The Girl in the Glyphs Page 3

  Chapter 7

  Lake Nicaragua—Asese Landing

  There were no soldiers aboard the ferry. No tourists either. Only crewmembers in blue uniforms, the locals with cardboard boxes, a couple of young Mormons in white shirts, and a muscular black man with dreadlocks. I hid my loneliness behind sunglasses, found a chair on the forward deck and gazed at the same sights Father Antonio must have seen in the 17th Century—the great waterside trees, the squawking birds, the majesty of a distant volcano.

  “Jennifer!”

  I jumped up. Locals turned to stare as if I had a sign on my back. One of the Mormons pointed over the railing. “Down there.”

  It was the embassy man—jeans, boots, crimson ball cap and sunglasses—standing at the bottom of the gangway. He waved.

  “They won’t let me come up!”

  I left my pack in care of the Mormons and hurried down the ramp, happy for the chance to thank him. “What are you doing here?”

  “Please don’t tell me you’re going to the islands by yourself.”

  “I’m not alone. A guide is waiting…in Ometepe. She’s armed.”

  “She?”

  “What’s wrong with a she?”

  He pulled me aside to let other passengers up the ramp. His hand lingered on my shoulder, warm and reassuring. “I guess you didn’t hear about that old couple?”

  “What couple?”

  “Old Indian man and his wife. Same volcano where you’re going. Hacked to pieces by machetes. The same day your friend Catherine disappeared.”

  An image of body parts, decapitated heads and blood flashed through my mind. It was not the image I wanted to start the morning.

  “How do you know Catherine and I were friends?”

  “She told me, said the two of you were buddies and she was here to do legwork for you.”

  He held up a hand to stop me from interrupting. “That’s why I was waiting last night. To warn you about Gonzales. Wouldn’t surprise me at all if he has a tail on you.”

  I followed his gaze to the upper railing. The Mormons in their white shirts were leaning over the side, staring. So was the man with the dreadlocks and everyone else.

  “Are you saying I should cower in my hotel, not do what the Smithsonian sent me to do?”

  “All I’m saying is stay with your guide. Don’t wander off by yourself.”

  A whistle blew. More passengers surged up the gangway with bags and boxes, sweeping me along. “Be careful!” the embassy man yelled. “We’ll talk tonight.”

  A bell clanged. The engines whined. Then a voice over the p.a. system was saying something as confusing and unintelligible as this entire trip.

  Chapter 8

  Ometepe Island—Volcán Maderas

  A few months earlier, when Stan and I were planning this trip, I had imagined us beneath the palm trees on a little tropical island, drinking nica libres, making love in a hammock, fishing and swimming, puttering around in a little boat, and eventually getting around to what I’d obsessed about for years—finding Father Antonio’s cave.

  Now, stumbling across a moonscape of black volcanic ejecta, I felt the weight of failure. There’d be no rum and cokes and bikinis and lovemaking beneath the palms. No exploring for Father Antonio’s cave either. Not this trip. Equally troubling was that idiot of a gun-toting guide who either couldn’t or wouldn’t keep up. She was far down the trail in her green army fatigues, blasting away at seagulls with her pistol.

  My lungs burned. My thigh muscles ached. I wasn’t even sure I was on the right trail. I came to a hot, bubbling spring that stank of sulfur, dropped my pack to the ground, and was about to consult my map when a flash of light startled me.

  Lightning, I thought, and ducked behind a boulder. But there was no thunder, no clouds, nothing but a forest above and Lake Nicaragua below.

  Something behind me moved. I spun around and almost bumped into an old Indian man with firewood strapped to his back. Next to him stood an old woman with a basket of mushrooms. Weird, I thought. Why hadn’t I seen them before? They glanced wide-eyed from me toward the sound of Blanca’s gunfire and shuffled on, taking a detour around the spring.

  “Wait!” I cried. “Is this the trail up to the crater?”

