In Cancún, Maceo turned off the highway and down one of the twisted city avenues with a sense of creeping dread. Everything crawled with heat-haze and the reek of its own consumption, as if the whole city smoldered, just short of bursting into flames. The god had not answered any of his questions, so he drove aimlessly, creeping along with the light traffic—at siesta, only the tourists and their slaves were on the streets—from one traffic circle to the next.
He had only been into the city a few times, and his feeble driving talents were not equal to the subtle insanities of the city. He learned all the traffic signs the hard way, only to realize no one else paid them any heed. Twice, his taxi was hit by other cars, who blandly cursed him and drove on, but he gave as good as he got. When he stopped at a circle and tried to dope out what was expected of him to cross it, a white man and woman climbed into the back seat and demanded someone or something called “Burger King!”
Maceo could not bring himself to order them out, let alone explain that he was lost, and on a mission from a faceless, bloodthirsty god, and so could not take them to Burger King, when the radio blared static and his god said, “Take them.”
Maceo let his foot off the brake and the car rolled. The radio told him where to turn, and when to stop, when to go. The couple—Americans, from Texas, they said again and again—ordered him to shut off the radio, but Maceo repeated the words the radio told him to say, and they subsided. Maceo did not know whether to cry or laugh as his god steered him through downtown Cancún, to the Burger King on Avenida Tulum.
But when he fought the taxi to a stop in front of the big orange charnel house, they were gone.
The doors were shut, and the woman’s big nylon beach bag still sat on the floor, but the seat—tattered vinyl draped in a colorful blanket his wife might have woven—was empty. It was also red and wet.
It was suddenly very cold in the taxi.
“Where did they go?” Maceo screamed, looking out the windows. A few people passed on the sidewalk; a jeep filled with blonde girls went by on the street, throwing suntan lotion and condoms at anything that moved.
One moment ago, they were there, honking and groaning in their native tongue, and then—
The pools of red shrank as the seat drank them up, like rain on desert sand. As he watched, horrified, the last traces of tourist blood seeped into the thirsty blanket, and there was nothing but the bag, and now there was not even that, for when he looked again, it was simply not.
“Drive on,” said the radio. “Pick up another one.”
Maceo picked up twelve more fares before sunset. Nine got out.
He didn’t look at them; he could hardly bear to look at the road, and whenever he passed the flashing red lights of a federales cruiser, or one of the wagons rounding up mobs of early disorderly drunks, galvanic twitches and rivers of cold sweat spurted out of him, filling him with the impulse to leap out of the car and run, as if there were anywhere safe to run to, in this damned place—
His god gave him directions that only he seemed to hear, and in between, when he was alone in the taxi, the god never stopped talking.
“This land is yours, Maceo Xijun, son of the Chilam Balam. Look at what they do to it. Does it please you? I have no power over them; their blood is not as ours, their spirits are thin and pale. And this land is no longer ours to rule. They have paved it, and poisoned the ocean, and made it as their own. If I would cleanse the land of them, I must know their essence, their blood—”
Silent, Maceo drove. He could plead for mercy for the invaders, but why? When had they ever shown anything but contempt for the Maya? Even now, when the interior had cast them out, they had given no thought to evacuating the Indians; even now, with a plague at their door, they only seemed to eat and drink more to forget their peril. He said nothing, for what he felt, he realized, was not guilt or remorse, but merely fear of being caught. He was a man, and so he swallowed his fear and drove on.
A gang of men in black balaclavas ran in front of his taxi, carrying bottles with rags stuffed in their necks. One of them slapped a sticker on the taxi’s windshield: UNO MUNDO SI—W.T.O. NO!
A horde of well-dressed men and women swarmed out of a towering hotel at the end of the street and scattered into the street just ahead of the masked men. “Stop here,” said the radio.
Maceo braked and almost immediately, a fare climbed into the taxi on the passenger side. He looked them over once, and knew that they would not reach their destination.
