“Don’t fuss all over me,” she said. But even while she grumbled, she closed her eyes and let me clean her up. “Stop moving.”
“What are we going to do with her?” Erik said.
“Take her with us.”
“That’s obvious,” she said. “You just trashed my car, for one thing.”
I pushed some of the hair out of her face. “Didn’t look like much of a car to me, you kleptomaniac.”
“You know you wouldn’t have got very far without me, anyway.”
“You’d better be worth the trouble,” I said, furious about the whole business.
“I know you’re happy I’m here,” she said. “It’s written all over your mug.”
Angry or not, I wasn’t able to deny that, and so I rubbed her whole face briskly with my tissue instead.
“Then again, if my father were here,” she went on, darting away from me, “no, if my father were here he wouldn’t be caught dead with the likes of you two. A gaggle of north Americans running around the Peten, hunting and picking and poking around—he wouldn’t have put up with it for even half a day. He’d run you out in a minute.”
“Are you starting on that again?” Erik asked, bristling. “I’m Guatemalan.”
“And I’m—Mexican,” I said. “American.”
“Not here, you’re not,” she replied. “You both look and talk just like Staties.”
It is an uncomfortable fact for many U.S. Latinos that they seem very brown in the States, but can appear less so once they cross the border. So Yolanda was very cheerily trampling over our delicate racial psychology.
She grinned, and Erik growled something under his breath. I was still having some intense flashbacks to the near-drowning and so was able to ignore her.
“In any case,” Yolanda went on, “back to our main subject—you’re lucky to have me along. Plus, it’s as good a time as any for us to be looking up in this area. Before anyone else does. Because now, you’re going to have to pay attention. They really have found something in the Sierra de las Minas.”
“Right—blue jade.”
“But it’s an even larger strike than I first—than any of us—first thought. Yesterday some men uncovered several huge veins of it in the mountains. I think that the mine’s going to be massive once they track down the source. And the quality—I’ve gotten hold of samples of the stones. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
I told her that my father had shown us a store of blue jade chips when we had seen him last.
“In the city you said they could choke on it,” Erik said. “The jade.”
“Did I?”
“Yes, you did.”
“Well, never mind what I said. I was not…in the best mood. But now—who knows? If they found the mine that’s described in that old story—that legend—then there might be a Queen Jade up in the forest, like he thought. My father. He always focused on the western side of the forest, though I thought we should head east—toward Tikal, the ruins. But that’s neither here nor there, if you really do have a map. You have to give it to me.”
“If you help me, I’ll help you,” I said.
“So—when do I get let in on the big mystery?”
Erik looked over at me, and I raised my eyebrows at him so that they disappeared into my hair.
Did he suspect a connection between the quests of Oscar Tapia and Beatriz de la Cueva, too?
“A day or so,” I said. Though I wasn’t sure what exactly I’d be able to show her then—if anything at all. “When I feel more sure that you won’t—”
“What—abandon you?” Her voice quickly turned hot. “Is that it?”
I hesitated.”Yes.”
“Like you abandoned me?”
She stared at me from under her hat, but when I flinched, something changed. The light in her eyes dimmed.
“I won’t do that,” she muttered. “Ditch you, I mean. Now that I’m here, I’ll stick—as long as you don’t give me another reason to distrust you.” While I continued to watch her, her mouth began to struggle in her face. I could swear that I saw some revised and furious love in her expression. Then she turned away. “And so—that’s what we’re agreeing. A day or two until you show me that map. I’ll help you find Juana, and then I’ll go looking for the Stone, specimen, Jade, whatever you want to call it. But the bargain is, if I find it, it’s mine. My father’s—I’m not having any Statie steal it. So it’s not his.” She looked at Erik. “And not yours. Not Juana’s. Mine. By rights.”
Erik rolled his eyes at me on this, silently explaining that Yolanda de la Rosa would be sorely disappointed in these expectations should any discovery be made, but I shook my head at him.
