Ghost Lights

4

He had to hire a car from the airport, a four-wheel-drive taxi in the form of a mud-spattered jeep. When he got in, vaguely remembering film-noir detectives, he rummaged around in his case and brought out a picture of Stern to show the driver. This opened the floodgates, apparently, and whenever he was beginning to drift off in his seat, whenever he thought that maybe, by dint of the long moments of contemplation and engrossment, he was on the edge of coming to a new pass — a discovery or at least a mental accommodation about him and Susan, or more specifically him and Susan and Robert the Paralegal — the driver would interrupt his train of thought with a question of triumphant banality. Then when Hal grunted out a minimal acknowledgment he would offer up a few words about his country, words so flat and devoid of content that Hal drew a blank when called upon to answer. “Beautiful.” “Nice weather, you know?” “We got beaches. You like the beach?”

There was nothing to say to any of this, though each remark seemed tinged with the expectation that Hal would answer with great and sudden enthusiasm.

Susan was a natural at responding to empty phrases, though she did not enjoy it either. He had watched her on occasion, dealing with, say, a person in a service transaction who was inclined to chitchat. She made soft murmurs of assent, often, nodding her head and smiling as she listened and, in a gesture of fellowship, asking questions so minute and tailored to the other person’s mundane interests that he could barely believe she was expending the calories to produce them. It was an exhausting effort for no clear payoff.

Casey, on the other hand, never did this. She would go so far as to rudely announce that she didn’t do small talk. And because of the chair, would be his own guess, she got away with this without blame or comment.

Twice the car stopped unexpectedly at a gas station and the driver got out, then loitered talking to other loiterers with no apparent purpose. Meanwhile Hal waited in the car, impatient and unmoving, full of rising resentment, until ten minutes later the driver got in again without bothering to proffer an explanation. A Caribbean cultural practice, possibly. Possibly Hal would be rewarded one day for broadening his cultural horizons.

It was three or four hours at least to the resort where Stern had been staying — first on a two-lane highway that meandered up and down hills with a view of the sea, then on a long red-dirt road down a narrow peninsula. Most people flew directly to one of the resorts on the coast and landed on a private airstrip, skipping the inland road where barren fields and dirty urchins with stick-legs would dampen the holiday mood.

Whenever settlement hove into view it was shacks with graffiti on them, snarled wire and molding, flimsy pieces of particleboard in place of fences and walls. There were fields of dirt where nothing grew but bald tires and garbage, smoke rising from ashcan fires, and no cars or trees or vegetation outside the hovels either, only bare expanses of soil with an occasional weed. Sometimes a woman or child or dog could be seen wandering through, emaciated; one old woman he saw through a fence with a ragged, open sore on her calf. He caught a glimpse of some skinny kids playing soccer outside what was probably a schoolhouse, which cheered him a bit until he also noticed, beside the stretch of baked earth where the boys were playing, a corrugated-metal rooftop. Underneath it two other boys were carving up a dead animal. He could not tell what it was.

Here and there a bedraggled brown palm tree struggled to look exotic. Forests must have been felled, for sometimes he caught sight of a clump of shiny-leafed bushes and trees in brief straggles of green against the backdrop of dirt and rust, with stumps around them that looked like they’d been hacked at with machetes. Once he saw a column of smoke on a low hill in the distance.

“When will we get to Placencia?” he asked the driver.

“Not too long, not too long,” said the driver unhelpfully.

The peninsula had been hit hard by the storm. There were still power lines down, and here and there a telephone pole lay tumbled in wire beside the road. It was strange to him, the poles left where they fell — as though there was no machine here to move them and make the roads safe again, no vigilant authority.

The sky faded into a velvety dusk as he watched it through the window, thinking: I came here to escape my wife. My wife who may not love me after a quarter of a century.

Now he was far away from her, in a strange place. He was almost nonexistent; he was nowhere and known by no one.

