Godhead

by Hansen, Jalex; Alexander, Writing as Jordan

  I wriggled out of my blouse and tossed it toward the jungle. I put my bra on one of the Indians head’s, made him into a Dutch gnome. I laughed so hard I fell down into the dirt where the bottle found me again. Without my clothes the jungle was even hotter, the mud felt like a warm bath of saliva. I watched the stars wheel around until Dante plucked me from the mire and handed me off to another man, who carried me back to the boat and tossed me in the bed in a half naked heap. Whoever it was grunted, and left me alone. I heard my own snores before I fell asleep.

  Morning was a vicious creature. I woke itching with mud and ravenously thirsty. I drank half a pitcher of water that had found its way to my nightstand, and promptly vomited it back up all over the bed. Dante heard me and hauled me out by my arm not even allowing me to get dressed. On deck he turned the hose on me and washed the mud and grime from my body. The cool water was a cascade of stars and I lifted my arms up high to catch them. My skirt, the only clothing I still wore, clung to my legs and flapped around my ankles. I swish-slapped over to the railing and considered the water we were docked in. All of the sailors were watching. Dante caught me around the waist and hauled me back down stairs, stripping me and wrapping me in a towel. “You’re still drunk,” he scowled.

  “What was that stuff?”

  “Indian gut rot.”

  “Whew.” I leaned back into the cushions closing and opening my eyes looking for an axis to spin around. “It felt good… last night.”

  “So it seemed. You’re exploits are getting tiresome already. I’m disappointed; every man loves a whore, but not a drunken slut.”

  I wanted to protest, but I could not answer with any real authority. I remained mute and overheated. There had been no satisfaction last night, only teasing and cloudy judgment. I did not really remember it, I did not remember if there was anything to remember.

  Dante said, “I am not sure what you are trying to do.” There was a strange twist in his voice, displeasure and intrigue.

  “I’ve just been hot,” I murmured.

  “So you’ve said.”

  I tried to lie down, to close my eyes and sleep away this cloud. but he righted me again. “Drink this coffee and then get dressed, we’re going ashore.”

  By the time I had finished three cups and two pieces of dry toast I was sober enough to feel shame. I was now really curious as to how I had behaved. What I did in shadows was one thing, but I did not like Dante knowing what I did, having that added power over me, that carnal knowledge.

  I dressed in loose clothes, cottons and khakis anticipating a trek. Up on deck Dante had assembled a few of his own men, on the dock nine Indians waited, and amongst them, stood Nacho. I felt a frisson of recognition and a dark fear. “What is he doing here?”

  “He is a very useful man,” Dante replied. “I like to keep him around.”

  Nacho winked at me and tipped his head, chuckling. I met his gaze as steadily as I could. I refused to be cowed.

  We walked through the forlorn and empty village. As we passed the scene of the crime the bartender winked at me. She was wearing my discarded blouse. It stretched over her bosom, her nipples dark pools underneath. She smiled. The villagers were all smiling at me. Jolted, I turned away and focused on the jungle.

  Beyond the village a man-made track extended for several hundred yards, a broken mass ground down by large tires, it dwindled away into a runoff of dirt cutting through the thick undergrowth, pocked with holes, and marred with tripping up-thrust rocks. The path ran erratically as we walked, a dark, wet, steamy green vein pumping with living things. Disturbed, macaws shouted curses and flipped their party dresses at us, monkeys played in the dusty green haze above us, a lone toucan looked down it ponderous clown nose at me. In the undergrowth, things slithered just out of reach of our eyes.

  We walked upward where the sunlight sent broken fragments down through the tangle and the green became clearer, more refined. Thick gummy ropes of root and vine crisscrossed our path.

  Nacho drew up beside me on a wide place in the path, his breath and stride even next to my ragged red faced struggle. He held a machete in one hand to cut the vegetation that hindered us. He swung it back and forth at his side and watched me out of one eye.

  “Haven’t you heard?” I asked him. “I’m the lady of the manor now.”

