by Heidi King
The woman closed her eyes and began to cough quietly, but I could tell her lungs couldn’t take much. She rocked back and forth, as if continuing the conversation was greatly straining her.
With my weak Spanish, I couldn’t really capture much of the exchange between María and Tuna. But according to what María later summarized for me, they spoke of black deeds and ancient Indian magic. The imposing and impassive slopes of Volcán Barú dominate the Chiriquí landscape. From its base in the town of Boquete, it doesn’t look much like a volcano. But take a step back and travel across the highlands to The Lost and Found, and you will see postcard perfect panoramic views of the mountain, set in breath-taking contrast to the hills and rugged mountain terrain surrounding it. The volcano now sleeps, but thousands of years ago it erupted and spat out massive boulders, scattering them for dozens of miles around the Chiriquí landscape. Hidden in the rivers and fields along the road between Boquete and The Lost and Found, and even more so on the road to Bocas, ancient symbols called petroglyphs can be found carved into the black stone of these volcanic rocks. One of the more well-known petroglyph sites is part of a tour The Lost and Found runs to hot springs near the town of Caldera. The boulder there is called The Elephant Stone, because of its resemblance to a sleeping elephant. Most archeologists believe that pre-Columbian Indians carved the symbols into the stone, and that the boulders served as kind of an ancient altar, adorned with the images of the spirits that the Indians worshipped and feared. But no one really knows their meaning.
“Or, at least…” Tuna coughed, turning to look at Gabriel. “They are forgetting their meaning.”
Our expert guide Gabriel is a Ngäbe Indian, the predominate indigenous group in western Panama. But his parents were killed when he was a child, and he was raised by Latinos. The other Ngäbe, his brothers, seem completely subjugated to me. One of the volunteers at the Lost and Found, Nico, is somewhat more generous in his assessment than I and prefers to describe them as, “cautious and reserved.” Of course, he worked with the Ngäbe during his time in the Peace Corps and may have gone a little native.
“The Ngäbe know,” Tuna said, staring at Gabriel. “But they are either afraid or they choose to forget.” Gabriel fidgeted again with his nose, although I am not really sure he knew what Tuna was talking about.
According to Tuna, below the ancient altar of symbols existed the huacas, tombs of Indian nobles accompanied by gold idols depicting their deities. The idols were buried to protect them from the invading Spaniards. But the gold was protected in other ways as well. Powerful sukias, shamans renowned for magic powers and abilities to communicate with the spirits, bewitched the tombs and burial grounds of their chiefs and kings, invoking the vengeance of the most malevolent of the spirits. The spirits enchant the huacas, and none of the Indians would dare desecrate the altar of their gods. But there would come a day, the legends say, when white foreigners who do not believe in the gods could resist their protective curse. When they shake the earth and light fires, the stones will rise, so the legend says.
“My husband tried to dig around the curse, but the spirits struck him dead.” Tuna began to raise her voice and tears flowed. “He did not find a mine. There is no mine.”
I have no idea if the story she told was true or if this was her first confession. But the old lady trembled and stared into María’s eyes. María walked over and hugged Tuna, who began to weep to so piteously that Gabriel and I looked at each other, wondering whether we should leave. But María leaned close and whispered something into her ear. Tuna’s demeanor changed dramatically. She stopped shaking and looked at María, repeating, “Gracias, gracias, Madre, gracias.”
It was dark by the time we left the village of Valle de la Mina. Gabriel left us for his home, and we walked along the highway in silence. I don’t know what was bothering María, but she seemed on edge. The exchange with Tuna had affected her.
We were walking in awkward silence for a while when a ragged old mutt ran from across the road toward us. María leaned down and petted him, and he trailed behind us as we walked toward The Lost and Found.
