“He might be jealous. She’s very beautiful,” Carl said. Carl tried to smile about it, trying to make a joke of it.

“You see, my friend. Even Carl says she’s very beautiful, and he’s a fucking homosexual. Can you blame me?”

“She’s a simple girl who’ll get hurt. She can’t even read. She’ll expect you to marry her,” Russell said.

“Shove the morality, old boy, will you please? She doesn’t need to know how to read for what we do, anyway.” Mahler slapped him on the shoulder.

“Wow, you’re something else,” Russell said.

“You wanted to sleep with her the moment you saw her, didn’t you? Tell the truth,” Mahler said. “Go ahead. I mean, in your newspaper you tell lots of pretty lies all the time, but here you don’t have to. It’s just us. Didn’t you want to sleep with her?”

Russell looked at Carl. “No, I didn’t,” he said. “You see, I’m not an asshole like you.”

They got drunk later and Mahler apologized, but it hadn’t sat well with Russell, and he didn’t let it go. The girl was in love with Mahler, Russell could see that plain enough. They slept together again that night, he was sure of it.

“You have to stop kicking and pulling on the reins. You’re confusing the horse,” Russell said angrily. He’d come back down the river, the water gray and turgid from the rain. The constant drizzle had suddenly turned to something harder. Above them, the strip of sky showing through the jungle’s canopy was completely gray. “Do you understand?” He could see Carl was scared.

Russell reached over and grabbed the horse’s halter, then moved up the neck and took the reins. “Now stop doing anything. Just stop for a moment,” he said, the rain dripping from Russell’s cowboy hat as he spoke. He’d told Carl to wear a hat but he hadn’t, and now he was scared and couldn’t see very well because the rain was hitting his glasses.

“I think I should go back; the fucking horse is wild,” Carl said.

“No, he isn’t. He’s tired of this river and he just wants out. But we have to go upriver; it’s the quickest way in,” Russell said.

“I didn’t know it was going to be like this.” Carl was wild-eyed. Everything seemed to be scaring him now. Russell led his horse out, away from the bank. The water was running off his hat and his clothes were soaked through, but he felt like he was sweating; it was that warm, maybe ninety degrees. He stopped his horse, got his plastic poncho out from the saddle bag and slipped it over his head. He would be even warmer now, but he was tired of getting wet.

“Now you have to stop putting on the gas and the brakes at the same time. It’s one or the other, but not both. Do you understand? And stop yanking the reins. They don’t like that.

Think about it; it’s a big piece of steel you’re shoving around in his mouth.”

“Yeah, okay,” Carl said. Russell pulled his horse around until they were directly across from each other, then handed Carl back his reins.

“What’s he looking for anyway? Mahler?” Carl asked

“How the fuck should I know,” Russell said. “I hope he’s looking for a big jade figure. And I hope to fuck he finds it. How much is Mahler getting of that ten thousand?” He hung his shotgun over his back, so that the weapon rode over the blue plastic of his poncho now.

“He gets a finder’s fee,” Carl said.

“How much? I want to know.”

“Twenty percent,” Carl said, collecting the reins and leaning back. He kicked his horse; the animal started stepping forward carefully, its head down. “I have to take a shit,” Carl said. “Very badly.”

“Go ahead,” Russell said and wheeled his horse upriver again. “Go ahead, nobody is watching as far as I can tell.”

Mahler was standing in the river next to the bank. He had his machete out. He was using one of those fat-ended ones, heavy and wide in the front. He had tied his horse and the mule, which carried all their equipment, to a tree.

“Here,” Mahler said. “I found this little creek. . . .” Like Russell, Mahler had worn a hat, but his was the military kind, a soft jungle hat. It was soaked from the rain.

“It will take us a day to chop ten feet,” Russell said, looking at the solid wall of jungle.

“Maybe. But I don’t think so. We go inside, we cut a path two-man wide. Leave the horses out here, see how it is.”

Russell looked around. He saw the water from the creek rushing out from the jungle, pushing against Mahler’s pants leg. The river was very shallow here. But otherwise, from what he could see, there was nothing to distinguish this spot from any other along the river bank.

“Wouldn’t there be more of a beach or something? I mean, if the Maya were going to develop something?” He had to hand it to Mahler, he could drink until late, stay up with the girl making love, he imagined, and now he looked fresh and strong here.

Mahler started chopping into the bush. The machete made a pleasing sound as it struck wood, a metallic biting sound that Russell had always liked.

“It was a thousand years ago…” Mahler said without turning around. “I found Bakta Halik, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, that you did,” Russell said. He climbed off his horse, tied it next to Mahler’s, then pulled his machete out of the scabbard hanging from his saddle. He’d chosen a different style of machete; his was long and wicked-looking, and served as a weapon, because it was light, as well as for hacking bush. He’d had it sharpened by one of the men at the plantation. It was razor sharp, the dirty blade silver where it had been sharpened.

Mahler stopped and turned. He had a .45 stuck in a clip-on holster in the small of his back. “We have some coffee first?” He took his thermos out of the pack on his horse.

Carl rode up, his blond hair dark and plastered to his head from the rain. He looked miserable. Carl’s horse had settled down now. Russell waded through the water and took the horse’s halter.

“Now what?” Carl asked

“Get down,” Russell said.

“I’ll get wet,” Carl said. Russell looked at the man, incredulous. “My feet. The water is cold.”

“Get the fuck off the horse before I pull you off,” Russell said. Carl said something in German to Mahler.

“He doesn’t want to get his feet wet. And he’s heard there are snakes in the water,” Mahler said in a monotone. He was carefully pouring coffee into the black top of a thermos. His backpack was slung on one shoulder, his machete driven into a tree limb right behind him.

“Four Steppers?” Russell said. A black snake called cuatro pasos lived in Guatemalan rivers. As a boy with the cowboys on his mother’s cattle ranch, Russell often saw them when the cowboys were herding cattle across rivers. They were called “Four Steppers” because that’s how many steps you took, after being bitten, before you died. Russell had seen horses bitten and drop the rider, who’d been bitten too after he fell. The cowboys called that a “lucky shot.”

“You’re a great big fat giant pussy, my friend,” Russell said in English. “Now get off that fucking horse.”

“I can’t. I’m afraid.” Mahler stepped forward and handed Russell first the cup of coffee, then his backpack. He calmly walked up and pulled Carl off his horse as if he were unloading a sack of some kind. Carl squealed and fought like a little girl all the way down. When he stopped carrying on, Russell pulled a machete from the scabbard on Carl’s saddle and handed it to him.

“If you see a snake, you let us know,” Russell told him. The rain and Carl’s behavior had put him in a foul mood.

Ten feet inside the bush, it was so hot they had to strip off their shirts despite the rain. Mahler had pinned his long hair up on his head so he looked like a Sikh. His skin was fish belly white, but he was wiry, and his muscles were visible under the skin. He seemed tireless.

Russell and he worked together side by side, cutting through the thick growth. They’d tried to get Carl to help pull the larger pieces away, but he was useless. Tiny mosquitoes rested on them as they worked, undisturbed by their violent motions.