by Ken Douglas
The water was rushing around him, dragging him, tugging on him, calling him. He was holding on, breathing like a machine, in and out, taking in vital oxygen for one last try, and then it dawned on him that he’d never be able to pull himself up on that branch, but it wasn’t the only way out, there was another way, a simpler way. All he had to do was inch his hands along the branch toward the riverbank.
The wet cold cut through to the bone, the driving river was pulling at his heavy legs, his arms were screaming, his hands aching and his fingers were numb. He was about used up. He was fighting just to hold on. He was afraid if he let a hand go he’d fall back in the river, but he knew that if he didn’t move quickly he’d fall back in anyway, and the river would finish him, so he slid first one hand, then the next toward the riverbank.
It was slow going, but he was making progress. He was getting out of the river. Then he couldn’t move anymore, something was holding him back. He started to panic, but fought it away. Then he realized what it was. His feet had hit bottom. He was safe. He’d made it. Soloed halfway through the rapids, with a dead body for a raft.
He stumbled out of the water, grabbing onto the tree’s root system for support. He was out of the water. Now he only had a twenty foot embankment to claw his way up. He thought about Maria. He thought about the money. And he thought about climbing that cliff. Not so high. Not so hard.
He wormed his way around the tree and started to climb, digging his damaged hands into the soft earth, pulling on small branches, clutching onto small stones, grabbing any and every purchase he could. He moved slowly and deliberately. He didn’t want to fall back into the river.
Chapter Five
“ You want to hang around or do you want to get out of here?” Broxton asked, coming up behind Maria. His voice cracked with the words. He sounded like a little boy fighting tears, and her heart went out to him.
“ The quicker I’m gone, the better, but I’m the senior flight attendant. I should stay till they release us.” She regretted the words as soon as they’d left her lips, but she really couldn’t leave. Her life had been split between Earl and the airline and the airline had been the better half. Still Broxton was a man in pain and after their experience on the plane she felt a certain kinship with him. She wished there was something she could do.
“ I understand,” Broxton said, with sagging shoulders.
He was looking down, at the floor, and she imagined that he was feeling twice rejected. She wanted to fold her arms around him and hug him into her like she would a lost child. She wanted to tell him everything was going to be all right. There were other women out there, she wanted to say, and someday soon he’d meet one and then the heartache would be gone. Instead she said, “I’m ready to go, if you are. I just have to make a quick phone call.” She had to call Earl, but she shivered with the thought that it wasn’t going to be the kind of call he was expecting.
“ But you said.”
“ I think the airline can probably get by without me right now. They probably won’t even notice I’m gone,” she said.
“ I have baggage, but I imagine I can get it tomorrow or the next day,” he said. Then he followed her toward the phones.
“ I’m sorry about your girl.” They were at the phones.
“ Thanks,” he said. He turned and faced her for a second with mist covered eyes. The pain there was real and it looked like it cut deep.
“ I’ll make the call from the hotel,” she said. Earl could wait. “Are you going to be okay?” she asked as they made their way to the street.
“ Sure,” he said. Then he raised his hand for a taxi.
A rusty Toyota pulled up to the curb. The car was fifteen years old, but the tires were new. “You want a taxi?” the driver said. His rich baritone and dark ebony skin conspired to hide his age, but the gray hair and wrinkled hands gave it away. He was old and he reminded Maria of her own father.
“ Yes, to the Hilton Hotel,” Broxton said.
“ I’m your man,” the driver said with a smile in his voice.
He opened his door and started to step out of the car, but she stopped him, saying, “That’s okay, we don’t have any baggage.”
“ Makes it easy on these old bones,” he said. Broxton opened the front door and put his carry-on bag on the front seat. Maria unclipped her small bag from the trolley and laid it next to his. Then they climbed into the back.
“ Dependable Ted, at your service.” The driver turned and handed her a card. “You need a taxi, anytime, day or night, you call me, hear? I’m dependable, like my name, the name on the card, Dependable Ted.”
“ I’ll be sure to do that.” Maria handed his card to Broxton.
“ Now you sit back and enjoy the ride. I might not be the fastest taxi in Trinidad, but I’m the most dependable.” Broxton laughed for a second, then he turned glum. On the plane he seemed bulldog-strong, now he was puppy-dog meek. She needed to get his mind off that girl.
“ Very lush here,” she said, making conversation as the taxi started winding its way along the access road, heading for the highway that would take them into Port of Spain, about a half hour away.
“ Your first time in the tropics?” Broxton asked her.
“ This is my third flight out of Miami, she said, so I guess you could say I’m new to the tropics, if you don’t count Texas. You?” He chuckled and she took that as a positive sign.
“ I spent a year in Mexico,” he said, slipping the driver’s card into his shirt pocket.
“ Looking for drug smugglers?” she asked.
“ Hardly. All I do is process the paperwork. The most exciting thing that ever happens to me is when the computer crashes. Even that scares me.”
“ Then why did they pick you to protect the prime minister?”
“ Because of who my future father-in-law is, or rather who I thought my father-in-law was going to be.”
“ I can’t believe that,” she said with a smile in her voice.
