Chapter 1
The Tombstone Painting

 

hadn’t seen my sister in a year, but I recognized her handwriting on the painted tombstone that claimed she was dead, the letters crawling out of a dream and biting into stone. That first shock still burns brighter in memory than most of what came after, before paint and imagery warned me that my life was about to be swallowed by a quest to Tikal.

What I didn’t understand at that first glance, and couldn’t really, was what the imagery in her painting meant. Her name, the dates, the R.I.P., and my brain stalled. Suicide? A stunt? Had she slipped away somewhere I couldn’t follow? I was so busy refusing the idea that I had to walk away and circle back before I could admit the possibilities to myself.

The little painting hung on a white wall in a Los Angeles gallery, a framed, foreboding rectangle of death, like a private joke only Floey’s gods understood. I hoped she understood. Clients around me speculated and ordered more wine. I stared at the date of death and wondered who, exactly, they had buried, if anyone. Later, standing by the temples at Tikal with her notebook in my saddlebags and jungle mud on my boots, I would think back to this room and realize how easily the living can be turned into artifacts.

It was one of those galleries on La Cienega, a polished white box above the smog-baked boulevard. “Parkhurst & Sloan” floated above the window in perfect black Helvetica, clean and smug. The rest of the building glared in the hazy yellow noon, throwing sunlight back at the city like a challenge. Every space on the block was clogged with polished status objects: Porsches, a black Jaguar, and a silver-blue Rolls with a grille like old money baring its teeth. I had wedged my motorcycle into the thin strip of asphalt between them and left it ticking as it cooled. Now I stood in the refrigerated air, facing my sister’s tombstone painting and trying to decide whether the real danger was that she was dead, missing, or staging some promotional stunt. This was the gallery opening she had dreamed of for years.

I drifted past the catered food. A man in a white tuxedo ladled oyster stew into shells with the solemnity of a priest dosing the congregation. Pale, well-fed art lovers moved from painting to painting, queued at the buffet, and swarmed the drinks table in a quiet frenzy. The noisiest knot of them had formed against the left-hand wall, all backs and perfume and nervous laughter, facing Floey’s cryptic announcement of her death two weeks earlier.

I scanned over their heads, searching for my sister’s naturally coifed curls and catwalk stance like a man looking for a lifeboat. People always moved toward her without quite knowing why. Give her a few props, candles, a chant she had half-stolen from an acupuncture book, and she could talk a migraine away or even something more serious. The medicine was mostly placebo, but the faith was real, and it scared me sometimes how quickly strangers started treating her like she had special knowledge the rest of us didn’t.

She had always been my safe harbor, the one who pulled me out of every rip current since our mother died when I was eleven. She was already twelve years older and half a world ahead of me. She took care of me, made sure there was food on the table and homework in my backpack while our father drifted farther out to sea. Our mother had lost our brother Barry to a jungle “accident” and then gradually lost the rest of her life to the bottle. By the time I was old enough to understand, Floey had already decided she would never let people with money and power take that much from her family again.

Floey had her own version of that story. When Eugene “Carl” decided he was done with his bohemian phase, his money and his lawyers peeled her three kids away from her like they were line items in a portfolio. A Nevada judge with an expensive haircut and no imagination signed off, handing Eugene “Carl” the children and the house because he had the money and the lawyers, and she had “unstable artistic tendencies.” The Magnin family had been calling judges by their first names since Prohibition. Floey didn’t lose custody because she was a bad mother; she lost because he could afford to look like the better parent on paper.

Tonight was supposed to be her night, the collision of critics, money, and the obscure demons that drove her to paint. Now her work hung in rigid rows, thin black frames marching around the room and into a small alcove, neat as soldiers waiting for orders. Through a doorway at the back, I spotted the command center: a plump gentleman wedged behind a leather-topped desk, a goatee sprouting over the folds of his double chin. He wore a green jacket with satin lapels too wide for current style and a belt buckle large enough to brand cattle. He nursed a glass of clear liquor, gin or vodka or aquavit, whatever chemical passed for courage.

It was December 20, 1977, and I was twenty-four. I had flown in that morning from Anchorage and its dark, honest cold, believing I was about to walk into a surprise reunion with my big sister, to let her see her baby brother was not still frozen at the northern edge of the map. Instead, I stepped into a manufactured Los Angeles afternoon of white walls and free wine and found Floey missing.

All I had were a handful of her letters and the dawning sense that a year away had cost me more than I’d realized. You do not often get to mark the moment your story slides off the rails.

