The Women Men Don't See - James Tiptree, ebook, CALIBRE SFF 1970s, Temp 2
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
The Women Men Don't See
by James Tiptree, Jr
I see her first while the Mexicana 727 is barreling down to Cozumel Island. I come out of the can and
lurch into her seat, saying "Sorry," at a double female blur. The near blur nods quietly. The younger one in
the window seat goes on looking out. I continue down the aisle, registering nothing. Zero. I never would
have looked at them or thought of them again.
Cozumel airport is the usual mix of panicky Yanks dressed for the sand pile and calm Mexicans dressed
for lunch at the Presidente. I am a used-up Yank dressed for serious fishing; I extract my rods and duffel
from the riot and hike across the field to find my charter pilot. One Captain Estéban has contracted to
deliver me to the bonefish flats of Belize three hundred kilometers down the coast.
Captain Estéban turns out to be four feet nine of mahogany Maya
puro.
He is also in a somber Maya
snit. He tells me my Cessna is grounded somewhere and his Bonanza is booked to take a party to
Chetumal.
Well, Chetumal is south; can he take me along and go on to Belize after he drops them? Gloomily he
concedes the possibility—if the other party permits, and
if
there are not too many
equipajes.
The Chetumal party approaches. It's the woman and her young companion—daughter?—neatly picking
their way across the gravel and yucca apron. Their Ventura two-suiters, like themselves, are small, plain,
and neutral-colored. No problem. When the captain asks if I may ride along, the mother says mildly, "Of
course," without looking at me.
I think that's when my inner tilt-detector sends up its first faint click. How come this woman has already
looked me over carefully enough to accept on her plane? I disregard it. Paranoia hasn't been useful in my
business for years, but the habit is hard to break.
As we clamber into the Bonanza, I see the girl has what could be an attractive body if there was any
spark at all. There isn't. Captain Estéban folds a serape to sit on so he can see over the cowling and runs
a meticulous check-down. And then we're up and trundling over the turquoise Jell-O of the Caribbean
into a stiff south wind.
The coast on our right is the territory of Quintana Roo. If you haven't seen Yucatán, imagine the world's
biggest absolutely flat green-gray rug. An empty-looking land. We pass the white ruin of Tulum and the
gash of the road to Chichén Itzá, a half-dozen coconut plantations, and then nothing but reef and low
scrub jungle all the way to the horizon, just about the way the conquistadors saw it four centuries back.
Long strings of cumulus are racing at us, shadowing the coast. I have gathered that part of our pilot's
gloom concerns the weather. A cold front is dying on the henequen fields of Mérida to the west, and the
south wind has piled up a string of coastal storms: what they call
lloviznas.
Estéban detours methodically
around a couple of small thunderheads. The Bonanza jinks, and I look back with a vague notion of
reassuring the women. They are calmly intent on what can be seen of Yucatán. Well, they were offered
the copilot's view, but they turned it down. Too shy?
Another
llovizna
puffs up ahead. Estéban takes the Bonanza upstairs, rising in his seat to sight his course.
I relax for the first time in too long, savoring the latitudes between me and my desk, the week of fishing
ahead. Our captain's classic Maya profile attracts my gaze: forehead sloping back from his predatory
nose, lips and jaw stepping back below it. If his slant eyes had been any more crossed, he couldn't have
made his license. That's a handsome combination, believe it or not. On the little Maya chicks in their
minishifts with iridescent gloop on those cockeyes, it's also highly erotic. Nothing like the oriental doll
thing; these people have stone bones. Captain Estéban's old grandmother could probably tow the
Bonanza.…
I'm snapped awake by the cabin hitting my ear. Estéban is barking into his headset over a drumming
racket of hail; the windows are dark gray.
One important noise is missing—the motor. I realize Estéban is fighting a dead plane. Thirty-six hundred;
we've lost two thousand feet!
He slaps tank switches as the storm throws us around; I catch something about
gasolina
in a snarl that
shows his big teeth. The Bonanza reels down. As he reaches for an overhead toggle, I see the fuel gauges
are high. Maybe a clogged gravity feed line; I've heard of dirty gas down here. He drops the set; it's a
million to one nobody can read us through the storm at this range anyway. Twenty-five hundred—going
down.
His electric feed pump seems to have cut in: the motor explodes—quits—explodes—and quits again for
good. We are suddenly out of the bottom of the clouds. Below us is a long white line almost hidden by
rain: the reef. But there isn't any beach behind it, only a big meandering bay with a few mangrove
flats—and it's coming up at us fast.
This is going to be bad, I tell myself with great unoriginality. The women behind me haven't made a
sound. I look back and see they've braced down with their coats by their heads. With a stalling speed
around eighty, all this isn't much use, but I wedge myself in.
