At the top sat a small low wooden table, carried up by someone earlier, and on it was a bottle of wine and two glasses. We sat on the ground and he poured a drink for each of us. The setting sun began to smoke and smolder, and filled the bowls of wine with its colors.
From this vantage point I could see all the square topped buildings around the plaza, and the men below, as small and slinky as ferrets. Beyond the camp was the unbroken line of the canopy, a thick fuzz of bitter green furring the hills and valleys. My eyes strayed again and again to the edge where the priests had rolled the bodies, and pieces of bodies, of their victims to the frenzied crowd below. I tried not to think about it, tried not feel it, but when one of the men brought up hot steaming fowl wrapped in tortillas, I could not eat.
The sun was going down in earnest now and all of its searing shades were sticking to my skin, burrowing in, coiling in my belly.
Dante watched me for awhile and then, deciding I was not going to eat, speared my panada with his pocket knife and mawed it all at once. With his mouth full, he said, “Tomorrow we’ll unearth your discovery.”
I was torn in my response, I desperately wanted to be there but my conscience told me to stay away. Childishly I tried to stick to a pact I had made with myself not to talk to him or show him how I really felt.
He tossed the burnt end of his meal off of the edge. “If you want to see it come up you need to be awake early.”
The man returned with freshly cut fruit, mangoes and papayas, and things I did not recognize, splayed flesh. I missed Julián.
“You’re not very good company tonight,” Dante complained drinking his wine in big thirsty gulps. “Would you care to tell me what I might have done wrong?”
What he did wrong. What he did wrong? He twisted my brain, drove fuzzy little burrs into it, made it itch and burn.
“Let me guess…it’s the heat.”
I put my fingers to my temples, tried to rub away the incessant grinding of gears he had set in motion there. “Dante, you know what is wrong with this, with all of this. You have pulled me into your sick little game, your pretend life, you are thrilled with the power you have over me. Like one of the rulers that commanded the killings here. You are just so into your own power there isn’t room for anything else.”
“Is that what upsets you, that there isn’t room for anything else?” He contemplated the sunset, its dying throes. “What drives you is what drives most people, the need to possess what you cannot have, or the need to get what can only be yours at great cost. You want the Father because he’s unattainable. You wanted me, although that disturbed you, because I said I did not want you. You want to make a success of the plantation, get the best of me, win this wager, because all these things are nearly impossible. Me, I‘ve lived a whole life rewarding myself on other people’s principles. I’ve had everything I’ve wanted at one time or another, and all of it has bored me sooner rather than later.”
“So you are bored with me?”
“No, not at all, but I would have been if all I had to look forward to every night was the same taste of your skin, the same contours of your body, the same voice in my ear. There is nothing so wonderful about any woman that I‘ve ever felt tempted to keep her. And you don’t want me at all. You hate me. Hate motivates lust, but not much else, and you have been endlessly entertaining to watch unwind, but I suspect you are almost at the end of your tether.”
I sipped at my wine relieved to know that some of his demands would not be placed on me again, and yet what did that leave me? Only this raw heat and the void in which it blazed. My need to fill it until it was sated. “You started it though, you gave me these cravings.”
“I just made you aware of them. Here now…” He reached behind him, “I got you a present, my condolences.”
He held out the hummingbird dagger, offered it to me hilt first. “I know you admired it. It suits you.”
I remembered Julián bleeding in the agony of his guilt on the other side of the window. I shook my head to clear it. “It’s such a beautiful thing to be used for something so awful.”
“Death is beautiful sometimes, seductive. It’s the one thing I want that I can’t have yet.”
“Seems it would be an easy enough thing to accomplish.”
“Death would get in the way of all my other plans. No, that one will have to wait until I’m ready.”
“It doesn’t work that way.”
“Not for everyone.”
I redirected the conversation, studying the fine gold wrought handle of my little ritual dagger. “So are you planning on stuffing everything from this temple into my bedroom? Do I get to sleep on the altar?”
