Avery McShane and the Lost Tepui
As promised, or at least hinted, the first chapter and a half of the sequel.
I just posted, earlier today, how I had managed to parlay my query letter for what ended up being Avery McShane (my first and, to date, only traditionally published book) into landing a new lit agent and a new publisher - two birds, one query. I teased my vast newsletter audience with a sample of Avery McShane’s adventures. Since I suspect that most of you have already purchased and read the original Avery McShane, I choose the following excerpt from the first sequel, Avery McShane and the Lost Tepui.
Here’s an aerial photo of a tepui, in case you’re not familiar with them.
You like this excerpt and the post, please share. Avery and I sure hope you do.
Preface
Sanchez turned his head to the side and pointed at the place where his ear used to be.
“And this,” he said, looking at me sideways. “For you it will be more than an eye for an eye. For you it will be two eyes for one, two ears for one. And I will cut off your nose, and each of your fingers and each of your toes. I will take my time. And when I am done, I will throw your bleeding body into the river to feed the piranhas.”
It was about what I figured he’d say. So I just went ahead and lit the fuse.
*****
The Return of Loca
Huge rain drops pounded the tin roof of our tree house and it was dark even though it was almost noon. That was because a humongous rain cloud had parked right over the huge mango tree that hid our clubhouse, and it was dumping everything it had on us. It was as if someone was trying to send us a message. If it was a message, it wasn’t good one. And you would’ve thought that it would be cold since it was so dim and windy, but it was never cold in the jungle that we called El Monte. The only cold places in Venezuela were on the mountain tops around Caracas and over to the west where the Andes were. It was always warm in Campo Mata.
Billy and Todd were sitting on the wood floor reading comics and I was looking out the open window at the tall bamboo trees that creaked back and forth with each gust of wind. I couldn’t see him, but I knew that my dog Mati was curled up at the base of the tree, under the cover of the tree house. Then, all of a sudden, a bright flash of lightning lit up the jungle and just as quickly went away.
“One thousand one, one thousand two…” I counted out loud, before the noise of thunder rumbled and then crashed on top of us. The tree house shook so hard that our collection of glass jars full of bugs and jungle creatures rattled and clattered. Billy dropped his Iron Man comic and looked out the window.
“Holy smokes, that was close!” he yelled.
Billy was afraid of lightning. A couple of years ago a big bolt had hit his house and fried everything inside that had been plugged in to a wall socket. It had left a pretty good impression on him.
“About two miles away,” I replied. “Not as close as it seems.”
As for Todd, he kept on reading his Batman comic as if nothing had happened. He didn’t seem to know what was going on outside, probably because every one of his hundred or so brain cells was tied up trying to read all the big words. Words like “boom” and “crash” and “pow”. Todd wasn’t the smartest kid around, for sure.
Billy stood up and walked over to where I was. He didn’t exactly stand next to me with his hands on the window sill like mine were. He sort of stood a little behind me, looking over my shoulder on his tippy toes. He probably figured I’d get zapped by the lightning first.
Billy Hale was my best friend. He was a little shorter and skinnier than me. That was saying something because I was darn skinny. I knew he was scared of lightning, but I bet he was chicken of the wind too, because it wouldn’t take much more than a gust of it to pick him up off the ground and blow him to the next county. It didn’t help that he had these big ears sticking out of the side of his head, but I figured he could use them to steer if he ever did get airborne. Billy’s parents were from West Texas, so I guess that made him a Texan even though he had never lived there. He had a strong Texas accent, like most of the other kids in Campo Mata, and he was proud of it. Since both of us loved to read westerns, and I didn’t have a southern accent, Billy figured he was more like a cowboy than me. He did have those clear blue eyes that they said all of the Wild West gunfighters had, so maybe he had a point there. Then again, I had always been able to draw my pistol faster than him. Of course, we didn’t wear the cap guns and holsters any more - we were too old for that - but we still kept them nearby, hanging from nails on the wall of tree house. They were there in case we had to shoot trespassers, especially if they were girls.
I suppose I didn’t look much like a gunfighter, even though I wanted to. My blond hair had been cut short in a buzz cut and I don’t ever remember reading about gunfighters with buzz cuts in my Louis L’Amour westerns. Most of the other kids in the camp had short hair too. And my eyes were green, so that was another strike against me. I usually wore blue jeans that were too long, so I had to roll up the bottoms. My mom said she bought them a couple of sizes too big because I was growing so fast that we’d end up in the poor house buying new pairs all the time. Fact is, I always ended up tearing up the knees and wearing them out in a hurry anyway. I always wore white Converse sneakers and a white t-shirt. Nelly, our maid back at the house, used a lot of bleach to keep them looking white, but they never stayed that way for long.
