The Snake

by J A Kellman

  Businesses that serviced trucks—semis and large truck repair, a retread tire business, a welding shop, a truck wash—backed up to the interstate. Tiny houses built after World War II, the homes of parishioners, dotted the neighborhood, struggling to avoid the encroaching trucks.

  St. Patrick’s Catholic Church, a red, wooden building that resembled a ranch house with a tiny square steeple topped by a small white cross, sat in the center of a large grassy soccer field. It looked more like a rural, southern Protestant chapel than a Catholic church—no statues, no stations of the cross, no stained glass. The parish hall was located in front of and to the right of the church: the rectory, a tidy brick two-story, was situated next door to the hall on the corner.

  When Father Diego left the restaurant three hours later, Cinco Gallos had been closed for an hour, and the parking lot was empty except for his car, Eduardo’s Jaguar, and the battered vehicles of two women mopping floors and readying the restaurant for the next day. The wind had increased while he was inside, causing the traffic lights to sway, hurling sandwich wrappers, sales flyers, and trash can lids into the air, blowing dirt from the interstate across the restaurant’s parking lot toward the tiny neighborhood beyond. Despite the late hour and the dirt, Father Diego was smiling. He headed home, full of wine, with a substantial contribution to the church in his pocket.

  The sound of I-74 seemed unusually loud that night, the whining noise that endless traffic makes as it moves along an interstate in any American city. Maybe it was the wind, but it sounded like La Llorano, the weeping woman, calling her dead children, or the wail of a creature in distress.

  Eight

  Big Grove, Late October

  In the far southwest section of Big Grove, Eighteen Rabbit watched blankly as José Polop’s garage door rose with a rattle just after midnight. I feel like a rat about Quesito, José Polop thought as he threw his carry-on bag into the front seat of his car and slid under the wheel. I’d like to take him with me, but I’ve got to disappear. I’d stick out like a sore thumb walking through O’Hare with a cat carrier at this hour. “Yeah, I saw a little Indian guy with a cat. He was buying a ticket for Guatemala.” I’ve left plenty of food. The Lunds will check when I don’t pick up my paper tomorrow morning. They’ll take care of him. He backed out of his garage and headed for the interstate.

  It was 12:30 when he turned north on I-57. The wind tugged at his car as he drove up the ramp. Unlike some early mornings, the road was empty. If all went well, it would be two and a half hours to Chicago, then a half hour more to O’Hare. He’d done this trip so many times on his way to research in Guatemala or visit family that he could drive it in his sleep. He’d buy a ticket for the five o’clock morning flight to Miami and then one from Miami to Guatemala. Once he got to Guatemala, he’d disappear. Visit a friend in Xela, or Quetzaltenango as they call it now thanks to the Spaniards, or maybe Chichicastenango. This whole Ruston business was so Guatemalan: there was nothing like torture to keep the wheels of time and existence turning. Whatever had gone on with Ruston probably wasn’t going to follow him to the Highlands, and the black Jeep Cherokee that had been driving past his house the last couple of days may have been someone visiting in the neighborhood. Probably he was paranoid, but he couldn’t take a chance. No one outside of friends and family knew where his former schoolmates lived. He’d be okay with them while he figured things out.

  When he got to O’Hare, his luck held. There was still parking in the long-term lot. Polop pulled into one of the remaining spots, grabbed his carry-on, locked his car, and hurried toward the shuttle for Terminal Three. His tickets were going to cost an arm and a leg, but he didn’t care. When he got to Guatemala it would all be worth it.

  The immense echoing ticket area was nearly deserted except for two or three scattered groups waiting for ticket agents’ desks to open. A rumpled family of four slept curled against one another on a couch in front of the huge front windows, their bags at their feet.

  Buying the tickets was easy. The sleepy-eyed clerk who emerged from the back hardly looked at him. Polop hurried through the remaining travel processes—TSA, passport screening, then headed toward his terminal, stopping for a coffee on the way. A half hour before the flight was called, he went to the men’s room nearest his gate to avoid using the airplane toilet later.

