Body of Truth (49 page)

Soon locked in a hopeless conga line of overloaded buses and crippled trucks belching black acrid smoke as they labored on the climbing switchbacks, Haydon and Janet rolled down their windows. Janet gamely twisted her hair into a tight coil and pinned it up off her neck, hiked her skirt up high on her long thighs, put on her sunglasses and stared out to the embattled highway. Even though the hot wind coming off the dark stony hills beat against their faces as it whipped in through the open windows, Janet was unperturbed. She knew ahead of time what the trip would be like. But Haydon could tell she was still furious about the Land-Rover.

They continued in the heat through mountains with slate gray rocks that yielded nothing but cactus and scrub brush and occasionally a patch of withering com on the steep slopes. Small whitewashed or dun-colored stucco houses sat isolated on far slopes or at the bottom of gorges, baking in the sun.

Haydon looked at his watch. “If this kind of traffic keeps up there’s no way we’ll make it in three hours.”

Janet shook her head. “It won’t. When we get to El Rancho we’ll turn off north to Cobán. Most of this traffic, not all of it but most of it, will keep on going to the coast.”

They came to another long climb, and the stream of traffic slowed to a crawl.

“Here, take the wheel,” he said to Janet. “I’ve got to get this coat off.” She reached over and held the wheel steady while he wrestled off his suit coat and threw it over into the backseat. He rolled back his cuffs and then took the wheel again. “Thanks,” he said. “One more favor. Would you mind pouring me a cup of coffee?” His mouth felt oily from the constant blast of diesel smoke, and his eyes were burning from the hot wind and bright light as he squinted into the sun. He hadn’t brought his sunglasses.

The traffic crept absurdly up the steep grades, picked up speed on the crests, and then plunged wildly into the downhill stretches, brakes screaming on the curves but not for long as each driver coped with as much speed as he dared in order to gain some momentum for the next long climb. Occasionally the cliffs beside the highway were recruited as political billboards on which the competing parties painted their initials and party logos, some of them very precisely rendered—a stylized brilliant orange sun, a blue flower, a white fist gripping a rose, a red rooster.

Janet handed him the cup of coffee and then poured one for herself, screwing the top on the Thermos as she gripped it between her knees.

“Have you been watching to see if we’re being followed?” she asked, wedging the Thermos between the seats.

He nodded. “Yeah, but it’s hard to tell. We’ve been lined up like this for so long. There are several cars and another Blazer, the rest in this string with us are trucks and buses.” He sipped the coffee. “When we get to the right kind of place I’m going to check it out.”

Janet looked at him, the black orbs of her sunglasses hiding what he needed to see, and then she turned back to watch the road.

The chance came ten hot miles later when the mountains jogged back southward and then again to the north and just in the kink of the bend a long suspension bridge spanned a gorge at the bottom of which was the unimpressive Río Plátanos and the glistening double rails of a railroad. On the other side of the gorge the highway rounded another bend, and just before it did, a dirt road cut off and meandered down into the gorge.

Haydon looked in the mirror and memorized the colors and makes of the cars and noted the color of the other Blazer. The vehicles steamed into the bend, meeting a straggling of traffic heading for the capital. They crossed the bridge high above the river at the bottom of the gorge and started around the other side. The traffic straightened out like a serpent rounding a corner, and Haydon kept his eye on the dirt road, which they were approaching at an angle that would obscure his exit to the traffic that was following the vehicles directly behind him.

“I’m going to turn off,” he said quickly, and whipped off the highway, catching Janet by surprise and throwing her over onto him, her coffee flying, as they hit the caliche in a cloud of dust that boiled up and then settled around them as he turned into a grove of scrub oaks just off the highway.

“Dammit, Haydon,” she yelled. “You could’ve said something…”

He hadn’t anticipated the telltale cloud of dust, which, if it didn’t settle quickly enough, would make the maneuver a foolish waste of time. The Blazer was facing the highway, and Haydon was out, the door open, watching the traffic. There had been two trucks and a bus behind him and all of them passed before the first two cars, wedged in between another bus and truck, then another car, the Blazer, a flatbed truck loaded with cinder blocks and another car. All of them went by, they had to. There was no way they could have anticipated the turnoff. Haydon had no way of knowing how far they would have to go if they wanted to turn around.

