High Adventure Read online

  She remembered from something she had read that the best way to be safe from wild animals in the wilderness was to sleep in a tree, so she chose a rough-barked thick-trunked tree near the crest of a hill and with some difficulty climbed up to a crotch about seven feet from the ground, where she did her best to become reasonably comfortable, and to sleep.

  No wild animals found her in the tree, but many mosquitoes did. They kept her awake a long while, until at last nothing in the world could keep her awake any longer, and she slept, crumpled up in the tree crotch, being fed on all night by nasty little flying things.

  In the morning she was so stiff, and so hot, and so itchy, and so dry, and so hungry, and so uncomfortable, she thought she would die. She thought it would be more comfortable to die. Twisting around in the tree crotch, every movement an agony, she searched from her vantage point for the road—for any road or any other sign of human existence—and saw nothing but woods, forests, jungle growth, high mountains to the west and south, a broken tumbled landscape untouched by man. Sighing, she made her creaky painful way down from the tree and plodded off northward, guided now by the sun.

  At first her spirits weren’t really low, because she was distracted by her training. Her studies in archaeology and her interest in the ancient Mayans had led her to Belize in the first place, and now here she really was, in conditions as primitive as anything the Mayans ever faced, crossing broken barren ground they had crossed a thousand years ago.

  They had survived. She would survive. In the meantime, were there discoveries to be made in this wilderness, finds of archaeological interest and importance? She surveyed every rut and arroyo, frowned at every rock.

  And yet, the distraction wasn’t total. In the back of her mind, she already knew this wasn’t an adventure of the kind she’d dreamed of while half dozing over her textbooks. She had imagined a life of purpose and work with some limited hardships—nothing a sturdy pair of boots couldn’t handle—but not all this, this, this …

  Danger.

  Confusion.

  Trouble.

  She had come out to find the world, knowing she knew nothing about the world, and was this it? A hot and stony place, alone, with no comforts and no certainties. All her old beliefs seemed to flow out of her with her perspiration, leaving her miserable and confused and dizzy. Plodding along, walking because there was nothing else to do, she soon forgot to look at stones for significance, holes in the ground for meaning. Here was the meaning: There was no meaning.

  She hadn’t wanted to know any of this.

  The next three days were terrible. In the middle of the day she would rest in whatever shade she could find, while all morning and all afternoon she walked northward, seeing no one, never finding any road. Each night she slept in another uncomfortable tree. The occasional quick cold stream provided water for bathing and drinking, and on the morning of the third day a brief torrential downpour did her laundry, but she never did find anything to eat. Berries, she thought, but there were no berries. Roots, she thought, but had no idea how to recognize an edible root nor where to dig for it nor what to dig for it with.

  I could die out here, she thought, getting lightheaded from the sun and the lack of food. The thought was frightening, but what was even more frightening was that the thought was also tempting. To give up the struggle, to lie down and rest, to stop being hungry and itchy and tired and stiff. She fought off that temptation by thinking about Innocent St. Michael, and Kirby Galway, and Vernon, and Fred C. She would not die. They would not get away with it. She would live through this experience somehow, and bring those devils to justice! Thus thinking, while her shoes disintegrated on her feet and her sunburned skin peeled and her empty stomach begged for something more than cold water, Valerie soldiered on.

  It was near sundown on the third day when, coming up along another stream, starting to look for tonight’s tree, she had stumbled into this little Indian village, where a great fuss had been made of her and where the head man, Tommy Watson, had announced, “It’s Sheena, Queen of the Jungle!”

  And so that’s who she was, and who she had been for a week. The tribespeople had fed her and given her a place to sleep, and the next morning had treated all her many cuts and scratches and abrasions; not with ancient tribal remedies but with mercurochrome and Unguentine and Band-Aids. “From the mission,” they told her.

  The mission. If she were to go to the mission, surely she would be safe? But then she thought again about the man she was dealing with, Innocent St. Michael, an important government official, a rich and powerful man, and she realized two frightening things: First, he must know she had the evidence to bring him down. Second, he must know his henchman had failed to silence her.

