Chapter Three #2
“That’s twenty points for using another big word, Junior Mint,” Juan hollered above the repetitive “rrrk” croaks of a pair of keel-billed toucans calling back and forth to each other nearby. “And ten points for correcting gatita on her misuse of her second language.”
“You’re full of crapola, too, Dad.” She smiled at Quint. “You also have that adorable dimple on your one side, heartbreaker, just like the candy.”
Quint’s eyelids lowered, flirting. “And which side would that be?”
“Don’t answer that, gatita,” her father said. “Neither Bronko nor I want to hear your reply.”
Raul stared at Quint, looking him up and down. “I see no dimple.”
“He keeps it hidden,” Angélica explained, stuffing her handkerchief back in her pocket.
“It’s a shy dimple,” Quint told Raul. “I show it to the boss, but only when she asks nicely.”
“?Ay, chihuahua!” Her father’s loud groan had an extra dollop of drama mixed in. “I had to share a tent with these two lovebirds at the last dig site,” he explained to Bronko, who Angélica heard grunt in reply.
“Like you could hear anything over the sounds of your own snoring, Dad.” She returned to Quint and the business at hand, pointing at his notebook. “Be sure to add that without proving the LIDAR data’s trustworthiness via ground proofing, other professionals will question the reliability of it.”
He followed in line, returning to the page. “Got it.”
“Believe me,” she continued, “you don’t want to put anything out in the archaeology world without solid, ground-proofed data.”
Her mother had learned that the hard way, although Marianne had offered proof to other scholars. What she’d provided, though, wasn’t good enough for the archaeology world at that time.
“There are plenty of pretentious assholes with over-inflated egos and career-hungry agendas who will rip you to shreds.” Even after her mother’s death, sadly enough, which had just made Angélica even more determined to make them eat crow.
“Gatita, you’ve been chewing on that bitter root for too long. Spit it out already.”
“Not until I show those bastards the error of their ways.”
“Next, you’ll be comparing your mother’s hecklers to those king vultures that have been circling over our heads all morning.”
Quint closed his notebook, staring at her for a couple of beats with what looked like concern lining his eyes before turning his attention skyward. “Why are those vultures circling? Do they know something we don’t about our future? Or is that some kind of sign from the Maya gods?”
She followed his lead, peering up through the holes in the forest canopy at the blue sky overhead. Where there’d been four king vultures earlier, now there were five. One more had joined the wake while she’d been telling Quint about ground truthing.
“Sí, it is a sign,” Raul said.
“Of course it is.” Quint stuffed his field notebook in the side pocket of his canvas pants. “You can’t throw a stick around Maya ruins without hitting some kind of mythological sign of life, death, or something in between that involves rain or corn.”
“I meant a sign that something is dead.” Raul returned to chopping through the large tangle of thick vines dangling from a strangler fig that was trying to take root. “La aguada is not far from here, remember. Life and death battles often happen around watering holes.”
Nodding, Quint uncapped his canteen. “Reminds me of some of the bars back home.”
“Those vultures are a warning sign, you know,” Juan called to them, sounding closer than before.
Angélica flexed her hand a couple of times before gripping her machete again. “Not a warning, Dad. Just scavengers looking for their next meal.”
“You say that, but you know as well as I do what the vulture represents in the Maya tradition, gatita.”
“What’s a vulture mean?” Quint asked before taking a drink of water.
She growled under her breath at her father while slashing through a mix of agave plants and palm fronds that skirted the structure.
“Vultures can represent many things, depending on the context of where their image is found. Sometimes they have symbolic meaning, other times it’s more ritual based. It could be both, too.”
“That sounds deliberately vague, boss lady.”
“Circumventing the truth will only make you dizzy, gatita.”
She sniffed mid-slash and smelled a familiar sweetness in the air above the jungle’s general mustiness.
She paused, lowering her machete. “Dad, are you smoking a cigar?” Now was not the time for a cigar break.
Neither was later, according to his doctor.
“You are not to smoke or drink alcohol with those heavy-duty painkillers the doctor gave you for your leg.”
While her father’s leg had healed well from the compound fracture, he still suffered from sharp stabbing aches at times, especially after traipsing through the jungle and not resting enough.
“I’m not smoking.”
