Pinkey's Tailing Box: a weekly Wednesday feature of At a Bottom Now for Gold...
Business Travel...HEXED
It was a night in Guatemala City like no other. Piles of trash and debris were stacked up along neighborhood streets in every zone of the capitol. At dusk they were lit and their smokey flames suggested a great insurrection had begun. Over some of the makeshift bonfires hung red and black piñata effigies of the Biblical Satan which were eagerly consumed by the flames.
The following afternoon, I took a green, red, and yellow Rebuly bus for the provincial destination of Panajachel. A few miles out of the city, it broke down. Fares had hardly all been returned when another bus bound in the same direction boarded those stranded. After more than two hours of dreary travel, the bus stopped at a pivotal intersection of many roads called Los Encuentros. Passengers stepping off were immediately greeted with cries of "Pana! Pana!" Panajachel bound transportation was already available for loading up.
The villa-taxi stormed down the mountainside and twenty minutes later zig-zagged through Solola just minutes before sunset and jerked to a stop a few blocks from the central park, unloading listlessly. I walked up an open stretch of rough pavement and was delighted just then to see a familiar pattern of green and red stripes rattle by ahead of him, the 3 o'clock Rebuly slipping in along the village square to disgorge itself.
The bus emptied quickly and the square was nearly deserted by the time I arrived to board what would be for him a last leg on down the curling mountainside to Lake Atitlan and Panajachel. Church bells tolled the sun's setting. The driver paced and stared, then motioned towards the bus in agitated sweeps of the hand as if offering refuge from vampires. I was among a few from the villa-taxi to step up onto the Rebuly and as soon as I did I watched intently as the the driver took to snapping shut every half-opened window on the bus, though the air felt plenty warm. The streets of the village were dead. A quarter hour passed.
I set about to pull down a window on the steamy bus. "No, no Señor!" the driver politely, but firmly enforced his earlier action as a flurry of tienda keepers across the street slamed shut their weatherworn fold-down shutters as if to follow the lead of the driver. With the kiosks secured, several children briefly playing with fireworks in front of the bus disappeared pell-mell up the street.
There was another frame of quiet. I was rather curious. What happened to all the people who1d just gotten off the bus? Surely some of them were going on to Panajachel and not just myself and the others from the shuttle, an English woman and teenage daughter, and a drunken passed out bum who'd thown-up out the door of the villa-taxi at 60 kilometers per hour. The woman broke the silence, "Driver, is something wrong?"
"No habla de Inges," he replied, adding a shrug.
She was right. Something was not going according to Hoyle here. One might expect the town to be rather quiet at dusk on a Sunday, but pin-drop dead? Where were all the people who got off the Rebuly? This deck was a card short. Oh sure, the kiosks maybe all did board up at the stroke of sunset. The kids may have run off because the ticket taker as he left told them that the gringos on board were cannibals. The driver possibly shoved people into his stuffy bus out of habit, since no other bus was there to compete for cargo.
A horrid, twisted thought fluttered through My mind. It was the last scene from Salem's Lot, where even in an isolated Guatemalan village, David Soule is discovered by the plague of vampires he'd almost destroyed. I noted that among my belongings, I didn't have a cross.
I turned and looked back through the emergency door window at the rear of the bus. Through the shadows, smoke, and fog, down a motionless expanse of cobblestone...something moved! At the far end of the park where storefront ends to become trees, statues, and benches, a lumbering form emerged. The light was too soft to make it out. It appeared to be a partially wrapped figure, no, several figures, robed and hooded--many figures ambling, inching their way from out of the thickening fog. Their slow and somber march suggested a funeral or religios procession. But at sunset?
The driver ushered a couple more passengers onto the bus, physically pushing them up the steps, then secured the door behind him as all hell broke loose and tumbled down on the village square in an avalanche of anarchy.
A hundred adolescents in mass juvenile revolt overran the park and square, engulfing the bus and parada with riotous insurrection. Wrapped in sheets, blankets and hooded shirts, their heads covered with masks, straw hats, or bags and sacks with eyeholes, the tricksters turned from subdued to frenzied as if by signal.
Shop doors were battered with makeshift cudgels of sugar cane and kindling. Firecrackers and spinning sizzlers rained down on roofs of tin and stucco. Rusting old pots and pans were beaten together or dragged on the cobblestone by the end of ropes and chains. Three dozen pairs of fists pelted the bus, then shook it back and forth while screaming insults. Green and brown camouflaged snakes, some several feet long, were whipped live up onto buildings and into the cargo on top of the bus, the driver invoking a fair amount of venom in response, but declining to venture outside.
The English woman turned back to me, "Why can't he drive away?"
"No ticket taker for one thing." I replied, "No passengers for another. If he moved now they might start throwing rocks. We're stuck here until this thing blows over."
The melee continued. A young Latin couple made a dash from the church across the park and entered the bus with shrieks of laughter. I shook my head. Since when was mayhem a joke?
From the sanctuary of a church across a patch of beaten cobblestones kitty-corner from the park a rush of passengers emerged and boarded the bus pell-mell. A moustached man in a faded yellow T-shirt and a paunch made of beer stepped onto the bus and it pulled away. For several miles the bus pulled over again and again to board more passengers until there were four or even five to many seats and the aisle of the bus itself was jammed with those standing.
Presently the faded T-shirt took to his task of collecting the fares, moving from front to back. With no conceivable way to do this, he ignored logic and crawled up onto the top of the seats, climbing from seat to seat while accumulating a fist full of cash. I slipped my camera out at the odd angle necessary to capture the absurdity and flashed. Laughter filled the bus.
Within twenty minutes I had reached my destination of Panajachel. I walked to my cheap hotel and obtained a key for a flat with a four inch mattress. Made of aluminum, the key slowly twisted in the lock, but in its bending, didn't turn. I carefully bent it back straight and pulled it out of the lock, relieved it was still in one piece.
I found the hotel keeper and explained the key was no good.
"Llave no trabajo!" I said.
He looked to his wife who wore the "another gringo" look on her face, then followed me to my room as his wife followed him. He placed the key carefully in the lock, ignoring my warnings it might get stuck, and turned. The padlock sprang open. He smiled and presented me the key, while glancing towards his wife to telegraph to her a strong confirmation of her initial "crazy gringos" sentiment. It was my last week ever spent there.
Dia de Diablo had come to an end, though an incident I would find out afterwards bespoke of a devil never resting. Two weeks later a bus enroute from Los Encuentros to that same Solola was halted by highway men and the passengers lined up along the side of the bus to be searched and robbed of their valuables. An older man protested the demand to turn over a cherished family ring and a scuffle broke out. The robbers panicked at the display of defiance and opened fire with machineguns. Some people survived by hurling themselved under the bus. Many others were killed.
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From the Tailing Box...
Dear Pinky's Tailing Box:
Zappa traded at 13 cents US today. Is that unlucky? --Superstitious Gus
Dear SG:
Only for those averaged in at 31 cents US. --Whirlwind
whirlwindbuyszappa@mindless.comb> |
