Night of the Jaguar (8 page)

A little pause here before the detective said, “Because there was no guy. The ground was nice and soft, the gardener had been there that morning and spread fresh compost around the plants. There wasn’t a single human footprint anywhere on the grounds, and there’s an eight-foot wall around the whole property, alarmed, gated, with no sign of forced entry.”

“A solo by the cat, then,” said Paz. “A wild animal escaped from one of those private zoos you read about, guy’s got fourteen half-starved Siberian tigers in a double-wide trailer…”

“Which escaped and made its way to Antonio Fuentes’s house and lay in wait on his roof until just the moment the man steps onto his balcony and jumps him, even though the area is lousy with dogs and cats and coons. There were peacocks wandering around there, too. It’s that kind of neighborhood. You think it just woke up that day and said mm-mm, gonna get me some Cuban entrepreneur tonight?”

A number of wiseass remarks flitted across Paz’s brain then, but he declined them all. Instead, he shrugged and said, “Fine. You got me baffled. What do you want me to say, Tito? It was more magic in Miami?”

“That’d be a start.” He paused here and then in a hesitant tone added, “It was a near full moon last night.”

“Oh, well, then. Definitely a werewolf. Or were-tiger, in our case.”

“Do they
have
were-tigers?”

“Do
they
have…? Tito, for crying out loud, listen to what you’re saying!”

Morales laughed nervously and rolled his eyes, to show (falsely) that he knew the comment had been a joke. “Yeah, okay, but seriously, is there, like, any buzz about people using predators ritually, a cult….”

Paz stood up, suddenly tired of the whole line of conversation. “No, Tito, I’m fresh out of cults. I don’t fuck with that stuff, I never fucked with that stuff, and I never
want
to fuck with that stuff. What I want to do right now is take my kid to the beach. Sorry. Give my best to the Major.”

With that, he returned to the kitchen. Yolanda had served out the last of the lunches, and the grill was void of everything but burnt-on crud. He removed this with degreaser and a steel scraper, using more force than was called for, cursing under his breath. When the grill was clean, he changed into cutoffs, sandals, and a clean mesh T-shirt and went into the tiny office. The girl was sitting in her grandmother’s swivel chair drawing with crayons on copy paper. She was already in her red Speedo, shorts, and the pink sneakers.

“Where’s your grandmother?”

“In the front. She’s yelling at Brenda again. She got the orders mixed up on table two and the man yelled.”

“Let’s go out the back, then,” said Paz.

Matheson Hammock consists of a mangrove forest and a broad muddy beach lapped by tepid wavelets and is nearly the last remnant on Florida’s Gold Coast of what the entire coastline of South Florida looked like before white people decided that beach living had status. Amelia liked it because she was frightened of big waves and because the place was literally crawling with littoral creatures—several kinds of crabs, seabirds, jellyfish, and a variety of mollusks. She knew their names and their habits, and tutored Paz about this in a manner absurdly reminiscent of her mother. Not too long ago Jimmy Paz had been something of a Casanova and had not thought much about children before he got this one, but like many such reformed rakes it turned out that he was an
excellent husband to a woman not all that easy to live with, and as for fatherhood, each time he looked at his daughter he grew weak with love.

She ran ahead of him on the beach, the lowering sun casting a long shadow ahead of her, causing panic among the herd of fiddler crabs she was chasing. This sun also made of her bouncing curls a golden nimbus about her head; she was golden all over; even her eyes were golden. Technically, as the child of a mulatto (Paz) and a white woman, she was a quadroon, and had she been born in Cuba a century ago she would have gone straight to the brothels of Havana. Now, of course, everything was just dandy for a mixed-race girl, no problems at all coming down the line for the little sweetheart. When Paz brought up his memories of middle school—where as a black half-white Cuban he had enjoyed the unusual honor of being abused by all three of the major races at once—his gut clenched. Naturally, now that the mom was an M.D., the talk was of private schooling in impeccably liberal venues, but Paz knew all about liberals, too. There was no escape.

On the other hand it was a lovely day, the child was healthy and bright, and all that lay in the unknowable future, Paz now demonstrating to himself his remarkable ability to shut down a line of disturbing thought, a skill that had brought him sane through any number of uncanny and terrifying events while on the police force. It was not for nothing that Tito Morales had consulted him on his cat or cannibal murder. No, shut down that line, too.

