Gringos, Page 4

  All the same, she said, and be that as it may, Ektún was a place of evil gloom, and so was Yaxchilán, and Piedras Negras too, come to that, all those old abandoned cities of the antiguos along the river banks, and you couldn’t pay her enough money to sleep for one night around those old stones.

  Sula was Mayan herself, of the Chontal group, with heavy-lidded eyes and hook nose and receding chin. I had seen her face on a mossy stela at the Copán ruin, carved in stone a thousand years ago. She was one of the few Indians I had ever heard express strong feelings about such matters. The ones I knew—uprooted city dwellers for the most part, admittedly—showed little interest in the monuments of their ancestors. They neither feared nor venerated the templos of the old ones.

  The Servel didn’t make it to fifty at the given time, or even to fifty-five, but the door gasket was bad, I pointed out, and once Manolo had replaced it, the box would surely do the job. It would last for years too. Refugio wrote “$75” on his palm and showed it to me.

  “That wouldn’t even pay for my gasoline.”

  But I gave in and settled for a hundred. He agreed it was a good buy.

  We stayed up late in the office talking about the old days, and one thing and another. Refugio fed tidbits to Ramos. He asked me to be on the lookout for a Tecumseh gasoline engine with a horizontal shaft, of about eight horsepower, and some of those little German cigarette-rolling machines that you used to be able to find in Veracruz. He asked me if I thought he needed one of those new water beds. “No.” Motorized golf cart? “No.” Food blender? “Yes, to make licuados. Milkshakes.” Trash compactor? “No.” It would take one the size of a house to compact his trash. He showed me an advertisement for elevator shoes in an American magazine. Could I get him a pair? One of the shoes was pictured, a brown loafer, which promised to give you an invisible three-inch lift above your fellow men.

  “Three inches,” he said. “How much?”

  I showed him with thumb and finger. “Like that. About eight centimeters.”

  He studied the deceptive shoe with a dreamy smile. Three inches was a little more than he had thought.

  I SLEPT ON the couch and was off early. I had breakfast as I drove. Sula had left me a sack of hard-boiled eggs, already peeled, and four buttered slices of Bimbo bread, some salt in a twist of paper, and a single habanero pepper pod, the world’s hottest. Bimbo is like Wonder bread, or light bread, as we called it in Caddo Parish. I had told her many times that I preferred corn tortillas, but she took that to be a polite gesture or an affectation. She knew the yanquis likes their bread finely spun from bleached wheat flour. Sula felt sorry for me because I had no wife to look after me.

  The washboard gravel ended just beyond Refugio’s place. No more maintenance. From here on the road was just a rough slash across the hilly Chiapas rain forest. The drive had once been a shady one all the way, under the jungle canopy. Now there were cleared pastures with stumps where cattle ranchers had moved in. I met a log truck and saw a Pemex crew at work with their seismic gear, sounding the earth for pockets of oil. Here and there I passed a hut made of sticks and thatch, where a solitary farmer had squatted. This was his finca. It was more like camping out than farming.

  The road, at this time, ended at the ruins of Bonampák, of the famous wall paintings, but I wasn’t going that far. To reach Ektún and the Tabí River, you turned off to the left, or east, on a still more primitive track. I did so, and the trees closed in on me. Limbs whacked against my windows. I moved forward at a creep, but even so my poor truck was twisted and jolted about by rocks and bony roots. The glove compartment door flew open. Screws were backing out of their holes and nuts off their bolts. I had to hold my hand on the gearstick to keep it from popping out of gear. I saw a wild pig, a black squirrel as big as a house cat, darting green parrots. You don’t expect parrots to be accomplished fliers, but they go like bullets.

  I saw nothing human until I reached the fording place on the Tabí. There was a flash of yellow through the foliage. As I turned the bend, I made out a car stranded in midstream. It was a bright yellow Checker Marathon, towing a pop-top tent trailer. The trailer had been knocked sideways by the current.

  Rudy Kurle. What was he doing out here? No use asking. How did he get this far in that rig? I honked my horn.

