Night of the Jaguar jp-3

by Michael Gruber

  Cooksey chuckled and rolled his eyes skyward. It was getting hard for Paz to see his face in the growing dusk, but he saw that. Cooksey said, “Honestly, my dear man, you give me far too much credit. Our Jenny will have told you about the death of my wife, how she exhausted herself trying to rescue some tiny portion of the living information being turned into money during that time, and so met her doom. What Jenny didn’t say, because I didn’t tell her, is this. First, the destruction of that particular patch of forest was a Consuela operation, and so all the calamities that followed in my life may be laid at the door of that firm. Second, after she died I went quite insane. I took acanoa and traveled upriver until I got to San Pedro Casivare, the last place on the map. I drank pisco. I had enough money to drink myself to death, which was my plan. There was one other fellow there who seemed to have the same thing in mind.”

  “The priest,” said Paz.

  “Just so. Father Timothy. Well, not to draw this out, we exchanged sad stories, and after that we drank a little less each day, and fished more. He decided to return to being a priest, to the extent that he resolved to seek holy martyrdom among a tribe of people we’d heard of, who routinely killed anyone who strayed within their borders. He convinced me that I owed it to my daughter to go home and take care of her. So I did; I took care of her by killing her. She was the image of my wife.”

  Cooksey fell silent here. Paz waited, observing that Cooksey was staring at the group by the pool, and especially, it seemed, at the frolicking Amelia. The adults had removed varying levels of clothing. Zwick and Scotty were in their shorts. Jenny was entirely nude, as was Beth. Lola and Amelia were in suits, Geli in bra and panties. Someone had brought the aguardiente bottle out and a bottle of Mount Gay rum to keep it company; little remained in either. The first faint feelings of uneasiness prickled in Paz’s belly. There was something a little too exuberant about the scene. Geli Vargos, for example, had been depressed a moment ago; now she was near naked and whooping.

  Cooksey began to speak again, distracting him from these thoughts. “The priest went to the Runiya, and I came here. When I found out who Geli was, I encouraged her to discover what Consuela was doing, and I passed the information on to the priest, who used it to achieve his martyrdom, a little late, but better late than never. I imagined that naturalists or environmentalists or whoever would pick up on that information and make a fuss. I assure you I did not expect Moie.”

  “Why didn’t you make a fuss at this end? You had this whole environmental organization here.”

  “Yes, well, that would have compromised Geli, wouldn’t it? She has, let’s say, mixed loyalties. She wanted to avoid what eventually happened, Colombian bad boys arriving in force. Also, as soon as we began to make the sort of stink respectable environmentalists can make, Consuela would have vanished in a tangled trail of dummy companies. And the cut would have continued. What I hoped for was that Father Tim would appear on the scene full of wrath, with photos and so forth. But in the event he somehow sent Moie. But you understand, of course, that something much larger is happening here.”

  “What do you mean, larger?”

  “Well, to begin with, why did you suddenly decide to arrive tonight with this group of people? A rather peculiar thing for you to do, yes?”

  “I was advised to in the course of a…religious ritual,” said Paz, and felt stupid at how this sounded.

  “Yes, I’d imagined something like that. You know, personally I have virtually no sympathy in that area: nothing to do with belief or disbelief, a matter of temperament, I suppose. Perhaps in reaction to my mother: she was always looking vaguely off and predicting events.”

  “Did they happen?”

  “More or less. Mum was a competent plain witch, and had been trained by several famous shamans. In any case, whatever talent she had didn’t pass on to me, although I can usually spot it when I see it in another. You have it-I noticed it when we met earlier-and of course our Jenny is in a class of her own.”

  Here he gazed to where Jenny was poised on a flat rock at the lip of the waterfall, about to dive into the pool. The pool lamps illuminated her from below, setting red sparks in her hair, and giving to her face and body the appearance of a sculpted figure from a forgotten and terrible cult.

