The lake was a walk from the village, the guide and his girlfriend said, the guide not Mayan like the people sitting nearby on the cinderblock wall beneath the shade trees. The guide and girlfriend were from Oaxaca and Veracruz, had moved to the jungle near the eastern coast to build a place for themselves where they might live native. The house was built of cinderblocks and indoors was of simple construction, a bare concrete floor with countertops for a kitchen and a spiral wooden staircase leading to a loft overlooking the couches and tables where guests could sit and rest their legs and smoke their hash and sip coffee. All water was either bought at a grocery store in town or purified with iodine. Before the Americans had arrived, the guide and his girlfriend had welcomed a wandering group of French hippies. Not good manners, not at all, the guide recalled, face scrunching at the thought of them. Didn’t clean up after themselves, didn’t respect the local ways, taught curse words to the village boy who helped around the place, and even worse, introduced the kid to the temptations of first world modern amenities, first their smart phones, then everything that could be purchased through a simple series of taps on a screen. These French were the last visitors they had brought to the lake, past the thatched open air huts where Mayan children waited to sell them jewelry and other such ornaments and trinkets.
They had driven an hour along a series of smaller and smaller roads and, coming upon the village, had passed it thinking surely what they’d just seen wasn’t a village but small gathering of wall-sitters along a road. But these were the only people they’d seen for some miles and the instructions given them by the woman in town had been clear: take the road and drive and drive until they came upon their first sight of people and buildings and pull over into the dusty parking lot. That would be the place, the village, and the guide would be there waiting. And he was, hatchback parked along the road, driver and passenger side doors open, waving at the car as it passed. A few miles later they realized this must have been the place the town-woman had described, so stopped clean in the middle of the road and jungle and turned around. The guide and girlfriend walked to the road as they came back around, arms raised to make it more plain, here they were, the people the Americans were looking for, fluent with English but without a telephone.
The guide introduced himself as Angel and the girlfriend as Xia, pronounced with an “S”, she-ah. The girl looked half his age, maybe still a teenager, and when she smiled she seemed to lose even more years, a relaxed, unconsciously joyous subtle lifting of eyebrows and cheeks, dark brown brightness of eyes. Angel was skinny as a snake and irradiated a thick dark hummus of ripe B.O.. They were hippies themselves, by local standards, proud to have gained trust of the villagers, nothing they admitted to outright but made plain through the eagerness with which they waved and nodded and smiled at the village boys and girls and women and men-sitting-on-walls. The waves and nods were returned with half the energy in which they were offered, but this of course could be due to the presence of people-unseen-before, strangers pale to the sun and born of forests, not jungles.
These were dry months, Angel explained, dry but hot. The rainy season had just ended. The lake was large and spread through the surrounding countryside along disparate winding channels. The Americans were awkward, cordially vigilant, gaining their bearings, hesitant to be walking through the village without invitation. The walk didn’t last long, small as the village was. A few concrete houses and huts, corrugated roofing, packed earth beneath thick-waisted varicose-branched trees, the path led them to a break from shade into massive sunlight, a hand-made dock of sorts and beyond it, a broad expressionless lake. Children were crouching on their heels off to the side, whispering among each other, watching.
Angel pulled off his shirt, slipped feet from flip-flops, walked into the water. Ribs and muscle and, back turned to the rest of them, spinal column fully visible and articulate of each movement he required of it, turning waist to lift arm and wave them on, out of their shirts and shoes, into the water.
Muddy-dark. Warm along the surface but chilly below. The American couple waded out onto the lake waist-deep, then, following Angel’s lead, lowered into a water-crouch to level chins along the lean even surface of it. A far swim beyond where they crouched and breathed and listened, enjoying the cool of the water along their shins and shoulder-blades and nipples, more trees could be seen, trees smaller because farther from where they floated, shores and boulders and turns of water beyond view into coves or channels.
There was a cenote not far from here, Angel told them, perfectly acceptable for them to climb down the rope ladder left at the entrance. Twenty feet down the ladder lit by a shaft of sunlight, down into dark, wait a short while until eyes adjust and the darkness around the cave’s innards lightens and what’s down there gains definition. Skeletons. Ancestral remains, the guide claimed, generations and generations long back, where these very villagers, the ones they’d walked past and waved at, came from. If they were in the mood for it, Angel said, it was an option. The Americans knew enough to not eagerly accept but expressed interest in maybe, after their dip, walking over to the cave’s entrance to stand over the ladder and the light falling through hole to touch ground twenty-feet deep, several arm-length’s from the purported skeletons. This was nice enough, the lady American said, cool lake, summer afternoon.
