I was trying to think of some Shreveport artists. We had some, I had seen their huge swirling works hanging in bank lobbies, but I could hardly be expected to know their names. Who was Humboldt anyway and how was it that the pre-Columbian stuff fell short in his eyes? No soul? Too cluttered? Too stiff? What? You wonder what people have in mind when they speak with confidence on such tricky matters. Old Suarez had his doubts about it, too, because it wasn’t socialist art. Only the royalty and the soldiers were glorified. We needed him here for this seminar, and Beth and Professor Camacho Puut and Louise and Nardo and Eli and Art and Mike. Bollard too; he could give us the very latest line out of New York, or fake it plausibly enough.
The orchid on Gail’s hat had gone brown along the edges. My information was wrong. Air alone wasn’t enough to keep the blossom going. They didn’t feed off wind after all.
“Well, Mr. Humboldt never saw anything like this,” she said. “This is art. You can tell right away. Look how it jumps out at you. Look how—strong it is.”
Ugly was the word she wanted. She was showing us the little Olmec figure with the demonic face. So now our Dicky had given that thing to her, too. What was going on here? She rubbed around on it, the way you do with jade, then buttoned it up again in her shirt pocket. No questions about the ownership, the way she patted that pocket. The ceramic bird, the jade man. Everything buttoned away there was hers.
But now Doc was off art and onto famous men he had known. Morley, Thompson, Stirling, Caso, Ruz Lhullier—they had all come to him for advice and consultation, to hear him tell it. Great Mayanists all! He too stood in that apostolic chain, nor was he the least of them! But what could he not have done with a proper staff and a little recognition now and then! From these low-life professors who controlled everything with their petty politics! These very little men! These gray mice! Who pretended not to know him while all the time they were stealing his ideas!
Purple drops ran down through the stubble on his chin. Gail had found a cold bottle of grape soda somewhere, and she was sharing it with him. The old lizard still had a way with the ladies. She hung on his every boastful word. Refugio, too, he loved the hot words and the bluster. This was the way a man should speak, out of the abundance of the heart. Vincent was poking away at embedded ticks on his legs with the burning end of a cigarette. But Refugio stopped him, grabbing his wrist and saying, “No, don’t do that while the Doctor is speaking.” He said to Gail, “My name is in his book. Refugio Bautista Osorio.”
Doc lay back on Gail’s pack and closed his eyes again. “Oh, my vindication will come, all right, but much too late for me. You will live to see it. You will hear the acclaim. You can tell your children that you were with Flandin on his last entrada into the Garden of the Kings. Or call it the Valley of the Kings if you like, the pharaohs be damned. Don’t forget, this was a great empire, too. You can say, ‘Yes, I was with the poor old fellow shortly before he died of malicious neglect.’ A victim of envy, too. A man literally murdered by the envy of cunning and hateful mice.”
He paused there on the mice, which was just as well, and I saw a chance to get a word in. I took off my boots and directed this crew of mine in perfectly clear language to wake me in an hour. That would give me time to cross the river and climb the hill and look over that pack of hippies before sundown. I dozed. The chatter went on and on under the arbor, though a bit subdued now. It didn’t bother me. There was no moving about. No one seemed able to move. We were in the grip of a curious Yoro paralysis. Refugio said to me, whispering, that, seriously now and all joking aside, the mature chaneques could grow hair all over their bodies whenever they pleased, at will, through their sorceries. “All the world knows this to be true, Jaime.” He would be telling me next that the little men had furry paws. Chaneques didn’t interest me at the moment. Vincent’s falling star was still on my mind. I was thinking of a fiery pebble blazing out of the night and striking the river with a faint hiss, then settling with the side-to-side motion of a falling leaf to the mud at the bottom, journey’s end. Down there with Doc’s watch and other forgotten things, and that little jade idolo, too, if I could get my hands on it.