  “Ai heard bout dit.”

  “I’m not afraid of you.”

  “Ju are and ju like it I tink.”

  “How dare you!” I snapped, prissy and defensive, irritated that he might be right.

  “Ai don’ noh dis fresh air so gud for you lady.”

  “Well I didn’t ask to come along.”

  “Ju marry de boss man ju do what de boss man do.”

  “Well the boss man don’t tell me what we’re doing too often. He enjoys surprising me.” Up ahead Dante walked just behind the first guides close to the swinging arc of their forest clearing blades. Most of the men carried large bundles of canvas on their backs and tools swinging and clanging around their legs. I hadn’t had so much as a word of explanation.

  “Wii goin’ to a site,” Nacho said.

  “We’re here to smuggle something?”

  “Das ri’”

  “He must have brought me along to help him carry it, like a pack mule.”

  Nacho laughed, looked me over. “Wii bring ju along caus’ ju get up to no gud when you left be.”

  “So you’re still my body guard.”

  “Das ri’ lady, das jus ri’ I take care ju body when de boss man busy.”

  The day was growing warmer and was slowing Dante down. I could see it in the slump of his shoulders. He stopped to hack up phlegm and wiped his brow on a handkerchief. I didn’t look as bad as he did, but I felt it. We stopped for luke-warm water and a moment of respite. I sat by myself on a thick branch, toes tingling, head aching from last night’s debauchery and the jungle sauna. All the vestiges of the alcohol were gone now and the day was flat and monotonous.

  We picked up again and had only walked a comparatively short distance when the land suddenly sloped upward and then spread out in a plateau. A cool fresh breeze blew off this flat surface and swirled around the ruins that hunkered down on its crown. These too looked Mayan, or maybe something older. They were more squat and wide, with the air of a fortress rather than a palace. A swift blade of loneliness for Julián stabbed me in the gut. How had I gotten here, to this place of violence, and sex, and desecration? I wanted healing and rest. Nacho prodded me from behind and I marched into the abandoned city and stopped right below its central attraction, a brute pyramid with a sloping face and twisted figures carved into its blocks.

  “What’s so special about this place?” I asked Dante as I pushed through the Indians to stand by his side.

  “You can’t tell?”

  “You going to steal it from some tribe, some unsuspecting widow?”

  “I don’t have to. Nobody owns this. Nobody knows about this except you, me, Nacho, and those useless villagers.”

  “You want to put that pyramid on my back and I’ll carry it to the boat for you?”

  He ignored me and walked the perimeter of the structure discussing things with the men. I walked around the opposite side and nearly collided with a large rock in my way, a basalt egg hatching from the ground. I would have just walked over it had I not noticed the chisel marks on its surface, the definitive handiwork of man. I scratched around in the dirt at its edges trying to get a better look, but achieved nothing.

  Dante was shouting from the back of the pyramid and I hurried around to find him with a crow bar in hand trying to pry rocks loose from a crumbled depression I assumed must be a collapsed doorway, an entrance to the temple. The men came forward and began to pluck the loose rocks from the mouth of the opening, enlarging a rectangle of darkness until it was big enough for a man. Fetid air smoked out into the sunlight “Did the Maya have mummies?” I asked Dante when he stopped to survey his work.

  “This isn’t Mayan, it’s Olme
c, and I don’t expect to find any mummies in here, but if we’re lucky we’ll find jade, and jewelry, and maybe some rare artifacts.”

  “There’s something big buried in the ground around there.” I indicated the side of the pyramid I had come from. “It might be a big sculpture.”

  He nodded and then returned to his hole, reaching his hand out for a lantern and plunging in ahead of everyone else. In a few minutes his head came out and he pointed at me. “Come see,” he said.

  Inside the cave the flickering shadows licked the creatures carved on the walls, encouraging bad dreams. In the center of the room was a large slab set high on a carved base. Around its surface small channels ran to spouts at the corners.

  “It’s an altar.”

