“But—”
“And if they don’t come today, and we don’t act, he”—and here there was that vague wave toward the lean-to—“won’t make it.”
“But how do you know?”
“His bones are exposed. He’s going to—”
“No—that they aren’t coming.”
“It’s not about knowing; it’s about not knowing. About the risk of waiting rather than acting.”
“So they might come.”
Jeff gave her an exasperated look, throwing up his hands. “And they might not come. That’s the whole point.”
They were circling, of course, not saying anything, really, just throwing words at each other; even Stacy could see this. He wasn’t going to give her what she wanted—couldn’t give it to her, in fact. She wanted the Greeks to come, wanted them to be here already, wanted to be rescued, safe, and all Jeff could say was that it might not happen, not today at least, and that if it didn’t, they had to cut off Pablo’s legs.
He wanted to do it; Stacy could see this. And Mathias didn’t. But Mathias wasn’t speaking. He was just listening, as usual, waiting for them to decide. Stacy wished he’d say something, that he’d struggle to convince her and Eric not to agree, because she didn’t want Jeff to cut off Pablo’s legs, couldn’t believe that it was a good idea, but she didn’t know how to argue this. She sensed she couldn’t just say no, that she’d have to tell Jeff why. She needed someone to help her, and there was no one to do it. Eric had become slightly drunk, was sleepy-eyed with it; he was much calmer than he had been, it was true, but not entirely present anymore. And Amy was far away, down the hill, watching for the Greeks.
“What about Amy?” Stacy said.
“What about her?”
“Shouldn’t we ask what she thinks?”
“She only matters if it’s a tie.”
“If what’s a tie?”
“The vote.”
“We’re voting?”
Jeff nodded, made an of course gesture with his hand, full of impatience, as if this were the only logical course and he couldn’t see why she was expressing such surprise.
But she was surprised. She thought they were just talking about it, searching for a consensus, that nothing would be done unless they all agreed. That wasn’t how it was, though; it would only take three of them, and then Jeff would cut off Pablo’s legs. Stacy struggled to put her reluctance into words, fumbling, searching for an entry. “But…I mean, we can’t just…It doesn’t seem—”
“Cut them off,” Eric said, his voice loud, startling her. “Right now.”
Stacy turned to look at him. He looked sober suddenly, clear-eyed. And vehement, too, certain of himself, of the course he was advocating. Stacy could still say no, she knew. She could say no and then Jeff would have to go down the hill and ask Amy what she thought. He’d convince her, probably; even if Amy tried to hold out, he’d eventually wear her down. He was stronger than the rest of them. Everyone else was tired and thirsty and longing to be in some other place, and somehow he didn’t seem to be any of those things. So what was the point of arguing?
“You’re sure it’s the right thing?” she asked.
“He’ll die if we leave him as he is.”
Stacy shuddered at that, as if Pablo’s potential death were being laid at her feet—her fault, something she might easily have averted. “I don’t want him to die.”
“Of course not,” Jeff said.
Stacy could feel Mathias’s gaze upon her. Watching her, unblinking. He wanted her to say no, she knew. She wished she could, too, but knew she couldn’t.
“Okay,” she said. “I guess you should do it.”
A my was taking pictures.
As she’d set off from the clearing, she’d grabbed her camera—reflexively, with no conscious motive—just picking it up and hanging it around her neck. It was only while she was crouched beside the path, midway down the hill, in that moment of relaxation and clarity that followed the release of her bladder, that she’d realized why she’d reached for it. She wanted to photograph the Mayans, to collect evidence of what was happening here, because they were going to be rescued—she kept insisting upon this to herself—and, after this happened, there would inevitably be an investigation, and arrests, and a trial. Which meant there’d need to be evidence, of course, and what better evidence could there possibly be than photographs of the perpetrators?
She started shooting as soon as she reached the bottom of the hill, focusing on the men’s faces. She enjoyed the feeling it gave her, a sneaky sort of power, the hunted turning on her hunters. They were going to be punished; they were going to spend the rest of their lives in jail. And Amy was going to help this happen. She imagined the trial while she aimed and snapped, the crowded courtroom, the hush as she testified. They’d project her photos on a giant screen, and she’d point at an image of the bald man, that pistol on his hip. He was the leader, she’d say. He was the one who wouldn’t let us go.
