Revelation at Tikal | Literary Adventure Fiction Podcast

Costa Rica, 1977. Somewhere ahead of him is a white van with his sister in it, and the only way to close the gap is straight over the roof of Central America.

Cutty Braughn takes the Inter-American Highway south out of San José and climbs into the Talamancas toward Cerro de la Muerte — the Mountain of Death, the highest pass on the Pan-American Highway. Then the fog comes over the summit like a slow avalanche and the world shrinks to a bowl of white light and a broken white line. No shoulder. No edges. No way to know what is coming downhill in the middle of the road.

Paula is on the back with one pair of jeans and a borrowed rain jacket, keeping score of every bad decision out loud. Cutty keeps riding, because stopping is the worse bet, and because every minute he creeps through the cloud is a mile he hands to the men who have his sister.

What waits on the far side: a plate of pork chops he will regret for hours, a border stamp he is afraid to speak a name in front of, and a trailer park in the Panamanian hills where a retired Canal plumber breeds horses and knows exactly where a rich man's money stops working.

**In this chapter** - The climb into the cloud, and the diesel truck that comes out of it - Layers, gaiters, and the failure of every one of them - What a wasp can do that frostbite cannot - Paso Canoas by night, and the question Cutty decides not to ask - La Herradura: a pool full of moonlight, a broken VW turn signal, and an offer of one dollar a night - Julio, the Kuna boy who became a Canal Zone plumber, on why the islands are not Panama - A cook's secondhand story: four men in white, a woman they kept apart, and a plan involving flying saucers and cocaine - The first hard confirmation that the road ends where the water starts

**Historical note** Cerro de la Muerte tops out at roughly 3,451 metres — about 11,320 feet — and is the highest point on the Costa Rican stretch of the Inter-American Highway ([Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerro_de_la_Muerte)). It earned the name before the road was finished, when crossing the range on foot or muleback could take days and not everyone arrived ([Q Costa Rica](https://qcostarica.com/the-famous-cerro-de-la-muerte-why-is-it-called-that/)). Paso Canoas remains the largest crossing between Costa Rica and Panama, at the southern end of Route 2 ([Two Weeks in Costa Rica](https://www.twoweeksincostarica.com/paso-canoas-border-crossing/)).

Julio is telling the truth about the islands. Following the Tule Revolution of 1925, the Guna secured a reserve in 1930 and formal recognition as the Comarca de San Blas in 1938 — one of the oldest legally recognised Indigenous autonomies anywhere in the world, with its own governing congress and its own say over who comes ashore ([Guna Yala](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guna_Yala), [Universidad de Panamá](https://revistas.up.ac.pa/index.php/contacto/article/download/7447/5535/16841)). In 1977 that is not folklore. It is jurisdiction — and it is the first wall the Foundation's money has run into.

**Content note:** peril and reckless driving, brief non-graphic sexual content, alcohol, illness, references to drug trafficking and coercive religious groups.

*Revelation at Tikal* is a serialized literary adventure novel, read in chapters. Start at Chapter 1 for the full ride.

Noon sits on his shoulders like a wet saddle. Cutty Braughn has a road map in the clear flap of the tank bag and a different one behind his eyes, and everything on the second one is moving: a white van, four believers who think his sister is their ticket to the stars, an ex-husband in Los Angeles quietly sawing through the rope that holds half a million dollars' worth of her paintings, and a punch line he cannot deliver.

Because the fear isn't that they take Floey somewhere he can't follow. It's that they finish turning her into the woman on their poster first.

So he stops. In a wooden shack a block off the market, with flattened hubcaps nailed across the roofline like fish armor, Gregorio in blue-and-white coveralls goes to work with a frayed drill, a tube of epoxy mixed by faith rather than instruction, and a bare bulb he uses to feel voltage the way other men use a timing light. It takes an afternoon Cutty cannot spare. Every ribbon of plastic curling off that bit is another mile of coastline gone.

And at the end of the block, a pale square-shouldered car keeps reappearing with a man leaning on the fender, buying nothing. Not a tail meant to catch him. A tail meant to confirm the direction he has already chosen, so that somebody will be waiting wherever he arrives.

There is a lie that must be mixed correctly, a brujo invented on the spot, two jolts of live current taken on his behalf, fifteen American dollars for a round of tractor fuel at El Charro, and a conversation at the curb with Paula about retirement plans that Cutty answers more honestly than he means to.

Then the bike shoulders into the heat, nose pointed south. Toward Panama. Toward the San Blas Islands, a barefoot nun, a contested fortune, and four believers who still think they're the ones steering.

Panama, early 1978. The engine note has changed. Less climb, more cruise, and salt in the air through the vents.

Four of them now instead of five. At a Canal Zone checkpoint the Californians who carried Floey out of Guatemala discover they are couriers rather than custodians, and Carlos, who held the checkpoint money and the say over every road they took while they were in his birth country, learns what the Foundation does with a man once his usefulness ends at a border.

Manuel has a house in the city. Secure, he says. Rest, he says. Then the Board will decide how to present her.

But behind his shoulder there is a strip of grey-green water and a chain of low green islands, and Floey knows something about people who need an audience in order to believe their own story. She hands them her own destination wrapped in their language, and not one of them notices the exchange.

It buys her a boat, two weeks, and chaperones. It does not buy her freedom, and she knows exactly what the collateral is: a monthly deposit that changes banks every time she is moved, and a California lawyer who will file for her children the moment she stands in front of the Board.

The most dangerous thing on the water with her is not Manuel. It is a warm coal Sara placed in her chest weeks ago, and how easy it would be to believe it again. To embrace the thought of the ancient astronauts.

Rene has friends behind every desk in this dusty Nicaraguan town, which turns out to matter more than an American passport when six hundred stolen dollars needs chasing through a rubber-stamp bureaucracy. Cutty walks away with an eighty-dollar emergency advance and a promise to forward the rest to Panama City. Every stamp cost an hour, and somewhere south, the white van spent those hours moving.

Costa Rica, the one country in the isthmus that fired its own army, waves them through the border in minutes, and for one glorious hour a smooth stretch of Pan-American blacktop turns the BMW into something close to a rocket, Paula welded to Cutty's back and whooping into every curve. Then a trench swallows the front wheel, the windshield snaps off in Cutty's hand, and a chase that felt, for sixty miles, like something he could win becomes, again, something he could die finishing.

A storm chases them into a roadside trailer park outside San Jose, where a BMW-riding expat tries to sell Cutty leathers off his own arm, and two American retirees named Bad Henry and Old Paul walk him straight into the road's actual ending: a chain-link cantina on a hill, bare bulbs, guaro poured like gasoline, and an economy of pensions and much younger local women that Cutty recognizes, uneasily, as the same machinery running his sister's cult, wearing a friendlier hat.

Paula makes him say the number out loud before the night is over: thirty hours lost to bank windows, border stamps, and other men's ruined retirements, thirty hours the van never had to spend on anything but driving. Cutty finishes his last swallow of guaro and asks the only question left that matters: how early does the border open.

IN THIS EPISODE - Rene's rubber-stamp diplomacy, and the true price of a stolen six hundred dollars in a country with no fast way to get it back. - Costa Rica's soldier-free border, and the strange calm of a checkpoint with no rifles in it. - The pothole that nearly ends the chase, and the windshield that snaps off in Cutty's hand at ninety miles an hour. - A trailer-park lobby, Charlie's Angels dubbed into Spanish, and a leather-jacket salesman living on borrowed glory. - Bad Henry, Old Paul, and Cantina Agua Caliente's quiet economy of pensions and young women. - Paula forcing Cutty to count the cost out loud, and the question he asks Bad Henry when the guaro runs out.

A LINE TO CARRY OUT "Not that she was bought. That the buying had gone deep enough she couldn't tell it from kindness."

ABOUT THE SERIES Part of the Cutty Braughn literary-thriller trilogy, one man, a motorcycle, and a hunt across Central America, 1977 to the 1980s, where the deadliest thing on the road is a polite instruction typed on a distant desk.

Content note: depictions of transactional relationships between older American men and much younger local women, and themes of economic coercion.

A rustic albergue off a back road in Honduras, a guancasco spilling out of the church square, and for one night the road stops chasing anybody. Cutty Braughn parks the BMW inside the beach bohio like a man who's done it a hundred times, and Paula pulls him into a crowd thick with trumpets, fireworks smoke, and saints nobody bothered to introduce. He dances. He almost forgets there's a reason not to.

Then a stranger in a straw hat mentions a white van, and the ground shifts. Somebody has been asking after a gringo on a big German motorcycle, and the description is too specific for coincidence. Cutty has spent the whole trip hunting the van that took his sister Floey south. Tonight he learns it has started hunting him back.

South through Nicaragua, past a Guardia checkpoint that lingers a beat too long on the bike, the road delivers Cutty and Paula to a lakeside trailer park on Ometepe's shore, where a bartender named Rene knows exactly which questions tourists never ask. What starts as small talk about a volcano-top religious camp turns into a name Cutty has heard before in a different country: a foundation, a freight account, and the same slide projectors and city-clothed men who never sweat. El pulpo again, the octopus, with an arm all the way out on the lake.

The night ends with a theft that isn't really a theft, a passport and papers left behind with the precision of a man who wanted Cutty moving, not stopped. The one thing he can't get back is the film, every face he's photographed since Chichi, now in the hands of the people it will hurt most.

IN THIS EPISODE - A guancasco in a Honduran church square, and one uncomplicated night before the road turns hostile again. - A straw-hatted stranger, a white van, and the moment the hunter realizes he's also being hunted. - The Guardia Nacional at a Nicaraguan bridge, and a sergeant's glance that lingers a beat too long on the bike. - Rene, the lake, and Ometepe: a volcano camp running on foundation diesel and the same slide carousels as everywhere else. - El pulpo's reach, from a 1954 coup to a freight account on a lake, and the con wearing a new hat on this hill. - A jacket gone missing with surgical precision, and why a man who returns your passport isn't your friend.

A LINE TO CARRY OUT "A man who returns your papers and keeps your camera and film isn't a thief. He's an editor."

ABOUT THE SERIES Part of the Cutty Braughn literary-thriller trilogy, one man, a motorcycle, and a hunt across Central America, 1977 to the 1980s, where the deadliest thing on the road is a polite instruction typed on a distant desk.

Content note: depictions of surveillance, theft, and the lingering threat of state violence.

