The Last Mayan (The Alan Graham Mysteries)

by Malcolm Shuman

  “And the policemen who arrested him?”

  “Bought off by Chucho.”

  “And the policemen killed Jordan?”

  I thought about the body a few feet away. Of course it had been too dark for her to see it. She probably thought the stench came from a dead animal.

  “Forget Jordan,” I said. “See if you can drag me off the trail into the jungle a few feet.”

  She rose and then, stooping, reached under my shoulders and began to pull.

  I felt the ground moving under me and after a second or two I lost consciousness. When I came to again there was something tickling my face and I smelled the chlorophyll odor of plants.

  “Alan?”

  Whose voice?

  Then I remembered and reached out. My hand touched something pliant and I realized it was a fern frond.

  “Alan, can you hear me? We’re off the trail. I got you into the jungle, I’m not sure how far, maybe fifty feet. I couldn’t drag you any farther, but maybe they won’t see us.”

  I didn’t say anything because my mind was spinning, and after a while I left the old, familiar earth of my physical existence and floated into space.

  When I opened my eyes again I was having a chill. The darkness was lighter and I dimly realized I was soaked with moisture. I tried to move, but nothing happened.

  “Minnie?”

  “I’m here. You’ve been asleep.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Just after five.”

  “When it gets a little lighter you have to try to get back,” I said.

  “And leave you? Don’t be crazy. Besides, Santos may come back with help.”

  “Santos may be dead,” I said. Or, worse, I thought, he’s sold us out.

  “But I can’t just leave you.”

  “Yes, you can. It won’t do any good for us to go down together. If you can walk while it’s still cool, you can make it most of the way back.” I licked my lips and felt a dry crust sand my tongue. “Reach into my left shirt pocket and take out the little notebook. I wrote our last coordinates in it. Take the GPS off my belt. Get them to Tapia if he’s still got his soldiers on the highway.” I coughed. “Remember: Tapia, not the judicial police.”

  “But Alan …”

  “I’ll be okay. I’m still alive, so it can’t be that serious. I can hold out for a couple of days.”

  “Alan …”

  “Please. It’s the only chance.” I reached up and my hand touched her arm. “Tell them these people are using the site as a drug depot. And for God’s sake, tell them they’ve got Pepper and to go easy.”

  I closed my eyes and waited. A minute later I heard her sigh and her fingers started to unbutton my pocket, slipping out the notebook. Then I felt her unbuckling my belt and a second later the GPS receiver was gone. Her lips touched my forehead for the briefest of instants.

  “I’ll be back.”

  “I’ll be here,” I said.

  And knew it was a lie.

  You never think you’re going to die until that day.

  I figured that day had come.

  I was shot in the head and I didn’t know whether it was a minor concussion or whether my brain had been damaged. I remembered what had happened just before I’d been hit, and that was good. Or maybe I didn’t remember and had invented memories to fill in the gaps.

  Maybe any damned thing. I was dehydrated and going into shock, with no real prospects for rescue. Minnie had as much chance of making it back as I did of hauling myself to my feet, dragging myself into the drug runners’ camp, and forcing their surrender.

  And they had Pepper, which I didn’t even want to think about.

  I was dying and I knew it.

  But the odd thing is that after a little while it doesn’t seem so bad. The body releases endorphins that ease you toward the realization that annihilation is imminent. And your mental computer starts looking for programs that can divert it from the fact that it is shutting down.

  I began to imagine I heard music.

  Not an angelic choir but some kind of reggae, rising and falling in volume, and it made perfect sense, because Bob Marley had gone before me and maybe this was some kind of homing signal.

  I jerked back to consciousness, staring up at a monster.

  The monster crawled across my glasses and down the side of my face and was followed by another. Ants.

  I tried to brush them away.

  You little bastards, just wait a couple of hours and you can have all of me, I thought and then, taken by the notion, began to laugh silently at the humor of the situation.

  The ants started to talk back.

  At first I wondered why they were speaking Spanish, but then I realized it made sense, because this was Mexico and everybody spoke Spanish and I was even thinking in Spanish as I lay there.

  “Be quiet,” I told them. “Have some respect for the dying.”

  But they ignored me and I turned my head to blow on them, because I was tired of their using my body for a highway. But when I looked, I saw they were larger than I expected, and were walking upright, and instead of mandibles they carried submachine guns and rifles.

  “Puta madre, porque no echaste este cadaver mas lejos? Se apesta, hombre.”

  “Me dijiste que lo lleve afuera. Nadie anda por esta senda.”

  “Nadie mas que los gringos, idiota. Y donde está el hombre que tiramos?”

  “Ya esta muerto, hombre, no te preocupas.”

  I realized the ants were discussing what had happened to me.

  “Busca en el monte1,” the first man ordered. “See if you can find his body.”

  He walked away, leaving his companion, whom I could make out only as a blur through the vines.

  The second man waited until the first man was gone and then ambled to the other side of the trail and parted the branches with his gun barrel. Then he came back, toward where I lay. I thought he saw me and I wanted to call out, to ask him if he was blind, and then to laugh as he shot me again, because I knew I was already dead and more bullets would only be a waste of ammunition.

