I turned my body toward her, and she came sideways into my arms. Her eyes were closed. She had very long lashes. I kissed her, but it wasn’t like that other kiss in the rain. I didn’t want it to be. The rain fell softly outside. A breeze stirred. She was all mixed up. She couldn’t stop thinking of herself as a coward, but she wasn’t a coward. She wasn’t going to drink herself into a stupor, though. At least that was something. She had me. I got up and stood looking down at her.
“I can’t go with you tomorrow,” she said.
“You’ve got to, after what they did. What makes you think they won’t try it again?”
“That’s just it. My mother wouldn’t leave the Parana Republic. If I’m in danger, then she’s in danger because of me. I’ve got to stay.”
“She’ll come with us,” I said. “We’ll make her come.”
“She has a bad heart. It would kill her.”
“She’ll come.”
“I’m sorry. No.”
“Use your head, for crying out loud.”
“I’m sorry. I have to stay with her.”
“I saw your mother. You want to know what I thought?”
“No.”
“She was like something out of a surrealistic painting. No background. Just bare walls and a sick old woman in a ray of sunshine on a camp chair in an empty room. She wants to die, Eulalia. It’s the only way she can escape from the present and get back to the past.”
“Shut up. Please shut up.”
“I’m asking you to get her out of it.”
“She’d die.”
“That’s not the way I see it. What the hell good is she doing herself or anybody now?”
“Get out of here.”
She turned over face down on the bed and lay there barely moving. I touched her hand but she drew it away. She seemed to be hardly breathing. She wasn’t crying that I could see.
I left her there and went looking for Hipolito Robles. I found him just leaving the dining room.
“Well?” he said.
“She doesn’t want to go. She knows she has to, but is afraid it would kill her mother. If she doesn’t go, the deal’s off.”
“I understand. She will accompany you. Emilio will bring her mother to the airport. Will that be satisfactory?”
“Yeah,” I said.
He put his hand on my shoulder. “You’re a buen hombre, Señor Drum. A good man.”
“Ah, the hell with all of you,” I said, and left him standing there with his mouth open.
I went to my room and got undressed and lay there without sleeping.
Rosa had a big breakfast ready at sunrise. It was drizzling outside and the coldest it had been since I’d arrived. Don’t let anyone kid you about those twenty-minute sun showers during the rainy season in the tropics and bright clear weather the rest of the time. The only place you find that is in the travel folders.
At breakfast Eulalia wouldn’t talk to me. I didn’t push it. Jesús went outside to see about the jeep he would drive us to the airport in. Rosa sat with Eulalia. Robles took me into the hall and gave me a roll of dolares big enough to choke a capybara.
“The pilot,” he said, “who is an American del Norte named O’Tool, will fly you to Asunción, Paraguay. There is enough money left for air fare from there to wherever you wish to go in the United States.” He also gave me an envelope. “Here are visas for Señorita Mistral and her mother, and a validated passport for the old woman.”
“You don’t exactly sleep on an idea, do you?”
Hipolito Robles smiled. “We had the blanks. We merely had to fill them in.”
Just then the motor of Jesús’s jeep coughed and caught outside, and began to purr smoothly. Rosa and Eulalia came out of the dining room and Eulalia said, “I don’t want to go.”
“Muchacha,” Rosa said. “Muchacha.”
Her brother gave me a revolver. It was a Smith & Wesson .38/44 Special. “Just in case,” he said.
We shook hands. Rosa pecked a kiss at Eulalia’s face, Robles said, “Suerte,” and I took Eulalia’s elbow and led her outside.
“Take care of the girl,” Rosa called after me. “Take care of her, señor Drum, and go with God.”
Eulalia’s arm was stiff under my fingers. We went over to the jeep, walking through the light rain. Jesús sat like a statue at the wheel.
All morning we drove up into the hills west of the ranch. The road was bad and we made very poor time. Jesús never said a word. He didn’t even turn around to look at us. He drove in splendid, isolated communion with the jeep and the bad road.
