Cave of Little Faces. Aída Besançon Spencer
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marveled and beamed on them with her hundred-watt smile, calculated as it was to dazzle marks out of their hard-earned reserves, effective up to thirty paces. Nice little town, she was beaming, let’s turn it upside down and see what shakes out. But, to the pure, all things are pure, and the trio took her enthusiasm for face value. This was, after all, Descubierta—“the Discovery.” And they knew there was much to discover.
Gauging a similar response in Basil, so it was probably unnecessary—but, she knew, it never hurts—Star decided to wheedle in her most reasonable and ingratiating tone: “Look, it’s after seven o’clock. We put some real miles in today, Bo. This town looks big enough to give us a good meal and a cheap place to stay. Last night was awful—we had to sleep all cramped up. We gotta get a good night’s sleep, if we’re going to go on tomorrow. Besides, I need a shower—and you definitely need one!”
Basil chuckled. “You’re right there, Schweetheart,” he replied in his truly miserable Bogart imitation.
“So, let’s discover the good life of Descubierta,” urged Star.
“Great idea! I think we could enjoy this town,” agreed Basil, grinning at Star and then nodding at the patient threesome. “Un hotel?”
All three smiled even more broadly, if that were possible, and pointed beyond the other side of the square.
Basil carefully inserted the little truck in among the motorcycles, pulled off an awkward K-turn, and navigated his way back along the road until they had left the central park.
“This is pretty,” murmured Star, looking out her window at the far side of the road, where a small waterfall, flowing from the mountains, passed under the street and filled a little valley in which people were wading.
Back on the left, on the next corner just after the park, was the hotel, a small two-story structure with a little restaurant on its ground floor, balconies above them for the front two upper rooms, and yellow and red flowers filling the entrance. A tiny parking area separated the building from the road, and into this Basil squeezed the little truck.
The proprietor, a garrulous and prosperously portly man of middle age, appropriately named Señor Feliz, welcomed them in with an infectious air of contentment. In a mixture of seven-eighths Spanish and one-eighth English, he displayed the wonders of Descubierta before them, as innocently as did Hezekiah show his treasures before the reconnoitering Assyrians. Yes, it was a relatively poor town, but the people were proud of it and hoped someday to complete the construction of the road on the northern outskirts of town. The main attraction was the “little faces” of the Indians. “You must not leave the area until you see the ‘little faces,’” he urged them.
So the next morning, bright and early, about the crack of dawn for Basil and Star—that is to say, about eleven o’clock—they headed off on the only lead they presently had: to see the “little faces.” When one is out to exploit, no avenue should remain unexplored.
No sooner had they left the comfort of Descubierta, however, than they made an unpleasant discovery. The construction Innkeeper Feliz had assured them was “in process” proved to be a torn-up road with no one either working on it or having worked on it for obviously quite a while. They rattled for a space through broken concrete and clouds of dust thrown up by a huge tractor trailer thundering by them and kicking up stones until Star demanded they turn back. But Basil doggedly bumped “on and on,” as she had accurately complained in the mountains. This time, however, he was rewarded by a stretch of recently paved highway and a clear straight-away as a mountain rose up on Basil’s side to their left.
“Bo,” said Star presently, “there’s something happening on my side. I think it’s water—I can see it through the trees.”
“You mean like a river?”
“Uh, I’m not sure. It’s all among the trees. It was like far away at the edge, you know? But now it looks like it’s spreading out and getting closer.”
Basil tried to strain over her and get a glimpse of what lay beyond the foliage on the right, but it was hard with the occasional bus or tractor trailer that nearly blew them off into the trees as it hammered through.
“I can’t see it exactly.” He gave up and kept his eyes on the road.
In a few moments, she said, a little worried, “Basil—it’s big! I think it might be . . .”
“Wait! Here’s the sign,” Basil cut her off. “I’m gonna pull over.” Basil tucked the truck in a tiny space at the side of the road, barely off the highway, and just at the edge of shrubs and small trees that rapidly spread downward in a sharp decline. He glanced at a huge wooden stairway that zigzagged up the sheer hill on his left, then he peered over past Star toward the right and the water she was indicating. “Wow, it does look like a lot.”
They didn’t bother to lock the truck, but headed immediately across the highway for the stairway. A huge sign on the left of the first rise of the stairs announced this was the “little faces” national site. A welcome booth was to the right, but it was locked up. No one was around. They started up the wooden staircase and at the first landing paused and leaned on the rail looking back over the road and now over the trees.
“Wow!” said Star.
“Good night!” said Basil.
They were confronting an astonishing sight—a huge body of water stretched in either direction, its far shore, for it had to have one, lost in the distance.
“Wait! We’re not in Haiti?” Star cried in a sudden moment of confused panic. “You didn’t turn the wrong way and stumble over the border—did you?”
“Of course not!” snapped Basil.
“Well, that looks like the ocean,” Star snapped back.
“No, it doesn’t! We just stayed in a city called ‘Descubierta!’ How could they have a city with a Spanish name if we were in Haiti?” he sneered. “It’s the lake we saw on the map in the guidebook—what did you do with the book?”
“It’s in the truck!”
Basil stared at her in his most commanding manner. Star stared back, unimpressed. Neither moved. Eventually, muttering something Star definitely did not want to hear, Basil lumbered back down the stairs, crossed over to the truck, leaned into the back, and began rummaging around in a pile of assorted odds and ends that either hadn’t been worthy of suitcase space or were assigned there in order to be “handy.” Somewhere under that mess, he fished out the book, identifiable as much by its battered appearance as by the stamp on it, which read, “Hamilton-Wenham Public Library, Hamilton, MA 01982,” one of Star and Basil’s many brief supply stops (in this case with a five-fingered library card) in the wavering trajectory of their uncelebrated flight.
He climbed back up with exaggerated effort, opened the book, and stuck it in her hand. “It’s a lake,” she admitted, and he was mollified.
Both of them continued their staring, more and more thunderstruck as they tried to form a mental measure of what was before them.
“This is colossal!” Star exclaimed.
“This looks undeveloped!” Basil observed.
“I think our idea might be here somewhere,” Star ventured.
“I think so too,” mused Basil. “But, we’ve got to find it. Let’s go back to that talky guy at the hotel and see if we can stir up a scam.” He started back down the stairs.
“Hold on!” called Star. “What about the faces?”
“Who cares about the faces?” yelled Basil back from the bottom of the stairway. “Come on!”
“I’ll tell ya who cares,” Star shouted back, “that ‘talky guy at the hotel’—that’s who!”
“Oh, yeah! You’re right! We can’t go back if we don’t look at those faces he was all worked up about.” He clamored back up the staircase.