Westlake, Donald E - Novel 43 (5 page)

 
          
I
know that man, Valerie thought suddenly. The face, the smile, the easygoing
manner, the being rather too sure of himself. She
knew
she’d met him somewhere, but couldn’t think where. As the cab
pulled forward and the green-jacketed bellboy came out to open Valerie’s door,
she frowned at the departing pickup and the vagrant memory. Somewhere,
somewhere. She got out of the cab, holding her attache case, and turned to
watch the pickup drive away, back toward the center of town.

 
          
All
she could remember was that she had seen that face before, and that she felt .
. . she felt . . .

 
          
Trouble.

 
          
Kirby
circled while they took in the laundry, far below. Watching, waiting to land,
lightly touching Cynthia’s controls, he repeatedly yawned.

 
          
It
had been a long day, now rushing toward sunset; the shadows of the Cruz family
and their wind'flapping laundry stretched long and black over the stubbly
pasture. Bright purple or orange sheets; red, black, or green shirts; modest
white underpants; the ubiquitous blue jeans; and finally the line itself was
unstrung. The smallest Cruz children had meanwhile chivvied the goats into
their log pen, and at last Kirby’s earphones spoke in Manuel Cruz’s
Spanish^accented voice: “Sorry, Kirby. All set now.”

 
          
“Thanks,
Manny.”

 
          
The
Cruz kids always loved a little acrobatics, so Kirby turned Cynthia up and over
on her left wingtip, powendived directly at the eastern end of the pasture—the
laundry having told him the wind was out of the west—brought the nose up at the
last possible instant, and walked Cynthia like a bride across the bumpy pasture
to the grove of sapodilla.

 
          
There
were only five Cruz children, but at moments like this they seemed like 50,
swarming around the plane, chirping with excitement, asking a million
questions, demanding the right to carry some package from the plane to the
house. “But I don’t
have
anything,”
Kirby kept telling them, elbow-deep in kids. “Your goddam old man brought it
all out in the truck.”

 
          
The
pickup truck, in fact, was parked in its shed beside the chicken house, with
the dishwasher still in it. The other boxes were gone, however, and Kirby was
not surprised, on entering the house, to find Manny listing slightly, a happy
smile on his face and a glass of red liquid in his hand.

 
          
Manny
Cruz did love Danish Marys. Whenever Kirby was gone for a while to the States,
he would bring back, along with clothing and toys and appliances and cookbooks
for Estelle, a few bottles of aquavit for Manny. To mix with it, Estelle grew
tomatoes year-round in the kitchen garden, and the necessary spices were for
sale eight miles away in Orange Walk.

 
          
Four
years ago, when Kirby had first met Manny, the skinny little man with the happy
smile and the brightly shining eyes was one of life’s more cheerful losers. A
subsistence farmer on rough land that had been stripped in the nineteenth
century by the lumber industry, he was—like most of the other rural people in
this comer of Belize—also a marijuana farmer in a very small way, tending his
little field, turning over the occasional bale of really fine sinsemilla for
some really fine greenbacks. To Kirby, then, Manny had been simply another
Spanish/Indian local supplier in tom workpants, with gaps between his teeth,
the only difference being that Manny Cruz tended to smile more than most
people, so his tooth-gaps were more memorable.

 
          
But
then the DEA, the Drug Enforcement Administration from the United States, in
one of its doomed, humorless, arrogant, sporadic efforts to force the Belizean
government to dry up the finest source of foreign exchange in the whole
country, compelled the local authorities at least to make a
gesture
, arrest
somebody
, destroy
some
patch of marijuana plants, and poor Manny turned out to be the last one
standing when the music stopped. The next thing anybody knew, his pot crop (and
part of Estelle’s com crop as well) had been burned, his 18-year-old
International Harvester step-in van (still reading
Lady Betty
on the side, under all the newer coats of paint) had
been confiscated by the law as having been involved in the transportation of
drugs, and Manny was sentenced to 20 years in Lynam Prison down by Dangriga.

 
          
Well,
the whole thing was a shock to everybody in the area. The taking of the truck,
the Cruz family’s only means of travel to and from civilization, seemed as
Draconian to most people as the removal of Manny from his children for a term
longer than their childhoods. They would all be
married
by the time he got out.

 
          
A
kind of unofficial Cruz family welfare program started up among the other
farmers in the area, as well as some of the merchants from around Orange Walk
and some of the middlemen in the marijuana trade and even a few of the North
American pilots who fly the stuff out, including Kirby. At that time, Kirby had
been around the scene only about five months, and was still settling in. He had
an unsatisfactory relationship going with a legal secretary in
Homestead
, he was beginning to be interested in
Belize
as a place rather than merely a cargo stop,
and he saw a way he might both help the Cruz family and introduce a little
stability into his own life.

 
          
Estelle
Cruz, as short and skinny and brown and gnarled as a cigarillo, had at first
thought Kirby was suggesting a sexual relationship between them during the term
of her husband’s incarceration, and she was edging toward the machete before he
managed to make his proposition clear. What it came down to was, he wanted a
home.

 
          
There
was a pasture in front of the Cruz house that could serve as a landing strip
for Cynthia—better than some of the jungle strips he normally used—and a good
grove of trees at one end in which to park her. A mule shed on one side of the
house could be enclosed for a separate apartment for himself. Estelle could
cook and clean for him, the children already knew better than to tell their
business to strangers, and Kirby would have a real base of operations at the
Belize
end of his route.

