The overwhelming impression you get from Cancun’s hotel zone is that everything permanent was constructed by Mayan Martians from Las Vegas. The nightlife strip is a little different, though. It’s essentially an MTV pachinko machine bouncing springbreak assholes around until they fall out the bottom.
Seagull, in The Blasé Sojourner.

Townsend’s problem was, he was on the ground, but had nothing to go on. Aphra Alisander had flown into CUN and that was all that he or anybody running knew about it. Until she was somehow spotted or used one of her compromised credit cards. Which so far she hadn’t done. So he was trying to dig her up through a combination of detective work and hoping to blunder into her or some rumor of her having passed through. He was diligent in his search, even though it was a long shot that got longer the more he persisted. He might look like a blond beach jock, but he was a seriously workaholic young man. Who combed the pleasure zones of a city built to be very little else, surrounded by an invisible cloud of his own peculiar discontent. A lack of happiness that would get absolutely no sympathy from any man alive.

He’d paid a courtesy/fishing call on a low-grade local asset, a reporter named Montero who covered politics for a tabloid rag. Montero had sniffed around the whole concept of regional impact on the gringo elections, meticulously dissected it for any possible profit opportunities, and gave a mental shrug. He just couldn’t see any feasible way the Yucatan would matter to anybody else, anywhere.

He considered the possibility of making something up (he’d read Carre’s “Tailor of Panama” four times since being recruited as a tag-end Agency stringer) but was dissuaded by his awareness that his abilities to concoct stories was limited–witness the fact he was working for a scandal-and-tits rag like “QueQui”. And something about Townsend. It wasn’t like the movies, he’d long since figured out. It isn’t the big, bulgy macho guys you have to watch out for. It’s clean-cut, meticulous, polite robots like Townsend Hardley who will disappear your ass for you.

So he worked at ingratiating himself. Towns was the first actual contact he’d had with any Norte operative since he was recruited ten years ago by a shaggy little spook who looked like Steve Buscemi playing a surfbum laid out on a rock in the sun for a few years. He dragged the young agent around Cancun’s stunning collection of bars, strip clubs and practically nekkid beaches, margarita and cervesas flowing like wine. It was doubly gratifying that the young gabacho picked up almost every check. Meanwhile plastering the kid with information and tips, most of it totally worthless. Townsend had learned early that intelligence is like that: a flood of mindless data where a few worthwhile plums dissembled like white raisins in stale coffeecake.

One tidbit that stuck with him was Montero’s dissertation on Mexican political news. “I know, I know, you’re from gringolandia; you think getting to the bottom of things is just a matter of throwing money and time at a question. It’s different here.”

It looked fairly different to Townsend as he spoke: they were sitting in lounge chairs with two young mulatas gyrating on their laps while his attention strayed to a pale redhead on the main stage, dancing nude and vicious in a blaze of spinning fireballs. “In Mexico, there is no bottom,” Montero continued. “Seriously, it’s like quicksand or some hole to China. You think you find out the explanation, but it’s just another layer on the onion. And there’s always another layer inside that one, forever. Periodistas here just settle for the story that works.”

“I don’t know about journalism,” Townsend replied, leaning over for his beer and getting a puffy black aureole rubbed in his eye. “But I’m beginning to think that’s the way it works with spycraft.”

And if Mexican politics was obscure, dire and berserk, Montero was pleased to inform him, it was apple pan dowdy compared to the governmental structures in nearby countries he could mention. Such as Belize, Guatemala, Cuba, half the Caribbean and all of Central America. Which made an uncomfortable fit with Townsend’s emerging awareness that flying into Cancun didn’t necessarily mean that Mexico was the ultimate destination. There was only one major jetport in the entire region that included Belize and a hell of a lot of Guatemala. For that matter, if you wanted to go from Washington to Cuba, the only really logical route would be to fly to Cancun, then transfer to a flight to Havana. So he could end up trying to trace a sexy black woman in a country internationally famous for them, and where he would be singularly unwelcome. His dad would have said, “Major bummer.”

The entire transportation thing was a nightmare, for openers. As soon as he’d mentioned checking car rentals, helipads, limos, bus lines, and such, Montero had laughed his somewhat drunken butt off.

