Caught (23 page)

I prefer we be honest with each other in all transactions.

Slaney agreed.

Honest and open, Lopez said.

Open discussion, absolutely, Slaney said.

I understand you lost a great deal on your last trip, Lopez said. This turns investors, no? He winced when he said this and shifted uncomfortably in his chair, removing a pistol that had been in a holster at his waist. He laid it on the table next to his plate.

You are young, Lopez said. Mistakes, you begin to learn. Now you know.

I think so, sir, Slaney said. He glanced at the flame of a candle in the centre of the table. It was wagging low and stretching, making itself thin. It was trying to squirm off the wick.

Hearn had lied to him. He had not told Slaney about Ada; he had said Carter had dried out. But this was of a different order of untruth. Now there was a loaded pistol on a linen napkin near Slaney’s crystal bowl of cubed papaya. Hearn had said Lopez didn’t know about the other trip. He had given his word Lopez wouldn’t know.

It was not Hearn sitting under the canvas tent in the rising heat surrounded by armed men. Hearn was probably sitting in an English class where the most loaded thing was the use or abuse of the semicolon in a thesis on Virginia Woolf’s stream of consciousness. Hearn had let him walk into a situation blind. There was a kerfuffle outside.

Shouts from the men. People running.

Lopez shouted back and he leapt up and was out through the flap with his pistol in his hand. Slaney and Carter followed behind him, ready to take off into the trees. They thought a raid. They thought: Make a run for it.

Fifteen men had arranged themselves in a line from one of the tents to the beach and they’d been tossing the bales of weed from one to the other, loading a large speedboat with the cargo they would transport to Carter’s sailboat. The sun was still very hot and the water near shore was crimson-streaked and too bright after the cool darkness of the tent.

Five soldiers were running over the sand from the forest behind them to the water’s edge with their guns held out before their chests and they halted together, lined up side by side, the guns raised and aimed, and they cocked the triggers and stared down the barrels like a firing squad.

Who have we here, Colonel Lopez asked. Ada was rising out of the surf. She was wearing the red bikini.

One of the men moving the weed had been hit in the chest by a bale while his head was turned to look at her.

Ada had swum the two miles to shore. She stood at the edge of the water and tilted her head sideways. She knocked one ear with the flat of her hand.

We are lucky the sharks didn’t get you, Lopez said.

He shook hands with her.

Come inside and have something to eat, he suggested. We have just finished, but there is lots left over.

I’m starving, Ada said. She had gathered her long hair in her hands and was ringing the water out of the length of it.

Do you mind, darling? Ada called to Carter. I’ll be in the big tent back there, getting something to eat. I was feeling lonely back on the boat.

Slaney and Carter helped the men load the weed and they were fitting the bales into the hold for the better part of three hours.

When they were done they screwed the false panelling in place and Carter slapped the wall and smoothed his hand down the length of it. They both stood back with their hands on their hips and surveyed their work.

They found that the wall looked like a wall. But they could smell the jungle stink.

Feathers

They’d been invited
to a beach party with the Colombians and headed back to shore in the speedboat.

A young man showed the three of them the path to the toilet, a deep pit with a seat built over it, a hole in the middle of the seat. The pit was covered in lye that glowed weirdly in the beam of the flashlight. The construction involved hanging over the open pit but the support beams looked sturdy.

Ingenious, Carter said. But Slaney wasn’t sure.

Lopez had broken out bottles of homemade whisky and they’d all smoked up. A bonfire going on the beach.

More people arrived in the back of a truck, men and women who had been working in the fields and had returned to the camp for the evening.

The weed was of a very high quality, stinking like Christmas trees, sticky with resin. It was strong and enlightening. Provoking of revelation.

Some of the men had taken out instruments as the night wore on and they’d sung Colombian folk songs and Carter and Ada had danced, her forehead resting on his collarbone. Two sisters sang a Spanish ballad in harmony, and everyone joined in the chorus. They sang with their eyes closed, nodding their heads slowly, as if they agreed with the words of the song.