• • • • •

It was only the next morning that he got a look at the hotel grounds. Out his window he could see the ocean, a few small boats without sails, and near the dock white-skinned guests sitting atop the glittering water in colorful kayaks. The water, he thought, was gray-blue, not what they led you to expect in commercials for Hawaii or the Bahamas — not the emerald or turquoise transparence of a kidney-shaped pool. The color was less stunning, more familiar. Crews worked in the gardens, making flowerbeds, laying turf and digging. There were many of them, men in straw hats with shovels and wheelbarrows.

He would eat, take a walk. It was safe to admit it, since no one was listening: he was not here to find anyone. Not here to exert himself, but rather here to melt down, settle, coalesce, and rise in a new form. . still he could occupy himself a few hours a day with a search of some kind. That was fine. It would give him something to do.

At his table in the restaurant, which overlooked the pool and beyond it the sea again, he gazed out the window. Children played in the pool, spitting long gouts of water out of their gap-toothed mouths. He watched a little boy bounce on the diving board and could not help seeing the boy’s head split open as it connected with the concrete bottom, spinal trauma and then, as usual, Casey. It was a sign of his partial recovery that he was falling back into his old habits of thought again, the worn ruts of his neural circuitry — back to Casey and her injury instead of Susan.

But then even this flicker of Susan opened up the whole scene again. She and Robert in the bedroom or on the floor of the office; himself, papery and sad in the blurry distance.

So there was no recovery yet, after all.

He should not think too much. As a rule he set too much store by thinking. Or at least, complacent in the knowledge that thought was the most useful tool available to men — and one so often neglected by his fellow Americans — he relied on it to the exclusion of other ways of filtering information. Thought was the act of conscious cognition but there were alternative processes of the mind that could work around or alongside it, processes of slow and growing awareness that did not register until they were complete, or the accretion of vague ideas that suddenly produced a form.

Thinking alone had not given him an answer to Casey’s situation and it would not give him an answer to his and Susan’s either. That was his prediction. He should walk on through his day and let the passing of time mold him; time would go by and he would see what to do. This was a vacation — and after the four long years of aggravation that Stern had given him, all the grating secondhand descriptions of his mini-malls and cookie-cutter subdivisions, it was right that Stern should receive the final bill.

Eggs arrived, with a slice of papaya to remind him of his location. Lest he mistake them for Hackensack eggs or eggs in Topeka, the papaya came along to announce they were tropical eggs, to remind him that congratulations! — he was on a tropical vacation.

He ate the eggs and even the papaya, which had an overly luscious, sweaty taste. He went to a rack and picked out a newspaper, then came back to read and drink his coffee. It was a day-old copy of USA Today. This was not a newspaper he chose to read at home — too many colors on the front page, for starters — but it was nice to let his eyes rest.

Sometimes he glanced out the window, past the pool at the stretch of beach: a few of the ubiquitous palms, a hammock, some beach chairs and umbrellas, flapping a bit in the breeze, a pile of upside-down red and purple kayaks and a man raking sand. This was less opportunity, he thought, than the simple end of something. Pebbles and sand and waves softly lapping. For their vacations, people liked to arrive at the end.

He himself would have chosen something with height, cliffs or mountains — something with grandeur and scale. Sure, the water was mild here, and there had to be a coral reef or two. But he saw mostly a blankness, a place that was less a place than an erosion into nothing. That was what he had seen when he stood on the shore that morning — the flat ocean lapping, the flat sand beneath his feet. Maybe tourists came here because they actually missed flat blankness in their daily lives. The flat blankness was possibly a reminder that there was an end to everything, a reminder they lacked while they were going to work and running errands in their suburbs and cities, where they were constantly required to answer the stimuli. Maybe they yearned to be in a place where there was little to see but a line between water and air.

He went back to the paper and listened to a conversation behind him as he scanned the headlines. He could not see the speakers, a man and a woman, could not turn to look at them without being noticed, but he could tell they were young.

