Читать книгу Cave of Little Faces - Aída Besançon Spencer - Страница 13

The afternoon was growing late, but Basil and Star were meandering along slowly now, savoring the fields of sugarcane, corn, plantain, and the orchards of coconut palms, mangos, lemons, and a variety of other delights.

“This is so beautiful,” Star repeated over and over again. All the land seemed so spacious and enchanting. A little run of stands perched beside the road with folks who looked a little different than those they had seen previously, and all of them were elderly. No one appeared to be under eighty among them. Still, when Star waved, they would nod and some would flutter a hand back in her direction. Thick trees and bushes surrounded these stalls, which seemed to sit next to tiny footpaths that disappeared back into the overgrowth.

A feeling of contentment suffused them both, not least of which was because of the meal that glowed within.

And then, to their left, they came upon a site that would be of great importance to their lives. A lovely meadow gave way to a beautiful floodplain and both of their mouths dropped open. A different lake, spacious and elegant, bordered by forested mountains on its far side and complete access through wetlands on their side, lay glistening in the slanting afternoon sun.

“Wow!” said Star.

“Double wow!” said Basil. “This is more compact than the big lake.”

“And way more beautiful,” added Star.

“It is at that.”

“And, look, there doesn’t seem to be anybody living next to it and it’s far off the road. It doesn’t look like it’s taking over.”

“You’re right!”

“And, look, Bo, there’s some kind of sign.”

Basil slowed to a stop, took in the sign, and then, without a word, turned into an empty gravel parking area before a small two-story building, newly painted in a festive light green. “This is an observatory,” he said to Star, rather unnecessarily because her grasp of Spanish was better than his.

A woman emerged with a big smile, delighted to receive visitors. This, she announced proudly, was Laguna Cabral Rincon on her side and Laguna Cristobal Rincon on the far side, depending on which side one was on, and, therefore, which side laid claim to it. For short, it was called “Lake Rincon.”

To their delight, they learned:

1. It was a government tourist spot, yes, but the land was both publically and privately owned.

2. It allowed fishing and boating, including sightseeing excursions controlled by the local towns.

3. In the morning, flamingos flew up from the lake and flew back in the early evening.

4. It had no crocodiles!

It was stirring information!

To the guide’s gracious invitation, they mounted the stairs to the second floor, which turned out to be a barracks for the police who guarded the lake (none of whom were present, to Basil and Star’s relief, as they were both allergic to police of any stripe or duty). The barracks provided visitors as well as the guardians with a wide porch that served as an observatory. The guide unlocked the small barracks and retrieved a huge handheld set of binoculars that she offered to them. First Basil then Star focused on the lake—it was breathtaking.

“Who are those people walking?” Star asked, training in on a small knot of women bearing large white bundles on their heads as they picked their way through footpaths in the green wetlands down toward the lakeside.

“The lake is very clean,” said the observatory guide. “They are Haitians going to wash their family’s clothing in the lake.”

“Hot dog!” cried Basil. “It’s so clean you can wash clothes in it!”

“This little lake has everything,” said Star.

“It does indeed,” confirmed the guide.

Back on the tree-lined highway, the Heitzes were no longer marveling at the plantains and palms and mangos and whatall. The dense foliage had now become an annoyance to them.

“We got to get above this all and get a decent view of what we’re talking about here. Maybe we can do the scam at the big lake all right, but this one suggests some kind of legitimate tourist business we can horn in on. I don’t see anything on this side like an amusement park or a boardwalk or anything. This all just looks like a nature reserve. It’s begging to be exploited—I mean—developed.”

“Right,” said Star. “New jobs for the locals. Lots of tourists. Sort of like Niagara Falls without the falls.”

“It’s a public service we’re offering,” said Basil.

Nearby they found what they were seeking. “How about I take the truck up this little mountain a bit and we can look this little lake over before we turn back? This way we don’t have to drive all around it.”

“That’s the ticket,” said Star.