He looked around at Janet, who had unbuttoned the top of her sundress and was fanning the coffee stain on the front of it. But she, too, was watching the traffic.

“I don’t know,” he said, getting back behind the wheel. “Sorry,” he added, looking at her dress. “We’ll wait a while.”

“Oh, great. This is a good place to wait,” she said, holding the front of her dress out with one hand and wiping the perspiration from around her mouth with the other.

“You think you’d recognize any of those trucks or cars if you saw them again?” He wrapped his arms around the steering wheel and stared out the windshield. Another gathering of buses and trucks was already moving past in front of them.

“I might,” she said.

“If someone was following us they’ll wait up ahead.” He reached for the map on the seat. “At Sanarate maybe. El Rancho for sure.”

“Do you think there is someone?”

He tossed the map back on the seat and stretched his left leg out the open door. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess we’ve reduced the odds some.”

Looking to his left, he squinted in the glare out across the scrub brush where the mountain dropped down to the Río Plátanos. The traffic steamed and groaned on the highway, and when there was a break in the sound of diesel engines the cicadas whined and keened in the unrelenting heat.

“How long we going to sit here?” Janet played with the height of her dress on her bare thighs, her expression hidden behind the lenses of her sunglasses, her face slightly flushed from the heat.

“Not long,” he said, looking at his watch. “Fifteen minutes.”

They stayed in the Blazer because it was the only shade, and even though Janet opened her door to let through a cross breeze, the air was hot and biting. Haydon wished for some of the ice he had had in his gin the night before. Janet fanned her legs until it was time to go.

The rest of the trip to El Rancho was like what had gone before. They gulped hot, diesel-laden air, crept up the steep rising grades and hurtled down the falling ones. They saw a wreck that had occurred conveniently at a caliche pullover where the highway bottomed out in a ravine and began another ascent. A small green Japanese car had apparently pulled out in front of a flatbed truck carrying a load of clay pots headed into the capital. Everyone was sitting beside the road, doing nothing, looking exhausted and forlorn. Haydon could not imagine what they were waiting for.

Though the highway had taken them on an up-and-down course, they actually had been falling steadily in elevation ever since they had left the capital, crossing over a low, nameless range of mountains into the arid Motagua River valley that cut across the country from east to west, accommodating Guatemala’s longest river.

At El Rancho, a dusty junction in the bottom of the valley, a film of sulfuric yellow dust coated everything including the stiff shocks of hair of the children who wandered along the caliche shoulders and lingered in the shade of the small food stands set up by locals hoping to take advantage of thirsty or hungry travelers slowing for the intersection. El Rancho itself was a couple of kilometers farther on, invisible beyond the undulating heat waves and dwarfed by a gigantic electric power station that rose stark and ominous like the ogre’s castle on the outskirts of the junction.

Haydon turned left at the intersection and crossed over the Motagua River to the north bank and doubled back west. As Janet had predicted.

most of the traffic was left behind at El Rancho. The terrain began to change. It was still desert, but this was true desert as opposed to what they had just been through, which simply had been a poor countryside burned up by the
verano
sun. Here the highway began to climb gently through a more picturesque setting, vegetation designed by nature for its environment, prickly pear and rangy cereus cacti, and thickets of thorny acacias. And, unlike the country south of the river, wildlife was visible here, orioles flashed like orange sparks in the dull reddish brush, and more than once Haydon saw brief flights of snub-nosed lime-green parrots, as exotic a thing as anyone would hope to see in the desert. And then there were the
zopilotes
, soaring, drifting, waiting, black crucifixes dangling like unimaginative mobiles from a glaucous sky.

The quickness with which the landscape changed in Guatemala was something that struck Haydon as marvelous the first time he visited there, and on subsequent trips it never failed to remind him of a theme park where every kind of terrain in “Guatemala” was represented in a short trip on a miniature train, here the desert, around this corner the cloud-crowned western highlands, here the northern jungles of the Petén, and now the volcanoes of the central highlands and the banana plantations of the east coast, and here the ever-rainy tropical cloud forests.