“ It’s true,” he said. “I’m sort of like an analyst. They give me the data and I try to put it all together in my trusty laptop. Some days I never see the outside.
“ That explains why you can live a year in Mexico and still be so white,” she said.
He laughed, and she felt like she was definitely making progress.
“ Hablas Espaniol,” she said, using the familiar form.
“ Claro,” he answered.
“ Most Americans don’t bother. They expect us to learn their language.”
“ Us,” he said. “You have a slight Mexican accent, but you’re American.”
“ How can you tell?”
“ It’s in the way you walk and talk. Like you’re sure of yourself. Like you’re an American.”
“ I don’t understand.”
“ Americans stand out, wherever we go. We can’t help it. Black, white, red or yellow, we’re all the same when you start comparing us with the rest of the world.”
“ I don’t know if I can believe that,” she said.
“ I’ll give you an example. Years ago, when I was a child, I was in Nairobi with my parents. It was the first anniversary of the death of Jomo Kenyatta. People had walked for miles to pay homage to the great man at a rally in this huge park in the center of the city. They were all black and as they passed my dad would say ‘Jambo, Hello,’ and they’d say Jambo back, and smile at us. But when this one man approached, my dad said, ‘Hello,’ and he said, ‘Hello,’ back. He asked where we were from and my dad told him Long Beach, California, and he answered back by saying he was from Portland. He was as black as everybody else, but he was different. He was an American. My dad knew it and so did everybody else.”
She thought about what he said. He didn’t sound like a racist or a nationalist, he was just telling the truth, and truth was truth, even if it wasn’t politically correct. Then she asked, “How about the Europeans? Do we look different from them too?”
“ Especially them,” he said, laughing.
“You should see us blundering around in their countries trying to communicate. When they don’t understand we just talk louder, till eventually we’re almost shouting.”
“ Your girl, the one in the paper, she’s Danielle Street, the literary agent, isn’t she?” She didn’t want to put the subject back onto something that would hurt him, but she had to know.
“ You’re a novelist?” Broxton asked. She saw the way his eyebrows arched and the way he bit into his lower lip. This wasn’t a pleasant subject for him.
“ I wanted to be once. I sent my manuscript off to an agent in Los Angeles, and shortly after it was rejected I received a letter from Ms. Street in New York.”
“ And?” Broxton said. She had a feeling that he knew what was coming next.
“ The letter said that she was told by another agent that I had a book worth publishing. The other agent was unable to take on any new clients, but felt that my work was worthy enough to mention to the Street Agency and would I please send her a copy of the manuscript right away.”
“ Which of course you did,” Broxton said.
“ Of course,” she said, meeting his eyes.
“ And,” Broxton said again. His hands were folded in his lap. The fingertips were white. He didn’t want to be talking about this.
“ She recommended an editorial service,” Maria said.
“ And for only four or five thousand dollars they could make your manuscript publishable,” he said.
“ Something like that,” she said. “But there was no way Earl ever would have let me have the money.”
“ Earl doesn’t sound like a man I’d like, but it’s probably a good thing you didn’t get the money.”
“ Rip off, huh?”
“ Usually.” Broxton nodded. “The old Dani never met a manuscript that five thousand in her pocket couldn’t fix. She owned the editing company.”
“ Who did the actual work?”
“ College kids mostly. She paid them peanuts. Usually the manuscripts never went anywhere, however once in a while one got published.”
“ How’d she get my name?”
“ She paid the secretaries in the other agencies for a list of all their rejections.”
“ That’s horrible,” Maria said.
“ She was ruthless,” Broxton said.
“ But what about Jack Priest? She’s his agent, isn’t she? I see his books all over.”
“ Oh she’s had her successes. She’s sharp. When she saw a book with potential she ran with it. She’s gotten several six figure advances.”
“ It makes it hard for the person starting out. If someone with a reputation like Danielle Street’s rips off new authors, who doesn’t?”
“ Lots don’t. In fact I’ll bet most don’t. Dani was just hungry.”
“ Was?”
“ She sold the agency. Now she just lives the life of luxury.”
The taxi turned onto the highway and Broxton noticed that the driver kept to the slow lane. Cars and trucks of all ages and sizes flew by them, all in a hurry, junkyard fugitives racing along with cars fresh off the showroom floor. Speed tempered by chaos seemed to be the order of the day, and if Trinidad was governed by any law, it certainly didn’t apply to the highway, Broxton thought. Everybody was in a hurry to get somewhere. Everybody wanted to pass the car in front and nobody wanted to be passed.
“ Do they always drive like this?” Maria asked the taxi driver.
“ Mostly, except me and a few others that have lived long enough to develop common sense. And of course the man that’s been following us since the airport.”
Broxton turned and looked through the back window. “The green BMW? How can you be sure he’s following us?”
“ We’re in Trinidad. Look how people drive here. That’s a new sporty car. How come he doesn’t pass?”
“ If he’s following us, he’s following the wrong people, I’ve got nothing to hide,” Broxton said.
“ I don’t either,” Maria said.
“ So should I ignore him or lose him?” the driver asked.
“ You could lose him? In this?” Broxton said.