A sunburned blonde man, blind and half-dead with drink, slid across the seat behind Maceo with his arm around a whore, who instantly ducked into the nest of his lap and resumed her vocation. Another man, balding, with bold, aristocratic features, fell in beside her and slammed the door. “Take us to La Boom, or take us to hell!” he shouted in Spanish.
“Do as he says,” the radio added.
The taxi inched down the street to the next traffic circle as the stream of protestors became a river of angry masked men waving signs and sticks and torches. “Fuck them,” the bald man said, snorting a hefty spoonful of cocaine from a kit he stowed in his beautiful suit. Emboldened by the drug, he hung out the window as the taxi turned off the embattled avenue and screamed, “Fuck you, you fucking Communists!”
The blond man attempted to sing something, then gasped and smacked the whore, who screamed and giggled. Maceo listened very carefully for the voice of his god, but the radio gave only static.
“You,” the bald man accused, and Maceo flinched, met his eyes in the mirror. “You are a working man, but you are not stupid, no? You hate the Communists, right?”
Maceo shrugged. There were all kinds of names for the games the dzul invaders played, but all of them left the Indians with nothing.
“We are trying to make a better life for them, a better life for you, you understand? And they come here to fuck it up. To make a mess of your beautiful city. We are not tyrants, we want to bring prosperity, you know? A plentiful harvest for all. I am an investment banker, do you know what that is?”
Maceo shrugged again, but the banker wasn’t looking at him, anyway.
“I am like a magician, you know? I make wealth. People pray to me, they say, make it rain, and I make it rain money. And factories grow, good houses, hotels, all over the world, and everybody is very happy and fat. Except these fucking Communists, they want everybody to fucking starve and live in shitty little huts in the forest like fucking Indians, you know? They want to destroy a better life for you and yours, right?”
“La Boom!” the blonde man roared, and vomited out his window.
“Yes, this club, have you been there? Is it good?” the banker asked, then chuckled as he saw his own joke.
The whore screeched and disengaged herself from the blonde man. Her hair matted with vomit, her face a mask of smeared makeup and the invader’s seed, she looked around and Maceo saw her eyes in the mirror.
“Papa?”
Maceo bit the tip off his tongue and looked out the window. Federales rolled past in the other direction, lights and sirens making a frenzied discotheque of the narrow street.
“Take them,” he whimpered.
“Hey idiot, is this the way to La Boom, or not?” The blonde man forced the whore’s head back down. She punched and scratched him and, judging by his screams, bit him. “Papa, they made me—”
“Take them!” Maceo screamed.
The car got very cold. Maceo kept his eyes shut. All three of them screamed. Maceo turned the radio up as loud as it would go. Horns honked in chorus behind him. Blood flooded his mouth. He spat it out and opened his eyes.
The street was empty before him, the noise of the cars behind him growing louder. He stepped on the gas and the car rolled, and he let it roll back to Avenida Tulum and the highway.
“We are satisfied,” said the radio, as if he didn’t know it.
The full moon cast the jungle in ghostly silver tones, so that Maceo seemed to drive through Xibalba, the land of the dead, as he re
turned home. The superstitious fear only hardened as he turned off the coast highway and into the interior, for he saw nothing that truly lived.
He parked the taxi in the clearing where he found it and walked the trail that shadowed the road. The army had set up a checkpoint not far from where he’d parked, and soldiers in masks and goggles stood behind a barricade across the edge of the sinkhole that had swallowed the tour bus. Even behind their rubber masks, he could hear them coughing.
Somewhere on the trail, he almost fell into a pit that had been covered with brush. A soldier lay at the bottom, impaled on a bed of wooden stakes. A nest of baby vipers slithered over the corpse and bit its broken, bloated flesh. Maceo went around the pit and forced himself to go slowly, watching out for traps. Once, he saw an iguana lazing across the trail, and just beyond it, he spotted a tripwire strung between two trees.
Unasked for, the god was protecting him, for he was still useful. Seeing what had become of the land, Maceo began to take heart, for he feared, now, that he knew which god he had called up.
