Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons
I could see the square structure on the top of the Pyramid of KuKulkan no more than three miles away, marking the way to Chichen Itza. The humidity was oppressive, making it hard to breathe and wringing rivulets of sweat from my body. The jeep bounced up and down as the wheels hit the numerous potholes in the dirt road that wound through what felt like endless jungle. The kapok trees formed a canopy that allowed little direct sunlight to reach the jungle floor creating twilight in the late afternoon. The moisture in the air carried the aromas of wet earth and decaying vegetation. The screams of black howler monkeys, their vocalizations unnerving and haunting, reverberated through the dense foliage.
I paid close to 2,000 pesos to a complete stranger who I met at the bus station in Cancun for the hand drawn map that lay on the seat next to me, weighed down by a Chichen Itza guidebook and a bottle of water to keep it from being blown away. My Spanish wasn't very good, but adequate enough to have a conversation with the man who stood outside of the station offering travel and tourism advice which he advertised by means of hand written words on a poster board that sat at his feet. He drew me the map without asking questions, only warning me that what I was doing could get me arrested.
I glanced in the rear view mirror at the back seat and saw Aapo's brown eyes opened wide as saucers as he searched the passing jungle for remembered landmarks.
#
Earlier that morning in the city of Valladolid I sat on a bench in the plaza in front of the San Gervasio Cathedral and watched the Mexican flags that hung from the bell towers flapping in the hot breeze. Two men in beige city uniforms walked side by side chattering in Spanish as they pushed their brooms across the concrete, sweeping up the trash left behind by a festival held the night before. A large flight of pigeons alighted on the pavement where the men had just swept and began pecking at the ground, picking up the bits and kernels of popcorn that the brooms had missed. A helium filled red balloon tied to a street light and caught in the shifting breezes danced on the end of a long piece of twine.
Walking alongside the low wall built in front of the cathedral, Aapo followed a bright green iguana that scampered along its top. He carried a twig that he scratched on the dusty surface of the wall, marking the lizard's trail. The wind tousled his black hair forming different shapes; a bird's crest, writhing snakes, a crown. When the iguana climbed down the side of the wall and ran off toward the direction of the cathedral, he sat on the wall and used the twig to poke at a small scab on his left forearm. The flat expression on his face was inscrutable.
An old woman wearing a lemon yellow scarf sat down on the opposite end of the bench. She held a woven hemp basket filled with oranges in the lap of her floral print skirt. Her sun-darkened brown face was perfectly oval shaped and lined with deep wrinkles. For a moment I imagined I smelled the scent of the oranges wafting from those in the basket, but I was just remembering the fresh oranges in the large ceramic blue bowl that sat in the middle of the table at my mother's house during Christmas that added their fragrance to the dining room. The old woman picked a large one from the basket and held it out to me in her tremulous hand.
“¿No quiere comprar una naranja, señor? ” she asked, smiling, displaying a gold tooth.
Caught in the sunlight, the peeling on the orange glowed. I looked at Aapo who had his arms out, waving them like the wings of a bird. “Sí, dos por favor,” I answered holding up two fingers.
She handed me two oranges and said, “Cincuenta pesos.”
I took the money from my pocket and gave it to her. She put it in a brown leather change purse, got up and walked away. I held the oranges to my nose, inhaling their sweet, pungent aroma as I watched the pigeons create a pathway for her as she sauntered through them. The way she walked reminded me of my grandmother working in her garden as she manuevered her way around lush lilac bushes a few months before she died. I put the oranges in the pockets of my windbreaker and headed for the jeep that was parked in front of the hotel where I had stayed the night before. I heard following me the slapping of Aapo's bare feet on the hot concrete.
#
I slammed on the brakes and sharply turned the steering wheel. The jeep skidded in the dirt, coming to a stop in a patch of ferns alongside the road. The guidebook, bottled water and map slid from the seat and fell onto the floor. I caught my breath and wiped sweat from my eyes with my fist. The buzz and hum of flying insects filled my ears. I turned in time to see Aapo leap out of the jeep and run up to the statue that lay in the road a few feet ahead of where the jeep had come to a stop. I picked up the bottle, unscrewed the cap, and took a long drink of the warm water. I looked up to see a crested flycatcher with bright blue and yellow plumage sitting on an overhanging kapok tree branch looking down at me as if studying me. I placed the cap back on the bottle, returned it to the seat, and then climbed out of the jeep.
The statue was a chacmool, a reclining figure with its head turned at ninety degrees. There were a few pictures of it in the guidebook. This one was mansize. Its facial features had been worn away by time and weather which did nothing to dimish the mesmerizing stare in its hollowed out eyes. Vines were coiled around it, almost hiding the sculpted bowl that sat upon its stomach. Aapo had brushed aside some of the leaves in the bowl and placed in it one of the oranges he had carried with him all the way from Valladolid. I scanned the area around the statue, wondering how or why it had been left there undisturbed for so long. It marked an abrupt end of the road, something the man who drew the map failed to include or mention.
I walked around the chacmool while Aapo used a small tree branch to poke at a black-tailed indigo snake that lay curled on the top of the statue's head. Although harmless, the snake held its head up as if ready to strike.
