The Snake

by J A Kellman

  If Ruston’s death was a ruse, however, who would go through the trouble and why? Flaking points, making arrows, creating an obsidian knife. Let’s face it. Killing someone by stretching him on a scaffold took work, organization, and a deep sense of purpose. It also made a statement of staggering proportions, a violent warning to anyone who was paying attention. No one could overlook Ruston’s demise, that was for sure, but why would he end up dead in such a gruesome way? Maybe as I dug through the images and notes, I’d think of something. I swear the ballplayer snorted.

  While I mused, I examined the little painted box next to the ballplayer. Inside, a jade pectoral—a simplified vulture—peered at me from a nest of cotton. I was stunned. It was beautiful. It was ancient. It was priceless. I could see from the style and its condition that it was early Maya, or maybe even Olmec. There was still dirt in the incised lines of the vulture’s face; a cloudy rainbow sheen tinged the surface from being buried for years. When had Ruston taken to stealing irreplaceable cultural artifacts? The Guatemalan government would go nuts if they knew he had it.

  ~ * ~

  After dinner, curled in my recliner with a glass of Bowmore 18 and my cat Rosie, I reflected on what I knew so far. According to Polop, Ruston was certain the stele included not only the name of the heretofore unknown ruler, K’in A’jaw, Sun King, but a startlingly early date for Tikal as a small city. The glyphs themselves were unusual as well. They were either early forms or hybrids of some sort.

  I paused; that was something to consider—hybrids, mixtures, fusions. What two or more writing systems could have influenced one another? Given the small population in the Petén, how could such contacts come about? People weren’t living next door to one another after all, so diffusion didn’t seem reasonable.

  Maybe conquest was the answer, one population supplanting another along with their writing system, but there would be archaeological signs—burned and shattered ruins buried deep in the jungle litter—or perhaps an outside elite replaced the first group’s leaders through peaceful means. But how would that happen and why? And what about the vulture pectoral?

  Something else interested me: the attack on Ruston coincided with his translation of and research into the ancient stone. He didn’t have a lot of friends, but no one could recall enemies who might want to be rid of him either. He was just a self-absorbed, obsessive middle-aged academic with dry scalp, if all the bottles of Selsun in his bathroom were an indication. Then the year after he found the stele and started his research, boom! He’s murdered. That might suggest some sort of connection between the two; why would the events occur so close together? Of course, coincidence explains a lot of things, but it seemed a stretch with Ruston.

  The dull headache I’d had behind my right eye since noon was becoming insistent. Since I wasn’t going to solve the problem overnight, I headed for bed. At least I could try to shake the headache.

  As the early autumn wind rattled the windows and drove thready clouds across the moonless sky, Rosie tramped and pawed before settling behind my knees. Maybe this Ruston business was making her restless, too. I certainly was wide awake. My brain was in overdrive.

  As the sky began to lighten, I took a couple of Benadryl. I finally fell into a restless sleep, dreaming in fits and starts of the rain forest dotted with small villages of thatched houses and Mayan people in traditional garments going about their daily lives. Far beyond the villages and miles from the tidy homes, though, deep in the dark and tangled jungle, something roamed, something that didn’t belong there, not then, not now.

  ~ * ~

  The next morning, groggy from antihistamines, I scanned the vulture pectoral into my computer, sending copies to Polop and Luis and Zoila, but I got shifty when I emailed the Mesoamerican curator at Dumbarton Oaks, a research center and museum in Washington, DC. I didn’t send him an image, just asked questions. I sure as hell didn’t want to start a witch hunt, not with the priceless pectoral on my desk.

  I hate sleepless nights. Not only had I not figured out anything with all my agonizing, I felt like dirt. I stopped at the South Seas Café for an iced cappuccino on the way to Ruston’s. It was blessedly cold in its paper cup as I let myself into the airless house and settled into my spot in front of the light box. At least this would be the last day I’d need to bake my brains out.

  To celebrate the approaching end of bending over the light box, I’d arranged with Bill Paulson, one of the two other people on my floor, and one of my closest friends, to meet for lunch at Cinco Gallos. Pat Barr, the other member of our usual threesome, couldn’t join us; she was scheduled to volunteer at the local library. We’d all known one another since we moved in about the same time years ago and felt more like siblings than neighbors. They’d been in on the Ruston business from the start.

