Night of the Jaguar

by Joe Gannon

  He trudged homeward, when his legs, following a body memory, turned right and stopped in front of a beer joint, Jardín Central. A beer. A cold beer. Gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme just the one.

  “You’re back.” He said it out loud like he’d bumped into someone.

  A cold beer. The local brew, called Victoria, was made without hops, which Nicaragua did not grow and could not import because of the American embargo. It had a shelf life of only three days before it turned to piss. Beer without hops. Bricks without straw. Victoria.

  By the time he stood at his own front door the sun was going down. There were newspapers strewn in front of it, and he realized he could calculate time that way. He got three newspapers a day, so he counted them. Eighteen newspapers. He’d been gone six days, not five. He scooped them up and locked the door behind him.

  He went to his office, sat in his chair, and pulled the dead drawer open. In it was the photo of him from July 20, 1979, Gio’s small makeup bag, the suicide soldier’s Makarov, and the bottle of Flor de Caña Extra Seco. The Needle was still strapped to his calf. He sat staring into the dead drawer until all the light crept away and night skulked in.

  2.

  Taking a drink was like lighting a homemade rocket. There was, Ajax thought as he lay on his back in his tiny garden looking up at the stars, that moment of anticipation when the hand holding the match hovered near the fuse. Will it go off in your face? Or burn nice and smooth before it explodes into the sky? There was no way to know but to touch flame to fuse, step back, and await the wonder, the release of detonation. When he’d finally cracked the seal on the bottle of rum, it was like pointing a rocket at the sky. Pouring himself three fingers of the liquid sulfur was like striking the match. Then tossing all of it into his mouth and holding it there for a moment was like that very first spark on the fuse. Holding it there just long enough for the taste buds to communicate to his stomach, to his body, to his entire being: Stand by for lift-off!

  Ten, nine, eight … Then—and this had always been his favorite part—the slow burn of the fuse as the rum ran slowly, dreamily, languorously down his esophagus to his belly. Three, two one …

  BANG!

  Of course, it was not so much an explosion as an implosion. And he did not so much watch the rocket go as ride it. With the bottle in one hand and the glass in the other, Captain Ajax Montoya pushed himself off the damp earth.

  “We have lift-off!”

  He stumbled over the low table on which he had assembled the contents of the dead drawer and sent them and himself tumbling back to earth.

  “Houston, second stage not complete.”

  He sorted the items he’d knocked off the table into a little pile of his heart’s detritus. He had added Horacio’s poetry manuscript, his thesaurus, the Python, and The Needle, its blade cleaned and oiled since its last use.

  “Too much ballast, Houston.”

  “Copy that, Captain Montoya, lighten your load.”

  He tore Horacio’s manuscript, Poems from the Volcano, apart, piled the pages into a vague cone shape, and soaked them with rum. Ripped a few pages out of the thesaurus.

  “Ballast, weight, counterbalance…”

  And added them to the pyre. Next he picked up the photo, looked at it one last time, and smashed his fist into it. He was drunk enough not to feel the glass shards go into his knuckles, but not so drunk he didn’t notice the blood trickle down his fingers. He watched a few drops make their slow progress until one slid off his fingernail onto the photo, obliterating his face there.

  “Bonfire, flare, beacon…”

  He ripped the photo from the frame, flicked his Zippo to life, and set it alight. When the flames had consumed half the picture he dropped it onto the manuscript pages. They burst into flame so quickly that he had to roll away. He poured himself three more fingers of rocket fuel and knocked it back. Then he fed a little more onto the fire.

  “Second stage is complete!”

  He fumbled for the small makeup bag, spilled the four items onto the ground, then fed the bag into the fire. He held the hairbrush over the flames until the acrid smell of burning hair roused his dulled nostrils. Then he fed the brush to the flames. The nail file he drove into the ground like a spike, using the butt of the Python to hammer it into oblivion. The lipstick tube, he rolled open. He ripped another page from the thesaurus and smeared on it in his bloody hand. Judas Cain. He held the page over the fire, and as it caught, some of the lipstick melted and rolled down the paper like the blood down his fingers.