OF COURSE they didn’t wake me and how could they, being asleep themselves, all sprawled together in a pile like a litter of puppies, not knowing or caring that sleeping on watch is a terrible offense. Night had come. An oil lamp was burning in the widow woman’s house. There was sheet lightning to the west, far off in the mountains. It must have been the thunder that woke me. I gave Refugio a shake, and we slipped away with Ramos down to the landing.
Two boatmen were there squatting before a fire. One of them had a fighting cock tied by the leg. They were roasting river mussels in the coals. I wished them a prosperous new year. They flipped a coin to see who got our business.
“Yorito?”
“Sí.”
But I changed my mind when we were launched out into the river and I told the man to take us downstream, around the bend, to the foot of the bluff. We wouldn’t have to walk so far. The old city of Likín would be directly above us. Yes, Rudy might well be up there observing the hippies. There seemed to be no point in taking notes on the end of the world, but he would probably feel the need to make some record of it. I was curious myself, and besides, I wanted to drink from the old spring again. I would press my face into the pool and open my eyes underwater and clarify my thoughts. It might help. For Doc everything came down to a cube. One night at Camp Pendleton I heard Colonel Raikes say that the key to it all was “frequent inspections.” How right he was too. You had only to look at my unconscious crew to feel the force of that truth. But I had not yet worked out any such master principle of my own, to guide my steps. It wouldn’t hurt to try the spring. I would gulp the water and clear my muddled head.
The man shut off his engine, and we could hear singing up there on the hilltop. We could see the red glow of a fire. It was an old song they were singing, something jolly like “Oh Susannah,” only that wasn’t it. I had expected wailing. The cayuca slid into the sand and went aground. I knocked against a bush in getting out, and mosquitoes rose from the branches in a cloud like blackbirds. Ramos was trembling, keen. He must have thought we were on a pig hunt. One whiff from the musk gland of a peccary and he would be off like a shot. But not all dogs hunt by scent. The greyhound must catch sight of his quarry, just as I did, and the night was black here in Chiapas, or rather Guatemala. There was no moon. Monkeys were screaming back and forth at one another across the river. The lunatic monkeys knew something was up.
I led the way with my flashlight along the bank till we came to a gully that was cut by the runoff water from the spring. Then up we went, straight up the gully, grabbing at bushes and slipping on wet moss. The spring, little used now, was about halfway up the cliff, enclosed in a circular revetment of ancient masonry. I was afraid the hippies might have found it and fouled it in some way, but no, the water was clear, with a few leaves floating in it and some bugs skittering across the surface. I pushed the head of my plastic flashlight beneath the surface. At the bottom, farther away than it appeared, grains of sand tumbled about where a jet of water surged out of the earth. I couldn’t fix the exact point. The source, the ojo de agua, the eye of water itself, was a mystery under the whirling sand. It was a small shifting turbulence, nothing more, a spirit.
We drank and then washed our faces, saying nothing. My dripping head was perhaps a little clearer than before. It was hard to say. My bad knee was a good deal worse for the climb. There was a smooth outcropping of rock here about the size and shape of a bus. We sat on the ledge and had a smoke.
Refugio said, “The boy is up there then? With the tóxicos?”
“I don’t know. We’ll see.”
“I think he is dead.”
“You may be right.”
“The two chiflados killed him and threw his body into the river. All that laughing didn’t fool me.”
“They would have kept his equipment and his clothes.”
“It was hidden. With their boat. They had a barca somewhere. Or a raft, a balsa. They won’t need a motor to go back downstream to Yoro.”
“No, they would have forgotten something. Some little something of Rudy’s. I don’t miss much when I’m looking hard.”
“You will die out here, too, a fool, with no money in your pocket and no wife at home and no pretty little child of your own.”
“Not me. I have my plans.”
“Qué va. You don’t have no plans.”
“I have long-range plans that I never talk about.”
