Читать книгу Cave of Little Faces - Aída Besançon Spencer - Страница 12

If Basil and Star thought the little patch of unfinished road up which they had nipped to see the little faces was a cause of concern in the otherwise well-paved highway north of Descubierta, they were totally unprepared for what lay to the south. They had begun the afternoon’s adventure in good enough spirits, remarking how beautiful it all was, as the sight of the lake, now continually in view of the road, filled them both with its promise of a brand-new opportunity about to blossom. That they may have been misreading what that promise was exactly did not occur to them. So, even the poorer little towns to the south, desperately trying to ignore the lake’s own ineluctable agenda and carry on business as usual, did not daunt their enthusiasm.

“Nobody’s developed this,” Basil kept marveling, as Star now guided their little truck up the narrowing road that ran along the lake’s western shore. “Honey, I was looking at the map in the guidebook while you were sleeping this morning, and I think we should give Pedernales a miss.” He waved down Star’s immediate chagrin before it turned into a protest from which he feared there’d be no return. “I know, I know, it’s on the Caribbean Sea and all that, but there’s a huge mountain range between us and it—look at the map in the book—it’s called the Sierra de Bahoruco, and I don’t see any towns marked on it and no roads going through it, so, if they got ’em, they’re worse than what we’ve been through already. Plus,” he added quickly before she could speak, “the only way in is to cross the border into Haiti, and it’s a long meandering way back from there.”

“Wow,” said Star glumly, reaching over to open the glove compartment, where she now stowed the guidebook so it would always be at hand. They’d folded the pages around the map so it fell open at the spot to reveal that Basil was, sadly, absolutely right. As he had calculated, all her fears of Haiti were back into play, so she closed up the book, dropped it into Basil’s lap, and kept on driving.

“But, look, Star,” he added quickly, now that he’d taken one toy out of her hand, to replace it swiftly with another—a good strategy that he’d often used in a con. “If we take that talky innkeeper’s advice and keep going around the lake, I’m sure we can find some more decent-looking towns and figure out an angle for all this. Besides,” he laid down his argument’s clincher card, “this lake road runs straight to Barahona. That was one of our two targets. It looks huge, and it’s right on the beach.”

“Okay,” said Star to all this, as she too was convinced as much by the little map as by Basil’s argument that this underdeveloped area was their only choice if they were going to find a place to hide on the peninsula.

Basil had no idea what the northern shore was like, past the caritas, the mountain of little faces, but he suspected it was a lot like this western one: basically barren, relieved only by a few poor villages—but, hopefully, as well, some bigger cities. “Nobody’s developed this at all,” he murmured over and over again like a mantra, as he looked around pointedly for possibilities. As they drove, he would see an occasional little house between the villages and a few cows or a sheep or a goat with a kid scurrying behind it, making way for them. But, besides several large vehicles barreling by in the Dominican way, missing them by a hairbreadth and making the little truck shake, as the road was narrow, there were few if any cars on the road.

And then Star snapped him out of his reverie, announcing, “There’s the detour!”

Basil wrested his eyes away from the lake and realized that the comforts of Descubierta were long gone. The road was deathly white. The detour led into what appeared to be a quarry. The detour itself was no more than a very wide service path, filled with stones. The sides of the path were blanched with a cement-like dust. In fact, the whole area was a desolate plain, broken only by the road construction. No oasis like the lovely little town of Descubierta was anywhere in sight—and to their right, in the distance, a forbidding-looking chain of high mountains rising into the clouds.

“What’s that?” asked Star in a querulous voice, slowing the little truck nearly to a stop.

“That’s Haiti,” Basil said glumly, the map in the little book open in his lap.

She shuddered and started up the road, bumping and sliding along the stones and the ruts.

Basil glanced over at the lake. It looked equally forbidding now. It lay sullen, dissipating into a huge floodplain that had engulfed everything around it. All along its shore was a huge marshland of short swamp grass and the tops of engulfed trees. The water was obviously expanding at what must be a frightening rate. As he gauged it on the map, he noticed something else. “Starling,” he cried, “there’s another lake just like this, just to our right in Haiti! We’re actually going through a little bridge of land between these two lakes. I think they’re trying to meet!”

