Gringos

  Down the way from the ball court, a dead woman lay stretched out on a striped blanket. Two girls were sitting there fanning the body. The dead woman’s name was Jan, I was relieved to hear, and not Tonya Barge. Then I saw that she was probably too old anyway to be Vincent’s sweetheart. One leg of her shiny black slacks was cut off, exposing a black swelling on her calf. Boots might or might not have helped. The snake had struck her a few inches below the knee, a palanca I had no doubt. By way of treatment someone had squeezed lime juice over the wound and poked around in it with a knife—a red-hot knife, the girls said. They didn’t know the woman’s last name or where she was from. She wore a white blouse and braided gold belt. The metallic strands gleamed under my light. No watch, no finger rings, one silver bracelet. It was my habit to note such things in case the description turned up on a Blue Sheet. The girls said she had passed out at once from the shock of the bite and never came around, never opened her eyes again. They were fanning her with branches to keep the flies off. The male fanners had already slipped away, if they had ever been here. You couldn’t count on men to stick with a thankless job like that.

  A gust of raindrops came and went. The lightning drew closer. Sula had told me that you can only see a person’s true face in the glare of lightning. Refugio was disturbed by the way these congreso people walked, or he pretended to be. Youngsters should show more spirit, he said, more gaiety, mas alegría. It was a shame the way they moped around. They should stand up straight and carry themselves through life with a manly bearing—like Refugio, that is, who strode about like the Prince of Asturias. With that carriage and that air, he had no real need for elevated loafers. Now he dropped into a slouch and imitated the hippie movements. He went into a creeping shuffle and then did a kind of slow chicken walk. I was limping myself. The rain came back in a scattering of fat drops. The congreso people said various things to me.

  “I have styes on my eyelids and ulcers on my tongue because I haven’t been eating right.”

  “El Mago feeds on human hearts.”

  “Just what is your authority?”

  “This is the landscape of my dreams.”

  “There are food thieves in this camp.”

  “El Mago is worth a hundred of you.”

  “They told me there was going to be a golden pavilion here with plenty of good food for everybody. They said you could pick grapes right off the trees.”

  “El Mago is waiting in his great house. You must know the right word before you can see him.”

  “It’s early yet.”

  “Why don’t you set your own house in order?”

  “El Mago can see the hidden relation between things.”

  “I almost didn’t come.”

  “I can’t get anything on my radio but static.”

  “Touch El Mago and your hand will curl up and wither into a claw.”

  “When El Mago needs something he always finds it.”

  But there was no Rudy news and not much about the sun and nothing at all to the point. Some of these folk were pale and shaky, barely able to stand. These, the fasters, had eaten nothing for days, so as to make themselves lightheaded, the better to see visions. Only one of the entire lot had anything to say about the Maya, and he told me that they had invented soap and “wireless telegraphy.”

  Refugio said, “What is it they say? I can’t hear. Do they speak well?”

  “No, they don’t. They make a poor showing there, too.”

  Art and Mike in one of their flights once claimed that, given some plague or holocaust, our little gang at Shep’s In-Between Club, an ordinary lot at best, was quite capable of reestablishing Western civilization, over time, with the help of a Bible and a dictionary and Simcoe’s old broken set of encyclopedias. They didn’t say how much time. But could it all spring anew from the crowd on this hilltop? I thought not. Better that a band of guerillas out here in the woods should survive, or an army patrol, with their camp women. Or a single lodge of the Elks Club. An Elk culture. My knee was blazing. I vowed never again to set foot outside Mérida.

  Refugio turned up his hands. “¿Listo?”

  “Yes, I’ve seen enough. Let’s go.”

