Roosters crowing waked her to gray dawn light. She remembered a dream about a faceless lover, and she stretched and rolled onto her side. Richard was sitting at the window, wearing jeans and a T-shirt; he glanced at her, then turned his gaze to the window, to the sight of a pale green volcano wreathed in mist. “It’s not working,” he said, and when she failed to respond, still half-asleep, he buried his face in his hands, muffling his voice. “I can’t make it without you, babe.”
She had dreaded this moment, but there was no reason to put it off. “That’s the problem,” she said. “You used to be able to.” She plumped the pillows and leaned back against them.
He looked up, baffled. “What do you mean?”
“Why should I have to explain it? You know it as well as I do. We weaken each other, we exhaust each other, we depress each other.” She lowered her eyes, not wanting to see his face. “Maybe it’s not even us. Sometimes I think marriage is this big pasty spell of cakes and veils that shrivels everything it touches.”
“Lisa, you know there isn’t anything I wouldn’t…”
“What? What’ll you do?” Angrily, she wadded the sheet. “I don’t understand how we’ve managed to hurt each other so much. If I did, I’d try to fix it. But there’s nothing left to do. Not together, anyway.”
He let out a long sigh—the sigh of a man who has just finished defusing a bomb and can allow himself to breathe again. “It’s him, right? You still want to be with him.”
It angered her that he would never say the name, as if the name were what counted. “No,” she said stiffly. “It’s not him.”
“But you still love him.”
“That’s not the point! I still love you, but love…” She drew up her legs and rested her forehead on her knees. “Christ, Richard. I don’t know what more to tell you. I’ve said it all a hundred times.”
“Maybe,” he said softly, “maybe this discussion is premature.”
“Oh, Richard!”
“No, really. Let’s go on with the trip.”
“Where next? The Mountains of the Moon? Brazil? It won’t change anything.”
“You can’t be sure of that!” He came toward the bed, his face knitted into lines of despair. “We’ll just stay a few more days. We’ll visit the villages on the other side of the lake, where they do the weaving.”
“Why, Richard? God, I don’t even understand why you still want me…”
“Please, Lisa. Please. After eleven years you can try for a few more days.”
“All right,” she said, weary of hurting him. “A few days.”
“And you’ll try?”
I’ve always tried, she wanted to say; but then, wondering if it were true, as true as it should be, she merely said, “Yes.”
The motor launch that ran back and forth across the lake between Panajachel and San Augustín had seating room for fifteen, and nine of those places were occupied by Germans, apparently members of a family—kids, two sets of parents, and a pair of portly red-cheeked grandparents. They reeked of crudity and good health, and made Lisa feel refined by comparison. The young men snapped their wives’ bra straps—grandpa almost choked with laughter each time this happened; the kids whined; the women were heavy and hairy-legged. They spent the entire trip taking pictures of one another. They must have understood English, because when Richard cracked a joke about them, they frowned and whispered and became standoffish. Lisa and Richard moved to the stern, a superficial union imposed, and watched the shore glide past. Though it was still early, the sun reflected a dynamited white glare on the water; in the daylight the volcanoes looked depressingly real, their slopes covered by patchy grass and scrub and stunted palms.
San Augustín was situated at the base of the largest volcano, and was probably like what Panajachel had been before tourism. Weeds grew between the cobblestones, the whitewash was flaked away in places, and grimy, naked toddlers sat in the doorways, chewing sugarcane and drooling. Inside the houses it was the fourteenth century. Packed dirt floors, iron cauldrons suspended over fires, chickens pecking and pigs asleep. Gnomish old Indian women worked at handlooms, turning out strange tapestries—as for example a design of black cranelike birds against a backdrop of purple sky and green trees, the image repeated over and over—and bolts of dress material, fabric that on first impression seemed to be of a hundred colors, all in perfect harmony. Lisa wanted to be sad for the women, to sympathize with their poverty and particular female plight, and to some extent she managed it; but the women were uncomplaining and appeared reasonably content and their weaving was better work than she had ever done, even when she had been serious about art. She bought several yards of the material, tried to strike up a conversation with one of the women, who spoke neither English nor Spanish, and then they returned to the dock, to the village’s only bar-restaurant—a place right out of a spaghetti western, with a hitching rail in front and skinned sapling trunks propping up the porch roof and a handful of young long-haired American men standing along the bar, having an early-morning beer. “Holy marijuana!” said Richard, winking. “Hippies! I wondered where they’d gone.” They took a table by the rear window so they could see the slopes of the volcano. The scarred varnish of the table was dazzled by sunlight; flies buzzed against the heated panes.
