Sacrifice

by Farris, John

  But that came later, much later. I need to say something first about what happened in Kan Petén when Daddy and I visited the site this morning. Because I don't understand why he acted the way he did. I've never known him to be rude to anybody. And never in my life has he said anything to so completely humiliate me in front of other people—total strangers! I can understand him being protective, we've both been through so much heartache the past few months. I'm trying to understand. But he seems tense and on edge since we came to Guatemala. I thought the change was what we both needed. As for the gang of guerrillas we hear about, but haven't seen—I guess he's just nervous because of me. I am glad he arranged for Veronica to hang out with me, although I felt foolish at first, going into town with her and her Uzi, the way everybody stared, and kind of snickered behind our backs. Gringa. I took three years of Spanish in school, but I didn't learn how many ways you could say that word and make it sound so unpleasant.

  This is the so-called dry season in the northern Guatemala rain forest, which means it doesn't rain enough to dose the unpaved roads in the area—that includes almost all of the roads outside of Cobían. A few years ago during the "wet" season (summer), they had sixteen feet of rainfall! But because of all the tourists who come to see the ruins in winter, the government maintains a good paved road to Kan Petén, and the trip from our hotel overlooking the lake takes only about forty minutes.

  We traveled to the ruins in Veronica's Land Cruiser. Myself, Dad, Veronica, and her stepbrother, Benito, who also works at the hotel. Benito brought along a 12-shot, 12-guage shotgun with a pistol grip that he carried on a sling across one shoulder. He always kept at least one hand on the gun, and seemed really proud of it. In contrast to Veronica, Benito, who I think is about sixteen and still goes to school, liked trying out his English on us. He is a few inches taller than Veronica and twice as wide, very muscular.

  The morning was dry and cloudless, but, as always since we arrived, there was a haze of smoke in the air to the east, toward Belize. We could smell the smoke as we drove northeast to Kan Petén.

  "Burning, every day, the forest," Benito said. "To make graze for cattle, no? Very bad. Also trees cutting, every day. For wood. ¿Cómo se dice? Muebles—"

  "Furniture."

  "Yes. Make furniture for U.S., I think. So many trees gone. One million hectares."

  We stopped in a village for gas. Dad had his morning headache: he said he was probably drinking too much of the rich Guatemalan coffee they serve at the hotel. He went into a farmacia. I walked across the plaza to take some pictures of the church, which was yellow and green and pink, the colors wearing off in places, and the school building next door.

  Some boys at recess were playing basketball and started showing off for me, or the camera, grinning over their shoulders. A couple of the daring ones came toward us, giving each other little shoves, and spoke to Benito. One of the boys was wearing a straw hat with a tall crown and a blue band with a four-pointed star pattern that was almost like the hat Benito wore. They were in awe of the Striker shotgun. He let them have a closer look at it. They discussed the damage it could do, and one of the boys made shotgun noises. Then the boy with the hat like Benito's spoke to him for a long time about something that sounded serious. I don't think he was speaking Spanish; it must have been the Itzá dialect.

  Benito didn't say much, but he gave each of the boys a coin and they walked away.

  Benito looked at me. "He is Porfilio, a cousin. Saying there was killing in another village not very far from here, two nights ago. Soldiers look for rebels hiding there." He shrugged. "Always fighting here, long time." He shrugged again. "The government does not care for us."

  "Are the Maya rebels?"

  "Maybe. Because we are Indians. Lowest people, long time. Most of us make no problems. Only live here, in our towns. Very poor."

  "Your cousin Francisco isn't poor. He owns the hotel."

  "Oh, yes." Benito tapped his breastbone with his fingertips. "He is a man of the cofradía. This is like—especial man, especial to God, a—protector of the old ways of Maya. Such a man is respected everywhere: un hombre de privilegio, always from father to son. ¿Usted conoce?"