The guide’s girlfriend had walked from the water and taken a seat on the ground atop her t-shirt, taking lengths of her hair in hand to wring water from it. The guide, being tallest, stood furthest out, his back to the wide remainder of the lake, faced the Americans and shore and girlfriend sitting beyond, children still in their crouches and other people unseen perhaps watching them from beyond the tree line. He told them a little of his life, how he’d come to live there. An architecture student in Mexico City. A straight-A nerdy kid from Oaxaca. Realized he knew so little about his mother’s side, who were from here, around this area, and thought if there was ever a time to live a while among his ancestors, now was the time and here was the spot. He had an aunt who lived in town, where the American couple were staying. His mother was no longer with them, he explained. Whether that meant death or something less final, neither of the Americans felt it appropriate to ask, so left that unasked-after. After he graduated he worked a while at an architecture firm and, when he tired of that, decided to take a long break between jobs and spend a few months near the edge of the jungle with his aunt. And Xoe? Xoe he met online. They’d been talking back and forth a few months when he first moved here and having fallen for him, she took a chance and left her parents’ house in Veracruz to visit. What a week that was, that first visit. They were inseparable. They were fated to meet, he said. She stayed a week that first week then went home, told her mother she was in love and was going to move to the north to this town they’d never heard of, near the coastal jungle, live with a man named Angel. She told her mother, but not her father. He would’ve objected, tried to block her exit. So Angel arrived by car late one evening and she slipped from the back door with two suitcases, leaving a note on the kitchen table for her father to read, when he rose in the morning, took his usual seat to sip his morning coffee. She didn’t leave an address where they might find her. Instead she emailed them once a week from an Internet cafe in town. To her surprise, neither her mother or father tried to convince her to return. Their objections were taken as a given but left unstated.
Water-beads drying on skin, eyes squinting against flashes of sunlight kicking off angles of lake-ripples. They were talking and listening, blending separate lives they’d each brought through the village and jungle to the lake. The sun was inches beyond noon and the children off to the side had taken to standing. They were looking elsewhere, slightly further down shore, and while the guide raised an arm to wave to his girlfriend, a group of men appeared from the tree-shade, two men and two teenage boys. The men carried above their heads an upturned canoe. Nearing the dock they worked it back to ground wordlessly, ease of coordinated movement suggesting this had been done many times before by the two, years of such afternoons carrying canoe to water, upending it to carry, then flipping it back over to lay to ground. Once on the downward slope angling toward water, it was a matter of pushing to ease it along the dock, one of the boys catching its prow by hand and leading it along until it wobbled fully dockside. Over one of the boy’s shoulders a rifle was slung, in hand he carried what looked like a gig pole and in the other a machete. What’s that, the American man asked. The guide had switched his wave from his girlfriend to the men and boys on the dock. Neither men nor boys waved but instead nodded, no talk between them. The Americans would have been forgiven for mistaking the Mayans for mimes, so little did they talk in an American’s presence, it might seem speech was forbidden to them. But the lady and man, being American, knew they were a people infamous for talking, loud, brash, asking questions, venturing unsolicited advice, speaking as authorities on what they had come into a knowledge of only moments before. For an American every moment spent outside the borders of their home country was new, and was experienced for the sake of later being retold as evidence they might exist a short while beyond their natural habitat without incident. They could master their surroundings and gather sights and people into their cameras and their memories, to post later online as trophies of their worldliness.
This was perhaps one such experience, so the American man, waist-deep in water, asked the guide Angel, What’s that? Where are they going?
Crocodile hunting, the guide said.
The American man and lady both looked to the guide to better gauge his meaning. Ironic? Had to be kidding.
But no, flat was his face, unmarked by amusement at their expense, friendly or otherwise.
Wait, Crocodiles? There’s crocodiles in the lake?
Yes, the guide said, but not a problem. Not here. Hunters have to paddle way out, into the channels.
To clarify the direction of where crocodiles might be found, and hunted, one of the guide’s hands had lifted from water and extended a finger to point, the finger steady but dripping. On the water surface ripples trembled outwards from where fallen drops had pecked it.
