Aztec Odyssey

by Jay C. LaBarge

  The vanquished Spaniards thus swelled Cortés’ ranks, and he set off, back to the island city, confident in his destiny to overthrow an empire. Yet when Cortés approached Tenochtitlán, he saw the countryside was up on arms. While Alvarado had thought he had used the Feast of Toxcatl to preemptively cut the head off the snake, instead he had rallied the whole of the Aztec empire against their oppressors. Montezuma’s courtiers had stealthily gotten word out across the realm, that the time for waiting had ended.

  Asupacaci shook his head, coming back to the present and allowing himself a glance back at the slow-moving column, which was kicking up small trails of dust along its entire length. It was impressive, how this small detachment of the bravest of Aztec warriors had each set out on this most holy of quests. They all knew none would be coming back and that even fewer of their number would be chosen to reach the final destination. It was so secret, that after the porters had loaded the cargo before they left Tenochtitlán in the dead of night, each had willingly lay on the alter to make an offering of themselves. No one must know what they had or where they were going. Even Asupacaci, who was leading them, hadn’t decided on the ultimate destination yet.

  A military air surrounded the expedition, and it was as quiet and orderly as Asupacaci could have hoped for.

  He breathed deeply and sighed, “Ayemo, not yet, we still have much to do and far to go.”

  The tethered Spaniards looked around instinctively through dead eyes, listening through heightened hearing, yet disoriented, walking as though they had drunk too much Octli, made from the fermented sap of the agave plant. They had been chosen from among a large group of captives, stripped bare to reveal their pale and abhorrent skin, and then closely examined for any sign of the plague that had killed so many Aztecs. Those who bore no scars of what the Spanish called the pox were immediately offered as a sacrifice to appease the gods. For it was now known that they could be invisible vessels of disease. Those who had devil marks, the scars of the pox, and had survived the disease but could no longer transmit it, would prove most useful.

  Even though there had been no real choice, the truth was it had given Asupacaci a certain amount of pleasure to have their eyes put out with red hot embers that served to both blind and cauterize. He needed the Spaniards to tend and manage their strange horse beasts, for they had so much of the heart of the empire to move, and they would be useful in proving to the Aztec’s friends and foes alike that they had a common enemy. Behold, they invade Tenochtitlán today, tomorrow they will be at your doorstep. But should even one Spaniard escape, they must never be able to tell where they had been. If they couldn’t see it, they couldn’t tell it. If they made too much noise, he would take their tongues out too, but their voices seemed useful in tending the horses, at least for now.

  The Spaniards held the bridles and led the horses and the heavily laden carts blindly, while on each side a warrior jabbed them with an obsidian spear whenever they started slowing, crying, or praying to their false gods. Though the Aztecs were tempted to twist their spears in deeper, or coat them with pocheoa, animal dung, to cause a painful and fatal infection, they knew it wasn’t the time. Not yet.

  Chapter 2 – May 25, Present Day

  Nick LaBounty felt the pounding in his temples even before he opened his eyes. This isn’t going to be good, he thought. The dry taste of cotton in his mouth told him he had violated the cardinal rule of drinking too much, he hadn’t bulked up on water before he fell asleep. Damn it, no wonder he had slept straight through the night, despite the relentless, recurring nightmares. He squinted at his wristwatch trying to figure out what time it was, holding it almost to his nose since he thankfully hadn’t fallen asleep with his contact lenses in. Been there, done that, he mused. It was never a fun exercise trying to peel out a lens and not the cornea first thing in the morning.

  It was 6:15 a.m. and the early sunlight filtered in through the open window. Lying on his back, Nick reached out to the nightstand and grabbed his glasses, sliding them on, he blinked hard and stared at the ceiling. He saw speckles of sunlight reflecting off the fine dust drifting in the air, moving ever so slightly. Blinking again, he focused on a small plastic solar system twisting lazily above him. How long ago had that been put up there? He could still see the white thumbtack his dad, Albert, used to hang it, back when he had first bought the camp on Lake Charlevoix, in the very top part of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, in the late nineties. The bunk beds were long gone, but like his dad had said back then, “two boys, one room, a lake, and lots of forest, what could possibly go wrong?”

