ViraVax Page 12

  Rico didn’t tell Carlos that he’d been here twice before, that he had lived with the Maya years ago and ghosted most of the jungles of the region. Instead, Rico kept him talking.

  “And the sacrifice of the ball court?” Rico asked.

  Rico could see Carlos was let down by this question, like he’d expected something more from Rico. Even the casual tourist has heard of the sacrificial ball game of the Mayas. Rico was flattered that Carlos expected better of him.

  Carlos shrugged.

  “Two teams, with captains. They wear equipment like your football, lots of pads. They try to slap a hard rubber ball through a stone hoop sideways on the wall. The winning team gets to run through the gallery, collecting jewelry and favors from the nobles. If the weather has been bad for crops, the winning captain has the honor of being killed. To save his people.”

  Carlos didn’t seem interested in elaborating and recited this lecture in a bored monotone.

  “How did they do it?”

  A sigh, a thump of the withered limb against the car door.

  “Cut throat, cut off head, open chest and take out heart,” Carlos said.

  He added the appropriate gestures.

  “Efficient,” Rico admitted.

  Carlos shrugged.

  “The ball court is nothing,” he said. “The Magician’s Temple, that is very special.” Carlos repeated, with a nod, “Very special.”

  “What makes it special?”

  “The place, the earth that it is on. Its position in that place. The centuries. You will see.” Carlos nodded his head at Rachel. “It will be good for you, the temple. You will see.”

  Then he stopped the station wagon on the shoulder to add his last jug of water to the radiator. The only mountain pass that Carlos had driven was this pitiful saddle, just a hundred meters high at the summit. The only other breaks in the terrain for two hundred klicks were temples.

  Carlos explained how sunset and moonrise faced off on the diagonal at the top of the Wizard’s Temple, making the inner chambers into alternating geometries of silver and gold, shadow and light. The staircase casts an undulating serpent of shadow against the walls. This happens once a year, and this is the night.

  “. . . and you stand inside, at the top, and let the shadows divide you. Then good and bad will leave your body: good to the light and bad to the shadow. You walk out with your luck for the rest of your life.”

  His glance shifted from the road to Rico’s eyes, back again. Then back.

  “Who told you this?” Rico asked. “A teacher?”

  “No, no teacher. Uncle. He was a bad one, my friend, and he came back cured of the women and mescal.”

  “Do you think I can be cured?”

  This was the first time Rico spoke of the argument, of his relationship with the young woman. It felt possible in Spanish.

  Carlos softened his voice almost to a whisper.

  “There is no cure for love, friend,” he said, but the word he used for “cure” was “salvation.” He rattled his bent left arm against his door and shrugged a twisted fist skyward. “If my uncle is right, if there are these devils, then I will walk away from them tonight.”

  Rico had no idea at the time that “tonight” meant “midnight” and “I” meant “we.”

  They drove awhile in the relative silence of the road and the countryside.

  Rico felt Rachel’s breathing shift. Now she stretched, and looked around, and Carlos aimed his attention straight ahead. Rachel’s eyes shone with an ice-light: cold, blue and clear. At dawn, driving the scrub jungle through heavy mist, he noticed her eyes had been a lush, snakeskin green.

  By the time the five of them got to Uxmal their eyes were tired from afternoon sun off the hood. Everything seemed hazed in light, a fine white wash. Carlos preferred to wait with his car in a patch of shade, so they cleared the guard gate without him and walked to the foot of the Temple of the Magician. A busload of American college students climbed the steep face in a gusting wind, all shouting to one another in rude, idiomatic English.

  To the left hunched a lone Jaguar statue, an altar. Several of the young people gathered around this one. Rico explained the Jaguar and fertility to Rachel and their friends, the Agency’s briefing version but a good one. From somewhere on the breeze came a whiff of tortillas hissing over charcoal.

  A fat American girl about Rachel’s age jumped onto the statue, clasping its head in her dimpled thighs. Another girl shrieked, then turned to the rest and shouted, “Tim, Brian. . . Shelley sat on its face! You guys, it was so funny! She sat on his face!”