While the guide and the Americans were talking through this revelation, the men and boys had climbed into canoe and with oars had begun pushing free of the dock, oars then re-angled into water for rowing. Quietly, easefully, the canoe split water before it and slipped beyond the shore, gig pole jutting from its rear at forty-five degrees upwards. Neither men nor boys looked their way again, after initial nods in response to the guide’s greeting.
Surely it was a joke at their expense. Or a way to test how chicken-hearted they might be, suddenly cued to the dangers of wild and natural water. And yes, chicken-hearted they were, and unembarrassed about it, walking closer to shore, leaving the guide alone standing further out and wading further, navel-deep, ribcage-deep, chest-deep. His back was turned to them, as if allowing them grace to embarrass themselves at failing to be so subtle, edging into shallows as if they’d come to the end of their swim unprompted. The guide may have been smiling then to himself or to the lake, or he may have been watching the men and boys in the canoe grow smaller, canoe in a slow-motion glide, listing left. Around a corner they turned, down a channel. What the guide said might be true or otherwise but surely they were hunting for something. A hundred, two hundred, a thousand years ago, the American man mused to his own girlfriend, the lake was probably a breeding ground of crocodiles. Every step near shore had to be taken with the utmost care and vigilance. They had seen their share of nature programs, water buffalo bitten on the snout as they lowered their heads to sip from muddy African rivers. Bitten savagely, yanked into a death-roll for drowning.
The guide’s girlfriend called them over to sit, dry in the sun. None of them were over forty, all of them were young. But to the children they must seem very much not one of them, adults, and adults from another world entirely. The guide’s girlfriend talked about the Mayans, attributing much of her knowledge to what her boyfriend had told her. His mother’s side was more indigenous than Spanish, she explained, and since his mother left her life, he’d become more interested in not just learning but living among that part of himself, the her that’s within him. Mainly though, she smiled as she added, he was tired of the city and decided to move to the country, where no one knew him, so he could start over as a new person. She was the new first person he met and welcomed into that new life. And how long had she lived in the jungle with him, the lady American asked. Two years, the girl said. They had their house, their friends. They made money as guides and provided sweat-lodge experiences for tourists. The locals all trusted them and supported them. Before the guide and girlfriend started bringing people out to the village, rarely were non-locals seen this far inland, unless on charter buses heading towards heritage sights, pyramids.
Nice, wasn’t it? the guide said, fresh from water and standing over them, providing them man-shaped shade from the sun. The lake is old, old, old. Older than your country even, or ours for that matter. Land’s always older than whatever country it supposedly belongs to. There’s a tree, we’ll show you on the way back, from the size of it, I’d guess it’s hundreds of years old. The biggest, oldest tree near anywhere around the village. People around here have been decorating it and honoring it for longer than the eldest of them can remember.
The sun did its work while they talked, drying them. Children were watching them again, ready to follow.
Into the trees again, sandy earthen path between tree and tree, birds gossiping brightly above them. They passed a stone kiln and a pair of plastic lawn chairs abandoned in the shade. Children followed at a distance, tracking their afternoon entertainment, these two specimens of mythical America in company of the guide and his girlfriend.
They came to four wooden stakes hammered into ground, twine tied to each and running between. Clumps of dirty grass and dust and bleached craggy stone opening into a slender jag of darkness, entrance to the cenote. The guide took a crouch, lifted the twine, ducked his head through, rested its tautness along back of his neck. He fished with fingers something from the dirt, lifted it, a rope. One rope and another running parallel alongside it, disguised underfoot, melded perfectly with dirt as it was. This lifting rendered the previously unseen suddenly visible, both ropes spanning the ground to meet around either side the trunk of a sizable tree, anchor for the rope ladder that hung from cave’s entrance to the underground floor below.
Want to go down and see, the guide asked. It’s ancient, sacred, and runs far along in that direction, toward the ocean, linking up with larger caves.
The lady American shook her head no, not even willingly. Standing at the height of her own relative shortness, she could look down into that slit of dark and feel bats and snakes and skeletons calcified over centuries until they blended with the walls. She could feel the rope fraying, splitting, dropping her, or worse, the ladder drawn up by someone aboveground, leaving her to shout echoes from the dark. Her head was shaking before she became aware her view of the guide and girlfriend and her boyfriend were sliding back-and-forth, caught in the nervous swaying of her no.
Again the guide’s face was flat, impervious to a clear read. If he was annoyed, it wasn’t apparent, if he was amused, was too polite to allow it to show, or too careful. An offended guest was bound to be a poorly paying one.
