Gringos (19 page)

“Yes, I have.” I had heard him say it about four times.

“Well, that's just what I mean. I mean to lie down out here and die where I was happiest. Please don't interfere. I will just lie down under the canopy of the trees. With my old empty heart. I will die and melt away and be with all the other forgotten things in the earth.”

“Where? Where will you do this?”

“Anywhere. Tumbalá will do.”

“What's that in your hand?”

It was the little jade man. He was going to lie down and die with that thing in his mouth. I told him there was something heathenish about this that I didn't like, and he said no, don't worry, he had already paid Father Mateo to say seventy-eight masses for him, one for each year of his life, and none too many, he thought.

“I don't know. I'll have to think it over.”

“The signal will be when I give you my machete. I want you to have it. At that point you will take the others and walk away. Don't look back and don't say anything. I couldn't bear any words. This is how I want it. You can't refuse my last wish, Jimmy. And don't let Cuco interfere.”

I left it at that. He was determined, and I saw no hope of reasoning with him. But I had already thought it over and I had no intention of leaving him out here. Melt away? A nice way of putting it. Doc wasn't dying. Soledad Bravo would have seen it in his eyes. It was one thing to help along an old man on his deathbed, to dispatch him with a razor blade, but this business, no. I would tie him in the boat if it came to that, and Refugio would help me.

Gail offered to make him a sandwich. “You haven't eaten anything, Dicky.”

“I got a boiled egg down.”

It sounded like he had poked it down his throat whole.

Refugio shaded his eyes and made a show of looking up and down the river, “I don't see no
cayucas
.” He cupped his ear. “I don't hear no boats.” He was going to dwell on every difficulty.

“One will be along,” I said. “Let's go. It's not far to Tumbalá. A little more walking won't hurt us.”

We set off downstream and the going was easier now, though we were out of the jungle twilight, into the full blaze of the sun. The river cut its way through rounded hills, with steep wooded slopes that came right down to the edge of the water, or almost to the edge. At this season there was a sandy shelf to walk on. The big river, we called it, and so it was for Mexico, but this upper middle stretch I would put at no more than a hundred yards wide. The water had not yet taken on a dark tropical look. It was just pale and lifeless ditch water coursing along.

No boat came, up or down. Gail had some good mosquito dope, the best I had ever used. The trick is to keep them out of your face, from swarming in your face, which can't be endured. We drank from springs and small feeder streams, after I had poured the water through a paper cone, a coffee filter. It trapped all the bigger parasites, or so I told myself.

Refugio stopped to look at a hairy object washing about in an eddy. Then he jumped back and cried out, “Mother of God! Another
chaneque!
” Another little brown man, that is, of the kind we had been shown at the Palenque police station. These small woodland creatures took sick and died, just as we did, and their bodies were always committed to flowing waters, according to Sula. Fair enough, but I didn't expect to see two of them in two days. They were washing up like sick whales.

This thing was vaguely childlike, a torso with something like a tiny arm flung out. It was just hide and bones, a headless, decaying mess of no very definite shape. Doc said it was a dog. Gail thought it might be a howler monkey. Ramos showed no interest. Much too hairy for a humanoid, I said, knowing nothing about humanoids.

Refugio snapped back at me. “Do you say I don't know a
chaneque
when I see one?”

“It's not like the one at Palenque.”

Later, farther down the trail, he said, “Some
chaneques
are hairy. The older males have much body hair.”

I might have believed that, coming from Sula, but Refugio knew no more about
chaneques
than I did.

He stopped us again when we reached Tumbalá. He raised his hand. “
¡Escuche!
Listen up!” Ramos was doing some furious barking around the bend. I was certain he had found Rudy. Refugio and I ran on ahead, across the ruins and up into a ravine, where Ramos had cornered something in a hole. It was a small cave in the hillside. I called out to Rudy. No answer. Then I thought it might be a jaguar. Yes, a
tigre
, I was sure of it, though real
tigrero
dogs are stalkers and don't bark at all. After all these years of going up and down in the woods, I was at last going to behold a jaguar at bay, in whose wonderful coat the Mayas saw a map of the starry heavens. Refugio said no, it was no
gato
, more likely a pig. This was pig madness. Ramos hated pigs.

