Gringos (26 page)

All four of us made the crossing to Yoro in the lead boat. The river was up. Our skipper wore a knitted cap pulled down over his ears to keep the malignant
aires
out of his head. LaJoye Mishell told me that she had been given nothing to eat for two days. I fell to muttering and then realized that Refugio was speaking to me.

“Who was that
hipopótamo?
Who was that big lop-eared
pagano?
”

“His name was Dan. That's all I know. Some wandering
cabrón
. He tampered with my truck once at Tuxpan. A jailbird, I think. Some
preso
from the States.”

“But all the same a
mago?
He could cast spells?”

“Just on certain people. Not on us.”

“What was it all about?”

“I don't know. But we'll keep it to ourselves. The less said about this the better.”

“His neck was bloated with poison.”

“Yes.”

“Did you see his breath? It was green.”

“I didn't notice that.”

“The two boys were drugged.”

“No, I don't think so.”

“Yes, a pair of
tóxicos
. Didn't you see their ugly naked heads? Like baby heads! Not a natural thing! It was dope that turned them into beasts! And not one but two! Who would expect to see two of them!”

“Harvey was the hard one. That first one who came back.”

“But the dead goat. What was that for?”

“I don't know. Some
pagano
stuff about blood.”

“Ay, then they get all they want, no? We show them plenty of blood! Maybe they get just a little more
sangre
than they want! We teach those animals some Mexican manners, no?”

I told the boatmen to keep their engines running, and we left them at the landing with the props churning the muddy water. The widow woman's
ramada
had collapsed into a heap of sticks and fronds. Her morning glories had been stripped clean by the storm and her fine
jitomate
plants battered down in the mud. Yoro was if anything darker than Yorito. We found our people and the stragglers huddled together in a storage shed behind the big fuel tank. Vincent was grumbling about the fleas. The dirt floor was infested with them. I had to wake Doc and Gail. She thought the little Mexican boy, Serafín, thirty-two inches high, was Rudy Kurle. “You found him!” she said.

“No, but we're leaving anyway. Where's the food sack? Let's get a move on.”

Only a few tortillas were left, curled leather flaps now. The two children chewed on them greedily and ate them without salt. I assured Vincent that Tonya Barge was fine, not really knowing. “She'll be back by daylight. They'll all be back. The show was a bust. It was a complete washout.” He said he wished now he had taken his chances with the storm rather than suffer here in this nest of fleas. Doc advised him to eat brewer's yeast and plenty of it. “It comes out in your sweat, don't you see, and repels them.” I promised Vincent that his sweetheart would appear very soon out of the mist, and I left him there with my knotted sock sulfur bomb and my earnest good wishes.

So now there were seven of us in two
cayucas,
not counting the boatmen—Doc, Gail, Refugio, me, the two children, and Ramos, and we were off on another night ride in these mahogany dugouts. We could have used some name tags. Doc asked why we were traveling in the rain and when would we reach Likín.

“We've already been to Likín,” I said. “We're going home now. We're leaving this garden.”

“But I wanted to show Gail how the sun strikes the tau-cross window. The radiance.”

“We'll do that another time.”

“But she wants to see the House of the Consecrated Bats and the hieroglyphic stairway. She is particularly interested in that. I promised to show her how easily you can read the dynastic information with my key. How it all flows down in a connected way in columns of twos.”

“Maybe another time. We're going home now.”

“You won't give us time to see anything! All these boats! You're just a terrible person to travel with, Jimmy! All this mindless movement! It's a sickness with you! I think you positively enjoy driving helpless people about!”

We spoke in darkness above the engine noise, our faces unreadable. I explained that we had to get in ahead of the hippie brigade, who would be departing now and taking all the boats. Then there were the two children. They were homesick runaways who had been traveling with the hippies, and I knew that he, Doc, would want them restored to their families without delay. He said nothing more. I let it go at that.

LaJoye Mishell didn't know where she was or where she had been. Her lips were cracked and her skin was peeling and her arms and legs were criss-crossed with red scratches. She was numb. It was all the same to her whether Dan cut her heart out or she went back to Perry, Florida. The boy could tell us little more than his name, Serafín. Mostly he slept. Dan had picked him up, the girl told me, in a city with a long main street that led to a pretty little seaside park. The Mexican port town of Chetumál was my guess. She said it was later when the big woman, Beany Girl, left them, deserted the Jumping Jacks, she didn't know why, at an island town on a clear green lake. That could only have been Flores, in Lake Petén Itzá in Guatemala.

The storm had passed, but the river was still choppy. These
cayuca
boys had only one speed and that was flat out, which suited me. We were well sprayed. As the morning light came, I saw sparklets of gummy blood stuck to the hairs on my arms, from Dan's face, and from Harvey, who had spit blood on me. I sloshed my arms about in the rushing water and washed my face too for good measure. But you can't get those stains out of a cotton shirt. There was no fog on this first day of the new year. It was a day like other days. The sun came up full and warm. The greater light that rules the day. It would never scorch Dan again or dazzle his eyes. Wrong about so many things, he did get the terminal day right. Jan, too, and Harvey, and the other hairless thug. For them it was truly the end of this world.

Yes, a strange business back there on that high terrace, and over so fast too. Shotgun blast or not at close range, I was still surprised at how fast and clean Dan had gone down. It was like dropping a Cape buffalo in his tracks at one go. I wasn't used to seeing my will so little resisted, having been in sales for so long. We passed more ruins and a village here and there, but they were all on the Guatemala side.

Everyone was hungry. Doc said, “Now you won't even let us eat!” I didn't permit a stop until we came to a settlement called Punta de Arenas, or Sandy Point, on the Mexico shore. It was a smaller Yorito, a Yoritito, an old
chiclero
camp, with the shacks now occupied by a few fishermen and squatters. In the woods behind it there was a minor ruin of four or five mounds, well picked over and too small even to have a name.

