The sight of the highway brought him back to earth. There was the offensively straight black strip of tarmac, and beside it, the hated billboard, though its winking electric lights had shorted out in the deluge.
Hilario stood under the sign’s dubious shelter, watching the road like a shipwrecked mariner on a reef. “No cars, no trucks have passed all morning,” he said.
“Surely not because of the rain?”
“The rain has awakened the earth, an old man told me. He passed by here on his way from Tulum. He would not give me a ride.”
In his own time, Hilario told Maceo what the old man had said. The rain came in the night, and when the first tour bus from the hotels at Tulum took to the interior highway, it got only a mile in when the road buckled under the front wheels and collapsed into an underground river. The tourists spilled out the doors and windows of the vertical bus; many fell into the hole, and were swept away under the earth by the rushing subterranean flood. Cars and trucks backed up behind the bus, and the road buckled under them, too. Drivers abandoned their vehicles and ran back up the highway in a panic. Others fled into the jungle, but they never came out. The army and the highway patrol had closed the interior highway at the coast road until further notice.
Maceo scoffed. His cousin was the worst of a lying lineage, and a fool for the lies of others. “Then why has nothing come from either direction, Hilario? Where are the trucks from Valladolid?”
“Something must have happened there, too. But no one has come, not even on a bicycle. I am so thirsty—”
Maceo heaved his bicycle up out of the sucking mud and onto the road. “Stay home and drink atole, Hilario. I will go to Valladolid myself and see what has happened. But I don’t think I will find any place for you to buy soda.”
Maceo hated the city. His eyes burned with tears that would never quite bloom, and his heart filled with cold lead at the sight and smell of it. The absence of green was an obscenity; the starved, smoke-stained trees in rows along the avenue looked like captives from a genocidal war. The stone of the city was the worst outrage.
The Mayans carved stone to unleash the dormant forms of the gods whose bones formed the earth, but the concrete and tarmac of the cities was chewed up, digested and shat out into ugly, barren shapes, as if the old ways had not merely been forgotten, but trampled and knowingly rejected. On any other day, the sight of Valladolid would fill him with despair, but today, it fueled his rage and his resolve. Today, the old ways had clearly come back, and the stones themselves seemed to have awakened.
Long before he came into town, he saw the smoke, black pillars stretching up to the electric gray canopy of storm clouds. The bright tang of the rain gave way to a charnel stink of burning and decay, and gutted buildings poured smoke into the rain, embattled tongues of flame waving in the downpour. Maceo knew the city houses had pipes that fed them gas. All the fancier buildings in the city center were blasted open, while the humbler huts, with no gas or running water and pirated electrical connections, were spared. He knew the gas was not tamed, only contained, in the hissing pipes beneath the ground. If the gas lines ruptured, the gas would burn.
A platoon of soldiers came out of an alley, running behind a wildly swerving jeep. The soldiers screamed and fired their rifles into the air, and Maceo took his own gun from the handlebars, but they passed him with no notice. All their attention was absorbed in the cloud of insects that besieged them despite the rain. Half the soldiers were blind, their eyes swollen shut with welts, their hands purple and puffy from countless stings. The officer in the jeep shrieked at the men to keep them running and they disappeared down the highway, presumably trying to run to the coast.
Everywhere he looked, Maceo saw the land in revolt, the city collapsing all at once. But he also saw others, untouched and watching impassively from their porches, as the apocalypse passed by. He saw a jaguar eating a soldier’s face in the street while naked, laughing children poked it with a stick. They were Mayans, and while they seemed not to understand what they saw, they knew it to be a miracle.
Maceo rode around Valladolid for the rest of the afternoon, ferrying women and children with their belongings to the safety of the jungle. He learned of the earth tremors and the explosions, and of how the soldiers at the post in Valladolid seemed to go berserk, evacuating from the airfield as their barracks went up in flames or collapsed in the storm. He heard of the mad stampede of cars that poured out of the town in the direction of Mérida and Cancún, and of the wondrous plagues that spurred them out to the coast or ate them alive. There was worry and terror, but there was also giddy excitement, and a sense that perhaps the old gods had stirred from their sleep, and had not forgotten the Maya, after all. Maceo listened, but told them nothing.
