Linton Robinson
Grayson Moran
Team 2012
Mayan Calendar Girls eBook Published by: Adoro Books
South Carolina, USA
www.mayancalendargirls.com
Copyright © 2011 by
Linton Robinson, Grayson Moran, and Team 2012
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Click titles to go to chapters, click title of any chapter to return here.
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Her hair was a foreign banner on ancient Mesoamerican soil, waving long and lustrous under the late sun and flaring golden against the rough black stone. Her head lolled back over the edge of the Nohoc Mul pyramid*, giving Curtsy a superb upside-down view from atop the 140 foot structure. Though she was distracted to an extent by the series of powerful orgasms blitzing through her inverted skull and glorious, twisting body. Spread wide as an eagle and soaring as high, she gripped the corners of the stone slab and ground her groin upwards in frenzied response to the ministrations of Puch Pop, who she thought of as "Pooch" and of what he was doing to her as "screwing the brains out of a blonde, for Christ’s sake".
Her legs came up, pointing skyward and quivering alarmingly as her hard, smooth athlete’s muscles spasmed. If the tourists had still been down there, some Japanese sariman could have taken home photos of the Cobá * ruins featuring a vibrating victory sign on top of the tallest pyramid in the Yucatan. Or taped a sudden cry blasting out of her extended, relaxed throat; perhaps interpreting it as territorial monkey cries or the lust call of a jaguar. The sound triggered something very deep in Puch, and he collapsed on her as if shot by an ambusher’s arrow. He lay on top of and between her, feeling the continued vibrations, his head pressed against her strong, lovely breasts. He shuddered in his own darkness, listening to the wild thrum of her heart.
"Some Mayan you are," she whispered to him in a slightly shaky voice after an indecent interval. "Aren’t you supposed to tear it out while it’s still beating? Offer it to the Gods?"
"That’s what I’ve been trying to do," he mumbled into her hot flesh. "Only fair: it’s what you do to me."
"Awwww." She spoke lightly, but was actually as moved as she could allow herself to be under the circumstances. She put her hand behind his head, wrapped her legs around him in a tight nether hug. "You’re the sweetest guy ever, Pooch. But I just can’t… you’re going to have to settle for just a mindless blond sex machine."
"I can live with that." He lifted his head to smile at her, both of them fully aware it wasn’t really true. "But I’d rather live with you."
"Then come with me."
Which they both knew wasn’t going to happen. He was bound to the family "homestead" at CroCun, would never go far from it, though he couldn’t have said why. It did fine under his parent’s management and his little brothers, sisters, and cousins were much more fetching than he was at tossing food to the gators and selling souvenirs, which freed him up to work around the area, earning outside money by guiding tourists around the stone monuments of Cobá and the underwater tunnels of the cenotes. And meeting attractive foreign women, an important step in developing his manhood and identity.
Then he’d met the ultimate foreign blond: beautiful in face and feature, body a fine-tuned racing machine, as agile and delighted underwater as he was. The Maya had been the most resistant people in the Americas to the Spanish conquista, but the comely Señorita Kurtz had conquered him utterly without even trying. And now she was leaving. He responded to her invitation with silence, and by tightening his embrace.
"It’s my dream, Pooch. I gotta go. You know that."
Oh, he knew. But had to give it a shot: would keep trying until he saw her walk off. "Look, I can stop working here at Cobá; we could spend more time diving the cenotes…"
"It’s not the same and you know it."
"And Enrique said he’ll take us out more, do some deeper reefs." That was where he really saw who she was, he thought, even more so than like this, straining her hard softness as he burrowed into her. She was still seriously interested in trying for freediving depth records: the two of them going a hundred yards and deeper, frolicking in the open ocean with their porpoise-tail monofins. Driving down the reef in a scatter of angelfish, blue tang and neon-striped wrasse.
"But I’d be working in tanks and BC’s. You know I hate that whole SCUBA thing. Those jerks are all gear queer, want to be submarines. I don’t want expeditions, I want to live down there."
"Me, too."
"I know. That’s why I like you." She did a quick hip flutter, scrubbing her blonde pubic patch against his thin, black Indian gloss and feeling a little tumescence cranking back up. She smiled at him from inches away: shining glory on him. "But Dolphin Discovery… Come on, Pooch, you know."
He knew. She’d be working with marine mammals, her greatest passion. A passion he couldn’t hope to supplant, is the way it was looking.
"I apologize for not being a dolphin or sea lion or something."
She made a sad face and put her hand over his lips. "You’re the closest thing I’ve met, though." She ran her other hand into his lush, coarse hair and started to undulate against him. She’d been right about detecting resumed interest down there. And now he was moving, too. Things would be all right for a little while longer. "And you’ve got me right here. In your manly arms and on top of the world."
He looked at the stark, brutal architecture of the ruins, the scatter of lakes in the hot green jungle, the slash of road leading north. He kissed her long, deep and hot as he tried once again to move inside her to stay. He moved his lips to her ear and said, "For now."
"Now’s all we’ve got," she said, her voice blurring as she responded to his urgency. "What else does anybody have?"
"The fascinating part of the calendar is what nobody seems to care about. August 13, 3114. Before Christ. Like he had anything to do with it. How many peoples have an opening date?"
Winston was wound up, lolling crossways in his matrimonial-sized henequen hammock, tripping his brains out and just dying to share it all. As he usually did, he rocked back and forth in the hammock, each swing bringing the tip of his toe to a bamboo pillar where it could propel his next rock with a mere flick. Every swing slightly flexed the hammock’s stanchions, which also supported most of the palm thatch palapa that provided shade and shelter on his handbuilt floating island. Seen from the lagoon, the sovereign islet of Winston Bacon pulsed slightly when he was in his hammock, the bamboo walls, palm thatch curtains, and various greenery growing on the roof of the slapdash shack of recycled detritus bouncing lightly on the plastic bottle floatation under its flooring, decks, sand "beach" and various potted shrubs and vines and trees.
