The River of No Return

by Jon Voelkel

  A Maya woman approached him. She wore a traditional white cotton dress, embroidered with colorful flowers and birds. Her name badge read KOO.

  She saw Max’s discomfort at the tools.

  “Old things,” she reassured him, “like in a museum.”

  “What were they for?” asked Max.

  “Dentistry. The ancient Maya had a lot of fun with it.” She pointed at a poster advertising different styles of tooth embellishment. There were teeth filed into points, and teeth filed into mountain ranges. There were sculpted canines, bedazzled bicuspids, incisors inset with jewels. “You want to try?” Koo grabbed a little stainless steel pick with a mirror on the end and waved it at him. “Open wide!”

  “Open wide!”

  “No!”

  “Sorry,” said Koo. “It has been a slow day. I am bored. My only client fell asleep.” She gestured at a barber’s chair at the far end of the salon. All Max could see of the customer was a pair of legs sticking out from under a pile of towels.

  Koo sighed. Then her eyes took in Max’s unruly hair. “Is that your natural color?” she asked, with pity in her voice.

  Max nodded.

  “Never mind, we can work miracles these days.” She guided him over to a low shelf behind the sofa in the reception area. It was loaded with beauty products. “Let me give you a makeover.”

  “No, thank you,” said Max firmly. “I’m just waiting for my friend.”

  He looked around for Lola, but she’d been spirited off into a back room by her stylist, a young Maya girl like herself, who’d been delighted to get her hands on a head of thick, glossy—albeit slightly scorched—hair after a day of styling fine-haired, wispy-curled tourists.

  “How about a new haircut?” suggested Koo, “I could do it ancient Maya style, all crazy punk?” She showed him a wig on a mannequin head. The hair was caught up in a high, springy ponytail and embellished with feathers, shells, and beads.

  Max shook his head.

  “False nose?’

  “What?”

  She indicated a display of adhesive nose bridges, some with goggles attached. “To give you the profile of a Maya king.” She selected a huge nose arch and held it in place against his face. “It suits you.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Koo replaced the false nose and picked up a stingray spine. “A tattoo?” she suggested. “Very trendy.”

  “No.”

  Koo was not so easily discouraged. “Warrior face paint?” She brandished a pot of blue paste.

  “Blue is for sacrifice victims; warriors used black,” Max told her.

  “How do you know that?” asked Koo suspiciously.

  “I’ve, er, read about it.” He could hardly tell her that he’d been painted blue himself a few times.

  “So you know about the Maya, eh? That is good. Many tourists, they come in here and they tell me that the Maya have all died out. And I say, What do you think I am, chopped lizard?”

  “Liver,” Max corrected her.

  “No food here. This is Salon on Six. You ask at buffet on seven, if you want liver. Maybe they have Liver Pizza.”

  “No, it’s just … never mind.”

  Koo shrugged and looked around for something else to sell him. “We have a special on nose piercing.”

  “No, thank you. I’ll just sit and read, if that’s okay with you.”

  He settled on the sofa and picked up a tourist guide to San Xavier.

  Koo sat down next to him and began to file her nails.

  She nodded toward the towel-swaddled customer. “That one, he is like a baby. If he wakes, I must drop everything and go to him. He has a tantrum if he has to wait even one minute.”

  Not wanting to talk, Max kept his eyes glued to the tourist guide.

  “You like to read? That one”—again Koo gestured to the towels—“he says he has a library in his house. He must be rich, no?”

  She looked at Max expectantly.

  “I guess,” said Max.

  “But he is mean. He has a temper like a fer-de-lance. You know what that is?”

  “Yes.” Out gathering firewood in the forest, he’d once come face-to-face with this deadly pit viper. Lola had told him later that it was the most dangerous snake in Central America.

  “So what do you think?” continued Koo. “Can a snake change its spots? Eh?”

  Max decided not to point out that the fer-de-lance wasn’t spotted, but had more of a diamond pattern. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “You don’t think that a good woman could make him change?”