“Qué va. Poco probable. . . . Do you know what I am doing, Jaime? I am praying for my baby. Sula was right. I should be with Manolo on his long drive to Yucatán and you take me out here on your foolish paseo.”
The opresión was on him. It was a terrible thought, that he might have to put up one of those little roadside crosses for his dead and mangled son.
“Your Manolito is all right. He’s a better driver than you are. Manolo is in Mérida right now. He’s in some game room playing a futbolista machine.”
“I should have listened to her. Sula is never wrong. You must drag the Doctor out here, too, and he is old and sick.”
“We’ll have a quick look around the ruinas. If the boy is there we’re done and if he’s not there we’re done. We’ll go home.”
He sighed. Not a word of concern about my truck. From here to the top, about 300 feet above the river, a flight of steps had been cut into the rock, still useful though overgrown and eroded. We were huffing and puffing as we came over the crest, two blowing men out of the night with guns and a dog. We appeared suddenly before a ring of hippies around a fire. There were open cans of food in the embers. A hobo jungle, you might think, if hoboes sang. They stopped singing and looked at us. Someone was always breaking in on their fun. In the heart of the Petén forest they still couldn’t get away from the likes of me.
I saw other watchfires here and there in the clearing. The place was a campground. There were beach towels and little orange tents and coconut shells and a stalk of bananas and pickle jars and bread wrappers and water jugs and sleeping bags and colorful serapes and pitiful shelters made of plastic raincoats. There was a girl with lightning bugs in her hair. One brave boy had made it up here on aluminum crutches. He supported himself on those half-crutches called forearm canes.
Many others must have dropped out along the way. These were the hardy ones. There may have been a hundred people scattered about on the plateau but no more. Vincent had led me astray there. I was expecting I don’t know what, a shrieking mob, the last hours of Gomorrah, a good deal of eye-rolling, but in fact the crowd was thin and listless, such as you might see at a track meet. Nothing of a ceremonial nature was going on. There was no apparent focus to the thing. No one seemed to be in charge. It was just one more herd of hippies milling around in a pasture. Had something gone wrong? Maybe the frolic was to start later.
A pasture, I call it, this long plaza or courtyard of the old city of Likín, which the people of Yorito kept cleared for their single milk cow to graze on. It was a rectangle bounded on the long sides by a series of mounds, with temples underneath the dirt and greenery. The Mayas had flattened the hilltop and built their City of Dawn here high above the jungle roof, where they could get a breeze now and then. This end of the plaza was open, overlooking the river, and at the far end there was a partially excavated pyramid, known as the Castillo. Most of the digging had been done there, at the pyramid complex. The grand staircase was exposed, leading to a shrine at the top, a stone box, and on top of that, capping the whole thing, was a decorative bit of stone fretwork, what they call a roof comb. No one was moving about on the Castillo stairway. It was odd. When travelers come upon a pyramid, they must climb it and crawl all over it and wave from the top.
I spoke a bit loud to the hippies. It was my experience that their attention wandered. “We’re not here to bother you,” I said. “We’re not going to interfere with your—program. I’m looking for a friend. An emergency has come up at home. His wife is sick, and I know you’ll want to help me. His name is Rudy. Can everybody hear me? Rudy Kurle is the name. From Pennsylvania. He’s a big blond fellow in army gear. A brown army outfit and heavy boots. Does that ring a bell? You may have seen him speaking into a tape recorder. He carries a lot of stuff on his belt. How about it? If you’ve seen him, please tell me. You’ll be doing him and his wife both a big favor.”
Someone said in a very low voice, “He may have his reasons for staying away from home.”
A Scandinavian girl with hairy legs said, “I am not even listening to you. Your words have no more significance to me than the buzzing of flies. I am no longer hearing all these dead words floating around in the air.”
Not a bad policy on the whole. “Suit yourself,” I said. “But we’re not leaving here till we find him. I think he’s around here somewhere. The sooner we find him the sooner we’ll be gone.”