“You can do the scuba class but I’m not doing it. No way.”

“Come on! Come on. Do scuba by myself?”

“This one guy I read about who’s a diver in the Marines or something? He got the bends and he ended up with these little pockmarks all over his face. Like bad acne. Plus he got double vision.”

“You won’t get the bends, OK? This would be at maybe twenty feet deep. They call it, like, a resort dive or something. To show that it’s basically for wusses that would sue them if anything happened. The risk is like nothing.”

“It can also hurt your brain. Or you can choke on your own vomit. You know who choked on their own vomit?”

“I’m getting the Belgian waffle. What are you getting?”

“Hermann Goering. Little-known fact.”

“What are you talking about? The guy took a pill! Believe me. I saw it on the Hitler Channel. He was going to be executed like a few minutes later.”

“May I take your order?”

“I’d like the egg-white omelet? With mushroom and tomato?”

“And I’d like the Belgian waffle.”

“Very good, sir. Coffee?”

“Wait. Does that come with like just regular fruit or that jelly-ish, bright-red fake-strawberry stuff? Know what I mean?”

“Seasonal fruit, sir. Today it is fresh blueberries.”

“OK. Yeah. OK then, I guess I’ll get the waffle.”

The woman addressed the waiter.

“Sorry. We’re on our honeymoon. He’s not usually so picky.”

“Are you kidding me? Picky? That stuff is like fluorescent. It’s full of Red Dye Number Three. Erythrosine. Heard of it? It’s a known carcinogen. It causes cancer in mice. They feed it to those little tiny white mice and then the mice sprout tumors the size of a cantaloupe. Man. They can barely even walk lugging those things around.”

When Hal got up to leave he saw they were pale and thin and black-haired — out of place in the resort, where most of the families were blond, overweight and Midwestern-seeming. Temporary refugees from SoHo, possibly. In fact he had not been to SoHo since the early 1970s but he imagined young people there might resemble these two.

•

“Excuse me,” he said to the clerk at the front desk. “You have a Xerox machine, right? I’d like twenty copies of this, if possible.”

He passed across Stern’s photo.

“One moment, sir,” said the clerk, a lofty woman with prominent cheekbones and beads in her hair, and went through a door. He would be expected to check in periodically with Susan — every couple of days, he thought, and wondered how he could get around it. He would fax her reports, that was it. Cheaper than international calls, was how he could justify it, and people liked to receive or send a fax. They liked to say the word fax, said it with abandon. No doubt its moment would be brief.

Personally he preferred telegrams and mourned their passing. He could remember getting one from his father when as a college student, traveling in Italy, he had called his parents in a panic and asked for money. His father had wired it to an American Express office and sent a telegram to Hal’s youth hostel to tell him this. It contained only the AmEx address and the words Next time beg sooner.

“There you go,” said the clerk, and smiled with white straight teeth. “Twenty.”

“Bill it to my room, would you? Thanks. 202,” he said, and as he went out thought she resembled an African queen.

It flashed through his mind that he, too, should have an affair, if only to prove he could, but then he knew this for a juvenile impulse.

He stopped in at the manager’s office and left a message with the secretary. He wanted to hear what the hotel knew about Stern’s trip up the river and what had become of the belongings from his room. He handed his business card to the secretary as he was leaving and she smiled at him sweetly.

At home the card struck fear, or if not fear a kind of casual contempt.

In the hotel gift shop he bought a local map, a baseball cap against the noonday sun, and what appeared to be a child’s backpack — they had none for adults and damned if he was going to carry his briefcase like a stodgy old fucker. The backpack was emerald green, festooned with frogs and lizards. He slid the photographs into the pack and ordered a taxi at the front desk, where the queenly woman had been replaced by a thin man with a pencil mustache. He had the address of Stern’s foreman in the papers Susan had given him and he gave this to the driver when he stepped in.

