Gringos (22 page)

“Then let me ask your advice on something. Should I be waiting on the other side of the river? I know this is Mexico and I don't have my Mexican papers.”

“You're okay. Nobody in Yoro is going to bother you about papers.”

“The last thing I want down here is trouble with my papers. Know what I mean? I don't like to break the law. That's just the way I am. I mean it's there for a purpose, right? But there's nothing to do over in Yorito, and those boat guys won't talk to you. Let me tell you what Tonya did. When we got out of the boat at Yorito. This is a great story. She went right on up the hill to that old pyramid city—in her sandals! Right off into the woods I'm telling you! With all those nuts! A long line of marching nuts and bums not saying anything! No way I'm walking into that jungle in my jogging shoes. It's so dark and shady you can't see where you're stepping and you just know the place is full of snakes and these marching ants that can bite right through canvas! Do you think I was cowardly? Tell me the truth.”

“No, it makes sense to me. I wouldn't go out there without boots.”

“Tonya wouldn't listen to me. I told her not to go. Are you saying I was right not to go? Just what are you saying?”

“I'm saying you were right and Tonya Barge was wrong.”

“So you seem to think I can live with my decision then.”

“She'll be back. I wouldn't worry about it.”

“They got to her head with their mind science. She went right on up the hill in her sandals. Some of those people are barefooted. I still can't believe it. Women should be cleaner than men, right? Well, let me tell you, some of those old gals could use a bath.”

“How many are up there?”

“A lot.”

“Fifty? A hundred?”

“More than that. Sometimes you can hear them chanting.”

I listened but couldn't hear them. Maybe the wind was wrong. You couldn't see the ruin itself from here, just the green mass of the hill downstream at the bend. Ramos came to his feet. A yellow tomcat was looking at him from a patch of weeds. They looked at each other. It was a staredown. Then the cat, who must have been Emiliano, withdrew, but in no haste. It just wasn't time to come back yet. Ramos did his dog turn and settled down again. Emiliano wasn't even worth a growl.

Doc spoke to me with his eyes shut. White stubble glittered on his face. “When are we going over to Likín, Jimmy? I want a long cool drink from the spring. Gail does too. I hope it's not silted up.” She had him lying on the ground in the shade of the
ramada,
with his head on her bag. She was fanning him. One panting old man had already died before her eyes, at another dinner table.

“We'll be going soon,” I said. “After we've rested a little.”

“Can we stay there overnight?”

“What for?”

“I want to take Gail up to the top of the
Castillo
and show her the Temple of Dawn. How the first beams of the day strike through that little aperture. With blinding splendor.”

“It's a steep climb.”

“We'll take our time going up.”

“Yes, well, it's okay with me. It's just that all those people are over there now. We'll see how things work out.”

A white vapor trail stretched halfway across the arch of the sky, so high that we couldn't see the airplane that was spinning it out, or hear it.

Vincent said, “That's the only way to cross this jungle if you ask me. They're up there in their seats and we're down here without any Pepsis.”

He had seen some young men wearing odds and ends of military garb but no one quite like Rudy. I went around to the villagers with my questions, hoping the women wouldn't snatch up their babies and run from me. In one hut I interrupted some men hanging green tobacco leaves over the roof stringer poles. They were polite but of no help. My description of Rudy meant nothing to them. Gringos were phantoms. A few more minutes and I too would be gone from their memory. Down on the river bank I woke up a pair of hippies who had fallen asleep fully clothed and all locked together in a tight embrace, like that petrified couple they found at Herculaneum. The boy was surly, not feeling well. The girl blinked at me through her hair and said she had seen a blond fellow in army clothes back at the lake town of Flores. No, not my man. I thought not. Wrong way. He wouldn't have gone upstream. I spoke to all the sick stragglers, and, I think, to every adult resident of Yoro. None of them had seen Rudy Kurle, planner of cities. I was convinced of that, unless someone was lying. Even in this flock of migrant cockatoos he would have stood out. In khaki or blaze orange Rudy would have made an impression. He would have been noticed, pointed out, discussed and remembered.

