Sacrifice

by Farris, John

  "Sure." He hadn't wanted to play me for a long time. On the court I carried Daddy as much as I could, but it was male pride or something. This would be like old times. I put an arm around him.

  Veronica got up slowly. "I should go back to the hotel, then. To see if Francisco needs me."

  "Can we go to town in the morning?" I asked.

  "It will depend on your father's wishes," Veronica said formally, looking at him.

  "We'll make tomorrow's plans tomorrow," he said vaguely.

  Veronica nodded, lowered her eyes, picked up her Uzi, and walked quickly toward the hotel.

  Daddy and I headed for our bungalow. He seemed more relaxed to me than he had for several days. And I was happy; tennis always had been the best therapy for whatever was wrong with me emotionally.

  "What were you two talking about?" he asked.

  "Oh—Veronica was in some kind of mood. I think she must be one of those people who are affected by the full moon, you know? I mean, she seemed really fatalistic tonight, neurotic, whatever. But I can't blame her, she's had such an unhappy life. Her father died before she got to know him very well, and her husband was killed. Her sister died too, it was like some sort of bizarre suicide pact. Veronica blames her death on their great-uncle, and there's a lot of other totally spooky stuff she—"

  "Spooky stuff?"

  "Well, she's Maya as well as Catholic. How superstitious can you get?" I shrugged. "What she was telling me sounded at least half made up. There was this Marquise who came to the hotel years ago, with a boy who wasn't her son—you really want to hear about it?"

  Daddy shook his head and smiled. "No, thanks. What did you do with the tennis gear, honey?"

  We ran up the steps together and went inside the bungalow. I missed the white message envelope lying on the floor inside the screen. Daddy paused to pick it up. I went into my bedroom and pulled the duffel with our rackets and balls out of the wardrobe, put on a sweater and headband. I felt, for the first time in a while, warm and secure. I didn't want to think about the last hour I'd spent with Veronica; her warning. So I didn't think about it, but still it stayed with me, keeping me a little off balance and annoyed, like a pesky mosquito buzzing around.

  When I went out to the living room of the bungalow Daddy was staring at the white message card with an expression I'd never seen before.

  "Daddy?"

  He looked at me slowly, but not as if he recognized me. His face was stiff with outrage. I don't think he was breathing. Then his chest moved, a surge as if he were packing in air, and he trembled, once.

  "What is that? Did something happen to—let me see!"

  "No. It's—okay. There's nothing—I don't want you to read this." He crushed the card in his fist. "Damn fool— someone must have the idea I'm the merry widower."

  "Why can't I see it? What does it say?"

  He breathed out slowly, still trying to control himself. "Sorry, honey. One of the female guests in the hotel thought I might be in the mood for a—a specific invitation to join her tonight."

  "Specific? You mean—"

  "I'm sure you get the point."

  "Why, Daddy. Well—it's nothing to get insulted about, you're—you're a very good-looking man."

  "Thanks. But it is something to get insulted about, the way she put it."

  "And you're not going to let me read her note," I teased him. "What's her name? Now I'm curious."

  "No name. Just an initial. And her room number, of course." He shook his head as if he needed to clear it, and smiled wryly.

  "Probably won't be the last time," I said. "Better get used to it."

  "I guess I'm a little old-fashioned. If the day ever comes . . ."

  This time when he shook his head, he looked so sad I could've cried for him, but it wasn't something either of us needed just then.

  "Hey, hurry and change before that court's gone."

  "Oh—sure. Be with you in a minute, Sharissa." He went into his bedroom and closed the door. I went outside and practiced some strokes on the walk, waiting for him.

  Daddy didn't have much to say as we walked toward the bright lights of the tennis courts. I decided to take the risk and talk about something that was going to nag me anyway, now that the subject had been half-raised.

  "Dad—it's probably too soon, but I know, as much as we both miss Mom, that one of these days—you'll want to get married again."

  He sighed. "I haven't even thought about it."

  "But it's perfectly natural to want—I'm going to college in the fall, and then—well, we each have our own lives to live, in spite of everything. What I mean to say is, you shouldn't consider not marrying again just because you have the idea I wouldn't approve. Dad, I want you to be happy. That's what I want more than anything."