  The blue tiled space was deserted except for two janitors who followed him in, pushing carts loaded with trash bins, plastic sacks, and cleaning supplies. The largest of the men set up a pair of yellow plastic signs in the entrance saying that the toilets were closed for servicing and warning of wet floors. An arrow pointed to the still open section on the other side of the entrance. The second man parked his cart in the middle of the room, removed a mop and a container of cleaning solution from his cart, filled his bucket at a service tap near the door, and began swabbing the floor under the sinks.

  Uninterested in the janitors but eager for privacy, Polop chose a stall at the end of the row away from the activity, pushed open the stainless-steel door, and stepped inside, fumbling with his bag, his jacket, the sliding latch. Suddenly the space behind him exploded. The door flew open and Polop was slammed forward into the stall. “What the hell? Get out!” he yelled as he struggled to keep his balance and turn to face the intruder. It was useless. He was penned in the limited space in front of the toilet, restrained by his jacket, the clumsy carryon, the arm around his throat. Rubber gloved fingers pressed hard on the pressure point below his right ear. It felt as if someone had jabbed an electric probe in his neck. He dropped his bag, staggered, fell back into the arms of the largest janitor who hauled him out of the stall.

  “Don’t say anything. Don’t make a sound. If you do, I will hurt you,” the man said in Spanish as he and his partner lifted Polop over the edge of the nearest cart’s trash barrel. “If you shout, move, anything, you’re dead.”

  Something hard, maybe a gun from its size and shape, pressed against the top of Polop’s skull. The second janitor scooped up Polop’s bag, threw it in on top of him, then covered him with the bulging, leaking trash sacks they’d gathered from the gates in Terminal Three. As the men moved into the echoing concourse pushing their carts of supplies, the smell of coffee, popcorn, and greasy french fries filled Polop’s lungs like poisonous gas: brown landfill-like leach trickled over his head and shoulders from the bags above.

  When Airport Security made enquiries later, passengers waiting outside a nearby gate remembered nothing unusual, just two janitors doing their nightly rounds, shoving carts with supplies in front of them as they headed for the main terminal. The airport employee monitoring passengers at the terminal exit recalled seeing two janitors push a single cart out a sliding door into the passenger pickup area, perhaps to empty the waste cans along the drive. The employee didn’t see the black Cherokee parked at the far end of the exit curb turn on its lights. When he looked later, the car was gone: the cart stood deserted on the sidewalk, bulging trash bags piled nearby.

  Nine

  Big Grove, Late October

  “Second Mayan Scholar Disappears,” the local headlines read, further disturbing Big Grove and the university. Even national news picked it up, especially since it was similar to the Ruston story earlier in the year—same university, same area of scholarly interest, and the two men had been colleagues. American Airlines verified Polop had bought a one-way ticket at their counter but failed to board his flight. TSA acknowledged he’d entered their system.

  According to Polop’s neighbor, Peter Lund, in a TV news interview, Polop had been uneasy a few days before he disappeared. Ruston’s murder and the Jeep Cherokee driving past his house had triggered memories of Guatemala at its worst. From the state of Polop’s condo and his appearance later in Chicago, however, he hadn’t been burgled or kidnapped. And he’d left plenty of food for his cat. Maybe, Lund suggested, the airport was the first step in a sudden trip to visit relatives, but where did he go after that? And why hadn’t he said anything about Quesito to the
Lunds before he left?

  ~ * ~

  I left my coffee in the kitchen as I headed into my bedroom to dress. Polop’s disappearance was a shock. I knew Luis and Zoila would call as soon as they read the paper. The world of Mayan scholars was shrinking. Two former colleagues gone: one dead, one missing. I wasn’t wrong; the phone rang just as I pulled on my sweater. Zoila was upset.

  “Can you come over? Polop’s disappearance has hit Luis hard. First Ruston. Now José. Just like the seventies and eighties.”

  The drive to the retirement community was rainy and cold. The wind had picked up; it buffeted the RAV4, making it lurch from side to side. Dried corn leaves and scraggly weeds tumbled onto the brown lawns and trimmed evergreens on the far side of the road. I got to the Velascos’ apartment fifteen minutes after I talked with Zoila.

  “This is terrible. Luis and José have been good friends ever since university in Guatemala City,” she said as she took my coat.