  The man gave me the kind of blank glance I associated with Native Americans who didn’t speak Spanish, but the woman stopped. With her basket and faded smock, and a face as cragged as the volcano, she looked like a painting from the marketplace of my childhood.

  “Por allá, cerca,” she said in a thick accent, pointing up toward the cloud forest.

  The man glared at his wife. “Come,” he barked in his Indian language. “Can you not see the thing is ix-dzul? Can you not see the other ix thing with the gun?”

  Unless I was hallucinating from the sulfur, he was speaking my mother’s language, Yucatec Maya, and he’d labeled me a foreigner with the qualifier ix for female.

  “Wait,” I cried again, and trotted after them.

  I caught up with them near a stand of volcanic boulders. Below us, Blanca was pumping another volley into the sky. “Bix a belex?” I called out in the traditional greeting.

  The old man dumped his firewood on the ground and swung about, his shirt wet where the wood had rested, his leathery face asking how an ix-dzul like me, who looked nothing like them, could speak the tongue of The People.

  “My name is Ix-Junapa,” I said, struggling with the explosive Mayan sounds. “I am called Jen among the dzuls. My mother is Maya.”

  They stared at me in my boots, photographer’s vest, sunglasses, and FSU cap.

  “Maya?” the man asked in a dry, high-pitched voice.

  “Maya,” I said, thumping my chest.

  The man gave me a yellow-toothed grin. The woman smiled, and just like that, I was among friends on the side of a volcano, as Indian as my grandmother, immersed in a world in which witches and demons are as real as the moon and the stars.

  “You are not of this mountain,” the woman said, which was the Mayan way of asking what I was doing there.

  I was not comfortable speaking Yucatec and had to search for the right words. I couldn’t even ask about glyphs without first explaining the class to which they belonged—non-animal, non-human, non-spirit. Still, I managed to tell them about my American missionary father and Mayan mother, and moving to Florida when I was ten. “I’m an arqueólogo,” I said, using the Spanish word for archaeologist, “a person who studies the past.”

  The man shook his head. “You will not find your cave on this mountain.”

  “That cave is cursed,” the woman added, spitting out the words.

  Sea gulls squawked. Another burst of gunfire sounded down the trail, and I stood there like a mummy, afraid to ask these old Indians how they knew I was searching for a cave. Or what they were doing on this mountain, a thousand miles away from their language zone.

  “Listen,” I said as firmly as possible. “I am not searching for a cave. I am here to photograph glifos—native rock drawings. Any old glyphs will do.”

  The man pointed with his machete toward the clouds. “If you follow that path, you will find a glyph. It faces the bright side of the sun,” which was his way of saying south.

  “Will you show me?”

  “They say the place is protected by an old forest devil.”

  I rolled my eyes. No doubt the same old devil that haunted my childhood, and there was only one way to defeat it. I dropped to my knees and began praying aloud to the creatures of the forest. The old couple knelt beside me, and the three of us prayed like the Indians we were, begging the birds and monkeys and lizards to protect us from the old forest devil.

  When we finished, the man struggled to his feet and scattered a handful of volcanic dust to the wind. I yelled down to my guide to wait for me at the bubbling spring.

  “I can’t hear you!” she yelled back.

  She kept trudging up the trail, looking Yucatec herself with her dark skin, straight black hair and eagle nose. “What did y
ou say?” she asked.

  “I said wait for me at the spring. They’re going to show me some glyphs.”

  “Who is going to show you?”

  I turned to point out the old couple, but where they had stood before, I saw only boulders, thorny brush, and a hissing steam vent.

  “That’s odd. They were right here.”

  “Who?”

  “An old Indian couple.”

  Her eyes widened. She yanked out her revolver and glanced around. “No one lives up here. There used to be an old couple but somebody murdered them.”

  “No, Blanca. I was just talking to them.”

  She tried to smile, but her jerky motions and the way her eyes shifted side to side told me she was unnerved. She bent over and searched for footprints.

  “Nothing. No one was here.”