When he finally stumbled into his village, he cast off all caution, for the compound was alight with torches and candles, and all the people were in the open, beneath the canopy of the spreading ceiba tree. Maceo called out, heartsick that someone else had died.
His wife came to him and hugged him. “Where have you been, you fool? The Jaguars are about, and the army has been coming and going on the road all night. They are burning the villages along the road!”
He kissed her, and though he tasted the caramel flavor of Pepsi on her lips, he held his tongue, which had only just stopped bleeding. “I had to go. . . into the city. . .”
“Then you know more than we do,” said Hilario, who came up to them and held up a battery radio. “The man on the radio says that there is a great fire in Cancún, and the water is making people sick.”
Maceo shook his head, numb. Could it happen so fast? “I saw—”
“Husband, Manuela is in the city. Our sons are at the hotels—”
“Nothing will happen to them, wife,” Maceo’s mouth said the words, “We are the people of the land. Our blood will save us, as it washes the invaders away. If. . . if they are pure—”
Hilario offered him a drink, which he took. “The Jaguars have told the people to leave their villages and hide in the jungle, but the soldiers have ordered everyone to stay in their homes. Nobody can decide what to do, Maceo—”
“I. . . I will find out what we should do,“ Maceo mumbled, and pulled free of them. He walked alone into the jungle.
The hut had been almost completely engulfed by hungry vines, and he only blundered into it because of the three-legged dog that he startled out of the darkness of its doorway.
Shaking with exhaustion, Maceo knelt down on the carpet of mold spreading out from the darkest corner of the hut. “O lord, humbly have I served, humbly have I offered the blood of my enemies, and. . .” Sobs choked his voice. “I have given you what you demanded, and I have beheld your works, and I know you for what you are: Lord Came, ruler of Xibalba, the Nine Hells. Your feast has glutted the land of the dead, and the world cannot abide your harvest any longer. Go back and leave the living in peace.”
As he spoke, a terrible energy seized him and drove him to strike out. His hands reached into the cowl of shadow where he’d carved the god—and his knuckles grazed the mossy plaster wall. The idol was gone.
Laughter shook the hut. “You are very shrewd, Maceo Xijun, but you are blind. I am not Lord Came, or any of your ancestor’s gods. These sacrifices—the blood that flows—are not for me. They are for you—”
Maceo ran back to the village as fast as he could, and only stopped at the edge of the clearing, though he could see that all the roofs were burning from very far away.
He sank into a pile on the trail behind the pyre of his home. Soldiers swept up the last of the bodies under the flaming ceiba tree, tossing them onto a raging bonfire. One of the soldiers raised his mask and coughed out a freshet of bright red blood. One of his comrades shot him in the head, and they added him to the pile, climbed into a truck, and rolled away.
Maceo lay still as the stars turned and the moon rolled like a curious eye across the night sky.
Then, after a while, he got up again. The stars began to die out in the east, but the glow of dawn was the ruddy purple of bruised flesh. Maceo stumbled out of his village and went to the highway.
The truck sat astride the road, stuffed to bursting with dead soldiers. A few bodies scattered on the road wore jaguar pelts or paint. The ground drank their blood with an almost audible slurping sound. Maceo climbed into the truck and drove east.
No one challenged him at the checkpoint. Soldiers lay dead everywhere with or without their masks on. Here and there, he saw the candles of pilgrims in the jungle on either side of the road. They headed east, too—towards the dawn. . .
On the coast highway, he saw signs of another broken down roadblock, but the huge truck crushed effortlessly through the ragged line of burning cruisers. As the sun began to rise red over the ocean, he broke the barricades around the tourist center for the ruins of Zama, the City of Dawn.
