‘Good Lord,’ she said, ‘those open-air butcher’s shops.’
The smell was still in the car, a smell of war and horror.
‘Did you see the flies?’ she asked.
‘When you buy any kind of meat in those markets,’ John Webb said, ‘you slap the beef with your hand. The flies lift from the meat so you can get a look at it.’
He turned the car around a lush bend in the green rain-jungle road.
‘Do you think they’ll let us into Juatala when we get there?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Watch out!’
He saw the bright things in the road too late, tried to swerve, but hit them. There was a terrible sighing from the right front tyre, the car heaved about and sank to a stop. He opened his side of the car and stepped out. The jungle was hot and silent and the highway empty, very empty and quiet at noon.
He walked to the front of the car and bent, all the while checking his revolver in its underarm holster.
Leonora’s window gleamed down. ‘Is the tyre hurt much?’
‘Ruined, utterly ruined!’ He picked up the bright thing that had stabbed and slashed the tyre.
‘Pieces of a broken machete,’ he said, ‘placed in adobe holders pointing towards our car wheels. We’re lucky it didn’t get all our tyres.’
‘But why?’
‘You know as well as I.’ He nodded to the newspaper beside her, at the date, the headlines:
4 OCTOBER 1963: UNITED STATES, EUROPE SILENT!
The radios of the U.S.A. and Europe are dead. There is a great silence. The War has spent itself.
It is believed that most of the population of the United States is dead. It is believed that most of Europe, Russia, and Siberia are equally decimated. The day of the white people of the earth is over and finished.
‘It all came so fast,’ said Webb. ‘One week we’re on another tour, a grand vacation from home. The next week – this.’
They both looked away from the black headlines to the jungle.
The jungle looked back at them with a vastness, a breathing moss-and-leaf silence, with a billion diamond and emerald insect eyes.
‘Be careful, Jack.’
He pressed two buttons. An automatic lift under the front wheels hissed and hung the car in the air. He jammed a key nervously into the right wheel plate. The tyre, frame and all, with a sucking pop, bounced from the wheel. It was a matter of seconds to lock the spare in place and roll the shattered tyre back to the luggage compartment. He had his gun out while he did all this.
‘Don’t stand in the open, please, Jack.’
‘So it’s starting already.’ He felt his hair burning hot on his skull. ‘News travels fast.’
‘For God’s sake,’ said Leonora. ‘They can hear you!’
He stared at the jungle.
‘I know you’re in there!’
‘Jack!’
He aimed at the silent jungle. ‘I see you!’ He fired four, five times, quickly, wildly.
The jungle ate the bullets with hardly a quiver, a brief slit sound like torn silk where the bullets bored and vanished into a million acres of green leaves, trees, silence, and moist earth. The brief echo of the shots died. Only the car muttered its exhaust behind Webb. He walked around the car, got in, and shut the door and locked it.
He reloaded the gun, sitting in die front seat. Then they drove away from the place.
They drove steadily.
‘Did you see anyone?’
‘No. You?’
She shook her head.
‘You’re going too fast.’
He slowed only in time. As they rounded a curve another clump of the bright flashing objects filled the right side of the road. He swerved to the left and passed.
‘Sons-of-bitches!’
‘They’re not sons-of-bitches, they’re just people who never had a car like this or anything at all.’
Something ticked across the window pane.
There was a streak of colourless liquid on the glass.
Leonora glanced up. ‘Is it going to rain?’
‘No, an insect hit the pane.’
Another tick.
‘Are you sure that was an insect?’
Tick, tick, tick.
‘Shut the window!’ he said, speeding up.
Something fell in her lap.
She looked down at it. He reached over to touch the thing.
‘Quick!’
She pressed the button. The window snapped up.
Then she examined her lap again.
The tiny blowgun dart glistened there.
‘Don’t get any of the liquid on you,’ he said. ‘Wrap it in your handkerchief – we’ll throw it away later.’
