Psychic Detective 38 By: Jake Preston
This is a work of erotic gay fiction, intended for readers who enjoy a murder mystery in which fully developed characters interact sexually and in other ways. Their sexual encounters are sometimes romantic, sometimes recreational, sometimes spiritual, and almost always described explicitly. My attention is equally divided between narrative, character development, and sex scenes. If you don't care for this combination, there are many other excellent "nifty" stories to choose from. And remember that while nifty stories are free, maintaining a website is not. Please think about donating at http://donate.nifty.org/donate.html
Writing is usually a solitary avocation, but not necessarily so on nifty.org, where a longer story appears in installments. If my characters and my story grab your attention, you can always intervene with suggestions for improvements. All sincere comments will get a response!
Jake, at jemtling@gmail.com
Chapter 38 Aztec Cosmology, II
And when they returned to Juan Carlos Hotel after picaresque adventures in the colonial streets of Mérida, Jésus reopened the bar as a favor to the manager, who no longer masqueraded as the proprietor and whose mind gnawed with a suspicion that he might be in trouble for cheating the bartenders, or maybe he was developing a conscience. "Only through the dinner hour," Jésus reminded him. "I'll be joining my friends when the Papantla pageant begins."
On the hotel veranda, Xiu sat at coffee with his partners in the 'spank and spunk' ménage à quatre. That game now seemed distant in time, blurred by the knowledge that while they were playing it, one of the Papantla acrobats, José Castellano, had been kidnapped and raped and tortured by Albino, also known as Howard Coleman, and his new accomplice, about whom nothing was known and perhaps never would be except for the results of a DNA analysis. Jack and Salvador rehearsed the tale of Göran's trance and repeated the 'ya'axche-oracle', as they now were calling it:
"The vultures will attack the cosmic serpent at Chichen Itza. Then they will fly to the ya'axche at the sacred cenote. Not for them the river below the roots of the ya'axche. That journey will be for another."
"It happened just as they said," Göran confirmed. "I remember everything except for the oracle. I don't remember saying it, and I don't know what it means. It it's from Manitou, all I can do is repeat Dark Eagle's advice that a shaman never utters an oracle unless other people are present and it is their responsibility to remember it and interpret it. I won't help you with the analysis, because I'm afraid that anything I say would mislead you, since I would be violating the limits set for a shaman."
Salvador said he couldn't see how this could be so, but Jack understood. "If we write it down maybe we can break it down," he said, and wrote on the top sheet of paper in his clipboard:
"The vultures will attack the cosmic serpent at Chichen Itza. Then they will fly to the ya'axche at the sacred cenote. Not for them the river below the roots of the ya'axche. That journey will be for another."
"Let's start with the obvious," Jack said. "The place is Chichen Itza. We've already planned to be there on Easter Sunday. Is the oracle telling us to go there sooner? Or later?"
No one could answer.
"Very well, then," Jack said. "Maybe we'll have better luck with the vultures. What do we know about them?" he asked.
"We know two things that they will do and one thing they won't," Salvador said. "They will attack some sort of serpent, perhaps a villain. They will fly to a ya'axche, which must be some sort of plant, since it has roots. And they won't take a journey on a river, but someone else will."
"I can help you with the ya'axche," Xiu said. It's the Yucatecan word for 'ceiba'. In Maya myth it's the cosmic tree. It connects earth and sky and the underworld. The gods live in its branches. Every ceiba in Yucatán is a replication of the original cosmic tree. It has white blossoms and when they come to fruition the Maya extract pochote, a fiber like cotton from which they get most of their textiles."
Xiu pointed to workmen who were busy erecting a 33-yard pole in the Square, in preparation for the azteca creación of the acrobats. "That's the cosmic tree, and it's a ya'axche."
"That complicates things," Salvador said. "I assumed that the vultures in the oracle are the same ones that I saw on the beach yesterday, but now it seems that they represent Maya gods who live in the cosmic tree."