He went back to the abandoned hut and bowed to the deepest shadows, where he knew the idol sat, for now, he believed he could hear it breathing.
“Who has made for me this fine new body?” asked the darkness.
Maceo grabbed for the ground and clung to it, fighting back waves of shivering terror as he replied, “Maceo Nahuat Xijun, descended of the Jaguar Priests of Zama, calls upon you.”
“Your people have not made offerings to us for many turnings of the Long Count. Why, now, do you call?”
“My people are enslaved. Our arts are forgotten, our cities devoured by the jungle and the grave robbers from across the sea. We toil in the forest, while every day they push us deeper into poverty and despair. We have forgotten the old ways, and the invaders have eaten our souls. We want our land back. We want the old ways—”
“You would give me worship, then?”
Maceo shrank away from the idol. The old gods thirsted for blood. “We would, but—”
“We did not desert your people. You abandoned us. When the gods smiled upon you, the secrets of the stars, of the future, were yours. Your ancestors turned away from the codes of worship, and fell into darkness. If I were to help you, I must have sacrifice.”
“I—will give you what you desire. Only help your people—”
“Enough!” the god thundered. “It has already begun, Maceo Nahuat Xijun. You will be my priest.”
As the days passed, the rains continued to fall, and Maceo’s wish came true.
The billboards collapsed and were consumed by avid rust. The road itself buckled and cracked as roots burrowing underneath the rain-battered tarmac broke out all at once. The black clods of tar were all but engulfed by the fresh carpet of undergrowth that covered the highway bed. And no one had come to fix it.
Many in Maceo’s village had seen which way the wind was blowing and abandoned their lights and televisions, but those who clung to them became oracles, of a sort, repeating whatever tidbits of news they saw from the outside world.
The army regrouped in Mérida, had made expeditions into the forest, but many had not returned. The interior had been completely evacuated—and yet no one had come for them. . .
Like that, the invaders had retreated in defeat. The heart of the Yucatan was theirs.
The news was saying the freak tropical storm had undermined the limestone foundation of the interior, which was honeycombed with caverns and subterranean lakes and rivers. This had caused all the other events—the earthquakes, the gas leaks and fires, the animal attacks. As soon as they had given it a name, the news seemed satisfied to let it slip, and the oracles fell from favor as the outside world forgot about them and their batteries died.
When the rains cleared, the road sprang to life again—with pilgrims, walking to Chichen Itza and Balankanché, the sacred cave. As they walked without pause, half in a trance with exhaustion, people who lived in the roadside villages joined them or simply fed them, pressing candles or gourds of corn and atole into their hands. The forest glowed and shivered with the light and the sounds of the old songs. Many carried offerings to Jesus and the saints and orishas, but he saw many more bearing the idols and ashtrays they’d once hoped to sell at the tourist stands, and cruder offerings of clay
and stone in the vague, hopeful shapes of their savior.
Maceo did not make a pilgrimage. Each day, whether it rained or shined, he rode past the hut where he’d left the idol. He did not go in or utter a sound, but he knew that it was still there, waiting for its priest. For though the disasters had claimed nearly four hundred lives, he had still offered no proper sacrifice—
He did not go to the hut, he told himself, because his heart was dark with doubt. The white men knew so much, and their science, and their pallid, One-In-Three God, had succeeded in turning the land and nature against the Maya, remaking the world into a false ghost of itself. Perhaps they were right about the storms, and the opportunistic spirit in the hut, if it were not a figment of his cigar-addled fever dreams, was only hoping to steal glory it had not earned. In his memory, the voice of the idol sounded like his own voice.
The people were beginning to forget their initial intuition that the old gods were afoot on the land again, and lamented the death of the highway. His wife wailed for Pepsi.