Estéban yells some more into his set, flying a falling plane. He is doing one jesus job, too—as the water
rushes up at us he dives into a hair-raising turn and hangs us into the wind—with a long pale ridge of
sandbar in front of our nose.
Where in hell he found it I never know. The Bonanza mushes down, and we belly-hit with a tremendous
tearing crash—bounce—hit again—and everything slews wildly as we flat-spin into the mangroves at the
end of the bar. Crash! Clang! The plane is wrapping itself into a mound of strangler fig with one wing up.
The crashing quits with us all in one piece. And no fire. Fantastic.
Captain Estéban pries open his door, which is now in the roof. Behind me a woman is repeating quietly,
"Mother. Mother." I climb up the floor and find the girl trying to free herself from her mother's embrace.
The woman's eyes are closed. Then she opens them and suddenly lets go, sane as soap. Estéban starts
hauling them out. I grab the Bonanza's aid kit and scramble out after them into brilliant sun and wind. The
storm that hit us is already vanishing up the coast.
"Great landing, Captain."
"Oh,
yes!
It was beautiful." The women are shaky, but no hysteria. Estéban is surveying the scenery with
the expression his ancestors used on the Spaniards.
If you've been in one of those things, you know the slow-motion inanity that goes on. Euphoria, first. We
straggle down the fig tree and out onto the sandbar in the roaring hot wind, noting without alarm that
there's nothing but miles of crystalline water on all sides. It's only a foot or so deep, and the bottom is the
olive color of silt. The distant shore around us is all flat mangrove swamp, totally uninhabitable.
"BahÃa EspÃritu Santo." Estéban confirms my guess that we're down in that huge water wilderness. I
 always wanted to fish it.
"What's all that smoke?" The girl is pointing at the plumes blowing around the horizon.
"Alligator hunters," says Estéban. Maya poachers have left burn-offs in the swamps. It occurs to me that
any signal fires we make aren't going to be too conspicuous. And I now note that our plane is well-buried
in the mound of fig. Hard to see it from the air.
Just as the question of how the hell we get out of here surfaces in my mind, the older woman asks
composedly, "If they didn't hear you, Captain, when will they start looking for us? Tomorrow?"
"Correct," Estéban agrees dourly. I recall that air-sea rescue is fairly informal here. Like, keep an eye
open for Mario, his mother says he hasn't been home all week.
It dawns on me we may be here quite some while.
Furthermore, the diesel-truck noise on our left is the Caribbean piling back into the mouth of the bay. The
wind is pushing it at us, and the bare bottoms on the mangroves show that our bar is covered at high tide.
I recall seeing a full moon this morning in—believe it, St. Louis—which means maximal tides. Well, we
can climb up in the plane. But what about drinking water?
There's a small splat! behind me. The older woman has sampled the bay. She shakes her head, smiling
ruefully. It's the first real expression on either of them; I take it as the signal for introductions. When I say
I'm Don Fenton from St. Louis, she tells me their name is Parsons, from Bethesda, Maryland. She says it
so nicely I don't at first notice we aren't being given first names. We all compliment Captain Estéban
again.
His left eye is swelled shut, an inconvenience beneath his attention as a Maya, but Mrs. Parsons spots the
way he's bracing his elbow in his ribs.
"You're hurt, Captain."
"Roto—
I think is broken." He's embarrassed at being in pain. We get him to peel off his Jaime shirt,
revealing a nasty bruise in his superb dark-bay torso.
"Is there tape in that kit, Mr. Fenton? I've had a little first-aid training."
She begins to deal competently and very impersonally with the tape. Miss Parsons and I wander to the
end of the bar and have a conversation which I am later to recall acutely.
"Roseate spoonbills," I tell her as three pink birds flap away.
"They're beautiful," she says in her tiny voice. They both have tiny voices. "He's a Mayan Indian, isn't he?
The pilot, I mean."
"Right. The real thing, straight out of the Bonampak murals. Have you seen Chichén and Uxmal?"
"Yes. We were in Mérida. We're going to Tikal in Guatemala.… I mean, we were."
"You'll get there." It occurs to me the girl needs cheering up. "Have they told you that Maya mothers
used to tie a board on the infant's forehead to get that slant? They also hung a ball of tallow over its nose
to make the eyes cross. It was considered aristocratic."
She smiles and takes another peek at Estéban. "People seem different in Yucatán," she says thoughtfully.
"Not like the Indians around Mexico City. More, I don't know, independent."
 "Comes from never having been conquered. Mayas got massacred and chased a lot, but nobody ever
really flattened them. I bet you didn't know that the last Mexican-Maya war ended with a negotiated
truce in nineteen thirty-five?"
"No!" Then she says seriously, "I like that."
"So do I."
"The water is really rising very fast," says Mrs. Parsons gently from behind us.
It is, and so is another
llovizna.