"So let’s look around the world of the times, where dates are a little sloppier, but more historically sanctified. The first Egyptian dynasty circa 3100, the first Mesopotamian city, Uruk, about the same time, though nobody claims to have found the cornerstone. Kali Yuga in India, 3102. It was a time of beginnings all over the world. And you can trace them through the ages of fire, earth, air and water. And now we’re looking at the age of ether, the Fifth Sun, the Age of Center.
"Your people didn’t just do things when it looked good. They timed it all out to the stars and Milky Way. Channel islands of the Pleiades, where they claim your people came from. Our system aligns with Alcyone in the Pleiades every fifty-two years, the exact length of the Calendar Round. You’re a race of astronauts. Illegal aliens."
For once he wasn’t raving to himself, though it’s uncertain how often he knew the difference. He was taking this particular info-dump on the girl who squatted naked at the edge of the raft, gazing up into the shaky rafters that managed to hold up the roof mats as well as their festoons of mobiles, strange clothing items, garish souvenirs, drug paraphernalia, and outlandish sex toys. She was quite a sight for anyone who cared to stare instead of blathering about crypto-archeology: breasts as spherical as stone temple houris in India, Chinatown cheekbones, matte skin the color of cinnamon sugar, and sleek black hair so long it brushed the floor every time she shifted her delectable ass (which was the only time it ever got swept).
Her name was Xchab and she was as Mayan as they come: he’d found her selling cheap Chilangoware * shell jewelry on the beach dressed in a village huipíl *, tapestry sash tied around her hips, and about three kilos of braids piled up on her head. Which she considered her working outfit. She’d much rather have worn retro-slut black drag with Doc Martins and a buzzcut because she was a ponk at heart--a ponkita, actually, since she was emphatically female and drastically underage. But the only outbound ticket that had punched her so far was this old hippie, who liked her to wear her hair down and mostly nothing at all, which was fine with her. Anything to quit being Maya village people.
Although she was entertaining doubts about stranding herself on this crazy raft with this old pendejo. What her mother would call me’ex káak. What did he do all day? Smoked mota, which nobody did but low class losers, and get crazy on hongos, which nobody did but psychos and gringos. Well, he was a gringo, more or less. So why did he like that jungle garbage instead of having some coca or better yet, "crack"? She had only heard of crack, but lusted for a taste because the name itself just sounded so very, very bad. Which is to say, of course, extremely good.
She stood up smoothly, though she’d been squatting on her heels for over an hour. She gazed at Winston Bacon, ranting on the bed, and shifted her weight just enough to give her pose a sexual tilt. She rocked her head forward, then shook it, her hair slithering around to hang in front of her the way he liked, her nipples staring out as round and black and beckoning as her eyes. She lowered her brow and stared at him from under her silken lashes, wetting her lips slightly. Under her breath, she said, "Winston, why don’t you shut up with that nutty Indio shit?"
He wasn’t really retarded. Not even a "savant" like some said because it was the only way they could explain somebody so talented in one field not having all the social skills and flashy acumen their own lives had led them to associate with intelligence. The best way to explain Ganzo might be to just realize he marched to a different drummer. A really slow, muted drum with wacko syncopation.
He waded ashore naked, the rip current tugging at his strong brown thighs. He stood stocky and firm, resisting the pull of each receding wave, moving forward as each new one flooded up from behind him. This ebb and flow was something he’d understood before anything he could remember, his ultimate measure.
He’d left his frayed white cotton manta cloth shirt and pants back on the other beach, the one just south of the postcard Tulum ruins where all the cabanas were. Clothes meant nothing to Ganzo. He’d learned you’d better have something over your hose when around other people, but the cabana crowd didn’t seem to care. They ran around naked all the time, especially the women. Who Ganzo had learned not to stare at.
He had no way to evaluate these people who paid more for a night in waterfront shacks with no floor, mosquito screen, electricity or running water than he paid for a month in his shed on the restaurant roof. The phrase "pretty Eurotrash stoners with money" would have meant nothing to him. They laughed at him and bought him drinks. And bought his obritas. The women wore them. He’d see women so enchanting it stopped his breath and heart, splashing in the surf wearing nothing but a necklace, bracelet or anklet that he’d made at night in his shed, turning shells and coral and native wood and hennequen * fiber into something that brought him money, something that could touch that fascinating, forbidden flesh.
Once there was a blond girl with blue eyes who wore one of his necklaces around her waist. She would walk the entire beach every morning, completely naked, but with his necklace--a nice piece of coral with the tunnels bored out with a nail--dangling right in a little thicket of golden hair that shone in the sun. When he finished one of his obras now, he held it up and saw it nestled in fine gold threads, displayed on a bed of sunlight.
But they didn’t come to this beach. It was a dangerous swim and offered nowhere to sit, no beachfront bars to sell them margaritas and dope. New arrivals would give him drugs when he walked through the bars selling his work. They wanted him to do something funny, say something weird. But they gave up when they learned that drugs had no effect on him. His drum beat on undisturbed, an ebb and flow in fifths and starts, diminished sevenths.
This was "his" beach, the realm where Ganzo was the King of Beachcombers, a fine-toothed comb over the sand and shallows where the waves built teacup beaches amid hollowed stone. He walked right to a little eddy between two shafts of limestone protruding out from the sand and reached down to scoop up a handful of tiny caracoles *, mini-conchs less than a half inch long. Once the mobile homes of tiny mollusks, then of miniature hermit crabs, soon to be darling earrings to be taken back to Italy or Winnipeg and forgotten in a drawer. He sluiced the little calcium spirals in a wave and dropped them into the mesh bag hanging around his waist.
There wasn’t much in the way of really useful coral today. He hadn’t expected it. You got the best stuff after a big storm stirred the deeps and tossed its findings into the currents. Big blows brought in the real treasures, including corazon de mono seed pods, little pucks of hard wood that took on a deep polish when he buffed them with old pantyhose and rubbed them with a little oil from the side of his nose. They looked like a heart, in a rounded way, but even if he’d thought about it he would have had no idea why it would have been a monkey heart.