“Can’t these countries do anything about this?” Star demanded.

He stared at her. “I think the land is disappearing,” he said. He studied the map more closely and then came to another realization. “Star, do you remember when we were up on that ‘faces’ mountain?”

“Sure, what of it?”

“Did you see an island?”

“No, just water, and plenty of that.”

“Well, there’s supposed to be an island in the middle of this lake, right next to where we are right now—a place called Isla Cabritos.”

“Goat Island?”

“Yeah, you see an island?”

Star craned over, slowing the truck to a bumpy halt, and surveyed the great body of water. “No.”

“Me neither.”

“What are you saying?”

“I think it’s gone.”

“You mean the land is disappearing?”

“Right—it’s submerging.”

Star opened her mouth and then closed it again. She started the little truck bumping along the road at a heightened speed, but had to slow it down almost immediately, as they were so jostled about that she was having trouble keeping it straight. “We gotta get outa here,” was all she muttered.

The road at times dipped down below the cutaway hill and the mound of whitened dirt, making Basil feel like they were rattling through a valley of concrete, as indeed they were: thousands of small stones on a cement surface. But, always to the left, he could sense the lake, faceless, unfeeling, inexorably sending its water out to claim more and more land. The two lakes were reaching to each other with an underground handclasp only hinted at by this surface expansion. He shuddered. He did not like this lake anymore. Now he feared it.

“A truck!” cried Star, nodding her head forward.

A cloud of white dust shot up in the distance.

“A cow!” yelled Basil, pointing. There on the mound of dirt was a black cow lumbering along the crest. As the white mound beside them tapered off, they saw four more cows grazing on the stiff grass beyond the dust.

The truck rumbled by, and Star waved in delight. Then a motorcycle with two soldiers on it jolted by, and the road turned to the left.

“This looks like a city dump!” grumbled Basil. And, indeed, mounds of garbage replaced the mounds of dust. Some of it was burning, giving off an acrid odor. Cans and food waste and paper and clouds of flies spread for a quarter mile before they came to a perpendicular road with trees and shrubs on the other side.

Star turned left and started up the road, momentarily disoriented, assuming she was on the other side of the lake now and wanting to pick up the shoreline drive.

“Look, a crane,” said Basil, pointing to Star’s left. A beautiful white crane sat on a small tree limb, regarding them.

“There’s one on your right—a brown one,” said Star, and Basil turned to see an even larger brown crane in another small tree.

“There are cranes everywhere in these woods. . . .”

“Bo, look at the road ahead,” cried Star. She stopped the truck in the middle of the road. What they saw was a panoramic view of what looked like the dissolution of civilization. Twenty yards ahead, the road simply disappeared. No wonder nobody was on this road except for them.

Basil got out and started walking forward. To his right, no more than six feet from the highway they were on, water was among the trees. As he walked the first ten yards, the water came right up to the edge of the road. All the little trees and bushes were standing in water. Two crude little rowboats foundered half submerged in it. Parts of their wooden bottoms were rotted away. Neither had obviously been used for a long time. Basil guessed they had been contraband carriers, smuggling drugs or human cargo in from the foot of the mountains looming to the left. Perhaps here they transferred to trucks. More likely they were just poor little fishing vessels that had succumbed at last to sea worms or simple rot, but positing smuggling was the way his mind worked.

The next ten yards of walking took him to the edge where the road was simply no more. He could not make it out under the surface. Even the trees and shrubs petered out as the lake itself took hold. He glanced behind himself. There was the lonely stretch of road with their little truck and Star’s head in the driver’s seat twenty yards behind him, watching him intently. And, then, he turned back around. Here was land’s end. The road simply immersed and disappeared. Far away was the mountainous shore. He could see nothing on the other side but the foot of the mountain. Whatever the road had connected to was also long gone—and so would be the spot where he was now standing in just a short while. Basil backed up as if it were already happening—which, indeed, it was. The power of the waters. What was it exactly that the innkeeper had said? “You do not know the power of the lake or you would not be talking so.”

