Gringos (23 page)

I led the way with my flashlight along the bank till we came to a gully that was cut by the runoff water from the spring. Then up we went, straight up the gully, grabbing at bushes and slipping on wet moss. The spring, little used now, was about halfway up the cliff, enclosed in a circular revetment of ancient masonry. I was afraid the hippies might have found it and fouled it in some way, but no, the water was clear, with a few leaves floating in it and some bugs skittering across the surface. I pushed the head of my plastic flashlight beneath the surface. At the bottom, farther away than it appeared, grains of sand tumbled about where a jet of water surged out of the earth. I couldn't fix the exact point. The source, the
ojo de agua,
the eye of water itself, was a mystery under the whirling sand. It was a small shifting turbulence, nothing more, a spirit.

We drank and then washed our faces, saying nothing. My dripping head was perhaps a little clearer than before. It was hard to say. My bad knee was a good deal worse for the climb. There was a smooth outcropping of rock here about the size and shape of a bus. We sat on the ledge and had a smoke.

Refugio said, “The boy is up there then? With the
tóxicos?
”

“I don't know. We'll see.”

“I think he is dead.”

“You may be right.”

“The two
chiflados
killed him and threw his body into the river. All that laughing didn't fool me.”

“They would have kept his equipment and his clothes.”

“It was hidden. With their boat. They had a
barca
somewhere. Or a raft, a
balsa.
They won't need a motor to go back downstream to Yoro.”

“No, they would have forgotten something. Some little something of Rudy's. I don't miss much when I'm looking hard.”

“You will die out here, too, a fool, with no money in your pocket and no wife at home and no pretty little child of your own.”

“Not me. I have my plans.”

“
Qué va.
You don't have no plans.”

“I have long-range plans that I never talk about.”

“
Qué va. Poco probable
. . . . Do you know what I am doing, Jaime? I am praying for my baby. Sula was right. I should be with Manolo on his long drive to Yucatán and you take me out here on your foolish
paseo.
”

The
opresión
was on him. It was a terrible thought, that he might have to put up one of those little roadside crosses for his dead and mangled son.

“Your Manolito is all right. He's a better driver than you are. Manolo is in Mérida right now. He's in some game room playing a
futbolista
machine.”

“I should have listened to her. Sula is never wrong. You must drag the Doctor out here, too, and he is old and sick.”

“We'll have a quick look around the
ruinas.
If the boy is there we're done and if he's not there we're done. We'll go home.”

He sighed. Not a word of concern about my truck. From here to the top, about 300 feet above the river, a flight of steps had been cut into the rock, still useful though overgrown and eroded. We were huffing and puffing as we came over the crest, two blowing men out of the night with guns and a dog. We appeared suddenly before a ring of hippies around a fire. There were open cans of food in the embers. A hobo jungle, you might think, if hoboes sang. They stopped singing and looked at us. Someone was always breaking in on their fun. In the heart of the Petén forest they still couldn't get away from the likes of me.

I saw other watchfires here and there in the clearing. The place was a campground. There were beach towels and little orange tents and coconut shells and a stalk of bananas and pickle jars and bread wrappers and water jugs and sleeping bags and colorful serapes and pitiful shelters made of plastic raincoats. There was a girl with lightning bugs in her hair. One brave boy had made it up here on aluminum crutches. He supported himself on those half-crutches called forearm canes.

Many others must have dropped out along the way. These were the hardy ones. There may have been a hundred people scattered about on the plateau but no more. Vincent had led me astray there. I was expecting I don't know what, a shrieking mob, the last hours of Gomorrah, a good deal of eye-rolling, but in fact the crowd was thin and listless, such as you might see at a track meet. Nothing of a ceremonial nature was going on. There was no apparent focus to the thing. No one seemed to be in charge. It was just one more herd of hippies milling around in a pasture. Had something gone wrong? Maybe the frolic was to start later.

