Sanibel Flats

by Randy Wayne White

  "Hollins was an acquaintance of mine. My associates and I helped him market some of the stuff he transported for Zacul—"

  "Then you know where this man is now? You know the whereabouts of Hollins?"

  Even though Ford knew that Zacul wanted Hollins, the intensity of Suarez's voice startled him. They wanted him, all right, and they wanted him badly.

  "Yes, I know where he is. He's dead."

  "Dead?"

  "Murdered. Check in my bag, the shaving kit, and you'll find a couple of newspaper clippings about it."

  Suarez began to pull things from the bag, took out the clippings and read them anxiously. "It says here that he committed suicide—suicida, no?"

  Ford shrugged. "I don't think so. He lived a dangerous life and I think he probably made some kind of mistake; trusted the wrong people. But it doesn't matter. Hollins is gone. That leaves General Zacul with no one to market his stuff. That's why we're here. I got to Hollins's body about an hour before the police. I found a little metal box the murderer had overlooked. There were interesting things in the box, particularly a notebook with his list of connections. That is how I found Zacul's name."

  Suarez lunged forward suddenly, taking Ford by the shirt and shaking him. "What else was in the box? What else, do you hear me? Tell me now or I will have my men shoot you this instant."

  Ford pulled slowly away from the man, no longer frightened, no longer worried about Suarez killing them—because he had Suarez, really had him. He said, "Some of the things are in my backpack; your men overlooked them in their first search. Some jade carvings, amulet-sized, and two emeralds. I brought them as a token of good faith."

  "What else?"

  What else? The emeralds weren't enough, and Ford knew he'd have to play his hole card. He said, "An old manuscript with a lot of writing I didn't understand," watching the man's eyes.

  "The book," Suarez said in a low voice, but very tense. "Describe the book to me."

  Ford smiled. "You're interested in the book?"

  "Yes/"

  "Let's see. ... It didn't have any covers on it. About thirty-five, forty pages long. Dark ink with some drawings in faded red and gold. That's about all I can remember. "

  "You still have this thing?"

  "I have it. But I didn't bring it with me. Not to Masagua, anyway."

  "Where is it?" Suarez was hunched over him, his fists clenched, as if he wanted to pull the information from Ford's throat.

  Ford leaned back in his chair and folded his hands behind his head, comfortable but not wanting to push the advantage too far. "I've done enough talking for one night, Colonel. My friend needs medical attention. And I could use some sleep. If you want to hear any more about the book, you'll have to take me to Zacul."

  Suarez gave him a long, cold look. After a few moments he said, "Very well. You will ride with us," but Ford got the impression that Suarez saw this as only a temporary concession.

  Ford knew that, barring interference from Zacul, Suarez would kill them.

  Ford shook his head. "We'll follow you in our own vehicle. It'll be easier for us to get back that way."

  Suarez pulled a snubnosed revolver from the back of his pants, cocked it, and leveled it at Tomlinson. "It has already been decided. Do you wish to argue more?"

  Ford got no chance to sleep; nor did he get a moment alone with Tomlinson. Suarez locked them in the room with a guard, then returned an hour later to lead them through the streets of Utatlan to a clearing beside the River of the Sun where four transport trucks waited.

  It was 4:30 A.M.

  Three of the trucks were filled with boxes of food and other supplies—Suarez had come to town for market day. The back of the fourth truck had room for the dozen or so guerrillas, and that's where Ford and Tomlinson rode, sitting in the open truck among crates of bananas, papayas, and live chickens.

  The last thing Suarez told the guerrillas before starting the caravan was if the gringos tried to escape, shoot them.

  The trucks made their way across the western valley, throwing a dusty wake in the darkness, while behind them the twinkling lights of Utatlan were absorbed by the low dark hills and then the fiery haze of a slow sunrise. The fresh light was harsh, and it touched the peaks of the volcanos that lay ahead in abrupt striations of light and shadow, showing wedges of mountainside. Two of the volcanos were active, and the roiling smoke, normally gray, was transformed into iridescent orange by the sunrise. The smoke flattened above the coned peaks in a great swath of rust.