  Wouldn’t a man like Innocent St. Michael have spies all over the country? Even assuming the absolute probity and integrity of whatever priests or doctors or nurses might be at the mission, wouldn’t there be other people there as well, locals who could betray her? And how safe from Innocent St. Michael would she be in a small and isolated mission deep in the jungle?

  The same fears kept her from telling the truth to her benefactors, the Indians of South Abilene. At first she claimed to be suffering amnesia, but that piqued their curiosity too much, so at last she let them understand she was a rich girl who was running away from a marriage arranged by her father. She had been flying her own small plane when an unexpected storm had dashed her against a jungle mountain. The rest they knew.

  They were delighted by that story, and made her tell it over and over, with more and more details. She added yachts, a severe limp to the elderly wealthy groom, a dipsomaniac mother helpless to save her daughter from being sold to the highest bidder. (Her Kekchi improved and improved.) They lapped it up, wide-eyed, loving every minute of it, and agreed the best thing she could do was stay here in South Abilene until her father would be so amazed and relieved to see her still alive that he would allow her to call off the wedding.

  “And you’re a pilot,” Tommy Watson said.

  “That’s right.”

  “We got a pal who’s a pilot. Nice fella. You and him, you’d get along terrific.”

  “Wait a minute,” said one of the young women, whose name was Rosita Coco. “Just wait a minute, okay?”

  Her brother Luz told her, “Just for friends, that’s all.” (Luz and Rosita and Tommy were the only ones who talked to Valerie in English.)

  “That’s-right,” Tommy told Rosita. “They could talk pilot talk together.”

  Instead, of which, in the days ahead, Valerie and Rosita talked girl talk together, and when Valerie heard the story this pilot had told Rosita she was just outraged. Wasn’t it like a man, every time? Valerie put Rosita straight on that fellow, and though Rosita didn’t want to believe her pilot was lying, the evidence was pretty clear.

  Generally speaking, Valerie got along with all the South Abilenos, male and female, young and old. They accepted her at once, shared their small bounty with her, and—encouraged no doubt by her knowledge of their tongue—allowed her to enter at least as an observer into their social lives. What an ideal position for an idealistic young archaeologist!

  The one fly in the ointment in all this was marijuana. The whole village appeared to be addicted to it, and spent most nights puffing themselves insensible. In order not to appear prudish, Valerie begged off by claiming a respiratory disease that prohibited her from smoking in all its forms. “Poor Sheena,” Rosita said, “I make you some pot tortillas some day, blow you right out of the tree.” Valerie managed a smile and an expression of gratitude, but so far, thankfully, nothing had come of the offer.

  Actually, for Valerie these days marijuana would be superfluous. She was high already, high on just being alive and high on this wonderful village in which she found herself. Her initial fears that she might be sexually mistreated faded rapidly when she saw how thoroughly this was a family village; life here was too open and monogamy too ingrained for any hanky-panky. (Had a few of the boys first m
et Valerie away from town it might have been a different story, of which she remained happily ignorant.)

  But the point was, these were Mayas, true Mayas. Unlike the other archaeologists Valerie had known, her teachers and her contemporaries, she had gone through the time barrier, had actually entered into the ancient civilization the other scholars only studied. It is true these people were no longer temple builders, were merely the decayed remnant of a once flourishing culture, but their clothing (apart from the inevitable blue jeans) bore echoes of ancient themes, ancient designs, ancient decoration. The faces of the people were the same as the faces on bowls and stelae a thousand years old.

  And they still made the old artifacts! When Valerie first stumbled on their little factory, where stone whistles and bone statues and terracotta bowls were being manufactured by men and women alike, they seemed almost embarrassed at having her know, as though wanting to practice the ancient crafts in secrecy and privacy. But when she extolled their abilities, when she spoke knowledgeably of their sources and their craft—hurriedly inventing an archaeologist boy friend in college, to explain the rich girl’s sudden expertise—when she expressed her true admiration, they lit up, smiled together, almost shyly showed her examples of their work.

