“Wheee!” Manny called out like an idiot as the Escalade bucked in and out of a trail hole.
As they straightened out, Lou’s eyes suddenly fell upon the vehicle’s fifth occupant he hadn’t noticed before, a small statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe glued to the dashboard.
Oh good, that’s just what I need, he thought, staring at it. More guilt.
Lou knew all about Our Lady of Guadalupe from his grandmother. Every time he would visit her on University Avenue in the Bronx, before he could get his cookie, she would give him a plastic saint card that he would have to read over and over until he could recite back the pertinent stats from memory.
Our Lady of Guadalupe, he remembered, was the venerated version of the Virgin Mary who had appeared before Saint Juan Diego near Mexico City in the 1500s. He knew all about Juan Diego’s famous tilma cloak that had miraculously been embossed with Her image from a bouquet of roses Our Lady had given him and how this image was the only one in Christendom that showed the Blessed Mother pregnant with Jesus.
Since he was in the middle of the commission of a litany of sins, as Lou looked at the little statue, he wondered if praying for help was even appropriate.
He decided to say a Hail Mary anyway. Then an Our Father as well for good measure. How could it hurt?
When he was finished, they were slowing. They were coming on a switchback turn on the jungle hill and through a gap in the foliage in the distance was the green splattering stream of a lovely waterfall.
Lou tracked the line of falling water as it wound down the jungle slope and then he stopped as his eyes almost bugged out of his head.
Because peeking out from the triple canopy below to his right was the top of a pyramid.
It was made of stone and was the size of a small office building. It had crumbling gray stone steps at its center with terrifying primitive carvings along its sides like you’d see on a totem pole.
Lou instantly remembered what Manny had said about Ancient Aliens. It could have been a still from the show, a pale Stone Age archeological site just sticking up out of the palm trees there in the middle of Mexican nowhere.
“Man, you gotta be joking,” Lou said, feeling the hairs rise on the back of his neck. “Do you see what I see? They got all that old Aztec stuff around here?”
“No, man. It’s not the Aztecs,” Manny said, popping the gum he was chewing. “It’s even freakier, bro. This is the area that belonged to the Mayans who were like before the Aztecs. The ancient, ancient ones.”
“This whole mountain is a Mayan burial ground, right?” Alessandra asked the driver.
The cartel driver turned. His ageless stony face might have been the model for some of the pyramid carvings below. He nodded cryptically.
“See? How many times I gotta tell you?” Manny said, clapping Lou on the back painfully. “We’re about to come into contact with some interplanetary multidimensional shit on steroids, Lou. Nazca Lines, star gates, Puma Punku, here we come!”
Lou unbuttoned another button on his silk shirt as the pyramid slid away out of sight to his right. When he looked up, his eyes locked on Our Lady again. He tried to read if Her young serene face was sad or angry at him. Both, it seemed.
He didn’t blame Her.
He looked away as they flowed deeper into the jungle.
He felt pretty much the same way about himself.