  He seemed to stumble on the path, then just stopped and looked at me. Such a helpless, devastated look that I wanted to take his face in my hands and kiss him. At that moment I understood perfectly the impulsive mystery woman who'd invited him to her room tonight. The truth was, I'd had some pretty confused feelings about Dad for a while. The school psychologist I'd talked to said it was normal, under the circumstances. My protective, not sexual, instincts were taking over. So she said. But there on the path in the tropical garden in a place far away from what I had known all my life as home I had the sweet scary feeling that it would be so easy, if I wanted, to go to Daddy while he slept tonight, and lie down beside him and hold him in my arms, and—

  Scary, then I flushed and felt sick and ashamed of myself. I turned and ran the rest of the way to the tennis courts. I was snapping balls against the backstop hard enough to hurt my elbow by the time Daddy got there.

  It would have been insulting to play him left-handed, but his game was in poor shape and he seemed to be just going through the motions anyway, smiling gamely at me when he missed an easy one. I wondered if he was thinking of the woman in the hotel, waiting hopefully for him. What was she like? I tried to recall some of the women I'd seen around the Itzá Maya, none of them young, a few working hard to try to disguise the fact. Except for Veronica and a couple of the women on the staff, nobody even close to my age was staying there.

  I nearly turned Daddy inside out with a topspin backhand drive, and he sprawled against the net, losing his grip on his racket.

  "Sorry!" I called.

  He got up slowly, grimacing. His left knee was scraped. "Now that . . . was a dirty trick to play on your old man."

  "You know how I am. Can't afford to lose my competitive edge."

  "I'm feeling a little run down. Not that I'm making an excuse, but—"

  I leaned over the net and kissed his moist cheek. "Can we get something to eat? I tossed lunch and missed dinner, and I feel kind of hollow."

  "You go ahead. I'll take a shower, if they've got the hot water going, and relax with a book."

  "Remember, you promised you're gonna learn some Spanish."

  "First thing tomorrow, I'll get started."

  I gave him a doubtful look and put our rackets away. Daddy carried the gear back to our bungalow. I watched him walking down the stepped path of the garden. The fathers of most of my friends, some of them only in their late thirties, were already in the going-to-pot stage, but Dad would never let it happen to him. He had too much pride in himself. He looked terrific, in spite of everything that had happened in the past eight months . . . that twinge returned, not half as powerful as what I'd felt an hour ago in the garden, not nearly what it had been like with Bobby those couple of times when I was sure I was going to forget all about good old-fashioned integrity and common sense; still, it was obvious enough to upset me. The little-girl-crush-on-her-father feeling, together with an overwhelming sense of loneliness and loss. Just the two of us left—and God forgive me for even thinking about my father in that way.

  As I watched him out of sight I had the disturbing feeling that someone was watching me, staring a hole in my back. I turned and looked toward the windows and balconies facing the court
s enclosure. No one else was playing now, and I was alone with the bugs swarming at the level of the brilliant lights.

  When I walked through the gate in the chain-link fence the court lights and, closer to the hotel, the poolside lights, began to go out, leaving a brief afterglow, a light-storm floating in front of my eyes. Off to one side of the afterglow cloud I noticed someone, a man, leaning against the railing of a balcony on the third and top floor of the Itzá Maya. The underwater lights of the pool were still on, and the glow from the slightly breeze-roughened surface of the water was reflected against the white stucco side wall of the hotel. The man on the balcony stood out against the whiteness in his Maya-print shirt. For a second or two I wondered if, or where, I'd seen him before. He wore glasses, I could tell that much, and seemed to have a beard, but it was such a light color it was hard to be sure. I couldn't read the shape of his head because of the dark-colored baseball cap he had on.

  I walked toward the hotel, glanced up again. He was about a hundred yards away, and now he had turned toward me, holding something bulky up to his face; probably a camera with a long lens attachment. Taking my picture? I didn't know what results he would get, although even with the court lights off behind me the moon was high and bright enough to give definition to the grounds. I cast a faint shadow.

