Divination by Ger Killeen (Appeared in the January 2010 Issue) We got a two-year grant, Max had said, to excavate some caves in the highlands that had interesting painted calendar glyphs. About five miles south from the dig, not quite out of the jungle, there was a small village, a pretty awful place where two dirt roads crossed, about a dozen families. You can just imagine it—the skinny dogs, the tiny Mayan women rattling away in broken Spanish and Kaqchikel, the malnourished kids peering around doors and trees, the men sullen or drunk, and, God, the mosquitoes. We hired a few of the men to haul rubble at the dig. Anyway, the place had a bar, really just a room in a house with a few tables, the whole place smelling of beer and piss. And somehow one of us discovered that the old woman who looked after the place would sell you pot, really good pot, for cheap. So every couple of weeks or so, usually on Sunday when we had a day off, we took it in turns to go down to the village on a pot run. The old woman, Juana, would ask if you needed aq’om q’ayis, medicinal herbs, and would throw her head back in a fit of laughter when you said a’e, yes. She would sit at a table and lay out lines of domino tiles in no particular order that I could see, and underneath the table she kept a gold-colored chicken in a cardboard box. For a few quetzales she’d plop the chicken up on the table, and the chicken would pace about, pecking at this domino and that one, and Juana would interpret the pecking and tell your fortune: how you’d surely find a great treasure up there in that cave, how there was a girl in Guaté that might marry you. So, usually, after I’d transacted the main business of the day, I’d buy a beer and have my fortune told. Why? I don’t know; just to do it and talk about it later maybe. Anyway, this one Sunday, I sat down at the table, Juana smiling her toothless smile, a few kids looking on, the chicken striding about and pecking at tiles. Suddenly Juana stopped smiling, looked straight at me, open-mouthed, looked at the table, looked at me again, and in the clearest Spanish I’d ever heard from her said, “Señor Max, you must now leave very quickly and go back up the mountain to your friends. Now, Señor Max, now!” She stood up—she barely came up to my elbow—and physically pushed me out the door. I heard her bolt it behind me. Well, as you can imagine, I was a bit surprised and puzzled, and okay, maybe even a bit worried—these people really believe in spirits and that kind of stuff. I used to even hear them saying prayers to the rain god, Chac, and Saint Anthony all in the same breath. There was nothing to do but head back to camp, and at least I had the pot. Next morning, none of the laborers from the village showed up for work, so someone—a young guy from somewhere in Texas—was sent down in the jeep to see what was going on and roust them. I was copying some glyphs in the shade when he came roaring back, laying on the horn, screaming. The villagers were all dead, every man, woman and child, shot in the back of the head, shot in the face, shot in the heart. Most of the women and girls had been raped. Even the dogs were dead. The army and their friends, you know... I remember thinking I had no idea the smell of blood could make your eyes burn like from smoke. I remember thinking, today is 9 Lamat, 16 K’ayab—or 9 Venus, 16 Turtle, in the old calendar. I remember seeing Juana’s golden chicken pecking near the feet of a small child.
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