Once Eulalia dozed off and her head slumped against my shoulder. She said something in her sleep, but I couldn’t make it out. When she awoke she jerked away from me. We didn’t talk at all. Pretty early in the morning we had passed the last of the higher, smaller ranches. The animals out grazing in the rain were small and bony. It was bad pasture land. Beyond it the hills rose steeply and Jesús took the jeep up and around one hairpin turn after another. From the look of the countryside it had been high jungle once, but had been cleared for ranching. The poor ranchers had long since given up their hopeless fight and a scrubby secondary growth of timber lay tangled and twisted over the hills, glistening and very green in the rain. Eulalia stared straight ahead, looking at nothing. She never saw any of it.
Around noon the highest hills were behind us and the road went gently down across a sloping plateau. We rounded a sharp curve and there was the airport below us. It wasn’t much of an airport, just a couple of corrugated metal shacks and a lonely hangar with a wind-stiffened yellow windsock flying above it. There was a biplane out in the rain that Errol Flynn might have flown in Dawn Patrol. The hangar door was open and there was a high-winged monoplane in there, possibly a Beechcraft. Jesús drove up to the larger of the two corrugated shacks, crossing the concrete tarmac. The surface was pitted and cracked. Weeds grew out of it. The place looked like the last airport for the final flight of the last airplane in a dying world.
As we got out of the jeep a fellow in an unzippered leather jumper came out of the shack. He was short and stocky, with reddish-blond hair and faded blue eyes. “Come on in out of the rain and grab some coffee,” he said cheerfully. “Hell of an airport, ain’t it?”
We all went inside the corrugated shack. The front room had a narrow zinc-topped counter and half a dozen chairs. An Indian lad behind the counter had a big pot of coffee perking and it smelled delicious. There was a platter of sandwiches on the counter.
“Rain don’t get any worse,” the man in the jumper said, “we can take off this afternoon. All right with you?”
I said it was all right. Jesús finished his coffee in a hurry and wolfed down one of the sandwiches. He got up and smiled politely and shyly and said, “Mucha suerte.” Those were the only words I had ever heard him speak. Then he went outside and in a moment we heard his jeep driving away.
“I’m O’Tool,” the man in the jumper said. He grinned. “I own this place, lock stock and barrel. Took me twelve years to pay off the mortgage, but of course by then the high ranches had all folded up and the place ain’t worth a bent slug now. I was going to fly supplies and grub in so they wouldn’t have to cart it up the hill roads. Going to make a million bucks. All the ranchers fooled me. by going back down into the river valley. Ain’t it a laugh?”
Eulalia smiled fleetingly. I introduced her and told O’Tool my name. The Indian poured a second cup of coffee for all of us. O’Tool took a bottle of Irish whisky out from behind the counter and spiked all our drinks.
“Cold up here. Elevation six thousand feet,” he said. “They radioed there’d be three of you.”
“We’re waiting for Miss Mistral’s mother,” I said.
We finished our coffee and O’Tool showed us around the little airport. There were five bunks in the back room of the larger shack, and an office took up the entire interior of the smaller one. The plane in the hangar was a big old six-seater Beechcraft. O’Tool seemed to take a kind
of perverse satisfaction in showing us around his business enterprise. “O’Tool’s Folly,” he said. “You could buy it now for enough bird turd to fertilize an acre, but you’d have to be out of your head.”
I never asked him what had brought him to the Parana Republic in the first place, or why he didn’t pull out. He didn’t ask me why we had chosen this way out of the country.
In the middle of the afternoon Eulalia went into the bunk room to take a nap. I didn’t have to watch her because there was no place she could go. Besides, she had to wait for her mother now. O’Tool looked uneasy and I asked him what was the matter.
“The weather,” he said. “I could take her up now, Drum, but I can’t swear for later. If that soup up there closes in, we’re grounded. And I mean grounded, brother.”
At four o’clock it began to rain harder. Clouds rolled and billowed like smoke on the surrounding hills. “I dunno,” O’Tool said. “It don’t look good.”
Twenty minutes later the rain slackened and he began to get cheerful. Then we heard the sound of a car coming down the hill toward the airport.
