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drilled with wet sand and pointed stick, rather than with the later, bird-bone, tubular drill. I had no feel for Olmec art—more pathology than art—but I knew this weird little man was valuable. I knew a collector in St. Louis who would pay $7,500 for this thing, maybe $10,000. If a man wants something and you’re any kind of salesman, you’ll make him pay for it.
    I knew that Refugio knew it, too, and would never trade it for an old icebox.
    He said, “Green, see, the color of life. Dead rocks are brown.”
    â€œWhere did you get this?”
    â€œWho knows?”
    â€œTres Zapotes?”
    â€œWho can say?”
    â€œThey make these things up at Taxco now, out of chrysolite and serpentine. On bench grinders.”
    â€œThey don’t make that one at Taxco. Look it over. Impecable . If you can scratch it with your knife, I give it to you.”
    â€œNo, it’s not bad. As a favor to a friend then. I’ll trade you even.”
    â€œHa! That is what you hope and pray to God for!”
    What he wanted me to do was take a photograph of it and show the picture around in Mérida and New Orleans, put out some feelers. I had no intention of being a broker in the deal but I humored him and took a couple of shots with my 35-millimeter camera. He posed it beside the Sidral bottle to show the scale. The camera flash made him jump and laugh, as always.
    Manolo reported that he couldn’t get the Servel to do anything. I advised patience. The cooling to be gotten from a small flame and no moving parts was magical but slow. I reminded Refugio of his old kerosene refrigerator, which took three days to make mushy ice, if you didn’t open the door. It was one of the earliest frost-free models.
    â€œTurn it upside down for a bit, Manolo,” I said. “Then try it again. Make sure it’s level.” I had heard somewhere that this headstand treatment did wonders for a balky gas refrigerator, though it seemed that any clots in the system would have been dislodged on the ride down.
    Sula brought in the giant shrimp cocktail. The camarones were piled high in a soup bowl. Refugio squeezed limes over them and spooned mayonnaise and salsa verde on them. I asked him about the Ektún dig. What was all this about a Toyota clutch?
    He threw up his hands. The subject disgusted him. He could no longer do business with those people. Dr. Ritchie was a good man, very amiable, but he was down with fever, and this new man, Skinner, who was running things now, was a person of no dignity, a monkey-head, a queer, and a rude animal, una bestia brusca . On and on he went. The woman who gave birth to Skinner was no woman at all but an old sow monkey, and his brother, if he had one, was worse than he was, certainly not a man of honor.
    What Skinner had done, I gathered, was to insist that Refugio provide detailed price breakdowns on his goods and services, in such an offensive way as to suggest that Refugio was a crook. Nor would the man buy any steel drums or plastic pipe. And he had brought his own rope from the States! To Mexico, the home of rope!
    â€œI can get his cloche in Villahermosa. One day and it’s there. I can find anything he wants and Manolo can repair anything he can break but how can I do business with a monkey? No, I will never go back while that monkey-head is there.”
    And a good thing, said Sula, because Ektún was no place for people to linger around at night. For her part she was glad that he and Manolo had stopped going there. So many demons were lurking around those old templos, not to mention the chaneques, a race of evil dwarfs who lived in the deep selva . When you came upon these horrible little men in a clearing, they would point at you and jeer, making indecent noises, and they danced about all the time so you couldn’t count them. They hated above all things to be counted. Sometimes they stole chickens.
    Refugio was squeezing limes with both hands.