"The ruins are no good?"
Amy shrugged; she didn't know. "He wanted fifteen dollars to drive us somewhere else."
Jeff came over with the can of repellent. He took the map from her and began to spray. Amy held out her arms, then lifted them above her head so he could get her torso. She turned in a slow circle, all the way around. When she was facing him again, he stopped spraying, crouched to put the repellent back in his pack. They all stood there, watching him.
A disquieting thought occurred to Amy. "How're we getting back?" she asked.
Jeff squinted up at her. "Back?"
She pointed down the road after the vanished pickup truck. "To Cobá."
He turned to stare at the road, thinking on this. "The guidebook said you can always flag down a passing bus." He shrugged; he seemed to realize how foolish this was. "So I assumed…"
"There aren't going to be any buses on that road," Amy said.
Jeff nodded. This was obvious enough.
"A bus couldn't even fit on that road."
"It also said you can hitch-"
"You see any cars pass, Jeff?"
Jeff sighed, cinching his pack shut. He stood up, slung it over his shoulder. "Amy-" he began.
"The whole time we were driving, did you see any-"
"They must have a way to get supplies in."
"Who?"
"The archaeologists. They must have a truck. Or access to a truck. When we find Mathias's brother, we can just ask them to, you know, take us all back to Cobá."
"Christ, Jeff. We're stranded out here, aren't we? That's, like, a twenty-mile walk we're gonna have to do. Through the fucking jungle."
"Eleven."
"What?"
"It's eleven miles."
"There's no way that was eleven miles." Amy turned to the others for support, but only Pablo met her eyes. He was smiling; he had no idea what they were talking about. Mathias was digging through his pack. Stacy and Eric were staring at the ground. She could tell they thought this was just her complaining again, and it made her angry. "Nobody else is bothered by this?"
"Why is it my responsibility?" Jeff asked. "Why am I the one who was supposed to figure this whole thing out?"
Amy threw up her hands, as if the answer were obvious. "Because…," she said, but then she fell silent. Why was it Jeff's responsibility? She felt certain it was, yet she couldn't think why.
Jeff turned to the others, gestured toward the path. "Ready?" he asked. Everyone but Amy nodded. He started forward, followed by Mathias, then Pablo, then Eric.
Stacy gave Amy a sympathetic look. "Just go with it, sweetie," she said. "Okay? You'll see. It'll all work out."
She hooked arms with her, pulled her into motion. Amy didn't resist; they started toward the path together, arm in arm, Jeff and Mathias already vanishing into the shadows ahead of them, birds crying out overhead to mark their passage into the jungle's depths.
The map said they had to go two miles along the path. Then they'd see another trail, branching off to their left. This one would lead them gradually uphill. At the top of the hill, they'd find the ruins.
They'd been walking for almost twenty minutes when Pablo stopped to pee. Eric stopped, too. He dropped his pack to the trail, sat on it, resting. The trees alongside the path blocked the sun, but it was still too hot to be walking this far. His shirt was soaked through with sweat; his hair clung damply to his forehead. There were mosquitoes and some other type of very small fly, which didn't sting but seemed to be drawn to Eric's perspiration. They swirled around him in a cloud, giving off a high-pitched hum. Either he'd sweated all the bug spray off or it was worthless.
Stacy and Amy caught up with them while Pablo was still peeing. Eric heard them talking as they approached, but they fell silent when they got close. Stacy gave Eric a smile, patted him on the head as she went by. They didn't stop, didn't even slow, and after they got a little ways down the trail, he heard them begin to speak again. He felt a little flicker of disquiet, the sense that they might be gossiping about him. Or maybe not. Maybe it was Jeff. They were secret keepers, though, whisperers; it was something Eric still hadn't grown accustomed to, their closeness. Sometimes he caught himself scowling at Amy for no good reason, not liking her: he was jealous. He wanted to be the one Stacy whispered to, not the one she whispered about, and it bothered him that this wasn't the case.
The Greek had an immense bladder. He was still peeing, a puddle forming at his feet. The tiny black flies appeared to find urine even more alluring than sweat; they hovered over the puddle, dropping into it and taking flight again, dimpling its surface. The Greek pissed and pissed and pissed.
When he finished, he pulled one of the tequila bottles from his pack, broke its seal. A quick swallow, then he passed it to Eric. Eric stood up to drink, the liquor bringing tears to his eyes. He coughed, handed the bottle back. Pablo took another swallow before returning it to his pack. He said something in Greek, shaking his head, wiping his face with his shirt. Eric assumed it was a comment on the heat; it had the proper air of complaint to it.
He nodded. "Hot as hell," he said. "You guys have a phrase like that? Everybody must, don't you think? Hades? Inferno?"
The Greek just smiled at him.
Eric shouldered his pack, and they started walking again. On the map, the path had been drawn as a straight line, but in reality it meandered. Stacy and Amy were a hundred feet ahead, and sometimes Eric could glimpse them, other times not. Jeff and Mathias had started up the trail like two Boy Scouts, all business. Eric couldn't see them anymore, not even on the longer straightaways. The path was about four feet wide, packed dirt, with thick jungle growth on either side. Big-leafed plants, vines and creepers, trees straight out of a Tarzan comic book. It was dark under the trees, and difficult to see very far into their midst, but now and then Eric could hear things crashing about in the foliage. Birds, maybe, startled by their approach. There was a lot of cawing, and a steady locust-like throbbing underneath it all that could suddenly, for no apparent reason, fall silent, sending a shiver up his spine.
The path seemed to be fairly well traveled. They passed an empty beer bottle, a flattened pack of cigarettes. There were tracks at one point, too, some sort of hoofed animal, smaller than a horse. A donkey, maybe, or even a goat-Eric couldn't decide. Jeff probably knew what it was; he was good at things like that-picking out constellations, naming flowers. He was a reader, a fact hoarder, maybe a bit of a show-off at times: ordering in Spanish even when it was clear that the waiter spoke English, correcting people's pronunciation. Eric couldn't decide how well he liked him. Or, for that matter-and maybe this was more to the point-how well he was liked by Jeff.
They rounded a curve and descended a long, gradual slope with a stream running alongside the trail, and then suddenly there was sunlight in front of them, blinding after all that time in the shade. The jungle fell away, beaten back by what appeared to be some sort of aborted attempt at agriculture. There were fields on either side of the trail, extending for a hundred yards or so, vast tracts of churned-up earth, baking in the sun. It was the end stages of the slash-and-burn cycle: the slashing and burning and sowing and reaping had already happened here, and now this was what followed, the wasteland that preceded the jungle's return. Already, the foliage along the margins had begun to send out exploratory parties, vines and the occasional waist-high bush, looking squat and somehow pugnacious amid all those upturned clods of dirt.
Pablo and Eric fumbled for their sunglasses. In the distance, the jungle resumed, extending like a wall across the path. Jeff and Mathias had already vanished into its shadows, but Stacy and Amy were still visible. Amy had put on her hat; Stacy had tied a bandanna over her hair. Eric called to them, yelling their names, and waved, but they didn't hear him. Or, hearing him, didn't glance back. The little black flies remained behind beneath the trees, but the mosquitoes continued to accompany them, unabated.