And then one day as he returned from work, his wife’s cries had scared the birds from the trees, and she was not alone. The whole clan mourned loudly, and when Maceo learned why, he joined them, though he could not make a sound. A jaguar had skulked into the palapa of his cousin’s daughter, and stolen away with their newborn baby in its jaws. Such things had never happened in any living memory. What had they done to offend the gods?
Maceo snuck away, as soon as he was able, to the hut. He lit a cigar and burned copal incense before he entered. Inside, the heat was sweltering, the air of the entire jungle compressed into that meager, lightless space. He sensed the presence of the god instantly.
It was a struggle not to pour out his heart to the spirit he’d summoned. Gods did not trifle with the whining of those who knew death; gods died again and again to make life, and so had no pity. And worse, he knew what the god would say, that it had been but an instrument of his will, and the child but the price of his negligence. The forces he’d unleashed—for he no longer doubted, now—had come back to roost. Though he knew in his heart what he must do, he did not relish the risk.
“I, who am your priest,” Maceo managed over the knot in his throat, “I do beseech thee, O lord of the north, lord of the rain. Spare your people. Put down this bloody geas that I have set upon you. The work is done, and the people are freed, and you. . . you have dined on the flesh of a child, which is most dear to you. Humbly do we plead for our lives, for the lives of the least of us, most of all.”
“You are not free,” grumbled the god, and Maceo shook, for its voice was so much stronger, and came not from the corner where he’d set the idol, but from the ground beneath his feet, from the infinite reaches of the dark above his head. “You are surrounded by your enemies. Zama, the city of the dawn, is trampled by invaders, and godless temples are everywhere consecrated to their scorn for the land. This age grows old, but a new sun ripens. A new age will dawn soon upon a Mayan glory undreamt of by your ancestors. I have given you but the least of your birthright. I would give you more, but my reach—”
“The people are humble, and their needs are simple, O lord of the rains, called Zac-Xib-Chac by my ancestors.” Maceo’s voice quavered as it threw the name into the dark. As he had carved the idol with his blood and faith, he could bind the god to his will, however fleetingly, by speaking his name. “We would have our old life back, and be free of invasion, but we would not be trampled by the fickle will of bloodthirsty gods, either.”
He reached out for the idol, moving boldly now that the die was cast. His shin barked against stone and he leapt back, for he had injured himself against something half as tall as himself, but the idol he had carved had been no larger than a human skull.
Numb with terror, Maceo stretched out his hand to reach for the image he believed he’d cut into the stone—the beetle-browed visage, the rearing proboscis-tentacle, the fanged mouth of Chac—and in his mind, he was already smashing it to the ground.
Something sliced across his palm, and he bit back a scream and tried to draw back his hand, but something held it. He heard blood spurt from the wound, and another sound he could not name, because he had never imagined such a thing. It was the sound of stone—growing.
“You have served your people well, Maceo Nahuat Xijun. You have served the gods well. You will go far, but you will not lead your god. I am not the lord of the rains.”
Maceo ran from the hut, but could not bring himself to go to the village with the taint of the god on him. He feared that he would lead it into his home, so loudly did its last words echo in his ears. “I will call you when it is time. . .”
Days passed, and the rains fell off, but still there were miracles. The trees bore fruit as never before, and corn sprouted like weeds around every village. Every dropped seed, every trash-midden and compost pile, became a garden. The land had never been generous, but now, it clearly loved them.
The people dreamed. In every village, one or more were struck with visions of the new sun soon to rise, and they spread the word throughout the Yucatec nation. Word came to Maceo’s village of guerrilla fighters who plundered the abandoned Army garrison at Valladolid and had mounted fierce, though sporadic resistance to the attempts to reclaim the interior. The guerrillas called themselves Jaguars, after the first created men, and wore spotted pelts that gave them sacred protection in the riotous new jungle. There was talk of a Maya state, of learning the old writing and reclaiming the old cities, of reviving the cult of the Chilam Balam, the Jaguar Priests—
Maceo, who had only wanted the billboards gone, only hoped that the white men were right.
