Cinnamon Skin

by John D. MacDonald

“What did you lecture on?”

  “Economics, to economists. Dry stuff.”

  She stared down into her glass for a moment and then lifted her head to stare directly at me. The impact of that look was astonishing.

  “I do not know where William is. I do not know where he has gone or why he went.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “Neither do I. I don’t know what to think. His clothing is here. His papers and credit cards. We were happy here together. We were talking about marriage. We quarreled, of course. I think everyone does. I thought he was wasting his abilities on these time-share projects. It is not really completely honest work. One has to promise more than can be delivered, and then try not to come upon the angry buyers later on. He is really a charming man, and quite intelligent, and with a lot of energy. But he was making a lot of money. He said that when he had enough, we would go back to Houston and he would go into another kind of work. But when I asked him how much was enough, he could not name a figure.”

  “Where is the money?”

  “In the Banco Peninsular. All of it. Earning big interest in a peso account. He was buying peso C.D.s, and he told me he would cash in before the next devaluation. Then we would leave.” Her eyes filled. “I am so terribly worried,” she said. “I saw him last on the sixth day of July, almost one month ago. It was a day like any other. I go to work first. When I came to the kitchen, he was in here talking on the telephone. I asked what it was and he said he had to go see someone, so on that day he left exactly when I did, and he drove me to the Camino Real. He kissed me good-by and said we would have some fish for dinner. Our car is a gray Volkswagen. I have not seen that either. They say he tired of me and drove back to your country. I can tell you that is a lie. I am so terribly worried.”

  “Do you remember a man who worked with him called Evan Lawrence?”

  “Of course. Why?”

  “How long did he work with him?” I asked.

  She frowned. “From Christmas last year. Maybe three months, maybe less. I told William it was against the law to have somebody working for you, a foreigner without papers. He said to me, ‘Who will find out? Will you tell them? Will Evan? Will I? He is a very good salesman. He has made us a lot of money. He is very good selling to the rich widows, promising them nobody can ever be lonely in Cancún.’ I just hoped he would go away, and he did. He met a woman, not very pretty, working for Pemex looking for oil, and he followed her back to Texas. I was glad.”

  She frowned, pausing for a moment.

  “Nora? A name like that.”

  “Norma,” I said.

  “He must have followed her back and married her, because the newspapers from Florida said that he and his wife and another person had died in a boating accident, an explosion, in Florida. Perhaps they were on their wedding trip. Everyone here who had worked with him selling the time-sharing was talking about it.”

  She looked at me with doubt and speculation.

  “How did you know her name? What do you really want?” She straightened in her chair and looked sternly at me and then at Meyer. “You will please tell me what my William, your great friend, looks like. Every detail, please.”

  I smiled. “A nice man. Tall. Well built.”

  “Yes?”

  “Dark hair.”

  She stood up quickly. “Dark hair? Dark hair? He has hair so red that the people here call him El Rojo, the red one. And his face and arms and shoulders are entirely freckled. So tell me why you are here or get out at once.”

  “We mean you no harm, Barbara,” Meyer said. “Please believe us. We need your help. And maybe you need ours.”

  “I do not want soft soothing talk, Mr. Meyer.”

  “Norma was my niece. She died as you say, in that explosion on July fifth. The boat had a bomb aboard. Norma was a successful woman. She had quite a lot of money she had saved. It is all missing. Everyone was supposed to think that Evan Lawrence died when Norma did. But he didn’t. He wasn’t aboard. That’s why we’re here.”

  Her face was expressive. I could almost track the patterns of her mind from the changing expressions.

  “But he seemed so very nice!” she said. “He made us all laugh.”

  Meyer said, “I don’t want to be brutal, Barbara. I don’t want to add to your pain. But it now looks as though William Doyle was the only person in Cancún who knew that Evan Lawrence lives down here, under another name and identity. I don’t think the man you knew as Evan Lawrence could take that kind of risk. I think he did what he had to do, to protect his identity. That’s who the phone call was from. That’s where he went.”

