Pacazo by Roy Kesey Page B

discovery like none since the Conquest and impossible, the Spaniards and yanaconas so thorough in their scouring, impossible but here the pieces are.
    Hay limas pepinos melones hay manzanas. I shift in my chair, my own breath loud from my chest. The police lead the archaeologist to the site and word has spread: huaqeros swarm the pyramids. The police have machine guns. The huaqeros run, stop, turn back. The archaeologist watches and knows there is no time for proper channels. He must simply start digging.
    I have not yet finished my coursework, lack the proper background, watch my colleagues devour the discovery and the police raid the Bernal house a second time. Ernil runs, is gunned down, or so the story is told. Smell of sewage, of jasmine, keen of a hawk that circles too high to be seen. Half of Sipán is camped around the site. The villagers claim all artifacts as ancestral inheritance. They claim Bernal as martyred saint. They threaten to kill the archaeologist if he continues.
    The archaeologist knows this calculus. He hires the loudest villagers as guards. In the main chamber he finds another body, and beneath it another chamber, a copper-banded coffin, the royal tomb. A gold death mask. A gold headdress. Pectorals and necklaces of scarlet chaquiras and gold.
    The doorbell rings and I twist, cough, and already the plan is failing: more villagers each day. One morning they surge, are barely driven back by tear gas. The archaeologist walks to the edge of the dig, cuts a hole in the barb-wire fence. He calls one of the villagers forward. He grabs the man by the lapels, drags him in through the hole, tells him to go get his inheritance.
    The man does not move. The hundreds lean in toward them. Smell of dust and heat and the archaeologist takes hold of him again, drags him to the very pit. Puts a shovel in the man’s hands. Dares him to dig.
    The man drops the shovel, steps back. The hundreds fall quiet, but soon they will begin stoning the archaeologist and his team as they arrive each day. Limas naranjas pepinos papayas, plátanos limas pepinos and of course a new museum is worth little when one’s village has no school and the roads are mainly unpaved. Broken glass glints at the top of the wall. I hear a slight sound, something soft brushing against something softer. I wait. Nothing more comes, and it was my imagination or else the curtains moving in the breeze of a fan, and now a flash of color in the tree.
    It is a putilla, lovely bird, tiny bright point of red. I see them often on campus, always in pairs. I wait for this one’s mate to come. Nothing moves. The putilla rests on a low branch. It looks at me, then flies away.
    The closest city to Sipán is Chiclayo: the city where Pilar was born and raised. From Piura it is an easy bus ride south. Two years ago she took me to meet her family. Her three brothers all teach English at local institutes, and during lunch that first day we discussed methodology and technique, but there was an oddness to their talk, a straining after sentences.
    Pilar and her mother left for Mass, and the rest of us went to the living room—the father and I in overstuffed chairs, the three brothers on the couch in descending order of height. There it was made clear that an interrogation was forthcoming, that all would be made known and judgment rendered, but there had been pisco sours before lunch, and beer with lunch, and now there was whiskey. Before the first question had been clearly phrased, all five of us were asleep.
    We woke when the women returned. The oldest brother then said, I hope, John, that everything is perfectly clear between us. I assured him that it was and the next morning we went to Sipán. The father drove slowly in their ancient sedan. Pilar sat beside him, me beside her, the mother and brothers mountained in the back seat.
    At first it was absurd. The mother gasped at each piece. The brothers pulled at my elbows. But the work: the paired necklaces of goldplated