The road south of San Miguel ends at a wall of sandbags, a platoon of soldiers, and the regime's informers — las orejas, the ears. Two men lie wired at the shoulder. A third is staked to a fence post as a warning. Cutty Braughn brakes, spots a footpath into the jungle, and runs for the frontier before anyone can decide he's a problem worth a phone call.

What follows is a night ride across a country that has quietly decided its own atrocity is simply the way things are now: El Salvador under permanent state of siege, a slogan dripping in red on a shuttered pharmacy wall, and a stalled village of trucks waiting to cross at El Amatillo into Honduras. When Cutty and Paula finally reach the closed border, the only currency that still buys passage isn't paper or a bribe. It's sleight of hand — a deck of gray cards, a forced two of clubs, and a table of bored, armed conscripts chanting Maestro, Maestro while a hand-written visa dries in the dark.

This is the chapter where the trilogy's real machine shows its reach: el pulpo, the octopus, the same quiet hand that touches a ministry office up north and a colonel down south. Cutty can palm a card off the bottom of the deck. So can they — and their deck is stacked the whole length of the isthmus. His sister Floey is already a week ahead of him in the back of a van, being steered toward the same lie.

IN THIS EPISODE - A checkpoint that isn't only army, and the price of having "witnessed" it. - The B-movie playing in Cutty's head, and why it isn't only in his head. - "SEA PATRIOTA. MATE UN CURA." What a painted wall says about a country that has been practicing. - Father Rutilio Grande, the cane fields, and the men who taught campesinos to read the land deeds. - The card table at the closed frontier, and the difference between a bribe and a visitation. - Three clocks still running: the hunt, the money, and the flip.

A LINE TO CARRY OUT "You and me, we're the trick. The rest of this is misdirection."

ABOUT THE SERIES Part of the Cutty Braughn literary-thriller trilogy — one man, a motorcycle, and a hunt across Central America, 1977–1980s, where the deadliest thing on the road is a polite instruction typed on a distant desk.

Content note: depictions of political violence and wartime atrocity.

Cutty Braughn wakes in Chichicastenango, in the church outbuilding where his sister Floey painted her Popol Vuh murals, and finds her last message waiting on a fogged mirror, written in soap: a riddle pointing south and a warning about a man in a linen suit.

As he decodes it, the pieces fall into place. "Cloud people wait where the sea stitches itself to the sky" means the San Blas Islands of Panama. "Barry's wings are metal" means their missing brother wasn't taken by flying saucers but died in an airplane. And the linen suit is the Foundation's man, the same figure the K'iche' mothers name to call their children inside at night.

Cutty learns the Fundación La Senda Luminosa is paying Floey a monthly retainer, the quiet leash of an artist they mean to keep painting their lie, and that she's taking the money to buy back the two children she lost to her ex-husband Eugene Carl and the courts. He sees the Foundation's forged pamphlet, Floey's jaguars reprinted beneath a painted saucer, and hidden inside it, in her own hand, the answer she left for him.

Reverend Zeek rides north with the pamphlet, the cable, and the catechists' death lists, aiming a letter at a man in Washington who could ask the one question that unwinds the machine. Cutty and Paula flee as a bought priest tips off the police, and three timers start running down at once: the hunt closing behind him, the money that can be turned off the moment Floey stops being useful, and four patient believers in a closed van, talking his sister back toward the stars.

He drops a gear and opens the bike toward Panama, racing to reach her before they talk her out of it.

Cutty and Paula roll into Chichicastenango with the last of the daylight — road-drunk, relieved, and almost hopeful. The town sits at altitude, half-wired and still half-dark from the '76 quake, its vast outdoor market bowing them under low cloth roofs of safflower and colored corn, right up to the steps of the Church of Santo Tomás. There a K'iche' cofrade swings a copal censer through the smoke while a knot of boys argues whether a Harley or a BMW is the greater god. Cutty has come for the priest and for the walls his sister Floey was painting. He is two days late. Inside the monastery courtyard the noise drops away and the walls come alive. The Popol Vuh runs around the stone in painted panels — hero twins, jaguars, maize, feathered serpents, the lords of Xibalba — Maya and Catholic fused in Floey's unmistakable hand. But on a second pass he sees what isn't there: no saucers, no silver men, no ancient-astronaut machinery in the sky. In Pasadena she'd preached it; here, where the K'iche' actually live, she stripped it out. A decision, not an oversight. And one panel quietly maps the artifact tunnel under Tikal onto the descent of the hero twins. Then Reverend Zeek — a broad-shouldered, camera-carrying preacher out of the Georgia–Carolina lowcountry — has seen the men who come photographing these walls for the Foundation: always in pale linen, always asking whether the artista painted the sky teachers. And the ancient Father Felipe, a young priest in 1954, lays out the architecture underneath it all. This was never about paintings. Whoever owns the brush owns the wedge — a manufactured gospel to split a landless people from their own history, with jade masks and a Tikal stela logged at the excavations and never arrived in the capital, and a line that runs all the way to Panama. The comfortable version comes apart in Cutty's hands. They weren't chasing a runaway artist. They were collecting their new prophet — and a man on a motorcycle is two days behind her, going up against something far bigger than he'd let himself imagine. A quiet, chilling chapter where the chase stops and the scope of the conspiracy opens up. The arrival that isn't. New in this chapter: Chichicastenango and the Church of Santo Tomás, the K'iche' cofradía and the copal ceremony, Floey's Popol Vuh murals in the monastery courtyard, Reverend Zechariah "Zeek" Kestrel, Father Felipe, the 1954 Guatemala coup, and the missing Tikal excavations.

The safe route to Chichicastenango meant the long loop through Guatemala City. Cutty doesn't have time for safe. His sister Floey was last seen weeks ago, painting the monastery walls of Santo Tomás, and a job like that has an end. If she finishes before he reaches her, she's gone down another road he can't guess. So Cutty and Paula point the BMW down a thin dotted line on the map and ride four hundred and fifty miles of rutted dirt, killer cobblestone, and cartographer's optimism.

What follows is a hard, dusty push toward the highlands: a dead-end dock where the '76 quake dropped the bridges, a jury-rigged oil-drum ferry across Lago de Izabal, a jaguar that comes off the cliff in the dark, and a bus that owns the middle of the road. Every hour lost to bad pavement is an hour the trail goes cold — and somewhere ahead, a telegram may or may not have reached the priest whose walls Floey was painting.

Then the story cuts to Floey herself, riding south in a smoke-windowed van with four calm strangers who call themselves the Foundation. They have photographs of her work. They have a pitch. And they have a door she can't open from the inside. What they want from her is bigger and colder than anything Ayer ever asked — and they insist, over and over, that it has to be her choice.

A propulsive travel chapter that tightens into a quiet, chilling interrogation. The chase and the trap, moving toward each other.

New in this chapter: Castillo San Felipe, El Estor, the Izabal ferry crossing, and the Luminous Path Foundation's first direct move on Floey.

In Chapter 17 of Revelation at Tikal, Cutty finally receives the replacement bearing that can get his motorcycle back on the road. The part arrives by cargo plane at the Tikal airstrip, carried in by a Scottish pilot whose casual story suddenly changes everything.

Over beers at the Jaguar Inn, the pilot reveals that he met Floey, traveling as Florencia de la Carmelites, and flew her from Tikal toward Chichicastenango. There, she may be painting murals at the Church of Santo Tomás under the protection of Father Felipe. Cutty tries to call, but the telephone lines are dead, so he sends a telegram instead: he is on his way and expects to reach her in less than forty-eight hours.

With Paula and Alexis helping, Cutty repairs the BMW by dust, grease, luck, and the "Braughn method." The wheel goes back on, the bike fires up, and the search leaves Tikal behind. Chichicastenango is now the next destination, and Floey is no longer only a rumor.

Short episode description A replacement bearing arrives at Tikal by cargo plane, along with a crucial message: Floey has gone to Chichicastenango. Cutty repairs the BMW, sends a telegram, and sets out with Paula to find her.

In Chapter 16 of Revelation at Tikal, Cutty realizes he has not been following Floey so much as the afterimage she leaves behind: rumors, sightings, symbols, and the lives she has disturbed along the way.

Timothy departs Tikal by DC-3, the Temple of the Moon acolytes disappear from view, and Cutty's search for his missing artist sister takes on a new shape. As he waits for a motorcycle part and gathers fragments of information, Tikal becomes both delay and revelation: a place of ancient temples, passing travelers, strange dreams, and half-understood warnings.

At the Jaguar Inn, a dinner among wanderers turns serious when Conrad brings news of a barefoot gringa nun, followers gathering behind her, and a hurried escape toward Chichicastenango. Floey is no longer only missing. She may be becoming a symbol, and in Guatemala, symbols can become dangerous.

Meanwhile, Paula walks beside Cutty with her own silence, carrying something he does not yet know how to read.

Cutty is waiting on the airstrip at Tikal, running every wrong version of this reunion in his head, when Paula steps off the bus from Palenque and straight back into his life. This chapter follows their uneasy reconnection: her hard questions about his drug use, his promise to stay clean, and the fragile "probation" they both know he deserves.

Together they explore the ruins of Tikal—temples, acropolises, and handprints blown onto plaster a thousand years ago—while Cutty keeps one eye on the past he's been outrunning. The jungle city becomes a stone mirror for their own histories: priests and sacrifices, tourists and guidebooks, and the power of stories to erase or preserve a people's memory.

Meanwhile, a junkie "mushroom" climber scrambles up the Great Jaguar, Colleen and Lisa work a stela, and Cutty can feel the real tangle tightening: him, Paula, Floey, the ruins, and a family story that stretches from Air Force "UFO" missions to United Fruit and CIA coups. When the Aviateca elder finally talks, Cutty learns what really happened to his brother Barry—and how the same machine that lied to their parents is still humming in the background of everything he's chasing now.

This episode blends reunion, recovery, and revelation: a love story trying to restart in the heat of the Guatemalan jungle, and a family myth about flying saucers that turns out to be cover for a very human covert war.

Cutty's day at the Tikal airstrip starts with flirtation and boredom and turns, very quickly, into an animal rescue and a reckoning. While Colleen heads back toward the Jaguar Inn, a charter plane vomits out tourists in double-knit leisure suits and one woman in a red dress with a toy poodle in a matching sweater. When a huge eagle stoops out of the hard blue sky and locks onto "Sweetie Pie" as its next jungle snack, Cutty does the only thing he can think of: he throws his notebook—his entire rough draft—into the dive path and ends up cradling eight pounds of shaking fluff instead of a corpse.