  Strewn on the ground were various implements and bowls and such. I reached down and picked up a dagger with a handle the shape of a hummingbird. The light jumped and flowed. I swore I smelled the reek of blood.

  “This place has been closed since the Mayans took over and left it,” Dante said. “These artifacts are in perfect condition, they are ready to be used today.”

  “Was this altar used for sacrifices?”

  “What else are altars used for? You’re sweating.”

  “I don’t like it in here.”

  He held the lantern up to my face, all I could see was light, his disembodied voice drifted behind it. “Why don’t you round up a few Injuns and investigate your big discovery.”

  I gladly backed out of the room into the sunlight. I asked Nacho to direct the men to the boulder I had found immersed in the earth. They poked at it with toes and shovels, discussed its merits, then looked expectantly at me. I shrugged, hoping it was a universal symbol. One of them pointed at the sky, a softening of the sun as it started slowly melting down toward a gooey darkness.

  “Tomorrow is another day,” I told them.

  Dante was coming to the same conclusion at his end. Regardless of his enthusiasm the men were tired and hungry, and would not work well until they had had a night’s rest.

  The Indians erected a simple camp. The tents, as it turned out, were for Dante and me and one for the mess hall. Beyond that, the men were obliged to sleep on the ground rolled into colorful woven blankets.

  We ate out of cans the first night, everything tasting and feeling the same. The men stayed up to gamble and drink, but I had had my fill of festivity and was ready to sling myself into my narrow cot and close my eyes.

  “Ju gon to sleep early lady. Ai hear de fun start later, Ai hear ju a lot of fun in de darkness.” Nacho was straddling the opening to my tent. He smelled of beans and sweat, an earthy viscous aroma.

  “All I’m doing in this darkness is going to sleep, you’ve got an easy job tonight watching me. I probably won’t even turn over once.”

  “Ai be watchin’ jus’ to make sure.”

  “You do that. Nighty night.” I pulled the tent flap closed behind me with a snap. He laughed and settled down on the ground outside. Shortly I heard someone bring him a beer, join him on his watch, and then I heard nothing else until morning.

  I woke alone in the damp sticky morning, pricked from sleep by a mosquito who was my only company in the camp. Dante had left a cold cup of coffee on a rickety stool next to his cot. It left a ring on a battered copy of Heart of Darkness. I sipped at the acrid brew and pulled on yesterday’s clothes. I hadn’t thought to bring more, I hadn’t expected a sleepover.

  Breakfast appeared to have been eaten without me, tin plates were scraped clean on the tables and left to gather insects. I must have been brought along to clean up camp. Driven by female impulses I gathered up all the plates and piled them in a large pot that I found, but I did not see any source of water so that was as far as I got.

  I could hear the commotion of steel against stone at the pyramid, and a choppy mechanical hum. I walked the hundred yards through the ruined buildings to see what was going on.

  An olive green helicopter sat fat and anxious near the site fringe benefit of Dante’s loyalty to the corporation. They helped him do his own dirty work as well as their own.

  Several crates were stacked around it piled with straw, and a generator ratta-tat-tatted on the uneven ground, belching occasional black fumes while frantically running energy through the cables that snaked from its belly into the recesses of the pyramid.

  I walked on my toes through the mess, ducking my head into the opening of the pyramid. The implements and artifacts found inside were catalogued by general description and then packed in straw. I was surprised by the meticulous operation. I had expected looters to throw what they could grab into a sack and run for the hills.

  “Sometimes it’s like that,” Dante explained. “Usually it’s like that. Someone else is on my heels looking for the same thing. Usually, I pay someone for a tip and then someone else pays them again for the tip. The Indians don’t discriminate when they need the money. I’ve tried to buy silence, but it seems I’ve never been able to afford it.”

  “Won’t one of the villagers tell about this site?”

  “They might, but we’ll be gone by then and so will everything here someone could want. And just in case a problem arises today I have several well armed men in the village willing to shoot anyone looking suspicious.”

  “You’d kill those people over these artifacts?” I waved my hand.

  He simply watched me.