“ Not if we were racing to the Hilton, no, but I can lose him.”
“ I’d like to see that,” Broxton said.
“ So you shall,” the driver said, and he settled back and continued on down the highway. “I’m going to pass Port of Spain and go out toward Chaguaramas where all the foreign boats anchor, so take it easy and enjoy the ride.”
Broxton and Maria sat back and looked out the windows, the desire for conversation killed by the car following. The scenery flashing by was covered in green and dotted with billboards bearing familiar names-KFC, Pizza hut, McDonald’s-and although the billboards were in English, the houses on the side of the road reminded Broxton more of Mexico than America. There were a lot of poor people in Trinidad, and Broxton wondered why he hadn’t thought about it before. When he’d first been given the assignment he’d imagined Trinidad as a sort of south seas tropical isle. Tropical it was, but Trinidad was firmly planted in the twentieth century and it looked like poverty was endemic.
“ Port of Spain just ahead,” Dependable Ted said, slowing down. “We’ll be stuck in traffic for ten or fifteen minutes till we pass.”
Broxton turned to look behind and couldn’t see the BMW.
“ He’s back there, ’bout ten cars,” Ted said. “But not to worry, once we pass the yacht club we be losing him good.”
“ The city reminds me of Nairobi,” Broxton said.
“ Why, ’cause we’re all black?”
“ Maybe, but it’s more than that.”
“ Maybe ’cause we were both colonized by the British.”
“ That could be,” Broxton said.
“ We’re not all black, you know, ’bout ten percent white and the rest split ’tween African and Indian. That’s Indian from India not the American kind.”
“ I’d never really thought about it,” Broxton said.
“ But the white people run things,” the driver said.
“ How’s that?” Broxton asked. “Isn’t this a democracy? Don’t you have elections?”
“ We do. The government was African, now it’s Indian an’ the prime minister’s a light skin Indian fellow, but it makes no difference. Once they get elected they think they’re white and they start stuffing their pockets.”
“ That’s a shame,” Maria said.
“ Way it is,” the driver said.
“ The same all over,” Broxton said.
“ True, true,” the driver said.
Then they were past Port of Spain, the beach still at their left, the sun starting to hang low in the evening sky and the traffic had thinned considerably. Broxton noticed the bars on the windows of the homes that flew by. “It looks like you have a lot of crime.”
“ Not like you do in most your big American cities. Peoples just over react. Nobody wants somebody breaking into their house.”
“ A mall,” Maria said, looking out at the buildings to their left, between them and the beach.
“ We have some malls in Trinidad. Not great big ones like you do. But they’re nice, just the same. And up ahead is the yacht club. We gets a lot of foreign boats in Trinidad.”
“ We saw some this afternoon,” Broxton said, remembering the tall masts he’d seen earlier that seemed to be reaching up from the sea, trying to grab the plane and pull it down.
There was a short bridge up ahead where the road changed from four to two lanes. Cars were putting on the gas. Everybody wanted to pass the slow moving taxi before the bridge. Broxton turned and looked out the back window. Not everybody was trying to pass. The BMW was three cars back, still following. Broxton continued watching as a battered, left-hand-drive American Chevy flew past the car immediately behind them and kept on coming.
“ I think he’s going to try and pass us, too,” Broxton said, his voice rising. He was more than a little surprised that the car wouldn’t slow down.
“ Can’t make it,” the driver said, but it made no difference, the car kept coming.
“ He’s not passing, he’s coming in on the left!” Broxton shouted as the car plowed into the left quarter of the taxi, then slammed on its brakes as the taxi lost control. He threw an arm in front of Maria, keeping her pinned to her seat as the taxi spun onto the other side of the road. A pickup truck, coming in the opposite direction, clipped the taxi’s rear bumper, tearing it off.
Then they were off the road and spinning through a park toward a soccer game. Children screamed and fled the oncoming taxi and for an instant Broxton thought they were going to roll, but Ted let out a whoop, like an American Indian’s war cry, and spun the wheel into the slide, managing to turn the car away from the fleeing children, pumping the brakes all the while, trying to slow the car as they scraped along a huge tree.
Ted screamed again as the car slid by the tree with a soul wrenching sound that shrilled through the evening. The tree slowed the car, but it didn’t stop it, and Dependable Ted never stopped working the wheel.
“ Hold on,” he yelled from the front seat. Maria looked up and saw what he saw. Another tree, this one, thicker than the last, and it seemed to be charging straight for them as it loomed larger and larger in the front window, a giant, green grizzly, with raking claws on the end of the branches. Claws and jaws, reaching for her, reaching to tear her apart, but at the last instant the roaring rear wheels found purchase in the wet grass. The old Toyota shot forward like a race horse. Ted yelled again, because even though he was heading for the tree, he was back in control.
He spun the wheel to the right, missing the tree, but the branches scraped the side of the car as it headed, like a wild mustang, into a huge mass of green, the very edge of the rain forest. Ted jerked the wheel one last time and stomped on the brakes. The engine died, but the car continued its slide through the lush green vegetation, twice missing trees that would have brought it to a crashing stop, coming softly to rest in an almost anticlimactic absence of sound.
