We put up for the night in a temple chamber with thick walls of glittering crystalline limestone. It was the camp storeroom. The ceiling was high and at least fifteen feet across, about as wide a free span as you will see in this land of the false arch. Most of the chambers in these great structures were no bigger than closets, and Art and Mike maintained that the Maya were not really architects at all but essentially sculptors. Their purpose was to throw up solid white platforms against the sky, and only incidentally to enclose space. There was a single doorway. Roland took pains to close it off with a double thickness of mosquito netting. He wished us goodnight.
“Nice boy but a mere technician,” said Doc. “He has no comprehensive vision.” We settled in against boxes and lumpy sacks. Ramos did two or three tight little dog turns in place before dropping down at Refugio’s feet. Doc prowled around with a citronella candle. He looked in corners and ran his hands over niches in the wall. “The ceremonial vesting room, I think. Yes, it seems we have been assigned to the vesting room.” He was never at a loss to explain the function of ancient things. Show him a rough, wedge-shaped rock, and he would identify it as a coup-de-poing, or hand axe. Show him a smooth one and he would say, “Ah yes, a nice votive axe.” Sometimes it was a votive axe, and for all I knew this was an old vesting room. These dead cities still lived and sparkled for him in the distance as they did not for me. This room had no message for me.
We slept. Doc woke us in the night. He came to us with his yellow candle and a scrap of paper. It was headed “Xupáh [as he spelled it] Guatemala,” and dated. Underneath that he had written, “I swear or affirm that I accept without reservation Dr. Richard Flandin’s theory of direct trans-Pacific Chinese settlement of Meso-America.”
“Would you look this over and then sign it, please? Take your time. I don’t like to disturb you but I might forget this in the morning. I’m not a hard man to work for. I do however insist on staff loyalty. If we’re not all pulling together then how in the world can we ever hope to accomplish anything?”
Refugio and I signed, he, writing with a flourish, “Refugio Bautista O.” We had done it before, though these chits usually ran to vows of silence about particular finds.
“I can’t sign this,” Gail whispered to me.
“Why not? Just put something down.”
She signed Denise’s name by the light of the candle.
“And I thank you very much,” said Doc, simpering over the paper, all but rubbing his hands together. He was a salesman closing out on a big and unexpected order. “A formal gesture like that gives the pledge more weight, I think. I say ‘theory’ and that will do for our purposes here, but it’s much more than that. It’s more than a theoretical construct, it’s a hard fact.”
Later he woke us again. “Excuse me, but I forgot to mention that this loyalty business goes both ways. It must come down from the top too. I’m fully aware of that. Here is a token of my trust in you.”
He set fire to the scrap of paper, watched it burn, and then left us alone. No word about lying down here and not getting up again.
ON TO Yoro. It was still dark when Roland came and said the boat was ready. I couldn’t blame him for speeding us on our way. He stood to lose his digging permit, so hard to come by these days, if Guatemalan soldiers found us here with no papers. I offered to pay him for his trouble, and he said no, just tip the boatman when we reached Yoro.
He, the skipper, was a shirtless little river rat, proud of his cayuca, this being a dugout canoe fashioned from a mahogany log. It was a good sturdy hull about thirty feet long, well shaped and finished. The hacking marks of the axe and the adze were sanded down. The sides were damp and had a nappy, velvet feel from long use. He pushed off from shore with his sounding pole and started the engine, and we slipped away into a fog bank. Roland trudged back up the hill to search for traces of Lamanites in the rubble of Chupá. A comprehensive vision, it seemed to me, was the very thing he did have.
Our man knew the channel well. There were no lights on the boat, but he ran his engine full out. He couldn’t even see the front of the cayuca. A heavy night bird swooped, came flapping right over our heads, confused by the fog, perhaps still looking for something small and live to eat. After that we had the river to ourselves. Doc lost his little Chinaman’s cap, and he looked better, more dignified, with his white hair loose and blowing. Then he lost his wristwatch trailing his hand in the water. Refugio said, “You never know what the day will bring.”