  Ford and Tomlinson rode in the far corner of the bed, nearest to the cab. They hadn't spoken more than a few words to each other because the soldiers sat on the other side, just a few feet away. The soldiers probably didn't understand English, but Ford wanted to take no chances. Not now; not when they were so close. But then the trucks began a long series of switchbacks as they entered the volcanic ranges, and the noise of the shifting gears and straining engines blotted out all other sound, so Ford slid down closer to Tomlinson and nudged him with his foot. "You asleep?"

  Tomlinson had his head pillowed on a sack of beans, his long legs draped over more sacks, and his eyes were closed. "What?" He sat up and stretched a little, touching his face experimentally. "Naw, had to open my eyes anyway to see who was kicking me."

  "Sorry. I guess you've been kicked enough for a while."

  Both of Tomlinson's eyes were black and his face was streaked with iodine from the first aid kit Suarez had given Ford. Looking around, he said, "Hey, you catch those volcanos up ahead? Weird-looking, man. Like something out of an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel. Like you expect to see dinosaurs and winged reptiles and stuff. Cave men eating raw meat, maybe."

  "Sounds like you're feeling better anyway."

  "I feel like hell, man." He tapped his head. "In here I feel like hell."

  "I can bang on the cab and tell Suarez to give us some more aspirin."

  "Pills aren't going to help what I feel. It's what those guys did to me. The way they humiliated me. They hit me with their fists and they kicked me in the nuts. They . . . they made me cry, Doc. I pissed my pants and they made me cry like a baby. That sort of shit shouldn't happen to a human being." He put his head down, not able to shake it off, the abasement.

  "It's okay, Tomlinson."

  "It's not okay, man. You told me to be careful, but I had to go and open my big mouth to that asshole Suarez. Hell, he seemed like a nice guy. Kind of dumb and harmless. Next thing I knew, he was kicking me down the alley. Now I've screwed up your plans."

  "Not too loud. Keep your voice nice and relaxed, like we're talking about the weather or something."

  "Well, I did screw it up, didn't I? No more messenger going into the mountains for us, no more clean exchange. And they're probably going to kill us."

  All of which was true.

  Ford said, "I'll think of something. We'll just have to play it by ear. One thing we can't afford is for them to catch us in a lie. Our stories have to match. That's why I need to know what you told Suarez in that room. Everything."

  Tomlinson blinked at him. "I didn't tell him anything, man. I zoned out while they were beating me. I had no reason to tell them because I didn't feel a thing."

  "Look, Tomlinson, it's all right if you talked. It's nothing to be ashamed of. You said they humiliated you—"

  "Not by beating me, they didn't. Hell, they degraded themselves, not me. It's what they made me feel that was so damn humiliating. It's what was going around in my brain while I was zoned out. You know what they made me feel? Hatred, man; hatred like I've never felt before. Hatred for all the cruel, unfeeling, unthinking sons of bitches in this world, and I wanted to kill them. I mean, I actually wanted to take a gun and kill the bastards because they were enjoying it. I could see it in their faces, kind of grinning while they kicked me, Suarez most of all. Hell, it was like a trip to Disney World for that buggy fucker. Hatred does a number on the bladder, I found that out. But I didn't tell them a thing, not one damn word. "

&nb
sp; "That's why you feel humiliated?"

  "Sure."

  "You feel bad because of the way you reacted. " Incredulous, as if Tomlinson were a cross between Audie Murphy and E.T.

  "Yeah. You know why? 'Cause I still got that feeling in my head. I can't get rid of it. I close my eyes and I see Suarez grinning and kicking, and I want to take a gun and give him one right here." Tomlinson, looking miserable, touched an index finger to his nose and pressed his thumb down.

  * * *

  Once they were in the mountains, the caravan made several stops, pulling off the road near clusterings of thatched-roof huts on the hillsides. At each stop, a couple of soldiers came straggling down, Maya teenagers, mostly, looking too small for their camouflage fatigues and shiny AK-47 Soviet assault rifles. These boys were the substance and sustenance of war in Central America, leaving their mothers to carry weapons made in countries they knew nothing about and would probably never see; fighting battles against their own kind in which each side functioned as little more than mercenaries on their own land. The young guerrillas would swing up onto the already overloaded trucks, neither smiling nor speaking; resigned to something, but Ford had never quite understood what was at the core of that resignation. He doubted if he ever would. Then someone would whistle and the caravan would rumble onward again as the teenage soldiers blinked stoically in the wind.