  Her lovely face twisted and then went vacant. She was standing. She put her hands forward, as though to brace herself, and then began to crumple. I reached her in two strides before she fell, picked her up, and took her to the couch, surprised at the warm sturdy heft of her under the coarse fabric.

  Meyer appeared at my elbow, with a cloth soaked in cold water. He placed its folded length across her forehead. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “Maybe it was a wild guess, not true.”

  She opened her eyes. “I’ve known he is dead. I’ve known it since three o’clock that day. I was working. And suddenly there was an emptiness in my chest, as if the strings that hold my heart had been sliced through, and it sagged to a lower place. I was going to tell William about that strange feeling. I know that was when he died, and I know he died thinking of me, trying to tell me. I could not admit it to myself. Suddenly you made me able to admit it. Don’t be sorry. I couldn’t live in limbo forever. He left everything behind.”

  I moved away. Meyer eased himself down to sit on the floor beside the couch. He held her hand. “The dead have to leave everything and everybody behind. For some, it is the right time. For others …”

  “How could that shallow smiling man be so wicked?”

  “He has been able to get away with being wicked because he does not look or act wicked. He has the gift of friendship. He inspires trust. My niece loved him and married him.”

  She tried to sit up and he touched her shoulder, urging her back. “Please,” she said. “What is his other identity here? You said he is someone else here.”

  “We can get into that later.”

  “Could you please get the box of tissues in the kitchen?” I went out and got it and brought it to her. She blew her nose and she wiped her eyes, and she tried to smile. “Sometimes we laughed about what my babies would look like. Dark little Indios with red hair. I said we should hurry with them. I am twenty-seven. William was thirty-two. He had been married once. I had not.”

  She pushed Meyer’s hand aside and sat up, swung her feet to the floor.

  “So! I am not a weak person. I come from people who have survived everything. And I come from people who know violence. That is the Toltec heritage, not the Mayan. And I am not going to mourn my man in front of strangers.”

  “Who would like to be friends,” Meyer said.

  She studied him. “Very American. Instant friends. Like your instant foods. Heat and serve. The heart does not move so fast. You walk in here and destroy me. In the name of friendship?”

  “But we only—”

  “Do you have a car?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I will not work tomorrow. In the name of this new friendship could you pick me up very very early? There’s a place I want to be when the sun rises. We’ll have to walk a distance in the dark. Perhaps at quarter to four? I will bring a good flashlight. And insect repellent. Wear shoes for walking, please. I’m not asking too much?”

  Meyer beamed at her. “Not too much to ask of old friends.”

  Twenty-two

  When I pulled up to the entrance to La Vista del Caribe, Barbara was silhouetted against the dim interior lights. She came striding quickly to our pink automobile. Meyer had moved into the back. She slid in beside me and said, “I’m very grateful for this. I should never have asked.”

  “It’s fine,” I said. “It�
��s okay. Where are we going?”

  “Toward the airport, but don’t turn off there. We go straight for many miles.”

  She had brought cups, a thermos of coffee, a dozen doughnuts. The road was straight. It was almost eerily straight under the overcast night. It had no shoulders. The jungle grew right to the edge of the pavement. She sat quietly beside me, half turned to lean against the door, blue-jeaned legs turned and pulled up, sharply bent knees angled toward me.

  “If we could go a little bit faster?” she said at one point. This was after a big bus came booming up behind me, doing at least eighty on the two-lane road, and nearly blew me away when it went by.

  She identified the turnoffs as we passed them. There were not many of them. “Puerto Morelos, for the truck ferry to Cozumel.” And San Carlos, Punta Bete, Playa del Carmen, Xcaret, Pamul, Akumal, Xelha, Tulum. Finally, not far past Tulum, where she said there were Mayan ruins on the seashore, she told me to slow down and pointed out the right turn. More straight two-lane road. But the vines and bushes leaned so far out over the concrete, I drove down the middle. An animal scuttled out of the way. It seemed to be tan and had an awkward waddling gait. “Coatimundi,” she said. “There are small villages here near the road. All dark at night. The children catch the coatimundi pups and make pets of them. But when they are grown they get angry quickly and bite.”

