Night of the Jaguar (4 page)

Then Ezra called out, and a woman brought a thing, and Ezra put another shining thing on his face that made his eyes look like a fish’s eyes and studied the thing the woman had brought, which was white as a cloud and rustled like leaves and was covered with little black marks, like dead ants. Moie had seen Father Perrin do the same with the thing he called Bible, which was how he spoke to the dead of his people. Moie waited respectfully while Ezra spoke to the dead and then Ezra smiled and said that the freighter
Guyana Castle
would leave for Miami in two days with a load of sawn timber. He knew this ship and described it, so that Moie would know it, even at night. Moie thanked him, and Ezra said that it was he that should be grateful, for Moie was the most interesting thing that had happened in Fernandino since the last hurricane.
He also said, when you get to Miami, you should get you some clothes, because they would arrest you looking like that. And he explained what
arrest
was.

Two nights later, Moie was in his canoe looking up at the rusting black hull of the
Guyana Castle
. The ship was tied to a long street that went out into the water, and this street was lit with
wai’ichura
lights that were brighter than the moon at the full, and there were men there standing in front of a small street that led upward into the ship. But Moie was on the other side, on the black, oily water, nearly invisible in the shade of the ship itself. Five lengths of men above him there was a low place on the ship’s side, where he had to climb. No man could climb up that sheer wall, so Moie mixed some powders together from small skin sacks he took from his net bag, and sucked the powders through a tube into his nostrils, and began a low chant. While he chanted he wrapped everything he wanted to take with him in a rope and placed the end of the rope in his mouth. Now his senses changed, expanded, while the part of him that was Moie shrank away. He smelled and heard things humans could not sense. Through different eyes he stared up at the rail far above. A tension built in his hind limbs. There was a fading sensation of rising through the air before he quite vanished to himself.

When he discovered he was Moie once more, he was in darkness deep in the belly of the ship, surrounded by the stink of oil and steam and the more familiar smell of cut wood. Hard shapes pressed against his back and the ship was no longer docked, but moving, her engines a constant throb in his ears and through his whole body. He was exhausted as he always was by such experiences, but he remembered to keep well hidden, and he had the suitcase and his other possessions at hand. After drinking some water from his water skin, he made himself as comfortable as he could amid the pallets of lumber and ate the herbs and started the ritual that would slow his body’s functions down to a level near to death, although he knew his spirit would keep lively enough in a different world.

Silence awakened him, and the absence of motion. He opened his eyes to dim light. They had broken open the hatches at the bow of the ship, and shafts of sunlight made bright pillars there. Moie moved farther astern and lower down, so that the stacked boards were like a dark
cliff above him. Machinery clanked and groaned and Moie waited for the night, as Ezra had advised. He was extremely hungry.

The sunlight faded, the noises of unloading ceased, and the only sounds he heard were the fugitive rumbles and clankings of
wai’ichura
machines. Moie prised a two-by-twelve mahogany plank from its pallet and dragged it behind him as he climbed a ladder. His case was secured to his body with the rope. There was no one on deck. As in Trinidad, the ship was tied lengthwise to a dock, and the way off led past a guard. Moie moved silently to the other side, dropped the plank, and followed it into the warm water. He slid belly-first onto the plank and paddled away toward the lights of the city to the west.

The night was perfectly clear and only a light sea breeze ruffled the surface of the bay. Above in the cloudless black sky Jaguar was waxing, returning from his voyage to Rain. Moie studied the sky and felt his heart seize in his breast. The friendly stars of his home were all gone. The Old Woman, the Otter, the Dolphin, the Snake, all vanished and replaced by a meaningless jumble. It was only with difficulty and the help of Jaguar that he suppressed his panic. The machines of the
wai’ichuranan
must be mighty indeed if they could rearrange the stars. Still, Jaguar ruled the night, even here, and that was something. He calmed himself and paddled to shore, heading for what looked like a small piece of forest embedded in the great cliff houses of the dead.

Muddy sand beneath his feet, he left the plank and walked onto the shore. There were trees here, some strange but others familiar, this great fig, for example. He paused and sniffed the night air. It stank of strange gases, like the ship, but he could also detect the lives of animals, some strange to him, others almost familiar. He began to feel a little better. At least he would not starve.