Suddenly, around a sharp bend in the highway, an eighteen-wheeler truck roared up from behind us. We turned at the same time as the dog, which stood right in the truck’s path. For a moment it looked like the truck would pass right over the little creature, but then we saw him get smoked by the crankshaft or the center of the rear axle. He bounced more than four feet in the air in the wake of the huge truck. We stepped to the side of the road, and the lights of the semi temporarily blinded us. When we looked back for the dog it had vanished.
We walked to the spot in the road where it should have been -- but nothing. Then suddenly we saw him yelping at the side of the road, running around in circles. He looked at us and then just flopped over onto his side, panting.
I wanted to just move on, but María wanted to help. She cradled the dog in her arms and at first it growled, quietly but deeply. After a moment it went back to panting.
“Do you hear that?” María asked, lifting her head.
I looked around. “What?”
“Someone crying.”
I listened intently. I heard nothing. Maybe the wind in the trees. Maybe some water running.
I remembered a time when I was younger. I woke up and thought I heard crying, but I wasn’t sure if it was just the sound of the air coming in through my own nose. I walked down to the garage, thinking it might have come from there.
When I opened the garage door, a tom cat hissed and ran out an open door. There, in the corner, was a paper bag with kittens, their throats ripped open, bleeding, dead. For some reason I wanted to tell María about this. To share something real from my past. But I didn’t.
“I wonder if it knows it will die,” María said, looking into its eyes.
“It looks okay to me,” I said.
“It’s hemorrhaging,” she said.
The dog let her stroke the back of its head and whined.
“We always feel most alive moments before death.” And then, suddenly and deliberately, she put a knee on the dog’s chest and snapped his neck with both hands. It made no sound. It just went limp in her arms. I lost my breath, and she could see I had trouble recovering. She caught my gaze and seemed angered at first by my shocked reaction. She let the dog fall from her lap and put her arm on my shoulders and leaned close to me. My heart was pounding. Her long dark hair fell into my face. I could smell the faint scent of lavender soap that has become her smell for me forever. But this gentle closeness, after such brutality, paralyzed me.
“All great things must first wear terrifying monstrous masks,” she whispered and turned back toward The Lost and Found.
At that moment I thought that María might not be traveling. She was running – maybe hiding. There are yesterdays on the road… a little behind you around the bend. And I wanted to know every inch of the road, no matter how uncomfortable.
La, la… la, la,la
By Steve Banks
Patty Poo,
Gabriel carried a rock down the hill before lunch. After lunch his job was to bring it back up. Gabriel asked why he is only carrying rocks up and down the hill. He looked sad. We all laughed. I think on the inside he was laughing. Or maybe later he will laugh.
A thousand apologies again for missing your call. Try Sunday after one P.M. and before two P.M.
More good news about the zip-line. Two quetzals flew in today and lucky me, I had a pellet gun to protect the garden. .. pang!. Made a fucking awesome hat that sold fast on e-Bay. Gabriel will start the zip-line after a few more loads of rocks.
Garden doing great. Thinking about planting coco but not the chocolate kind. Can’t tell you what I mean over email… need to be discreet, ya know. Someone named Capitan Gonzalez dropped by but was disappointed because it looked like the weed didn’t yet have THC in it. He promised to come back though. Funny, I asked about his boat but he said he didn’t have one. Sure would be nice if he had a boat to take this stuff back to the Stat
es.
P.S. Kermit (The kinkajou formerly known as Rocky) was biting his fur. Well, he ate a fair chunk of it off. Don’t worry we fixed the problem. The thing is we didn’t use sugar free Kool-Aid to die him green and we all know how much he likes sweet things. He must have been in heaven… like he was tasting cotton candy for the first time. Anyway we solved the problem and used blue sugar free Hawaiian Punch to die him this time around. The kinkajou formerly known as Rocky (whoever named him must have eaten one too many retard sandwiches) who later became Kermit will now be known as Papa Smurf and you shall refer to him as such in all future emails please.
The only one who respects you,
Steve
Bar is Messy
By Steve Banks
Andrew,
I find myself quite fetching these days when I look in the mirror. Have a pin mustache, suspenders, Panama Hat and wife beater.