  Dad was calling us from across the plaza. I took a couple of pictures of a huge Ceiba tree that was surrounded by a sort of ramshackle gazebo, and some boulder-size heads, stone faces with big eyes but no pupils that Benito said were gods of rain and wind. The day was getting warmer. Benito stopped at a stall on one side of the plaza and bought me a straw hat with a tall crown, like his. He wouldn't let me pay him back.

  "Look what Benito gave me," I said, pulling the brim of the hat down over my eyes, the way Benito wore his. Veronica gave him a look that implied he had a crush on me, and drove away from the gasolina. We both ignored her. "¿Muy guapo, no?" I said to Daddy.

  Dad smiled. "Looks good on you. Is that what guapo means?"

  "It means handsome, and you'd better start learning some Spanish."

  "Tomorrow," he said. He still had that deep line between his eyebrows, which meant the headache was still bothering him, or else he was worried about something, like being stopped on the road at gunpoint. I think he would have been happier just to hang around the hotel until the Randalls, who were in charge of the mission team at Usumucinta, drove up to get us on Saturday. But I had nagged and made a pest of myself, so here we were on the way to Kan Petén. Which, according to what I'd been reading, was one of the most incredible sights in Central America.

  But at first glance Kan Petén was a disappointment. "Disneyland," Daddy said disgustedly. There were small hotels and cafés and souvenir shops for a kilometer or so leading to the gravel parking lots, then more shops and stalls and cages filled with birds and animals—most of them threatened or endangered species, if I understood Veronica's mumbled Spanish correctly. I saw a sorry-looking quetzal (but still the most beautiful color of any bird, except flamingos), a sleeping golden anteater, and a margay, which looks like an oversized spotted housecat. We walked a long way up a wooded hill, seeing the rugged tops of some pyramids, and stelae along the path, all of them worn down and partly covered with lichen.

  It was humid in the forest we walked through. For a few minutes we were out of sight of any buildings. We came to a series of waterfalls and a pool some tourists on a guided tour were throwing coins into, and up another long gradual rise with the trees beginning to thin out and suddenly there it was, the Great Plaza and the pyramids of Kan Petén! Even if you don't know anything about archeology, and I don't know much, you have to be impressed.

  Kan Petén had been discovered a hundred and fifty years ago, almost nine centuries after it was abandoned. Only parts of it had been dug out of the forest so far. According to my guidebook, Kan Petén covered fifty square miles; more than a thousand years ago the city, or city-state, had been home to as many as sixty thousand Maya. Now, except for all the damages that time (and probably acid rain) had done to the stonework, the North and Central Acropolis of the Great Plaza still resembled what they must have been when Kan Petén was the center of one of the great Maya cultures.

  The only modern additions to the site were an air-conditioned museum and souvenir shop and a cafeteria, each with a thatched roof, and a large official-looking building in a cleared area several hundred meters east of the Great Plaza. There was a helicopter landing pad beside this building. A big helicopter circled overhead and landed as we crossed the plaza to climb the temple that stood beside a reservoir. Three men and a couple of women got out. All of them wore muddy boots and jeans and khaki shirts. Two of the men were wearing guns, and one of them, the tallest of the group, had on an Indiana Jones-style hat. It was almost like a movie. They unloaded a few crates and canvas bags of tools and carried them into the building.

  Archeologists, Benito explained, and he pointed south, where the helicopter had come from.

  "Working at another site, 50 kilometers from here. No roads. Many ciudades like this one, no one finds them all yet."


  Temple Two was as high as a twenty-story building, with steps that went up at an angle of about fifty degrees. Of the restored pyramids it was the least dangerous to climb, but signs in four languages warned of missteps. The way to do it was to climb at a lean, sometimes using the steps above for handholds. I played indoor tennis until the day we left Sky Valley, but halfway up the temple I started feeling all those steps in my calves. Veronica and Benito climbed stoically and methodically up the front of the temple, as if they'd done it dozens of times. Daddy was below me at arm's length, ready to catch me if I stumbled. He wasn't having any trouble with the climb, but he was breathing hard.

  He needed to sit down when we reached the top. I sat beside him and squeezed his hand.

