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“Colombia?”
“That’s where it’s happening. Bush is sending a lot of arms down there to fight the druglords, but the Colombian government has a way of whacking out some of the peasants with it at the same tune. So there are antigovernment people down there who pay big money for weapons, and I figured I could make a couple of runs, twenty thou a drop, and not worry about the political complexities involved. Why not? I dropped everything in Laos from pigs to napalm homemade from gasoline and soap detergent.
“Then Jack Gates offered me the big score, eighty thou for one run. The plan was for me to fly an old C-47 into Honduras, pick up a load of arms, land at this jungle strip in Colombia, where these guys process large amounts of coke, load about eight million dollars worth of flake on board, then do the arms drop up in the mountains and head for the sea.
“But I told Gates I wanted the payoff when I loaded the coke. He said I’d get paid on this end, and I told him it was no deal, then, because I didn’t exactly trust the kind of people he represented. So he made a couple of phone calls and finally said all right, since eighty thou is used Kleenex to these guys. Also, Gates and Joey Gouza thought we’d be in business together for a long time. Except I took them over the hurdles. Sit down. You’ll enjoy this.”
He pressed the remote button, and for fifteen minutes the screen showed a series of scenes and images that could have been snipped from color footage filmed in Southeast Asia two decades earlier: wind whipping the canvas cargo straps and webbing in the empty bay of a plane; the shadow of the C-47 racing across yellow pasture-land, hummocks, earthen dikes, and brown reservoirs, the dark green of coffee plantations, a village of shacks built from discarded lumber and sheets of tin that looked as bright and hot as shards of broken mirror in the sun; then the approach over the crest of a purple mountain and the descent into a long valley that contained a landing strip bulldozed out of the jungle so recently that the broken roots in the soil were still white and pink with life.
The next images looked like they had been taken at an oblique angle from the pilot’s compartment: sweat-streaked Indians in cutoff GI fatigues dragging crates of grenades, ammunition, and Belgian automatic rifles into the bay, a man who looked like an American watching in the background, a straw hat shadowing his face; then suddenly an abrupt shift in the location and cast of characters. The second cargo was loaded at twilight, and the bags were pillow-size, wrapped in black vinyl, the ends tucked, folded, and taped, carried on board as lovingly as Christmas packages.
“The next thing you should see is a lot of parachutes popping open in the dark and those crates floating down toward a circle of burning truck flares in the middle of some mountains,” Weldon said. “That’s where I made a change in the script. Watch this.”
The screen showed a moonlit seacoast, the waves sliding up on the beach in a long line of foam, humps of coral reef protruding from the surf like the rose-colored backs of whales. Then the kickers began shoving the cargo out of the C-47.
“I call this part ‘Weldon pickles the load and says get fucked to the greaseballs,’?” Weldon said.
The wind ripped apart the bags of cocaine and covered the black surface of the water with a floating white paste. The crates of arms tumbled out into the darkness like a flying junkyard. Some of the crates sent geysers of foam out of the groundswell; others burst apart on the exposed reef, bejeweling the coral with belts of .50 caliber shells.
The screen went white.
“That’s it?” I said.
“Yeah. What do you think of it?”
“This is what Gouza’s been after?”
“Yeah, I told both of them I had their whole operation on tape. I told them to get out of my life. I figured they owed me the eighty thou for the earlier runs, anyway. I took thirty-seven holes in the fuselage on one of them. What do you think of it?”
“Not much.”
“What?”
“What else have you got besides this tape?” I asked.
“This is the whole show.”
“Have you got something connecting Gouza to arms and dope trafficking?”
“I’ve just got this tape.”
“Will you make a sworn statement that you were flying for Joey Gouza?”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I made all the arrangements with Jack Gates. Gouza stayed out of it.”
I looked out the ceiling-high window at the live oaks in Weldon’s sideyard.
“What’s Bobby Earl’s part in this?” I said.
“He’s got no part.”
“Don’t tell me that, Weldon.”
“Bobby doesn’t have anything to do with it.”