But a few torn pages lead him somewhere darker. Following scraps of his own handwriting along the tree line, he discovers an isolated bohío near the runway and, inside, a shape that first looks like abandoned gear and then breathes. Timothy—rail‑thin, dehydrated, and burned out from the commune's drugs, machete games, and plans for Floey—has crawled into a corner to disappear. Cutty hauls him back to eggs and beans at Comedor Florecita, helps him send a telegram home, and parks him in the shade of the Aviateca office, promising not to vanish. It's the first unambiguous rescue he's pulled off on this trip, but as the runway shimmers and Floey and Paula occupy two different horizons, he knows one good deed doesn't clear the ledger. This road story is still tangled up with cults, coups, and the damage he keeps doing to the people who trust him.

Tikal, Guatemala. 1977. Cutty wakes in a thatched bohío hollowed out by dysentery, marooned with a dead BMW, a missing sister he hasn't found, and an outhouse that smells like flat soda. Civilization arrives in the form of a battered VW bus and a campground full of fellow wanderers — Conrad the Canadian mechanic, Raul the Madrid snob, Kevin the Australian veteran of worse scrapes, and two art historians who know both Maya glyphs and campground gossip. Over eggs, beans, and recycled jokes at Comedor Florecita, Cutty learns that no one has seen a barefoot woman in a gray habit. Floey hasn't reached Tikal yet. He has time he isn't sure he deserves.

At the tiny Aviateca office, chasing a rear-wheel bearing, Cutty meets Don Ernesto López — an older clerk in a pilot's shirt who quietly rewires the whole journey. Between part numbers and quetzales, Don Ernesto talks about fools on motorcycles, CIA flights, and the 1954 coup that turned Guatemala into a company town. The hunt for Floey starts to tangle with an older story: a brother who vanished here decades earlier, and the damage Cutty is already doing to the woman who still hasn't given up on him.

New episodes every Wednesday. Read and narrated by Cutty Braughn. Goleta Time Press.

Before dawn in Palenque, our narrator kicks his BMW to life and tears off into the jungle, certain Paula has climbed into Conrad's jeep and abandoned him for Tikal. She hasn't — but the story he's telling himself is louder than the one that's true.

The road has other plans. Dysentery, bad pills, and jungle heat turn the ride into a moving disaster. At Puerto Fronterizo El Ceibo, teenage Guatemalan soldiers in mirrored sunglasses lay his life out across a sun-baked table while one word floats through every conversation: CIA. He's a long-haired American alone on a German motorcycle on a road where the 1954 coup still lives just under the skin.

What follows is a sweltering dance through searches, checkpoints, and a concrete-hole bathroom that nearly finishes him off. Somewhere in the smeared afternoon, with his BMW's rear bearing beginning to sing a death song, he finally understands what he's running from — and it isn't the border guards.

The real border he crosses that day was never on any map. It was the line between the story he was telling himself about saving his sister and the harder truth about the woman in Palenque he was leaving behind.

Cutty pays the bill for every bad choice he's made on the road to Palenque. As the last of the speed burns out of his system, Randy's grudge and Hernandez's talk of pilgrimage start to sink in—and Paula quietly decides how close she's willing to ride beside him. A thin wall, two separate motel rooms, and one simple question ("Promise me you're not going to kill us chasing your sister") push their fragile partnership to the edge. By morning, an empty bed convinces Cutty he's been left behind, and he kicks the BMW toward Tikal in a panic, chasing a jeep that may not even have Paula in it.

Cutty and Paula limp into the sweltering jungle town of Palenque looking for a barefoot "nun" who paints motel signs and answers to Floey. Instead, they walk straight into a wall of heat, mushroom‑eating pilgrims, and Randy—an old L.A. friend whose grudge may be more dangerous than any bad road. Over one long day, Cutty learns how far ahead his sister has already gone, who flew her into the jungle, and why the Maya sacbe she's walking isn't just a shortcut through the ruins but a kind of pilgrimage. By the time a local patriarch explains that some journeys matter more than whether you survive them, Cutty is realizing what the cost of this chase is.

Please stand by for part two of this chapter next week

In Chapter 11 of Revelation at Tikal, Cutty decides that time is the enemy.

Floey circled Palenque in her books. She might already be there. She might have found whatever she was looking for and moved on. So Cutty does what Cutty does best and worst: he tells himself a story that makes the reckless thing sound necessary.

He takes a black beauty without telling Paula.

What follows is an all-night speed run south through Mexico, fueled by amphetamines, gas-station food, Coca-Cola, and the desperate hope that he can close the distance between himself and his missing sister. The drug hits hard: the road slows down, the curves become almost beautiful, and Cutty's body stops complaining long enough for him to ride far past the point of common sense.

Paula, riding behind him, slowly realizes something is wrong.

They reach Mexico City after dark, cold, wet, and half-lost in a freeway system that seems to end without warning. A patient guard gives them directions south toward Córdoba, and Paula solves the mystery of semáforos before Cutty does. But the road ahead is worse than either of them knows.

By dawn, they are in Córdoba. Cutty takes another pill in a filthy gas-station bathroom and keeps going. Paula asks the question he has been avoiding: what is he taking? His answer is half joke, half confession, and not nearly enough.

The ride continues through bad roads, truck stops, strange diners, and the tropical wreckage of fatigue. In Minatitlán, Paula nearly falls asleep at the counter while Cutty orders food he cannot read from a Spanish menu. For a few quiet minutes, over steak, onions, peppers, and coffee made from hot milk and instant crystals, they almost feel like a couple with a future instead of two people outrunning consequences.

Late that night, they finally reach Palenque.

Outside town, they find two gringo motels facing each other across the road: Alicia's Looping and Motel Bonampak. Cutty chooses Bonampak because of a new hand-painted sign hanging out front. The letters look like Mayan glyphs. The background is a tangle of colored whorls. The paint is fresh.

It looks like Floey.

Cutty gets two rooms, as Paula requests, then rides the motorcycle up a plank and into his bungalow, because by this point nothing about the trip is normal. He tries to ask the night boy who painted the sign, but his Spanish fails him. Tomorrow, he tells himself, he will find someone bilingual and shake the place for answers.

But sleep does not come easily.

In the small motel room, with the BMW parked at the foot of the bed and Paula breathing somewhere through the wall, Cutty finally has to stop moving. His pulse is too fast. His body is too wired. His sister may be close, or already gone. And Paula, who has become more important to him than he knows how to admit, suddenly feels just as easy to lose.

By the end of the chapter, Palenque is no longer just a place circled in Floey's books.

It is the next threshold.

In this episode Cutty secretly takes a black beauty before the ride south

Paula begins to sense that something is wrong

A wired, dangerous motorcycle run across Mexico

Rain, cold, bad roads, and a confusing Mexico City freeway

The mystery of semáforos

A dawn gas stop in Córdoba and Cutty's second pill

Paula confronting Cutty about what he is taking

A strange highway diner in Minatitlán

Truck-stop food, improvised coffee, and exhausted tenderness

Arrival in Palenque after a brutal ride

A fresh Bonampak motel sign that may have been painted by Floey

Cutty parking the BMW inside his motel room

A sleepless night between Paula, Floey, and fear

Why this chapter matters This chapter pushes Cutty's search for Floey into more dangerous territory. He is not just riding hard now. He is chemically forcing himself forward and lying to Paula by omission.

The chapter also deepens the emotional triangle that will shape the story from here: Floey ahead of him, Paula beside him, and Cutty caught between his need to save his sister and his fear of losing the woman who has chosen to ride with him.

Palenque becomes the first place where Floey's presence feels physically close. The motel sign may be her work, and that possibility changes everything. Cutty is no longer following only rumor. He may finally be standing where his sister has just been.

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Visit cuttybraughn.com for more material from the road to Tikal and beyond.

In this chapter of Revelation at Tikal, the road finally eases up—at least for a while.

Cutty and Paula roll into a funky beach shack outside Mazatlán, where "Mi Restaurante" serves fish baked in a stone stove, Mexican Coke in sweating glass bottles, and attitude from a green parrot that refuses crackers. A simple meal turns into a kind of truce: between sore bodies, bad Spanish, and a mission that keeps pushing them south, they let themselves enjoy being exactly where they are.

At Campo del Sol, a half‑forgotten trailer park on the sand, they pitch a tent among aging RVs and stray dogs. A swim in the Pacific turns into something more—Paula finally lets her hair down, literally and emotionally, and an impulsive decision in a shared sleeping bag changes what this trip means for both of them.

Meanwhile, Cutty can't stop thinking about the miles ahead. With Palenque and Tikal still far down the map, he teams up with a local surfer kid, Guillermo, to find something stronger than coffee to keep him awake on the night rides. A Christmas‑eve visit to a Mazatlán farmacia ends with legal "go‑juice" in his pocket and a new layer of risk under the romance.

By the time the sun sets on Mazatlán, Cutty and Paula are tangled up in each other, in the town, and in the quiet dread of what comes next. The road is calling, and so are the ruins—and nothing in this chapter stays simple for long.

In this episode:

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After the play and a long drinking session with the actors, Cutty and Paula wake up in Rocinante at Dr. Summers' place feeling the price of the night before.

Cutty's head is trying to leave through the ceiling, his stomach has become a tilting disk at the bottom of a lake, and the only sensible rule is simple: move slowly, and do not anger the physics. But even hungover, he reaches for his journal. The dream he writes down is too vivid to ignore: a flying sailing ship, a huge crew, an endless supply of Cutty Sark whiskey running dry, and a mysterious destination somewhere south.

Paula, barely awake, sees the meaning before he does. Cutty is the Cutty Sark. His own nickname, his own history, and his own uneasiness about drinking are all tangled up in the dream. For Cutty, it is one more example of something obvious sitting right in front of him that he somehow failed to see.

Then the chapter shifts from hangover logic to road logic.

Cutty starts breaking down the life he has been living out of Rocinante and repacking it for the motorcycle: foam pad, sleeping bag, Svea stove, cookset, tent, traveler's checks, vaccination papers, passport, spare clothes, notebooks, tools, and all the small items that separate an adventure from a disaster. Every object has to justify its place. The BMW has limited room, and Mexico is waiting.

Paula comes out of the shower, still game for the trip, and begins helping him carry food and gear to the bike. Cutty gives her one more chance to back out. She refuses. She is going south with him.