  “Now the secret ingredient.”

  He lifted the petite, cut-glass perfume bottle, tore the top off as he had done the rum bottle, and dribbled what was left into the fire. The alcohol in it flared and singed the hair on his hand.

  “A la gran puta! Gotta have the last word, don’t you, bitch!”

  He hurled the vial over the back wall and heard it shatter in the darkness. Ajax stirred the fire to keep the manuscript pages burning. Then he stared at the flames with the unfocused countenance of the drunkard. His mind was not blank so much as adrift, like a satellite out of orbit, drawn into the void of space. He waited—as the flames got smaller, as the fire died—for something, anything to come into his mind. Nothing did. That was when he noticed he had the Python in his hand. He rolled the cylinder back and forth across his palm.

  Back.

  And forth.

  Then he stopped. He held the weapon in both hands. Looking at it. The last of the flames glinting off the chrome. He felt he was trying to remember something.

  And then he did.

  He flicked open the pistol—all six cylinders held a bullet.

  “Eighty-eight. That’s the lucky number.”

  He spun the cylinder as he had eighty-seven times before.

  “Loaded dice. Yeah.”

  Ajax screwed his eyes shut and began to rock, back and forth. He gripped the Python in his left hand and cupped his right on the pistol butt, to steady it. His face twisted into a grimace, he grunted aloud as if in pain, and rocked, rocked back and forth. He touched the Python’s barrel just beneath his chin. He rocked and grunted as he tilted it from one angle to another, tracing in his mind’s eye the path of the bullet. Ninety degrees was too vertical: he saw himself alive but chinless. Forty-five degrees was too low, and he conjured an image of a quadriplegic with a diaper full of shit. About sixty-five degrees should send it through the roof of the mouth and into the brain. And all the time he rocked and grunted and grimaced.

  He squatted on his haunches. “Come on! You goddamned chicken-shit little puto! Okay, okay. Gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme just one more drink.”

  He held the Python under his chin with one hand and poured with the other until his cup overflowed. He swallowed most of it and threw the rest into the dying fire, which flared into flame.

  And in the fleeting illumination he saw eyes.

  The boy with the long eyelashes crouched in the corner of his garden, watching him.

  “You!”

  The ghost, he saw, squatted with his hands cupped under his chin. It took Ajax a moment to realize he was posed just as Ajax was, his index finger pointed like the pistol barrel. Ajax lowered the pistol from his chin, and the ghost did the same. Ajax rolled from a squat to his knees, and the ghost did, too, like a child imitating an adult.

  “Is this what you wanted? By my own hand? Is that it?”

  Suddenly Ajax could see himself as the ghost must have. A wretch. A wreck, squatting upon the ground. Bestial. A gun to his head.

  “Then come with me.”

  Ajax fired into the boy, and fired again and again as if he could kill him again. Then he leapt to his feet and lobbed the almost empty bottle at the ghost-boy and kept firing. Somewhere in the darkness he heard a crash, wood splintering. He thought he heard his name shouted.

  “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!”

  He put the Python to his temple and pulled the trigger. Click. And again. Click.

  “No!”
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  Click. Click. Click. Click.

  He’d emptied it into the ghost he could no longer see, blinded as he was by the muzzle flashes.

  “Ajax!”

  Then Ajax understood. The Needle. He scrambled on the ground until he found it.

  “Is this it?” He shucked the blade from its sheath and pressed it to his neck. “You want me to die like you did?”

  “Ajax!”

  Gladys tackled him and they wrestled, his blood aflame again with the killer’s rage.

  “Ajax, stop!”

  She rolled him onto his back and pinned his hands. It was the heat from the fire that brought him to his senses. The heat, as his body extinguished the last of his bonfire, brought him back to earth. He opened his hand and The Needle rolled away.

