It wasn't necessary. When I slipped into the clearing and scanned the open ledge, Antonio was fast asleep. A friend with him also was asleep. In the dim light of not-quite-dawn, they looked like two logs wrapped in blankets.
Just in case it wasn't Antonio and a friend, I lowered the heavy Russian Volska I'd been carrying and palmed Wilhelmina. I sat to one side of the trail and aimed at the first blanket-covered sleeper.
"Antonio, wake up."
The log raised up, the blanket fell away and there was Elicia Cortez staring down the muzzle of my luger, her eyes wider than saucers.
"Senor Carter," she exploded, much too loudly for comfort. "We thought you were dead."
Antonio stirred in his blanket and I thought perhaps he had also been wounded, worse than me. But he aroused, proving only that he was a sound sleeper.
As I told them all the things that had happened to me since Antonio and I had parted on that steep hillside with bullets raining down from above, Elicia kept watching my every move, hanging on every word. She also kept inching closer, as though I were a campfire and the air was cold.
"We have heard much of the hermit of Mount Toro," Antonio said when I was finished, "but you are the first man to have seen him in thirty years and to tell about it. The stories say that he cooks and eats anyone who comes near his cave."
"The stories are all wet," I said. "For one thing, the man is a vegetarian. He won't kill animals for food or for wearing apparel. For another, he doesn't have a cave — just a hut he built himself out of vines. Now, tell me about yourselves. How did you happen to wind up together? Where are your friends?"
Both faces went gloomy. Elicia stared at the ground, but remained at my side, touching me occasionally with a knee, a hand, an arm. Antonio told how he had found one of his friends, wounded and roaming aimlessly on a trail. The friend had died in his arms. He hadn't found any others.
Finally, he had returned to his parents' house, hoping that perhaps some of his friends had left word there.
"I wish I hadn't gone home," he said sadly. "What I feared would happen has happened. My parents are gone and a bunch of Cuban Marines are living in the house. I asked around, but the neighbors could tell me only that there was shouting and screaming in the night, two days ago. And there was shooting, then silence. I know, Senor Carter, that our parents are dead. Our property now belongs to Colonel Vasco."
And Colonel Vasco, I knew, would sell it at a high price to Cuban immigrants after the bloody revolution put Don Carlos in control and made both Nicarxa and Apalca allies of Cuba. Antonio had reason to be fearful that his parents were dead. "This may sound ungrateful to the memory of your parents," I said, "but we haven't time to mourn them properly. Our greatest chance is to find the Ninca tribe, get to that sacrificial cave in the mountain and hope to God the chimney is big enough for us to climb up through it."
"I know a shortcut to the Ninca lands," Antonio said, brightening in spite of his grief for his parents. "Are you ready to travel?"
I had traveled all night, but I had also slept and rested for more than two days. I was ready. To make certain, Elicia insisted on carrying my rifle. She would have carried me, if she'd been strong enough. She couldn't seem to show me enough attention, to touch me enough.
It became more and more obvious as we moved along dark trails toward the Ninca lands that Elicia had fallen in love with me. Recalling how I was when I was her age, I wasn't about to underestimate that love. It was real and it was intense. But I didn't fee! the same about her. Ever since my mind had made the connection between Elicia and American high school girls, I had thought of this girl the way a father might feel about a daughter. I had even begun to entertain a fantasy that I might somehow spirit her out of this troubled country and find her a foster home with a friend in the States.
There, I thought in my typically American way of thinking, she could finish out her schooling, live in peace, perhaps fall in love with a handsome blond boy on the football team and settle in suburbia with a couple of cars, a dog and mortgage. And, of course, kids.
We were resting beside a clear-running stream along about noontime when Elicia brought me a container of water, sat beside me and gazed up into my eyes. Antonio was off downstream, looking for edible fruits and vegetables.
"I have not thanked you for saving my life," she said.
"I didn't save your life, Elicia," I said, remembering that night when the Marine with the enormous organ had tried to rape her. "I merely stopped…"
"You saved my life," she said emphatically, placing her slender brown hand on my knee. "I had promised myself that very day that, if the Marines came again and did that to me, I would cut my own throat. What I was living, what I have been living the past three months, has not been life. It has been a kind of horrible death, full of terror and disgust, and no joy. I still feel the disgust."
"For the Marines?"
She looked at me curiously. "No, for myself."
"Why would you be disgusted with yourself? You did nothing wrong?"
She gazed at the ground and took her hand from my knee. "You do not think I am soiled? You do not think I am something for disgust?"
"Good God, no. Why would I think that?"
She didn't respond and I began to think how similar rape victims are the world over. They cannot control what has happened to them, they were unwilling victims of one of man's oldest invasions of privacy, yet they always seemed to feel guilt, or, in the case of Elicia, self-disgust. It was a phenomenon that never ceased to amaze me. I had no words to console the girl, or to change her mind about herself. But I still couldn't remain silent.
"Virginity is important to you, isn't it?" I asked.
Her head snapped up and she looked into my eyes for a time. Then, she looked away and muttered an almost inaudible "yes."
Then, you must consider yourself a virgin, Elicia. In your mind, you are. You gave nothing of your own free will. It was taken from you. In God's eyes, you are still unspoiled, if that's the way you must look at it."
A fraction of a smile crossed her lips, and then she was sad again. She looked at me, holding my eyes with hers.
"For many months before the Marines came, she said, speaking as though to a priest, in confession, "I had certain thoughts, certain feelings, that I could not control. In spite of all that has happened, I still have those thoughts and those feelings."
I understood perfectly. The girl was a woman, she had thoughts and feelings about sex. She had had them since she was at least twelve or thirteen. Because she had had them, she felt that what had happened to her was God's will, that she hadn't had her virginity taken from her. She believed her previous thoughts had actually caused the rapes to occur.
"The thoughts and feelings you had and are still having," I said, "are natural thoughts and feelings. Every human and every animal alive has those feelings. They shouldn't be sources of guilt, though. In God's eyes — and in mine — you're still a virgin, still unspoiled, or whatever the word is."
She moved closer, seeming to understand what I was trying to say. Or wanting to understand so badly that she was fooling herself.
"I know what thoughts are natural," she said, "and what thoughts are not. What I am feeling now, for you, is natural. If I am a virgin still, I want you to be the one to receive the fruits of my virginity."
Not even an American high school girl, with all her modern boldness brought on by the national yen for honesty and forthrightness, could have put it more plainly. And very few American high school boys would have turned down such an offer. But I was years away from high school. And I couldn't give as much as I would take.
My silence was my answer. Elicia sat gazing up at me for several seconds, then her eyes fell. I let her think it all out. She would consider all the possibilities. Perhaps I thought of her with disgust, had even lied when I had said that she was still unspoiled, that she had nothing to be ashamed of. Perhaps I thought her beneath me, since I was an obviously important American government agent and she was a lowly Nicarxan peasant girl. Perhaps…