J
ennifer Simpson awoke early to birdsong, a mockingbird trilling in the garden and the finches in their wickerwork cage on the patio of the big house. The mockingbird finished a long phrase and then began to imitate the finches. She slipped from the bed and stood naked in the doorway of her cottage, a rangy, high-breasted girl with a mass of thick red-gold hair down to the small of her back, and covered from head to toe with pale freckles. Her face was oval, finely featured, with pale blue eyes as blank and open as a child’s. (An observer, and there was one, thought “Botticelli,” not for the first time.) The air was as cool as it would get today, and every surface of leaf and stem in the garden was covered with glistening dew. It was her favorite time of day, because although she didn’t mind communal living, she harbored a lust for privacy. She took a mask and snorkel from a hook on the porch post, retrieved a rolled-up waxed paper bag from a niche in the rough stone wall, slipped her feet into rubber flip-flops, and started down the coral-gravel path. After a few yards she encountered an enormous spiderweb laid across it, occupied by one of those spiders with a spiky body that looked like it was made of highly colored plastic. She reached for the name of it and came up empty. Scotty was always telling her the names of things, but it was hard to keep them all in her mind. Nature Boy, Kevin called him, but privately, and also The Hobbit.

From the terrace of the house Shirley let out a scream and then yelled
“Come and get it!”
three times. Jenny stopped and looked back over her shoulder, waiting to see if the noise had roused Kevin. No, and she was glad of it, because although she loved him and all, he had a way of hovering, and she wanted this time to herself. She knelt and eased herself under the web, shuddering a little when it caught on her back. The rule was nothing was killed in the garden, everything lived in balance, no pesticides, no fertilizers, the way nature intended. Jenny was down with that, and Scotty seemed to make it work.

The pool had been dug out of living coral rock, and the spoil from the dig had been used to build a little hill on which grew dozens of different kinds of bromeliads and orchids. From near its crest a good-size waterfall, driven by a solar pump, burbled merrily down into the pool. The water was clear as air. Scotty had arranged for it to feed the garden sprinklers, from which it seeped back through the porous soil to return to its source, just as nature intended water to do. The rain made up for any loss. She spat into the mask, rinsed it out, slipped it on, and lay down upon the rippling surface.

It had been designed to imitate a natural pond in Amazonia, and it was big, a half-acre of surface and forty feet deep at the deepest. Rupert, the owner, had been to Amazonia a number of times and had built the pool with that in mind, although he had never got it to balance right until he found Scotty. Scotty was a genius at practical ecology, so said Rupert. Everyone had a genius, that was Rupert’s idea, and given the right social conditions, it would flourish. Jenny had not until now received any evidence of her own genius, but Rupert said she was only nineteen and should give it a chance. When Jenny was seven, one of her foster parents had taken her to a dentist in Sioux Falls, and in the waiting room there had been a large tank full of tropical fish, brilliant, darting things full of light and life, and there was a tiny statue of a mermaid in it that seemed to open a little pirate chest at intervals, when a mass of bubbles would emerge and go glittering to the surface. Jenny had been transfixed and had thought at the time that no heavenly joy promised by the Disciples of Christ Sunday school could match actually
being
that little mermaid, spending the hours opening the pirate chest, surrounded by brilliant fish. And now here she was.

She took a breath, jackknifed her long body, and plunged downward into the deep. The fish scattered before her, hundreds of fish, she had no idea how many. Scotty knew; he kept careful records of birth, growth, and death, part of the ecological balance. Jenny had little interest in that part of it, although she knew the names of the main kinds: discus, like enameled dinner plates, a dozen varieties of cichlids with bright flowing fins, clusters of solemn angelfish, headstanders streaked with crimson, clouds of tiny jewel-like killifish, golden dorados, the jagged metal flash of hatchetfish: and also, swimming slowly in a tight group, looking like thugs outside a candy store, a substantial school of red-bellied piranhas. These were Rupert’s special pets, which Jenny thought was a little weird. They were also the only beings in the compound that got red meat, for Rupert would go out at dusk every day when he was in residence and fling bits of dripping offal to them from the crest of the waterfall hill and watch the water boil as they thrashed in their blood frenzy. Scotty said they were perfectly harmless unless you were bleeding or moving in an erratic fashion, although what a piranha would think erratic was something she did not know, nor did she believe that anyone else knew. She tried to avoid them on her swims, for she didn’t trust them nor the look in their beady little eyes. She’d known guys with that look.