I pushed toward the left-hand wall, and the whole thing snapped into focus the way a dream does just before you wake. I had already seen this once, the bodies and the nervous laughter, but now the sequins scraping my arm and the perfume stinging my sinuses were rougher, meaner, too sharp at the edges to belong in a dream. The crowd buzzed around the painting like curious insects drawn to the scent of someone else’s death. In the cramped alcove that housed the tombstone, their tight ring turned claustrophobic.

“Probably some kind of stunt,” a man in a cravat said, with the smug authority of someone who had never strayed far from comfort.

“Artists are all crazy, especially painters,” another voice chimed in, as if craziness were something he wore on weekends.

Bits of talk floated back as I eased closer:

“She picked the right way to raise her prices.”

“Oh, please, she’s not actually dead.”

“Painters are the worst. They never know when to stop.”

“Says the man who edits other people’s words for a living.”

A large woman in a blue silk kaftan blocked my view, the same human curtain in the same wrong place, only this time I knew what waited on the other side. I cleared my throat.

“Excuse me,” I said.

She drifted aside with practiced, heavy grace, looking up at me as if we had rehearsed this scene. And there it was: the small painting, more plaque than canvas, a tombstone planted in a ridiculous patch of bright green grass. The inscription did not merely sit there. It stared back, simple and obscene. Above the lettering hovered a single Mayan glyph. Floey’s work often carried Native American symbols, but this one hung, menacing, like an ancient curse.

 

R.I.P.

Florence Magnin Braughn

Born February 27, 1941

Died December 5, 1977

 

I read it once and then again, each pass making her signature at the bottom begin to swim, as if it wanted off the surface. My mind hit a bad stretch of road.

 

* * *

 

Eight hundred miles south, on the old causeway that runs from Palenque toward Tikal, the woman who used to be Florence Magnin Braughn is walking.

Two days now without shoes. The path is Maya limestone in places, broken into chalky white rubble in others, and in the long stretches where the jungle has taken it back, it is only a suggestion underfoot — a firmer line of earth where a thousand years of feet packed it down before hers. Her satin robe was white when she set out from Bonampak. It is the color of weak coffee now in places where it brushed the leaves, and darker at the hem where her feet have bled into it.

Her feet. She does not look at them anymore. Looking made it worse. She has learned to set each foot down the way she once set a brush to a primed canvas — committed, not tentative. Tentative is what tears. The first day it was small cuts from the limestone edges. The second day a thorn went in below her left big toe and came out somewhere she could not see, and after that her steps acquired a small private rhythm she did not fight: long-step, half-step, long-step, half-step, the way a horse favors a fetlock. She has been told, by a voice that may be hers and may not be, that the feet are the part of her she is being asked to give up first. The rest will follow.

Howler monkeys are starting up somewhere to the east, that low gravel roar that sounds like the throat of the forest itself. She does not flinch at it the way she did the first morning. The jungle had been a wall of noises then and she had stood inside it like a tourist who had walked through the wrong door. Now the noises have coalesced into background ambiance. The roar is just the howlers. The shrieking is the parrots. The thing that sounds like a child crying is also a bird; she has decided this and will not unmake the decision.

The satchel against her hip is light. Two days ago it had the heft of a thing you could lean on. This morning it knocks against her thigh like an empty gourd. She has been rationing the water in sips so small they barely register, just enough to wet the tongue and keep her from making the mistake of thinking about water.

She does not know how far she still has to walk. Don Hernandez the hotel owner at Bonampak had drawn a line in the dirt with a stick and said tres días and then, looking at her feet, cuatro, and then, looking at her face, had not said anything else. She has walked two. She is choosing to believe in the three.

Somewhere on this Maya sacbe the woman in the gallery painting is being left behind, paragraph by paragraph, the way a saint’s old name is left at the door of the cloister. The new name has not yet been earned. The feet are arriving. The name will come when there is someone whole enough to wear it.

The path bends and she walks on, the white of the robe moving down the green tunnel and growing smaller, like a candle at the far end of a nave.

El Ceibal is ahead. The altar is ahead. She does not yet know which of the things waiting for her there is the one she came for.

 

* * *

 

Eight hundred miles north, in the refrigerated air of the gallery on La Cienega, I stood in front of her painted tombstone and did not know any of it. Not the heat. Not the bark of the ceiba under her hand. Not the small private rhythm of her walking. I would not learn the name of that path for a fortnight, or the new name she had given herself, or the man at Bonampak who had looked at her feet and then at her face and said nothing. I knew only what the wall in front of me said, and the wall in front of me said she was dead.

How could she do this to me?

Was it a stunt?

It felt like my father’s departure all over again, the same black joke with a different punchline. She could not have. Not like this. Not today.

