Night of the Jaguar jp-3

by Michael Gruber

  But she only nodded and said, “If you like.”

  “I’ll see you later, then,” he said and turned away to collect Amelia.

  Who was not to be found.

  Paz strode through the rooms, pushing past crowds that seemed to have grown thicker, and thicker, too, the odor of the candle and incense, and warmer the rooms. Sweat ran into his eyes and soaked the sides of his shirt. He called her name, he asked strangers if they had seen a little girl (pink shirt and jeans, pink sneakers) and got concerned but unhelpful looks, shakes of the head. With panic rising in him, he ran outside and looked up and down the block. The air felt wonderfully cool against his hot skin, but he plunged back into the heat and the noise, with his stomach lodged in his throat.

  And found Amelia sitting peacefully on her grandmother’s lap, having bits of smeared yellow and green icing wiped from her mouth. She said, “Daddy, I got a piece with Orunmila’s name written on it.”

  “That’s nice,” said Paz from an arid mouth. “Where were you? I was looking all over for you.”

  “I was right here with Abuela all the time.”

  Paz could not meet his mother’s glance. He would have sworn out a federal affidavit that he had been in this very room four times in the past ten minutes, and that it had contained neither Margarita Paz nor her small descendant.

  Paz let Amelia sit in the shotgun seat of the Volvo like the irresponsible daredevil dad he was. The wife always made her sit in the backseat for that extra level of safety, but Paz as a cop had seen a lot more car wrecks than she had, and he thought that safetywise it was a toss-up. Also he liked having her up there with him. He himself had spent what seemed like years in the front seat of an old Ford pickup with a bright stainless catering rig on the bed, sans seat belt in an interior vaunting any number of steel edges capable of piercing young skulls. He had survived this, and such riding with his mother remained among his dearest memories of childhood.

  He was now driving in a dreamlike state, more or less southward toward home, but when he reached the turnoff to South Miami he passed it by and headed farther south on Dixie Highway. I could keep going, he thought, down to the Keys, to Key West, the end of the road. He could get a boat and a hose-rig and dive for conch, and Amelia could sit up topside and mind the regulator. He could open a little shack and serve conch fritters to the tourists and drink a lot of rum and let Amelia take care of him. That was a kind of life. He knew guys who had it, and they seemed pretty happy until their livers crumpled or they went boating in their rusty old automobiles. He wanted a beer to go with these stupid thoughts.

  He pulled into a truck stop just north of Perrine, at the point where suburban Miami fades into rough and rural. It comprised a squalid array of gas stalls and a low office/grocery made of peeling white concrete, somewhat uglier than it had to be, as if in defiance.

  “Can I have a Dove bar?” asked Amelia.

  “No, your mother’s going to slaughter me as it is. I’ll get you a juice box. Don’t move and don’t touch the car.”

  “I can drive a car.”

  “I’m sure, but not today, okay?”

  Paz got out and went into the store. The air was cruelly refrigerated and stank of microwaved tacos. He purchased a six-pack of Miller talls and a box of juice. He sat in the car, popped a can, and drank most of its tasteless fizz in one long swallow.

  “That lady has clown hair,” said Amelia.

  Paz looked. The lady, an African American, indeed wore a thick helmet of bright orange hair, also tiny blue satin shorts, high-heeled sandals, and a red tube top that served up her large breasts like puddings. There were several other similarly dressed ladies lounging around, chatting to truck drivers and a car full of what looked like Mexican farmworkers. As they watched, the lady with the clown hair walked off with a stocky man in a feed cap and a long trucker’s wallet stuck in his back pocket and fixed to his belt by a chain.

  “Is she that man’s wife?” asked Amelia.

  “I don’t know, darling. I think they’re just friends.”

  “He’s going to let her ride in his truck. He’s a demon.”

  “Is he. How can you tell?”

  “I just can. I can tell demons and witches. Some witches are good witches, did you know that?”

  “I didn’t. What about monsters? Are there good and bad monsters?”

