Hot Ticket (11 page)

The next caller trashed the medical profession for allowing one of the century’s finest public servants to turn to farina.
Someone else countered that the vice president had been brain dead since the inauguration. Debate raged concerning his replacement:
the country was ready for a woman; a black; a homosexual; a Jew; a general. Bobby Marvel had to be very careful with this
one, as he was running for reelection in November and could not afford to offend more than six voting blocs. Aurilla Perle
seemed to be the heavy favorite. Then one listener suggested that Marvel demote himself to vice president and give the man’s
job to his wife Paula, who had been running the show for almost four years anyhow. I left the cab as enraged female callers
flocked to the First Lady’s defense.

Checked in for my flight as Cosima Wagner, my favorite alias. Plenty of seats: unless you were a hurricane, equatorial zones
were not popular destinations in September. I looked ghoulishly pale compared with my fellow passengers, handsome Cubans and
Germans, all strung with gold. Throughout the trip the Berliner across the aisle stared at me with that look of vague recognition
I both craved and abhorred. Had I been carrying a violin, he would have pegged me. Witnesses everywhere, the down side of
fame: thank God classical musicians were third-rank celebrities.

Landed early in Miami. I took a stroll around the terminal, fighting for right of way with the elderly in golf carts and pregnant
teenagers in microshorts. Finally located the locker matching the key Maxine had given me long ago at the zoo. Inside was
a beat-up carry-on. I went to a phone. “Out of Armani totes, dear?”

Maxine didn’t laugh. “What’s your time frame?”

“Two days.”

“I thought you were off for a month.”

“Something came up with Fausto.”

“Great.” Maybe she said
Shit.
“Take your medicine. Follow the map. Call when you get back.”

She knew better than to wish me luck. I brought my bag to a ladies’ room. Bolted myself into the handicapped cubicle, inventoried
my very light load. Binoculars but no heat scopes, no computers, phones, global positioning equipment. Instead the Queen had
packed a variety of drugs in disposable douche packets. Sewing kit was nothing but hypodermic needles. Zero weapons: I didn’t
know how to interpret that. Jabbed my ass with a megadose of immunoglobulin and amphetamines, the high-octane formula for
those jobs involving infectious diseases, many square miles, no time. I wouldn’t be needing food or sleep for the next two
days. Nevertheless, Maxine had provided me with two thousand bucks and a manicure set designed for locks rather than fingernails.
I changed into hiking gear, all Salvation Army reissue. Cosima Wagner would blend into the scenery all right.

F
ROM MIAMI I
took my seat in another nearly empty airplane. With the amphetamine high came paranoia. A chubby brown baby peered through
the crack between the seats ahead of me: maybe a little young to be credible, but a witness nevertheless. Across the aisle,
an islander wearing large gold rings and a straw hat kept checking out my legs. Behind me, a businessman tapped his laptop.
Had either of them followed me on this flight? You never knew until it was too late. I stared out the window at huge Michelangelo
clouds and tiny boats flecking a turquoise sea.

Maxine had left a map of Belize in my shirt pocket. An X about forty miles inland, deep in the Maya Mountains: Louis Bailey’s
campgrounds. Barnard had abandoned her equipment at a nearby X: San Ignacio, a hick outpost on the Macal River. The third
X marked Belize City, the former capital, on the Caribbean coast. Louis’s doctor friend Yvette Tatal worked at the hospital
there. On paper the trip looked simple, but I was thinking in terms of paved roads, potable water. While I was studying a
topographical map, the plane shuddered. Sabotage? I glanced outside. Murky jungle had displaced the sea. The clouds had turned
gray and fretful, as if evil genies writhed therein. The plane flew between bolts of lightning, over rainbows and sidling
olive rivers. Disneyland, I thought … until the first beads of sweat trickled down my jaw. The cabin was getting hotter. Baby
began to cry as the plane nosed toward the swollen treetops. My pulse jumped: that green was too thick, too
alive.

The ground crew rolled a staircase up to the aircraft as its internal temperature rose by the second. I said good-bye to the
pilot, stepped into incinerating light and heat. After a moment’s shock, my skin began to weep in rebellion. Walked quickly
to the terminal, only to discover it was the same temperature as the tarmac, minus the breeze. Tried to collect myself for
the customs agent as the archaeologists in line chatted with the snorkelers. Easy for them: they all had legit passports.
As the queue shuffled forward, I studied the whirring fans, rehearsed my smile. Finally I stood in front of a woman with red
lipstick and skin taut and black as an olive.

