The Snake

by J A Kellman

  Twenty

  Tikal National Park, Guatemala, December 18

  When Ochoa walked into Captain Ríos’s office early one morning just before the holidays, Ríos was already working on a list of things to be done before the park closed for two days at Christmas. “We need to send a small expedition to the northern boundary of the park before the break,” he said, removing the tip of the ballpoint pen from his mouth that he had been gnawing. “There is too much plane traffic heading that direction. We can’t ignore it any longer. Add that increase to Ruston’s murder and other events—Ann and her purse, for example—it’s clear something is up. I want you in charge. You know the park inside and out. Take Jaime with you and maybe the two newest guys; it’ll let them see what that part of the park looks like.

  “Just don’t go snooping in Mexico,” Ríos added. “That would start something nasty. I want you to just document what you find and leave, but don’t let anyone see you while you are at it.”

  ~ * ~

  It was just after dawn six days before Christmas when Ochoa pointed the Forest Service Land Cruiser, which was packed with tents and enough food and water to last a month, along a dirt track toward the northern edge of the park.

  “What’s with all the supplies?” Jaime asked. “I thought we only planned two days away. We’re not going to hang around in the jungle for Christmas, are we?”

  Just then the SUV lurched. Ochoa grunted as he jerked it back onto the smoothest part of the track. “No, we aren’t, but Ríos wants us to be prepared for anything. You know how he is. This is supposed to be an in and out. We see what we can see, photograph anything of interest without anyone—if there is anyone—spotting us, and then we head back.”

  As they drove past central Tikal and headed deeper into the jungle toward the ancient city of Uaxactun, the road turned ugly. The unusually frequent rains during the rainy season had done nothing to improve its surface. Ochoa clasped the jerking steering wheel, his knuckles white, muttering under his breath as he addressed the ruts. The others braced themselves, silent, except for the occasion gasp as the SUV jolted over rocks. By the time they reached the park boundary, Ochoa was eager to get out of the Land Cruiser. His shoulders and wrists hurt from the effort of holding the Toyota on the road, and his spine felt as if it had been driven through the top of his head.

  “It’s like riding a bronco,” Ochoa said. “The road makes steering a nightmare. I need some water,” he added as he slid from under the wheel, unscrewing the top of his canteen at the same time. “Then let’s see what the hell is happening. I don’t see anything here, but Mexico may be another matter.”

  Jaime grunted in assent and returned his own water bottle to his belt; then he walked to the back of the SUV and unloaded the spotting scope from behind the seats. The new guys, looking queasy from the jerking drive, still leaned against the Toyota sipping from their canteens.

  Ochoa stepped to the edge of the undergrowth, scanning the distant open space with his binoculars. Things had changed since he’d been there six months ago with a group of archaeologists looking for possible dig sites. Where once there had been no sign of humans, an airfield had sprung up just over the border, complete with control tower, hangers, and airplanes of all sizes—medium sized transports to Piper Cubs. That wasn’t all. Three large pole buildings with logos on their sides lay beyond the hangers: “Maya Jungle Gold” stated the logo in red and gold letters around an image of Temple I: “World-wide exporters of fine, wild-grown organic cacao beans,” was written below in large red and black letters. Trucks arrived and left in a steady steam to and from the loading docks of the largest building. Workers in blue jumpsuits with the Maya Jungle Gold company logo on the pockets unloaded burlap sacks stamped with the same logo, pushing them inside on flat-bottomed trollies, or moved sacks between buildings.

  Ochoa let out a low whistle. “Take a look at this, Jaime,” he said lowering his binoculars. “It’s an entire community.”

  Jaime raised his binoculars. “Jesús y María! An airport, too, and guard towers!”

  Jaime had set up the scope in a small clear spot in the vegetation with a sight line through the trees to the bustling scene. Ochoa switched to the scope for a better view. Beyond the runways and tower, he could see a low building with Oficina written over the door in red letters. He also noted what appeared to be a bunkhouse, wash house, and mess hall with a thatched outdoor eating area just beyond.