He had the car up to sixty miles an hour.
‘If we hit another road block, we’re done.’
‘This is a local thing,’ he said. ‘We’ll drive out of it.’
The panes were ticking all the time. A shower of things blew at the window and fell away in their speed.
‘Why,’ said Leonora Webb, ‘they don’t even know us!’
‘I only wish they did.’ He gripped the wheel. ‘It’s hard to kill people you know. But not hard to kill strangers.’
‘I don’t want to die,’ she said simply, sitting there.
He put his hand inside his coat. ‘If anything happens to me, my gun is here. Use it, for God’s sake, and don’t waste time.’
She moved over close to him and they drove seventy-five miles an hour down a straight stretch in the jungle road, saying nothing.
With the windows up the heat was oven-thick in the car.
‘It’s so silly,’ she said, at last. ‘Putting the knives in the road. Trying to hit us with the blowguns. How could they know that the next car along would be driven by white people?’
‘Don’t ask them to be that logical,’ he said. ‘A car is a car. It’s big, it’s rich. The money in one car would last them a lifetime. And anyway, if you road-block a car, chances are you’ll get either an American tourist or a rich Spaniard, comparatively speaking, whose ancestors should have behaved better. And if you happen to road-block another Indian, hell, all you do is go out and help him change tyres’
‘What time is it?’ she asked.
For the thousandth time he glanced at his empty wrist. Without expression or surprise, he fished in his coat pocket for the glistening gold watch with the silent sweep hand. A year ago he had seen a native stare at this watch and stare at it and stare at it with almost a hunger. Then the native had examined him, not scowling, not hating, not sad or happy; nothing except puzzled.
He had taken the watch off that day and never worn it since.
‘Noon,’ he said.
Noon.
The border lay ahead. They saw it and both cried out at once. They pulled up, smiling, not knowing they smiled….
John Webb leaned out of the window, started gesturing to the guard at the border station, caught himself, and got out of his car. He walked ahead to the station where three young men, very short, in lumpy uniforms, stood talking. They did not look up at Webb, who stopped before them. They continued conversing in Spanish, ignoring him.
‘I beg your pardon,’ said John Webb at last. ‘Can we pass over the border into Juatala?’
One of the men turned for a moment. ‘Sorry, señor.’
The three men talked again.
‘You don’t understand,’ said Webb, touching the first man’s elbow. ‘We’ve got to get through.’
The man shook his head. ‘Passports are no longer good. Why should you want to leave our country, anyway?’
‘It was announced on the radio. All Americans to leave the country, immediately.’
‘Ah, sí sí,’ all three soldiers nodded and leered at each other with shining eyes.
‘Or be fined or imprisoned, or both,’ said Webb.
‘We could let you over the border, but Juatala would give you twenty-four hours to leave also. If you don’t believe
me, listen!’ The guard turned and called across the border, ‘Aye, there! Aye!’
In the hot sun, forty yards distant, a pacing man turned, his rifle in his arms.
‘Aye there, Paco, you want these two people?’
‘No, gracias – gracias, no,’ replied the man, smiling.
‘You see?’ said the guard, turning to John Webb.
All of the soldiers laughed together.
‘I have money,’ said Webb.
The men stopped laughing.
The first guard stepped up to John Webb and his face was now not relaxed or easy; it was like brown stone.
"Yes,’ he said. ‘They always have money. I know. They come here and they think money will do everything. But what is money? It is only a promise, señor. This I know from books. And when somebody no longer likes your promise, what then?’
‘I will give you anything you ask.’
‘Will you?’ The guard turned to his friends. ‘He will give me anything I ask.’ To Webb: ‘It was a joke. We were always a joke to you, weren’t we?’
‘No.’
‘Mañana, you laughed at us; mañana, you laughed at our siestas and our mañanas, didn’t you?’
‘Not me. Someone else.’
‘Yes, you.’
