In the Trees

by Pauline Fisk

  The city fell behind in a tangle of clapboard houses, cinderblock supermarkets and endless churches with exotic names. Churches, churches, churches, Kid thought – Belize seemed full of churches. Beyond the turn-off to the airport, the highway emptied save for the occasional truck roaring past, throwing up clouds of dust. Finally Kid felt that he could relax. He put away the note. There were no hostile stares to worry about any more, no hustlers wanting dollars, nobody even curious. On this bus, he was just another traveller rocking back and forth, lulled by the rhythm of the road and whatever music the driver decided to put on.

  The bus passed through a flat land dotted with vegetation and occasional pools, shacks and cattle, pine ridges and little farmsteads. Mangroves sweltered in the hot sun, growing out of sandy soil. At every village, the bus turned off the highway and made a detour of pale, sandy-coloured tracks around which clustered tumble-down houses, lines of washing, broken-down old cars and banners calling on the nation to either Believe in Belize or Wish for Change, depending on the party they supported. Kid dozed until Belmopan, which he later learned was the capital of Belize, though it certainly didn’t look like any capital to him. Then he slept again, only awakening when the coastal flatlands had completely gone. The bus was driving through a hilly landscape now, which was lusher and greener. The air blowing in through the windows smelt of trees, which was hardly surprising because citrus farms lined the road, their groves hanging with ripening oranges.

  The people on the bus were different too, not Caribbean-looking like the ones in Belize City, but more Indian-looking and some of them speaking to each other in Spanish. One of them saw Kid staring at the oranges on the trees, and said, in slow and careful English, ‘You get a chance, you pick one. Belizean oranges are as good as they look.’

  Kid felt as if the journey would never end. Finally, however, the bus turned off the highway and plunged down a straight, wide road which led to a river where children were bathing. It bumped over a single-track bridge and pulled up the hill on the other side, halting beside an open market full of stalls.

  ‘San Ignacio,’ called the driver.

  Kid had arrived. Getting off the bus he walked down to the back doors where people were pulling out luggage to sort out whose was whose. By the time he’d identified his rucksack, everybody else had gone. The bus pulled away and he was left alone.

  Kid looked around. San Ignacio, he realised straight away, was completely different from Belize City. It wasn’t just that the people here were a mix of Mestizos, speaking mostly Spanish and a form of English that he understood more easily than Kriol. It was the pace of life. No one came up to Kid or wanted anything off him, including dollars, or even bothered to look his way.

  Kid started walking through the market, taking in everything from shirts to skirts, furniture to car parts, eggs and butter to vegetables and exotic fruit. No one tried to force their wares on him, and they didn’t speak unless he spoke first.

  Kid reached the far side of the market, crossed the road and entered a square full of shady almond trees, dotted with concrete benches painted pink and blue. Here he sat down and took stock. On one side of him was a fountain as ornamental as a wedding cake, which looked as if it had long-since been switched off. On the other side was a row of battered old taxis parked in front of a parade of shops.

  One of the shops was an internet café, and Kid gave a passing moment’s thought to emailing Nadine to say that he was safe and well. But beyond it was a shady bar called Mrs Edie’s Place, and it looked far more inviting. Old men wandered in and seemed unwilling to come out. Dogs panted in the doorway. Women on the veranda sipped ice-cold drinks in little glasses. There were even a couple of tourists who looked as welcome as everybody else.

  Kid forgot about the internet café and headed for Mrs Edie’s shade instead. ‘What can I get you?’ called out the woman behind the bar as he picked his way between the tables.

  Back at home, Kid would never have got away with it, but he tried his luck and asked for a beer. By the time he reached the bar, a chilled bottle had been opened for him and slammed on to it, wrapped in a napkin. He drank it straight down, then before the bar attendant saw how young he was and changed her mind, paid for a second one and took it to a table.

  Kid drank this beer more slowly, then ordered a bottle of water and a plate of scrambled eggs. Now that he wasn’t quite so thirsty, he realised how hungry he was. The eggs came with fry-jacks, which were triangles of fluffy dough deep-fried in oil. The woman brought them over. She was Mrs Edie, she said, and who was he?

