Lovers in Belize

         The baby had been crying, squirming in her mother’s arms, sounding off with whimpers and whines since the James bus had pulled out of Belmopan, but after taking a sharp curve down the Hummingbird Highway – accelerating perhaps a bit too fast considering the bus was filled to capacity and then some with people standing in the aisle and 3 boys all sitting on an overturned bucket in the back – the infant let out with open mouth ear piercing wails. The mother shushed and rocked the baby while her 2 other children, a boy and a girl no more than a year apart, the girl sitting on her older brother’s lap, ate their way through a bag of vanilla cream waffers.
         Directly across the aisle sat 2 conspicuously gangly Americans. 10 days in the country, with another month to go before they departed, John Chambliss and Laurie Duffenhouzen had traveled enough through Belize that screaming babies on overcrowded busses barreling down unpaved highways had long lost the quaint Belizean charm. At the moment morale was low for the young lovers.
         “Laurie, do you like the Boss?”
         “Who?”
         “Springsteen. The album Nebraska. The title track is about young lovers who go a killing spree through the Badlands of South Dakota. It’s based on a true story.”
         “Music fans are pretentious.”
         The bus struggled up a hill. Attempting to placate her child, the mother pulled down the v-neck of her blouse, and shoved the baby’s face into her exposed breast. The infant turned its head away and continued to scream. John and Laurie simultaneously gritted their teeth.
         John sang a lyric from the aforementioned song, “I can’t say that I am sorry / for the things that we’d had done / At least for a little while sir / me and her had us some fun.” He sang just loud enough for Laurie to hear that he was singing, but not loud enough for Laurie to hear what he was singing.
         Public transportation throughout Belize was by means of 2nd hand school buses. James was the most reliable of the 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 companies in operation, and even their fleet fell victim to breakdowns, hazardous roads, daredevil and/or drunken bus drivers. Buses departed whenever they departed and arrived whenever they arrived, stopping to pick up passengers, stopping to drop off passengers, anywhere along the route. John and Laurie lurched forward as the driver stomped a hard break at a junction surrounded by fields of citrus trees. Bodies shuffled down the aisle to accommodate new passengers. 3 field hands, their pant legs tucked into their knee-high rubber boots, boarded carrying machetes. The machete blades were wrapped in bits of newspaper. Across the aisle the mother had given up trying to quiet her baby. She’d hidden her breast behind her shirt and sat listlessly while the child continued to scream.
         20-somethings John Chambliss and Laurie Duffenhouzen had eked out a clueless existence as liquor store cashiers back home in Altoona Pennsylvania. Their whirlwind lustful courtship had been rooted in a few drunken gropes and tumbles in John’s Dodge Neon parked behind the Blue Goose Tavern. After the liquor store was shut down for operating without a valid liquor license, John and Laurie used their unemployment checks to fund an escape to Belize. John had proposed the idea. Completely lacking in ambition, he hid behind nihilism as an excuse for his laziness, and naturally swallowed any doomsday theories hook line and sinker. It was the year 2012. Ancient Mayan texts predicted catastrophic events to occur on December 21st. John had seen a show about it on TV. The Mayans lived in Belize, and John figured he’d go down and scope things out for a return trip before the shit really did hit the fan.
         The brother and sister across the aisle unabashedly stared at Laurie, their mouths agape and bits of cookie crumbs stuck to their cheeks. A defected Catholic girl (Laurie had gone as far as tattooing an upside-down crucifix on her ankle) Laurie openly embraced anything that even hinted at being Satanic in nature. She had her own reasons for visiting Belize. She’d seen a show about what Ancient civilizations believed were possible entrances into the underworld. One of them was a cave in Belize. Laurie thought that sounded pretty cool. She was definitely going to check that out. Considered ‘different looking’ by Altoona Pennsylvania standards, Laurie was downright freakish to the Belizeans. Although mostly German both in name and lineage, she was a redhead with the railpost physique of a fair-skinned Irish maiden. Her hair was hacked boyishly short on the sides with incongruous strands left at the back of her head to grow down over her shoulders. Her face and earlobes was a pin cushion of piercings. The Belizean sun had fried mottled patches of freckles into her pale skin. By contrast John was quite ordinary in his crew cut and khaki shorts, but like Laurie he was freakishly thin and freakishly tall. As they traveled further south in Belize, their collective height would be all the more accentuated by the smiling Mopan and Ketchi villagers. Most of the fully grown adults didn’t stand much higher than Laurie’s elbow.
         John looked on as the mother across the aisle deftly shifted her baby and pulled a bottled of Coca-Cola out of a pink backpack. She held the bottle to the baby’s mouth. The infant stopped crying long enough to take a sip, before its balled fists and pudgy arms went pumping again and the baby resumed her howling.
         John put his hands on Laurie’s knee.
         “I hate people,” she said.

