Body of Truth (55 page)

Dr. Grajeda’s eyes dreamed on the fire. “Grief is a luxury, Mr. Haydon, and God has taken all such comforts out of my life. He allows me nothing in that way anymore. Perhaps, I don’t know, but perhaps death is arranged in such a way that the dead are allowed to forgive the living for their stupidities, I think it must be that the moment you die you receive wisdom and you can do this; you can forgive. I hope this is so, because I love the idea of forgiveness. But as for me, in my ignorance, I cannot do it. Not in this life,”

CHAPTER 52

T
he walk out of the rain forest with Lena’s crude coffin was a gruesome journey that took half an hour longer than the two-hour trip coming in, and this time there was no stopping to smoke. Aside from the four men who volunteered to carry the coffin, there was the nameless woman who had brought them from Cobán and who took the lead on the trail, and there was Dr. Grajeda himself, who brought up the rear. All of them carried Uzi’s, the compact little weapons hanging over the bearers’ shoulders and banging against the
lepa
coffin as they struggled and maneuvered the box through the dense forest, over the swift streams, down slippery slopes, and up slippery slopes. Three times during the trip the woman in the lead stopped them, and the coffin was lowered to the jungle floor while she waited to reassure her senses. Each time the coffin was lowered the bearers grunted under the strain and then panted like hounds in the darkness as they knelt against the box in the mud. Each time they raised it, they grunted again and then plowed ahead into the undergrowth. Janet once again followed Haydon and occasionally gripped the belted waist of his trousers for support as she had done on the trip in. She had spent the rest of the time they were in the compound with Lena’s body, insisting on helping the Indian women transfer the body off the chairs and into the narrow box, and she was the one to cover Lena’s face with a layer of folded cloth just before the lid was nailed into place.

In no time at all Haydon’s clothes were completely soaked through once again; his street shoes quickly accumulated three times their weight in heavy jungle gumbo, and once again the butt of the automatic he had kept wedged into his waistband, rubbed an enormous blister just below his last rib on his left side. But none of these distractions was enough to take his mind off the leg of the trip from Calvario to the Cobán highway. Whatever was going to happen was going to happen there, somewhere between those two points, during the hour it would take them to get from one to the other. The uncertainty of that coming hour was enough to have taken Haydon’s mind off a great deal of personal discomfort.

When they finally reached the truck, Haydon was not surprised to find that the driver they had left behind was gone. No time was wasted. The bearers walked straight to the back of the truck with the coffin and set it on the ground. Still keeping their Uzi’s strapped to their shoulders, they climbed into the truck and began moving the large burlap bags of coffee until they had cleared a space large enough for the coffin to rest on the flatbed. The coffin was then loaded and wedged into place with sacks of coffee, with two final sacks stacked on top of it. The tailgate of the truck was chained closed, and the tarpaulin flap was laced tightly over the rear opening.

It was all done with a minimum of conversation, with Dr. Grajeda watching every move and instructing them to make adjustments here and there until everything met with his satisfaction. When they were through the bearers moved away from the truck with the woman and waited under the black canopy of a giant
amate
tree that stood near the trail that would take them back into the rain forest. Without speaking to anyone, Janet crawled into the truck on the passenger side and closed the door.

Dr. Grajeda took Haydon by the arm and casually walked with him a few paces away from the truck.

“It has been my privilege to meet you, Mr. Haydon,” Grajeda said. “Give us a thought now and then, the people you have met here in Guatemala.”

Haydon could barely see the doctor’s face in the darkness. He had no way of knowing what emotions the man’s features might have betrayed.

“I’ll do that,” Haydon said lamely, and he reached out and shook Grajeda’s hand. But the doctor surprised him.

“In Belize,” Dr. Grajeda said, holding the grip, not letting Haydon go, his voice calm and concentrated, “the authorities will require an autopsy and embalming before they will release her body to be returned home.” He paused. “Do not feel badly for her. Remember what I told you about death in Guatemala? Each one is a message, a letter to the living. Even Lena’s.”