From an elevation of about fifteen hundred feet at El Rancho, the small two-lane highway rose steadily to three thousand feet and then to four thousand. The bare, pockmarked mountains of the desert gave way to hills with thicker vegetation, stands of pine suddenly appeared, and within ten miles the temperature dropped twenty degrees. Pockets of wispy fog began to appear here and there in the draws of converging hills, their vaporous tails sometimes reaching into the stands of pines. The air softened, and the moist fragrance of conifers wafted through the windows of the Blazer.

Then the road climbed sharply and they came to a village way station where they were supposed to stop, pay a fee, and have their car sprayed with an insecticide before progressing any farther up into the lush vegetation. The station, a cluster of half a dozen stucco buildings that looked distinctly European in style, sat off the highway on a thin isthmus of a ridge where the road turned and began a steep climb. The central building was vaguely triangular in shape, its two diverging sides forming two “streets” fifty meters in length before the hamlet ended where the ridge fell away abruptly into the valley on the other side. Haydon pulled off the turn in the highway and stopped the Blazer in front of the building. An Indian man and woman stood in the dooryard and looked at them silently, apparently unwilling to administer the insecticide and reluctant, or unconcerned, about coming out to collect the fee.

But one checkpoint’s laziness was another checkpoint’s offense. Haydon knew he had to have the receipt for passing the station, so he got out of the Blazer and went up to the doorway and paid. They gave him a receipt, and he went back to the truck, where Janet was buying candy from two little girls who were displaying their sticky, homemade confection on a dirty board.

Haydon got back in, Janet paid the girls, and Haydon slowly maneuvered the Blazer through a scattering of speckled chickens that were pecking all over the road as if it were a barnyard. That was the checkpoint.

From here on the land dropped again, back to four thousand feet, and they entered lush and cool pine forests cleared out here and there for
granjas
, small single-family farms with meager plots of com or chick-peas, some with cinder-block houses with red tile roofs that glistened in the moisture-laden atmosphere, some with wattle-and-mud houses with rusty corrugated tin roofs, but each of the homesteads, the houses and their plots of corn and peas, was invariably partially hidden within a stand of limp and glistening banana trees.

They now were well into the
departamento
of Baja Verapaz, the Lower True Peace, and the forests grew thicker, the highway climbed even higher, and suddenly, around a bend in the winding road, the Sierra de Chuacús threw up their muscular shoulders against a roiling, titanic bank of thick white clouds with depths of gray that churned and struggled against the summits but did not cross as the Chuacús grudgingly held back the life-giving rain from the parched Motagua desert valley below.

The light began to change, affected by the huge plumes of clouds that diffused the sun above them rather than blocking it out. They drove through a luminous land without a sun, without a sky, lighted only by a glowing canopy of tumbling clouds.

They climbed again to five thousand feet and crossed the invisible border into the misty regions of
la selva nublado
, the cloud forest, that exotic high-mountain tropical land of ferns and bromeliads and orchids, where the famous and mythical national bird, the quetzal, resided in sequestered and timorous resplendence as though it knew full well that it had retreated to its last refuge and was living through the waning days of its existence.

The pine forests were behind them now, and the light in this primeval region was brooding and embraced by a dense fog that rose and fell over black-green jungle-draped mountains like the breath of gods. This was the land of the
chipichipi
, the fine drizzle that fell unceasingly, touching everything lightly, intimately, penetratingly. There was no “dry season” in this region, though in January and February the drizzle was less heavy than during the rest of the year. It was not a land for people predisposed to melancholy or dark moods.

By the time they approached the Biotopo del Quetzal, almost three thousand acres of cloud forest set aside as a reserve and administered by the University of San Carlos, it was late morning and they were still an hour away from Cobán. They stopped at a small inn not far from the entrance to the reserve. It sat on the cliff side of the roadway overlooking a vast valley whose panoramic sweep could only be guessed at because it was veiled in floating clouds of mist and fog. Across the roadway a green wall of jungle-covered mountain rose up and disappeared into a gray eternity. They had fresh, strong coffee from overlarge cups and a small plate of fried plantains prepared by an Indian woman and her young daughter. Outside they stretched their legs a few minutes on the damp caliche shoulder, the huge silence of the cloud forest cushioning the sounds around them. Before they got back into the Blazer, Janet pulled a sweater from her bag, and Haydon put on his suit coat against the slight, but welcome, chill.