“So what do you think?” Richard squinted against the glare.
“I thought we were going to give it a few days,” she said testily.
“Jesus, Lisa! I meant what do you think about the weaving.” He adopted a pained expression.
“I’m sorry.” She touched his hand, and he shook his head ruefully. “It’s beautiful…I mean the weaving’s beautiful. Oh God, Richard. I don’t intend to be so awkward.”
“Forget it.” He stared out the window, deadpan, as if he were giving serious consideration to climbing the volcano, sizing up the problems involved. “What did you think of it?”
“It was beautiful,” she said flatly. The buzzing of the flies intensified, and she had the notion that they were telling her to try harder. “I know it’s corny to say, but watching her work…What was her name?”
“Expectación.”
“Oh, right. Well, watching her I got the feeling I was watching something magical, something that went on and on…” She trailed off, feeling foolish at having to legitimize with conversation what had been a momentary whimsy; but she could think of nothing else to say. “Something that went on forever,” she continued. “With different hands, of course, but always that something the same. And the weavers, while they had their own lives and problems, that was less important than what they were doing. You know, like the generations of weavers were weaving something through time as well as space. A long, woven magic.” She laughed, embarrassed.
“It’s not corny. I know what you’re talking about.” He pushed back his chair and grinned. “How about I get us a couple of beers?”
“Okay,” she said brightly, and smiled until his back was turned. He thought he had her now. That was his plan—to get her a little drunk, not drunk enough for a midday hangover, just enough to get her happy and energized, and then that afternoon they’d go for a ride to the next village, the next exotic attraction, and more drinks and dinner and a new hotel. He’d keep her whirling, an endless date, an infinitely prolonged seduction. She pictured the two of them as a pair of silhouetted dancers tangoing across the borders of map-colored countries. Whirling and whirling, and the thing was, the very sad thing was, that sooner or later, if he kept her whirling, she would lose her own momentum and be sucked into the spin, into that loving-the-spin-I’m-in-old-black-magic routine. Then final rinse. Final spin. Then the machine would stop and she’d be plastered to the side of the marriage like a wet blouse, needing a hand to lift her out. She should do what had to be done right now. Right this moment. Cause a scene, hit him. Whatever it took. Because if she didn’t…He thunked down a bottle of beer in front of her, and her smile twitched by reflex into place.
“Thanks,” she said.
/> “Por nada.” He delivered a gallant bow and sat down. “Listen…”
There was a clatter from outside, and through the door she saw a skinny bearded man tying a donkey to the hitching rail. He strode on in, dusting off his jeans cowboy-style, and ordered a beer. Richard turned to look and chuckled. The man was worth a chuckle. He might have been the Spirit of the Sixties, the Wild Hippie King. His hair was a ratty brown thatch hanging to his shoulders, and braided into it were long gray feathers that dangled still lower; his jeans were festooned with painted symbols, and there were streaks of what appeared to be green dye in his thicket of a beard. He noticed them staring, waved, and came toward them.
“Mind if I join you folks?” Before they could answer, he dropped into a chair. “I’m Dowdy. Believe it or not, that’s a name, not a self-description.” He smiled, and his blue eyes crinkled up. His features were sharp, thin to the point of being wizened. It was hard to tell his age because of the beard, but Lisa figured him for around thirty-five. Her first reaction had been to ask him to leave; the instant he had started talking, though, she had sensed a cheerful kind of sanity about him that intrigued her. “I live up yonder,” he went on, gesturing at the volcano. “Been there goin’ on four years.”
“Inside the volcano?” Lisa meant it for a joke.
“Yep! Got me a little shack back in under the lip. Hot in the summer, freezin’ in the winter, and none of the comforts of home. I got to bust my tail on Secretariat there”—he waved at the donkey—“just to haul water and supplies.” In waving he must have caught a whiff of his underarm—he gave it an ostentatious sniff. “And to get me a bath. Hope I ain’t too ripe for you folks.” He chugged down a third of his beer. “So! How you like Guatemala?”