The road was deeply rutted and the jeep had no suspension, so he bounced on the hard seat as they drove. Out the window he could see restaurants in rickety buildings on stilts, named after animals and painted in pastel colors. They had a temporary, slipshod appearance and were often combined with homes or small convenience stores; faded soda logos graced the storefronts and fluttering laundry hung on clotheslines out back. The thin walls would only suffice in this warm, mild place, where no protection from the cold was needed.

There was a garish, yellow-green color to the palms and other trees, gaudy and somehow translucent. He did not believe in the permanence of the trees any more than the buildings. He had read that many of the trees and flowers here had been shipped in from far away — Tahiti and Australia.

The peninsula was a glorified sandbar, he thought, waiting to be washed away by a towering swell.

As the jeep jerked along in the ruts he saw debris collected against the base of palms, clustered along hedges — food trash mostly, cardboard and plastic, but also netting and newspaper and old shoes and wrinkled pieces of mildewed rug or fabric. They turned left at what seemed like a construction site, many small shacks going up all over the place on the slick, muddy ground.

It was like a minefield of outhouses, he thought.

“Seine Bight,” said the driver.

“This?” asked Hal, before he could stop himself.

“Rebuilding,” said the driver, nodding. “You know: it was all knocked down. In the big storm last month.”

They drove between the shacks, not on a road at all as far as Hal could tell — bumping over the corrugated curves of culvert pipes, weaving and tipping sideways. A white bird, duck or goose maybe, flapped out of the way and children ran alongside the car. He was enraptured by this, stared out the window at the flashes of light on skin, the kids’ stretched and laughing faces. Then quickly the field of shacks was behind them again, the beach and ocean not so far ahead, and on their right in a grove of palms was a colorful small house with a nice garden.

“Here you go,” said the driver.

“Please wait,” said Hal, even though they had it all prearranged. “I won’t be long. Maybe fifteen minutes.” He recalled the driver from the airport, how he had randomly stopped at service stations and once leaned against a wall, doing nothing but gazing at the ground. The driver had kept up the pose so long that it seemed he was dutifully observing an officially appointed function.

The contract between driver and passenger here was a loose one.

He walked up to the house and knocked on the door, thinking he wished they had a telephone so that he could have called to warn them, but goddammit, while he was standing there waiting he heard engine noise and turned and sure enough there was the taxi pulling away again. He had the urge to run after it screaming — half-turned from the front door to do this, even — but then figured maybe the driver needed to use the toilet or some other mild embarrassment. Surely he would be back in fifteen.

Still. Couldn’t he have said something? What was it with these people?

Impatient and a little anxious, Hal waited until the door opened. It was a short woman, her black hair tied back with a red ribbon. She was dull-eyed and barely looked up at him.

“Excuse the interruption,” he said. “I’m looking for Marlo?”

“He is out working,” said the woman.

“Can you tell me where I can find him, then? It’s about Thomas Stern. His disappearance.”

The woman nodded vaguely. “He’s at the big hotel. The Grove.”

“Oh you’re kidding,” he said, exasperated. “I just came from there. It’s where I’m staying.”

She nodded again, unsmiling.

“All right,” he said lamely, and turned to go. Then turned back. She was already shutting the door. “Listen, could you tell him I’m looking for him? If we miss each other again? My name is Hal Lindley. Here, here’s my card. Wait, let me write my room number on it. He can stop by whenever. Room 202.” She had to open it wider again for him to stick the card into her fingers. “Thank you.”

After she closed the door on him he stood there for a long moment letting the foreignness absorb him. He had an impression of being out of place: that was what it was, ever since he got here. Even more now, near the village that was in ruins, than at the hotel, of course, since the resort was populated by people he could just as easily have run into on the streets of Westwood.

