by J A Kellman
I was getting a late start that Friday morning after the return of Ruston’s body to Big Grove, when Luis Velasco, Mayan anthropologist and one of my closest friends, called. He was agitated, and due to his stroke a couple of months earlier, impossible to understand. His anthropologist wife Zoila took the phone.
“We knew Bob was missing. In Guatemala that is never good. But this latest news! Heart excision! Arrow sacrifice! It is unbelievable! He was a scholar, for God’s sake, not an ancient captive!”
“Maybe he ran into something sensitive in his research, but what? Ancient Mayan glyphic writing isn’t a likely reason for murder,” I said, “especially a killing that was so carefully staged.”
“It doesn’t make sense to me,” Zoila said. “Maybe Luis will have some ideas. Why don’t you come for dinner? If nothing else, he can let off steam. This entire business is going to make him crazy if he doesn’t feel he is doing something, even if it is just talk.”
I’d met Luis and Zoila when we were grad students in Guatemala, and we became friends. When all three of us ended up at the university in Big Grove, our relationship picked up where it had left off in the cobblestone streets of Antigua, with one additional twist: Luis had become a Mayan calendar priest as well as a well-known anthropologist. As the direct descendant of the last Lord of the Cauacs, one of the five ancient K’iche tribes, and from his years of apprenticeship with a holy man in the Highlands, his ability to divine the future was formidable. Maybe he’d have insights into Ruston’s death.
~ * ~
After dinner that evening, we took our drinks onto the balcony. We were still talking about Ruston, or rather, Luis was. He was having a hell of a time getting the words out with his stroke-fractured speech, but that didn’t stop him and we were willing to wait patiently for him to say everything he needed to say.
“I knew Bob Ruston ever since we got to Big Grove, I hate to say it now he’s dead, but I always thought he was a stuffed shirt. Self-important. I used to wonder how he could lord it over Zoila and me when we are the real deal as far as being Maya goes. He studied Mayan culture. We are Maya. His research was solid, though. Maybe that made up for his personality. No matter. He didn’t deserve this. What a terrible way to die.”
We grew quiet, thinking about Ruston’s death—alone in a steaming jungle, face to face with his killers, pierced with arrows, suspended like a hide to be scraped, eviscerated. No way could it have been worse. Besides, he would have known what was coming as soon as he saw the scaffold.
“What was he working on?” I asked, just to break the gloomy silence.
“I don’t know,” Luis said. “Bob found something at Tikal last year, but that’s all I know. Maybe José Polop could tell you. They were colleagues for years. I’d talk with Polop myself, but I hate the phone, and I don’t want to go out in this heat. Zoila can call if you’re willing to see him. Polop is one of those people with contacts everywhere. He’s bound to have more details. Besides, he might appreciate advice about taking care of Bob’s papers, since they ran in the same academic circles.”
By the time I left that evening, José Polop, Mayan art historian, had agreed to meet me the following morning at his condo in a new development on the western edge of Big Grove.
“You can’t miss it,” he said. “It’s the only house with a replica of the stele of Eighteen Rabbit, Lord of Copan, on the front porch.”
“Eighteen Rabbit? Full size?” I asked, envisioning the fifteen-foot original in front of a suburban dwelling.
“No, I only wish. It’s only a couple of feet tall, but it’s a good copy. He appears to be watching the street. He’s fierce enough looking…he keeps people from hanging ads on my door or pestering me with religious tracts.”
“Thanks for the tip. See you tomorrow.”
~ * ~
The following morning, I used my time on the way to Polop’s to think about my questions surrounding Ruston’s demise. How did Ruston get from the airport’s passenger pickup area in Guatemala City to Flores three hundred miles away and then journey thirty-nine miles to Tikal without anyone seeing him? Unless, of course, he traveled by car—he and his bags bundled into a vehicle with tinted windows, just like the old days. That would explain his disappearance and reappearance miles away, dead in the lowland jungle. But what happened between the day he disappeared in June and August and when he was found behind the pyramid? Was this a return to classic Mayan ceremonies that included auto sacrifice and elaborate rituals or what? Whatever else it was, it was creepy.
