I awoke to the sound of an angry voice—a male's, and not Ambrosio's. I looked across at Maya's hammock. In the early dawn light it hung limp and withered like an empty cocoon.
I rolled over in my own hammock and felt a jab in my flank. The tine. At Maya's insistence I'd stuffed it inside my shirt before sleep. It was warm against my palm as I pulled it out. I squeezed its handle, waiting, wanting to feel something different about it, about myself.
Nothing. Just a piece of metal.
I left the hammock and shoved the tine into a pants pocket as I padded to the doorway.
I couldn't find the sun, but the clear sky was bleaching to the east. A dozen feet away, a little Mayan man in a white shirt and loose pants was gesticulating angrily at Maya. His eyes were level with the base of her neck, so he had to tilt his head back to look at her.
I didn't know what all his glottal stops and shhhes meant, but I had no doubt that he was angry. Maya was nodding, trying to placate him in the same tongue, but he wasn't having any of it. In fact, it only seemed to make him angrier.
Responding to an instinctive protective urge, I took a step forward. Maya spotted me and made a surreptitious it's-okay gesture with her hand.
I looked around and saw the shadowy figures of other villagers standing in their doorways, watching the contretemps. Then I noticed two other men standing off to my right. I looked closer and recognized Ambrosio and Jorge, and behind them, the other Jeep. I sidled over to Ambrosio.
“What's the problem?”
The little man leaned closer. “He is the man of the house you are staying in. He is very angry that you and Maya slept there.”
“What's wrong? Not enough money?”
“No. He is saying that there is not enough money in the world to make Maya welcome in his house. And worse, she brought a Yankee dog with her.” Ambrosio touched my arm apologetically. “Ambrosio does not say these things—only translates.”
“I understand,” I told him. “What else is he saying?”
“He says his home is now permanently tainted and he will have to burn it.”
Tension thickened the air around me.
“Is he nuts?”
“I think he is big talk, putting on a show for his neighbors. He is even blaming Maya because his wife bears no children.”
“Better than blaming himself,” I muttered, then remembered what Ambrosio had said on my first day here: Some of the locals call her “bruja”—witch.
“He is also calling her a ‘half breed,’” Ambrosio said.
And now I felt my anger mixing with the tension. The little jerk had no right to talk to her like that. I wanted to come to her defense but didn't speak the language. I could guess how Maya felt. She'd been so deeply angry last night about the centuries of depredations against her people, and here was this strutting little cock of the walk telling her she didn't belong.
Finally the man made a series of violent pointing gestures toward the end of the village—undoubtedly a demand that she hit the road—then stomped off toward one of the huts.
Maya walked over to us. She was dressed in a rough cotton blouse and cut-off shorts.
“We must leave,” she said in a low, thick voice. She didn't look directly at me, so I couldn't read her expression in the dim light, but she sounded on the verge of tears. “We were only staying here this one night anyway, but we must leave immediately.”
“No problem,” I said, wanting to put her at ease. “I'm wide awake and ready to go. I'll stow my stuff in the Jeep.”
“No,” Ambrosio said. “No Jeep for you. Boat.”
“Boat? Why a boat?”
“We take the river from here,” Maya said. “We cannot reach the next tine by road, and it is too far to walk. Ambrosio will drive west and meet us later near the water tines.”
“The river,” I said. I'd never been much for boats. Lots of the other doctors I knew had cabin cruisers and sailboats and sport fishers, but the charm had always eluded me. “What kind of boat?”
“I bought one of the village dugouts yesterday.”
Swell, I thought. A dugout to me was little more than an overweight canoe, powered by paddles. My back was already stiff and sore.
“Downstream, I hope.”
That managed to elicit a tiny smile from Maya. “Yes. Downstream all the way.”
“Good. Let's get going.”
As I carried my duffel down to the stream, I worried about fitting it into a dugout canoe. But I was determined to find a way to take it along. No way was I going to be separated from my little Kevorkian kit.
I needn't have worried. The dugout was a big one, hand hewn from a twenty-foot cedar log, and back-breakingly heavy. It took the four of us to slide it from the bank into the water. The dugout easily accommodated my duffel and Maya's, plus a pair of sleeping bags and a cooler Ambrosio produced from the rear of the Jeep.
