Nightmare Country (5 page)

If his life had not been so bizarre since the shattering of his home, Thad's first reaction would have been to doubt his sanity. Unexplainable things did happen. He had an inkling they always had, but he'd explained them away or ignored them before Ricky's death made him vulnerable. His wife, Molly, had turned to religion. Religion explained everything. Molly'd left him and moved back to San Diego to live with her mother. Molly's mother had all the answers too, and there was no need to question. He hoped they were happy. He wished they'd stop sending him the tracts.

The first story of this house was one room, the kitchen divided from the living room by a waist-high double bookshelf. The inner skeleton of the house's construction was bared, studs and some of the nails exposed. Open joists and beams overhead, all unpainted. The floor—just bare boards of indestructible mahogany from the mainland.

“Good morning, Thaddeus. You want breakfast now?” Rafaela Paz, his father's housekeeper, entered by the screen door. She wore the island uniform for women—two brightly colored pieces of cotton sewn up the sides and ending just above the knees, flat-thonged sandals on her feet.

“Please, and no eggs this morning, huh?” The islanders assumed Yankees ate nothing but eggs or cornflakes for breakfast. “Fix something like you would for Stefano.”

Thad stepped out the side door and climbed the exposed stairs to the second floor. Odd arrangement, but practical unless it rained. Rafaela and Stefano Paz's house sat across a courtyard of sand. Both houses were enclosed on all but the cemetery side by the same board fence and shared the same water tank and cistern.

There were two bedrooms upstairs, with a jerry-rigged bathroom tacked onto the back and supported by stilts. Thad showered in a tepid, brackish trickle and could see daylight through the drain at his feet. The sand far below would soak up the water. In Anchorage the whole construction would have spelled poverty. In San Tomas it was sufficient, and sensible on an island where a hurricane wiped the slate clean every twenty years or so and all building began anew. On Mayan Cay, survival was not as hard as it was uncertain.

He brushed away the sour taste of a returned first breakfast and, dizzy with hunger, went downstairs for his second—a tasty mixture of highly seasoned rice and pieces of leftover tortillas fried together. And an orange cut into slices. His plate clean, Thad Alexander leaned back and sipped harsh, invigorating coffee. “Rafaela, have you ever heard of a yacht named
Ambergris
?”

She was at the endless task of sweeping the beach back out the door. The broom paused. She had the face, plump and brown, of one who has seen all but has the strength to remain calm, the patience to remain kind. “You see this boat, Thaddeus?”

“I had breakfast aboard her this morning.”

“Madre mía!”
Rafaela crossed herself and expelled a string of exclamations in Spanish mixed with creole. She started sweeping again.

“You haven't answered my question.” But in a way she had. She'd heard of the
Ambergris
. It existed somewhere other than the inside of his head.

“Thaddeus, you talk to Stefano, yes?” It was unlike her to sidestep a question.

Thad stopped the busy broom with his hand. “Why not you?”

“I think Stefano will tell you better.” She had to bend her neck way back to look into his face as he stood above her, but she did this without quite meeting his eyes. That was not like her either. “I think this place is not good for you. You should go to your home.”

Thad shrugged. “I'll talk to Stefano.”

In the cemetery the bitch lay curled in her favorite morning shade. The soggy heat seemed pressurized as he walked next door. Stefano stood between pilings under his house, drawing a line with a thin paintbrush along the wooden model of a fishing trawler.

Placing houses high on pilings was the norm in San Tomas, Thad's father's house more the exception. It served many purposes, but Thad had yet to discover which were originally intended and which had been later perceived as convenient. The obvious one was the hope that a high storm wave would wash under and then recede, leaving the house standing, although any wave worth its salt would surely knock out the pilings and bring down the house.

But it did provide ventilation and the perfect place to dry clothes out of the sun's fading rays and the frequent rains—as his now hung on a nylon rope with those of the Pazes. It also provided storage for canoes and fishing boats and cool shade for work and play.