  Luis was in the living room looking grim. He hadn’t touched his coffee or sweet bread, but my appearance seemed to rouse him. He pulled himself up straighter in his recliner and adjusted the red and purple blanket over his legs.

  “It started when Ruston was sacrificed in Tikal. Now Polop disappears in O’Hare. It doesn’t make sense,” he began without saying hello.

  “I’ve had sheet lightning running on my skin ever since Ruston died,” he said, mentioning the effects of his divination abilities as a calendar priest. “It’s been clear something is amiss, but starting last night, the warning of trouble has become even more pronounced. I’ll cast the seeds. Maybe the ancestors will tell us something.”

  Luis began to plan for the ritual. “You need to be here, too.” He looked at me over his reading glasses. “You were just talking with José about Ruston and his stele a few days ago and Ruston’s discovery seems to be the beginning. Let’s plan for four o’clock. That gives us time to pull everything together.”

  “I’ll get the offerings,” I said. “Flowers, candles, anything else?”

  “How about a couple of cigars? Cheap is fine. Even cigarettes would work in a pinch. With Ruston’s interests, it makes sense to have tobacco on the altar.” Luis Valasco, calendar priest, daykeeper, mother-father, Mayan holy man, diviner, smiled grimly.

  By the time I returned with the offerings later that day, Zoila had swept the balcony, apartment, and stone altar, lit copal incense in the broken potshards that lined the balcony’s railings and set pots of thyme from her herb collection among the shards.

  The autumn wind still blew down from the north, winding the incense into thin blue strands beyond the balcony, sending it back through the partially open door as I settled in my chair across from Luis. The curtains twisted in the gusting wind.

  Zoila positioned the little table with the striped cloth over Luis’s knees and placed his divining sack in the center. Then, she arranged the offerings on the altar.

  Luis emptied the red seeds and clear quartz crystals into the middle of the table, then sat, eyes closed, hands resting in his lap, listening to the wind, the voices only he could hear, his lips moving in silent prayers. He swept the seeds and crystals counterclockwise with his right hand, spreading them out, then swept again, chanting softly, requesting the lords of the Cauacs to heed his voice, asking the ancestors to listen, inviting them to come closer, requesting guidance and help. Luis paused in his prayers to place ten large crystals in a row along the front of the table. He arranged piles of seeds and crystals behind them. He waited, scrutinized the tiny heaps, gathered them up and threw them down again—throwing and reading four times, resting in between throws, eyes closed, oblivious to everything but the seeds, the crystals, and the patterns they made.

  Zoila and I sat quietly, focused on Luis’s circling hand, his chanting, the smoke wafting in from the balcony. The copper disk of the autumn sun slid beyond the haze of trees on the horizon; the orange light of sunset spread and thinned. The room darkened.

  Finally, Luis spoke. “It’s clear. We must go to Tikal. That is where the story began thousands of years ago, when the early people began to build their cities. Those stories reach into the world today, touching us all. Maybe Ruston and Polop were caught in a related struggle, something between indigenous rebels, or the cartels moving out of the Highlands. Perhaps we can find a trace of the two men, as well as information about the rising interest in Tikal’s narrative.”

  “I don’t like it. You’ll be a sitting duck in that wheelchair if someone is after Mayan scholars,” I said. Besides, I thought, what the hell kind of demands are being made on Zoila? Had the ancestors thought of that? And why and how do I, a retired gringa professor, fit into their schemes?

  “And Luis, the walker. How can we manage?” Zoila asked. “You tire easily. And I don’t—”

  Luis waved his hand dismissively. “The situation demands it. Besides, how else are we going to find out what is really happening? And we haven’t visited the relatives for months. The trip itself isn’t a big deal. All I’d have to do is sit. So, what’s new there?”

  It became clear there was no sense arguing with Luis, or the ancestors either. By the end of the evening, we were deep into plans for a trip to Guatemala. The decision wasn’t as precipitous as it seemed. I’d been talking about a vacation for weeks, and Zoila and Luis hadn’t been back to Guatemala since Luis’s stroke. They were eager to see relatives and friends again.

  Despite my misgivings, I could spend a week in Tikal with them, reacquaint myself with the site and visit museums in Guatemala City after they left for the Highlands. Mrs. Bertramson, who’d lived upstairs for years, could look after Rosie as usual.