The American man declined the invitation, citing concern about sightseeing on hallowed ground. To this the guide nodded, agreeing, or in approval of the reason offered. Had anyone ever accepted, worked down the ladder? The Americans were told the guide often led people around Mayan communities and conducted rituals of healing, the purging of bad moods and spirits. An ex-architect from one of the largest cities on earth, previously Tenochtitlan, currently Mexico City, in truth he was as much a journeyman and transplant as they were. One or both of the Americans would travel a while along the same route, perhaps meet later that afternoon at the crossroads of mutual consideration: at one time he had been as much an oddity as they were, to these children, these men sitting on walls watching the afternoon descend around them. Foreigners. Visitors in cosplay among genuine rural backwaters. Vacationing and collecting into memory visions of some authentic tribal past, among a people who watch them with equal curiosity, waiting to sell them handmade jewelry once they receive signal from the guide the tour was over.
A short walk from the cenote brought them to the tree, the one esteemed by villagers. Wide skirt of packed earth around it, roots flexing from ground, vein-like, truck so thick if two of them were to stand opposite each other and reach around it to join hands, would struggle to do so. Many of the lower branches were thick as trunks, bark burnished and shiny, as if pulled taut by the branches’ fullness, straining to split. From these by lengths of twine hung geegaws of shells and bones, constructions of patterned twigs. To the Americans it looked a Christmas tree so ancient it predated Christ. Jars filled with flowers and cruddy liquids were laid about its base, wedged between roots. Jars and stacks of stones and candles melted down and re-hardened into mounds of weeping wax. If it wasn’t sacred, it surely played the part well.
Beautiful, isn’t it? the guide half-whispered, signaling lowered voices were in order. He pronounced its name among the locals, something outside the reach of English or Spanish, but the Americans were too self-conscious to be standing in sacred shade, having paid for the privilege, to ask the guide to pronounce it again more loudly, slowly, for their benefit. Children watched them between trees, the four of them walking around its base, taking measure of the full perimeter of its reach. The guide suggested he invoke the spirits of the tree with a brief prayer. The Americans, not knowing what prayer might look like or require of them, held hands behind their backs, bowed their heads. The guide spoke a few indecipherables that, translated, might be a recitation of last week’s grocery list or a petition to tribal ghosts, meaning lost among the sound of words that, for all they knew, were invented on the spot.
The path away from the tree brought them back into the company of huts and silent-eyed women, children walking from designated waiting areas along the path to follow beside them and tempt them with highly affordable authentic necklaces and bracelets. The guide included the flair of salesmanship to his translations, encouraging the lady American to buy more than one, buy several, some for her friends and mothers and sisters back home. Out of politeness purchases were made, once money changed hands the children and quiet women removed themselves from their company as if this were routine, planned. Walking past the make-shift kiosks where jewelry was sold, visitors were not to be bothered. Back at the parking lot, they found their cars where they left them, interiors burning with accumulated stale heat. The guide invited them to open all doors and leave the cars to air out. While the cars cooled, they could stand and talk about what to do next. Across the one road leading towards and through and away from the village, the cinderblock wall was bare of sitters. While they’d been lake-visiting the angle of sun had shifted to fry the wall and eat the shade, so the men had moved to cooler whereabouts on the parking lot side of the road. Eyes adjusted to the sun and revealed the men sitting nearby in the spotty dark beneath conjoined trees, buckets upturned in the dirt to serve as chairs. The guide walked over to talk with them, give his thanks, say his goodbyes, the men motionless and conversing with minimal response, as if they were being watched and were aware of it. The watching went both ways, of course, and the Americans did the same, compensating for their awkwardness by making a show of smiling.
Not long, not much time, the afternoon would lose hours so it was best they got driving, the guide told them, returning from across the parking lot and another century. They didn’t want to be caught driving back to the coast under dark. No streetlights, yes, but not to scare them, but there were checkpoints and people along the roads who’ve been known to stop cars. It wouldn’t be safe for them. Not for certain dangerous, but not safe either.
One car followed the other, out the lot, onto the road, drifting down a hot line of road with jungle boiling on either side. One turn and another turn, no roads marked, the last paved and lane-less road crumbling into gravel, the gravel lasting briefly until dirt took over. One dirt road carving and wending past a clutch of houses and half-finished foundations overgrown with weeds. At road’s end the guide’s hatchback slowed to park. To the right an odd cylindrical building pocked with smallish windows. Our casa, the guide told them, out of affection for the place stealing some Spanish into his English.
