of sunlight. A hammock vendor strolled through the square and hailed the retired couple without success.
"You know the night that we had a smoke down by the cenote," I said suddenly. "I met the curandera over by Salvador's hut. I wish I had understood what she said to me. She was pretty excited about something."
"You hang around this place long enough, and eventually you realize that you won't ever understand half the stuff that goes on around you. Even when you understand the words, you can't catch all the nuances."
Barbara shrugged. "I wouldn't worry about it." She glanced at my face and reached across the table to pat my hand. "Why don't you just relax and enjoy your vacation. Don't worry about Liz. Things will sort themselves out."
We slept that night in real beds. Of course, we had breakfast at Cafetería Mesón, and of course Emilio and Marcos— "the boys" as Barbara had taken to calling them—showed up as we were drinking our coffee. Emilio bought a round of coffee and I tried to forget camp.
"So what are you going to do today?" Emilio asked, spooning sugar into his coffee.
"We were talking about going to Chichén Itzá," Barbara said.
Emilio looked up. "You want me to come and drive?"
"Depends," said Barbara. "Do we get a cut of the profits for providing transportation?"
Emilio's grin widened. "Sure. I'll pay for gas."
Barbara glanced at me and laughed. "Don't look so shocked, Diane. This bandit makes a hell of a good profit on his sales. Even on a bad day, he makes more money than a graduate student."
"What does that mean—bandit?" Emilio asked, stirring his coffee.
Barbara grinned and shook her head.
He looked up at her, pouring more sugar into the pale brown coffee. "I think you like this bandit," he said.
He set down the sugar and grinned at Marcos. "We will have good luck today."
In the end, we all went to Chichén Itzá: Barbara, Emilio, Emilio's hammocks, Marcos and I. Emilio hailed a German couple on the steep stone steps of an ancient pyramid and sold them two hammocks on the spot. He dickered with an elderly couple in the shade of the feathered serpent columns that topped the Temple of the Warriors. He haggled over a hundred pesos on the steps to a platform carved with jaguars clutching human hearts. He offered a man a good price, a very good price, on the steps that led to a crumbling stone dome. Grass grew between the stones of the steps.
Barbara took to hailing the young male tourists herself. "Hey," she called happily to two blond college students. "Want to buy a hammock?" They stopped to talk in the shade of a massive structure that was little more than a tumble of stones. A dark passage that led to the inner recesses of the structure smelled faintly of rot and urine. The blond man in the University of California T-shirt bought a matrimonial hammock at twice Emilio's usual rate.
Emilio led us into Old Chichén, the older portion of the site where the monte had been cut back but the buildings were unrestored. In a secluded corner beyond the main ruins, out where the only sounds were the rustling of leaves in the monte, we smoked a joint and listened to the birds call in the trees. Then Barbara insisted that we had to go see the Sacred Well.
Marcos led the way. Emilio had his arm around Barbara and they strolled slowly, stopping to look at carved stones and buildings. We passed a stone wall where each limestone block had a relief carving of a skull. The blocks were carefully stacked so that row upon row of grinning skulls watched us as we bought soft drinks at a refrescos stand and walked to the Sacred Well to drink them.
We sat at the edge of the precipice, where we could look down on the green water, a small pond far below. Emilio rested his head on Barbara's lap. Blue-green birds with long tail feathers—Marcos called them motmots—skimmed over the water's surface and perched in the trees that clung to the crumbling limestone cliffs on the far wall of the well. The drop to the water looked like more than a hundred feet.
Marcos pointed out the platform from which the Mayan priests threw gifts into the well, a small ledge of limestone on the south side.
"They threw people in, didn't they?" I asked lazily, leaning back against a boulder.
Marcos nodded. I squinted at the ledge. I wouldn't want to