  “You’re wrong, Blanca. They were standing here. I spoke to them.”

  “Then you spoke to ghosts.” She backed away with her pistol. “Hey, Indios, go back to your grave! Next time you show your faces, I’m coming after you with holy water!”

  She fired two shots into a boulder.

  “Stop it! You could hurt them.”

  “How can you hurt someone who’s already dead? Let’s get out of here.”

  “No, Blanca. Just wait for me at the spring. I won’t be long.”

  She gave me the kind of glare locals reserve for stupid foreigners and left with her pistol, her feet crunching in the volcanic soil.

  “Ferry leaves at six,” she yelled back. “Don’t be late! I’ll signal at four!”

  I turned back to where I’d last seen the old couple. “She’s gone!” I yelled. “Come on out!”

  A gust of wind was my answer.

  I searched behind boulders. I looked in thickets and gullies and in patches of thorny bushes, but there was no trace of them, nothing, nada, not even footprints. How could that be?

  In spite of the warnings about wandering off alone, I trudged up toward the clouds, passing around jagged boulders and steam vents and in and out of shallow ravines, determined to find the old couple and get my photos. My breath came in labored spurts. This was crazy, I told myself. I wasn’t in shape for this kind of climbing, but I was almost there.

  Why waste this opportunity to get photos for the Smithsonian?

  At last, sweating, gasping for breath, I reached the tree line and stepped into a lush forest of tangled vines and ancient trees with gnarled limbs. The air was cooler, the shade welcome, but it was as spooky as a witch forest in a fairy tale. Monkeys and macaws ruled the overhead. Frogs croaked. Insects chirped. A clear running stream meandered out of the shadows. A trail ran beside it, disappearing around a bend. No way was I going deeper into this place.

  “Hello!” I called out in Yucatec, cupping my hands around my mouth. “Are you here?”

  No answer.

  I plunked onto a fallen tree to catch my breath and was still sitting there when something shrieked. Then came the thump of running feet. Like a wild animal. Or the forest devil.

  Without thinking, with my heart in my throat, I jumped up and set off in a fury.

  And almost crashed into the old couple.

  Chapter 9

  They didn’t look like ghosts, at least not the ghosts of my imagination. They weren’t transparent. Didn’t have hollow eyes or scary features either. Just an old mom and pop, ancient and fragile. The only thing out of the ordinary was an earthy odor I’d not noticed before, like damp soil and decay, as if they’d been living in a crypt.

  “Come,” said the man in a thin reedy voice. “We will show you the speaking stones.”

  “Speaking stones?”

  “What you call glyphs.”

  I hesitated, not sure if I wanted to go anywhere with them.

  “What happened to you?” I asked.

  The woman stepped closer. “This mountain has many hiding places.”

  “Why were you hiding?”

  “The ix-thing with the pistol. She does not like us.”

  “Why does she not like you?”

  “Because we are dead.”

  A chill came over me. I gazed into her eyes, saw her wrinkled skin, breathed in her foulness, and again had to fight back the impulse to run.

  “Did you say dead?”

  “It is what the ix-thing with the pistol says. Come, let us show you the speaking stones.”

  I checked my watch and was stammering for an excuse when once more they dropped to their knees and began praying. Again, they asked the birds and the monkeys and lizards to protect us from the old forest devil. They sighed as they prayed. Their chests rose and fell like other living persons, and when they stood, their knees left imprints on the forest floor.

  Ghosts, what was I thinking?

  I followed them in and out of patches of mist, around boulders as large as my townhouse in Virginia, over fallen trees and beneath low-hanging limbs. Moisture dripped. Lichen and flowering bromeliads clung to trees. Brightly colored parrots fluttered from tree to tree, and each swing of the old man’s machete brought up the pungent odors of freshly chopped plants.

  At last, we jumped the stream and stopped at a cluster of moss-covered boulders. The old man pointed with his machete. “Here are the speaking stones.”

