The Travel Writer (28 page)

He nodded to himself. “It’s a good plan,” he said. “You, the American, will be the killer,
Dionisius died bravely as he was investigating the false kidnapping, and the supposed kidnapped victim escapes alive. You three Americans can leave, but quickly. If Barrientos finds you, you die too, for killing Dionisius. Barrientos is not as reasonable as I am. Don’t leave through the lobby. His men are there.”

“We’ll find another way,” I said.

“And Ray?” asked Hilary.

“He stays to clean this mess with me,” said Arturo. “And you go home.”

He waved his gun again to emphasize his insistence, not threateningly but not idly either.

“Yes. You go home and tell everybody that you were hiding, and then became tired of hiding and decided to return home. That is your story. The hotel was not at fault; you were not kidnapped; you were only hiding. That is what you tell everybody. Your lover stays with me. If you tell a different story, then he dies, I swear it.”

As we left, Ray was too stunned even to look up from his mopping to say goodbye to his lover. All Hilary brought with her was her passport and her wallet.

It was 4:30
A.M
. We returned to our room to grab our passports from the room safe. All the lights were on; our clothes were strewn about, as if they’d been spat from the flung-open closet doors; the furniture had been yanked out of position. Dionisius had come here first tonight.

“How did they find us?” asked Hilary as we crammed stuff in our packs. “Did they follow you?”

“They’ve been combing the hotel. They saw me near the Alpaca Wing last night. I thought they’d find you soon. I took the risk to find out what Pilar was hiding.”

“That dead man killed Pilar?”

“Yes.”

She sat down and bent her head so that her hair fell around her face like a dark veil. In the heavy light of the room, she looked thin and pale, wasted by boredom and worry.

We left the room. On our way through the hall we passed a maid, the first woman up in the morning. She smiled and wrapped her skirt tight to shrink herself as we passed.

“Permiso,” she said to me. “Señor Esmalls?” She held up a finger, as if she had a message for me. Had the staff been told to look for us?

I shook my head. She took out a Nextel from her apron. I kept walking. From farther
behind I heard another voice, a male voice, not Kenny’s, shouting “Stop!”

I turned a corner and ran, hearing only Kenny’s following thunder behind me. And Hilary’s.

I used Pilar’s passkey to slip through the door she had shown me, just last night. We struggled past the boiler and into the passage behind it. There was no light, but I knew it was a straight shot ahead. I grabbed Hilary’s hand like a lover and pulled her along, my other hand sliding forward on the wall to guide us. Behind us, Kenny yelped. He must have bashed his head. Finally my knuckles knocked on something hard. Far behind us I heard a door open and could suddenly make out my fingers in the gloom. I shoved the door ahead, and we were through into the cool air. It was almost sunrise. I shut the door.

“Where now?” asked Hilary.

“Down,” I said.

On a terrace high above us someone pointed and shouted.

We ran past the altars and down the hillside gardens, shouldering through shrubbery and trampling priceless tropical flowers, their bold colors a pewtery gray in the gathering predawn light. With his gasping breaths and heavy footfalls, Kenny sounded like a charging bison, but I couldn’t spare the breath to shush him. Hilary kept close behind me. Or maybe she just wanted me to take the first bullet. I didn’t know where we were going, but I knew that the road and the river were below, so I followed gravity and kept blundering down. Then the gardens were behind us and we had to slalom through an orchard of trees. Coffee? Banana? How big was this orchard?

We moved as fast as we could, waving our arms before us to intercept the branches whipping at our eyes. There was no wind, no sighing of the branches, and as yet no clamor of pursuit behind us. But they’d be coming. Back in the garden, we must have left a Sherman’s swath of destruction to follow. Or maybe they were ahead. Maybe they had a helicopter. There was a helipad at the hotel. I glanced up. You’d hear a helicopter, wouldn’t you?

It seemed that we spent years pushing through the trees, until the adrenaline wore off and my arms felt as heavy as clubs. At last there were no more branches. We were at the road. The clouds and the pink dawn made the sky as blotchy as the face of a feverish child. Kenny leaned back against a tree and puffed for his life. I sat down at the roadside and saw black fireworks. Now that my legs had stopped I could feel their electrified trembling. What a stupid place for a rest, I thought. We couldn’t stay by the road. But how else could we get to Coroico? I didn’t know any other path through the wilderness. As soon as I got my breath back I’d make a decision.