Maya took the rear position, I climbed in near the bow; our gear lay piled between us. A push from Jorge and Ambrosio, plus a few swift strokes from our paddles, and we were off.
We didn't have to work hard to keep moving. Maya used her paddle as a rudder to steer us to the center of the flow where the current did the rest. I dipped my paddle regularly, but it was more for show than anything else; the stream carried us along at an easy pace.
Behind us the sky glowed rose and gold as the sun clawed its way toward the tops of the dense tree walls lining the banks. Monkeys chittered in high-pitched voices as they scampered from limb to limb, bright green and red birds glided overhead, herons stood statue-still in the shallows, while kingfishers poised on the low branches, studying the flow, ready to lunge at anything that moved below the surface. Around us the water lay smooth and glistening, with only the faintest hint of a ripple—a mirror made by a glazier who hadn't quite got it right yet—to betray the presence of the current.
I glanced back at Maya. She was staring over her shoulder at the village as it disappeared around a bend in the stream. I admired the long slopes of her quadriceps running the length of her lean muscular thighs, saw them tighten and roll under the smooth brown skin as she knelt in the stern.
When she turned toward the front again, I saw the hurt in her eyes.
“Why was that man so angry?” I said.
“Because I am half dzul. The people in that little village are pure Mayan. They are very proud that they have not allowed their line to be tainted with dzul blood.”
“Back where I come from we call that racism.”
She sighed. “In a textbook sense, I suppose it is. But here in Maya country, it is different. Here they do not let bygones be bygones. They do not forgive, and they never forget.”
“The injustices you were talking about last night?”
“Yes. But the centuries of slaughter are nothing compared to the devastation wrought by the diseases the dzul brought with them from Europe. Ninety percent—this is not an exaggeration, Cecil—nine out of every ten Mayas died in the plagues that stalked Mesoamerica during the sixteenth century. We lost our priest classes, our royal families, our daykeepers, our finest minds. Our towns became mortuaries. The raw number of dead among the Aztec, Incas, and Mayas is estimated at somewhere between forty and fifty million souls.”
She paused, perhaps to let that sink in, perhaps to hear how I'd react. I was speechless.
She went on: “The Aztecs and the Incas had already been defeated militarily by then. The conquistadors had conquered them with their guns and swords, but the Mayas remained unbowed. The invaders needed the microbe as an ally against the Mayas.”
Now that I thought about it, I remembered reading about the fall of Mexico City, and how, further south in Peru, Cortés or one of his fellow armor-plated barbarians had held the Inca king for ransom. But I knew nothing about the fall of the Mayas.
“We did not have a single king or a central royal city,” she said. “We were scattered throughout Mesoamerica in dozens of selfcontained pockets, much like ancient Greek city-states. There are still twenty different Maya languages. We were a hydra of a nation—chop off one head and the rest remained alive and well. That was our strength, and our great weakness. Our many city-states could not find a common leader to unite them and drive off the invaders. Or if such a man existed, he was taken by the plague before he could rise to power. By 1620, when your Pilgrims were landing on Plymouth rock, my people and their civilization had been reduced to an empty shell.”
“‘My people,’” I said. “It didn't look to me like that bantamweight bully back there includes you in his version of ‘my people.’”
“No. The women accept me but the men do not. The memories of the invasions, the old slaughters, the new slaughters, the Caste War have been passed on from father to son. The blood debt remains fresh. And the fact that I do not stay here in Maya country, that I shuttle back and forth between the land of the dzul, especially the U.S.—”
“The U.S.? We never invaded Maya country.”
“Of course you did. With Frutera.”
“With Who-whata? What are you talking about?”
“Frutera—that was what we called your invading army. Or sometimes ‘the Green Octopus.’ You probably knew it as the United Fruit Company. It tried to buy up most of Mesoamerica, or at least all those areas that could grow bananas. It controlled the railways, it rigged elections and maneuvered puppets into the presidential palaces. Where do you think the term ‘banana republic’ comes from? But when Jacobo Árbenez decided he wanted to give some of the uncultivated land back to the natives, Frutera called on its allies in the U.S. government. The CIA was sent in to arrange his overthrow.”
“Oh, come on. Everything that goes wrong in the world gets blamed on either fluorocarbons, El Niño, or the CIA.”