Hot girls in the bar last night… right on! Bar is a mess though… cleaners can’t get in.
Steve
P.S. I know what everything tastes like.
Response:
Hey Steve,
Good to hear you got skinny girls in the bar. Remember a hard on counts as personal growth. Put that on your resume.
Andrew
P.S. Why? Why on earth would you think to eat hair follicles?
Masonic Pillars in the Rosicrucian Temple
By Mathew Hope
When I arrived at Bambu Hostel in David, I asked for the discount I heard was given to volunteers at The Lost and Found. I was denied. I went back to the pool where María was lounging on a deck chair, wearing a bikini and soaking up the sun. There was a small collection of backpackers dangling around her aura. I offered her a kiss on the cheek. She looked at me as if I had been testing her. She grabbed the back of my head and gave me a kiss on the lips. I told her we had to pay the regular price for the dorm.
“Dorm?” she said, raising an eyebrow. She took off her sun glasses and sauntered up to the front desk. She came back with a private room at half price.
“I guess I don’t have the face for a discount,” I said. She smiled sympathetically, as if she detected resentment.
“Oh Matt,” she said. “I am a woman. There’s no face. It’s your eyes that see what you want to see.”
The first few weeks with María I was waiting… waiting with nervous anticipation to see if she felt the same as me. I was ecstatic to learn that she did, and even more so to discover we were exclusive. Now I am still on edge. The interview, where we put our best face forward, is over, and we are now making the contract. Everyone writes this differently but we sign when we are on the same page… when we both know what we would consider betrayal… when we think we know what the other is capable of.
At three a.m. that night, María woke me up.
“Did you hear that?” she said. I listened and heard the distant sound of thunder.
“A storm?” I said.
“Yeah, I have been counting. It’s getting closer. We have to leave now.”
She pulled a small backpack from under the bed and told me to get dressed – not like a gringo – while she looked for a taxi. We took it to a 24 hour fast food chicken place not far away and continued on foot, toward the David fairgrounds.
After a few minutes, María dropped her backpack and flopped down on a curb in an area with almost no houses. It was dark and I could really only see her in flashes of lightning. Despite the electric, metallic smell that filled the air, the rain had yet to come. María took my hand, and we sat in the blackness.
“Matt, there is something I have to do – three things actually, that Tuna asked me to do, during our last visit.” There was stress in her voice.
“You don’t have to believe any of this. I don’t even believe it, but listen. You know she confessed that her husband was digging under the giant stones with the symbols, the petroglyphs, to find the gold of La Mina. The gold that everyone thinks came from a mine. Well, what she didn’t say when you were there was that he was working for the hydro dam. He was a night watchman in a nearby town, Los Planes.”
I knew Los Planes; you pass it on the way to The Lost and Found from David. It is a huge ghost town, a collection of dark wooden complexes enclosed by a dense, foreboding ring of pines. It once boasted a school and even a hospital. But now it is all shut down and boarded up. A huge barbed wire fence surrounds it. Gabriel told me the hydro dam company built Los Planes in the ‘70s to house the workers’ families.
“Well,” María continued, “Tuna told us that the Indian legend says that the rocks will rise when the outsiders shake the earth and light the fires. Who else could that be but the dam? They are moving the earth to drill tunnels and the fires are the electricity they’re making.”
Light rain came and I took back my hand. I was clueless as to where this was going, but I knew if the details came at three in the morning that this was all an exposition she needed to convince me of doing something stupid. I was getting a little pissed at the trap she set for me. I asked her to get to the point.
“Matt, the gold Tuna’s husband stole was only part of the gold being extracted by the hydro company. It was kept in Los Planes until the American Invasion in ’89. They built that…”
She grabbed my head and pointed it across a field to a large white building half illuminated by distant street lights. On the front was a large Egyptian symbol, the gold disk and colorful wings on either side.