  Bill, marathoner, former Navy SEAL, and retired police officer, co-owns a sport shop with his brother. He is our little group’s trainer and tactician when we need one. Pat is a retired research librarian from Health Sciences. What she doesn’t know about medical issues isn’t worth knowing, and better yet, she is acquainted with everyone remotely part of the health-care field in the Midwest. The three of us in combination are formidable researchers, investigators, and snoops, or at least we like to think so.

  I shut off the light box at noon and hurried down the stairs to the RAV4, eager for lunch and to hear what Bill had to say about my recent discoveries at Ruston’s.

  According to the address on the carryout menu, Cinco Gallos was in the old Dunkin’ Donuts out near the interstate. It was easy to spot. Its bright colors and Spanish language sign made it stand out in the jungle of car washes, payday-loan joints, and gas stations at the end of the steeply curving off-ramp of I-74. I pulled into the busy gravel parking lot.

  The restaurant’s architecture vaguely hinted at what it had been, a boxlike fast-food establishment with a drive-through window, though efforts had been made to disguise it. A glass-roofed sunroom filled with plants and an adobe-walled patio with bright umbrellas advertising Mexican and Guatemalan beers had been added, and large planters of impatiens marked the entrance.

  Any trace of the former donut shop disappeared once I got inside. A tall wooden cashier’s desk sporting posters from western Mexico faced the front door; the dining space had been transformed from grab-and-go Formica counter to a real restaurant with murals of winding cobbled streets, hanging ferns, and norteño and salsa on the sound system. No wonder Ruston liked it. It was as close as one could get to Mesoamerica in Big Grove.

  Bill sat in a booth just beyond the entry, sipping iced tea and reading a menu. I slid in across from him, savoring the icy air, the smell of grilling meat and onions, and the cool Naugahyde against my damp back. An iced tea magically appeared at my place as soon as I arrived, as well as a basket of hot homemade tortilla chips and an array of sauces in small dishes.

  “I figured you’d want tea in this heat,” Bill said. “The menu is stunning,” he added as he pushed his copy toward me.

  After we ordered, we sat back to watch the action. The place was surging—dark-haired men in jungle-print shirts ran between tables. Most looked like they pumped iron; a couple had gang-banger eyebrows shaved into lines, patches, and peaks. Over the music, we could hear the greasy laughter of men full of self-satisfaction sharing a joke in an office just beyond the entry.

  “They’re having a hell of a time in there,” Bill said.

  “I wish I were feeling as pleased with myself as they are,” I said, scowling. “Nothing stands out from all those notes and images I’ve examined, except Ruston clearly hadn’t become interested in K’in A’jaw until last summer. In fact, according to him, no one had even heard of the ruler till he tripped over the stele.

  “What made his continuing research complicated was that it wasn’t just K’in A’jaw he wanted to uncover, he wanted to piece together his world, to discover how closely linked the ancient people were to those who followed them later.”

  Bill nodded as he
scooped salsa onto a chip. “You’re probably right,” he said with his mouth full. “That doesn’t seem like much after all that work, but it’s something. And it tells you where his research might have gone next and maybe what people didn’t want him poking into in the future.”

  Our lunches arrived in a sizzling cloud of steam. The grilled steaks were perfect—as were the homemade tortillas and black beans with thyme—just what I needed after a morning spent bending over the searing light box. Bill smiled as he rolled a tortilla full of guacamole and fresh cheese and licked his fingers happily. Customers poured through the door in a steady stream while we ate—construction workers, truck drivers, people from nearby businesses, glassy-eyed travelers off the interstate.

  Traffic into the parking lot hadn’t slowed by the time we left an hour later. Two large semis were pulling into the lot next to the restaurant as we crossed the hot gravel to our cars. A group of students parked near the entrance and darted inside.

  The guy who owns Cinco Gallos must be rolling in cash. Maybe that helped explain the new British racing green Jaguar F type coupe parked in the “Reserved for Owner” space near the rear entrance.

