We entered the tall water and prepared to wade across it. Yolanda first, then Erik. I entered third, and Manuel walked behind. My father wore a large forest-green pack with a red handkerchief tied onto it. His shoulders bowed slightly beneath the weight; the soaked blue cotton fabric of his shirt puckered against his skin, pressing transparently onto his thin arms. The water reflected back his face, his moving shoulders. He did not look very sturdy. His small fine head, with its vanishing black and silver hair and large-lobed pink ears, barely reached above the vinyl back of his rucksack. Beneath the rising blue water, which reached to his hips, his legs moved uneasily. I turned from him and forged ahead—but then, when the three of us had passed already beyond the midpoint of the inlet, where the water was as high as our chests, I heard him slip and tumble into the stream.
“Dad!”
I jerked around to see him flailing in the water twenty feet away from me, grasping hold of a large rock close to the bank.
“I’m all right,” he said, though I saw that the shirt fabric had torn from his arm and that his shoulder was scraped raw. He crawled away from us back through the pond and gripped onto the banks with his hands, pulling himself up onto the mud and turf that shelved away from the thick stand of trees.
“What’s going on?” Yolanda asked. Close to reaching the other side, she half-turned in the water that extended to her shoulders.
“Señor Alvarez!” Erik yelled. He was chest-high in the water.
Manuel continued to climb up the bank, breathing heavily. He looked frail and his face had turned white.
“We shouldn’t get separated,” Yolanda said. “Cross over the water.”
“Just give me a second,” Manuel said. He had reached a flat, grassy area butting onto the wall of mahoganies, and remained on his hands and knees. “That winded me.”
As we stood in place in the pond, watching him, our ears were filled with the dreamy, windlike sound of the water purling around us. But then came another sort of noise from behind the boles of the trees: a cracking, and a trembling of leaves. And next came an explosive sound of birds beating out from the shrubs.
“What’s that?”Erik asked.
“I don’t know,” I answered.
We continued to watch, unsure what was happening. My father remained crouched on the bank, half covered in mud.
“Manuel,” I heard Yolanda say. “Manuel, get over here.”
My father turned his head. “There’s something …”
Before our eyes, the bush parted with a tender rustling sound.
A huge, rangy, gold-furred cat with black markings and green eyes emerged and stepped onto the bank less than two feet from Manuel.
The animal looked to be almost two hundred pounds. It had long daggered teeth that would rip my father’s flesh. The belly of the beast hung low and bulged and was covered with white fur; it moved with lithe slow steps, and lowered its head between its shoulder to hone in on its prey. From its throat came a rumbling menacing purr. And then it drew back its lips over its fangs. It hissed. It sounded as if it were screaming.
“Jaguar,” Erik said, in a tight voice.
The cat’s shadow cleaved Manuel’s body. He looked up at its shining face and sat on his knees.
I stared at my father sitting in front of that monster, and experienced a moment of such perfect terror that I closed my eyes and imagined myself cowering back in the dusty peaceful aisles of The Red Lion, which was full of paper tigers and dead men who were made out of words.
It was where I had always hidden from my fears.
Then I opened my eyes again.
I raced toward Dad, through the swelling water that splashed all around with a great clashing sound, so the cat gave a startled leap in the air. But it didn’t run.
“Stand up and shout at it, Manuel!” Yolanda yawled. She was scrambling about, trying to reach behind her to get a hold of the machete that was strapped to her pack. “It thinks you’re food, for God’s sake!”
My father’s face tremored. “I’m afraid I can’t move. I told you I’m not good at this sort of thing.”
Erik ran beside me with deranged slow steps through the flood. We slipped, submerging into the pond, then heaved ourselves out of the firth again.
The cat stretched out its head and widened its eyes and roared. It swiped at the air in front of my father’s face with its sharp massive paw. Erik and I shrieked to frighten it away. Yolanda was just managing to get the machete untied from her pack.
“Oh, it’s pregnant,” I heard Manuel say. “Don’t hurt it.”
“I can’t let it get to you, Manuel!” she yelled back to him.
“She’s going to be a mother,” Manuel said.
“Get away! Get away!” I screamed. I’d nearly reached the bank. I could see the cat’s pink teats poking out from her white fur, and for a second thought I might black out from panic.
Erik rushed past me and gripped hold of Manuel, trying to drag him back into the water. All of us were shouting at the animal while she shivered and growled and scraped at the mud.
And this is when we heard another rustling in the bush, and a noise like footsteps in the wood.
Yolanda had her blade out and raised it over her head, as if she were going to throw it at the cat. But the jaguar had stopped roaring; it flinched and turned toward the noise.
“Don’t—don’t—don’t—Yolanda,” Manuel yelled.
“Move!” Erik hollered. He and I had our arms around my father’s shoulders, and we were dragging him into the water, away from the cat. Yolanda stood there, with her blade still poised in the air, and looked confused.
The cat moved away from us, padding in the direction of the trees; we could see that it was terribly thin. A ray of sunlight glinted over the gold fur, and then it slipped between the mahoganies and disappeared from our view.