The morning light came slow and the sun was well up before we could see it through the vapor, a pale disk. Surely it would rise again tomorrow. Gail passed around some cheese and tortillas and mashed cake. Soggy cake is bad but mashed cake is not so bad. Ramos clambered from one end of the boat to the other. He couldn’t find a good place to settle. The river rat had nothing to say to us. He kept his hand on the tiller and held his head high and sucked on a dip of snuff. The cud was packed under his lower lip, and it appeared to be a satisfying snuff of the very finest quality. My guess was that he was silent at home, too, if he had one. Gliding up and down the river in your own boat, knowing you had plenty of snuff in reserve, was better than yapping all the time, and being yapped at.
The engine sputtered out three or four times, and we lost half the day drifting, wiping oil off the fouled spark plug, blowing through the fuel line, yanking on the starter rope. Good mechanics that they are, and for all their Latin delicacy in other matters, Mexicans are not much troubled by a firing miss in an engine. Almost every taxicab has an ignition skip or a faulty carburetor. The missed beat doesn’t gnaw at them. Time enough to fix the thing when it goes out altogether.
We arrived in the afternoon. Some of the hippies had fallen sick here at Yoro and were lying about in the shade or just sitting on the riverbank hugging their knees. Others had moved on to Likín for the big event. Nothing was moving on the river. Most of the cayucas were beached across the way on the Yorito side. A late afternoon stillness. No women washing clothes in the shallows.
I went to pay our boatman, and Doc said, “Here, no, I’m taking care of this. Give the fellow some money, Gail.” He had turned over all his money to her.
There was a new and bigger gasoline storage tank at the landing. It seemed there were more children about, and the tire swing had been introduced here since my last visit. Otherwise Yoro looked much the same. A dirt track ran up from the landing through two rows of shacks and then petered out against the forest wall. A ranchería, they called it, and you could take it all in at a glance. It was still a sad little outpost.
The restaurant was the same, too, known only as the widow woman’s place. The woman prepared food in her house and brought it out back to a small ramada open on all sides. There were four tables under a palm-thatched arbor. It was this same woman, now scowling at us, somewhat fatter but not looking much older, who had refused to take my tortuga note years ago.
We had disturbed her nap. It was nap time in Yoro. All the food was gone, she told us, there was nothing to be had here, the young gringo beasts had eaten everything as fast as she could cook it. They had frightened her cat Emiliano away, and look how they had trampled down her morning glory vines and her tomato plants, her fine jitomates—in the season of the Nativity!—bringing their social diseases and their foreign eye diseases! There was a place in Hell for them, for dirty gorristas like that one there!
She pointed to a hippie who was stretched out on the ground with a hat over his face. It was a touristy hat made from green palmetto blades. I thought he was asleep, but he must have been watching us through the weave cracks. “There’s not a single Pepsi left in town,” he said. “They’re all out of bread, too, and ice.”
Refugio told the woman that we were forest rangers and that she would do better to show more respect for the government. Was she blind? Couldn’t she see that we were important captains from the forestal and not young viciosos? “Now go to your pots and bring us what you have.” She served up some black beans and fried pla
ntains and coffee. We had our own tortillas. Refugio said she could put on a new red dress and red shoes, do whatever she liked, crawl on her knees to the Shrine of Guadalupe, and still she would never find another husband, a scolding woman like that.
The hippie spoke up again. “My car doors are frozen shut in Chicago. All the ice you want up there.” His jeans were pressed, and if anything he was cleaner and more presentable than we were. But then he really wasn’t a hippie and he was quick to set us straight on that point. Right off the bat he showed me his new Visa credit card. His name was Vincent. He and his sweetheart, Tonya Barge or Burge, had flown down here to celebrate the end of his apprenticeship. He had just won his “electrician’s ticket”—which I took to mean a union card or some kind of professional certification. And it was true, he had come down the big river with this wandering tribe, but he wasn’t one of them.
“I thought we were going to the beach. Christmas on the beach, that was our plan, see, just the two of us, staying in bargain hotels and eating bargain food. Like bananas, you know, and tacos, and those real big Cokes? Then we ran into these interesting people, or anyway Tonya thought they were interesting, with all their talk about cosmic energy. I’m not into pyramids myself and I can’t buy the mind science these people are putting out. Forget it. I like the beach. What’s wrong with that? There’s plenty of cosmic energy coming down on the beach.”