“I already have a buyer for everything here, except for whatever it is you found. I scouted this place awhile ago. It’ll all be put in the hold and picked up when we put into port.”
“When are we going home?” I was afraid and anxious for that.
“As soon as we get everything packed away here. We should finish tomorrow. Are you ready to go home? “
I wasn’t ready for anything. “Yes.” I had cracked the walls of my limbo and it was only a matter of time before I had to step out of the delirium I was living in, the place of no consequences.
He contemplated me through the half empty glass, spinning it between his fingers. “Why don’t you come into line with me?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why don’t we align? I am offering you so much and asking for so little. All you need to do is stop resisting, and everything I have can be yours without any demands.”
“I don’t believe you,” I told him wanting to. “You will always make demands.”
“Not the ones you’d expect. You’re a shrewd woman when you decide to use your own mind. If you come into agreement with me on all things, if you do not turn from what I give you, if you do not ask for more or rebuke the decisions I make, you could have a very happy life.”
“If I just put my life in your hands.”
“If you just accept that it already is. Acceptance will lead you to a great many rewards. All bets off. Resistance, as they say, is futile. It only prolongs your suffering and raises my ire. You are destroying yourself for no purpose whatsoever. “
I held my tongue unsure how to say no, unsure if I even could. I did not know if my will was my own.
He set down his glass and stood giving me no more time to contemplate. “Your hesitation is itself repudiation; we don’t need to waste any more time talking. You will remain belligerent and hostile, and I will continue to punish for it until you either agree with me or I break you. The choice is yours.”
His tone was modulated and even, his voice nonchalant, but the set of his lips was grim and the lines of his body were tense and fused. I did not speak as I followed him, as he made his awkward way down in the semi-darkness, away from the last of the sun, the remains of the day.
In bed I could not sleep. I had put the little dagger under my pillow and I reached again to feel it. I pondered his words, his gift. I tried to fabricate remorse and regret for any of my recent behavior, but I could not. I burned and itched with the gnawing inferno that smoked in the pit of my body. I was weary of torment. I wanted release. I wanted to be free to make a decision, any decision that was completely my own.
I rose quietly from my cot and tip-toed out underneath Dante’s snores. The moon was full and bright and flat, a disc of steel in the sky. The camp was quiet, hushed with the snufflings of sleeping humans. I took a lantern from a hook in the mess tent and crept out of the camp toward the pyramid.
In the moonlight the buildings were impossibly large and sinister shadows prattled and capered just out of my sight. As soon as I thought I was far enough away that I would not be seen, I struck a match and lit the lantern keeping it turned down to a dim orange glow.
The opening to the pyramid gave the impression of a tomb with the rock just rolled away. I took a deep breath and plunged into the darkness. The room filled with the lantern l
ight and looked almost cozy, a snug cave waiting in a rainstorm.
The crates had all been removed and only the altar remained, waiting in the middle of the chamber, while the twisted characters and manimals played host on the carved walls. The light made them appear to move and it seemed to me I was in the lobby of Hell.
Evil deeds had been committed here, and yet they were sanctified with the blood of innocents. Perhaps the Maya had been right, perhaps all of those ritual killings had kept the sun coming back. Maybe we had them to thank for our existence. Maybe blood made the world go around.
Martyrs had always bled for us, blood atoned for our sins.
I realized I had carried the hummingbird dagger with me clutched in my moist palm, and I saw with sudden clarity what I had hidden from myself, what I meant to do here.
I had been manipulated by Dante, made an agent of his desires. I did not have the will or the strength to resist him, and what lay ahead was only more destruction. I had come here to atone, but also to stop the pendulum that Dante had set in motion. Did that mean my death or only a smaller sacrifice? Was it my responsibility only to plead, or would I hear a definitive answer? I was willing to offer what was asked of me. I was both Isaac and Abraham. I was willing.
