Nightmare Country (32 page)

“Who's that?” the old man asked the giant, but looked straight at Adrian. “One of your angels?”

“Help me,” Adrian pleaded, and watched the chimera of herself disappear.

V

Chimera

33

When Tamara stepped off the Sahsa jet that had flown her to Belize City from New Orleans, she realized just how foolish had been her hopes of finding Adrian alive anywhere, or even finding news of her in a place like this. The near-certainty that her daughter was not hopelessly lost, which had sustained her until now, weakened in the sudden onslaught of blinding sunlight, soaking heat, and humidity.

“Feels just like Jerusha's apartment.” Agnes Hanley removed her sweater and added it to the coat over her arm. “Really think I'll find my Fred … here?”

Tamara swallowed back a disappointment so intense it stuck halfway down and made her cough. She stumbled on the ramp stairs that led to the concrete runway, and a stewardess—Latin, beautiful, cool-looking—reached up to guide her last few steps.

Sweat tickled down between her breasts. It had been snowing when their plane left Cheyenne the night before. It had been snowing when they left Denver at four that morning.

“Belize International Airport,
Bienvenidos a Belice
” was emblazoned in blue across a building of white concrete block about the size of a small-town high school, with a tiny control tower where there might have been an old-fashioned bell tower. One runway. A huge military-drab helicopter approached over nearby jungle. A white man in tennis shoes and khaki shorts jogged along the runway. Antiaircraft guns sat surrounded by dun-colored sandbags covered with camouflage netting.

“Looks like a military base,” Russ said as they waited under a hot sun outside the approach to the customs area and in a line of heavy-jowled North Americans of retirement age. A small dark plane screamed down the runway and rose into the air like a helicopter. Five more followed it at staged intervals. “Fighters. Fixed-wing. Vertical takeoff.”

The weaponry everywhere around them seemed incongruous with the smiling black faces of the young airport personnel and the lilting, laughing tone of speech that had already haunted Tamara for months.

“You suppose Jerusha came from here?” Agnes asked.

“But she's not black.” Russ looked out of his element in this alien place.

“Not Kalkasin neither.”

No passport was required to enter Belize, just proof of citizenship, and they passed through customs and out to a waiting taxi for a hair-raising ride along a narrow jungle-shrouded road and then through foot and bike traffic to an even smaller airport. Here they crowded into a propeller-driven Mayan Airline plane which held a pilot and nine passengers.

Tamara sat next to the pilot, a Yankee who wore a leather flight jacket and a white scarf. He looked like Robert Wagner without the Pan-Cake makeup and told them that if they really wanted to see Belize they should visit Belize City sometime. Tourists were generally shunted around it and out to the cays. “You'd see the real Central America and some of the most incredible slums this side of Calcutta.”

When they were over the Metnál, he pointed out dark shapes under the water that he claimed were wrecked ships encrusted with coral. The water was a true sea-green today, and so clear she could see the ocean floor, trace the shapes of coral banks and mounds from the air. Tamara wondered how the
Gloucestershire
could have sunk from view.

Her dreaming of the
Gloucestershire
's disappearance did form a link between this exotic place and barren Iron Mountain. Possibly a link to Adrian? “Accepting the loss of a child,” she'd overheard a sheriffs deputy tell Russ, “is just near to impossible for some women.” Was that all it was? Had she given Agnes Hanley false hope?

Behind her Agnes said, “I never been anywhere before. I never saw anything like this except on TV. Never knew it was really this beautiful.…” She droned on in astonishment to her hapless seatmate. Perhaps both she and Tamara would begin to face their mourning here.

An island appeared off one wingtip, its center a swamp of muddy water and long-rooted bushes. The pilot told her it was uninhabited. After a stretch of empty sea—another island, long and narrow, its beaches cutting a dazzling line between the green of the sea and the dark of inland jungle. Tamara imagined the taste-smell of sea salt and a fragrance mixed of flowers and the overripe greenness of vegetation. The memory impression of her dreams. Her heart speeded up even before the pilot announced, “Mayan Cay,” and circled above the lopsided heads of coconut palms, their fronds parted at the crown and flopping over in all directions.