“Cancun,” he hooted, “Is really nothing but transportation. A computer in the federal tourism office figured out this was the place, so they built a city here, then started building ways to get here. Then the syndicates started nailing down the ways of getting around from hotels to bars to brothels to tourist traps. There might be more taxis in Cancun than in New York. Think about this thing, Town: a city of three quarters of a million residents–not counting over three million turistas every year–that didn’t even exist thirty years ago. Where would you find anything like that in the world?”

“Bahrain? Dubai?”

“Oh, right, it’s all about Arabs now. Nobody cares about us frijoleros anymore. You aren’t even fucking with Castro these days. But listen, every centavo that comes into this town–falls into the Hummer dealers, the Donzi dealers, the Ferrari dealers–gets brought here by a tourist from somewhere else. Millions of people bringing billions of pesos…and none of them come here with a car.”

That bit of information did what the sheer boredom of the task hadn’t been able to do to Townsend’s husky work ethic. He gave up canvassing transport and ditched the shoe leather approach altogether. In fact, he ditched shoes altogether. Opting to spend his time strolling the shreds that remained of Cancun’s famous powdery “air-conditioned” beaches, poking around at random in the gush of sunstroked humanity laid to waste thereupon. Until he had more to go on, this was as legitimate a place to search as any other, he realized, and fell into a rather solemn and joyless beachbum life: drifting along the miles of hotel frontage, mingling with groups of funlovers, checking out the bikini corps at poolside, stopping by dozens of bars to cool off and ingest fluids.

And he actually spotted a few black women, even a couple that might have fit the bill. But not for long. He pored over the broiling, coconut-scented bodies and kept moving.

And at night he made the rounds of a staggering number of absolutely absurd clubs, disdaining the hypertrophied stroboscopic honk of the tourism mill while quietly quartering rooms where legions of exhilarated, shitfaced hedonists boogied around like corn in a popper.

The problem with Townsend–who was about as fit, handsome, and sexually desirable specimen of human male as the planet produces without ironically making them queer–was that he just wasn’t that committed to the mindless philandering that flirted shamelessly with him or just stalked over to peep some cleavage and slip him a room number. He tended to feel his father’s legendary womanizing as a sort of hereditary flaw, which somewhat spoiled him for the banquet of female pulchritude continually laid at his feet.

He suffered numbly from a condition that has been virtually eliminated in the American male, at least to hear the popular media tell it: a hunger for “something more meaningful”. And like most pilgrims searching for meaning, he had no idea what that means. Up to his ears in sex, he would have liked to feel love–never suspecting that he was too tightened up to experience normal emotions. He wanted something special, something that grabbed his breath, heartbeat and balls at the same time and wrung them every which way but loose. He sought The One.

Worse yet, his bar was set pretty high. He wanted a woman he could talk to about what was really going on his head. Which meant classified material as well as secrets of being that very few people experience or understand. Somebody as stealthy and lethal and over-engineered as himself. He dreamed of a beautiful female spy who would be the only one with whom he could truly be himself. He hadn’t yet figured out that the only person he’d ever seen or heard of who fit the bill was Aphra Behn.

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MeiMei’s ruminations on her knack for blowing off men just when they were getting interesting–and useful–were interrupted by the appearance of a tall, athletic Black woman, decked out in tropical whites whose simplicity only advertised their expense. Recognizable at once as the languid lounger from Zama. She blinked into the blaze of reflected sunlight, then gaped as Aphra said, “My guess? He was too small to keep, anyway.”

She swiveled elegantly and unbidden into the chair Tuan had just flounced out of and inclined her head to the chubby mama in charge. Who had been glaring at MeiMei for whatever sins had caused her to drive off a good customer, but immediately brought another wine cooler over to Aphra. Sisterhood, and all.

Which was the card Aphra laid out to MeiMei Chiang. “Listen, girlfriend, I heard that guy’s tantrum, and his bit over at Zama. Skin tone caste system crap. Tell me this…” She laid her long, strong arm on the table, shining ebony against the white table top. “Where do I fit in?”

She was putting on just a slight glass of southern girl accent that she’d found to be effective and disarming. Her mother had praised the full-on pickaninny dialect she called “Tom Tom Club”, but Aphra really never got the handshake right for Steppin it.

MeiMei said nothing, just goggled at the sudden invasion of this electric model who looked like a dropout from Aphrodite’s Child and moved like a hunting cat. It was obviously her day for eclectic chat-ups.

“So we establish, I’m thinking,” Aphra went on, “That ain’t neither of us exactly leisure class tourists. And that you got something on your mind, don’t got nothin to do with suntans or dating pools.”