  “But this is wonderful!” she said, over and over.

  “Do you really think so?”

  “But yes, yes! Why—” turning a bone statuette of a leaping jaguar “—you could put this on display in any museum in the world, and no one would guess it was anything but a thousand years old!”

  “I’m really glad to hear you say that, Sheena,” Tommy said. “That makes us all feel really good.”

  What charming people. What a delightful simple lifestyle; except, of course, for the addiction to marijuana. Civilization with its medicine and information was as near as the mission, and otherwise their lives were idyllic. I wonder how long I’ll stay, Valerie thought from time to time, and every reminder that she must eventually leave this Eden saddened her, made her turn her mind to something else.

  But now Kirby Galway had appeared! Out of the blue, quite literally out of the blue.

  Earlier today Tommy had come by to say, “Listen, Sheena, there’s a guy coming today to pick up some stuff. We make some goods for market, you know, tourist stuff.”

  Valerie could imagine: glossy mahogany statues of Maya priests, cheap pieces of decorated cloth. The sort of thing primitive people do all around the world, debasing their culture for currency, hard cash.

  “Probably,” Tommy had gone on, “you ought to stay here in town. You don’t want this guy spreading the word there’s a white woman hiding out in South Abilene.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” Valerie said, and stayed out of sight when the plane first came over. Then some time later she heard it leave, and came out of the hut, and was walking around waiting for everybody to come back when all at once there was the plane again, diving right down at the village! Into the nearest hut she had run, the image of the plane burned into her mind, and at once she remembered where she’d seen that plane before. It was Galway, Kirby Galway.

  Which Rosita confirmed, when she came back: “You know Kirby?” she asked.

  “Kirby Galway,” Valerie said, excited, “that’s right, that’s his name!”

  Rosita’s eyes got very wide. “You know him, Sheena?”

  Oh-oh. The implications could be very bad. Kirby Galway’s relationship with these Indians could be simple and benign—merely flying their tawdry commercial gewgaws to town and no doubt cheating them mercilessly—but nevertheless Galway and the Indians were aligned. Did Valerie at this point dare tell the truth?

  No.

  Thinking fast, she said, “I certainly do know him, Rosita, and let me tell you, he’s a very bad man!”

  “Oh, I thought he was,” Rosita said. “You bet I did. He rape you one time, did he?”

  “No, no,” Valerie said, then wished she’d said yes-yes; it would paint him blacker in Rosita’s eyes. Instead, she said, “He used to work for Winthrop.”

  Rosita was impressed. “Wintrop Cartwright?” she asked. “The man your papa gone make you marry?”

  “Yes. He worked for Winthrop and cheated Winthrop very badly. This was a few years ago,” she added, not knowing how long the Indians and Galway might have known one another.

  “Well, ain’t that something,” Rosita said, and gazed away sharp-eyed at the empty sky. “Next time he come around here,” she said, “I think I give him a spider in his ear.”

  “You mean a flea in his ear,” Valerie said.

  “Oh, no, I don’t,” Rosita said.

  5

  BOOTS AND SADDLE

  It was embarrassing at first, but also rather funny. Gerry winked at a boy in Sheridan Square who then turned out to be a girl, who gave him such a glare. Giggling to himself, Gerry walked on through the slushy snow toward home, waving at a friend in the window of the bar called Boots & Saddle, continuing on his way, wishing he could share the funny moment with Alan—“I winked at a very nice hunk in Sheridan Square who turned out to be some awful dike in full drag”—but Alan would think the point of the story was his winking rather than the sexual confusion, and there’d just be argument and upset and wild talk about disease, and Gerry just didn’t think he could face it, so he decided not to mention it at all.

  What he needed, he reflected, not for the first time, was a boyfriend on the side, someone he could really talk to.

  The sun was shining today, but the wind-chill factor was somewhere down around your ankles. Walking west on Christopher Street, looking at the anemic milky sky over the Hudson River, Gerry found himself thinking again of Belize. That had been rather fun, really, in parts, and God knows it was warm. It had been a mistake to play investigative reporter for Hiram, just too nerve-wracking.