  Horrified to be caught in a heart-to-heart with a stranger, Max pretended to be engrossed in an article on shrimp farming.

  Koo nudged him. “That girl you are waiting for, is she your girlfriend?”

  Max shook his head.

  “No? You are single?”

  He nodded.

  “You are happy to be single?”

  “I’m fourteen.”

  Koo sighed. “When I was fourteen I had big dreams of marrying a rich man and living in a palace. But I am still waiting.” She scrutinized herself in a mirror. “I worry that I will lose my looks.”

  Max kept his eyes fixed on the magazine.

  “Tell me,” persisted Koo. “You are a rich tourist. What advice do you have for me?”

  Max ignored her.

  She nudged him again, hard. “What is your advice?”

  Max panicked. His eyes fell on a headline in the magazine. “The key to a successful shrimp farm,” he pronounced, “is a good water-filtration system.”

  Koo narrowed her eyes, trying to understand what he’d just said and ponder its significance to her love life. Luckily, before she could ask any more questions, the heap of towels at the far end of the salon began to stir.

  Max watched as the legs stretched out, extending two smallish feet in two shiny, pointy-toed black leather boots.

  Max knew those boots.

  “I must go back to work,” said Koo. “Perhaps we can talk again. Enjoy your reading.”

  “Frío! Frío!” whined a familiar voice. “The towels have gone cold.”

  Koo tried to soothe him. “Nice hot towels, Koo brings them to you.”

  Max watched in the mirror as she carefully lifted the old towel from the man’s face. Just before she replaced it with a steaming new one, he caught a flash of black hair, a hooked nose, and a thin handlebar mustache.

  It was enough to confirm his worst fears.

  There, in a barber’s chair maybe fifty feet away from him, sat the thuggish Spanish aristocrat who’d been chasing him since his very first day in San Xavier: Count Antonio de Landa.

  Landa was descended from the guy who had burned all the Maya books way back in history, and he seemed determined to outdo his ancestor’s notoriety. He was brutal, vicious, power hungry, slightly insane—oh, and he’d tried to marry Lola.

  Of course, at the time of the wedding, he’d unwittingly been sharing his body with the evil priest Tzelek. But Landa had been collecting photographs of Lola long before that, and his creepiness knew no bounds.

  Max’s heart was racing. Somehow he had to warn Lola not to come out of the back room. But how to get across the salon without Landa recognizing him?

  Slowly he reached up to a hook on the wall and took down a jaguar-patterned nylon cape, the kind hairdressers use to protect their clients’ clothes. He draped the cape over his head while he searched the shelf behind him for more items to add to his disguise.

  As Max’s hand closed around the face paint, Landa launched into one of his tantrums. “Hot? You call this hot? Idiota! How will the pores open if the towel is cold?”

  “But Don Antonio, your skin is cold like a fish. It sucks the heat straight out of my towels.”

  “Cold like a fish?” His thin lips smiled. “Cold like a shark, you mean.”

  Koo shuddered. “So, Don Antonio, are you going to the show tonight?”

  “I have no time for such fripperies. I am enga
ged in an important research project; I am writing a book.”

  “You are a writer?” She inspected one of his small, bony hands. “Ah yes, I see you have sensitive, artistic fingers.”

  “Give me a manicure, if you know how.”

  Koo sniffed to show she was offended. “Trust me, Don Antonio. I am a qualified nail technician.”

  “Trust you?” he snapped. “You are a woman, are you not? Once I trusted a woman, and she left me on our wedding day.”

  Koo almost dropped her nail file in surprise. “You are married?”

  “She escaped before I could force her to say her vows. She was my one true love, el amor de mi vida.”

  “For myself,” said Koo, “I believe there is more than one woman for one man.”

  “Then your heart has not been broken.”

  “More times than I can count.”

  “Then I see you know nothing about true love.”

  Koo pursed her lips. “So where did you meet her, this true love of yours?”

  “It was destiny that brought us together. Our paths first crossed when she was a child, but I waited for her with patience.”