MeiMei smiled. If nothing else, this should be entertaining. “Just a working girl, here,” she said. “And it’s not working out.”

“Kind of work you do? Offhand, I’d rule out the hospitality trades.”

“Apparently. I’m an archaeologist, actually. And I can’t seem to find the Meso-American paleontology hangout around here.”

“No shit? You out there finding lost arks and temples like Indiana Jones? Ah… you’re here for that Mayan stuff, huh? Chichen Itza and shit. Sacrificed virgin skeletons.”

“Mayanology’s my specialty, but I’m more theoretical. I can barely remember the last time I got chased through a tomb by mummies.”

“Well, I bought ‘Mummies For Dummies”, but I couldn’t get into it.” Aphra snapped her fingers and dug into the cloche purse that clung to her flanks. “But see what I picked up in town just today. Genuine Mayan stuff, probably made by coolie slaves in Szechuan.”

MeiMei looked at the silver ashtray with bright enamel design. Homage to the ancients, she thought. Grind out your fake Cuban cigar on the face of the Gods. “Actually, that’s the Aztec calendar,” she said. “Taken from the Sun Stone in Mexico city. The Mayan depiction you generally see is a guy squatting with a tumpline on his forehead, surrounded by twenty glyphs. We call them ‘day signs’.”

“Oh, and they just all the rage, these days. But you see this thing, keep hearing about all this Mayan Calendar, Mayan astrology, Mayan Prophesy stuff.”

“I know, believe me. That’s sort of my specialty-specialty. And the fad nonsense around it is getting pretty ripe.”

“Damn, this morning I buy a calendar, ain’t even got a naked man on it, today I’m talking to an expert. So, what’s the skinny, honey? We talking about the end of the world? Or just same shit, different millennium?”

“It’s a pop myth. A buzz like the 20K thing.”

“No. Scuse me, cause you’re the expert here, but I don’t think it’s the same thing. That 20K bizness was all inside computers, right? All those geniuses didn’t know they’d need three numbers in thirty years. But it ain’t really the End Of The World, what I’m saying.”

“Actually, they just ran out stone during their production runs.”

Aphra didn’t get stopped short in conversations very often, but MeiMei was an adept of the inscrutable Asiatic straight face so the Black woman just stared at her a moment. Then got the slim, Kuan Yin smile.

“Here’s the deal. You’ve got your main calendar, called the Tzolkin, twenty day glyphs by thirteen symbols called “tones”. Making 260 permutations, unique ‘dates’ that establish a sort of holy ’year’. Nobody used that calendar in their daily lives, you understand, and there wasn’t one hanging on a wall anywhere. All theoretical, of interests to priests.”

“Sound healthier than priests being mostly interested in little boys’ backsides.”

“You get a lot of hubbub just over that. People with their little ‘Mayan Hieroglyphic’ necklaces for their birthdates. The human genome has 260 cell families, so it’s mystical…”

“Shit, I’ve seen a whole book of stuff that the number 42 represents.” Aphra winning hearts and minds.

“Exactly. Anyway, much later when they had enough history around to need longer time lines, they developed another concept called the “long year”. So you’ve got three numbers interacting–they generally show them like cogs on gearwheels–and it produces this BakTun period of about five thousand years.”

“You giving me the two dollar dummies tour here, huh?”

“Calendar 101. If you want more detail I can give you links to my monographs and recommend some books.”

“Oh, Lord, no.” Aphra fanned her glistening ruby nails defensively. “Way too much info. But that five thousand year thing coming up pretty soon, right? Two thousand twelve?”

“Coming soon to a theater near you.”

“Then we getting these tidal waves and comet hits and ninja attacks and what not, right?”

“Worse, a wave of blonde actresses with issues.”

“Damn! Now that’s a right dire scenario. But seriously, since I got an expert here, what’s up with all that? What’s your prophesy, your prediction?”

MeiMei smiled and started to wisecrack, but stopped. She looked at the calendar ashtray, then at the sleek hull of the Nahual. And said, “Believe it or not, there might be a clue to all that. And that’s what I’m here looking for.”

There was nothing in the taut black planes of Aphra’s face to reveal the hot pulse of exultation that shot through her. This was her drug of preference, the sight of the fox tail on the moors. She leaned forward and said, “So you down here hunting up the playbook for the end of the world? Look, you need any help? I always wanted to be, like, Assistant Laura Croft.”

