The Last Mayan (The Alan Graham Mysteries)

by Malcolm Shuman

  The books of Chilam Balam, the Mayan prophet who had supposedly foretold the coming of the Spaniards, mentioned these towns in their migration narratives. Ticul, the place where the Mayan Itzá kings were seated; Oxkutzcab, the place of good tobacco; Tekáx, the place of the wilderness.

  I drank in the sights and smells and wondered if my life at home, in the States, had been a dream. Because now, as I shot down the two-lane highway, with cornfields and orchards on either side and men on foot carrying stacks of firewood on their backs with the help of tumplines, I felt as if I’d never left.

  It was a dangerous mood, because fifteen years ago I’d taken the same road to find Felicia after she hadn’t met me in Mérida and when I’d reached the archaeology camp a few miles west of Chetumal I’d found out the truth.

  Last night I’d dreamed of her for the first time since meeting Pepper. Felicia was telling me that I’d only imagined my life in the States and that no one I’d met there was real, as I’d find out when I reached the camp.

  I shoved the dream out of my consciousness and tried to concentrate on driving.

  After Tekáx there isn’t much, just a few little towns shimmering in the dry heat. I was headed for the last stronghold of the Maya, in what, a hundred years ago, had been deep rain forest.

  At Polyuc I came to the first army roadblock. They were set up to stop westbound traffic and they waved me through, but I saw a Honda they’d pulled over, with its doors open and hood up.

  There’d never been army roadblocks in the old days and I had a sense of foreboding.

  I reached Carrillo Puerto at a quarter to four and gassed up at the Pemex station. Then I made my way to the old church that dominated the east side of the main plaza.

  The Balam Nah, it was called in Mayan: the House of the Lord. The rebellious Maya had built it in the mid-nineteenth century, patterning it after a Catholic church. In it, they’d worshiped God, who revealed Himself through a talking cross. With the help of an interpreter, the cross had advised them on battle strategy and admonished them when they failed. They called the town Chan Santa Cruz, or the Little Holy Cross. And they’d been safe here until a hundred years ago, when a stubborn Mexican general named Bravo had built a railroad from Mérida all the way through the jungle to this town, using the rails to ferry soldiers and ammunition. The Mexican army had entered Chan Santa Cruz early in May 1901, but the Maya had fled. Years later, after the last rebels had been seduced into capitalism by the chicle trade, the town was renamed Carrillo Puerto, after the martyred socialist governor of Yucatan. But the cult of the talking cross still existed in little villages scattered throughout the forest.

  Now I waited in front of the old church and wondered if the desk clerk in Mérida had understood Pepper correctly.

  When five-thirty came and went, I decided he hadn’t.

  All I could do now was drive south to the archaeology camp at Bacalar and try to find out what was happening.

  There was another army roadblock on the southern outskirts of town and this time they were checking traffic from both directions.

  I showed my passport and car rental papers and the soldier nodded and handed them back. As I was returning them to the glove compartment, I noticed a Humvee coming from the other direction. But instead of pulling it over, the soldiers waved it past, and I caught a glimpse of the dark, round-faced driver.

  The village of Tres Cabras was so tiny I almost missed it, just a cinder-block store with a Coca Cola sign, a Baptist mission with a basketball court, and a pair of speed bumps. I pulled in at the store and nodded to the big-eyed children who watched me get out of the car. A fat man in a T-shirt was behind the counter. I told him I was looking for a gringa and showed him Pepper’s photograph. “Her name is Pepper Courtney,” I said.

  He nodded. “Sí, como no? She used the telephone. She came yesterday and waited for a long time and then left, and then she came back again this morning.”

  “Did she leave again?”

  “She took the road to Oxté.” He gestured behind him.

  “When?”

  “Ten o’clock, maybe eleven.”

  “And she didn’t come back?”

  “No, señor. I tried to tell her it wasn’t a good road, but she was looking for the other one, the old gringo.”

  “How far is Oxté?”

  “Thirty kilometers. I told her it wasn’t a good place to go.” He shook his head. “Muchas contrabandistas. Es peligrosisimo. The drug smugglers will kill anyone.”

  “Is it possible she could have returned another way? A way you wouldn’t have seen?”