  “Stop moving!” Gladys sat on his chest. “Stop!”

  “What?”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Gladys?”

  “Yes, it’s Gladys. What are you doing?”

  “I think I’m on fire.”

  She rolled him over and brushed the embers and burnt paper from his back.

  “What’s happening over there?” A voice as annoyed as frightened called from the other side of Ajax’s wall, which now bore six holes in it.

  “Everything’s fine, señor,” Gladys called back. “Police business. Everyone okay?”

  “Except for the fucking firefight over there.”

  Ajax rolled onto his belly and tried to push himself upright. He got as far as his knees and stayed there, not sure if he would rise again. He heaved once and puked, the recent rocket fuel coming back up like acid. He laid his hot forehead on the cool earth.

  “Puke. Hurl. Retch.”

  Gladys knelt next to him.

  “You’re drunk.”

  He heaved and puked again. “Deduced that, did you?” He dry heaved; the convulsion made his body feel like a bag of sand being beat with a bat.

  “What the fuck are you doing?”

  “‘Wine is a mocker, strong drink a brawler.’”

  “What?”

  “Proverbs.”

  “What were you shooting at?”

  Ajax managed to sit up. “What’d I hit?”

  “The wall, on the other side of which people live, Jesus Christ.”

  “They all right?”

  “Nice of you to care after you shot the place up!”

  His dry heaves passed, but his limbs trembled and the bat being used on his body moved to his head.

  “Why are you here?”

  “Because you’re not answering your phone.”

  Gladys squatted down in front of him. Put a hand on his shoulder. She gave it an imperceptible shake, as if trying to wake something very small and fragile.

  “I just had to work some shit out, Gladys. Okay? Everything’s fine.”

  “No. It’s not.”

  She shook him again, like one of the many tiny tremblers Managua had—so slight you’d call out to someone, or no one, Did you just feel that?

  He’d felt it.

  “Ajax. I got a call. Six bodies were brought into Matagalpa. An ambush on the road from El Tuma. A bloodbath.”

  The bat banging his head was joined by a hammer in his heart in a race to see which could pound fastest.

  “No, no. They were a few hours behind me. Can’t be.” He grabbed Gladys’s shirt and used it like a rope to help pull himself to his feet. “She’s here, she’s back. She’s got to be.”

  “Three Nicas and three foreigners.”

  “No! No. Call her. Call Connelly, get the phone.” He let go of Gladys—the phone was … where? He couldn’t recall the layout of his own home. The earth undulated like a full-on quake, so he had to put his hands out to steady his balance like a drunken tightrope walker. He reached for the wall to steady himself, but it was miles away and he fell, but there was no net and he hit the ground, hard.

  “Ajax, I’m sorry. But the foreigners were two men and a woman. No IDs yet, but … I’m sorry.”

  “No. No it’s not her. It can’t be!”

  “We’ve got an hour before the ministry informs the embassy; if we want to get there before the media circus we’ve got to go now.”

  “No! No. The Contra wouldn’t…”

  And then it all stopped: the earthquake under his feet, the bat against his head, and the hammer in his heart. Ajax stood up, flat footed, steady. He looked into the corner where the ghost had squatted. He counted the bullet holes, sloppily placed like slurred graffiti—six of them, so that one didn’t go into his head.

  “Maybe you’re right, Ajax. Maybe even the Contra wouldn’t dare.…”

  “It wasn’t the Contra. Get in the car.”

  18

  1.

  Gladys stood in the entrance of Saint Peter’s Cathedral. There was no morgue in Matagalpa. Not even a proper hospital. Saint Peter’s was the heart of the town—a whitewashed colonial church that soared above the rest of the city. Most of the town’s tragedies ended up here. The church faced west, so it was still dark in the dawn light.

