Don't Look Back (8 page)

“I don’t know.”

“Did it have to do with a man with a scar here?” Eve circled her neck and jaw with her hand. “Lives in the canyon by the zip line? You’ve seen him?”

Fortunato shook his head rapidly, picked up his bucket, and walked away.

Concepción gathered the brushes. She turned to leave as well but paused before Eve, her head lowered, straining to find words. “Do not go … there.”

“Why not?” Eve asked.

“Hombre malo,”
she said.

Eve watched her scurry off. The air tasted of dust, tinged with the bitter mist of the cleaning agent.

Hombre malo.

Bad man.

Chapter 11

Steering crazily, Neto cried out, “Look! Mexican zebras!”

In the back of the van, Eve and Jay strained to gaze ahead, only to see a few burros blocking the road. Neto erupted in laughter.

Jay looked at Eve, tapped an imaginary microphone. “Is this thing on?” He rolled his eyes and went back to working the lid of his baseball cap into a better U, his softball biceps lifting and falling.

The van bounced across a series of hand-grenade-worthy potholes, Sue letting out a gasp from the front bench seat, Will almost smacking his head on the roof beside her. The ruins, their afternoon destination, were still a few hard miles out, and impatience was on the rise. Lulu had ceded the passenger seat to Harry after he’d complained of back tightness; she shared the middle bench with Claire, who remained as sullen as ever, gazing out the window, fidgeting with her dive watch. The roaring engine and branches rattling against the van’s sides meant it took effort to communicate with anyone beyond those sitting adjacent, ensuring a measure of privacy for each row.

“Sorry!” Neto shouted back to them, proving he was equal to the task.

“Why don’t you get a four-wheel drive?” Harry shouted.

“Four-wheel drive just means you get stuck
farther out.
” Neto laughed, his fists fighting the wheel. “The roads, the jungle is hard on them. You leave one alone for
six months,
you can come back and it is
gone.
”

As if to prove the point, the asphalt turned to mud. And then, at once, the ground past Eve’s window fell away. She peered down the steep slope. A cargo truck had skidded off the road and rolled partway down the wooded decline before smashing into a tree trunk. The cracked trailer had led to a free-for-all, villagers crowding the fissure, carrying off the abandoned grain in sacks and buckets they had brought. The scene whipped by, and then the ground rose again back to where it belonged. Pressing her face to the glass, Eve peered ahead, spotting a cluster of half-built shacks among the trees. Several of the workers were on break, napping on the dirt road, using bricks as pillows. Eve tensed as the van bore down on them. The tires passed within feet of them, but they didn’t so much as stir.

Same hemisphere, different world.

Neto jerked the wheel, and they bumped across a scalloped ditch, arms bracing, legs sprawling.

“So much for napping on the way there!” Will called out.

“Thank
God,
” Jay muttered to Eve. “He snores.”

“That must get annoying in a…” Here she always struggled.
Boyfriend? Lover? Spouse?
“… a partner.”

Jay swiveled to her. “Partner?
Partner?
Wait a minute.
Will?
” He looked like he might heave.
“Gross.”

“But I thought—”

“Will is
straight
. Like
rebuilds-engine-blocks
straight. Like
drinks-milk-from-the-carton
straight. He’s such a
guy.
” This last with mild disgust. “It’s Gay
Jay.
Not Gay
Will.
”

Eve checked ahead, but thankfully the others were too busy riding the turbulence to overhear anything from the rear. “I just figured—”

“Straight people think any guy who’s friends with a gay dude must be a fag.” Jay thought about it, amused. “Actually,
we
think that, too. But no, Will’s my oldest friend.
Friend.
From elementary school. I just had a bad breakup—hel-
lo
? my
ringtone
?—and he said he’d go on a trip with me to keep me company.”

The van crowded up behind a
colectivo,
a bus-truck combination with a curtain in place of a tailgate, all order of
indígenos
crammed inside and hanging off the sides like human saddlebags. Neto hit the brakes, and Jay reached out one massive arm to catch Eve before she pile-drived into the seat in front of them.

“You haven’t
noticed
?” Jay said.

“What?” Eve said.

“Man, you are
clueless.
The way he’s been looking at you.”