Still, here she was in the better-than-heaven, the little mermaid in the clear water, far from Iowa, in Miami, with plenty of sex and food and a place to stay where they didn’t hassle you, and something important to do in life. The Earthly Paradise: one of Rupert’s phrases, and it was true.

The important thing was saving the tropical rain forests, which was why Rupert had gathered them all together in his house, so they could all live in an ecologically sensitive way, giving an example to the world, and forging a political movement. Jenny did not see that they were doing much forging. The community spent a lot of time—the Professor excepted—sitting around naked or half-naked, smoking superior marijuana and discussing what it was okay to eat or use, depending on whether the product was ecological or not, and they spent a lot of time recycling; the total trash produced by the six of them, plus guests, didn’t fill a shoe box a week. The forging part was mainly her and Evangelina Vargos, who lived off the property, going out nearly every day in
the brightly painted VW bus, setting up a table in some public place, and trying to get people to take folders and sign petitions and contribute to the Forest Planet Alliance.

Jenny’s secret was that she snuck food to the fish, disturbing the ecological balance Scotty so diligently (and irritatingly) sought. The fish were allowed to eat only plant and animal matter derived from the garden plot fertilized by water and sludge sucked up by the solar pump. What she fed them was thus beyond un-kosher—bread balls made from toxic loaves purchased on the sly from the Winn-Dixie and secreted in various hidey-holes around the property. Now she hung in the crystal water with her arm extended to a cloud of living jewels that pecked with delicate mouths at her fingers and the dissolving bread. It was so cool, the absolutely coolest thing in her life so far, better than dope, quite often better than sex with Kevin, and she wished very much for someone she could share it with. Then the food was gone except for tiny flecks, each surrounded by a little mob of fish, and then even that was gone and the fish dispersed into their normal flowing patterns.

She surfaced, blowing, and lay on her back, her young breasts bobbling prettily above the water. Her nipples were stiffened from the slight chill of the lower levels, and this produced a pleasant tingling in her groin, and she thought that if Kevin were still in bed she might slide in there and get him to give her a good one, as she often did after these expeditions. Then she spied Rupert walking down the path to the pool, naked, old, and terribly hairy. She sighed. The sight of Rupert Zenger naked always had a peculiar detumescent effect on her, for which she felt a passing shame. He could not after all help being fifty, and the body, of course, was a healthy thing, as he himself often said, but she wished he wouldn’t shove it in all their faces so often. He was a solidly built, exceptionally hairy man, with a Brilloesque beard down to his chest and a full head of hair of the same consistency sticking straight out eight or so inches all around his long skull. He had a bony face, ugly in the honest Lincoln style, and large mild brown eyes that reminded Jenny of one of the Amazonian mammals in the Forest Planet brochures, a brocket deer or a tapir. She watched him approach and kicked herself to the shallows. As always her eye was drawn, if briefly, to his crotch. He certainly had a big one, truly the largest she had seen, and it was both funny and
a little scary the way it swung like a clock pendulum as he walked. The Tripod, Kevin called him, nor did she appreciate the boyfriend’s sly suggestions that she and Scotty’s girlfriend, Luna, were angling to get a piece of it, and she always having to tell him that she wasn’t interested, and she didn’t think Luna was either, and that his was perfectly big enough and fine. Zenger paused and selected a towel from the large plywood box full of them on the pool margin.

She hoisted herself up onto the smoothed coral slab that ran along the near edge of the pool, removed her mask, and wrung the water out of her hair. Zenger came up behind her and said, “Good morning, Jennifer. Had your swim?”

She turned a little, and unfortunately there It was a couple of feet in front of her face. She made herself look up at his face.