The workmen in the Square had finished assembling the 33-yard cosmic pole. They were starting to raise it in place, and then they were interrupted by Pablo and the other three male acrobats who insisted on inspecting the two connecting points on the pole before it was raised. The workmen looked pissed but even from a distance Jack and Göran and Salvador and Xiu could see that Pablo was tightening one of the bolts that the workmen had left loose. Then they started to assemble a metal framework to support a safety-net around the pole. The acrobats helped with that, too, and checked each other's work and the work of the workmen.
"For the workmen it's a job, but it's life or death for the acrobats," Salvador observed.
"It's more than a safety-net; it's part of the act," Xiu said. "During the combat of the acrobats, they take turns falling to the ground and the net signifies the ground that they fall to, and then they bounce back to the top of the ya'axche and cling to a square platform at the top called Omexocan, the 'place of Duality', symbolized by Ometéotl-Omecíhautl, the Father- Mother Creator-God."
How does this relate to the oracle? Göran and Jack and Salvador didn't ask. They knew that Xiu was getting to that. To unravel the riddle in an oracle, one must approach it with a large base of knowledge from which to extract pertinent details. You can't find a needle in a haystack unless there's a haystack, and the haystack is always more important than the needle, even though it's not the haystack you're looking for.
"Let us put Easter out of our minds," Xiu said. "The first part of the oracle tells us precisely when we must be present at Chichen Itza, and the fact that it corresponds with Easter is just a coincidence. The 'cosmic serpent' in the oracle is the image that appears on the front of the Great Pyramid at the moment of Summer Solstice. This is the secret hidden in the open. Thousands of Mexicans travel to Chichen Itza each summer to see the cosmic serpent. This is the feathered serpent called Kukulkan in Yucatecan, and Qutzalcoatl in Nahautl."
"Albino will be in the crowd at Chichen Itza, cruising his next victim" Salvador said, and added, "even though he knows we're on to him."
"Albino doesn't know we've got a psychic and a Maya magician on our side," Jack said.
"Albino can't help himself," Göran interjected. "He's driven by lust-murder and it no longer matters what he knows or doesn't know. This much I can say, but I can't say anything about the oracle itself."
Jack drew a circle around the first sentence in the paper on his clipboard: 'The vultures will attack the cosmic serpent at Chichen Itza'. "Let us consider that we have solved this part of the riddle," he said.
"Except for the vultures," Salvador said. "Are they actual birds, or Maya gods?"
"If this were a Lakota oracle, or Ojibwe, the vultures would be both birds and spirits, or birds inhabited by spirits, which is the same thing as gods." He looked to Göran for guidance, but Göran was watching the tight-figured acrobats who were tightening the bolts on the brackets that steadied the framework that was to hold their safety-net.
"Safety is the most important thing for acrobats," Göran said.
"Pablo!" - They heard the voice of Jésus who had left his post at the bar and was calling to him from the low wall of the veranda, and they saw Pablo leaving his crew and engaging in conversation with Jésus.
Jack gazed at the undried blood of José Castellano on Göran's palms and the marks on his face. He realized that Göran had given a new oracle.
"Albino wants to take another acrobat, and the one he's chosen is Pablo," Jack said. "He killed José Castellano by mistake and now he needs to rectify the error."
"This new oracle would not have come to Göran if he had violated the taboo and given us clues about the other one," Xiu said.
"There's more to it than that," Jack said. "Call him or Ometéotl-Omecíhautl or Manitou, the Great Spirit will help us as long as Göran is his shaman."
"But why Pablo?" Salvador asked.
"Because Pablo impersonates Ometéotl-Omecíhautl in the azteca creacíon. Albino wants to kill God," Xiu said.
"I think we should warn Pablo. He has a right to know," Salvador said.
"That would distract him from his performance," Xiu said. "Just tell him we've got his back, and ask him about the exact time when the Papantlas perform their pageant at Chichen Itza."
Back to the ya'axche-oracle: 'They will fly to the ya'axche at the sacred cenote'. "There are many underground rivers in Yucatán, and many cenotes lead to them, and many of them are held to be sacred at one time or another. Even the Christians have legends about saints' miracles performed at a cenote," Salvador said.
