Flight or Fright: 17 Turbulent Tales (13 page)

Colvin reached for his calculator but it had flown free in the cabin, colliding with hurtling bottles, glasses, cushions, and bodies that had not been securely strapped in. The screaming was very loud.

Two minutes and forty-five seconds. Time to think of many things. And perhaps, just perhaps, after two and a half years of no sleep without dreams, perhaps it would be time enough for a short nap with no dreams at all. Colvin closed his eyes.

Diablitos

Cody Goodfellow

What’s worse than being stopped at customs in a South American country while trying to smuggle out contraband? How about being sealed in a 727 at 30,000 feet with a hellishly lively stolen artifact in your carry-on bag? In this story, Ryan Rayburn III is faced with both. Cody Goodfellow is something of a mystery. Did he really study literature at UCLA? Does he live in Burbank? Did he once earn a living as an “undistinguished composer of scores for pornographic videos?” Maybe some of the above, maybe all, maybe none. Two things are for sure: he knows how to chill your blood, and you’ll thank God Ryan Rayburn isn’t your seatmate.

Invisible and invincible, Ryan Rayburn III betrayed no trace of worry as he breezed through security and passport control of Nicoya’s Guanacaste Airport, a cool American tourist right up until they culled him out of the boarding line, took him behind a screen and ordered him to open his bag.

Smiling guilelessly, he presented his boarding pass, declaration form and passport to the hangdog customs agent.
No big deal, you’re just doing your job.
None of the other passengers looked his way as they filed by. It had to be random, but he was a white man traveling alone. He probably wasn’t going to blow up the plane, but odds were excellent he was holding contraband, maybe even a mule for
las drogas
…

This wasn’t some banana republic where tourists got disappeared. Costa Rica was almost civilization—hell, even better, since they didn’t even have an army, and a “safety patrol” in lieu of state police. But
la mordida
was still king. Ryan looked around for a supervisor or a camera, smiled nonchalantly and fished five twenties out of his money belt. The customs agent strapped on a pair of baby blue rubber gloves before commencing an autopsy of Ryan’s duffel bag.

Guanacaste was slightly fancier than most modern Latin American airports, but still had the ambience of a cheap 70s sci-fi film set in a futuristic prison. Signs everywhere tried to shame flyers with images of hooded and handcuffed prisoners with tormented thought bubbles:
Why Did I Try To Smuggle?

Stiff upper lip. Don’t smile or try to chat him up. Don’t do their job for them. The idiots they caught always broadcast their guilt in creepy, toxic waves that would kill a canary. He was doing nothing wrong. The security checkpoint didn’t even know what they were looking at, and even if this guy did, it was hardly worth delaying the flight. He wasn’t smuggling drugs, or weapons. He was just another tourist, bringing back tourist stuff.

The customs agent laid out clothing, camera equipment and toiletries with the odd delicacy of a servant setting out a picnic. He excavated the whole bag, then reached in and peeled back the inner lining and unzipped the false bottom.

“It’s just a souvenir, sir.” Ryan gulped like he was breathing through a wet towel. “Is there a problem? I bought it at a souvenir shop—”

The customs agent did not acknowledge him. He just stared into Ryan’s bag with his hands planted on the scuffed stainless steel table. Then he coughed into his hand.

Ryan looked around, fanning the cash in his hand, pushing it at the agent. A steady stream of passengers filed through the metal detector towards the departure gate. “My flight leaves in ten minutes, friend.”

Still coughing, the customs agent dropped Ryan’s travel documents and waved him away like a mosquito cloud. Strings of mucus sprayed out around his fist.

Ryan hurriedly stuffed his bag and pocketed his cash, turned to go up a broken escalator and down a long, mostly unlit terminal to his gate before he noticed that his papers were sticky with saliva, dappled with blood.

Jesus, some security… Tries to shake you down and gives you TB
. It wasn’t funny, but he had to laugh, or he’d scream. They’d had him—caught him red-handed. The look in the agent’s eyes when he opened the false bottom, just before he got sick… It had gone a sickly pale olive, and his eyes just about rolled down his cheeks to fall in with the thing in his dirty laundry pouch. The sad bastard had known what he was looking at. He’d
known
, but he’d said nothing, neither did he touch the money.

