BOOK ONE
(Lucy)
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Workers began to overtake the site and our solitude on the ledge was interrupted. James heaved my pack over his shoulder. “Let’s get out of here.” We mounted the hillside to depart when Virgilio Fuentes, the park overseer, intercepted us. He wanted to speak with James, as everyone always wanted to speak with James whenever they would happen to catch him walking the grounds. He chatted with Virgilio while I tried to pull my hand from his, but he would not release me. James held my hand as I turned in one direction, while he faced the other direction to speak with Virgilio.
I didn’t know what Virgilio wanted. I know only that he went on and on. I felt disoriented and aggrieved. I wanted to understand why a woman committed murder to humiliate James.
Freed from Virgilio at last, tension mounted in James’s face. He led me into the wood and down the dirt road just west of the Principal Group. The canopy cooled us and the breeze lifted our faces. James walked in a slow gate, no leaning strides. Pebbles popped under foot. The moist air and singing birds elicited from me a calming effect and I settled. I said, “It’s peaceful here. I feel human here.”
“Humanness is also chaos, Lucy,” he said. Then he was silent.
The path opened to a small hidden plaza that I had not seen before. It was clearly a playing court with two alleyways, but not nearly of the size and extravagance of the Ball Court in the Principal Group. “Is this a ball court?”
“A Late Classic court. We think it was used only locally, not for state games. It had a dirt floor instead of stone or plaster.” James didn’t point, or turn, or lift his cap, or put hands on his hips the way he had done so naturally on other occasions. He walked toward a winding path that picked up on the other end of the ball court.
“Were they rituals?”
“Were what rituals?”
“The games played here. Or was it pick-up ball?”
“We found evidence for a number of stone incense burners, but it was probably a local lineage court used for contests that were not of state-level importance.” He spoke blandly. “It’s strictly Late Classic, between C.E. 700 and 800.”
“Where are you taking me?”
“We’re almost there.” On through the thick wood, batting away bugs and bowing beneath looping branches, the trail led to a hidden Ceiba tree, its root buttresses twelve feet high, twice the size of James when he stood between them.
“I come here when I want to be alone,” he said. We sat at the base of the roots.
He pulled me between his legs and folded his arms about me from behind, the way the root buttresses enfolded him.
“What’s the matter?” I said.
“I’ve made a mess of my life, Lucy, and other peoples’ lives. You were right when you said I ruin lives.” His eyes grew dark, his brow was in knots. “Several years ago I made a woman pregnant and she bore a son.” He pressed his cheek against mine. “I have a son, Lu.”
I turned to face him. “Paco.”
He nodded.
“Paco’s your son.”
“Yes.”
“He told me he didn’t have a mother.”
“He doesn’t live with his mother. I took him away from his mother.”
“Who is his mother?”
“Berto’s niece. Her name is Yamileta. You bought vegetables from her at the air strip.”
“The vegetable lady is Paco’s mother?” He nodded. “Does Paco know you’re his father?” He nodded again. “He calls you Mr. Fee.” I turned away. Then, as quickly, I turned my eyes back upon him. “He told me his father didn’t want him to live with him. He said that’s why you let him sleep in your bodega.” James didn’t speak.
“How old is he?”
“He’s eight. I was twenty-five, just out of grad school.” He explained, with less than polished diction and without his signature spell-binding effect, that he took the child from his mother after he was born, but at the time didn’t feel capable of caring for him. So he asked his maid, Brigida, to keep him while he paid the boy’s expenses. James had named him Tomás. Brigida nicknamed him Paco and that’s what stuck. Over the years, as the boy got older, she would bring him to work at James’s home. Paco began to perceive the unique connection between them, which James himself could not resist, and when Paco was about six he wanted to be around his father more. That’s when he started sleeping in the bodega. The boy had been with Brigida when I visited Copán a year ago, which is why I didn’t see him then. When James returned with me to Tegucigalpa and, later joined me in Wisconsin, Paco was with the maid.
“Why did you take him from his mother if you weren’t going to raise him yourself?”
“I wanted him to have a better life than he would have had there, with Yamileta. But I also had to protect my work and my standing in the community. It seemed like a good solution at the time.” He lowered his head. I felt myself stiffen. “Lucy,” he said.
I stood. “The great founder of the Copán dynasty Yax K’uk Mo’ is dead. His flesh and his bones rotted in the grave. Your son is alive.” He didn’t answer. I felt heat rise to my face. “Have you ever tucked him in at night? My God, James, he begged for money to bring me food in the jail. He begged.” I backed away and turned around. Then I faced him again. “Do you love the Maya more than life?”
He stood and faced me and looked at me coldly. “Go back to Larry, Lucy. I won’t stop you.” He took three steps in the direction of the path and waved a hand. He turned to look at me again, then walked away. And the land of Maya tilted off course. A second time the warrior king attempted to control the forces of the world of his own making. He procured his victim for sacrifice and I sat alone on the ground. The moon fell from her rising, once bright and full of light, she had fallen and faded and disappeared behind the sun. That is death. I closed my eyes.
Then, in the time it took for me to close my eyes and turn my head from the direction of his leaving, he returned. He held me. Lillian would have pronounced, “Rebirth!” The truth is, I can’t say which of us was holding the other up. It didn’t matter. In that singular moment, cradled amid the roots of the giant Ceiba, we both knew who we were. We knew I would be his wife and the mother of the child born from seed he spilled with a woman he did not love. He had left her the way he had once left me. He left his son too, the son who slept in his storage closet.
But the king did not fall. He held. The stars and planets remained in their courses. He took my hand.
We trod the long path back through the wood, back to his truck. He said, “We need to go see Yamileta.” I knew it was so. After that we did not speak. Weariness settled over us, and James’s brow was still in knots as he drove, knuckles white upon the wheel. The thought occurred to me: I shall be a mother now. This kind little boy who begged tortillas for me, is to be my son. Is this why I came back to this place? Because a shoeless boy needed a mother?
We would go to the woman I had spoken with on the airstrip, whose hair fell loose upon her crooked neck. Who asked me about the party she knew she had intended to hijack with a dead man painted blue. She would ruin the man who stole her child, the man in the truck sitting next to me. But he was not ruined. He found his way around her plan.