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If the idea of visting a strip club chilled Xchab, the reality treated her to hot blasts of sheer panic. It was bad enough out on the sidewalk. Not the teeming crowd of testosterone mainliners she’d seen in high season, but even in summer there were enough bargain-hunting gringo men, narco downliners, and the usual Machus Mexicanii milling around outside the rope trying to spring for or weasel out of the cover charge to qualify as a crowd. And it turned out that a striking redhead wearing practically nothing and a Mayanita cum punker in slitherene and lethal cockatoo crest were crowdpleasers. The same mob that had ignored Xchab in her tribal drag now brayed their interest. With a certain degree of detail and body language. She had stepped off the bus with a degree of assurance and matched Copper’s leggy strides with her own imitation of forward press femgression, but once dangled in front of the slavering maw of mankind, she balked and quivered.

Copper shot her a sidewise glance. Should have expected this. She was surprised her faithful Indian sidekick didn’t drop into a submissive squat. And if she did, it was a good thing she’d made her put on the RoboUndies. The stagedoor Juanitos interpreted the falter as a wound, calling for culling. But Copper dealt with that briskly enough. The first guy that stepped up, coming on with “Hey, guapa, why don’t we…?” found her right in his face, wafting him a complex perfume of faux-expensive musk and curdling erotica. “You’re on. Let’s see the four hundred bucks.”

A comment that almost sent Xchab into mental arrest, but then she marveled as the fratpack parted in front of them. No child of Israel had been more amazed at the parting of the sea, nor walked through the gap with greater trepidation.

Inside of BlackJack was worse. Instead of a looming mob, it now started to look more like an organized sport where the rules all favored the team in trousers. Shirts vs skins. Xchab stared, apalled beyond words, at her first inside shot of Sodom by the Sea. The music hit her like a swollen black fist. The big trashcan thwallop of last-quarter grudgefucking, the nasty nature of the sneered lyrics obvious even to somebody who didn’t speak English or rapjive. She felt it on every inch of her skin, deep in her tripes. It made her ill.

Made her want to kick things. She registered the entire, uncensored antics of men for the first time. She’d seen the eyes on the beach, the leers. And of course had put up with Winston. But here for the first time she saw what her aunts had told her all along, Brutes yowling for their meat, shoving each other aside to rub their hands on girls’ privates. Holding up money, then exchanging it for crude degradation and twisted pleasure. A temple of release where cats toyed with mice and ripped the veils from their intentions. They stared at Xchab, even though she was clothed, more or less. She quailed from their eyes, unable to sort out admiration from rapaciousness, longing from lust.

Copper was yelling at her, finally grabbed her bare shoulder and shook her out of her paralysis. Numbly, she followed her twitching butt through a labyrinth of tight-packed tables, lightly packed with men. Tables on which nude girls did a stylized prance. This was what Mexicans call “teibol”, she realized. Whoring from middle distance. She revised that definition when one girl jumped on a man’s shoulders, calves kicking the beat on his back, hands twisting in his hair, naked crotch grinding into his face. Copper had to come back, grab her and tow her away, she locked up so bad behind that little performance. And it was going on all around her.

Copper sat them both down at a table far from the main stage, where two blondes simulated lesbian bliss, and close to the service bar at the rear. She gestured and a stocky waiter with a scar on his jaw and a white shirt that glowed like blue dashboard lights in the club’s stutter of blacklight and discoduck strobes. He hugged Copper with an obvious affection and respect and they chatted in friendly yells. Then she introduced Xchab. Who had been noticing and trying to sort out the looks she was getting from the men, but saw nothing but professional courtesy in this Manuel. Who shook hands, leaned over for the perfunctory Mexican kiss at the cheek, and went to get drinks.

Copper was speaking very loudly in her ear, “Stay at this table. The ladies’ room is right there behind you. Don’t accept a drink from anybody except Manuel. If a man sits down here while I’m gone, tell him he has to pay a hundred pesos each song to sit with you. And buy you some twenty dollar fake Johnny Walker. Anybody lays a hand on you, call Manuel and he’ll come cripple the fucker.”