If there was anything in the world that could make Ryan cross himself and utter a prayer, it would be the thing in his bag, but not because he believed in magic. Smuggling a kilo of uncut Colombian shouting powder might net thirty grand before it got stepped on. For the two pounds of handcarved hardwood in his bag, Ryan might take twice that amount, but if he got caught down here, extradition and federal time in the states would be the best he could pray for.

Ryan Rayburn III never set out to create the life he lived. He casually baited the lines and let it come to him. He blew his trust fund on a BA in art history, then trashed all remaining parental goodwill by bumming around South America instead of getting a job. After three years of misadventures and hard-won discoveries in the darkest corners of the earth, he finally learned the one lesson that his parents had tried to teach him, back in Palo Alto. Being poor sucked.

Back in California, Ryan resolved to convert his impractical degree into a career. He trawled the gallery scene and started picking up contacts for private art collectors and stumbled into the hothouse sub-culture of pre-Columbian artifact freaks. He did shopping trips from Mexico to Tierra Del Fuego, cutting out layers of middle-men until he had a dozen dot-com millionaires in his client list. Half the antiquities in South American museums were fake, and archaeologists worked in secret to keep looters at bay. The UN and US Customs had cracked several rings that operated around Palo Alto and Stanford, but Ryan didn’t move in show-off circles. His clients didn’t flash their grave robbery trophies at charity galas, and he didn’t trade in the crap you’d see in
National Geographic
.

The Xorocua lived in the high alpine valleys of the Cordillera de Talamanca, less than two hundred miles from the capitol, and yet a day’s hike from the nearest navigable road. They were initially believed to be a virgin Stone Age tribe until 1950, when they were documented by a Smithsonian photographer.

His photographs of the Xorocua harvest ritual told a tragic story of prior contact buried in the bizarre ceremony. A man in a crude bull costume rampaged around the huts of the village all night until just before dawn, when a procession of masked guardian spirits arrived to defeat the bull by spitting blood upon it until it weakened and died. The guardians in their carven masks drank corn liquor mixed with various poisons to summon into their bellies the
diablitos
, who repaid in kind the torments and genocide that decimated their tribe and drove the survivors into the most remote cloud-forests of Talamanca.

The Xorocua were primitive by any standard, having struggled too long and hard with basic survival to devise any elaborate cultural treasures. Their greeting to strangers was a formalized plea for food. But the harvest festival masks in those photographs were a revelation.

Each mask was “mouth-painted”—airbrushed using paint spat through a reed—in livid, smoldering colors and elaborate motifs more like runes than abstract motifs. Despite their hostile rejection of the outside world, the Xorocua masks inspired a collectors’ frenzy in the 70s. By 1982, the last Xorocua had died from influenza. But the neighboring tribes still feared their masks.

With no analog anywhere in the region, they were stranger and more elaborate and fearsome than any Maya or Aztec deities, almost Polynesian in their fusion of human, insect, floral and animal features, and imbued with a feral malevolence that made the most severe Gothic gargoyles look like Care Bears.

From what he could find in print, he gathered they were a nasty variant on the Latin American fairies, known as
duendes
. The word came from the Spanish
duenos
—or owners—because they were the true owners of any habitat they shared with humans. But the neighboring tribes’ Spanish name for them, and for the Xorocua themselves—was more fitting for spirits never quite seen, but keenly feared—
diablitos
, or “little devils.”

Ryan had scored some incredible Moche burial charms on a sweep through Colombia and Peru and successfully posted them to his drop contact in California. He flew to Panama City, drove a jeep into the Cordillera de Talamanca just to hike Cerro La Muerte and chill out. He didn’t expect to find any remnant of the Xorocua in the rudimentary museums and tourist traps in the nameless mountain villages, and he didn’t. Fakes and pastiche trash chiseled out of balsa wood and haphazardly airbrushed with acrylics by
mestizo
hillbillies who knew less about the Xorocua than Ryan’s dumbest clients.

Ryan Rayburn III never got anywhere by forcing success. That way lay madness and ulcers; just ask Ryan II and Ryan I. He simply let good things gravitate to him, as they always had. An old blind woman outside a hut with a cooler full of blood-warm Fanta had made a strange gesture and coughed into her hand when he asked her granddaughter about the Xorocua. Coughed into her arthritic claw and opened it up and a red butterfly took flight from her hand.