Stefano Paz had white skin and a military spine, grayed hair and the dignity to carry off the long-sleeved white shirt and dark trousers he always wore. Only his hands showed the effects of tropical sun, his head never outdoors without the incongruous hat—straw, wide at the brim, flat at the crown. Skin color on Mayan Cay, as mixed as the language, ranged from white to black. And hair from black to auburn. But all the eyes were brown. Color had no pecking order here, and no prestige. The only people made fun of were the “backras,” those of white skin who cavorted in sun and water until their backs were blistered raw. In the creole-English dialect, “back raw” had become “backra.”

“Buenos días. Señor Paz.”

“Good morning, Mr. Alexander.” Stefano's cultured British made the various slurs of the United States sound uneducated, and it was yet a third language used on the island. He managed to look down his nose at Thad even though he was the shorter of the two. He was as aloof as his wife was endearing. But Thad stepped under the shade of the house, leaned against a piling, and told his story. “Rafaela said I should speak to you.”

Heedless of the open paint cans and jar of thinner on the makeshift table before him, Stefano lit a cigarette and kept it between his teeth as he added a red strip at the trawler's waterline. He kept one eye shut to the smoke crawling up his face and managed to snort derisively around the bobbing cigarette, “Scrambled eggs.…”

Stefano Paz put down the brush. “I think, Mr. Alexander, that you should wear a hat when out in the sun.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“The
Ambergris
vanished two years ago. In a storm.”

“Maybe this is a different yacht with the same name.”

“Perhaps it is the same
Ambergris
and … it just vanished again.” The sound of Stefano's laughter bounced from piling to palm tree and back. Thad was sure it could be heard all over San Tomas.

5

An official from the mainland and the one local policeman, Ramon Carias, had gathered most of Edward P. Alexander's notes and put them in a box, which they handed over to Thad when he arrived on the island. He sat now sorting through them for a mention of the
Ambergris
or the Kellers. They were in no order, and Edward P.'s penmanship was too stylistic to be consistently legible. But it was something to do besides relive the strangest of mornings, or rest and swim and drink—the three great temptations of Mayan Cay.

“Must remember young Ricky's birthday” was scribbled on a list of things to do. Edward P. had never found the time to travel to Anchorage to see his grandson, but a package had always arrived for Rick's birthday, containing some misplaced oddity. A shrunken head when the boy was two, a machete when he was four. Now Ricky was twelve. And would be so always.

Edward P. Alexander III had been an indifferent father, too, dragging Thad and his mother all over the world on his once-famous jaunts. Until Dorothy Alexander, worried about the constant interruption in their child's education, had put her foot down in Anchorage, Alaska. Edward stayed with them long enough to write a book on his adventures in the Klondike and then moved on.

He'd drop in every few years, and when Thad graduated from high school, Edward took him on a trip to the outback of Australia, a sort of sentimental visit to the place where Thad was born—in a tent on an archaeological dig—delivered by his own father.

Thad had seen Edward P. only twice in all the years since. Once at his mother's funeral. And the last time on the day he'd married Molly. Edward's wedding gift to the young couple had been the royalties from his new book, which made a big splash at the reception, where the famous adventurer announced it in his booming voice. After the first year there'd been little in the way of royalties.

The elder Alexander was a showman. He'd caught the people's imagination for a while, been the subject of several early TV documentaries. Scholars put down the theories of a self-educated man who claimed to be an expert on everything, and Thad agreed with them. He considered his father, if not a knowing fraud, at least a genial con man.

He flipped through a three-by-five notebook. “Order new lens cap.” “More film.” “Write to Pearsons for latest on Mayan hieroglyphs.” “Roudan is the key!”

If Thad did find mention of the
Ambergris
or her owners, the note wouldn't make sense. They weren't even dated. Roudan was the key to what?

He picked up another box, containing a manuscript in progress, and took it out to the hammock. The upper story of the house overhung the lower by six feet on the side fronting the beach, and the net hammock was strung between two of the supporting posts set in concrete blocks in the sand. Here Thad had done a great deal of daydreaming, telling himself he was thinking. Now he determined to read his father's words carefully, even attempt to decipher the scribbles in pencil in the margins or between double-spaced type. He'd already skimmed parts of it but hoped a thorough reading would hint at Edward's latest escapade and offer a clue as to what had become of him.