  Kid told her his name in full, Marcus Aurelius Cato. He hoped it would ring a bell but, if it did, she gave nothing away. She didn’t even react when Kid dug out his father’s photograph. Not a flicker of recognition showed in her face.

  ‘But this man was definitely last seen up Cayo way,’ Kid said, thinking that Mrs Edie looked like the sort of person who knew everybody.

  ‘Up Cayo way doesn’t just mean San Ignacio,’ Mrs Edie replied. ‘It’s an entire district, stretching from the Guatemalan border up past Mountain Pine Ridge.’

  Kid’s heart sank. He showed the photo round the bar, but no one else recognised his father either. There were some comments about his mother, and some about the hat, but that was all. Had he come here on a false trail? Mrs Edie took pity on him and took a second look. The only men who ever came to town dressed as flashily as that, she said, were the ones who stayed at Night Falls Lodge.

  ‘They might help you up there,’ she said. ‘They’ve always got strangers passing through. It’s meant to be a tourist lodge but its so-called guests aren’t the usual tourists, if you get my drift.’

  Kid didn’t get her drift, but his curiosity was aroused. What did Mrs Edie mean, he wanted to know. She muttered about night visitors and planes and something called ‘Belizean breeze’. But if Kid’s father was in that business, she said, he was best left well alone. In fact, she wished she hadn’t mentioned Night Falls Lodge. Kid should forget she’d even spoken.

  Kid tried to find out more, but Mrs Edie had already said more than enough, she reckoned, and turned her attention to her other customers. He couldn’t get another word out of her. In the end, he settled up and went outside. The market was empty by now, the sun lowering and the only car on the street a taxi, its driver sitting on a low wall looking out across the square.

  Kid crossed the street. A whiff of danger blew his way, but it didn’t frighten him. He was up for it. ‘I need a ride,’ he said, his voice shaking with something that could have been fear, but he told himself it was excitement.

  The driver stood up. She was a Mestizo woman with enormous hips, high, flat cheekbones and a big nose. ‘I was just thinking of heading home,’ she said. ‘But where you wanna go?’

  Kid braced himself. He knew that this was madness. He’d no real lead. No reason to hope. Only Mrs Edie’s words and some crazy hunch half-forming in his brain. But he’d come to find his father, and what else had he got?

  ‘Night Falls Lodge,’ he said.

  8

  TAXI-MAY

  The taxi driver didn’t want to go that far. It was getting late, she said, and the road to Night Falls Lodge was pretty rough. It was a long way too, and she had a family wedding in the morning. Her daughter Carmelita’s wedding – which meant she only had tonight to talk the stupid girl out of it, or else she’d make the biggest mistake of her life.

  ‘Everybody knows she’s making a mistake,’ the driver said, ‘except for her. They come to me and say Taxi-May – that’s my name, Taxi-May – why’s that beautiful daughter of yours marrying a man like that? She could have anyone, so why’s she chosen that crook?’

  She spat out the word crook. Kid said that he was sorry, but he needed to get out to Night Falls Lodge as a matter of urgency.

  Taxi-May looked at him searchingly. ‘You’re not in trouble, are you?’ she said.

  ‘Nothing like that,’ said Kid. ‘I’m just looking for someone.’

&nb
sp; ‘And they can’t wait till the morning?’

  Kid said they couldn’t. Taxi-May shook her head. ‘You kids, you’re all the same,’ she said. ‘As impatient as each other. You’re like my Carmelita. If you’re not in trouble yet, you will be soon, you mark my words.’

  Even so, she agreed to drive Kid up as far as the Night Falls turn on the Cristo del Rey road, which was on her way home.

  ‘But you’re on your own after that,’ she said. ‘It’ll be dark by the time we reach the turn, but you’ll have to walk the rest.’

  Kid didn’t argue. Anything, he reckoned, beat hanging around San Ignacio knowing that he’d ignored his only lead. Taxi-May drove at breakneck speed, talking all the way, bemoaning the tragedy awaiting her daughter. She was only sixteen, apparently, and as beautiful as the sunrise. Taxi-May wanted her to get an education and make something of herself. But she’d happily see her married to anybody else, just so long as it wasn’t this low-life scum.

