidewalk-shoveling, lawn-mowing, leaf-raking money trying to toss a wood hoop over a wristwatch mounted on a black-velvet-covered stand. The watch gleamed. It looked easy, anyway possible. The stand was the catch, of course. Being black made it appear smaller than it was. It was actually only an eighth of an inch less in circumference than the hoop, a million (or more)-to-one shot. The carnival man had given Wiley a plaster Krazy Kat statue as a consolation prize. Wiley had smashed it on a rock wall on the way home.
The shopkeeper asked which saint.
Wiley had no idea. Saint Ignacio looked pretty good and so did Saint Sebastian. To be on the safe side, Wiley bought Jesus for fifty dollars. The largest Jesus in the place, about four feet tall, Jesus in a shocking-pink robe with a green mantle and red sandals, flesh a Man Tan color. A slightly walleyed Jesus, the way it was painted, wreath of thorns in gold.
Wiley was sorry he hadn’t picked the statue up before he paid for it. It weighed about sixty pounds.
What a sight, he thought, as he made his way out of town with four quarts of ardent water in one hand and Jesus on his shoulder.
It was three miles to the turnoff onto the even lesser road that went up another half mile to Lucho’s land. Wiley was glad to get there. He put the statue and the aguardiente out of sight in a clump of bushes not far from camp.
Lillian didn’t ask where he’d been. She had gotten through fifty pages of Stendhal, and now Miguel was explaining an automatic rifle to her. She was thoroughly absorbed. This was the first evidence Wiley had seen that Miguel was armed. The rifle had a retractable stock, so it could easily have been concealed in his bedroll. Miguel ran down the specifications in a patient, instructional monotone. It was obviously something he’d done many times before. The rifle was Russian. The 7.62 millimeter PPS-43. Fully automatic, blow-back operated. It could fire 700 rounds per minute.
“What’s the muzzle velocity?” Lillian asked.
“Sixteen hundred feet per second.”
Lillian tried the feel of it, put the butt of the steel-frame stock to her shoulder and sighted. Miguel showed her how to release and connect the magazine. He only had to show her once.
Wiley thought there she was, his love, sitting high in the mountains in the late light of day, handling a lethal weapon. But really, would he rather she was doing needlepoint?
That night after supper, Lillian and Miguel talked old times. Wiley was a good listener for a while, then got up and went off. He
glanced back once, saw he wasn’t being missed. Despite the dark he had no difficulty finding the Jesus and the aguardiente. He carried them up to the house.
Lucho was glad to have company. It took him a while to accept the fact that the Jesus was a gift for him. He was overwhelmed. Only the finest large homes had such an impressive Jesus. Lucho would build a special shelf for it and get more candles. For now it stood on the table.
Wiley thought perhaps he should have bought a smaller version, for the statue overpowered the modest room. As for the aguardiente, Lucho could not accept it.
“You are in my house,” he said. “Perhaps when I come to your house you may offer me a drink, but here you are the guest and it is I who should pour for you.”
“Have I offended you?”
“No. However, I am ashamed that I do not have a drink to offer you.”
“There has been a misunderstanding,” Wiley said. “Look, the bottles aren’t even open, so how can I offer you a drink? When I go, the bottles will be left behind, because I didn’t intend to take them from this house tonight or ever. Sooner or later, perhaps months after I’ve gone, you will open a bottle, won’t you?”
“It would be a long while.”
“Then why don’t you share with me now that I’m here?”
Lucho appreciated Wiley’s having found a way around the situation. It was the sign of a kind man. He broke open one of the bottles and poured double an adequate measure into cups.
When they had drunk to each other, Wiley asked, “How many trees do you have?”
Lucho knew exactly. “One thousand six hundred and thirty-two.”
That sounded like a lot to Wiley.
Lucho explained that on the average each tree produced two thousand ripe beans a year.
“How many beans in a pound?” Wiley asked.
“Two thousand beans make one pound.”
“So, each tree yields a pound of coffee every year.”
“Yes.”
Green Ice Page 21