  Nick was only seven when they moved in, and his brother Charlie was thirteen, much bigger and tougher back then, but no more adventurous than his little brother. Dad had been right, it was paradise for two boys, and for his mom Josephine too. Summers as an outlet from their house in Muskegon, near Grand Rapids, had been everything a young boy could want growing up.

  When his mom passed, far too young, at only 53, Dad had sold the house and moved to the camp in Charlevoix full time. Frankly, it was the reason Nick decided to do his PhD in Chicago, to be near his old man and offer what moral support he could, even if only through his occasional presence. The camp was the only place his dad could be truly content, because he always felt she was with him when he was there. Nick’s eyes burned, and he fought back tears making his dull headache throb harder. He was still trying to get his mind around the fact that now his dad was gone too.

  What had Winston Churchill described it as? Melancholy that was always in the background and surfaced occasionally like an old familiar pain . . . that heavy depression? Oh yeah, Nick thought. Churchill called it the black dog, and now it seemed to be Nick’s constant companion as well. I’d rather have a Labrador Retriever, he thought. A dog would be less depressing and a whole lot more fun.

  Coming to terms with grief over his Mother’s death five years prior had been hard enough, but here he was thirty-years-old and now with no parents at all.

  Charlie struggled with it as well, but he was in a different place in his life. Happily married to a terrific woman he had two great kids, a fabulous career, and he had been their child.

  No, that wasn’t fair, Nick and Charlie had both been their children, and they had always been loved and treated equally. After Al and Josie had Charlie, they tried for a larger family. Two miscarriages and many tears later, they adopted Nick, and he was forever grateful.

  If anyone had ever won life’s lottery, it was me, to have been so randomly brought into a household so selfless and so full of love, Nick reflected. Enough of the self-pity, Mom and Dad wouldn’t want endless mourning, time to face reality and get my ass up and face the day.

  Nick sat up on the edge of the bed—slowly—allowing his throbbing head to gain some semblance of equilibrium. The cool hardwood felt familiar on his bare feet, and he smiled at the memory of how he and Charlie used to see who could do the best Tom Cruise imitation from the movie Risky Business and slide the farthest across the floor in only their socks and underwear. Charlie always won, but Nick said he looked the best doing it. Charlie would scoff at him and say at least he had something in his underwear instead of Nick’s skinny little butt and would give Nick a noogie for his troubles.

  “Thank you, sir, may I have another,” Nick would sarcastically yell and quickly scramble away before Charlie could grab him and administer it. Good times, those long-ago days.

  He stood up and did a long, lazy stretch to unlimber his athletic six-foot frame, and walked over to the mirror above the dresser. Absent mindedly scratching the stubble on his face, he looked at himself, the striking pale blue eyes of a thirty-year-old who had already seen too much heartache staring back at him. In the corner he saw his old beat up yellow metal detector standing next to the closet. It was well used. “Got a lot of love,” as his dad put it. Funny how that gift to acclimate a precocious youngster to the Upper Peninsula, Yooper’s they were proudly called, led to what would be his passion in life.

&nb
sp; Nick and Charlie took to exploring like ducks to water, and Albert found and researched the local history to find that a lot had gone on near here in pre-colonial and colonial times. Fort Michilimackinac had been recreated and was now a national park, and while there was no longer a Fort de Repentigny, exploring the trails and byways to both yielded a small treasure trove of artifacts, which Nick had kept in an old WWII machine gun ammunition case under his bed. Dad used to get genuinely excited on his “expeditions” with his boys, and always said that if he had gone to college, he would have been an archeologist, anthropologist, or historian. Instead life had led him to do what his father had done, continue to run the family business, a lumber yard that had done well for Grandpa Jacques after the war, but was only limping along like the rest of Muskegon now.