  I twisted out of my pack and stepped closer. If there were glyphs on these boulders, they were as hidden as the chattering monkeys. “I see only boulders.”

  He shrugged and began peeling back decades of moss and creepers. He splashed water on a boulder. He rubbed it with a filthy handkerchief. The profile of a woman appeared, a naked woman with a moon-like face and flowers in her hair.

  The man stepped aside and took off his hat. “She is speaking to you.”

  “All I see a nude woman who likes flowers.”

  “She is telling you her name is Glyph Girl. The message is in her eyes, in the down-turned corners of her mouth, in her sadness. She is speaking to you, telling you of her need for a man.”

  I frowned at this crude remark. It reminded me of Stan’s putdown of my good friend, Diane. Before I could reply, he peeled the moss off another boulder, this time revealing a princely fellow with headdress, rich garments and an enormous erection.

  “This man is also speaking to you. Can you not hear his words?”

  I tried to answer with a straight face. “Is he saying he is the man for the woman?”

  He nodded and went to work on a third boulder. On it appeared a clockwise spiral.

  “It is the symbol for attraction,” said the man. “The feelings people have for each other.”

  “Love,” the woman said. “A spiral means love.”

  I stepped closer. Spirals were common in the world of Indian rock art. Archaeologists had many explanations—birth, death, heaven, whirlwind, a journey into the unknown.

  “Are you saying the woman feels an attraction toward that man?”

  “It is the meaning of a spiral,” the man said. “As clear as the stars at night.”

  He uncovered a fourth glyph—the man and Glyph Girl together, holding hands beneath a smoking volcano. The old man lowered his voice, and I could picture him sitting around a campfire a thousand years ago. “It is a moonless night, dark and starry. The night birds are calling. Look closely at the girl, my child. Is she not a reflection of you?”

  I shrugged but said nothing. The man went on: “It is in your face, child, in your eyes. The stones are speaking to you. This is you—a lonely woman in need of a man.”

  He tapped the last boulder with his machete, the one with the two of them together. “There is great trouble. See it in the volcano behind them, how it smokes? Smoke means trouble.”

  I thought about Stan, who was nothing but trouble. I even thought about the embassy man. Was there an attraction, a spiral between us, framed against a smoking volcano?

  Or was this nothing but the world of my childhood?

  I took out my Leica and began adjusting the settings. The woman jumped back as if I’d pulled out
a rattlesnake. I showed her the camera.

  “For images,” I said. “I need them for my work.”

  “Take all the images you want, child, but do not point that thing at us. It steals the soul, leaves you as nothing but a walking corpse, an empty body for witches to feast upon.”

  Her dark Indian eyes had the same fear I remembered in the faces of the old women of my village, the revulsion, the terror of tourists with cameras.

  “I understand,” I said, and motioned them to step back.

  The man went to work on another boulder. The woman stood beside him. It was impossible to get a broad view without them, so in spite of my assurance, I captured them unaware—the man in his straw hat and sandals, his face turned to leather by a thousand suns; the woman in her dark shawl and long faded dress. For Blanca, I told myself, to prove they weren’t ghosts.

  “Here is another one,” the man said, stepping back from his work.

  I almost choked at the sight. There they were again, this man and woman of the glyphs, the woman with her mouth open as if crying out in pleasure; the man with a wicked smile, poking it to her, juices splashing, the volcano behind them hurling out fire and debris.

  The archaeological term for erotic expression is coitus, a word that can be used with a straight face in presentations. But the word didn’t come close to capturing the raw passion on the boulder. Stan would have come out and said it. They were fucking. Period.

  I smiled at the thought and again adjusted the lens. This was better than a good romance novel—five glyphs in sequence, glyphs that told a story.

  The Girl in the Glyphs.

  It is a moonless night, dark and starry. Night birds coo outside my window. Crickets chirp. Life stirs all around but I am so lonely it hurts. Why can’t I find love? What must I do?

  Oh, yes, I could get mileage out of this. Write an article for an academic journal. Or a novel.