  All at once rain came sweeping across the plaza in dense curtains that quenched the campfires and raised clouds of steam. There was a scramble for cover. In the hurrying confusion, I thought I caught a glimpse of my hotel neighbors, Chuck and Diane, if that was their names. In the lightning glare, I thought I saw them running together hand in hand, and then they were gone. Refugio and I ducked through a doorway into a narrow stone chamber. Ramos, too, and with each clap of thunder he barked at the heavens. Chino would have tucked his tail. I turned my light about to see if we had guests. I smelled sour clothes. No, it was us. We reeked. On the back wall there was a small black handprint and the words A KOBOLD FEB 1941. Old Alma had been here, in this very room! Perhaps waiting out a rain herself, or just getting away from Karl for a bit. She had left her mark in the way of the Mayan architects, who sometimes signed their monumental projects with a red handprint. All that you see here is the work of this hand. My flashlight filament was getting redder and weaker. I turned it off, and we waited in darkness with the mosquitoes.

  It was a black night again in the old city of Likín. Others had found shelter across the way in cubbyholes like this one. Here and there through the rainy blear, I could see feeble points of candlelight. Then we did get a guest, a young man in dripping jeans and a sailor’s blue woolen jumper, who asked if we had room for him. He had been running. We made way and he came in breathing hard. His sleeve cuffs were folded back one lap, and I almost ordered him to turn them down and button them properly. When I was on gate duty at the Bremerton Navy Yard, I made the sailors button their sleeves and square away their caps, among other things. It was for their own good, a kindness really. We couldn’t let them get jaunty. It was their great weakness in those outfits they wore. They liked to turn their cuffs back to show the golden dragons embroidered there, which meant they had served in the China Sea or some such thing. They hated us and we loved it. We cherished our power at Marine Barracks. Nobody could get to us. We even had our own bakery. I should have stayed there in the guard shack, imposing a petty bit of order on the world.

  The boy wiped off his glasses, which were of the utopian communard model, with small round lenses and earpieces of the very thinnest wire. He had to raise his voice over the roar of the storm. “I got caught out there in the woods behind the big pyramid,” he said. “It’s really tough going out there without a machete. There must be a trail to the top, but I couldn’t find it.”

  I said, “Why not go up the front way? The staircase is cleared.”

  “They won’t let anybody on those steps. They’ll run you off. They won’t let you up there unless you know the right words.”

  “Who won’t?”

  “The two baldheaded guys. They pushed some people down earlier with their forked poles. It’s like they own the place. I don’t know who they are or what words they’re talking about. You can take a bad fall down that thing.”

  “There are people up there now?”

  “Yes, in that square chapel or whatever it is on top.”

  “How many?”

  “I’m not sure. They have a goat. All I’ve seen is the goat and the two bald thugs, but there are some others moving around inside. El Mago himself could be in there.”

  He was a sensible kid and you could talk to him. Here was a piece of news. Yes, now I could make out a yellow light up there on top of the Castillo. Of course, that’s where Rudy would be, at the heart of it all, at the citadel, taking useless measurements and perhaps chatting with the temple bullies. I would have to drag my inflamed knee all the way to the top, step by step. We waited. Rain this hard couldn’t last. On summer afternoons we got these pounding showers in Mérida, and in five minutes the sun was shining again. And when it didn’t rain, Fausto would run a hose on the sidewalk and let the water pool up in hollow places so the birds
and the town dogs could get a drink.

  We shared our dank closet with mosquitoes. They had done their worst to Refugio and me years ago, infecting us for life with malaria and dengue bugs, all the various fever bugs they carried. But in their numbers here and their agitated state, these big black Petén bichos were driving us crazy. They had only one raving thought and that was to get at our blood. They swarmed in our eyes and clogged our nostrils and our ears and finally drove us out into the rain.

  Refugio thought we were making for Yorito, and I had to grab his soaked and flapping shirttail. “No! Up there! The templo! We’ll have to check it out!”

  “You say we are done! ¡Término!”

  “We’ve come this far! We can’t get any wetter! A quick look and we’re done!”

