The Very Best of F & SF v1 (29 page)

But something is
irritating me. The damn women haven’t complained once, you understand. Not a
peep, not a quaver, no personal manifestations whatever. They’re like something
out of a manual.

“You really seem
at home in the wilderness, Mrs. Parsons. You do much camping?”

“Oh, goodness no.”
Diffident laugh. “Not since my girl scout days. Oh, look—are those man-of-war
birds?”

Answer a
question with a question. I wait while the frigate birds sail nobly into the
sunset.

“Bethesda... Would
I be wrong in guessing you work for Uncle Sam?”

“Why, yes. You
must be very familiar with Washington, Mr. Fenton. Does your work bring you
there often?”

Anywhere but on
our sandbar the little ploy would have worked. My hunter’s gene twitches.

“Which agency
are you with?”

She gives up
gracefully. “Oh, just GSA records. I’m a librarian.”

Of course. I
know her now, all the Mrs. Parsonses in records divisions, accounting sections,
research branches, personnel and administration offices. Tell Mrs. Parsons we
need a recap on the external service contracts for fiscal ’73. So Yucat
á
n is on the tours now?
Pity.... I offer her the tired little joke. “You know where the bodies are
buried.”

She smiles
deprecatingly and stands up. “It does get dark quickly, doesn’t?”

Time to get back
into the plane.

A Hock of ibis
are circling us, evidently accustomed to roosting in our fig tree. Estéban
produces a machete and a Mayan string hammock. He proceeds to sling it between
tree and plane, refusing help. His machete stroke is noticeably tentative.

The Parsons are
taking a pee behind the tail vane. I hear one of them slip and squeal faintly.
When they come back over the hull, Mrs. Parsons asks, “Might we sleep in the
hammock, Captain?”

Estéban splits
an unbelieving grin. I protest about rain and mosquitoes.

“Oh, we have
insect repellent and we do enjoy fresh air.”

The air is
rushing by about force five and colder by the minute.

“We have our
raincoats,” the girl adds cheerfully.

Well, okay,
ladies. We dangerous males retire inside the damp cabin. Through the wind I
hear the women laugh softly now and then, apparently cozy in their chilly ibis
roost. A private insanity, I decide. I know myself for the least threatening of
men; my noncharisma has been in fact an asset jobwise, over the years. Are they
having fantasies about Estéban? Or maybe they really are fresh-air nuts... Sleep
comes for me in invisible diesels roaring by on the reef outside.

We emerge
dry-mouthed into a vast windy salmon sunrise. A diamond chip of sun breaks out
of the sea and promptly submerges in cloud. I go to work with the rod and some
mullet bait while two showers detour around us. Breakfast is a strip of wet
barracuda apiece.

The Parsons
continue stoic and helpful. Under Estéban’s direction they set up a section of
cowling for a gasoline flare in case we hear a plane, but nothing goes over
except one unseen jet droning toward Panama. The wind howls, hot and dry and
full of coral dust. So are we.

“They look first
in sea,” Estéban remarks. His aristocratic frontal slope is beaded with sweat;
Mrs. Parsons watches him concernedly. I watch the cloud blanket tearing by
above, getting higher and dryer and thicker. While that lasts nobody is going
to find us, and the water business is now unfunny.

Finally I borrow
Estéban’s machete and hack a long light pole. “There’s a stream coming in back
there, I saw it from the plane. Can’t be more than two, three miles.”

“I’m afraid the
raft’s torn.” Mrs. Parsons shows me the cracks in the orange plastic;
irritatingly, it’s a Delaware label.

“All right,” I
hear myself announce. “The tide’s going down. If we cut the good end off that
air tube, I can haul water back in it. I’ve waded flats before.”

Even to me it
sounds crazy.

“Stay by plane,”
Estéban says. He’s right, of course. He’s also clearly running a fever. I look
at the overcast and taste grit and old barracuda. The hell with the manual.

