Ghost Lights (18 page)

“Uh huh?”

“He’s a conscientious boss-type guy, my wife’s devoted to him. Right now, you’ll see, he’s unshaven, he looks like a mountain man, but the guy I know wears three-thousand-dollar suits and drives a high-end Mercedes. So yeah, was he depressed when he came down here? Sure. Anyone would be. But that’s it. He needed a change. Decided to do some backpacking, so he hired a local guide to take him up the river. I think they were headed for some trailhead near the jaguar preserve.”

“Ways up there. Cockscomb? Past the confluence with the Swasey Branch? You can drive there in an hour. Tourists don’t tend to take the river route.”

“Their first night out the guide apparently died. Out of the blue. He suffered a heart attack or something. Stern said he found out in the morning, because they were each sleeping in their own tents. He went into shock or something, the death of the guide really threw him.”

“I bet.”

With his left hand on the wheel, Brady fumbled with his right to shake a cigarette from his pack and light it off the dash. He seemed distracted. Hal needed to get his attention.

“I mean here he was, this young guy from L.A., up a jungle river with just this one person who was his lifeline. And that lifeline suddenly disappears. Plus the fact, this guy Stern, over the past few months, is like a death magnet. Everyone close to him dies. Or gets debilitated. My wife told me the father left the mother—this aging frat boy left the mother, you know, his wife of so many years, to be a gay stripper in Key West. Then the girlfriend dies, of some heart condition he didn’t even know she had. This woman, by the way, was twenty-three and ran marathons. His mother tried to O.D. but ended up losing her mind. She’s got dementia or something. His dog gets hit by a car. Even his business partner ditched him.”

“Rough year.”

A spark of interest. Either the cigarette or the drama was putting Brady in a better mood.

“So anyway, after he found the guide dead Stern went into shock I guess, and eventually he dragged the body back down to the boat. We’re talking, for miles. I did that hike, looking for him. It was exhausting even without a 200-pound dead weight to haul. I guess he wrapped it up in the tent and got it all the way down to the river, where he put it back in the boat. But then later the boat’s propeller snapped and he ditched it against the bank, body and all, and tried to hike out. He almost died too. It was a close call for him.”

Brady nodded, negotiated a pothole. The car jumped.

“The guide was older, in his sixties I guess? It was a freak thing, but there’s no way it was anything other than natural causes. A couple days later the boat floated down to the ocean, but by then there was no body in it.”

“No body,” said Brady. “At all? Huh. Problematic.”

“The guide’s brother, I met him, I mean he isn’t bringing charges or anything. It was called in by some neighbor lady or something who has a beef with Americans. I don’t even know what they’re holding him on.”

“We’ll find out. Don’t worry.”

They drove in silence for a minute or two. Cars were smaller here than at home, smaller, older, more banged-up. The road was called a highway, but as in Mexico there was no fencing alongside to keep out stray animals. The corpses of roadkill appeared every few hundred yards, here a dog, there what seemed to be a raccoon.

“You know anything about a military incursion into the jungle down there, by the way?” he asked Brady.

“Come again?”

“A military incursion.”

“Whose military?”

“Ours.”

“When?”

“I think maybe yesterday. Or the day before.”

Brady laughed abruptly.

“Uh, that’d be a no.”

“I think there was one, though.”

“I’d know. Trust me. This is a very small country.”

“I heard they were doing a flyover. Some alleged guerrilla camp of Mayans, from over the border.”

“There’s no such thing.”

“If you say so.”

“Who told you this, anyway?”

Hal looked away from him to his own side of the road. There were flat, ugly fields stretching out beside him to the east, while to the west rose the low mountains.

“A German schoolteacher,” he said slowly.

“What?”

“Long story.”

“I’m all ears. We still got half an hour to go.”

Hal told him about the armed forces, the boat trip, the hike. He told him what Hans had said as he lay down on the boat’s bench at the end, his stomach full of warm liquid.

“Aural hallucinations. Fatigue can do that to you.”

“You think so?”

“I know so.”

“But then what about what his wife said? Yesterday?”

“Guy sounds like a weapons hobbyist. Maybe he likes to spin tales to impress the little lady.”