  I guess I didn't want my picture taken without knowing who he was. I'd been having a problem with the little toe on my right foot, a rubbing that might turn into a blister. I stopped to take my sock off and retie the shoe, and when I started walking again he wasn't on his balcony anymore.

  There were a lot of people in the Itzá Maya's open-air lobby, mostly men; everybody wore name tags. A gathering of some sort seemed to be breaking up. I recognized a few faces from the cafeteria at Kan Petén. And it wasn't hard to spot Glen Hazen. All that red hair, and at six-six a head taller than the other men milling around the lobby. He was on the telephone opposite the reception desk, his back to me. I thought about going over to say hello, but I was still embarrassed by what had taken place at lunch, so I went the other way, to the coffee shop that was still open. The hamburgers there were okay, and I had one with a Coke.

  "Thought I noticed you out there in the lobby," Glen Hazen said.

  I looked up. He was wearing a name tag with the legend PETEXBATÚN REGIONAL ARCHEOLOGICAL PROJECT.

  "Hi," I said.

  "Hi. Okay if I sit down for a few minutes? Maybe I've got time for a burger." He checked his watch. "Drinks at ten-thirty, some VIPs from the National Endowment of the Humanities. Our project sugar daddies."

  "What's going on?" I asked him.

  "Convention. Mostly it's an excuse to get together with our Guatemalan colleagues, some of the diplomatic people, and the local bureaucrats who suffer our presence here. Unfortunately, we have to be away from camp a few days. Hope the rebels don't raid us and make off with our generators while we're gone. Not that the government troops don't do their share of thieving. It can be hard to tell who the bad guys are in Guatemala, and even the guards we pay aren't all that reliable."

  "I guess my dad was right. You do live dangerously down here."

  Glen ordered what I was having, and helped himself to a couple of my french fries, which I wasn't eating anyway. Not on a touchy stomach.

  "Yeah, I admit his concern is well placed. It's just that we get used to it. There's a big Guatemalan army base near us, at Las Pozas, and the rebels hit them all the time. We've heard firefights but haven't seen any, and this is my third year at our dig. I guess we don't get on the wrong side of any factions. Also Dos Pilas is probably the most significant dig, I mean one that has a real theoretical edge, in the last fifty years of MesoAmerican studies. Am I boring you? Most people your age are bored by archeology. How old are you, anyway?"

  "I'll be eighteen in June. I never knew much about archeology, but I'm not bored. What do you mean by a 'theoretical edge'?"

  "Oh, well, see, it has to do with the central cultural mystery: what happened, and where did they go? Societies rise and fall, of course, but the Maya society was at least a thousand years old, the population numbered in the hundreds of thousands, and within a few decades it simply dissolved. The Spanish missionaries left us with almost nothing in Maya literature—three or four books—and the monumental carvings which they didn't know about or couldn't destroy. Dos Pilas is rich in carvings as well as walls and defensive systems. So we believe the definitive theory of what went wrong, environmentally, will come from our discoveries."

  "Siege warfare equals starvation, isn't that what you were telling me today?"

  He nodded, looking at me in approval, and I had to smile.

  "I'm not an airhead. I was listening."

  Glen nodded again.

  "The significance, of course, goes beyond political greed. The causal order of the collapse of societies has been the same throughout history. Short-term strategies and goals. Everybody's interested in today, not tomorrow—here in El Petén, in the Amazon, Borneo, Madagascar, there's a classic ecological disaster, and last but not least, the U.S. We're besieged by population problems in many areas, and societies are notorious for ignoring the environment in favor of short-term, wealth-now, self-destructive policies. Let the next generation worry about the consequences. With this sort of political foundation, castles will crumble and kingdoms will fall. Probably what we're seeing in the world today is a mirror image of the Maya dissolution; and also a last-chance scenario."

  He turned in his chair, both ways. "Hey, what happened to that hamburger?"

  "You just ordered it five minutes ago." My expression must have been glum. When he looked at me again he seemed startled.

  "Didn't mean to carry on that way. You okay?"