The child was approaching an area where dunes and beach grass extended toward the bay. She had been told repeatedly not to walk across such areas barefoot, but now did it anyway, despite Paz’s shouted warning, and picked up a sand spur in her foot and fell over and got another one in her hand. Shrieks, wails, refusal to let Daddy look at the burrs, hideous hopping about to avoid same; then the frantic capture, the forced removal of the burs, the child transformed from an intelligent, competent angel into a writhing animal across his lap. Then, the operation complete, exhausted whining, and a demand to be carried back to their blanket.

Which Paz was happy to do, foreseeing an end to the days of carrying, and not wanting to miss a single one. At their blanket, Paz offered
her a pink, pilled item, laundered nearly to pulp, that she had needed for sleep during her entire conscious existence, to which came the reply, “I think I’m too mature for a security blanket, Daddy.”

“We could use it as a regular blanket, though,” replied Paz, and so they did, the girl curled up in the crook of his arm with the spurned item over her and asleep in minutes. Paz tried to read a newsmagazine, but after ten minutes of trying to figure out the latest corporate scandal, he, too, succumbed to nap time.

And awakened in panic: Amelia was not there. He shot to his feet and looked to the shore, and a tide of relief washed over him, because there was the red bathing suit. The beach had filled up a little with people taking a little fun time after work: a couple of families, some teenagers goofing around with a Frisbee, and some kids and a black Labrador dog splashing in the shallows. Amelia seemed to be in conversation with a boy standing in a Styrofoam dinghy bobbing in the small waves close to shore. The Lab was barking insanely at them, without apparent effect. Paz walked toward the water, and as he approached he saw that it wasn’t a boy at all, but a very short stocky man, darker than Paz, with straight blue-black hair and some marks on his face. There was something around his neck on a cord. When Paz came within twenty feet of the two of them, the man pushed the dinghy away with the aluminum oar he was holding, and, still standing upright in the stern, propelled the craft rapidly away with an odd swirling motion of its blade.

“Who was that, baby?” Paz asked.

“Just a man. He talked funny.”

“Funny English?”

“No, funny Spanish. I could hardly tell what he was saying. He said I had a beautiful chew it. What’s a beautiful chew it?”

“I don’t know, kid. You know you’re not supposed to talk to strangers when Mommy and I aren’t there.”

“I know, but he was in a little boat,” said the child, with the logic of seven years. “And he was sad.”

“Why was he sad?”

A shrug. “That’s what I couldn’t understand. Could we go for ice cream?”

Moie paddles on across the shining calm water. That morning he awoke in his tree hammock, with a full belly and a head filled with dreams of killing and the taste of hot flesh between his jaws. He packed his hammock and his black suit into his case, and wearing only his breechclout, he walked down to the edge of the bay. He saw that the
wai’ichuranan
had left boats floating and tied for anyone to take, just as the Runiya do, so he took one.

Moie’s boat is made of what he thinks is some crumbly white wood like balsa, and the paddles are made of metal and a kind of very hard red stuff and are too long. He has to stand and use one of them like a pole.

He goes south, hugging the shore, past Sunrise Point, past Tahiti Beach, past the canal on which stood the house where Jaguar had taken the man Fuentes. He doesn’t know why he goes south, only that it is the proper direction to go now. Presently, he comes to a long sand spit extending east into the bay that has many
wai’ichuranan
on it, although they are not fishing or repairing boats, but just sitting and eating or running around like dogs, and screaming in their monkey talk. He has to pass close to the beach on the course he is traveling, and there he sees the little girl, standing and looking out on the water as if she were waiting for him. She is wrapped in red cloth, as the Runiya do with the little girls who are left for Jaguar, and that attracts his attention. Also, he can see her death quite clearly shining behind her left shoulder. He had noticed already that the
wai’ichuranan
had their deaths showing when they were small children, but then they died, and the deaths went inside of them. By the age that this girl is, they are often all gone, so this was also unusual. Perhaps Jaguar has prepared this one for himself and Moie has to do something with her. But Jaguar is silent in his heart.

Nevertheless, he paddles close to her and says in Spanish, “Little girl, answer me! Are you
hninxa
?”

The girl says, “No, I’m Amelia. What’s your name?”