Then Grajeda clasped Haydon’s hand in both of his and squeezed it tightly. Though they were close enough in the thick night for Haydon to feel the doctor’s penetrating eyes, he could not actually see Grajeda’s face, rather only a hint of a visage in the narrow gulf between them. Then Haydon caught a dull, gray light, a ghostly glint of the two discal surfaces of Grajeda’s glasses, and the doctor let go of Haydon’s hand. Grajeda turned away, and in a matter of a few steps the darkness and the cicadas had swallowed him.

Haydon waited without moving in the humid jungle heat until even Grajeda’s footsteps had faded, feeling an inexplicable affinity with the erudite doctor-rebel. It was an unlikely alliance that Haydon could explain only in the context of this particular time and place and circumstance, as though he had lived the last few days in a dream that, like all dreams, was a world unto itself.

At the end of his thoughts, he turned back to the truck and climbed into the cab. Janet was crying, her head leaning against the glass. For a brief moment Haydon thought of Germaine Muller, leaning her head against the car window spattered with winter rain, and he felt an odd sense of loss himself, for never having actually met the girl who had been the source of so much emotion in others.

He started the truck—the keys were still in the ignition, a sure sign that the guerrillas commanded respect in Calvario—and flipped on the lights. Immediately he checked the gas tank: it was three-quarters full. Good. He backed around, making several efforts at it to avoid the boggy ditches where he knew he would spend the rest of the night if he wasn’t careful, and finally got the truck headed back up the long sloping stretch toward Calvario, several hundred meters distant. Though the town was not far away, the lights of its houses could not be seen clearly because a fog had moved in and the amber lights that dotted the hillside came and went with the shifting strata of the low-hanging cloud.

The worst part of the long, upward-sloping road was the first three or four hundred meters. Here, at the end of the line, great eroded gashes ate away at the roadbed as the rain forest persisted in its ceaseless efforts to reclaim the hill where men had built Calvario. Haydon never shifted out of low gear as he let the truck ease down into the rifts and then creep out of them again, as though he were painfully scaling a wall, hand over hand. Then there were a few meters to the next hole and then ten meters and twenty, until they were moving at a fair pace, though still in the lower gears because they were continually climbing. Finally the gashes became potholes, and then the potholes were shallower, until Haydon could actually say they were on a street of sorts, with houses rising up steeply on either side, their lights hovering above the truck in the floating mist.

When the street turned and grew suddenly steeper, Haydon realized they were on the bottom leg of the switchback. He threw the headlights on low, trying to see the edge of the road in the thickening fog, and slowed to a crawl again. He thought about the coffin and what would happen if the chain across the bed of the truck was not properly secured. He thought about that all the way up to the actual switchback itself, and then all the way up to Calvario proper, his mind playing out the entire drama of the consequences of such a macabre occurrence, until the nose of the truck leveled off into an immediate turn and they were instantly into the
plazoleta
.

Everything looked different from behind the steering wheel than it had from underneath the tarpaulin in the back of the truck. But the place was small, the church where they had stopped was to their left, the main entrance and exit to the teardrop-shaped
plazoleta
was to their right. Haydon turned right into the narrowing top of the teardrop, realized they were on pavement, and within seconds they were leaving the town on a sloping paved road. In his headlights, Haydon could see the poor cinder-block houses on either side of the road. They seemed more scattered than he had remembered them from his seat behind the cab, and more isolated, and if there were barking dogs, the roar of the truck’s motor drowned out their strident voices. Again he looked at his watch and noted the time.

As he pushed the truck down the long glistening ribbon of pavement, dropping meter by meter out of the cloud that hovered over Calvario, his headlights reached out farther and farther. It was clear for a while, the jungle and the road looking as if they had just been washed, but Haydon’s luck didn’t hold long. At first the fog came from the green wall on either side of the road in little tonguelike penetrations at the height of his headlights. He drove in and out of them until they became so numerous they pervaded, and then he had to slow the truck. Not only had the fog closed in, but the road changed too, leaving its straight descent from Calvario and beginning its serpentine course through the cloud forest.