  By the time they reached the Night Falls Lodge turn, Kid knew all about it, including the fact that Taxi-May had made the same mistake herself, apparently. She’d been sixteen too, when she’d married, and where was Carmelita’s father now? Having a child had meant nothing to him, and neither had having a wife. And now here was history repeating itself.

  The taxi pulled up next to a broken-down old sign announcing NIGHT FALLS LODGE. 10KM. GUESTS WELCOME. Kid opened the car door. The din of cicadas rose to greet him, and so did the same smell of trees that he’d first noticed at the airport. He started getting out, but Taxi-May dragged him back in as if she’d had second thoughts, and slammed the door.

  ‘Talking to that daughter of mine’s going to be a waste of time,’ she said. ‘I know that before I even start. And if you go walking off into the night, I’ll end up worrying about whether you survived. It’s not a park out there, in case you hadn’t noticed. It’s the jungle. You could get yourself eaten alive.’

  She turned the taxi up the track. Kid said he didn’t want to put her out and she told him to shut up. The road wound up through open farmland into rolling hills. To begin with, they drove through orange groves, with cattle grazing between the trees, white birds standing on their backs picking at them with thin, sharp beaks. But then the orange groves fell behind and Kid realised what Taxi-May had meant about jungle.

  This was the landscape he’d seen from the plane, only then he’d been flying over it and now he was in the thick of it. Not only that, but night was falling fast, and there was nothing to pierce the darkness but a couple of distinctly wonky headlights.

  Kid shivered and thought about Night Falls Lodge and wondered what lay ahead. Would the people up there help him? Would they recognise his father? Would they even offer him a bed for the night? Kid was a long way from town now. Taxi-May had already put herself out enough, and he didn’t want to have to ask her to take him back to San Ignacio.

  The road began to climb up into the hills. Taxi-May said that they were entering a dangerous region whose gorges, plunging drops and dense jungle were the perfect hideaway for smugglers and poachers.

  ‘Are you sure you want to carry on?’ she said, offering Kid a chance to turn back.

  Kid shook his head. He couldn’t, he said. The man he was looking for was his father, and he’d come a long way to find him – all the way from England.

  Taxi-May said she hoped he knew what he was doing. She started on about her own father and what a useless waste of space he’d been. All the while, the road was getting steeper and the car becoming slower. A cliff rose on one side of them and, in the darkness beneath them, Kid could hear the sound of a river.

  Suddenly a sign loomed out of the darkness, announcing Night Falls Lodge up ahead. Beyond it, Kid caught sight of a stretch of concrete road, lit up by the taxi’s headlights. They started up it, Taxi-May swearing that the damn engine would never make it to the top.

  Finally, however, the car reached level ground and drew to a halt, steam seeping from its bonnet. Taxi-May switched off the engine and they sat in darkness staring at a row of thatched cabanas lit by the moon. Beyond them, Kid could make out a lawn surrounded by palms, and a cinderblock building with a tin roof, in front of which hung an illuminated sign which said RECEPTION.

  He climbed out of the car. ‘I’ll be back in a minute to pick up my rucksack.’

  ‘No worries. This car’s not going anywhere till it’s cooled down, and neither am I.’

  Kid headed across the lawn. The reception door was ajar, so he pushed it open. Inside he found an office full of filing cabinets and computers, its only decoration being a jar of dead snakes pickled in gloopy liquid. The place appeared empty, but it did at least have a bell. Kid rang it and waited to see what would happen. When nothing did, he rang again. Someone had to be here, he reckoned, otherwise the lights and computers wouldn’t all be on.

  Finally a skinny Mestizo boy appeared, looking as surprised to see Kid as Kid was to see him.

  ‘What you want?’ he said, his voice thick with suspicion.

  ‘This is a tourist lodge, isn’t it?’ Kid replied, suddenly shy about his purpose for being here. ‘I’m looking for a bed for the night.’

  The boy said he’d go and find somebody called Marky. It took a while for him to arrive but, when he did, he turned out to be a big, jowly bull-frog of a man with rings of armpit-sweat and a mop of bright brown hair whose colour looked highly unnatural.