The manuscript consisted of a group of essays, one to a chapter, each relating certain aspects of the places to which Edward had traveled and presumably leading to some central conclusion. And if Thad knew his father, that conclusion would be outlandish. Von Daniken and others had covered similar territory to exhaustion, and he'd have to come up with some new kinky kink to warrant publication.

Thad found himself skimming again. The cenotes in Chichén-Itzá—Mayan ceremonial pools where Edward had dived in a commercial hard-hat suit. Hardships in the unexplored regions of Quintana Roo, where he had lost his way and very nearly his life from starvation and disease. Diving for sunken treasure, for the lost continent of Atlantis. Exploring the famous Blue Hole in the reef off Belize. He'd been imprisoned in Tibet and shipwrecked off Cape Horn.

Next door, Roudan, the bartender and owner of the Hotel de Sueños, laughed in his peculiar high pitch. Thad scratched at the welts left by tiny sand flies. He was shaded by the porch overhang, but sun drove heavily against a placid sea. He pushed against the house, and the hammock swayed, causing a soft breeze to play across his moist skin. His thumbs left light smudges on the manuscript's margins. Thad dozed … and awakened with a thirst that put his father's loony ideas right out of his head. What he needed was a cool Belican. He put away the manuscript and headed for the Hotel de Sueños.

The Mayapan catered to the more affluent, with individual thatched cabanas, a separate bar hut, and a tiny fleet of pleasure craft for deep-sea fishermen or scuba divers. The Hotel de Sueños was locally owned and all of a piece. Bar and dining room on the first floor, double and single rooms on the two remaining floors, with a bathroom at each end of the hallway. It often filled with package tours of schoolteachers from the States, British sailors on R and R, and wandering college students from almost everywhere.

It also had an attic loft with worn-out mattresses on the floor and no bath. This was the stopover home for some on their illegal journey to the Land of Promise. They came from all odd points of South and Central America, spoke various forms of western-hemisphere Spanish, wore crucifixes on slender chains under their shirts, and carried transistor radios that told them of a world they would not have known otherwise because few were able to read. They were already homesick for their families.

Afternoons at the bar of the hotel were more subdued than the evenings, when the men of the village joined the tourists, but for Roudan Perdomo the afternoons were often the most interesting. He could study the tourists and not worry about performing for the locals.

The professor's son came every afternoon to drink Belican. He was as tall as Roudan and as curious behind a quiet, watchful face. But he was not as strong or as clever. Roudan found him intriguing. He already showed the signs of disturbed sleep it had taken his aging father months to reveal. The professor's son came often in the evenings, too, but Roudan had more time to needle him in the afternoons.

“I think what you need is not your father, Meester Alesandro, but a woman,” he said now, and watched for signs of worry or at least recognition on a sun-bronzed face born to be pasty white. But the shuttered eyes merely watched him back, reminded Roudan of a dog he'd seen in a picture—a husky with empty eyes that seemed to reflect the light.

Roudan thought of the five men in the loft, weeping over their crucifixes and their memories. Did the professor's son have no memories? “Do you never dream of a woman, Meester Alesandro?”

“Ever hear of the
Ambergris
?” he countered as Roudan slid a brown bottle without label across to him. Beer brewed in a government brewery on the mainland, favored by the locals because of its price and by visitors because Roudan kept it better refrigerated than the Budweiser. Why did people who came here to get warm want their drinks so cold?

“I did hear, backra, of your most interesting breakfast.” Roudan turned away, noting the slight quickening in the dulled expression, knowing now just how to twist the knife. He made kissing sounds against the bird cage hanging above the bar, and his parrot clung to the wires so that he could stroke her feathered belly. “You are not the first man invited aboard that ghost ship.”

A heat-drugged white couple gravitated from a table in the corner to ask about his Chespita of the flaming colors, and Roudan used their intrusion to irritate the professor's son further. He clapped his hands and whistled, and Chespita sang “Happy Birthday” for the couple.