He looked down at the details of the doorknob — a cheap brassy color — and the frame, which was painted purple. Marlo’s house was not an American house: nowhere in America would you find a house like this. The difference might be in the physicality of the doorframe, the stucco, he couldn’t put a finger on it. Possibly it was more asymmetrical than he was used to, or the lumber was a tree species unknown to him. But somehow there was an irregularity, a foreignness. It seemed to discourage him, imply he was not natural here. He was an intrusion.

Or maybe he had forgotten, over time, how familiar elements everywhere had a steadying influence. At home there was the security of known formulations and structures all over the place, in window fastenings, in the door handles of cars, gas pumps, faucets, sidewalks, restaurants, shoes. Products and habits were so deeply linked it was hard to separate them. And their reliable similarity helped keep him on an even keel, apparently, had given the world a predictable quality that made passage through daily life calm and easy: he glanced around when he was out in the world and he recognized everything. There was almost nothing that jolted him, almost nothing in the landscape that broke him out of his reverie of being.

He had not considered it before, this effect of mass production. Could it be that the very sameness of these commodities, these structures both small and large that gave the physical world its character, afforded a certain freedom from distraction? The ill effects of their sameness, of this standardization and repetition were talked about and studied — how their homogeneity devolved the world and denuded it of forests and native peoples and clean water and difference. But now that he was far from all the standard objects and dimensions what he noticed was how they also gave a feeling of civilization. In their reassurance they conferred strength on the walking man — strength and the illusion of autonomy.

On his way down the garden path he noticed the skull of an animal. It was stuck on a fencepost among flowers — a goat, he guessed from the horns. It still had a little meat on it.

His taxi was nowhere in sight. He stood for a few seconds, waiting, and then started walking back along the troughs of baked road-mud to the village.

• • • • •

He could not find Marlo on the hotel grounds and soon he gave up looking, found a lounge chair beside the pool and ordered a midday beer. He planned to sleep afterward, and was looking forward to it with a kind of greedy anticipation, when the manager of the resort bent over to talk to him. Hal blinked at the blinding light of the sun, saw the man’s broad face recede as he sat up.

There was a small valise of Stern’s clothes, the manager said, which he would have brought up to Hal’s room. Beyond that he feared he could not be helpful; he knew nothing but the name of the town where Stern had rented his boat, and what he had already told Mrs. Stern. It was a very small village at the mouth of the Monkey River, so small it made Seine Bight look like a crowded metropolis. You could only reach the town by water, said the manager, which was why it was so small. There were no roads overland.

The boat itself, said the manager, had come floating back downriver to Monkey River Town during the night. He had told Mrs. Stern all of this. The boat had struck a dock and become wedged underneath, and kids had found it in the morning. They had noticed nothing out of the ordinary. It had been cleaned and tied up but that was all that the manager could tell him. If he wished to learn more Hal could visit the tour guide’s brother, who was not reachable by telephone.

Hal nodded, drained his beer glass and hoped the manager would give up. The double bed was calling, with its bleach-smelling sheets and blessed privacy.

But the manager persevered. “There is a family,” he said. “Other guests. They are from Germany. They are renting a boat to go on a day trip up the river.”

To get to the river Hal would first have to take another, larger boat to the town, he went on. You took one kind of boat to travel down the coast over the ocean, to reach the river delta; then you disembarked and walked to a smaller dock, where you took a different boat to go up the river. Hal could tag along with the Germans if he liked, said the manager, as far as the delta town where the guide’s brother lived. The Germans were taking an afternoon cruise up the river themselves, however; he would have to wait a few hours for the return trip.

So without his rest in the double bed, and slightly disgruntled, Hal met the German family on the dock where they were waiting for the first boat. He shook hands with them and smiled quickly. There were four of them, a mother and father and two young boys, all tall and tanned and lovely, with shining hair in shades of blond and golden-brown and perfectly molded biceps visible where their short, well-ironed cotton shirtsleeves ended. To make matters worse they seemed resolutely cheerful. They radiated something akin to joy. Such Germans were irritating.

