by George Wier
When I hung up the phone, I stood for a few minutes, and took in the view. The Yucatan had always been an Eden-like paradise, going far back into history and even before. Then why, I thought, couldn’t human beings live as though it was paradise? The answer, whatever it might be, whispered of greed and lust, envy and pride, and ultimately of despair.
I turned and went back inside the house.
*****
Inside, the couch beckoned to me. Candace Monsiváis had left a clean pillow and a blanket there for me. Mother and daughter were in the next room, whispering between themselves.
I slept, thankfully, without dreaming.
That is, I slept until there was a loud knock on the door.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I recognized the soldier standing in the doorway to Candace Monsiváis’s home. He was the same soldier who drove Samuel and me to the military compound to meet the General.
I listened as Candace and the soldier spoke in Spanish, catching only a word or two.
Candace turned to me, “The General wishes to speak with you. He is waiting outside.”
I got up from the couch, felt my head swim a little from the sudden drop in blood to the head, then walked out the door. The soldier escorted me to a humvee, where the general was waiting.
“Señor Travis,” he said. His window was down. He had a large cigar in his hand. It was unlit, and from this I gathered that he simply chewed them down to nubs, as opposed to smoking them. “Tell me, what are you planning to do with the townspeople?”
“So, you’ve heard.”
“I know everything.”
“Everything?”
“Everything, accept what I do not know.” He smiled at me.
I nodded and returned the smile. “General,” I said. “The best military men in history have always known that the best wars are those won without firing a shot.”
He nodded in agreement. I had piqued his curiosity.
“Phil...Sunlight, reveres the peasants.”
“This is so. It is in my reports.”
“I’m taking the peasants to him. All of them that will come, anyway. I’ll need you to stay out of it. You and your men. There will be no firefight tonight.”
“If you catch him, you will give him to me?”
“I will.”
“You promise?”
“Unless there is a better reason not to do it, I will.”
“That is no promise.”
“It’s the best I can do.”
He didn’t say anything for nearly a whole minute, and that is an interminable amount of time when you are watching someone’s eyes. During that time, neither one of us so much as blinked. The stare-down ended abruptly with a huge laugh. “The television news people will not be pleased. They have been coming into the town in the last few hours to report on the coming bloodshed. You would give them no blood for their troubles.”
“That would be the best thing I could give everybody,” I said.
“Then, Señor Travis, I will give you this chance. You have this night and no more. By the time the sun comes up, my forces will attack Sunlight and his insurgentes. I will kill every last one of them.”
“Sunrise,” I said. “The first rays of the sunlight.” And then I shivered. The image of a bloody sacrifice being thrown into the Sacrificial Well came unbidden into my thoughts.
“Si. Or, instead, you will bring Sunlight, as you call him, to me.” He brought his hand back inside the humvee, tucked his cigar into his mouth, then handed me something. It was a pair of handcuffs.
“Where’s the key?” I asked.
“You will not need it,” he said.
*****
I watched the humvee disappear, and turned and started back to the house. At that moment, Señor Burro poked his head around the corner of the house. He had a bright, multi-colored saddle blanket on his back, and a new rope halter around his head. Herlinda had washed him and combed him from his overly tall ears to the tip of his tail. This incredible apparition halted me in my tracks.
I walked over to him.
“Hello, old friend,” I said.
“That is Señor Cannon’s donkey,” Candace stated from the doorway.
“No kidding? No wonder he likes playing jokes on me. When did Walt buy him?”
“Several years ago, in the market in town. He was just a little one then.”
I patted his head and rubbed his nose, then whispered into his ear. “I came here to save your master. Why the hell didn’t you tell me you were his?”
He tossed his head, opened his mouth as if to bray, then simply snorted.
“You want to go with me?” I asked the donkey aloud. “It’s going to be a long walk?”
“Of course he will go with you,” Candace stated. “This is why he is clean.”
I spoke softly to him again. “After this is all over, if things go well, you’ll have your own fan club.”
*****
We walked to town. For the first part of the trip, Herlinda led Señor Burro while her mother and I walked beside them. Once we were within blocks of main street, we halted. Herlinda handed the reins to me, placed a bright red bandana around my neck and tied it off, then placed the ridiculous, overly large sombrero on my head and tucked the strap under my chin.
I heard trucks coming and turned to see the convoy of jeeps and humvees. I thought they were going to stop, and that there would be another useless talk, but instead they continued on. I looked for the Generalissimo, but didn’t see him.
When we got to the Pisté Hotel, I had expected to see a few dozen of the townsfolk, and no more. Pisté boasts a population of a little over five thousand souls. There, lining the street—and in many instances, blocking it—were more than five hundred, and I could see that more were coming.
I looked to Candace and Herlinda, and they smiled at me. The air had departed my lungs. My legs grew wobbly.