  But after a glance he shrugged and turned around again, slapping a mosquito with a curse.

  I heard the music again and realized it was coming from a radio somewhere in their encampment. I tried to raise my arm to see what time it was, but the parts of my body didn’t want to work.

  My brain began to run another program.

  The Xtabai was bending over me, her long, vinelike arms caressing my body.

  “You can’t run anymore,” she said and I thought it was odd that she was saying it in Spanish instead of Mayan.

  But instead of strangling I felt a wetness on my face and realized she was crying.

  “Why?” she asked. “I wouldn’t have done it if you’d been there.”

  Then she buried her head against my chest and my whole body became soaked with her tears.

  I opened my eyes and saw that it was raining.

  I opened my mouth and let the runoff from the treetops tantalize my parched lips and throat. Soon the water bore me up and I was floating, a sailor on a stormy sea, and even though I knew I was dead I was afraid.

  The boat was being driven toward a beach and I saw the froth breaking on a reef. There was a grinding sound and I pitched forward into the waves, water filling my mouth. I started to choke, and lashed out, desperate, but all I grabbed was water.

  When my eyes opened I was on the beach and the natives were looking down at me.

  “Ma cimi?” one asked and the other, an incredibly ancient man with white hair, shook his head.

  “Cuxaan,” he pronounced and I knew he was telling the younger man I was still alive.

  They should have been almost naked, I thought idly, but the young man was dressed like a Mayan peasant of modern times, down to his baseball cap, while the older man wore a white cotton shirt and a blue-striped delantal, or apron, a traditional style of dress I hadn’t seen in fifteen years.

  They were lifting me
now, despite the rain, and my head flopped as they bore me away down the now-muddy trail.

  I tried to tell them I was dead, but no one listened.

  And when they came to a resting spot under a dripping oak, the old man wiped my face with a cloth and Santos told me I’d been saved by the rain.

  TWENTY

  When I opened my eyes again I was in a hammock and the old man was leaning over me. I heard rain beating down on the grass roof and smelled smoke from a cooking fire.

  “Where am I?” I asked.

  “My name is Leodejildo Chim. You are in my house,” the old man said slowly in Mayan, making sure I would understand.

  “Where?”

  “In the forest. My grandson and I brought you here.”

  “Your grandson?”

  “Santos.”

  “But—”

  “Don’t talk.”

  The old man lifted something wet from the side of my head and I saw him place it in a zinc bucket. Some kind of dressing. He went to the fire, which was under a thatched canopy just outside the rear door of the hut. I saw him stir a pot and then dip a strip of cloth into it. He fished out the cloth with a stick, waved it in the air a few times to cool it, and folded it into a square. He placed the new dressing on my side and I flinched as the heat started to spread through my face.

  He reached down, picked up a gourd, and lifted it to my lips.

  “Drink,” he said. “But not a lot.”

  I swallowed the lukewarm liquid and then he took the gourd away.

  “Enough,” he said. “Sleep.”

  “You don’t understand. There’s a young woman. She was taken—”

  “We know. My grandson will be back soon.”

  They bore me from the beach inland, to a temple, and soon a crowd had gathered to stare down at the stranger. A child poked at me with a stick and earned a slap from his mother. A priest with sharp-filed teeth and dark, blood-clotted hair came to appraise me. He said some words I didn’t understand and I gathered he was telling them I should be sacrificed, because I was a danger to them alive. But another man, middle-aged, with an air of command, confronted him and, muttering, the priest backed down.

  The leader bent over me and said something. I shrugged. He struck me a slap across the face and then motioned for me to rise.

  It was dark outside when I opened my eyes again. The rain had stopped, succeeded by a slow dripping from the trees. How many days had passed?

  I tried to get out of the hammock, but pain rocked my head.

  “Not yet,” the old man said, from his place on the little wooden stool by the fire. “These things are slow.”

  “But I can’t stay here.”

  He sighed and I thought I detected a smile. “You are like the other one. Everything must be fast.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “No?” He stirred the fire and then, lifting a pot, spooned some beans onto a tin plate. He opened a folded handkerchief and I saw a stack of tortillas.

  “Here,” he said, making a spoon of a tortilla, and scooping up some of the beans. “Eat.”

  He watched me swallow the food, nodded approvingly, and fed me another helping.

  “The other one had fever. But he was still very much like you.”

  “What other one? Who?”

  “The man who came here when I was young. The other dzul.”

  I turned my head to look at him again. Yes, he was old. enough now to have been a young man in 1939 …

  “What did you say your name was, Tata?”

  “Leodejildo in kaba.”

  “Leodejildo,” I repeated. “Jildo.”

  He nodded. “The same.”

  “And the other dzul who came here …”

  “His name was don Juan. I met him in Bacalar. He was sick and Dr. Carrillo was taking care of him. Dr. Carrillo was very interested in the old ways. He spoke Mayan and he traveled to the villages. People trusted him, even the h-menob. The doctor told don Juan about things he had seen and then brought me to take don Juan there, because the doctor knew I was the nephew of the famous h-men don Eleuterio Euan.”