This was the very last building the guide had designed, had taken him a year and a half to finish, starting and stopping, paying for labor piecemeal when he had the money. The exterior was unadorned, minimal, but the inside, thanks to multiple skylights above, its one large room was filled with natural light, warm and crisp with acoustics.
They sat on bar stools around the kitchen island counter, eating jerky and energy bars. The guide poured them shots of mescal and toasted the great god of chance that had that morning and afternoon brought them together, four souls meeting once and maybe never again in this life. They weren’t sitting there long before a boy came standing in the doorway, door left open as invitation for him to join them. This is Lupe, the guide explained, a boy from the nearest village who asked to serve as the guide’s apprentice of sorts, to learn what he could from him. Imagine how vast and unending a summer afternoon must be around such a place, the American man would later muse to his lady, once they’d returned to the town and coast and the pristine calm orderliness of their hotel room. No television, he assumed, so no football matches or telenovelas. If you wanted to watch soccer you had to play with whoever was around, if you wanted to get swept up by romance or drama, you had to stir it up yourself among other villagers or imagine it. The appeal of becoming a self-appointed shaman’s apprentice would sound nigh irresistible. Joining them around the kitchen island, the boy listened shyly and stood by while the guide’s girlfriend combed his hair with her fingers and bathed him in the warmth of her smile. She offered him bars of chocolate and a soda from a cooler. He knew some English and, the guide explained, was eager to practice. The American man told the boy he was from the United States, as if that needed to be clarified, from a city to the north and middle of the country called Chicago. The boy brightened just short of smiling, it seemed, at the mention of Chicago. They continued talking a while and sometime during their discussion about the sweat lodge and such, the rest of the afternoon’s plans and such, the boy had slipped back through the doorway unnoticed, to return shortly while they were gathered outside, throwing blankets over the rigged makeshift lodge structure. The boy returned wearing a shirt several sizes too large for him, clean and ironed and nearly brand new, a Chicago Bulls jersey. At sight of the jersey, the guide appeared annoyed, explaining the boy was fascinated with America, collected sports gear of all his favorite teams, one for each city he wanted to one day visit.
The American asked the boy if he liked Chivas, only Mexican soccer team he knew of. He asked the boy if he liked Ochoa, the goalie, only national team player he knew by name. The boy received these efforts politely but offered no opinion on either, Chivas or Ochoa. This was the problem, the guide said somewhat bitterly, trying to convince local kids they have a history and tradition that’s worth knowing and not fleeing. To the U.S. they all want to go, soon as they’re old enough. Had already happened to some of their older brothers and cousins. Pointing to mounds of dirt beyond the lodge of mounded blankets and campfire around which they were standing, the guide said off and on he’d been digging here and there around his place, in the jungle, inviting kids to help. There were artifacts free to be found anywhere a person chose to dig. There was history everywhere around, beneath their feet. Even here, where they were standing. But being so close to it and used to it, how could a kid not take it for granted? Everything in a jungle was forever new, but simultaneously so perennial and ancient, nothing about it seemed very exciting to a kid who grew up within one. Instead they dreamed of city life in America. A place so new it wasn’t hindered by what happened the day before, the year before, much less centuries.
The guide and the boy carried heavy rocks to lay as weights along the edges of blankets hanging off the lodge, touching ground. The finished product didn’t resemble so much a lodge as an ant mound, dirty patchwork of blankets and rocks along the base. As the guide and boy ducked inside the entrance to prepare the interior, the girlfriend gathered tinder and dry leaves, crumpled and stuffed loose wads of old newspaper into a nearby fire pit. Larger stones in a circle around charred logs and an inches-deep wash of ash. With the flick-flick of a candle lighter she birthed the beginnings of flames at choice points among newspaper stuffed among clutches of twigs. Soon a fire was loud with heat and crackle, sputtering drifts of burning paper-ash from flames to drift and curl on the air above them. As the fire settled to a steady burn, the guide’s girlfriend took a shovel in hand, scooped fair-sized smooth stones from a designated stone-spot, lifted and lowered them into the fire. The guide, stripped to shorts, barefoot, called the Americans to do the same. The lady American shed jean-shorts and t-shirt to reveal a bathing suit, to the amusement of the guide folded these neatly to stack on a log. Conforming to the cosmic-mother vibes of the proceedings, cleaving the blanket-folds, ducking to enter, was not unlike splaying vulvaic folds to crawl back inside the womb. If so, it was a lodge-pregnancy with only enough room to nurture triplets, the guide and his travelers, these Americans. The insides were surprisingly dark and each sat with backs to blanket-wall, center of the lodge occupied by another ring of stones inside of which was a small earthen pit. Guide holding blanket-edges clear of the entrance, his girlfriend fished hot stones from the fire with the shovel, carried stones through the entrance to lay in the center of the lodge’s earth pit. Counter to expectations, the stones didn’t glow. But once several were laid atop one another and the lodge’s entrance was sealed and pinned shut, the guide poured water onto them from one of several pitchers at his side. Hissing and sputtering, hot plumes of steam guttered from the stones, water evaporating instantly. It stung the lungs and winced the eyes, soon sweat-beads were creeping down backs and bare arms and legs and necks and foreheads.
