Gringos (21 page)

It got worse, embarrassing. Doc went on to repay Roland's hospitality by trying to provoke a quarrel, telling him bluntly that he was all wrong with his Hebrews wading ashore at Veracruz. It was the Chinese who had settled this country. The Meso-Americans could not possibly have come from the Mediterranean, because there, as in Europe, the snake was a symbol of evil. No, it was in the Far East, in China, where you found benign reptiles, holy lizards, celestial dragons, and such, as you also found here with the iguana god and the cult of the mighty plumed serpent. The same lotus theme too. Just as it was here, as in China, that jade was believed to have divine properties. And was not every Indian baby born with the Mongolian Spot at the base of his spine?

Roland took all this in a good-natured way, deferring to the old man, calling him Sir, saying he made some good points, that the jury was still out on so many things down here.

Gail was drowsy, and I was nodding too. Ramos moved about impatiently under the table, nudging my leg for more scraps. Doc tried again. He asked Roland where he stood on carbon-14 dating. Roland said it was a useful tool, but he said it with no confidence, sensing he was going to be on the wrong end of this argument too. Doc informed him that carbon dating was a colossal hoax, perhaps the greatest scientific scandal of the twentieth century. “You can get any date you like. If you don't like the reading, you just say the sample was too small or it was contaminated. You keep running the stuff through the lab till you get a reading you do like. Look at what they did to Spinden. First they said he was right, and then they said he was wrong. Off by 260 years. Of course he
was
wrong, but they had to keep cooking their numbers to show it. You boys are easily taken in, if I may say so.”

We put up for the night in a temple chamber with thick walls of glittering crystalline limestone. It was the camp storeroom. The ceiling was high and at least fifteen feet across, about as wide a free span as you will see in this land of the false arch. Most of the chambers in these great structures were no bigger than closets, and Art and Mike maintained that the Maya were not really architects at all but essentially sculptors. Their purpose was to throw up solid white platforms against the sky, and only incidentally to enclose space. There was a single doorway. Roland took pains to close it off with a double thickness of mosquito netting. He wished us goodnight.

“Nice boy but a mere technician,” said Doc. “He has no comprehensive vision.” We settled in against boxes and lumpy sacks. Ramos did two or three tight little dog turns in place before dropping down at Refugio's feet. Doc prowled around with a citronella candle. He looked in corners and ran his hands over niches in the wall. “The ceremonial vesting room, I think. Yes, it seems we have been assigned to the vesting room.” He was never at a loss to explain the function of ancient things. Show him a rough, wedge-shaped rock, and he would identify it as a
coup-de-poing
, or hand axe. Show him a smooth one and he would say, “Ah yes, a nice votive axe.” Sometimes it
was
a votive axe, and for all I knew this was an old vesting room. These dead cities still lived and sparkled for him in the distance as they did not for me. This room had no message for me.

We slept. Doc woke us in the night. He came to us with his yellow candle and a scrap of paper. It was headed “Xupáh [as he spelled it] Guatemala,” and dated. Underneath that he had written, “I swear or affirm that I accept without reservation Dr. Richard Flandin's theory of direct trans-Pacific Chinese settlement of Meso-America.”

“Would you look this over and then sign it, please? Take your time. I don't like to disturb you but I might forget this in the morning. I'm not a hard man to work for. I do however insist on staff loyalty. If we're not all pulling together then how in the world can we ever hope to accomplish anything?”

Refugio and I signed, he, writing with a flourish, “Refugio Bautista O.” We had done it before, though these chits usually ran to vows of silence about particular finds.

“I can't sign this,” Gail whispered to me.

“Why not? Just put something down.”

She signed Denise's name by the light of the candle.

“And I thank you very much,” said Doc, simpering over the paper, all but rubbing his hands together. He was a salesman closing out on a big and unexpected order. “A formal gesture like that gives the pledge more weight, I think. I say ‘theory' and that will do for our purposes here, but it's much more than that. It's more than a theoretical construct, it's a hard fact.”