Chino would have charged the hole. Ramos was content to race about in a frenzy before the entrance. Nor would Refugio, brave man that he was, enter a cave. Close places didn't bother him, or man-made holes. You could grab his ankles and hold him head down in a
chultún
, a kind of bottle-shaped underground Mayan cistern, and he would work calmly away with a flashlight in his mouth, scratching about for artifacts with one hand while swatting at snakes and scorpions with the other. But he wouldn't go into a natural cave. Unquiet spirits still lingered there from the old days, far back in the darkness where virgin water dripped. You could go in and never come out. I was no spelunker myself. It was Doc who liked to prowl caverns, where one day the cache of lost books would be found. That was his firm belief.

Refugio fired a shot into the cave. I set fire to a dried palm frond and tossed it inside, more for illumination than with any hope of driving the animal out. There was movement. Then we heard voices.

“
¡Vale! ¡Vale! No te alteres!
Okay, hold it! Take it easy!”

Two scraggly young men came out with a small chain saw and a .22 rifle. They were laughing, their eyes smarting from the smoke. I went inside with another blazing frond to make sure there were no others. There was a nest of bedding where they slept, and some scanty baggage. I poked around in it. If these two
chamacos
had done away with Rudy, they would have kept some of his fine equipment and his fine army clothes. I found nothing in that line, only three lumpy sacks hidden under a pile of brush. They were sisal sacks filled with sawed-off fragments of inscribed stone. I dragged them out into the light.

These boys were commercial pot hunters, and they had hidden here, they said, when they heard us coming, thinking we might be an army patrol. One of them had a bad arm wound, a ragged
cuchillazo
, gone purple along the edges. The chain saw had kicked back on him and ripped a long gash in his forearm. They had packed the wound with sugar and poured gasoline over it and tied it up with two pieces of rope. I got some antibiotic capsules from my shoulder bag and told him to take one every few hours. Leave it to me to have some antilife pills tucked away somewhere. He swallowed the lot, which hardly mattered, as the stuff was old and probably inert anyway. Doc and Gail came up. She gave the boy some aspirins, and he gobbled those down too.

I questioned them. They laughed and jabbered. The long and the short of it was that they hadn't seen Rudy. They had seen no one for four days.

Doc looked over the cave. He had a good eye and a good feel for these places. He pronounced this one a dud. It was barren, sterile, he said. And yet all around us were the tiny temples of Tumbalá, doll houses of stone and scaled-down shrines that stood no higher than your waist, a wonderland for flying saucer theorists. I don't know how Doc could tell so quickly, but he was always decisive. He kicked at the sacks of carved stone and asked the boys if they had come across any
libros
. He made a show with his hands, as of someone unfolding a road map, not an easy idea to put across. He gave them some money.

But of course they had found no books. Were there any left to find? There were only three Maya manuscripts or codices extant, and none dating back to the classic period. All three had turned up in Europe many years ago, with no back trail, no provenance, as they say. No one knew where they were written or where they were originally found.

Not around here, I would bet. Somewhere up in dry Yucatán perhaps, or in the high mountains of Guatemala. Not even bones survived in this sour soil. They were soon leached away to nothing. I had heard a lot about bones, too much about bones, from people who called us ghouls and grave-robbers and other hard names. Their idea was that we trampled about ankle-deep in old bones, crunching skulls and femurs heedlessly underfoot and raising great clouds of unhealthy bone dust in our bonemad search for treasure. In fact, there were no bones. We came across a tooth now and then but never a human bone, not one. I had never disturbed anyone's bones, that I knew of, which was more than the
arqueos
could say.

I told the boys we wanted to hire their boat.