Slaney asked Ada if she wanted him to give her a brainer. They were sitting in old frayed lawn chairs and Ada slid off her tilted chair and crawled to him, the mock slink of a wild cat, a panther or lynx, until she was between Slaney’s legs. She raised herself up to kneeling, with her hands on his thighs, and she opened her mouth an inch or so from his.

Slaney drew in a deep lungful of smoke from the joint and put his mouth as close to hers without touching as he could. Then he blew out a soft grey column of pummelling smoke. It streamed from his open lips to hers until her mouth was a smoky O. Ada sucked it in, dropping her head, and then let the smoke pour back out and he was ready with another lungful.

She fell over in the sand, her arms and her legs spreading open and shut as if she were making snow angels.

Look at the stars, Ada said. I wonder if anybody is out there. Maybe my mother is looking down from heaven. Hi, Mommy.

Slaney was offered a violin and he played it like a fiddle, jigs and reels, and then something slow and full of need that he made up as he went along. Ada had rolled over on her side now, her head in her hand, and she stared up at him.

All the need he’d felt in prison came out of the wooden instrument under his chin. All the longing, terse and barbed and broken, hung over the bonfire. The flames near the crackled black logs were blue and flicking. It seemed like the fire breathed up and sank down with the music. The ocean roared and shushed. Someone had bongo drums; someone had a tin whistle. There were a few stringed instruments made of gourds. A silver flute. Everybody playing together, improvising. Looking up into each other’s eyes so they could all know where they were going with it. Slaney leading the way, sawing gently, tapping his foot, urging them on by nodding yes and yes.

If Slaney had a reason for going on this trip in the first place, maybe it was this: so he could be on a Colombian beach playing all his sadness out under the stars, stoned out of his mind. He was there for the sense of abandon he felt.

That’s why, he said out loud when he stopped playing. Ada had stood up and brushed the sand away from her elbow and dropped into the empty chair next to him. She was wearing army fatigues someone had loaned her, the fabric faded from washing. She rubbed her shoulder back and forth against his shoulder. She was flushed and grinning.

What’s why?

What, he asked.

You just said, That’s why. What’s why?

You’re why, he said.

I’m why what?

You’re why. You’re why, he said. His flimsy lawn chair, with its chrome frame and woven nylon strips of plaid, collapsed under him then. He stood, with great effort, and the trees behind them lurched sideways and he bequeathed the unharmed violin to the man next to him and took the flashlight and headed off to find the lye pit.

The flashlight beam bounced and jiggled over rocks and tree roots and then the swaying beam found a girl with shiny black hair tumbling down one shoulder. She was sitting on a wooden chair, her knees apart, her boots planted firmly. She was plucking a chicken and she had a kerosene lantern that lit her like a painting by Rembrandt, golden and shadowed. The denuded, incandescent and pimpled bird hung by the claws from the girl’s raised fist.

There was a tree stump and the axe stood up in it, the blade sunk into the blond wood that was stained with blood. A chicken’s head lay in the dirt, and when the flashlight beam strayed to it, the chicken’s yellow eyeball with its black pupil and red warty-looking eyelid stared at Slaney, unblinking. The eye looked full of consternation and acceptance.

The woman spoke a few words to him and he told her: No entiendo. But she kept talking.

White feathers filled the air. They seemed forever suspended in the beam of his light.

She was pointing toward the lye pit and kept talking and plucking though he didn’t understand a word of what she was saying. But he knew the gist. He had a good idea she was talking about the bathroom. The crude toilet was an entrance to hell. He must be very careful.

She was saying life is magnificent. Freedom was running in his blood now, it was part of him. Nobody could take it away. She was reminding him of the light on the water, how bedazzling it had been on the way down and the crack of the sails when the wind picked up and the horizon and the smell of salt in the air and the fish they’d eaten the minute they pulled it out of the water and how fish as fresh as that could affect your dreams. She was saying Hearn had been right about one thing: they were no longer who they had been before.

They had been changed.