  "Sure. Want the rest of these french fries?"

  "Thanks." Glen waved to a couple who had come into the coffee shop and were looking for a vacant table. I was glad they didn't come over. "Tom and Rita Hawkins. University of Texas. Our big rivals down this way. Along with Tulane. Rita's one of the best glyph readers in the world. A very few have the gift. It's enough to make you believe in reincarnation."

  "Speaking of reincarnation—" Veronica crossed my mind then, and a second later I shuddered; I was wearing a tennis sweater but they kept the temperature way too cold in the coffee shop. Glen was smiling at me, waiting. I smiled back and shrugged. "Oh, nothing. How long have you known Veronica?"

  "Met her two years ago. A few months after her husband was killed. Did you know about that?" I nodded. "Then she came to Nashville for a few weeks to have some reconstructive plastic surgery done at the University Hospital. Pete Clausen, one of the best in the South, did the work. I recommended him to 'Nica. While she was recuperating, we went out a few times. So what's the association? Veronica and reincarnation?"

  "Well—maybe I don't want to say anything if you two are, uh, real tight."

  "I'm not sleeping with her. I don't think she can handle a serious relationship right now. You've got me curious."

  "It's just that—something really upset her tonight. She was rambling on about—not reincarnation, but astrology and Maya sacrifice and eclipse cycles, and she said I was in danger, being here before an eclipse. Because I'm young and I'm a—oops."

  "A what?"

  I looked down, then looked him in the eye.

  "Virgin."

  Glen didn't smirk or have a witty comeback. He just looked puzzled.

  "That's—a little out of character, for 'Nica. I mean, she doesn't talk all that much, about anything."

  "Did she ever mention a sister to you?"

  "Didn't know she had one. I only know Benito, but they aren't blood kin. He's the son of her mother's second husband."

  I told him the story Veronica had told me. I must have told it pretty well. His hamburger came, but he didn't touch it or take his eyes off me.

  "So her uncle Santiago had both kids thrown into a cenote, after—what was it supposedly happened to the Marquise?"

  "She died. A horrible death.
Veronica's uncle, she says, closed the hotel immediately."

  "Died of what? A stroke, in a fit of rage? Because the boy—who wasn't her son—ran off with Miriam?"

  "Convulsions, not a stroke."

  "If the old man closed the hotel, maybe she had something catchable. Cholera, yellow fever, who knows."

  "You think that's it? And it didn't have anything to do with—"

  "With the moon and star-crossed lovers? What do you think?"

  "Star-crossed virgin lovers," I said. Then I laughed. And shuddered again.

  Glen decided to eat. Between mouthfuls he said, "Well, I've always found Veronica to be level-headed. More than a little enigmatic, but not neurotic."

  "I don't think she was putting on an act. She really believes all that stuff. She was—scary."

  He frowned slightly. "Where is she now?"

  "I don't know," I said. "Doesn't Veronica live at the hotel?"

  "Close by. Most of the help here live on the street where that half-finished time-share condo is moldering away. Maybe I'll run by tonight after the cocktail, see how she is."

  "Are you worried about her?"

  "No. Nothing like that. I'll just say hello."

  "When are you going back to—what's it called?"

  "Dos Pilas. Day after tomorrow."

  I was glad he wasn't leaving right away. "Are you in the hotel?"

  "Can't afford the Itzá Maya on our grant. We're thirty miles from town, on the northwest shore of the lake—the part without crocodiles. It's called the Parador Libertad. The restaurant's decent, if you're not doing anything for lunch tomorrow? Your dad doesn't want you in a helicopter, but maybe he wouldn't object to a boat ride or a tour of the Biotopo."

  "Dad's mellowed out. He really has. I'd love to."

  "Terrific! I'll pick you up about eleven-thirty in the minibus." He looked at his watch and abandoned his hamburger. "Got to run. I'm assigned to Congresswoman Delaney tonight, from the great state of I-forget-where. She thinks the way you solve questions of human rights abuse is to get in the faces of certain Guatemalan government officials and talk to them as if they were not particularly bright house pets."