The Mayans paid her no attention. They weren’t watching, hardly even seemed to glance her way. Only when she stepped out into the clearing, searching for a better angle on the group of men clustered around the nearest campfire, did two of them stir, raising their bows in her direction. She took their picture, stepped quickly back into the vines.
After awhile, the sense of power started to slip away from her, and she had nothing good to replace it with. The sun kept climbing, and Amy was too hot, too hungry, too thirsty. But she’d already been all these things when she’d first arrived, so this wasn’t what the shift was about. No, it was the Mayans’ indifference to her presence there, so busy with her camera, that finally began to wear her down. They were clustered around their smoldering campfire, some of them napping in the slowly diminishing line of shade at the edge of the jungle. They were talking and laughing; one of them was whittling a stick, just carving it down into nothing, a bored man’s task, a way to occupy his hands while time ticked sluggishly by. Because that was it, wasn’t it? That was what they were so clearly doing here: they were waiting. And not in any suspense, either, not in any anxiety as to the outcome of their vigil. They were waiting with no apparent emotion at all, as one might sit over the course of an evening, watching a candle methodically burn itself into darkness, never less than certain of the outcome, confident that the only thing standing between now and the end of waiting was time itself.
And what does that mean?Amy wondered.
Maybe the Mayans knew about the Greeks. Maybe Juan and Don Quixote had already come, had walked by the opening to the trail, kept on until they reached the village, only to be turned back, oblivious, never even thinking to check the tree line. Neither Amy nor the others had mentioned this possibility, yet it seemed so obvious now, once she’d thought of it, so impossible to overlook. They weren’t coming, she realized suddenly, with the weight of certainty: no one was coming. And if this were true, then there was no hope. Not for Pablo, certainly, nor for the rest of them. And the Mayans must have understood this—it was the source of their boredom, their lassitude—they knew that it was simply a matter of waiting for events to unfold. Nothing was asked of them but that they guard the clearing. Thirst and hunger and the vine would do the rest, as they had so many times before.
Amy stopped taking pictures. She felt dizzy, almost drunk; she had to sit down, dropping into the dirt at the foot of the trail. It’s only the sun, she told herself. My empty stomach. She was lying, though, and she knew it. The sun, her hunger, they had nothing to do with it. What she was feeling was fear. She tried to distract herself from this realization, taking deep breaths, fussing with her camera. It was just a cheap point- and-shoot; she’d bought it more than ten years ago, with money she’d earned as a baby-sitter. Jeff had given her a digital camera for the trip, but she’d made him take it back. She was too attached to this one to think of relinquishing it yet. It wasn’t very reliable—it took bad pictures more often than not, sun-bleached or shadowed, and almost always blurrily out of focus—but Amy knew she’d have to break it or lose it or have it stolen before she’d accept the prospect of a replacement. She checked how many shots she had left—three out of thirty-six. That would be it, then; she hadn’t brought any extra rolls, hadn’t thought they’d be gone long enough to need them. It seemed odd to think that there was an exact number of pictures she’d taken in her life, and that nearly all of them had been with this camera. There were x number of her parents, x of trees and monuments and sunsets and dogs, x of Jeff and Stacy. And, if what she was feeling just now was correct—if the Mayans were correct, if Jeff was correct—then it was possible that there were only three more to take in her entire life. Amy tried to decide what they should be. There ought to be a group shot, she supposed, using the timer, all of them clustered around Pablo on his backboard. And one of her and Stacy, of course, arm in arm, the last in the series. And then—
“Are you okay?”
Amy turned, and there Stacy was, standing over her, with that makeshift umbrella on her shoulder. She looked wretched—gaunt and greasy-haired. Her mouth was trembling, and her hands, too, making the umbrella rattle softly, as if in a slight breeze.