  Dad had always suggested that there was some family legend he was trying to unwind, and their summer trips were inevitably to the American Southwest. The boys would be packed into the back of an old rambling station wagon with air conditioning that never seemed to work quite right, and the adventures were fond memories to all. “Just one more stop,” he would always say, while Mom rolled her eyes, and off he went to investigate some obscure trail with a goal only he could see. Everyone tagged along, Nick with his trusty metal detector in hand. More than a few artifacts from those trips, including arrow heads, musket balls, uniform buttons, the occasional belt buckle, and one treasured piece of eight were still in the ammo can.

  Funny, where life takes you if you aren’t paying attention, Nick thought. Following their dad’s advice, who joked that the only college he had the chance to go to was the school of hard knocks, the boys followed their passions.

  Charlie had a head for numbers and obscure concepts, along with the lack of personality and gravitas to go with it, Nick would jab. That had led to Charlie going to MIT for economics, where he also got his master’s in finance. A logical steppingstone to his first job as a stockbroker and money manager, and to his current career in Chicago running a hedge fund.

  Nick however never got over the thrill of the hunt or the find. He loved the research and history that went into it and ended up following Dad’s unfulfilled dream of becoming an archeologist. He found an innate affinity for the mental as well as physical challenges it presented, the cryptology of deciphering the past, and the blend of both teamwork and solitude.

  “That covered a lot of ground for me,” Nick would muse, first to the University of Michigan for his Bachelors in Archeology, then to UPenn for his Masters in Historical Research & Methodology, and now working on his PhD focusing on Mesoamerican Migrations at the University of Chicago.

  “Yeah,” Charlie would laugh. “We’ll be the highlight of any party, me talking actuary tables and you with your Clovis arrow heads, we’ll get laid every night!”

  Nick laughed out loud, for the first time in a couple of days. It actually startled him. Based on his data sampling with his brother over the years and their relative successes or failures, evidently actuary tables were more exciting.

  Nick walked out of the bedroom and scanned the scene. The cabin was neat and tidy, the way Dad always kept it. As neat as the day Nick came out to see his dad when he wasn’t able to get a hold of him back in early March. Dad was always good about keeping in touch, maybe not right away, but he would always follow up when he got a voicemail or text message. Lots of dead cell phone space up here, which was always fine with everyone. Dad would spend his days out in the woods, or out on one of the many ponds, or even on one of the Great Lakes. He had two to choose from, Lake Michigan to the west, and Lake Huron to the east.

  But he hadn’t replied, despite Nick and Charlie calling and texting, and it had been three days. That was too out of character for Dad, to go dark on communications. Nick dropped the work he was doing on his PhD at the University of Chicago, jumped in his beat up, old Chevy pickup truck, and headed up the familiar west coast of Lake Michigan, past Muskegon, and up to Charlevoix. When Nick had arrived at the cabin, nothing was amiss, at least as far as he could tell. The front door was unlocked, nothing unusual there since it was never locked, and the wood stove was cold. Plates from what looked like breakfast had been washed and left in the dry rack next to the sink, the cell phone was gone, and a steak was thawing on the counter. Normal—except no Dad.

  There was still a decent snowpack on the ground, and a cursory look around the cabin revealed only tracks of deer, squirrels and rabbits, and maybe a muskrat or two. No human footprints, which was puzzling since there had been no new snowfall for the last four days. Dad had to have gone somewhere, and while he was a talented outdoorsman, he wasn’t Icarus and couldn’t simply fly away.

  Nick had wandered down to the edge of the lake and sat on the dock which had been pulled up on the shore for the winter. Odd, this doesn’t add up, he thought, too many things out of character. Then Nick saw it, and his heart fell deep into an abyss. About 100 feet out on the lake, in a crease in the shifting ice, a frozen hand reached for the sky.

  The funeral two days before had gone well, even better than could have been expected.

  “I’m not even sure I would call it a funeral,” Nick caught himself saying out loud. Charlie and Nick had followed Dad’s wishes to the letter. They were simple and understated, like the man himself. Albert wasn’t a particularly religious man, and never felt that he or anyone else had the right to cast judgment on what anyone chose to believe, as long as it wasn’t harmful to others. He would joke in his folksy way that “religions are like ice cream, they come in lots of flavors that are all good, so who could choose one over another?” He couldn’t buy into one religion, believing it alone had all the answers, and damning anyone else who didn’t follow their doctrine, every honorable Christian or Hindi or Muslim or Buddhist, to some sort of purgatory or hell.