"That's true," Xiu agreed, "but there's one near the edge of gorge at the edge of Chichen Itza that's larger than most. I don't recall if there's a ceiba there, but it's a common tree in the region."
"Needless to say the underground river means someone will die there, and it won't be the vultures," Salvador said. For a man who was skeptical about Aztec and Maya mysticism, he had gotten into it and now he was trying to make sense out of oracles.
The veranda doubled as a viewing-stand for the azteca creación on the Square. Xiu served as commentator for Göran and Jack and Salvador and Jésus, and when a crowd gathered to hear him, a mariachi-singer loaned him a microphone and he explained each episode of the pageant in English, Spanish, and German, and then in Yucatenic out of solidarity with a few Maya spectators. He stood on a chair and after he had engaged his audience in the allegorical meaning of the pageant, he said that the money collected in a bowl in the table in front of him would be given to the family of José Castelleno, the Papantla acrobat who had been murdered on the night of Maundy Thursday, in whose memory the Good Friday performance was dedicated, and whose part was now being played by María Santana, the first woman ever to perform in the azteca creación. Xiu kept sentences rolling flawlessly in four different languages, a linguistic feat that entranced his auditors even when he was speaking a language they didn't understand. Göran pitched in a hundred-dollar bill, which shamed the American tourists, and a few Germans, into donating more than they would have done, although (it pains me to say) Göran's example was not enough to get mexicanos to part with more than a few meager pesos, perhaps because they didn't know an American hundred-dollar bill when they saw one.
Pablo Rivera began the pageant with a solo performance. Xiu announced him as Ometéotl-Omecíhautl, the Father-Mother Creato. He climbed the ya'axche like a cat-burglar and somersaulted upward to Omexocan, the 'Duality' platform, where he pirouetted like a ballet- dancer and then dove headlong toward the net, and somersaulted upright and sprung back to Omexocan in one smooth bound. Salvador, Göran, and Jack glanced at Jésus and felt a twinge of jealousy knowing that he was Pablo's sexual partner while Xiu explicated the scene in four languages, too busy for jealousy.
"And now Ometéotl-Omecíhautl will create Earth and the East. His color is red and the name of this god is Tlatlauhqui Tezcatilipoca," Xiu said. "The acrobat impersonating this god is Alfredo Tloxhuitl." Alfredo climbed the ya'axche and received a laying-on-of-hands blessing from Ometéotl-Omecíhautl and then he dove to the net and bounced back. From there he flew in mid-air suspended by a rope that was attached to the foot of the Creator-God, although this part was an illusion.
Next came the creation of Fire and North, whose color is black. "This god is called Yayauhqui Tezcatilipoca and he is impersonated by Antón Sandro González. One of his ancestors was a Conquistador who settled in Veracruz but he had cousins in Mérida." The remark drew cheers from the spectators as Antón repeated Alfredo's performance, and then there were two colors flying in mid-air, red and black.
The performance was repeated by Arcaño Xlachihuitl who impersonated Quetalcóatl, the god of Wind and the West whose color was white; and again by Señorita María Santana who impersonated Chalchiuhtlicue, the goddess of Water. She was Quetzalcótl's wife, who represents South and whose color is white. "The Aztec god would have been Huitzolcpochtli, and he would have been impersonated by our beloved José Castellano, and he's with us in spirit while the lovely señorita plays his part," Xiu said in four languages, and reminded the spectators to make a donation in his memory, an then there were four acrobats flying mid-air in circles of red, black, white, and blue around the ya'axche.
The peaceful aerial dance of the acrobats erupted into a combat during which Alfredo (Tlatlauhqui Tezcatilipoca) sent the other three gods rolling to the net. By the time that they sprung back to Omexocan, Ometéotl-Omecíhautl had been toppled and Alfredo took his place on the platform. "This is the First Age of Creation, the Age of Earth, East, and Redness," Xiu explained. The aerial dance of the acrobats resumed, with Tlatlauhqui Tezcatilipoca on the 'throne' of the cosmos.
