I started to run, but I ran at dream speed: my feet moved slowly; my steps took me nowhere. Diane had locked her arms around my neck; she was a burden that I could not drop. My foot caught on the edge of a sidewalk stone, and I fell heavily to one knee. Diane lost her grip around my neck and fell away from me.
I heard the coughing roar of the jaguar behind me and knew that I did not have the time or the strength to save the child.
I woke in my hammock. The thunder sounded again, a rumble like a jaguar’s roar, like the hoofbeats of the horses that the Chaacob were reputed to ride. No rain yet, just thunder. Thunder from a rabbit sky, the Maya called it. A bad sign. The Chaacob rode, but they brought no rain. A particularly unlucky sign for us if it presaged the end of the dry season. When the rains began, excavation would have to end.
I stood in the doorway of my hut, looking out across the plaza. Though my watch said quarter past one, a burning lantern still hung from the corrugated tin roof that sheltered a small area just in front of Tony’s hut. I pulled on my clothes, knowing it would be hours before I could sleep again, and crossed the plaza.
Tony sat in one of his two lawn chairs. His old plaid robe – the same robe he brought to camp each year – was belted tightly around him. He wore scuffed leather slippers. Above them his legs were painfully thin and marked with the red swellings of mosquito bites. A wooden crate served as a side table, holding Tony’s pipe, a box of wooden matches, a glass, a bottle of gin, and a bottle of tonic water. Tony was reading a thick blue book that I recognized as a reference on Mayan pottery types.
He looked up when he heard my footsteps, smiled, and set the book aside. ‘You’re still up,’ I said. ‘The thunder woke me. Do you think the rains are starting early?’
‘Not a chance,’ he said. ‘It’s just a summer shower. Come have a drink with me. It’ll help you sleep.’
When he ducked into his hut to get me a glass, he seemed a little uncertain of his footing, a trifle unsteady. I had never worried about Tony’s drinking until his wife, Hilde, died two years ago. Before that, I knew he drank in the field, but assumed that Hilde kept him from drunken excesses at home. Now he lived alone in Las Cruces, and I suspected he drank heavily throughout the year. I had noticed that the circles under his eyes were darker this year than last. He seemed thinner, paler, a bit more battered and scuffed.
The drink that he poured for me was warm and the tonic was flat, but I did not mind. The lawn chair creaked beneath me when I sat down and stretched my legs out in front of me. The air was muggy and still. The thunder rolled across the sky like the stones of falling empires.
My first dig was a Hopi site located in Arizona’s Mogollan Mountains. For two months, I lived in the motley village of leaky tents that New Mexico State University called a field camp. On my first night, I woke to the sound of thunder, to the trickling of running water, and to a feeling of dampness. I snapped on my flashlight and the beam glinted on the shifting surface of a minor waterfall that cascaded down the side of the tent – a foul-smelling army surplus model supplied by the university. A puddle had soaked my shoes and was creeping toward the tent flap. Outside, the rain whipped against the side of the tent, shaking the poles. The wet khaki-colored canvas shifted uneasily around me.
I had crawled out of my wet sleeping bag and was pulling on my clothes when I heard the creaking of poles shifting position, the sharp crack of a rope giving way, and the soft sigh of wet canvas released from tension. One side of the tent gave way and the rest followed, soddenly collapsing into itself, relaxing into its natural folded state.
I abandoned my possessions and groped my way to the door, cursing with a passion, swearing exotic oaths I had learned from the madwomen in the nuthouse, kicking at the dripping canvas and beating at it with my fists and flashlight, flinging the tent flap aside and escaping into the downpour. The tent lay like a dying animal, twitching sporadically in the wind.
The rain beat on my head, hammering my hair to my skull, soaking my clothes. I was barefoot in the mud. I heard someone chuckling. He stood in the open doorway of another tent, his hands in the pockets of his flannel robe. He was dry, clean, and amused, and I started over to kill him.
He stopped laughing when he saw me coming. ‘Stop grinning or I’ll kill you,’ I said. I had not been out of the nuthouse long, and I managed to remain socially acceptable only through a conscious effort. Without that effort, I slid easily back into a more primitive state.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Want to come in and dry off?’
I think it was his voice that won me. Even at thirty, Tony had a husky comforting voice with a soft rasping quality, like a fine wool blanket against bare skin or the warm coat of a friendly dog. He offered me a towel, loaned me dry clothes that did not fit, made hot chocolate over a camp stove, and, in the morning, helped me resurrect my fallen tent.
We were never lovers, Tony and I. We were good friends, best friends for a while, but we never slept together. I thought it better that way.
I can remember Tony’s wedding more clearly than I can my own. Thinking about my wedding to Robert is like seeing stones at the bottom of a clear running stream. I can see them, but I know that their shapes are distorted by the water’s movement, that the colors I see are not their true colors. I know that the stones are not as smooth as they look, but I can’t touch them to be sure. The water is too cold and too treacherous; I cannot venture closer to investigate. I must keep my distance. I think, as I recall that time, that I married Robert in an effort to become a person I wasn’t. An ordinary normal person.
Thinking of my wedding, I imagine Robert and me, dressed neatly and uncomfortably in our best clothes, standing before a justice of the peace in an office that smelled of dying flowers. I feel cold, thinking of it now. I cannot remember if I felt cold then.
Tony’s wedding was in a church filled with flowers and well-wishers. I stood in the back, having declined a place in the bridesmaid lineup. Hilde had asked me, but I would have felt strange and awkward in a lacy gown. I remember watching Tony stride toward the altar, fumble for the ring, lift the white lace veil and kiss the tow-headed bride. I can even remember what I was thinking. I was wondering why I did not hurt. I was considering how curiously empty I felt. I felt like the shell of a half-constructed house or like a broken pot. The hollowness was centered in the pit of my stomach and I wondered if I might be catching the flu.
After the wedding I wished them well and drank champagne. The bubbles rose and burst in the great void inside me, but failed to fill it. I danced badly with men I did not like.
A little after midnight, I returned to my home. Sitting at my desk in the cramped ill-furnished one-bedroom apartment, looking at the flowered wallpaper and the ugly green rug, I worked on my thesis project, reading and taking meticulous notes. At dawn I went to the campus library so that I would be there when it opened, and I passed an Indian hunting party on my way. When Tony returned from his honeymoon, I welcomed him back and we picked up our friendship without a hitch.
Now we had come to this: old friends drinking warm gin and tonic and listening to thunder.
‘I like your daughter,’ Tony said easily. ‘She’s a lot like you were on that first dig.’
‘Yes? And how was I?’
‘Careful,’ he said. ‘Very cautious. She’s friendly, but she never lets her guard down completely. Something’s going on under all that calm, but I don’t know what it is.’