“You know I don’t care about any of that,” I said. “You can have it. I just want my mother.”
“All right,” Yolanda said. “We have a deal.”
She leaned back again in her seat and then touched the tissue to her forehead, which had begun bleeding again.
Erik wrinkled his nose at me but stayed very quiet, and pressed the Jeep forward through the shoals of mud and the downpour that was so thick it was white as steam. I looked back at Yolanda, and when I saw that she had belted herself in and was keeping quiet, I relaxed a little. I reached down and touched the fabric of my mother’s bag, listening to the sound of the plastic crackle inside until I felt a hard rectangular object. I touched the outline of this for a while. I had it back, and it was safe with me. Erik tried the radio for some news or music, but only received static. No other cars were visible on the road, not even a bus or an army van, though after a few miles I saw a settlement of plastic huts shivering on a far plateau. I knew these to be some of the relief camps we’d seen on television the day before, and that they were filled with people evacuated from the regions most severely ravaged by the storm.
The huts stood on a promontory elevated from the banks of the highway about five miles off, and were built on hastily constructed wood foundations. The settlement was so far away from us and visibility so limited that I couldn’t see very much, except for the green shapes of the little dented tents arranged in a half-circle within the mud. Two brown vans were parked to the left of the huts, but I couldn’t make out any people or animals. The flashing rain looked as if it would erase the little sanctuary.
I looked at these awful houses for a long while. They were a horribly clear reminder of why I was here.
I retrieved Erik’s copy of Von Humboldt from a bag at my feet, then unzipped my mother’s duffel and began to unfold the origami of clothes and paper and Xeroxes. As I tucked the Narrative between two of my mother’s shirts, I found it at the bottom. I lifted up my mother’s journal from its plastic wrappings; it was still dry.
Erik glanced at me, but I didn’t say anything to encourage his interest. Yolanda peered at me too, but I wasn’t about to open up my mother’s secret book for her greedy gaze or anyone else’s.
I only wanted, I said to myself, to hold it in my hand and feel part of her close to me.
CHAPTER 26
Erik, Yolanda, and I continued to descend into the Motagua Valley, which extends from the southern highlands of the country, down past Guatemala City, and into the plains that stretch beneath the eastern Sierra de la Minas until it reaches the outskirts of the Peten and Belize.
In the thin light of the morning, I could see that we weren’t in the deepest part of the valley yet. Our slow pace was telling: what should have been a ten-hour journey north would take much, much longer. Still, the constant dark-and-pale presence of the rain fell on land that changed with a terrible alacrity. The hurricane had done its worst in Honduras and Belize, rushed northwest through the forest, and then stalled in the higher regions of Guatemala. But the effects here were still severe. The highway flooded with high and shining water, out of which stretched the black arms of tree branches. The rain cleared for several minutes at one point, so that we could see the road filled with drowned wood boards and unidentifiable crushed masses of plastic and met
al, perhaps from homes or other buildings that had been torn up by the storm, then carried over the desert on the wind.
“Farmers grew coffee here,” Yolanda said suddenly. “And they grew tobacco, and cardamom, and lower down they grazed cattle. But all that’s gone now.”
“Everything looks … dead,” Erik said. His profile was clear and sharp against the gray window.
“Except there,” she replied. “Those settlements.”
Farther up to our right stood another land projection, upon which stood another camp of perhaps one hundred tents, fashioned out of more dark green tarp. They trembled against the gray and white sky, and the flooding waters ran around the plateau, met in one stream, and came tumbling over down to the highway where we drove. The camp was mudstained and drenched; I could see several bent figures hurrying from one tent to another, holding baskets in their arms, or shielding their heads from the deluge with their hands. Dogs scampered after them, jumping and snapping at each other in the puddles. I couldn’t see any children. Some of the tents looked as if they might collapse from the weight of the water.
“I heard on the television that there were almost two hundred thousand evacuated,” Yolanda continued.
“From … Honduras?” Erik asked.