“Fine,” said Richard. “Why do you live in a volcano?”
“Kinda peculiar, ain’t it,” said Dowdy by way of response; he turned to Lisa. “And how you like it here?”
“We haven’t seen much,” she said. “Just the lake.”
“Oh, yeah? Well, it ain’t so bad ’round here. They keep it nice for the tourists. But the rest of the country…whooeee! Violent?” Dowdy made a show of awed disbelief. “You got your death squads, your guerrillas, your secret police, not to mention your basic crazed killers. Hell, they even got a political party called the Party of Organized Violence. Bad dudes. They like to twist people’s arms off. It ain’t that they’re evil, though. It’s just the land’s so full of blood and brimstone and Mayan weirdness, it fumes up and freaks ’em out. That’s how come we got volcanoes. Safety valves to blow off the excess poison. But things are on the improve.”
“Really?” said Richard, amused.
“Yes, indeed!” Dowdy tipped back in his chair, propping the beer bottle on his stomach; he had a little potbelly like that of a cartoon elf. “The whole world’s changing. I s’pose y’all have noticed the way things are goin’ to hell back in the States?”
Lisa could tell that the question had mined Richard’s core of political pessimism, and he started to frame an answer, but Dowdy talked through him.
“That’s part of the change,” he said. “All them scientists say they figured out reasons for the violence and pollution and economic failure, but what them things really are is just the sound of consensus reality scrapin’ contrary to the flow of the change. They ain’t nothin’ but symptoms of the real change, of everything comin’ to an end.”
Richard made silent speech with his eyes, indicating that it was time to leave.
“Now, now,” said Dowdy, who had caught the signal. “Don’t get me wrong. I ain’t talkin’ Apocalypse, here. And I for sure ain’t no Bible basher like them Mormons you see walkin’ ’round the villages. Huh! Them suckers is so scared of life they travel in pairs so’s they can keep each other from bein’ corrupted. ‘Watch it there, Billy! You’re steppin’ in some sin!’” Dowdy rolled his eyes to the ceiling in a parody of prayer. “‘Sweet Jesus, gimme the strength to scrape this sin off my shoe!’ Then off they go, purified, a couple of All-American haircuts with souls stuffed fulla white-bread gospel and crosses ’round their necks to keep off the vampire women. Shit!” He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table. “But I digress. I got me a religion, all right. Not Jesus, though. I’ll tell you ’bout it if you want, but I ain’t gonna force it down your throat.”
“Well,” Richard began, but Lisa interrupted.
“We’ve got an hour until the boat,” she said. “Does your religion have anything to do with your living in the volcano?”
“Sure does.” Dowdy pulled a hand-rolled cigar from his shirt pocket, lit it, and blew out a plume of smoke that boiled into a bluish cloud against the windowpanes. “I used to smoke, drink”—he flourished his beer—“and I was a bear for the ladies. Praise God, religion ain’t changed that none!” He laughed, and Lisa smiled at him. Whatever it was that had put Dowdy in such good spirits seemed to be contagious. “Actually,” he said, “I wasn’t a hell-raiser at all. I was a painfully shy little fella, come from backwoods Tennessee. Like my daddy’d say, town so small you could spit between the city-limits signs. Anyway, I was shy but I was smart, and with that combination it was a natural for me to end up in computers. Gave me someone I could feel comfortable talkin’ to. After college I took a job designin’ software out in Silicon Valley, and seven years later there I was…Livin’ in an apartment tract with no real friends, no pictures on the walls, and a buncha terminals. A real computer nerd. Wellsir! Somehow I got it in mind to take a vacation. I’d never had one. Guess I figured I’d just end up somewhere weird, sittin’ in a room and thinkin’ ’bout computers, so what was the point? But I was determined to do it this time, and I came to Panajachel. First few days I did what you folks probably been doin’. Wanderin’, not meetin’ anyone, buyin’ a few geegaws. Then I caught the launch across the lake and ran into ol’ Murciélago.” He clucked his tongue against his teeth. “Man, I didn’t know what to make of him at first. He was the oldest human bein’ I’d ever seen. Looked centuries old. All hunched up, white-haired, as wrinkled as a walnut shell. He couldn’t speak no English, just Cakchiquel, but he had this mestizo fella with him who did his interpretin’, and it was through him I learned that Murciélago was a brujo.”