Then she was gone, plunging Xchab into fullbore anxiety. But then Manuel was beside her, handing her a Margarita. She took it with a tellingly grateful lunge. He smiled at her; a dark, dangerous face above the ghostly glow of his shirt, and waved a hand around the place. She followed his gesture: it was all Bosch to her. He leaned down by her ear, chuckling, and said, “Bienvenida a BlackJack, ‘mana. Provecho.”
Startled, she realized that he was Mayan, too.

She sipped her tequila slush and turned her attention to the girls. How they dealt with it: some bold, some reticient, all trading the ogling and pawing for American dollars. Pura carne. Then Copper came out and she saw something very different.

The redhead didn’t mince or prance like another plate of libido chow, she roamed in like a jungle cat working up an appetite. She moved as if performing sports, an ancient dare from long-forbidden folklore. She swarmed up a polished brass pole: perching like a bird, soaring like a hunting shark, skinning around like a Chinese acrobat.

She leapt to the edge of the stage, daring men and rebuking them. She stomped on their groping hands and they threw money at her disdainful backside. She leaned down to rub bald heads, slap insolent faces. She grabbed a guy’s glasses and flaunted them on various parts of her anatomy, creating caricatures of the very dumb-lust they trumpeted. She jumped from the stage to a tabletop, kicked out at the howling faces, leapt from the circle of grasping hands. She dived under a long table of conventioners, her progress underneath it traced by men jumping back out of their chairs, laughing.

Then she popped up for a lope along the table and a long, leggy leap back to the stage. And the lights went out and Xchab felt another clutch of fear. But then two red eyes glared out of the darkness.

And started to move. It was the same electron dance Xchab had seen before, but now the tiny lights spun in close, their glows revealing portions of a ruddy nude anatomy. Finally the little lights–which she knew Copper had named Deimos and Phobos and referred to as her “new secret weapon”–swung around behind her and out of sight, then up between her legs from behind. She trapped them between her thighs, became an undulating patch of lurid red hairs before the little eyes winked out. The lights came up to a thunderous, stamping applause, but the stage was empty except for a busboy gathering up big drifts of tossed bills and stuffing them into a plastic bag.

Xchab felt a hand on her shoulder and leaped up in alarm, but it was just Copper, laughing at her.

The last three hours had been pretty weird, even given the location and circumstances. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect was that Xchab, barely-reconstructed teen-aged junglebunny, had gotten used to BlackJack. She wasn’t seized up by ongoing atrocities on stage, tabletop and thightop any more, could actually hear Copper without straining or flinching beneath the hit parade of anti-personnel music.

Her tour guide to gringo sex hell now arranged a big sheaf of bills the busboy brought her, fanned them in Xchab’s face; a welcome cool breeze with hints of sweat and illicit substances. When Manuel came by with another round she peeled off a third of the stack and handed it to him. Then gave him an American five and pantomimed him having a drink. Xchab had seen enough by then to realize that Copper was bringing in four or five times what the other girls attracted. And that it made her popular with the whole house.

And what she was saying was mostly about picking up tips from the other girls. How they did it, what worked and what didn’t. Watch the Brazilians, she emphasized. They’re Black as Cubans and know how to shake a booty from birth. The toughest thing about stripping isn’t the eyeballs out front, it’s stepping out of a G-string in high heels.

But after two more dances, with the same rain of currency, and a few more drinks, she leaned shoulder to shoulder with the younger girl and said, “Look, it’s a play, okay? I see myself as an artiste, really. More than that: fire is like my religion. This is just a gig, a gancho you understand?”

She took another swallow of some gold foreign whiskey and turned to talk right into the kid’s face. “Thing is, it’s a slippery slope.”

She studied Xchab’s blank look. Had to keep remembering Spanish was her second language. “You understand me? A nasty business. You get around it too much, get sucked in, they start owning your ass. I don’t have much morality… I do whatever I need to, fuck the rules. But here’s Copper’s Law: Whatever you’re doing–dancing, stripping, married, peddling your ass on the street–the big thing is that nobody owns you.”

So there it was. Xchab stiffened up and blurted out, “I’m not going to dance in front of people naked.”

Copper laughed and patted her forearm. “Some punker you are.”

That gave her pause. Copper watched her chewing on it. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, this kid. But there was something about her, something sort of draped around her like an invisible veil or rebozo that Copper responded to instinctively. Probably part of her veneration of Santa Muerte and La Alma Perdida. This girl’s soul would have to find a map in order to even quality for being lost.

Finally Xchap spoke up, almost inaudibly under the pud-thud of the soundtrack. “Then why did you bring me to this place?”