In the eyes of their populace, Mayan leaders were looked upon as deities, demi-gods predestined and birthed into human form, acting as the fated link between the lowly citizens of the civilization and the all powerful gods of the other world. The price of such high standing and esteem was personal sacrifice and pain. In chambers atop temples peaking through the jungle canopy, cones of incense billowed and fumed. Priests brought out their sacred tools: a blade, the needle bone of a stingray spine, each sharpened to the utmost skin-tearing efficiency.  The instruments laid their claim on the ascending royalty, and reverently punctured, passing clear through tongues, ear lobes, penis tips, and the resulting blood was ceremoniously gifted to the gods. Even mighty leaders, godly personas sent to rule the human world, weren’t exempt from shedding their own blood.

         The accommodations in San Miguel had been prearranged with a farmer – an American expatriate – who spent 9 months out of the year in the Southern Village. John Chambliss and Laurie Duffenhouzen would work on his farm in exchanged for room and board and a chance to learn hands on organic farming. The experience wasn’t near as educational or idyllic as either had hoped, although San Miguel was a quaint town of 500 indigenous souls with the pure Mayan blood running through their veins and the K’chi language on their lips and tongues. The farmer Mike Scott, astonishingly sound in mind and sturdy in body given his 75 years of age, was also a short-tempered old crank. Haphazard patches of chaya, banana, citrus, avocado, and plantain trees were cut into the jungled hillside. Bushes with red coffee berries, coco yam with its long stalks and large leaves were planted in rows bordering the yard where scraggly chickens and stray dogs lazed through the hot afternoons. Whatever Mike Scott did know about organic farming, he failed to pass the information along aside from barking orders “till a row through there” or “hack down all the bush along here” and the ilk.
         A staple tool of any Central American farmer is the machete. John first put one to use when Mike told him to clear away the brush along a row of guava trees. The simple object’s lethal fluidity pleased John near the point of orgasm. Its handle so light in his grasp, he almost forgot a blade was attached to it. Simple wrist flicks, no different than signing his name, cut clean wood stems and meaty fronds with the ease of passing through empty air. 
         Prior to Belize John had never traveled abroad, in fact, he hadn’t wandered much beyond the hills of Western Pennsylvania. Laurie had been overseas. As a kind of present to herself for beauty school certification, her and her younger sister spent what turned out to be a miserable month as ill-matched traveling companions meandering through Eastern Europe. One stop on their tour was Auschwitz, where Laurie had stood in a chamber specifically constructed to routinely murder as many people as possible via gas vented out through shower heads. “I didn’t feel anything,” Laurie had explained to John. “I’m German you know. My family’s been in PA a few generations, but we’re not too far removed from the motherland. I stood there. I could picture the room filled with people. I could picture them dying. I thought about governments and their armies and their people. I just didn’t feel anything.” The story had made John’s blood run cold. If Laurie Duffenhouzen had been born an era earlier? If the Duffenhouszen clan hadn’t fragmented and taken the leap across the Atlantic Ocean to settle a new life in the American interior? An alternate course for an alternate Laurie formed in his mind’s eye. She was a German citizen with a government job, working her way up and coming of age under the 3rd Reich. She was imposing in uniform, the shiny black belt an eye-popping line of demarcation between her slender tummy and voluptuous buttocks and thighs. The dark knee-high patent leather boots adding a crispness to the outline of her calves. Her modest chest bisected by a row of buttons with 2 slight symmetrical bulges on either side, just noticeable enough to promise something soft and warm under the drab green fabric. Her red hair grown out evenly to her shoulders, always kept up in a tight immacualte bun. John could imagine the alternate Laurie Duffenhouzen mingling in the German beer halls after a hard day’s work, sneaking out back to neck with S.S. guards, while a noxious odor from her daily duties at the gas chamber clung to her skin, hair, and uniform.
         Laurie and John shared the queen bed in the spare room at the top of the stairs in Mike’s house. The ceiling was vaulted at a steep slant with 2 dormer windows that looked out over the huts and shacks burrowed into the lush hillsides. Day and night there were geckos skittering and chirping behind the drywall. While traveling through Belize, becoming strangers in a strange land, physically John and Laurie were timid and restrained. They slept side by side, but any lovey-dovey stuff was as chaste as Sunday schoolers afraid to get carried away and sinfully go too far. Yet before they bedded down, each would steal a sly glance as the other stripped to their sleeping clothes. Their body heat raised the temperature of the room 20 degrees. When they did tentatively sidle up to each other under the bedsheets, every nervous touch from every quaking fingertip sent loose a gush of painfully restrained euphoria.
         Quite out of the blue one night while laying in bed, “John, had you seen a cop this whole time we’ve been here?”
         “Sure. Our bus got stopped at the checkpoint. The guard came on with a machine gun. Remember? It scared the shit out of me.”
         “That guy was military. That guy doesn’t count. Even if he did, did you see his badges?”
         “Yeah,” laughing a little, “they were safety-pinned onto his sleeve.”
         Laurie asked, “did you ever see the movie Natural Born Killers?”
         “No.”
         “What do you know about Bonnie and Clyde?”
         “Nothing.”
         “Bonnie Parker was a writer,” Laurie explained. “She had some stuff published while the Barrow gang was on the lamb. It was pretty trite, real sing-songey, but oddly captivating when you consider the context and inspiration.”
         “Inspiration?”
         “Young lovers on a murder spree through the heartland of Depression era America. Bonnie and Clyde were celebrities. Everybody was poor then.”
         “There’s a lot of poor people here in Belize.”
         “John.”
         “Yeah.”
         “Put your arm around me.”
         A chirping sounded. The rounded reptilian form of a geko skittered across the window screen.