“How long will you be staying in Belize?” she asked Cosima Wagner.

“Two days.”

Sweat poured past my ass, past my knees, as she peered at my immigration card. “You’re a journalist?”

“I’m writing an article on jungle medicine.”

A pause, then
thunk
went her stamp. “Enjoy your trip.”

Sure. I was already down a quart of water. I went outside, where the air was more active but no less crushing. Palm trees
rustled beside a fraying strip of macadam. A dilapidated yellow bus, crammed with passengers and poultry, rattled past. Two
more bumps and its gearbox would be road kill. I got a cab.

“Vacation?” my driver asked in soft, undulant Creole, tooting his horn at children on bicycles. Punta rock throbbed from the
radio.

“Yes.” The car reeked of warm vinyl. Already I yearned for a shower, a Tom Collins.

“You wish a guide?” He passed a business card to the backseat. “I am Pablo.”

Minutest pressure on the accelerator produced thick gurgling from the vehicle’s underbelly. Heat and dust streamed through
the windows as we passed wooden shacks on stilts and construction crews on perpetual coffee break. Once the cab entered Belize
City, a shanty town in need of paint, sewerage, and perhaps another hurricane like the one that washed it away thirty years
ago, Pablo tooted the horn every few seconds, signaling friends, policemen, other cabdrivers, children, dogs, fruit vendors,
and women, none of whom moved an inch out of his way. Those who could honked back.

“You may rent my car,” he offered in that delicious singsong. “Very reasonable.”

“Sorry, I’ve already got one.”

He smiled, shrugged: no problem. “You are hungry? I know a fine restaurant.”

I dropped thirty bucks into the front seat. “Just get me to the car rental. Fast.”

Speed was relative in the tropics. Swishing around a few corners, Pablo crossed the narrow bridge at Haulover Creek. To my
right, gulf water lapped at dinghies. We cruised past dull Caribes and dusky shops selling only sneakers. No ATMs, no bagels,
cell phones, air-conditioning, yet the populace looked perfectly content. Soon the city petered out and we were back to shacks
on stilts.

Already three o’clock. I rented a jeep, bought water, and headed west past halfhearted housing projects gouged from the brush.
More vehicles stood, cannibalized, in front yards than used the highway. Every mile or so someone waited patiently for the
yellow bus that would eventually appear. I passed dozens of tiny settlements whose inhabitants downshifted from slow to motionless
in order to eyeball the jeep. Far ahead, the land heaved bluish mountains. I kept driving toward them. Sunlight became intermittent
as the road began to rise. Just a few minutes from the Guatemalan border, I reached a steep, unpaved turnoff seamed not with
ruts, but with gorges: slip into the gulch between two narrow bands of ground, kiss axle good-bye. I checked my map: fifteen
miles on this moonscape, another five on foot, and no lingering sunsets at the equator. I wouldn’t get to Louis’s camp before
dark.

First, I drank. Then I got the lug wrench from the toolbox. Killed the AC, opened the windows. As heat flooded in, my sweat
glands mounted a ferocious defense. I shifted into four-wheel drive and left the last pavement I’d be seeing for a while.

The baseball-size rocks weren’t a problem until the road suddenly lurched downward, putting the jeep’s ass so high in the
air that one good bump would pitch it over the hood. I fought to keep all four tires on the highest ridges. No help when the
sun disappeared and shadows came alive, blurring width and depth. The wind shifted, red dust blew in. I looked at the speedometer
and laughed: five miles an hour. I could have walked faster than this. Finally the jeep reached the bottom of the hill. The
road evened out for a few revolutions of the tires before boomeranging upward again.

Beyond the hum of the engine, I heard a cacophony of insects and birds. Spooky, all that noise but nothing in sight. I disliked
being the spied upon rather than the spy. Flipped on the headlights and inched skyward, chipping rocks into the wayside ferns.
Did cougars pounce into cars if they were hungry enough? Maybe I should roll up the windows.
Get a grip, Smith, you’re not even in the jungle yet.
I went as fast as I dared. The jeep began to creak like a cricket. With each bounce, I half expected to see the transmission
in the rearview mirror. The sun was dropping faster than I was climbing and the heat never quit. As the light waned, apprehension
increased, I began to smell and hear with feral acuity.