The others had nothing at all to say to me. They weren’t so much defiant as puzzled and annoyed. Tired too, no doubt, from their long trek. It was hopeless. I would need a bullhorn to get through to these people. I went about my old business of looking them over one by one. I put my light into the faces of those in the shadows. Some took this indignity better than others. I interrupted their feeding. I lifted the flaps of their little tents. We moved from campfire to campfire. Refugio walked behind me, grumbling. Ramos drew back and bared his teeth at those who tried to pet him. They took him for a Frisbee-catching pal, a great mistake. The girl with the lightning bugs followed me around too, saying the same thing over and over again.
“Share the wonder, bring a friend.”
“I did bring one.”
“Share the wonder, bring a friend.”
“Most people wouldn’t want bugs in their hair.”
“Share the wonder, bring a friend.”
The bugs were tied to her hair with thread, and they flashed on in ragged sequence with a cool green light. Refugio said we should have brought along something to sell. We could have coiled great long ropes of sausages around our necks and sold them here at monopoly prices. I agreed, we should have thought to bring sausages and a megaphone. The arqueos or some other looters had been here since my last visit. All the inscribed stelae had been uprooted and carried away, leaving only the blank ones. They looked like blank tombstones. They were memorials to nothing, or perhaps some daring artistic gesture.
The Yorito milk cow, of a stunted breed unknown to me, stood very still in a sunken place, a walled-in arena where the Maya once played a game with a rubber ball. She was ivory-colored with drooping ears and a pink deflated udder not much bigger than a goat udder. The weeds looked tough and wiry there in the ball court, but it was a quiet place to wait out the siege. All this vegetation and you could see her ribs. I wished I could have given her an armful of sweet alfalfa.
They weren’t all young dopers at this congreso, as Refugio called it. A middle-aged man with bangs came up to me. He wore a baggy shirt with a dazzling floral pattern, and of course sandals. Feet are all the better for a good airing out, and I would be the last one to deny it, but I think these people had something more than ventilation in mind. They were downright aggressive about displaying their feet to the world. The man came up to me, hesitant and polite, and asked if I might by any chance be El Mago.
“Who? No.”
“No, I didn’t think so. Excuse me. I didn’t really expect El Mago to be armed, though they do say he is a complex and unpredictable brute. The thing is, I don’t know what he looks like. He could very well be right here among us.”
So, they were waiting for this El Mago fellow to appear. He, The Wizard, was overdue and there was growing fear that he might not show. Just who was he? What would he do? No one seemed to know. The only El Mago I knew was a very old man who lived in the town of Valladolid, if indeed he still lived. He was a famous brujo, a witch, who could read the future from the flopping throes of a decapitat
ed turkey, and who was credited with fortyfour sons out of a long series of wives and mistresses. The daughters went unnumbered. I knew of him, that is, from newspaper articles and photographs. I had never actually seen him give a reading. But that scrawny old bird could hardly be described as a complex brute, nor at his age would he be fit to make the hard journey to Likín. Unless they had lashed him to a chair and borne him in here on shoulder poles, with his old head lolling from side to side. I put nothing past them.
I wondered about their theory and what part El Mago would play and how they saw the end coming. Why gather at this place? Why gather at all? Was there to be a spectacle or just lights out? No wrath? I couldn’t get a feel for the mechanics of the thing or for the shape of it. I was curious but too proud to show much interest. The line I took was one of indifference—no lofty contempt, just that I couldn’t be bothered. In fact I was uneasy. These lost sheep knew nothing. I was pretty sure of that. They simply wanted to be on stage for the dramatic finish. It must all wind down with them and nobody else. The thought of the world going on and on without them, much as usual, and they forgotten, was unbearable. Nothing important was going to happen here. The burning light from heaven might indeed fail one day, but not, I thought, tomorrow. And yet I was uncomfortable. I didn’t like meddling in such things.
Gringos Page 17