There were incantations and group song, fables wrung from several world traditions like damp from a twisted washrag. There were turns taken, each speaking of their griefs, ones who died or are dying, grandparents and friends returning from the shade-place, the void, to sit a while shoulder-to-shoulder with them. Mostly, though, there was water and salt exiting their bodies from hundreds of thousands of pores, pints and eventually liters. From a Nalogen bottle were was water at hand to sip, but it was hot, uncomfortable to drink. Dehydration and panting exhaustion and, after an hour of sweating away their bodies until supposedly only their souls were left, cross-legged, heads bowed, sluggish, first the man said he’d had enough, then the woman. Crawling from the lodge they enjoyed the most delicious shock, cool air bright along their whole bodies of skin.
The guide stood over them, skinny and stretching, arms raised and fingers flexing. One of the arms lowered around the shoulders of his girlfriend, her head tucked to his chest so he could kiss it. The Americans were advised to remain seated, to wait while the boy brought them fresh water. The boy came from the house not long after, plastic gallon jug in each hand, one for the Americans, the other for the guide and girlfriend. Reborn, the guide said. You feel it? The Americans, taking his suggestion of rebirth as metaphor, agreed. There was a place for myth beyond merely stories, but it was another thing entirely to dehydrate yourself to the edge of consciousness, short of passing out. Young and strong, both of them, rarely had they felt so weak. A half hour sitting in the dirt gulping water, chewing modest handfuls of trail mix, their strength returned while faint reminders of the weakness remained. What they’d endured, the man would later tell his girlfriend, was a kind of collective fever, good for killing viruses, maybe why long before the invention of penicillin a good long sweat in presence of a lodge-guide was considered healing. Relieved of distress, their bodies were free again to be taken for granted. While the guide and boy pulled down blankets and piled them, the American’s helped one another to standing. Birds brimming the leaves above them, invisible but busy.
Late afternoon, only a few hours of light left, the guide invited them back to the house to exchange emails and talk backwards through the events of the day, to gauge or feel maybe through the Americans’ eyes how their lives and world appeared, nearly now a shared memory. People from all over made their way to this out-of-the-way patch of jungle, the guide told them, they hardly needed travel, the world sent samples of each of its countries to them. And not always the most affluent emissaries, he said, you’d be surprised. It was then he recalled without fondness his recent hosting of French hippies, their lack of manners, leaving about the house unwashed dishes. They’d paid him half beforehand through Venmo but stiffed him when it came to honoring the remaining half, after they’d continued along their travels to Belize. The Americans, taking this as an expression of concern they might do the same, made a point of paying him cash. He and his girlfriend offered thanks and one last guide back through the mess of roads that had brought them there. Waving from driver and passenger side windows, they parted ways in the dirt lot of the Mayan village, Americans continuing along that lean meandering road they had followed from the coast, the guide’s hatchback paused along the shoulder as long as the Americans were in view, as if making sure they were well on their way, unimpeded. An hour and many miles of jungle, other villages, chickens pecking among dirt and scattered junk, checkpoints and military police asking for I.D., waving them on, they reached the town just as the horizon was blazing and trees were darkening. Back at the hotel, they laid their travel gear by the door and took turns standing beneath the feeble sputter of the shower’s nozzle, dried dirty sweat rolling off their legs and feet to twist down a sudsy drain.