  Two hours from Utatlan, they reached the peak of the lowest pass and there was the lake, God's Eye, bright blue and almost perfectly round from that distance, glittering like a mirror amid the dark hills which surrounded it. Beyond a vent in the hills was another pale-blue void that Ford knew was the Pacific Ocean.

  Tomlinson was looking, too. "Boy, there's no describing that, is there? Like a picture you see on a calendar, only you hate to see something like this on a calendar because it spoils it some way."

  Ford said, "See that village? It's Tambor. I used to live down the shoreline from there, about a mile. I had a little lab set up."

  "Where you studied the sharks."

  "Right. For about eight months."

  "I'd like to get a look at ol' Carcharhinus leucas." Using the Latin name, but not sounding affected—something only Tomlinson could do.

  "Just don't get in the water to do it."

  "Man-eating fish, huh?"

  "They're not as quick to attack as the Maya say, but they can be pretty aggressive. They act differently than sharks in saltwater, too. For one thing, their growth's been stunted, possibly because of overpopulation, possibly because of the fresh water, but mostly because of the limited food supply. The lake's more than a thousand feet deep in some places, but the sharks have to feed near the surface because that's where the food is: fish, birds, turtles, stuff like that. They take what they can get."

  "I'd feel safer in the water than I would with that bastard driving."

  "Yeah, well, you probably would be safer. Once I watched these guys trying to row a horse across the lake on a makeshift bamboo ferry. The ferry dumped and the horse went in the water. I was in a boat, so I got a good look. I hadn't seen a shark all morning, but within a minute of that horse hitting the water, they were all around. The water's so clear you can see them from a long way off."

  "Goddamn, they ate a whole horse?"

  "No. That's the point. They never touched it. The horse made it clear to shore with these five-footers cruising all around. But the way those fish vectored in the instant that horse hit the water was impressive. I don't believe in the legends, but I don't want to test them either. "

  Tambor was bamboo, thatch, plywood, and tin, too rustic to be tacky, too well traveled to be quaint because it was the only village on the lake built on the main road. Ford looked to see if he recognized anyone as they drove through, thinking that, if they stopped, he might somehow be able to get a message to . . . who? Rigaberto Herrera, maybe. Ford couldn't think of anyone else who could help.

  He didn't recognize anyone on the street, though. And the caravan didn't stop. It turned east up a mud logging trail, the trucks grinding along in low gear, twisting and sliding for nine or ten miles past a series of camouflaged bunkers. They were following the perimeter of the lake tpward the sea, and, at each checkpoint, guerrillas stood with their machine guns and made sloppy, bored salutes. Finally the forest thinned and they ascended onto a broad plateau a hundred feet or so above the lake and about a mile from the Pacific, but still hidden by the hills behind and the forest beside. Then they came to a clearing: Zacul's main camp, almost directly across the lake from Tambor.

  Ford had spent time on this section of shoreline, but he didn't recognize what he now saw. What was once thick jungle had been cleared and pushed back. Zacul had installed a permanent camp, using fiberglass housing shells that were camouflaged to blend with the high green forest canopy. There was a big open cook house, kettles boiling. There were open-air messes and a parade ground, too. Ford guessed there were facilities for five hundred or more men. The rest of Zacul's forces, as were Rivera's, would be spread around the country as a sort of civilian militia. Sitting not far from the parade ground beneath gray webbing was a Soviet gunship, its blades folded like wilted petals, rockets clinging to its underbelly like eggs on a gravid crab. There were artillery bunkers, too—antiaircraft ordnance, Ford guessed, but the artillery was covered and he couldn't see it clearly. The whole camp had a sterile look; a place of raw earth and fresh paint, as if the bulldozers had only recently finished their work.