Other combats followed. Each one began a new age. The Second Age was Yayauhqui Tezcatilipoca, the age of Fire and North, whose color is black. The Third Age was Quetalcóatl, the age of Water and South, whose color is white. The Fourth Age was Chalchiuhtlicue, the age of Wind and West, whose color is blue. In each of these combats, Pablo (Ometéotl-Omecíhautl) drove a usurping god or goddess from his platform, but then is was seized by another.
In the last aerial combat of the acrobats, Ometéotl-Omecíhautl too his rightful place and the dance of four colors was restored. "This is the Fifth Age, the age of the Aztecs and the Maya," Xiu announced. After a dazzling display of acrobatics, the Papantlas bounded from the net to the ground, each one helping the other, and the pageant was over. Jésus ran to them and told them to stick together. "Come join us on the veranda. Don't disperse. The killer who got José Castellano is somewhere in the crowd," he said.
The Papantlas trusted Jésus and followed Pablo to the veranda, where they spent the rest of the evening with Göran and Xiu. Jack went home with Salvador, who (at Jésus's insistence) took the José Castellano 'memorial money' with him. He had good instincts, too: before the evening was over, the hotel manager came to him and demanded twenty percent of the money "in consideration of your use of the veranda."
"The fund is in the care of the Policía," Jésus said. "If you think we owe you money, you should take your complaint to Detective Salvador Marcos Gutierez at Police Headquarters, but if they invite you to stay the night, you might find the sleeping accommodations somewhat less elegant than those at the Juan Carlos Hotel."
Jésus thought he heard the word 'mariposas' muttered as the manager stomped off with unlined pockets. Back at their table, he didn't forget to ask Pablo what time the azteca creación was scheduled for at Chichen Itza.
According to legend, the azteca creación causes Quetzalcótl to appear on the side of the Great Pyramid," Pablo said. "It's like a ritual, so we start the pageant an hour before the Summer Solstice image comes."
Göran looked thoughtful. "From now until Easter Monday, I want you boys to stick together," he said. "You're all in danger but there's safety in numbers, and don't let one of you drift apart unless you've got me or Jack and Salvador close by."
"Even at night?" Alfredo Tloxhuitl asked.
"Especially at night," Göran said. "It's a lot to ask but it's only through to Monday."
Salvador thought that he had to explain to his nosy neighbors, Señora García especially, why he was bringing a strange man to his home in a conventional middle-class neighborhood near the eastern edge of town where Mérida ends and the desert begins. He started to say that Jack was his cousin, but Jack intervened with something closer to truth:
"I'm a sheriff from South Dakota, ma'am, and I've come to learn policing methods in this part of México. Detective Gutierez was kind enough to show me the Square where we sat a pageant of the Papantla acrobats and I'm most impressed with your fair city, ma'am, but I believe there's more people living here than in the entire state of South Dakota."
It was much to Jack's advantage that 'South Dakota' may as well have been Timbuktu or Shangri La to Señora García. As Salvador translated his run-on wordiness, the eyes of Señora widened and her lips smacked of her first taste of the next day's gossip which had been handed to her so unexpectedly. Jack showed Señor García his sheriff's badge and let him heft it to feel its weight. "It's not solid gold; it's just gold-plated brass," he said, and Salvador translated that, too, as under-the-surface disclosure was the essence of gossip for Señora and her teatime friends.
"The Juan Carlos Hotel was too crowded because of Holy Week and I told Salvador that I would like to see the inside of a real-life house in México," Jack said, anticipating Señora's next question, which was, indeed, a not altogether neighborly one about the propriety of bringing a foreign visitor into the privacy of their neighborhood. So it was the stranger's idea and Salvador was an accommodating host.
Señora García commented on the impropriety of bringing "those pagan Papantlas" to Mérida on Good Friday, but Jack was two quick on the uptake for her and soon she confessed that she had never actually seen the Papantla acrobats, except on television, and Jack extracted from her a pledge to seen them on the Square next year on Good Friday.
"You look so young for a sheriff," Señora said and of course she meant 'too young'. His undeniable sexiness penetrated even her gossip-jaded eyes.