He didn’t know whether Janet slept or brooded, her head against the window, wrapped in silence. For his part, Haydon was almost weak with exhaustion. His mind fought the powerful urge of his body to quit. He rolled down his window and let the clammy fog whip across his face and into the cab. Constantly passing through alternating waves of dense and light fog was unnerving. He slowed when he could see only a few meters past his headlights, concentrating on the black margin of the road, and accelerated when he could see farther. It seemed that every kilometer or so he adjusted speed, corrected his distance from the cusp of the pavement, adjusted his eyes to a different depth of field, all of it drifting, wavering gray and silver.

But even in his bleary exhaustion, Haydon was nervous about what lay ahead. He knew something was waiting for him, a resolution of one kind or another with Cage or Pittner or General Azcona’s death squads—or even some unimaginable amalgam of all three. The confrontation was inevitable, but the anxiety he felt at its approach was a peculiarly placed apprehension, perhaps not focused specifically on himself, despite the unbelievable experiences of the last twenty-four hours. Navigating the truck through the swirling veins of fog, he felt more like Charon, who, being only the boatman who ferried souls across the Hateful River of hell, had no fear himself of the torments on the other side. It was Lena they wanted. But they weren’t going to like what he was bringing them.

The first stream caught him by surprise, and he plowed into it with a crashing roar that threw water up over the top of the cab. Horrified that he might have drowned the motor, he jammed his foot down on the clutch, hit the accelerator until the engine whined and smoked to life, and then he let out the clutch again and continued through the water and out the other side, more awake than he had been going in.

As the truck emerged dripping from the water, he allowed himself to take his eyes away from the headlights and saw that Janet was awake, staring sleepy eyed, her elbows raised as she ran her fingers through her hair. Haydon didn’t bother to explain what had just happened. He assumed she had figured it out, and if she hadn’t and didn’t care enough to ask about it, he wasn’t going to waste his time. She rode awhile with her eyes open, peering out across the headlights just like Haydon, but then the constant rush of fog wore her down and once again she slumped against the door, her head leaning on the window.

They were half an hour out of Calvario—Haydon had just checked his watch—when he thought he saw a faint rosy cast in the fog ahead. But it disappeared, or he thought it disappeared, if in fact he had seen it. And then it was there again. He was so tired his reaction was immediate confusion. Rose light? Was he hallucinating? Baffled, he took two deep breaths and reflexively lifted his foot off the accelerator. Suddenly he hit a pocket in the fog, and the light was brilliant ruby, and instantly the world was carmine, the color dancing off the particles of suspended fog until he felt as if he were entering the veins of a red planet.

“Jesus Christ!” Janet screamed, suddenly sitting bolt upright, her hands out in front of her bracing against the dash. “Slow down…for God’s sake!”

Haydon hit the brakes, and they started sliding, the bed of the truck drifting. He let up and fought the steering wheel to correct the fishtailing and they straightened out, and then he eased down on the brakes again to slow the hurtling truck, and up again as he felt the rear end drifting. It seemed to last a long time, this unchecked plunge toward the heart of the brightening ruby light.

But the truck actually stopped in plenty of time, maybe twenty meters short of it, and Haydon, trembling and wide awake now, looked over the steering wheel at the roadblock, two cars nose to nose across the glistening pavement, each with ruby spotlights burning into the fog. Leaving the lights on, he cut the motor and sat there. For a moment no one showed himself, and Haydon heard nothing through his open window except cicadas and frogs.

“God, what’s happening?” Janet wondered hoarsely. She was sitting forward in her seat, hands on the dash, her eyes so wide Haydon could see the red reflected in them when he looked at her.

“Just sit tight,” he cautioned her softly. “Give it time.”

He hardly had finished speaking when someone moved between the two cars, and the solitary, barrel-chested figure of Taylor Cage emerged through the mist and stopped squarely in the middle of the road, a red world at his back.

And then a slow drizzle began to fall.

CHAPTER 53

“H
aydon,” Cage shouted, ignoring the drizzle. “Is that Janet in there with you or Lena?”