  “Of course. The Credible Hunk is a good monster. Godzilla is a good monster. Shrek is a good monster.”

  “What about vampires?”

  “Daddy, vampires are just make-believe,” explained Amelia patiently, “like Barbies. Look, there’s that lady who had dinner with us.”

  Paz looked. Beth Morgensen had just stepped out of a Honda and was talking animatedly with a couple of the road whores. They appeared to be well acquainted.

  Paz downed the rest of his beer and started the car, planning on a quick getaway, but the sound of the engine had attracted attention, and Beth walked over, grinning. She gave Paz a fat kiss through the window, holding lip contact a little longer than was strictly required, and then eyed the beers.

  “Getting your load on before going home to the wife. How perfectly working-classish of you.”

  “Ever the sociologist.”

  “Accompanied by the little darling, I see. How are you, sugar?”

  “Fine,” said Amelia and sucked loudly on her juice straw. Whatever was happening was grown-up stuff, boring and a little disturbing. More interesting were the funny ladies who now came vamping up to the car, cooing over Amelia in a friendly way. Beth made introductions, as at a garden party. It was all very civilized. One of the whores offered to watch the child while Paz did whatever business he needed to do (laughter). Another offered a lowball price on account of you got such a cute baby. Not that I want another one. More laughter, in which Beth joined. Paz pasted a sickly grin on his face and traded wisecracks until their business called and they drifted away.

  “Are you what they call a participant-observer in this study?” Paz asked, with a little edge to it, at which Beth Morgensen chuckled and said, “Oh, no, Jimmy darling, you know I’m a charitable foundation. I just give it away.” She drew a business card from her bag, licked it lazily, and stuck it to the visor above his head. “Call anytime. Sociology never sleeps.”

  On the way back, Paz removed the card from the vinyl, and instead of tossing it, his hand moved as if compelled by a mystic force and slid it into the pocket of his shirt.

  Eight

  Jennifer sat on the floor of the fishpond just deep enough to allow her snorkel to clear the surface, with a coral rock on her lap to counter buoyancy. She had never thought about drowning herself before, but now, after what had happened, she let the idea linger in her mind. She wondered whether it would hurt a lot, whether it was fast, and realized that this was one more thing she didn’t know. Because she was stupid,hopelessly stupid, according to Luna during the tirade she had delivered after the discovery that Moie had vanished yet again. Like she could watch him every single fucking minute! And then Luna had told Rupert, practically ordered him, to get rid of her, and Rupert, instead of his usual mild peacemaking, had looked at Jenny with an expression on his face like that of a spoiled baby who’d just been denied a treat (and Jenny knew that look as well as anything), and he’d said, well, maybe, considering all this, it might be best if you started looking for another living arrangement. But really the worst thing was later when she was alone with Kevin, crying her eyes out, and he’d said, oh well, tough shit, babe, let me know where you end up. And when she said, I thought we were together I thought you loved me, he’d said, oh, yeah, I do, sure, we could still see each other and all. So then she had taken her sleeping bag and moved into Moie’s old shed and had slept there last night.

  She held out her hand and fed bread filaments to a horde of jewel-like tetras and cichlids. She would miss this at least; maybe the fish would miss her, too. Did fish miss? Yet another bit of knowledge her stupid head did not contain. The bread gone, the t
etras dispersed like flung sequins, and Jenny’s attention was drawn to a large oscar moving slowly in midwater in an erratic manner, like a plate stood on edge and wobbling. It had hurt itself, a common problem in the pool, for the fish were not accustomed to the razor-sharp edges of the coral rock from which the pool was made, coming as they did from an environment where nearly every solid object was coated with mud or soft algae. This Scotty had told her with some irritation, as it was the one feature of the pond he could not control. They sometimes moved quickly in their various mating rivalries and collided with coral and ripped their scales off. He said they should drain the thing and put in a soft porous liner, but this Rupert was unwilling to do, being a cheap bastard, according to Scotty. The oscar turned clumsily, and she saw that it had a red gash behind its little arm fin. She considered emerging and finding Scotty. He had a forty-gallon hospital tank for such cases, but before she could put this thought into action, the red-bellied piranha struck and ripped a ragged chunk out of the wounded fish, and then in an instant there were ten more piranha writhing in a cloud of blood and tissue. Then the piranha were gone, as was the oscar, except for some tiny specks, the center of a cloud of killifishes and tetras, cleaning up the scant remains.