  He was in the back seat, where he must have been asleep. He stuck his head out the window and shouted. “Hey, Burns! Great! This is great! Did you copy my Mayday?”

  “What? No!” I could barely hear him over the rush of water.

  “I need a jump start!”

  He needed more than that.

  He had been sitting there all night, dead in the water, trying to start the thing and calling for help on his CB radio, on one channel after another, until he had run his battery down. His DieHard had done died. I seldom turned on my own CB, and in any case there were no signals to pick up out here. The water was about knee deep, but with deeper potholes. He had dropped his right front wheel into one of these. I drove around him and positioned my truck on the hard ground of the opposite bank. I pieced together a chain, a nylon rope, and a nylon tow-strap.

  Rudy wouldn’t get out of the car to help. The water was too rough, or he didn’t want to get his lace-up explorer boots wet, or something. Useless to ask why. Usually he wasn’t such a delicate traveler. How long would he have sat there? The river was a tributary of the Usumacinta, tea-colored from dead leaves, only moderately swift at this time of year, and only about sixty feet wide at this ford. A bit more maybe. I’m a poor judge of distance over water.

  I went out into the stream with my tow-line, jumping from rock to rock. Another of man’s farcical attempts at flight. We keep trying but none of us, not even the high-jumper slithering backwards over his crossbar, ever gets very far off the earth. And yet we come down hard. My bad knee gave way on one of these landings, and I went head-first into the water and tumbled a ways downstream. I didn’t matter, getting soaked, as I had to bob all the way under anyway to hook the strap to a frame member.

  All the while Rudy was making suggestions. “No, no,” I said. “Listen to me. Put it in neutral and just keep the wheels straight. Don’t do anything else. Stay off the brakes. Stop talking.”

  First the chain came loose from my trailer ball, and then the nylon rope, twanging like a banjo string, snapped. The line parted, as the sailors say. Pound for pound stronger than steel! Such is the claim made for these wonder fibers, but I’ll take steel. Third time lucky. I removed some rocks in front of his tires and then, in low-range four-wheel drive, in doble tracción, I yanked him loose and got him up on the bank, trailer and all, without stopping.

  Rudy didn’t thank me but he did offer me some food. He had brown cans of meat and crackers he had taken from his National Guard unit in Pennsylvania. All I wanted was a long pull on my water jug. I checked my tires for rock cuts. Wet rubber is easily sliced. Rudy showed me a nick in his bumper. “That’s what your strap did.” The bumper was decorated in the style of big Mexican trucks, with his road name, “The Special K,” painted on it. That was his CB handle.

  He said, “Wait a minute. Who told you I was going to Tumbalá anyway?”

  “It was all over town when I left. There must have been something in the papers.”

  “Louise told you. Everybody wants to stick his nose into my business.”

  “Nobody told me. I’m not going to Tumbalá.”

  He thought that over as he spread meat paste on a survival cracker with his commando knife. “Well, it’s funny, you coming along like this, right behind me.”

  “Yes, except I’m going to Ektún. This is not the road to Tumbalá.”

  “Your map says it is.”

  My map! He showed me. Yes, I remembered now. A month or so ago I had told him about this Tumbalá, a minor ruin on the Usumacinta, with curious miniature temples. They were small stone houses, built as though for people two or three feet high. Rudy was excited. This was his meat, tiny houses. Little rooms! An old logging road,
no longer passable, even in four-wheel drive, led to the place, but you could follow it on foot easily enough. Quite a long hike, however. I had explained all this to him and sketched out a rough map.

  “No, you came too far, Rudy. You didn’t turn soon enough.”

  “Your map is not drawn to scale.”

  “Of course not. It’s just a simple diagram. But it’s easy enough to see where to turn off. You can’t drive to Tumbalá anyway. I told you that.”

  “I was going as far as I could and then set up base camp.”

