“She’s very attractive,” I said sympathetically. At least I tried to sound sympathetic, a difficult feat.
“My wife left me last year. For a younger man. Twelve years younger, in fact. I don’t know why it should be more humiliating to have your wife leave you for a younger man than it would be for one the same age or older, but it is. Maybe humiliating isn’t the word. Demoralizing would cover it better, perhaps.”
“That’s too bad,” I said. I thought of the dying days of my marriage to Clive and the parade of younger women I’d put up with for a while. Suddenly I was feeling genuinely sympathetic: humiliating and demoralizing indeed. “Been there,” I added.
“Have you? Really?”
I nodded.
“You probably won’t believe this, but the affair wasn’t my idea. It was hers. I was flattered, of course. I mean, it didn’t take much to persuade me. I gave it a couple of nanoseconds’ thought, I confess.
“But now…” he said softly. “Now I’m wondering why she… I mean, maybe this is the anxiety of a middle-aged guy, but I’m wondering if she did it for some other reason, to displace Hilda on the project or something.” He stopped. “I’m sorry, I have no business burdening you with this.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “But I don’t think you should assume that. You’re an attractive man, and you both share the same interests.” I couldn’t believe I was saying this, actually. Why would I ever try to convince Steve that everything was okay with Tracey, I wondered, when I found him rather appealing myself? But the fragility of the middle-aged man’s ego never ceases to amaze me, and I felt I had to say something to make him feel better, even if it wasn’t in my own best interests.
“Thanks,” he said. We talked for a few more minutes about the work, about his children of whom he was obviously very proud, about the approaching El Nino. Then he got up from his chair and came over to mine. Leaning over, he kissed me. It was a nice kiss, the kind that makes you think you might not mind making the guy’s breakfast for a while. We parted company at the top of the stairs, leaving me wondering what was going on. I like to think I am not lacking in self-confidence, but I try to temper it with a firm grasp on reality. The point was, a contest between me and Tracey for a man was not one I’d expect to win. Was I doing the same thing I’d thought Steve was doing, having self-doubts about a member of the opposite sex, or was there something more calculated happening? There was something about the conversation, I thought, that didn’t ring entirely true, but perhaps it was just that there was so much left unsaid.
The Hacienda Garua contingent hung in. Even Ralph decided to stay. The trouble was, most of the Peruvian crew wouldn’t come back to work at the site. If they’d thought the place evil with a few relatively harmless accidents, this latest incident hadn’t improved their impression of the place one bit. Pablo stuck with us, as did Ernesto, surprisingly enough, the fellow who’d cut himself so badly. I’d heard he had a wife and four children, so maybe a few evil spirits were not enough to deter him from earning his living. Tomas too agreed to stay on. The students all stayed, with the exception of Robert, who said he’d had enough and headed back to Lima.
The one positive aspect of all this was that I was able to get Puma a real paying job. When the Peruvian workers disappeared, Steve tried to carry on with the small team he had, but the work slowed considerably.
“I’ve just got to get more manpower out here,” he groaned. “We’ll never get this done.”
“I have an idea,” I said. “How about Puma? He couldn’t do the technical work, but he can carry the dirt and work the sieve. He could sure use some money, if there was some way we could pay him.”
“I pay the Peruvian crew,” Steve said, “and with several of them gone, there’ll be some money. When can he start?”
The answer was right away. “Amazing!” Puma said. “Working on an archaeological site! Do you think we’ll find treasure?”
“You never know,” I replied. “And even if we don’t, this way you’ll be able to make sure we don’t unleash some terrible curse.”
I’d meant it as a joke, of course, but Puma heartily agreed with me.
Puma, as it turned out, was a willing and hard worker—when he showed up. In the first place, he wasn’t an early riser. While the rest of us started work as soon as it was light, Puma usually turned up a little rumpled-looking, late in the morning. Some days he didn’t show up at all. It was annoying because we were sorely shorthanded, and everyone left had to pitch in. Steve didn’t seem terribly perturbed by it: He said it was pretty standard behavior for a boy that age, and that Puma would be paid when he showed up, and not when he didn’t.
I tried to talk to Puma about it. He was always very contrite, saying there was something else he’d had to do, and I had a feeling there was something he wasn’t telling me, but that was about it. Gradually, we all took the attitude that with Puma, like the magician he was, it was sometimes you see him, sometimes you don’t.
I was assigned to help Pablo, working beside him to catalogue all the little pottery shards he uncovered, making notes on the depth, the exact placement, and bagging and tagging them all. We started work right at dawn, and worked until the wind and the dust made it impossible to continue. Then we hauled everything back to the lab, and worked well into the evening cataloguing the day’s finds.
Even Lucho was called up for action, made to haul sand and staff the sieve. His complaining and shuffling drove us all crazy, but we needed him to work. What that meant was that the hacienda was left unguarded at least part of the day, before Ines came to make supper.
Tracey’s prediction that there would be no more incidents was regrettably not correct. While Rolanda Guerra might be gone, his family was not, and, as I had feared, they took to hanging around the site, watching us work with a real malevolence in their stance. They plainly blamed us for Rolando’s death, even though the police had made it clear to them that Rolando was looting illegally: He’d been caught red-handed after all, albeit almost dead at the time. The Guerra family, however, saw it differently. In their eyes, Rolando had been forced to take desperate measures because of us, measures that had ended his life prematurely.
The situation came to a head one day when I returned to the hacienda with Ines to find an axe through the beautifully carved front door, and a message for us sprayed across the front of the house. What the painter lacked in artistry, he made up for in brevity and clarity. Asesinos!—murderers—the message read. Lucho returned to his post as guard of the hacienda forthwith; Cesar Montero, the mayor, had a police guard posted on the site for a couple of days to deter the culprits, and Carlos, the landlord, tutted and clucked, and then sent a crew over to paint it out.
With all this drama and activity, it took me a while to realize that I hadn’t seen Puma recently. With some irritation, I headed over to the commune to get him. Nothing appeared amiss when I first got there. The place looked pretty much the same, laundry flapping in the breeze, a couple of the commune members working away at the far end of the garden. I checked the kitchen. Pachamama wasn’t there. Then I went to their little hut. There was only one sleeping bag— Puma’s, I thought, but he wasn’t in it. All of Pacha-mama’s belongings appeared to be gone. Everyone else was out working, so I headed for the main house once again and knocked on Manco Capac’s door. He was a minute or two in opening it, but cordial enough when he saw me. “Come on in,” he said. “Beer?”
“Not right now, thanks,” I replied.