  “Is it really worth that much, worth human lives?”

  “I didn’t hear you complaining when you slurped down the profits in your fancy New Orleans apartment.”

  I felt sick, swift, thudding nausea.

  “Besides,” he said, “do you really think the lives of these drunken backwater Injuns is equal to your own?”

  “I’m not in the position to judge that and either are you.”

  “Honey, it’s an imposition, but I’ve had to make that call many times over the years and I still don’t think I’ve made a mistake.” He sat back in the dust and wiped his hands on his pants, lit an unfiltered cigarette wrapped in brown paper.

  “Look at this; this is a killing room, an abattoir of human flesh legalized by a society that believed in the god’s judgment. Problem with societies is men get to make up the rules they think the gods should have. If I remember my Bible, God’s judgment was usually a bit harsher than mine. So before you pick sides you might look at the facts. Those village men drink and gamble and whoremonger, it’s a regular Sodom and Gomorrah down there, you don’t think they deserve a little of God’s wrath?”

  “I think they deserve mercy.”

  He spit in the dust. “You just say that because you think you need it too. You’re afraid some higher power might judge you for the way you’ve been behaving. The Mayans that built this hidey hole, they would have rolled your head down the side of this beast for your little performance the night before last.”

  His smile was indulgent. “Honey, you better hope I’m that higher power, because I’ll let you get away with a whole lot more than God will.”

  All day the men worked crating the articles found in the temple and in other buildings around the plaza. I was interested in the finds, but unwilling to implicate myself in the theft of them. I watched from a safe distance as the bulbous masks, the serpentine coils of jade beads, the languid posing figurines, and the delicate tools of torture and sacrifice were carried out and packed away. The helicopter left and came back three times. So far no one had gone near my discovery, although they had staked little flags around it to denote its importance.

  Nacho came for me at noon and told me I was to go to the river to wash the dishes. I wanted to protest but than changed my mind. Everyone else was working; my choices lay between benign dishes or helping to plunder blood-bought goods. He pointed me in the direction of the water down a beaten track left by animals. The river was only a few feet across, a gushing artery of jungle water clogged with gray rocks. I picked a spot where the water pooled, and set to work scrubbing the plates with sand.


  The heat of the day caught in the fragmented sun reflected off the water, and the rocks and mud of the shore. By the time I had the dishes clean I was sweaty and thirsty. It was probably not safe to drink the water; however dipping in it would be almost as refreshing. I took off my clothes and gave them a quick wash and then spread them on the rocks to dry. I dunked myself in the warm silty rush and opened my eyes under water watching the clear bubbles filter up and pop in the light.

  Afterward I spread myself on the rocks and listened to the bugs drone while my back grew hot against the stone. I fell asleep lulled by the solitude and silence, and woke to find Nacho standing over me, his face unreadable in the shadow he created.

  “De boss man looking fu ju.” He was slowly, carefully appraising me, studying every crevice and feature as I lay immobile feeling the familiar heat begin to burn in my blood.

  I sat up, allowing him to look. I rose from the rocks and bent to gather up the dishes and put them back in the pot, and then I retrieved my clothes and pulled them on watching him watch me.

  His face was immobile, but he was flustered just the same, I could read it on the air. I brushed past him and walked ahead carrying my load with the grace of a native woman balancing a pot on her head.

  Dante was in the tent washing the day’s archaic dust and detritus from his face and hands. “Sun kissed you,” he said.

  I reached up and felt the flush on my cheeks, the warmth I had gathered and held onto from my nap on the rock. It seemed I gathered all heat to me, collecting it inside of my soul, adding twigs to it and fanning the flames. “What did you want?”

  “I’ve made dinner plans for us, follow me.” He went around the back of the pyramid beyond the opening to a set of carved steps eroded by time, though still usable. I clambered up behind him annoyed at his slowness and ungainly clutching and scrabbling of the rock. It was like following a toddler up a deep staircase. From the back I found him unfit and unpleasant, lacking the dimensions to be attractive.