Curiously, she also realized that she had no remorse about the men she had shot and presumably killed in Kiev while defending herself. She kept all of this locked up inside her, and went about her daily business in her remote venue, even while no answers were coming forth for Mr. Collins. She had been sent here to observe, to develop a theory about who would want these indigenous people off their land and want the missionaries gone. She had by now spent several weeks studying the area from the ground, from the air, and occasionally by water. And there were no suggestions of anything amiss.
She began to wonder if she had made this trip for nothing.
SIXTY-EIGHT
Then there were the events of late July.
They began when the young girl, Paulina, who had sold Alex her new pendant, had traveled halfway down the mountain path one morning with two other girls. The three girls came running back in terror around noon.
Alex was one of the first to see them. “¿De qué se trata?” Alex asked the breathless girls. “¿Quién es?” What’s this about? Who is it? A group from the village gathered, including the missionaries.
The girls explained. “Strange men,” Paulina said. “A whole band of them!”
“¿Dondé estan?” Alex asked. Where are they?
“At the clearing. Halfway down the mountain,” said a second girl, trembling with fright. The men, the girls said when they came breathlessly back to the village, were heavily armed and had threatened them. They had tried to capture the youngest and prettiest of the three girls, but the girls had run.
“¿Qúantos?” Alex asked. How many men?
Maybe a dozen of them, the girls answered. Men they had never seen before, at one of the clearings. Men who had no good business in this area.
“¿Cazadores? ¿Banditos? ¿Soldados?” Alex pressed. Hunters? Bandits? Soldiers?
“¡No sé, no sé!” Paulina said, starting to cry. The girls couldn’t tell. They only knew enough to be frightened of this band of outsiders.
“Did they follow you?” Alex asked.
“No,” Paulina said. “They looked like they were scouting. They didn’t follow.”
Alex embraced Paulina and turned to the men of Barranco Lajoya. “We should go have a look,” she said.
Several men from the village went into their homes. They emerged with rifles and an array of handguns. Alex went back to her own hut and strapped the holster with the Beretta around her waist. The pistol hung on her right side. She tucked an extra clip of bullets in her pocket. She brought a canteen of water, also, as well as a compact pair of binoculars.
A group of angry men waited for her when she emerged. They looked at her oddly.
“You are going with us?” one of them questioned. “¿Una mujer?” A woman?
“I’m going with you,” she said steadfastly in Spanish. “¡Claro! ¡Si! ¡Una mujer!”
The men looked at each other, then nodded, all in accord. There were no further questions. They brought with them every rifle in Barranco Lajoya.
In a burning sun, they went back down the mountain to take a look. Paulina went along, staying close to Alex. They tried to find the place where the strange group of intruders had been seen.
Alex expected the worst. Her heart was like a drumbeat as the group from the village descended the rugged mountain trail. She wondered whether this event would throw some light on what she had been sent here to discover. She wondered what Robert would have thought if he could have seen her here now with these people. He would have been proud of her, she thought to herself.
After a march of half an hour, they found the spot where the girls had seen the men. “They were here,” Paulina said. But no one was there now, other than the party from the village.
Alex stepped slightly off the path near the clearing. She examined the thick underbrush. It had recently been trampled, but that indicated nothing. She looked for other signs of human activity, food wrappers, cigarettes, bullet casings, but found nothing.
“There were men here. I swear,” Paulina said to Alex.
Alex placed a hand on the girl’s shoulder. “Yo sé. Te creo,” she answered. I know. I believe you.
A moment later, there was a sudden noise in the brush about fifty feet away. Reflexively, Alex’s hand went to her pistol. She drew it and instinctively went down to one knee. The men of the village turned toward the sound with their rifles. And then a wild ram emerged slowly from a thicket. The beast looked at them in contempt, chewing on something, then turned its head and disappeared.
Alex put her gun back into its holster.
“We shouldn’t return home until we’ve had a thorough look around,” she said.
There was agreement. The group from the village split in two and followed two paths that led away from the clearing, about a dozen individuals in each group. They searched the area, found vantage points that allowed them to look across clearings up and down the mountain. At her locations, when she could, Alex used her binoculars to scan in every direction. But she saw nothing.
The two groups made a rendezvous back at the larger clearing an hour later, hot and exhausted. The blazing summer sun was starting to sink in the sky by this time. Alex glanced at her watch. It was past 5:00 p.m.
The search party returned to the village without a shot fired. Several men had the nagging suspicion that for whatever reason the teenage girls had made up a tall tale.
Alex quickly grew tired of listening to them. Quietly, she slipped away from everyone and disappeared to a secluded cove in the river with a change of clothing. She wanted to bathe and wash the day’s sweat from her body as well as rinse the shorts, T-shirt, and underwear she had worn that day. Alone and undressed, she was careful to go only knee deep in the water and keep her pistol within quick reach on the riverbank.
She washed quickly, herself and her clothes, then stepped out of the water, dried off, and dressed in a clean shirt and shorts. Her only witnesses were a flock of noisy parrots who kept her company overhead. She welcomed the presence of the birds, as they formed a primitive sentry system. She had already learned that the birds’ chatter changed when strangers approached.
In the evening, after dinner, the men from the search party grumbled loudly about the hike down the mountain. They didn’t feel the story Paulina and her friends had told was reliable. Later, many of them buried their complaints in warm beer on an outdoor patio.
Alex could hear them and understand them as she lay on her own foam mattress, reading a novel in Spanish by Isabel Allende by the light from two candles.
Alex wasn’t so sure that the girls had made up their story. Why would they? And the trampled underbrush suggested larger bodies, and several of them.
Alex had fallen into the habit of sleeping in her clothing, except for the socks and shoes. She also kept her pistol loaded and at her bedside.
Tonight was no exception. Yet the night was calm, the darkness deep in the jungle around the small enclave. The only noise, distantly, were the normal jungle sounds of the feral creatures that lived by night. And the only sounds nearby were the occasional mutterings of some of the village men, slumped on front doorsteps drunk on guarapo, the local cane-sugar liquor.
SIXTY-NINE
Many of the residents of the Barranco Lajoya left each morning before dawn to make the long trek down the mountain. A jitney, a rusting old minivan with missing windows, would pick them up at daybreak at the base where Manuel had parked his Jeep. The van would take them to either the nearby ranch or a more distant one where they would work in the fields of sugar cane. There they worked for the equivalent of three dollars a day, plus a lunch of beans and rice. This they would do seven days a week for ten hours a day in the torrential subtropical rainy seasons of the winter as well as the sweltering heat of the summer. These were the lucky ones.