My failing intellect fixed on the odometer. All this rutting around may have added a tenth of a mile to the reading. Max-ine’s
map had directed me to a pile of stones at 15.3 miles off the highway: overshoot that and the forest would devour me. I slowed
to a crawl. Had that little mess been a pile? Did three stones equal one pile? Each time I hit a bump, my headlights ricocheted
into the trees, surprising birds, bats, beetles big as my fist. Light was draining from the earth like blood from a slaughtered
bull. The sky was almost black when I saw the tiny stack of stones.

Hid the car behind high ferns and dug in my bag for insect repellent and flashlight, neither of which would protect me from
anything here. I was checking out the pile of stones when a tarantula scuttled over my boot.
Jesus Christ!
Humans I could handle: animals were different.
They’re more scared of you than you are of them.
Bullshit! I didn’t have fangs loaded with venom or jaws that could tear a rabbit in half. I didn’t have wings to fly, legs
good for forty miles an hour, ears bristling with radar. I didn’t have quills, talons, scales, or antennae. I was just open
fillet, and this was dinnertime.

Glutinous fronds stroked me as I plunged into the forest. The path was slippery, littered with rocks and small bones. Odors
of blossom and rotting entrail saturated the air. The blindness was nowhere near as terrifying as the noise. Each time I heard
a nearby grunt or the heavy snap of twigs in the dark, I braced for a dozen teeth in my intestines. The chirring of cicadas
hit me in huge, throbbing waves, as if I were amid an army of angry maraca players shaking their gourds inches from my ears.
Add hoots, caws, screeches, and heat, always the goddamn heat. Sweat dribbled down the crease of my ass, joining the sweat
dribbling down from my navel in a salty, musky confluence that drove bugs wild. Whenever I stopped to drink, they swarmed
my ears, fed on my wrists. Maxine’s repellent had shot its wad about half an hour ago. I had slogged almost two hours when
the flashlight went black.

Had I buried myself alive, the darkness could not have been more total. Raided my pack for matches, violently scratched one
aflame. Ten seconds of feeble light convinced me I’d never find wood dry enough to make tinder, let alone a torch. I could
either sit here and wait to be eaten or plug ahead. As the match sputtered out, I saw a footprint in the path. A second match
proved I wasn’t hallucinating. Memorized the impression, sucking all possible hope from it. When the match died, I crawled
slowly as a worm toward the next dip in the earth.

All thought melted into a sinkhole of adrenaline. Following less a path than an absence of forest, feeling for the footprints
that miraculously recurred at fifteen-inch intervals, I proceeded a fingerling at a time, patting the dirt ahead of me so
that snakes and rodents, hearing the vibrations, might flee. The insects stayed, and they ate. Flying things strafed my ears.
After bumping into a dead armadillo, I began to go a little mad.
If Barnard could do it, so can you.
Crawled for ages in black, shrieking hell. Then the path tricked me and vanished. Suddenly I saw millions of fireflies. Stars.
Grass?
I crept ahead, muttering as my knees sank into the sod.

A swish preceded blinding light. “Who are you?” a voice demanded.

I could only blink as the brain fast-forwarded ten million years along the evolutionary chain. I staggered to my feet, brushing
compost off my knees with hands that looked like raspberry trifle. “Cosima Wagner. I’m looking for Polly Mason.”

The light didn’t move. “You came here on foot?”

No, in a Checker cab. When I tried to smile, my lower lip split. “On my knees, actually. Flashlight died.”

“You’re alone?”

“Yes.” I looked at my watch and nearly choked: one in the morning. This field trip was already half a day behind schedule.
“Is Polly asleep?”

“Polly’s been gone for weeks.”

I tried to look shocked. “Where to?”

“I don’t know.”

I upended my water bottle over my head. By the time the water reached my shoulders, it was hot enough to percolate coffee.
I waited as it dribbled down my back, my front, met at the lower fork, wept toward my ankles, fed the grass: still no invitation
to stay. “Could I trouble you for some water?” I asked finally.

“What’s that in your belt?” he asked. I threw away the lug wrench. “I do not believe you have come looking for Polly.”