I went outside and waited for it. Eulalia came out too and stood next to me without talking.
“Sleep any?” I said.
She didn’t answer me. The car was closer. Then it came around the shoulder of the closest hill. It was a jeep. I put my hand on the butt of the .38/44 in my belt and felt foolish doing it. Who the hell could it be but Emilio and Señora Mistral?
The jeep drove across the tarmac and came to a stop, its brake linings squeaking with wet and rust. Emilio opened the canvas door and climbed out. He saw me and beckoned with his hand. I trotted over there with Eulalia right behind me.
Señora Mistral was sitting in the back of the jeep. She wore a poncho. All you could see of her was a little wrinkled skin and her deep-set eyes. She looked two hundred years old. I leaned in and helped her to the jeep’s door. She was a poncho and a husk and those deep-set eyes. She didn’t weigh ninety pounds. She was not a young woman, but with the poncho covering her she looked old enough to be her own grandmother. She looked a little like an Indian, too.
“Madrecito,” Eulalia said. “Are you all right, madrecito?”
The old woman mumbled something.
Emilio told me, “If we can make a saddle with our hands—”
“No. I can carry her.”
I lifted Señora Mistral out of the jeep. Emilio leaned in and shut the engine. I took a step away from the jeep with señora Mistral in my arms, waiting unconsciously for the complete silence of the high hill country. It didn’t come.
There was the sound of another car, far away. It grew more distinct. “Quick,” I told Emilio. “Take her.”
He lifted the old woman from my arms. The other car was much closer now. I thought it would appear around the shoulder of the hill in another moment; but it didn’t. Then the sound of its motor rose and fell, rose and fell—as if the car were being seesawed back and forth across the narrow road to make a U-turn.
I jumped into Emilio’s jeep and started the motor. I swung around on the tarmac, skidding, and pushed the gas pedal down to the floor. The jeep surged forward. It was about half a mile to the hill. When I reached it I slammed the brakes on and leaped from the jeep, clawing the .38/44 from my belt.
The other car, also a jeep, had still not completed its U-turn when I sprinted through the mud around the shoulder of the hill and saw it. The road was very narrow. There were deep tire marks in the mud on either side of it.
“Come out of there or I’ll shoot!” I shouted.
It was a battered old jeep, mud-splattered, its canvas top torn and slack without any plastic windowpane in the rear window. The man at the wheel turned around and stared at me. I had a quick look at a square, dark-skinned face. The eyes were big with fear. The jeep roared suddenly, as if it too had life and was afraid. It backed through the mud toward me very quickly, then the gears ground and it began to move forward. I fired quickly from the hip and saw a spider web appear magically in the windshield alongside the man’s head. I fired again, but the jeep was moving fast now, lurching a little from side to side, gaining speed. It had taken the driver all this time to turn around on the narrow, muddy road. I saw his face again suddenly, in my mind. I knew that face.
It was Ansensio Martinez.
I ran back to Emilio’s jeep and jumped in. The engine was still idling. The rain was coming down harder now. The jeep slid and slipped up over the hill, seeking traction. Then it really began to move. I saw Ansensio Martinez’s jeep, a quarter of a mile away, laboring up another hill. I opened the door and leaned out to fire the .38/44 at him, but he was much too far away.
When I reached the top of the second hill, he was far below me in a drop in the convoluted terrain. I stepped on the gas and held the wheel as hard as I could. The jeep went down very smoothly. He was climbing again, following the road upwards and to the left. I was gaining on him. As long as he climbed I would gain.
The rain pelted down. I dropped the .38/44 on the seat and used my right hand to work the manual wipers. At the bottom of the hill I patted the brake pedal and swung left with the road. The rear wheels of the jeep swung right. I got both hands on the wheel and tried to ease the front of the jeep in the direction of the skid.
I felt a lurch and a drop and was staring not at the road rising on the flank of the next hill but at a wall of trees and secondary growth. The jeep struck something and I went forward hard against the windshield.