"A young man like me has so much to learn from an elder," Jack said, and now the conversation was taking on double meanings and Salvador thought it was time to end it. He saw Señora's glance at his little house, how she was calculating the layout of three bedrooms and wondering of Salvador had a spare bed in one of them. Before she could ask, Señor García interrupted and said, "I hope you'll get a chance to visit our neighborhood in the morning light, Sheriff Jack. The desert is only three blocks that way" (he pointed), "and after you've seen it, Señora and I would be most honored if you would come to our home for breakfast, say at nine o'clock?"
Señora García gasped and was about to protest, but Señor assured her, "you can invite some of your lady friends, my dear," and then it occurred to her that the neighborhood drama of showing off an exotic American guest would be worth more than three weeks of gossip put together, so she repeated her husband's invitation and they were agreed.
"Alone at last," Salvador laughed when his front door closed behind the clutches of Señora García. "When she sees me with a woman, like my cousin for instance, she takes me for a fornicator, and when she sees me with a man, she takes me for a hombre gay, which is right, of course, but I think she believes your explanation about why you're here."
"That's because it's mostly true," Jack said. "What were you planning to tell her, before I butted in?"
"I was starting to say that you are my cousin and we just arrived from the Mérida airport," Salvador said.
"One would think that a Senior Detective would dream up an alibi that wouldn't implode the moment I opened my mouth and spoke not a word of español," Jack teased. "Tomorrow morning, let's give these ladies something to talk about, some alien exotic Americana that will exorcize their fantasies of homosexual boys. Maybe they can learn to gossip on a loftier plane."
Salvador embraced him and they kissed and then he wondered if they could be seen through the window and suddenly he realized that he didn't care. "You seem to understand women better than me," he murmured. "Why is that, I wonder?" He fondled Jack's butt like it had something to do with gossiping señoras which of course it didn't, or maybe it did indirectly.
"Señoras want gossip," Jack said. "Tomorrow morning, we'll tell the tale of Albino the American serial killer who came to México to murder acrobats and you'll be their hero because the news will be on television, and they'll be preoccupied with gory details known only to themselves, so there won't be room in their gossip for speculation about who you make love with, or which one of us is playing goalie and which was is kicking the ball in our amusing soccer game, which is usually the first thing they wonder about."
"You are such a bad boy, Jack, so devilish devious," Salvador laughed and the musculature of his body under his clothes made him horny. He turned on the air conditioner in the master bedroom because it was stuffy but mostly to muffle the sounds of romance that would have been heard from his window, had it been left open, when Señora García took a post- midnight stroll in her garden to check on the welfare of her roses and gardenias.
Jack stripped and presented his naked body to Salvador, who tried to remember a time when he looked as good as Jack did now, but he couldn't, for he had never been anything like Jack, never an ideal specimen, and the thought came to him that if he couldn't be Jack, he could have Jack and maybe the second option was the better one.
He tried to explain how he felt, putting his thoughts into words. This wasn't easy for him, as he was accustomed to keeping his deepest sexual feelings to himself, and now it seemed like a Good Friday confession to a closeted priest in Catédral de Mérida, but he was relieved to confess, and unexpectedly happy when he saw that his words had planted a seed in Jack that flowered to lust in his soul, and, more important at this moment, in his body.
"When you have me you can be me if we imagine ourselves as the same person while we fuck," Jack said. "All we have to do is concentrate. When you fuck me I'll imagine my body as an extension of yours, and if you imagine the same thing, you'll be me and I'll be you."
Salvador ran a finger down his cleft and then Jack lay face-down on the bed and arched. Salvador fondled his butt-cheeks and ran his finger along the cleft. "Welcome to the breeding ground," Jack said.
Salvador mounted and cock-frotted Jack's cleft. "What are we doing, do you know?" he whispered in Jack's ear.
"We're making love with our minds and then we'll make love with our bodies," Jack said. Salvador nuzzled his chin on Jack's left shoulder close to his neck.
"You know, Salvador, I never told you that I'm basically a top man, not a bottom. As Göran, if you don't believe it. Then I fell in love with Calvin, my boyfriend in Lakota, and he's a top too so I turned for him, but even so I'll always be a top."