The storms last November had been fiercer than usual, flattening many of the cabanas and scaring away the hippies for a few weeks. But they had brought him the strangest treasures of all, his coralcaturas *. They had not been easy to swim over to the main beach, carry to a taxi, then tote up his shed, but they were precious in a way he couldn’t fathom, held his attention as much as any naked beauty romping in front of Paraiso or Bocola. He had never shown them to anybody.
The weather had been fair this week, though, and he knew there would be no deep sea gleanings. But there would be other things. Perhaps the skull of a pelican or frigate bird. Boiled, exposed to the merciless tropical sun on his corrugated tarpaper roof, lovingly polished, lightly waxed and mounted in a hardwood shadowbox, they were beautiful mementos and some he’d made graced walls in Mediterranean villas and Heidelberg dormitories.
Or perhaps vertebrae from fish discarded by fishermen. Spinal bones from tarpon or marlin turned into wonderful adornments in Ganzo’s instinctive hands. This beach was a sort of sargasso, a place where currents met and cancelled, cooperated to bring him things. If a dead bird fell into the water anywhere in a fan-shaped area of ocean extending out almost sixty miles, the Caribbean currents would beckon it to this beach and to Ganzo’s sharp gaze. People marveled at the things the sea laid at his feet, but to Ganzo it was no more miraculous than sipping water or breathing air. He’d found everything from SCUBA gear to a boatful of huddled Cuban refugees on his beach. Nothing he could find here would be a miracle of any kind. Or so he believed before he walked around the last fingers of softened limestone before the beach gave way to the big cliff that tumbled straight into the waves.
Spectacular as his new find was, there was so much sand and seagrass piled up that a beachcomber less experienced and receptive than Ganzo might not even have noticed. But he spotted her foot and calf immediately and stopped to stand in a semi-religious shock. There was a woman washed up on his beach. He could see her leg sticking out from the pile of kelp, could see an outthrust hand rising from the wash of sand... could see a flow of long blonde hair.
He dropped to his knees beside this visitation and began the slow, tectonic shifts of mind that served him on those rare occasions that required thought. It was a naked blond woman with golden skin. White skin burned red in a stripe across her back and on the portion of buttock he could see without moving any sand or seaweed. She wasn’t moving.
It took awhile for it to surface, but Ganzo faced the concept of death. This woman must surely be dead. And dead people were trouble. Deaths, even of beautiful women, were not unheard of on the hippie beach and they brought trouble by the carload. Ganzo reached out with glacial slowness, finally placing his hand on the woman’s shoulder. It was warm. And beneath the surface, like the submarine currents that rolled and ground huge rocks beneath apparently calm seas, he could feel a throb: dim, muted, syncopated.
He moved then, all the thinking blessedly dealt with and leaving him a grateful slave to the innate movements of his hands. He tossed away seaweed, he moved sand, he splashed water. He excavated a beautiful woman in her mid twenties, muscular and shapely, with lovely proportion even in the slackness of her private sleep. Her hair was a twisting flow of cornsilk... and a curly delta of honeygold fiber. He reached out shyly and pried one eye open. It stared sightless at the sky, a pool of topaz blue. She was breathing, though barely. She was badly bruised and moderately burnt in the areas that most held Ganzo’s attention. Her nipples were as pink as the inside of a shell.
He knelt with his head bowed, smitten silent and still by the presence of The Greatest Find Of All Time. Then it became mercifully clear what he would do. Again his hands moved unbidden. His right hand slid under her back, lifting her breasts up towards his face as her head lolled back, trailing gold glory. His left hand went to her thighs and sought the advantage he needed. Then he stood, his strong legs and shoulders hefting her slim frame effortlessly. He paused for a moment, holding her cradled, staring at her and breathing the briny musk of her. Then he walked into the water, clenching his toes for purchase against the pull of the receding waves. Simple enough for even Ganzo to grasp: Finders, keepers.
He’s sitting right here." Blaster patted the round shape under the purple velvet shroud like a father doting on a real comer kid. "Man, I like, so hate to part company with this guy. He’s like a member of the family. But you know how it goes?"
Oh, I know how it goes, Bannock thought, looking around the dingy motel room. Not even a Motel 6; more like a Motel 2.3. On a scale of a hundred. Cat smell, dope smell, hippie smell. And the gorgeous girlfriend dressed practically in rags. Yeah, if I was "Blaster", I might part with an incredibly valuable ancient treasure to scrape this lifestyle off my waffle stompers.
Loris was leaning back on the ratty couch, already cutting the cord. Which was a good thing. Sick transit Monday. But she had a few last words on the oXo deal.
"He changed our lives. Seriously." No need for that last word; her solemn brown eyes told all. "He showed us how to live, unsnarled our karma, opened us to The Love."
Wouldn’t mind cracking a case of that myself; Bannock eyeing her just enough to let her know it was there if she wanted to nibble. But it’s all about business, isn’t it? He motioned towards the velvet lump, which somehow dominated a little clearing on top of the grungy, littered coffee table. "So, let’s see what we’ve got here."
Blaster nodded, but Loris gave him a deadpan look and said, "Yeah, let’s."
She didn’t like anything about this, and this looming, soft-spoken heavy least of all. She couldn’t decide if he looked more like a Mob soldier with his callused hands and callous expression, or some ex-military mercenary with his short brush of stiff, steel-gray hair.
Bannock hefted his black ballistic nylon messenger bag and tapped it significantly. "As agreed," he told her, not bothering to address Blaster anymore.
The shaggy dealer wiped his hands across the skidmarks on his hemp pants and reached for the velvet. "Good enough for me."
When he whisked the cloth away even as hard a case as Bannock stalled out for a moment, struck by the presence of oXo.