Now Todd, he wasn’t skinny, but he wasn’t fat either. He was just big and strong, about three inches taller than my four foot eleven and a half. Billy and I figured he’d max out at about six five, like his dad. I still had another half inch to get to five feet which we all agreed was the required height to be considered grown up. Maybe not quite adults, but we wouldn’t be kids any more. Anyway, Todd wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed and he didn’t do well in school, but he could beat up most of us, so he had his own special place. He was my second best friend. The three of us made up our secret club called the Machacas, and the tree house was our headquarters.
“I sure hope it doesn’t rain like this next week,” said Billy, “with us out on canoes on the Orinoco River and all.”
Billy was always fretting about something. The three of us were going diamond hunting in the deepest part of the jungle with my Dad, Mr. Slater and Mr. Fulton. It was the first time we’d been invited to go with them and we were really looking forward to the adventure. My dad and his friends always went once a year to the diamond districts of Venezuela to pan for diamonds along the banks of the river. They’d also go fishing for huge tiger-striped catfish, piranhas and peacock bass. It was always cool to see what they’d brought back after each trip, and even neater to eat it all at the fish fry we’d have at the house the next weekend. I especially liked the deep-fried piranha. A couple of years ago my dad had even gone hunting and shot a wild pig. It had big long tusks that my dad said could cut your leg off if you weren’t careful. It tasted great when they barbecued it. They usually found diamonds, but they just looked liked little pebbles of sand to me. All the moms and dads would look at the them and “ohh” and “ahh”, but I didn’t quite understand all of the fuss. They were just a bunch of rocks. Not even big enough to use in my sling shot.
“We’ll be fine,” I replied. “My dad wouldn’t risk having us drown and get eaten by a cayman. Mom would raise a fuss and make his life miserable.”
“Tell that to the guide that went with them a couple of years ago,” said Billy. “I heard he got his leg speared by that ray’s tail and they ended up having to fly him to the hospital in Ciudad Bolivar. The doctors had to chop off his leg right below the knee.”
“Those things happen,” I said. “It’s just the luck of the draw sometimes.”
“Well, I think I’ll do some extra praying just in case,” said Billy. “If I do enough of it, he’ll have to pay attention.”
Billy was sure that man upstairs was always watching us. His parents were pretty religious, so it had rubbed off on him. That’s why he’d never look at the pictures of naked women in the magazines that Todd had stolen from his parents, the ones we kept under the stacks of comic books in the tree house. Seemed that everything bad that happened to him was because the devil did it, and he was being punished for some fib he told or some such sin. Billy was probably thinking that the thunder storm was happening because he did something wrong, or maybe because Todd or I had.
“Good grief, Billy,” I sighed. “Doesn’t the good lord have enough to do without having to pay attention to everything we do? Seems to me he’s got enough on his plate, what with all the wars going on around the world and all those terrorists running around blowing up things. I mean really.”
I always got a little short when Billy started fussing about sinning and the devil and such. I figured I’d worry about all that once I got older and could work it all out after college or something.
Todd finally finished his comic book and put it on top of his stack in the corner. It took him about as long to read a comic book as it took me to read a whole western. He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles and stretched out, still sitting cross-legged on the wood floor. He always wore the same cut-off blue jean shorts and black polo shirt with a little crocodile patch on the chest.
The rain stopped, and so did the wind. Bright rays of sunlight came shooting through the five or six gaps in the jungle canopy above, like high beams on my dad’s pickup. The cicadas started up again. They sounded like a bunch of small engines without mufflers, but we always got used to them after a while. Then I heard a high pitched screeching that didn’t come from one of those bugs. It came from that stupid monkey, and he was raising Cain about something. It usually meant that someone, or something, was coming down the path from Campo Mata. It was the same racket he always made when I walked down the path on my way to and from my house. Stupid monkey was probably already squishing out some poo to throw down at whatever it was. Todd stood up and joined Billy and me at the window. We all looked in the direction of screaming.
“Wonder who it is?” said Billy in his scaredy cat voice.
The last time someone who wasn’t a Machaca had come down that path, we had gotten all tied up in a big fracas. That had been Pablo Malo, and he’d ended up tearing apart the inside of our tree house, and we’d ended up going to war with him because of that. And we won.
All of sudden Mati started growling. We could see him standing right below us looking in the direction of the path and his fur was standing up on his back. Mati was my dog and the official guard of our hideout. He was as old as me, which made him pretty old in dog years, but he never seemed to act old. He was an Australian Shepherd with one light blue eye and one black eye and a black fur coat with splotches of white spots on his hind end. If he was worried about what was coming, we were too.
“I don’t like this one bit,” whispered Billy. “What if it’s the spirit of Pablo Malo, coming for us ‘cuz we killed him?”
“Ain’t no such thing as ghosts in the middle of the day,” replied Todd.
“Well then maybe it’s Lieutenant Sanchez, escaped from jail, looking to cut off our noses and ears for what we did to him,” said Billy.
“He’s locked up in jail for the rest of his life,” I whispered back. “Probably just an ocelot or a capybara or something…maybe a tapir.”
Our eyes were riveted on the spot where the path opened up onto the clearing around our the mango tree that we were up in. And then there she was.
