Aztec Odyssey

by Jay C. LaBarge

  Cortés couldn’t see what was happening behind him and pressed ahead with his horses, fighting until they were on solid ground, away from the city. Asupacaci had heard that over 1,000 Spaniards and 2,000 of their allies had been killed, along with most of the horses and all of the lightning logs called artillery. But that did little to compensate for the loss of so many nobles, including his two brothers who were deliberately killed when they became too much to manage. Asupacaci had alertly used the chaos of the flight to dive into the water with his bound hands. Before he could be caught three warrior canoes shielded him from the vengeful Spanish and pulled him in, but he was hit by a crossbow bolt, the head of which he still carried inside of him. And even now, with every breath he took, its pressing against his shoulder and lung reminded him of his sacred task and hated enemy.

  The Aztecs had chased the remnants of Cortés’s army and whittled down their numbers, but they didn’t succeed in destroying them. Exhausted and suffering their own losses, they gathered those Spaniards who were taken alive to be sacrificed, and subjects from all corners of the empire saw that these were indeed just men, who felt pain, prayed to their false gods, and fertilized the earth with their blood. Their heads filled the ceremonial skull racks at the base of the great temple pyramid, and a few were stuck on the tops of lances with their helmets on and made into torches, to show that they could indeed be defeated. One was even mounted on a skeleton of a horse, to show that these creatures too weren’t invincible.

  A special gold coated skull was kept separate from the rest and was placed on the very top of the temple, next to the sacrificial alter. This was the Spaniard known as the Inquisitor, that trained practitioner of the dark arts of extracting information from those who wouldn’t tell or didn’t know.

  Asupacaci had seen him do his foul work on many, including his relatives, who were left to die a lingering death once the desired information was obtained. The Inquisitor had been left behind and surrounded on the causeway and dragged from the water when he tried to drown himself. He was bound and taken to the base of the temple, where he was buried in sand up to his neck. The gold and silver he’d had on him were melted before his eyes.

  With Friar Rodrìguez translating, the Inquisitor was told that the gold would be poured upon his head, drop by drop, until he was encased in it, since he and all the Spanish had such an insatiable hunger for it. He would then be placed where he could look out and see every sacrifice the Aztecs would make, for all of eternity. When the screaming subsided and all movement stopped, the head was cleanly cut off the body, the molten silver was poured into the eye sockets, and a priest with much ceremony carried it aloft with two hands to the top of the great temple pyramid.

  Cuitláhuac demanded to be kept abreast of every movement of Cortés and learned from his many spies that they were gathering strength, bolstered by more Spaniards, horses, fire logs and thousands upon thousands of traitorous allies. The day of reckoning would be coming, and only one way of life would survive.

  As more allies deserted them, as their enemies gained strength, Cuitláhuac foresaw with great clarity the inevitable where others in Tenochtitlán did not. He devised the plan to save the heritage and legacy of the Aztec people, to send out token caravans in different directions and purposely let some overhear the false parts of the plan to spread rumors. He alone charged Asupacaci with leading the single, true expedition far away, far beyond the reach of the Spaniards. It had been with a sense of foreboding that Cuitláhuac told Asupacaci to choose the final route and destination and keep it to himself, so that no one in Tenochtitlán would know the location of the ultimate goal, not even himself.

  The Aztecs dredged along the causeways. They recovered much treasure lost on La Noche Trist and gathered the vast hidden wealth that was never disclosed to the Spanish. And as the renewed army of Cortés worked its way back to the valley of the Aztecs, Asupacaci stole away in the night, leaving behind all dead who could tell the tale. All except Cuitláhuac, now the last great leader of the empire.

  Chapter 6 – May 29, Present Day

  Nick sat on the dock a long time, rubbing the stress out of his temples. He was feeling the slight buzz from the whiskey, letting his thoughts drift unguided, hoping for connections he might have missed. When none came, he stood up and stretched. He wandered along the shoreline, skipping a few rocks on the calm lake, like he had done so many times in his youth. He passed some stacked wood and smiled as he remembered a favorite saying his dad had, “Chop your own wood boys, it will warm you twice.”

  He followed the shoreline aimlessly, further down than he usually did, and turned to walk back up toward the camp. Not following any path, he nearly tripped on a couple of pine branches in the underbrush, and out of habit reached down to toss them deeper into the woods. As he picked them up, he noticed the ends weren’t broken off or torn, but weathered and cleanly cut. The needles were still on them, not yet too dry and brittle, probably from last winter. That made no sense, not way over here away from the camp. His curiosity aroused, he walked toward the closest cluster of pine trees, felt around them at shoulder height, and found the corresponding branch cuts on the far side of one tree.

  Now why would Dad cut off branches on the far side of a tree, and toss them into the undergrowth? Odd indeed, he thought. He tossed the branches to the bottom of the tree and worked his way to the side door of the cabin.

  Like his dad used to do, and was now his habit, he went inside and grabbed the old guitar, and sat on the porch and started strumming along to the music emanating from the hidden speakers. It Don’t Come Easy by Ringo Starr came on, and Nick easily slid into synching with the rhythm of the song.