Copper leaned closer and slipped her arm around the girl’s shoulders, under the heavy rope of braided hair. Her lips just inches from her ear, she said, “I’ll tell you why, honey. You live in an unstable world. There might come a day when you need some money and this is actually about the cleanest way a girl with no education and nice tits can make this much in a night. Keep it in mind. You’ve got the stuff. To say the least. Two years from now, you’ll be legal and still tight.”

There was a longish pause while she let Xchab process the whole thing, arm still around her bare shoulders, lips still at her ear. Then she said, “Here’s three main lessons, Chiquita.

One, learn how to do things that bring money. What pays, pays off.

Two, don’t be ashamed of your body or being a woman. We rock.

Three, don’t let them be in charge. Don’t give to them, take from them.”

Her lips touched the brown shell of Xchab’s ear and laid down the softest, gentlest of kisses. With just the tiniest thrust of pink tongue into dark recesses.

Then she took another drink and said, “And if you feel like getting up there to dance, just say the word and I’ll make you a star. Maybe even a comet.”

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Stepping from the blaze of tropical sun into the dark, tawny interior of Ganzo’s palapa had damped her vision, so it came as a bit of a thrill to suddenly feel his hands plunge in under her damp hair and around her neck. But she reacted without hesitation. Her looks and gold hair might as well have been a target painted on her ass since she got out of grade school and she had learned to cope with it. And she was obviously strong and agile.

She jerked her head back and brought her fists up to strike just below the vault of his rib cage, driving both of them backwards a half step. She stepped on the edge of the door blanket and stomped down on it with her other foot, tearing it loose and letting the avid, damp light flood the shack.

He blinked once, but hadn’t moved or apparently felt her double punch. His face showed no expression at all. His hands were still extended out in front of him, but now she saw that they were connected by a leather strand. From which dangled a white carving. He brought his hands to his own throat, modeling the necklace, then extended it towards her again, nodding gently as if teaching a baby. Now she felt rotten.

She stepped inside and looked into his open, guileless face. What had she been thinking? This guy couldn’t hurt a fly if it was mugging him. And if he wanted a piece of her, he’d had plenty of opportunity. She reached out to touch the bruise on his left side. “I’m sorry, amigo. You just startled me, is all.”

But she got the feeling he’d barely felt the punch. This was one solid dude. He nodded again. No harm done. Hey, here’s a necklace.

She took the dangling charm in her hand and examined it. “Whoa! This is beautiful.”

It was a round piece of coral the size of a quarter, flat on one side and gracefully domed on the other. A baby coral, she thought. Only got this big before something broke it off and washed it in. The domed side was sanded smooth and bore a very subtle low-relief carving. Of a woman riding on the back of a dolphin. She was stunned by the workmanship, deeply moved by the image as she rubbed it with the pad of her thumb. Ganzo thrust out his hands again and she didn’t resist, let him hang it around her neck and clasp the ingenious shell catch in the down of her nape.

She looked down at it, then gave him the thousand watt California billboard smile that flashed her perfect white teeth and daybreak blue eyes. She leaned in to give him a soft kiss on the cheek and pat his pecs like you’d pet a friendly Rottweiler. He smelled like saltwrack and coconut. “Thank you. It’s wonderful. You made it, right?”

She’d seen his “workbench”, two fruit crates supporting a sea-smoothed chunk of plywood that was littered with coral and shell and rusting files and knives and naked hacksaw blades. But with the sudden infusion of light she could see his inventory hanging in the rustly fronds of his walls. Dozens of similar wonders hanging there, the sea treasure of a loving craftsman and gifted beachcomber. She moved over to touch them, turn them to the light.

The soft inner chaff of baroque coral chunks had been routed out to leave burnished, creamy webwork; finger-thick slabs of conch had been laboriously graven into sharks and mermaids and Mayan godheads with a faint gold backlight from the translucent shell; coconut shell disks were mounted with sea turtles and angelfish and modest nudes scraped out of scraps of bone or marlin vertebrae; hollow monkeyheart pods concealed keys or wave-sculptured green glass and even a tiny pendant watch. She was hanging with an artist, that much was obvious. She turned to him, eyes shining. This was just so bitchin’.

He pointed to a set of shelves made of curved weathered planks (from Cuban boats foundered on the reef, would be her guess) resting on battered, pre-used cinder blocks. They’d just been areas of dark brown shadow in the umber palapa light before, but now she saw the cream of Ganzo’s Olde Curiosity Shoppe.