One moment there was nothing, and then the next, there she was. It was Loca. Pablo Malo’s killer dog had come back to finish the job. She looked up at us with her black werewolf eyes, just standing there. We knew all too well about her mouth full of sharp, long fangs and her mean disposition. And so did Mati who had backed up against the base of the tree, probably wishing that he could climb up the tree to be with us.
We were all trapped.
Kiss and Make Up
But Loca didn’t leap across clearing, through the air and straight into the tree house to rip out our throats for killing her master. She didn’t bare her vampire fangs and growl like a bear, and she didn’t let out a banshee scream. She didn’t even chase after Mati to tear him to pieces in front us to show us what she had in store for each one of us, especially me. Instead, she sat down on her haunches and just looked up at us. It even looked like she was kind of smiling, with her long pink tongue hanging out of the side of her huge Doberman-German shepherd mouth.
Billy and I glanced at each other with puzzled looks and then we turned to Todd who always seemed to have a confused look on his face.
“What the heck?” I blurted out.
“You sure that’s Loca?” asked Billy. “Sure isn’t acting like her.”
“It’s Loca alright,” said Todd, pointing at her. “There’s that scar across her snout, the one she probably got killing a crocodile or anaconda.”
Sure enough, the scar was there.
“Okay, it’s Loca,” I said. “So, now what are we going to do? Stay up here all afternoon until someone comes looking for us?”
Billy pulled his slingshot out of the back pocket of his Levis and loaded it with one of the small ball bearings he kept in his front pocket. He had his brave face on now. It always happened that way. At first he’d be all scared and wussy, but then he’d put on his gunfighter face and start to talk in his slow Texas drawl. He’d start being a famous gunslinger and not afraid of anything.
“I say we each go down there with our sling shots and loaded for bear,” he said. “It’ll be three against one.”
“Four, if you count Mati,” added Todd, who had just used up the best of his math skills.
“Okay,” I said, as I grabbed for my own slingshot. “Sounds like a plan.”
The Machaca gang stood at the base of tree side by side, with Mati behind us peeking through our legs. We had our slingshots armed and ready, pointing at the ground, but ready to draw. It was like the standoff at the OK Corral. I was Wyatt Earp, Billy was Doc Holliday and Todd was Virgil. We had played the game lots of times. Only this time it wasn’t a game, and we weren’t facing off with pretend Clantons and the McClaurys. We were facing something a heck of a lot scarier. We were facing the meanest, most vicious dog that ever walked the face of the earth. But Loca still hadn’t moved, or growled, or anything. She just sat there looking at us with her tongue sticking out of the side of her mouth, smiling. It was like she knew something funny that we didn’t know.
“Why’s she just sitting there?” said Todd.
“No idea,” I replied.
“Let’s just shoot her on the snout and get this over with,” said Billy in his tough guy voice.
But there was something different about her. I got the feeling that she wasn’t going to try to hurt us. I put myself in her place. Her master was gone and Lieutenant Sanchez and Guillermo Santos were in prison. Those were the only people she knew.
“Guys, I think she’s lonely,” I said. “I think she just wants to kiss and make up.”
Billy and Todd looked at me like I’d gone nuts.
“I ain’t getting my lips anywhere near those fangs,” replied Todd.
“You try to give her a kiss and she’ll rip your lips off and eat them in front of you,” cried Billy. His girly voice had returned. “Loca’s just waiting for the right chance to get us.”
But I had already made up my mind. I handed my sling shot Todd.
“You guys cover me, but don’t aim at her or shoot unless she comes after me.”
I started walking toward the big dog. Mati whined, and so did Billy. When I was half way there I stopped and looked back at my buddies.
“See? She hasn’t moved,” I said. Then, all of a sudden, before I had turned around to again to face the dog, I saw their eyes get really big and their mouths open up wide, but they didn’t – or couldn’t - say anything. I froze.
“She’s right behind me, isn’t she?” I said.
They both nodded at the same time. The hair on my neck stood up.
“She going to kill me, isn’t she?”
They nodded again.
I turned around, really slowly. There she was, not more than a yard in front of me. But she wasn’t showing her fangs. She was looking straight into my eyes and her tail was wagging slowly. When she barked I nearly died of a heart attack. It was the same bark she did that day on the washed out bridge when Pablo Malo’s body had fallen into the flooded river. It was a bark with a question mark at the end of it.
I kept my hands at my sides. I didn’t want her to get the wrong impression.
“Amigos?” I said. “Friends?”
Loca barked again, this time without a question mark at the end, more like an exclamation point. It sounded like a yes to me. I slowly got down on my knees and even more slowly reached my hands out to her. I heard Billy whispering to Todd behind me.
“He’s going to die.”
But I didn’t die. Loca walked straight into my arms and licked me full on the face. I gave her a hug, the kind you give dogs, and her tail started to really motor. We had kissed and made up.
So good! I never get tired of these stories.