I wanted to weep for this sudden restoration of my sight and senses. I had been lost, whirled in the maelstrom all these months without purpose. I had made grave mistakes, but now they could be rectified. I could be saved. I could rise from the ashes; resist the immolation and combustion that was taking place within me.
I took off all of my clothes and laid them in a neat pile in the side of the room. Naked, I crawled up onto the altar and sat with my ankles crossed and my back straight. With a steady deliberate hand I raised the point of the dagger first to each of my earlobes, then to my cheeks, and then last to my lips, making small deep punctures. The sting of the wounds was mitigated by the scalding release of the blood as it ran the poisons out of my body and onto the altar. I closed my eyes and waited for stillness, or madness, or answers. I waited to know if this would be enough.
I heard movement and opened my eyes to find Nacho in the room watching me with a glazed and hungry expression. I felt horror at first, and then only a flatness, an emptiness, the gentle pop of a bubble. I waited to see what he would do, if he would redeem me by slaughtering me here. But instead he came toward me with his lips parted and wet, and his breath fast.
I knew then that I had lost, that I should not have hesitated to finish the job.
I was weak and the heat had returned to mock me. I lay the dagger by my side and leaned my head back.
I offered him the last there was to give, and he took his fill.
He left me alive and purged, slaked by that tumble down moment of loose frenzy. He took his satisfaction until the coming of the sun stirred the birds to restless waking, and then he turned and fled into the dawn.
Having lost my taste for innocence, cooled and complete in my contented ruin, I slunk back to the tent where Dante waited awake and charged with the yearnings of anger.
He saw the cuts on my face, my snarled hair, my skin slick with evidence, and his face contorted.
He said, “I offer you the whole kingdom and instead you choose to fuck the slaves.”
He grabbed me by my hair and I instinctively fought back, I bit and shrieked and clawed at him while he forced me to the ground and beat my head against the dirt floor filling it with ringing stars and flashes. “Do you want blood?” he asked me calmly as his first blow split the tender inner lining of my mouth. “Do you want to suffer for your sins?” As he pummeled any part of me that continued to resist, he pressed me flat and straddled my body catching my wrists in one large hand. “Do you want pain?” He had wrested the dagger from me, and now with his free hand he tore at the collar of my shirt exposing the left half of my chest. He pressed the dagger into the skin above my heart, pressed hard enough to pull another scream from me. Death had seemed so easy last night, but today in the daylight, the prospect of my own murder filled me with terror. He took the torn piece of my shirt, stuffed it in my mouth, and then set to work with the blade digging deep trenches in my skin while I choked, and spat, and slobbered, and watched spots form before my eyes. All of his endeavors took less than a few minutes before he released me and stood over me sneering. “I’ve branded you like the cow you are.” he choked and tossed the dagger down in the dirt beside me.
He smoothed his hair and clothes, and strode out of the tent leaving me in a shaking bloody heap. I looked down at my chest and could not see for all the blood what he had done. I pressed the cloth he had put in my mouth over the wound and winced and whimpered feeling my legs go numb from belated adrenaline and fear. Anger quickly returned me to awareness and strength. I rose on steady legs. I wiped at the cuts ignoring the pain and saw for a moment what he had carved, a ragged but unmistakable letter A.
I staggered out of the tent and over to the pyramid where the men were grouped around my discovery. It had been pulled from the ground, and hung suspended and dripping dirt by the straps and cables that had winched it up. It was a head, a huge carved head as tall as a man and many times as wide. Its expression could have been kindly with its soft lips and hooded eyes and rounded cheeks, if it were not for the twist just above the mouth, a sardonic devilish sneer that told of the enjoyment of horror, the pleasure in other’s suffering. It was the disparity that made it ghastly.
As I came around the corner the men all caught sight of my bare breast, and swollen face, and bloody gashes and they fell away from the head. Startled, the men at the ends of the pulleys dropped the ropes and the thing came down with a thud, narrowly missing several of them. A few crossed themselves and others backed away quickly and muttered incantations or charms to ward me off.
