"Watch out!" yelled Drexel and I together.
Tudor backed off the cliff and vanished. The monster dove after him. Two splashes came up, in quick succession, from below.
When we reached the top of the cliff, Tudor's body was lying awash below us. We caught a glimpse of the fish-man, flapping swiftly along like a sea lion just below the surface and heading for deep water. In a few seconds, it was gone.
"We've got to see if Ronnie's alive," said Drexel.
"Stevie," I said, "run back to the top of the little cliff just this side of the ravine. Call down to Flavio, telling him to bring the boat. Don't mention the monster—"
"Aw, Dad, I can get down that little cliff," said Stephen. He was gone before I could argue. He slithered down the cliff like a marine iguana and leaped the last ten feet to sprawl on the beach. In a minute he was in the launch, which soon buzzed around to the place where Tudor had fallen.
Stephen and Ortega got Tudor into the boat, but he was already dead. He had been dashed against a point of rock in his fall.
"Maybe," said Ortega, "there is a evil esspell on this place after all."
"Well," said Drexel later, "at least we know now what Captain Eaton meant by 'this accursed thing.' "
We sailed back to Baltra and arranged for the local burial of Ronald Tudor.
"He was kind of a con man," said Drexel, "but an interesting one. Let's not put anything in our report to the local authorities about the monster. We don't have a specimen to show, and the Ecuadorians might think we had murdered poor Ronnie and were trying to cover it up with a wild yarn."
So we said only that our companion had met death by misadventure. While I had not much liked the man, his death cast a pall on our vacation. Instead of rounding out our tour by visiting Tower, Isabela, and Fernandina Islands, we cut it short. Drexel sailed for the Panama Canal, while the Newburys flew home. After we got back, it was as if Ronald Tudor and the fish-man had never existed.
But, although I have been back to Ocean Bay several times since, nobody has ever again inveigled me into playing a round at that miniature golf course. To have the revolving statue of a fish-man goggling at me while I was addressing the ball would give me the willies. No pun intended.
The Figurine
The off-black statuette from Guatemala was five inches high and two inches thick at its widest. It also seemed to interfere with our television reception.
This figurine represented a squatty, sexless little person, with a large, wide head on which knobs stood for ears. It had a snub nose, slitty, slanting eyes, and thick lips set in a look of cosmic disgust. It reminded me of the Billikens that decorated the homes of my parents' generation, albeit its expression was far less amiable.
The statuette had been made of a lump of either brick or red sandstone, shaped with a jackknife and a couple of files and painted black. After poking at the base with a tool, I guessed sandstone.
I got the object when, for almost the only time in our married lives, Denise and I took separate vacations. The Museum of Natural Science, in which I have a family membership, offered archaeological safaris to Central America in March and April. The Newburys wanted to look at Mayan ruins; but, with two children in college and another in high school, we did not feel we could both leave at once. While our children have been pretty good, the great youth revolt of the sixties was boiling. We had heard too many horror tales of bourgeois parents who left adolescents in charge of their houses and returned to find the houses savaged by their children's scruffy friends.
I took the first of these field trips, and Denise took the second. I won't give a travelogue, save to say that I got through without a case of the trots and was devoured by mosquitoes at Tikal while sitting in the jungle watching for wild life. There had been a yellow-fever epidemic among the monkeys, so I saw none. I did, however, smell a big cat—a puma or a jaguar—in one of the so-called temples, where this feline had made its lair. But it had cleared out in advance of our coming.
Our bus stopped at Solola, by Lake Atitlan, on market day, to view the colorful crowd of Guatemalan Indians. They still wore the distinctive costumes of their villages. Some of the little brown men were in pants and some in kilts. Each, no matter how poor he looked, wore a spotless new straw sombrero. Someone must have once sold a lot of surplus nineteenth-century hussar jackets hereabouts. Many wore monkey jackets obviously copied from that pattern. They were made of coarse brown cloth, embroidered in black with frogs, like those worn in the charge of the Light Brigade.
As we were getting off the bus, an urchin piped up: "Buy esstatues! Ancient pagan gods of Indians! Bery reasonable!"
The boy had set out a row of little uglies on the sidewalk. They sell many of these at Chichicastenango. Evidently this boy, learning that we should stop first at Solola, meant to steal a march on his competitors. I must have looked like a good prospect, for he glued himself to me and uttered a flow of sales talk.
Much as I admired his enterprise, I remembered that Denise does not like filling the house with strange-looking souvenirs. So I fobbed the boy off with "No ahora, gracias; mas tarde, acasa"; and other ambiguities. Perhaps, I thought, he would have gone away when we returned to the bus.
He and most of his idols, however, were still in place. When I still declined to buy, he set up a cry: "But you promised, Meester! All Norteamericanos keep their promises!"
"Oh, all right," I said, secretly glad of an excuse to buy a souvenir of my trip. I paid a dollar for the figurine. "What's he called?"
"No name. Just ancient god."
"Well, what's your name?"
"Armando."
"Fine; this ugly little fellow shall be called Armando."
When I got home, I put Armando on the desk in my home office. Then the children began complaining of television reception. The tube was full of snow, failed to hold the vertical, and displayed other malfunctions. The service man could find nothing wrong. When the set was taken back to the shop, it worked perfectly, but nothing seemed to fix it at home. The repair man guessed that some neighbor might be operating a citizen's-band transmitter.
Priscille said: "It's that hideous little idol Daddy brought back from Guatemala."
"It might have a radioactive core," said Stephen.
"No," said Héloise, "because then we'd all be dying of radiation disease."
"I don't mean that," said Priscille, who seems to have an instinct for these things. "The god is sore at not getting his daily sacrifice."
"Whom would you suggest that I eviscerate with a flint knife?" I asked.
"Well, there's my geometry teacher—but I guess that isn't practical. Maybe you'd better buy a rabbit or chicken or something. If you'll hold it, I'll cut its throat in front of the idol, if you're too squeamish."
"Not over my nice oriental rugs!" cried Denise.
"You bloodthirsty little monster!" I said. "Maybe Armando will be satisfied with an offering of flowers."
"The flowers will not be out till next month, my crazy dears," said Denise.
"You could buy them from a florist," said Héloise.
"With whose money?" I said. "Look, why not use one of those wax flowers that fellow sold your mother last year? Okay, darling?"
Denise shrugged. "It is all to me equal. Amusez-vous done."
So a couple of waxen flowers were placed at the feet of Armando. At once the snow disappeared from our tube.
Denise departed on her tour. A few days later, Carl telephoned to say that Ed and Mitch were both in town, and couldn't we arrange an old-time get-together?