Basil turned the truck off the main road and started up the hill. The view promised to be perfect, initially showing a stretch of the shoreline that looked a lot more barren than what they had seen below. But no sooner had they begun to climb when the dense foliage closed everything off. Basil kept ascending up and up, but every time he thought the foliage would break for a better view, the trees and vegetation still obscured it. “Let me look at the map,” he grunted, guiding the car to a little level place in a dip in the hill, leaving his foot on the brake, though it hardly seemed necessary since he was in a hollow space with the road rising before and behind them. “Let’s see if we’ve got any other choices for an overview.”

“I wonder what’s up with the blue line,” mused Star, staring out the window at the road, which she noticed now was cut into the side of the mountain like an unwelcome scar.

“I don’t see any other choice, but these hills,” grumbled Basil. “Maybe we’re gonna have to drive around it to get a better look, but that would be a mistake today. It’s bright enough now, but once night comes on—oh boy! There are no street lights and we want to be pulling into Barahona by twilight. We still need to find a place to stay. We’ve got a long way to go. There must be an opening some place in these woods!”

Basil took his foot off the brake, craning around, trying to see if he could get any decent glimpses of the lake between the trees, when an astonishing thing happened. He had put the little truck into neutral to pause and look at the map, but, before he could put it into gear, it suddenly began moving swiftly backwards—speeding rapidly up the incline behind him. “What on earth?” he exclaimed.

“Why are you driving backwards?” demanded Starling.

“I’m not driving backwards!”

“What are you talking about? You’re backing up the hill like at sixty miles an hour!”

“I’m not! This truck is doing it on its own.”

“Are you crazy?”

“No, watch this—I’ll show you what I mean.” Basil put on the brakes, drove down the incline to the spot around the blue marking in the road, and put the truck in neutral again. “All right, you see where we are?”

“Yeah, in a little mini-valley between two rises,” said Star, peering around.

“All right, watch this!” Basil eased his foot off the brake. The truck began moving backwards. He put on the brake and stopped it. When he released it, it started up the hill again at increasing speed. “Okay, this is weird!” he said.

“What on earth is going on?” cried Star.

“I have no idea,” he said, “but we’re gonna find out.”

“How on earth could a truck, without giving it any gas, take us up a hill backwards?” summed up Star, staring at Basil. “This is mystifying.”

“We got to ask somebody when we get to town,” concluded Basil.

Now theirs was a whole different attitude than they’d had before. Instead of savoring the countryside, they checked the map, got a gauge on exactly where lay their destination—the city of Barahona—then Basil floored the gas pedal and they went tearing down the road.

La Lista, a town of great interest to tourists, hove into sight. Its specialty was chairs, “manu”-factured from acacia wood in the fullest sense, that is, by hand, by artisans standing in the dirt front yards of homes under lean-tos, ten feet behind the stalls. This town made and displayed rocking chairs, high chairs, tiny children’s chair and table sets, great grandparent chairs, primary school chairs, teensy weensy doll house chairs, every imaginable chair, varied and intriguing—but not to Star and Basil, who simply flew by. The “sleeping policemen” (as speed bumps are called in Spanish) had been installed to catch—even demand—the attention of passersby. At each of these many speed bumps, the vendors called from their stands, as they always did, “Look, look, very white, very tan, new and lovely—very, very inexpensive.” Their neat little wooden houses testified to how popular their wares were to the gawking tourists they could size up and match to a chair before any of them had even maneuvered over the sleeping policemen, but the little truck bounced over the series of bumps at great risk to all its mechanical parts and tore out of town. Basil and Star were now on a mission.

By the time they reached Barahona, they were starving again, but now the wonderful smells of cocina criolla pouring out of the dining room of the hotel and casino combination they swiftly selected was not going to be enough to satiate them. This time they were hungering both physically and mentally. The answer to the mystery of the moving of their truck had to be a simple one, and every puzzle like that had an angle. Somebody here had to know.

Of course, they were right. Everybody knew the remarkable mystery of what caused a stopped vehicle to go backwards up the hill near Lake Rincon. But what Basil and Star could not have known was its puzzle—as immensely intriguing as it was—was not the greatest mystery that they had encountered unwittingly that day. An even deeper mystery lay, of all places, beside the little village of Villa Bahoruco into which they had stumbled for lunch—one so vast it had the potential to dwarf their sorry little schemes with an impact as tumultuous upon their lives as the lawyer’s life-changing letter had been to Jo’s.