I would have to investigate the others across the river, go through the motions at least, but not now. I was drained. All these futile questions. I went back to the
ramada
muttering a little and lay down. Doc and Gail and Vincent were talking about art. What a subject. A girl with a round belly came by. Refugio shielded his face with his hands and shouted, “
¡Ay!
Look out! God help us! She's about to pop!” The pregnant girl made a face at him and he laughed and said, “Be brave! It won't be long now! You won't regret it when you see that little wet rat!” The girl laughed too and waddled off with her plastic buckets. The women of Yoro were carriers of water.

It was Vincent's souvenir, a lacquered gourd, that had set off the art talk. Black monkeys were painted on it, under a clear coat of lacquer. Very poor workmanship, said Doc, who was drinking something from a bottle. The monkeys looked like squirrels, he said, and sick squirrels or dead squirrels at that. It was nothing,
basura,
trash. This was the only part of Mexico where the people had no gift for the graphic arts. There was no vigor or joy in their work. They lacked a sure hand. They had no more art in their bones than—he looked at me—than the people of Caddo Parish, Louisiana. Vincent defended his gourd. The monkeys looked okay to him. This art was okay. What he couldn't appreciate was diamonds and rubies and such. “I mean, why all the fuss?” What he couldn't understand was the point at which pretty stones became precious gems, worth millions of dollars, that people gloated over. Gail said she had a similar problem with the mystery that surrounded the serpent. As a child, of course, she had feared snakes and gone in awe of them, as of some fabulous beasts. Now, of course, she knew better. She knew now—they had explained it all to her in college—that snakes were neither horrible nor magnificent, but only creeping digestive tracts. And in many cases they destroyed harmful rodents and other agricultural pests. Yet the myth persisted! She and Vincent both were from Illinois but nothing was made of it. Some social gap there. Doc said that Humboldt, usually so wise, had denied that there was any art in ancient Meso-America. Carvings, paintings, sculpture, ceramic pieces, funeral masks—all very nice in their way but only proto-art. It was just something on the long road that leads to art.

I was trying to think of some Shreveport artists. We had some, I had seen their huge swirling works hanging in bank lobbies, but I could hardly be expected to know their names. Who was Humboldt anyway and how was it that the pre-Columbian stuff fell short in his eyes? No soul? Too cluttered? Too stiff? What? You wonder what people have in mind when they speak with confidence on such tricky matters. Old Suarez had his doubts about it, too, because it wasn't socialist art. Only the royalty and the soldiers were glorified. We needed him here for this seminar, and Beth and Professor Camacho Puut and Louise and Nardo and Eli and Art and Mike. Bollard too; he could give us the very latest line out of New York, or fake it plausibly enough.

The orchid on Gail's hat had gone brown along the edges. My information was wrong. Air alone wasn't enough to keep the blossom going. They didn't feed off wind after all.

“Well, Mr. Humboldt never saw anything like this,” she said. “This is art. You can tell right away. Look how it jumps out at you. Look how—
strong
it is.”

Ugly was the word she wanted. She was showing us the little Olmec figure with the demonic face. So now our Dicky had given that thing to her, too. What was going on here? She rubbed around on it, the way you do with jade, then buttoned it up again in her shirt pocket. No questions about the ownership, the way she patted that pocket. The ceramic bird, the jade man. Everything buttoned away there was hers.

But now Doc was off art and onto famous men he had known. Morley, Thompson, Stirling, Caso, Ruz Lhullier—they had all come to him for advice and consultation, to hear him tell it. Great Mayanists all! He too stood in that apostolic chain, nor was he the least of them! But what could he not have done with a proper staff and a little recognition now and then! From these low-life professors who controlled everything with their petty politics! These very little men! These gray mice! Who pretended not to know him while all the time they were stealing his ideas!

