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  “It looked great when I saw it,” Kirby said. “St. Michael was just representing the real owner, some big aristocrat up in Mexico. The aristocrat couldn’t take back a mortgage on account of taxes, so the price was right because I could pay all cash.”

  “Fat man?” Tommy asked. “Happy with himself?”

  “That’s Innocent St. Michael,” Kirby agreed.

  “It was his land,” Tommy said. “He’s been looking for a first-class fish for years.”

  “I appreciate that information, Tommy,” Kirby said.

  “So you’re a rich man, right?” said Luz. “You can afford a mistake.”

  “Rich men,” Kirby told him, “don’t risk their ass and twenty years in jail flying pot to the States. That’s how I got the money. Oh, Jesus,” he said, remembering.

  Tommy swigged home-brew and puffed pot and said, “Something else, huh?”

  Kirby swigged and puffed and swigged and puffed and said, “I just gave the rest of my money to a guy in Texas for some cows.”

  Luz laughed. Tommy tried to look sympathetic, but he was grinning. Kirby swigged and puffed, and then he too laughed. “Well,” he said, “I guess I’m not as smart as I think I am.”

  “Nobody is,” Tommy said. “But what the hell, we can still enjoy ourselves.”

  They enjoyed themselves. Various anonymous foods—some animal, some vegetable—were consumed, all liberally laced with hot peppers and other explosive devices. The home-brew cooled the throat while the marijuana cooled the brain. A plastic radio picked up a salsa station from Guatemala, fading in and out while the sun went down and the breeze whispered funny stories among the leaves in the upper branches, to which the stream chuckled and giggled below. Various people showed what they looked like dancing on uneven ground while both drunk and stoned. Night fell, and so did many of the villagers. Fires were started; in the orangey-red light, black ghosts whipped by, and people spoke to them in their native tongue.

  Kirby lay on the cooling ground, head propped on an empty inverted clay stewpot, half-empty jug in one hand and faintly smoldering joint in the other, as he watched the moon come up over his mountain. Seated cross-legged beside him, dark face stony and rough-sculpted in the moonlight, Luz Coco told his story: “I was a kid,” he said, “my Mama took up with an oilman.”

  “Rich oilman?”

  “That’s what he said.” Luz spat at the fire, which spat back. “Just a ragged-ass geologist, is all, wanted somebody with him in his sleeping bag. Looks for oil in these hills around here, works for Esso. They called it Esso then.”

  “There’s oil here?” Kirby was trying to find his mouth with the unlit end of the joint.

  “Lotta good it does,” Luz said. “Oil’s got to be in lakes, down underground, or it’s no use. This limestone around here, the oil’s just in millions of little bubbles, not worth shit. Cost too much to pull it up.”

  “You know all that, huh?”

  “I grew up with it,” Luz said. “That’s the story. The village threw my Mama out, we went to Houston.”

  “Back up a little bit,” Kirby said. “I don’t think you touched all the bases.”

  “These assholes around here,” Luz said, waving an arm to indicate each and every resident of South Abilene, “they’re very strict, man. Specially about sex. You fuck around the wrong place, you’re in trouble.”

  “I get it,” Kirby said. “Your mother was sleeping with this geologist—”

  “And my Daddy wasn’t dead yet,” Luz pointed out.

  “So the tribe threw her out.”

  “The village threw her out.”

  “Okay,” Kirby said. “I buy that.”

  “She took us kids along,” Luz said, “mostly because she was pissed off. I was nine, Rosita was one.”

  “Rosita?”

  “My sister. You met her before.”

  “Okay.”

  “So we went to Houston, and Cary’d forgot—Did I tell you? His name was Cary Smith.”

  “Really?”

  “He was John Smith,” Luz said, “my Mama’d never found him. But she got him. We went up through Mexico, wet-backed into the States, got to Houston, and old Cary’d forgot to mention Mrs. Smith.”

  “Whoops,” said Kirby. “So then what?”

  “Mama signed on as the maid. Lois didn’t give a shit.”

  “That was Mrs. Smith?”