Am I okay?Amy thought, struggling for an honest answer. Her dizziness had been followed by an odd sense of calm, a feeling of resignation. She wasn’t like Jeff, wasn’t a fighter. Or maybe she simply couldn’t fool herself as easily as he did. The threat of dying here didn’t fill her with an urgency to be up and doing; it made her tired, made her feel like lying down, as if to hurry the process along. “I guess so,” she said. And then, because Stacy looked so much worse than she herself felt: “Are you?”
Stacy shook her head. She gestured behind her, up the hill. “They’re…you know…” She trailed off, as if unable to find the words. She licked her lips, which had become deeply cracked in the past twenty-four hours—chapped, rawly split—a castaway’s lips. When she tried again, her voice was a whisper. “They’ve started.”
“Started what?”
“Cutting off his legs.”
“What’re you talking about?” Amy asked. Though she knew, of course.
“Pablo’s,” Stacy whispered, lifting her eyebrows very high, as if this news were a surprise to her, too. “They’re using the knife.”
Amy stood up without knowing what she intended to do. She didn’t feel herself reacting yet, was numb to the news. But she must’ve been feeling something, because her expression changed in some way. She could see Stacy reacting to it, stepping back from her, looking scared.
“I shouldn’t have said yes, should I?” Stacy asked.
“Yes to what?”
“We voted on it, and I—”
“Why didn’t anyone tell me?”
“You were down here. Jeff said it only mattered if there was a tie. But there wasn’t. Eric said yes, and then I…” There was that same frightened expression again. She stepped forward now, reached out to clutch Amy’s forearm. “I shouldn’t have, should I? You and Mathias and I—we could’ve stopped them.”
Amy couldn’t bring herself to accept that this was happening. She didn’t believe that it was possible to cut someone’s legs off with a knife, didn’t believe that Jeff would ever attempt such a thing. Perhaps they’d only been talking about it, were still talking about it now; perhaps she could stop them if she hurried. She pulled herself free of Stacy’s grip. “Stay here,” she said. “Watch for the Greeks. Okay?”
Stacy nodded, still with that fear in her face, that trembling coming and going in the muscles around her mouth. She sat down, dropping awkwardly in the center of the path, as if some supporting string had been cut.
Amy waited another moment, watching her, making sure she was all right. Then she started hurriedly up the hill.
J eff and Mathias were the ones who did it. They didn’t ask Eric to help, which was a good thing, because he knew he wouldn’t have been able to. He kept pacing about the clearing while they worked, pausing to watch and then turning quickly away, finding both states unbearable, the seeing and the not seeing.
First, they put the belts back on. They found them lying in the dirt beside the backboard, three tangled snakes, abandoned there the night before. Jeff and Mathias needed only two of them; they bound the Greek at his chest and waist. Pablo’s eyes remained shut through all this jostling; he hadn’t opened them, not once, since he’d stopped screaming earlier that morning. Even when Jeff prodded him now, calling his name, wanting to mime out what they were about to attempt, the Greek refused to respond. He lay there with a clenched expression on his face, everything—his mouth, his eyes—closed against the world. He seemed beyond their reach somehow, not quite present any longer. Past caring, Eric supposed, long past.
Next, they built a fire, a small one—it was all they could manage. They used three of the archaeologists’ notebooks, a shirt, a pair of pants. They crumpled two sheets of paper for kindling, then added the notebooks whole. The clothing, they doused with tequila. The fire was almost smokeless; it burned with a low blue flame. Jeff set the knife in its midst, along with a large rock, shaped like an ax head. While these heated—the stone making a snapping sound as it took on a deep reddish glow—Jeff and Mathias crouched over Pablo, murmuring back and forth, pointing first at one leg, then the other, planning their operation. Jeff looked grim and downcast suddenly, as though he’d been coerced into this undertaking despite his better intentions, but if he was having any second thoughts, he wasn’t allowing them to slow the procedure down.
Eric was standing right over them when they started. Jeff used a small towel he’d found in one of the backpacks to pull the stone from the fire; he wrapped it around his hand, glovelike, to protect himself from the heat. Moving quickly, in one fluid motion, he scooped up the stone, raised it over his head, turned toward the backboard. Then he slammed it down with all his strength against the Greek’s lower leg.