‘I’ve never been to this particular station before.’
‘I know you, anyway. Run here, do this, do that. Oh, here’s a peso, buy yourself a house. Run over there, do this, do that.’
‘It wasn’t me.’
‘He looked like you, anyway.’
They stood in the sun with their shadows dark under them, and the perspiration colouring their armpits. The soldier moved closer to John Webb. ‘I don’t have to do anything for you any more.’
‘You never had to before. I never asked it.’
‘You’re trembling, señor.’
‘I’m all right. It’s the sun.’
‘How much money have you got?’ asked the guard.
‘A thousand pesos to let us through, and a thousand for the other man over there.’
The guard turned again. ‘Will a thousand pesos be enough?’
‘No,’ said the other guard. ‘Tell him to report us!’
‘Yes,’ said the guard, back to Webb again. ‘Report me. Get me fired. I was fired once, years ago, by you.’
‘It was someone else.’
‘Take my name. It is Carlos Rodriguez Ysotl. Go on now.’
‘I see.’
‘No, you don’t see,’ said Carlos Rodriguez Ysotl. ‘Now give me two thousand pesos.’
John Webb took out his wallet and handed over the money. Carlos Rodriguez Ysotl licked his thumb and counted the money slowly under the blue glazed sky of his country as noon deepened and sweat arose from hidden sources and people breathed and panted above their shadows.
‘Two thousand pesos.’ He folded it and put it in his pocket quietly. ‘Now turn your car around and head for another border.’
‘Hold on now, damn it!’
The guard looked at him. ‘Turn your car.’
They stood a long time that way, with the sun blazing on the rifle in the guard’s hands, not speaking. And then John Webb turned and walked slowly, one hand to his face, back to the car and slid into the front seat.
‘What’re we going to do?’ said Leonora.
‘Rot. Or try to reach Porto Bello.’
‘But we need gas and our spare fixed. And going back over those highways … This time they might drop logs, and –’
‘I know, I know.’ He rubbed his eyes and sat for a moment with his head in his hands. ‘We’re alone, my God, we’re alone. Remember how safe we used to feel? How safe? We registered in all the big towns with the American Consuls. Remember how the joke went? “Everywhere you go you can hear the rustle of the eagle’s wings!” Or was it the sound of paper money? I forget. Jesus, Jesus, the world got empty awfully quick. Who do I call on now?’
She waited a moment and then said, ‘I guess just me. That’s not much.’
He put his arm around her. ‘You’ve been swell. No hysterics, nothing.’
‘Tonight maybe I’ll be screaming, when we’re in bed, if we ever find a bed again. It’s been a million miles since breakfast.’
He kissed her, twice, on her dry mouth. Then he sat slowly back. ‘First thing is to try to find gas. If we can get that, we’re ready to head for Porto Bello.’
The three soldiers were talking and joking as they drove away.
After they had been driving a minute, he began to laugh quietly.
‘What were you thinking?’ asked his wife.
‘I remember an old spiritual. It goes like this:
‘I went to the Rock to hide my face
And the Rock cried out, “No Hiding Place,
There’s no Hiding Place down here.”’
‘I remember that,’ she said.
‘It’s an appropriate song right now,’ he said. ‘I’d sing the whole thing for you if I could remember it all. And if I felt like singing.’
He put his foot harder to the accelerator.
They stopped at a gas station and after a minute, when the attendant did not appear, John Webb honked the horn. Then, appalled, he snapped his hand away from the horn-ring, looking at it as if it were the hand of a leper.
‘I shouldn’t have done that.’
The attendant appeared in the shadowy doorway of the gas station. Two other men appeared behind him.
The three men came out and walked around the car, looking at it, touching it, feeling it.
Their faces were like burnt copper in the daylight. They touched the resilient tyres, they sniffed the rich new smell of the metal and upholstery.
‘Señor,’ said the gas attendant at last.
‘We’d like to buy some gas, please.’
