The Sooner the Better

After what seemed like an eternity, she was waved through. She collected her suitcase and carefully searched the waiting area, but saw no one remotely resembling the man in the photograph.

“Time for Plan B,” she muttered to herself, grateful that she’d thought this out beforehand. She made her way across the airport to the car-rental booth.

“Can I help you?” the clerk asked.

“Great,” she said, digging through her purse for her driver’s license. “You speak English.”

“Yes.” The young woman flashed her a toothy grin.

“I need to rent a car.”

“Very good.”

“I’m not sure how long I’m going to be needing it, possibly an entire month, unless there’s a rental agency I can return it to near El Mirador.”

The friendly smile faded when Lorraine mentioned the name of the town. The clerk looked over her shoulder and said something in Spanish that Lorraine didn’t understand. Right away the first woman was joined by a second, who appeared to be the manager. They spoke in rapid Spanish, and while Lorraine recognized a few words, she couldn’t catch the gist of the conversation.

When they finished, the girl with the toothpaste-ad smile turned serenely to face Lorraine once again. “I’m sorry, but my supervisor says we have no cars available at this time.”

Lorraine didn’t believe it. “But you were perfectly willing to rent me one a minute ago.”

“Yes.” She didn’t deny that.

“Why won’t you now?”

“El Mirador has no roads.”

“No roads?”

The clerk pulled out a rental agreement, silently read it over and underlined the appropriate section before handing it to Lorraine. People in the line behind her were becoming impatient, so Lorraine moved away and sat down to read the section the other woman had highlighted. With the aid of her dictionary, she discovered that rental cars were not allowed on anything but paved roads. In other words, El Mirador was well off the beaten path, and the roads leading in and out of it were either dirt or gravel. Getting there, it seemed, would be no easy task.

“Okay, then. Plan C.” Except she hadn’t yet figured out what that would be. There had to be another way to reach El Mirador. A bus. If she couldn’t get a rental car, she’d take a bus. Which meant she had to find the bus station first.

That decided, she wheeled her suitcase out of the air-conditioned airport. The blast of heat made her stagger. She felt as if someone had thrown a hot towel over her head. Almost immediately her linen pantsuit became damp and clung to her like a second skin. Summers in Louisville could be stifling, but she’d never experienced anything like this—and it was only May. She looked down at her limp wrinkled trousers and sweat-stained jacket; this was what she got for wanting to make a good impression on her father. If she’d been meeting anyone else, she would’ve dressed less formally.

Joining the long line for a colectivo—cab—she patiently waited her turn. Unfortunately the taxi driver spoke little English, but with her pocket dictionary and traveler’s phrase book, she was able to get her message across. The driver nodded repeatedly at every question, then loaded her suitcase into his trunk, which he tied shut with a frayed rope.

Lorraine climbed into the backseat and searched for a seat belt. There wasn’t one. The instant he got behind the wheel, her meek and mild-mannered driver turned into a road warrior. Lorraine was tossed about the backseat like a sack of oranges, flung from one side of the vehicle to the other as he wove in and out of traffic. He switched from lane to lane, sometimes racing toward oncoming traffic at a death-defying rate. It would have helped had she found something to hang on to, but all she had were her wits, and those had scattered long ago. The one compensation was that she was too terrified to notice how miserably hot it was.

By the time she arrived at the bus station, she was grateful to have survived the trip. Her shoulder ached from being slammed against the side of the car and her jaws hurt from being clenched. She paid the fare with no argument but without any tip, either, and lugged her suitcase into the depot.

One thing was for sure: her presence certainly attracted a lot of attention. Every eye in the dilapidated place was focused on her. With what she hoped was grace and style, she squared her shoulders and made her way up to the window as if she’d done this every day of her life.

“I’d like a ticket to El Mirador,” she said in English, forgetting to use Spanish.

The man stared at her blankly.

Lorraine reached for her phrase book and flipped pages. Mentioning the name of the town apparently wasn’t enough to achieve the result she wanted, so she attempted more than once to ask for a ticket. Each time, the agent merely shrugged and looked blank.

Then he tried speaking to her. First he spoke slowly, then louder as if that would make her understand. After five minutes of this, she was ready to scream with frustration.

“Perhaps I can help.”

Lorraine turned to find a smiling clean-cut man standing next to her.

“Jason Applebee,” he said.

“Lorraine Dancy.” She held out her hand, noting that his was bandaged. “You’re American?”

“Sure am.” He grinned. “I guess that’s fairly obvious, isn’t it?”

“And you speak Spanish?”

“Fluently.” Then, as if to prove it, he spoke to the man behind the counter. The clerk grinned, nodded and said something in return. His eyes moved to Lorraine; she couldn’t miss the relief in his expression.