The skippers nosed the boats in around a jam of floating trees, brought downstream by the high water and stuck here at the point with a lot of dirty foam. The resident fishermen were at breakfast and made a hospitable fuss over us. There is always room for unexpected guests at a Mexican feed. We sat on a log and joined them for black coffee and some rice with scraps of pork mixed in, and peppers on the side. No fish. They trafficked in fish the way I trafficked in art. It was for other people. All the talk was about the storm, the big
tronada,
so unseasonable. The trees here were still dripping. Doc asked if they had come across any writings of the old ones, but they couldn't understand a word he said. Refugio asked if any
ídolos
had been turned up lately from the mounds here. They laughed. “No, no, no.
No hay nada aquí.” There ain't nothing here
. They had only three coffee cups, and we passed them back and forth. An old man, too old to work, just hanging around now, showed us he could still crack nuts with his teeth.

Gail bathed the kids in the backwater and scraped up some clean clothes for them, shabby adult garments but dry enough. She found a jar of yellow salve in the camp and rubbed it on their sores. Poor little LaJoye Mishell had taken the worst of it. Her scalp was spotted with scabs where Dan had pecked her with his stick when she displeased him. She couldn't learn how to answer him properly. Whatever she said was wrong.

I could hardly keep my eyes open. This was the green and wet part of Mexico, and I liked it and this place in particular, Sandy Point. I liked the old man and the bushes covered with white blossoms like snow and the way the clearing opened up to the sky, some happy combination of things. I marked it down in my head as a good place to come back to for an extended stay. But then I liked the brown parts of Mexico, too, and I had marked down so many places, never to see them again. Refugio shook me awake and said we had best not linger here. He had just been told there was a soldier prowling about. The big
soldado
had come down the river a few days ago, a lone passenger in a
cayuca
. “They say he is a big clean fellow in fine boots with many badges on his fine uniform.” An officer then. He would want to see our papers. He would be curious. What was our business here on the
frontera?
We were an odd enough party, worthy of a report, and he would remember our guns and our faces if not our names. It was indeed time to leave this sandy hook.

Refugio rounded up the crew. Doc was no longer speaking to me. We were already in the boats when the lone
soldado
appeared. It was Rudy Kurle in his military rig. I hadn't even bothered to ask about him here. He and three local boys came out of the woods with a plastic dishpan full of dark honey, all clotted up with leaves and sticks and dead bees. They had robbed a bee tree. Rudy was chewing on a sticky comb. A gleaming strand of honey hung from his chin and swayed. Something new was attached to his belt. I thought I was familiar with all his field gear, but the pedometer was new to me.

“Hey, Burns!” he said. “Is that you? What in the world are you doing here? Look! Do you know what this is? Nature's most perfect food! A field expedient! Living off the land!”

“I've been looking all over for you, Rudy.”

“Yeah, why?”

“You've had everybody out beating the bushes for you.”

“What for? You should see how these little guys can climb. They don't speak a word of English.”

“You've put a lot of people to a lot of trouble. Did you know that? Why did you have to sneak off like that from Ektún? Can you tell me what you're doing here?”

“I'm here for an international conference if it's any of your business, which I doubt. Now I'll ask you a question. Do you have any idea of where you are?”

“Yes, I do.”

He laughed. “I mean where you really are. Right back there, Burns, is the site of an ancient city that you never heard of, known in our modern language as the Inaccessible City of Dawn. I've had it all to myself. There's not much to see, you think, and then you realize that this is just the tip of an extensive conurbation. It goes back for miles in the jungle. Other people will be coming along soon, but I can't discuss that. I can't talk about our agenda. I can tell you that a compass needle does some very crazy things here. Mine won't even move. There's a powerful magnetic force field here and it's highly localized. It's an entry window. You've always underestimated me, Burns. You never dreamed that I would find an entry window all on my own. Did you know I was the first one to arrive? But I think now I may have gotten the day wrong.”

“All right, get your stuff together. We're going downstream to catch a train. We're going back to Mérida.”

“Oh, no. The other delegates will be along soon. I've already made a rough map of the central court, what I am calling the Promenade, and I've dug two latrines. A lot of these conference chumps won't know the first thing about field sanitation. Right now I'm trying to clear some separated areas so we can have several workshops going on at once. It's the hardest work I've ever done in my life. The brush is too wet and green to burn. We killed two snakes just this morning.”

“Nobody's coming, Rudy. They called it off. This is the wrong place anyway.”

He finished off the honeycomb and licked his fingers. There were bee stings on his face. “Oh? Is that a fact? And just how would you know?”

“The City of Dawn is a long way upstream on the other side of the river. You got the day right but you came down too far and you're in the wrong country on top of that.”

“How would you know? Who invited you?”

“We just came from there. Ask any of these people. It's all over. Your conference got rained out.”

“You're not a trained observer.”

“No, but I could see that much. I was there.”

“It's odd how you keep turning up. Anyway I'm not going downstream. I left my trailer and my Checker Marathon back at Ektún.”

“Your car is in Mérida. There's nobody at Ektún. They're all gone. Now get your things and let's go. Louise is worried about you.”

“Louise sent you out here?”

“She thought you were lost.”

“Me lost?”

“Yes.”

“It's funny how she keeps running to you with every little thing. You never even went to college. What's that on your head? Who are all those people with you?”

They were prisoners. I was dealing with prisoners, and here was one more. All I could think of was to keep my head count straight and get them back to the brig intact and sign them over to the turnkey and be done with them. As for my headgear, it was one of Doc's gift handkerchiefs with the corners knotted, a skullcap, a Dan cap.