  "Beautiful," he murmured, looking around. Beads of sweat were clinging to the rims of his sunglasses where they touched his cheeks. They looked like tears. I wanted to wipe them away, but he turned his head, looking east. "They came three thousand years ago, nobody knows from where. Their culture survived six times longer than the Roman Empire. They had an accurate calendar, predicted eclipses, built great cities—and this temple we're sitting on—with a few simple tools."

  "And then the Spaniards showed up."

  "It wasn't the Spaniards who destroyed Classic Maya civilization. Most of it had vanished by the end of the tenth century. Six hundred years later the Spaniards mopped up what was left around here, and farther north along the coast of Yucatan—a mixture of Toltec and Maya society."

  "Didn't know you were a Maya scholar," I teased him. "Oh—I wasn't sleepy last night, so I rummaged around in one of those books you brought along."

  "Does anyone know what happened to the Classic Maya civilization?"

  "Yes," Veronica said, and I looked up at her, startled. Then I smiled, encouragingly, I think. She didn't change expression but she went on, in English, "One man can destroy what thousands have built, if he have the power. Probably it happen here. At least Glen think so."

  "Glen who?" I asked.

  She nodded toward the helicopter pad. "You saw him. The one with the hat. His name is Glen Hazen. From Vanderbilt University. The site they are working at Dos Pilas have a tomb twelve hundred years old. They find a king in the tomb, but they also find writings that may esplain how Classic Maya civilization collapse in less than a century."

  "Vanderbilt? That's where I'm going to college when I get back."

  "Small wurl," Veronica said with a shrug. "If you would like to meet him, maybe he talk to you more about this."

  Which is how I met Glen Hazen, in the busy cafeteria at Kan Petén. He's tall, probably six-six, with crinkly red hair and a reddish-brown mustache. He greeted Veronica with a kiss on the cheek, but near enough to her lips to give me the impression they might be more than just casual friends; although her expression was still sort of frozen, the pupils of her eyes looked, all of a sudden, bigger. Just a little "simmer" to the dark chocolate. Glen's brown eyes pop slightly, like a Sendak goblin's eyes, but in spite of that he isn't bad-looking. His hands were red and swollen from conga fly bites. "Archeology seems like a glamorous profession," he said. "Until you learn that basically what you are is lunch for a lot of exotic bugs." It seemed as if better than half of the cafeteria crowd were archeologists, from all over the world; and they all knew each other. There was a lot of cross-talk and loud talk, greetings flying back and forth across the room.

  Veronica and I sat on either side of Glen, and I had to lean close to him to catch what he was saying.

  "Our theory has it that Maya civilization died when their rules of warfare changed," Glen said. "Mayas always had a taste for blood and conquest, which certainly doesn't make them all that different from the run of human beings, but instead of fielding great armies and systematically reducing the population, their early conflicts were ceremonial in nature, ritual enactments between elite groups. A ruler from a city like Kan Petén—Speaking-Serpent, for instance—would capture the king or a high-ranking member of the nobility from, say, Tikal or Caracol. Then Speaking-Serpent would torture his rival, keeping him just on the edge of death for months or even years, thereby enhancing his own stature with his subjects, and the gods. And while this was going on, the ordinary people would go about their business, most of them farming small plots of ground cleared from the forest. They practiced crop rotation, which was a necessity. Topsoil in a rain forest ecosystem is thin, and the heavy rains constantly leach out nutrients."

  "But the rules changed, you said."

  "One of our neighborhood kings—we don't know his name yet, we just call him Ruler Two from Dos Pilas—began to covet not only high-born captives, but his neighbors' land. To take it, and hold on to it, he needed the equivalent of a Roman legion or two. In order to resist his armies, rival city-states raised their own armies. The era of the siege began in Central America. Cities built walls and moats—we have good examples of this kind of construction, and the changes in warfare, at Dos Pilas—and the scattered plots of farmland had to be moved inside the walls, to prevent total destruction by roving armies."

  "So they wore out the soil in a few years," I said, "and then they all—"

  "Starve to death," Veronica said, making a motion across her throat with the edge of her hand. "All but a few survivors, who hide out in the forest. Like peasants during the Dark Ages in Europe."