  “Must’ve been too big to get her mouth around it,” one boy commented, and they all laughed.

  Rachel’s friend Bob reached for an empty Coke bottle that leaned against the Jaguar’s shoulder, but a little dark-eyed boy snatched it up first.

  Rico pulled them away in disgust, sorry that he’d been seen speaking English at all. He and Rachel wandered the stones under a reddening sun and climbed the Wizard’s Temple just before sunset. Everyone else came down early, afraid of the treacherous footholds and the rising shadows.

  Shadows clarified the open spaces between the sacrificial ball court and the scrub jungle skirting the compound. A few stragglers walked the ball court below. Every word they spoke rang true to Rico four hundred meters away. Every grunt and cry of the ball players must have been heard by all. This ceremonial game performed a great prayer to cheer on the restoration of happiness and plenty.

  Rico toyed with the ring in his right pants pocket. Marrying Rachel would be respectable, and not at all what anyone would expect.

  Especially Grace, he thought.

  Another buzzard circled twice, then trailed out of sight somewhere towards Costa Brava. The scrub jungle around the temples reminded him of his first meeting with Red Bartlett, inside the border of what had once been Guatemala, and, before that, Belize, British Honduras, the Mosquito Coast. The young Red came down to please his wife and to hone his broken Spanish. Like Rico, he had stayed, seduced by the ultimate opiate of doing what he loved. That was a lifetime ago.

  Bartlett’s lifetime.

  Rachel and the other couple waited on the veranda of the temple, but Rico stood inside, watching them and shooting pictures through the archway.

  “What’s the matter?” Rachel asked with a childlike shrug. “Can you see through my dress?”

  Rico had been staring from the shadows. She stood in the doorway of the temple, her body backlit by sunset and a glorious rising moon that just fit its shoulders into the frame of the entrance around her. A sharpness in the setting of the ring in his pocket bit at an infected hangnail on his finger.

  “Nothing’s the matter,” he said, “just daydreaming. Yes, I can see through your dress.”

  They stood inside a stone doorway atop the Sorcerer’s Pyramid, a doorway that framed tonight’s moonrise over sunset perfectly. This room had been the Magician’s personal quarters. Bats chittered from the beam holes. Outside, crickets and cicadas quieted with the rising of the moon. When it came time to give her the ring, Rico didn’t know why he asked her what he did.

  “I thought we were going to drop it,” she said. Those soft lips thinned into a hard gray line. Her freckles stood out in the rising moonlight, distinct in a dead sort of way, like bruised scales.

  “I can’t drop it.”

  “What do you need to know for, anyway?”

  “Because you don’t want to tell me.”

  Rico’s heart was slamming along pretty fast, and he had the shakes a little bit. Hunting used to make him feel that way. Slipping around in a war at night made him feel that way.

  The shadow of the hooked arm of their driver snaked across the temple wall behind Rico like a great plumed serpent, encircling Rachel’s head and shoulders. Only an illusion of shadow, but in an eyeblink it boosted Rico’s heartbeat even more.

  “We must go now,” Carlos announced. “They are locking up, there will be trouble and a fine.”

&n
bsp; Rico thanked him. Rachel took Rico’s hand and they called the others. When the going got rough, Rachel picked her way ahead of him. He got two great shots of her silhouette against the moonlit stones. Her pale dress fanned out like wings in the breeze, the red splash of her hair the only real color left against the gray.

  They met Carlos on the path, and two muttering guards locked the gates behind them.

  “Do you know how you’re going to get back in?” Rico asked him.

  “Yes,” he said. “What about the others?”

  “I haven’t asked them. Everyone is hungry and thirsty, no? Let’s go to the mission that we passed. After dinner I will ask.”

  “For this, for the rest of the night, you are the guests of me and my car.”

  Rico thanked him, as though he had a choice, but courtesy demanded it.

  “There are snakes,” Carlos warned. “Serpientes.”

  He repeated the word for Rachel’s sake, but to her credit she didn’t flinch.