Lorraine didn’t understand what either of them had said. By this point she was beyond translating even the simplest verbs. Jason turned to her. “Now, what were you trying to ask?”

“I need a ticket to El Mirador.”

“You’re joking,” Jason said, his face lighting up. “I’m heading that way myself.”

“Really? I thought it was just a small town.”

“Actually, I’m going to a place not far from there. I was planning to spend the night in El Mirador.”

“You mean there’s a hotel?” If things didn’t work out with her father, it was reassuring to know she’d have someplace to sleep that night.

“I guess you could call it that,” Jason said, and they both laughed.

Lorraine paid for her ticket, and Jason bought his, as well. When they’d finished, they sat in the shade outside and waited for the bus, which was due to arrive, Jason said, in thirty minutes.

“Will you be staying at the hotel, too?” her newfound friend asked as he arranged his backpack at his feet.

“I don’t know yet,” Lorraine said. It had been a long day already, with a plane change in Atlanta and a two-hour delay. “How long will it take to reach El Mirador?”

“A couple of hours, possibly more—if the bus doesn’t break down, that is.”

“Oh, great.” She sighed loudly, wondering if anything else could possibly go wrong.

“Hey, it isn’t so bad,” Jason said. “At least there aren’t any bandidos. Not like the dig I was on last week.” He explained that he was a part-time archaeology lecturer at a small college in Missouri; she didn’t recognize the name. He was here doing research for his doctoral thesis. He’d been in Mexico a month now, he told her, although this wasn’t his first trip. Lorraine guessed him to be in his mid-thirties. He had short dark hair and the ubiquitous sunglasses, and wore a short-sleeved cotton shirt tucked neatly into khaki pants. The freshness of his clothes made Lorraine feel even more despairing about the condition of her own.

“So you were working on this dig? And…and there were bandits?”

“Yeah,” he said, lifting his bandaged hand. Jason entertained her for the next hour—the bus was late, of course—with tales of his adventures, including a harrowing description of the incident during which he’d injured his hand. He’d rescued one of the Mexican assistants on the dig from a knife-wielding pair of thieves. She shuddered at his dramatic telling.

Lorraine liked Jason. It was impossible not to. He was witty and cheerful, not to mention generous with his help. He bought some melon slices from a street vendor and shared them with her. Lorraine hadn’t really been hungry, but the fruit quenched her growing thirst.

She’d never made friends with anyone so quickly. She suspected that everyone responded to Jason this way; his open exuberant personality encouraged confidences and camaraderie.

With billowing exhaust and much grinding of gears, the bus finally pulled into the station. Jason had been right to warn her about its likely condition. The rattletrap of a vehicle looked as if it’d been on the road since the Second World War. Its color was no longer distinguishable and half the windows were missing. In this heat, though, that was probably a blessing.

The bus was one thing, her fellow travelers another. The minute the bus rolled into the yard, people appeared from every direction. Adults and children and caged chickens. One man was hefting a pig under his arm.

“Go and get us the best seat you can,” Jason advised, urging her toward the bus. “I’ll make sure our luggage gets on board.”

Lorraine watched, astonished, as two men clambered on top of the bus and waited for Jason and another man to throw suitcases up to them. She didn’t envy anyone the task of lifting her suitcase, let alone hurling it eight feet off the ground.

After about ten minutes a breathless Jason climbed on board and collapsed onto the seat beside her.

“You mentioned you’d be traveling to someplace near El Mirador,” Lorraine said once he’d caught his breath.

“I’m on my way to another dig,” he said, shifting a bit to give her more room on the cramped seat. The narrow cushion was barely wide enough for one adult, let alone two.

He’d told Lorraine a little about Mayan ruins earlier, and she’d found it fascinating.

“There’s a dig near El Mirador?” She’d researched the tiny coastal town at the library and on the internet, but hadn’t learned much. El Mirador had a population of less than a thousand. The economy of many of these towns along the coast depended, not surprisingly, on the fishing industry, but there was little else. She couldn’t remember reading about Mayan ruins in the area around El Mirador, but that didn’t mean much.

“Actually,” Jason said, “our El Mirador was named after another El Mirador, in Guatemala. It was an important Mayan site—one of the earliest. But there’s a Mayan temple a few miles from this El Mirador, too. It was discovered a few years ago, and they’ve only begun excavating, so I want to spend a few weeks there before I go home.”

“Home is Missouri, right?”

“Jefferson City,” he said. “Now what about you? Why are you traveling to El Mirador? It’s not like the town’s exactly a tourist destination.”

Lorraine took her time answering, wondering how much to tell Jason. She’d known him slightly more than an hour. Granted, they’d become virtually instant friends, but still… This wasn’t the kind of personal information one generally shared on such recent acquaintance.