Free Westlake, Donald E - Novel 43 by High Adventure (v1.1)

“And this is my cousin, Luz
Coco.”
                 “How
you doing?”
                 “Sure,”
said Luz Coco. “Let’s go get your stash.”
                 They
all walked down the hill together, and Kirby got the two Glad Bags out of the
pocket in his door. “I don’t have enough papers for everybody. ”
                 “That’s
okay,” Tommy said. “We’ll get some toilet paper from the mission.” He spoke to
his friends again, and a disagreement took place. Hefting the Glad Bags in his
palms, Kirby leaned against his plane and waited it out. What the hell, there
was no hope anyway.
                 Kekchi
is a language containing a lot of clicks and gutturals and harshnesses even
when people are being friendly with one another; when they’re arguing about who
has to go over to the mission for toilet paper and therefore miss the beginning
of the party it can sound pretty hairy. But eventually two of the group
acknowledged defeat and went sloping away, glancing mulishly back from time to
time as they went, and Kirby joined the rest of them in a walk over his sun-bleached
hill and halfway up the next slope and around into a green and cheerful
declivity in which the 11 wood and Trond huts were placed higglety-pigglety on
both sides of a swift-moving, clear, cold, bubbling stream. “You bastards even
have water,” Kirby said. They were by now well away from his land.
                 Tommy
looked at him in wonder. “Jesus God,” he said. “So that’s what you’re hanging
around for. You bought that swamp.”
                 “Desert,
you mean,” Kirby said.
                 “You
haven’t seen it in the rainy season.”
                 “Hell
and damn,” Kirby said.
                 But
there was little time for selTpity. Kirby had to be introduced to all the
villagers—fewer than a hundred people, none of whom had more than a smattering
of English—and the party had to be gotten under way. The home-brew, which came
out in a variety of recycled bottles and jars, was a kind of cross between beer
and cleaning fluid, which in fact went very well with pot.
                 Tommy
said the village was called South Abilene, and maybe it was. Most of its
residents were actually very shy, prepared to accept Kirby’s presence—and his
donation—but otherwise staying well within their stoic dignity, though they did
express amusement when their two friends came back from the mission all out of
breath, carrying rolls of toilet paper and pamphlets explaining the Trinity.
                 These
were the descendants of the people who had built the temples. Their
relationship with the world had narrowed since those glory days; now, they were
farmers, jungle dwellers with only a tangential connection to the modem age.
Small villages like this were scattered through the Central American plains and
jungles, their Indian residents clinging to a simple self sufficiency, almost
totally separate from the technological civilization swirling around them. They
had given up both temple building and war; they neither fought nor praised, nor
even very much hoped; they subsisted, and survived.
                 Tommy
Watson and Luz Coco were the only South Abilenians fluent in English and, so
far as Kirby could tell, the only sophisticates in the crowd, whose
conversation and manner betrayed a wider knowledge of civilization. With their
halTmocking existential hip form of the traditional Indian fatalism, they were
like a couple of Marx brothers wandering through a Robert Flaherty documentary.
They were so total a contrast, in fact, that Kirby would have loved to know
their story, but they insisted he tell them first how it happened that he had
bought the farm.
                 “It
looked great when I saw it,” Kirby said. “St. Michael was just representing the
real owner, some big aristocrat up in