Pablo’s eyes jerked open; he began to scream again, writhing and bucking beneath his bonds. Jeff seemed hardly to notice; his face showed no reaction. He was already dropping the stone back into the fire, reaching for the knife. Mathias, too, remained expressionless, focused on his task. It was his job to keep the fire burning hot, to feed in new notebooks if they were needed, to sprinkle more alcohol, to stir and blow upon the embers.
Jeff was hunched over the backboard, muscles taut with the strain of his labor, sawing and chopping. There was the stench of the hot knife against Pablo’s flesh, a cooking smell, meat burning. Eric glimpsed the shattered bone below the Greek’s left knee, the bloody marrow spilling out, Jeff’s knife pushing and cutting and prying. He saw the bottom half of Pablo’s leg come free, the foot and ankle and shin bones a separate thing now, cut off, gone forever. Jeff sat back on his haunches, catching his breath. Pablo continued to scream and writhe, his eyes rolling, flashing white. Mathias took the knife from Jeff, returned it to the fire. Jeff picked up the little towel, started to wrap it around his hand again. As he reached for the glowing stone, Eric turned quickly away, started off across the clearing. He couldn’t watch any longer, had to flee.
But there was nowhere to go, of course. Even on the far side of the clearing, with his back turned to the scene, he could still hear what was happening, the crunch of the stone slamming into Pablo’s other leg, and the screaming—louder now, it seemed, higher-pitched.
Eric glanced over his shoulder—he couldn’t stop himself.
Mathias was holding the black pan, the one Jeff had brought back from the bottom of the hill, with that word carved across its bottom— peligro. Eric watched him place it in the fire. They were going to use it to cauterize the Greek’s wounds, pressing it flat across his stumps, one after the other.
Jeff was bent low over the backboard, working with the knife, a steady sawing motion, his shirt soaked through with sweat.
Pablo was still screaming. And there were words now, too. They were impossible to understand, of course, but Eric could hear the pleading in them, the begging. He remembered how he’d fallen on the Greek when he’d jumped down into the shaft, that feeling of his body bucking beneath him. And he thought of how Amy and he had thrown Pablo onto the backboard, that clumsy, lurching, panic-filled toss. He could feel the vine moving inside him, in his leg, and his chest, too—that insistent pressure at the base of his rib cage, pushing outward. It was all wrong; everything here was wrong, and there was no way to stop it, no way to escape.
Eric turned away again, but he couldn’t maintain it. He had to glance back almost immediately.
Jeff finished with the knife, dropped it into the dirt at his side. Eric watched him pick up the towel; he wrapped it around his hand, turned to pull the pan from the fire. Mathias had to help him now. He squatted beside the backboard, bent to lift Pablo’s left leg, what remained of it, grasping it with both hands just above the knee. Pablo was crying, talking to the two of them, Mathias and Jeff both, using their names. Neither of them showed any sign of hearing, though; they wouldn’t look at him. The pan was glowing orange now, and the letters scratched into its bottom were a deeper color, almost red, so that Eric could still read the word they spelled there, even as Jeff swung it free of the flames. He watched Jeff spin, place the pan against the base of Pablo’s stump, holding it in place, pressing hard, using all his weight. Eric could hear the flesh burning, a spitting, snapping sound. He could smell it, too, and was appalled to feel his stomach stirring in response—not in nausea, either, but, shockingly, in hunger.
He turned away, dropped into a crouch, shutting his eyes, pressing his hands to his ears, breathing through his mouth. He remained like this for what seemed like an impossibly long time, concentrating on the sensation of the vine inside his body, that insistently probing spasm in his leg, that pressure in his chest, trying to feel them as something else, something benign, some trick of perception, as Stacy kept insisting they must be: his heartbeat, his overtired muscles, his fear. He couldn’t do it, though, and he couldn’t wait any longer, either; yet again, he had to look.
When he turned, he found Jeff and Mathias still crouched over the backboard. Jeff was pressing the pan into Pablo’s right stump now. There was that same sickeningly enticing smell in the air. But silence now—Pablo had gone still, stopped screaming. He seemed to have lost consciousness.