  “It was an arranged marriage?”

  Landa nodded. “Arranged by the gods, to bring together the Maya kings and the throne of Spain.”

  Max was electrified. He couldn’t stop eavesdropping on Landa’s confessions. Was he talking about Lola?

  “She was Maya, your girlfriend?”

  “She was a royal princess, descended from the Jaguar Kings.”

  At this point, Koo apparently decided that her client was deranged and moved the scissors out of his reach. Max reached the same conclusion. If Landa was calling Lola a royal princess, he was talking nonsense. Which meant that Max did not have to break it to Lola that the crazy count had stalked her since she was little. All Max had to do was—

  No! No! No! What was that mustachioed maniac saying now?

  “The old man, the shaman, he paid me to steal her from her mother.”

  “Trouble with the mother-in-law, eh?”

  “He said the mother was a bad woman.”

  “So you rescued her, like a knight in shiny armor?”

  “I left her under a mahogany tree.”

  Max’s stomach flipped.

  “How romantic,” said Koo, evidently never dreaming that he could be talking about abandoning a little baby. “If she is your destiny, perhaps she will find you again?”

  Landa let out a groan. “Me odia. She hates me.”

  “Poor man, how you have suffered.” Koo put down the black nail polish she had selected for him, and began to massage Landa’s temples. “But you know what they say, Don Antonio: there are plenty more fishes in the sea.”

  Landa sprang up, sending the manicure tray flying. “How dare you say that? There is no one else for me. She is the one.”

  Koo tried to calm him down. “Please, Don Antonio, the polish, it needs to dry—”

  “Have you understood nothing? I am a broken man. Every day I wait for a sign from the gods. I would give everything I own just to see her again.…”

  Catching sight of his own reflection, Landa picked up the barber’s chair and hurled it at the mirror, like a rock star trashing a hotel room. Max froze where he sat, but the angry aristocrat had no eyes for him, nor for anyone who was not the girl who had broken his heart. He threw some coins at Koo and swept out, twirling his salon cape around him like a matador.

  The noise brought Lola’s stylist running out of the back room.

  “Are you all right, Koo?” she asked, looking at the mess.

  “Who did this?”

  Koo picked up the coins and looked at them sadly. “He is just another gambler. But he has placed his bets on the wrong woman.”

  “Forget about him,” said the other stylist. She admired herself in the cracked mirror. “Let’s close up early and get ourselves ready for the show tonight.”

  Lola emerged from the back room. “Hoop?” she called. “Where are you?”

  “I’m over here.”

  She followed his voice to the reception area. “Is that you under there?”

  The figure she addressed wore blue body paint; a false nose with goggles; an elaborate wig complete with feathers, shells, and beads; and a jaguar-patterned nylon cape.

  “How do you like my new look?” asked Max, who had loaded on the Maya finery to disguise himself from Landa.

  “What are you doing, Hoop? Was it you making all that commotion?”

  “Me? No.”

  “So who was it?”

  He looked at her through his ridiculous goggles. Her hair was straight and glossy; she wore a new T-shirt; she was all clean and shiny again. But Max knew that, with one name, he could reduce her world to ruins. That name was Antonio de Landa—or Toto, as Lola had called him.

  Should he tell her what he had overheard or not?

  “Just let me take this stuff off and clean myself up.”

  Playing for time, Max slowly dismantled his disguise and wiped his face with a towel, all the while wondering how to handle this unwelcome development.

  Landa was a stalker, a dangerous madman, a psychopath to be avoided at all costs. But if Lola found out what he’d been saying, she was sure to want to confront him. It could only make a bad situation even worse.

  “So who did this?” Lola asked again, indicating the broken mirror and the upturned furniture.

  Max looked where she pointed. He crossed his fingers behind his back. “That? Oh, that was me.”

  “What? Why did you smash up the salon?”

  “It was an accident. I tripped. It was the goggles.”

  “You tripped? But—”

  Koo came out with a broom and Max waved at her.