“No. Guatemala. The lowlands—mostly eastward. But of course, it’s the lowlands where we’re all going.”
“Where are the rest of the evacuees?”
“Not in the cities. I think camps have just been scattered all over the valley, like this.”
I sat there quietly, not moving or saying much for another hour. We drove, and drove. Yolanda eventually fell asleep in the back seat, and Erik had to concentrate so much on the road, he didn’t notice what I was doing.
Afternoon began to approach; the light lowered in the sky. I looked down at the recovered prize I held on my lap, on top of the crinkling bag. I rubbed the rough pink cloth covering the journal. I rasped my finger against the edges of the pages shut tight, and I tapped at the tin lock with my nails. The face of the lock was pierced with a small keyhole. I ran my thumb over its contours.
“What are you doing?” Erik whispered. “That’s your mother’s, right?”
“I’m just tinkering with it,” I whispered back.
“Well, tell me if you find anything in there.”
I ran my fingers around the lock’s small metal square. I lodged one of my fingernails beneath the tin face of it, and pulled. Nothing happened. I tugged a little harder. I heard the sound of paper ripping.
And then the lock broke loose. With a yank, I snapped it off.
The diary opened.
Erik couldn’t have known my clenching panic as he edged the Jeep over rocks and gaps and whirling water. A shallow though deepening river stretched in front of us, and more heaps of black and gold debris collected in jagged heaps on the higher sections of the highway. A sign that was still standing said we were forty kilometers away from a landmark called Rio Hondo. My heart pushed against my ribs, but not because of the water rushing onto the Jeep in streams and waves.
I lifted the pink shell of my mother’s journal and ran my hand over the first page, which was embroidered with her Gothic script, its letters like delicate leaded windows.
I began to read.
CHAPTER 27
After sixty pages filled with my mother’s difficult mathematical formulas, notations on obscure archaeological theorists, and complaints about academic politics, there came a long gap, lasting about a year, where she hadn’t written anything at all. And then I found this:
October 13, 1998. My work on the Stelae has been interrupted by the news of his death. I have not been able to concentrate on my refinements of the Labyrinth of Deceit ever since.
Pneumonia, I heard. Though others have said malaria.
I had hoped to send my work out for publication this week, I can’t get organized. All I can think about now is the past.
October 15
I’ve spent days incapable of concentration on my Puzzle. Perhaps it if I write my memories down in their entirety, I will be able to release myself from them.
The ‘67 Symposium on the Flores Stelae was the first time we met Tomas.
We’d been hearing stories about him for years, however: Of his discoveries of rare jade pieces, his interest in the Witch’s stone, his work in the Resistance and his sabotages of the army’s death squads. Later, we’d add to these tales the rumor that he bombed an army colonel’s house and killed an accountant. And he disfigured a guard, as well, a kid lieutenant—whose negligence was punished so effectively he grew into one of the bloodiest killers in the war….
All of these events helped to make de la Rosa notorious. But it was his paper on the Stelae’s meaninglessness that would make his name. And we were undeniably jealous, as we’d thought we’d come up with the idea first.
As soon as we walked into the El Salvador conference room, I saw a giant, ugly man, grave-faced, dark-eyed, black-hatted. He was tipping back a whiskey and surrounded by apoplectic and conservative scholars Drs. Guillermo Saenz and Gregorio Rodriguez. He was not handsome—no. Not gentle-looking. But there was something about him. Something attractive.
The next thing I knew, that man turned and stared at me.
I swear, he looked at me in the most indiscreet way.
“You must be the kids who nearly beat me with your article on the Stones,” he said, after unraveling himself from his colleagues and walking up to us. His gaze did not veer from my face. “Hell, I’d rather talk to you about our crazy hieroglyphs than get yelled at any more by those old coots”—here he pointed to Saenz and Rodriguez—”who are my best friends in the world, even if they are damned capitalists.”
“Well, yes, it’s very nice to meet you,” Manuel said, as polite as always.
I’d nearly forgotten he was standing next to me. He put his hand on my shoulder.
