Night of the Jaguar jp-3

by Michael Gruber

  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.

  At breakfast, meanwhile, everyone sat democratically at the same table, which showed, Jenny thought, that they were not servants after all. The table was located in the center of a patio floored with worn, blood-colored tiles, and the house rose around it on four sides, a single story in golden coral stone, roofed in red Spanish tiling, except for the east side, which was two stories and called “the tower.” This was where Rupert had his bedroom. The Professor, Nigel Cooksey, had the room below this, but Cooksey had not yet arrived when Kevin drifted in, dressed in cutoff jeans shorts and a blue work shirt with no sleeves, looking angelic and fresh, darling golden dreadlocks and little fringe of beard, sleepy hazel eyes, she always got a little thrill when she saw him first thing in the morning, how lucky she was to have him. When they’d first met, in a squat in Cedar Rapids, he’d had fairly short hair and just one earring and hadn’t been on the road that long, so she knew more about how to get by than he had. She thought that was why he’d hit on her, that and the sex, and she figured he’d drift away like the others when he found out about her problem. And she had actually gone to the club behind the rail yard with him, where they had strobes, and sure enough she’d had a full-blown seizure, and come out of it on the sticky floor, with the other people pretending that nothing had happened, and the music blasting, but he had stayed with her, to her immense surprise and gratitude. She still got a little flash of that moment, him looking down at her with a look in his face that was not oh-what-a-freak-show, but human, a concerned-human-being kind of look. And she recalled that moment whenever he acted shitty. Although now he gave her a grin and a little secret squeeze and slurped up a piece of mango, and then went to the little Mexican cart where the coffee carafe was and poured himself a cup.

  Then Rupert and Luna came out of the office, which was a big room in the corner of the house, and was where Luna spent most of her time. Luna had on what she always did, a crisp white short-sleeved shirt and baggy khaki shorts. She was a slim hard-bodied woman of around thirty who seemed to be constructed of piano wire and space-age substances, even her hair, which was dark and shiny, short, and held up on one side with an amber barrette; it seemed made of one piece of prestressed plastic, like the fender of a Corvette. She wore round steel-rimmed glasses on her sharp little nose. Jenny would have figured her for a sexless virgin type, but she knew for a fact that Scotty got to her frequently; the property was small enough and so quiet at night that the sex life of each inhabitant was common knowledge, at least in the audio channel. Jenny and Kevin could hear them almost as well as if they were in the same room, and Luna’s rising shriek of pleasure, Scotty’s satisfied groan, were frequent accompaniments to the mockingbird’s evensong. Jenny had not been much of a noisemaker in that regard before arriving at La Casita but now felt compelled to join the night sounds with whoops of her own, often genuine. Kevin seemed to find it amusing.

  Shirley screamed from her cage as she always did when she saw Rupert. Luna told her to shut up, and she fell silent.
Like the other local denizens, the big hyacinth macaw almost always did what Luna said. Scotty arrived and sat down next to Luna. He had his social face on now, he made light remarks about the weather, about pruning the fruit trees, received the usual compliment from Rupert about the flowers, and the breakfast got under way, with everyone telling everyone else what they were going to do with their day. Rupert and Luna spoke about a mailing, and the purchase of mailing lists from other enviro organizations, and then some computer stuff she couldn’t follow. There was an environmentalist letter-writing campaign about the S-9 pumping station up north that was pumping polluted water into the Everglades and killing all the wildlife. Scotty talked about the rototiller being out of whack and other repair and plumbing stuff and then they got into a little argument about what was compostable and wasn’t. Jenny let the talk slide past her ears, letting it blend in with the whisper of the light breeze in the slender palms that rose above the courtyard and the sound of the waterfall. She nodded and smiled when Luna addressed her. Ms. Robotica, as Kevin called her, had arranged permission from the Coconut Grove library to set up a display and table on the little plaza in front of their building. Evangelina Vargos would meet her there and Kevin would drive the VW van. Jenny glanced at Kevin, who rolled his eyes.

  “Unless you’d like to help Scotty with the rototiller,” Luna added pointedly.

  “Oh, no, ma’am,” Kevin replied, “driving’s just fine with me. I always hoped that when I grew up I would get to drive people so they could hand out little brochures. Chopping down trees to make paper to stop people from chopping down other trees. Makes perfect sense to me.”

  “The brochures are printed on recycled paper,” said Luna with her typical exasperated sigh.

  “I know it, Luna. And that’s good. I’m sure our recycling program throws terror into the hearts of the fucking corporate bastards and the lumber barons that’re killing the rain forest. They’re shaking in their boots.”

  “Then what would you like us to do, Kevin?” asked Luna. “Blow up the Panamerica Bancorp Building?”

  “That’d be a start,” snapped Kevin.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Kevin, grow the fuck up!” said Luna.

  There was a silence around the table, as there always was when Kevin gave vent, which Rupert broke by saying in his calm, slow voice, “Jennifer, if you’d be so kind: could you check on what’s keeping Nigel?”

  Jenny rose at once and left, happy to go, disturbed by the friction that had marred the lovely morning and their breakfast. There was something going on that she didn’t understand and didn’t like, that was not just Kevin being silly. A look had passed between Luna and Kevin, as if even though they were in opposition, there was something going on between them, like they were pumping each other up in some way, each getting some kind of sick energy from the other. This was just a feeling; she could not put it into words.