This, he thought, was where the idol would come to be worshipped. The last outpost of the old Maya civilization, Zama was a pitiful miniature of the greater glories of Coba and Chichen, but the pyramid called the Castle, perched on the lava rock cliffs overlooking the tranquil azure sea, was the most beautiful vista in all the Yucatan. It was a holy site to his ancestors, who had believed, as their empire sagged into decay and the invaders swept in from across the once-infinite ocean, that each day the sun might lose its battle with the night, and might fail to rise forever, if it was not fed—
Maceo jumped down from the truck and ascended the palisade around the city, stepped through the narrow gate in the outer wall around the city, uncertain what to expect, unable to hear any sounds over the rushing of blood in his ears, so like the roar of crowds—
He stepped out into Zama, alone. The ruin slumbered, frozen columned buildings of white stone, crawling with bougainvillea vines and drowsy iguanas. The roar he’d heard was only the tumbling surf.
Where, then?
He went back to the truck and drove out onto the coast highway until he found a group of pilgrims in the woods and used them as beacons. They led south from Zama to the most unlikely of places, but Maceo was beyond weighing ironies, as he got out of the truck and ran to the entrance of the hotel.
It was called the Grand Mayan, and to its credit, it strove mightily to emulate what a Mayan emperor, if not a god, might choose to build for a palace. Molded limestone bas-reliefs mocked Maceo with their cryptic pictographs, and a towering obelisk bearing the faces of the gods drooled water into an elaborate fountain in the open lobby. The desks were abandoned, and Maceo saw no people anywhere. A few pieces of luggage lay here and there, as if dropped during an evacuation, but he also noticed rigid puddles of candle wax in a more or less straight line through the lobby and out across the hotel’s grounds, and Maceo followed the trail.
By now, he was so far past any plan, any hope for himself or his people, that he lived only to see, to understand. The blood of the Chilam Balam, the Jaguar-priests, flowed through his veins only until he could find the appropriate venue in which to spill it.
Long before he found the beach, at the end of a tangle of trails through manicured stands of jungle with sterile, paved lagoons and every kind of toy and extravagance secreted at every turn, he could hear the voice of his people.
They chanted, and something answered in a voice that dwarfed their own.
Giant golden arrerra ants scourged his legs and butterflies battered his face, but he slouched on through the thinning stands of mangrove trees, where the soil became sand, and where there should have been an ocean, there it was but it was made of people, and the waves were arms raised and flailing at the sky and the roar of the worship, their joy, drowned out the surf.
And before them, a poured
-concrete step-pyramid on the shore, a fantastic half-size replica of the castle at Chichen Itza, but for the feathered serpent waterslides running down its flanks. And atop that, Maceo, alone, saw the god that he had carved out of the earth, for all the other worshippers averted their eyes.
In outline, it was not unlike a man, though many times taller, and at first, he took it for an armored image of Itzam Na himself, for the long reptilian old man’s face that glowered down at him resembled the idols Maceo had carved of that deity, but then it shifted and he saw that its head was a television screen, and the face of the god competed for screen time with flashing advertisements even as it fed on the adoration of the mob.
Its body had grown from the stone Maceo had chiseled out of the ground, but it had added to its mass, adorning itself with all manner of talismans and banners of every color and material, until it resembled the walking billboards who drove the invader’s fast racing cars. Neon veins and embedded video screens flickered and popped all over the monstrosity, its flashing divine flesh touting soda, gasoline, hamburgers, handguns, cigarettes, while hissing ports and hoses all over its body dispensed these commodities in showers that brought fresh waves of exultation from the crowd. And yet he saw that it was hollow, for fissures and cracks ran throughout its misshapen form, out of which licked green flames.
Acolytes in jaguar pelts and paint led bound captives—hotel employees and guests—up the steps of the pyramid, and a priest threw wide the door in the idol’s chest. The acolytes threw a howling captive into the flames, and the crowd’s screams cracked the sky.
Maceo had caused all of this to be. The voice of the god had been his own voice, after all. He had learned, at last, why his people had turned their backs on gods.
The god bellowed, and the crowd surged around Maceo and bore him into the air, passed him over their heads to the steps of the pyramid, and drove him up until he sagged to his knees before the god.
Strategies Against Nature Page 6