  “There are cenotes, wells. They drop out from under you in this earth here. It falls in sometimes and swallows you up.”

  “When was the last time?”

  Carlos shrugged. “I don’t know. People just say.”

  Village women glided in with the unsubtle dusk. Their arms resembled great wings, draped as they were with embroidery. Green- and blue-bordered sashes trailed them like fragile tail feathers. They held the dresses to Rachel and smoothed them out, sweeping her blaze of hair where they wanted it for effect in the dim light, just so. Their eyes reflected coffee and candlelight.

  Rachel bought a white dress, a pretty one that immediately came unstitched, but it was that warm, happy time of evening just as the mosquitoes come out.

  They downed a few beers at the mission bar, then dinner. Carlos stuck to Diet Coke and cigarettes that he snapped out of the pack to his lips in a graceful, one-handed flick. The others liked the idea, Rico knew they would.

  Then Bob told them about the duct tape in his bag.

  “For around the doors in the hotel in case there’s a fire,” he said. “But we could make a ball out of it and play on the court. That would be a trip.”

  Rachel and Bernice laughed and toasted, “Yeah, let’s do it!”

  They had two hours to kill. Carlos paced it off outside.

  When Rico stepped outside for air, Carlos showed him the path. A power line strung out from the mission in a straight line to the temple grounds, for the tourist shop. Scrub brush came chest-high to Rico and wasn’t hard going except for the bugs.

  Chiggers in the grass bit them up around the ankles. They were just drunk enough and the moon bright enough that they made it, still a little tipsy, sweating under the ivory disc of a moon. Bob’s duct-tape ball was a silver blur against the stones of the ball-court wall.

  “Remember,” Bernice called out from some shadow to Rico’s right, “winning captain gets sacrificed.”

  “Only on special occasions,” Rachel said.

  She let go Rico’s hand and slapped the makeshift ball into the wall. It skidded, sparkling up along the stones in a long, smooth arc.

  “You have to be quiet down there,” Carlos hissed. “The guards will hear.”

  Rachel tugged Rico’s sleeve.

  “Where are you going? Don’t you want to play?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “But I want to see the moon now from the top. Then I’ll come down and play.”

  “You won’t,” she said. “You always say you will, but you won’t.”

  The ringstone in his pocket irritated his right thigh with every step up the steep stairway of the temple. It felt heavier, colder.

  “Play ball!” Bob said in a clear whisper.

  Rico turned to watch Rachel run off to the game. He topped the temple stairs, conscious of the beer numbing his feet, toying with his balance. At the top, Carlos faced away from him, standing across a diagonal line of stone inlaid across the floor.

  The doorsill at the tips of Rico’s feet dropped away down the rough stone face to the ball-court plaza. Now the moon polished the face of the stonework and lit up the countryside. All around them birdsongs started up, sleepy and confused at the light. The scent of allspice and bougainvillea hung in the humid stillness of the night.

  The moon sighted down the diagonal between Rico’s feet. He did not feel a particular pull towards either side.

  Bob scored below, his duct-tape ball thwocketing through the ancient stone goal. Because of the drinking and the excitement, Rico wasn’t surprised that Rachel called him by the wrong name. Rico had heard her use this very name by mistake instead of his own.

  “Bob,” she corrected herself, “I’m sorry. I meant ‘Yeah, Bob, nice shot!’”

  Suddenly Rico stood awash in light. The shadow had swept aside while he was distracted, and now he heard other voices down below, speaking abrupt and agitated Spanish. Behind him, Carlos sighed and shuffled forward. He patted Rico’s back with his good arm.

  “We’d better go down,” Carlos said. “Now we will all be fined. There is trouble. I hope you and your friends have money.”

  Carlos flexed his left arm a couple of times before they started down.

  “The arm,” Rico asked him, “will it work?”

  Carlos shrugged in his way, intent on the footing. The moonlight’s angle dazzled them on their climb down, the way it reflected so brightly off the stone.

  “Perhaps with exercise,” Carlos said.

  When they were nearly down and the four guards approached with the others, Carlos asked, “And your woman? The girl?”