  “Got to pay your dues if you wanna sing the blues,” Nick sang along softly. His thoughts drifted. His consciousness focused on the music, his unconsciousness seeking connections.

  Abruptly he sat straight up, and said aloud, “It wasn’t Dad, someone was covering their tracks!” It was only one little piece of a much greater mystery, one he wouldn’t be able to prove, but it explained why he could find no human tracks in the snow or out onto the ice when he found Albert, despite the fact that there were numerous animal tracks onshore everywhere. He never came to terms with the circumstances of his dad’s death, there were too many loose ends. Things just didn’t add up. Somehow, he knew this was the thread he needed to pull on, to see where it might lead.

  Nick’s feet took him into the cabin until he was staring at a rustically framed photograph of Charlie, Mom, Dad, and himself standing proudly in front of the old station wagon on a deserted stretch of highway somewhere in Arizona or New Mexico. The barren landscape stretching out endlessly into the distance. It was faded from the passage of time and sitting where sunlight hit it, almost to a point of looking like an old daguerreotype. He carefully took the photo out of its frame and slipped it into his shirt pocket. It was going on the dashboard of his truck.

  What was he missing? What was the link to all this? What could anyone have possibly wanted from his father?

  Suddenly feeling nostalgic, Nick wandered into the master bedroom, and got on his knees in front of the old steamer trunk at the end of the bed. An old family heirloom, it had seen many a trip with his Grandparents and Great Grandparents. Weathered, dented, copper clad and reinforced on the edges, it was in remarkably good shape. Dad had used it as his catch-all for his adventures over the years, like Nick did with the ammo can under his bed.

  He flipped it open and immediately smiled, seeing the visceral reminders of many journeys with his family. Nick unfastened and removed the top tray out of the trunk and put it on the bed. Still on his knees he started flipping through everything in the tray, small notebooks, photos and negatives of each trip still in the envelopes they were mailed in, old tour books, the occasional AAA TripTik, worn topographical maps with notations, all the memorabilia of past quests. Nick dug deep into the trunk itself, sorting through it, looking for something without really knowing what it was he wanted. Methodic
ally, he removed all the contents onto the floor around him including a compass, gear sacks, old binoculars, a portable GPS, head lamps, various dig tools, bug spray and head nets, an older digital camera, sunglasses, a foldable cap, bandanas, and a set of logbooks, one for each year of their Southwest wanderings.

  But one logbook was missing, and it occurred to Nick that that was what he was looking for. The hair on the back of his neck stood up. Dad had been meticulous, every trip was choreographed and planned out in minute detail. The logs were a chronological record of where they went, with small crudely sketched and annotated trail maps, key latitude and longitude coordinates, the soil and terrain conditions, the weather, people encountered with contact information, various photos taped to the pages, and what—if anything—they found. And the one logbook that was missing was one Nick distinctly remembered, because that was from the summer when his dad got his only tattoo.

  The next morning, Nick drove the thirty minutes over to the Horizonvue Nursing Home, where his dad had placed Nick’s grandmother, Grandma Ingrid. When his dad had moved from Muskegon to Lake Charlevoix full time, he was pleased to find this facility which catered to her increasing dementia, and the ease of access allowed him frequent visits. Nick and Charlie had decided not to tell their 96-year-old grandmother that her son Albert had passed, concerned with her ability to grasp the reality of it, deal with it, and to remember it. Nick recalled trying to convey information to her the past few years, and out of frustration had resorted to writing notes out in large letters so she could reference it, but she would simply forget there was even a note in the first place.

  Occasionally she would have surprising moments of perfect recall, reciting events and facts that left Nick speechless, filling him on little known details of the family and their history. Grandma Ingrid had fallen for the handsome lumberjack who fluently spoke both French and English in Saginaw back in 1940, when she was only seventeen and he was twenty. One year later they were married, and one year after that he was off to the Pacific to fight the Japanese as part of the Army Air Corps. Grandpa Jacques came back physically unharmed, but like many of his generation he compartmentalized his wartime experiences, and set out to make a better life for he and his wife, and a better world to live in.

  After a series of odd jobs, he was taken on at a lumber yard in Muskegon, proved himself, and worked his way up. He became enmeshed in the regional community, joined Rotary, the school board, and the Chamber of Commerce. As the business boomed in the postwar years, the widowed owner wanted to move to a warmer climate, and Grandpa Jacques bought the business. Jacques and Ingrid had a good life together, raised a family they were proud of, and had been very influential in the lives of their grandchildren.

  The one thing that threw Nick off the most was that regardless of how lucid Grandma was or wasn’t, she always thought Nick was Albert. There is a certain irony in that, Nick thought, since Charlie was a dead ringer for Albert. But somehow, even in her confused mind, Ingrid saw past the face and directly into the soul, where Nick was exactly like his dad.

  “Hi Mémé, how have you been?” Nick asked as he rapped on the doorframe and let himself in. The room was bright and bathed in natural sunlight, comfortably furnished, with photos of the family on the dresser and a dream catcher in the window, which briefly reflected a bright glint as it turned lazily. Ingrid was propped up in bed, and her gaze shifted to Nick and she smiled, “Albert, how nice to see you.”