On the one hand they were an unpleasant reminder of Vikings and Nazis, on the other hand you envied them.

He, by contrast to the Germans, was a low creature. He was not sleek and limber as a tree, but hunched and preoccupied; he was not shining and tanned, but dim and pale despite the fact that he hailed from Southern California, where movie stars and surfers reigned. He wore a baggy windbreaker and clutched his green-reptile backpack; he was a tired assemblage of imperfect elements. Protruding from his jeans pocket was a wallet messily stuffed with small bills and old receipts.

He watched the Germans file into the powerboat ahead of him, and in particular the two blue-eyed, tow-headed boys, who reminded him of a horror movie he had watched with Casey called Children of the Corn. It struck him that he had been picturing himself in a movie ever since his arrival. It was a movie of his life, which had suddenly become interesting in the way only a story could be, with hills and valleys of plot like a rollercoaster. There was much to laugh at in this posture, certainly, but the feeling of cinematography lingered. He was still half-dazzled by the warm beer.

All of them sat on a bench at the prow, touched by the clean spray as the boat thumped over the waves. No one spoke, though they were all quite close together, perfect strangers, side by side. The Germans, he sensed, felt no awkwardness at this. Probably they were content just to Be.

Though the kids, at least, were now rummaging impatiently in their bags.

“My wife’s employer disappeared on one of the Monkey River boat tours, just a few weeks ago,” he announced.

The boys ignored both him and the scenery. They had found what they were looking for; frantically they pressed buttons on their handheld video games. Beadily concentrating. This was a comfort since it showed they were as venal as regular U.S. children.

“We think he’s probably dead,” he went on.

There was something about the Germans and their seamless tans. He felt like shocking them.

“Oh my God,” said the German woman.

She seemed earnestly concerned. The husband held her hand and nodded, also looking worried. Not only were the Germans beautiful and cheerful, they were also capable of empathy.

“What do they think happened?” asked the husband.

Hal was faintly gratified to note he had the typical German accent, endearing because it was also quite foolish-sounding. A slight but recognizable z sound on his th’s.

“No idea,” said Hal, a little too breezily perhaps. “The boat came floating back empty.” He turned and dipped into the backpack, handing over one of the photographs.

“When was this?” asked the husband, studying it.

“A few weeks ago. I’m here looking for him,” said Hal.

“But there aren’t any rapids,” said the woman, peering over her husband’s shoulder at the picture. “It couldn’t have been a drowning accident, or?”

“Maybe there were mechanical problems,” said the husband. “If you are going to see this boat, you should check the outboard motor.”

“Cannibals,” said Hal.

They looked at him blankly. No doubt alarmed at his callousness. But they had a point. It wasn’t witty.

“The truth is, we don’t know what happened,” he went on quickly, to cover up his inane remark. “That’s what I’m here for. I’m here to find out.”

He caught himself wanting to mollify them. The Germans should not think ill of him, after all. They were not unlike superheroes. You might mock them for their stolid, self-righteous attitudes and overly muscled chests, but still you wanted to remain in their good graces.

The three of them sat in an ambiguous silence for a few moments until the Germans turned and said something to each other in discreet, low tones in their guttural language. He imagined it was along the lines of “What a pig this guy is,” or “Americans are stupid.” He faced into the spray and closed his eyes, but then he felt a soft hand on his arm.

“Let us know,” said the German woman gently, “if there is anything we can do to help you.”

He found he was blinking back tears. It came on him without warning. He tried to smile at her, at the same time turning away a little to disguise his emotion. Ahead of them there were a few boats out on the water, and to the east a low, blurry line of trees on a far-out island.

What about him and Susan? Once, when they were young, they could have passed for Germans. Couldn’t they? He was unable to look at the Germans to verify it. They might see the tears that stood on his lower lids. But if he could look at them, he would see statuesque beauty. See what humans could be: weightless and straight, beautiful in their purpose and their autonomy. The sun shone down on them and the breeze whipped back their light clothing.