“This time it is true. John Foster Dulles was Secretary of State then. He was also a major shareholder in United Fruit. The head of the CIA was his brother Allen. Árbenez was labeled a communist, CIA-trained rebels overthrew him, and the disputed land went back to Frutera.”
I didn't know enough of the political history of the region to argue with her. And I wasn't sure I wanted to. The story had an ugly and familiar ring to it.
“Mesoamerica has been in political turmoil ever since,” she said. “Contras or Sandinistas, left wing or right wing, my people wind up either at the wrong end of the gun or in displacement camps. Somehow we always lose.”
I turned and looked at her. “And where do you wind up?”
“In between,” she said. “Always in between. Sometimes I am welcomed as a sabia—especially in places where I have healed. In other places, when something bad has happened after I have passed through, I am blamed, and from then on shunned as a wicked bruja. But even in places where I am welcome, I am not completely accepted. Always I exist one step removed. This is to be expected in someplace like Westchester. But even in my mother's village, I am an outsider.” Her eyes glistened. “Nowhere is home.”
I could have said something about everywhere being home if you believed in Gaea, but turned back to my paddling instead. She was hurting. Until this moment, I had perceived Maya as someone serenely self-contained, supreme mistress of her own skewed reality. But I'd just been allowed a glimpse into the heart of a very private woman, where all her vulnerabilities dwelt. I felt strangely privileged.
I wondered how I'd feel in her place. Here I was a born-and-bred American, a U.S. citizen, a licensed member of a respected profession, firmly entrenched in the social and economic fabric of my society. But Maya belonged nowhere. She spent her life adrift in a hazy no-man's land between cultures and races and nations. Even her belief system—what little I knew of it so far—lay outside the established safety zones of the major religions. How terribly alone she must feel at times.
I felt sorry for her. And I admired her too. Despite the pain it had to cost her, she wasn't giving in an inch. She wasn't hiding who she was, she wasn't backing off from her beliefs. Gutsy.
As we paddled on in silence, passing an occasional tiny village, I noticed a number of logs floating in the water near a sunny bank to my left. I was about to ask who'd cut them when a pair of eyes opened on one and it wriggled away from the others toward deeper water. I kept a close eye on it, wondering if it was going to come our way.
Maya must have been watching me. “Don't worry,” she said. “It won't bother us.”
“Crocodile or alligator?” I said.
“Alligator.”
I jumped as I caught a flash of movement to my right—an eightinch lizard was running across the surface of the water. It darted away from the bank, dipped its head to snatch something from the surface, then looped back to shore.
“Did you see that?”
“Jesus Christ,” Maya said.
“My sentiments exactly.”
“No-no!” she laughed. “They call that a Jesus Christ lizard. It got the name—”
“—because it walks on water,” I said, getting the picture.
What a fascinating place. An endless parade of wonders. Why hadn't I done this before? Why had I waited until I was dying to experience the magic of this planet?
The stream widened, then joined another to create a wider channel that had to qualify as a river. The dugout rocked back and forth in the turbulence of the merging currents.
“Please don't tip,” I whispered, remembering those alligators.
Maya had everything under control, however, steering us surely through the roiling waters with the apparent ease of skill born of long practice. We were moving considerably faster now, and the banks were farther away, at least fifty feet to either side. The current in this anonymous river—I didn't bother asking Maya its name—was strong enough to allow me to rest my paddle across my knees and become a passenger.
My watch was still in the duffel so I couldn't be sure, but it seemed to me that we traveled this way for hours, passing more villages and an occasional native boater who waved as he fished the river. The sun had climbed high above us; if not for the cooling effect of the river, we'd have been baking in its relentless glare.
Eventually we came to what at first seemed to be a small island. Maya steered us along its right shore. Only then did I realize that the river split here, and that we'd chosen the lesser tine of the fork.
The current slowed. Overhead the trees reached for each other like star-crossed lovers stretching to hold hands. Maya steered us leftward, out of the central flow and into blessed shade. Soon we were barely drifting. I lifted my paddle to begin pushing us along, but Maya stopped me.
“Let us rest a minute.”
I looked back at her. Her face and legs glistened with a sheen of perspiration. Strands of hair too short to reach her braids framed her face in fine damp ringlets.
