Jungle Crossing (10 page)

Alfredo gathered us for an introduction. "Chichén Itzá was big city—a hundred thousand people lived here. Only a few buildings are restored. We explore those today." He looked at Barb. "Stay with the group so we don't lose you."

"I will for sure," Barb said, saluting. And she's the one making friends!

"Just stick with me," Talia said, acting like she'd officially adopted Barb.

"We will go with the guide and see the main buildings, then free time and lunch on the way back. See Mayan dancing," Alfredo said.

I just wanted to go swimming. Take a shower. Take the next plane home.

My shirt, drenched with sweat, stuck to me in a disgusting and embarrassing way. Everyone avoided standing near me. I watched the Bronze Sun Goddess holding hands with Dante; her cheeks flushed pink in the heat, but on her it looked good. I sympathized with some old ladies standing near me under a big tourist bus umbrella. They were wearing stretch pants and long-sleeved blouses. I pulled my shirt from my back and tugged on the bottom of my shorts. My hair, also wet with sweat, clung to my neck. A few gangly trees lined the path, but even the shade felt hot. I gulped some water to avoid heat stroke. Muluc's fainting had sounded a bit dramatic in Nando's story, but now I totally got it. The place was an oven.

We started out at the ball court, and I understood why Muluc felt intimidated. A pair of thick stone walls loomed more than twenty feet above us, stretching down a grassy area wider than a soccer field, capped with crumbling temples on either end. The gray stones, some with mysterious carvings, made me feel tinier than the time our class toured the Utah Jazz basketball arena. Everyone looked small—even Dante and Luc! I couldn't see anything beyond the ancient walls, patchy with moss, and the trees crowding the temples at the end. I snapped several photos of the ball court, but those ladies with their umbrellas kept getting in the way. Besides, I couldn't get the whole thing in one shot, not from the ground anyway. I'd have to sketch it.

"The ball game was sacred to the ancient Mayans," the guide said. "Like basketball to a Lakers fan." He was an older man, short like Nando, but stocky. And funny. I could never be so funny in a second language, let alone a third. I totally messed up the knock-knock jokes we had to present during our Spanish class fiesta.
Muy
embarrassing!

"They played with a ball of rubber made from the sap of the zapote tree, the same tree sap used for chewing gum by Wrigley's last century. Your grandparents chewed it." He looked at the cheerleaders. "Have you ever heard of Chicklets?"

"Sure, we have them in Texas," C.C. said.

"
Chicle
is the Mayan word for chewing."

"Cool." Talia fanned her hair against her neck. Barb imitated her.

"The ball weighed ten pounds." He pointed to a small circle with a hole in it, up at the top of the wall. "To score, they had to get it through there."

I couldn't imagine anyone getting anything through those little stone loops in the wall. Max and Josh faked jump shots.

"You want to take me on?" the guide asked. "But you can't use your hands—just your hips and your feet."

"Sure," they said.

"Even if the loser gets sacrificed?"

Max and Josh flushed red. Everyone laughed. Even me.

The guide walked us over to a panel of stone carvings and showed us a scene of ball game sacrifice. The carvings were so filled with details that it took a while for me to see the players, who wore elaborate feather headdresses, kneepads, and ornaments. Sure enough, in one, a man held a decapitated head. Our guide showed us how the neck of the loser spurted blood in the form of six snakes. He explained that Wak-Kan—or Six Snake—was the name of the Mayans' great World Tree and that all sacrifice had important religious reasons behind it.

"It's not just that they were bloodthirsty, violent people," the guide explained. "The sacrifice of the ball game echoed their myths. It would make your American basketball more interesting, eh? Sacrifice the loser?"

"Sometimes I'd like to sacrifice the referee," Josh said.

I raised my hand, like some dork sitting in a classroom. The guide nodded to me. Talia scoffed, rolling her eyes at Barb, and I almost didn't ask my question, but the guide kept nodding at me, so I did. "Who played the ball games—did they have teams?" I asked.

"Like, duh. Look at the size of this place," Talia said. "As if they'd make one shorty run around this place." She flipped her hair. "It's, like, a
stadium.
"

I blushed, hotter, redder.