I said, “You need to keep better company, Vincent.”
“Hey, don’t I know it! I mean, come on, all these potheads giving out their bum information! This big brownout they’re talking about? The death of the sun? Who wants to hear that? Who needs it! And this El Mago that nobody knows who he is? With all his strange powers? Nobody has ever seen him here yet but oh yeah he’s going to work wonders! Dark forces are gathering! Signs and wonders! Give me a break, will you! I don’t like to hear stuff like that and I don’t go for this sleeping dirty either and all their weird baloney about the mystery of the underground colonies! Don’t get me started on that! Am I talking too loud? It’s a bad habit I got to watch.”
“No, don’t let it get a foothold.”
“Say, I been meaning to ask you. What are all the guns for?”
“Songbirds. We’re hunters. Trophy kills.”
“Well, hey, that’s your business, not mine! I don’t know one bird from another except for robin redbreast! I’m no sportsman, I’m just passing through! I’m not even supposed to be here! I mean the country is green and beautiful but all these bugs. We didn’t see any alligators yet, just snakes so far and those iguanas with the ugly spines on their backs. The boat ride was fun though, I got to admit that, and last night we watched a falling star all the way down. Wait, did I dream that? No, what am I saying, everybody saw it. They were all talking about it. They said it fell out there in the water somewhere. Don’t tell me you people live around here.”
“I live in Mérida.”
“Mérida, right, I’ve heard of it. And you live there! With your dog! And the old man and the girl with the machete, they’re after these little birds too?”
“No, I was only playing around with you a little bit there, Vincent. We’re just making our way down the river. We’re looking for someone.”
He put up his hands in surrender. “Hey, don’t worry, I can handle that! No problem! I’m not offended! I can take a joke! You think I don’t know decent people when I see them? So let me see now if I understand this. You’re taking your river trip and the chunky Mexican guy, he’s not a policeman or anything like that with his big pistol?”
“No, he’s not a policeman.”
“Then let me ask your advice on something. Should I be waiting on the other side of the river? I know this is Mexico and I don’t have my Mexican papers.”
“You’re okay. Nobody in Yoro is going to bother you about papers.”
“The last thing I want down here is trouble with my papers. Know what I mean? I don’t like to break the law. That’s just the way I am. I mean it’s there for a purpose, right? But there’s nothing to do over in Yorito, and those boat guys won’t talk to you. Let me tell you what Tonya did. When we got out of the boat at Yorito. This is a great story. She went right on up the hill to that old pyramid city—in her sandals! Right off into the woods I’m telling you! With all those nuts! A long line of marching nuts and bums not saying anything! No way I’m walking into that jungle in my jogging shoes. It’s so dark and shady you can’t see where you’re stepping and you just know the place is full of snakes and these marching ants that can bite right through canvas! Do you think I was cowardly? Tell me the truth.”
“No, it makes sense to me. I wouldn’t go out there without boots.”
“Tonya wouldn’t listen to me. I told her not to go. Are you saying I was right not to go? Just what are you saying?”
“I’m saying you were right and Tonya Barge was wrong.”
“So you seem to think I can live with my decision then.”
“She’ll be back. I wouldn’t worry about it.”
“They got to her head with their mind science. She went right on up the hill in her sandals. Some of those people are barefooted. I still can’t believe it. Women should be cleaner than men, right? Well, let me tell you, some of those old gals could use a bath.”
“How many are up there?”
“A lot.”
“Fifty? A hundred?”
“More than that. Sometimes you can hear them chanting.”
I listened but couldn’t hear them. Maybe the wind was wrong. You couldn’t see the ruin itself from here, just the green mass of the hill downstream at the bend. Ramos came to his feet. A yellow tomcat was looking at him from a patch of weeds. They looked at each other. It was a staredown. Then the cat, who must have been Emiliano, withdrew, but in no haste. It just wasn’t time to come back yet. Ramos did his dog turn and settled down again. Emiliano wasn’t even worth a growl.