Of course he is not going to tell a little girl his name. “Tell me the truth,” he says, “should I take you with me and give you to Jaguar? You can come in the canoe, even though it is wrong for girls and men to be in the same canoe. But it may be that this is
ryuxit
in the land of the dead.”

But the girl only stared at him impolitely and said nothing. Then he saw that a brown man was coming toward them, and there was something about the man that Moie didn’t like, he did not exactly trail his death like a real person, but there was something
else
accompanying him, something Moie had never seen before. It frightened him. To the little girl, he said, “You have a beautiful
achaurit,
” and then he stroked his boat rapidly away from the shore.

P
rofessor Cooksey didn’t drive, so Rupert asked Jenny to take him in the Mercedes to Fairchild Tropical Gardens for a science lecture he had to give. Actually Rupert asked Jenny to ask Kevin, who was the group’s designated driver, but Kevin had been stoned and in bed with headphones on since the blowup of the day before, and rather than having to pull his cable out and have a fight about it, she decided to do the run herself. She didn’t mind this at all because she enjoyed driving the big old car, which was a 1968 model 230, in cream with red leather upholstery, that had belonged to Rupert’s mother. It was like being in an old-time movie driving that thing, especially with the Professor next to her talking in his English accent and the churchy music he liked playing on the radio. And, unusually for her, she had a skirt on because the leather got hot beneath her thighs if the car had to stay out in the sun; this, too, added to the effect of being displaced in time.

She didn’t know why the Professor didn’t drive. Her personal theory was he was too old, but Kevin said he was a drunk and they took his license away. Although she had never seen him drunk, so that might be one of Kevin’s stories. When she thought of that, she recalled the story he had made up about the Indian getting lost, which even
she
didn’t believe, and when she asked him later why he did it, he was nasty, and
that’s when he got his headphones on and cranked the music up so loud she could hear the punk squeaking through around the edges, and that was that. Sometimes he got so mad at her she thought he was going to hit her, but he never did, not like some guys she’d been with, so she thought it was mainly a pretty good deal, Kevin and her.

It was not much of a drive from the property to Fairchild, a couple of miles at most, and Jenny could have dropped him off and come back and picked him up later, but she decided instead to hang around the Gardens. There was an atmosphere on the property just now that made her uncomfortable, a miasma of irritability because of Kevin, and also maybe things weren’t going so good with the Forest Planet Alliance. Luna was frosty to her at breakfast and spoke to Rupert in whispers, and they had both looked at her in a funny way. Like it was her fault, Kevin being a jerk. She welcomed the chance to get away for a while until it all blew over. And she liked being with the Professor.

“What are you going to talk about?”

“Agaonid wasps.”

“I got stung by wasps once,” she said. “I was about, I don’t know, six or something, and I was chasing a ball. I was living with this farm family, like on a farm? And I stuck my hand into this hole where the ball went, and holy gee, they were all over me! I thought I was going to die.”

“Yes, well, these particular wasps don’t sting. They fertilize the fruits of fig trees. Each species of fig has its own species of fertilizing wasp.”

“Like bees?”

“Exactly. Except that bees are indiscriminate foragers attracted by the color and scent of flowers, and these wasps pollinate only one sort of fig, and are attracted by hormones. The female has to burrow into the unripe synconium, which is a tough pod containing immature blossoms, through a hole so tight that she rips her wings and antennae off.”

“Oh, wow! That must really smart. How does she fly out again?”

“She doesn’t. She has fulfilled her function and spends the rest of her short life entombed in the synconium. Her eggs hatch, and her female descendants pollinate other fig trees. A demonstration of the power of instincts driven by chemical stimuli. A great deal of interesting work
has been done on plant-insect pheromonic interaction, actually: for example, Kostowitz and Petersen found that trees of the genus…”

Once you got Professor Cooksey started on his bugs he went on for a good while, which Jenny didn’t mind too much, she was used to tuning stuff out, and with that voice it was like doing ironing with
Masterpiece Theatre
or a nature show on in the background. She had once stayed in a foster home where that was all they would let you watch, educational programs and nothing with sex and violence, not even cartoons. Oddly enough, some of what he told her seemed to stick in her head by accident and would pop out later with her not even knowing it was there. She occasionally wondered what it was like to know a lot and read the kind of books that Professor C. had, with small printing and no pictures, although he had a lot with pictures, too, that he didn’t mind her looking at. When she did think about it she felt a heaviness grow behind her eyes, and she felt kind of sorry for those people, like there would be no room for their own selves inside their heads with all that
stuff
pressing down.

