It was incredibly hot in there. Though you could see off into the scrub jungle for maybe forty feet, there was no breeze at all. The air was as thick as pastry. The sweat began to pour. Jorge and Juan set a very fast pace, schlepping along in their dumb little sandals. They did not seem to sweat. I began to hate them. I wondered if Barbara was sweating. I lengthened my stride and caught up to her for a moment. Yes, she was. She was the winner of the international wet T-shirt award. But she flunked Miss Conviviality. Meyer, with shorter legs than mine and in not as good condition, had it the worst of all. He was panting and blowing and streaming. I had brought some salt tablets. I stopped, and Meyer and I took a good swig of cool water and a salt tablet each. They kept going, out of sight around a curve far ahead.
“Hold it!” I roared into the thick buggy silence of this third-rate jungle. There was no answer. So on we trudged, thrown off balance by the stones as they rolled, waving our arms to catch ourselves. Meyer said a few words I had never heard from him before. I discovered that there is a certain amount of sweat that begins below the forehead band and runs into the eyes. The wristlets took care of that for a time until they became too soggy.
I began to wonder if Cody Pittler had hired Barbara to take us into the wilderness and lose us for good.
They stood waiting for us where the trail converged with the old Mayan trail from Coba to Chichen Itza. Jorge and Juan squatted on their heels. Barbara leaned against a small tree. She took a look at me and decided that whatever she was going to say would not be appreciated.
“Now this way,” she said. “Let’s go.”
“Can’t you slow those dwarfs down?”
“Wherever there is a choice of directions, they’ll wait.”
“And you too?”
She gave me her obsidian stare and said, “Of course.”
I had hoped that the old Mayan trail would be in better shape, but if anything it was worse. I finally settled into that hypnosis of physical effort which frees the mind to roam to better things. I stomped along until, not far ahead of me, I saw a better thing. Her baggy slacks had become as sopping wet as the T-shirt and clung to the alternate flexing and bunching of the round smooth musculature of her buttocks. Her hair was sweat-wet, flattened to her skull. I slowed and looked back. Meyer was out of sight. I stopped and saw him come around a bend. I caught up to Barbara, stopped her for a salt tablet and a slug of water. In the stillness I watched her throat work as she tilted the canteen. She exuded a warm murky scent of overheated woman. She smiled her thanks.
“You said it’s a rough walk. Okay, it’s rough. Do you have to be cross?”
“I’m not cross, Travis. Really. I’m just very very anxious that this works for us, that we kill him.”
“Have you ever killed anybody?”
Her eyes changed. “No. I saw a person killed. When I was very small. He broke the law of the village. Have you ever killed anybody?”
“Not in cold blood. Not by trapping him, like this.”
“Other ways, though.”
I shrugged. “Self-defense.”
“Many?”
“Not a lot.”
“I heard it gets easier.”
“I guess it depends on the person. From where I stand, you heard wrong.”
“After I saw that person killed I had bad dreams and woke up screaming, night after night. Maybe I will after this, too. I don’t care. I just don’t care.”
“When will he be coming in?”
“Tomorrow, earlier than we’re arriving. Maybe ten thirty.”
“Who brings him?”
“These same boys. They know this area. Miguel too.”
Meyer came up to us, sighed, settled down on the curve of a fat root. He took a short drink, capped his canteen, and shook his head at us, smiling a sad and weary smile. He looked as though he had been dipped in fine oil. He gleamed. We talked for a little while and then went on together, better friends somehow.
At last we turned off the rock-strewn trail and angled off through the brush. The boys had their shining machetes out, and they cut through the vines with effortless twists of the wrist. I had hoped that it would slow them down so that we could keep up with them. I had finally realized that it was a childish game with them, to effortlessly outdistance the heaving sweating Yanquis.
Then they showed us another trick. Meyer and I were following Jorge. Barbara was off to the side, following Juan. Jorge would get a little ahead and then go around a tree in an unexpected direction. Unless you noticed you would charge ahead and suddenly be wrapped in tough vines, held motionless. You had to back off and find where he had sliced through them. That took time. And by then he was farther ahead than ever, cutting tricky patterns through the undergrowth. So I roared at him with enough authority to stop him in his tracks. I told him that if he did not stay back so I could follow him, I would take his machete away from him, lop off his head, and kick it all the way back to the highway. He didn’t understand a word, of course. But he understood the meaning. And from then on he kept looking back nervously, making certain Meyer and I were keeping up.
The second cenote we inspected looked about right. One wall had collapsed into rubble, so it was easy to clamber down to where the small stream flowed. It flowed through an area of flat rock. The flat rock extended into the mouth of the cave, with another flat shelf about three feet higher. It was astonishingly cool in the mouth of the cave. A breeze came blowing gently out of it. There seemed to be a kind of camping place on the higher flat rock, and just outside the mouth of the cave there was a big rusty iron kettle. Barbara explained that this had probably been a place where the chicleros met to boil down the gum they had tapped from the chicle trees. Juan had been carrying the blue pack. He put it down beside Barbara and went off to retrieve the stores they had brought in the previous day. While he was gone, Jorge made three fast trips off into the jungle, returning each time with a huge armload of boughs. Juan came back overburdened with goods. There was a small Primus stove, canned goods, a jug of water, bread, blankets, and two rifles wrapped in plastic and tied with twine.
He handed me one with a polite bow and smile. I undid it and found myself the proud possessor of a single-shot Montgomery Ward.22-caliber rifle. A friend of mine had had one just like it when I was a kid. It had been made by Stevens Arms up in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, back in the thirties. The front part of the foregrip was painted black. The blueing was pretty well gone. It was called a Frank Buck model, I remembered, but I couldn’t remember who Frank Buck had been. I had the feeling he had gone to Africa to capture wild animals for American zoos. My friend’s little rifle had been chambered for shorts. This one came with a small leather pouch tied to the bolt in which I found nine long-rifle shells. My face must have shown great dismay. He explained something very rapidly to Barbara and she said, “Juan says it is a very good gun. Very accurate. It belonged to his father. He treasures it.”
I made myself smile. Meyer unwrapped the other one and handed it to me. It was a Remington 410 shotgun with four shells. All birdshot.
“We are a veritable arsenal of democracy,” I said. “I think it would be useful if he left us his machete.” She took me seriously, and he did. And then they were gone. They disappeared without a sound.