William Lashner - Bitter Truth

Lonely clapboard houses on stilts rise above the sodden ground. The rusted-out hulks of old American cars are half covered by the swamp. Canek leans on his horn as he passes a bus. The landscape is flat and wet and flat and smells of skunk. A ratty old sign in front of nowhere announces that we have reached the Belize Country Club, another urges us to check our animals to keep Belize screwworm free. Canek keeps his foot firmly on the pedal and soon we pass out of the swamps and onto a vast, sandy heath littered with scrub palmetto.

“This used to be a great pine forest,” shouts Canek over the engine’s uneven whine, “and mahogany too. But they cut all the trees and floated them down the river to the ships.”

We drive a long while, seeing nothing but the occasional shack rising askew out of the flat countryside, until to our left we spot the vague outlines of strange peaks, like great haystacks jutting from the flat ground. As we pass by these toothlike rises I begin to see, in the distance, the jagged outlines of the mountains to the west. At a colorful sign planted in the earth Canek slows the Trooper and turns off the highway, pulling the car into the dusty parking lot of a windowless and doorless shack-bar call JB’s Watering Hole.

The place is studded with wooden placards bearing the names and emblems of British Army squadrons that were once stationed in Belize to protect it from Guatemala: “34 Field Squadron, Royal Engineers”; “1st Battalion, No. 2 Company, Irish Guards”; “The Gloucester Regiment, QMs Platoon-25 Hours a Day.” A few men in ratty clothes are drinking already, a young girl is wiping a table. Canek says he needs some water for the car and so I sit under a spinning fan as he works outside.

After a few moments he comes in grinning and tells me everything is fine. “The car gets thirsty,” he says. “Let’s have lunch.” He orders us both stewed chicken in a brown sauce. It comes with coleslaw and rice and beans and even though it is already spicy hot he covers his with an angry red habanero sauce. As we eat we both have a Belikin and he tells me stories about the place, about the wild ex-pat who owned it and how the British soldiers turned it rowdy and how Harrison Ford drank here while filming Mosquito Coast .

“You’re a good guide, Canek. The good guides know all the best bars.”

“It is my country and there are not many bars.”

“This chicken is wonderful.”

“Outside of Belize City it is best to stick with chicken. You don’t have to store it or refrigerate it. When you are ready to eat you just go outside and twist off the head.”

I stare at the thigh I am working on for a moment and then slice off another piece. “What is San Ignacio like?”

“Small and fun. It used to be wilder when the loggers were there but the loggers have moved on and now it is not as wild.”

“Are there good bars there?”

“Yes, I will show you. And on Saturday nights they have dancing at the ruins above the city.”

“If a man was hiding out, would he hide out in San Ignacio?”

“No, not in San Ignacio. But it is the capital of the Cayo and the Cayo is wild country. There are ranches hidden from the roads and rivers that flow through the jungle and places you can only get to by horseback or by canoe.”

“Is it pretty?”

“It is very pretty. You haven’t told me what is your business there, Victor.”

“I’m looking for someone,” I say. “Someone who owes me money.”

“This is a long way for an American to come to collect on a debt.”

“It’s a hell of a debt.”

Back on the road, the highway starts kinking and slowly the landscape around the road changes to pine-covered hills and rocky pasture lands holding small villages. We pass a two-room schoolhouse, no windows or doors, old men sitting on the railing outside, listening to the lessons. Now and then we begin to pass boys on horseback. Canek shows me the turnoff to Spanish Lookout, where a Mennonite community farms the land in their straw hats and black buggies. He asks me if I want to see and I shake my head. Lancaster is only forty minutes from Philadelphia and I have never had the urge to visit the Pennsylvania Dutch there; I don’t need to see them in Belize.

The land begins to undulate more and more violently and the mountains grow closer and on the mountains we can now see the forests, a dangerous green spilling thickly down the slopes. We pass a horseback rider sitting straight in his saddle, a rifle strapped to his shoulder, the muzzle jutting forward, serving as an armrest. Finally, in the middle of a valley, on the banks of a slow river, ringed with high hills, we find San Ignacio.

We wait at the end of a long one-lane bridge for a rickety red truck to pass before Canek drives us across the Macal River. The metal surface of the bridge rattles loudly beneath us. Canek takes us through the twists and turns of the town, filled with old storefronts and narrow streets, and then we are back on the Western Highway, traveling toward the ruins of the Mayan stronghold of Xunantunich.

“The word means ‘stone maiden,’ ” says Canek as he drives us further on the paved road, alongside a wide shallow river. “The legend is that one of its discoverers saw the ghost of a woman on the ruins. It is set on a level hilltop overlooking the Mopan River and it guarded the route from the great city of Tikal, now in Guatemala, to the sea. It was a ceremonial center, along with Caracol, to the south, when this area had a greater population than the entire country of Belize has now. There was an earthquake in the year nine hundred that caused the abandonment of the city.”

“It’s amazing,” I say, “how the Maya just disappeared.”

“But that’s not right,” says Canek. “We haven’t disappeared at all.”

I turn and stare at him. He is very serious and his broad cheekbones suddenly look sharper than before.

“I didn’t know you were Mayan.”

“We have our own villages here and in Guatemala where we continue the old ways, at least some of the old ways. We don’t go in for human sacrifice anymore.” He smiles. “Except for during festival days. This is San Jose Succotz. The first language here is Mayan.”

He pulls the car off the road onto a gravel shoulder. To our left is a village built into a hillside. A pair of ragged stands flank a small drive that leads straight into the water to our right. On the far shore of the river is a wooden ferry, short and thick and heavy, big enough to hold one car only. We wait in the car for the ferry to make its way to our side of the river. Boys come to the car’s window, offering slate trinkets and carvings with Mayan designs. “You buy here when you come back,” says one of the boys to me. “Don’t believe what they say on the other side, they are escaped from the hospital, you know, the crazy house.” On the other side I see more boys waiting to sell their slate. Further down the river, women are scrubbing laundry against the rocks and children are splashing in the water.

When the ferry arrives, its leading edge of wood coming to rest on the gravel drive, Canek slowly pulls the car down the small drive and onto the ferry. An old ferryman patiently waits for Canek to situate the car in the middle before he begins to twist the crank that winches the wire that drags the ferry back across the river. The water is calm and the ferry barely ripples as the old man draws us forward with each turn of the crank. Canek and the ferryman talk in a language which is decidedly not Spanish. “We were speaking Mopan,” he says. “This village is Mopan Maya. I am Yucatec Maya but I know this dialect as well as my own.”

When the ferry reaches the far bank, Canek drives the Trooper off onto another drive, takes a sharp right, and begins the climb up the rough, rock-strewn road that will take us to the ancient fortress. Canek tells me we are only a mile and a half from the Guatemalan border. After a long uphill drive we reach a parking grove. When Canek steps down from the car he pulls from it a canteen of water and a huge machete, which he slips into a loop off his pants.