By the end of the chapter, Rocinante's keys have been handed over, Paula has squeezed herself into Cutty's spare yellow Bell Star helmet, and the two of them are finally on the BMW together. Her hands settle lightly at his waist, tentative and uncertain, as Cutty starts the engine and points them south.

The road has become real now. The trip is no longer an idea, a plan, or a drunken promise. It is two people, one overloaded motorcycle, and a direction.

South.

In this episode A brutal hangover after drinking with the actors

Cutty's strange flying-ship dream and the Cutty Sark revelation

Paula's discomfort with the idea of Cutty as a drinker

Packing Rocinante's contents onto the BMW

Foam pads, Svea stoves, notebooks, socks, passports, and road-trip triage

Paula deciding, again, that she is not backing out

One last goodbye to Dr. Summers

The yellow Bell Star helmet and the reality of riding passenger

Cutty and Paula finally pointing the bike south toward Mexico

Why this chapter matters This chapter is a hinge.

Before this, Cutty and Paula still have a temporary base, a borrowed refuge, and the option of delay. By the end, that is gone. Rocinante stays behind, the motorcycle becomes home, and the road south becomes the only plan.

The dream also matters. Cutty thinks it is about a ship, whiskey, and some mysterious destination, but Paula sees the personal meaning immediately. The dream is about him. About running dry. About being carried south by a machine he supposedly commands but does not fully understand.

That tension follows him onto the bike.

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Leave a rating or short review. It helps other listeners find the story.

Visit cuttybraughn.com for more material from the road to Tikal and beyond as there are two more novels in this trilogy..

Episode Description

In Chapter 8 of Revelation at Tikal, Cutty needs a place to leave Rocinante and a person who knew him before Alaska. He picks Dr. Jennifer Summers, the Beverly Hills High English teacher who once treated his writing seriously enough that the writer he might be became more real than the screw-up he already was.

The drive over gives Paula and Cutty their first real travel-companion conversation. He tells her how the old student writers' club at Dr. Summers' house used to end every meeting with a joint after she let it slip that she and her husband sometimes got high. Paula counters with her own teen biography: parents who drank enough for three families, a commune full of people stoned by breakfast, and her one rebellion, being boringly healthy. Running, swimming, push-ups, case law. "One of the first things I liked about you was you weren't trying to get high every other minute like your friends."

Coldwater Canyon climbs into the hills behind Beverly Hills, into the territory where the entertainment industry hides its neuroses behind manicured lawns. Dr. Summers' house is near the top, fronted by a Bodhi tree she claims was grown from a cutting of the original, and a blue-slate path set in yellow grout that Cutty calls fairy-tale perfect. Mr. Summers — taller, paler, deferring — opens the door. The dining alcove cantilevers out into the trees behind a curve of leaded glass, and Dr. Summers is already setting out a blue ceramic tea set when they walk in.

Paula's recognition lands the moment they step out to fetch Floey's trunk. "Cutty, this is where Timothy grew up. Dr. Summers' son. It is exactly how he described it." Timothy was at the Temple of the Rising Moon. Paula knew him there.

Back at the tea table, the chapter does its real work. Cutty lays out Floey's books across the coffee table — Gods, Graves and Scholars by C. W. Ceram, The Ancient Civilizations of Peru, Vilcabamba, Indian Crafts of Guatemala and El Salvador — and the underlined Maya passages, the question marks all over the Sacred Well at Chichén-Itzá, the folded map with Palenque circled in his sister's hand.

The Braughn family campfire story comes out for the first time, in full. Their older brother Barry, vanished doing Project Blue Book work for the Air Force somewhere south of the border, near one of the ruins. The official letter said lost in an accident while investigating an aerial phenomenon. Their mother, in her drunker moods, turned that into something closer to a flying-saucer abduction. "Floey grew up between government letters and bar-stool fairy tales, and ancient astronauts were the only story that made both halves feel like they might fit."

Then Paula speaks the part Dr. Summers didn't know was coming. Ayer Dada keeps a blown-up photograph of King Pacal's sarcophagus lid from Palenque on the wall of the temple — Erich von Däniken's "astronaut in the stone," the Maya king re-read as a rocket pilot with helmet, levers, and exhaust flames. Timothy met that photograph before he ever met Ayer. He had been hooked on flying saucers and ancient astronauts since boyhood, partly through his father's plays. The commune fed an existing fire.

Worse: by the time Paula left, Ayer was talking about Floey as the chosen one, a high priestess for the star visitors. "Chosen" in Ayer's mouth didn't mean honored. It meant owned. And Timothy followed her south. Took the money meant for college and most of it went to Ayer. The last time Paula saw Timothy he was scared, half hoping for a way out, unwilling to come home empty.

Dr. Summers' face barely changes, but the room does. A mother with a missing child does not need footnotes. The Bodhi leaves tap the glass. Outside, traffic whispers somewhere down the canyon. Between Timothy gone to a cult and Floey stripped of her kids and running after star-gods, it felt like the world was full of mothers walking around with pieces of themselves missing.

The Summerses agree to keep Rocinante for the trip. Mr. Summers has his play opening that night at the Oakwood Little Theater — handing Cutty two glossy gold tickets in a way that almost demands a thanks awfully, old chap. Cutty takes them, pockets them, and points the BMW toward Ventura Boulevard.

Al's accessory shop is the chapter's second act. Al is the same hustler Cutty knew in high school — short, stocky, black curly hair, swarthy, big calculating brown eyes, a beard with a small gray patch under the chin like a price tag he can't peel off. He sold Cutty an ounce of Kansas ditchweed once, packed like salad dressing, and he is selling now. A motorcycle trailer first. A heavy-duty rack and a fiberglass trunk second. A pair of police-style leather saddlebags third. Cutty agrees to write a Rider magazine testimonial in exchange for a discount and a "free" rack he wasn't planning to buy.

The fitting takes a sledgehammer. Sometimes Al reshapes the rack. Sometimes Cutty is pretty sure Al is reshaping the bike. "A sledge is essential in the accessory business," Al says between slam-bang-whangs. When the work is done, the BMW has grown a tumor. The trunk sits behind the seat like a giant black hunchbacked toad. "It grows on you," Al says. The trunk is cavernous. The leather saddlebags are real hide that will scuff instead of shatter when they hit pavement. That part Cutty likes.

The test ride teaches him the most important new fact of the trip. The trunk pushes Paula forward against him on the seat. His back is warmer. Every time her chest brushes his shirt there is an electric tingle, a tightening in his gut. The road might be long, but I was not dead.

Then Paula peels off for an hour. She tells him she has paperwork to finish — old law-school loose ends. Cutty agrees to meet her at the BMW parts place on Robertson and goes off to price tent poles and mosquito netting.

What she actually does with that hour, the narrator tells us, Cutty will not learn until much later. Paula walks into a downtown Army recruitment office and sits through the pitch. The Army will pay for the rest of her law school if she signs on the dotted line and wears the uniform afterward. On her way out, she stops at the pharmacy next door and buys birth control pills with the same steady hand. Whatever else happened on the road, Paula Martz was not going to outsource her future to me, Ayer, or anybody else. She does not tell him. Not yet.

The chapter ends with two travelers fueled, fitted, and quietly making decisions on parallel tracks — Cutty assembling a Central American expedition out of camping gear and family myth, Paula assembling her own future without showing him the blueprints.

Paula and Cutty's first long companion talk: writers' club, weed, and "boringly healthy"

Coldwater Canyon, the Bodhi tree, and the leaded-glass dining alcove

Mr. Summers, Dr. Summers, and the blue ceramic tea set

Paula recognizing the house as Timothy's — Dr. Summers' son

Floey's books spread across the coffee table: Gods, Graves and Scholars, Vilcabamba, the Tikal-Palenque map

The full Braughn family campfire story: Uncle Barry, Project Blue Book, "lost in an aerial phenomenon"

Erich von Däniken's "astronaut in the stone" — King Pacal's sarcophagus lid in Ayer's temple

Timothy at the commune, Ayer's "high priestess" pitch, and the chosen-means-owned distinction

Mr. Summers' play opening at the Oakwood Little Theater and two glossy gold tickets

Al's accessory shop, the sledgehammer rack fitting, the fiberglass "hunchback toad" trunk, and the police-style leather saddlebags

The test ride, Paula on the seat behind, and the warmer-back discovery

Paula's secret hour: an Army recruiter, a law-school deal, and a pharmacy stop on the way out

Chapter 8 is where the trip stops being theoretical and starts being a packing list.

The visit to Dr. Summers gives the Maya/Tikal route an outside witness. Up to this point, Floey's interest in Palenque, Tikal, and Pacal's sarcophagus has been a private inheritance — her underlined books, her circled map, the family campfire story about Uncle Barry. By laying it all out on a teacher's coffee table and watching a thoughtful adult treat it as a credible thread, Cutty crosses an invisible line. The expedition is real now. He is going.

The chapter also seeds the second protagonist of the search beyond Floey herself: Timothy Summers. The trilogy's antagonist has, for the first time, recruited footsoldiers who got there before the search did. The line some of his people had already decided she outranked him from Chapter 7 now has a name and a mother. Whatever happens at Palenque or Tikal will not just be Cutty against Ayer. It will be Cutty against believers who have decided Floey is their goddess and are willing to follow her into the jungle to make it true.

The hunchback-toad sequence is the trilogy's first real road moment, and the warmer-back beat on the test ride locks Paula into the BMW. From this scene on, when the bike moves, she moves with it.

The hidden hour is the chapter's quiet bombshell. Paula's two stops — recruiter, pharmacy — are the trilogy's first scene of her acting on her own behalf without Cutty in the room. She is not just the rescued cult roommate or the co-counsel anymore. She is a woman building two futures in parallel: one with him, one without him, both hers. The narrator's confession that Cutty will not learn this until much later is the trilogy's first promise of a reveal still to come.

By the end of the chapter, Rocinante is parked under a Bodhi tree, the BMW is loaded for jungle, two travelers are choosing each other a little more every hour, and the road south finally has a date.

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Episode Description

In Chapter 7 of Revelation at Tikal, Cutty parks Rocinante across two metered spaces in front of the Oxnard DMV — a minor crime in service of an important cause — and walks into one of the smaller circles of California hell. Linoleum floor. Quiet suffering in lines. The shortest queue is Information, behind a sun-bleached teenager trying to retake his driver's test before "Surfing Safari" comes up, and an old woman who pilots only a motorized golf cart and would like to know why she has to test for it.