Some half-remembered movie flickered through my mind: two broke painters in Paris, starving because nobody would pay for their misery. One of them figures it out — die, or put on a convincing enough show of it to fool the buyers. Desperate, grim, plausible. Standing in this room full of gossip and free liquor, it didn’t feel like fiction anymore.

“Can I be of some service?” a voice rasped behind me, rough as if he had smoked his conscience years ago.

I turned. The man from the back office had materialized at my shoulder, his forehead folds crumpled into a practiced concern.

“I’m Cutty Braughn,” I said. “Floey’s brother. I flew in from Alaska this morning to see her opening. I figured she’d be here. First exhibit and all.”

“You saw her… ah,” he said, his eyes drifting toward the tombstone painting as if it might answer for him.

“Uh-huh. Whose idea was that?”

“I wasn’t here. She must have done that the night before our original opening day, which was the fourth of December.” He straightened; the jacket fell open over a straining belt. “I left her alone to arrange the paintings as she wanted. Then I was barred from entering our business for a couple of weeks during a zoning dispute, so I didn’t see it until today, when we finally opened. We were originally scheduled to open the fifth. You’re right, though. She should be here. An artist never skips their own opening. I have been trying to contact her at the commune.”

He shuffled over to the alcove and fussed with one of her perfectly aligned paintings, nudging the frame as if the world might tilt if it leaned a fraction of an inch. I followed, helmet in hand, and met his bloodshot brown eyes when he finally turned back.

“I’m a businessman,” he said, looking away as if the word needed polishing before he could wear it. “I own this gallery. No matter how fond I may be of your sister, I can’t supervise her every move. She’s an artist. Sometimes the great ones have to be a little crazy, but I don’t think we’re talking about anything as final as that, not when she’s just starting to break through.” He paused, then shrugged the whole problem off his shoulders. “Whatever she did, it’s not my affair. My business is to sell paintings.”

That was the gospel right there. As long as the money moved, the rest was rumor. That was the lesson I kept tripping over for the next ten years: money decides who keeps the house, the kids, the gallery, but it’s family and love that decide who walks away whole. With Floey gone, he might even get to keep her commissions, and if that bothered him, it didn’t show.

“It was all Floey’s idea?” I asked. “You knew nothing about the tombstone?”

“It would be unethical to perpetrate a hoax of that nature,” he said, with the queasy dignity of a man who liked the sound of his own principles.

“But it’s helping sales, isn’t it?”

He hesitated just long enough to make the answer obvious. “Well, I, ah, am doing rather well. Better than expected, in fact. I must be able to get hold of her and hand over her share.”

“How much are we talking?”

He shrugged again, casual, almost bored. “Nearly fifty thousand in oral commitments so far this morning.”

Oral commitments, some sales. Half the room was drunk, the rest shopping with someone else’s money, but he made it sound like a bank audit. At the far end of the desk, one of the clients slid a gold card into the metal imprinting machine and yanked the handle. The carbon set snapped forward and back, catching her name and the amount in raised numbers and smudged blue copies. It sounded like someone stamping approval on my sister’s death epitaph. I only heard the real numbers later, when lawyers had started circling and Floey’s ex had sharpened his papers. Then every dollar looked like a trapdoor. And there were a lot of dollars.

“Is she still staying in the hills above Pasadena?” I asked.

“The Temple of the Rising Moon,” he said. “Hippie commune.” He stroked his goatee, striving to appear thoughtful. “Maybe one of them pushed her into this. They’re like cattle, or zombies on drugs. They’ll do anything their leader, ah, Ayer Dada, tells them. Sit on a mountain all night waiting for the aliens to return for them, hand over their cars and bank accounts. You might find her up there.”

“I’ll drive up and take a look,” I said.

“Call me if you find her.”

“When I do,” I told him, “you’ll hear from me.”

On the way out, I passed two women in fitted Rodeo Drive clothes, their minds already redecorating their houses with other people’s suffering.

“I simply must have that adorable one with the yellow rock and the little squiggles,” one was saying. “Charles keeps saying the wall above our bed looks naked.”

Her friend nodded, solemn and eager, as if this were a crisis.

I saw them again reflected in the glass door as I left: twin silhouettes gliding past in the street, sleek and beautifully groomed, like greyhounds bred to chase the scent of money. From the far side of all this, with jungle ruins and missing years between, I can say this much: what drove Floey off the map wasn’t some dark romance with ruin; it was the plain, stupid pain of a mother who had watched money take her children away and was still looking for any power, paint, gods, flying saucers, that might give them back.