Criminy, he thought, lotta starglow for a piece of rock.
The quartz skull sat in the same gloom as the rest of the room, but seemed more luminous, as if touched by an overhead spotlight. "Aura" wouldn’t be all that farfetched. There was silence for half a minute, oXo’s usual effect. The toothy grin was enigmatic, but approachable: this was one skull that signified nothing of terror and death. The faint golden tone of the crystal seemed warm and wise, invited the touch. Enticed confidence.
Damn, maybe the whole crystal skull fetish has something to it, Bannock was thinking. At least he didn’t have to go into some grungy old temple full of boobytraps for it. Though thinking of the cluttered, toxic motel room, he modified that to more like, Not totally, anyway. His hand surprised him no end by moving out unbidden to stroke the top of the quartz cranium. It felt slightly warm to the touch, smooth and caressable.
"You’re going to take good care of oXo." Loris didn’t make it a question, more of a kind of pointless threat.
"Sure I am. Some major people want to get in on his..." He glanced at her, the lovely young face now hard and the lissome body tense. "...guidance. His wisdom. There are lots of lives that need changing."
She relaxed a little, but still eyed him suspiciously. Hey, ol’ oXo is sure as hell going to change my life, he thought. "How does anybody know his name?" he asked her.
"He tells you," Blaster blurted out. That’s how we know it’s ‘Osho’, not like ‘ox-o’ or something."
"There’s a label on the bottom," Loris said.
The two men stared at her. Bannock picked oXo up with both hands, feeling a peculiar impulse to cradle the skull by his heart, wrap his arms around it. Carefully he rotated it, the crystal a dance of reflections and light shafts shattering down inner faultlines. And sure enough, there was a sticker: "Made in China".
That tensed Bannock up, but Blaster practically levitated. He jittered out of control, goggling at the others, staring at the label like it was an ace falling on the dealer’s jack. The spasm passed over him and he fell back on the couch waving defensive hands towards Bannock and the quiescent oXo. "No way, Man. No fuckin’ way. He’s been... Look, I got him from Ginrick himself, he’s... Ah, shit!"
Loris eased languidly forward and extended a natural colored but well-cared-for fingernail. She flicked the label off and leaned over to stick it on Blaster’s forehead. It might as well have said "Vacancy" in that location. She smiled a beautiful little smile and said, "April fool, asshole. Just wanted to find out if you were really washing him every day like you’re supposed to."
Blaster was hors de combat, Bannock thought he might be in love for the first time since his teens. Loris leaned forward, her loose hempen top falling open a little, revealing no evidence of support garments. She bored right into Bannock’s eyes and said, "Now you show me yours."
Bannock could have used a little more eyeball time with her, but there was the business thing. He set oXo down beside him in the rickety plastic deck chair, lifted the shoulder bag onto his lap, and opened it. "There’s good news and bad news about that, kids."
Blaster showed him a mild befuddlement he figured was his usual game face; Loris looked calm but reproachful.
"The good news is, I’ve got the money," he said, "The bad news is, you don’t get any of it. Sorry."
Blaster jerked forward as if kicked in the balls. Loris slumped and looked around the room, then at Blaster, with a sad expression.
"More bad news," Bannock went on, sliding a very wicked-looking little .32 auto out of the bag. It was fitted with a dummy silencer he’d picked up; didn’t work--and was therefore not illegal--but sure looked intimidating. Definitely slammed Blaster back onto the couch. "Good news, I never shoot anybody unless I absolutely have to."
Loris turned a very searching gaze on him and said, "You should consult with oXo before you do anything rash. He can help you work this out."
"I’ll pencil him in for this evening, Sunshine." Bannock gently lowered oXo the bag, slung the strap over his head, slipped his gun hand inside it to continue vaguely covering them, and stood up. She stood up, too.
"Just ask him what you should do," she said in a neutral tone. "oXo knows about people, can get things done. Believe me, I’ve lived with him for three years."
"Maybe one of the things he got done was bringing me here to bust him out of this shithole."
He got a different look from her, then. He was unsure what it was, but willing to find out more. Slowly, thoughtfully, she said, "That’s what I’ve been meditating with him about for the last few weeks."
Bannock backed towards the door, but kept his eyes on the girl. She shifted her posture almost imperceptibly, and just like that he knew where she was coming from. He looked her over head to toe, scanned her face with finality. Said, "You got a passport?"
She squatted quickly and dragged a big Mexican hippie bag out from under the coffee table. "Right in here."
Blaster stared at her but couldn’t seem to settle on the right question. As she strode toward Bannock she said, "oXo told me I should get one.
One more thing pissin’ Aphra off--the gatekeepers and guardians you have to go through to talk to powerful people. And what pissed the pissiest was the way they always think they’re the ones with the power. Always way more arrogant and self-important than the people they supposedly guard from whoever is supposed to be trying to crash their party.
She’d worked her way up to this jive-time turkey, Mr. Ivy League Don’twannabe trying to talk down to her and pretend not to be eye-fucking her in the process. Playing everything close to his tailored chest, trying to string her out. Carefully avoiding saying anything of substance, much less of interest. Not even, Get Lost. Only thing he’d made clear was that she wasn’t talking to The Senator unless she told him exactly what she had to sell. And she’d been just as definite that she wasn’t laying out the goods for anybody except The Man.
"A bit of a misconception, I’m afraid," he was droning on. "The whole idea that any Senator from the South, especially one who made the wise move to our party from the Democrats before..."
"Do people still say ‘Dixiecrats’?" Aphra asked innocently.
"I suppose. Not around here, anyway." First smile out this stiff. About as sincere as his artlessly displayed PhiBate key.
"Oh, that’s right, it’s the Republicans who’re the Jim Crow bloc these days, isn’t it?" Aphra wrinkled her brow in thought, "I guess ‘Dixicans’ doesn’t have that ring."