Then there was the sound of footsteps approaching. Amy was coming up the path. She entered the clearing at a run, out of breath, her skin shining with sweat.
Too late,Eric thought, watching her stagger to a stop, staring—seeing—a look of horror on her face. She’s come too late.
J eff didn’t know what to feel. Or no: He knew what he thought, and then he knew what he felt, and he couldn’t seem to bring the two into line. It had gone well, maybe even better than he’d expected—this was what he thought. They’d gotten the legs off fairly quickly, each of them a few inches below the knee, saving the joint. They’d cauterized the stumps thoroughly enough so that when they removed the tourniquets, there was only a minimal amount of bleeding. Seepage, really, would be the word for it, nothing too serious. Pablo had lost consciousness toward the end, more from shock, it seemed, than anything else. It wasn’t pain—Jeff was almost certain of this—he shouldn’t have been able to feel a thing. But he’d been awake; he’d been able to lift his head and see what they were doing, and that must’ve counted as its own sort of anguish. He was safer now, Jeff believed, though still in peril. All they’d done was buy him some time—not much, maybe another day or two. But it was something, and Jeff believed that he ought to feel proud of himself, that he’d done a brave deed. So he couldn’t understand why he felt so sick at heart, almost breathless with it, as if holding back the threat of tears.
Amy wasn’t helping much. None of them were. Mathias seemed reluctant to look at him, was hunched into himself beside the remains of their little fire, completely withdrawn. Eric had resumed his pacing, his fretful probing at his leg and chest. And Amy, without even bothering to take the time to understand what he’d accomplished—while they were still removing the tourniquets, carefully smearing Neosporin on the seared stumps—had immediately begun to attack him.
“Oh Jesus,” she’d said, startling him. He hadn’t heard her approach. “Jesus fucking Christ. What’ve you done?”
Jeff didn’t bother to answer. It seemed clear enough.
“You cut off his legs. How could you fucking—”
“We didn’t have a choice,” Jeff said. He was bent over the second stump, spreading the gel across it. “He was going to die.”
“And you think this will save him? Chopping off his legs with a dirty knife?”
“We sterilized it.”
“Come on, Jeff. Look what he’s lying on.”
It was true, of course: The sleeping bag they’d used to cushion the backboard was soaked through with the leakage from Pablo’s bladder. Jeff shrugged it away. “We’ve bought him some time. If we’re rescued tomorrow, or even the next day, he’ll—”
“You cut off his legs, ” Amy said, almost shouting.
Jeff finally turned to look at her. She was standing over him, sunburned, her face smudged with dirt, a half-inch-deep layer of green fuzz growing across her pants. She didn’t look like herself anymore; she looked too ragged, too frantic. He supposed it must be true for all of them, in one way or another. He certainly had stopped feeling like himself at some point in the past twenty-four hours. He’d just used a knife and a stone to cut off a man’s legs—a friend’s, a stranger’s, it was hard to say any longer. He didn’t even know Pablo’s real name. “What chance do you think he would’ve had, Amy?” he asked. “With his bones exposed like that?”
She didn’t answer; she was staring to his right, at the ground, with an odd expression on her face.
“Answer me,” he said.
Was she starting to cry? Her chin was trembling; she reached up, touched it with her hand. “Oh God,” she whispered. “Oh Christ.”
Jeff followed her gaze. She was peering down at Pablo’s severed limbs, the remains of his feet and ankles and shins, the bloodstained bones held together with a few remaining cords of flesh. Jeff had dropped them beside the backboard, carelessly, planning to bury them when he was through cauterizing Pablo’s stumps. But it wasn’t going to come to that, apparently. The vine had sent another long tendril snaking out into the clearing. It had wrapped itself around one of Pablo’s severed feet and was dragging the bones away now, back through the dirt. As Jeff watched, a second tendril slithered forward, more quickly than the first, and laid claim to the other foot.