She parked the car, and he walked off with his stiff birdish stride to the Garden House Auditorium, and she strolled off toward the lakes. The day was bright, the air mild, and the tall palms swayed in a gentle breeze from the bay. As always the foliage and the precision and artfulness of the plantings had a psychedelic effect, even, as now, when she wasn’t chemically stoned. She thought that if there was a heaven and if it was like Fairchild, then death could have no terrors. Although she had been turned off religion at an early age via the never-fail method of enforced churchgoing, she retained an ample capacity to experience awe, and this was now well exercised as she entered a corridor of gigantic royal palms interspersed with dense plantings, many showing their seasonal blossoms—pink trumpet vine, bird-of-paradise, bellflower, ground orchid. She stood before the blooming plants in thoughtless delight, as a peasant might before an ancient Madonna, quite lost to the world. Flowers made her happy, and she stumbled over the vast question of why everyone just couldn’t be happy with what simply was. A motion attracted her eye: an anole lizard had run out on a branch of a lignum vitae tree. She moved closer to inspect it. It was vivid green, a traveling exhibit of what green
was,
and in full male mating fig: as she watched, it shot out a vivid red throat pouch three times, advertising this state, and then scuttled away.

A laugh burst from her. “Guys,” she said out loud. She often talked aloud to herself while in the Gardens, or to the plants and animals there. It was a habit she had acquired as a child, to keep herself from dying of loneliness. She had lived in places where no one actually spoke to her, except to give an order, for months on end.

She walked around Royal Palm Lake and past the amphitheater and then to the rain forest exhibit. One of her secret shames was that, even though the rain forest was really, really important, and even though she drew her sustenance from an organization dedicated to its salvation, she didn’t really like it all that much, even the compressed simulacrum of one presented by the Gardens. She found it dank and gloomy and clammy hot, and she didn’t care for the way everything crawled over everything else grasping for light and things to eat. In a strange way it reminded her of winter in an Iowa kitchen, steam and bad odors and the adults looming overhead and the unwanted children on the rough floors clamoring and striving and pushing one another. Still, she visited the place every time she came, hoping that she would get it, and feeling down when she did not.

When she came to the little path that led to the entrance to the great conservatory that housed the more delicate tropical plants, Jenny was passed by three running men in the tan uniforms of Fairchild groundskeepers. They seemed to be searching for something, calling to one another, and pausing at intervals to peer behind branches. Shortly they came back along the path at a slower pace with a blue-uniformed security guard in tow.

“Did you get him?” one of them asked the others, and was answered, “No, he must have left over the wall.”

Jenny asked, “What’s going on?”

One of the groundskeepers, a portly woman with cropped gray hair and rimless glasses, said, “Some guy stealing plants. He was just standing there like he was shopping in a supermarket, taking cuttings with a little knife and sticking them in a bag.”

Another groundskeeper added, “Yeah, they usually come over the walls at night. What’d he get, Sally?”

“Not a lot, from what I could see. Usually they dig up plants, but he was just doing snips. Some bark peelings, too.”

The security guard spoke. “You say he was a black guy?”

“Not really. I didn’t get much of a look at him, but I’d say he was an Indian of some kind—brownish red skin and straight black hair. He was wearing some kind of bathing suit, a bare chest anyway, and boy, could he disappear. I mean I was ten feet from him and I saw him chopping at the jatoba, and I yelled, ‘Sir, excuse me, you can’t do that,’ and then he was just gone.”

The guard’s radio burbled, he spoke into it, and then said, “Well, we’ll keep an eye out for him, but he’s probably back on the reservation by now.”

He left, and the group dispersed. Jenny walked back along the path into the rain forest exhibit, looking at the plant labels, laboriously sounding out the names on each until she came to one that read
HY-MENAEA COURBARIL
—
JATOBA TREE
, and then some fine print about what all the natives used the tree for, which she didn’t bother to read but looked upward along the trunk. The groundskeeper had said he’d been cutting on this tree, and Jenny figured he was probably still around it. At least it was a place to start looking.