When Cutty's turn arrives, the policy speech comes out on autopilot. Written request. One week. He doesn't have a week. He drops Ayer Dada's name, and the receptionist's face changes. Everybody in the department knows about Ayer. The state is already trying to bring action against him for running an unlicensed used-car business through a shell organization called the Luminous Path Foundation. More than a hundred cars in the past year. Ayer never appears on the pink slip — he leaves the new owner line blank and fills in a buyer's name when he finds one. That is why he wouldn't show Cutty the title up at the commune.

Just this once, Cutty asks her, can she look up Floey's plate? She breaks policy long enough to confirm it. Transfer complete. The car is gone. The clock is running. The only thing between Ayer and the horizon is his yacht.

Back in Rocinante, Paula puts down the paperback she has been pretending to read and walks Cutty through what is actually at stake — the real headline, not the pink slip. In her near-JAG voice, the one she would have used in a courtroom if she had not bailed out of Yale Law in her third year, she lays it out. Under California conservatorship law, if Eugene Carl can convince a judge that Floey is gravely disabled and unable to manage her own affairs, he can be appointed conservator of her estate, with control of her painting income "for her benefit" while she is missing. The tombstone painting and the rumors of instability give him the optics he needs. If she does not appear in court, he wins by default. If she stays gone long enough, he plays grieving widower, pushes for a legal-death declaration, and everything funnels to him and the kids.

"Welcome to California," Paula says. "One cult wears beads. The other wears robes and carries a gavel."

They drive to the marina. A young sign painter with a patchy beard is working in the shade of a yacht sales office, a German Shepherd dozing under his easel, carving and lettering a new transom board for the Rising Moon. Cutty asks why the boat needs a new one. Apparently Ayer didn't like the old version. The previous transom — done by Floey — had the words Rising Moon arced over two white mounds against a pink background, like a sunrise.

It takes Cutty and Paula a beat to clock the joke. Floey had painted a bare backside on the back of a holy man's yacht and it took him weeks to notice. The painter says Ayer eventually called it "misleading to the spirit of the voyage."

For one clean second the news is good news. That is Floey, slipping a small dirty joke past a fraud who thinks he is the prophet.

The schooner is two slips from the end. Long, narrow-hulled, black freeboard, the deep keel of an ocean-going boat. Provisions stacked in the salon. A generator still in its crate. New radio gear. Sealed navigation aids. Everything for a long ocean run with a small handpicked crew. Cutty leaves Paula at the gate, hops the chain-link, and goes aboard alone, his theory being that one of him is easier to talk out of than two.

Below deck he sweeps two aft cabins, the storage lockers, the galley, the walk-in fridge, the crew's quarters forward, the sail bins. Fresh varnish, fresh stores, fresh equipment. No paint smell. No sketchbooks. No scrap of cloth that ever belonged to his sister. If she has ever been on this boat, the boat is not going to admit it.

Halfway back to the companionway, footsteps land on the deck overhead.

Cutty makes the call to run. Up the forward ladder, out the bow hatch, onto the dock. Two of Ayer's enforcers see him from the stern. The hairier one, the one Cutty kicked into the ivy bank back at the temple, drops his crate and comes for him. The schooner is tied stern-first. The choices are him or the harbor. Cutty sprints for the end of the dock, slips on a wet patch, keeps going, and dives.

The harbor water is cold and black. He surfaces twenty feet out, hears them shouting about a dinghy and an oar banging a thwart, fills his lungs, and ducks under the dock to disappear into the green-black murk between the concrete floats. He works his way toward the gangplank, freezing, and finds a cross brace under the planks to hold on to.

That is where the chapter quietly tilts.

Paula's voice comes down through the cracks above him. She is standing on the dock with Ayer himself, refusing to let his men hunt Cutty. "It isn't in keeping with your teachings," she says. "And if they had," she adds, "I'm not unarmed." The Damascus knife from Chapter 6 just earned its place in the story.

Ayer, oily as ever, calls his men back — no violent karma — and then tries one of his close moves on Paula. Tell me, he says, what is Cutty to you? And Paula answers, in language Ayer cannot easily argue with, that intuition is higher than logic, and intuition tells her Cutty is her soul mate.

Cutty hears it from under the dock, dripping diesel and plankton, and feels like something else entirely.

When he finally hauls himself onto the dock by a cleat, Ayer is waiting at the top of the gangplank flanked by two beautiful vacant-eyed women, with the damp enforcers behind them. He gives Cutty his teeth-no-warmth smile and offers a guided tour. Then he tries one more pitch. Floey's tombstone, he says, was not a suicide note. It was a statement that her old ego had died and a new being had been born. She was very close to enlightenment when she left us. Uh huh, Cutty says, and starts edging up the ramp.

Walking back along the wharf — past the chandlery, the restaurant with barn-wood siding, the boutique with its tarred pilings and coiled manila line for atmosphere — Paula asks where now. Cutty already knows. The trunk again. The Maya books. The Tikal folder. Floey's journal entries about their uncle Barry, the Blue Book officer who disappeared on a mission near some ruins south of the border. The campfire story their mother turned it into: Your brother vanished down there among the pyramids. Floey grew up on that line.

The chapter ends with Cutty starting the engine and turning Rocinante back toward the trunk, and with one quiet line of foreshadowing the reader has not earned yet:

What I didn't know then was that some of his people had already decided she outranked him. Their goddess had slipped the leash, and they were already tracing her path into the ruins.

The Oxnard DMV, "Surfing Safari," and a motorized-golf-cart grandma

The Luminous Path Foundation and Ayer Dada's hundred-car shell game

The receptionist who breaks policy long enough to say "transfer complete"

Paula's near-JAG breakdown of California conservatorship law

"One cult wears beads. The other wears robes and carries a gavel."

The young sign painter, the German Shepherd, and the new transom board

Floey's secret joke: two bare moons against a pink sunrise on the Rising Moon's stern

The black-hulled schooner stocked for a long ocean run

Cutty's solo sweep below decks — fresh varnish, no trace of his sister

Footsteps overhead, a sprint to the end of the dock, and a dive into the harbor

Hiding under the planks while Paula stares down Ayer with a Damascus knife in her boot

Ayer's "no violent karma" save and his pitch about Floey's enlightenment

The pivot south: Maya books, the Tikal folder, and Uncle Barry's vanishing

Chapter 7 is where the search turns from local to continental.

The DMV scene confirms Ayer Dada is exactly what the trunk and the bungalow already suggested — a low-rent confidence operation hiding behind a foundation, peeling the title off vehicles signed away by people he has emotionally drained. He is dangerous, but he is also small. The state has him in its sights for the cars, and Paula has him pegged for the spiritual fraud. He is not the long answer to where Floey went. He is the warm-up act.

The conservatorship explanation tightens the deadline introduced in Chapter 6 and gives it teeth. No insanity hearing required. All Eugene Carl needs is to convince a judge Floey is gravely disabled and unable to manage her own affairs while she is missing — and Carl has the family name, the lawyers, and the rumor mill on his side. Every week she is gone is a week in his column.

The Rising Moon sweep is the last no in the local search. The boat is provisioned for an ocean voyage, but Floey is not on it and never has been. The only piece of her still aboard was a joke painted on the transom, and Ayer made sure even that got covered up. After this scene, Cutty knows in his bones that his sister is not in California anymore.

That is what makes the closing line of the chapter the trilogy's first real horizon. The trunk is no longer a bunch of family relics — it is a route. Maya books. A Tikal folder. Uncle Barry, the young Blue Book officer who disappeared south of the border on a mission near some ruins, turned by their mother into a campfire story Floey grew up on. Mexico and Guatemala stop being ambient set dressing and become the destination.

Paula's two big moments in this chapter — the courtroom-grade legal explanation and the soul mate declaration over a cult leader's gangplank — also lock her in for the long road south. She is no longer along for the ride. She is the reason Cutty made it off the dock alive.

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Episode Description

In Chapter 6 of Revelation at Tikal, Cutty wakes inside Rocinante still gripping the fingers of a dream.

He is standing in front of a small locked metal case. The long, complicated key in his hand should fit, but the teeth are wrong. It is not his key. It is Floey's. The key stretches and grows new notches as he holds it, until he sees her hiding it in a crevice between two gray stones at the base of a Maya pyramid. She turns and waves at him from the top, a long satin dress moving like water in slow motion. The harder he climbs, the steeper the steps get, until the stone slides out from under his hands.

He sits up in the cramped bed, scribbles the dream into his notebook without trying to interpret it — psychoanalysis has always felt like somebody else's religion — and admits only one thing: in both the dream and the waking world, he is reaching for his sister and missing.

While Paula sleeps in a rumpled lumberjack shirt, Cutty puts a moka pot on the burner, dropping in a healthy scoop of grounds. "On the ranch we used to crack an egg into the pot to drag the grounds down," he tells her over breakfast. "So instead of an egg you used what," she says, "spite and anxiety?" They eat granola at the dinette, knees brushing, neither of them moving away.

Then Paula bends to her pack, and a leather sheath slips loose. A short Damascus-steel blade flashes before she tucks it back into the top of her boot. A graduation present from her father, she says, who told her if she was going out into the world she should have something sharper than her tongue. Cutty files that away.

He heads off to the campground showers with his shaving kit and a pocketful of change. The morning is wet and gray, fog weaving tendrils around the bushes. The shower building is a squat blue-gray box. Most of the hot taps are dead, choked with mineral deposits from the spring water, but he finds one near the end of the row that still runs. The water flashes from cold to near-steam, the stall fills with the rotten-egg tang of hydrogen sulfide, and for the first time since he saw the tombstone painting, his thoughts cut clean.

He works through the day in his head. Call the gallery manager. Drive to Oxnard. Walk Ayer Dada's yacht. Swing by the DMV and see if paperwork can pry Floey's woody wagon loose. He does not really expect Oxnard to give him the truth. His gut says she is already a long way from Southern California. But the dream key needed a lock, and standing still is not a plan.

While he shaves, he can hear Paula singing on the women's side of the wall, in a thin high voice that comes through the vent grate. He thinks about his old crew in the bomb shelter, and how casually he handed Rocinante over to them last year, and how that will not happen again. Alaska put a backbone in him without him noticing. He has stopped measuring every move against what Jerry and Mark would think. It is like dropping a backpack he did not know he was carrying.