A pasture, I call it, this long plaza or courtyard of the old city of Likín, which the people of Yorito kept cleared for their single milk cow to graze on. It was a rectangle bounded on the long sides by a series of mounds, with temples underneath the dirt and greenery. The Mayas had flattened the hilltop and built their City of Dawn here high above the jungle roof, where they could get a breeze now and then. This end of the plaza was open, overlooking the river, and at the far end there was a partially excavated pyramid, known as the
Castillo.
Most of the digging had been done there, at the pyramid complex. The grand staircase was exposed, leading to a shrine at the top, a stone box, and on top of that, capping the whole thing, was a decorative bit of stone fretwork, what they call a roof comb. No one was moving about on the
Castillo
stairway. It was odd. When travelers come upon a pyramid, they must climb it and crawl all over it and wave from the top.

I spoke a bit loud to the hippies. It was my experience that their attention wandered. “We're not here to bother you,” I said. “We're not going to interfere with your—program. I'm looking for a friend. An emergency has come up at home. His wife is sick, and I know you'll want to help me. His name is Rudy. Can everybody hear me? Rudy Kurle is the name. From Pennsylvania. He's a big blond fellow in army gear. A brown army outfit and heavy boots. Does that ring a bell? You may have seen him speaking into a tape recorder. He carries a lot of stuff on his belt. How about it? If you've seen him, please tell me. You'll be doing him and his wife both a big favor.”

Someone said in a very low voice, “He may have his reasons for staying away from home.”

A Scandinavian girl with hairy legs said, “I am not even listening to you. Your words have no more significance to me than the buzzing of flies. I am no longer hearing all these dead words floating around in the air.”

Not a bad policy on the whole. “Suit yourself,” I said. “But we're not leaving here till we find him. I think he's around here somewhere. The sooner we find him the sooner we'll be gone.”

The others had nothing at all to say to me. They weren't so much defiant as puzzled and annoyed. Tired too, no doubt, from their long trek. It was hopeless. I would need a bullhorn to get through to these people. I went about my old business of looking them over one by one. I put my light into the faces of those in the shadows. Some took this indignity better than others. I interrupted their feeding. I lifted the flaps of their little tents. We moved from campfire to campfire. Refugio walked behind me, grumbling. Ramos drew back and bared his teeth at those who tried to pet him. They took him for a Frisbee-catching pal, a great mistake. The girl with the lightning bugs followed me around too, saying the same thing over and over again.

“Share the wonder, bring a friend.”

“I did bring one.”

“Share the wonder, bring a friend.”

“Most people wouldn't want bugs in their hair.”

“Share the wonder, bring a friend.”

The bugs were tied to her hair with thread, and they flashed on in ragged sequence with a cool green light. Refugio said we should have brought along something to sell. We could have coiled great long ropes of sausages around our necks and sold them here at monopoly prices. I agreed, we should have thought to bring sausages and a megaphone. The
arqueos
or some other looters had been here since my last visit. All the inscribed stelae had been uprooted and carried away, leaving only the blank ones. They looked like blank tombstones. They were memorials to nothing, or perhaps some daring artistic gesture.

The Yorito milk cow, of a stunted breed unknown to me, stood very still in a sunken place, a walled-in arena where the Maya once played a game with a rubber ball. She was ivory-colored with drooping ears and a pink deflated udder not much bigger than a goat udder. The weeds looked tough and wiry there in the ball court, but it was a quiet place to wait out the siege. All this vegetation and you could see her ribs. I wished I could have given her an armful of sweet alfalfa.

They weren't all young dopers at this
congreso,
as Refugio called it. A middle-aged man with bangs came up to me. He wore a baggy shirt with a dazzling floral pattern, and of course sandals. Feet are all the better for a good airing out, and I would be the last one to deny it, but I think these people had something more than ventilation in mind. They were downright aggressive about displaying their feet to the world. The man came up to me, hesitant and polite, and asked if I might by any chance be
El Mago.

