Читать книгу Cave of Little Faces - Aída Besançon Spencer - Страница 9

At the same time Jo was slipping out of the door of her classroom at David B, a world away in the land of Jo’s birth—the Dominican Republic—Basil and Starling Heitz were racing out of Puerto Plata as quickly as their rattle trap of an unreturned rental pickup truck could take them. The cause was a “misunderstanding” between them and a prospective investor over some salted iron pyrite in what they had purported to be a vein of gold begging to be mined on some otherwise nearly worthless terrain that they claimed to own in the usually lush farm land of the Cibao region.

Puerto Plata is a lovely, tourist-oriented city on the northern coast of the island of Hispaniola, renowned for its all-inclusive resorts, its golf courses, and its longtime, old-moneyed visitors, all of whom, as a village policy, were protected by the local policia. As a consequence, the Heitzes were speeding off into the interior on little Route 5. Their plan: cross the mountains before nightfall, work their way along the border of Haiti, and lose themselves in the peninsula that extended down to the generally undeveloped south, where they would definitely not be known. Here, in what they’d heard were the comfortable little cities of Pedernales and Barahona, they would once again see what fortune would bring.

So far it had not brought them much. They had come to the Dominican Republic after reading about a recent discovery of the gold that had eluded Columbus and his soldiers of fortune so long ago. Of course, they imagined themselves in a plush tropical paradise surrounded by millionaires who would throw money at them. They’d begun in La Romana, a city beloved by tourists as well as humanitarian and church mission groups, but nothing developed. The government years before had hired a Canadian firm to mine the gold and dreams of being 49ers Latin-style evaporated as fast as their meager capital. Puerta Plata beckoned, so they traveled north, but that was disastrous. So here they were at this moment, somewhere west of the mountain village of Platanal, as Route 5 yielded to a precarious winding road, identified only with the number 18, that went up and up and up. Dusk began encroaching upon the mountain fastness like a bad case of disclosure, until both of the erstwhile bunco stock conspirators realized that hiding in the hills was a very poor idea—to say the least. Star was the first to speak.

“What a dump!” she grumbled. “There’s like absolutely nothing up here! There’s not even like a gas station. There’s no restaurants. There’s no nothing!”

Basil offered a suggestion. “Shut up!” he growled.

“I will not! If you hadn’t oversold him, we would be at the casino right now.”

“Me? Me? You were the one talking about gold prices and the government disenchantment with the Canadians and how, if we just offered them four pesos out of every ten, we could clean up!”

“Well, you weren’t bringing it home! You knew he had some kind of surveyor set to check it out and some lawyer looking at the documents. What’d you imagine they were gonna find when they checked out our coordinates?”

“Well, how was I to know that old guy was sharper than he looked?”

“You never figure out anything in time. You just push on and on until the whole thing blows up.”

Basil glowered at her, but he had no answer to that, and they settled into a grim and completely unsatisfying temporary ceasefire, both licking their recent wounds, which cut a lot deeper than this little common skirmish.

Presently, Star said, “Bo, I’m scared. These roads are so little and there’s no lights and there’s no guard rails. The sides are falling away and it’s a sheer drop over the side. We haveta stop!”

Basil strained into the darkness. “I don’t like it either. We got gas—I look ahead—not like you said. But you’re right this time. We could run off the side and no one would find us.”

The little truck rolled slowly to a halt in the center of what now looked like a tiny path. There was no sound but the wind.

“I can’t see anything.” Basil opened the door and began feeling his way up the path. He came back almost immediately. “I don’t think anybody’s gonna come this way tonight. There’s no place to stay. We gotta make do.”

“I’m hungry.”

“Me too.”

“Where we gonna sleep?”

“Well,” said Basil pointedly, “we could pile the suitcases out on the roadside and stretch out in the truck bed.”

“Not on your life,” snapped Star. “Not my suitcases! They stay safe in the back. You can stretch out on the ground.”

“Right! And get eaten alive by mosquitos.”

“Well, what’s your plan?”

“We’ll just start at dawn.”

A night cramped in their little rental with the mosquitos banging against the windows like suicide bombers did little to improve their disposition. Morning entered gently like a blessing. Basil simply woke up, started the truck, and was winding down through little clusters of country houses when Star finally woke.

“Where’d all the shacks come from?” she yawned.

“We’re in a valley skirting the mountains,” Basil explained.

“Whatever. But I’m starved and I gotta go.”