The girl played mute, but while he was drinking his third Fanta, Ryan poked around the compound. All the men were off hunting or logging, and nobody saw him except a naked boy whose testicles had yet to descend. The huts were huddled in an octagon around a well beside a waist-high soapstone idol, weathered and worn until its chiseled features were only vague dimples in the stone.

Ryan nearly shouted and threw his soda in the air. It was a Xorocua village, or the revival of one, which was highly unlikely. Many tribes in the region buried their dead under their homes, then moved far away. The site of a tribal extinction would be like a stone age Chernobyl.

The old blind woman appeared, then, and sold him the mask for two hundred dollars. That was what he would tell anyone who asked. He’d told himself the story enough times by now, that he almost believed it. What really happened was hardly the worst thing he’d ever done, and there was simply no point in reliving it.

The mask was authentic. It looked like it weighed a hundred pounds, but was carved of some unidentified purple-black jungle softwood that weighed less than water. The paints were indigenous pigments; the deep indigo derived from
azul mata
, the pale, liquid gold extracted from onion skin, the fiery orange from
achiote
fruit, the lurid violet extracted from the glands of an endangered mollusk called
munice
. The unexpected splash of deeper, duller red on the inside of the mask looked less like an accident than a savage signature, and would probably only increase its value.

He had a standing buyer on the line—two, actually, and fiercely jealous competitors. When his plane touched down at LAX, he could unload the mask for fifty thousand, maybe double that, if he held it long enough for discreetly seeded rumors to spark a bidding war.

The exhausted purser at the gate held the door open for him without checking his papers. Stepping out onto the tarmac was like walking into a whirlwind of animal breath. The jungle closed in on all sides of the runway like walls of emerald fire. The Pura Vida Air 727 idled as the last straggling passengers hustled up the rolling stairway and into the hatch.

The flight was just over half full. About fifty passengers, two-thirds American. Most of them had already turned out their lights and were trying to go to sleep, huddled under thin nylon blankets against recycled paper pillows.

He groaned as he found his seat. 11A, by the window, just aft of the wing, beside a longhaired Caucasian beardo and a buxom Asian lady snuggling and tinkering with the faulty fans set into the ceiling. Perking up alarmingly as they got up to let him squeeze into the window seat, the man introduced himself as Dan, his wife Lori. “Need something to read?” he asked, holding out a paperback. “I wrote it myself.”

“Quit bothering people, honey,” his wife murmured. Ryan shook his head and spread out in the empty seats across the aisle.

The stewardess began the preflight emergency pantomime, gesturing to masks and escape hatches in time with the crackling recording in Spanish, when the last passenger stumbled down the narrow aisle and nearly sat on his bag.

Ryan grabbed his bag out of the shadow of the large descending ass just in time. He started to say, “Watch where you’re going, idiot,” when he saw the white cane gripped in the fat old woman’s hand.

Ryan’s whole body went rigid. He pushed back against the window, and if he’d been seated next to an escape hatch, he might’ve grabbed the latch and popped it and leapt out onto the wing.

He threw up a defensive arm and tried to squeeze out of the seat. The blind woman stumbled against the steward who had helped her to the seat, then rebounded off the arm of 11C and threw out an arm to catch herself before she fell into his arms.

At second glance, his seatmate was just a girl, maybe thirteen, with a long horsy face and terrible acne scars. Her eyes bulged out of her head like unscrewed lightbulbs. Her pupils rolled up to stare through the ceiling, half obscured by heavy, sleepy lids. Her white cane snapped out to jab his ankles.

He took a second to catch his breath, longer to collect his thoughts. With so many empty seats, why on earth would they put her next to him? A young American man traveling alone sitting next to a blind foreign girl was asking for trouble. “Aren’t there a lot of other seats on the plane?”

The steward returned to the tail of the aisle to help lipsync the tail end of the safety instructions.

Perhaps deaf as well as blind—or perhaps she didn’t speak Spanish—the girl lowered herself into 11D and sat with her knees tightly together and a handwoven native bag trapped in her arms.

The plane bumbled backwards and then taxied onto the runway with a woozy, rolling speed that made Ryan wonder who was flying the plane. Maybe the blind girl could go to the cockpit and help.

The turbines were winding up when Ryan noticed the girl hadn’t buckled her seatbelt. “Señorita, your belt should be fastened…”