A second passed; we were all in the water now. No one spoke. Another second passed, and another.
Then we heard the unmistakable sound of a gunshot beyond the trees. A second shot followed it. The woods shuddered and then were still again.
I jerked forward. “What’s that?”
“A hunter?” Erik said. He gripped his arms under my father’s armpits and was hauling across the water so that my father’s body bobbed around.
“Just go!” Yolanda said.
“Erik—agh—” Manuel said.
“What?”
”—you’re—squashing—me.”
“Sorry.” Erik removed his grip but kept a close eye on Manuel as he skittered into and across the pond.
“What was that?” I asked again. “Did someone shoot her?”
“I think I might have heard her run through the woods,” my father groaned.
We slipped and half-swam through the pond, pushing each other from the back and pulling each other onto the other side of the bank. Erik reached the bank first and hauled me out by grasping around my ribs; he yanked Yolanda up, too, by the arm straps of her pack.
I bent down, grabbed Manuel, and helped lift him onto solid land.
Then we looked out onto the firth and the trees, and everything seemed peaceful and soundless again. There was no sign of the jaguar except for the scrapes and paw prints it had made in the mud. There was also no sign within the dark wood of a gunman.
We have four miles to go,” Yolanda said, looking at my father. “Do you think you can make it?”
“There’s not a question that I’m making it.” Manuel was standing beside her on the bank and looking very white and grim.
“All right then,” she said. She looked troubled but didn’t press the fact that he had just frozen in fear and so endangered his life, and perhaps the rest of ours as well.
Erik and I stood up.
“We’ll go when you’re ready,” I said to Manuel.
“I’m ready now.”
We pushed on through the forest. But Manuel didn’t look as strong as he claimed. As we started on the route again, I walked behind him and
noticed every shake of his legs and the way he half-stumbled over the marshy sections of the forest. Though he’d kept up a decent stride before, the fall had hurt him, and he seemed to lack vitality and also confidence. He took slow, uneasy steps; we had to hold our pace to his.
I kept my eye on my father the whole next section, and every slip and hesitation, every time he reached out his hands to balance himself or hesitated, made me nervous.
On we trekked like this for another three hours, hacking away at the brush, worrying, half-lurching through the swamps and the meads. At last we hit the point that was our closest approximation of the place where Oscar Angela Tapia had discovered the Flores Stelae, and where Beatriz de la Cueva had found the Maze of Deceit with Balaj K’waill.
This point was the horrible and magnificent mouth of the Rio Sacluc.
“This isn’t what we expected,” Erik said.
“Oh, damn,” Yolanda said.
CHAPTER 52
The Rio Sacluc reached much higher than the pond; it made the pond look like nothing. It ran through the jungle as a fury of ragged water, streaming in a torrent to the lower depths of the jungle. Through this we would cross to the other bank, which was half landslide, half soft mud, leading toward another outcropping of chicle trees that were shorter and thinner than the mahogany. Some of them had fallen in the storm, but when I squinted past the water I saw that three of the standing trees bore men high up on their trunks; these chicleros, or chicle extractors, were strapped to the trunks in leather cradles; working with knives, funnels, and buckets, they extracted the resin from the trees, which would later be used to make chewing gum. They weren’t working at the moment, though—instead, they had stopped their labors to turn and stare at us as we contemplated fording the river.
One of them gestured at us to forget what we were thinking.
As we were too far to shout at each other, and the river too loud, I just waved back. Then I looked back down at the water.
I remembered that de la Cueva wrote to her sister Agata of a little stream that she crossed to get to the Maze: “The Sacluc is a very refreshing and lovely creek, which I understand is changeable, but today runs as the thinnest line of crystal water. The Maze of Deceit sits at its very mouth.”
I winced. The four of us stood at that same bank of the white and moving deluge carving through the forest, and watched as the branches swept down in Heraclitean whorls of water. I thought how it was obvious from this evidence that the Sacluc was “changeable.” It appeared that much of Mitch’s fall had drained off from the forest, and entered here.
“I’ve never seen the high part extend this far,” Yolanda said. “I’ve never seen it like this at all.”
“Is there any way around?” I asked.
“There’s no way to tell, though it doesn’t look like it.”
“We could track it down to see if it does peter out,” Erik said. “How long does this stretch up?”
“Seventy miles or more,” she replied. “It hooks up with the Rio San Pedro toward the west, and then a network of other rivers and lakes toward the east. It could take us days to find a better crossing than this. And this is where we’re supposed to start, remember.” She consulted her compass. “This is the original mouth of the Sacluc. And so this is the place Tapia found the Stelae, right across the water. It’s from there that we’ll have to choose a direction.”
“We had better simply go ahead, then,” Manuel said, “as I am still assuming that my Juana is down here somewhere, and I’d like to find her as soon as possible.”
“I agree with that,” I said.
“It’s very high,” Erik said. “Manuel, can you make it?”
“It’s just—a little water.”