"You made that sacrifice for Calvin and then for me?"
"I never thought of it as sacrifice," Jack said. "Maybe I thought of you as Hernán Cortez and me as Montezuma."
"When in México," Salvador smiled.
"You're not saying what's on your mind," Jack said.
"It's overwhelming to learn that I conquered a stud without knowing it," Salvador said. "If you're gonna land these surprises on me, you've got to give me time for cognitive processing."
Salvador penetrated the portal and he knew that Jack was the finest specimen he'd ever fuck and then Jack was making noises like he was taking it like a man which prompted Salvador to give him more pain by sticking dick into him just a bit harder and then a lot harder. Then Jack flipped on his back and Salvador crawled between his legs and Jack rested his ankles on Salvador's shoulders and guided his cock into the culo that seems snugly fit, not one-size-fits-all but a culo laid out just for him. Salvador liked screwing most men from behind because then it seemed more like breaking a bronco or taming a beast, but with Jack he liked missioning, the better to see the athletic contours of his body as he came down on them, and he liked the stoic expression on Jack's face when he accepted a full-bodied cock up the culo from a man he could easily throw across the room if he had a mind to.
Salvador knelt before the muscular frog-legged figure of Jack with his cockhead brushing his partner's perineum and prodding his scrotum. He fondled Jack's cock and flexed his foreskin with two fingers and imagined his torso as an extension of his own, just like Jack said he should do, in an attitude of body-worship that soon turned to ownership while Jack gazed in his eyes and caught his breath and braced for a violent session of punch-fucking that he knew was coming. No words were exchanged but Jack nodded in the affirmative. They had vowed to fuck without words while imagining themselves as one body, but Jack couldn't suppress a loud groan when Salvador's dick drove all the way into him and he moaned when Salvador pulled it out again. Still, groans and moans don't count as words and Salvador's punch-fucking established a rhythm for his subvocal reactions. An now Jack was ready to cum and the only thing preventing him was the pressure of Salvador's punch-fucking. Salvador alternated between cock-frotting and punch- fucking when he saw that he was getting close to orgasm.
Release came, when it did, simultaneously, and idealized occurrence but a rare one, in a fuck (nor a frot), proof, Salvador said, that Conquistador had turned Tenochtitlan from Moctezuma to Montezuma.
"You'll have to explain that one to me," Jack said.
"It's just a bit of Maya folklore about the Aztecs, the sort of thing you learn when you live in Yucatán," Salvador said. "The Aztec name for Méxcio is Tenochtitlan and it is also an epithet for the king. His Aztec name was Moctezuma, until after his death when Europeans called him Montezuma. I've heard tell of a Maya dramatic troup in Oaxaca that performs a Conquistador pageant in which Hernán Cortez and Moctezuma fall in love and during their courtship Moctezuma turned from a 'straight top' to a 'gay bottom' and that's how he came to be called Montezuma. The pageant gets a lot of laughs in Oaxaca and Quintana Roo but in Veracruz it would cause a riot. Of course it's just legend. In reality, Moctezuma became Montezuma due to an orthographic error in one of the sixteenth-century Spanish chronicles about the Conquest. No one in Europe knew anything about the Aztecs except by hearsay, so the Moctezuma of reality became Montezuma in history."
"It's more than legend to me," Jack said. "It's one of those anecdotes that shows history to be another category of fiction, like the North American belief that the Indians were illiterate and had no writing, because Americans never heard of the birch-bark scrolls of the Ojibwe, and even when you show them the scrolls, as happens at the Ojibwe Monument in Lake Ashawa, they still believe that the Indians were illiterate. But, Salvador, I would very much like to see the Montezuma pageant."
"From what I've heard, it's performed only in Maya dialects and we'd have to go to Oaxaca to see it," Salvador said. "Still, it's not out of the question."
"Priceless pillow-talk," Jack laughed. "I'll bet our friends wonder what we have to talk about après de sexe," and then Salvador was ready to fuck again so they did.