  “This is the only way in, señor, and the only way out.” He shook his head again. “I told her not to go.”

  “Where is this road?” I asked.

  He left the counter and walked out into the fading sunlight. I smelled wood fires and the odor of pork cooking.

  “Over there.” He pointed and I saw an unpaved track leading into the trees. “It goes to the coast. Oxté used to be a fishing village. Now …” He shrugged. “It isn’t a good place to go.”

  I thanked him, got back into the car, and drove onto the track. Its surface was red earth, stable enough so long as there was no rain. I had an hour at most before darkness. Thirty kilometers was just under twenty miles. I decided I’d go as far as I could in half an hour.

  Behind me, at the clutch of cinder-block houses that was Tres Cabras, eyes watched me, no doubt wondering at the foolhardiness of gringos. I nudged the accelerator and started down the narrow trail.

  The first five kilometers were easy enough and took fifteen minutes, but I knew at this rate I wasn’t going to make it more than a third of the way before I had to turn around. Once I saw a boy on a bicycle headed toward me, loaded with palm leaves for thatch, but when I asked him if he’d seen a gringa he just kept going. When he was gone I got out and studied the ground. There were fresh tire marks, but I had no idea if they were from her vehicle.

  I got back into the car, slapping a mosquito. The shadows were blotting up the last of the sunlight and the smell of night was in the air.

  Fifteen minutes, I told myself. Then I’d find a place to turn around and I’d drive straight on to Bacalar. Maybe the archaeologists at the camp would be able to help. Or maybe, despite what the storekeeper had said, she was already there.

  After ten minutes of bumping over the ruts, I flicked on my headlights.

  And five minutes later I came to a fork in the road.

  The storekeeper hadn’t said anything about a fork.

  Common sense said it was time to go back.

  Instead, I got out and tried to make out which way the tire tracks went.

  Maybe it was my imagination, but I thought they headed right. I started down the right fork.

  I was home, in an area I’d known well, albeit fifteen years ago: Nothing could happen to me here.

  I reached a curve in the road, eased my way around it, and saw the ghost.

  At first it was just a wisp of fog shimmering in the headlights. Then it coalesced into a form and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

  It was the form of a woman, coming toward me, a hand held up to blot the glare of my lights.

  An old Mayan folk belief about a witch who snared men sprang into my mind and I tensed.

  When the hand came down a fraction I saw it was Pepper.

  I jerked my door open and jumped out to meet her and she lurched forward as I called her name.

  “Alan?”

  I ran forward and grabbed her to keep her from falling.

  “What are you doing in the middle of the jungle?” I demanded. “Are you okay?”

  “The Rover stuck in a hole,” she said. “I’ve been walking for three hours.”

  I guided her into the car and handed her a bottle of water from my cache. Then I gingerly maneuvered the car until we were turned around.

  “What were you doing back here?” I asked, as she lowered the half-empty bottle from her lips.

&nb
sp; “I was looking for Paul. He was supposed to be at Oxté, a little fishing village on the coast. He’s trying to find copies of the Chilam Balam books, some kind of linguistic study. Eric dropped him at Tres Cabras a couple of days ago. Paul was supposed to take a cargo truck to Oxté. Then I was supposed to meet him yesterday, when the truck made its return trip. But they said at Tres Cabras he hadn’t come back on the truck. He’s not a young man. He must be seventy and he had a stroke a year or two back. He could be too sick to go anywhere. I thought maybe I could drive to Oxté and see if he was there and get back to Carrillo Puerto in time to meet you. But the Rover bottomed out in a rut. I figured all I could do was walk back.”

  “That was crazy,” I said. “All by yourself at this time of day, with jaguars and snakes …”

  “Nobody’s seen a jaguar around here for years,” she said, then nestled against me.

  “Maybe not, but everybody tells me there’s a bad situation down here now,” I said. “Drug smugglers. There’s army all over the place.”

  “That’s what we keep hearing,” she said. “But nobody’s bothered us.”

  We came to the split in the trail.

  “Shouldn’t be too much longer,” I said.

  Then the men in fatigues with rifles stepped out of the trees and into my headlights, and I knew I was wrong.

  THREE

  I slammed on the brakes and sat frozen as the figures moved toward us in the dusk.