  “She was okay,” Luz said. “Had three kids of her own, older than us. We all grew up together, big fucked-up family. Tommy come to visit a couple of times—”

  “Wait a minute. Tommy Watson?”

  “Yeah, he’s my cousin.”

  “He came up from South Abilene to visit?”

  “Naw,” Luz said, “South Abilene didn’t want to know about us. Tommy was in Madison, Wisconsin.”

  “Wait a minute,” Kirby said. Surging to his feet, he reeled away into the darkness. He propped himself against a tree for a while, listening to the splash, then found another jar of home-brew and came back and fell on the ground again beside Luz. “Madison, Wisconsin,” he said.

  “You from there? Cold, man.”

  “Tommy was there.”

  “Sure,” Luz said. “His old man was with the college, the scientists took him up. He knew all that carving stuff, you know, the old arts and crafts baloney from the old days, he taught it and, uh … What do you call it when you say this thing’s okay, this thing’s a piece of shit?”

  “Validate?”

  “That’s cars.”

  “Authenticate,” Kirby decided. “Say if it’s real or fake.”

  “That’s it. Tommy’s old man did that. Tommy could do it, too, but he’s like me. We’ve seen the world, man, you can have it.”

  “How’d you both wind up back here?”

  “Tommy’s old man died, is how with him,” Luz said. “Tommy brought the body back, he was nineteen, he felt relaxed here, he never did like that snow shit, he was home again.”

  “Same with you?”

  “Naw. I’m sixteen, Rosita’s eight, Mama gets mad at Cary, we go off to L.A., get into some very weird scenes. Mama’s dealing, we’re into all this heaviness, Chinamen, Colombians, I took it three years, I said, I got to get out of this. I got in the car, head south, turns out Rosita’s hiding in the trunk, she can’t stand that shit either. So we go down to San Diego, sell the car, come on down south.”

  “Where’s your Mama now?”

  “Alderson, West Virginia.”

  “That’s a funny place to be.”

  “Not that funny. It’s the Federal pen for women.”

  “Oh,” said Kirby. He thought a few seconds, and then he said, “Luz?”

  “Present.”

  “If these people here are so moral …”

  Some time went by. Luz said, “Yeah?”

  Kirby woke up: “What?”

  “So what’s the question?” Luz said. “If these people here are so moral, what?”

  “Well,” Kirby said, taking a hit as an aid to thought, “to begin with, how about all this pot?”

  “What’s immoral about pot?” Luz wanted to know.

  “Good point,” Kirby said.

  “You go on south,” Luz told him, “you got people down there, all these mushrooms, these button things, they got peyote coming outa their pores, man. You got people down there, nobody’s seen their eyes in years.”

  “Okay,” Kirby said. “Okay.”

  “Pot and brew, now, you just relax. Sex, now, that’s family, it’s property, people’s feelings, it’s, uh, it’s, uh, it’s politeness.”

  “Got it,” Kirby said. “Sexually conservative, makes sense.”

  “So your question is,” said Luz, “how come these simple, conservative, primitive assholes put up with spoiled goods like Tommy and Rosita and me. Right?”

  “I guess so,” Kirby said.

  “Everybody’s cousins,” Luz said. “That’s number one. And our Mama, Tommy’s daddy, they took us away, and on our own we came b
ack, that’s number two.”

  “Okay.”

  “Everybody knows we’re different, cause we were out there, but we’re still family.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “We just lay back,” Luz said. “Tommy and Rosita and me, we just coast with it.”

  “Go with the flow,” Kirby suggested.

  “You got it. Where else we gonna do that? Play by our own rules and they accept us, man. Listen, I’ll be right back.” Luz rolled over, and left. On all fours.

  Kirby slept, or maybe not. Maybe those weren’t dreams. The white moon rolled slowly across the blacktop sky. Then a form slid between him and the moon, and collapsed in a flutter of skirts. “Hello,” she said.

  This was the sister of Luz, Kirby remembered that now, and if the moon weren’t revolving in those slow circles up there he’d probably even remember her name. “Harya,” he said.

  “Rosita,” she said.