When I start
cutting up the raft, Estéban tells me to take the serape. “You stay one night.”
He’s right about that, too; I’ll have to wait out the tide.

“I’ll come with
you,” says Mrs. Parsons calmly.

I simply stare
at her. What new madness has got into Mother Hen? Does she imagine Estéban is
too battered to be functional? While I’m being astounded, my eyes take in the
fact that Mrs. Parsons is now quite rosy around the knees, with her hair loose
and a sunburn starting on her nose. A trim, in fact a very neat, shading-forty.

“Look, that
stuff is horrible going. Mud up to your ears and water over your head.”

“I’m really
quite fit and I swim a great deal. I’ll try to keep up. Two would be much
safer, Mr. Fenton, and we can bring more water.”

She’s serious.
Well, I’m about as fit as a marshmallow at this time of winter, and I can’t
pretend I’m depressed by the idea of company. So be it.

“Let me show
Miss Parsons how to work this rod.”

Miss Parsons is
even rosier and more windblown, and she’s not clumsy with my tackle. A good
girl, Miss Parsons, in her nothing way. We cut another staff and get some gear
together. At the last minute Estéban shows how sick he feels: he offers me the
machete. I thank him, but no; I’m used to my Wirkkala knife. We tie some air
into the plastic tube for a float and set out along the sandiest-looking line.

Estéban raises
one dark palm. “
Buen viaje
.” Miss Parsons has hugged her mother and gone to cast from the
mangrove. She waves. We wave.

An hour later we’re
barely out of waving distance. The going is purely godawful. The sand keeps
dissolving into silt you can’t walk on or swim through, and the bottom is
spiked with dead mangrove spears. We flounder from one pothole to the next,
scaring up rays and turtles and hoping to god we don’t kick a moray eel. Where
we’re not soaked in slime, we’re desiccated, and we smell like the Old
Cretaceous.

Mrs. Parsons
keeps up doggedly. I only have to pull her out once. When I do so, I notice the
sandbar is now out of sight.

Finally we reach
the gap in the mangrove line I thought was the creek. It turns out to open into
another arm of the bay, with more mangroves ahead. And the tide is coming in.

“I’ve had the
world’s lousiest idea.”

Mrs. Parsons
only says mildly, “It’s so different from the view from the plane.”

I revise my
opinion of the girl scouts, and we plow on past the mangroves toward the smoky
haze that has to be shore. The sun is setting in our faces, making it hard to
see. Ibis and herons fly up around us, and once a big hermit spooks ahead, his
fin cutting a rooster tail. We fall into more potholes. The flashlights get
soaked. I am having fantasies of the mangrove as universal obstacle; it’s hard
to recall I ever walked down a street, for instance, without stumbling over or
under or through mangrove roots. And the sun is dropping down, down.

Suddenly we hit
a ledge and fall over it into a cold flow.

“The stream! It’s
fresh water!”

We guzzle and
garble and douse our heads; it’s the best drink I remember. “Oh my, oh my—!”
Mrs. Parsons is laughing right out loud.

“That dark place
over to the right looks like real land.”

We flounder
across the flow and follow a hard shelf, which turns into solid bank and rises
over our heads. Shortly there’s a break beside a clump of spiny bromels, and we
scramble up and flop down at the top, dripping and stinking. Out of sheer
reflex my arm goes around my companion’s shoulder—but Mrs. Parsons isn’t there;
she’s up on her knees peering at the burnt-over plain around us.

“It’s so good to
see land one can walk on!” The tone is too innocent.
Noli me tangere.

“Don’t try it.” I’m
exasperated; the muddy little woman, what does she think? “That ground out
there is a crush of ashes over muck, and it’s full of stubs. You can go in over
your knees.”

“It seems firm
here.”

“We’re in an
alligator nursery. That was the slide we came up. Don’t worry, by now the old
lady’s doubtless on her way to be made into handbags.”

“What a shame.”

