Hot-blooded and restless, eager to see signs of progress, Philippe had grown impatient with the work, annoyed at the frequent delays while John photographed the site. In the moist warm passageway, he had shoved too hard on a crowbar, using muscles built through long hours in the gym. A boulder, suddenly loosened, tumbled down so quickly that Philippe had no time to dodge. The rock pinned the young man’s foot beneath it.
Working in the narrow passageway, squeezed between unyielding masonry walls, was difficult. It took half an hour for the other workmen to lever the rock off the wounded foot. When Salvador and Pich carried the young man from the passageway, his bravado and impatience were gone. He was pale; his jaw was set; and his face was covered with sweat. Salvador and Tony took him to the hospital emergency room in the pickup truck.
Dinner that evening was not good. I believe that Maria was punishing us for indirectly causing, by our existence, her younger brother’s injury. The chicken was smothered in a sauce that left the tongue scalded and numb. Beneath the sauce the chicken was scorched. The salad was limp and the tortillas were cold.
I was lingering in the plaza over a cup of bitter coffee when I heard the coughing roar of Salvador’s pickup truck. After a time, Tony came to find me and report. Philippe’s ankle was broken and the foot was badly bruised. With his ankle in a cast, he had returned. Now that the ordeal was over, his bravado was restored.
At Maria’s insistence, Philippe would be staying with Salvador’s family until he was better. Maria was determined to nurse him back to health.
‘Tomorrow,’ Tony said, ‘she wants Tony to bring the curandera from Chicxulub to come and see him. Apparently she thinks this is more than a medical problem.’
I offered Tony a cigarette and lit one myself. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘She wants a specialist in matters of bad luck, evil winds, and sorcery.’
‘I don’t suppose there’s much we can do to talk her out of it,’ he said.
‘I don’t suppose so.’ I leaned back in my chair and watched the red-hot coal on the end of my cigarette. ‘That leaves us short another man and marked as unlucky in the bargain.’ I shrugged. ‘Nothing we can do about it. Nothing at all.’
‘Do you suppose there’s a chance that she’ll give us a clean bill of health? No bad spirits here.’
I shook my head. ‘I doubt that. At best, she’ll blame the Aluxob.’ The Aluxob were mischievous gremlins that haunted the old ruins and occasionally harassed people who disturbed the ancient places. ‘At worst, we’ll need an exorcism. For that, we’d lose a few days’ work.’
‘That’s not so bad. We could weather that,’ Tony said.
I watched the shadows grow longer and I hoped he was right.
On Thursday, the day Men, we dragged the winch and other equipment out along the sacbe to raise the stela. Salvador and five of the men from his crew constructed a wooden tripod and rigged an arrangement of pulleys that culminated in the small gas-powered winch. Salvador politely ignored most of my advice on how to rig the pulleys, quietly setting them up his way, and in the end I sat with Tony by the mound and picked thorns and burrs from my clothing while listening to the workmen. In digging to slide a rope beneath the stela, they had disturbed a nest of stinging ants and they were cursing steadily, colorfully, with many anatomically impossible suggestions.
Not far away in space but very much removed in time, two young men, h’menob or apprentices studying to be h’menob, were playing what looked like a gambling game with the red fortune-telling beans. I tried to listen to their conversation, but Tony kept interrupting with comments about the weather, the dig, the stela.
Throughout the morning, the sky rumbled with thunder and the sun hid behind a solid gray expanse of clouds. Salvador sniffed the air and said that it would not rain before afternoon, but I had my doubts.
Just before noon, as Salvador’s crew was digging a depression in which the stela could rest once it was upright, the survey crew came tromping through the monte. The end point of their latest transect was about a mile away, so they had decided to join us for the raising of the stela. Diane looked cheerful enough, smiling even though her legs were covered with insect bites and scratches.
When Salvador started the winch, it made a horrible sputtering noise, then died immediately. He swore, made various adjustments, and tried again. It caught this time and began to turn. One man on each corner of the stela held a guy wire, steadying the great stone slab as it shuddered, then began to tilt, lifting slowly from its bed in the dirt and leaves. At first, it moved smoothly.
The wind blew, fluttering the leaves of the trees around us. Birds flew here and there, calling their displeasure. The sky cleared its throat. The rain began when the upper end of the slab was a foot off the ground and rising steadily. In minutes we were drenched. The stela’s steady ascent faltered as the workmen holding the guy ropes slid in the mud. I ran to help the workman who was guiding the northwest corner of the stela, clinging to the guy rope and planting my heels in the mud in a vain effort to stop sliding. Tony was on another rope, shouting encouragement. Diane and Barbara were dragging on another rope, helping a thin old man who was calling loudly to the saints for assistance.
The rain whipped us, stinging on my bare skin, soaking through my thin shirt. The flashes of lightning shattered the world into fragmentary blue-white images: Tony’s face, his mouth open to shout; Diane’s hands, knuckles white as she tried to grip the rope harder; black exhaust rising from the coughing winch; wet metal glistening in the rain. Thunder crashed as if the sky were tumbling down around us, overwhelming Tony’s shouts, Salvador’s instructions, and the old man’s prayers.
The slab was nearly erect, sliding slowly into the hole that had been dug for it, when the thunder crashed with a cataclysmic rumble and the lightning struck the end of the stone, filling the air with the crackling smell of ozone. I could hear a man’s voice, shouting in Spanish to the Virgin Mary for mercy and another calling to Saint Michael and the Chaacob. The winch coughed once, a petty imitation of the thunder, then roared with a sudden surge of power, jerking on the stela. We gripped the guy ropes, our hands wet and slippery, our feet sliding in the mud, and the great stone slab kept moving, tumbling with majestic grace, its momentum overcoming our puny efforts to stop it, continuing on its slow inevitable path. It fell.
The thunder mocked us with deep demonic laughter, and I scrambled through the mud to see the stela, ducking involuntarily whenever the lightning flashed. The limestone had broken when it fell. An irregular diagonal crack – bright white but darkening already in the falling rain – cut through the relief carving, separating the slab into two parts.
The leaves and dirt that clung to the surface made the relief carving stand out. On the top section, a Toltec warrior stared down, resplendent in an eagle headdress, a jaguar-skin cloak, and full military garb. His eye was a dark clot of mud, and angry ants ran over his robes, his spear, his round shield.
The crack separated him from the Mayan woman who crouched at his feet. Her head was lowered and her hands held out an offering – a bowl of something. I recognized her face as that of Ix Chebel Yax, the fickle Mayan moon goddess who sometimes brought healing and sometimes death.
The lightning flashed again and the thunder rolled more softly, as if it were moving away, having finished its work. I looked up and saw Zuhuy-kak watching me from the far side of the stela, smiling in the rain. Angrily, I called to her in Maya, asking why this had happened. She did not reply.