  People buzzed around like the flies trying to settle on the six corpses laid out in the nave. She’d tried to keep them out, to give Ajax a private moment, but the church was too public and the news was too big. They’d arrived just before dawn in a Red Cross Jeep Marta had conjured up. Having the “chief medical examiner” with them had given Gladys and Ajax some control over the scene, but as the sun rose the street filled with government officials and journalists, most of whom outranked two city cops. Still, most of them held back while Marta examined the dead.

  Gladys had watched Ajax for several minutes now. He stood over the covered body of the redheaded gringa as Marta examined the others. She’d never seen him stand so still, frozen. Only the fingers of his left hand flexed, like an irregular pulse. His stillness and that small twitching made Gladys think of a broken mechanical man. He’d joked often enough about the things that made his trigger finger itch. But if the guns he’d stashed in the back of Marta’s Jeep were a clue, Gladys was sure he wasn’t joking now.

  The Jeep had been Marta’s idea when she’d called her last night. From the moment Gladys had broken the news—and, she saw now, Ajax’s heart—it had taken twenty minutes for the three of them to be on the road, him driving, Gladys next to him, both of them dressed in civvies, and Marta in the backseat crowded with her medical bag and the weapons.

  Marta pulled a bloody sheet over the dead priest, who was so long it reached only to his calves. The three Nicas in the nave, on the other hand, were short enough so that their improvised shrouds covered them entirely. Gladys had stood over Marta while she examined them. From their ages, Gladys figured they were the middle-aged sister, her teenage son, and younger sister, or maybe daughter, of the man in Ohio Amelia had been taking them to meet. Their dark mestizo skin had taken on a gray pallor in death. All the bodies had multiple gunshots, but it seemed to her the Nicas had been dressed in their Sunday best. The women wore colorful shirts—one a deep red, the other lime green—and black skirts to their knees, which made Gladys think it more likely they were sisters than mother and daughter. The boy wore khaki pants and a T-shirt with VAN HALEN printed on the front.

  Marta knelt next to Amelia. She looked at Ajax. Gladys laid a hand on his shoulder. “Do you want to see this?”

  Ajax nodded and then changed his mind. “No, wait.”

  He knelt next to the body. Gladys was surprised when he drew a knife like a knitting needle from his boot. He clasped a sprig of red hair, sliced it off, and slid the blade back into his boot. He looked at the lock of hair for several moments, then closed it in his palm. Whatever Gladys’s confused loyalties had been up to this moment, she knew now whose side she was on. Where she belonged.

  “Go ahead, Marta,” he said.

  Gladys watched Ajax’s face. When Marta drew the sheet back, he looked for the quickest of moments, then turned his head as if slapped. The gringa’s body was riddled with bloody holes
, like the others.

  He turned away. Gladys watched him take a pack of Reds out of his pocket, slip the cellophane wrapper off the box, and place Amelia Peck’s hair inside. He rolled it up and slid it into his breast pocket.

  A sound of brakes and the quiet commotion of people arriving drew Gladys back to the cathedral’s huge doors, big enough for a Goliath to enter. Outside she saw only small people, but the big shots had arrived. Gioconda Targa was there with Senator Teal, Cardinal Obando, and a man she was pretty certain was the American ambassador. She intercepted them on the cathedral steps.

  “Senator Teal, I’m Lieutenant Darío. I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  “Amelia is in there?”

  “Yes, sir.” Gladys tried to send a discreet signal to Gioconda. “So is Dr. Marta Jimenez. If she might have one minute to finish examining the body.”

  “No.” The ambassador stepped forward, all fight. “We want to see them now.”

  Gladys could see she’d get no help from Gioconda, so she led them all inside. She was surprised that Ajax was gone. A discreet nod from Marta signaled the door he’d left by.

  2.

  “Forty-three, forty-four, forty-five.”

  Gladys counted bullet holes while Ajax searched the priest’s vehicle. The Jeep had been hauled in a few hours after the bodies and dropped at a gas station just outside of town. As far as they could tell, no one else had been here yet.