Maceo was devastated by his failure to dismiss the god of the idol. All that he knew of the old gods had told him, by the signs of the disaster, the identity of their savior. The Mayan gods were not immortals possessed of powers over nature; the powers were the gods, the forces of the spirit world manifesting in matter to shepherd the world through its fragile cycle.
The gods did not merely create the earth and sun and moon, they became it, and peopled and provisioned the earth with the sacrifice of their own flesh and blood. They did not beget offspring, but unfolded into new forms, donned new masks, as the currents of the spirit realm demanded. The uncreated creator, Hunab Ku, unfolded into four sons who were also one, Itzam Na, and Itzam Na erected the tree of life and raised the heavens, parted the water from the land. Then he/they unfolded into lesser gods to wield the powers of nature. If the god of rains was not their savior, then it must be some higher iteration of him, and Maceo shivered with the thought of challenging such a power with no knowledge, even, of whom he faced. . .
Such were his thoughts when he left home to work and found himself facing a jaguar on the trail. Its muzzle was crusted with blood, its jade eyes avid with a man-eater’s cunning. It lay down on the trail and licked its forepaw.
If this was not the monster that carried off the baby, it still needed killing, and Maceo drew a bead on it with his shotgun. He tensed and fired at the disinterested jaguar, but both shells cracked and blew only sour smoke. Maceo made to run, but the jaguar fixed him with its brazen gaze and padded away down the trail, looking back, clearly, to command him to follow.
They moved east alongside the ruined old road for nearly three hours. Once, they heard a helicopter pass overhead, and later, a truck loaded with soldiers hobbled by on the broken road. The soldiers wore rubber masks that made them look like giant insects, and carried rifles with bayonets affixed.
Maceo found fruit to eat and spring water in fissures in the rocky ground, and the jaguar waited whenever he fell behind. He knew full well whose business he was about, and he grasped his machete in anticipation of the moment he might use it on the beast.
Almost noon, the jaguar stopped and sat facing a clearing in which Maceo could make out slashes of white through the green. He sped up, all fantasies about killing the jaguar lost as he stumbled out into the open ground.
A car, a new white Vol
kswagen painted as a taxi, was parked in the clearing. Maceo looked but saw no one inside or anywhere else around.
“Get in the car,” a booming voice commanded. A voice from within—
Maceo could count the number of times he’d been inside a car or truck on one hand, and he had only driven once, when Hilario had stolen a villager’s truck and gotten too drunk to return it. He hated the things, he knew now, more than the billboards, but they were so much a part of the invaders’ lives that he’d never dreamed of living in a place they did not ruin with their noise and exhaust. Now, after weeks of blessed quiet and sweet, clean air, he could not imagine why he was getting into this one.
He made to climb into the back, but the voice barked, “Get behind the wheel, Maceo Xijun.” The god’s voice came from the car’s radio, crackling with static and the flapping of the blown speakers.
“Whose taxi is this? I will not steal—”
“It is yours, Maceo Xijun. Get in.”
“But I have never driven,” he lied, “I don’t know how—”
“I will teach you. Only get in and tarry no longer, for we have business in the city.”
There was no city of Cancún until 1975, by the dzul reckoning, when Maceo’s daughter was old enough to walk. Now, over seven hundred thousand people lived there, an army of slaves to serve the tourists hordes.
And the hordes had descended in their tens of thousands, for the high season was gearing up, and something else that the radio had told him about, a great gathering of the masters of wealth from all over the world.
The radio had told him other things as he clumsily steered the taxi onto the very edge of the unbroken road that led east to the coast highway. The soldiers sent in to patrol the interior had come back with a fever; six had died in Mérida, and hundreds more were sick all around the disaster area. The jaguar had guided him out of the quarantine zone. Maceo had heard of no one falling ill—at least none of his people. He asked his god about it, but the radio only played more news, and then some appalling parody of music.
Strategies Against Nature Page 5