All the condos in the Walnut Woods development were an uneasy mixture of Georgian pillars, brick facades, International Style panels, and angled rooflines. Without the stele on the low porch, I would have gone right by Polop’s. I pulled into the short cement drive in front of his garage. A walk edged with prickly pear and yucca led to the low porch. Eighteen Rabbit stood next to the step surveying the street: regal, inscrutable, alien.
Polop must have been watching for me to arrive. No sooner did I raise the knocker than he pulled the door open.
“Glad you found me. Come in,” he said.
“Who could miss Eighteen Rabbit?” I said as we shook hands. “I appreciate you taking time to see me and so does Luis. He’s upset. He’d known Ruston for years.”
Polop, a tiny solid man with spikey black hair, led the way into the house.
“Let’s sit in the living room; it’s cooler,” he said. “Would you like anything? Water? Ice tea?”
“No, thanks, I’m fine.”
Polop, settling on a hassock, began. “I’m not sure I can tell you anything that Luis doesn’t already know. Ruston and I weren’t close, more just longtime colleagues with similar interests. We only saw one another every couple of months. We were busy. Last time we got together was late April—I grilled steaks on the deck—we caught up on news, discussed our work. He was excited about an inscription on an ancient preclassic stele he’d found in the jungle in Tikal last summer. It’s an interesting story. He’d been tramping around in the brush to the east of Temple Four, looking for architectural artifacts, when he fell over the thing. Once he pulled away the overgrowth, he knew it was unusual because of its size and shape, so he took photographs and rubbings, brought the material back to Big Grove at the end of the season.”
“What do you mean unusual?”
“According to Bob, he’d never seen anything like it. It was small, thick, boxy, more like a small boundary marker than the later Mayan political, or astronomical statements. During the school year he deciphered it, made out the name of a ruler, K’in A’jaw, Sun Lord. That’s when he got excited. Bob had never heard of K’in A’jaw, and no wonder. The date seemed to be in the early days of Tikal itself, around six hundred BCE.”
“Six hundred BCE? Did Tikal exist then? I thought it was just a collection of villages.”
Polop shifted on the hassock. “Yes and no. Some of them were beginning to coalesce, but still it wasn’t a large community. I didn’t hear from Bob again until he was ready to leave for Guatemala. He was taking off the first week of June, wanted to let me know he’d be staying with a friend of ours, Enrique Otzoy, in Guatemala City for a couple of days, and he’d booked a room in the Tikal Inn inside the park for the rest of the summer. I didn’t hear from him after that, but that wasn’t uncommon. He’d be busy packing, making appointments with people in Guatemala, planning his work.”
“Ruston disappeared no sooner than he got into the airport in Guatemala City according to the news,” I said. “At least Otzoy didn’t see him after he left passport control. Ruston seems to have vanished into thin air. And this part is really weird. The autopsy report indicated he had been alive all through the months of June and July. The pathologist said he’d only been dead for a couple of days when Ochoa found him. What do you think happened?”
“It is odd. Where the hell was Ruston for two months? He certainly wasn’t camping in the jungle; and where did he get that outfit? And who shot him full of arrows?” Pol
op asked, shaking his head.
“Ruston found that stele the summer before; might that be it?” I asked. “But when you think of it, how strange is it for a Mayan epigrapher to find a stele in the Petén?” I answered my own question. “The area is covered with ruins waiting to be discovered, even though the rain forest is so thick one can’t see more than a few feet in front of one’s face. Why wouldn’t Ruston find something after all those years spent poking around? The entire business is creepy, very creepy.”
I thought for a minute. “Might Ruston’s research indicate what he was thinking, what he was investigating in Guatemala, what caused his kidnapping and murder? Maybe someone wanted to learn what he knew and got rid of him.” That last bit sounded way too TV, even to me. “After all, what could he have learned about the ancient Maya that was toxic thousands of years later?”