“I better set a
line down in the stream while I can still see.”

I slide back
down and rig a string of hooks that may get us breakfast. When I get back Mrs.
Parsons is wringing muck out of the serape.

“I’m glad you
warned me, Mr. Fenton. It is treacherous.”

“Yeah.” I’m over
my irritation; god knows I don’t want to
tangere
Mrs. Parsons, even if I weren’t beat
down to mush. “In its quiet way, Yucat
á
n is a tough place to get around in. You can see why the Mayas built
roads. Speaking of which—look!”

The last of the
sunset is silhouetting a small square shape a couple of kilometers inland; a
Maya
ruina
with a fig tree growing out of it.

“Lot of those
around. People think they were guard towers.”

“What a
deserted-feeling land.”

“Let’s hope it’s
deserted by mosquitoes.”

We slump down in
the ’gator nursery and share the last malt bar, watching the stars slide in and
out of the blowing clouds. The bugs aren’t too bad; maybe the burn did them in.
And it isn’t hot anymore, either—in fact, it’s not even warm, wet as we are.
Mrs. Parsons continues tranquilly interested in Yucatán and unmistakably
uninterested in togetherness.

Just as I’m
beginning to get aggressive notions about how we’re going to spend the night if
she expects me to give her the serape, she stands up, scuffs at a couple of
hummocks, and says, “I expect this is as good a place as any, isn’t it, Mr.
Fenton?”

With which she
spreads out the raft bag for a pillow and lies down on her side in the dirt
with exactly half the serape over her and the other corner folded neatly open.
Her small back is toward me.

The
demonstration is so convincing that I’m halfway under my share of serape before
the preposterousness of it stops me.

“By the way. My
name is Don.”

“Oh, of course.”
Her voice is graciousness itself. “I’m Ruth.”

I get in not
quite touching her, and we lie there like two fish on a plate, exposed to the
stars and smelling the smoke in the wind and feeling things underneath us. It
is absolutely the most intimately awkward moment I’ve had in years.

The woman doesn’t
mean one thing to me, but the obtrusive recessiveness of her, the defiance of
her little rump eight inches from my fly—for two pesos I’d have those shorts
down and introduce myself. If I were twenty years younger. If I wasn’t so
bushed.... But the twenty years and the exhaustion are there, and it comes to
me wryly that Mrs. Ruth Parsons has judged things to a nicety. If I
were
twenty years younger,
she wouldn’t be here. Like the butterfish that float around a sated barracuda,
only to vanish away the instant his intent changes, Mrs. Parsons knows her
little shorts are safe. Those firmly filled little shorts, so close...

A warm nerve
stirs in my groin—and just as it does I become aware of a silent emptiness
beside me. Mrs. Parsons is imperceptibly inching away. Did my breathing change?
Whatever, I’m perfectly sure that if my hand reached, she’d be
elsewhere—probably announcing her intention to take a dip. The twenty years
bring a chuckle to my throat, and I relax.

“Good night,
Ruth.”

“Good night, Don.”

And believe it
or not, we sleep, while the armadas of the wind roar overhead.

Light wakes me—a
cold white glare.

My first thought
is ’gator hunters. Best to manifest ourselves as
turistas
as fast as
possible. I scramble up, noting that Ruth has dived under the bromel dump.

“Quién
estás? Al socorro!
Help,
señores!”

No answer except
the light goes out, leaving me blind.

I yell some more
in a couple of languages. It stays dark. There’s a vague scrabbling, whistling
sound somewhere in the burn-off. Liking everything less by the minute, I try a
speech about our plane having crashed and we need help.

A very narrow
pencil of light flicks over us and snaps off.

“Eh-ep,” says a
blurry voice, and something metallic twitters. They for sure aren’t locals. I’m
getting unpleasant ideas.

“Yes, help!”

Something goes
crackle-crackle whish-whish
,
and all sounds fade away.

“What the holy
hell!” I stumble toward where they were.