I had instructed Herlinda, by way of her mother, to go to each house she knew—and any she chose to visit that she didn’t—and ask a simple question. The question was, ‘Do you wish to end the war that Sunlight has brought to us?’ If they said ‘Si,’ then she was instructed to tell them to be in front of the Pisté Hotel at six o’clock, to bring good walking shoes if they had any, and to bring no weapons, but that a walking stick was permitted. If possible, they were to bring a flashlight.
Taking in the throng—who stood silent, still and grim—I understood something: these people were fed up. They were done. The drugs in the streets and in the homes, the violence, the intimidation, were about to be a thing of the past for them.
We made our way to the center of the crowd, and as we did, the crowd behind us closed in. A young boy led an old woman by the arm. She had a cane in her other hand, and she was clearly blind. A husband with his wife beside him, and she clearly pregnant, fell in with us as we passed them.
We came to a stop.
The silence deepened.
I removed the sombrero, looked slowly from face to face until I realized I would have to turn and face each one, so I made a full circle of it. When I came back, I looked down at Herlinda.
“We go,” I said, placed the sombrero on my head, took Señor Burro’s reins in my hand, turned him toward the Chichen Itza road and began walking.
Herlinda raised her head and shouted, “Vamanos!” and with her hand in her mother’s, followed.
*****
No large crowd of people can move from one point on the globe to another without the crowd becoming a line. Our line—the people of Pisté—took up the entire avenue. Before we reached the edge of town, I noticed a policeman in uniform walking along with the crowd. He was without a weapon. Also, he was smiling.
A faint flame of hope rose in my chest.
It’s roughly a little over a mile and a half from the center of Pisté to the Pyramids. I had walked it and I had ridden it, and aside from the fact that I had consulted a map before leaving Austin, I knew the distance deep down in my bones. Th
e airport is exactly the same distance, the two destinations parallel to one another in relation to the town. In those dim hours before I had hopped in my little co-op airplane and flown there, I had measured on my computer the exact distance from the town to the airport, from the airport to the pyramid, and from the airport to the cenote that was anciently used to sacrific people to the god Chaac. Oddly enough, the distance from the cenote to the airport was no more than two hundred yards—two football fields. I could run the distance in mere minutes, if need be.
I had no idea, however, how far Sunlight’s camp would be along the trail leading from the airfield. Yards? Miles? I had no way of knowing.
The sun was low in the sky by the time I looked ahead to where the road split and the sign for the Chichen Itza site pointed to the right-hand way. To the left the road disappeared into thick forests. We would be taking the lefthand fork.
“What do you think of all this, Señor Burro?” I asked him.
He demurred to speak or otherwise register my question. Maybe he wasn’t in a talkative mood.
*****
The other thing to note about a crowd of people moving along toward the same destination is that it can travel no faster than its slowest participant without becoming a very long line. When we reached the turnoff, I turned and looked behind me to see that the line stretched all the way back to Pisté. There had to be more than a two thousand people. And the sun was going down in the west.
Herlinda clicked on a flashlight, and shined it ahead as we continued.
We turned off into the airport. I was glad to see Lola, my Cessna, parked beside the airport office and appearing none the worse for her brief stay there.
At the end of the runway I found the trail, the double-ruts of a disused road, and the line followed us down it.
*****
A dog began barking as we came into the camp—that is, if it could be called a camp. A dozen old cars and trucks—and a few new ones, including two stretch limousines—were parked against the forest in what was clearly a square-cut parcel of land encompassing about five square acres.
There were four large and expensive-looking travel trailers parked in a huddle, and the barking dog ran toward us from among them.
A dozen flashlights speared it with light and it stopped in its tracks and ceased barking when Herlinda cried, “Cállate!” Shut up!
One of the trailer doors slammed open, and someone came toward us.
We advanced slowly on him as the line continued to pour into the clearing to the sides of us.
He had a gun in his hand, a semi-automatic.
He called to us in Spanish, a loud, demanding tone.
Candace translated, “He wants to know what we are doing here.”
“Tell him we’re ending the war. Tell him that Sunlight had better come talk to us. Now.”
She raised her voice and shouted the commands at him. He stood a moment with the light in his eyes. He removed one hand from the gun slung around his neck and held it in front of him in an attempt to shield his eyes from the light, which seemed to grow ever brighter as more people flooded in behind and to the sides of us.
“Campesinos,” he said. Peasants.
He turned and ran back to the second trailer in line. Other doors had quietly opened in the other trailers, and figures silhouetted in lights emerged from them. More men with guns.
They came up into a line in front of us. By the time they were all there, there were thirty of them. If they opened fire on the people of Pisté, it would be a slaughter, followed by a stampede to get the hell out of there. This was the gamble. This was all. I had bet the farm on the insurgents having some humanity still woven into the lining of their souls. And I was going to shortly discover whether I was right or wrong.