  Over time he simply found that the pomp and circumstance of organized religion was not for him, certainly not since Josephine was taken from him. It wasn’t bitterness, maybe simply numbing emptiness was a better description, yet he continued to be a spiritual man who believed in the inherent goodness in everyone, despite everything.

  Albert’s wishes were not that elaborate, but a part of them left Nick and Charlie confused. Since Mom had been cremated, there was no surprise with him having the same wish. But he didn’t want any showing or gathering back in Muskegon, only a small one at the camp on Lake Charlevoix for those who chose to make the trip or neighbors already there. And like the mischievous guy he was, it wasn’t to be a solemn gathering, but rather a sharing of the passions he had in his life, shared among his two boys, friends, and relatives. He wanted a B3 party, and the family was no stranger to it. Blues, Brews, and BBQ’s all around. The tv and some strategically placed electronic picture frames scrolled the life he and Josephine had built and shared with the boys through digitized photographs. What was anticipated to be a small crowd, given the distance, turned into a large one despite that.

  Lives not touched in many years, even people who didn’t show up for Josie’s tribute five years ago, came by with well wishes. The day went off exactly liked Albert had planned. Nick reflected on the people laughing, reminiscing, telling old stories and lies, drinking the favorite drinks they had all shared, listening to Dad’s blues collection, making some new memories, and at the end of the night one mass toast from the shore as the sun set. Nick and Charlie paddled out and scattered half of Albert’s and Josephine’s ashes as a gentle evening breeze breathed on the lake. It was serenely peaceful, the dust diffusing in the twilight, the echoes of the toast and laughter fading. Two lives, passionately lived, fading back into the world from whence they came.

  Before Charlie headed back to Chicago the day after the funeral, along with his wife Sophie, their five-year-old son Julien and his mischievous three-year-old sister, Yvette, hugs and kisses were given all around, along with some playful tickles for the kids from their favorite Uncle.

  “Hey, Julien, what was the most famous movie in Ancient Greece?” Nick
asked. Julien made a face like he was concentrating hard, then looked at Charlie for help. “Troy Story!” Nick exclaimed.

  Julien didn’t get it, but it got a laugh out of Charlie and Sophie. Nick told them he would be fine. And he was, until he wasn’t. He saw them off and went out and sat heavily on the front porch. Looking out on the lake, he felt the warmth of the toast from so many friends, and the companionship of his brother and his family, all begin to fade as the black dog of depression started to work its way back into his temples.

  Hell, I don’t even have Topaz around to keep me company, he thought, as his hand instinctively reached out below him to give the yellow lab a pet. Topaz, who preferred water to land, had been a gift from Charlie and Nick to Albert when he had moved to the camp full time after losing Josie. The dog, intended as the best kind of company, the kind that is always there, always ready to listen, was always ready for an adventure. Topaz was a rescue dog that had immediately bonded with Al, but he had to have been six or seven when they got him. He had four good years at the camp. Nick glanced over to his left and could see the little plaque on the tree his dad had put up when Topaz passed, and the telling rise of earth underneath it.

  The shadows grew longer. A lonely afternoon turned into a lonely evening. Nick fixed himself a tall glass of ice, grabbed a good bottle of bourbon, put his feet up on the railing, and tried to make sense of his world slowly and steadily being pulled asunder. That had led to this morning’s episode of cotton mouth, and he was actually surprised to find the bottle empty, not realizing he had gone so deep into his cups.

  The thing that continued to puzzle Nick was Dad’s second set of wishes. Which was for the two of them to go together to scatter the remaining commingled ashes in the Southwest, but at a place they had never been told had any special significance in all their summer wanderings. The refrain from one of Dad’s favorite songs that they had played two nights ago at the B3 party, Woodstock, penned by Joni Mitchell but best performed by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, looped in his head.