Night of the Jaguar jp-3

by Michael Gruber

  After three minutes of this, which included a lesson on why people and the fate of the planet were more important than corporate profits, Kevin ran down. The man had not said a word; he just looked at the two of them expressionlessly, his dark eyes showing nothing but a faint ennui, as if he were waiting for a train. Then three big men in blue-gray uniforms came into the office and said they had to leave. Kevin said he wouldn’t leave without a written guarantee that all illegal operations on the Puxto would cease as of this moment, at which point one of the guards grabbed his right elbow and wrist and did something that caused Kevin so much pain that he sank to his knees and had to concentrate to keep from wetting himself. None of the guards touched the Indian, who meekly allowed himself to be led away, while just in front of him, Kevin howled and threatened a host of violent retributions, all of which were beyond his power to accomplish.

  He drove back to Coconut Grove in a good deal of pain. His wrist ached, and one of the guards had given him a couple of shots to the kidney in the elevator. Still, he felt good in a way he hadn’t in a long while. The fascists had shown their true colors at last, he had been met with the violence and brutality he had expected, justifying his own fantasies of violence. He observed his wrist on the steering wheel and was gratified to see it red and swelling slightly; he only regretted that no blood had been shed, as he thought there was nothing like a bashed face to elicit the sympathy he considered the key to real political action. As he drove, his clever mind reassembled the events of the recent past into a pattern more favorable to him. He summoned up fear in the face of Fuentes where there had been only contemptuous boredom. In his mind’s ear he heard the man trying to justify his crimes in a whining voice. These Kevin had destroyed in a series of brilliant retorts, which he now composed and polished. The guards had tried to subdue him, but he had used martial arts to send them sprawling; oh, yeah, and the Indian, they had tried to mess with the Indian and he had avoided their fascistic grasp by means of strange jungle moves, and they had strolled out of there heads high, like a couple of action heroes. He glanced over at the small man sitting silent next to him. That was a problem, if he brought him back to the property they would talk to him, Luna knew Spanish and so did the Professor, which might screw things up. But why bring him back? Who knew what an Indian would do?

  Kevin turned off Bayshore onto McFarlane, and almost as soon as he did so, he saw that the display and the rest of the FPA stuff was gone from in front of the library. Clearly the girls had called Scotty, and he’d come by with the truck. He parked anyway and got out of the van. To the Indian he said, “Vamanos, tenemos buscar las mujeres.” He went around and opened the passenger door.

  “Come on, man,vamos, you go around that side. Busca alli. ” He gestured so the stupid Indian would know to go around the east side of the library. When he was gone, Kevin went inside the building and looked around for about thirty seconds. Then he got back in the van. Shit, I don’t know where he is, he explained to the people in his head, I went back to the library and you guys were gone and we looked and looked and then he was nowhere, man. He just disappeared. Kevin started the truck and drove off.

  They all came running out to meet him when he pulled into the property, although his reception was considerably dampened when they discovered he had lost the Indian. Nor were they much impressed by his story. Luna was especially furious, and she had a mouth on her, too, to which she did not ordinarily give full vent when Rupert was around, but now let fly. He was an irresponsible moron, a lazy, lying, hopeless, sub-asshole piece of shit, who had just wasted practically the best piece of luck they had ever had, an actual witness from the rain forest, someone they could have written articles about, someone who could have appeared with them on television, for God’s sake, a man travels three thousand miles, most of it in a canoe, to save his forest and his people, avoiding untold dangers and who should he run into but the fuckup of the Western world! Thus it went on for what seemed like a long time, with Rupert trying to get a word in edgewise, and Kevin screaming back mindless obscenities, and Scotty looking contemptuous and self-satisfied, and the Professor looking stunned, and the tears running slowly down Jenny’s face until he couldn’t stand it anymore and threw a flowerpot against the wall. In the stunned silence following this act he stomped back to their cottage cursing. Then the sound of the slammed door.

  “He has to go, Rupert,” said Luna in the echo of that sound. “I mean it. He’s a lazy son of a bitch, he does nothing but lay around and smoke dope, he’s a disaster politically, and this last stunt is completely unforgivable. Jesus! We could have learned so much from him, we could have given him shelter….” She raised her eyes to heaven and clenched her fists in frustration, not a pretty sight. To Rupert she said, “So? Can we please get rid of him?”