“Where are we going?” asked Kenny, between puffs.

“The nearest village.”

“Then what?” asked Hilary.

“Back to La Paz.”

Kenny slid his butt down the tree trunk until he was sitting and folded his arm around his eyes. He probably hadn’t exerted himself this much since high school gym class.

I had just gathered enough of my reluctant strength to stand when I heard what at first sounded like the wind rising and then the rumble of an engine. Hilary darted away, and I pulled Kenny behind a tree. It wasn’t big enough to hide both of us. I started to drag him farther back into the orchard when I realized the vehicle was coming from the other direction, not from the hotel, and it wasn’t an SUV or a minivan.

It was an open-backed fruit pickers’ truck, loaded with laborers, tottering over the rise. The first truck of the morning back to La Paz. Kenny gasped as I jogged out to the middle of the road and flagged it down.

It groaned to a halt, and the driver leaned out the window, his eyebrows squished together less in annoyance than in incredulity. In the growing daylight I could see the muck on my arms and pant legs. I flicked a wet leaf from my shirt and waved Kenny and Hilary over.

“Good morning.” I forced myself to speak slowly. “Can you take me and my friends to La Paz?”

The driver said nothing. Kenny’s backside was glistening with wet mud and grass; he must have slipped on the way down. Hilary stood beside him.

“Please,” she said.

“I’ll pay you twenty dollars,” I added.

I pulled a crumpled bill out of my pocket, smoothed it ingratiatingly on the truck’s filthy hood, and handed it up like a prayer. Twenty dollars was more money than any of those laborers made in a week. It bought us each a square foot in the back of the truck.

* * *

The bumps, backfires, and engine roar rendered conversation impossible. I would have been grateful had I not been devoting all my concentration to not throwing up. The overpowering smell of exhaust and people wasn’t helping my efforts. Kenny, to my surprise, seemed to bear the ride easily, perhaps because he had ridden rush-hour subway cars all his life. He even tried speaking to me over the chaos, but I couldn’t listen. His fair face rose over everyone else’s like a white flag. What if someone saw him and stopped us? But no one did. The truck never stopped at
all, not even at Chuspipata; perhaps it was too early for the soldiers to be up. Hilary huddled in the corner; the other riders gallantly allowed her a few extra inches of space. We all got splashed when the truck thundered under a waterfall, but we dried quickly in the sun. In El Alto, the driver let most of the men off and I managed to suppress my queasiness enough to leap off and negotiate a ride to the airport for another twenty dollars. The driver might have done it for free, but I wasn’t taking any chances. The snobby airport guards refused to permit a clattering truck driven by an Indian to pass the security gate, so the three of us climbed down and trotted the rest of way, gasping in the thin air, looking in all directions for we didn’t know what. I had felt so much safer in the truck, despite the nausea.

“I have to call Ray,” said Hilary, inside the sanctuary of the terminal. “I can’t just abandon him.”

“Leave Ray alone if you want him to live,” I said. “All you can do is go home.”

“We should have taken him with us.”

“Arturo wouldn’t have let us. He’s holding Ray hostage to make sure you don’t say anything stupid to the media. Just go home and tell everyone you dropped out of sight for a few months until you got sick of it. You were staying with a man you don’t want to talk about. You’re sorry, and now you’re home.”

“My parents, my friends, my boss—they’re supposed to buy that?”

“Why not? It’s just about the truth. Anyway, you better hope they believe it, if you want Ray to live.”

“When can I see him again?”

The answer was too obvious to state. “Do you have any money?”

Through all her hardships, she had managed to hang on to her parents’ credit card. “They must have canceled it by now,” she said.

“Maybe not. They were hoping someone would use it, someone they could track down. Preferably you.”

We spent some time cleaning ourselves up in the bathroom before attempting to haggle with the ticket agents. We bought Hilary a pair of sunglasses and a cap to tuck her hair under so she wouldn’t resemble the Missing picture. I decided we should split up, for Kenny’s sake—he winced whenever he glanced at her, which was every five seconds. I gave her enough cash for eggs at the café and a copy of
USA Today
and told her we’d see her later on the plane. She said she wasn’t hungry, so we left her browsing listlessly through sweaters at a gift shop and went to arrange our return home.