They had no boat and had seen no boat for days. They had not heard motors on the river since yesterday morning. But those sacks of stone would collapse a mule, I pointed out, let alone a man. How did they propose to carry them out of here if not by boat? They laughed some more. No, no, I didn't understand. A friend was coming up from Yoro tomorrow to pick them up in his dugout. A couple of nuts, Refugio called them, a pair of
chiflados
. He didn't trust them, didn't like them. They were poaching in his private valley. Their mindless laughter annoyed him. He refused to answer when they asked if he would sell his .45. Instead, he climbed a tree and came down with a yellow orchid for Gail. “A pretty rose for your hair.” She stuck it in her khaki hat. It would go on living up there, disembodied. These strange flowers lived off the air, if my information was correct, in the way of Dan and his people. Again the two
chiflados
asked about the pistol. Refugio said they would never have enough money to buy this gun. “This is a man's gun!” What business did a pair of monkeys have with a man's gun? They couldn't even handle a baby chain saw with a short bar!

Then he turned on me. “You say the boy will be in Tumbalá and then our work is done. Well, where is he?”

I had no idea. Rudy had left no camping evidence here. It was all a bust. I knew the smell of failure. I was chasing after a shadow. In any case, the thing now was to get Doc away from this place, keep him moving. He hadn't gone for his machete belt yet but I was worried. I was afraid to meet his eyes. The time has come, they would say to me. Without a boat we would have to take him by the heels and drag him out of the forest against his will, with his arms folded across his chest and his head scraping a little furrow across Chiapas.

“The boy is dead,” said Refugio. “That is what I think. Now we can go back to our homes.”

“Not yet. Somebody must have seen him. And we may as well go on down to Yoro now. There are bound to be boats at Yoro.”

The gloomy Refugio said Yoro was far, far away and that we could not possibly walk there before dark.

“It's still the easiest way out. It's better than going back. A night on the river won't kill us. And a boat may come along yet.”

Gail was naturally curious about Yoro. “What is it, a town? A ruin?”

“It's a river terminal where you can buy gasoline. Just a little village with some hens pecking around in the mud. Or it used to be. I don't know. They may have a yacht club there now.”

I hadn't been to Yoro in years. The first time there I nearly starved to death on a 500-peso note. Nobody could change it. The widow woman who served meals wouldn't accept my
tortuga
note and she wouldn't feed me on credit. They used to call that note a turtle because it moved so slowly. Now you could just about buy a pack of cigarettes with 500 pesos.

Doc, to my surprise, said, “Yes, Yoro is a wonderful idea, Jimmy. Why didn't I think of that? Yes, Yoro and Yorito. We can go up on the bluff and see the great old city of Likín again. We can drink from the hidden spring of water. Is it still flowing, I wonder? What's wrong with me? I had forgotten all about Likín.”

So had I. It was a sprawling hilltop ruin across the river in Guatemala. I had also forgotten, if I had ever known, that “Likín” was the Yucatec Maya word for “east” and “sunrise.” An important word, as it turned out, though it wasn't until the next day that I made the connection, what with so many things on my mind. Had Doc then decided against lying down and giving up the spirit, or was he only putting it off? Best not to ask. He may have feared that the two
chiflados
would disturb him after he had arranged himself on the ground here. They might stand over him and look down on him with disgust and talk over his condition, in the way of medical students.

I got the party moving again and picked up the pace a little. At least our way was downhill. A night on the river wouldn't be so bad, if it didn't rain, and if Gail's mosquito dope held out. Strong stuff, though I believe my powder bag—a knotted sock filled with sulfur—was more effective against the ticks. Where were all the boats? Doc was holding up well, his little cap now dark with sweat. He wanted to keep those vapors in his head. Everybody else in Mexico was trying to keep them out. Straggling behind a bit, he and Gail were lost in a lively chat. He told her about the panoramic view from atop the great
Castillo
at Likín.

Refugio glanced back at them over his shoulder. “This Gail,” he said to me. “She will make you a good enough wife, Jaime.”
Esposa regular
.