Through sliding glass doors their room opened onto the beach, the Atlantic within view from the foot of their bed, Portugal and Spain and England hidden far beyond its level horizon. Drawing open curtains in the morning, they enjoyed sunrises so full and bright they reached for sunglasses even before they left their room. Evenings, sun merging with the mainland, palm trees grew shadows along the sand and the few squat dunes of beach grass they crossed along the path leading from double sliding glass doors towards the shore lengthened and darkened, quietly doubling themselves. This was the beach they’d walked in either direction for miles until they’d grown tired of the unchanging expanse of ocean on one side, variations of resort and restaurant and palm tree on the other. The predictability of beach-miles was occasionally ruptured by small disorienting surprises, an old woman blithely topless watching them pass an unmarked suddenly nude beach, two military police strolling towards them along the shore, cradling machine guns. Other than these variations the beach was like any other beach, though one oddity still remained for them to examine, especially after sundown. Among the shore-facing lower reaches of dunes were patches of sand cordoned off by wooden stakes bound by police tape. Not large, quite small actually, but plentiful, set apart from one another every ten, twenty paces. What were these, they asked the desk clerk at the hotel. Nesting sites, they said, each marked the location of sea turtle eggs. They would be hatching soon, should be already, they said, and this was why the hotel would prefer guests with beach-facing rooms to keep their rooms mostly dark after sundown. When the turtles hatch, dig their way out, they scan their surroundings for a light source, traditionally moonlight playing along the ocean’s surface, use that as a guide to crawl towards. If there are too many lights within view inland, that can cause some confusion, electrical light being more reliably brighter than moonlight. The stakes and police tape were there to keep people from stepping on them, crushing them, and the hotel room blackout policy was in place to keep the turtles from crawling towards even more certain death inland.
Dark worked the land, played with silhouettes far out on the water, sailboats, freighters, breezes carrying bird-sounds across the long flatline where sky folded into ocean. It was visible a while, then through gradations of gunmetal blue and deep gray blended past twilight into an inky black hatching quality stars above them. First evening in country the Americans were impressed to find a night sky they could actually view, no light pollution, no dense knits of smog-and-cloud. Quickly their amazement had fallen away and stars were merely stars again, decorative to an evening dinner on the hotel’s outdoor patio, one more perk paid for then taken for granted. They were on the patio again, different from the couple they were even a day before, as was always the case, ordering margaritas two at a time to keep pace with their thirst. They were talking of the morning and afternoon and the village and the couple who were nearer than they to the place they had visited, but who were foreigners all the same, despite the fact a house had been designed and built in the jungle to make their stay more homely. What did the villagers think of the guide and his girlfriend, did they find them strange? Non-Mayans from larger cities who willingly had chosen to move to a countryside where nothing of much importance happened, except the usual commerce between survival and boredom.
This was talk that pushed them from their seats, meal finished, margaritas poured into carry-cups, walked them along a sandy path between buildings and palms, other guests nodding good evening as they passed. They walked into the blackout zone, bungalows and cabanas dark against dark, beach leading them toward water. Voices crossed paths, bodiless until their people nearly walked into them, silhouettes striding from liminal drift, sounds more solid than sight, waves, palm leaves, children laughing or arguing. A pleasantly disorienting middle-world, a domesticated afterlife. The Americans stepped from their flip-flops, carried them in hand, sand bearably cool enough to walk on for once. Both were suddenly drunk, standing there holding hands, swaying under influence of breeze. Lasting effects of their dehydration earlier in the day, they speculated. Liquor was bound to hit them differently, their bodies still stunned and recovering, best to head back to the room and drop a few electrolyte tabs in glasses of water, drink to add solid ground beneath their drunkenness. They were turning to head back when they noticed a light wandering towards them, on shoreside of the dunes. A man, white shirt and khaki shorts, a hotel staffer, scanning the sand with the flashlight of his smartphone. He walked half-bent, and carefully. What was he looking for, they asked, had he lost something, maybe they could help. The man thanked them but said no need, he was looking for turtles. Some would be hatching, he said, had been the past few evenings.