On the way to the ranger booth, he passes a Mexican family of four camped under a Winnebago awning with a portable black-and-white TV, an electric omelet maker, and an R2-D2-bleeping electronic game for the boys. No fire, no dirt, no myth of simplicity. Just a bubble of circuitry transplanted into the trees. Maybe this is what going native looks like now, he thinks, dragging your machines into a new environment and letting them colonize it for you.

The pay phone behind the ranger booth is corroded by salt air and held together by its inner wires. The first dime sticks on a smear of gum. Information answers in the nasal voice of a young woman with a cartoon-character r problem: "You weally can help keep youw phone costs down…" He hangs up, sacrifices more dimes, and finally reaches the gallery manager in Hollywood.

The conversation is the chapter's hinge.

Eugene Carl has called the gallery. He told the manager he is still Floey's husband, which is technically a lie, and legally — given the children — close enough not to matter. He has heard about the sales. He is moving to have Floey declared legally insane so he can take control of her painting income as her trustee. It is faster, the manager explains, than waiting seven years to have her declared dead. The hearing will land in four to six weeks. If Floey does not appear, Carl wins by default.

The manager estimates more than a hundred thousand dollars in sales already, and rising fast. "You know how people are. Once a commodity acquires a notorious reputation and they believe it to be scarce and in demand…" He doesn't have to finish. The idea of Floey turned into a commodity with a notorious reputation makes Cutty's skin crawl.

The pay phone keeps his last dime. Cutty steps back, judges the distance, and snaps a clean kick at the chrome plate over the change box. The contraption rattles and spits out a small fortune in dimes and sticky quarters. Karma in coin form.

He scoops up the change and walks back toward Rocinante through the thinning fog. By the end of the chapter the day has gotten brighter and uglier, and the inventory is laid out plain: a sister who painted her own tombstone and vanished, an ex-husband from a rich, well-connected family sharpening his legal knives, and a fake holy man driving her car and spending her money, with a circle of true believers ready to crown her their goddess. All Cutty has on his side is an RV, a future JAG candidate held together with willpower, a stack of blank paper — and a brand-new deadline ticking.

The dream of the Maya pyramid, the impossible stairs, and the wrong key

Moka-pot coffee, the ranch trick of cracking an egg into the grounds, and granola at the dinette

Paula's Damascus-steel boot knife and the graduation present from her father

Sulfur showers, mineral-clogged taps, and a moment of clean thinking

Paula singing on the other side of the vent grate

The Mexican family and the Winnebago full of circuitry — going native in 1976

A salt-corroded pay phone, a sticky dime, and an information operator with a cartoon "r"

The gallery manager's report: more than a hundred thousand dollars and rising

Eugene Carl's plan to have Floey declared legally insane and take her income as trustee

The four-to-six-week hearing window and the danger of winning by default

One clean kick and a small fortune in pay-phone change

The new inventory: an RV, a co-counsel, a stack of blank paper, and a deadline

Chapter 6 is where the story acquires a clock.

Up to this point, Cutty has been searching for Floey out of love, instinct, and the unease of the tombstone painting. The legal framing the gallery manager hands him on a corroded pay phone changes the geometry. Eugene Carl is not just a bitter ex-husband locking the ranch against his ex-wife. He is moving in court to have her declared legally insane so he can scoop up the income from the very paintings that are making her famous. If Floey does not appear at that hearing, Carl wins by default, the painting income flows to him as trustee, and Floey, whatever is left of her, is legally erased.

That gives the search a deadline of four to six weeks. From this scene on, every chapter is timed.

The chapter also keeps quietly building the trilogy's deeper imagery. The opening dream is the first time Cutty himself sees a Maya pyramid in his sleep — Floey, the key, the stones, the impossible stairs. The trilogy's destination has now appeared in his unconscious before he has any plan to go there.

Two smaller details earn their place. Paula's Damascus-steel boot knife is the kind of object that does not get introduced unless it eventually gets used. And the Mexican family with the Winnebago and the omelet maker is Cutty doing what Cutty does — watching the way technology and travel and culture braid together — and is also a small, unannounced overture for the road south. The next chapters are going to put him in those campsites, and not as a tourist.

By the end of the chapter, Cutty has stopped measuring himself against his old crew, started measuring himself against a courtroom calendar, and walked back into Rocinante with a pocket full of liberated change and a much sharper idea of what he is actually fighting.

Follow Revelation at Tikal so you don't miss the next chapter.

Leave a rating or short review — it helps other listeners find the story.

Visit cuttybraughn.com for photos, background notes, and more behind-the-scenes material from the road to Tikal.

Bonus: Previously in Revelation at Tikal – Chapters 1–3

I flew down from Alaska expecting a surprise reunion with my big sister at her first Los Angeles gallery show—and walked straight into a tombstone painting she'd signed with her own name and death date. While collectors treated her "death" as a clever stunt and the gallery owner counted the money, Floey herself was nowhere. Chasing the few clues she left behind, I fell back in with old friends, reclaimed my beat‑up RV Rocinante, and followed her trail into a decaying New Age commune in the Pasadena hills, where a guru was busy selling off her car and her faith. There, amid UFO‑Maya posters and chanting true believers, I teamed up with Paula, a sharp‑mouthed law student trapped in the cult, and together we pulled off a small heist, a big escape, and proved I'm willing to get bruised and stupidly brave if that's what it takes to find my sister.

Full Episode Description

In Chapter 5 of Revelation at Tikal, Cutty and Paula need a place to sleep before they hit the marina at Oxnard, and Cutty picks Leo Carrillo State Beach Park, the same stretch of sand he used to sneak into on his motorcycle whenever school and friends started to itch. Rocinante is too tall for the bridge, and there's floodwater under it anyway, so they take spot number twenty-four near the showers — handed to them by a freckled, red-haired ranger in a Smokey Bear hat with her own complicated phone life happening in the back of the booth.

After dinner at Nick's in Santa Monica, where Paula pushes a bowl of vegetable soup around with her spoon and refuses to trust the kitchen with anything that used to walk, they pull into the campsite, kill the diesel, and split up. Paula takes a heavy green Safari flashlight down to the beach to chase phosphorescent waves and look for the sea cave with the half-buried wooden ship she has been reading about in the park pamphlet. Cutty stays in Rocinante with a strip of beef jerky, a cup of Sleepytime tea, and Floey's trunk.

The contents come out across the dinette table in layers. Brittle family records. Sepia photographs. Books stacked like bricks. Near the bottom third, under a folder of his uncle Barry's Project Blue Book files from 1955 — Barry was twenty-two, already climbing the Air Force ladder, and would later disappear south of the border between one jungle and the next — Cutty hits a stiff manila envelope torn open at one end. His name is on it in Floey's handwriting, the same flowing script she has used on his birthday cards since he was a kid trailing seventeen years behind her.

Inside the envelope: a sheaf of blank twenty-pound rag bond. Maybe a hundred sheets. Front blank. Back blank. No invisible ink. No spy tricks. Floey never went in for spy tricks.

It takes a minute, but Cutty sees it. Ayer Dada would not have replaced a stolen letter with clean paper. The blank pages are not a robbery. They are an instruction. Floey has been telling him for years: Cutty, you're the writer. Let the story flow through you. Be the receiving instrument. The envelope is her invitation to fill it.

Cutty pulls his Alaska notebook from beside the driver's seat and starts working. The chapter takes a long, deliberate breath here and lets him think through everything that brought him to this beach: Floey's fifteen-year marriage to Eugene Carl, the John Birch pamphlets, the high Mormon standing, the painter Sancho Sánchez who was supposed to be her tutor but became her rapist instead and shut her talent down for a decade. The cosmic-slapstick run of accidents that ended the marriage — Eugene Carl tied off to the station-wagon bumper and dragged across the roof, the ram in the corral, the lighter and the bathroom vapor and the shotgun. Floey finally pointing the wagon south on 395 and not looking back.

Then Paula comes through the door with windburn on her cheeks and salt on her skin, full of news about the cave, the buried wooden deck poking out of the sand, the dinoflagellates lighting up under her boots. Cutty tells her about the manila envelope. Paula nods slowly. Very Floey.

What follows is the longest, most honest conversation either of them has had in this story so far. Paula talks about Floey's two-week vow of silence at the commune, her time in John Lilly's isolation tank, her stated need to paint again — imperative, her word — and the search for the Pakal gods that brought her into Ayer's orbit. Cutty fills in Sancho Sánchez and the first pregnancy. Paula's face tightens as the timeline clicks together.

The conversation widens. Cutty tells her about Alyeska and the North Slope, the public-relations degree out of Reno, the press releases about ANCSA and "hiring local" and respecting traditional life while the pipeline went across caribou migration routes. The slow realization that his real job was containment. That the Inupiat were what the project managers called "constraints." That he had been hired to keep the anger polite. Paula counters with her own version: dress blues, rules of engagement in a windowless room, saying no, sir to keep pilots from turning villages into target practice. The career she walked out of before she ever wore the uniform.

"Floey wanted to help the people the ancient astronauts picked. You wanted to help the people the oil companies stepped over. I wanted to help the people the Army turns into collateral damage. Feels like we've been circling the same campfire from different sides."

Then a John Prine cassette goes into the deck. Bruised Orange. "The Hobo Song" floats out thin and lonely. Cutty pulls a blanket from the locker and wraps it around both of them. Paula doesn't move away. She asks if the dinette folds down. He drops the table and flips the cushions into a narrow bed. She comes up with her pack and that same crooked smile and leans, more than steps, into him. The first kiss is a question. The second is steadier, her hand catching at his shirt for an anchor.

"Okay," she says when they finally break apart. "Now we're in it."

"In what?"

"Same case. Same side."

By the end of the chapter, the blank pages are no longer empty, the trunk is no longer a mystery, and Rocinante feels for the first time in a long while like more than just a vehicle pointed away from Cutty's mistakes.