But he and Susan had both aged out of that splendid independence, or the illusion of it. Whatever it was that young, beautiful people had — people who were young and strong, who could scale cliffs and toss their heads back in laughter, whose cheekbones caught the sun. Their own outlines were not so fine, their shoulders and profiles not so elegant.

Was it worse to have been beautiful once and not be beautiful anymore? Or to never have been beautiful at all?

Because he had never been a German.

And poor Casey had never been the blond boys.

She was better, his love said — better! She was everything.

But briefly it twisted him with sadness, this matter of never having been German.

•

It took a long, dull while to find the man he was looking for once he and the Germans parted company. He sat in a small restaurant with wooden floors, where they served nothing but fish with too many small bones in it and no discernible seasoning and rice and beans and warm soda. He waited. These were his instructions; another man had told him the first man, the tour guide’s brother, was on the water and would come in later.

He had tried waiting outside the brother’s house for a while but there was nowhere to sit, only a patch of dirt beside a screen door hanging off a single hinge, and eventually he had wandered back to the restaurant and told the hostess he would like to wait at a table, please.

Once or twice he got up and walked around, stretching his legs. In the back of the restaurant, on a small, dusty table, they sold folk art of a heartrending ugliness.

The Germans were coming back at four-thirty, when he was due to meet them at the ocean pier again for the ride back to the hotel. He consulted his watch frequently and worried that the brother wouldn’t show up by then, that he’d come all this way for nothing. Finally he fell asleep with his head on his arms on the table, and a man came and tapped his elbow. He jerked his head up in startlement.

It was an older man, dark-skinned with thinning hair cropped close to his head.

“Mr. Lindley?” he asked, and Hal nodded, still sleep-addled, and gestured at him to please sit down, and could he get him something to eat or drink.

When they both had grape sodas in front of them — the only thing available in a bottle besides beer — Hal said he understood the man’s brother had taken Stern on the boat, and only the boat had come back. The man said it was his half-brother Dylan, and that yes, the boat had come back but not the men.

At first, when the boat was discovered, no one was sure whether to do anything. After all the men had been headed out on a cross-country backpacking trip. The loss of their boat would be a handicap, but only when they returned to the trailhead at the river and found it missing. No one knew when to send another boat looking for them. They had taken enough supplies for a couple of weeks, and Dylan knew the braids of the river well and could bring them back down without the boat. On the other hand, if their food was entirely depleted by the time they discovered the boat was missing, that could be a problem.

Hal remembered what the German had said and asked about the boat’s outboard motor. The brother said it was broken, one of the blades had snapped, but it was not clear when this had occurred, whether it was before or after the boat had been separated from the men. It was more likely, said the brother, that it had happened when the motor was running. But this made little sense, because Dylan would not have abandoned the boat. Under no circumstances. He had bought it himself and rebuilt it with his own hands.

In any case, said the brother, they had to assume, at this point, weeks later, that the men were not returning.

He would never have thought it could happen. The Monkey was a slow, muddy river; the only possible human predators in the rainforest were jaguars, and in many generations none of these had harmed anyone. There were venomous snakes like the fer-de-lance, but it was unlikely a snake would have bitten both men. Possibly they had been attacked by thieves or guerrillas wandering the jungle, but that too was extremely far-fetched.

He was confused. He was mourning his brother but it was an odd, uncertain mourning.

“If I needed to find out more,” said Hal, “what could I do?”

“I don’t know,” said the man, and finished his grape soda. His way of speaking had a kind of Creole lilt, or maybe Caribbean generally. It was melodious.

“Should I go up the river myself? Pay an outfitter or another guide to cover it, take along some rescue workers? I have a budget.”

“The problem is,” said the brother, shrugging, “there’s too much ground up there. It’s only jungle and mountains. We don’t know where they went. One day I looked around where my brother used to go, this one place where there is a hiking trail, but you know, the rains already came then. There were no tracks or anything. I did a couple of walks with some guys from the village here, you know, but we never found anything. None of us.”

