A Serpent In Turquoise

“Clearly we don’t have a meeting of minds here. But muchas gracias, señor, all the same.”

As she eased the Jeep past a swaggering rooster and onto the road, Raine figured she had two hours before the sun dipped below the craggy peaks beyond the canyon to her west. If she couldn’t find a place to bed down in Mipopo, she supposed she could return to the motel where she’d stayed in Creel last night. Some eighty miles of butt-bruising road to the north, the little logging and tourist town boasted the main stop on the railway that skirted the canyon rim. It was the last place even pretending to civilization for a hundred miles in any direction.

On the other hand, she could press on regardless, heading south into the hinterlands. According to her map, a dotted line swerved off the rim road about ten miles past Mipopo. This track appeared to switch back down the canyon wall, dropping from bench to bench. If she made it down to the river before dark, she’d surely find a place to pitch a camp.

“Darn,” she muttered aloud. She’d pictured herself finding the professor tonight. Professor McCord had started out as the longest of longshots, barely more than an excuse for this escapade. But after her discovery yesterday in the Creel gift shop, her urge to consult him had grown more urgent. “So how do I find you?” she murmured, then glanced to her right at the building she was passing—and stepped on the brakes.

It was one of the few two-story buildings in Mipopo, and there were three battered cars and an overloaded lumber truck parked in the vacant lot beside it. Farmacia, proclaimed the rusty sign that swung above its torn screen door and sagging boardwalk, though the blinking red, chili pepper Christmas tree lights that framed each window were sort of festive for a drugstore. Plus they were either too early or way too late, this being only the first week in October. Still, if there was a pharmacist lurking within, surely he’d speak Spanish? The screen door banged shut behind her and Raine stood, half-blind in the dusky light.

“Dame una tequila!” demanded someone at her ear in a metallic monotone. She spun to find herself eyeball to beady black eyeball with a mynah bird, perched on a plastic coat hanger suspended from the ceiling.

A hand-lettered sign hung from the bird’s trapeze. “Magdalena,” Raine read aloud. “You’re Magdalena? Then this must be—”

“¡Una tequila o tu vida!” A tequila or your life! Feathers brushed her ear as the bird swooped away.

Turning to follow its flight, Raine saw the bird flutter down behind a long marble counter, fronted by a row of red-topped stools. Back in some distant and glorious past, this must have been the town’s ice cream parlor and drugstore. The round white wrought-iron tables remained, but nowadays they didn’t accommodate miners’ wives and children, sipping ice cream sodas and limonada. Half a dozen men slouched here and there, with their beers frozen halfway to their open mouths and their dark eyes drilling into Raine.

“Buenas tardes,” she said to the room in general.

Nobody smiled back or even twitched.

Wonderful. Raine walked between the tables and up to the bar.

Somewhere overhead, a woman burst into wild laughter. A bed creaked, then kept on creaking, settling into an age-old, familiar rhythm. “Great taste in post offices, Professor,” Raine muttered under her breath. From upstairs she heard two distinctly different guttural groans of masculine bliss added to the woman’s rolling giggles. So there was a trio up there.

“How d’you get a drink around here?” she asked the bird, now perched on a beer tap, as raptly attentive as the rest of Raine’s audience. Choosing one of the tattered vinyl stools, she turned her back on the tables.

As a girl brushed through the beaded curtain that hung over the doorway behind the bar, Raine greeted her. “¡Hola!” The kid teetered on the low edge of her teens, with big black eyes and long black pigtails. “Una cerveza, por favor.”

The girl reached for a heavy glass stein. She whisked the mynah off its perch; with an indignant squawk, it hopped down to strut along the countertop.

“Yo busco—I’m looking for—un norteamericano,” Raine said as the amber liquid rose inside the glass. “Se llama Professor McCord.”

The girl paused in the act of serving Raine the drink. Her eyes narrowed to slits.

“You know him?” Clearly she’d heard of him.

The kid shrugged, rummaged under the counter, drew out a second stein. This one had a smear of red lipstick along its rim. Deliberately she poured the beer from the clean glass into the dirty one, and then thumped it down before Raine.

“And welcome to Mipopo.” Raine contemplated the spillage while somebody snickered behind her. The girl moved down the bar, to pick up a rag and scrub an invisible stain.

From her shoulder bag, Raine fished out her prize souvenir of the trip so far. Wrapped in a red bandanna to protect it, it was a mug made of low-fired local clay. She’d found it in Creel, in a gallery near the train station. After she’d spotted it, she’d realized that this trip might not be entirely a fool’s errand. That she really ought to find Professor McCord and pump him for information.

Against a creamy background, the design was glazed in irregular squares of mottled greenish blue. Glaring out from the side of the mug, the critter’s beaky face looked precisely like the professor’s photo of the carvings on the temple of the Feathered Serpent at Teotihuacan—except for one added feature: The hornless Triceratops appeared to be covered with a turquoise mosaic.

Raine leaned across the bar to fill her blue dino-mug from the tap. With a toast to the outraged child, she took a long cool swallow. “Delicioso!” she assured the girl. Then she skated the dirty stein down the counter.

The kid caught it before it flew off the end. “Una bebida para la pájara,” Raine directed. A drink for the bird. “Or give her a tequila, if she prefers. Con gusano.” The premier tequila always came with a pickled worm in its bottle.

