AFTERWARD, HE HURRIED BACK to the bar and his bags which were, surprisingly, still there. The bartender was missing, probably off with the rest of the town looking after the girl, and the Marine was the only one inside. He raised his head from the table.

“Not an evil spirit after all?” he said. “You can see how the Spanish conquered this place with a fag on a horse.”

Ethan picked up his bag and went out into the night. At the bus stop he changed his shirt and waited. Down the road, a red security light wavered from the Guatemalan border shack where maybe the guards were sleeping or drinking or playing cards. Beyond the frontier post, the road turned into the jungle, toward the Copal station. It was almost Madrugada, the blue hour before dawn. In his abandoned life, Ethan was a photographer, and the photographer in him should be drawn to this light, but here it made everything appear out of proportion, enlarged: the flowers and crescent leaves, the bare hills. The insects. Copal was the same way. It was a land out of another century or world, a dying, twilit country where you knew the night would be bad.

On his stunned walk back into town, he had seen a lake pooling out on the plateau behind the shanties. Under the slivered moonlight it hung flat and motionless and Ethan thought about what he would have to do in the coming days. Once when he went snorkeling off the north coast of Honduras he had watched pearl divers in boats out beyond the reef line grab weights and jump overboard. It was like that. Getting down there would be easy. You let yourself sink. Anyone could do it. But getting back without consequences, where the stakes raised with every moment, would be difficult.

The woman appeared out of the dark and stood before him. She was short and stocky and the gauzy border light dredged half her face from shadow. In one hand she held a woven sack, in the other a machete.

“I have something to show you,” she said to him in English.

She held out the sack and he didn’t know what else to do but take it.

“This is something you need. It is a relic. Taken from a conquistador. It is precious and magical and very old.”

Ethan untied the sack and let it drop. He held the skeletal hand in his own hands. A man’s hand probably, white bone bleached and broken at the wrist into jagged shards—a hand certainly severed.

“Please take it,” she said and stepped closer to him, fully into the light. Hours ago, when his bus let out, she had been there, halving coconuts with clean, sure strikes of a machete and selling them to people to drink from as they got off the bus. He could imagine her severing this hand with the same skill.