I fingered the pistol tucked into my waistband. Why had I requested that the people not come armed?
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A man stepped forward from the center of the line.
It wasn’t Phil.
“Dónde está Phillippe?” Herlinda asked.
This was good. The voice of a child.
“En la pirámide.” At the pyramid. He appeared to have awakened from a nap.
“Where is Walter Cannon?” I whispered to her quietly.
“Dónde está mi abuelo y donde es mi padre?” Where is my grandfather and where is my father?
“En la pirámide también.” At the pyramid also.
“Shit,” I whispered. Recovering from this, I said, “Tell them to lay down their guns. The war against the state and against the people is over.”
Candace conveyed the command to them, and they stood shocked, then began looking between them for someone to make a decision.
A tense moment passed.
I stepped forward alone, raised a hand, held it in the air, then lowered it slowly. The universal sign to lower one’s weapon.
One by one, they complied.
The people stepped forward and took their guns from them.
I began to breathe again.
I took off the sombrero and wiped my forehead, all of the flashlights were on me. I looked around at them, squinting against the glare but not daring to shield my eyes. And then I smiled.
A shout cut through the night, then another, and another. Shouts and cheers of joy.
I stepped back to Candace, Herlinda, and Señor Burro and hurriedly said, “Tell them to make a bonfire at the center of the clearing. Tell them to go and find all the drugs and burn them. Any money they find, tell them to divide it among them. Stack the guns were no one can get to them and have them guarded. We’re turning them over to the military.
“Yes,” she said.
She began shouting these commands and the people got quickly into action.
I stepped up beside Señor Burro and took his reins.
I looked down to see Herlinda standing there beside me, waiting.
“Hold on to Señor Burro,” I told her, and handed her his reins.
“Where are going?” she asked.
“Your English is pretty good,” I said. “I’m going to get your father, and your grandfather.”
“I will go.”
“No, you won’t.”
She turned to her mother, who watched us. Candace shook her head in confirmation. The child would decidedly not be going on this particular errand.
“Vaya con Dios, Señor Travis,” Candace said. Go with God.
“Gracias,” I managed to say.
The crowd had cleared from the trail. I took one last look toward the camp and noted that the trailers were being ransacked. A pile of things—chairs, bedding, all kinds of things that I couldn’t make out in the dark—had sprang up in no time at all.
I heard Candace’s voice behind me, speaking to several people. And then I heard my name and stopped in my tracks.
I turned and waited. It took no more than a minute, but a dozen men were holding up their hands. Candace walked toward me with a flashlight in her hand and the men followed.
“These men are going with you. This one, Enrique, speaks English.”
“I do,” Enrique stated. “I went to school in the United States.”
“Where?” I asked.
“Texas Tech.”
“Go Red Raiders,” I said.
“Are we going to the pyramid?”
“We are.”
“Through the woods?”
“Yeah.”
“Then I’ll lead,” he said.
I stepped aside and held out my arm to the road going back. “Be my guest.”
*****
It was a good feeling having a number of men at my back. My team, as it were. As we walked, I also realized I hadn’t thought clearly enough ahead. How many men did Phil have with him? How well-armed were they? What was he doing? What was the grand plan?
But there was another part of me that already knew the answers to those questions. He had about as many as he’d had the night before. About five hand-picked men, his closest and most-tr
usted. They would be armed to the teeth. As for what they would be doing, they would be waiting for the right moment to sacrifice Walter Cannon to the god Chaac before the Temple of Kukulkan.
“They’re probably armed,” I told Enrique, who was now walking beside me. “Sunlight’s men are going to have weapons. I wish I hadn’t told everybody to leave their weapons at home.”
Enrique laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
“Probably a third of the people there had guns. Just because you didn’t see them doesn’t mean they didn’t have them.”
“Oh. You mean—”
Enrique pulled out a revolver and showed it to me in the bouncing light of his flashlight.
“Crap,” I said. “Are all these men armed?”
“That was the requirement to be allowed to go with you.”
“I just realized something,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“She really is Walt Cannon’s daughter.”
“The Texas Ranger? Yeah. Everybody knows that.”
“There aren’t many secrets in Pisté, are there?”
“We don’t do secrets down here,” he said. “Everything is everybody’s business.”
We lapsed into silence.
The runway came and passed, and within minutes we were plunged into the forest opposite the airport.
We picked our way through the dense vegetation, over gullies, paving stones from ancient Maya, and fallen columns with stele depicting weird faces, big noses, and lolling tongues. The Mayans were all about the face, apparently.
“When we come out of here,” I said to Enrique, “we have to turn off our flashlights. Stealth, and all that.”
He relayed the command back down the line, and received acknowledgments.