Basil jogged back quickly to the truck and got in. “The trees are full of cranes,” he muttered. “The road is so gone I can’t even see it—plus, there’s no connection on the other side. It’s all gone—completely.”

Without a word, Star threw the truck into reverse, backed it up quickly into a jolting K-turn, and barreled up the road. She flew by the detour turnoff and covered the short space to the intersection where this turnoff ended. There a group of young men and boys were cleaning off their motorcycles in an outpour of water that splayed across the road. “Which way?” she grunted.

“Right,” said Basil, looking at the map.

Immediately, homes and gas stations and stores began to pop up. Star pulled into the first gas station they saw, for the gas gauge had dropped dangerously low, “bending the needle,” as Basil always put it. He got out and eyed the attendant suspiciously. “Fooolll!” he said with the right intonation, and added, “Regulaar!”

“Fooolll ’er up!” smiled the attendant, popping the hose out and, sizing up Basil, he pointed to the meter, clicked it, and said in his approximation of English, “Zaaaro!” pointing with the nozzle at the zeros across the gauge.

Basil nodded and soon parted with the better part of three thousand pesos—about seventy dollars.

“Gas is expensive here,” whined Star when he got back in.

“You’re telling me!”

“It’s all going out, Bo, and nothing’s coming in,” she warned him as they plunged deeper into the city of Jimani, the last great outpost before Mal Paso and the beautiful inland lake of Haiti, reaching across to Lake Enriquillo like the hands of lovers beneath a table.

“I know, I know,” he snapped. “I’m thinking about it. I still think there’s something in this lake for us. We just gotta put our heads together. There’s an angle to everything that nobody’s got a claim on. This is all undeveloped. Well, I can see why, because the lake’s taking over everything. Okay, if that’s the way it is, that’s the way it is, but it’s still got an angle. We just got to find it.”

But the other side of Jimani did not look like it was going to yield any ideas to either of them. On the contrary, the road led them through a pass and down into a stark, completely undeveloped wilderness. The only sign of the human touch was the flotsam and jetsam of an occasional can or bottle or bit of paper lying here and there at great intervals beside the road or tangled in the low bushes.

Where Jimani had boasted a “Palace of Justice,” a concrete and cement works, even some farms, this great plain was desolate, empty except for distant mounds of dirt and little patches of dusty shrubs that stretched far away to hills in the distance.

Behind them loomed the high Haitian mountains. Storms had gathered at their tops as if warning them not to cross over, having enough trouble of their own already to need a Basil or a Star. Happily for Haiti, neither of them was capable of considering it, though they missed a beautiful land and gracious people on the other side, since all they could see was the horror in their own minds. Similarly, all they could see on this side of the mountains was emptiness: the empty road, the empty plains, the empty hills in the distance. Worse yet, the lake was no longer in sight and the road had veered a distance off. In fact, it was so empty that every once in a while now a huge tractor trailer came running down the center of the road like an airplane taking off, using the center line for guidance, and then crowding over to the right lane, whizzing past them, then centering itself once again in the middle of the road. All that lined the highway, besides the bushes and small trees, was a lonely stretch of telephone poles, the only thing connecting the country to itself. When one of these poles sported a wind-battered poster for the election of a prospective president, Basil pointed it out. Then a little house came up by the side of the road in the middle of nothing but scrub on either side. Basil shook his head in wonder. Far off, on a distant mound of dirt he soon saw two men digging with spades. How had they gotten there? Why were they bothering to dig in one of many similar mounds scattered across the empty plain? Why would anyone want to live in such a place? He had no idea.

When the town of Limon—“the Lemon”—came up, it was like a benediction, announcing the end of the desolation. The land was still arid, and the very old and tiny wooden houses that sheltered the people seemed very poorly made from mere scraps of wood. But at least there were people. Then a number of cement houses began to appear around a large National Guard compound. Next to this, in what passed for the center of town, stood a dry little square alive with children playing and graced by the bust of a Taino Indian. The children were climbing up next to it and playing at its base as if clinging to it for protection. A little farther on, they saw a poster of Jesus Christ and a message about deliverance in his grace. The Savior and the Indian seemed connected. Even Star and Basil could feel a healthy exuberance about Limon, perhaps, they thought, because they also noticed an enormous sign announcing a government agricultural project commencing. All in all, despite the dryness of the land, they felt they had come out of the wilderness at last. The terrain was still arid, but they had seen people and they crossed the rest of the great plain, ignored the mountains of Haiti to their right, and then, to Basil’s relief, began to glimpse again the great lake in the distance.