#
The week before, I left the Legion of Honor museum in San Francisco after wandering through an exhibit of Mayan art and stood on the steps and watched a mother and her child sitting in the grass nearby sharing an orange. She peeled the orange carefully, stripping away the bright orange peeling with her long painted green fingernails, then fed the little boy segments of the orange, placing them on his tongue and laughing with him as he bit into them causing juice to squirt out and dribble down his chin. Not far away, water that sprang up from the middle of a pool created the sound of heavy rainfall. I walked to the edge of the museum grounds, looked out over the Pacific Ocean, and watched a ship making its way south. Restlessly I slapped the museum brochure that I held in my hand against my leg. The statue of the Mayan boy on its cover resembled me – or to be more accurate, how I looked as a young boy – in a way that had left me feeling both uncomfortable and slightly lost.
It was there that I met Aapo. He walked out of the museum, came to where I was standing, and silently gazed out at the water. I turned and started to leave when he grasped my hand.
“Yaan wa'a a paalal?” he asked.
#
We waited in the jeep or sat on the chacmool until the purple and golds of twilight filtered through the canopy. The trek from the statue to the outer edge of the Chichen Itza grounds took less than a half an hour. Along the way, Aapo collected colorful stones and plucked clusters of huayas fruit and stuffed them in his pockets. We hid behind a large kapok tree with above-ground roots that spread out across the ground like octopus tentacles, listening for the sounds of those who guarded the site after the tourists had left. Roused by the coming nightfall chachalaca birds filled the air with their grating calls that sounded like the grinding of rusty gears. Mosquitoes swarmed around our heads. It was dark – in those minutes before the stars and moon begin to shine – when we made our way from the tree to around the base of the Pyramid of KuKulkan. At the bottom of the long, steep flight of stairs that lead to the top of the pyramid, I stopped and surveyed what else I could see of Chichen Itza. From every direction it seemed the vacant eyes of other chacmools and the withering gazes of sculpted serpent heads were fixed on me. Aapo ran up the stairs, losing some of the stones and fruit that fell out of his pockets.
#
Two days before, visible waves of heat rose from the tarmac as I stepped from the plane stairs after landing in Cancun. It smelled as if the earth had been cooked. It reminded me of the aftermath of the fire that burned entire neighborhoods in the Oakland firestorm in 1991 when I was a boy. My mother and grandmother took baskets of canned goods, freshly baked loaves of banana bread, and bags of oranges to people displaced by the fires and living in motels. The hot wind blowing across the runway carried the smell of jet fuel mixed with the scent of the Caribbean waters. I had stashed a bottle of water I had gotten while on the plane inside my wind breaker and walking to the airport terminal I could hear the water sloshing around inside the bottle. Aapo bent down and scooped a gecko from the ground and carried it in his hands as he walked beside me. He put it in his pocket as we walked through the glass doors.
During the ride in the taxi from the airport to the small hotel in downtown Cancun, Aapo kept his face against the window glass, staring wide-eyed at the passing sandy and windswept landscape. A recent hurricane had stripped the fronds from the top of palm trees and filled the lagoons with debris. I leaned forward, my arms resting on the back of the front seat and talked to the driver, who spoke perfect English.
“What is the easiest way to get to Chichen Itza?” I asked him.
“There are tour buses that you can catch at most of the hotels early in the morning,” he said. “Just ask your hotel concierge or a clerk.”
“What if I want to go there on my own and not with a group, and through the jungle?” I said.
He looked at me in his rear view mirror, his eyebrows raised. “You can rent a jeep but it's expensive and you will need a good map to get you there. I should warn you, it's illegal to enter Chichen Itza other than through the front entrance. ”
“Where can I get a map?”
“Talk to the guy standing outside of the bus station who always has a sign advertising his services to tourists,” he said.
#
“The physical traits of our ancestors pop up time and again after skipping a few generations,” I remembered my mother telling me as she fed me orange segments when I asked why I looked different than my own brothers. My hair was black, while theirs was light brown. I was short in stature, they were tall. The color of my skin was like coffee diluted by milk. Their’s was white. “It's rumored we are descended from the Mayans,” she said. “Our ancestry never leaves us entirely.”
#
The pinpoints of glittering stars were scattered across the sky. From the west a quarter moon cast pale moonlight across Chichen Itza. Breathless, Aapo returned at a run from a chacmool across the compound where he had emptied his pockets of the last of the stones and fruit into their bowls. When he sat down by me on the steps at the bottom of the pyramid I took the orange from my pocket and slowly began to peel it.
“I have no children of my own, yet,” I said, at last answering the question he had asked when we first met, neither knowing how I finally came to understand what he had asked, or if he understood my reply. I handed him a segment of the orange and laughed when he bit into it, squirting juice that dribbled down his chin.
I don't know when I fell asleep, but I awoke just before sunrise on the ground, curled into a ball. I sat up and looked through the mist that had formed a few feet from the ground. Aapo was gone, but that was how it was meant to be from the beginning. I left Chichen Itza, glad that I had not been discovered there, and returned to the jeep. The chacmool had disappeared, but left in a shallowly dug bowl-like indentation in the ground where the statue had been was a small pile of stones and a handful of huayas fruit.
Steve Carr, who lives in Richmond, Virginia, has had over 330 short stories published internationally in print and online magazines, literary journals and anthologies since June, 2016. Four collections of his short stories, Sand, Rain, Heat, and The Tales of Talker Knock, have been published. His plays have been produced in several states in the U.S. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize twice. His Twitter is @carrsteven960. His website is https://www.stevecarr960.com/ He is on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/steven.carr.35977