Polop grunted. “All I know is he wanted to see if there were similar steles hidden away in the jungle around Tikal, or tucked away in museums or private collections. Someone should take a look at his notes. He doesn’t, didn’t, have much of a family. I’ve got the key to his house, but I’m not up to the task. I’ve got my own work to do.”
Not one to fool around, that was all I needed to jump into the situation with both feet. I was curious about the stele and didn’t have another job on my calendar for weeks. I told Polop I’d do it if Ruston’s relatives were interested.
Four
Tikal National Park, Guatemala, Early September
Ochoa tugged off his Forest Service hat and wiped his forehead with his bandana. His hair was wet, and his uniform stuck wherever it touched his skin. Despite his liberal application of repellent, he’d attracted a surging cloud of insects that had followed him ever since he’d crossed the Great Plaza. He was glad to break for lunch. He’d spent the morning leading a small tour group of German academics through the central heart of Tikal. Now they were eating in a thatched shelter near the Central Plaza, discussing what they had seen. A couple of them looked wilty, but sitting in the shade and drinking Coke seemed to be having a positive effect on even the most miserable.
As Ochoa waved away flies and waited for his clients to finish their meal, a small airplane headed high over Tikal’s central courtyard toward the northwest border of the Petén. Strange. A small red and white plane, maybe a Cessna, flying over Tikal; there weren’t any airports that direction, just a few big ranches and patches of jungle that hadn’t been burned for fields yet. If the plane kept going on its current heading it would end up in Miami. Ochoa grunted. Maybe it was someone going to one of the ranches…it was daylight after all, but most often in this part of the country planes out of place meant drugs. And drugs meant trouble.
Five
Big Grove, Mid-September
I pulled into Ruston’s drive a mile and a half from my condo in Burr Oaks at 8:30 a.m. on a sweltering, cloudless Monday, two weeks after the request to tackle his papers arrived from Ruston’s sister in Omaha.
His house, a two-story, white brick contemporary, had an outside staircase, a gravel courtyard surrounded by a wall, and the bleak look of a dwelling whose inhabitant was never coming back. Four months of inattention had taken their toll, or maybe maintenance hadn’t been high on Ruston’s to-do list. Weeds sprouted through the pebbles. The mailbox to the left of the stairs was pulling loose from the wall. The small patch of grass was dead.
I grabbed my supplies—a plastic tub filled with cotton gloves, labels, and everything else I might need—and struggled up the steep steps, scraping my elbows on the rough walls as I went. I let myself in with Polop’s key, pushing open the faded yellow door with my hip. A couple of months of being uninhabited had done nothing for the dwelling’s interior ambience, either. It was hot, dark, fusty—a mixture of mildew, years of cooking, stale clothes, and cigars. Great. Not only would it be hot while I worked, but also smelly.
A glass-walled dining room and kitchen cantilevered over the garage to the left of the door. A hallway to the right led to Ruston’s study at the back of the house. Aside from the view of the neighbor’s garden, the study was all business—a light box and stacks of drawings and photos on an oak library table, computer and printer on a nearby desk, and a chair that had allowed Ruston to wheel from one work station to another. I set my water bottle on the desk between a wooden box decorated with images of highland village life and a ceramic figure of a Mayan ritual ball player.
Since an unair-conditioned house in Big Grove at the end of summer is always stifling, and dealing with a light box would make the situation worse, I’d come prepared. I dug a small tabletop fan out of my bin and plugged it into a nearby wall socket. The breeze wasn’t cool, but a little circulation was better than nothing. Aiming it directly at my body and clamping my magnifier to my forehead, I settled into Ruston’s chair, eager to tackle the piles of materials next to the light box.
Luckily, a quick riffle through the papers showed they were of the newly discovered stele. There were three kinds of images—photos on large sheets of transparent film, ink drawings, and rubbings on thin sheets of paper. Each had particular qualities that made them of special value for my purposes. The photos documented an area from an unedited perspective, presenting a richly colored tapestry of unsorted information.