We climb back into the Bonanza. I try to rig my parka for a rain catcher,
which blows loose as the storm hits fast and furious. We sort a couple of malt bars and my bottle of Jack
Daniel's out of the jumble in the cabin and make ourselves reasonably comfortable. The Parsons take a
sip of whiskey each, Estéban and I considerably more. The Bonanza begins to bump soggily. Estéban
makes an ancient one-eyed Mayan face at the water seeping into his cabin and goes to sleep. We all
nap.
When the water goes down, the euphoria has gone with it, and we're very, very thirsty. It's also damn
near sunset. I get to work with a bait-casting rod and some treble hooks and manage to foul-hook four
small mullets. Estéban and the women tie the Bonanza's midget life raft out in the mangroves to catch rain.
The wind is parching hot. No planes go by.
Finally another shower comes over and yields us six ounces of water apiece. When the sunset envelops
the world in golden smoke, we squat on the sandbar to eat wet raw mullet and Instant Breakfast crumbs.
The women are now in shorts, neat but definitely not sexy.
"I never realized how refreshing raw fish is," Mrs. Parsons says pleasantly. Her daughter chuckles, also
pleasantly. She's on Mamma's far side away from Estéban and me. I have Mrs. Parsons figured now;
Mother Hen protecting only chick from male predators. That's all right with me. I came here to fish.
But something is irritating me. The damn women haven't complained once, you understand. Not a peep,
not a quaver, no personal manifestations whatever. They're like something out of a manual.
"You really seem at home in the wilderness, Mrs. Parsons. You do much camping?"
"Oh, goodness no." Diffident laugh. "Not since my girl scout days. Oh, look—are those man-of-war
birds?"
Answer a question with a question. I wait while the frigate birds sail nobly into the sunset.
"Bethesda … Would I be wrong in guessing you work for Uncle Sam?"
"Why, yes. You must be very familiar with Washington, Mr. Fenton. Does your work bring you there
often?"
Anywhere but on our sandbar the little ploy would have worked. My hunter's gene twitches.
"Which agency are you with?"
She gives up gracefully. "Oh, just GSA records. I'm a librarian."
Of course. I know her now, all the Mrs. Parsonses in records divisions, accounting sections, research
branches, personnel and administration offices. Tell Mrs. Parsons we need a recap on the external
service contracts for fiscal '73. So Yucatán is on the tours now? Pity … I offer her the tired little joke.
 "You know where the bodies are buried."
She smiles deprecatingly and stands up. "It does get dark quickly, doesn't it?"
Time to get back into the plane.
A flock of ibis are circling us, evidently accustomed to roosting in our fig tree. Estéban produces a
machete and a Mayan string hammock. He proceeds to sling it between tree and plane, refusing help. His
machete stroke is noticeably tentative.
The Parsons are taking a pee behind the tail vane. I hear one of them slip and squeal faintly. When they
come back over the hull, Mrs. Parsons asks, "Might we sleep in the hammock, Captain?"
Estéban splits an unbelieving grin. I protest about rain and mosquitoes.
"Oh, we have insect repellent and we do enjoy fresh air."
The air is rushing by about force five and colder by the minute.
"We have our raincoats," the girl adds cheerfully.
Well, okay, ladies. We dangerous males retire inside the damp cabin. Through the wind I hear the
women laugh softly now and then, apparently cozy in their chilly ibis roost. A private insanity, I decide. I
know myself for the least threatening of men; my noncharisma has been in fact an asset jobwise, over the
years. Are they having fantasies about Estéban? Or maybe they really are fresh-air nuts.… Sleep comes
for me in invisible diesels roaring by on the reef outside.
· · · · ·
We emerge dry-mouthed into a vast windy salmon sunrise. A diamond chip of sun breaks out of the sea
and promptly submerges in cloud. I go to work with the rod and some mullet bait while two showers
detour around us. Breakfast is a strip of wet barracuda apiece.
The Parsons continue stoic and helpful. Under Estéban's direction they set up a section of cowling for a
gasoline flare in case we hear a plane, but nothing goes over except one unseen jet droning toward
Panama. The wind howls, hot and dry and full of coral dust. So are we.
"They look first in sea," Estéban remarks. His aristocratic frontal slope is beaded with sweat; Mrs.
Parsons watches him concernedly. I watch the cloud blanket tearing by above, getting higher and dryer
and thicker. While that lasts nobody is going to find us, and the water business is now unfunny.
Finally I borrow Estéban's machete and hack a long light pole. "There's a stream coming in back there, I
saw it from the plane. Can't be more than two, three miles."
"I'm afraid the raft's torn." Mrs. Parsons shows me the cracks in the orange plastic; irritatingly, it's a
Delaware label.
"All right," I hear myself announce. "The tide's going down. If we cut the good end off that air tube, I can
haul water back in it. I've waded flats before."
Â
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]