  The pyramid was tilted slightly, with water coursing down one side of the staircase in a hundred little cataracts. The thing had not been designed for easy ascent, certainly not for the Maya themselves, who stood five feet high at most. The pitch was too steep, the stone risers too high, and the stone treads too narrow. You couldn’t get into a comfortable stride no matter how long your legs or how sound your knees. We struck off up the higher side, away from the falling water. The incline must have been close to sixty degrees, and the wet lichen on the stone was slippery. It was like climbing a ladder without using your hands. We could have tacked, gone up in prudent zigzag fashion, but no, it was straight up to the top for us in one go, with Refugio leading the way. He was angry. I hobbled along behind using my old Smith shotgun as a support stick. Ramos followed me, advancing in awkward hops, until, just short of the crest, he stopped and froze in place, spooked, like a frightened housecat up a tree. His hair, wet and heavy though it was, stuck up in a spiky ruff around his neck from all the lightning in the air.

  Let him wait there and ponder the glyphs carved on the riser faces. We could pick him up on the way down. I knew, looking at those strange symbols, that Doc could no more read them than Ramos could. Probably he would “interpret” them, not translate them. But that was all right with me, he was still a formidable man and in his own way a great man.

  I knew too, suddenly, and so late, that we were dealing here with Big Dan and his people. This was the sunrise city, Likín, the City of Dawn. And now the two bald boys. But my poor head was so muddled that I didn’t work it out until that moment on the pyramid steps. It came to me all at once. I stopped dead in my tracks and took off my hat in this driving rain and offered up a prayer of my own. I asked God to let me find the little girl, LaJoye Mishell Teeter, promising not to let her out of my hands this time. I promised not to take any money for her recovery. The wind was fierce up here above the forest canopy. The rain came sideways. Down there in the treetops the monkeys must have been hanging on for their lives.

  The little temple was oblong rather than square, and it took up the entire summit platform, except for a narrow bit of deck space on each side. There was a single doorway, or so I thought, in the front. A male figure stood there in the opening with a faint light behind him. I could smell the burning wax of candles.

  He didn’t see us until we had stepped up onto the platform, and then he gave a start. “Hey, that’s far enough!” He came forward holding a six-foot length of trimmed sapling that was forked at the slender end. “Hold it right there! Let’s have the words! Do you know the words?”

  I put my light on him. There were colored stripes painted front to back across his shaved head. He was one of Dan’s Jumping Jacks.

  “The password tonight is L. C. Smith,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Put that pole down and get out of the way. I don’t want to hear any more out of you.”

  He must have seen the shotgun leveled at him, and still he made a lunge. He came at us like a pole vaulter, with the pole held low. Refugio was a small barrel of a man standing on two stumpy and bowed legs, but he was fast on those legs. He sidestepped and grabbed the middle of the sapling and jerked the boy off his feet, and then with a kick sent him tumbling down the stairway. The boy didn’t cry out. He fell on his back with a grunt and was gone, just like that. Ramos yelped down below. He came hopping up to join us, barking away, all fight again now, as though he had stopped back there only to take a leak or look at an ant. Now he was Ramos again of the 1st War Dog Platoon.

  I moved fast on the others, who had crowded into the doorway to watch. “Back inside! Let’s go!” I wanted to get in there out of the night so they could all see the gun. No need for any more trouble. It was a smoky, highvaulted room. I drove them into a corner and made them sit. Their faces too were painted with vertical stripes. They looked sick and hungry. Each one held a sprig of something green. But I had bagged only five Jumping Jacks and these were the lesser, dimmer ones. Dan wasn’t here, nor was LaJoye Mishell Teeter, nor the big woman, Beany Girl, nor the second skinhead. There was no goat. Rudy Kurle wasn’t here either.

  “Where is Dan?” I said. “Listen to me now. I don’t have time to fool around with you people. Where is the little girl you call Red? Where is Dan?”

  “El Mago is biding his time.”

  “His knife is keen and yet it gives life.”

  “He is one set apart. He is no longer Dan.”

  “El Mago is our father. You will never enjoy his favor and intimacy.”

  “He used to give us doughnuts sometimes when he was Dan.”