  He wore a bush hat with the brim turned up on one side, Australian fashion, and a belted safari jacket with epaulets, rings and pleated pockets, and he wanted to be known as “Rudy Kurle, author and lecturer.” He and Louise were in Mexico to gather material for a book about some space dwarfs or “manikins” who came here many years ago from a faraway planet. There was no connection with the chaneques, as far as I knew. Their little men were benign, with superior skills and knowledge, and they had transformed a tribe of savages into the Mayan civilization. Not very flattering to the Indians, and it wasn’t of course a new theory, except perhaps for the dwarf element. There had been recent landings as well.

  As a geocentric I didn’t find this stuff convincing. I knew the argument—all those galaxies!—a statistical argument, but in my cosmology men were here on earth and nowhere else, go as far as you like. There was us and the spirit world and that was it. It was a visceral belief or feeling so unshakable that I didn’t even bother to defend it. When others laughed at me, I laughed with them. Still, the flying saucer books were fun to read and there weren’t nearly enough of them to suit me. I liked the belligerent ones best, that took no crap off the science establishment.

  Rudy was often gone on these mysterious field trips, to check out reports of ancient television receivers, pre-Columbian Oldsmobiles, stone carvings of barefooted astronauts strapped into their space ships. The ships were driven by “photon propulsion,” although here in the jungle the manikins went about their errands in other, smaller, “slow aircraft.” Rudy wouldn’t describe the machines for me. He and Louise tried to draw people out without giving anything away themselves. There were thieves around who would steal your ideas and jump into print ahead of you. So much uncertainty in their work.

  And so little fellowship among the writers. They shared a beleaguered faith and they stole freely from one another—the recycling of material was such that their books were all pretty much the same one now—but in private they seldom had a good word for their colleagues. There were usually a few of these people in temporary residence in Mérida. They exchanged stiff nods on the street. Rudy even expressed contempt for Erich von Däniken, his master, who had started the whole business, and for lesser writers too, for anyone whose level of credulity did not exactly match his own. A millimeter off, either way, and you were a fool. It was the scorn of one crank for another crank.

  We dried off the contact points and the distributor cap and with a jump from my battery we got the Checker running again. The engine was a Chevrolet straight six, the old stovebolt six, very reliable but looking skinny and forlorn in that big engine bay. To help control this beast on the road, Rudy wore soft leather driving gloves perforated with many tiny holes. Inside the car there was a clutter of boxes, jugs, blankets, gourds, magazines, rocks, books—and a big scrapbook of newspaper clippings, telling of saucer landings in Russia and Brazil, near towns that could not be found in any atlas. The gas pedal was in the shape of a spreading human foot, with the toes all fanned out. It must have been on the car when Rudy bought it because he didn’t go in for comic accessories. There was a press sticker on the windshield—PRENSA, in big red letters, courtesy of Professor Camacho Puut.

  He followed me on to Ektún. Exploration by taxicab. He took that old Checker into places where few others would have ventured. Rudy was serious about his work. In the bars and cafés of Mérida I had heard anthropologists laughing at him, young hot shots who never left town themselves or who went out for a night or two and then scurried back.

  We left the river for a bit and then came back to it downstream to the ruin site. Three pyramids of middling size, partly cleared, and a camp of red and blue tents. A canvas water bag hanging from a limb. A sagging grid of strings lay across the plaza. The Bonar College people stopped work and looked at us. No word of greeting. We came from the outer world bringing good things, and this was our welcome. No more joy here. The dig was falling apart. I had seen it all before.

  Sula was right about the demons. The place was infested with them, many thousands of whom had taken the form of mosquitoes. They swarmed in my face as I got down from the truck and walked shin-deep in ground fog. It was cemetery fog from a vampire movie. A mockingbird perched on my bumper and pecked at the smashed bugs. Up high in the trees the howler monkeys were screaming. Our clattering arrival had set them off. It was like cries of agony from cats. You couldn’t see them.

  I took a bar of yellow laundry soap and went back into the river in my wet clothes. This was a little trick I had picked up years ago in Korea with the First Marine Division. You immerse yourself fully clad and have a bath and wash your clothes at the same time. Then you change into your dry dungarees, all rolled up and resting in your pack. Let dirty clothes rest for a while and they are almost as fresh as clean clothes. A bit stiffer, and the black glaze is still on the collar. There are tigers in Korea, but I never saw one. Nor had I ever caught a glimpse of a jaguar here in the Petén forest. Pumas, ocelots, margays, but not one tigre.

