The Luck of the Maya. Theodore Brazeau
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a bit by what Lucy was telling us. We were practical everyday down-to-earth smugglers, albeit romantic adventurers in our own minds. Stuff like this was not part of our portfolio. But, it was Lucy telling it, so we took it, if with the proverbial grain of salt.
As she had already told us, our Object had been around for a while, a few thousand years at least. “Family tradition tells of its presence for at least two long count calendar cycles,” Lucy said. “If true, that puts it at over ten thousand years right there, and maybe it was around a lot longer, much longer. It was supposed to be destroyed at the end of the last cycle, in 3114 BC, but wasn’t. The next opportunity will be in 2012, after that we would have to wait another 5126 years and I don’t think we’d make it.”
Nothing like planning ahead, I thought. But what is this about calendars? I asked. Actually, I knew a fair amount about the Mayan and Aztec calendars. During my brief career at the University of Texas I’d had courses in Mexican history and anthropology. We’d spent more time than I wanted to on those calendars. Very complicated. I got a C. It was a C+, though.
I had spent a couple of years at UT in Austin, back then. If nothing else it straightened out both my Spanish and my English, got most of the border slang out. I could now talk in either language without throwing in a lot of words from the other, and I lost my border accent. Jeb’s Spanish was better than mine to begin with, since he spent some time living with cousins and going to school down in Saltillo, being an orphan and all. He claims to have attended UT, too. And he did, although I don’t think he ever took any classes. As I recall, he spent a bunch of time hanging out on the campus, mainly doing things with girls.
I never really intended to quit college, just tapered off. We did a few gigs in the summers, but never enough to keep body, beer and soul together, so I thought I’d drop out for a while and build up a little nest egg, get a better idea of what to study and go back to finish up. Well, one thing led to another and I still haven’t got it together academically. Maybe if this job really paid off, I’d give it another shot.
Lucy was explaining calendars. “The Long Count calendar goes in cycles of 5126 years. The day-to-day calendars, the Tzolk’in , the Haab and the others, you and I are not concerned about here. That date in December of 2012 of the modern calendar is the important one. That’s when everything resets and changes. Or not.”
“You mean some disaster will happen?” Jeb asked. “The end of the world or some such?” Jeb reads about stuff like that in the supermarket tabloids.
“No, no,” Lucy said, “not that. Some people like to say that about the world ending, but that’s not it. Even so, it’s very important. As I said before, it’s all about luck, good and bad,” Lucy said, “about chance, probabilities, fortune. That’s why our ‘Object’, the lobil inside the golden head, must be destroyed on that date, or within a few days of it.”
“Why? What happens if it’s not?” Jeb asked. “Or if it is?”
“If it’s not, there will be no resetting. The world and everything and everyone in it will continue as is, just as it did last time. In that sense, I guess you could predict an end to the world, because I don’t think we can take another five thousand years of the way we’re going.”
“My family is Mayan now, but we have a family history and tradition that is much older. The so-called Mayan calendar is much older, too. We’ve watched over this Object for a long, long time and should have destroyed it five thousand years ago.”
“We failed at that time, family oral history tells of politics – there were those, in and out of the family, who did not want a resetting. There are those now who think the same way. It’s to their advantage for things to stay as they are, or so they think, even though the world will almost certainly be better off if the resetting takes place. And this may be our last chance.”
“Thousands of years ago, things were different. Groups and individuals could have good or bad luck and it didn’t matter much overall. But when you’re dealing with nuclear weapons, biological experimentation, major pollution, big time wars and who knows what else, you can’t afford a lot of bad luck.”
We stopped stretching our brains for a while to watch the nets being drawn up. Tío Sebastián had been slowing down to fish from time to time, both to appear authentic to any observer and to add some shrimp to his catch in the hold. Also to time our arrival tomorrow. We didn’t want to get there too early.
The catch spilled over the deck in all directions. Shrimp and fish and other strange looking creatures I’d never seen before and certainly wouldn’t eat. Some looked like they might want to eat me. The deck hands, Eusebio and Humberto, started pulling out the shrimp and a few fish, then pushing the shrimp into the iced hold and the rest back into the sea through the slots in the boat’s rail. Seagulls swarmed behind the boat, hoping to cash in on all the good stuff.
“Lunch in thirty minutes,” Eusebio shouted, running into the wheelhouse galley with a pail full of shrimp and an armload of fish.
Lunch sounded good and, thirty minutes later, proved to be gourmet quality. Fresh shrimp and fresh fish five minutes out of the water, cooked on a galley stove by a seaman who knows what he is doing is the best anywhere. It puts the finest Houston restaurants to shame. I wish I could eat it every day, as these lucky fishermen do. Eusebio served it to us on tin plates with lemons and tomatoes and chiles “Contra el escorbuto,” he pointed to the vegetables, “to prevent the scurvy,” I didn’t think we would be out here long enough for scurvy to be a serious problem, but I squirted lemon on everything and ate up.
After lunch, we collapsed back into our lawn chairs, but were too stuffed to want anything else to eat or drink, so we settled for chewing ice while Lucy went on with her story. Jeb asked her about the ‘Object’.
“It’s sometimes called the ‘Object’, and has other names. In our family some call it ‘Pol’, which means simply ‘Head’, others call it ‘Lobil’ which means ‘Badness’—that’s the ancient thing inside. Take your pick. I prefer Pol.”
“Let’s go with Pol,” Jeb said. “I don’t like that other word.”
“Pol it is. As I said, I’ve never seen it, but people who have been near it say you can kind of feel it. I’m told that the Object itself, the thing inside, is shaped like a slice of apple. If you core an apple and slice it into eight pieces, you’ll get a shape like that. Family legend has it that it is somehow hard to look at and attractive at the same time, but no one has seen it for thousands of years, so who knows. It was sealed inside the golden head to hide it—a bad choice for nowadays, but back then there was no real point to stealing gold. Food, maybe, clothes, tools, girls, but not something heavy and useless like gold. Besides, gold weighted it down—it is weightless by itself and tends to float away if you’re not careful. I’d guess it probably made people nervous, just floating around. Also important, gold seems to mute its effects to some extent, makes them less extreme.”
“What effects are those,” Jeb asked. I was trying to keep my eyes open after that big lunch. So far, so good, but I thought a nap would be in order very soon.
“Again, luck, good and bad,” Lucy smiled. Not the funny little smile, just regular. “If you touch it, even through the gold, your luck will probably change. For better or worse. For most people it will be for the worse, sometimes mildly, sometimes horribly. In our family, there are some who touch it eventually, but probably not until after they’ve had children, if they intend to have them.“
Why is that? I wondered aloud.
“The reason is that, because of our long term responsibility, we traditionally have large families and people whose luck changes to bad tend to die young one way or another. They fall in a cenote, a tree falls on them, they cut themselves and die of infection, a snake bites them, who knows? Better to have your family first. Most such changes are for the bad, but not all and sometimes it’s hard to tell.”
Hard to tell? I asked, still awake. “Yes. An awful example, an uncle of mine, a great-uncle actually, was caught in a terrible fire, along with his whole family, his wife, both their mothers,