  “Where are we going?” Meyer asked.

  “Now it is only perhaps ten miles. It is called Cobá. Great ruins, partially excavated.”

  We arrived at a large parking area. There was a shack where one was supposed to buy admission tickets. I locked the car and we followed her and the beam of the flashlight directed on the ground.

  A man came wandering out of a dark structure behind the shack.

  “¡Señora, señora, cerrado!” he cried.

  She put the light on him. As he stood blinking, bare to the waist, she said a single long sentence in a language unlike any I had ever heard before. It was full of snappings and pops and little coughs. He bowed and backed away and she began walking again, so swiftly I had to take a couple of running steps to catch up with her.

  “Watch where you step,” she said. “It is uneven here. There are pebbles and stones.”

  I would estimate we went two miles on a dark track wide enough in places for a car, through the jungle, through the keening, shrilling of a billion bugs, the caws of night birds, a thick stillness of the air. Toward the end she was almost running.

  When she stopped abruptly, I stopped in time but Meyer ran into her and backed off apologizing. She ignored the apology. She gave me the flashlight. “Here I am going up that pyramid. I will not need the light. Please don’t turn the light on me while I climb it. It will spoil my night vision. Please wait here. When it is time, I will call for you to come up.”

  I turned the light off. She went off into darkness. In a few minutes I could see that she had gone toward a huge bulk that loomed up out of the jungle, bigger than any cathedral. As my eyes became used to starlight, I saw how it projected up and up, blotting out a big segment of the starry sky, and I could make out the paleness of her white long-sleeved shirt, a tiny object a third of the way up, moving steadily. Meyer was still panting from the fast two-mile walk. We had, all three, forgotten the bug repellent. So we stood in the darkness, waved our arms, slapped our necks and foreheads. I broke some small leafy branches off a bush. When we whisked those around, it lessened the problem.

  A rooster crowed nearby, and when I looked toward the summit of the pyramid, it was now outlined against gray instead of against a blackness with stars. It was not much later when I realized I could see the tree trunks and see Meyer’s face. Looking at the summit, I thought I could see her up there, sitting on a flat place at the very top, her back toward us.

  Morning bird sounds began. There was a gray morning light, and then a rosiness beyond the pyramid as the sun began to come up out of the sea. I could see her clearly then, with a spill of black hair down the back of the white shirt. Sunlight struck her, golden, setting her ablaze. Soon we could see it against the tree-tops to the left and right of the pyramid.

  A small herd of turkeys came strolling out of the brush, gabbling softly among themselves, stopped aghast when they saw us, whirled, and went back to cover swiftly, looking back over their shoulders, telling each other how dangerous we were to turkey life everywhere.

  We heard her faint cry and looked up and saw her standing, beckoning to us. My watch said she had been alone up there for a little more than an hour.

  “She wants us to climb up there,” I said.

  “Up that?” Meyer said.

  “Come on. Just don’t look down.”

  “Dear God,” he muttered, and came padding along behind me.

  When we got to the base of it, we could no longer see her up there. I put the flashlight down and looked at the dimensions of the steps. They were about twenty inches high and only about eight to ten inches deep. So the way to go was almost on all fours, to lean into the slope and use the fingers on the steps for balance. I told Meyer this would be the best way, and I heard him sigh.

  Once one was into the rhythm of it, it was not bad. The full heat of the day had not yet arrived. It was a long climb. I tried not to think about going down. I waited near the top until Meyer was on the same level, about six feet to my left. She bent and caught his hand and helped him up the final tall step. I scrambled up. She smiled at us. She encompassed all the world in one sweep of her arm and said, “Look! Just look!”