“Whatever you say,” I told her. “You've been doing all the work.”
She wiped a forearm across her brow. Her cheeks puffed as she caught her breath. She smiled, ruefully.
“I have been away too long. I am getting soft.”
She opened the cooler and removed two bottles of water. She tossed me one and I took a long grateful pull on it. The first swallow was tight, but then my throat loosened up and I guzzled the rest as we drifted.
As Maya sipped hers she glanced up and pointed. “Look. A quetzal.”
I followed her point and saw a parrot-like bird sitting on a palm branch. Its head and back were green, its belly a bright red, but no parrot I'd ever seen had tail feathers like this—vibrant green and running easily twice the length of its body.
“They were prized for their tail feathers. No self-respecting Mesoamerican priest would be seen without a ceremonial headdress ablaze with quetzal feathers.”
I was staring, captivated by the colors, when something hissed and rustled in the willow branches directly overhead. I shrank to my right and looked up, expecting a snake. I had a nightmare flash of a giant anaconda uncoiling from a branch and wrapping me up in a fatal stranglehold. Instead I saw a five-foot ring-tail iguana sticking out its tongue at me.
Maya laughed. “Do not worry. He does not eat people.”
I stuck out my own tongue at the lizard as we passed. And then I caught a whiff of a sharp odor. I turned my head this way and that, sniffing the air.
“You look like a bloodhound,” Maya said.
“What's that smell?”
“You don't recognize it?”
I sniffed again, detecting a sulfurous component. “No.”
“It is fire and brimstone.”
“Does that mean we're headed for hell?”
“It means we are nearing the place of the fire tines.”
“Why does that not make me impatient to move on?”
She dipped her paddle and began stroking the water. “Now you may paddle.”
The current slowed further as the stream widened again. No villages along this stretch. The sulfurous odor thickened in the air. We came to a curve, and as we followed that to the right, it opened into a wide lake, tranquil and blue, like an aquamarine embedded in a lawn. Low over the serene surface, a sulfurous haze undulated like a muslin shroud. And beyond the verdant rim of jungle towered a ring of black cinder cones.
A volcanic lake, either a water-filled crater or a basin between the cones. More likely the latter since the water was cool to the touch. I gawked, utterly taken with the beauty of the scene.
“Oh, damn,” I heard Maya say behind me.
It was the first time I'd heard her curse. The word seemed almost obscene in this ethereal setting. I turned and looked at her.
“What's wrong? All we need are some monks and a city and we'll have Shangri-La.”
“The lava is flowing,” she said, pointing.
I followed her pointing finger to a plume of smoke and steam rising from the far shore, feeding the haze.
“Is that bad?”
“It can be.” She pointed again. “There, to the left. We will land the boat there.”
She was pointing to a break in the trees and what looked like a beach about two hundred yards this side of the steam plume. I bent my back to the task. No current here to help, and no more shade. I was panting and drenched with sweat by the time we made the shore.
The dugout nosed against the black pock-marked volcanic rock that sloped into the water. I jumped out and pulled the weighty bow as far up as I could.
At least it was shady here.
Maya brought the cooler to shore where we sat on the rocks and finished the rice and beans left over from dinner. I noticed that I was having a little more trouble swallowing the solids than last night. I didn't even bother trying a tortilla.
“You are having difficulty?”
I looked up and found Maya staring at me.
“It's okay.”
“It is not ‘okay.’ Tell me the truth: Are you having difficulty swallowing?”
“Yes,” I said, meeting her gaze. “But only a little.”
“But it is too soon for that. You told me you had more time.”
“I thought I did. But Captain Carcinoma has other plans, it seems. The tumor is more aggressive than we first thought.”
Maya leaped to her feet and began pacing the lava.
“This bad! This is very bad!”
Was that real anguish in her voice?
“It doesn't really change things.”
“Yes it does! Of course it does! You still have three more tines to claim. You will need all your strength to succeed. If you cannot eat . . .”
“I'll be all right,” I told her. “I'll be fine.”
With swift, almost jerky movements, she began packing up the food and closing the cooler.
She pulled a pair of long pants from her duffel and slipped them over her shorts. Then she produced the two pairs of gloves from yesterday and two machetes. She handed me a set of each, plus the flashlight.
“Follow me,” she said, and we started into the brush.