Aces Abroad

The guns ceased firing at the same moment Hunapu ended his chant and held out his hand to Xbalanque. In the silence Maxine put her hands to her ears. Maria knelt beside the general, holding the offering bowl in front of her. Xbalanque backed away, shaking his head. Hunapu sharply thrust his arm out at Xbalanque. Looking over Hunapu's shoulder, Xbalanque saw the government tanks roll forward, tearing apart the fence and crushing the Indians under their treads.

As Xbalanque hesitated, the general woke up. Finding himself stretched out on an altar, he cursed and tried to roll off. Maria shoved him back onto it. Noting her feathers, he held himself away from her as if he could be contaminated. He began haranguing Hunapu and Xbalanque in Spanish. "What the hell do you think you are doing? The Geneva convention clearly states that officer prisoners of war are to be treated with dignity and respect. Give me back my clothes!"

Xbalanque heard the tanks and screams behind him as the Guatemalan army officer cursed him. He tossed his obsidian knife to Hunapu and grabbed the general's flailing arms.

"Let me go. What do you savages think you're doing?" As Hunapu raised the knife, the man's eyes widened. "You can't do this! Please, this is 1986. You're all mad. Listen, I'll stop them; I'll call them off. Let me up. Please, Jesus, let me up!"

Xbalanque pi

"Hail, Mary, full of g-"

The obsidian blade cut through flesh and cartilage, spraying the brothers and Maria with blood. Xbalanque watched in horrified fascination as Hunapu decapitated the general, bearing down with the knife against the spine and severing the final co

Xbalanque released the dead man's arms and trembling, took the bowl filled with blood from Maria. Shoving the body off the altar, he set fire to the blood as Maria lit copal incense.

He threw back his head and called the names of his gods to the sky. His voice was echoed by his people, gathered below with arms thrust into the air toward the temple. Hunapu placed the head, its eyes open and staring into Xibalba, on the altar.

The tanks stopped their advance and began a lumbering retreat. The foot soldiers dropped their guns and ran. A few shot officers that tried to stop them, and the officers joined the flight. The government forces disbanded in chaos, scattering into the city, abandoning their equipment and weapons. Maxine had vomited at the sight of the sacrifice, but her cameraman had it all on tape. Shaking and pale, she asked Akabal what was happening. He looked down at her with wide eyes.

"It is the time of the Fourth Creation. The birth of Huracan, the heart of heaven, our home. The gods have returned to us! Death to the enemies of our people!" Akabal knelt and stretched his hands toward the Hero Twins. "Lead us to glory, favored of the gods."

In room 502 of the Camino Real a tourist in flowered shorts and a pale blue polyester shirt stuffed the last souvenir weaving into his suitcase. He looked around the room for his wife and saw her at the window.

"Next time, Martha, don't buy anything that won't fit into your suitcase." He leaned his considerable weight on the bag and slid the catches closed. "Where is that boy? We must have called half an hour ago. What's so interesting out there?"

"The people, Simon. It's some kind of procession. I wonder if it's a religious occasion."

"Is it a riot? With all this unrest we've been hearing about, the sooner we get out of here the better I'm going to feel."

"No, they just seem to be going somewhere." His wife continued to peer down at the streets filled with men, women, and children. "They're all Indians too. You can tell by the costumes."

"My god, we're going to miss our plane if they don't get a move on." He glared at his watch as if it was responsible. "Call again, will you? Where the hell can he be?"

FROM THE JOURNAL OF XAVIER DESMOND

DECEMBER 15, 1986/EN ROUTE TO LIMA, PERU:

I have been dilatory about keeping up my journal-no entry yesterday or the day before. I can only plead exhaustion and a certain amount of despondence.

Guatemala took its toll on my spirit, I'm afraid. We are, of course, stringently neutral, but when I saw the televised news reports of the insurrection and heard some of the rhetoric being attributed to the Mayan revolutionaries, I dared to hope. When we actually met with the Indian leaders, I was even briefly elated. They considered my presence in the room an honor, an auspicious omen, seemed to treat me with the same sort of respect (or lack of respect) they gave Hartma

Well, I am an old man-an old joker in fact-and I tend to clutch at straws. Now the Mayan revolutionaries have proclaimed a new nation, an Amerindian homeland, where their jokers will be welcomed and honored. The rest of us need not apply. Not that I would care much to live in the jungles of Guatemala-even an autonomous joker homeland down here would scarcely cause a ripple in Jokertown, let alone any kind of significant exodus. Still, there are so few places in the world where jokers are welcome, where we can make our homes in peace… the more we travel on, the more we see, the more I am forced to conclude that Jokertown is the best place for us, our only true home. I ca

Why must we draw these lines, these fine distinctions, these labels and barriers that set us apart? Ace and nat and joker, capitalist and communist, Catholic and Protestant, Arab and Jew, Indian and Ladino, and on and on everywhere, and of course true humanity is to be found only on our side of the line and we feel free to oppress and rape and kill the "other," whoever he might be.

There are those on the Stacked Deck who charge that the Guatemalans were engaged in conscious genocide against their own Indian populations, and who see this new nation as a very good thing. But I wonder.

The Mayas think jokers are touched by the gods, specially blessed. No doubt it is better to be honored than reviled for our various handicaps and deformities. No doubt. But…

We have the Islamic nations still ahead of us… a third of the world, someone told me. Some Moslems are more tolerant than others, but virtually all of them consider deformity a sign of Allah's displeasure. The attitudes of the true fanatics such as the Shiites in Iran and the Nur sect in Syria are terrifying, Hiderian. How many jokers were slaughtered when the Ayatollah displaced the Shah? To some Iranians the tolerance he extended to jokers and women was the Shah's greatest sin.

And are we so very much better in the enlightened USA, where fundamentalists like Leo Barnett preach that jokers are being punished for their sins? Oh, yes, there is a distinction, I must remember that. Barnett says he hates the sins but loves the si

No,?'m afraid that ultimately Barnett and the Ayatollah and the Mayan priests are all preaching the same creedthat our bodies in some sense reflect our souls, that some divine being has taken a direct hand and twisted us into these shapes to signify his pleasure (the Mayas) or displeasure (Nur al-Allah, the Ayatollah, the Firebreather). Most of all, each of them is saying that jokers are different.

My own creed is distressingly simple -I believe that jokers and aces and nats are all just men and women and ought to be treated as such. During my dark nights of the soul I wonder if I am the only one left who still believes this.

Still brooding about Guatemala and the Mayas. A point I failed to make earlier-I could not help noticing that this glorious idealistic revolution of theirs was led by two aces and a nat. Even down here, where jokers are supposedly kissed by the gods, the aces lead and the jokers follow.