“Huh,” said Hal. “I don’t know, Jeff. I mean he did bring the Marines to me.”

Then it struck him that this discussion might be impairing his credibility. He should change the subject.

But Brady did it for him.

“What do you do, anyway? Stateside?”

Hal was surprised. He was sure he had mentioned it.

“IRS.”

“Kidding.”

“Why, you delinquent?”

“My brother works at the Service Center in Austin.”

“Government service runs in your family, huh?”

“That and gallbladder problems.”

“Sorry to hear it.”

By the time they got off the highway and headed into Belize City he felt reasonably confident that Brady was won over. He had recognized, in Brady, the cynical posture of high-waisted Rodriguez. And by treating Brady essentially as he treated Rodriguez—as though they were brothers-in-arms, jaded yet hearty mercenaries in civil service’s trench warfare—he was in the process of securing Brady’s confidence.

He coughed, breathing exhaust fumes as they made their way down a narrow street behind a rickety pickup full of bags of garbage.

“No unleaded gas around here,” said Brady. “Not yet. Pity. OK. Not far now.” He pulled into a parking space abruptly and braked. “Here we go. Follow me, and don’t speak unless you’re spoken to.”

“Draconian.”

“Only because I’ve been in the situation. Trust me.”

As it happened Hal was made to wait in the lobby, near a uniformed guard standing beside a young woman’s desk, while Brady was ushered into the interior. The chairs were uncomfortable, the walls gray and the ceilings low. On a bulletin board was a picture of a wanted man with a banner above his head:
FBI TEN MOST WANTED FUGITIVE
. Beneath, three headings:
DESCRIPTION
.
CAUTION
.
REWARD
.

For a second it seemed to Hal that Belize was an outpost of America. It had been British Honduras, previously. But the British were nowhere.

An overhead fan whirred, the blades ticking monotonously against the dangling chain, but did little to aerate the room.

He wished he had a glass of ice water.

Finally Brady came out again, a portly man in shirtsleeves beside him, sweat stains under his arms.

“Hal, Jorge Luis. Hal Lindley, U.S. Internal Revenue Service.”

They shook. The man’s hand was faintly greasy. Hal’s own was probably just as bad.

“Mr. Stern is not here yet,” said Jorge, in English that was unaccented and fluent. “He’s being transported overland. They should be getting in a little later.”

“We can come back,” said Brady. “We’ll have our interview then, and talk to the detective.”

“Do we know—”

“We’ll get the details then,” said Brady, smiling. “No problem.” He turned and shook Jorge’s hand.

Out on the street he told Hal not to seem overeager, that a casual attitude was best. Hal stopped on the sidewalk and turned to him, incredulous.

“Casual? Casual attitude? An innocent man’s languishing in prison! Who knows if the rule of law even holds? I mean do we even know if they have grounds for arresting him?”

Brady took him by the shoulder.

“The key is not to get overwrought. Trust me. Keep things low-key, unless we get indications there’s a hidden agenda. In that case, we’ll go in from a whole different angle. But there’s no sign of that yet. Best way to get him out quickly is to act like the stakes are low, like there’s no official anxiety. Act like we’re all on the same side. Because we are, basically. Walk softly, carry a big stick. Trust me.”

“Poker face. That’s what you’re saying?”

“More or less. Let’s go get some lunch. I know a nice little place right around the corner. Family runs it. Shall we?”

•

L
unch was jerk chicken they ate off paper plates on cheery red and green vinyl tablecloths. They washed down the chicken with tepid half-pints of watery beer, and afterward Hal retired to his hotel room, a relief. In the thick air the beer was making him feel heavy, his limbs difficult to lift.

He lay down on the coverlet, then thought of the bacteria Susan would assure him were writhing there—possibly even parasites such as crabs, which would take up residence in his pubic hair.

All right! Jesus.

He stood, pulled the coverlet off and lay down again on the cool top sheet. He was logy, but he was also restless. He missed Casey.

When she picked up the phone he felt drunker, suddenly, than he had since Gretel. It seemed all things were transparent, and who was he to pretend otherwise?

“I know about the phone sex,” he said.

“Shit,” said Casey.

“Yep. I do.”