Later he woke us again. “Excuse me, but I forgot to mention that this loyalty business goes both ways. It must come down from the top too. I'm fully aware of that. Here is a token of my trust in you.”

He set fire to the scrap of paper, watched it burn, and then left us alone. No word about lying down here and not getting up again.

ON TO Yoro. It was still dark when Roland came and said the boat was ready. I couldn't blame him for speeding us on our way. He stood to lose his digging permit, so hard to come by these days, if Guatemalan soldiers found us here with no papers. I offered to pay him for his trouble, and he said no, just tip the boatman when we reached Yoro.

He, the skipper, was a shirtless little river rat, proud of his
cayuca,
this being a dugout canoe fashioned from a mahogany log. It was a good sturdy hull about thirty feet long, well shaped and finished. The hacking marks of the axe and the adze were sanded down. The sides were damp and had a nappy, velvet feel from long use. He pushed off from shore with his sounding pole and started the engine, and we slipped away into a fog bank. Roland trudged back up the hill to search for traces of Lamanites in the rubble of Chupá. A comprehensive vision, it seemed to me, was the very thing he did have.

Our man knew the channel well. There were no lights on the boat, but he ran his engine full out. He couldn't even see the front of the
cayuca.
A heavy night bird swooped, came flapping right over our heads, confused by the fog, perhaps still looking for something small and live to eat. After that we had the river to ourselves. Doc lost his little Chinaman's cap, and he looked better, more dignified, with his white hair loose and blowing. Then he lost his wristwatch trailing his hand in the water. Refugio said, “You never know what the day will bring.”

The morning light came slow and the sun was well up before we could see it through the vapor, a pale disk. Surely it would rise again tomorrow. Gail passed around some cheese and tortillas and mashed cake. Soggy cake is bad but mashed cake is not so bad. Ramos clambered from one end of the boat to the other. He couldn't find a good place to settle. The river rat had nothing to say to us. He kept his hand on the tiller and held his head high and sucked on a dip of snuff. The cud was packed under his lower lip, and it appeared to be a satisfying snuff of the very finest quality. My guess was that he was silent at home, too, if he had one. Gliding up and down the river in your own boat, knowing you had plenty of snuff in reserve, was better than yapping all the time, and being yapped at.

The engine sputtered out three or four times, and we lost half the day drifting, wiping oil off the fouled spark plug, blowing through the fuel line, yanking on the starter rope. Good mechanics that they are, and for all their Latin delicacy in other matters, Mexicans are not much troubled by a firing miss in an engine. Almost every taxicab has an ignition skip or a faulty carburetor. The missed beat doesn't gnaw at them. Time enough to fix the thing when it goes out altogether.

We arrived in the afternoon. Some of the hippies had fallen sick here at Yoro and were lying about in the shade or just sitting on the riverbank hugging their knees. Others had moved on to Likín for the big event. Nothing was moving on the river. Most of the
cayucas
were beached across the way on the Yorito side. A late afternoon stillness. No women washing clothes in the shallows.

I went to pay our boatman, and Doc said, “Here, no, I'm taking care of this. Give the fellow some money, Gail.” He had turned over all his money to her.

There was a new and bigger gasoline storage tank at the landing. It seemed there were more children about, and the tire swing had been introduced here since my last visit. Otherwise Yoro looked much the same. A dirt track ran up from the landing through two rows of shacks and then petered out against the forest wall. A
ranchería,
they called it, and you could take it all in at a glance. It was still a sad little outpost.

The restaurant was the same, too, known only as the widow woman's place. The woman prepared food in her house and brought it out back to a small
ramada
open on all sides. There were four tables under a palm-thatched arbor. It was this same woman, now scowling at us, somewhat fatter but not looking much older, who had refused to take my
tortuga
note years ago.

