Tears of the Jaguar (2 page)

Deborah had eaten
chaya
—a traditional Mayan vegetable like spinach—every day since coming to Ek Balam. Raw it was poisonous, but cooked, they said, it was a miracle plant, loaded with healthy properties.

Adelita turned and took a step, then froze as a thunderclap split the air, loud as an artillery shell. Deborah ducked instinctively, and before she was back up, the rain had started.

It had rained every other day since Deborah had arrived, sometimes for a couple of hours, but always a steady pattering shower. This was no shower. The rain came down in sudden shafts, great wet bullets that turned the garden gray and hazy. In seconds the gravel was swimming in water and the trees were leaning perilously. Deborah stood up, moving farther under the sheltering roof, but the wind still drove the rain at her. It was getting heavier by the second and she could no longer see the swimming pool through the trees. Deborah turned to Adelita
and the child’s black eyes were wide, her grown-up manner gone. She looked scared.

Deborah, accustomed to what they called popcorn thunderstorms in Atlanta, offered her hand and took a step back toward the wall that bordered the street. In the same instant, a lightning flash tore through the air like a flare in front of her face, so that for a second after it had gone, she couldn’t see. The thunder followed right on top of it, like a great mace beating the earth, and Adelita slapped her hands to her ears. The wind tore paper napkins from the table and shot them across the lobby. A glass shimmied to the edge of the table, fell, and shattered—almost soundless under the drumming of the rain—and then the table itself began to move.

This was no popcorn storm. It was big and it wasn’t going to just blow through. Another flare of lightning lit the sky like a bomb and Deborah ducked. The rain was spraying them like surf, even though they had backed up to the wall. Looking up, Deborah could see the thatch flapping with the wind, filaments of palm tearing out and hurtling like shrapnel. The garden was already submerged, and through the gate Deborah could see a fast, brown river where the street had been. It got deeper and swifter as she watched, and bore part of a log fence away like a raft. She looked up, considering the sheltering roof, and wondered just how bad things could get out at the site.

If the water washes away the ground beneath the structures? Pretty bad.

She couldn’t see out to the garden, but heard something heavy fall and burst in that direction. She looked up again in time to see the lightning flash through a hole in the thatch, wincing at the bark of the thunder, and when she straightened up again, still holding Adelita’s tiny, hard hand, she could smell burning.

Deborah looked wildly around to see where the fire was, and then—as if the physical laws of the universe had temporarily been suspended—the ground buckled and dropped. Adelita screamed. Deborah grabbed the girl’s hand and threw herself backward, scrambling to firm ground as the hole spread in all directions like a mouth opening in the earth. The table where they had been sitting plummeted with a clatter of crockery and silverware, and then the boiling gash in the ground spread wide and, with a great, tearing crash, the perimeter wall sagged. Adelita pulled at Deborah’s hand dragging her out into the rain and, in the same instant, the masonry exploded as the wall collapsed into the sinkhole, and the thatched roof came thundering down.

Even as it did, a single despairing thought screamed through Deborah’s head:

Oh God, the site. The site!

Eustachio Lacantun, the Ek Balam dig’s sixty-seven-year-old site foreman, was lying in his blue nylon hammock in the cabana he had built with his own hands from local
ya
wood when the storm hit. He recognized it for what it was right away and rolled out easily—his left leg dragging slightly on the dirt floor—stepping out into the rain to look at the sky. He knew that Adelita had already gone to work at Oasis, but he checked her bedroll anyway, then limped over to the cinderblock house, calling to his son.

Across the street he heard a creak and a splintering crash. One of the cabanas had collapsed. Eustachio turned, half crouching, one hand raised protectively over his head, but he couldn’t see what had happened, and by then Juan was appearing in the doorway, his pregnant wife behind him.

Eustachio moved into the dim, square concrete room, lit by the greenish light of a flickering TV set—some braying game show with that woman who was all teeth and tits—sidestepping
a pile of laundry. Ten years ago, no one in the village had a TV. Now they all did, and the infernal machines seemed to be on constantly. The game-show host laughed and the audience applauded and then there was a little pop and the TV died.

The three of them stood in the darkness, and Eustachio watched the roof critically. The cinderblock houses had been the government’s gift after the hurricane of 2005, built by high-altitude Mexico City bureaucrats who never paused to think what a structure like that would be like in the hundred-degree summer of a place only a few meters above sea level where no one had air-conditioning. He called them
los hornos
: the ovens.

Juan sat Consuela down. She had her hands on her belly, shielding, and her eyes were alert but composed.

“Get over there,” said Eustachio to his son, nodding over the street. “Something fell. Make sure the Uks are OK.”

The Uks were in their sixties and the only elderly couple in the village without grown-up children living close by.

Juan’s eyes flashed to his wife, who shaded her eyes with one floury hand as she looked at him and nodded.

“She’s fine,” said Eustachio. “I’ll stay with her.”

Juan nodded and took a breath, as if about to dive underwater, then ran out into the storm. Eustachio watched him pick his way across the road, avoiding the deepest potholes and stepping around a frightened turkey and it was only then—amazingly—that Eustachio thought of the site.

The site. It was normally the first thing he thought of the moment he opened his eyes, a constant lurking anxiety at the back of his mind as it had been for his father and his father’s father.