  We couldn’t pretend we hadn’t noticed that the experts in an entire area of study seemed to be disappearing from the university. Tikal would be a good place to look for answers, since that was where Ruston died and Polop’s research was focused on precontact Mayan art imagery—just what one would find in the ancient site.

  That night, as I hurried to the RAV4, the air held the first hints of winter. I smelled snow on each gust of wind as it wrapped my coat around my legs and drove dried leaves across open spaces between buildings. The trees fretted and complained, uneasy against the dark sky.

  Ten

  Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, Late October

  It was midmorning and the heat had begun to rise when José Polop and his four escorts landed in Ciudad Juarez. His airport exit was the reverse of his entrance into Midway from O’Hare. They hauled him through the lounge, his feet barely touching the floor, then frog marched him to curbside parking. A black Jeep with tinted windows waited near a flowerbed of prickly pear. Was there no other vehicle for this sort of work? Polop wondered as he struggled to remain upright. The two guards—janitors, thugs, whatever they were—dragged Polop with them into the back seat. The small-boned jumpy guy in charge who’d been in the Jeep at O’Hare, got in next to the driver. The last kidnapper, as before, was somewhere behind him in an extra seat. Polop could smell his cheap aftershave.

  It was like a Gabriel García Marquez short story—surreal images, fragmented conversations, cloudy dreams—held together with the hum of the auto engine, the hiss and thump of tires over rough spots in the road. At night, they pulled into isolated ranchitas, tiny rural houses with tin-roofed porches, ever-present pots of nixtamal—corn and lime in water—simmering over small fires, and scruffy dogs, patchy, and nervous, that barked when they arrived, then hurried behind the house as they opened the Jeep’s doors. The dream included tortillas and frijole, beer if they were lucky, silent people in worn clothes, stars thick as smoke wheeling overhead, night winds rattling rusty roofs.

  He slept in sheds behind the houses, tipsy with beer, exhaustion, and fear, shackled to an iron ring for tying animals to the shed’s wall or trussed like a calf in a roping contest when there wasn’t a ring.

  Three days later, by the time the car stopped for the night, Polop had gleaned a few scraps of information from the muttered convers
ations among the men. They were headed south. He was supposed to arrive safe and sound, then do something, look at something. His escorts smoked, worked puzzles, listened to music. The guy in charge fiddled with his cell when there was reception. Polop slept, tried to think, slept again.

  That night, like the first, Polop was chained to the back wall of the tiny storage building attached to the house. He squirmed to make himself comfortable on a rough woven mat under a filthy burlap bag. The cold desert wind blew dirt against the door. Rodents skittered among the feedbags. Polop shivered. What the hell is next? he wondered.

  ~ * ~

  The drive to the Lacandon National Park in Mexico, just over the border from Guatemala—at least he’d found out where he was going for certain last night—was murder. The roads were lousy and Jesús, the leader, was on edge. He kept poking at his cell, craning his neck to see the road ahead, consulting a hand-drawn map spread on his knees. The thugs on either side watched the roadside like Rottweilers at a fence, their hands close to guns in holsters they’d strapped on that morning, holsters like those seen in pictures of SWAT teams. Who knows what the guy behind him was doing? Probably the same thing.

  When they finally stopped that fourth night, God knows where, it was dark. They pulled through the open gate of a small compound surrounded by an adobe wall on the edge of what had appeared in the fading light to be a tiny aldea or village scattered in the nearby jungle. Their destination, a small cement-block building at the back of the compound, was dim inside, except for a smoking kerosene lantern on a crude table in the center of the room. Polop counted a half dozen men seated on rough chairs in the flickering light. His throat tightened. They looked like ancient Maya, Yukatek Maya if their language meant anything—ponytails over their foreheads, earplugs, jade-inlayed teeth, which flashed in the feeble light—except they were dressed in commando outfits that included sidearms, bandoliers, and thick belts sagging with radios. A dozen assault rifles leaned against the walls. Two men dressed in street clothes sat well back from the table. They were Mexican from their appearance as well as their Spanish. No one smiled. His escorts didn’t either.