The plane lined up with the shortest, narrowest runway imaginable. And at the end of the runway, a settlement—one of its larger buildings a direct target ahead of them as they touched down. On either side, palm trees hemmed them in. They stopped just short of the swath of sand that separated the runway from the building—two-story, with children all dressed alike sitting on outside staircases and with lettering above the second-story balcony overhang that could be seen only from the air but which Tamara's startled eyes had registered,
“Escuela de San Tomas.”

“‘
Escuela
' means ‘school,' right?” She realized she'd grabbed the pilot's knee. “They built it at the end of a runway?”

“Sort of like we'd put a housing development there, back in the States, or a shopping center.”

“Well … you certainly earn your white scarf.”

“Just remember, whatever you think of the way things are done here,” and he patted her hand, “these people think all backras are crazy.”

“Backra? You know him?”

“That's what they call all Anglos.”

A jeep from the hotel carried them and their luggage along a narrow street of sand between wooden houses sitting on stilts. Some white. Others in bright pastels—yellow, green, blue, pink. Some with sand yards enclosed by solid-board fences, lovely flowering bushes and plants growing directly out of the sand. Clothes hanging to dry under the houses. Poles carrying power lines aloft, looking naked and out-of-place. Footprints in the sand, and dog droppings. Theirs the only vehicle in sight.

“Holy gonads,” Russ whispered reverently. He recognized this street too.

“I think I'm scared.” Agnes' eyes widened to fill her glasses.

The sagging gate from which a little boy had stepped and then run through Tamara's dream body. The house where a woman had been sweeping the stairs, her hair in even pin curls, her thonged sandals slapping as she moved from one step to the next. The storefront on a corner that she and Backra had passed when he sleepwalked to a roofless church. Its shutters stood open now, and racks of canned goods and packages of potato chips and candy bars were set out for sale. Cases of empty Coke bottles still lined one outside wall.

She could see the ocean and the beach in patches at the other end of side streets. This street ended with a familiar thatched hut, and the jeep pulled into a courtyard of beach between it and a two-story building, its veranda paved in black and white tiles.

The Dixie woman walked up to the jeep. “Welcome to the Mayapan, folks. My name's Dixie, and your cabanas are …” She stared at Russ and then from Agnes to Tamara, the same way they were staring at her. “Have you been here before?”

Tamara's mouth was too dry to allow for speech. But she and Agnes were soon ensconced in a hut with a thatched peak in the roof, with its own bath, porch with patio chairs, twin beds, and a rush matting on the floor. Expensively primitive. Tamara figured that in two months she'd have spent every cent she had in the world.

“Never thought I'd sleep in a little grass shack,” Agnes said as Tamara slipped into shorts and a sleeveless top and still felt damp. Her hands looked ten years younger as her dry skin drank in the moisture on the air.

The windows were a series of wooden louvers with a screen outside and adjustable to take advantage of the ocean breeze. Agnes played with the louvers on the back window and then bent to squint through them. “Come take a look,” she said in a choked whisper.

Tamara was shorter than Agnes and didn't have to bend to look out at the graveyard in the sand directly behind their cabana, the tumbled concrete coffins and farther down the statue of the Virgin Mary blessing the bones of Maria Elena Esquivel.

“That'll be his house, then.” Agnes pointed to the farthest of two houses at the back of the cemetery. “The one with the hammock.”

“Yes.” Tamara turned and walked to the door on rubber legs.

“Want me to come with you?”

“No, Agnes, not this time.”

Russ Burnham stood outside, talking to two men sprawled across lounges and brown enough to have been here awhile. She shook her head and walked away when he made a gesture to include her. She was aware of her winter-white legs and the patch on her nose that was beginning to redden.
God, Tamara, how can you even think of such meaningless things at a time like this?

An older man in a straw hat stood in the sea, his pants legs rolled to the thigh and shirt sleeves rolled above the elbow. With a long knife he cut seaweed and threw it away from him. For a moment their eyes met and held. Then he flung the green weeds in his hand and bent back to his task. He was white. His sneer was Latin. Different, say, than that of the pilot, who definitely had an Anglo sneer.
Hell, Tamara, they're both just men looking at a woman. A sneer's a sneer
.