  Jenny was out of the water almost before she knew it, standing on the edge of the pool and shivering, although the sun was out already and warm. She stripped off her mask and wrapped a towel around her body. Well, that was out, no drowning, not in that pool, silly really, because what did you care if you were dead, but on the other hand, maybe they would know you were trying to kill yourself, the struggling and all, and what if they decided to eat you while you were still alive? She shuddered, not from the air temperature, and almost ran to the green-roofed shed.

  Professor Cooksey was there, rubbing his chin and staring at the ground. Jenny was not pleased to see him. He had offered no support during her condemnation, had looked at her in his usual blank manner, as if she were one of his bugs. But automatically, her gaze followed his to the ground.

  “What’re you looking for?” she asked.

  “Hm? Oh, nothing. But observe that footprint. Doesn’t it seem odd to you?”

  She looked. The floor of the shed was soft earth, from the fall of years of potting soil and humus, and took prints well. This one was human, of a smallish bare foot, the toe and heel marks well defined. It was the only barefoot print on view, the others being shoe prints, either the lugged soles of Scotty’s Merrell shoes, her own cheap flip-flops, or Cooksey’s leather sandals.

  “It’s Moie’s probably,” she said. “What’s wrong with it?”

  He looked at her briefly and knelt to point. “Why, don’t you see? It’s much too deep. It’s deeper than Scotty’s here and far deeper than yours or mine, although I would have said that you and Moie were of a size. How much do you weigh?”

  “I don’t know. About one twenty, one twenty-five.”

  “Hm, and this print is yours, I take it, conveniently close by. Let’s see what we can make of this.” Cooksey took a small brass ruler from his shirt pocket, measured the depth of both prints, stood up, took a small leather-bound notebook from his pocket, and made some calculations. He frowned, mumbled, “No, no, you idiot, that can’t be right!” and resumed his scribbling. After some minutes he sighed and said, “Impossible, but there it is. According to these figures, Moie weighs two hundred and six kilos.”

  “Is that a lot?”

  “I should say so! It’s over four hundred and fifty pounds.”

  Jenny said, “But he could have been carrying something heavy. Wouldn’t that make the dirt squash down more?”

  Cooksey stared at her, and then a look appeared upon his face that she had never seen bestowed upon her in her life, a look of delight that had nothing whatever to do with her physical appearance. “By God, of course! What an imbecile I am! That’s what comes from doing this just for animals, who rarely haul any baggage. Well, my dear, you have just accomplished an act of scientific reasoning. Good for you!”

  Jenny felt herself blushing from her breast to her hairline, smiling hard enough to make her mouth feel funny. Cooksey added, “Still, if we assume he’s around your size, and even accounting for the extra upper-body strength of men, that’s quite a load, well over three hundred pounds. And what could it have been? A boulder? An anvil? And look here, you can see it’s a normal walking footprint, the ball and toes digging into the earth more firmly than the heel. He’s not standing here heaving something up like a weight lifter. I ask you, could you or I snatch up three hundred pounds and trot off with it as if it were a parcel from the shop? No, and therein lies the mystery. In any case, you may wish to inquire why I was visiting here in the first place.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, I am, ah, aware of your difficulties-I mean, being asked to leave-and I feel responsible in a way.” And here he related Moie’s problems with mass media, and what had transpired thereafter. “But if you really wish to stay here, I believe I can arrange something. I require an assistant. My specimens are an absolute brothel, and I barely have room to turn around in, as you may have observed. Um, and there’ll be a modest stipend from my grant, of course.”