  She waved back sadly.

  “See,” said Max. “It’s fine. We’re cool.”

  Lola narrowed her eyes. “But why—”

  “There you are!” squeaked a voice. Max was saved from further interrogation by the arrival of the concierge, who scurried in wheezing and panting, as if he was out of breath. He didn’t even notice the mess in the salon. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you two! It’s time to go down for the show.”

  “We have to get out of this if we’re going to rescue Bahlam,” Lola whispered to Max. “Follow my lead!” She slumped on the sofa and groaned. “I don’t feel good. I think it was the pizza.”

  Max slumped next to her. “Me, too.”

  “What’s this?” asked the concierge.

  “Your Guano Special at the pizza buffet has made us sick,” explained Lola.

  “Too sick for the show,” added Max, clutching his stomach.

  The concierge’s nose was twitching furiously, as if he could smell bad acting. “What do you mean, too sick for the show? You have VIP tickets.”

  “We’d like to take a rain check,” said Max, “if it’s all the same to you.”

  “No,” replied the concierge, “it is not all the same to me.” His eyes were flashing pink with anger and his voice rose to a squeak. “You have partaken of our hospitality, you have eaten and drunk your fill, you have availed yourselves of all our facilities, and you have left behind a trail of destruction. All I ask is that you fulfill your duties as our VIP prize winners and make an appearance at the show. If you refuse, I will have no choice but to charge you for your stay at the Grand Hotel Xibalba. And believe me, with damages, that is one bill you cannot afford to pay.”

  Max and Lola went into a huddle.

  “Eusebio will be waiting,” whispered Lola. “We need to sneak the animals out while everyone else is at the show.”

  “So we do what Rat Man says. We just make an appearance. We’ll take our seats, wave at the crowd, and when the lights go down, we’ll slip away.”

  Lola bit her lip. “Okay. I guess we have no choice.”

  They turned to the concierge. “We are feeling a little better,” said Max.

  “A wise decision,” said the concierge. He wiped his brow wi
th a handkerchief, as if a crisis had been averted. “Follow me.”

  He led them out of the salon, through a set of “Employees Only” doors, and into a dark, narrow corridor that led to a single elevator.

  An elevator without a call button.

  “This is the VIP elevator,” explained the concierge, taking a jade-colored passkey out of his pocket and sliding it through a slot in the wall. “It goes straight down to nine.”

  Inside the elevator, the doors closed silently and they dropped so fast that Max’s ears popped. “The ninth floor must be pretty deep,” he said. “Feels like we’re going to the center of the Earth.”

  Eventually, with a squealing of brakes, they came to a bumpy stop. The lights flickered, then fizzled out altogether. The only sound in the darkness was a scratching noise like the claws of a small animal.

  “I don’t like this,” said Lola.

  Max said nothing. He was trying not to have a panic attack.

  Then—and relax!—the doors slid open, and they emerged into a brightly lit corridor.

  Something shot out between Max’s feet.

  “It’s a rat! There was a rat in the elevator! Maybe it chewed through the— Wait, where’s the concierge?”

  The concierge was nowhere to be seen.

  Max’s and Lola’s eyes met. But before they could discuss their suspicions, a small, round Maya woman—the first ugly Maya woman Max had ever seen—came to greet them. She wore the traditional white embroidered dress, and she held a clipboard.

  “Good evening,” she said. “You must be the Hero Twins. We’ve been expecting you.”

  “We are not the Hero Twins,” said Lola. “There’s been a mistake.”

  The woman checked her clipboard. “A mistake? I don’t think so. You are on my list. You are the VIP guests, are you not?”

  “But who made the list? Who gave it to you?”

  “I am just an usher,” said the woman impatiently. “Please follow me. The show is about to start.” She turned and strode off briskly, her sandals slapping the stone floor.

  “Wait!” Lola called after her. “Why did you call us the Hero Twins?”

  The usher turned. “It is not important.”

  “It is to me,” said Lola stubbornly.