The air in the mercado was thick with incense and spices. I found pollo, pescado, pan, banana empanadas, cerveza. Fruit was piled in yellow, green, pink, and maroon heaps on brilliant Maya blankets, encased in thorny shells or tough husks, fruit that grew on trees in the jungle or swelled on vines. I bought too much food, more than we’d ever eat, but who cared? Some completely atypical domestic urge was apparently running the show here.
Rikki and Jan were out when I got back. One of them had left the radio on, and a Mexican tenor complained to me of his love wounds. A kingfisher sat on a post across the street by a tied-up boat that banged against the sides of the underwater house. I chopped onions and chilies, then stirred them around in the snapping grease of the frying pan, stopping halfway through to crack an icy beer for company while I cooked. As dinnertime approached, I found myself listening for the door and thinking about how I was going to surprise everybody.
When they finally arrived, though, taller Rikki behind his father in the doorway, both of them observing the set table, the candles, all the food, I could see that once again I’d made some kind of mistake, at least as far as Jan was concerned. Rikki was just Rikki, a perpetually starving sixteen-year-old. He couldn’t have been more delighted at the prospect of a feast. But something went over Jan’s face as he stared at my day’s work, the edge of a shadow, and after one piercing look at me, he wouldn’t meet my eyes. Somehow, as in the North Acropolis tomb when I had startled him so badly, I’d wandered into territory I didn’t belong.
This ruined the meal, in spite of Rikki’s stuffing himself. This, and what Jan said at the end of it, which was, “You could leave if you want.”
It took a moment to digest this. “I don’t understand,” I said. “Leave?”
“When I hired you, I did not think the project would be so rugged.”
“It’s not rugged.”
“I did not think you would get so interested.”
“Interested in what?”
“Has Rikki been teaching you how to read the glyphs?”
Actually, sometimes on those long, lazy jungle days when Rikki and I had nothing to do but wait for night to fall, he had indeed taught me some things. I knew, for example, about Glyph G, the nine Lords of the Night who each ruled their own hour of darkness. There was my favorite, monkey-faced G1. And then, probably more to the point in Jan’s paranoid mind, G3, which had our old friend the k’in sign buried right in the middle of it. My noticing this had led to a discussion, not Rikki’s fault, about the fact that k’in showed up practically everywhere, as common as a stop sign or an exit marker. I asked him why on earth we were recording something so mundane. He had gotten wound up and blurted out what he probably wasn’t supposed to: that it was this very quality, the fact that you could find it everywhere, that made it such a perfect code sign. Then he’d blushed like crazy and snapped his mouth shut, and I hadn’t gotten another peep out of him for an hour. Now, with Jan’s brooding gaze on him, he hung his head like a bad dog.
That made me mad. “What’s wrong with me learning a few basic facts?” I said.
“Our agreement was that you would never publish any of your photographs or drawings, and that you would keep whatever you are doing for me to yourself.”
“Who says I’m not?”
He was looking uncomfortable. “One morning I saw you going through a lot of paperwork in your tent. I cannot keep you on if you are working for somebody else.”
“Look, what are you thinking?” I demanded. “That I’m some kind of spy for the Maya Hunting Club, or whatever it is you people belong to? I don’t care if we shoot that damn glyph every night for another year as long as you get me to Chiapas.”
If there’d been a reverse button, I would have hit it, but the words were already out, filling the air like the lingering odor of frying onions.
“Why Chiapas?”
And suddenly, though still angry, I was tempted to spill it. The case of the unofficially missing priest. But that was impossible, so instead I mutely lowered my head.
“Do you need help of some kind?” he said quietly.
Again I shook my head no.
He frowned. “But you are happy with this job?”
“Very.”
I could see him thinking all this over. Then he put his hands on his knees and stood up. “All right then. We leave in the morning for Palenque. It is a two-day trip, a long two days. We will take the truck as far as the Usumacinta River. You two had better pack.”
Rikki offered to do the dishes, and I went upstairs. Palenque. Where the wife was. I took off my skirt and sandals and crawled into bed in my black T-shirt, where I lay staring at the ceiling. A dim light from the street undulated across it like water. For a couple of long moments, I felt strangely queasy, as though the dinner had suddenly turned against me, which, in a sense, it had. I found myself thinking of Chicago again and, much to my surprise, whether or not I was living the way I should. Whether I should have just married some Italian or Pole or maybe even Alexander, straight out of high school, and settled down in a Polish or Italian neighborhood a few miles from Hana and Bruno and given that sad pair a couple of grandkids to distract them. Whether, if I’d kept on going to Mass, Stefan wouldn’t have gone searching all over the world for someone he could talk to. We’d had a family, I thought, screwed up as it was. I had always assumed Stefan was the one who broke it to pieces, but maybe not.
Drowsing, I tried to imagine myself married, but couldn’t. So I thought about the secret thing I’d purchased today, along with all that gorgeous fruit, at the downtown Flores market. A lovely boot knife, just like the one the USIA man had taught me to throw. Because you never knew what would happen next, especially in places like the Petén, across which we would be driving, or Chiapas, where guerrillas and the Guardia Blanca roamed like antelope across the plains.
The other, the bit about my wasted life, was just the kind of sentimental schlock you think about alone in bed in strange countries. And I realized a long time ago that it’s not some weird bug from Africa that finishes off people like me. It’s self-pity. But just to make myself feel better, I crawled back out of the sheets and rooted through my camera packs, supposedly double-checking, but really to feel the familiar shape of them against my fingers. Then I got back under the woven blanket, turned over and went to sleep, which is what I should have done in the first place.
Jan was not kidding about the length of a single day when you are crossing the Petén. It might have been even longer, but luckily we were waved on through the military checkpoint at La Libertad where a guy with a .38 in his hand was directing a bus search that looked like it was going to take a while. After La Libertad, we rocked west for hours through long stretches of open savannah, ragged with burnt tree stumps, what was left of the rainforest after three decades of civil war and thousands of highland Maya refugees streaming north into the jungle, burning trees to plant their little cornfields, and right behind them, the loggers and the oilmen and the cattlemen.
Occasionally, the forest reappeared, and a group of men would emerge from a muddy track through the trees, feet bare, machetes slung across their backs. They would stare at us patiently as we rolled by until Jan stopped and motioned toward the bed of the truck. Then we would jounce along with our new passengers for a few kilometers until they knocked on the back window. Jan would stop, they would leap down, duck their heads and murmur “Gracias,” and once again vanish into the trees.
Rubber tappers, maybe. Strong, undernourished little men with broken teeth and dirt ingrained in patterns like tattoos. I’d seen the same kind of men in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Thailand, Burundi. It didn’t matter what forest or desert they were in. Each of them had eight to ten kids and half of those would die, especially if yet another war between this big man and that big man broke out. It was okay with me that Jan kept picking them up, but I hoped nobody tried to make off with our stuff.