They were all staring now—Eric and Mathias, too. And then Mathias was in motion, jumping to his feet, the knife in his hand. He stepped on the first length of vine, bent to slash at it with the blade, severing it from its source. He swooped toward the second one, slicing again. Even as he did this, though, a third tendril slithered into the clearing, and then a fourth, reaching for the bones. Amy screamed—once, short and loud—then clapped her hand over her mouth, retreating toward Jeff. Mathias bent and slashed, bent and slashed, and the vine kept coming, from all directions now.
“Leave it,” Jeff said.
Mathias ignored him. Cutting and stomping and tearing at the vines, faster and faster, but still too slow, the tendrils fighting back, wrapping themselves around his legs, hindering his movements.
“ Mathias, ” Jeff said, and he stepped toward him, grabbed his arm, pulled him away. He could feel the German’s strength, the taut, straining muscles, but also his fatigue, his surrender. They stood side by side, watching as the vine pulled the severed limbs into itself, the white of the bones dragged into the larger mass of green, vanishing altogether.
They were still standing like this, all four of them, perfectly motionless, when, from across the hilltop, there came that familiar chirping again, the sound of a cell phone plaintively ringing at the bottom of the shaft.
S tacy sat beneath her jerry-rigged umbrella, in her little circle of shade, cross-legged, hunched into herself. She kept having to resist the temptation to glance at her wrist, kept having to remind herself that her watch wasn’t there, that it was resting on a table beside a bed in Cancún, in her hotel room, where she ought to be right now, too, but wasn’t. Or perhaps not: perhaps her fears had finally come true and a maid had stolen the watch. In which case, it would be where? With her hat, she supposed, and her sunglasses, adorning some stranger, some woman laughing over lunch at a restaurant on the beach. Stacy could feel the absence of these possessions in a way that was almost physical, an ache inside her chest, a bodily yearning, but it was her glasses that she missed most of all. There was too much sun here, too much glare. Her head throbbed with it—throbbed with hunger, too, and thirst, and fatigue, and fear.
Behind her, up the hill, they were amputating Pablo’s legs. Stacy tried not to think of this. He was going to die here; she couldn’t see any way around it. And she tried not to think of that, too.
Finally, she couldn’t help it: She gave in, glanced at her wrist. There was nothing there, of course, and her thoughts began to circle once again—the night table, the maid, the hat and sunglasses, the woman eating lunch at the beach. This woman would be rested and fed and clean, with a bottle of water at her elbow. She’d be careless, carefree: happy. Stacy felt a wave of hatred for this imaginary stranger, which quickly metastasized, jumping to the boy who’d squeezed her breast outside the bus station, to the—probably fictional—felonious maid, to the Mayans sitting across from her with their watchful faces, their bows and arrows. One of the boys was there now, the one who’d followed them on the bike yesterday, the little one, riding on the handlebars. He was sitting in an elderly woman’s lap, staring toward Stacy, expressionless, like all the other Mayans, and Stacy hated him, too.
Her khakis and T-shirt were covered with the pale green fuzz from the vine, her sandals also. She kept brushing it away, burning her hands, but the tiny tendrils quickly grew back. They’d already eaten several holes in her T-shirt. One, just above her belly button, was as big as a silver dollar. It was only a matter of time, Stacy knew, before her clothes would be hanging off her in shreds.
She hated the vine, too, of course, if it was possible to hate a plant. She hated its vivid green, its tiny red flowers, the sting of its sap against her skin. She hated it for being able to move, for its hunger, and its malevolence.
Her feet were still caked with mud from the long walk across that field the previous afternoon, and the mud continued to give off its faint scent of shit. Like Pablo, Stacy thought, her mind jumping up the hill, to what was happening there, the knife, the heated stone. She shuddered, shut her eyes.
Hate and more hate—Stacy was drowning in it, dropping downward, with no bottom in sight. She hated Pablo for having fallen into the shaft, hated him for his broken back, his fast-approaching death. She hated Eric for his wounded leg, for the vine moving wormlike beneath his skin, for his panic in the face of this. She hated Jeff for his competence, his coldness, for turning so easily to that knife and heated stone. She hated Amy for not stopping him, hated Mathias for his silences, his blank looks, hated herself most of all.
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