Gringos (6 page)

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 followed 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
.

The Toyotapickup belonged to Skinner. He had driven down alone from Illinois, arriving a few days after the main party. The problem was that you couldn't disengage the clutch. Pressing the pedal did nothing. The flywheel of the engine was locked up to the driveline. I did what I called taking a look at it. Burt and I lay on our backs and examined the linkage and pooled our ignorance. It was alien to me. Some sort of Nipponese hydraulic booster up there, a slave cylinder. The only clutches I knew had a straight mechanical linkage. What I needed here was Manolo and his thirty-three wrenches. I was only a shade-tree mechanic, and an impatient one at that. Get a bigger hammer or put a bigger fuse in and see if anything smokes. That was my approach.

I decided on a show of violence. Burt and I got the truck going in the lowest forward gear, and I drove around and around the clearing, poking the gas pedal for a lurch effect, and pumping on the clutch pedal, hoping to pop something loose. It worked, to everyone's surprise. The clutch disc had stuck to the flywheel with rust or some fungoid rot and was now free again.

Skinner had been chasing after us, shouting and waving his arms. We were abusing his truck. Now he was doubly annoyed. All the to-do had ended with a quick fix, and he had made a spectacle of himself before his crew. He was a fat lady running after a bus.

Then he tried to beat me down on my prices. He went over the list, muttering, going into little fake body collapses. As the hated, profiteering middleman, I had seen this show before.

“You must think you've got a gold mine here, Burns.”

“If it's such a gold mine then why can't you find anyone else to do it? What about the wear and tear on my truck? My prices are not out of line. I'm not even charging you for the clutch repair.”

“Am I supposed to be grateful? It's not as though you actually did anything. I'm not even sure it's fixed. You and Bautista may be able to take advantage of Henry, but you're dealing with me now.”

“You called me, I didn't call you.”

“And this famous bucket of shrimp. I can't find the price listed. Where have you hidden it?”

“I was throwing it in free, as lagniappe, but now I want thirty dollars for it, and I want it now. I'm not going to stand here and haggle with you, Skinner. Pay me now or everything goes back. Nothing comes off that truck until I get my money.”

A bearded engineer named Lund interceded. He took Skinner away to calm him down. In the end they paid. Lund paid me. It was all Becker's money anyway.

Some truckers refuse to lift things, but I wasn't proud in that way. We unloaded the goods and stowed them in the “secure room,” which was a stone chamber in Structure II-A. Wonderful dead names these
arqueos
have for their pyramids. The entrance could be closed off with a ramshackle door made of poles and locked with a chain. Here the food was stored, and the more valuable pieces of equipment, and the finds, running largely to fragments of monochrome pottery. There were beads and other knickknacks sealed in clear plastic bags, and some chunks of organic matter—wood and charcoal—wrapped in aluminum foil, for carbon-14 dating. I saw nothing worth locking up. Pots put me to sleep. The romance of broken crockery was lost on me.

Great care would be taken here, every last pebble tagged. Then the loot would be sacked up and hauled away and dumped in the basement of some museum, where tons of the stuff already lay moldering. Buried again, so to speak, uncatalogued, soon forgotten, never again to see the light of day. But the great object would have been achieved, which was to keep these artworks out of the hands of people. Don't let them touch a thing! A sin! A crime against “the people!” By which they meant the state, or really, just themselves. At least Refugio and I had put these things back into the hands of people who took delight in them, if not “the people.” We gave these pieces life again. Sometimes I thought there weren't enough of us doing this work. That was the way I put it to myself. I stole nothing. It was treasure trove, lost property, abandoned property, the true owners long dead, and the law out here was finders keepers. That was the best face I could put on it.

Rudy set up his tent camper, not bothering to ask permission. He sat on the black boulder, for which the place was named, and spoke into his tape recorder. “An extremely short astroport oriented from northeast to southwest,” I heard him say. He stopped speaking as I approached but was in no way embarrassed.

“A word to the wise, Rudy.”

“What?”

“Make yourself useful around camp and they may let you stay. They're short-handed. But don't make a lot of suggestions. Stay out of their hair.”

“I know how to behave myself. How far is it to the big river?”

“Not far. Just remember, you're a guest here.”

I walked out into the woods about a hundred yards, where there was an oblong structure standing alone, a
temescal
, a Mayan steam bath. Refugio and Flaco Peralta and I had punched a hole in the floor of this house years ago. We found nothing. Actually I lost something, my Zippo lighter, smoothest of artifacts, which rode a little heavy in the pocket. Some
arqueo
might turn it up in a hundred years, and with acid and a strong light bring up the inscription—CHAMPION SPARK PLUGS. I noticed that the carved panel above the door had been cut away with a chain saw. You could see the tooth marks in the stone. As soon as I got out of the business, people started buying everything. Slabs of stone.

There was a beating of wings. A flight of bats came pouring out of the doorway in panic, right into my face. No, they were birds. Swifts. Well named. They nested here but their life was in the air. They ate, drank, bathed, and even mated on the wing, if that can be believed. This aerial life was what the hippies were after. I had tried for it, too, perhaps, in my own way, but with me it was all a bust. I never got off the ground. I peered inside and saw that our pitiful hole was almost filled again with debris and guano. We had dug for treasure in a steam room, fools that we were. It took Doc Flandin and Eli to show us the ropes.

Back at the clearing Skinner was in another rage. “Who keeps moving this?” he said. It was a drafting table. No one confessed. I watched the excavation work at the base of Structure I. Burt was in charge of the job. His people had cut a ragged opening in the thing, such as I had never seen made by professionals. It was a bomb crater. They had broken through the limestone facing and were now into the rubble filler. They were going for the heart.

Mapping then, fine, and a certain amount of poking about and collecting of surface finds, nobody could object to that, certainly not me, but were they really authorized to make such a breach? I suspected them of exceeding the terms of their permit.

“Just a probe,” Burt said. “We're going to put it back the way it was.”

Some probe. I wondered if Dr. Ritchie knew about this. Well, it was no business of mine. I was in no position to object. Refugio and I would have used a backhoe if we could have gotten one into the woods. And they weren't going to find anything, just more rubble, perhaps the wall of a smaller, earlier pyramid. They had started too high above the base and they didn't have the labor or the equipment to do the job right.

The crew, a bedraggled lot, weren't even screening the spoil. They were two gringo boys, and two Lacondón Indians in long white cotton gowns, with bulging eyes and long black hair. These Lacondones were the last of the unassimilated lowland Maya. You didn't often find them working for hire. For what little cash they needed they sold souvenir bow-and-arrow sets for children that broke on the first pull, or the second. Only a handful of them were left, straggling about in the jungle, living in small clans. They burned copal gum as an aromatic offering to the old gods and kept to the old ways as best they could.