  I went along to Dr. Henry Ritchie’s tent and found him half asleep on a cot, behind a mosquito bar. His clothes were soaked with sweat. His breath came hard. A real gentleman, a good man, as Refugio said, and I always felt a little shame in his presence. Few arqueos had that effect on me. He knew my background but was always friendly. After all, as Doc Flandin said, permit or no permit, we all lived and worked by the same words, namely, there is nothing hid but it shall be opened.

  In a minute or so he saw me sitting there on the stool. He gave me his trembling hand. It was cold. “Jimmy. You’re here.”

  “Just now. I was out of town when your message came or I would have been here sooner. I hear you’ve been ailing.”

  “Oh, I’ve been through this before. Not quite so bad maybe. I can’t keep anything down. Did you have a nice Christmas?”

  “Very nice, thank you. I brought you some long cigars and a bucket of shrimp.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “Why don’t I run you in to Villahermosa? I can have you there in the clinic tonight. That’s where you belong. No use in punishing yourself.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe tomorrow, if I’m no better. Can you stay over?”

  “Sure. We can be off first thing in the morning. You can lie down in the back.”

  A man came barging through the flap and took off his dust mask.

  “You’re Burns?”

  “Right.”

  “I’m Eugene Skinner. You should have reported to me first.”

  This was Skinner, the ape in a shirt. He was a nervous man, about my age, with kinky auburn hair, nappy hair, which must have suggested the monkey to Refugio. It reminded me more of a Duroc hog.

  Then Rudy came in and wanted to know if he was at Tumbalá.

  Skinner said, “No, my boy, this is Ektún. Which is to say, Dark Stone, or Black Stone. Who are you?”

  I introduced him as a friend and a reporter.

  Dr. Ritchie said, “Jimmy brought us some fresh shrimp, Gene.”

  “That’s fine. How about the clutch?”

  “I didn’t bring one.”

  “They didn’t have one in Mérida?”

  “I don’t know. You didn’t tell me what model it was for.”

  “He doesn’t know. We need a clutch, and he brings shrimp.”

  “What’s it doing? Why don’t we take a look at it?”

  “It won’t do any good to look at it.”

  He barged out again. I f
ollowed him and grabbed his arm. “Why haven’t you taken Dr. Ritchie out of here? He’s in bad shape.”

  “How? On a motorbike? If you and your pal Bautista had done your job, I would have some transportation here.”

  The expedition had begun with a respectable little motor pool, now reduced to a single motorcycle, owned by a young graduate student named Burt. The International Travelall was down with a broken axle. The Nissan pickup was in a Villahermosa garage with a blown head gasket. Becker had returned to Chicago in his new Jeep Wagoneer, with a female student who had fallen ill. I was surprised to hear that Becker had bailed out. He who was so eager to get at it. He was a young rich man, a graduate of Bonar College (as was my friend Nardo, the Mérida lawyer) and a dabbler in archaeology. Becker was financing the dig. I think he must have seen himself as Schliemann at Hissarlik, or Lord Carnarvon at King Tut’s tomb. Camp life didn’t suit him, however, and when no treasures were turned up in a week’s time, he went home, back to the trading pit of the Chicago commodities market, where things moved faster.

  It might have been the digging itself. A man who has never dug a ditch or a well or a deep grave, as distinguished from the shallow grave of crime news, has no notion of the work required to move even a moderate amount of rocks and dirt about in an orderly way with hand tools. At this remote site there were no cheap labor gangs, only a few Lacondón Indians, and the professors and students had to do most of the work themselves. Becker must have looked at his little pile of dirt, his spoil, then saw how much remained to be removed before he could get down to work with the dental pick and the tweezers and the camel’s hair brush. He despaired. It may have come to him in the night: I am only Becker at Ektún.