Pacazo by Roy Kesey Page A

on his three-wheeled cart, his water bottle in a dirty plastic bag suspended from the handlebars, the tarp stretched taut across the bamboo frame. The papayas here can grow to the size of watermelons. The sun now behind a cloud, the doll only a doll. My garden wall, smooth and white and fifteen feet tall, lined with broken glass and useless.
    Behind the wall is a warehouse of some sort. It appears to be and perhaps is abandoned—it has been years since I’ve heard the sounds of storage. I suspect that the burglars come through or along it, climb ladders, lay empty rice sacks over the broken glass, vault across into my yard.
    The cloud slips east. The shards of glass go bright with sunlight caught and colored. In truth the burglars do little damage: my few appliances were bought secondhand and cheap, there is a roving market where they can be recovered still more cheaply, and I do not keep much cash in the house. All the same it pleases me to think of them seeing me on the street, noting the color of my skin and imagining me rich, following me home and breaking in only to discover that Mariángel and I possess mainly books and plush toys.
    Even if I wished to, I could not hate them as much as I hate the huaqeros. Like me the huaqeros read the desert as text, but they are searching for clues to a far simpler narrative. They come with shovels, iron rods, kerosene lamps. They dig into each dirt mound, prod at the sides of the tunnels. If they have read correctly the mound is a burial site and the rod slides cleanly into the cache. The archaeologists arrive days or months later. They preserve the scraps, study the fouled context, the fouling itself now part of history and how I would enjoy gathering the world’s huaqueros and beating them to death with a mattock, one by one.
    At times there is little or nothing for them to sell. Farmhands search for fresh pasture near Laguna de los Cóndores, glance up at limestone cliffs, see a row of Chachapoya tombs. In a week Pilar will be murdered. They climb, secure themselves, draw their machetes and slash at the bundled remains. No precious metals, no gems. The farmhands shrug and climb back down. Later a museum will be built in Leymebamba to house the mutilated skeletons, textiles, quipus. I have not yet gone, hope to at some point, have not yet decided if I must.
    At other times there is a great deal to be sold. Early 1987 outside Sipán, a slumping set of pyramids thought to be Chimú. A tunnel into the smallest pyramid advances down through two layers of guardians: one of canine skeletons, another of humans with their feet amputated to forestall abandon. The huaqeros hit a vein of ceramic pots once filled with food and drink for the dead. Then a first tomb, four skeletons covered with semiprecious jewelry.
    Still deeper, and lateral tunnels branching. A layer of stonework, another of soil blended with cinnabar. Ernil Bernal, the lead huaqero, sees an unlikely textural variation in the tunnel wall. He prods at it, and the wall collapses, and he is buried in dirt, silver, gold.
    His brother pulls him out. The others reinforce and extend, begin filling their sacks, are crazed by their sudden fortune. Night after night they return. But Sipán is too small for such a secret, and other rumors start as well—betrayal, kidnapping, murder. A week later the police raid the Bernal house and find a single sack of artifacts. The rest is gone, on its way to the private collections of rich men here and elsewhere.
    Midnight. The police look through what they have found. They call an archaeologist, the director of a local museum. He has bronchitis, has not slept in three days. He tells them that whatever it is can wait until morning.
    The officers say, No, no, we do not believe that it can. They describe the objects they hold and the archaeologist is out of bed and dressing. Arrives at the police station. Lifts the pieces, one and then another. Not Chimú but Moche, seventeen hundred years old, a