"Well, huh, huh..." Now was that the phoniest chuckle she’d heard, even here inside the Beltway? Tough competition, but it had the legs. "That’s the sort of misconception I was talking about. Actually the Senator’s record on issues relating to African Americans is..."
"I beg your pardon?" Aphra’s first use of her Drop Dead Voice froze the aide in mid-sentence. "Do I seem deficient in English?"
"Your English? No, not at all."
"Perhaps I still haven’t entirely shaken that nagging Ebonics accent?"
"Uh... why do you ask?"
"Well you seem to think I’m from Africa. I hope that isn’t about the whole ‘descended from apes’ thing." He was starting to show that future-roadkill-in-the-highbeams stare she always liked to cultivate in a white man.
"And what makes you think I’m American? Rather than Canadian or Bahamian or something?"
"No, of course not. I meant, you know... your..."
"Oh my ‘heritage’? Is that what you meant?"
"Well, look I just meant, Black people..."
Aphra stuck her arm close to his so aggressively he flinched. She said, "Your sleeve there is black. Am I that color?"
He got more flustered, then suddenly drew a breath and leaned back in his chair. "How about you tell me?" he said. "Make sure I got the right password for this week."
"Call a spade a spade?" That restored his fluster level in a hot minute. She shrugged. "I prefer to be referred to as a ‘nigger’, if you don’t mind. Cut the BS, wipe out the cheapest shot in history"
He stared, giving her a chance for a chuckle or rimshot, but she sat there serious as a process server. He steepled his fingers and gazed over them. One more stunned victim of the N-attack. Whitey never realized he was forging us a weapon there. Anybody got the sense and gumption to pick it up and swing it.
"Appropriating the ‘queer folk’ model, are you?" the tout suit came up with, trying to regroup.
"They copped our licks, we’re copping theirs."
"Well it sounds like a lot of fun, actually. I wish you luck on it. I’m dying to hear Diane Sawyer or Hillary Clinton drop that one on television."
She gave him a sly smile. Wouldn’t mind seeing that, herself.
"Meanwhile," he said. "I assume you’re just as prickly about your sex as your color. Have chicks retro-ed to wanting to be called ‘bitches’ as well?"
"If the shoe fits," she drawled, crossing her legs to dangle an Italian minimalist piece of footwear in his view. Mostly just luscious leather sole and the blatant hint of two straps. "I’ll wear it."
Fifteen minutes later she was sitting across from The Man, pitching Her Plan. It’s all in how you talk to honkies, she thought. Just speak slowly and enunciate clearly.
Keep turning the crank, May. Maybe you’ll crank out an answer. Hit the right line-up and the past and future will fall out the bottom like a Vegas jackpot and you’ll be PlayDate of the Month for History Channel. She grabbed the handle on the huge interlocking gears on the white wall, and turned them easily, watching the little glyphs on each cog come into new permutations.
There was something soothing in the clockwork reliability of the wheels turning within wheels, the little gears meshing solidly as they rolled each little Maya glyph in place to generate new combinations of human attempts to depict the silent sheets of time. She’d dialed up her birthday (12 Bakun, 18 Katun, 6 Tun, 3 Winal, 16 Kin, I Cib Tzolkin, 4Mol Haab), the day she got her doctorate(12 Baktun, 19 Katun, 11 Tun, 4 Winal, 99 Kin, 12 Muluc, 12 Uo, 8 Lord of the Night), the day she lost her virginity(12 Baktun, 19 Katun, 68 Tun, 5 Winal, 4 Kin, 8 Kan, 12 Zotz, 5 Lord of the Night-Edgewater Hotel, Seattle, Post-prom). And kept spinning it all the way forward, to where the glyphs stopped and the last three signified the winter solstice of 2012. 13.0.0.0.0. Otherwise known 13 Baktun, 0 Katun, 0 Tun, 0 Winal, 0 Kin, 4 Ahau, 3 Kankin, 9 Lord of the Night. Triple lemon. Locally noted as December 20, 2012 AD. 20/12/2012 does have a little more ring to it than 9/11/2001, huh?
She turned away from the huge calculator, the largest of its gearwheels stretching past the floor and ceiling of the museum hall. And wasn’t that a lot of the problem, right there? It was in a museum! Not exactly breaking news. It had been on TV, in U.S.A. Today (writhing in glee at the cool graphics to go with the over-simplified factoids), even the tabloids. A jillion psychics and psychos, mediums and medianauts, astrologists and asshologists, were all over it. There were seminars and conventions, like Star Trek. She’d been trying to come up with a "Trekkie" type name for Mayan Calendar groupies (Twelvies? Mayanistas? Baktunies? Tzolkin Heads?).
She walked over to the displays of Mayan buildings, highly accurate and spotless white models under the glass floor, and stared down at Palenque and Chichen and Uxmal like an astronaut god. They always reminded her of the little white buildings on the "Game Of Life" board. Probably built with Lego then customized, she thought. Wonder if they’ve put out a Mayan Set with snap-on blue warriors and feathered serpents.
But she had to admit, Burkhardt had been right. You take what’s laying on the table and build on it, he’d told her, add the next layer. Forstemann * had cracked open the hieroglyphics with the Dresden Codex * two hundred years ago. And that lay on the table until Thompson *, Lips, Deckert and L’huillier had layered on more interpretation on top of that, then that lay on the table until Vickie Bricker * came along and figured out the whole calendar system. The remarkable interlocking wheels of days that had suggested the cogwheel analogy she’d just been playing with, though the Mayans hadn’t made any of those sidereal gearboxes. Wheels weren’t their long suit: math and stargazing were. It was the stuff of public imagination, but nobody remembered Bricker now, did they? They talk about Arguelles * and McKenna *, and the other New Age nutrolls.
Burkhardt had pushed her towards the next layer: beyond the Great Cycle. "The Day After Doomsday" was his idea of a killer book. With her meticulous scholarship and--as the old letch was always quick to toss in--her looks, she’d be a media star as well as an academic hero. The Sagan of archeology, the Lord Carnarvon of Mesoamerica. The Laura Croft of real life. But not if she couldn’t figure out a way to turn this thing up to Eleven.