  “You’re right. You’re absolutely right.” He remembered her now. She was as short as the rest of them, but skinnier, with the wiry spareness of the born neurotic. Her eyes were large and liquid brown, cheekbones strong, mouth broad and sensual, skin like warm cocoa. She moved like a puma.

  While Kirby watched the way moonlight silvered her earlobe, she took the joint from his fingers, made inhaling sounds, put the joint back where she’d found it, leaned down over him, kissed him, and exhaled smoke into his mouth.

  It took a major effort of will neither to throw up nor bite her tongue in half, but he managed, and when he obediently inhaled while she exhaled, then exhaled while she inhaled, it turned out the moon was making those slow revolutions inside his head.

  After a while, she lifted up and said, “You sleep out here all night, the bugs gonna bite you to death.”

  “True. True.” It was a sad thought.

  “So come inside,” Rosita said.

  So they went inside, and soon it was morning and his body and brain were in terrible difficulties. He had a rash like poison ivy on the surface of his brain, he knew it, he could tell. He felt as though he were being digested, his whole self shriven and melted by the gastric juices inside the whale that had eaten him.

  He crawled out to a sun that had approached much closer to Earth overnight, was now about 11 feet from the ground. He peered around and was not surprised to see that the rest of the human race was as stricken as he. Was there hope for mankind?

  Some. Coffee, bacon, more coffee, tortillas, more coffee, a joint, and a brief retirement with Rosita all helped. The villagers doctored themselves in similar fashion, and in the afternoon the party started again. Rosita explained to Kirby how she’d always felt maybe she’d left the States a little too soon, before she’d really experienced the place, given it a chance. She was just a kid, really, when she came back. She’d always thought, she told Kirby, it might be nice to go back there some time, spend a while; with the right companion, you know. “Uh huh,” Kirby said, and went off to wander around town.

  He found Luz and Tommy together, and joined them, and that was when the conversation turned to the heritage of the Maya Indians, and the mystery of their past. “At least,” Tommy said, “you fucked your own self—”

  “With Innocent St. Michael’s help,” Kirby said.

  “Still, you were there. We were screwed out of our rights by our ancestors. A thousand years ago, our people lived in some really class cities. Duded themselves up with gold and jade and all that stuff.”

  “Human sacrifice,” Luz said, and grinned like a wolf.

  “Then our people left,” Tommy said. “Property values went to hell. You got to maintain a temple, or pretty soon it’s just a pile of rocks.”

  “Especially in the jungle,” Kirby said.

  “That’s right. The dirt piles up, things grow, die, rot, more dirt, more things grow. Rain eats out the mortar between the stones, the whole thing goes to hell. Used to be a temple, now it’s just a hill, you can’t even see it any more.”

  “Listen,” Kirby said, “you guys both used to live in cities, you gave all that up, remember?”

  “Madison,” Tommy said, with curled lip. “Houston. I’m talking about our cities. Lamanai. Tikal. Colorful places.”

  “Colorful ceremonies,” Luz said, with that grin again.

  “I don’t know,” Kirby said. “Not to insult your ancestors, but I don’t think I’d like to live in places where they do human sacrifice.”

  Luz frowned at him: “Why not?”

  “I’m a human.”

  “Hmmmm,” Luz said, and they grew quiet for a while, silently comtemplating the various functions of spectator and participant.

  The next day, Kirby sobered himself up and kissed Rosita and flew away to become a cargo pilot again and start to dig himself out of the hole Innocent St. Michael had walked him into. And two weeks later, eyes shining, he had flown back to his dried-out land and carried two more Glad Bags up into South Abilene, and told Tommy and Luz his scheme.

  “Rosita says hello,” Tommy said, tired of waiting for Kirby to catch his breath. “She says is your wife any better,” he added solemnly.

  “Alas, no,” said Kirby. “She had two more violent spells, they had to put her in the strait jacket again. It’s looking pretty bad.”

  “I’ll tell Rosita,” Luz said, straight-faced. “She’s very interested in the condition of your wife.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  Tommy said, “Those two customers from yesterday; they making trouble?”