“Juana?” he asked. “My dear? What’s wrong?”
“There’s nothing wrong with her” Tomas said, too boldly.
I looked away from him; he and I had already communicated everything to one another. And this is when I told Manuel the first lie.
“Nothing, sweetheart” I smiled at him. “I’m perfectly fine.”
Manuel was so trusting, he suspected nothing. He even invited de la Rosa to accompany us on our drive back to Guatemala City.
I could feel the man’s eyes on me the entire drive.
October 16
I’m going to stop scribbling these memories down and get back to my work! I’ll never get it done at this rate.
I king jade fierce king true a jade
under born noble and jade the of sign jade
I have to concentrate. I must make sure I translate the lines of the Maze perfectly.
My right hand pressed against the leaves of the journal while I read that last line again.
I took in a breath; I found almost everything in these entries baffling, but I knew that sentence was critical.
I flipped back to the beginning of the entry:
“My work on the Stelae has been interrupted by the news of his death. I have not been able to concentrate on my refinements of the Labyrinth of Deceit ever since.”
It had seemed strange to Erik and me that Beatriz de la Cueva and Alexander von Humboldt had described a labyrinth, but never mentioned Oscar Angel Tapia’s Stelae, even though all three adventurers had canvassed the same area. It also appeared very odd that my mother had scribbled down fragments that I recognized from the Stelae, and had written here also of"translating” the maze.
Was it because the Maze of Deceit and the Flores Stelae were the same thing?
“That’s it,” I whispered. “That’s what I thought.”
But neither Erik nor Yolanda heard me. Nor did I have time to react to the other strange passages I’d just read.
For here there came a bump, a jostle. I was thrust forward and crumpled the diary’s pages. The sides of the Jeep creaked.
And then came a harder jolt.
CHAPTER 28
Oh, no,” Erik said.
“What’s that?” Yolanda said behind me. I didn’t know how long she’d been awake.
I closed the journal so she wouldn’t see what my mother had written. The rain thrashed against the sides of the car, sounding like rocks thrown onto the metal hood; water dripped down in streams onto us from openings in the Jeep. Steam and the white water made it difficult for me to discern what was in front of us. I put my hand over the book and shook my head.
“It’s nothing,” I said. I wrapped the journal back up in its plastic. “I’m just reading—”
“What are you talking about?” she asked. She hadn’t even noticed the diary; she was poking her head through a vent in one of the Jeep’s rubber windows.
“That doesn’t look good,” Erik said. He stuck his head out of his window, too. “All right, it’s okay, I can maneuver through this.”
“You can? We’ve got to get out of this car. Where did all this come from?”
I peered up through the windshield again. “I can’t see anything. What’s going on?”
“That,” she said, pointing.
I unzipped the rubber window on my side of the Jeep, peeled it down, and squinted through the storm to see that we had reached the outskirts of the half-submerged town of Rio Hondo. And I saw, too, that the road we had been traveling on had disappeared.
From our right-hand side, green-white water poured around us, frothing, curving, slamming into the highway, having burst through dams constructed days before. The Rio Hondo, which runs parallel about a kilometer southwest of this small village, had flooded on account of Mitch and the ensuing days’ rain, then broken through the sand bags that the townspeople had piled up on the banks. The bulwarks were ripped and draining sand into the river, so empty burlap sacks floated by us in the rushing pool that gathered about the Jeep, smacked up at its sides, and poured water through the doors before it pummeled past. Yolanda, Erik, and I yanked down our windows to get a better look at the situation. To the west, there was nothing but high and leaping water. Directly to the east stood the town. Here we saw a desolate gas station, a quarter of it covered by the water already, as well as vacated convenience stores and some homes with half-shorn roofs. I also saw one small, very pretty church built from clay and stucco and painted white, so that it resembled a delicate porcelain sculpture. It didn’t bear any visible damage, though the storm had pushed up mounds of dirt, broken tree branches, and rocks against its sides.
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