If she could only get past what she termed "materials failure". The realworld proof was not co-operating. She turned expectantly as Luis came up behind her. She was sure he’d struck out again. However much he desperately wanted to get on base. The museum staff had gone ballistic when she requested dismounting the Jade Codex so she could examine the back of it. But Luis had been ecstatic to help: convincing the stuffy old politically-appointed staff at the Museum of Mayan Culture * to honor her impressive credentials, doing the physical job and paperwork himself. To end up with nothing.
When she’d first come down to Chetumal *, Luis had been highly apologetic that most of the relics in the state trophy museum were replicas, especially the big impressive stones. She’d soothed his embarrassment on that issue with her genuine opinion that it was better that way. The reproductions were excellent, sufficient for study, perfect castings taken from molecular polymer molds. People could see the evidence, feel the impact of their own past, in which they were glorious lords of existence, not marginalized aborigines. Greatly preferable, she’d said, to looting the original stones and hauling them in like captives. Leave them where they belonged, not kidnapped like the Elgin Marbles.
Luis, a fresh-scrubbed INAH * rookie aided by his political activities while studying in Mexico City and a powerful uncle with PRI * connections, was extremely happy to hear such an opinion. He fit in well with the current National History Institute concept of creating cashflow Disneylands rather than boring digs. And he’d been extremely excited when she showed up talking about the obverse of the Jade Codex.
It was improper to call it a Codex, of course: it was more like a tablet. A pocket calendar, if you like. A slab of very dark jade the size of a legal pad and a half inch thick, intricately carved in a medium that had held the detail better than the limestone steles and friezes. Obsessively copied, lovingly displayed. And now revealed as inadequate. Maybe.
She’d shown him the citations to make him believe the probability that there was more on the back of the jade tablet, and that it was highly significant. "Just having an obverse is really unique," she had told him. "It’s like the U.S. Great Seal."
"What, the escudo of the United States?"
"Yes. The only national seal with an obverse side. You must have known that. It’s famous."
"Oh, wait, the pyramid and eye."
"Exactly." Find me an archeologist who hasn’t been blown away by that image, and spent a career denying it, she’d thought. "The occult side of the official story."
"So the Estados Unidos has a Dark Side." He asked with playful innocence. Like most Latin Americans with college education he pretty much assumed it was all dark.
"Not dark: just out back," she had chuckled. Then struck a movie pose and wickedly croaked out, "Come over to the Back Side, Luke."
Her backside was something Luis was dying to come over, but the other side of the ersatz jade slab had come up smooth and empty; mounting studs cast right into it.
But now he stood there grinning, ready to play his trump. It had been like pulling hen’s teeth to get it and she’d know that. There was some deep departmental embarrassment about the Jade Codex. But he’d gotten the lead to the original artifact. He held up a printout in front of her, but couldn’t wait for her to read it. He said, "At Cobá."
Her gratitude was marvelous to behold. Licking his mental lips, Luis offered to drive her up to the Cobá site himself. She was just so damned hot. Quite beyond the firm curves on the delicate bone structure and the graceful fluting of her face and throat and calves, she was "china". The Yucatan borrows a lot from Cuba, including music and food, and one bit of slang was the term china or chinita to describe the highest and most erotic style of female. And if there was ever a girl who was chinisima, it was the lovely archeologist, Doctor MeiMei Chiang.
Bannock gave Loris a glance and smile when she came out of the bathroom, wrapped in a fluffy white Sheraton robe and toweling off her long mahogany hair. And looking very, very good. No rush. For a professional thief, extortionist, asskicker, and kneecapper, Bannock was far from brutal or crass with women. He knew quality when he saw it and he knew the hippie girl was a class act who’d made her call. He couldn’t completely discount the idea that she had tagged onto him to try to get the skull back, but he figured she’d be around and patience would pay nice dividends. He liked the real thing.
So he turned his attention back to oXo, regarding him from the dresser as he crouched on the foot of the bed trying to look into those transparent eyes. He had a feeling there was something going on there, but was clueless about how to get a grip on it.
Loris swiveled past him and stepped out on the dinky harbor view lanai. Southern California is best seen from at least twelve stories up, was his theory. She sank into a lounge chair and busied herself with her hair. "You have to formulate a question," she said. "Not a demand, though. Try to be unselfish: you get more benefit that way."
Pretty much what he’d just been thinking, wasn’t it? He stared into the gleaming nothingness of oXo. "Clue me in on how it works? I don’t mean aliens or ancient kings or that crap. I mean, where is this dude coming from?"
"Crystals absorb and resonate vibrations," she said. "On a cruder level, that’s how a radio works."
Ah shit, he thought. Why did I expect anything other than mystical spiels?
"Wherever he came from, he’s been on Earth thousands of years and passed through many hands. Kings, murderers, courtesans. And he’s absorbed vibrations from all of them. He’s a repository of human wisdom. He knows the future and your fate."
Hmm. Not as flaky as much he’d read since starting his search for the skull, and no way to prove or disprove. He had a gut feeling that she might be right. And actually, she was.
However, for the last fifty years oXo had been in America, most of it in the Los Angeles basin. He’d moved from hand to hand, but they were all criminal hands and almost entirely--except for some movie people and one rich Arab--hands that chiefly handled drugs. He had been a sensation among top-level coke dealers, the ultimate status symbol and better poonbait than a Ferrari or yacht.
He’d been traded for staggering amounts of dope, gotten raked off by biker gangs, presided over grower communes, accepted animal sacrifices by Santeria-crazed smackers, wreaked havoc on the fragile psyches of tweakers. And most recently snatched up as Blaster ran towards the back door of a mansion whose owner was on the front porch being handcuffed by DEA agents.
And now he sat staring into Bannock.