  Bill whistled when he spotted it. “You know how much that costs? Sixty-three thousand dollars, give or take. We aren’t talking only selling tacos to buy that thing. If we are, I’m changing jobs!” He gave me a half salute and headed for his battered old Land Cruiser parked near the dumpsters at the rear of the lot.

  ~ * ~

  Back in Ruston’s study, I examined the remaining pile of materials. So far there wasn’t anything about the stele that meant anything to me beyond what he told Polop in the first place. I’d start packing his papers and books tomorrow. I’d be done by late afternoon if I kept moving. I was eager to wrap things up. The heat and stale air were getting me down.

  By Friday morning, nothing new had appeared in Ruston’s papers except a short description of a jade green vulture pectoral at the end of his field notes. He’d made a rough sketch of it, too; it was identical to the one I’d found on his desk. By noon I’d heard from Luis and Zoila about the vulture’s possible meaning. They suggested it was an image of transition between sky, earth, and the moisture that flows between. Polop proposed a water connection as well, a link between earth and sky in which the vulture played a role in moisture and fertility.

  The Dumbarton Oaks curator said the same thing—water, sky, rain, moisture, fertility, and jade itself carried similar watery connections. Just before we hung up he added, “Here’s something interesting, around six hundred BCE there was a lord called Grandfather Vulture, K’utz Chman, in a large community near the west coast.”

  Huh. Curious.

  The other information I’d gleaned during my time at Ruston’s, aside from his use of Selsun, was that his interest in cigars was more than casual—if the large wooden humidor on an office shelf and the lingering odor of tobacco after several days with a window open were indicators. There was his fondness for Cinco Gallos, too. I guess that counted as a discovery, but still, taken together, there wasn’t much information about Ruston as a person or his stele after a week spent digging through his papers.

  Nothing suggested what had happened to him. Nothing indicated the role of the stele in his demise or the jade pectoral’s place in his enquiries, either.

  Six

  Big Grove, First Week in October

  A week after my Ruston job, Big Grove was jolted out of its early fall routine of football, tailgating, and raking leaves. At six o’clock Saturday evening, on I-74, at the north edge of town, a battered white Cintas truck—The Uniform People, it said in blurry letters on its side—was blown off the road near the Sutter Avenue turnoff behind Cinco Gallos, according to the ten o’clock news. The driver tried to swerve back onto the road, but the front tire caught in a depression in the gravel below the sharp edge of the pavement. The truck skidded onto the narrow shoulder on its side, slid down the embankment, and came to rest upside down below the tight curve of the highway exit. An hour later, as emergency personnel began the process of documenting and cleaning up the site, the truck burst into flames due to a gas-tank leak.

  Several things made the accident notable, the newswoman continued: the driver and his companion had disappeared, and they had been hauling a substantial quantity of drugs. According to her, a number of brick-sized plastic-wrapped packages had fallen from the truck and spread across the grass behind Cinco Gallos as the vehicle skidded down the incline. The police, always alert to the possibility of drugs, brought a dog to check the scene. The officers were right. The dog was eager. The packages on the grass appeared to contain heroin, as did the bricks stacked floor to ceiling in the back of the truck. The dog, her work complete, was returned to the back of the squad car, just before the truck caught fire.

  Emergency personnel from several jurisdictions kept bystanders away from the burning truck, but they couldn’t do anything about the smoke. The north end of Big Grove was blanketed in a thick cloud by the time the flames were put out, a couple of hours later. During interviews the next morning, people who lived in the area joked they would be high for weeks.

  ~ * ~

  In the investigations that followed, officers learned that two days before the accident, a mason on his way to work saw the boxy white van as it turned north out of El Paso toward Wichita. Other people, too, took note of its rapid northeastward progress, since speeding Cintas trucks aren’t common in interstate traffic. A semi driver spotted the van heading east from Wichita toward Kansas City. A day later, an Illinois Highway Patrol officer saw the truck on the interstate between St. Louis and Effingham. Then it turned north.

  Evening traffic was thick by the time the truck approached Big Grove. Several people interviewed after the accident had seen the truck exit I-57 and turn east on I-74, where crosswinds—always tricky on that stretch of road—caught it and rolled it down the off-ramp incline. The truck’s flaming demise was well-documented, for by then several people were using their cells to take pictures.