  “No, no,” Kirby said. “They bought the story all right. I’ll see them this afternoon, make the final arrangements. The problem is the next guy.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I got a message yesterday. He isn’t due till next week, but all of a sudden he’s coming in today.”

  Tommy translated this for the others, and everybody looked distressed. Luz said, “Asshole.”

  “Exactly,” Kirby said. “But it’s too late to stop him, he’s on his way. So I’ve got to stall him somehow in Belize City, and keep him from meeting the other two, and then bring him up here tomorrow. So you’ve got to get the place ready by then.”

  “Not much to do,” Tommy said. “The last guys didn’t dig around a lot, like some of your people. Just the jaguar stela, basically.”

  Luz said, “They didn’t even find the stone whistle.”

  “The main problem is the field,” Kirby said. “The place shouldn’t look as though it gets a lot of traffic, but you can really see Cynthia’s landing tracks there.”

  “So we’ll mush them up a little,” Tommy said.

  “Right.” Kirby looked serious. “And, Tommy,” he said, “don’t do your little peeking-out-of-the-bushes number any more, okay? If one of those guys had seen you yesterday, he’d have had a heart attack right there. It’s bad business to kill the customers.”

  “I never have any fun,” Tommy said.

  8

  THE QUESTION

  “Do you like the conch?” Innocent asked, pronouncing it conk, as in conk on the head, and Valerie said, “Very much.” Innocent smiled. “I take all my girlfriends here,” he said. “Before sex, after sex. They always like the conch. They like it better after sex.”

  Valerie didn’t quite know how to answer that, nor did it seem possible to eat the firm white conch immediately after such a remark, nor drink some more of the Italian white wine, so she filled her mouth with salad instead.

  Delicious salad. Very nice restaurant at the back of a private house, more outside than in, the widely spaced white tables surrounded by the flowers and plants of a nursery, that being the proprietors’ other business. Hanging plants, lengths of tall picket fence, moist dirt floor beyond the tiled part, areas roofed with sheets of translucent plastic.

  Tropical flowers are so much more blatant than the flowers of southern Illinois. In southern Illinois, the flowers aren’t all in hot, hot oranges and yellows and reds, and they don’t all look like human genitalia. Idealized male and female
parts hung in the air and protruded from clay pots and peeked with false modesty out of veils of shiny green leaves.

  The waitress came over to see how they were doing, and Innocent put an arm around her hips, his hand caressing her leg. “So you’re working here now, huh?” he said.

  “Just for a little while.” She was short, plumpish in a jolly way, with a very pretty face and reddish-brown flesh. She seemed not to mind Innocent’s hand on her leg. “I got tired being cooped up in an office all day,” she said. “Maybe I’ll go back to Belize.”

  They were, of course, already in Belize, and it took Valerie a minute to realize the girl meant Belize City. (In just the same way, people in Mexico say they’re going to Mexico, not Mexico City, and people in New York State say they’re going to New York, not New York City.)

  Innocent grinned at Valerie. “Susie liked the conch after the sex.” Squeezing her leg, he said, “Didn’t you, baby?”

  Susie giggled. Innocent winked at Valerie. “But she liked the sex better.”

  Susie gave Valerie an arch look, woman to woman. “These men,” she said. “They all think they’re the best, right?” Imitating a little boy, pressing one fingertip to her cheek, she said, “Wasn’t I great, honey? Ain’t I the best you ever had, honey? Don’t I beat all the other fellas, honey?” Then she became a schoolmarmish sort of woman, humoring the little boy: “Oh, you were wonderful, dear. Such a great big thing.” As Innocent guffawed, she held up her hands, palms facing each other, like a fisherman describing an extremely small fish.

  Valerie had to laugh. She also had to eat conch. The question was, did she have to go to bed with Innocent St. Michael?

  Not have to, that wasn’t the word. It wasn’t as though sex would be his kind of bribe, the gift to the Third Worlder to gain cooperation. That wouldn’t be Innocent’s way. Valerie wasn’t too awfully wise in the ways of the world, but she did understand that Innocent was merely permitting the subject of sex to float in the air all around them, giving her the opportunity to decide whether or not to go to bed with him, and suggesting without too much blatancy the reasons why she should.