  “What about Jen?” This from Scotty, earning a sharp look from Luna, who said quickly, “Oh, Jenny’s fine. No one has anything against Jenny.”

  Jenny snuffled and said sulkily, “I’m not staying here without Kevin.”

  “Whatever was meant to happen will happen, Luna,” said Rupert in his calm, maddening way. “And if the few of us can’t live here together peacefully, what hope is there for the world at large? Isn’t that right, Nigel?”

  After a brief pause, Professor Cooksey said, “Quite,” excused himself, and went back to his workroom.

  “Well,” said Rupert, “let’s all take some time to calm down, shall we? Jenny, could you…ah…deal with that plant?” And they all disappeared to their various lairs, leaving Jenny alone on the patio, staring at the shattered pot and the smear of earth on the blood red tiles.

  Night. Moie lies in his hammock high up in a great fig tree in Peacock Park in Coconut Grove. He watches the moon come up from the sea. He sees that Jaguar has nearly returned from his mother, and by this sign he calculates how long it has been since he left Home. He recalls the word lonely, feels the feeling it represents, wonders if he will return there, and also wonders a little about the Firehair Woman, and if he will see her again. He has her smell in his nose and can easily find her, he thinks, even in this place of unbearable stench. If it is necessary.

  But now he tests the air for another scent, one he acquired earlier in this strange day, that of the man Fuentes. He had not understood what the Monkey Boy had said to Fuentes, but the meaning was perfectly clear, as was the response of Fuentes. He feels Jaguar’s anger building in him and feels a faint sadness for the man, as he sometimes did when they gave a little girl to the god. Some things are necessary, however. It is not for him to judge. He chews some more of the paste he has prepared; after a few minutes he feels the god start to take hold of his body. Moie has never discussed this event with anyone. He has never known anyone who carried Jaguar except for his old teacher, who has been dead for years, and even when he was alive it was not something they discussed, any more than they concerned themselves with the circulation of their blood.

  Moie feels numbness begin in his hands, his feet; the waves of numbness flow toward his center and meet in a certain spot in his belly. Sounds and smells fade; his vision grows dim, contracts, goes to black. Now he is out of his body and can see again, if dimly. He sees his body there on the tree limb, perfectly inert, its arms and legs hanging down. He regards it with only mild interest, no different from the interest he takes in the bark of the tree, its leaves, the little insects of the night crawling among them, the motion of the moon through the clouds. He is free in nature, indifferent to and perfectly accepting of its benevolence, its horrors. In this state of profound detachment he observes Jaguar unmake nature. First there is a man in a tree, and then there is some kind of event (not really, because event implies duration, and this occurs outside of normal time), and then the same place is occupied by a golden cat spotted with black rosettes, a creature with about four times the mass of the man. Inside this being is Moie, held like a memory in the consciousness of the god. He will recall what is about to happen as we recall dreams.

  Wit
h the waxing moon high in the clear heavens, Jaguar descends from the fig tree. Like a slice of solid moonlight he flows out of the park and goes south, slipping through the sleeping yards, over walls and fences, to a chorus of frantic dog-barks. He encounters finger canals, and either works around them to the west or swims across. He is a good swimmer. There are few people out in these neighborhoods this late at night; they sleep secure behind their alarms and guard services. Jaguar stops at a canal bank and sniffs the air.

  Antonio Fuentes is restless in his bed, in his fine house on the canal at Leucedendra. He can’t get theIndio out of his mind. The screaming American was nothing, but the Indio wasnot nothing, should not have been there at all, and the American should not have known about the Puxto cut, and should not have known that Consuela Holdings was behind the Colombian timber operation doing the cutting. There were several dummy corporations designed specifically to cloud that connection, so how could an ignorant Indio and a tree-hugging pendejo have worked it out? Answer: they could not, and therefore someone was trying to fuck them over, someone with connections down there in Colombia. That was the problem when you dealt with Colombians: there was no law at all, not even corrupt law; you never knew if you had paid off everyone who could screw up your deal, which is why they had a man like Hurtado involved.