She warned him that once he was back in Canada he must forget Hearn. They should go their separate ways. Hearn was weak and dangerous, she said. Hearn had lied about Lopez and the first trip. Lopez knew everything. How they had failed the first time. What they owed.

You owe so very much, the woman said. She asked him did he think about his mother. What this was doing to his mother.

The feathers stirring in the little beam of the flashlight.

Watch out for the girl, she said. But it was unclear if she meant he should protect Ada, as a guardian angel might, or be afraid of her.

Everything the woman said came out all at once, every thought overlapping, currents of converging thoughts and tidal pulls and he was following her drift. She was speaking Spanish very quickly and pointing toward the lye pit, but what she communicated came in a gush of interior voice that Slaney understood without effort.

Then a man came out of the woods behind the woman and stood like a sentinel with his rifle, his hand on her shoulder.

What are you looking for? the man asked. For a second Slaney believed he had broken through the language barrier once and for all. Because he understood. Then he realized the man had spoken in English.

Looking for the bathroom, Slaney said. He thanked them with everything he had in him. He hoped they understood his sincerity. He thanked them in English and Spanish and he turned and stumbled on through the woods to the pit.

The three of
them ended up sleeping in the same small tent, Ada in the middle between Carter and Slaney. He’d hit the ground hard after he stumbled through the tent flap. The ground rose up to meet him and fell with the rhythm of the sea. Great swells lifted him and let him slide down.

Slaney could not remember getting into the tent but he woke in the middle of the night with an amorphous terror pounding through him.

Nothing stirred outside except the surf. The ocean roared up over the beach and drew back. Carter was snoring the clotted, wavering honk of the trumpeter swan.

In the beat while Carter inhaled lived the hope the noise would stop. But Carter kept snoring.

There was the terror and then Slaney felt himself falling, as though from a great height, falling backwards into forever, arms and legs flailing. Below him, his friends had stretched a white sheet that glowed in the dark as the dancers’ white clothes and teeth had glowed under the black light at Hearn’s party. They were waiting to catch him. But as he got closer he realized the white circle was an aerial view of the lye pit. He was heading straight for it.

The fall gathered velocity the closer he got to the ground and finally he thumped down hard and his heart burst out of his chest and he passed out until morning.

He woke with his arm wrapped tight around Ada’s waist, her bum sunk into his hips, his cock hard against her. He got up and tore the tent flap open and a shaft of bright light struck him in the face.

Slaney walked down the beach until he was sure he was alone and took off all his clothes and ran into the surf.

He strode forward until he was up to his chest and he watched for the right wave, rolling in from the horizon. The wave rose higher and higher, sunlight blazing through the thick glassy wall of it, the crumbling white crest plowing toward him. When it reached him he threw out his arms and let it carry him into shore.

Animism

On the first
two days sailing up from Colombia, along the Pacific coast, Carter maintained a profound level of drunkenness. The drinking gave him a level gaze and his face slackened and his speech became prim and elegant. The effort of becoming sober for the visit ashore with Lopez had withered him.

It had been a mistake for him to get that sober. Now he was saying he didn’t believe the man’s military credentials.

He said that the lobster, which he had gorged on, dipping each morsel in a bowl of drawn butter, had disagreed with him. He thought he had been poisoned.

Carter told them there was a religion of animism practised in the region where they’d partied. He’d read about it in
National Geographic
. A mix of witchcraft and Christianity that made use of hallucinogenic roots, ground to powder.

Some of these rituals involved the ancient art of voodoo, he said.

Carter believed they’d given him something altering on the night of the party. Slipped something in his whisky. He’d given up on the idea of drying out as soon as Lopez offered some wine after lunch.

Don’t mind if I do, he’d said. Now he believed they’d been trying to kill him. A formality crept into his diction that frightened Slaney. Then he became very sick.

I have acute indigestion, he said. He was flushed and pale by turns, clammy and sour-smelling, vomiting every hour or so. Ada said his temperature had reached one hundred and four. He’d broken out in a rash and the touch of the bedsheets hurt his skin.