  I thought back about the letter Paul Hayes had shown me.

  “When don Juan was well, we went on horses because in those days there were no roads like today. It took us a full day to arrive at the village.”

  A world without electricity or televisions or airplanes, where the Mayan villagers still lived in the shadows of the Caste War, when they’d risen to drive out the Ladinos.

  “In those days,” don Jildo said, as if reading my thoughts, “things were different in the villages. There was still talk of driving the dzulob from Yucatán. The chiefs had taken money from the chicle companies and many of them were no longer interested in war. But in the villages there was still talk about the old ways. There was still a guardia, men of the village who kept watch against the Mexicans, and there were still ceremonies to honor la santa cruz.” I thought, as he talked, that he was looking beyond me and into the past. “There was still reading from le huunobe, the books.”

  “Don Eleut had a book,” I said.

  He nodded and spooned out more beans with the tortilla.

  “He had a book,” the old man confirmed. “He kept it in the balam nah—the lord’s house—which was what we used to call the temple, where we kept la santa cruz. My uncle would bring it out on special occasions. He would read from it after the holy cross spoke.”

  I tried to imagine it, the men in their white shirts and delantales, just like the ones this old man wore now, and the women in their flowered huipiles, gathered respectfully around the thatched, pole-sided house while the cross spoke inside to its interpreter, don Eleut.

  “You introduced don Juan to your uncle,” I said.

  “Yes. But my uncle knew he was coming.”

  “Oh?”

  “The cross told him. The cross knows everything. It even knew before the first dzulob came from across the sea. The cross knew they would come. It knew about the god they would bring with them, jesucristo, and it knew he would come back.”

  “So your uncle became friends with don Juan because don Eleut was expecting him.”

  “Yes. Because the prophesy said the one who came once would come again and don Eleut thought this was the man.”

  I waited. My mind was reminding me that Pepper was in danger and I had to force myself up, go find her, free her from the killers who had her. But on a deeper level it was telling me to be patient, there was nothing I could do. This old man seemed to understand the situation better than I, and he was calm.

  “Tell me about the god who came a long time ago,” I said.

  Don Jildo lifted the poultice from my head, examined the wound, and then replaced the wet wrap.

  “He was a king in his land. He lived here with the people for many years, married, had sons, and he led the people in many great battles against their enemies. When he died he was buried underground and a temple was built for his chibal, his lineage.” Jildo struck a match and a little candle began to dance its light off the pole walls.

  Seven kings. Seven masks. The seven faces on the temple.

  “Don Jildo, is there a building …”

  He smiled. “You are like him. You are in a hurry. All the gringos are in a hurry.”

  Don Jildo took out some cigarette paper and a little tin of tobacco and began to roll himself a smoke. He lit it from the candle and puffed.

  “He was sick, too, when he came to the village.”

  “Don Juan?”

  “Yes. He already had the fever when he dismounted in the plaza. My uncle and I took him to my uncle’s house, to my uncle’s hammock, and he was sick for fifteen days.”

  “Paludismo,” I said, but Jildo shook his head.

  “No, it only looked like paludismo. It was a susto. Something had frightened that man’s soul.”

  “What?”

  “Something in his own land. It was what brought him to us. He was running away from something. But a ma
n cannot run forever. When he reached this land it caught him.”

  “But he survived.”

  “No, he died.”

  I turned my head to stare at him. “What?”

  “My uncle did a ceremony to purify him, to satisfy the gods of his own land, but those gods are different than the balamob of the forest. They were far away, too far away to be reached, and when he came here he had the susto already in him. My uncle was able to help him for a time, but after don Juan was gone my uncle told me that he would surely die, because what was making that man sick was something no h-men could cure.”

  He smoked thoughtfully.

  “And later, when my uncle saw him die, he told us all.”

  “He saw him die?”

  “Ich zaztun,” the old man said. “In his crystal.”

  Of course. Every h-men had a stone—a zaztun—that showed him the future.

  “When don Juan was better,” Jildo went on, “my uncle talked with him to see what kind of a man he was. To see if the sickness he carried inside him was something that would hurt others or just himself.”

  “And?”

  “Only his own soul was being eaten. So my uncle showed him the book and told him what the cross had said and how it had made the ancient prophesies that had been written in the book. And when he was sure that don Juan could be trusted, he showed him the place of the heads.”

  “Don Jildo, what was the name of this place?”

  The old Mayan threw his cigarette out the front door of the hut and walked back across the dirt floor and took his place on the little wooden stool, his face flickering in the firelight.

  “We call it Lubaanah.”

  Lubaanah—fallen house. The real lubaanah, not the place where Eric had been digging for two years. The place that Paul Hayes had told me existed, because he had a letter from the man who’d found it in 1939. The site with the seven masks.

  “That’s where they’re holding my friend,” I said.

  “It is.”

  “How can you be sure she’s all right?”

  He got up from the stool and walked over to a small wooden table in the corner, where I saw a huipil-clad cross and several unlit votive candles. There was a small metal box in the center of the table and he brought it over to the hammock.