  He slips out of bed and into a robe and walks to the French windows of his bedroom. His wife stirs but does not wake. They both take sleeping pills, and he hopes he will not need another one tonight. It would make him groggy all morning, which he cannot really afford. He has called a meeting of the other principals of Consuela to discuss the threat represented by the incident in his office. He hopes they can resolve it without bringing the Colombian into it directly. Fuentes has squeezed the law many times during his career, but this is the first time he has ever done business with an actual narcolista. Although officially, on paper, there is no connection. He doesn’t like it, but the profits are potentially enormous, and it is not like they are actually in the drug business themselves. Probably not actually, but the important thing is, he doesn’t have to know anything about it. And to make sure the insulation is still intact, or if not, to repair it. He thinks that the screaming boy should not be hard to find, if it should come to that.

  Fuentes opens the French window and steps out onto the little balcony. The air is fresh and scented by night-blooming jasmine and the marine tang of the bay. He is on the second floor here and he can look out at the expanse of water. It is a clear night with a fat moon riding high above a single line of cloud. He can just make out the lights of Key Biscayne and Cape Florida to the east. Sometimes, he has found, a little pacing back and forth on this balcony will tire him enough so that he will sleep.

  He takes a few steps and stops short. There is something wrong. What is it? Something he has forgotten to do? He glances back to the bedroom wall: the emerald gleam of the security light is on, the house is sealed. He hears a scratching sound overhead and starts violently, then allows himself a secret, self-deprecating laugh. Raccoons. He will have to have the man out with the traps again. But this whole incident has made him uncharacteristically jumpy. I’m nervous as a cat, he thinks to himself, and begins to pace.

  He paces the ten feet, turns, and ten back, and his head while he paces is full of figures. He is the numbers guy in the group. Calderon had the Colombian contacts, Garza generated the seed money, and Ibanez has the machinery to turn the timber into cash, for there are still plenty of people whose hunger for prime mahogany precludes asking any questions about where it came from. It would be good if they had a survey of the area, how many trees they could expect per hectare and so on, to get a clearer picture. Using averages was fine, but they had heard rumors about the incredible density of growth in the Puxto, was it possible it was as high as four trees per? He does some mental calculation on that basis: the mesa was twelve hundred square miles, convert to hectares at 259 per square mile, and say it was four trees per, that would be a million trees, figure average radius of a meter and a half, thirty tall, that would be, say, two hundred cubic meters of usable wood from each and…and in the midst of these ruminations he hears again that noise above him, a scraping on the tiles.

  He raises his eyes to the roof, sees nothing, and resumes his pacing and his thought: two hundred million cubic meters of prime old-growth mahogany, Jesus! Although they’d have to play a little with the market because they wouldn’t want the price to drop much below the going fifteen hundred dollars per cube…but another sound interrupts his figures, like a cat’s purr but much louder.

  Ararah. Ararararh.

  Fuentes looks up again. No, not a raccoon.

  Jimmy Paz walked into the kitchen of Guantanamera, his restaurant (actually his mother’s restaurant), and cast a practiced eye across the room. It was Wednesday, so the specials were seafood salad andajiaco criollo, a beef stew whose recipe had been in his mother’s family for generations, and which was famous among local aficionados of down-home Cuban cooking. Cesar, the chef, was accordingly prepping all the marine life-forms that would go into the salad-lobster, stone crab, shrimp, squid-and Rafael, the prep cook, was cutting and peeling the fruits and roots-malanga amarilla, yuca, green plantain, boniato, malanga blanca, calabaza, and name yam-that would go into the stew. Also at the prep table, to Paz’s surprise, was Amelia, who was carving flowers out of pickled mushrooms and radishes and also slicing lemons in half and giving them a scalloped edge, all for the seafood salad garniture. She was standing on a stool, and the apron she was wearing came down to cover her pink sneakers, as she was only three foot four.

  “How come you’re not in school?” asked Paz.

  “It’s a teacher’s work day. I told you, Daddy. And we’re supposed to go to Matheson after lunch. You forgot.”