“A little water,” I said, “is not what I’m looking at. Dad, I want you to stick close to me.”
“And who’s going to stick close to you?” Yolanda asked.
“I will,”Erik said.
“Don’t worry about me,” I said. “I’m strong enough to cross it.”
“She’ll have to take care of herself, the same as I will, and the same as you,” Yolanda said. “That’s the hard truth, Manuel. So if you want to go, let’s do it.”
We hiked our bags high onto our shoulders and began to move in a line down the bank and toward the rapids. It rushed forward in a broad roar, cresting in sprays and plucking off chunks of the shoal, which crumbled and melted into the river. The water rose much higher on our bodies than I had allowed myself to anticipate when I’d been trying to estimate it from our perch. It was cold, hard, fast, and did not allow much traction for our feet as they scrambled across the rocks littering the river’s bottom. The weight of the packs, battered back and forth by the force of the waves, made us even less stable. Yolanda’s black hat jerked this way and that, particularly when she reached back to check the machete that she’d restrapped to the outside of her rucksack. Manuel fared less well as he walked ahead of me. When the river reached only up to his hips, he stumbled several times. The red handkerchief that he’d kept tied to his backpack unknotted and then fell into the water. In a violent snap, it was sucked toward the west. The deluge moved so fast and loud I couldn’t hear anything else—though I saw Yolanda turn her head over her shoulder and shout something before continuing. When I looked back, Erik yelled something at me as well and pushed his hands forward so that I would go on. I pressed into the deeper water, and then saw that my father’s body canted toward the left, and his arms waved up crazily.
I called his name but couldn’t even hear myself. I plunged through the river, reached out for him. He steadied himself; he put his thumb up in the air to signal he was all right.
And when I moved to grab hold of his pack, I felt my right foot glide against a smooth rock beneath me.
I slipped. Badly. I saw the water rushing toward my head.
The torrent thrust me off my feet, turned me around, and moved me with the same thrashing motion down its path as it had that red handkerchief.
I went down under the water, and the rocks jutting up from the floor of the river came up to cut me. My left shoulder and then both of my legs rammed and slapped against the sharp boulders. A roaring in my ears. I waved my arms around my head to keep my skull safe until water poured into my mouth and my lungs. I struggled up in the water; it was over my eyes, over the top of my head. The weight of the pack bearing me down in the river pushed my face under the surface. My feet kicked free in the river, and I heaved myself up once, twice, three times, to suck oxygen before I was slammed under again. I shrieked and grabbed at a rock and felt my fingertips slip. The deluge hammered over my shoulders. But I insanely kept my bag on my back—it contained the maps, my mother’s journal, the other papers we’d need to find her. There was one moment when I looked up through a wave and saw Yolanda, Erik, and Manuel screaming at me from the river’s bank, and then Yolanda ripped off her hat and crashed back into the deeper and more dangerous part of the water. I thrashed farther away from them, around a bend. I somehow righted myself, half cocked up through the water, and tried to drag my feet on the bottom, but they wouldn’t hold. Seconds or minutes passed while all I did was swallow more and more water. I saw a rock coming toward me, bigger than the rest; I reached out for it, missed it. I reached out again.
And here, I grabbed Yolanda’s hand.
“Hold on to me!”
“But you’re—you’re drowning!” I garbled back at her.
It was true; the two of us both were going under in that river. The water continued to blow past, and we pummeled through it. We gulped and kicked, then Yolanda gripped onto one of the huge rocks. Solid white waves smashed over our heads. Yolanda and I hung onto each other and pulled ourselves above the waterline to see that the rock she had grabbed was not so very far from the bank. We kicked off the rock and lunged toward the river’s shelving, then half-ran and half-swam across that terrible channel until we landed on the shallower part of the river’s bottom.
We dragged our way up
it, and I still had the pack on; I unlooped my arms from its straps.
Then I lay down in the mud, and I worked to breathe, and it felt like my lungs had been torched.
I curled on the bank. It took me a few minutes before I could hear my friends’ voices above the sound of the water. Then I jerked to a complete and lucid consciousness.
“Lola,” Yolanda said. She huddled next to me. “Hold still. Just talk to me so I know you’re all right.”
I saw cuts on my arms and my legs and my hands. My shirt and my jeans had been shredded. Only one of the injuries felt serious, a contusion on my hip. The pack appeared to be just fine.
“Lola,” she said. “Just say something.”
I began crying. “I want to find my mother.”
She looked up at Erik and Manuel. “She looks—all right.”
“We’re waiting here an hour to watch her and make sure,” Manuel said.
I shook my head and wiped my face. My body felt full of panicked energy; I really didn’t feel so much pain yet. “Okay—no worries—I’m fine.”
“You are not,” Erik said.
“I’d like to just keep going. I don’t want to just lie around here.”
“Sit back down!” Manuel hollered at me.
I stood up, and sat down again.
Yolanda remained by my side, with her knees in the mud; the skin around her eyes and mouth had turned gray.
The Queen Jade Page 26