The little wooden structure that served as a store offered them gasoline in little cans and, hanging from small hooks and dangling over the counter, dried, spicy jerky, which they ate ravenously.

Starling almost cried when she saw the accommodations in the shed back behind the store—a hole in the ground, no sink, and a slab of old wood simply leaning in to the entrance to serve as a sort of door, pulled open by a broken piece of rope dangling from a nail. This was the lowest they had ever fallen. Basil shared her sentiment as he gaped mournfully at the broken, filthy porcelain tray in a small, door-less aperture around the far side of the same shed. Neither of them said anything afterwards as they shared a little towelette for cleaning hands that Star had in her purse.

Munching on the rest of the jerky and drinking sweet carbonated bottled drinks that together made their stomachs churn, they were still able to notice that the poor little country villages had begun to multiply. Maybe civilization, as they saw it, wasn’t too far away. . . .

The land was arid now, like a wilderness, but makeshift roadside stands had also begun to appear before the little wooden and sheet-metal houses. Beside them sat entire families, selling whatever was in season and watching what came by. Star waved at one little family knot and they broke into big smiles and waved back. Maybe this wasn’t going to be so bad, she thought. And she felt almost good about it when they reached the border road at Dajabon and with relief turned south at last.

But the border was another world than the mountains, empty and desolate. Both Star and Basil felt their spirits sinking again. And, as they traveled, the northwestern border villages all matched their mood—depressed little places with empty-eyed people who stared at them as they drove swiftly past—and on the edge of each town cemeteries with all the graves broken open. “This place gives me the creeps,” shuddered Starling over and over again as they hurried through town after town. Another stop and the sun was beating upon them as on a voodun drum.

Then about six o’clock in the afternoon, the road left the border and continued winding south, past villages with more encouraging names like “Happy Angel,” “Granada” (Star loved that song and began to hum it), and “The Pines.” Star’s spirits began lifting again. Both of them were feeling as if they were on the brink of some kind of deliverance when suddenly a little city aptly named Descubierta—the “Discovery”—hove into sight. This was a lovely little town with an “up and coming” appearance punctuated by motorcycles zipping by like so many new ideas.

Basil paused before the village square and studied the benches replete with lovers lost in their mutual attraction, the tables with old men playing dominos, and, specifically, a mature family threesome sitting next to the road to whom he asked the name of the town in his “get-by” version of Spanish, awkwardly leaning over Star to do so.

The grey-haired man in the center of the trio spread his hands in either direction, smiled, and announced with invitational pride, “La Descubierta—a gozar.”

“He wants us to enjoy ourselves!” Star marveled and beamed on them with her hundred-watt smile, calculated as it was to dazzle marks out of their hard-earned reserves, effective up to thirty paces. Nice little town, she was beaming, let’s turn it upside down and see what shakes out. But, to the pure, all things are pure, and the trio took her enthusiasm for face value. This was, after all, Descubierta—“the Discovery.” And they knew there was much to discover.

Gauging a similar response in Basil, so it was probably unnecessary—but, she knew, it never hurts—Star decided to wheedle in her most reasonable and ingratiating tone: “Look, it’s after seven o’clock. We put some real miles in today, Bo. This town looks big enough to give us a good meal and a cheap place to stay. Last night was awful—we had to sleep all cramped up. We gotta get a good night’s sleep, if we’re going to go on tomorrow. Besides, I need a shower—and you definitely need one!”

Basil chuckled. “You’re right there, Schweetheart,” he replied in his truly miserable Bogart imitation.

“So, let’s discover the good life of Descubierta,” urged Star.

“Great idea! I think we could enjoy this town,” agreed Basil, grinning at Star and then nodding at the patient threesome. “Un hotel?”

All three smiled even more broadly, if that were possible, and pointed beyond the other side of the square.

Basil carefully inserted the little truck in among the motorcycles, pulled off an awkward K-turn, and navigated his way back along the road until they had left the central park.

“This is pretty,” murmured Star, looking out her window at the far side of the road, where a small waterfall, flowing from the mountains, passed under the street and filled a little valley in which people were wading.

Back on the left, on the next corner just after the park, was the hotel, a small two-story structure with a little restaurant on its ground floor, balconies above them for the front two upper rooms, and yellow and red flowers filling the entrance. A tiny parking area separated the building from the road, and into this Basil squeezed the little truck.