  “It is lost,” he said. “Perhaps another time.”

  The guards might have settled for a private sum and the whole matter could have been dropped right there. The chief of the guards delicately insisted that he and his men had standards. Bob indelicately shoved a wad of money under his nose before Rico could intervene. It became a long night.

  The next morning in the city Rico sold his plane ticket and paid off the fine against Carlos and the station wagon.

  Carlos drove Rachel and the others to the airport while Rico sold his ring to a thin, unhappy-looking jeweler above the courthouse. It came to quite a pile of pesos. By the time Carlos pulled in with his radiator steaming Rico had already moved into the spare room, the small one out on the porch with all the light.

  Solaris walked in a week later, claiming a personal call. The remarkable albino left behind everything there was to know about Red Bartlett, or anyone who showed interest in Red Bartlett. Solaris implied that Rico could be back in the saddle soon. Meanwhile, they both had some whispers to drop and personal markers to call in, and it would start back in Costa Brava with a party at the embassy. Solaris even bought him a suit, a white one like the old boys wore in Guatemala, when there had been a Guatemala.

  Rico was unofficially employed. He sweetened a rum to celebrate.

  Chapter 17

  La Libertad oozed like a great brown sore from the crusty foothills of the Jaguar Mountains to the sea. Sonja banked Mariposa around as gently as possible to give Harry an all-points view. Harry was getting better about flying, but he still white-knuckled it the whole way.

  Industry met the sea at La Libertad, fouling the lucrative bathing beaches and the mandatory air alike with its thick, brown scum. Pollution was the Satan that President Garcia had sworn to smite when the Children of Eden won him his office. Fouled air framed the elegant, emerald islands of plenty in a sea of despair. The private grounds of the haciendas of the wealthy had long ago sucked the surrounding beauty dry.

  No wonder the Gardeners are winning over the rich, Sonja thought. Greening the earth is noble. Feeding the poor is a threat.

  The Gardeners promised the poor more food. While there was no more food, there were fewer people, so it worked out much the same.

  Birthrate down to zero in some neighborhoods, she thought. But never a word on the news—the Gardener news.

  Two large buildings that were not private stood out from
the rest: the National Palace, home of President Garcia; and the United States Embassy. Sonja’s mother would be attending a reception at the embassy this afternoon and that made Sonja nervous. The reception would end after curfew, and her mother would have to spend the night.

  I don’t know what’s worse, she thought. Curfew roadblocks or drunk politicians.

  In the past couple of years she’d had a few bad experiences with the drunk politicians, their backhand brushes against a breast, a bump against her butt. Sonja thought she’d take her chances with the roadblocks.

  The palatial and embassy compounds were made more green, more beautiful, by the scabby contrast of the surrounding poverty that they fed upon.

  Sonja watched the guns of the outdated Phalanx system on the embassy rooftop tracking her little biplane. The Phalanx was outdated, but blow-by alone would disintegrate her Student Prince. If she continued her course for a few more moments, a red flare would warn her off. If she did not change course within thirty seconds of the flare, she and Harry and her little biplane would be confetti.

  Sonja throttled up and banked towards the Park of Justice and Mercy, and as they lost altitude she heard clearly the horns of morning traffic blare over Harry’s groan and the clatter of her engine.

  La Libertad was not a peaceful city, even from the air.

  A Holy Week procession intersected a political march, and between icons Sonja could read signs like: “Alphabets not Bullets,” “Beans and Liberty,” “Arrest the Death Merchants.” She wasn’t quite low enough to recognize faces. Sonja was sure that both she and Harry knew some of the demonstrators. Students all over Costa Brava chose this spring vacation to march the streets with their signs and masks.

  Three truckloads of soldiers positioned themselves ahead of the marchers and to either side. One soldier pointed up at Sonja’s plane, and another spoke into his Sidekick. A Mongoose vertical takeoff jump jet had been hovering near the crowd; now it turned on axis and rose to Sonja’s altitude. She changed course again, heading back home via the long loop up the valley.