  ‘I’m pleased to see the sign down on the road is still doing its job,’ he said in an accent that could have been American, but could equally have been German or Scandinavian.

  Kid booked himself into a cabana. Much to his surprise, he didn’t have to show his passport, and there wasn’t even any register to sign, just a piece of paper.

  ‘Here, write your name on this,’ said Marky, pushing it at him.

  Kid wrote Marcus Aurelius Cato, then pushed the paper back, wondering if the name would mean anything. But Marky didn’t even look at it. Instead he sent Kid off to Cabana No. 6 without even giving him a key, saying he wouldn’t need one because, in a place like this, there were never any thefts.

  ‘It’s as safe as houses up here at Night Falls Lodge,’ he said. ‘We don’t need keys. Everybody here’s friends.’

  PART THREE

  BAK-A-BUSH

  9

  NIGHT FALLS LODGE

  Taxi-May had gone when Kid finally made it back outside, leaving his rucksack on the grass. He didn’t blame her, not given what she faced at home, but he missed her all the same. Standing in the dark without her, he felt as if he might just have made a terrible mistake.

  Kid found Cabana No. 6, let himself in and switched on the light. It had a cool tiled floor, a high cone of thatch, shuttered windows with mosquito netting and a double bed. It was airier than the room Kid had stayed in at the Ocean Hotel, and its shower worked, as Kid quickly found out. But it smelt of mothballs, and there was dust over everything and dead flowers in a vase. Then, of course, there was the little matter of no key in the door, which mightn’t matter to Marky but did to Kid.

  Remembering what Taxi-May had said on the subject of smugglers, Kid pushed a chest of drawers in front of the door and checked the fastenings on the windows. Then he lay on the bed, listening to the whirring of the electric fan and the whistling of the jungle outside, wondering whatever had possessed him to come out here. Where was his hunch now? This was crazy. Yet again he’d done what he always did. He’d done what had brought him out here to Belize. He’d acted without thinking. Acted on a whim. And look where it had got him.

  The night turned cold, much to Kid’s surprise. He switched off the fan, slid under the bedcovers and was just falling off to sleep when cars came labouring up the road beneath the cliff. He heard car doors banging, snatches of voices and laughter. Then, later on, he heard the pounding drums of punta rock, Belize’s favourite music, which carried on for most of the night.

  Night Falls Lodge mightn’t be the obvious place to a hold a party, bu
t one was definitely being held. Every time Kid awoke, it was still on the go. Only in the morning did silence fall. Kid opened the wooden shutters and looked out. All the cars had gone, leaving behind a grey, empty lawn surrounded by trees shrouded in mist. It was as if the party had never taken place.

  Kid pulled on some clothes and went outside, shocked to find out how warm it was so early in the day. What he hoped he’d find he’d no idea, but someone to talk to wouldn’t have gone amiss. He sauntered across the lawn, heading for an open-sided structure with a thatched roof, which looked as if it had once been a restaurant, but not any more. A bright green parrot swooped into it from one side and went out the other. Kid walked between tables piled with chairs. Another smaller bird hovered over a blossom growing up in the thatch, and Kid realised it was a humming-bird.

  Suddenly a boy appeared, the same sort of age as the one Kid had met last night. He pulled the chairs off a table and started laying it. Breakfast was on the way, he said.

  No sooner had he finished than a sun-leathered man appeared as well, as thin as a rake and smelling like the inside of a tobacco tin. Saying ‘Hi’ in an accent straight off the cowboy movies, he sat down opposite Kid and poured them both a coffee out of little tin jug.

  Instinctively Kid didn’t like this man. He shivered. The man’s mouth was smiling but his eyes were cold. When another boy brought out two plates of scrambled eggs, he snapped at him for being so slow. And when he started eating, he cursed the boy because the eggs weren’t cooked to his liking.

  The boy had to bring out fresh eggs while the man sat back and sipped his coffee, which was black and bitter, Kid discovered, when he tried his own. Then, after the eggs, the boy brought out plates of sliced fruit, including pineapples, bananas, guavas and papaya – all grown here on what he called ‘Mistah Marky’s farm’. The American gave him a look as if he was talking too much, and the boy’s smile dried up.