Aaron Elkins: Skull Duggery

At twelve thousand feet the Mexicana jet had dipped its wings to afford the passengers a better view, and he hungrily drank it in. He’d been to Monte Alban before, but he’d never seen it from above, and from here, looming over a countryside of small, rectangular farms from its table-topped mountain setting, it was truly stunning, the second-grandest city in all of ancient Mesoamerica (only Teotihuacan, on the outskirts of Mexico City, was larger). Its creation was an accomplishment of unimaginable effort. The mountain had not always been table-topped. In one of the great feats of antiquity, the Zapatecos had leveled it in about 500 BC and had then begun building their monumental terraces and plazas and step-pyramids and tombs. It had been a thousand-year project.

“There, that’s the Grand Plaza,” he whispered, “and that’s the ball court, of course, and that’s the Observatory, although nobody knows if that’s really what it was used for. And-”

“It’s gigantic,” Julie said. “How many people lived there? There must have been thousands.”

“No, nobody. As far as we know, it was never used as a habitation center. There’s no water source, for one thing, unless you go down the mountain, and the mountain’s well over a thousand feet tall.”

“So it was ceremonial? All that?” They were both craning their necks as the site disappeared behind the plane’s wing.

“That’s the best bet. It’s in a great place for military purposes-you must be able to see for fifty miles in every direction-but there’s no evidence of its ever being used that way. There are a lot of theories, of course, but the one I buy, and this is really interesting…”

As it is with many people, Gideon’s strengths were also his failings. An animated, witty lecturer, always among the university’s most popular professors, he did sometimes overdo it. Among his most endearing, most annoying traits-derived from the optimistic premise that everyone must surely be as fascinated, as mesmerized, by archaeology and anthropology as he himself was-was to treat the world as his classroom. “Launching into lecture mode,” Julie would whisper warningly to him when he got carried away among friends, or even simply “lecture mode.” In fact, just a murmured side-of-the mouth “launching” was usually enough to do the trick by now. The moment he realized he was at it he ceased, usually with some embarrassment. He knew enough droning old pedants to live in dread of turning into one. But when it was just the two of them, good sport that she was, Julie was disinclined to stem the flow.

He was still at it twenty minutes later, bubbling with enthusiasm, after the plane had landed at Xoxocotlan International Airport (usually referred to, for obvious reasons, as Oaxaca Airport), a small, single-terminal affair with a couple of runways carved out of a landscape of dry brown fields.

“But think about how hard it was to build. Shaving off the top of a mountain was just the start,” he said as he pulled their bags from the luggage rack. “All those huge stones they used to build it had to be dragged all the way up from the valley floor almost fifteen hundred feet below-a hundred and fifty stories. Think about that. These were small people; the men were only five feet tall or so. How did they do it? They hadn’t figured out the use of the wheel for transportation yet. And what about shaping the stone? They had no metal tools. How did they do that? Why did they do it?”

“Carl,” she said.

“And how did they-what?”

“The man coming toward us-the cowboy. That’s my Uncle Carl. He’s here to pick us up.” She shook her head, smiling. “God, he never ages. He looks the same as he looked fifteen years ago. More than fifteen years ago.”

Julie gave her uncle a happy hug, then made the introductions. Gideon liked him right away. A lanky, loose-limbed man, perhaps an inch shorter than Gideon’s six-two, he was in denims and scuffed boots and carried a hat in his hand; not the ubiquitous straw campesino ’s sombrero that was on just about every male head in rural Mexico, but a genuine cowboy’s ten-gallon Stetson (although Gideon had read somewhere that a ten-gallon hat would hold only three gallons of water), convincingly sweat-stained and curled.

Gideon saw right away why he reminded Julie of Gary Cooper. He was appealing in the same lean, rawboned way, graceful and awkward at the same time, with a weathered, wise, kind/stern face and a reserve that somehow managed to convey both shyness and a serene self-assurance. He even had a lazy Western twang to go along with all this; Montana, Gideon thought, or the Dakotas. The only off-note was the sharply delineated fish-belly-white expanse of skin from just above his eyebrows to his thinning widow’s peak. Clearly, the hat he was holding in his hand was rarely off his head in the outdoors.

His daughter Annie, for whom Julie would be filling in, was waiting at the curb outside, beside a dusty red Ford Explorer SUV with the Hacienda logo, a photographic blowup of a man and a woman on horseback on the side. Annie, like Julie in her mid-thirties, was plump and pretty (in a squirrel-faced kind of way) and as voluble and feisty as her father was strong and silent. Her welcoming hug of Julie involved emphatic, bilateral cheek-to-cheek air kisses, during which her steady stream of chatter never missed a word.

“Dorotea’s making a late breakfast snack for you,” she was chirping as they got into the van. “ Quesadillas de queso; she makes them with epazote and green chiles… yum! I wasn’t going to join you-I’ve already had breakfast, but I’m making myself hungry. Maybe I’ll have just one…”

Gideon sat in front with Carl, so that Julie and Annie could catch up more easily, and the two women gabbed happily away about people he’d never met, with names either unknown to him or only hazily familiar. He had grown a little sleepy again-it was just after eight o’clock in the morning; they had taken a red-eye from Mexico City rather than staying the night at an airport hotel-so he was content to sit quietly and watch the scrub-dotted countryside slide by, so starkly different from the green, cool ambience of the Olympic Peninsula. And Carl was the sort of man who was just as happy, or probably more so, to be sitting in companionable silence as he would be to making conversation.

The airport was on the south side of the city, on the way to Teotitlan, so in no more than ten minutes they were free of the bustle of city traffic and the scrawled political graffiti, and out in a wide, flat valley checkered with the same small, rectangular farms he had seen from the air. Most were communally owned, he’d read, a result of the sweeping nineteenth-century reforms of Benito Juarez. Here in Oaxaca, Juarez’s home, virtually all of the old haciendas and large ranchos had been broken up. There were alfalfa plots, corn, garbanzos, maguey (for making mezcal), cereal crops for animal feeds… not that he could tell one from the other, of course, but so he’d read and so he believed.

There were small communities on the flanks of the distant dun-colored hills on either side, but buildings in the center of the valley, along the highway, were scarce. There was an occasional isolated roadside tourist shop-weavings, mezcal, crafts-but no businesses geared to the locals. And those few scattered dwellings that existed near the highway were in small family compounds enclosed within high whitewashed walls, although every now and then one in brilliant tangerine orange, or canary yellow, or chartreuse green would bring him suddenly awake.

When, after a while, he was awake enough to tune in to the conversation behind him, Annie was bringing Julie up to date on things at the Hacienda. Her uncle Jamie, the resort bookkeeper, had indeed left for Minnesota a few days ago to have his knee operated on. Annie would be staying through today so she could orient Julie on things, but she would head for Winston-Salem the next morning to wrap up the last of her divorce. Tony Gallagher was back home in Mexico City at the moment “Oh, I’m sorry,” Julie said. “I’d love to have seen Uncle Tony.” Tony, being Carl’s brother-in-law, wasn’t actually Julie’s uncle, but she had come to refer to him that way when she was working at the Hacienda. She had felt strange calling him “mister,” she had once explained to Gideon, and she’d been too shy to call him “Tony,” so “Uncle Tony” it had been. For whatever reason-perhaps that he was younger-Tony’s brother Jamie, who had exactly the same relationship to her that Tony did, was just plain Jamie. Interestingly enough, Annie, who was niece to both of them, called neither of them “uncle.”