“Orden Rosacruz,” she said. “I don’t know how to say it in English. When they hauled off Noriega they built that temple to move some of the gold they were taking from Los Planes. But it was a cover to hide the gold from invading American soldiers.”
I thought it was a test. I know María has balls. I know she plays with people – making them guess where her childlike sense of naivety becomes pure adult recklessness. I was about to call her bluff and express some disappointment when a bright flash cut through the darkness and the following boom of thunder shook the ground. Several car alarms sounded, and the light rain became a crashing torrent all at once.
María jumped to her feet. “There’s danger on the edge of town.”
I sat waiting, letting myself get drenched. Fuck María. She grabbed her backpack and disappeared in the darkness. Within a few moments she reappeared under the light of the whitewashed building called the Orden Rosacruz. She rested the blade end of a tire iron between the double doors and then whacked it with a hammer, breaking the lock.
Sure enough, there was an alarm, but it was clear now that María had timed her breaking and entering with the thunder of the storm and the wailing of the car alarms. Dogs barked, but they stopped when the alarm ceased. I was still waiting for police. I thought that building security systems, even in Panama, must be connected to the police.
I got up and walked around the block to hide near the wall of the fairgrounds. My heart pounded and it seemed like forever, but nothing moved. A moment later the rain stopped and everything was once again silent and dark. I must have waited ten, fifteen minutes. Then I went to look for María.
I looked at the building and before I was consciously aware that I was contemplating entering, the hair on my arms stood up. I don’t know what the hell overtook me, but before I knew it I was standing in front of the splintered doors and found myself pushing the doors open automatically, with no fear, like it was a lucid dream – a lucid dream I, like the others, was learning to control.
It smelled like my old elementary school. Where I was there was nothing unusual, just a foyer with a low porcelain water fountain and small cloak room off to the side. Swinging doors led to an empty room, much like a community hall, with stairs stacked to the side. I heard a humming sound coming from across the room and instinctually followed it. The glossy hardwood creaked under my feet as I walked toward a small kitchen at the back.
I found the origin of the sound. White and red wires lead from the wall to a sink full of water that muffled the sound of an alarm. Maria mu
st have ripped it from the wall and dropped it there. Beside the sink was a note written in English and an arrow pointing to a flight of stairs at the back: This way to the ancient gallery.
María had melted candles onto tin foil pie plates and placed them on every other stair. I picked one up to light my way. Each step groaned as I ascended to a room that had the feel of a waiting room to a university dean’s office. There was a big leather sofa and locked glass book cases with large leather bound books and group portraits of older, white men, some in formal wear and others in white robes. There were mysterious framed prints on the wall. Prints that resembled old auspicious maps and puzzles filled with esoteric symbols and graphs, yet revealing no destinations or the locations of treasures. There was no sign of anything that looked as if the antechamber hid raided antiquities.
On the door to another room, María had left a small paper held by a heavy brass knocker. The paper read, “Weird scenes inside the gold mine.”
I pushed open the door. It led to an elaborate ritual hall dimly lit by two candles on a marble altar in front of me. The hall stretched on to the left and the right, disappearing in shadow. Facing me on the opposite wall was a large golden fresco of Isis standing over the coffin of Osiris. The flickering battle between the gloom and the candlelight made the fresco seem larger, more alive and ominous. I suppose Isis was raising Osiris from the dead. The fresco made me think of Dr. Anderson and the art María and Estrella had been painting at the Lost and Found. Placed along the other wall to either side of me were seats covered in purple velvet, like old movie theater seats. At the far end, I could barely make out two large pillars that stood like sentinels on either side of an ornately carved throne. I walked toward the pillars and saw they had perfectly symmetrical globes resting at the top, almost touching the high ceilings. María sat on the throne a couple of steps above the black and white chessboard tiles that covered the floor. She was barefoot and wearing a white robe. Tied to each of her arms were golden cords each about a meter long. Her clothes were folded in a neat pile in the corner of the hall.