‘We are all out of gas, señor.’
‘But your tank reads full. I see the gas in the glass container up there.’
‘We are all out of gas,’ said the man.
‘I’ll give you ten pesos a gallon!’
‘Gracias, no.’
‘We haven’t enough gas to get anywhere from here.’ Webb checked the gauge. ‘Not even a quarter gallon left. We’d better leave the car here and go into town and see what we can do there.’
‘I’ll watch the car for you, señor,’ said the station attendant. ‘If you leave the keys.’
‘We can’t do that!’ said Leonora. ‘Can we?’
‘I don’t see what choice we have. We can stall it on the road and leave it to anyone who comes along, or leave it with this man.’
‘That’s better,’ said the man.
They climbed out of the car and stood looking at it.
‘It was a beautiful car,’ said John Webb.
‘Very beautiful,’ said the man, his hand out for the keys. ‘I will take good care of it, señor.’
‘But, Jack –’
She opened the back door and started to take out the luggage. Over her shoulder, he saw the bright travel stickers, the storm of colour that had descended upon and covered the worn leather now after years of travel, after years of the best hotels in two dozen countries.
She tugged at the valises, perspiring, and he stopped her hands and they stood gasping there for a moment, in the open door of the car, looking at these fine rich suitcases, inside which were the beautiful tweeds and woollens and silks of their lives and living, the forty-dollar-an-ounce perfumes and the cool dark furs and the silvery golf shafts. Twenty years were packed into each of the cases; twenty years and four dozen parts they had played in Rio, in Paris, in Rome, and Shanghai, but the part they played most frequently and best of all was the rich and buoyant, amazingly happy Webbs, the smiling people, the ones who could make that rarely balanced Martini known as the Sahara.
‘We can’t carry it all into town,’ he said. ‘We’ll come back for it later.’
‘But …’
He silenced her by turning her away and starting her off down the road.
>
‘But we can’t leave it there, we can’t leave all our luggage and we can’t leave our car! Oh look here now, I’ll roll up the windows and lock myself in the car, while you go for the gas, why not?’ she said.
He stopped and glanced back at the three men standing by the car which blazed in the yellow sun. Their eyes were shining and looking at the woman.
‘There’s your answer,’ he said. ‘Come on.’
‘But you just don’t walk off and leave a four-thousand-dollar automobile!’ she cried.
He moved her along, holding her elbow firmly and with quiet decision. ‘A car is to travel in. When it’s not travelling, it’s useless. Right now, we’ve got to travel; that’s everything. The car isn’t worth a dime without gas in it. A pair of good strong legs is worth a hundred cars, if you use the legs. We’ve just begun to toss things overboard. We’ll keep dropping ballast until there’s nothing left to heave but our hides.’
He let her go. She was walking steadily now, and she fell into step with him. ‘It’s so strange. So strange. I haven’t walked like this in years.’ She watched the motion of her feet beneath her, she watched the road pass by, she watched the jungle moving to either side, she watched her husband striding quickly along, until she seemed hypnotized by the steady rhythm. ‘But I guess you can learn anything over again,’ she said, at last.
The sun moved in the sky and they moved for a long while on the hot road. When he was quite ready, the husband began to think aloud. ‘You know, in a way, I think it’s good to be down to essentials. Now instead of worrying over a dozen damned things, it’s just two items – you and me.’
‘Watch it, here comes a car – we’d better …’
They half turned, yelled, and jumped. They fell away from the highway and lay watching the automobile hurtle past at seventy miles an hour. Voices sang, men laughed, men shouted, waving. The car sped away into the dust and vanished around a curve, blaring its double horns again and again.
He helped her up and they stood in the quiet road.
‘Did you see it?’
They watched the dust settle slowly.
‘I hope they remember to change the oil and check the battery, at least. I hope they think to put water in the radiator,’ she said, and paused. ‘They were singing, weren’t they?’