  “Ah, magnificent!” Cooksey exclaimed softly when she had vanished in a splash of dark water. “But not entirely human. Do you know, when she arrived, everyone here thought she was mentally deficient, but that’s not the case at all. She’s perfectly competent at the ordinary tasks of life, and in at least one area, wasp taxonomy, she’s nearly brilliant, despite being a practical illiterate. She has what we call a feeling for the organism, very rare indeed. I think her story is that her upbringing was so perfectly dreadful that at an early age she simply drew a magic circle around some inner core of her being and sheltered there, while responding minimally to what was happening to her body. A perfectly empty vessel, perfectly open to…whatever. God. Gods. The pulse of nature. Moie thinks she’s quite something, and he should know. But back to tonight. Here you are, summoned in some way, and here we are, and why do you suppose that is?”

  “I’m not really sure,” said Paz, “but it has something to do with my daughter. He wants her.”

  “Yes, he does. I’ve tried to think why. Come with me, I believe the drinks table needs refreshing.” At that he moved off toward the house, and Paz followed. The night remained warm but not sultry, perfect in fact, and the breeze had dropped to nothing. Every blade and leaf of foliage was still as stone, and the larger trees and shrubs seemed to Paz to have a presence, as if they had personalities. It was very like being at abembe, the slight thickening of the air, the way living objects seemed to be haloed with tiny spirals of neon light. Paz’s head felt oddly heavy, as if the stones of his orisha were really, rather than figuratively, sitting in his head, and behind him, intimately close, as if someone treaded on his heels, or was wearing his body like a suit of clothes, he felt the loom of his saint.

  He didn’t follow Cooksey into the house but waited on the patio. For some reason he was reluctant to leave the outdoors, to suffer artificial structure around him. He spent the time (of uncertain duration-there was something wrong with the flow of time as well, he discovered) contemplating a banana tree, its goodness, the modest green beauty of its long leaves, the dense dark redness of its fruits. Then Cooksey emerged bearing a tin tray upon which sat an ice bucket, several bottles of various spirits, and a six-pack of St. Pauli Girl beer.

  “And have you come up with any conclusions?” Paz asked as he snagged one of the beers.

  “Oh, mere theorizing. I suppose all this comes under the heading of some things man was not meant to know, as in those old horror films, but it seems to me that this is in the nature of a reverse butterfly effect. You’re familiar with the term?”

  “It’s from chaos theory. The butterfly in China makes the tornado in Iowa.”

  “Just so,” said Cooksey, setting the tray down on the poolside table. The swimming party had now wrapped themselves in towels taken from the plywood box and were arranged on lounge chairs and smooth rocks. Only Amelia and Jenny were still playing in the water. There was something very Greek about the gathering now, thought Paz, and it wasn’t just the towels. He mentioned this to Cooksey.

  “Yes, I was getting to that. It’s Pan come again. Real Eros has been drained from the world these many centuries and now it’s back in this little garden for the night. But to continue: a reverse butterfly effect would be when something gigantic and complex throws out something tiny and simple, which yet has a significance at some other level of being. I’ll tell you a little story.” He poured a healthy measure of scotch into a plastic cup and drank from it. “When I was quite a small boy, my mother took me to visit a relative of hers in a village by the sea, in Norfolk. It was late in the war, and when we arrived, we found that an errant German flying bomb had landed nearby and exploded. No one was hurt and there was almost no damage, but a small piece
of metal from the blast had flown into this man’s garden and struck down an ancient Bourbon rosebush. The old gent was carrying on as if all of the Second World War had been a vast conspiracy to destroy this particular rosebush. Quite dotty really, but it stuck in my mind, the idea that immense enterprises produce these strange little catastrophes, and further, that from some unknowable vantage point these tiny events are significant indicators. On the one hand fifty millions of dead people, on the other a killed rosebush.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” said Paz. He was trying to concentrate on Amelia and Lola, to fix their location in his mind, so he could move to protect them when whatever was about to happen took place. For something was about to happen: the queerness he had been feeling for the last few minutes (and was it really just minutes-surely it had been strange for a longer time) had turned to dread, and he felt something like madness plucking at the edges of his mind. He started to move toward his family. Cooksey drifted in his wake, still talking.