Three dogs in this dreadful burial ground—two together, one alone, all of a similar tan color. Small, short-haired mongrels with sad, suspicious eyes. They looked like the kind that would yap and bark, but remained quiet as she approached, backing off just far enough to make a leisurely getaway if they had to.

The one off by itself was fatter and spryer than the others, its look more intelligent. Tamara thought of her daughter again, fat and healthy but unacceptable—she pushed the pain of Adrian away with a grunt, stared at the Virgin Mary and ran her fingers over the dirty letters.
EN SAGRADA MEMORIA DE MI HIJA
, in sacred memory of my daughter.…

Tamara turned to face the house with the hammock, felt the eyes of the man in the water. The little lone dog in front of her curled a lip and began a backward slink at her approach. Its silence was more unnerving than her awareness of the man cutting seaweed. As if this creature could not make sound. Guardians of the dead, perhaps, had no voice, because the dead cannot hear.

Tamara worried she might be sick on the clean sand, under the ponderous sun and the black ugly bird circling above—huge, silent, intent.

You're just afraid to face him. What kind of a mother are you?
Poor Agnes probably watched her between wooden louvers. Tamara was small, but she wasn't helpless. She'd seen that fact register in Russ Burnham's eyes and was still trying to digest its import.

The treacherous thought that not everyone had the opportunity to confront a fantasy … She hoped he wasn't home. She hoped he was different from the man in her dream. She hoped she could go through with this.

The frayed ends of loose strings in the net hammock on the porch trembled on a breeze from the sea in time to the trembling in her. But her hand was steady as it reached for the screen door. She could remember walking through it without opening it in her dreams. She didn't knock now, but barged in before she had time to think it over.

Everything here, too, was as she remembered. Backra sat at the round table with the oilcloth, eating and looking at some papers. He set down a fork filled with food and stared at her. His suntan was even deeper than she'd dreamed it, and made the light metal-colored eyes and hair seem to glow in the shuttered room.

Blood thundered in Tamara's head. She ordered herself to stomp over to him and demand to know what he'd done to Adrian, but she froze, balancing with one hand against his refrigerator, realizing how stupid she must look, and wondering why he didn't look more sinister. He just looked stunned.

Backra opened his mouth to speak but shrugged instead, pushed back his chair, and stood. He came to stand over her, and still she couldn't move. His fingers felt hot on her cheek when he touched her. He drew them away, stared at them and then at her.

She'd been screaming at him inside her head, but when her repeated words finally found voice, they came out as a whisper: “Oh, God, where is she?”

And then she was pounding on him and sobbing childishly. “You have her. I know you have her somewhere. Give her back to me. Please!”

He held her away and lifted her to look into his eyes. Suspicion replaced the shock on his face. “Where do you come from?” he said in that familiar raspy voice, but as if he expected the answer to be Mars.

“Iron Mountain.” Tamara, who'd never fainted in her life and didn't believe in it, felt herself going and began gulping in air to ward it off.

“Iron Mountain. Does it have railroad tracks and tunnels?”

“Yes. Please give her back to me.” She started slipping through his hands and toward the floor; the buzzing in her ears threatened to snap something in her brain. She was suddenly on one of the hard kitchen chairs, her head pressed down between her knees, staring at pieces of sand dotting the unpainted boards of the floor between her running shoes.

“All right now?” His voice was cold, but the pressure of his hand on her back eased.

“I think so.” Tamara hated herself for being so weak, hated him for being so in control and ignoring her repeated pleas for Adrian. He helped her to sit up, brought her a glass of water, watched her drink it, long elegant fingers clasped in front of him. Everything about him was long and elegant. The sleek Backra of her dreams. Walking. Speaking. Real.

“You are one dream I never wanted to come true,” he said cruelly, and took the glass from her hand. He wore powder-blue swim trunks and a short-sleeved white shirt open in the front and he needed a haircut and he bent over and kissed the raw patch on the end of her nose.