  Protruding from the jungled hillsides, in stark contrast, were wedges of gray stone blocks buried beneath earth and vines that were now being torn away by men working on scaffoldings.

  Tomlinson noticed and nudged him, excited. "Those are pyramids, man. Even covered by that hill, you can see the shapes."

  Ford said, "Yeah, I think so."

  "I thought an earthquake supposedly took all that stuff. Look at it, man. It's not supposed to be here."

  Ford did not reply. He had suspected that this was where he would find Zacul, suspected it when he heard that Pilar Balserio's archaeological camp had been attacked by robbers.

  Zacul and his men had been the robbers and it was here they must have assaulted Pilar and taken the book that Rafe

  Hollins would later steal from them, the Kin Qux Cho. Now Zacul and his men were continuing the work that Pilar had started, uncovering the lost temples of the Tlaxclen Maya.

  When the trucks stopped, they waited for the soldiers to get out; then Ford jumped to the ground. He took a few steps, looked to see if anyone was watching, then squatted and picked up something small and black, as shiny as quartz. He handed it to Tomlinson.

  "What's this, man? An Indian arrowhead? Naw, it's a—"

  "It's a shark's tooth," Ford said.

  Tomlinson was staring at the ground. "Hey, they're all over the place. There's one; there's another one. A big one, too—"

  "Don't pick it up. Just keep walking."

  "What are sharks' teeth doing up here, man? We must be a mile from the ocean and at least a half mile from the lake. A lot higher, too."

  "It's because we're standing where the lake used to be."

  "Huh?"

  "The earthquakes didn't cover the lake, they moved it. That's why no one ever found anything looking in the lake."

  "I'll be damned!" Tomlinson couldn't resist, and picked up another shark's tooth. "Yeah, right—I get it. The whole bottom shifted." He turned to Ford. "But how did you know? Did Pilar tell you?"

  Ford said, "No, I told her."

  They were herded across the parade ground to a fiberglass structure about forty feet long and fifteen feet wide set apart from the other, smaller huts. Two guards with automatic weapons lounged outside, and they watched blankly as Suarez snapped open the padlock. "Your hotel while you are our guests." Grinning like a comedian, Suarez mfade a sweeping gesture with his arm. "But do not get so comfortable. I am sure General Zacul will want to speak with you soon. Tomorrow, yes. Or the next day." He had made a joke in English and wa
s laughing.

  Inside, daylight filtered through a grating at the far end creating a dusky darkness that emphasized the heat and the stench. Ford was aware of movement inside, of other shapes hunched close to the ground. Then his eyes adjusted and he could §ee that the shapes were human; people chained to the walls, sitting in the stink of their own offal, no longer bothering to swat at the flies that buzzed in a translucent veil around their faces.

  Most of them were men, but there was at least one boy, too. Ford stood breathing shallowly in the foul air, studying the child chained beneath the grating. The boy was using his free hand in play, trying to build a tiny house of twigs but without much success. The house fell when Suarez slammed the door, locking them in. The boy began to rebuild the house again, but it fell once more. Finally, with a moan of frustration, he knocked the twigs away and buried his face against his arm.

  He did not cry, though, and his silence was more chilling than any scream.

  The boy was Jake Hollins.

  SEVENTEEN

  Tomlinson was saying "You know why I like traveling with you, Doc? Because you steer clear of all that tourist-trap stuff. No Days Inns or Ramadas for you, man. Places you go, a guy doesn't have to worry about that troublesome holiday traffic." His voice slightly higher with a nervous edge, Tomlinson was frightened and had to talk.

  They had found a space on the ground as close as they could to the boy without making it obvious that they had an interest in him. Outside the temperature was probably 84 degrees with a cool breeze from the mountains. Inside the fiberglass hut, though, it was like a sauna, and Ford's cotton shirt and pants were already soaked. If the heat was bad, the stink was worse, plus there were the flies.

  Now Tomlinson was trying to be funny.

  "Then there's all the interesting people we've met, and now you even found us a place to stay for free." He patted the ground like it was a pillow. "Don't think I don't see the wisdom in a vacation like this. Nothing shakes off those nine-to-five blahs like a good dose of hepatitis."