  “Yes, it doesn’t make sense, not from our viewpoint, but perhaps there are others. There may be imperatives of which we know nothing, any more than the fig wasp does when she sacrifices her individual life for the preservation of her species. Studying the social insects gives one a somewhat different perspective about the survival of the individual, you know. In any case, when my family died, or was killed, I devoted a good deal of thought to the subject, descending at least partway into lunacy, as you might understand, being a family man yourself, but one thought did emerge that I rather fancied, which was that something is trying to send us a message.”

  “Something,” said Paz. He was now within a few yards of where Amelia and his wife lay, swathed in towels. Lola was rubbing her daughter’s hair. Zwick and Beth lay on one of the chaises, Scotty and Geli on the other. Jenny was standing, wrapped in a yellow towel, drying her hair with a green one. She was looking into the dark, dense foliage beyond the reach of the pool lights, as if waiting for something. Everything seemed to be moving too slowly, as it does in a dream. Behind him, Cooksey’s voice continued.

  “Yes, the planet, for example, or its guardians, or the noetic sphere, however you want to describe it. You see at a certain point we decided that everything was dead, including us, and that it was perfectly all right to turn the entire substance of nature into some imaginary abstraction-power, or some idea of the nation, or race, or just at present it happens to be money. So let’s say this something has awakened after a long nap, not really long for something that’s been alive for four billion years, but long in our terms, and it noticed a little itch, a little raw spot, and it scratches idly, and that was the twentieth century, a hundred million dead from war and famine, but unfortunately we kept on, learning nothing, and now it’s a little more interested, because now we’re fiddling with the basic balancing mechanisms of the whole shebang. And now it turns out that great Pan wasn’t dead after all. Now he wakes up, not among us, of course, because we’re dead, but among Moie’s people, and because of what happened to me I’m impelled, let’s say, to provide the impetus to bring him here.”

  “And what does it all mean?” Paz asked, not because he thought Cooksey really knew, but to keep him talking as if his talking was a preface to whatever was going to happen and it had to wait until he was finished. Paz thought he needed a little more time. He also needed his bow and arrows. This was a new thought, and he felt his body turning away, being pulled back toward the Volvo. He lifted the rear hatch with some difficulty; for his hands seemed to have forgotten how to work the latch, and the whole vehicle seemed unhealthy in some way, hideous, something that should not exist. He walked back to the pool, holding the bow and the quiver of arrows. The last time Paz had actually shot a bow, the arrows had been tipped with suction cups. He had no idea what he was supposed to do with the things, only that it was necessary for him to have them in hand.

  No one seemed to have moved; Cooksey seemed not to have finished, seemed to have been talking to the night. “…in any case, we could be seeing a new order of things, a nexus of some kind. We see this in evolution occasionally, a time or a place where speciation seems to move at an accelerated pace-we have no idea why. Now we may have a situation where a certain kind of unconscious evil is directly punished, a partial solution to the question of why bad things happen to good people and not the reverse. Someone gives an order and at the other end of a long chain of actors we have murder, destruction, rapine, the world ground to paste to change the registers in certain bank accounts. What would it be like if the hand that gave the order was then bitten off? Wouldthat change things, or are we so ungodly stupid that not even that would work. Or what if, as now, a child sacrifice were required? Would that get our fucking attention?”

  Cooksey’s voice had risen for this last phrase, but no one seemed to notice. Everyone was looking at Jaguar.

  Twenty

  Jaguar emerged soundlessly from the darkness and now stood full on the paved patio that surrounded the pool. He was a lot bigger than Paz had imagined, nearly the size of an African lion, but leaner and longer, much larger than a real jaguar. It shone as if illuminated from within, like a jack-o’-lantern, its black rosettes seeming to vibrate against their golden ground. Cooksey was now speechless, frozen, his mouth still open holding the shape of his last words. Paz wanted to yell at Lola to take the child and run, but his voice was somehow missing. He felt his hands withdraw an arrow from the quiver and nock it on the bowstring. The arrows were long and fletched with bright green parrot feathers, and tipped with points of milky stone, very sharp.