“Then how come I smell one of your cigars?”
“Because Bronko is smoking the cigar that I gave him. I’m simply savoring the second-hand smoke. The doctor said nothing about breathing near a cigar.”
She heard Bronko’s deep, rumbling voice, but couldn’t hear his words over the sound of Raul’s chopping at a strangler fig root.
“You’re splitting hairs,” she told her father.
“And you’re stalling because you are afraid to tell Quint what the vulture really represents in Maya mythology. Keep it up, and I’m going to give Junior Mint another fifty points just to ruffle your feathers.”
“I’m not playing that damned game anymore, Dad.”
“What game?” Raul asked between chops.
“Spill it, Angélica.” Quint lifted his camera and started taking pictures of the broken-down platform now semi-cleared of foliage.
She slashed through a couple of fronds with extra oomph.
Her father’s persistence at making something out of nothing rivaled his mulishness some days.
At least the rest of her usual crew wasn’t in tow at the moment, especially young Esteban, who tended to latch on to her dad’s supernatural yarns of potential terrors.
“As you know,” she explained to Quint, “vultures are scavengers that consume the dead. The Maya knew this was helping to cleanse the land. Renewing it in a way. This is one reason they revered the vulture and included it in glyphs and religious tales.”
“The thirteenth day of the month in the Maya calendar shares its name,” Raul added, kicking some of the cut roots from his path.
Angélica glanced at the ranger with raised brows. “Did they teach you that in school or for your job at Calakmul?”
“Neither. Mi abuela was Maya. She is why we moved to this area from Mexico City when I was a boy. She needed mi padre to help with her family’s ejido.”
Angélica smiled. “How young were you when you moved to her farm?”
He held up one hand, all five fingers stretched out.
“She once told me the blood and feathers from king vultures were supposed to help cure some diseases.” To Quint he added, “One of our cows had died from a snake bite, and the vultures were taking care of the carcass. She had me gather any feathers left behind after the vultures finished with their meal.”
“Damned snakes.” Quint tucked his camera back in the small padded case he’d brought along today. “Why else did the Maya revere the vulture?” he asked her.
There was no way around the truth. Her father would spill the beans if she didn’t. “Vultures also accompanied the Lord of Death.”
“Yum Cimil,” Quint said, wrinkles forming a fence line across his forehead. Was he remembering their adventures involving the Lord of Death from the last site?
She continued in spite of his frown. “Yes, also known as Ah Puch in books about the Maya.”
She glanced at Raul to see if speaking about this particular god from Maya mythology was making him uncomfortable. It certainly had some of her crew on previous digs. But Raul seemed to be taking it in stride, as he was back to slashing away at the jungle’s clingy grip.
“The Flatulent One,” Juan shouted across the mound, earning several barks in response from a nearby spider monkey.
In a lowered voice, he continued to Bronko, “I always liked that title for the god of death. Sort of takes the spookiness out of him, which I need in dark temples when I come across his image on the wall in his decomposing, skeletal glory. I mean, really, did the scribes need to show his abdomen spilling out rotting matter while he chomps away on human bones? It’s a little much. ”
“They called him Ah Pukuh in Chiapas,” she heard Bronko say.
Chiapas, huh? Was that where he’d spent a lot of time while working for one of the South American cartels? There was certainly a lot of instability and worries in that part of Mexico, keeping all but the bravest archaeologists at bay in spite of so many potential discoveries.
“I thought a screech owl accompanied the Lord of Death,” Quint said. “What’s it called? A muan, right?”
She nodded. “Owls, vultures, spiders, centipedes, scorpions, and more hang out with Ah Puch,” she told him. “Which creatures were included depended on the artist’s take on the god.”
Angélica sheathed her machete and returned to the sacbe next to the platform.
Pulling out her satellite map, she tried to locate the junction where the old sacbe they’d followed along from northwest to southeast passed this platform.
Now that they’d cleared away some of the vegetation, she could definitely see the platform structure better, picturing what it might have looked like in its pre-crumbled lifetime.
Unfortunately, that didn’t help her find where she stood at the moment on the map.
Damn it, she should have brought her tablet with the map along.
Although what she had wasn’t nearly as good as what Dr. Fernel promised to provide if she’d just let him join her.