He was struck by an impulse to run, to get his bicycle and ride over. He had to make sure. But he had said he would stay
with Consuela. His eyes flashed back to her, sitting in the corner, her eyes on the street. The thunder roared and the rain drummed on the roof, but she looked serene as ever. Maybe he should have sent her to check on the Uks. She was the level head in the household, the strong one, pregnant or not. Juan watched too much TV.

Well, he wouldn’t be doing that for a while
.

Who knew how long they would be without electricity? It wouldn’t make any difference to Eustachio, who had no fridge, TV, or air conditioner. He looked out through the door, as if imagining he could see the pyramid through the rain that sheeted the pueblo, and his neck prickled with unease. He needed to be there, to make sure it was secure. That was his charge, his purpose in life, a trust handed down through generations.

“You should go,” said Consuela.

He gave her a questioning look, trying to look confused and innocent.

“To the site,” she said. “You should go. Everything here will be all right.”

He thought for a second, then nodded, grateful.

“I’ll come back as soon as...”

His voice trailed off and she held his eyes. He nodded once, then ducked outside.

Shuffling through the mud and pooling water where the hard earth had been only moments before, he hobbled back to his cabana where the old black Mercurio had been propped unlocked against the wall. It had blown over, but he got it upright and maneuvered himself onto the seat.

He pushed off without looking at Consuela, who he knew was watching him from the door of the concrete house, and as
he turned onto the road he thought he heard her call. He raised a hand in acknowledgement but didn’t look back, bending low against the wind and the rain as he began to pedal through the village.

Sixteen years before, Eustachio had been working on a peripheral site near Chitchen-Itza, when a barrow full of tooled stone had overturned, crushing his left ankle. He had been taken to hospital in Valladolid, and they had saved his foot—and his life, he supposed, given the amount of blood he had lost—but he had never regained full use of it. Nerve damage, they said. On his bicycle, he did almost all the work with his strong right leg, pushing hard so the heavy machine surged forward, coasting as his feeble left took over, then pressing on with his right. It wasn’t easy, and if he didn’t time it right he could lose momentum and stall, but it worked pretty well most of the time.

When it wasn’t raining like Chaak himself had set a new task for Noah.

Eustachio always thought like that, the threads of his Catholicism interweaving with the ancient Mayan beliefs that the Spanish had tried vainly to eradicate, like different colors in a complex hammock. Tales of trickster rabbits coexisted with the crucified Christ and the shiny televisions, though the influence of both the ancient Mayan and the Christian were, he suspected, fading.

He could see faces in the doorways as he cycled down past the cabanas—their roofs flapping alarmingly in the wind—past the school and the church, and then he left the village behind. He pressed on, dodging by memory the submerged potholes, and pedaled through the flat jungle scrub that lined the road and concealed patches of crop fields: some agave, mostly the corn that kept the village alive. They had built the fancy new blacktop
road to connect the ancient site to the 180, but hadn’t bothered to resurface the road to the village itself. The dead of Ek Balam got asphalt and road markings; the living got dust and potholes deep enough to drown a pig.

Well, that was just the way it was
.

The past was their future, it seemed, and not just for Eustachio, whose interest was particular and secret. The villagers needed to keep that past alive or they may as well sell off the land to be planted with sugar cane or the stuff they made into diesel, and move to the city. No one wanted that. The kids went to school in the village, and church in the village. They worked at home, and most would do so forever. Eustachio wondered about Adelita. She was bright, did well in school. But her family needed close to two hundred of the handmade, fist-sized tortillas a day, and the necessary grinding, shaping, and cooking took most of Adelita’s time. Consuela knew it. He caught her watching the girl as she worked and he felt the division in her heart. She didn’t know what she wanted most, to keep the child with her till she married and moved to a cabana down the street, or to push her away. Eustachio hated to see children leave the village, but Adelita was special. She could work in Valladolid or even Merida and be close enough to visit. She might even go to college...

The rain ran in his eyes, but he blinked it away and pushed forward, the bike a foot deep in brown, fast water. It wasn’t like riding, he thought. More like sailing, the front wheel the prow of a boat. He felt it push at him, threatening to turn him off, but he adjusted and rode on.

The road to the ruins showed no sign of damage, but that meant nothing. It was what he would find inside that worried him, and worse, what others might find if he did not get there
first. He surged across the parking lot, propped the bike against a wind-bent Mop, peering through the rain for signs of anything out of place or damaged. His heart was beating fast as he began to limp down the ancient
sacbe
and into the site.

Deborah drove carefully over to the site from the Oasis Retreat the moment everyone had been pronounced safe, twenty minutes after the rain stopped. The sky was now an almost implausible blue, the air fresh and cool, but it didn’t fill her with optimism. She knew carnage might await her at the site. If the rain could collapse walls in the village, it could do untold damage to her dig.

It was hard to believe that just six months earlier, working at the Druid Hills museum in Atlanta where she was curator, she’d never heard of Ek Balam. Now, she’d seen every inch of it, personally. It was a large site of about fifteen square kilometers of continuous urban settlement that had flourished for roughly three centuries until falling into decline approximately a thousand years ago. It had a core of pale step pyramids, ritual centers, and civic structures. It was mysterious, beautiful, desolate, and—for a little while—hers.