Vegetable soup at Nick's in Santa Monica and a cow waved over the pot

The freckled ranger, Chuckie baby on the phone, and campsite number twenty-four

Phosphorescent waves, a sea cave, and a wooden deck buried in the sand

Floey's J.C. Penney trunk on the dinette table, layer by layer

Uncle Barry "Blitz," Project Blue Book in 1955, and a disappearance south of the border

The manila envelope addressed to Cutty in Floey's handwriting — and the blank pages inside

"Cutty, you're the writer." Floey's instruction to fill the envelope

Sancho Sánchez, Ophir Canyon, and the rape that shut Floey's painting down for a decade

Eugene Carl, the John Birch pamphlets, and the cosmic-slapstick run of accidents that ended the marriage

John Lilly's isolation tank, the Pakal gods, and Floey's "imperative" to paint again

Alyeska, ANCSA, and Cutty's slow realization that his job was containment

Paula's almost-career as a JAG officer and her own walk away from the machine

Sleepytime tea, John Prine on cassette, a shared blanket, and the kiss neither of them quite saw coming

Chapter 5 is the quiet center the first act has been moving toward. The action chapters bookending it — the cult compound on one side, the marina at Oxnard on the other — needed a chapter where the chase stopped long enough for the story to breathe. This is that chapter.

Three things happen here that change everything that follows.

The blank pages turn the book itself into a conscious act. Up to this point, Cutty has been a man searching for his sister. From this scene forward, he is a man writing her story while he searches, by her express invitation. The trilogy's framing voice — the older Cutty looking back through journal pages — is justified inside the fiction. Floey told him to fill the envelope, and he is filling it.

The Alyeska confession is the first time Cutty tells anyone, including himself, why he really left Alaska. Not bad luck. Not a better offer. He realized his job was to keep Inupiat anger polite while the pipeline went across caribou country, and he could not keep doing it. Paula's near-miss JAG career mirrors his almost exactly. Two people who tried to bend a machine toward justice from the inside, and who walked when they saw what the machine was actually for. Same campfire, different sides.

And Paula stops being the rescue and becomes the partner the rest of the trip depends on. The kiss is small, careful, almost shy — more question than answer — but the line that follows it is the hinge: Now we're in it. Same case. Same side. Whatever happens at the marina in the morning, whatever happens on the road south after that, they are going through it together.

It is also the chapter where the trilogy's deeper machinery, the ancient astronauts and the Pakal gods and Barry's Blue Book files, all start sitting together in the same trunk at the same time. The pieces are now in the same room. The next chapters will start fitting them together.

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Full Episode Description

In Chapter 4 of Revelation at Tikal, Cutty and Paula climb back into Rocinante and head five more miles up the mountain road, away from the main Temple compound and toward the rented bungalow where Paula and Floey once lived as roommates. On the way, Paula explains the financial machinery behind Ayer Dada's smile — the sob story about Brotherhood vehicles, the donated property, the volunteer labor, the consent forms, the tax-exempt status he is just beginning to bend past breaking. "Spiritual used-car salesman with tax-exempt status," Cutty calls him. Paula corrects him: it is the unpaid capital gains on a big developer sale that may finally get Ayer in real trouble.

The bungalow sits on a row of sagging little shacks that long ago surrendered to dreamers and drifters. Paula leads the way up a path worn through tough Bermuda grass and pushes the door open without a key. In Ayer's world, what one of them owns, all of them own. Cutty translates: convenient when you want to redistribute property.

Inside, Floey's old painting corner still smells like her. Linseed oil. Turpentine halos around the brush cans. A square ceramic sink stained by a hundred rinsed brushes. Taped to the wall above the table, one of her sketches: a feathered figure standing under a low saucer-shaped sun, its rays coming down like ladders to the figure's hands. Paula remembers Ayer's reaction. He called it proof Floey was already seeing the Pakal gods. The sign of a born priestess.

The walls are otherwise stripped, except for two things: a cracked mirror over the tiny sink, and a torn page from a book pinned above one of the cots — the Ten Commandments with check marks beside each rule, except for Thou shalt not kill, which someone has marked with a question mark.

Cutty leans in toward the mirror. There are smeared traces of something written in soap, half-wiped away. Floey used to leave these messages back at the family ranch in Nevada, quotes and poem fragments and small philosophical grenades that drove Eugene Carl crazy. Paula remembers what was on this one: There is only the existence of the present moment. Cutty translates it the way he and Floey would have during their long Zen phase. The Now. What lies beyond Maya.

The closet behind the front door tells the rest of the story.

Floey's red, white, and blue J.C. Penney trunk is half-tipped on its side, books and envelopes and family photographs spilled across the closet floor in a way Floey would never have left them. She would tolerate clutter on shelves, but she hated junk underfoot. Somebody else has been through this trunk, and not gently. Cutty bets it was Ayer or one of his helpers. Paula bets he is right.

There are no clothes left. No socks. No paints. Every Winsor & Newton tube she ever owned is gone. The only thing remaining of Floey in this bungalow is a trunk full of Braughn family papers, set out almost as if she meant for him to find it.

Cutty sets the trunk upright. He and Paula gather the books, the envelopes, the dusty photographs, and a large torn manila envelope back into the box and snap the latches shut. Whatever is in the trunk is the only thing Floey did not take with her, and the timing — three weeks since she vanished from Ayer's world, no letter, no collect call — makes Cutty think she left it deliberately.

They carry the trunk down the Bermuda-grass path between them. Paula barely strains under the weight, which gets a quick raised eyebrow from Cutty and a clean "Shut up and lift" in return.

By the end of the chapter, the next destination is set. Ayer keeps his yacht, the Rising Moon, at the marina in Oxnard. If Floey is anywhere in Ayer's world, that is where the next thread leads. Cutty has Rocinante, a borrowed banter rhythm with a partner who can keep up, and a trunk of family papers thumping into the dirt beside the camper door, waiting to be unpacked.

The financial anatomy of Ayer Dada's Brotherhood: donated property, volunteer labor, signed consent, and a developer sale with unpaid capital gains

"Spiritual used-car salesman with tax-exempt status"

The mountain bungalow Paula once shared with Floey

Linseed oil, turpentine halos, and Floey's sketch of a feathered figure under a saucer-shaped sun

Ayer's "born priestess" reading of Floey's Pakal-gods imagery

The Ten Commandments page with a question mark beside Thou shalt not kill

A half-erased soap message on the cracked mirror, and the Zen line behind it: "There is only the existence of the present moment"

The Braughn family ranch in Nevada and Eugene Carl tearing down Floey's mirror manifestos

Floey's red, white, and blue J.C. Penney trunk dumped open on the closet floor

Paula's stronger-than-she-looks lift and the banter that goes with it

The Rising Moon at the Oxnard marina, and the plan to confront Ayer on his floating tax shelter

Chapter 4 is where the chase quiets down for a moment so the evidence can speak. After the karate kick at the end of Chapter 3, Cutty and Paula step out of the Brotherhood compound and into a small, smelly room that holds the most direct trace of Floey we have seen yet — her painting corner, her handwriting, her trunk.

Three things happen in this chapter that the rest of the trilogy depends on.

The Pakal-gods sketch on the wall is the second time Floey's work has lined up with the ancient-astronaut imagery from Ayer's living-room posters. Her own art has been pointing south, toward Palenque and Tikal, before she ever left the mountain.

The soap line on the mirror — "There is only the existence of the present moment" — quietly establishes that Floey and Cutty share a Zen background, a private vocabulary, and a habit of leaving each other messages in unlikely places. It also tells Cutty that Floey was still herself, still leaving signals, when she walked out of the bungalow.

And the trunk is a love letter shaped like luggage. Floey took every paint tube and every sock with her, but she left a box of Braughn family papers behind — ransacked by someone, but still mostly intact. The contents of that trunk will reshape what Cutty thinks he knows about his family, and the chapter ends with the trunk thumping into the dirt beside Rocinante, unopened.

It is also the chapter where Paula stops being a rescue and starts being a partner. The banter sharpens. The "shut up and lift" lands. By the end, "we drive to Oxnard" arrives without anyone needing to ask.

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Leave a rating or short review — it helps other listeners find the story.

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Full Episode Description

In Chapter 3 of Revelation at Tikal, the search for Floey takes Cutty up into the mountains north of Pasadena, where Rocinante grinds her way through hairpins with the BMW lashed to the stern rack like a pendulum trying to drag the whole rig into the canyon.

A glossy billboard for Villa Viejo, a paper retirement project that exists only in an architect's hallucination, gives way to a smaller, hand-painted sign tilted in the weeds: WELCOME TO THE TEMPLE OF THE RISING MOON. A yellow moon orbits a blue-and-green planet on the emblem, like a bumper sticker for cosmic sincerity. A dirt track climbs through ragged ivy past sagging houses and storm-damaged sheds. In the dirt lot at the top, Floey's wood-sided 1959 station wagon is parked outside a tired-looking house, and two bearded men built like mafia bouncers are loading duffel bags into it.

The man directing them is small, soft-bodied, and dressed in slacks and a tight black turtleneck. He has the angular bone structure of a low-budget movie Jesus and the calm, judgmental brown eyes of a man who has rehearsed his patience. He introduces himself as Ayer Dada, founder of the Temple of the Rising Moon. The car, he says serenely, has already been sold. Pink slip and all. Floey gave it up when she joined the Brotherhood and surrendered her material possessions, the way all members do.

Cutty doesn't believe a word of it. The wagon was their father's. Floey would not have let it go without a fight.

Ayer cannot be openly challenged on commune doctrine, so Cutty does the next best thing. He asks to look around, and Ayer, smiling, lets him. Then Ayer climbs into the woody and drives off with one of his bouncers, leaving the larger one planted in the lot, eyes locked on Cutty with the tense expectation of a guard dog.

Inside the main house, Cutty walks through a converted living room reeking of damp wool, dust, and incense. The fireplace has been turned into an altar to a silver-framed photograph of Ayer himself. The walls are crowded with tapestries, gurus, politicians, and Ayer always conveniently included in the shot. Between them run glossy posters of Palenque and Tikal with luminous flying saucers hovering above the pyramids and beams of light hauling stick-figured humans up to helmeted "gods." A red-underlined caption explains, helpfully, that the Maya were waiting all this time for Ayer to decode their space program.

A small procession of robed members shuffles past Cutty toward the temple bell, heads bowed, eyes on the floor. He drifts deeper into the building looking for any trace of Floey. In a back hallway, an open door reveals a small cot, a slump-shouldered young woman, and a Yale University Law sweatshirt that has clearly been through too many washings.

Her name is Paula. Soft pink-blond hair, a small arc of freckles, blue-gray eyes still sharp under the tiredness. She quit a third year of law school after deciding she believed in billable hours more than justice, got dragged up the mountain by her sister, and bought the routine for one bad week. Now her parents and aunt have sent her a five-hundred-dollar check meant for traveling, and Ayer is refusing to hand it over. He has put her on a vow of silence as punishment, claiming the devil scrambled her soul segments.