Now traffic was picking up somewhat. That is to say, occasionally Star would notice a motorcycle fly by, but Basil had become completely preoccupied with straining in the distance for the shoreline, since the road had diverged quite far from it. By midafternoon, the lake was now completely back in sight. At first it was still some distance away, and then it got gratifyingly closer, and then even closer, and then it began to get uncomfortably close. Suddenly, Star started slowing the little truck down, pulling as far over to the side away from the lake as she could go, but that wasn’t very far since at the same time the hills had been encroaching and a sheer wall of rock had begun to hem them in. As she slowly crept ahead, they could see the lake side of the road falling away rapidly to a descending slope beyond which were the rippling waters. At first a few goats and cows and a little wooden house or two and even palm trees would fill the space between the road and the lake, but, as they drove on, they began noticing the road was lowering. Star was glancing at it continually as she drove slowly on. Every few yards it was dipping down, and the space between it and the lake was still narrowing. So she began pausing every few yards. All this time, Basil was staring intently at it.

“Bo!” she said.

“I know!”

There was no doubt about it now. The road was descending to meet the lake. Waters that had been some fifty yards away were now only thirty, then only ten, then lapping up among the trees. Shortly, the lake was beside the road. And then the road dipped down out of sight, and Star came to a sudden halt. The lake had crossed the road and begun to fill the other side, lapping up against the foot of the mountain wall that had been their far-side border. All that either of them could think about was the road submerged to nothing back on the western lakeside above Jimani.

Basil got out once again and surveyed the water over the road. “This is deep,” he called back to Star.

Her head was down, and then she leaned out the window and waved the guidebook at him. “Watch out!” she called. “I just noticed they got crocodiles in this lake!”

Basil jumped back. “Crocodiles? They don’t have crocodiles in this part of the world!”

“They do here! According to the book, they put ’em in here.”

“Geez!” said Basil. “Who would want to put crocodiles in your water?”

“Says they’re supposed to be a tourist attraction.”

Basil shuddered and peered more closely at the waves.

“Says they’re shy,” shouted Star.

“Sure! Shy!” Basil picked up a long stick as a tomato truck rattled by, splashing the water around, and spilling several fruit as it bumped back up on the road ahead of him. Basil waited until the stirring subsided, then stuck the stick in and saw it was up several inches. “We shouldn’t go into this,” he yelled back. “We’ll lose our brakes or—worse yet—get stuck.”

“I don’t wanna get stuck in some crocodile-infested lake.”

“Me neither. But what can we do? We can’t go back all that distance—and we got nothing to go back for. Lemme drive.” He squeezed into the driver’s seat, which Star, by this point, was glad to relinquish, and then he grunted as much to himself as to Star, “The other truck made it.”

“It was three times our size!” Star pointed out with a nervous gesture.

But Basil just backed up a bit, then rammed his foot on the gas, and barreled ahead, splashing and sliding through the water until their little truck skidded up an incline on the other side.

They both heaved out sighs. Star laughed and patted Basil on the shoulder, and they forged on now with determination, ignoring the heavy trucks that whirled by, splashing through the invasion of the lake until they left it all behind them.

“This might be our future here,” mused Basil, “if we can find a partner with some capital.”

“Whaddaya mean?” asked Star.

“I’ll bet we can buy some of this disappearing property real cheap and sell it to easy marks on the internet. All we got to get is a downpayment and then take off with it. It’s not like they didn’t get anything for their money. They got exactly what they paid for. It’s beachfront property—at least for now. . . .”

“Right!” said Star, catching the vision. “We don’t wait for them to come and see it to pay the rest of the payment! In fact—we can’t!”