  "If you'd like to see something really unusual," Glen said to me, "I'm flying down to Machaquila in a couple of days. Some of the people from the University of Texas camp have located a cave and cenote that was probably used for ritual sacrifice twelve centuries ago. It's supposed to be a more important find than Naj Tunich—"

  "I don't think so," Daddy said, with a smile, kind of a thin smile. "I don't trust helicopters. Didn't you all lose one last month?"

  "A copter did crash near Topoxte, but it wasn't our group. Some Danish anthropologists who chartered an old Huey from the Guatemalan Air Force. We've got a new Bell we leased from an oil company—"

  "Still don't like the idea," Daddy said. "Sorry, Sharissa."

  "Dad. It's fascinating; when will I ever get another chance to—"

  "I heard the helicopter was shot down by rebels, and there is no way I'll allow you to—"

  "Dad, chill. Don't you think you're being overprotective?"

  Sometimes you just pop off and say the wrong thing without thinking. I probably sounded antagonistic, but I was excited. A helicopter trip to ruins in the jungle—I really wanted to go and if Glen thought there was any danger I'm sure he wouldn't have invited me. I know I wasn't trying very hard to understand Daddy's point of view. Mom was gone; I was all he had left. He had a good reason to be worried.

  Dad stared at me for a few seconds, as if he couldn't believe I was the daughter he'd raised.

  Glen said, not trying to be too persuasive, "Promise to take good care of Sharissa, sir."

  Dad shook his head, not angrily but as if he had too much on his mind and this wasn't worth arguing about. To me he said, "Time to go." He looked back at Glen. "Nice meeting you, Hazen."

  Glen nodded, then smiled at me and shrugged slightly, and I made a last try. "Dad, I know I'll be all right—"

  "You don't know anything," he said bitterly. He might as well have reached across the table and slapped me, hard. I was stunned, and then I did the most stupid thing imaginable, I started to cry. It wasn't a big deal, I didn't make a fool of myself, some tears just spilled out. I had thought that was over with, my heart clenching up and tears coming out of nowhere. He was a little surprised, but it was a hostile kind of surprise; he didn't say anything else to me, he just looked grim and walked away. That was the really humiliating part. He might have said something conciliatory, at least tried to make it look better, but there I was in front of strangers with tears running down my cheeks.

  Veronica looked at his back. Her expression is usually hard to read but she seemed astonished and puzzled. Benito was fiddling with his shotgun, not meeting anyone's eyes. Then Glen did something nice
; touched my shoulder and said, "Hope I see you again. Where're you staying, Sharissa?"

  I tried to tell him but my throat was raw and dry.

  "Itzá Maya," Veronica said. Then I heard Daddy again. His voice was loud, but he wasn't calling to me.

  "You've made a mistake!"

  He sounded so agitated that I was scared suddenly, afraid he might really be losing it after five months of grieving. I saw him by the cafeteria door, looking down at a man in a wheelchair who was more or less blocking Daddy's way. The man was large from the waist up, fat bulging out of his short-sleeve shirt in a few places. His legs were as short and useless-looking as those of a ventriloquist's dummy. He had a triple-chinned face red as roses. He was smiling broadly. His teeth were so big and white and obviously false it looked as if someone had tiled his mouth.

  There was a lull in the loud hum of conversation in the cafeteria, otherwise I probably wouldn't have been able to hear what he said to Daddy.

  "Oh, no, I don't think so." He sounded Scandinavian. "I'm not so good with names always, but faces, those I don't forget." He had offered up a hand to Daddy. "Nils Lagerfeld. Uppsala University. And we met before, here at Kan Petén—yes, I'm certain of it—almost twenty years ago. Your lovely daughter was with you."

  "I've never been here before." Dad looked around, searching for me, I think, and gestured. "That's my daughter, over there. She hasn't been here before either. Now if you wouldn't mind—Veronica! Sharissa! What's holding you up? I said we're going!"