  Nigel Cooksey occupied the whole southeast corner of the house, a small bedroom and bath and the larger room adjoining the Alliance offices that he used as a study-cum-depository. He was a professor and knew everything about the rain forest and had lived down there for many years: this much Jenny knew, and also that Rupert and Scotty treated him with the greatest respect. Kevin called him Professor Stork and thought that all this studying the problem was a waste of time, because what was the point of knowing every goddamn thing about the forest when by the time he got it all down and published, there wouldn’t be tree left standing. Cooksey kept to himself, or spent hours with Rupert discussing Alliance strategy. A couple of old faggots, had been Kevin’s take on the two of them when he and Jenny had arrived at the property the year before, but the vibes had been wrong for that, and when she voiced this opinion Kevin had scoffed (oh, you and your vibes!), but she’d been right. Rupert might be a little weird but was perfectly heterosexual, there were a couple of women he entertained regularly in his bedroom in the tower of the house, and clearly, from the sounds floating out of the garden on those nights, he knew well enough how to wield his spectacular unit.

  What Cooksey was she had not figured out yet, maybe he was gay, but he didn’t seem to do anything about it, maybe not all that interested in sex, although when she entertained that idea her mind skidded a little. Sometimes she thought there was something, like,wrong with him because he was the only one of the inhabitants who did not bathe nude in the pool, and so no one there had seen his equipment. It was huge, purple, with spikes and blades on it, like they drew on demons in underground comix, so said Kevin, but Jenny thought he was just lonely, and she always made an effort to be nice to him. She liked his voice, too, it was like on the TV, as when she switched it on sometimes and found it was tuned to the public TV channel and before switching to her show she would listen to that accent, those people talking like they never had a care in the world and no one could ever be mean to them.

  She knocked on Cooksey’s bedroom door and, receiving no response, went to the next room on the hall, his study, where she poked her head in. Cartons, crates, barrels, teetering piles of books on the floor, bookcases almost to the ceiling, stuffed animals and mounted skeletons of animals atop these, a row of filing cabinets of different sizes and vintages, a wicker fan in slow rotation above, light from the windows greened by passage through the mango orchard illuminating the dusty air, and in the center, Nigel Cooksey leaning back in a wooden swivel chair, sandaled feet and thin knotty legs up on the cluttered worktable, arranged carefully among half a dozen soiled tea mugs and a stuffed hoatzin on a stand. The room had a peculiar, penetrant odor compounded of old paper, bachelor, formalin, whiskey, and incompletely preserved organic materials.

  Jenny cleared her throat, coughed, said, “Um, Professor…?” At which the legs shot up, the chair crashed against a wooden crate and spun on its axis, its occupant confronting her with a gaping look, like one of the stuffed jungle creatures that decorated the high shelf. A small white object went clattering across the tile. Jenny stooped to retrieve it. It was a plaster cast of an animal’s foot. She handed it to him.

  “Rupert said he wanted to meet with you?”

  “Oh, dear! It can’t be nine already!”

  There was a wooden clock on a bookcase shelf, whose face was nearly obscured by stacked journal reprints. Jenny moved these and said, “It’s half-past. Did you fall asleep?”

  “Oh, not at all, no, I was in a kind of brown study.”

  Well,yeah, thought Jenny, with all the smoke. Cooksey was the only smoker (of tobacco) on the property, and the white walls of the workroom had acquired an amber glaze. He was staring at her in a way he often stared, as if she were a creature he was observing from concealment. His eyes were gray, deep-set, and sad. He said, “‘Never shall a young man, thrown into despair by those great honey-colored ramparts at your ear, love you for yourself alone and not your yellow hair.’ Yeats.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Nothing, my dear. Musing is all. Well, I must stir myself.” He placed the cast on the desk.

  “What is that thing, a foot?”

  “Yes. Of a tapir,Tapirus terrestris. You can learn a lot about the larger mammals by their footprints. Weight, of course, and sometimes sex and age. This is a male, perhaps two years old.”

  “How do you know?”

  “How? Why, it’s written here on the base of the cast.” He laughed, a dry chuckle, and after a slight pause, Jenny laughed, too.

  “Gosh, and I thought science was hard.”

  “If it were, I couldn’t do it, slug that I am. Seriously: you observe the animals, you see, and then when they’ve left, you scuttle out and pour plaster into the prints, and then there’s a little gadget with a spring that you press into the soil near the print, until it’s as deep as the print was, and it gives you the weight, or rather you calculate the weight from the readings. And if you do that for a few years, you get a sense of how the animals grow and survive. Every creature has a unique print.”

  “Like fingerprints.”

  “Just
so. I have a large collection of them, all the mammalia, of course, and the larger lizards and crocodilia, and the gallinaceous birds.” He stood and gestured to the door. He was tall and very thin and dressed always in faded khaki shirts and shorts.

  “After you, my dear.”

  That was one reason she liked the professor. After you, my dear! It was like being in an old movie on TV.

  Kevin was not in that good a mood as they drove up Main Highway to the Grove, and Jenny was all tensed up, waiting to see if he would take it out on her. Sometimes he would shoot questions at her, or talk about things she couldn’t follow and then get all sarcastic about it, or else he would get her to talk about stuff that happened to her while she was growing up, school or the foster homes or the strange kids that she’d shared them with or the foster parents. She had quite a few stories saved up, some of them pretty sad, and just when she thought she was sharing stuff that she didn’t ordinarily like to share, he would yank his attention away, like Lucy with Charlie Brown’s football, and she’d feel like a jerk for going on about old shit. Or he’d actually say, after listening to her talk for half an hour or so, Why do you keep talking about old shit like that? So she felt stupidagain, and wanted to bawl.