“Exactly!” said Basil. “In the meantime, we can take some pictures, which will look great. Real honest-to-goodness beachfront property. They don’t need to know what it’s gonna do in a year or two. For now, though, let’s keep on going toward Barahona to get the lay of the land. I think we should spend a little time just checking out this huge opportunity.”

“And the crocodiles?” asked Star.

“Jungle theme park,” grinned Basil. “I’m getting a lot of ideas.”

“Yeah,” said Star chuckling, “Then it can become completely ‘Crocodile World.’”

Basil laughed and they rode on.

Hungry as they were, they felt good. Perhaps the credit for Star and Basil’s new positive attitude toward the southern region of Laguna Enriquillo should go to the fact that they now had a handle on a workable scam. That always lifted their spirits.

Perhaps the reason for their lifted hearts was that they had finally begun to leave the lake itself behind and no longer had its terrifying commandeering of the land so uncomfortably in front of them. In other words, their response was proportional: As the lake receded behind them, so did its terror. They were, after all, immediate sort of people. Their final lingering look at the great lake was through a strange portal in a large, grayish white wall of cement, with sidewalls that stopped halfway back, making a three-sided enclosure, but with no rear wall. Its entrance was a large opening with a cross at the top and the result was that it framed a panoramic view of Lake Enriquillo for those who stood before it. Paradise, one might say, through a portal. And this is exactly what Basil did say.

“This is great! Great!” he enthused. “We got to get a picture of this. Welcome to your summer home! Beauty! Boating! Fishing!”

“Crocodiles!” muttered Star, but he ignored her. He had his hands up making squares with his fingers, imaginary lenses through which to capture the best shot of the water.

What he didn’t know was that he was standing at the entrance of an unfinished cemetery. The town was hoping as the years went by to afford to complete it.

Another possibility for their positive attitude was the astonishingly lush beauty of the land to the east of the lake. They had been through some beautifully prosperous fields of plenty, but nothing bested the region southeast of the lake. There was a hand at work in these fields that would arrest the attention of anyone. The magic of the land’s obvious comestible wealth was working on Star’s appetite. In a matter of minutes, she began complaining, “I’m hungry.” They had left Descubierta at noon, but without the foresight to pack a lunch.

Basil smirked, however, reached awkwardly into his pockets, and began dropping things into Star’s lap.

“What’s this?” she demanded.

“Tomatoes. Wipe ’em off. That should hold you until we get to a food chute!”

They rode along, munching the tomatoes that had dropped from heaven, or at least off the tomato truck at the first spillover of the lake, and these allowed them to be a bit picky as several food stands flew by and then they entered a lovely little town named Villa Bahoruco.

“I see a television antenna!” Star exclaimed.

“I smell food!” Basil agreed.

“I wanna stop here!” demanded Star.

“Done!” grunted Basil, and he pulled in by a neat little roadside restaurant out of whose kitchen poured the wonderful smells of cocina criolla, traditional Dominican food. Soon they were feasting on rice and beans in a thick warm sauce, chicken grilled in garlic, fresh salad, and—to their delight—platano maduro, the sweet banana-like vegetable that was a Dominican staple, good for breakfast, lunch, or supper in all its many guises. This time it was sautéed in cinnamon and honey.

“What a lovely little town,” enthused Star.

“It’s the best looking one we’ve seen yet,” agreed Basil. “Best” for Basil meant prosperous and, sitting as it did in the midst of great fields of waving green plantain orchards, lined with protecting coconut palms, and filled with mango trees, it was lush and luxurious, particularly after the stark wilderness from which they had just felt themselves delivered.

So, a very contented Basil and Star strolled from the reasonable little restaurant, paused before their truck, and got their bearings from the little guidebook. Now, with full stomachs, they envisioned from the map’s promise that the rest of the trip was, indeed, a fairly straight shot to the coast and to the major city (by peninsula standards) of Barahona. More lush greenery spread ahead as far as they could see. And, as they traveled along, their first impression seemed accurate enough. A number of fair little towns and beautiful hills suggested to both of them this was, indeed, a perfect place to set up shop and exploit their idea.

But, just as they were ready to hunker down in Barahona and start to put the scam together, they made another intriguing discovery.