  ~ * ~

  Our Burr Oaks group gets together at least every couple of weeks in someone’s apartment for what we call cocktail hour. Our evenings are BYO and everyone brings snacks to share. Bill, runner thin, can be depended on to have a bag of Cheetos or salsa and tortilla chips and a microbrew of some sort. Pat, short and chunky, leans toward vegetable sticks, homemade spreads, and a glass of pinot noir. I usually have a hunk of nice cheese, crackers, and Bowmore neat. We gather around a kitchen table, spread out the hors d’oeuvres, and dig in.

  “Where the hell was all that stuff going?” Bill mused at our cocktail hour the Friday after the news broke. “Chicago? Detroit? Indianapolis? I mean, millions of dollars of heroin and fentanyl, too. Who could buy that quantity? Where else could that be sold but a big city?”

  We were in Bill’s kitchen this time. Plenty of Cheetos, potato chips, and onion dip. Pat brought her new baked ricotta and herb spread with crostini. I’d gone all out and purchased smoked salmon, a change from my usual cheese and crackers.

  “Was the truck exiting, do you think?” I asked as I bit into a layer of salmon on thin, buttered brown bread. “Or did it just blow off I-74 at that point?”

  “It’s hard to know,” Bill said, dunking his potato chip into the dip. “Maybe they were pulling off for the night. There are a lot of cheap motels in that part of Big Grove.”

  Pat sipped her wine. “But where was the driver?” she asked. “There wasn’t a sign of him.”

  “Long gone after that accident,” Bill said. “He wasn’t going to stay around for the finale.”

  “Do you think someone set fire to the truck or did it catch on its own?” Pat asked, not expecting an answer.

  We kicked the questions around for a while, then drifted into other considerations: Pat’s enthusiasm regarding new seating in the library, Bill’s plans for running the marathon in the spring, my growing interest in taking a real holiday. An hour later, as we packed the leftovers, Bill prom
ised to see what he could find out from his police buddies at the gym about the truck and drugs. Maybe they knew something.

  As it turned out, none of them knew anything that wasn’t in the paper or on TV. In fact, nothing more came to light about the crash until months later, but in the meantime things continued to go wrong in Big Grove.

  Seven

  Big Grove, Second Week in October

  Father Diego Muldonado sighed as he locked the back door of St. Patrick’s social hall. It had been a long day. It was eight o’clock and nearly pitch black. Parishioners called good night as they moved to their cars, keen to reach the warmth of their homes after the parish board meeting. Father Diego waved.

  At least they had finalized the parish holiday arrangements—a Day of the Dead Fiesta (they’d have to hurry their preparations, since they had waited to the last minute), a communal dinner on Thanksgiving, and a tamale supper and gift exchange on Christmas Eve after midnight Mass. There also had been decorations that needed to be discussed, since the women were eager to make the large open space of the hall as festive as possible. They would do most of the work—the decorating, the cooking—but they were excited despite their family obligations and the fact that making tamales would mean several of them cooking all day in the steamy parish kitchen.

  Father Diego had one more thing to do before he could go home to his old brick rectory on the corner. He palmed his car keys, clicked open the door of his Corolla, and eased under the wheel. He headed out of the parking lot and turned north toward the interstate and Cinco Gallos. If he were lucky, the meeting with Eduardo Guzmán, owner of the restaurant, would be brief.

  Father Diego’s parish covered the entire length of Bloomingdale Road between Sutter and the I-57 exit and paralleled I-74. It wasn’t much to look at. On the east, at the interstate’s intersection with Sutter, a McDonald’s, bright with lights and colored plastic play equipment, faced a payday-loan office in a former fast-food restaurant. To the west, Bloomingdale was lined with tired, inexpensive motels surrounded by gravel parking lots dotted with semis, the trucks of workmen, and the cars of people saving money. Interspersed among the motels, small businesses waited for customers—a seafood shack smelling of hot fat and fish advertised hush puppies and fried okra on a white plastic foldout sign near its door; a faded, yellow concrete-block liquor store announced its weekly specials in hand-lettered signs behind its window grates; a bait shop listed minnows and night crawlers on its sign out front.