I must have blacked out for a moment. The jeep was silent now. I heard only the rain. The undergrowth against the windshield was spinning around. I tried to start the jeep, but it wouldn’t kick over. I don’t know how long I sat there trying. Finally I went out into the rain and staggered up the road. I stopped and almost fell down. I’d been going in the wrong direction. I went back past the jeep. It had plowed into a tree. The tree was bleeding sap and the jeep’s front end was raised so you could see a bent axle. I kept on walking, not feeling the rain. After a long time I walked up and over the last hill and down the road to the airport. The hangar door was closed.
O’Tool must have seen me coming. He met me at the door of the bigger corrugated shack. “Jesus,” he said, “what happened to you? There’s blood all over your face.”
I said, “Got to take off right now.”
“In this rain? We wouldn’t have a chance.” I felt his hand on my arm. My head was whirling. “… inside and take a look at you.”
“You don’t understand,” I said. “It was Martinez.”
He didn’t answer me. He took me inside. I thought I heard low voices in the back room, but we didn’t go in there. He bathed my face with a wet rag and said something about a gash on my forehead. Then he put something stinging on it, probably alcohol. After a while he said the bleeding had stopped.
“Where are they?”
“In the back with Pedro.” Pedro was the Indian.
“What’s the matter?”
“The old lady’s sick. They think she’s dying.”
Chapter Seventeen
THERE was only one small window in the bunk room, and very little light. The old lady lay on one of the lower bunks, gasping for breath and coughing. Someone had propped some pillows behind her head. She was covered with poncho. Her face looked like old yellowed ivory in the dim light. It was covered with a film of sweat. Her eyes were wide and jerked in her head when I came in. Weakly she raised one hand, for no reason that I could see. Eulalia knelt by her side, patting her wet face with a cloth.
Emilio looked at me and shook his head. The Indian, Pedro, stood with his head down, as if he were praying. I nodded toward the door and Emilio came into the front room with me. O’Tool wasn’t there, but I heard the hangar door sliding.
“Bad?” I asked Emilio.
He shrugged.
“Well, what do you think?”
“The vieja was sick when I came for her. At first she wouldn’t go. She wouldn’t believe it when I said he
r daughter was waiting. A heavy woman, muy borracha, helped her to the jeep. ‘She is very sick,’ the heavy woman said. The drunkard. ‘It is her heart. You take her to her daughter quickly.’ The vieja sat without moving all the way here. You saw how we had to carry her from the jeep. I saw her legs when we put her in bed. Her ankles. Swollen, señor. Clearly, it is her heart. She is dying, I think. My father’s brother died like that.”
I said, “Ansensio Martinez was in the other jeep.”
“Martinez,” he said. He made a face. “Did you get him?”
“No.”
He said nothing.
“How long will it take Martinez to get to Ciudad Grande or someplace he can call?”
“In the rain, six or seven hours. There is no place he can call from, except one of the high ranches. Six or seven hours to the city. Perhaps two hours to the high ranches.”
“He’ll call if he can find a phone.”
“He’ll call,” Emilio agreed bleakly. “It will mean much money to him. In the swamps on the border you should have killed him. There are telephone lines to the high ranches.”
“Two hours,” I said. And six hours for the security police to come. Eight hours in all. It was now four-thirty. We had until midnight, or a little more.
I went into the bunk room. The old lady was coughing. Her eyes darted from Pedro’s face to Eulalia’s to mine. She was breathing very rapidly. “Eulalia,” she said.
“I am here, madrecito.”
“Eulalia!”
“Yes, madrecito.”
“You’re here. Oh, you’re here.”
The old lady tried to sit up. She did not have the strength for it, but the muscles corded and stood out on her neck.
“… these others,” she said, coughing.
“Leave us,” Eulalia said, without looking up. Pedro left the bunk room.
“Listen,” I said. I didn’t know what I wanted to say.
“Get out. Just get out.”
I went out and closed the door softly. We stood there waiting. Pedro poured coffee. Emilio drank his. I let mine stand. After a while the hangar door slid and we heard O’Tool running through the rain, his shoes drumming on concrete. He came in soaking wet.
Murder Is My Dish Page 15