  If they’d simply gone down there on their owny-own—

  To actually deal with Kirby Galway? To actually buy smuggled pre-Columbian artifacts for resale?

  Well, maybe that wouldn’t have been such a bad idea at that.

  The more Gerry thought it over, in fact, the more he believed he and Alan had been hasty in talking to Hiram, and in deciding the point of that story—like the wink and the dike—was a magazine article exposing the racket rather than the potential of the racket itself. He hadn’t quite had the courage yet to broach the subject with Alan, so of course he had no idea if Alan were still content with their having sacrificed themselves for king and country.

  Entering the lobby of his home, Gerry sighed, thinking just how difficult it was to understand Alan, to follow his moods, to cater to him. We all have our crosses to bear, he thought, and went over to the mailboxes.

  The usual bills. A tacky postcard from a friend wintering in New Orleans. And a blue and white envelope containing a cablegram. A cablegram? Gerry went to the elevator, which for once was right here on the first floor, boarded, pushed his button, and ripped the cablegram as the elevator started up.

  “Al-an!” Gerry called, entering the apartment, waving the cablegram in front of himself, all thought of the wink-dike story fled from his brain. “Alan, you will simply not believe this!”

  Alan appeared, covered with flour. So they’d be eating in tonight; good. “All right, Gerry,” he said, very testily (he was wonderful in the kitchen, but it was bad for his nerves), “what now? I’m in the middle of things here, I hope this is important, not some silliness.”

  “Al-an,” Gerry said, aggrieved. “Would I disturb you for nothing at all?”

  “You would, and you have. Well? What is it?”

  “Oh, you take the heart out of everything,” Gerry said. Tossing the cablegram on the nearest table, he said, “Read it for yourself,” and went on into the bedroom to sulk.

  Well, of course Alan came in three minutes later, flour washed off, black apron removed, cablegram in hand, to say, “Gerry, you’re absolutely right. I was abominable.”

  “It’s only because you’re cooking,” Gerry
said, having decided to be magnanimous. “I know what it does to you, but it’s perfectly all right, it’s worth it, because I know what comes out of your kitchen is just fabulous.”

  “Gerry,” Alan said, positively blushing with pleasure, “you are in truth the sweetest person, I don’t know what I ever did to deserve you. The good fairy brought you to me.”

  “I am your good fairy,” Gerry said, beaming, happy they’d made up. Pointing to the cablegram, he said, “And what do you think of that? ”

  “This.” Alan held the cablegram up, frowned at it. “I just don’t know,” he said.

  “Al-an, it’s from Kirby Galway!”

  “I know that.”

  “He still wants to do business with us!”

  “He says so.”

  “He says so? He says this Sunday, in Florida!”

  “I know he does,” Alan said. But still he frowned and looked disapproving.

  Gerry couldn’t understand it at all. “Al-an,” he said, “this is wonderful news!”

  “If true.”

  “Alan, for heaven’s sake, what’s the problem?”

  “Our missing tapes,” Alan said.

  “Oh, dear,” Gerry said, suddenly seeing it all.

  “This could be a trap, Gerry. If Kirby Galway is the one who arranged to steal our tapes …”

  “Oh, dear, oh, dear,” Gerry said, and the doorbell rang.

  Alan frowned. “That’s the upstairs bell,” he said.

  “Then it must be Hiram,” Gerry said, starting out of the bedroom. “We can ask him what he thinks.”

  “At this hour?” Alan was finding fault with everything, as usual. “I don’t know, Gerry,” he called, as Gerry went on through the apartment toward the front door. “That door downstairs has been funny lately, it—”

  “Oh, it’s bound to be Hiram,” Gerry called back.

  “Yesterday I saw him going out with suitcases.”

  “Oh, who else could it be?” Gerry called, flung open the door, and found himself staring at the mobster he’d seen with Kirby Galway back in Belize. “My God!” he cried.