  “This used to be scrubland. Now it’s an industrial development,” Ochoa said. “Look at all those trucks and planes! How many cacao beans can one company sell: enough to fund all this construction in a space of a few months? Three runways? A tower? Living quarters? Guard shacks? If this is about selling chocolate, I’ll retire right now. There can’t be enough cacao in the whole of Guatemala to keep this place operating, but it’s perfect for drugs. Ríos is going to hate the hell out of what we tell him, but what can we do? It’s in Mexico.”

  “The authorities are probably in on it anyway,” Jaime added.

  Ochoa pulled his camera from its bag behind his seat, twisted on a lens, lined up his first image. “Let’s document and head home. We can’t peek in their windows. Talk about trouble, that would be it.” Ochoa paused. “But at night, if we’re careful…”

  “Two perspectives are better than one,” Jaime said, carefully easing his bulk through the undergrowth as he attached his long-distance lens. “Let me know if you want to poke around once the sun goes down, or better yet, come back later on our own. I don’t want to drag the kids into something ugly,” he said, glancing at the two young rangers busy with their binoculars on the far side of Land Cruiser.

  ~ * ~

  Deep in the duff in the understory near the SUV, the snake stirred uneasily. Humans were poking around her new resting spot. She would have to move again.

  ~ * ~

  When Ochoa and Jaime arrived at Captain Ríos’s office two days after Christmas, he was already at his desk. He was humming under his breath but stopped when he saw them.

  “Sit,” he said, waving his hand at the two battered wooden visitors chairs in front of his desk, but he wasn’t smiling. “How were your holidays?”

  “Excellent,” Ochoa said. “My mother-in-law went all out. Even got a turkey.”

  “Tamales and chicken at our place,” Jaime said, “and all the kids were home. That made it special. How about you?”

  “Fine,” Ríos said. “Fine. Or it was fine until I got a call from the border patrol. They’d spotted a couple of guys in camo driving a Forest Service truck right up to the Mexican frontier late the day after Christmas. The patrol figured they better see what was going on, so they waited. Once it got dark, the two guys snuck into Mexico, past the empty guard shack at the far end of the compound, headed to the back of the pole buildings behind the hangers, and went up to the window of the one nearest the border. The guys took photographs, did the same at the remaining two structures.” Ríos paused, made a steeple with his fingers in front of his face.

  Ochoa groaned to himself. They’d taken a chance, but who’d think a patrol would be out so close to Christmas? What the devil were they doing at that location anyway? Watching the action as well?

  “I have the feeling it must be you two, from the sound of the operation. You know, two men with binoculars, cameras, side arms, Forest Service truck.”

  Neither Ochoa nor Jaime said anything.

  “I thought so! You could have started an international incident! I can see the report now! Tikal Park Rangers invade Mexico on Christmas!” Ríos was nearly shouting. His face was red. “Well?”

  He paused, waited. Still neither Ochoa nor Jaime said anything. Losing patience, he demanded an answer. “What the hell did you see?”

  “Drugs,” Jaime said. “Drugs and guns.”

  “They’re packaging heroin in one building, cocaine in another, warehousing in a third,” Ochoa said. “And it looks like they’re mixing something in with part of the heroin in that first bu
ilding, too.

  “They don’t seem to be doing anything else, just repackaging in smaller amounts, like they’re preparing it for distribution.”

  Ríos chair creaked as he sat back. “What the hell can we do?” he asked no one in particular.

  Twenty-one

  Big Grove, January

  The holidays following Father Diego’s murder had been muted, but once the New Year began, life in Big Grove settled back into a more familiar routine and a cold-weather pattern. People dreamed of blazing fireplaces, good books, and chili and soup. Rosie and I spent our evenings curled in the recliner reading in a warm pool of lamplight, and Pat, Bill, and I went back to our biweekly cocktail evenings.