“Okay, I—”

“You sure
you’re
straight?”

“Fairly.”

They veered around the
colectivo,
Neto ticking a thank-you on the horn as they passed. With the movement Eve glided across the bench into Jay. He deposited her back on her side.

“Look, I
wondered
if he was straight,” Eve said. “But, I mean, you guys are sharing a hut—”

Feigned indignation seized Jay’s face. “Oh, so straight people and gay people can’t sleep in the same room?”

“Yes,” Eve said, already starting to smile. “That’s
exactly
what I’m saying. Straight people and gay people can’t sleep in the same room. Actually, they
can,
they just
shouldn’t.
You never know what could happen.”

They rounded another bend, and Eve slid across again, this time turning and tucking in her knees to cannonball into him. They were laughing loudly enough now for Claire to shoot them a sour glance.

The jungle crowded in on the road, the van slowing gradually until it was creeping along, boughs scraping the roof. At last Neto stopped at a seemingly random spot. They spilled out, stretching their necks, testing sore limbs.

“Walk where I walk,” Neto commanded, shoving his way through a break in the foliage.

They followed blindly, struggling through thick underbrush that had covered the remnants of a trail. Despite being the oldest, Harry and Sue made good time, staying up with Neto to soak in every last bit of tour-guide knowledge. Claire struggled to keep pace, Lulu waiting back with her. The jungle grew denser. Will offered his hand, helping Eve over a gnarled root. Jay slowed to give her a told-you-so look over Will’s shoulder.

Ducking under a branch, Neto scared up a swirl of tiny bees from a hive. Everyone froze, and Sue stepped protectively in front of her allergic husband. The swarm swept past them and off into the shadows, their buzz fading like the sound of a passing car. Harry exhaled a pent-up breath, and they continued on, winding deeper into the jungle.

Eve mopped her forehead with the collar of her shirt. Overhead, a black vulture coasted in lazy circles, its silver-tipped wings like a fringed cape. The trail dipped, and the sky vanished behind solid canopy, the bright day turning to false dusk. A trio of brilliant blue dragonflies urged them onward, porpoises at the bow of a ship.

Neto gestured to the darting insects. “We call them
caballitos del diablo.
Little horses of the devil. So it is appropriate they are leading us …
here.
”

He parted a wall of fronds and stepped into a vast chamber within the jungle. The others slipped through, one after another, gazing up in awe. The clearing stretched the breadth of several football fields, broken by two pyramidal ruins with an ancient, sunken courtyard between them. To take in each structure, Eve had to tilt her head back, a tourist ogling high-rises. The closer one was more eroded, a rubble-topped heap, but the other thrust proudly thirty or so meters toward the canopy, its shape largely intact. The stone looked mossy and sleek, worn down by centuries of harsh weather. The whole area had the feel of a grand civic plaza, which is what Eve supposed it once was. Giant trunks scattered throughout the space propped up a dense ceiling of foliage, dripping with vines. The air was choked with humidity. It felt like stumbling into the insides of some great beast.

“El Templo de las Serpientes,” Lulu announced grandly, gesturing at the more intact of the two structures.

“There are a lot of snakes here?” Eve asked.

Neto removed a balloon from his pocket. “We will call them.” He inflated it a few puffs, then squeezed the neck so it gave off a prolonged, breathy squeal. “They think it’s a wounded mouse or bunny.”

Sue toyed nervously with a turquoise bauble around her neck. She said, “Are we sure that’s such a good idea?” and the others laughed.

“There’s no way that works,” Jay said.

“Behind you?” Neto said. “That’s not a vine.”

They turned to see, swaying stiffly from the canopy far above, four feet of visible boa constrictor. Jay bellowed, and Sue nearly left her sandals. The snake bobbed curiously in their direction a few times, all dead eyes and flicking tongue, and then, with a tightening of scales, hoisted up and away, weaving itself back into the leaves. It could have been six feet long or twenty.

Eve’s skin had been set tingling, less with fear than excitement.

“Come.” Neto slid the balloon back into his pocket. “Stay close.”

“Gladly,” Will said.

They headed into the plaza, descending a run of reconstructed steps so eroded they seemed part of the ruins themselves, and stood at the brink of the courtyard with the temple looming over them.