Behind her, one of the men gave a snorting guffaw and then instantly hushed. The screen door banged, as somebody walked into the cantina.

Just for a change, could it be someone sociable? Raine petitioned, staring straight before her as she drank.

Whoever the newcomer was, he smelled of peppermint and cigars. He was big enough to make the stool creak as he settled in, leaving only one seat between them. Not a local, judging from the well-cut shirt sleeve and crisp khaki trousers Raine could see from the corner of her eye. Neither was he an American professor, she concluded, stealing a glance while the stranger ordered a beer in halting Spanish. This guy was German or Swiss, if you added his sandy mustache and ruddy coloring to his syntax.

The kid gave him a come-hither smile, and he responded with courtly boredom, his gaze locked on the glass she held hostage.

Raine drew a notepad from her bag and penned a quick note:

Professor McCord,

Got your letter regarding the temple at Teotihuacan and your question’s intriguing. I happen to be in the area for a week or two, so could I buy you a drink? I’ll check back here at Magdalena’s whenever I can these next few days. Set a date and a place at your convenience and I’ll be happy to meet you.

Yours sincerely,

Raine Ashaway

She folded the page in thirds, then sealed the message with a strip of tape from her bag. She addressed it to the professor, then set it to one side with a five-dollar peace offering laid on top.

“A most handsome cup,” observed the stranger, swinging on his stool to face her. “Might I please examine it?” His suntanned fingers were already extended.

Pushy, but she supposed he meant well, and for an icebreaker, it beat the weather. Raine handed the cup over with a smile. “Like it? I understand the artist is local.”

The German inspected it gravely. “It is really quite…charming.” His blue eyes lifted to include her in the compliment. “Might I introduce myself?”

He might. His name was Johann Grunwald, and he insisted on standing Raine to a second beer while they moved casually from names, to observations about Mexican pottery, to their reasons for being there.

Not that Raine told the truth. You never knew when you were going to bump into the competition these days. Even if Grunwald had no interest in paleontology, he might talk, and news spread fast where there was little to gossip about. “I’m just a wandering travel writer. I’ve heard about the Copper Canyons for years. Deeper than the Grand Canyon, with almost three times its area. Thought they might be worth an article.”

That launched Grunwald into an oration on the most spectacular of the canyons; the trails offering the finest panoramas or the best swimming holes. He’d be delighted to show her his favorite spots, since it was so very easy to get lost down there. Beyond the point where the roads played out, the canyon system branched like a gigantic labyrinth. The footpaths vanished or changed with each flash flood or rockslide. The maps were imprecise, GPS reception was abysmal and the natives were hardly helpful.

“But after six months of surveying the terrain, I assure you I know my way around. My men and I study the geological structures and the hydrographics in anticipation that my company—” beaming with pride, he named one of the biggest contractors in the world “—will soon build a dam hereabouts. A most magnificent and enormous dam.”

In that case, the kid could have him. Raine didn’t believe in drowning natural wonders for the convenience of mankind. Even if she had, she’d noticed in her travels that building dams might be a lucrative pastime for politicos and engineers, but it rarely improved the lot of the natives.

But why waste her breath arguing? Her companion wasn’t the type to be shaken in his convictions. Raine dried her cup with the bandanna, preparing to tuck it away.

“That really is a most delightful cup,” Grunwald observed. “I hope you will not be offended, but I have been seeking a gift for my, uh, sister, to send for her birthday. You would not, by any chance, consider selling to me this mug?”

He needed a gift for someone nearer and dearer than a sister, Raine suspected. He didn’t wear a ring; still she’d lay money that he had a wife back in Hamburg. “Sorry, but I’m quite attached to it. And I’m afraid I bought the last one in Creel. The gallery owner said its maker was a new artist, a young Tarahumara she’d never dealt with before. She took only a few of his designs on trial. But perhaps you could buy something from the artist directly,” Raine suggested at Grunwald’s look of chagrin. “The shop owner said that he’s built his kiln at a town called Lagarto.”

Boot heels shuffled on the plank floors and Raine glanced behind to find one of the men from the tables standing at her shoulder with an empty mug. She turned back to the engineer. “In fact, do you know where Lagarto is?” After she located Professor McCord, she meant to track down the artist, ask him where he’d gotten his idea for the turquoise creature.

While the kid drew a refill for her thirsty customer, then exchanged a few rapid words with him in a language that sure wasn’t Spanish, Grunwald explained that Lagarto was a ranchito some sixty miles south, on a branch of the Rio Verde. “It is not a town. Many of the names you will see on your map are ranchitos—just the little farm of some Indio family, no more than that. There will be no stores to buy food or drink, no one to rent you a bed. The Tarahumaras are shy and standoffish, not fond of strangers. You must carry your own supplies down in the canyons, and even so, without a knowledgeable and trustworthy guide…” He patted her fingers reassuringly where they rested on the cool marble.

“I see.” Raine smiled and drew back her hand. She should go. Grunwald was pleasant enough in small doses, but he was starting to lean too close and lick his fleshy lips too often. “I had one other question. Do you happen to know an American hereabouts—a Professor McCord?”

“Anson McCord, the archaeologist? Yes, I’ve run into him down in the canyons once or twice. We share an interest in caves.”