We had disturbed her nap. It was nap time in Yoro. All the food was gone, she told us, there was nothing to be had here, the young gringo beasts had eaten everything as fast as she could cook it. They had frightened her cat Emiliano away, and look how they had trampled down her morning glory vines and her tomato plants, her fine
jitomates
—in the season of the Nativity!—bringing their social diseases and their foreign eye diseases! There was a place in Hell for them, for dirty
gorristas
like that one there!

She pointed to a hippie who was stretched out on the ground with a hat over his face. It was a touristy hat made from green palmetto blades. I thought he was asleep, but he must have been watching us through the weave cracks. “There's not a single Pepsi left in town,” he said. “They're all out of bread, too, and ice.”

Refugio told the woman that we were forest rangers and that she would do better to show more respect for the government. Was she blind? Couldn't she see that we were important captains from the
forestal
and not young
viciosos?
“Now go to your pots and bring us what you have.” She served up some black beans and fried plantains and coffee. We had our own tortillas. Refugio said she could put on a new red dress and red shoes, do whatever she liked, crawl on her knees to the Shrine of Guadalupe, and still she would never find another husband, a scolding woman like that.

The hippie spoke up again. “My car doors are frozen shut in Chicago. All the ice you want up there.” His jeans were pressed, and if anything he was cleaner and more presentable than we were. But then he really wasn't a hippie and he was quick to set us straight on that point. Right off the bat he showed me his new Visa credit card. His name was Vincent. He and his sweetheart, Tonya Barge or Burge, had flown down here to celebrate the end of his apprenticeship. He had just won his “electrician's ticket”—which I took to mean a union card or some kind of professional certification. And it was true, he had come down the big river with this wandering tribe, but he wasn't one of them.

“I thought we were going to the beach. Christmas on the beach, that was our plan, see, just the two of us, staying in bargain hotels and eating bargain food. Like bananas, you know, and tacos, and those real big Cokes? Then we ran into these interesting people, or anyway Tonya thought they were interesting, with all their talk about cosmic energy. I'm not into pyramids myself and I can't buy the mind science these people are putting out. Forget it. I like the beach. What's wrong with that? There's plenty of cosmic energy coming down on the beach.”

I said, “You need to keep better company, Vincent.”

“Hey, don't I know it! I mean, come on, all these potheads giving out their bum information! This big brownout they're talking about? The death of the sun? Who wants to hear that? Who needs it! And this
El Mago
that nobody knows who he is? With all his strange powers? Nobody has ever seen him here yet but oh yeah he's going to work wonders! Dark forces are gathering! Signs and wonders! Give me a break, will you! I don't like to hear stuff like that and I don't go for this sleeping dirty either and all their weird baloney about the mystery of the underground colonies! Don't get me started on that! Am I talking too loud? It's a bad habit I got to watch.”

“No, don't let it get a foothold.”

“Say, I been meaning to ask you. What are all the guns for?”

“Songbirds. We're hunters. Trophy kills.”

“Well, hey, that's your business, not mine! I don't know one bird from another except for robin redbreast! I'm no sportsman, I'm just passing through! I'm not even supposed to be here! I mean the country is green and beautiful but all these bugs. We didn't see any alligators yet, just snakes so far and those iguanas with the ugly spines on their backs. The boat ride was fun though, I got to admit that, and last night we watched a falling star all the way down. Wait, did I dream that? No, what am I saying, everybody saw it. They were all talking about it. They said it fell out there in the water somewhere. Don't tell me you people live around here.”

“I live in Mérida.”

“Mérida, right, I've heard of it. And you live there! With your dog! And the old man and the girl with the machete, they're after these little birds too?”

“No, I was only playing around with you a little bit there, Vincent. We're just making our way down the river. We're looking for someone.”

He put up his hands in surrender. “Hey, don't worry, I can handle that! No problem! I'm not offended! I can take a joke! You think I don't know decent people when I see them? So let me see now if I understand this. You're taking your river trip and the chunky Mexican guy, he's not a policeman or anything like that with his big pistol?”

“No, he's not a policeman.”