  “I did forget,” said Paz. “Do you think I’m the worst daddy in the world?”

  The child considered this seriously for a moment. “Not in the whole world. But you shouldn’t forget stuff. Abuela says you would forget your head if it wasn’t tied to your neck.” This last phrase was quoted in Cuban Spanish, with the Guantanamero accent Paz knew so well. The child was perfectly bilingual.

  “I remember where you’re ticklish, and if you didn’t have that knife in your hands I would tickle you so much,” said Paz, and was rewarded with a giggle. “I’m busy, Daddy,” she then said, now imitating the mother, Doctor Mom, an extremely busy person at all times. Paz watched his daughter cut vegetables for a moment. She was slow but accurate, and respected the blade without fearing it. Her grandmother had let her peel carrots at four, and now, nearly three years later, she had many small paring tasks well in hand. The blade she was using was sharp as a scalpel, but Paz didn’t worry about it at all, because if she cut herself it would be a clean one, and getting sliced was part of the education of a chef. This was, however, an appraisal he had never put into so many words to the child’s mother. He put on his own apron and started cutting up meat for the ajiaco: short ribs, flank steak, and tasajo, salt-dried beef.

  Four hours later, Paz stood in seeming chaos as the lunch rush crested; seeming only, for the three men and the woman who made up the kitchen crew at the restaurant Guantanamera were like trained athletes or soldiers working on the edge of catastrophe amid flashing blades, boiling cauldrons, burners shooting out gouts of flame, pans spitting fat. The waiters shouted, the cooks shouted back, the dishwasher rumbled, and Jimmy Paz worked the grill station within a self-created egg of calm. The dozen or so pieces of expensive protein in front of him-marinated steaks, pork chops, snapper fillets, lobster tails, giant prawns-all cooking at different rates toward different degrees of doneness, on a grill whose temperature varied every couple of inches and that was gradually getting hotter overall as the hours went by-were all present as little clocks and calculations in his head, all perfectly unconscious but crowding any unwanted thoughts from his grateful mind. It was what Paz did instead of religion or meditation. Thus, now, thoughtlessly as a fish swims, Paz p
roduced a meal for a party of four-a lobster, a steak, some pork chops, a handful of tiger prawns, all cooked to perfection and all ready at exactly the same instant. He loaded each entree onto a warm plate and shoved them down to Yolanda, the line cook, to be garnished, sauced, veggied, and shipped out the service port. And another and another, until, and this was about two-thirty, there was a subtle slackening in the pace, and then the noise faded, there were only two or three things on the grill, and it was over. Paz went to the sink, splashed some water on his face, and drank an icy Hatuey beer down in two long swallows.

  “Daddy?”

  Paz looked up to see his daughter dressed for the dining room in a floor-length black skirt, a lavishly pleated white blouse (with a name tag that read AMELIA), shiny Mary Janes, and a red hibiscus stuck in her mass of pale brown curls: the world’s smallest hostess. This was herabuela ’s idea and confection, and so cute that people waiting for tables were often brought to their knees through excess of delight. She was very good at it, too, and it took a nasty customer indeed to bitch to this one about seating.

  “Uncle Tito says he needs to talk to you,” said the child, “table eight.” She departed, and after buttoning his tunic and telling Yolanda to mind the grill, so did Paz.

  The dining room at Guantanamera was high, cool, white, and gold, with rattan fans moving the air-conditioned air around; many-armed chandeliers cast the bright light characteristic of Cuban restaurants. It was in every respect except size a replica of the dining room at the great tobacco finca where Paz’s mother had worked as a child before the revolution, and her mother before her, and back to slavery days, all helping to invent the cuisine of Cuba. Paz didn’t know how much of this pastiche was irony and how much was clever marketing. The original custom of the place had consisted of exiles nostalgic for the kind of comidas criollas that white Cubans believed only black people could authentically produce. That was one of the problems Paz had with his mother’s operation. The oldsters were running thin, the tourists were seasonal, and the yuppies did not much fancy sitting down in a room lit like a stadium to a meal rich in carbs and spicy greases. Paz was always trying to darken the room and lighten the menu, hence that seafood salad, but it was hard to tell anything to Margarita Paz.