It was a museum of seldom-seen, eye-grabbing jetsam. The bleached clavicle of an adult turtle, a hollow segment of the branch of tree coral, tubular sponges like panpipes made of Swiss cheese, cadmium yellow razor clams still joined and filtering the topaz light town on stingray spines and triggerfish spikes and barracuda teeth, crazy twisted worm tubes colored like caramel, cowries and trochas flanking delicate conch shells of all colors, a finned trolling weight cast of lead and now encrusted with tiny bonsai trees of red coral, purplish fans spangled with miniature snails like Christmas trees. a gold-hued conch almost two feet long with the tip of the spiral sawed off. When she looked at the conch and laid it back down in a constellation of periwinkles and barracuda jaws, Ganzo lifted it to his lips and blew it like a trumpet.

The deep, vibratory sound of the conch call got to her. She felt the hair on her neck ripple a little, a slight tightening of the skin on her upper arms. There was something deeply elemental about it: not mournful so much as solemn, contemplative. It droned on like a Tibetan temple horn, as she stared at him. He stuck a hand in the bell of the exponential pink curve and made movements that modulated and feathered the soft, ponderous lowing of the horn. The notes were still dying out when she noticed the four big white coral blocks.

There was something about them, the way they sat on display in a little niche formed by the upright prow of a broken dingy, caught the light in obliques that seemed to raise their convolutions as if embossed. They just seemed to have something to say. She approached them as if tugged along by some invisible, somewhat pushy, usher. As the conch note shivered somberly off to silence, she reached out to touch them.

She held the coral–a white brick as thick as a brick, wide as a lunchroom tray, slightly tapered to a mild keystone–like she’d hold an infant, staring at it. It was trying to tell her something, had some secret or clue. She felt like prodding around it to find the secret drawer.

Ganzo came up beside her and she turned to him with the intimacy and respect she’d learned in the last five minutes. “How did you make these?” So softly she could barely get it out.

He shook his head. “I didn’t do, I found. Big storm.”

She traced the contours of the design on the coral, the twisting web of solid stone she was definitely seeing as a design. “What are they?”

He moved over and straddled a plastic milk crate padded with slubby jerga cloth. Picking up a labyrinthine piece of coral, he used a sixteen penny nail to point out the flaky star inside the tube of hard material. The delicate web of crumbly calcium that had been the polyp’s fragile furniture inside its sturdy marble walls. She winced as he ground the nail into it, crunching away at the interior structure. In less than a minute he had reamed out the soft stuff, leaving a tube that ran all the way through the piece. He inserted a soft pencil wrapped in emery cloth and polished the inside to the same dull gloss as his necklaces. Suddenly she saw coral as stack of tenements, the rooms littered with flimsy trash that could be cleaned out to create a gallery of ocean sheen. And no longer as complex rocks, but as collections of tubes.

He held the piece up in front of her, watching her face until she nodded. Then he took the big chunk of coral that she was still cradling and set it on the plywood and traced his finger along the raised pattern of white stone. She nodded again and he grabbed a blue school notebook from the table, whipped the sandpaper off the pencil and sketched with a sure, fine hand that once again shocked her with his hidden depths.

He held up the design and she studied it. Something familiar about it, but… Hell, her face was familiar, “but”…

He rummaged around in his “shelves”, mostly gallon plastic paint buckets stacked in rows at the wall end of his “bench”, and drew out a battered metal ashtray. Cheap market souvenir for gringos, the squatting guy with his laden tumpline, surrounded by glyphs. The Mayan calendar, as seen all over the tacky little stalls off main streets in tourist dives like Playa Carmen and Isla and Tulum.

He dumped out a handfull of brass findings and pointed to one of the glyphs, then back to his sketch. And it all fell in. She felt her breath catch in wild surmise. He said “Akbal,” then pointed to the sketch and repeated, “Akbal.”

“Oh, holy, shit,” she muttered. “That’s just impossible.”

He nodded gravely and patted the coral affectionately. “Coralcatura.”

She looked at him, stunned and confused.

He reached to the “shelves” again, pulled out a musty old “Condorito” comic book, and pointed at the peppy little cartoon condor on the cover, flipped the pages. He said, “Caricaturas.”

Then pointed to the white blocks in his alcove and again said, Coralcaturas