The drawings, done on lightweight paper, contained the clearest descriptions of the subject from Ruston’s personal perspective. The rubbings were somewhere between the photos and drawings, providing a topographical view of the stele’s surface features in dark, soft crayon, looking for all the world like Wisconsin’s rolling hills and winding valleys. Stacked together on the light box or laid side by side, the images looked as distinct as the patterns of a Mayan woman’s traditional blouse, a huipil.
I placed the first drawing on the box and pressed the switch. The image suddenly glowed like Tiffany glass in the darkened room. Every line, form, recess, and protrusion was delineated; amounts and relationships were clear. Next, I added the photo and a rubbing illustrating the same view, searching the surface of the photo with the help of my magnifier, looking for anything unusual on the stele’s surface—a vague shape, a change of hue, anything. With its two-power enlargement, details that were nearly invisible to the naked eye became large enough to see. Maybe I’d get lucky.
Working in an airless house on a hot day was miserable, but leaning over the battered old light box with an incandescent bulb was like bending over a stove with the burners going.
In half an hour I could feel perspiration trickling down my back; even my short hair felt damp when I ran my fingers through it.I exchanged the drawing for the next one in the stack, one with greater contrast and a closer view, adding the accompanying rubbing and photos. K’in A’jaw, the ruler’s name according to Ruston’s accompanying notes, filled the top-right corner of the stele—a pursed-lipped howler monkey face with a bean-shaped form containing the cross-like k’in shape floating in front and above it. I put on another set of pictures.
I couldn’t distinguish a thing beyond what seemed a human skull looking left. Everything else had been worn away, leaving shadows, softened bulges, rounded depressions. The stele had been broken across the bottom sometime in the past, making it even more difficult to decipher. I had to take Ruston’s word for what it said. From my perspective, nothing stood out as unusual—late preclassic size, boxy shape, badly eroded surface—only the name and the date were out of whack; they were way too early, according to Ruston, and he’d never heard of K’in A’jaw. I sighed. Why would I spot anything new if he hadn’t seen it first? I bit my lip in frustration and pushed my glasses up my nose. I needed something more if I was going to figure out what happened.
On breaks away from the searing light box, I organized and filed Ruston’s papers for disbursal. I learned a little about Ruston himself at the same time, but it wasn’t much when one considered his age and international reputation. His interests lay almost entirely in Mayan glyphs and Mesoamerican cultures, even down to his fondness for Cinco Ga
llos, a Mexican–Central American restaurant located in a repurposed donut shack out by the interstate, if their dog-earred menu on his desk meant anything. His world was Guatemala—its capitol city, with high rises and ghastly traffic, and the countryside, where the smell of wood smoke and roasting corn hung in the air and small plots of corn dotted mountainsides. Big Grove was just an add-on. There was nothing to suggest a reason for landing him tied and butchered in the jungle.
The Mayan ballgame player next to my water bottle gave me an idea, though. He understood sacrifice. His game included plenty of it. So how did a frowsy epigrapher wind up as part of a similar ceremony? “What do you think?” I asked the ballplayer.
I swear he answered. “It was a ritual to nourish the gods, to keep the world in balance, predictable, stable—rain falling, crops growing.”
It must be the heat. Now I was talking to inanimate objects, and worse, they were answering back.
But what about Ruston? Was he a sacrifice in the traditional sense, or was his death a cover-up, meant to look like a sacrifice, to steer people away from the facts, away from what actually was going on? Surely a group hadn’t gone back to the pre-Columbian ways.
The sacrificial blood stuff gives a lot of modern Maya the willies—piercing tongues and penises, cutting out hearts. Not what the people I knew considered spiritually significant, or something they wanted to think about in a world with Internet and airplanes. So, if Ruston’s death was a sacrifice, a real sacrifice, who would have carried it out? Could there be a small group of Maya hiding in the the Petén? Could the rain forest still be sheltering a little band in its depths, people isolated from modern life? Or, and this seemed another stretch, had a group of modern Maya returned to old rituals?