Barb leaned over to me and said, "You look like a sunburned lobster."

"Shut up, you little brat!" I tried to pinch Barb, but she skittered away, squealing. Nando had a look of disgust on his face that made him look
worse
than one of those creepy carvings. Why does he care anyway? To him we're just dumb tourists.

The guide cleared his throat. "Yes, the Mayans played with two teams: the warriors and the captives. Ball games were political and religious," he said. "Many times kings would capture other rulers from different cities, and they would settle their differences on the ball court. Or a king could make himself more powerful by sacrificing another ruler's elite to the gods after a ball game."

I felt a little shiver of worry for Parrot Nose's brother. But then I felt totally stupid. Why did I care about some silly story Nando made up? I only listened to it because there was absolutely nothing else to do on that stupid, boring bus.

"Guess they didn't need cheerleaders," Talia said to C.C. and Jessie, but they ignored her.

"The elite watched the ball games from these two temples, but others could sit on top of the wall and watch." The guide moved forward. "Let's continue."

"Your shirt is
so
sweaty," Talia said to me as we walked through the crowds of people to another section of the ruins.

"Yeah," Barb echoed.

I growled low, "You're like a little parrot—imitating her all the time. It makes you a total brat when you laugh at her mean jokes. Like yesterday—"

"But it's true!" Barb said. "You look like Dad after he's played basketball."

I shoved Barb hard enough to make her stumble. "Shut up!"

Nando looked at me, all wide-eyed and shocked. "Are you okay?" he asked Barb, completely ignoring the fact that I was actually sticking up for him!

I marched ahead, letting them stare at my disgusting sweaty shirt.

The guide led us along the path near the big pyramid. The steps looked so steep, and I pictured myself slipping, tumbling backwards, and breaking 203 of my 206 bones. Thankfully, the whole thing was roped off, so even Barb couldn't get any ideas. I tried taking another picture, but there were just so many people crowding around. I mentally added a new reason to my journal, number 48: too many tourists!

"There are too many people," I said. "I want to see it like it was."

"With a hundred thousand people, I think it would have been even more crowded back then." Nando looked at me like my intelligence hovered around 2.3. "There are maybe a thousand people here right now." Nando glanced around as if he were counting.

"I just mean—It would be cool to see real Mayans," I said, probably lowering my intelligence score to a 1.7.

Nando stood in front of me, faking a big, cheesy grin. "That's what you want? Okay, take your snapshot of the happy little native boy."

"That's not what I meant." My face felt like it might burst into flame, so I gulped the rest of the water I'd brought. Chances of contracting heat stroke now: eighty percent.

"We should start sacrificing rich American
turistas,
" Nando muttered. "
If
the gods would have them."

***

We walked through the searing heat until we stood in front of a pyramid with a round dome on top. Barb ran ahead of the group, begging me to take her picture. I refused, but then Talia handed her camera to Nando and got him to snap a picture of her and Barb. Let them have their chummy little photo—there was nothing about this day that I wanted to remember.

"This is the observatory," our guide said, "or El Caracol, because the Spanish thought it looked like a snail, with its round walls and spiral staircase. The Mayans were great astronomers; they knew the sky so well that their calendar was actually more exact than the one we use today. They were also great mathematicians. Did you know the Mayans invented the concept of zero?"

The ancient Mayans would have loved me: a big, fat zero.

With Barb still at her side, Talia slung her arm through Luc's and whispered in his ear. Why wasn't she listening? Even the ancient Mayans were intelligent. She kept making fun of Nando and Alfredo because they had accents, yet somehow Luc's didn't seem to bother her.

We walked back j oward the center of the plaza, past the pyramid again. I wondered why they'd closed it to tourists. Too many deaths? We kept trudging along in the heat (I'd lost like seventy-five percent of my body water) until we were on a long white chalky tree-lined road that led to a massive green well of slimy-looking water. It was as round as a giant's bowl of pea soup and as wide across as our hotel's largest pool (not that
anyone
would want to swim in water the color of infected pus). Trees, bushes, and vines nervously peered over the edge across from us; we stood near a small stone platform that looked way too much like a diving board.