Cutty offers a deal. He'll get the check back from Larry the ex-accountant in the office behind the garage. She gets her choices back. A bus ticket, a plane, anything not stocked with true believers.

Paula stands up. The motion is deliberate enough to register, a small instinctive test of what the rescuer does with it, and she catches Cutty looking. "If we're caught, you're carrying me out bridal style," she says. "Deal," he answers, "though I'm more of a fireman-carry romantic." A few lines of crooked banter later, the two of them are walking toward the garage stairs in lockstep, like a lawyer and a client about to commit some tidy white-collar crime while the rest of the Brotherhood is locked into two hours of chanting up at the temple.

The bearded enforcer Ayer left behind is still tracking them. He follows them across the dirt lot, breathing close to Cutty's neck, and when Cutty starts up the office stairs, the big man lunges. Cutty goes off the side, rolls down the ivy bank, and comes up dirty and laughing about needing a stunt double.

What he does next is the kind of decision Cutty makes in a heartbeat and pays for later. He remembers a German shepherd that once charged him in Reno, and how he stopped it by yelling and charging back. He decides to test the same principle on a cult enforcer. He yells from the bottom of his lungs, runs straight at the bigger man, and snaps a karate kick at his solar plexus.

The kick lands lower than intended.

The enforcer folds like someone hit a kill switch and goes down in a tight, agonized knot. Paula stares, then lets out one short, disbelieving laugh. "You really do your own stunts. Remind me never to argue with you about anything important."

By the end of the chapter, Cutty has a bruised conscience, a dirt-streaked shirt, a temporarily disabled goon on the ground behind him, and a brand-new accomplice halfway up the office stairs already calling him "Sensei."

The Moon Job is on.

Rocinante grinding up the switchbacks with the BMW lashed to her stern rack

The Villa Viejo billboard and the hand-painted Temple of the Rising Moon sign

Floey's 1959 woody station wagon being loaded for sale in the dirt lot

Ayer Dada, the soft-bodied guru in the black turtleneck and his Brotherhood doctrine

The altar to Ayer in the converted fireplace, and the wall of gurus, politicians, and Ayer-with-celebrities photos

Posters of Palenque and Tikal with flying saucers — the ancient-astronaut seed planted early

Cutty's first meeting with Paula, the Yale-Law dropout in the wrinkled sweatshirt

The trapped five-hundred-dollar check from Florida and Ayer's "devil scrambled her soul segments" excuse

Larry the ex-accountant and the office behind the garage

The temple bell, the procession of robed members, and the two-hour window

The bearded enforcer, the ivy bank, and the karate kick that lands lower than planned

Paula's first laugh and the deal that turns her into Cutty's accomplice

Chapter 3 turns a missing-person story into a road story. Up to this point, Cutty has been retracing Floey's shadow through gallery openings, bunker jam sessions, and a long-distance call to Nevada. Here, for the first time, he finds physical evidence of where she has been — her father's woody wagon being sold off in a dirt lot — and the place that swallowed her: the Temple of the Rising Moon.

This is also the chapter where the trilogy's deeper machinery starts showing through. Ayer Dada is a small-time guru with big-time appetites, but the posters in his living room are no accident: Palenque, Tikal, ancient-astronaut iconography, helmeted "gods" hauling humans up to flying saucers. Floey's gravity has been pulling her toward Mexico and Guatemala for a reason, and the same iconography that will surface again in later chapters is hanging on the walls here, in red underline.

And then there is Paula. Cutty walks into her room looking for a clue about his sister and walks out with a partner. She is sharper than he expects, more wounded than she lets on, and the chemistry between them is built into their first three exchanges. The bridal-style joke, the bra-less straightening, the fireman-carry comeback, the bumped shoulder in the hallway — none of it is decorative. Paula is the second protagonist of this story, and the road south is not the same trip without her.

The chapter ends with Cutty fully committed: not just to finding Floey, but to dragging at least one other person out of the wreckage on the way.

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Chapter 2: Rocinante and Old Friends

Floey's no-show at her own gallery opening sends Cutty back to old haunts. He rides up to Jerry's Pasadena house, lets his hand trail along Rocinante — the thirty-foot diesel bus Floey gave him as a graduation gift — and drops down into the bomb-shelter bunker where Jerry, Mark, and Randy are still jamming as if no time has passed. The weed is gone, replaced by jars of fermenting cabbage juice. Floey, of course, is the one who sold them on it. A long-distance call to Carl in Nevada turns up something colder than dead air: fear in his voice, and a warning to keep Floey away from the children.

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## Full Episode Description

In Chapter 2 of Revelation at Tikal, Cutty's search for his missing sister carries him sideways into the past.

He rides up to Jerry's place in Pasadena, where Rocinante still sits on the cracked driveway like a beached whale next to Jerry's eternally "almost restored" Nash. The house is the same and not the same. The television has been gutted and replaced by a murky aquarium with a single swollen-headed goldfish drifting around like a tiny convict in an orange jumpsuit. Mark's surgical neatness still rules the surfaces, but the neglected fish tank suggests his order is already starting to rot.

Cutty hasn't come for the bus. He's circling old haunts, driven by the larger question of why Floey didn't show at her own gallery opening that morning.

The story of Rocinante carries the chapter's first weight. Floey bought Cutty the diesel-guzzling, thirty-foot recreational vehicle as a high school graduation gift, carved out of her share from selling the family ranch — the one she sold when she married Eugene "Carl" and shipped Cutty off to boarding school. She paid less than she should have, the way she always did. People did things for Floey the way iron filings line up for a magnet. Realtors, mechanics, and one stunned banker all seemed to wake up in the middle of helping her, wondering when they had agreed.

Following the music, Cutty drops down into the bomb shelter behind the house. The bunker is late-fifties vintage, built by a previous owner with a reputation for high-functioning paranoia, then stripped of its fallout fantasies and converted by Jerry into a musician's den: waterbeds, an over-tuned sound system, instruments wired for maximum volume and minimum sleep.

Jerry is half-naked on a waterbed with his guitar. Mark is on bass, ghosting his fingers over the strings as if he doesn't want to fully acknowledge Cutty's arrival. Randy stands in the middle with his flute, eyes half-lidded, swaying to the rhythm. They are jamming exactly the way Cutty left them a year ago, locked into an eternal practice session.

Only one thing is off. The familiar marijuana cloud is gone, replaced by something sour and vegetal. Mark opens a cabinet, pulls out a glass crusted with dried green sludge, and pours from a pitcher of cabbage juice. Floey, of course, turned them on to it. She convinced them it would replace drugs, sharpen the senses, and even land Randy a job at his father's insurance company. Floey's charisma working at full strength, even in absentia.

Mark steers the conversation toward Mahesh "the Animal" Davis, the only one of the old crew Cutty ever truly trusted. The story is about a sixteen-year-old neighbor, a tutoring arrangement gone sideways, and Mark's barely concealed pleasure at having walked in on it. The story matters less to Mark than the way he can use it to needle Cutty about his own private silences.

Cutty extracts himself, climbs back upstairs, and uses Jerry's phone — Jerry's father's bill — to dial long distance to the Magnin ranch in Nevada's Big Smoky Valley. His nephew Davy answers, repeating that he is not supposed to talk to Cutty anymore, that Daddy doesn't want him "corrupted," maybe by those Zen books. Then Carl gets on the line. He tells Cutty the place is locked against Floey. She hasn't been there. She won't be coming back. And then, beneath the anger, something Cutty has never heard in Carl's voice before: fear.

"You tell her to stay away from me and the children."

By the end of the chapter, the gallery's missing painter, the bunker's missing weed, and the ranch's missing welcome have all clicked into the same quiet pattern. Floey isn't just absent. Something is wrong.

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## In This Episode

- Rocinante on the cracked Pasadena driveway, and the story of how Floey bought it - Jerry's "almost restored" Nash and the gutted-television aquarium - Mark's territorial neatness, the policed ashtrays, and the borrowed Webster's incident - Down the steel stairs into the converted bomb shelter - Jerry, Mark, and Randy locked into the same year-old jam session - Cabbage juice, Floey's latest spell, and Randy's improbable new job - Mahesh "the Animal" Davis and the gossip Mark can't resist sharpening - Mark's needling about Cutty's private life, and the trauma Cutty cannot quite name - A long-distance call to the Magnin ranch in Nevada's Big Smoky Valley - Davy, the Zen books, and Carl's warning to keep Floey away from the children - The new note in Carl's voice: fear

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Chapter 2 widens the world without leaving Pasadena. The gallery opening in Chapter 1 told us Floey was missing. This chapter tells us why her absence matters to so many people, and how far her gravity reaches.

We see the Floey effect in action through other men: how she could walk into a bunker full of pot smokers and leave them drinking cabbage juice and applying for insurance jobs. We see her financial cleverness in the story of Rocinante. And we see, for the first time, what Floey looks like from the outside to someone who lived with her — Carl, scared, locking the ranch against her.

The chapter also begins to draw the shape of Cutty's own buried history: the father's suicide, the missing years before thirteen, the boarding-school exile, and the silences he carries into every room he walks into. Mark prods at those silences for sport. Cutty deflects. But the chapter quietly establishes that Cutty is searching for two things at once — his sister, and whatever he himself cannot quite remember.

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## If You're Enjoying the Story

- Follow **Revelation at Tikal** so you don't miss the next chapter. - Leave a rating or short review — it helps other listeners find the story. - Visit **cuttybraughn.com** for photos, background notes, and more behind-the-scenes material from the road to Tikal.

Chapter 1 — The Tombstone Painting

Los Angeles, December 20, 1977. Cutty Braughn flies in from Anchorage expecting a surprise reunion at his sister Floey's first gallery opening on La Cienega. What he walks into instead is a small framed painting of a tombstone — her name, her dates, her handwriting — and a room full of strangers placing bets on whether she's dead, missing, or staging a stunt to raise her prices.

Eight hundred miles south, on the old Maya causeway between Palenque and Tikal, the woman who used to be Florence Magnin-Braughn is walking barefoot toward an altar she doesn't yet understand. Neither of them knows about the other.

The opening chapter of Revelation at Tikal — a 1970s literary thriller about money, missing children, painted gods, and the year a brother went looking for his sister and found a stranger waiting at the end of the road.

Narrated by the author. New chapters every Wednesday.