Doc spoke to me with his eyes shut. White stubble glittered on his face. “When are we going over to Likín, Jimmy? I want a long cool drink from the spring. Gail does too. I hope it’s not silted up.” She had him lying on the ground in the shade of the ramada, with his head on her bag. She was fanning him. One panting old man had already died before her eyes, at another dinner table.
“We’ll be going soon,” I said. “After we’ve rested a little.”
“Can we stay there overnight?”
“What for?”
“I want to take Gail up to the top of the Castillo and show her the Temple of Dawn. How the first beams of the day strike through that little aperture. With blinding splendor.”
“It’s a steep climb.”
“We’ll take our time going up.”
“Yes, well, it’s okay with me. It’s just that all those people are over there now. We’ll see how things work out.”
A white vapor trail stretched halfway across the arch of the sky, so high that we couldn’t see the airplane that was spinning it out, or hear it.
Vincent said, “That’s the only way to cross this jungle if you ask me. They’re up there in their seats and we’re down here without any Pepsis.”
He had seen some young men wearing odds and ends of military garb but no one quite like Rudy. I went around to the villagers with my questions, hoping the women wouldn’t snatch up their babies and run from me. In one hut I interrupted some men hanging green tobacco leaves over the roof stringer poles. They were polite but of no help. My description of Rudy meant nothing to them. Gringos were phantoms. A few more minutes and I too would be gone from their memory. Down on the river bank I woke up a pair of hippies who had fallen asleep fully clothed and all locked together in a tight embrace, like that petrified couple they found at Herculaneum. The boy was surly, not feeling well. The girl blinked at me through her hair and said she had seen a blond fellow in army clothes back at the lake town of Flores. No, not my man. I thought not. Wrong way. He wouldn’t have gone upstream. I spoke to all the sick stragglers, and, I think, to every
adult resident of Yoro. None of them had seen Rudy Kurle, planner of cities. I was convinced of that, unless someone was lying. Even in this flock of migrant cockatoos he would have stood out. In khaki or blaze orange Rudy would have made an impression. He would have been noticed, pointed out, discussed and remembered.
I would have to investigate the others across the river, go through the motions at least, but not now. I was drained. All these futile questions. I went back to the ramada muttering a little and lay down. Doc and Gail and Vincent were talking about art. What a subject. A girl with a round belly came by. Refugio shielded his face with his hands and shouted, “¡Ay! Look out! God help us! She’s about to pop!” The pregnant girl made a face at him and he laughed and said, “Be brave! It won’t be long now! You won’t regret it when you see that little wet rat!” The girl laughed too and waddled off with her plastic buckets. The women of Yoro were carriers of water.
It was Vincent’s souvenir, a lacquered gourd, that had set off the art talk. Black monkeys were painted on it, under a clear coat of lacquer. Very poor workmanship, said Doc, who was drinking something from a bottle. The monkeys looked like squirrels, he said, and sick squirrels or dead squirrels at that. It was nothing, basura, trash. This was the only part of Mexico where the people had no gift for the graphic arts. There was no vigor or joy in their work. They lacked a sure hand. They had no more art in their bones than—he looked at me—than the people of Caddo Parish, Louisiana. Vincent defended his gourd. The monkeys looked okay to him. This art was okay. What he couldn’t appreciate was diamonds and rubies and such. “I mean, why all the fuss?” What he couldn’t understand was the point at which pretty stones became precious gems, worth millions of dollars, that people gloated over. Gail said she had a similar problem with the mystery that surrounded the serpent. As a child, of course, she had feared snakes and gone in awe of them, as of some fabulous beasts. Now, of course, she knew better. She knew now—they had explained it all to her in college—that snakes were neither horrible nor magnificent, but only creeping digestive tracts. And in many cases they destroyed harmful rodents and other agricultural pests. Yet the myth persisted! She and Vincent both were from Illinois but nothing was made of it. Some social gap there. Doc said that Humboldt, usually so wise, had denied that there was any art in ancient Meso-America. Carvings, paintings, sculpture, ceramic pieces, funeral masks—all very nice in their way but only proto-art. It was just something on the long road that leads to art.
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