Tours of the Black Clock

145

WE GET ASHORE AND there are more German soldiers waiting for us. No officer of rank needs to interfere, the soldiers just wave the old man and me on by. For a few days we live in a small abandoned hut on the northern outskirts of the port. A dirt road runs from the port up our hill and right past the hut. At night the old man crosses the road and sits on the edge of the cliffs watching and listening to his war taking place before him, up and down the coast of the Quintana Roo. In his face the sea flashes the green of coral and the red of bombs, and his eyes are still filled with the mad swirl of ancient birds in the hallways of the lagoon’s sinking city. I’m not sure what to do next except try to get further into the Yucatan to Progreso, a large seaport that’s divided between German and Mayan control. Each day a black cab drives up the road past us, the same guy at the wheel; sometimes he looks my way and waves. After a week I go down to the port to beg some food and see if I can find the black cab. I manage to talk the driver into taking the old man and me up the coast. I don’t really trust him. I’ve seen him around the base transporting German officers and sailors here and there, and I don’t understand why he would do this for me. I’ve made it clear I can’t afford to pay him. But I’m thinking perhaps he’s a spy for the guerrillas; he isn’t Mexican but he isn’t German either, Brazilian perhaps, latin but fairer than the Indians of the area. In other words, a German’s idea of an acceptable latin. I sit in the front of the car, Z in the back. We drive slowly up the winding coast. I don’t know where we’re going and the driver doesn’t either though he seems perfectly willing to take us there. I watch the Caribbean through the splattered insects on the windshield and after a while I fall asleep as the twilight rushes in from the western hills. When I wake, the driver’s just sitting there in the same place, with his eyes open and a line of blood written across his throat as black as the cab itself; he doesn’t look so fair now. The car’s parked off the road among a circle of trees, and standing around are a lot of people with guns who definitely don’t look like Germans.