  Nick walked over to her bedside, gave her a kiss on the forehead, pulled a chair closer to her and took her hand. “I missed you Mémé. You’re looking well today. The nurses said you have been staying out of trouble, not attempting any jail breaks lately.”

  Grandma Ingrid had developed a habit of getting up and wandering at odd hours, startling other patients by looking into their rooms to find her deceased husband Jacques. Several times she had sounded an exit alarm when the night shift was too preoccupied with their cell phones to notice the lithe figure silently shuffling down the hall.

  Nick looked into her eyes and could see that she had already drifted off somewhere else, content. He had developed the habit of talking to her whether she was engaged or not and found that sometimes his innocuous updates of the goings on in his life, in Charlie’s or Dad’s, would trigger something and bring her back into focus. Ingrid had been the family historian, and fortunately she had taken on that task with a passion when she was still sharp as a tack, shortly after Jacques had passed.

  With a great amount of love and devotion she’d put together a very detailed booklet tracing the family tree, including copies of old letters, newspaper articles, faded photographs, deeds, awards, civic recognitions, all of the flotsam and detritus of an ambitious, wandering, growing immigrant family making their way in a new world.

  “If I don’t document this for all of you, who will? I don’t want our family history to fade with me. This is your legacy, and you can’t add to it unless you know where you have come from,” she had beseeched at a family reunion, and proudly gave out copies to everyone. When Nick ran out of small talk and updates, he would inevitably grab her well-worn copy of the book, and read it aloud to her. Even when she wasn’t focused on what he was reading, he could see the corners of her eyes soften and a slight smile form on her lips.

  Nick flipped to the post-it note he had in the booklet, which is how he kept track of where he left off, more for his sanity than Grandma Ingrid’s. It was near the very beginning, and Nick shifted to get comfortable and started reading aloud. He started with very distant relatives who had arrived in New France, and noticed Ingrid sitting up slightly when he mentioned her great-great grandfather Alexandre LaBounty, who had been born in 1840, fought in the American Civil War, and then stayed in the cavalry after the war and was posted out west.

  Nick’s dad had tried over the years, via their annual summer trips, to visit every posting he had. The boys would pester Albert with questions about why go here or there, what was it that seemed to so obsess all his free time. Al would always allude to tales of family legends, of something Alexandre had come across in a remote desert, of trying to unlock a long-held secret. And what better way to have time with Josephine and his boys than with some high adventure.

  Nick continued to read aloud on more details of Alexandre’s life, the specific remote outposts he was assigned to, of how he befriended the native tribes in a time it wasn’t fashionable to do so.

  “Alexandre started this whole thing, you know,” Grandma Ingrid said softly, and started humming to herself.

  “Started what Mémé, how did he start it?” Nick inquired. The humming continued, but the eyes went somewhere else, and Nick knew he had had her for a moment, but the moment had passed.

  Undiscouraged, Nick told her that he was about to take a little trip, to, perhaps, some of the places Alexandre had been, to places his dad had taken the family over time. He also was thinking out loud, wondering why his dad had never told the boys what the odd tattoo he had on his left forearm was, what it signified, and was always told that they would learn someday, when the whole puzzle came together. Until then it was just a fun curiosity, the butt of constant jokes, and they never thought too deeply about it. But that single, very distinct bite mark left around the tattoo continued to swirl in the back of his mind, gnawing at him, at some detail he was missing, some connection he couldn’t make.

  The humming then abruptly stopped. “Why honey, that was the necklace you had made for me, don’t you remember?” Grandma Ingrid said, staring straight at him. Nick realized she was back, lucid, at least for the moment, but she was talking to her son Albert, not Nick.

  “Yes, I remember. Whatever became of it? I searched your room high and low and can’t seem to come up with it.” Nick looked pleadingly at her, hoping she would stay with him just a little longer.

  “Well, those lovely nurses took the necklace off me, said they didn’t want it getting caught on anything, and you hung it over there, in the window.” Nick glanced
at the window, where he saw the dream catcher moving ever so slightly with the draft, and noticed a brief, bright reflection. “Bring it over would you, dearie, let me tell you all about where it came from.”

  Nick walked over and saw that there was a small necklace hanging off the dream catcher, but had never noticed it before, because it was so short and close to the same color. He lifted it to get it off, and then held it up to the light. The necklace was made of some type of thin rope or hemp, taupe in color, with what looked like a black metal link about the size and shape of an oversized zipper pull, hanging from the bottom. He held the link up to examine it closer, and saw it was covered in some type of heavy paint, slightly sticky, almost like tar. And on one part the covering had chipped off, revealing a bright glint underneath, the reflection briefly caught his eye.

  Nick went back over to Grandma Ingrid and held it in front of her. “Here is it, where did you say this came from?” But instinctively he knew he wouldn’t be getting an answer, as her eyes were now unfocused, and she drifted off somewhere else in her mind, hopefully with Grandpa Jacques. He leaned down and affectionately gave her forehead another kiss in farewell.