Purple drops ran down through the stubble on his chin. Gail had found a cold bottle of grape soda somewhere, and she was sharing it with him. The old lizard still had a way with the ladies. She hung on his every boastful word. Refugio, too, he loved the hot words and the bluster. This was the way a man should speak, out of the abundance of the heart. Vincent was poking away at embedded ticks on his legs with the burning end of a cigarette. But Refugio stopped him, grabbing his wrist and saying, “No, don't do that while the Doctor is speaking.” He said to Gail, “My name is in his book. Refugio Bautista Osorio.”

Doc lay back on Gail's pack and closed his eyes again. “Oh, my vindication will come, all right, but much too late for me. You will live to see it. You will hear the acclaim. You can tell your children that you were with Flandin on his last
entrada
into the Garden of the Kings. Or call it the Valley of the Kings if you like, the pharaohs be damned. Don't forget, this was a great empire, too. You can say, ‘Yes, I was with the poor old fellow shortly before he died of malicious neglect.' A victim of envy, too. A man literally murdered by the envy of cunning and hateful mice.”

He paused there on the
mice,
which was just as well, and I saw a chance to get a word in. I took off my boots and directed this crew of mine in perfectly clear language to wake me in an hour. That would give me time to cross the river and climb the hill and look over that pack of hippies before sundown. I dozed. The chatter went on and on under the arbor, though a bit subdued now. It didn't bother me. There was no moving about. No one seemed able to move. We were in the grip of a curious Yoro paralysis. Refugio said to me, whispering, that, seriously now and all joking aside, the mature
chaneques
could grow hair all over their bodies whenever they pleased, at will, through their sorceries. “All the world knows this to be true, Jaime.” He would be telling me next that the little men had furry paws.
Chaneques
didn't interest me at the moment. Vincent's falling star was still on my mind. I was thinking of a fiery pebble blazing out of the night and striking the river with a faint hiss, then settling with the side-to-side motion of a falling leaf to the mud at the bottom, journey's end. Down there with Doc's watch and other forgotten things, and that little jade
idolo,
too, if I could get my hands on it.

OF COURSE they didn't wake me and how could they, being asleep themselves, all sprawled together in a pile like a litter of puppies, not knowing or caring that sleeping on watch is a terrible offense. Night had come. An oil lamp was burning in the widow woman's house. There was sheet lightning to the west, far off in the mountains. It must have been the thunder that woke me. I gave Refugio a shake, and we slipped away with Ramos down to the landing.

Two boatmen were there squatting before a fire. One of them had a fighting cock tied by the leg. They were roasting river mussels in the coals. I wished them a prosperous new year. They flipped a coin to see who got our business.

“Yorito?”

But I changed my mind when we were launched out into the river and I told the man to take us downstream, around the bend, to the foot of the bluff. We wouldn't have to walk so far. The old city of Likín would be directly above us. Yes, Rudy might well be up there observing the hippies. There seemed to be no point in taking notes on the end of the world, but he would probably feel the need to make some record of it. I was curious myself, and besides, I wanted to drink from the old spring again. I would press my face into the pool and open my eyes underwater and clarify my thoughts. It might help. For Doc everything came down to a cube. One night at Camp Pendleton I heard Colonel Raikes say that the key to it all was “frequent inspections.” How right he was too. You had only to look at my unconscious crew to feel the force of that truth. But I had not yet worked out any such master principle of my own, to guide my steps. It wouldn't hurt to try the spring. I would gulp the water and clear my muddled head.

The man shut off his engine, and we could hear singing up there on the hilltop. We could see the red glow of a fire. It was an old song they were singing, something jolly like “Oh Susannah,” only that wasn't it. I had expected wailing. The
cayuca
slid into the sand and went aground. I knocked against a bush in getting out, and mosquitoes rose from the branches in a cloud like blackbirds. Ramos was trembling, keen. He must have thought we were on a pig hunt. One whiff from the musk gland of a peccary and he would be off like a shot. But not all dogs hunt by scent. The greyhound must catch sight of his quarry, just as I did, and the night was black here in Chiapas, or rather Guatemala. There was no moon. Monkeys were screaming back and forth at one another across the river. The lunatic monkeys knew something was up.