"So I just ask him a question? Out loud?"
"Seems to work better out loud. Or write it and slip it under him."
"And he replies by email?"
"You just know. You sorta know something in your head. Once you identify his voice you can’t miss it."
Great, Bannock thought, feeling foolish. You get around these people and they always want to clean your aura, give you a coffee enema, make you listen for inner voices. He regarded oXo a moment, then spoke conversationally, "So, can I get you anything?"
Immediately he was aware of a thought, like one of those memos you do to yourself sometimes. Remember to pick up the laundry. Don’t forget Mom’s birthday again, asshole. Next time bring the shotgun. Except this one said, "How about a bong hit?"
Bannock stared for a moment more, then slowly turned to Loris, who was watching him intently, her hands poised on top of her head. He said, "You got a bong in your bag?"
She lowered her hands and shook her hair, stood and walked inside. She looked at him, then at oXo. "He likes you," she said, laying her hand lightly on his shoulder.
Bannock had a feeling she might not require quite as much patience as he’d thought. Little oXo was already growing on him. He gave the skull a pat on top and told it, "Hang in, little buddy. I’m taking you home."
"Now mind, I can stare at a graph and look owlish as well as the next peanut down the road, but damned if I see what you’re drivin’ at, honey."
Yeah, sure you can’t, Aphra was thinking. And if you weren’t a Senator who can make me richer than Jesus, I’d "honey" your fat cornpone patooty for you. I’m slinging some major ‘tel your way and you’re thinking I look like a tasty poke chop. You know... for a lil Nigra gal. What she said was, "Over at the right side, there."
While he was pretending to puzzle it out, she checked out the only Senate office she’d ever invited herself into: the maze of flags and talismans on the wall, the pictures of Hizhonor hamming it up with a half-century’s worth of Rich and Infamous, the Dogpatch bric-a-brac, the incredible clutter. Place could use some maid service, she thought. Another minute he’ll be wanting me to tie a Jemima bandana around my nappies and grab a feather duster.
"You mean where all these different cycles sort of bottom out at once? Minds me some of my ex-wife’s checking account?"
"Hyper-cycles, really. Composites of all that crop yield, stock values, incidence of conflict, major indicator kind of thang."
He leaned his considerable bulk back in the sturdy old walnut swivel chair that looked like it should be hauled up to a checkers barrel in some general store in Hootin’ Holler, and regarded Aphra Alisander. Mighty fine for a colored gal, he was thinking. And just sashayed right on in here with her little printout of dyn-o-mite. Sometimes life’s just a bowl of chocolate-covered dog dookie.
"Now if I was playing the market I’d be out there getting short right now." Instead of getting right long from looking at them Hershey Kiss titties there. "But being a simple Ways and Means senator..."
"Who just happens to head up the Committee to Steal the Presidency Back From The Jigaboo."
She thought his laugh was going to blow all her data off the cluttered old walnut clerk’s desk. His wattles shook like the old bowlful and he threw back his head to give a cheap tour of the thicket of silver nostril fur inside his julepblossom nose.
"For a smart, educated gal you got a bit of mouth on you." Lord help us all, she does. Big, soft and red as the Harlot of Babylon. Damn. "But yeah, we could call it that, here among us people of color."
She stared at him, then caught the hidden smile. "Black face and red neck, huh? We could be an anarchy vaudeville team."
He let the smile out, almost charming with his good-ole-boy manner and white TV preacher pompadour. And moved on in. "So you’ve run your pretty little head over the... you know... implications here? Ramifications and whatall?"
"Know what? That’s kind of why I came up here. I’ve got a plenty good job with Oracon, and could get fifteen minutes of media buzz with this, but here I am bringing it to Massa. Cause yeah, I think there’s more play in predicting history’s biggest economic collapse than just selling you short."
Damn, she did have a mouth, no two ways aboutin’ it. He had a fleeting vision of lying around in bed on Sunday afternoon with some sippin’ whiskey, his newspapers, and this gorgeous, overbuilt Afamercan, and being more interested in the conversation than crawlin’ her too-tall frame. "The printout runs too long to make out the time frame too close. Down at the business end over here. In the, omigosh, election year. Think it might make a nice October sprize for somebody?"
She shook her head, the retro-Angela ‘fro wiping the air like a brillo eraser. "Sorry. December. December 20, actually."
"Whuthehell, you got it nailed right down to the day? Got financial armaggedon zeroed right to Eastern Standard Time? Think I’d kinda like to pencil that into my DayRunner."
"It’s bigger than that, by the way." That wiped the chitlins grin off him for a second.
He leaned back and stared for a full minute. "Bigger than what looks from here like the entire world economy going down like a hungry whore? I’m too long in the tooth to think that far out of the crokersack, sugar."
Yet you manage to spend your dotage as one of the dozen most powerful men in Washington. "A lot bigger, maybe. And I think I can find out what it’s all about. Maybe how to cope with it."
"Given the right motivation? Am I peekin’ up the right skirt there?"
"If you’ll just turn your attention to that other document."
He picked up her proposed compensation package with two fingers like it was long-dead bigmouth bass. "Well now, that kind of money sort of holds my attention despite distractions like the Bear Buggerin’ the Bull to Perdition. Not to mention the below-the-line stuff. Are you just trying to be paid more than that chimp over in the Formerly White House, or get proof you’ve got bigger balls than Hillary?"
"Well, everybody seems to think you Republicans have more money and business sense than the Dim-ocrats. But I haven’t tried them yet."
He gave her a long scan that might do a nerve number on anybody less of a stone-cold Holdem player than Aphra, then reached for his old rotary-dial phone. "Hey, it’s Lijah."
He held the black bakelite receiver out and stared at it in incredulous scorn then treated it to a brimstone thunder, "Elijah whompin’ Weatherwax, Senior Senator From Crackertown, you dumbass hebe! How many Lijahs got this number?"