 
          
What
he offered in exchange was, in effect, the twentieth century. The Cruz family
homestead was too far off the beaten track to tap into the public power lines,
and they’d never been able to afford their own gasoline-powered electric
generator. Kirby promised to supply electricity, and the appliances to be run
by it. No actual cash would change hands between himself and the Cruzes, but he
would provide them with
things
and
they would provide him with a home.

 
          
it
was a fine deal for everyone. While some Cruz and Vasquez (Estelle’s family)
relatives built the addition onto the house, complete with a concrete floor and
glass in the windows, Kirby brought in load after load of materiel. His
southern flights had always been cargoless— except for wads of greenbacks, with
which to pay for the northbound cargos—and money at that time seemed no problem
(he hadn’t yet met Innocent St. Michael), so down came two composting toilets,
an electricity-generating windmill, four solar panels, a gasoline-driven
generator for emergencies, a washing machine, a television set, a refrigerator,
three air conditioners, four blue-light bug zappers, assorted lamps, and a
Cuisinart. And from a dealer in
Belize City
came the used pickup, which Estelle could
use whenever Kirby didn’t need it, replacing the confiscated van.

 
          
Even
without the Cuisinart, Estelle had been a wonderful cook, and modem appliances
simply made her output more lavish. In
Belize
, Kirby ate better than ever before in his
life, and when he looked out his window he could see the spot where his food
had been growing until earlier that same day. The Cruz family was company
without being intmsive (he was gradually learning rudimentary Spanish and
Kekchi from the kids), his quarters and clothing were kept scrupulously clean,
and during those extended intervals when he was up north he knew his goods were
safe.

 
          
When,
in the middle of all this, the Belizean authorities released Manuel Cruz from
prison after less than nine months of his term—the DEA apparently at last
looking the other way—it changed nothing. Kirby and Manny hit it off very well,
Kirby teaching Manny cribbage while learning from Manny an Indian game
involving small stones and a number of cups, and Manny sometimes helped out in
small ways.

 
          
Bringing
the pickup truck to town today, Manny had carried a shopping list from Estelle—cloth
and thread for the girls’ school dresses, salt, filters for Mr. Coffee—so he’d
spent the afternoon downtown while Kirby was off showing the temple. After
dropping Witcher and Feldspan at their hotel, Kirby had given the pickup to
Manny and gone to see a fellow about a shipment to be taken north on Friday.
For security’s sake, they’d had their conversation in the fellow’s
Toyota
, driving around and about for a while,
there being some disagreement about money. Finally, consensus having been
reached, the fellow dropped Kirby at the Municipal Airport, from which Manny
and the pickup and the dishwasher and the other goods had long since departed.

 
          
Feeling
weary from his long day, and a bit cranky because of arguing about money with a
man in an air-conditioned Toyota, Kirby had flown north and west, less than 60
miles, and when the familiar design of the Cruz homestead had spread out below
he had smiled and relaxed, not even caring that Manny hadn’t yet had the
pasture cleared.

 
          
Estelle,
who was very short, always looked up at Kirby with adoration glistening in her
eyes. For a while he’d been awkward with her, thinking her feelings toward him
were sexual, but everything became all right once he understood her passion was
religious. On the surface a rational modern woman, who enjoyed the Guatemalan
and Mexican television stations as much as the kids did and who frequently
talked back at the announcers during news broadcasts, somewhere in her deepest
soul Estelle was still a pre-Columbian artifact herself, an unreconstructed
Maya. Kirby was the creature who dropped out of the sky, bringing electricity
and magic, bringing comfort and riches. What was the name of such a creature?
Exactly.

 
          
Now,
with the usual light in her eyes, Estelle approached Kirby with a bottle of
Belikin beer in one hand and a piece of notepaper in the other. “Cora brought
it home after school,” she said, extending the paper. Since there was no
telephone line out here, Cora, the eldest, picked up Kirby’s few messages at
the store in Orange Walk.

 
          
Kirby
took the beer with more pleasure than the message, which must have shown on his
face, because Estelle said, “You look tired, Kirby.”

 
          
“I’m
very tired.”

 
          
“I
hope you got a good appetite.”

 
          
“I’ve
always got an appetite, Estelle,” Kirby said, and swigged beer, and looked at
his message.

 
          
Shit
and damn! Whitman goddam Lemuel!

 
          
Last
month, three days after the disaster at the Soho gallery, when that irritating
pest had queered his pitch, Kirby had run into Lemuel unexpectedly at another party—this
one on Park Avenue in the 90s, in the apartment of a rich and avid collector of
pre-Columbian art—and on that second try he had succeeded at last in landing
his fish. Yes, Whitman Lemuel was interested in previously unknown Mayan
artifacts. Yes, his museum had the funds to support that interest. Yes, they
were prepared to be casual about the provenance and prior ownership of items
they bought. YES, he would come to Belize to look at an undiscovered Mayan
temple!

 
          
Next
week, next Thursday. It had all been arranged, with an exchange of phone
numbers and a writing down of dates. And now here was a message from Whitman
Lemuel, bland as could be, saying he would arrive tomorrow! “Know you’ll
understand my impatience. Wouldn’t want anyone else to beat us. Will be on
afternoon Miami plane. Fort George Hotel reservation confirmed.”

 
          
No;
it’s not possible. On Friday, day after tomorrow, Kirby had another shipment to
fly north, the very topic of his discussion this afternoon with the man in the
Toyota. But that problem paled next to the
real
worry: Tomorrow Witcher and Feldspan would still be here, also at the Fort
George.