  Jaguar glided across the pool patio to where Lola and Amelia lay. The child’s head was bent across her mother’s knees. Lola had been untangling Amelia’s wet hair with her fingers. Paz could see his daughter look into the topaz lanterns of the god’s eyes. She had a soft smile on her face. Lola was looking at the beast with what seemed to Paz to be casual polite interest, as if the girl were about to introduce a new and suitable playmate. Everyone else seemed to be fixed solidly in place, like the background figures in a classical painting, an effect augmented by their draped towels, their languid postures.

  Paz decided that he had been wrong and that this was, in fact, a particularly vivid dream, and really, just like the ones he’d had so often in the recent past. There was his girl and there was the jaguar and it would take her as a sacrifice and everything would be better for everyone, the world would be made whole again by it, and he felt an odd stirring of pride that his daughter should be so honored. And here he contemplated the being of the girl herself, the lines of inheritance combined in her, the generations of Jews back to Jerusalem, and Africans back to Ife, and Spaniards back to wherever, Rome, Greece, the Gothic lands, Arabia, all the ancestors, studying in synagogues, serving the gods of Yoruba, serving the masters in the cane fields, conquering the infidels, worshipping Allah, all to produce the particularity of this gleaming child…

  But now these portentous musings were interrupted by a swift movement near the pool. Jenny Simpson had dashed out of her place in the frieze and was hanging on Jaguar’s neck, tugging at the golden head, shouting “No, no. Stop it, leave her alone,” which Paz thought was absurd, she was treating him like a naughty puppy, and he felt vaguely annoyed at her for disturbing the stately aesthetics of the scene. Jaguar shuddered like a dog, flinging the young woman aside, casting her down on the paving with an audible thud. Paz heard a sound, a deep growl so low he thought it might be imaginary, like one of the false sounds one hears upon just falling into sleep.

  Ararah. Arararararh.

  As if it were a signal, Paz felt something move inside his head at the sound, felt his limbs moving to the urging of the Other within, felt the tension of the bow in his hands, the feather against his cheek, felt the twang of the release in his shoulder and his spine.

  Jaguar opened his jaws above the child just before the arrow struck him behind his foreleg.

  Paz tried to keep his eyes open, but an agency deep in his midbr
ain forced them shut to avoid registering events that evolution did not permit his brain to process. He recorded a wind and an unidentifiable noise, though, and when he could see again, he saw chaos on the pool deck. A small brown man with a bowl haircut was lying in a pool of blood, coughing blood, with Paz’s long arrow stuck in his side. Zwick was kneeling by his side, rallying long-dormant medical instincts. He took a moment to yell, “Jesus, Paz, why the hell did you do that!”

  Lola meanwhile was attending Jenny, who had seized dramatically just as the arrow struck. She frothed at the mouth, her naked body bent into a paraboloid, with only the crown of her head and her heels touching the ground. Paz found himself with an armful of Amelia, who was shrieking and shaking as if she had absolutely rolled in sand spurs. The others were standing around the stricken pair, trying to make themselves useful. Paz carried his girl away to the patio, where he sat down in a chair and held the small body to him, kissing her damp hair and murmuring reassurances. The cries eventually subsided to whooping gasps and then one last sigh, and she said, sobbing still, “I was scared, Daddy.”

  “Of course you were. It was very scary. I was scared, too.”

  “It was going to eat me up, for real!”

  “Yes, it was.”

  “Part of me wanted to get eated up and part of me was so scared.”

  “Yes, that was your bad dream, wasn’t it? But now it’s over. It can’t hurt you anymore.”

  “And it turned into Moie,” she said. “I saw it! Everything in the air was all ghizzhy.” She waved her fingers and twisted them around themselves to illustrate just howghizzhy. “And Moie got shot with a arrow.”

  “That’s right,” said Paz.

  “But he won’t die because he’s good, like Frodo. He got wounded, didn’t he?”