  At the end of month, I began a new commission…organizing the papers of the village of Riverview for transfer to the local historical society. A town west of Big Grove with a population of 350, Riverview had been founded in 1850 with a handful of rough houses, general store, a church, and one saloon. After the railroad came through and corn from the elevator could be shipped, it had grown to a good-sized community with a business district, bank, and a second church. Then grew it to its current size as shipping of corn and beans moved from rail to truck.

  In the end, the job turned out to be more interesting than I first imagined. The city council had saved everything from the earliest days—meeting minutes, agendas, receipts, correspondence, every copy of the Riverview News, announcements for social gatherings, school plays, church suppers, photographs—all stuffed in no particular order in cardboard boxes in the tiny storage room behind the city offices, which were located over Bud’s Place, one of the two bars in town. I parked the RAV4 in the icy gravel behind the Victorian building that held Bud’s and the offices. A peeling, white wooden door led directly into the dark and quiet of the midmorning tavern, where Bud, a stout man in his sixties with a halo of white wispy hair, was reading the paper behind the old mahogany bar.

  “Hi, Bud,” I said, resting my plastic tub of archiving materials on a nearby stool. “I don’t know if you remember me. I’m Ann Cunningham. We met at the last city council meeting. I was there to answer questions about preserving city papers.”

  Bud peered at me over his glasses. “I remember. Glad you’re here,” he said as he led the way to the narrow stairs at the back of the room. “We should’ve organized things years ago. Papers are a real mess now.” He looked at my jeans and turtleneck. “Looks like you’re dressed for it.”

  I struggled up the stairs in the back of the bar with my box of supplies and down the narrow hall that led to the storage room at the back of the building. There wasn’t much to see once I got inside, just shelves of boxes, bundles of papers tied with twine, a single light bulb in the center of the ceiling, and the sense that time had stopped in the tiny space. It was musty, too. I had just managed to open the window across from the door when Bud appeared with a chair.

  “Thought you could use this,” he said, placing it in the only clear space. “Let me know if you need anything else. I’m always downstairs. Just give a shout.” He cocked his head to one side as if listening. “I better go. Just heard someone come in. I’ll check on you later. See how you are doing.” He gave a wave as he turned to leave. I could hear him retreating down the creaking narrow stairs.

  The first box I opened was a mixture of old mouse nests, brittle paper, and dirt. The nests smelled, the papers fractured like glass, and dust rose in clouds into the pale sunlight that filtered through the single window’s cloudy surface.

  ~ * ~

  I was about half way through the job a week later when I found something that sounded strangely familiar. The story unfolded over several years in crumbling copies of the Riverview News. In 1870, the banker’s son brought home his new wife. He’d left home ten years earlier to go to college in the east, take the Grand Tour, see the world. A faded picture of the stolid German banker’s son and his delicate bride—an indigenous woman from another world, if the braids wrapped in ribbon and coiled around her head and Mayan dress meant anything—showed the pair staring, unsmiling at the camera. According to the accompanying interview, the young man came back with dreams of a business empire of grain sales and shipping, a rich and productive farm, and a big house on the hill north of town. His bride, he said, was from the Yucatán, daughter of a community leader named Kan. They’d met on one of his trips.

  Later papers announced the birth of children: first a boy, later a girl; the creation of the grain business on a spur of railroad next to the river that ran east and west through town and the construction of the palatial dwelling on the hill. The business prospered according to the paper, but of the family there was nothing more after the daughter was born. It was as if they disappeared. The banker’s son died twenty years later, alone in his grand house. His obituary didn’t mention his wife or children.

  Bud didn’t know much about the story either, just that the woman and her children left years before the man died. “People figured she went back where she came from. Not much room for strangers in Riverview then,” Bud said.

  It reminded me of K’in A’jaw and his princess—the foreign wife, her rejection by the husband’s community, the flight—but at least K’in A’jaw accompanied his wife and children into the jungle, not like the banker’s son who let his family leave without him. I wonder where their descendants are now, I thought as I headed to the icy parking lot, remembering the sepia image of the tiny woman, the stolid businessman, his growing list of properties.