“A wizard,” said Lisa, who had read Castaneda, to Richard, who hadn’t.
“Yep,” said Dowdy. “’Course I didn’t believe it. Thought it was some kinda hustle. But he interested me, and I kept hangin’ ’round just to see what he was up to. Well, one night he says to me—through the mestizo fella—‘I like you,’ he says. ‘Ain’t nothin’ wrong with you that a little magic wouldn’t cure. I’d be glad to make you a gift if you got no objections.’ I said to myself, Oh-oh, here it comes. But I reckoned it couldn’t do me no harm to let him play his hand, and I told him to go ahead. So he does some singin’ and rubs powder on my mouth and mutters and touches me, and that was it. ‘You gonna be fine now,’ he tells me. I felt sorta strange, but no finer than I had. Still, there wasn’t any hustle, and that same night I realized that his magic was doin’ its stuff. Confused the hell out of me, and the only thing I could think to do was to hike on up to the volcano, where he lived, and ask him about it. Murciélago was waitin’ for me. The mestizo had gone, but he’d left a note explainin’ the situation. Seems he’d learned all he could from Murciélago and had taken up his own post, and it was time the ol’ man had a new apprentice. He told me how to cook for him, wished me luck, and said he’d be seein’ me around.” Dowdy twirled his cigar and watched smoke rings float up. “Been there ever since and ain’t regretted it a day.”
Richard was incredulous. “You gave up a job in Silicon Valley to become a sorcerer’s apprentice?”
“That’s right.” Dowdy pulled at one of the feathers in his hair. “But I didn’t give up nothin’ real, Richard.”
“How do you know my name?”
“People grow into their names, and if you know how to look for it, it’s written everywhere on ’em. ’Bout hal
f of magic is bein’ able to see clear.”
Richard snorted. “You read our names off the passenger manifest for the launch.”
“I don’t blame you for thinkin’ that,” said Dowdy. “It’s hard to accept the existence of magic. But that ain’t how it happened.” He drained the dregs of his beer. “You were easy to read, but Lisa here was sorta hard ’cause she never liked her name. Ain’t that so?”
Lisa nodded, surprised.
“Yeah, see when a person don’t like their name it muddies up the writin’, so to speak, and you gotta scour away a lotta half-formed names to see down to the actual one.” Dowdy heaved a sigh and stood. “Time I’m takin’ care of business, but tell you what! I’ll bring ol’ Murciélago down to the bar around seven o’clock, and you can check him out. You can catch the nine o’clock boat back. I know he’d like to meet you.”
“How do you know?” asked Richard.
“It ain’t my place to explain. Look here, Rich. I ain’t gonna twist your arm, but if you go back to Panajachel you’re just gonna wander ’round and maybe buy some garbage. If you stay, well, whether or not you believe Murciélago’s a brujo, you’ll be doin’ somethin’ out of the ordinary. Could be he’ll give you a gift.”
“What gift did he give you?” asked Lisa.
“The gift of gab,” said Dowdy. “Surprised you ain’t deduced that for yourself, Lisa, ’cause I can tell you’re a perceptive soul. ’Course that was just part of the gift. The gift wrappin’, as it were. It’s like Murciélago says, a real gift ain’t known by its name.” He winked at her. “But it took pretty damn good, didn’t it?”
As soon as Dowdy had gone, Richard asked Lisa if she wanted a last look at the weaving before heading back, but she told him she would like to meet Murciélago. He argued briefly, then acquiesced. She knew what he was thinking. He had no interest in the brujo, but he would humor her; it would be an Experience, a Shared Memory, another increment of momentum added to the spin of their marriage. To pass the time she bought a notebook from a tiny store, whose entire inventory would have fit in her suitcases, and sat outside the bar sketching the volcanoes, the people, the houses. Richard oohed and ahhed over the sketches, but in her judgment they were lifeless—accurate, yet dull and uninspired. She kept at it, though; it beat her other options.
The Jaguar Hunter Page 32