The proprietor, a garrulous and prosperously portly man of middle age, appropriately named Señor Feliz, welcomed them in with an infectious air of contentment. In a mixture of seven-eighths Spanish and one-eighth English, he displayed the wonders of Descubierta before them, as innocently as did Hezekiah show his treasures before the reconnoitering Assyrians. Yes, it was a relatively poor town, but the people were proud of it and hoped someday to complete the construction of the road on the northern outskirts of town. The main attraction was the “little faces” of the Indians. “You must not leave the area until you see the ‘little faces,’” he urged them.

So the next morning, bright and early, about the crack of dawn for Basil and Star—that is to say, about eleven o’clock—they headed off on the only lead they presently had: to see the “little faces.” When one is out to exploit, no avenue should remain unexplored.

No sooner had they left the comfort of Descubierta, however, than they made an unpleasant discovery. The construction Innkeeper Feliz had assured them was “in process” proved to be a torn-up road with no one either working on it or having worked on it for obviously quite a while. They rattled for a space through broken concrete and clouds of dust thrown up by a huge tractor trailer thundering by them and kicking up stones until Star demanded they turn back. But Basil doggedly bumped “on and on,” as she had accurately complained in the mountains. This time, however, he was rewarded by a stretch of recently paved highway and a clear straight-away as a mountain rose up on Basil’s side to their left.

“Bo,” said Star presently, “there’s something happening on my side. I think it’s water—I can see it through the trees.”

“You mean like a river?”

“Uh, I’m not sure. It’s all among the trees. It was like far away at the edge, you know? But now it looks like it’s spreading out and getting closer.”

Basil tried to strain over her and get a glimpse of what lay beyond the foliage on the right, but it was hard with the occasional bus or tractor trailer that nearly blew them off into the trees as it hammered through.

“I can’t see it exactly.” He gave up and kept his eyes on the road.

In a few moments, she said, a little worried, “Basil—it’s big! I think it might be . . .”

“Wait! Here’s the sign,” Basil cut her off. “I’m gonna pull over.” Basil tucked the truck in a tiny space at the side of the road, barely off the highway, and just at the edge of shrubs and small trees that rapidly spread downward in a sharp decline. He glanced at a huge wooden stairway that zigzagged up the sheer hill on his left, then he peered over past Star toward the right and the water she was indicating. “Wow, it does look like a lot.”

They didn’t bother to lock the truck, but headed immediately across the highway for the stairway. A huge sign on the left of the first rise of the stairs announced this was the “little faces” national site. A welcome booth was to the right, but it was locked up. No one was around. They started up the wooden staircase and at the first landing paused and leaned on the rail looking back over the road and now over the trees.

“Wow!” said Star.

“Good night!” said Basil.

They were confronting an astonishing sight—a huge body of water stretched in either direction, its far shore, for it had to have one, lost in the distance.

“Wait! We’re not in Haiti?” Star cried in a sudden moment of confused panic. “You didn’t turn the wrong way and stumble over the border—did you?”

“Of course not!” snapped Basil.

“Well, that looks like the ocean,” Star snapped back.

“No, it doesn’t! We just stayed in a city called ‘Descubierta!’ How could they have a city with a Spanish name if we were in Haiti?” he sneered. “It’s the lake we saw on the map in the guidebook—what did you do with the book?”

“It’s in the truck!”

Basil stared at her in his most commanding manner. Star stared back, unimpressed. Neither moved. Eventually, muttering something Star definitely did not want to hear, Basil lumbered back down the stairs, crossed over to the truck, leaned into the back, and began rummaging around in a pile of assorted odds and ends that either hadn’t been worthy of suitcase space or were assigned there in order to be “handy.” Somewhere under that mess, he fished out the book, identifiable as much by its battered appearance as by the stamp on it, which read, “Hamilton-Wenham Public Library, Hamilton, MA 01982,” one of Star and Basil’s many brief supply stops (in this case with a five-fingered library card) in the wavering trajectory of their uncelebrated flight.

He climbed back up with exaggerated effort, opened the book, and stuck it in her hand. “It’s a lake,” she admitted, and he was mollified.

Both of them continued their staring, more and more thunderstruck as they tried to form a mental measure of what was before them.

“This is colossal!” Star exclaimed.

“This looks undeveloped!” Basil observed.

“I think our idea might be here somewhere,” Star ventured.

“I think so too,” mused Basil. “But, we’ve got to find it. Let’s go back to that talky guy at the hotel and see if we can stir up a scam.” He started back down the stairs.