  Big Grove, February

  Polop was sent home from Guatemala by the US Embassy at the beginning of February, twenty-five pounds lighter, jumpy as a cat, and nursing a flesh wound in his thigh. We’d nearly given up on seeing him again. He was staying with Zoila and Luis until he could tolerate being alone. They invited me for dinner, so I could see him and hear his story.

  “Managed to escape on the way to the toilet one night,” Polop said after supper. “There was an outhouse on the edge of the compound. I’d been with them so long they were getting lax: they let me go alone. That’s when I ran. Lucky for me it was dark and the compound backed into a grove of trees. I’d been in Santa Elena long enough to have a sense where things were—main street, causeway, road to the airport. Besides, there isn’t much else there. I headed north staying on back streets. I thought I’d get to the airport or the road to Tikal that way. There aren’t streetlights to speak of, so it was easy to hide most of the time. I was crouching behind a tumbled-down section of wall, trying to catch my breath, when I got shot. They must have seen me in the shadows. I ran anyway. There’s nothing like fear to keep me moving. I didn’t have money, my leg was dragging, and I must have looked terrible, but once I got to the airport, the guards were willing to listen. They knew about my kidnapping from a police watch list.”

  “Sounds like Indiana Jones,” Luis said.

  Polop snorted. “Ha. Some adventure. Looking back, I still can’t believe what happened. Those men with their front-facing ponytails give me the willies. I hate the jungle. And all I could think of was Ruston. I imagined I was next. Otherwise, why were they hanging on to me? They probably were waiting for a propitious moment, the right day in the calendars, Venus rising or something.

  “I just remember pieces of the ordeal—the jolting car, the rickety ferry across the Usumacinta, the hike north to a limestone ledge deep in the jungle, the narrow cave, which was wet and full of bugs.” Polop paused for a moment, then plowed on.

  “They felt they had to look like the ancestors for this holy journey and didn’t wear their usual combat gear. Jesús y María! They dressed as classical period warriors—breechclouts in those awful weeds full of insects and snakes, then crawling on all fours in a cave piled with bat dug. They’re...they’re possessed.”

  “Nasty,” Zoila said. She shuddered slightly.

  “By the time we reached the central chamber, the men were electrified, beside themselves. They’d reached the holy of holies, and now they believed they’d learn the
secrets of the universe.

  “They were right to be excited. The mural is amazing, even in lantern light. The colors are still good, though some paint has flaked off. In the center of the mural, a young lord dressed in a plain white loincloth, green quetzal-feather headdress, and jade necklace is seated cross-legged on a throne. A young woman, maybe his wife, offers him a pot of chocolate. Two guards with spears in court regalia—jaguar capes and sandals, quetzal headdresses—stand behind him. Another figure, badly eroded, but maybe another lord, approaches the throne from behind the woman. His clothes didn’t look familiar: long, white sheer robe, more like the Lacandones today, simple bead necklace, maybe jade, it’s hard to tell; plain sandals and hair done in a bun. He looks older, too; he’s got a paunch. And he’s carrying a necklace with a vulture pectoral, maybe as a gift for the young lord.”

  “You’re joking!” I exclaimed, leaning forward eagerly, not wanting to miss a word.

  Polop shook his head. “The mural looks early, late preclassic maybe. Kan, the leader, wanted to know if the jade pectoral is like the one on the stele Ruston found. I told them what I knew about the stele, the meaning of the glyphs, the pectoral. They really became animated then.”

  Polop paused, remembering.

  “They believe the painting proves the Petén was theirs from the beginning, before the Spanish invaders arrived, before foreigners claimed their world. According to them, Tikal, the Lacandon Reserve, and all the other parks have to be reclaimed, ranchers have to be driven out, the cartels eradicated. Even though they are working with Los Zetas for the moment, they don’t care. Every non-Mayan trace has to be destroyed.” He drummed his fingers nervously on the arm of his chair. “They’re on the warpath and they want to find that pectoral. It’s the symbol of kingship, according to them. Oh, and something else, they have an early Spanish document that completes the story, but they need someone to piece it all together. They said they found it with some old papers in Kan’s grandfather’s trunk.”