The LAB agents in Bolivia were, as always, solicitous of American passengers; our agent professed (in English no less) to be delighted to change my ticket, though she let slip that today’s
flight to Miami featured a stopover in Manaus, Brazil, thus adding several hours to the flight time. No wonder she had space. She let Kenny change his bucket-shop ticket too, but charged him $150. I expected a tantrum, but he just pulled out a credit card. I was half surprised he had a credit card. I wondered if Hilary would find changing her ticket as easy. Probably—as far as a gate agent was concerned, she was just another name on a computer, that of a rich, idle American who had missed her flight weeks ago.

“There’s food at the gate,” I said. “We’ll eat there.” Our flight wasn’t for another four hours, but I wanted to put Hilary, and more airport security, behind us.

At the gate, we agreed to stay alert and maintain a strict anti-napping policy until airborne, just in case. We bought empanadas and coffee.

“What was she doing with Ray?” Kenny said. “That dumb-ass. And what was your girl doing? Pilar.” He was poking at the innards of the empanada. I realized he was picking out the olives.

“Lying to me.”

“Hilary never lied to me. No one ever lies to me. So fuck me.” Kenny inserted a tiny piece of his empanada into his mouth and chewed slowly, ready to spit if it offended. Finally he swallowed, with a little nod to help him toss the morsel down. “But I found her,” he said. “That’s what I said I’d do, and I did it. So what if she never loved me.”

“You don’t know that,” I said. “Maybe she loved you for a moment, when she kissed you that time. Just because she changed her mind doesn’t mean she never loved you.”

Kenny rubbed his fork and knife together fretfully. “It’s like she’s dead.”

“But she’s not.”

“No. Pilar’s dead. It’s not right. I don’t care if she lied. I liked her. We should do something.” He was pleading. “Call the police. Shut down that hotel.”

“What good would it do? Dionisius is dead, and so’s Pilar. That’s everyone I care about.”

Kenny stopped rubbing and went back to scrutinizing his food for olives.

* * *

During the flight I was too espresso-wound to sleep. Hilary sat far behind us, dozing or pretending to doze. I shut my eyes and interrogated myself. What was I going to do next? Once home, I’d have to line up another guidebook gig, but how could I go on writing guidebooks? People who’ve suffered as I had need to change their lives; otherwise, suffering would be unbearably pointless. But how could I go on paying rent and buying groceries if I didn’t write
travel guides? Could I make it just on magazine work? I hadn’t been able to yet. I should have taken a job at a website while I had the chance. They would have laid me off by now, but maybe I’d have had the foresight to sell my stock options early. I knew I wouldn’t have been that smart. I decided I had to do something better with my life. I could become a schoolteacher in East Harlem. Unlike the other white teachers, I’d know when the kids were mouthing off in Spanish. I’d mouth right back at them, and the rest of the kids would cheer or woof or whatever kids did these days for the cool new teacher. Yeah, right. Those kids would eat me alive.

Since our first night together in the Ecuadorian jungle, and even after she dumped me by email, not a day had gone by when I hadn’t thought of Pilar at least once. When would I break the streak? What if it took years, or even the rest of my life? My regret would last many years longer than our romance. I should try to hate her, to hurry the pain to the grave, to molder there with Pilar’s body. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t even resent that she hadn’t loved me in the end. After all, I had failed her first. I was only sorry that her pride had robbed both of us of our best chance at contentment. She had been happy with me. I repeated the statement, and found it settled easily into my mind. Everyone is entitled to at least one article of blind faith.

I opened my eyes. Kenny was sleeping, his head slung against the airplane window, his mouth gaping in permanent surprise. Thank God he was going home.

At the Miami airport, I said farewell to Kenny, but we arranged to beer ourselves up again at Siberia later in the week. We shook hands, and he gave me the urban half hug he must have picked up from watching guys on the subway. “Phew,” he said when we released. “You stink.” I watched him watching Hilary, at a respectful but not excessive distance, as he drifted toward the gate for the flight to New York.