  They went into their group hum and said nothing more. I had given them time to recover. I should have struck faster and harder. I should have knocked one of them down right away and got in his face. But the moment had passed, and to compound my foolishness I said, “Dan is the false El Mago. I was sent here to tell you that Dan is a false teacher. Look at me when I’m talking to you! Can you at least understand what I’m saying?” All a waste of breath. They sat there droning away with their mandrill faces cast down. Their hymn had one disagreeable note and no words. They had tuned me out. Old Alma had a word for this. It was urdummheit, primitive stupidity, which she used freely with servants, and with me as well when I let the wheels of her chair drop down hard off a curb. Urdummheit!

  “Such people!” Refugio kept saying. “What a mess! . . . ¡Qué gente! ¡Qué embrollo!” He had his .45 out and the hammer was pulled back. Mine was cocked too. L. C. Smith was known for his “hammerless” shotguns (and for his typewriters, later to be called Smith-Corona), but this old fowling piece had two big upright S-curved hammers like they don’t make anymore, and when drawn all the way back under tension, they gave you some sense of the detonation to come.

  A few candles burned in wall niches. At this end of the room there was a small campfire on the floor, with the flames jumping and falling. The gusts of air should have told me there was another big opening somewhere. This was the east end, where two wall slits in the shape of a T caught the first rays of the morning sun. Those dawn rays were said to light up the shrine for an instant in some striking way. I had never taken the trouble to see this flare effect for myself, perhaps a mistake, though such sights are often disappointing. A tau-window, it was called. Now a dead toad was stuffed there at the intersection of the slits, with his belly cut open and a length of red yarn tied around his neck in a bow. I pulled the bloody slimy thing out of the crevice and flung it into the lap of a Jumping Jack. He didn’t move. The girl next to him was twisting something in her hands, a greasy rag. She pressed it to her face and kissed it and moaned. It was Dan’s old head covering, the knotted blue bandanna, in decayed tatters. I noticed too that she and the others had smears of blood around their lips. They were off doughnuts now and on toad blood.

  “Here’s our rathole,” said Refugio, at the far end. “This is the way he left, all right. You can see. But why should the boy run from you?” He had found the other opening behind a partition wall. There were two walls, with a wide space between them, and a passage, and the outer wall was split from top to bottom. The crack had spread and eroded into a hole at floor level. It was a bolthole big enough even for Da
n to crawl through.

  “No, it’s not the boy,” I said. “We’re not looking for the boy now. We’re looking for a dangerous fat man and a little girl.” I snatched the rotten bandanna from the hippie girl’s hands and took Ramos by the scruff of the neck and rubbed his nose around in it and spoke soft and unusual words to him. I could always talk to dogs, certain dogs, if not to people very well. It was a gift; the words just came to me.

  We made a quick circuit around the outside deck and then struck off down the backslope. This side was uncleared but not nearly as steep. There were trees and earth and tangled undergrowth and rushing water madly seeking an ever lower place. Ramos was in the lead, taking us below and off to the right. He knew what was wanted, and even with the rain there was still a good smelly trail to follow. That bandanna was strong, and Dan himself would be pretty ripe by now. There was the goat, too. Refugio said, “What a night!” I told him to be careful.

  Our path was littered with yellow blossoms which the rain had beaten off the palo blanco trees. I lost my hat in the vines. Down to our right there was a complex of structures, still half buried, called the acropolis, though it was by no means the high point of the place. It was a maze of galleries and chambers, most of them roofless shells, set at different levels on terraces. We broke out of the woods onto the topmost terrace, and Ramos was off at a lope and into the maze. We lost sight of him. We had to follow his barking through twists and turns, up and down. Diggers had been here recently. They had cleared one corridor and put up marker ribbons along the way. Strange looters though, to leave the artworks behind. I saw a fine stucco mask of the long-nosed rain god, with the fragile nose intact, a rare find. There were wooden door lintels, untouched. That carved sapodilla wood had endured tropical heat, rain and insects for a thousand years, and it was still in place and still bearing a load. Iron would have crumbled away centuries ago.