“Hold on!” called Star. “What about the faces?”

“Who cares about the faces?” yelled Basil back from the bottom of the stairway. “Come on!”

“I’ll tell ya who cares,” Star shouted back, “that ‘talky guy at the hotel’—that’s who!”

“Oh, yeah! You’re right! We can’t go back if we don’t look at those faces he was all worked up about.” He clamored back up the staircase. Another zigzag and they were up near the top. The mountainside indented a bit and in the hollow under a small overhang was a series of circles etched into the walls that looked like children’s carvings—little round ovals with dots that were obviously meant to be eye sockets with straight or curved lines for mouths. Some looked to them like they were “smiley faces.” To the right, at the edge of the cliff, stick figures and more faces on a huge rounded boulder, wedged into the mountainside, showed a commanding view of the sweep of the lake behind it with a small patch of thick trees before the shoreline began.

“How’d they get out there to do that?” Star marveled.

“Yeah, what’s it all mean?” wondered Basil. “Some of these look fake, like jokers imitated them, like that one with the ears and the big round circles for hair and the stick arms and hands, but I dunno.”

“Why are they just out here?” asked Star. “We haven’t seen anything like this in the mountains. How old are they? The people who put them up—what were they trying to say to the lake?”

“Or maybe to people coming in off the lake—maybe a warning,” wondered Basil, “but they look friendly enough.” He shook his head. “The government’s already got these here for free, so the lake is where we should be concentrating. That’s got acres and acres of shoreline—beachfront property! There’s got to be an angle here.”

Whatever the angle was, Star and Basil were getting less help than they expected from the innkeeper back in Descubierta. They kept plying him with questions about the lake: Did anybody own it? Did anybody use it? Who had the rights?

But he kept wanting to talk about the Taino Indians and the little faces and the fact that these simple carvings had been gracing this particular hillside for, maybe, a thousand years.

Finally, Basil broke in. “Look,” he said, in his best Spanish. “The Indians are great! The little faces are great! But the lake is great too! We,” he indicated Star and himself, “want to do something great with the lake.” Not much variety of expression, but he finally had the proprietor’s attention.

“You want to buy the lake?”

“Well not the whole thing,” explained Basil, “but, you know, some of the beach front—to help somebody set up something . . . like a hotel—wait,” he realized he was talking to an innkeeper with whom this idea might compete. “Not a hotel,” he corrected himself quickly. “Maybe a park.” “Theme park” was beyond him, so he added: “Water park.”

Señor Feliz became very serious and suddenly very quiet. He looked at both of them mournfully. “Oh, Señor, Señora,” he said, and all but patted their hands in a growing dismay. “You do not know the power of the lake or you would not be talking so. Before you make any plans or invest any money, you must go and see the lake for yourselves.”

“But we saw the lake,” countered Basil quickly, “from the stairway at the little faces.”

“No, no!” said the proprietor. “You saw the size, yes, but you did not see what the lake itself is doing. You must travel now to the south—around the other side of the lake. You must see for yourselves. Here is what you must do. Go now—it is still early—watch for the desvio.”

Both of them looked at him blankly. Star opened her little dictionary and asked him to spell it. He did. “It’s detour,” she said to Basil.

“Yes, daytuur,” tried Señor Feliz phonetically. “You watch for that and do not miss it. Take that road and you will come out by the great city of Jimani. After that you must go left down by El Limon. Do not miss either the daytuur or the later left turn. If you miss the left at Jimani and you work your way to Mal Paso, you will cross over into Haiti.”

Star shuddered. Being xenophobic, she and Basil could not think of Haiti as anything but a mass of spirit-possessed voodooists, thin, with crazed eyes, beating ceaselessly hypnotic rhythms designed to turn all strangers who haplessly stumbled across her borders into zombies. They had both seen far too many horror movies in their youth, and these had helped addle their brains into what they were today.

“I’ll write the directions down,” said Star nervously.

“Note them on the map,” suggested Basil.

The innkeeper produced a pen and made sweeping circles and arrows on the little partial page map in the light-fingered library book that belonged in Massachusetts.

“We won’t miss it,” said Basil.

“That’s because I’ll drive,” decided Star.

So, with two bottles of water, a couple of grape sodas, and the innkeeper’s best wishes, they headed out to discover the power of the waters of the lake. But, little could they know that the real discovery that might change their destiny, bring them fame at last, and even potentially provide a bit of fortune was just beyond the lake and waiting for them later that afternoon.