“So it’s a dead end,” said Hal.

Then the Germans were at the screen door, looking fresh and invigorated with wet hair. Hal was surprised to see them until he recalled this was the only eating establishment in the town. Before he could say anything the man and woman were sitting on the rough bench on either side of him, their kids standing in the middle of the room toweling off their blond heads and then snapping the towels at each other.

“Did you find out good information?” asked the husband.

“There isn’t any,” said Hal.

“You know where the boat came from?” asked the German woman, looking at the brother.

“I know the trail he used,” said the brother, and shrugged.

“Here, look,” said the husband eagerly, and pulled a map out of a clear-plastic sheath. It was a topographical map, Hal saw, far better than anything he had. Trust the Germans. “Where is this? Show me, if you please.”

The husband and the brother bent over the map, tracing their fingers up the line of the river. Their heads blocked the view and after a few moments Hal sat back, feeling superfluous.

The wife reached out and took his hand, squeezed it briefly and let go.

“We went swimming in the river,” she said, smiling. He noticed her white teeth and the youthful, sun-kissed sheen of her skin. Her hair was caught back in a golden-brown braid. He could picture her in a blue and white dirndl, gaily performing a folk dance.

Too bad he couldn’t have sex with her. But he was not an old lech. Not quite yet. He wouldn’t wish himself on her even if she would have him.

“Aren’t there caymen? Or piranhas or something?”

“Sure, crocodiles,” she said, and laughed lightly. “But you know, very small. The water was so refreshing! We didn’t see the crocodiles. Too bad. But we saw beautiful herons.”

Germans always thought water was refreshing. They ran down to the water and plunged in boldly, welcoming the bracing shock of it as some kind of annoying proxy for life.

“Here, see here, Mr. Lindley?” asked the husband. Hal was surprised his name had been remembered. He leaned over the map, obliging. “Here is where Mr. Palacio says his brother would usually start the hikes. You see? There. I marked it with the pencil. Back at the Grove you can make a copy of this.”

“Thank you,” said Hal a little faintly.

Once they were back on the powerboat, the boys hunched over and pushing buttons on their handheld games again and the German couple became caught up in the momentum. They were enthusiastic.

“You must contact your embassy in Belmopan,” said the husband. “They have military forces! Maybe they would help you.”

Germans. They thought you could just call in the army.

“My understanding is, the U.S. embassy there is a very small facility,” protested Hal, but they were already shaking their heads at this trifling objection.

“This is what they are here for,” said the wife. “To help the citizens!”

“Technically I think they’re here to prop up the Belize Defence Force,” said Hal. He had skimmed a passage on the local military in his guidebook. “Which boasts about six soldiers.”

“But also humanitarian assistance,” said the husband, and the wife nodded in affirmation. They believed in the logic of cooperation, the good intentions of everyone. That was clear.

“They must have, what do you call it, Coast Guard,” said the wife. “To do rescues in the ocean. Like Baywatch.”

“Baywatch,” said the husband gravely.

“Exactly,” said the wife.

He had no idea what they were talking about. Possibly it was some kind of wholesome Krautish neighborhood-watch thing. He nodded politely.

Would he like part of a granola bar, asked the wife, with peanut butter in it? She divided one into three parts and they shared it.

The husband was some kind of electrical engineer, he learned, and the wife was a kindergarten teacher. They were living in the U.S. recently for some job of his. Their names were Hans and Gretel. He hadn’t caught that at first. He asked if they were joking and they gazed at him with wide eyes and shook their heads.

He told them he worked for the IRS and they were practically admiring. That was a new one on him.

• • • • •

In the hotel business office, his third whiskey in hand, he composed a fax for the clerk to send to Susan. It was in telegram style, though he had a whole blank sheet to write on.

RAISING AN ARMY WITH GERMANS.