"You are now at the sacred cenote." Our guide swung his hands wide. "Mayans today still occasionally make sacrifices to this well. A cenote is a collapsed cave above an underground river. The Yucatán Peninsula is covered with limestone. There are no surface rivers, but there is an extensive network of underground rivers and caves and many cenotes. So watch out if you're wandering around in the jungle." He laughed. "You might fall in. Sacrifice yourself by accident."

"It smells like something's rotting around here," I said.

Nando made a snuffing sound through his nose. That was disgusting too.

Talia simply said, "You're probably just smelling yourself."

Barb laughed—even after what I'd said to her!

We walked closer and gaped at the thick, almost greasy-looking green water about twenty feet down. The rocky sides were the color of gravestones—whitish with smudgy black areas. Scrubby bushes grew from the cracks in the pocked stone.

"The Mayans
did
sacrifice people here, but not just virgins, like some guides like to tell tourists. Not me, I'm honest." He put his hand on his chest and crossed his heart. "The Mayans sacrificed everybody." He stopped and pointed at each one of us. "Yes, all of you would make good sacrifices. Any volunteers?"

The guys laughed. Josh grabbed C.C.'s arm and pretended to sacrifice her. "No way are you
even
going to try to get me into that foul hole," she said.

"Just think of all the rotting bodies," Josh teased.

Everyone started adding their own descriptions: decapitated skulls, flesh dripping with slime, hands reaching out to grab you. The guide took it all in stride, but Nando's face darkened to an angry red.

"It
is
pretty gross," I said, but Nando shot a poisoned look at me.

He muttered, "It is
sacred.
"

The guide ignored all the sacrificial pushing and shoving, and continued. "Many many years ago, a man decided to dredge the cenote. They found bones from people of all ages, plus gold and many other treasures."

"Did they find all the gold?" Barb asked.

Not again!

"No, the cenote is very deep—about one hundred feet—and the bottom is covered with hundreds of years of trees and debris, plus the current of the river makes it dangerous. We'll probably never find everything."

Barb walked out to the very edge, but I yanked the back of her shirt.

"Don't even think about it," I said. "There is no way I'm rescuing you in that green swamp of ancient rotting bodies, even if there is gold a hundred feet down."

"Yeah. Besides, you'd
never
be able to get back out," Talia said. "And you couldn't get Dante to come to your rescue this time either."

"I just know there's treasure down there," Barb said. "I just know it."

"So go to graduate school, or make a million dollars and come back with all your fancy equipment." I pulled her next to me. "
Not now.
"

Talia smirked at me. "Quit stressing. It's not like she's serious."

But then Barb asked, "Does anyone ever swim here?"

I rolled my eyes at Talia, but she was too busy watching Josh flirt with C.C.

"No, this cenote is sacred," the guide said. "The Mayans didn't even get their water here. They used another one closer to the plaza. Look, the walls are steep; just the fall alone killed most of the sacrificial victims."

Barb looked unconvinced. "It's so hot, a swim would feel great."

"Nice try," I said.

"Come on, Barbie," Talia said. "I'll take you swimming when we get to the hotel."

"Promise?" Barb asked.

Barbie? She
hates
that nickname!

"I can take my own sister swimming," I said, but Talia looked at me like she wasn't so sure.

"But you'll be too busy writing postcards to your zillions of friends back home," she said. "Barbie tells me everything." She nodded her head toward Barb, still gawking at the cenote. "Plus, it's not like you're exactly athletic.
I'm
teaching her the backstroke."

I sauntered up next to Barb to hide my blushing cheeks—and pinched her arm hard.

"Since you're such a blabbermouth, Barb, why
don't
you go for a swim?" I lowered my voice. "And stop talking about me, or I'll sacrifice you myself."

"Ouch! I'm telling Mom." Barb ran to catch up with Talia.

Nando gave me another dirty look. Why does he care? It's none of his business anyway.

I brushed past him, trying my best to catch up with the group without breaking into a run. I felt like such a little kid—just like the time Fiona made us all speed walk around the mall like the old people. I couldn't keep up. I never kept up. Fiona called me "oh-so retirement home ready." Talia's right, I'm not athletic. I can't do anything! I'm even dumb when it comes to all the Mayan culture stuff, asking stupid questions, making Nando mad.