We sat at the edge of the precipice, where we could look down on the green water, a small pond far below. Emilio rested his head on Barbara’s lap. Blue-green birds with long tail feathers – Marcos called them motmots – skimmed over the water’s surface and perched in the trees that clung to the crumbling limestone cliffs on the far wall of the well. The drop to the water looked like more than a hundred feet. Marcos pointed out the platform from which the Mayan priests threw gifts into the well, a small ledge of limestone on the south side.
‘They threw people in, didn’t they?’ I asked lazily, leaning back against a boulder.
Marcos nodded. I squinted at the ledge. I wouldn’t want to dive from that height, let alone be thrown. Marcos offered me a cigarette, then lit one for himself. The cliffs shimmered in the sunlight and the dope made the world brighter. ‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ Marcos said.
I nodded, my eyes still half closed, still watching the ledge. I saw something move there: a flash of blue the color of the Virgin Mary’s robes, something falling. Then Marcos took my hand, leaned over, and kissed me gently, blocking my view.
Back at the hotel that evening, Barbara and I compared notes. On the drive back, Marcos had asked me if I wanted to go to the beach at Progreso with him on Sunday. Barbara said that Emilio had asked her if she wanted to go swimming at the village well at Tixkokob. ‘Sounds like the theme is “divide and conquer,”’ Barbara commented.
‘Looks that way.’
She shrugged. ‘I said I’d go. It’s a chance to see a Mayan village with a native guide. And the village well sounds safe enough. Happy children playing in the water. Village women washing their clothes against the rocks.’
‘Ah, yes.’ I lay back on the bed and tucked my hands behind my head. ‘A rare anthropological opportunity.’ The ceiling fan rattled rhythmically, like a boy running a popsicle stick along a picket fence.
‘That’s right.’ She kicked off her sandals and sat on the edge of the other bed. ‘Look for trouble and sometimes you find it. Let’s go for it. What trouble can you get into at a well in the heart of a rural village? Or at a public beach?’
‘I’m sure we’ll find out.’
The bus to Progreso was of the same vintage as the cross-town bus. It stopped a block from the beach.
Beneath an overcast sky, an endless line of palms marched alongside the white sand. Coconut hulls and broken seashells washed in the surf with the crowds of laughing brown children. Young men were courting teenage girls by chasing them into the water. An older woman was splashing herself while standing in thigh-deep water. The little skirt on her one-piece swimsuit lifted when the waves hit and hung limply around her thighs when the water retreated. Each time the water reached her, she called to her husband in excited Spanish.
The sun was hiding, and the colors seemed muted and dulclass="underline" an amateurish watercolor where paints had become muddy. Near the shore, the water of the gulf was the color of turquoise, an opaque milky blue. Farther out, it darkened to green, I could not see beneath the surface.
My mother would see this beach in a different way. What would she see? Mayan women collecting shells to be carved into jewelry. Mayan men drying salt for trade. Would she have seen the woman falling from the platform at the sacred well?
‘Qué piensas?’ asked Marcos. He was walking beside me.
I shrugged.
‘You don’t know what you are thinking?’
‘I can’t explain.’
We kept walking. As we walked farther from the bus stop, we left the families behind. There were only a few couples strolling along the beach. Marcos put his arm around my waist. He stopped beside a palm tree that leaned away from the ocean, reaching toward Mérida with grasping fronds. ‘Want to sit in the sun?’ he asked.
‘Sure.’
He rubbed suntan lotion on my back, his hands lingering longer than necessary, carefully stroking the lotion into the skin along the edge of my bikini. He began rubbing lotion on the backs of my legs and his hand dipped between my legs and pressed against me with a gentle insistent caress. The other hand stroked my back.
‘Hey,’ I said, rolling away from him.
He smiled. ‘I like you very much. You make me a little crazy.’ He looked around us. The nearest family was a few hundred yards down the beach. ‘No one saw. It’s all right.’
‘No it’s not.’
‘Yes it is.’ He reached out and ran a hand along my shoulder and arm until he reached my hand. ‘I like you very much. We could have a good time together.’ He smiled at me brilliantly and squeezed my hand. ‘What do you think?’
‘Not likely.’
‘Porqué no? Why not?’
‘It doesn’t seem like a good idea.’
‘It’s a good idea,’ he said. ‘You don’t know what you think.’ He released my hand and lay back on the sand, tucking one hand behind his head. ‘You make me a little crazy.’
I lay on my back and closed my eyes. The surf washed in a steady rhythm.
‘What have you found, out where you are digging?’ he asked.
I told him about the stone head, the manos and metates, the tomb site.
‘When I was a little boy, I found a very old pot in the fields near my grandmother’s house. A very old pot, with paintings on the sides. I took it home to my grandmother, and she said that I must take it back to the fields. She said it was very bad luck to take it from the old ones, very bad. I went back to the field and buried the pot.’ I could tell from his voice that he was smiling. ‘If I found that pot now, I’d sell it to someone like your mother for lots of money. I wouldn’t worry about bad luck.’
I lay on my back, listened to the surf, and worried about bad luck.
‘Your friend Barbara will have a good time at Tixkokob,’ Marcos said. ‘You and I could have a good time too. Why not?’
‘Because I don’t want to,’ I said.
‘You want to.’
I shook my head and listened to the surf wash the beach clean.
‘Qué piensas?’ he asked.
‘I’m thinking about my mother.’
‘Why are you thinking of your mother?’ I believe that Marcos was growing impatient with me. He wanted me to be thinking about him, not about my mother.
‘She doesn’t want me to come back to the dig.’
‘Why not?’
The sunlight was warm on my eyelids. ‘She is afraid of something. She won’t say what. I think she’s like your grandmother. She’s afraid of the old ones.’
‘Your mother is afraid of the old ones? She’s crazy.’
I opened my eyes to protest and saw the old woman standing by the surf. She was dressed in blue and in her hand she held a conch shell. I turned to Marcos to ask him if he saw her too. He leaned toward me, forcing me back down on the sand. I felt a warm strong hand on my breast and another between my thighs and he leaned on me, kissing me hard on the mouth. ‘You’re crazy too,’ he said. I pushed him away and he laughed. The woman was gone.
‘Later,’ he said. ‘At your hotel, we will have a good time. I like you very much.’
I left him on the beach and went swimming in the warm murky water of the gulf, swimming far away from the beach and looking back at the line of palms, the strip of white sand. Floating on my back in the blood-warm water, I admitted to myself that I was afraid of the strange apparition in blue. I was afraid. I was haunted by a Mayan ghost and I felt very much alone.
As a child, I had played tag with other neighborhood kids on summer nights. As the sunlight faded to darkness, we would go on playing, but the nature of the game changed. The kid who was It would not chase the rest of us – he would slip into the shadows and sneak up on people, appearing out of the darkness like a ghost. I remember jumping at shadows, thinking that each one was going to tag me. I felt like I was playing night tag now, fighting with shadows that appeared and disappeared.