         Time passed quietly in San Miguel. Mike Scott only had the young lovers farming and working for 2 or 3 hours in the morning, then he spent the afternoons reading in his hammock. John and Laurie walked through the village. The road back out to the highway was gravel, barely one lane wide, and it rose and dipped with the dramatics of a rollercoaster track through the humid green hills. Everyone of the villagers said ‘hello’ to John and Laurie as they passed. Some of them with a firmer grasp on the English language, in open kindness and innocent sincerity John and Laurie had never witnessed, even stopped to recommend nearby attractions, offer directions, or possibly answer any questions the young lovers had about the village and its people. They took a day trip to the Mayan ruins of Lubantuun, where an infamous crystal skull had supposedly been found. The temple had been dynamited in the 1920s by a vainglorious British treasure hunter working under the guise of an archeologist. Although neither spoke of it, visits to such sites were equally maddening and humbling to John and Laurie. Lubantuun was once a city. People lived in it and then one day they didn’t. Now their ancestors were selling baskets made in Guatemala outside the entrance.
         Afterwards John and Laurie took a detour to the nearby village of Columbia. Desperate for anything American, they headed straight to the grocery store, a dim and dusty structure with overcrowded shelves and an impressive selection of prepackaged cookies. Laurie stood in the Belizian equivalent of a snack food aisle wondering if it was worth it to shell out 5 dollars for a small bag of Doritos that had expired a month ago.
         John contemplated a different purchase. The machetes were stuffed vertically in a metal canister with the handles pointing up. A sigh above, written in black marker on a hot pink sheet of poster board read: ‘2 for $5.’ John pulled one loose just as Laurie approached.
         “Machetes?” She blew a film of dust off her bag of Doritos.
         “I can’t pass up a deal like this.”
         “One for me and one for you?”
         “Yeah, and that bag of Doritos,” he said, “it’s on me.”

         The last bus out of town was stopped eerily still and sat diagonal across the road. An ‘S’ of tire treads was torn into the gravel from its hard stop. The back emergency door flung open and the alarm sounded with its incessant ‘EHHRRR.’ Laurie jumped out first, ghoulishly giddy with a dipperface smile. She held her arms to the sky, machete in her left hand as she pivoted on the ball of her right foot like a Rockette in a chorus line.
         “Pay attention chikee-baby!” John called, poking his head from the emergency exit, struggling to spit out words between his gut-busting laughter. “Bombs away!” He threw out her pack and then his own. They landed with a thwump in the gravel, sending up a gray cloud of dust. The straps were smeared red with blood quickly crusting to maroon where John had touched them. Now Laurie held her machete like a baton, imitating a drum major as she marched in place. Blood droplets had splattered indistinguishable among her freckles. The machete blade was coated with blood quickly congealing on the metal. John hopped out and landed in the gravel on the flats of his feet. Blood was saturated in his shirtfront. Blood was smeared down his arms. He held the machete horizontal across his belly, strummed it like a guitar and sang, “You wanna know why I did what I did / Sir I guess it’s just a meaness / in this world.”
         It was near sunset with a storm moving in, and an intensity of orange electrified the cotton candy clouds. The quivering fronds and quaking leaves of the rolling hills shone neon green. Flinging on their packs, grasping each others hands, John and Laurie took the plunge, breeched the vegetation, and continued running through the jungle’s humid mystery.
         When their breath could no longer carry them, John draped his weight upon Laurie and she allowed it. They fell earthward, salivating, dripping and moist. Clothes were peeled away. Laurie straddled over John’s waist. John found a rhythm of inhales and thrusts, arching his back, lifting his haunches from the mat of dead fronds. The pleasure was deafening.
         The jungle ceased its rustling and whirring: a moment of silence from the all-encompassing yet elusive audience. Invisible eyes of past souls paid tribute to empires and civilizations long since eradicated. Centuries of war, slavery construction, discovery, abandonment, immigration, colonialism; a murderous trudge of bickering humanity towards greedy self-preservation manifested in John and Laurie’s orgasm.