It was a gray-barked tree, around forty feet tall, with shiny thick leaves and dark brown podlike fruit. Its foliage started about three-quarters of the way up and was tangled in some thick climbing vine. She stared up into the green gloom and called out softly, “Hey, Juan! Whatever your name is! Are you there?”

No sound but the breeze whispering among the branches and a lawn mower off in the distance. She continued staring upward, and as her eyes adjusted to the shade, she saw something brown that was not a fruit, or bark, or shadow. At first she thought it was an animal, a coon, or, absurdly, a sloth, but then she saw that it was a man’s face, his.

“Hey, you can come down now. They’re gone. They think you’re out of the Gardens. Come down!” She gestured broadly and wished again that she wasn’t so dumb and could speak Spanish. But the Indian appeared to catch her meaning. In what seemed like no time at all he flowed down the trunk like a python and stood in front of her, regarding her gravely. He was wearing nothing but a breechclout and a kind of furry belt, and a thong around his neck with a little bag hanging on it.
He had his cloth suitcase secured over one shoulder by a woven band, like a mailman carries his sack.

“Wow, we thought we lost you!” she said. “You shouldn’t have gone away when you were with Kevin. Anyway, you could’ve got arrested. They don’t allow cutting plants and stuff here. See, it
looks
like a rain forest, but it really
isn’t
.”

Blank stare from the Indian.

“Look, man, here in Gardens you no pick! No do like this!” She went to a small bush and looked around to make sure no one official was watching, and plucked a leaf, while shaking her head vigorously. “No do this, see? Not allowed.”

He took the leaf from her and examined it. In his own language he replied, “This is
mikur-ka’a
. I use it mainly for skin diseases, but it’s also good for headaches. Also, if someone has been cursed by a witch, I have them bathe in a decoction of the leaves, and it usually works pretty well, depending on the witch, and so on. We could try it, if you have that problem.”

“That’s right,” she said encouragingly, “no do. No pick. Get in big trouble.”

“Although you don’t seem witched to me,” he added. “It’s hard to tell with dead people.”

“Right, but we can’t just stand around talking,” she said, “we have to get you to the car and out of here. Let me go ahead and check if the coast is clear, and then I’ll wave, like this, and you come on. Try to stay off the paths, okay?” She sighed. “Hide in bushes, yes.
Sí
. We go car,
sí
?”

“
Sí,
” said the Indian.

She smiled. “Great! Okay, follow me!”

She started off down the path that led from the rain forest area to the parking lot. She waited for a group of tourists to pass and then performed a come-along gesture. The path behind her was empty. “Oh, no!” she cried. “He got lost again!”

But hardly were these words out when the Indian stepped from behind a large cycad three feet behind her. She gaped in amazement. “Wow, that’s awesome! How did you do that?” Receiving no answer, she said, “Okay, just follow me, then.”

She started out again, without the gesturing now, but stopped
every fifty yards or so to assure herself that he was still with her. Each time he appeared among the plantings almost within arm’s reach, although she didn’t see or hear him move. When they were nearly at the entrance, she led him through some narrow paths to the wall that separated the Gardens from Old Cutler Road.

“Okay, you have to go over the wall here, because you can’t just walk out past the guard. I’ll get the car and pick you up. You
comprendo?
” She gestured broadly, climbing and staying, repeating them until she was sure he understood. Which he did, apparently, for she drove around and retrieved him without incident. Then she drove the Mercedes back to the lot and parked in the shade of a cocolobo tree.

She turned the radio on and adjusted the dial. “When I’m alone, I listen to country. Kevin hates it. He likes alternative/punk, Limp Bizkit and Maroon 5, like that. I mean, I can handle that kind of music sometimes, but country is more real, if you know what I mean, it’s about, you know, love and having hard times, like life is, or maybe I’m just a hick. That’s what Kevin says. Of course, compared to you, I’m like totally downtown.” She laughed. “God, what an idiot, Jennifer! You don’t understand a word I’m saying, do you? But you sort of know what I mean in a funny way. I can sort of feel it. Like a dog does, but better. Maybe I could teach you English. Do you want to learn English? Okay, here goes: I am Jenny.” She pointed to herself and repeated the phrase, and then just her name, and then pointed to her mouth. “Jen-ny.”