“Who? No.”

“No, I didn't think so. Excuse me. I didn't really expect
El Mago
to be armed, though they do say he is a complex and unpredictable brute. The thing is, I don't know what he looks like. He could very well be right here among us.”

So, they were waiting for this
El Mago
fellow to appear. He, The Wizard, was overdue and there was growing fear that he might not show. Just who was he? What would he do? No one seemed to know. The only
El Mago
I knew was a very old man who lived in the town of Valladolid, if indeed he still lived. He was a famous
brujo,
a witch, who could read the future from the flopping throes of a decapitated turkey, and who was credited with fortyfour sons out of a long series of wives and mistresses. The daughters went unnumbered. I knew of him, that is, from newspaper articles and photographs. I had never actually seen him give a reading. But that scrawny old bird could hardly be described as a complex brute, nor at his age would he be fit to make the hard journey to Likín. Unless they had lashed him to a chair and borne him in here on shoulder poles, with his old head lolling from side to side. I put nothing past them.

I wondered about their theory and what part
El Mago
would play and how they saw the end coming. Why gather at this place? Why gather at all? Was there to be a spectacle or just lights out? No wrath? I couldn't get a feel for the mechanics of the thing or for the shape of it. I was curious but too proud to show much interest. The line I took was one of indifference—no lofty contempt, just that I couldn't be bothered. In fact I was uneasy. These lost sheep knew nothing. I was pretty sure of that. They simply wanted to be on stage for the dramatic finish. It must all wind down with them and nobody else. The thought of the world going on and on without them, much as usual, and they forgotten, was unbearable. Nothing important was going to happen here. The burning light from heaven might indeed fail one day, but not, I thought, tomorrow. And yet I was uncomfortable. I didn't like meddling in such things.

Down the way from the ball court, a dead woman lay stretched out on a striped blanket. Two girls were sitting there fanning the body. The dead woman's name was Jan, I was relieved to hear, and not Tonya Barge. Then I saw that she was probably too old anyway to be Vincent's sweetheart. One leg of her shiny black slacks was cut off, exposing a black swelling on her calf. Boots might or might not have helped. The snake had struck her a few inches below the knee, a
palanca
I had no doubt. By way of treatment someone had squeezed lime juice over the wound and poked around in it with a knife—a red-hot knife, the girls said. They didn't know the woman's last name or where she was from. She wore a white blouse and braided gold belt. The metallic strands gleamed under my light. No watch, no finger rings, one silver bracelet. It was my habit to note such things in case the description turned up on a Blue Sheet. The girls said she had passed out at once from the shock of the bite and never came around, never opened her eyes again. They were fanning her with branches to keep the flies off. The male fanners had already slipped away, if they had ever been here. You couldn't count on men to stick with a thankless job like that.

A gust of raindrops came and went. The lightning drew closer. Sula had told me that you can only see a person's true face in the glare of lightning. Refugio was disturbed by the way these
congreso
people walked, or he pretended to be. Youngsters should show more spirit, he said, more gaiety,
mas alegría.
It was a shame the way they moped around. They should stand up straight and carry themselves through life with a manly bearing—like Refugio, that is, who strode about like the Prince of Asturias. With that carriage and that air, he had no real need for elevated loafers. Now he dropped into a slouch and imitated the hippie movements. He went into a creeping shuffle and then did a kind of slow chicken walk. I was limping myself. The rain came back in a scattering of fat drops. The
congreso
people said various things to me.

“I have styes on my eyelids and ulcers on my tongue because I haven't been eating right.”

“
El Mago
feeds on human hearts.”

“Just what is your authority?”

“This is the landscape of my dreams.”

“There are food thieves in this camp.”

“
El Mago
is worth a hundred of you.”

“They told me there was going to be a golden pavilion here with plenty of good food for everybody. They said you could pick grapes right off the trees.”