  I did not feel at all comfortable about standing on that small flat top. It was only about four feet by eight feet, and it fell steeply away in all directions. We were so high above the jungle that it looked like a dark green shag rug. The sun was two widths above the horizon. She pointed and said, “See that little silvery glint out there, like a needle beyond the trees? That’s the Caribbean. Over thirty miles from here. Look down that way. See? There is the pink car. It is so glorious up here in the morning!”

  To my relief she sat down, legs hanging over the rubbly slope on the side opposite the one we had climbed. We sat on either side of her. She pointed out smaller pyramids that poked out of the trees.

  I said, “Is it part of being Maya? I mean, to come here when someone has died?”

  “Not really. I don’t know. Maybe they did that. It all ended hundreds of years ago. By the time the Spaniards came, it was already over. Archaeologists make up stories about what it was like in the Mayan cities, trying to read old stelae and glyphs, and other archaeologists translate in some other way and make furious objections. We do know that the classical period ended five hundred years before the Spanish came. The Maya abandoned their cities and temples, moved away, went off into the jungles. Why? No one knows. They thought it was because the land would no longer produce. But that has been proven false. They dug channels through swamps, piled the muck on the center rows between the channels, grew water lilies, and racked them up onto the long mounds to decay there. It was sophisticated agriculture and very productive. Tikal was the greatest city of all, to the south of where we are, in Guatemala. Perhaps two hundred thousand people lived there. It was a center of commerce on the rivers and the sea. This Cobá was one of the strange old cities. Like Chichén, Uxmal, Palenque, Bonampak, Yaxchilan. I have been to the others, but it is only here in this place I feel … part of it. As if it pulls upon my heart. We were a bloody people long ago, even before the Toltec, with rites, ceremonies, processions, blood sacrifices. And we had measurements of time going back eight million years. I was in Canada when my father died. When I was able to come back, I came to this place as soon as I could, and I sat here at dawn and said his Mayan name one hundred times as the sun came up. They gave him the name Pedro Castillo because they could not say his real name.”

  When she said it, it sounded like “Pakal.” But the P was more explosive than the P sound in English, and there was a coughing sound to the K. The L was odd, as if during it she moved her tongue
from the back of the roof of her mouth toward the front, giving it the value of “ulla.”

  “It was believed that he was descended from priests. Some priests became kings and then became gods. He would have been seen as a tall man anywhere, but he was very tall for a Maya. And my Mayan name is …”

  If I’d had to spell it, it would have been Alklashakeh. The vowels were purred, the sibilants rich.

  “It is all over,” she said, “and yet it isn’t over. I do not know why I was moved to say his name, and William’s name, one hundred times at dawn from here. But it made me feel better both times, as if they were afloat in death and I had moved them to a safe shore. Do you know that deep in the jungle there are small secret villages where men with guns still guard hidden idols from everyone except the deserving Maya? The holy figures sit there in the dark huts, remembering everything.”

  She shrugged off her sadness and asked us to swivel around to face in another direction, toward a small nearby body of water and a cluster of tile-roofed buildings.

  “There is the hotel,” she said. “There is a lake in front of it. See? And the old Mayan road went across that lake on a causeway, and it went all the way through the jungle, all the way to Chichén Itzá. It was wide enough for a carriage, but they did not have wheels, it is said. If they did not have wheels, then why does one ancient wall at Chichén clearly show the meshing of the cogs of three wheels as in the gears of some machine? If they did not have wheels, how is it so that a giant roller was found here at Cobá, weighing tons, and was used to crush and flatten the limestone out of which they built that road? It went off that way, beyond that lake, for fifty miles. It is now all narrow and rough. But it is a trail that goes from here to Chichén and from Chichén to Uxmal. We were not animals. There was a culture here.”

  Meyer shook his head. “I’m not ready for all that, Barbara. I am still trying to comprehend the thing I am sitting on here, to comprehend the skill and devotion and determination it took to raise up this gigantic pyramid. I was about to say in the middle of nowhere. For them it was perhaps the middle of the universe.”