The guide tossed his cigarette butt into the sacrificial well and turned to follow his flock. Sarah forgot about him immediately. She’d felt something crawling up her leg, but when she looked nothing was there. She tucked the full skirt of her cotton dress in under her thighs and clamped it between her knees. This was the kind of place you could get flea bites, places with dirt on the ground, where people sat. Parks and bus terminals. But she didn’t care, her feet were tired and the sun was hot. She would rather sit in the shade and get bitten than rush around trying to see everything, which was what Edward wanted to do. Luckily the bites didn’t swell up on her the way they did on Edward.

Edward was back along the path, out of sight among the bushes, peering around with his new Leitz binoculars. He didn’t like sitting down, it made him restless. On these trips it was difficult for Sarah to sit by herself and just think. Her own binoculars, which were Edward’s old ones, dangled around her neck; they weighed a ton. She took them off and put them into her purse.

His passion for birds had been one of the first things Edward had confided to her. Shyly, as if it had been some precious gift, he’d shown her the lined notebook he’d started keeping when he was nine, with its awkward, boyish printing—Robin, Bluejay, Kingfisher–and the day and the year recorded beside each name. She’d pretended to be touched and interested, and in fact she had been. She herself didn’t have compulsions of this kind; whereas Edward plunged totally into things, as if they were oceans. For a while it was stamps; then he took up playing the flute and nearly drove her crazy with the practising. Now it was pre-Colombian ruins, and he was determined to climb up every heap of old stones he could get his hands on. A capacity for dedication, she guessed you would call it. At first Edward’s obsessions had fascinated her, since she didn’t understand them, but now they merely made her tired. Sooner or later he’d dropped them all anyway, just as he began to get really good or really knowledgeable; all but the birds. That had remained constant. She herself, she thought, had once been one of his obsessions.

It wouldn’t be so bad if he didn’t insist on dragging her into everything. Or rather, he had once insisted; he no longer did. And she had encouraged him, she’d let him think she shared or at least indulged his interests. She was becoming less indulgent as she grew older. The waste of energy bothered her, because it was a waste, he never stuck with anything, and what use was his encyclopaedic knowledge of birds? It would be different if they had enough money, but they were always running short. If only he would take all that energy and do something productive with it, in his job for instance. He could be a principal if he wanted to, she kept telling him that. But he wasn’t interested, he was content to poke along doing the same thing year after year. His Grade Six children adored him, the boys especially. Perhaps it was because they sensed he was a lot like them.

He’d started asking her to go birding, as he called it, shortly after they’d met, and of course she had gone. It would have been an error to refuse. She hadn’t complained, then, about her sore feet or standing in the rain under the dripping bushes trying to keep track of some nondescript sparrow, while Edward thumbed through his Peterson’s Field Guide as if it were the Bible or the bird was the Holy Grail. She’d even become quite good at it. Edward was nearsighted, and she was quicker at spotting movement than he was. With his usual generosity he acknowledged this, and she’d fallen into the habit of using it when she wanted to get rid of him for a while. Just now, for instance.

“There’s something over there.” She’d pointed across the well to the tangle of greenery on the other side.

“Where?” Edward had squinted eagerly and raised his binoculars. He looked a little like a bird himself, she thought, with his long nose and stilt legs.

“That thing there, sitting in that thing, the one with the tufts. The sort of bean tree. It’s got orange on it.”

Edward focused. “An oriole?”

“I can’t tell from here… Oh, it just flew.” She pointed over their heads while Edward swept the sky in vain.

“I think it lit back there, behind us.”

That was enough to send him off. She had to do this with enough real birds to keep him believing, however.

Edward sat down on the root of a tree and lit a cigarette. He had gone down the first side-path he’d come to; it smelled of piss, and he could see by the decomposing Kleenexes further along that this was one of the places people went when they couldn’t make it back to the washroom behind the ticket counter.

He took off his glasses, then his hat, and wiped the sweat off his forehead. His face was red, he could feel it. Blushing, Sarah called it. She persisted in attributing it to shyness and boyish embarrassment; she hadn’t yet deduced that it was simple rage. For someone so devious she was often incredibly stupid.

She didn’t know, for instance, that he’d found out about her little trick with the birds at least three years ago. She’d pointed to a dead tree and said she saw a bird in it, but he himself had inspected that same tree only seconds earlier and there was nothing in it at all. And she was very careless: she described oriole-coloured birds behaving like kingbirds, woodpeckers where there would never be any woodpeckers, mute jays, neckless herons. She must have decided he was a total idiot and any slipshod invention would do.

But why not, since he appeared to fall for it every time. And why did he do it, why did he chase off after her imaginary birds, pretending he believed her? It was partly that although he knew what she was doing to him, he had no idea why. It couldn’t be simple malice, she had enough outlets for that. He didn’t want to know the real reason, which loomed in his mind as something formless, threatening and final. Her lie about the birds was one of the many lies that propped things up. He was afraid to confront her, that would be the end, all the pretences would come crashing down and they would be left standing in the rubble, staring at each other. There would be nothing left to say and Edward wasn’t ready for that.

She would deny everything anyway. “What do you mean? Of course I saw it. It flew right over there. Why would I make up such a thing?” With her level gaze, blonde and stolid and immovable as a rock.

Edward had a sudden image of himself, crashing out of the undergrowth like King Kong, picking Sarah up and hurling her over the edge, down into the sacrificial well. Anything to shatter that imperturbable expression, bland and pale and plump and smug, like a Flemish Madonna’s. Self-righteous, that’s what it was. Nothing was ever her fault. She hadn’t been like that when he’d met her. But it wouldn’t work: as she fell she would glance at him, not with fear but with maternal irritation, as if he’d spilled chocolate milk on a white tablecloth. And she’d pull her skirt down. She was concerned for appearances, always.

Though there would be something inappropriate about throwing Sarah into the sacrificial well, just as she was, with all her clothes on. He remembered snatches from the several books he’d read before they came down. (And that was another thing: Sarah didn’t believe in reading up on places beforehand. “Don’t you want to understand what you’re looking at?” he’d asked her. “I’ll see the same thing in any case, won’t I?” she said. “I mean, knowing all those facts doesn’t change the actual statue or whatever.” Edward found this attitude infuriating; and now that they were here, she resisted his attempts to explain things to her by her usual passive method of pretending not to hear.

“That’s a Chac-Mool, see that? That round thing on the stomach held the bowl where they put the hearts, and the butterfly on the head means the soul flying up to the sun.”