“Yeah, it’s great. It looks like another nice day.”

“Indeed. There are croissants for breakfast. And the Heidi mangoes.”

This was his way of giving the order, a little annoying, too, he never actually asked for anything or treated anyone like a servant, but Jenny made breakfast for him and the whole group every morning. The expectation was there, although she could not recall when it had been decided that this was part of her function. Shirley screamed again, which was certainly part of
her
function. Rupert walked slowly down the gentle slope into the water.

Ten minutes later, dressed in a Forest Planet T-shirt and white shorts, with her hair in a damp braid, Jenny stood in the huge, cool, and elaborately equipped kitchen, cutting mangoes into slices and arranging them in parenthetical rows on a blue glazed platter. She had ground the organic shade-grown fair-trade coffee and placed it in the drip machine and had the croissants warming in the oven. No carcinogenic microwaves here. The mangoes done, she set a white camellia at the edge of the plate and brought it out to the patio. The table was set for six with colorful native ceramics from Latin America and the Caribbean and tablecloth and napkins made of hemp fibers by indigenous craftspeople. She went back into the kitchen, poured the coffee into a thermos flask, and used a powerful Oster juicer to extract the juice from a dozen and a half organic oranges. While she was doing this, Scotty
came in and, as he did every morning, arranged in a tall crystal vase the flowers he had just picked from the garden: yellow orchids, frangipani, a branch of wildly violet bougainvillea. Jenny looked up from her machine to watch him do it. Scotty said flower arrangement was a high art in Japan, and that samurai had competed to be the best at it. Jenny didn’t know if this was more of Scotty’s weirdness or really true, but she did see that there was something about the way the flowers looked when Scotty did them that was different, that made them look like they had grown that way, and that she never quite got when she tried it herself with the pickle jar in her cottage.

The Hobbit. As usual when Kevin supplied a name, Jenny felt her mind locked into seeing the person that way. Scotty was quite short, inches shorter than Jenny herself, and built like a barrel, with a head that looked a little big for his body, and he
was
extremely hairy, bearded, and with his dark hair drawn back into a ponytail. But unlike the hobbits in the movies (and Jenny had seen all of them, all more than once), Scotty’s face, which was actually pretty handsome in a rough way, she thought, had on it a forbidding expression, almost a scowl, as if life had petulantly refused him something he thought he deserved. His eyes were tired blue, startling against the deep tan of his face. He was only a little over thirty but looked older: Jenny thought of him as an old guy, in the same class as Rupert and the Professor.

He finished his flowers and brought the vase out to the table, all this without a word or a glance at Jenny. She was used to this and not offended. People had their peculiarities, this she had learned early in a series of foster homes, and her position was that you minded your business and they minded theirs and everyone got along. Scotty was a bear in the morning; Rupert wanted things but never asked you up front; Kevin was almost always stoned; Luna was picky and tight-assed in a variety of ways; the Professor never got naked in public and he talked funny, being English. All bearable faults. As for Jenny herself: not the sharpest knife in the drawer, an expression she had overheard Luna using in reference to her in a conversation with Rupert, which she wasn’t really hanging out under a window to listen in on, but happened to hear anyway. It had hurt her at the time, but she had after all heard something like it many times before, and anyway so fucking what, there were other things in life
besides big brains, and those that had them, in her experience, didn’t seem any happier than the rest of the stupid world.

Breakfast at La Casita (for so the house was named, and the name displayed on a hand-painted ceramic plaque affixed to one of the squat coral pillars at the gate) was where the Forest Planet Alliance gathered each morning to discuss the tasks of the day. All other meals were either informal or by invitation. Rupert often dined out or else entertained important people in the large, airy dining room. On those occasions, Jenny found herself serving and busing, while Scotty and Luna cooked, and Kevin washed up. They received no pay for this, for technically they were employees of the Forest Planet Alliance Foundation and were paid to serve the interests of this 501 (c) nonprofit corporation rather than soup, but this was what they did, more or less in return for their food and rent-free accommodations. Jenny thought it was the greatest deal she had ever heard about, and Kevin thought it was a rip-off, but she didn’t see him doing anything to change it anytime soon.