Dante strode through the melee and picked me up, putting me over his shoulder and carrying me limply back to the tent where he dropped me unceremoniously on the ground. “Stay out of sight,” he commanded. “You’re scaring the Indians.”
Rattled and damaged, I obeyed. I lay on my cot and waited out the sun until the evening came and he returned with water and a plate of food. I drank but could not eat with my swollen mouth.
He took the last of the water and dipped the corner of his own shirt in it wiping away the blood from my face and chest. He stopped to admire his handiwork.
“I upped the stakes you know,” he whispered. “I doubt you’ll ever show the padre this.”
I didn’t answer him. He finished cleaning me, and replaced my ruined shirt with one that smelled of sweat and tobacco, and rubbed the hurt on my chest. He lay me down in my cot and fanned the sheet over me. Then he crawled into his own cot and turned off the lantern casting us in darkness. Soon I could hear the he was asleep. Outside someone shifted and paced just beyond the tent flap, making sure I did not sneak out. They had nothing to worry about. I was done trying to escape.
I had nothing left to offer.
Chapter Fourteen
SWALLOWED
The helicopter returned and the altar was strapped to a platform and lifted into the sky with the stains of my sacrifice still on it. The Indians were paid and had hurried down from this cursed place back to the village where they would drink their earnings, and the fat whoring bartender would grow plumper on her profits and the stories of the wild woman possessed by Mayan demons.
I did not know Nacho’s fate, whether he had disappeared by his own choosing, or whether my willing surrender had brought Dante’s judgment down upon him.
The helicopter returned that evening for Dante and me. We flew into the setting sun with the godhead strapped and hung below, a sinister weight trying to drag us from the sky, trying to hold us to the corrupted earth.
The hatchway to the hold on the deck was opened wide, its jaws unhinged, so that the godhead could be lowered in among the crates.
As it swung down from a makeshift crane, the stone suddenly shifted to the right and came plummeting down. It pinned a sailor,
crushing his leg, stopping short of crashing into the deck, as if it had calculated, and deliberately pulled up six inches above the boat. The man was extracted and hauled screaming off to the village to be treated.
The head was lowered the rest of the way slowly and without incident and the hold was secured. Then the doors were shut tight with a metallic slam. The Sea King sat low in the water, weighted with plunder.
“We’ll travel at night,” Dante said. “Wouldn’t want to attract any attention.”
I didn’t know why he bothered to explain anything to me. I was past hearing or caring.
We cast off soon after and cut through the night toward British Honduras. There were too many stars for comfort, a plague of them infesting the sky. I stayed downstairs huddled alone in bed, listening to the hum of the godhead below, its mirthless commentary in the dark.
Dante slept during the day, while we were anchored. I took liberties while he rested. I searched the drawers, the cabinets, looking for weakness or vice. I found everything in order, neatly folded, organized, lined up by size and category, everything was ship shape. Anything that might have held interest for me was under lock and key. I told myself I was being silly, that Dante had no secrets, only mechanisms, an openhanded dishonesty and pride in his lack of morals. Still, I could not help hoping that I would find a chink in his armor, a lever and a fulcrum with which to move my world.
When I ventured up on deck the sailors blatantly avoided me and if I spoke to them they did not answer. I spent most of my isolated days on the stairs by the hold, listening to the shifting within, the moving and settling of the Mayan artifacts and their king the godhead.
One afternoon I fell asleep sitting at the bottom of the stairs, only to be jostled awake by a slamming sensation, and then a lifting and dropping. Up above I could hear the shouting of the men. I ran up into the lounge. The world outside the windows was a wash of gray spray and roiling spittle flecked waves that crashed and collided into one another, heaving the sea into gasping plumes and deep swallowing troughs. I fell once, twice, rose again and gripped the brass rail of the bar. I made my way hand over hand toward the stairs to the upper decks, meeting Dante plummeting down. There was a low iceberg crack and one of the windows began to fracture.
Godhead Page 16