“What about weapons?” I asked.
“There will be guns for you two,” she said. “I will tell the guides. We will find out which men Hoffmann has used, and the jefe will talk to them. It will all be arranged. I will leave a message and you can come here ready to go. You must have good strong shoes that come up high, to support your ankles. The trail is all loose rock as big as this.”
She made a circle of thumbs and fingers big as a baseball.
“It will be steaming hot in there. You should wear clothing to absorb moisture, and maybe have a sweatband for your head and a light hat. We will need a great deal of water, so get something to carry water in. We will go in the afternoon and stay through the night. The guides will leave us there, wherever we decide. I will be the cat he has come to kill.”
“Bedrolls?” Meyer asked.
“A light blanket only. Boughs can be cut. Bring a knife.”
“Food?” I asked.
“I will arrange that. The guides will carry it. And a repellent for the insects. Each person should bring his own. And toilet tissue, and any medication you take… You would know what you need for an overnight hike, the same as when you were little boys.”
“Or little soldiers,” I said.
“You were military?” she asked me.
“A long time back.”
She went into a long brooding silence and held up a warning hand when Meyer started to speak. “I think it will be possible to remove his rifle,” she said. “If the guides could take him to a very difficult place where he had to climb up or down, one of them might take his rifle and then just melt off into the brush like magic, the way they can.”
“Won’t that alert him?”
“By that time, it will not matter, will it?” she asked.
Meyer was very quiet on the way back to the Dos Playas. He moved a chair onto our small balcony and sat with his feet up, braced against the railing. I opened two beers in our kitchenette and took them out. He thanked me and drank half of his before putting it down on the floor beside his chair.
“She thinks we should just blow him away.” I said, turning to lean on the railing. “Did you see her eyes?”
“I did indeed. But she wants him to know why. They met. She is not a woman one would forget. If he gets a good look at her, then he’ll know why. But I think she wants the satisfaction of a few words. I have a very ugly image of things to come, Travis.”
“Such as?”
“I see us in a cave. Water is dripping. Cody Pittler is tied hand and foot. She is squatting beside him. She tells us to take a walk. We climb out of there and walk to where the guides are waiting. We all stand there and hear him screaming for a while, and then it stops, and she comes climbing out, looking tired but smiling.”
“Was that on NBC or CBS?”
“Listen, I do not have any affection for Cody Pittler, God knows. And I am pragmatist enough to realize we can’t get the law down here to do anything about him, and we can’t get him back to Eagle Pass. I have just never directly killed anyone.”
“This one should probably be indirect.”
“Just the same,” he said, picking up his beer and finishing it. “I don’t know exactly how to think about it. How have you thought about it?”
“In the past? There has never been enough time to do much thinking.”
“And afterward?”
“Kind of blah. Draggy. Tired and guilty and also a little bit jumpy. Takes about a week to go away. But the actual scene never really does go away. It’s sort of like having a collection of color slides. Some nights the projector in your head shows them all. Meyer, just don’t think about it. Let it happen. There is no little book of rules. No time outs. No offside. Just CYA. Cover your ass, because you can be certain the other guy will not feel that badly about you.”
Twenty-four
WE WAITED a long time before we heard from her. We had a difficult time finding the kind of walking shoes she described. Everything else was easy. Meyer found shoes. I couldn’t find a pair big enough until finally I found a pair a size and a half too big and too wide. But with two pair of heavy white orlon athletic socks, they felt snug enough, especially with the laces pulled tight. We found liter canteens in a downtown supermercado, on long straps, and bought two apiece. The Texas straws were too big for jungle walking, so we found baseball caps with Velcro bands which said Y-U-C-A-T-A-N in red across the front. Tennis shirts and tennis headbands and wristbands were available, as were long lightweight cotton trousers. Small flashlights, repellent, waterproof matches.
I debated the choice of knives for a long time and at last bought two. They both folded. One went in a leather holster with a snap fastener on my belt, and the other went in the right-hand pocket. It had no case, and when I took it out exactly right, and flicked my wrist, the five-inch blade fell out and snapped into place.
Dressed for action, we looked like tourists waiting for a party boat. I got impatient and went over to her place twice, but she wasn’t there. Meyer said she was doubtless doing everything she could. But Monday, Tuesday Wednesday Thursday, and Friday went by On Saturday August fourteenth, when we went down to breakfast, there was a small sealed envelope in the box. Come here today at eleven this morning. B.
We dressed in our jungle best. I had the car gassed and the oil checked. She was waiting for us outside the entrance, sitting on a bulky blue canvas pack. She hoisted it without effort and put it in the back beside Meyer. She seemed both intent and preoccupied as she looked us over, and gave a small nod. She wore a cotton T-shirt in a pale salmon color, baggy oyster-white slacks tucked into what looked to be L. L. Bean women’s hiking boots. She had her black hair tied back and a white terry band around her forehead.
“You are late!” she said.
“By almost three minutes.”
“If they should think we’re not coming-”
“Don’t get yourself in a nervous sweat,” I told her. She flashed me a black and evil look out of the side of her eye.
“Have you got everything?” Meyer asked.
“Yes, but not in that pack. They have already taken some things out to where we are going.”
I turned on the air conditioning, and that ended all conversation. I kept them too busy hanging on to think of talk anyway. The tires were the best looking thing about the pink rental, so I had the satisfaction of making her yelp with alarm when I darted between an empty southbound fill truck and a full one coming the other way.
Almost an hour later she yelled to me to slow down. She leaned forward, looking high into the trees on the left. She told me where to pull as far over as I could. There was some semblance of shoulder there, gravelly and badly tilted. When we got out, three small men appeared out of the brush. She introduced them quickly. Jorge, Juan, and Miguel. They wore toe-thong sandals, dirty khaki shorts which looked too large for them, faded cotton shirts, and ragged straw hats. Jorge and Juan also wore small-caliber rifles strapped diagonally across their backs arid machetes in scabbards on belts around their waists. They were solemn and their handshakes were utterly slack. They did not inspire a lot of confidence. Miguel wanted the car keys. He got in, and when I began to object he went roaring away, turning out almost directly in front of a maddened tourist bus. It blatted around him and went fartingly on its way toward Tulum.
She caught my arm and said, “It will be brought back when this is all over. Now we follow the boys.” And that was a very good trick indeed, following the boys and following her. It was a strange kind of jungle: scrub jungle. The soil could not support big trees. They ranged from sapling size to ball-bat size, and from ten feet tall to thirty feet. The cover was sparse. A lot of sun came down through the leaves. It was, as she had promised, a punishing trail. At first I tried to watch where I placed each foot, but that made the passage too slow. I finally decided to trust to the ankle support of the high shoes and let the stones underfoot roll as they pleased. Rain had washed all the soil from the trail, leaving loose rock. On either side, the terrain looked a lot better for walking, but it was a wilderness of tough vines that dropped from above, sprang up from below, and were hammocked from tree to tree. One would have to chop through them all to make a path.