  Then Pepper said, “They’re army.”

  One of them was motioning for me to lower the window.

  “Que hacen aquí?” he demanded. “What are you doing here?”

  “The señorita’s vehicle got stuck a few kilometers down the road,” I said. “I went to find her. We’re archaeologists.”

  The soldier’s face stared at me without expression and then he moved aside and a man shot a flashlight beam into my face and then into Pepper’s.

  “Papers,” he ordered and we dug out our passports and tourist cards. He handed them to the first man and stepped back. “Please get out of the car.”

  I muttered something under my breath. But there was nothing to do but comply.

  “Your Spanish is very good,” the man holding our papers said. I noticed that he was a head shorter than the others, but his sidearm indicated he was an officer.

  He turned to Pepper. “Why were you going to Oxté? The archaeologists are working out of Bacalar.”

  “I was trying to find a member of our crew,” Pepper managed in halting Spanish. “An old man, a viejo. He disappeared.”

  “Un viejo, eh?” The officer turned and said something I didn’t catch to one of his men. “You know this is an area of drug trafficking?”

  “We’re just interested in archaeology,” I said. “We don’t know anything about drugs.”

  There was movement in the shadows and another form emerged, as short as the officer but broader.

  “I guess I really screwed things up,” the new man said in a midwestern accent. “Teniente, estos son mis colegas.”

  “Paul?” Pepper came around the front of the car and embraced the older man. “I’ve been worried sick about you. Where have you been?”

  “Chasing rumors,” Paul Hayes said and I caught a glint of his bald head. “When I got to Oxté they told me the old man who had the book was another ten kilometers up the coast and I had to hire a boy with a tricycle to take me there, only when I got there it turned out his Chilam Balam book was just a bunch of patent medicine formulas copied in a school notebook.”

  “Are they going to let us go?” I asked in English, figuring the soldiers wouldn’t understand.

  Hayes shook his head. “Afraid not. They’re on some kind of drug-raiding mission. They told me they were going to hold me overnight until they do whatever it is they came here for. I imagine that goes for you, too.”

  The officer in charge let him finish speaking, then turned to me.

  “Please turn off the car motor and give me the keys. My name is Tapia. I regret that you will have to stay with us until tomorrow. After that, you will be free to go. If you don’t have hammocks and mosquiteros, we will loan you some. I wish we could make you more comfortable, but …”

  I shrugged. It wouldn’t do any good to argue. “Servidor de usted,” I said. “We’re at your disposal.”

  He responded with a little bow. “You’re very understanding. I will do what I can to make your stay bearable.”

  Which is how, an hour later, we found ourselves camped just off the trail, our hammocks slung between trees as we shared the canned food and chips and mosquito coils I’d brought with the grateful soldier who’d been assigned to stay with us. His name was Raul. He came from Chihuahua and he said he hadn’t joined the army for this. We took turns sympathizing and when he nodded off we eventually changed from Spanish to English, talking in low tones so as not to wake him.

  “I’m sorry I landed you in this,” Hayes told me. “It’s a hell of a way to celebrate coming back to Yucatan.”

  “I’ll live,” I said, slapping away a bug. I turned down the light of the Coleman lantern and then slumped back into the hammock and let the gauze mosquito net fall over me. “But you did have me worried about Pepper.”

  “Hey, I can handle myself,” Pepper protested from a few feet away. “But I thought something had happened to you, Paul.”

  The old man chuckled in a low voice. “I was tromping this jungle when you were in diapers. Of course, there weren’t drug lords then and you never saw the army. You didn’t need it. And if there was ever a problem with the law, a few hundred pesos could get you out of it.”

  “What about this bunch?” I asked.

  Hayes sighed. “That’s why they’re here: The army’s less corrupt than the civil police. And the fellow leading this bunch, Lieutenant Tapia, takes himself pretty seriously. I was talking with him after they grabbed me. He has strong opinions. So I didn’t even try to bribe him.” He shifted in the webbing. “What the hell? It’s only one night.”

  “Any idea what they’re after?” I whispered.

  “They’d like to get Chucho Cantu, but they’ll settle for whatever they can find in Oxté.”

  “Who’s Chucho Cantu?”