They stood and watched the phone’s light, bracing and crisp, cast baby shadows across the sand, shells and seaweed and footprints. Begin at the marked hatching areas, search in either of two directions, shorewards or oceanwards: he had a method, and following it, it wasn’t long before he squatted to scoop a first find from the sand. A toy-sized turtle, head extended from shell, finned forelegs working. The hotel worker held it for their admiration beneath the smart-light, hooded eyes and a beak and faint comma of a tail poking from the rear of the shell. What next, they asked, walk it to the water? Not yet, he said, later. Later near the end of his shift he would walk to the shore and set them into water, leave them to amble towards their fate, the odds in their favor not great. What now then, they asked, but already he was answering, walking away from them towards the path cleaving dunes, ending at a side door to the hotel’s main lobby. He was beyond them a ways before they decided to follow.
The man must have left the lobby by other means by the time they entered. Mock-rustic decor, clay brick and teak and palm-thatched roofing, more functional roofing above such decoration, surely. The attendant behind the desk greeted them, two other guests in view in the adjoining room in middle of a game of pool, balls snapping, thudding against felt runners. Near the main desk built into the lobby floor was a circular stone-lined pit. They had noticed it when they’d first checked in and thought little of it, a fire-pit maybe. The lady American was stepping to the desk to meet the attendant’s smile and ask for some clarification from it when the boyfriend called her over to the pit. Walking to stand beside him, she saw what he was viewing, four, no, five newborn sea turtles working their fins against the pit’s sand-lined interior. The room was filled with light, overflowing with it, their confusion must be terrifying, the girlfriend said. The turtles each were inching themselves forward at an angle alongside the stone, pushing in perpetually recurrent circles. Tiny as they were, the effort required would burn quickly enough through what little energy they were born with, she said. How long had they been here, she asked the woman at the desk. The attendant appeared surprised by the tone, the edge to the woman’s question. Half an hour, the attendant guessed. They will be okay, she assured them, they wouldn’t be harmed. It was long a feature of the hotel to provide guests an opportunity to see the turtles a short while before they were released to the ocean. I can’t, the American woman said. I can’t stand here watching them any longer, it’s awful, it’s so mean. Hearing this, the attendant presented her most professional face and neither agreed nor disagreed, assured them again the turtles wouldn’t be harmed and would be carried soon to the water, invited them to come back in half an hour and watch the staff do so, if they liked. The Americans chose instead to return to their bungalow, to its roof and chairs, stars free-range above them. No television in the room, the night sky was feature entertainment. A jacuzzi on the roof as well, more margaritas if they liked, view of the shore from where they sat, water-jets rippling against sore back muscles.
On the rooftop the air was cool and brought a chill on the breeze. Their lower halves submerged in heat, upper halves goose-bumped and gently shocked by upsurges of cold. Earlier that day, miles from where they sat currently but centuries in contrast to the present moment, the same contrast, half in water, half in open air, then later crawling from an unbearable swelter to a more moderate temperature, on hands and knees from the lodge. Had they been there, had it actually happened? Since they were feeling it, neither had to find words to state it: grateful for their relief, they could thank their discomfort only in retrospect.
The turtles. Trapped, laboring in circles, hotel guests pausing as they returned from dinner or a stroll or live music at the bars, to marvel with pity at their persistence, instinct driving them forward along circuits in the pit. Hands would come, lift and drop them in a bucket. There they’d weakly tread atop each other until a hand selected them, ascended them from bucket to ease into pulsing breaches of water. Scanned from jacuzzi height, the beach was dark, depopulated. They saw nothing so imagined: by dozens if not hundreds, tiny lives struggled to exhume themselves from sand where, months before, their mothers had buried them. They were invisible from such a view, except in the abstract, as ideas, creatures rendered imaginable by example. From a comfortable distance they considered the great routine migrations of a species from land to water, then noting the pruning of fingertips and a wooziness, elected to do the same. Land was their element, but water was what they were born from, the man reminded the both of them, his girlfriend smiling at this, not laughing.
She was ready to dry off, she said, stood to step free of the tub. Then stopped, shocked: a frigid brightness coursing along back, thighs, belly. She let out a scream, surprising both of them. Rigid, stunned. Then shivers came, little quakes beginning in shoulders, shaking her in spasms. Cold startling then less startling, then tolerable. Then suddenly could move again, breathe again, so stepped from the tub. All this he watched from a warm crouch, hesitant. One more minute, he figured, five more, dreading the inevitable. He’d meet her down in the room, wasn’t ready yet. As a provocation she grabbed his towel and slung it over her shoulder, threatened to bring it down with her. Go ahead, he told her, knowing only if he took the threat seriously would she make good on it. They were drunk after all and this is how they flirted. Feign indifference, gain back a towel. Or feign it too well and lose it.