  Jenny did not know what a modest stipend was but did not admit it. “Yeah, but what about Rupert and Luna?”

  “Jennifer, not to blow my trumpet, but I draw a great deal more water in this organization than our Luna. A word with Rupert and the thing is done. What do you say, then?”

  “But…I mean, I don’t know anything.”

  “Yes. And therefore there is nothing to interfere with learning. I have my little ways, and the average graduate student is ordinarily not disposed to learn them. So-are we agreed?”

  Nor are they as decorative, nor as full of fine animal spirits, he thought, but declined to say as she flung her arms around him and pressed her damp and marvelous body to his.

  During the following week Jennifer found to her great surprise that the skills required of a research assistant were very like those she had learned in the succession of Iowa farmhouses and homes where she had been fostered. These included: moving heavy or bulky objects without getting hurt; not spilling things, or if you did by accident, cleaning them up quickly and efficiently; scrubbing walls, floors, and windows; putting things in stacks of the same kind and storing them in places where you could find them again; and doing everything you were told to do in a cheerful manner. Professor Cooksey was a good deal nicer than many of the foster moms and dads she had endured, always patient with her mistakes and never treating her like the retard she was. When the work was done, all the specimen boxes were neatly arranged on shelves (which Jennifer had put together with Scotty’s help), the scattered papers were put away in files, the journals were racked in green cardboard journal boxes with neat machine-printed labels on them, and an entire room, a former laundry, once filled with cartons, had been cleared, cleaned, and painted. The place now smelled of furniture polish more than tobacco smoke or formalin, and Jennifer was absurdly proud of it.

  One morning when Cooksey was meeting with Rupert on the terrace, and she was mopping the floor, Kevin came and had a look and commented that she had finally found her place in life as a janitor. He meant the remark as one of his casual put-downs, but rather to her surprise Jenny felt no sting. “It’s honest work,” she said. “You should try it sometime. It might do you good.”

  She turned away from him and continued mopping, and waited for a nasty comeback, which failed to come. Instead, Kevin said, “So what’s the situation, babe? When’re you coming back to the cabin?”

  “I don’t know, Kevin”-still mopping-“do you want me back?”

  “Well, shit, yeah! What do you think?”

  She stopped her work and faced him. “What do you think I should think? When they kicked me out, you were, like, totally cool with me taking off. So, what, you changed your mind?”

  “Hey, I’m sorry, all right? I was wrong, okay? You don’t have to get all bitchy about i
t.”

  She leaned on her mop and stared at him, as all the good energy she had enjoyed over the past few days seemed to drain out of her. For the first time she noticed something blurry in his face, and she realized that it had to do with all the time she’d been spending with Cooksey. The professor’s face was solid in a way, a reflection of what was really going on in his head, while Kevin’s was always waiting to see which expression was right for getting him what he wanted, like now, he was giving her the melting, yearning look, slightly hurt, and despite herself it was starting to work. She really did love him, even when he was a total piece of shit, and she knew he really loved her, or would someday if she just kept at him, if she could find a way of making him more like Cooksey. But not just now, just at the moment she had no patience for his tricks. She said, “Well, if I’m bitchy, you don’t have to hang around, do you?”

  “I didn’t mean it like that. Come on, babe, be nice.” The fetching smile, and now he took a step onto the freshly mopped floor. “Out!” she said. “I got work to do.”

  And he slammed out, muttering curses, leaving her shaken and amazed at herself. This argument had proceeded at a peculiar low volume, for Rupert was out on the terrace and Rupert required at least the appearance of harmony. Luna was the only resident allowed to give vent at full voice. Later that day, Jennifer removed the backpack that held all her chattels from the cottage she had shared with Kevin and parked it in the former laundry room, together with her sleeping bag and air mattress. The little room was floored and walled with Mexican tiles, like the kitchen, except for the places where the old sinks had been removed, which were patched with rough concrete. There was a small window and a separate door to the outside. As she surveyed it, she wondered at her own presumption. She seemed to be changing in a way she had never expected.