He rolled his eyes at Aphra, momentary inducting her into the tiny in-group of people with a clue amid the sea of struggling nitwits, then toned down to his karo syrup drawl. "I’m sending this little girl over there. Right this minute. BetsyAnn’ll send you the paperwork. What there is of it on this one, if you catch my drift."
He awaited confirmation that the drift had been caught. Wow, I’m crypto-funded, Aphra was thinking. Took a redneck Dixieland pol to finally put me in a black bag.
"Give her a place to sit, one a them Ain’tMeBabe Visa cards, whatever she needs. Hear that? Any lil ole thing she needs." He paused, smiled, and ran a lascivious leer over Aphra. "Oh, definitely. But just wait’ll you lay eyes on her."
He hung up and heaved himself out of his chair. He leaned forward with hands on the desk that suddenly turned back into one of the longest-surviving power consoles in the Free World. He gave her a look nothing like the Senator Fogbound clown show she’d been treated to so far.
Whoo, gettin’ face from Stone Mountain, Georgia, she thought. Cold-assed ofay, will-be-done, face. She stood up to face him, but he turned to stare out the window at the Mall.
"All done," he muttered over his shoulder. "Now get your succulent black ass out there and earn it."
The Monsoon swizzled his watery drink in time with the oomp and pah of the chubby--but game--dishwater blonde’s aftermarket boobs, idling wondering if it was a sign of decline that he found cheesy strip clubs relaxing these days, rather than stimulating. Probably. Among so many others. The jackals of The Hill were probably savoring the spoor of his decay out there in the darkness, the Beltway Buzzards circling too high to yet be seen. He tipped a unilateral toast to hungry predators everywhere, siphoned up a moderate snort, and he trolled for a receptive G-string with a folded bill.
"If I can tell from here that’s only a one, she sure as hell can," Jerome Weistler scoffed. "Think she can’t smell a Reno banknote from down the block?" He nodded acceptance of Munson’s lightly flipped finger. He also found this misnomered "Gentleman’s Club" relaxing. And one relaxing thing about it, it was unlikely that anybody of any importance would see him with Munson in a hole like this. Even if there was enough light. And if they did, they’d think twice about mentioning it.
Monsoon was on his wave length, as so frequently. "How come the Senators can reach across the aisle, but if guys like us, the real power, even shake hands it’s godawful corruption?"
"Forget the aisle. I’m happy when they don’t reach across the bathroom stall."
It seemed ironic and contra-instinctual, but it also stood to reason: Jerry and Monsoon were the only two guys in Washington, if not the world, who really knew what the other one did and thought. Each saw his opponent as his only real peer in a world of peerlessly moronic muggers, shysters and shitforbrains. Monsoon had once suggested that they just switch jobs. Both resign on the condition that the GOP National pick up Monsoon and the Committee to ReElect hire Jerry. His Republican counterpart had laughed, then furrowed his brow. "But wouldn’t there be issues of trust?"
Which had cracked them both up so bad the Atlantic City tarts they were tag-teaming had been afraid they’d have to flee the scene of a double coronary.
They’d been friends since Sixty Eight when Jerry canvassed for Bobby and Monsoon was an under-assistant junior intern flackster for what he now called "SpiroDick". Back when they actually could switch jerseys between games. By now, of course, they were too powerful to have much say over their own lives. But they could sure as hell monkeypuppet other lives around.
Monsoon shifted his florid bulk and eyed the scrawny Weistler. Who gazed back unflustered through his scuffed horn rims that seemed constructed to announce: What, you never saw a skinny Jewish geek from NYU before? And who wasn’t overly empathizing with Monsoon’s bitching about running Obama’s re-election campaign. They guy had all the incumbent advantages and did nothing but whine. Like now.
"The guy played on a state champ hoops team. Played in college for crissakes. But did I get to use that in the campaign? Nooooooo. Running against Minnie the Mooser, who’s playing up her state championship for MukTuk High every time she turns around."
"Yeah, it’s so unfair for white females to have a basketball advantage over black males," Weistler "commiserated".
"Natural order of things, there’d have been hours on ESPN comparing their roundball careers," Monsoon ranted. "The campaign could have been about basketball. But I couldn’t touch it."
"So we run Palin again next time and maybe we can have a Network Sports Celebrity Half Court Shootout."
"You’re on. But I’m just saying. What if McCain had a black grandfather but you couldn’t bring it up?"
"I’d have leaked it and pretended we didn’t want the press to go with it. But we’re Republicans. Think we hire people of uncertain racial extraction?"
The Monsoon jiggled his slushy drink and gave Jerry the aggressively bland smile that let him know he was about to pop one of those no-man’s-land things that came up now and then among the other nut-cutting, log-spiking and barn-razing. Didn’t bother with a question mark, "Aphra Alisander."
Jerry smiled coyly, delighted to be caught out. "You’re already on to those credit cards?"
"We’ve been waiting for them to light up, and one went off like a twenty dollar slot machine yesterday."
"But there’s something you don’t know?" Jerry secretly loved it when Munson was snotty/smug like that.
"Oh, you know... what, why, who. We already got the where and when. Or won’t she be alone down in Cancun? Is Aphra short for Aphrodite?"
"Well, I’d say so. But that’s just because I know what she looks like."
"If she looks like her mama I’d say you’re right."
"Oh, you remember Debra Alisander? Good trivia points."
"I remember her better after she become Debra Fathiya. Kind of like, who remembers Lou Alcindor or Cassius Clay? Just another ‘whatever happened to’ episode these days, but I remember who she was. Talked like Huey Newton, looked like Cleopatra Jones."
"Well, standing by her daughter she’d look like a boy."
"Whoa. So what hold has she got on you guys’ nuts?"
"You tell me. Betcha can’t figure it out in thirty days."
"You’re on. Hundred bucks?"
"Covered. Who’ll hold the money?" Both their eyes turned to the blonde stripper, who had sniffed out the wagered C-note and was indicating total approval.