“Archaeologists worked here last summer before the funding ran out,” Lulu said. “We hope they will return when the economy improves.”

That explained the look of the ruins, half excavated, half lost to the jungle. Despite the high foliage ceiling, the chamber felt claustrophobic, as if it could close up on them at any moment, swallow them alive.

Lulu gestured to the temple at their backs, then to the other structure at the far end of the courtyard. “These date to the seventh century, probably Zapotec judging from the
talud-tablero
style. See how the sides go up and in? Slope, then panel. Like that. And there—” She pointed to the sunken courtyard below them. “That’s a ball court. This all became an Aztec colony in the 1300s.”

“What happened in between?” Harry asked.

“Many cities were destroyed by floods,” Lulu said. “Or abandoned for reasons no one knows.”

“
Lotta
things can go wrong out here,
amigo,
” Neto said. “But the jungle comes back. The jungle
always
comes back.”

They passed the mouth of a narrow archaeologist tunnel at the temple’s base, and a chorus of rattles came to life, underlining his point.

Jay said, “Those are…?”

Lulu nodded.

Sue, still on the prior point: “Didn’t Aztecs sacrifice humans like in that Mel Gibson movie?”

“
The Passion of the Christ
?” Will whispered to Eve, and she stifled a laugh.

“Mostly they made blood sacrifices without killing,” Lulu said. “Literally giving their blood. They used the sharp tips of agave plants to poke their lips, fingers, even their penises.”

Jay signaled an invisible waiter. “Check, please?”

“So they
didn’t
sacrifice people?” Sue asked.

“I didn’t say that,” Lulu said. They approached an eroded stone sculpture that Eve mistook at first for a table. But no, it was an enormous jaguar, its features smoothed by time, a bowl hollowed in its spine. Lulu placed her palm in the contour and smiled darkly. “For
hearts.
”

A thin beam of sun filtered through a break in the canopy, catching the side of the temple. It refracted blindingly across the ball court, illuminating a wide passageway in the side of the far structure.

“The Zapotecs stuccoed the sides of the temple with crushed oyster shells,” Lulu said. “To catch the light. The scientists re-created some there.”

“What’s that passageway?” Will asked, already starting down into the courtyard toward it.

“A burial chamber,” Lulu said. “These buildings became cemeteries for the invading cultures.”

Keeping an awed silence, the group crossed the sunken court to the tunnel. It bored through the base of the crumbling structure, ending in a tiny square of light on the far side. They stood at the entrance for a moment, Eve wondering if they were actually going to go in.

Neto turned on a flashlight, and they shuffled into the embrace of darkness. Spiderwebs brushed Eve’s cheeks. A musky scent filled her nostrils. She took short, careful steps, letting her night vision adjust.

Neto’s beam picked across the moist stone walls, finally illuminating a femur resting on an inset ledge. A slow pan revealed a shattered hip bone, a nest of ribs, and a jawless skull. Rats scurried among the shards. Where the neck had eroded lay a spill of horseshoe-shaped necklace links.

The air had grown cold here, locked in the chill of the stones.

Neto switched the flashlight to the walls ahead, revealing set after set of burial ledges, stacked like bunk beds, running the length of the catacomb. Most were empty, but a few housed fragmentary skeletons, this one missing a rib cage, that a skull. Rising from one slab was what looked like a bulbous growth, the bones fossilizing into the rock over the centuries.

Insect legs tapped across Eve’s neck, and she brushed them away. Her senses soaked in the damp air, all but vibrating with the Indiana Jones thrill. If Nicolas were here, he’d explode in delight.

As they turned to reverse out, she rested a hand on Will’s shoulder ahead of her. Without looking back, he tapped her fingers once, a quick, flirtatious gesture that made her smile to herself in the darkness.

Near the mouth of the passage, she slowed, seeing if there was enough ambient light for her crappy disposable camera to take a picture for Nicolas. The others kept on as she fumbled it out, turned it on.

She held the camera to her eye. Nothing but blackness. She lowered it again. The fall of light from outside ended literally a hand span away from the first skeleton, a viable photo just out of reach. Picturing her son’s face, she exhaled with disappointment.