  “Big wheel hereabouts. Owns a lot of land, has his finger in everything. Drives a Humvee with armor and bulletproof glass. They weren’t able to touch him while the PRI Party was in. Now there’s a new president and a new party, but it may take a while to sort things out.”

  I thought of the Humvee that had been waved through the roadblock on the outskirts of Carrillo Puerto.

  “The next best thing is to try to scoop up some of his men and hope they’ll talk. And hope that the new government in Mexico City’s telling the truth about wanting to clean things up.”

  “So until then we get to see them round up the usual suspects,” Pepper said, yawning. “I think I’d rather be back in my own hammock.”

  Hayes grunted. “Where else would you have a chance to be in the thick of things? Enjoy it while you can, eh, Alan?”

  “Right,” I said and slapped away another bug.

  I woke up several times in the night, once in a sweat, thinking I’d heard voices and seen green-clad ghosts filtering past me in the gloom, and then another time before daybreak, when the cold of dawn had sent icy fingers along my chest and arms. I curled up as best I could and heard one of the others shift in the webbing.

  I stared up at the milky netting over my head, listening to the cries of birds high above. Maybe I’d dreamed the last fifteen years. Maybe if I got up now, tiptoed to the edge of the camp to obey the urging of my bladder, I would come back and find that I’d only imagined the breakup with Felicia. And that would mean that my whole life as a contract archaeologist was a product of my imagination, and none of it had happened—there was no shabby office on the edge of the university, no scrambling for contracts from nightmare bureaucracies like the Corps of Engineers, no Bertha Bomberg to torment us with niggling regulatio
ns, no … Pepper.

  Suddenly I did not want it to have been a dream.

  I forced myself up, unused to the instability of the hammock after so many years, and swept the netting off me. I fumbled on my glasses and shook my sandals. Dew gleamed on the greenery of the jungle and a damp-earth smell permeated the thin mist hugging the ground. My fellow sleepers were wrapped in cocoons, half mosquito nets and half fog, and I cautiously slipped out of my hammock so as not to awaken anyone. Hayes was still snoring, but as I stood in the chill gray air I saw Pepper turn over in her own netting. For a moment I thought she was going to awaken, but as I watched she settled back into sleep, her light blanket wound around her.

  The guard was dead to the world and we could have all stolen away, but it made little sense to aggravate the army for no reason. I walked to the edge of the clearing, relieved myself, and then considered my options.

  My watch said five-ten. It would be light in another hour. I knew I wouldn’t be going back to sleep, but neither did I feel like lying in my hammock wide awake. I tiptoed to the other side of the clearing and stumbled on something in the leaves. I bent and picked it up: a thin shard of pottery with a brown glazed surface and the remains of a glyph. A fragment of a Maya pot, evidence of the brilliant civilization that had once inhabited these jungles and been cut short by the arrival of the Europeans.

  I tossed the shard away, for the forest was full of them, and lifted a hanging vine as I sensed movement in the bush beside the trail. A jaguar? Not likely: They’d all been hunted out years ago. And we were still too far north for monkeys. Then I saw the grass move again and froze, waiting. A masked face with a pointed snout and a banded tail peered out from the side of a stump. I smiled. A coatimundi, a raccoonlike creature with a ringed tail. It was scrounging for food and trying to ensure that the tables wouldn’t be turned. I’d tasted their flesh. Not bad, but this one didn’t need to worry.

  I watched it scamper over a square fragment of stone and realized the stone was a portion of a limestone block, once part of an ancient Mayan building. I stared down at it, then scanned the undergrowth. A form took shape through the trees, all chunky blocks and heaped earth, split by roots and half concealed by the foliage. It was a pyramid, stretching above the treetops, possibly never visited by archaeologists and certainly never excavated. Not a major discovery, considering that the entire peninsula was a field of jumbled ruins and some estimates put the ancient population at over a million: There were sufficient ruins in the Mayan area to keep an army of archaeologists busy for the next five hundred years. Still, the thrill of touching something hidden for so long couldn’t be denied. I eyed the ground for signs of more pottery, trying to make a tentative estimate of the pyramid’s age. Maybe, I thought, if I scrambled to the top I could see if it had any datable motifs, a diving god over the lintel, for instance.