weeks into the field season at Dzibilchaltún that Tony, Salvador, and I held a council of war.
We sat at a folding table at one edge of the central plaza, an area of hard-packed dirt surrounded by mud-and-wattle huts. The plaza served as dining hall, classroom, meeting place, and, at that moment, conference room. Dinner was over and we lingered over coffee laced with aguardiente, a potent local brandy.
The situation was this. We had thirty men to do a job that would be difficult with twice that number. Our budget was tight; our time was limited. We had been at work for three weeks out of our allotted eight. So far our luck had been nonexistent. And the municipality had just commandeered ten of our workmen to patch potholes in the road between Mérida and Progreso. In the Yucatan, the season for road building coincides with the season for excavation, a brief period in the spring before the rains come. In five weeks— sooner if our luck was bad—the rains would come and our work would end.
"Shall I go talk to the commissioner of highways?" I said.
"I'll tell him that we need those men. I'm sure I could convince him."
Salvador took a drag on his cigarette, leaned back in his chair, and folded his arms. Salvador had been working on excavations since he was a teenager in Piste helping with the restoration of Chichén Itzá. He was a good foreman, an intelligent man who was respectful of his employers, and he did not like to tell me I was wrong. He stared past me.
I glanced at Tony. "I think that means no."
Tony grinned. Anthony Baker, my co-director on the excavation, was older than I was by just a few years. We had met nearly thirty years before at a Hopi dig in Arizona. He had been an affable, easygoing young man. He was still easygoing. His eyes were a startling shade of blue. His curly hair—once blond, now white—was sparse where it had been lush. His face was thin, grown thinner over the years, and sunburned as always. Each season he burned and peeled and burned again, despite all his efforts to block the sun. His voice was low and gravelly, a soft rough whiskey voice with a deep rumble in the throat, like the voice of a talking bear in a fairy tale.
"I'd guess you were right," he said to me.
"That's too bad," I said. "I was rather looking forward to barging into the commissioner's office. I can be rude to young men." I sipped my coffee. "It's one of the few compensations for growing old."
Salvador took another long drag on his cigarette. "I will talk to my cousin," he said at last. "My cousin will talk to the commissioner. He will reason with the commissioner." He glanced at me but did not unfold his arms. "It will cost some money."
I nodded. "We budgeted for that."
"Good."
"If it doesn't work, I can always go negotiate with the man," I said.
Salvador dropped the stub of his cigarette to the ground and crushed it out with a sandaled foot. No comment. Tony poured another shot of aguardiente into each cup.
The sun was setting. The hollow wailing of conch shell trumpets blown by Mayan priests rose over the trilling of the crickets and echoed across the plaza. I alone listened to the sweet mournful sound—neither Tony nor Salvador could hear the echoes of the past.
At a folding table on the far side of the plaza, three of the five graduate students who were working the dig this summer were playing cards. Occasionally, their laughter drifted across the plaza.
"The students are a good bunch this year," Tony commented. I shrugged. "They're like every other bunch of students. Every year they seem to get younger. And they want to find a jade mask and a gold bracelet under every rock or else they want to have a mystical experience in the ruins when the full moon rises."
"Or both," Tony said.
"Right. Some hide it better than others, but they're all treasure hunters at heart."
"And we hide it better than any of them," he said. "We've been at it longer."
I glanced at his face, and could not continue pretending to be cynical when he was grinning like that. "I suppose you're right. Do you think this is the year that we'll find a tomb bigger than King Tut's and translate the hieroglyphics?"