“Huh,” said Casey. “What can I say. Sorry?”

“You’re not sorry,” he said. He was curious, actually. “You said you liked it. In the kitchen, to what’s her name. Who crochets the hideous multicolored afghans. And the baby booties.”

“Nancy.”

“You don’t have to lie to me, is my point. I’m your father.”

“Come on, Dad. You don’t want to know stuff like that. I mean really. Do you?”

He felt clean, miraculous. As though the details had no power over him. Everything was the idea of itself; everything was the shape of itself, not the texture—the shadow it threw or the light it cast, the arc of its traveling. Not the trivia, not the variables, no: the great sweep of feeling, the adventurous gesture.

“If it makes you happy, that’s good enough for me. Whatever. I mean not everyone wants to work for the IRS, either.”

“Nice try, Daddy. IRS, phone porn, same thing.”

“Anyway, sweetheart, I don’t need to know the details. But that doesn’t mean I need to be lied to. I’d rather get the respect of hearing the truth and having to deal with it.”

“I thought, you know, no one wants to think of their crippled kid doing phone porn for a living. Sordid. You know—do you really need the ideation? It’s like seeing your parents have sex. Right? Pretty disgusting. No offense, but who wants that? Come on!”

“The truth will set us free.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“OK, the truth will set me free. That’s what I’m seeing, since I’ve been down here. Or wait. What I’m seeing is more: I want to know the truth, but I don’t want to have to
tell
the truth. See? You want to have the truth available to you, but then you also want the freedom of never having to tell it yourself. That’s the deal with truth. It sets you free when you hear it, but if you have to tell it, that’s pretty much a non-freedom situation. Get it? People should tell the truth to me, if I ask them for it. But I should be able to hide the truth whenever I want to.”

“Are you drunk?”

“I resent the implication.”

“Uh huh. Mom said you’d been hitting the sauce. It’s not like you. So what is this? A mid-life-crisis thing?”

“I did have two beers with lunch. With the guy from the embassy. Beer in the middle of the day knocks me out, though. It’s humid here.”

“She also said T.’s in jail.”

“It’s more of a holding facility. Don’t worry. We’re gonna spring him. We’ll bust him out. I’m working closely with the U.S. embassy.”

“He killed someone?”

“Of course not, honey. A guy just happened to, you know, die next to him.”

“Just die?”

“Hey. It happens.”

“And there’s no, they don’t have any evidence against him, or whatever?”

“There’s no body, even. Don’t worry, Case. Hey, listen. What about Sal? How’s it going with him?”

“Oh, you know. It’s not anything, really.”

“Good to hear.”

“I bet.”

“Hey. Case.”

“Uh huh.”

“So I’ve been wondering. What happened with you and T.?”

She was silent. He was overstepping, but he couldn’t help it—there was a carelessness to him. Or he was carefree.

“In a nutshell? He condescended, Dad.”

“He condescended?”

“He condescended to me.”

There was nothing more. Casey was not one to step into an awkward pause, to take up the slack. The static buzzed between them. He let it rest.

“That’s all?”

“That’s all, Daddy. So when are you guys coming home?”

After they hung up he lay back on the sheet, content. It always made him feel good to talk to her. She always sounded like herself, whole, confident, abrupt. Her matter-of-factness was comforting, her cheery pugnacity. When he went to see her, or even heard her speaking to him on the phone, it reminded him that she was not gone at all—not gone at all and not miserable, at least no more so than the rest of the humans. She was warm, she was there, she was not the specter of a miserable daughter that lived alongside him. That specter could be dismissed.

It was irrelevant.

•

W
hen he met Brady outside the jail there was another man with him, a younger Anglo in a seersucker suit. It turned out he was a lawyer.

“You said there was nothing to worry about,” said Hal, alarmed. It was beyond his control after all. It had run away on him. “You said walk lightly, not to show we’re worried!”

“A basic precaution. Cleve’s an old friend of mine from Miami. Jorge knows him too. He met him last year at a pool party. Remember that, Cleve? After the ribbon-cutting? At the new youth hostel?”

“With the—that woman with the grass skirt? The supernumerary nipple?”

“Right. Right! Who kept showing it to everyone.”