When she opened her eyes, she found it had grown pitch-dark. She couldn’t see her hand in front of her face, and she panicked, thinking she had gone blind; but accompanying the panic was a gradual brightening, and she realized that she must have willed away all light. Soon the world had returned to normal. Almost. Though the slopes of the volcanoes were unlighted—shadows bulking against the stars—above each of their cones blazed a nimbus of ruby glow, flickering with an inconstant rhythm. The glow above Murciélago’s volcano was the brightest—at least it was for a few seconds. Then it faded, and in its place a fan of rippling white radiance sprayed from the cone, penetrating high into the dark. It was such an eerie sight, she panicked. Christ, what was she doing just sitting here and watching pretty lights? And what was she going to do? Insecurity and isolation combined into an electricity that jolted her to her feet. Maybe there was an antidote for this, maybe the thing to do would be to go see Murciélago…And she remembered Dowdy’s story. How he’d been afraid and had gone to Murciélago, only to find that the old apprentice had taken up his own post, leaving a vacancy. She looked back at the other two volcanoes, still pulsing with their ruby glow. Dowdy and the mestizo? It had to be. The white light was Murciélago’s vacancy sign. The longer she stared at it, the more certain knowledge became.
Stunned by the prospect of setting out on such an eccentric course, by the realization that everything she knew was dissolving in light or fleeing into darkness, she walked away from the pier, following the shoreline. She wanted to hold on to Richard, to sadness—her old familiar and their common woe—but with each step her mood brightened, and she couldn’t even feel guilty about not being sad. Four or five hours would take her to the far side of the lake. A long walk, alone, in the dark, hallucinations lurking behind every bush. She could handle it, though. It would give her time to work at controlling her vision, to understand some of what she saw, and when she had climbed the volcano she’d find a rickety cabin back in under the lip, a place as quirky as Dowdy himself. She saw it the same way she had seen Richard and the girl. Tilting walls; ferns growing from the roof; a door made from the side of a packing crate, with the legend THIS END UP upside down. Tacked to the door was a piece of paper, probably Dowdy’s note explaining the care and feeding of wizards. And inside, the thousandfold forms of his spirit compacted into a gnarled shape, a nugget of power (she experienced an upwelling of sadness, and then she felt that power surging through her, nourishing her own strength, making her aware of the thousands of bodies of light she was, all focused upon this moment in her flesh), there Murciélago would be waiting to teach her power’s usage and her purpose in the world.
Oh God, Richard, goodbye.
ALL THIS HAPPENED several years ago on the island of Guanoja Menor, most of it to a young American named Ray Milliken. I doubt you will have heard of him, not unless you have been blessed with an exceptional memory and chanced to read the sketchy article about his colony printed by one of the national tabloids; but in these parts his name remains something to conjure with.
“Who were dat Yankee,” a drunkard will say (the average Guanojan conversation incorporates at least one), “de one who lease de Buryin’ Ground and say he goin’ to bring down de space duppies?”
“Dat were Ray Milliken,” will be the reply, and this invariably will initiate a round of stories revolving about the theme of Yankee foolishness, as if Ray’s experiences were the central expression of such a history—which they well may be.
Most Americans one meets abroad seem to fall into types. I ascribe this to the fact that when we encounter a fellow countryman, we tend to exaggerate ourselves, to adopt categorizable modes of behavior, to advertise our classifiable eccentricities and political views, anything that may later prove a bone of contention, all so we may be more readily recognizable to the other. This tendency, I believe, bears upon our reputation for being people to whom time is a precious commodity; we do not want to waste a moment of our vacations or, as in the case of expatriates like myself, our retirements, by pursuing relationships based on a mistaken affinity. My type is of a grand tradition. Fifty-eight years old, with a paunch and a salt-and-pepper beard; retired from a government accounting job to this island off the coast of Honduras; once-divorced; now sharing my days with a daughter of the island, a twenty-year-old black girl named Elizabeth, whose cooking is indifferent but whose amatory performance never lacks enthusiasm. When I tally up these truths, I feel that my life has been triangulated by the works of Maugham, Greene, and Conrad. The Ex-Civil Servant Gone To Seed In A Squalid Tropic. And I look forward to evolving into a further type, a gray eminence, the sort of degenerate emeritus figure called upon to settle disputes over some trifling point of island lore.
“Better now you ask ol’ Franklin Winship ’bout dat,” they’ll say. “De mon been here since de big storm in ’seventy-eight.”
Ray’s type, however, was of a more contemporary variety; he was one of those child-men who are to be found wandering the sunstruck ends of the earth, always seeming to be headed toward some rumored paradise, a beach said to be unspoiled, where they hope to achieve…something, the realization of a half-formed ambition whose criteria of peace and purity are so high as to guarantee failure. Travelers, they call themselves, and in truth, travel is their only area of expertise. They know the cheapest restaurant in Belize City, how to sleep for free on Buttermilk Key, the best sandalmaker in Panajachel; they have languished in Mexican jails, contracted dysentery while hiking through the wilds of Olancho, and been run out of various towns for drug abuse or lack of funds. But despite their knowledge and experience, they are curiously empty young men, methodical and unexcitable, possessing personalities that have been carefully edited to give the least effrontery to the widest spectrum of the populace. As they enter their thirties—and this was Ray’s age when I met him—they will often settle for long periods in a favorite spot, and societies of even younger travelers will accrete around them. During these periods a subtype may emerge—crypto-Charles Mansons who use their self-assurance to wield influence over the currencies of sex and drugs. But Ray was not of this mold. It seemed to me that his wanderings had robbed him of guile, of all predilection for power-tripping, and had left him a worldly innocent. He was of medium stature, tanned, with ragged sun-streaked hair and brown eyes set in a handsome but unremarkable face; he had the look of a castaway frat boy. Faint, fine lines radiated from the corners of his eyes, like scratches in sandstone. He usually dressed in shorts and a flour-sack shirt, one of several he owned that were decorated with a line drawing of a polar bear above the name of the mill and the words HARINA BLANCA.
“That’s me,” he would say, pointing to the words and smiling. “White bread.”
I first saw him in the town square of Meachem’s Landing, sitting on a stone bench beneath the square’s single tree—a blighted acacia—and tying trick knots for the amusement of a clutch of spidery black children. He grinned at me as I passed, and, surprised, being used to the hostile stares with which many young Americans generally favor their elders, I grinned back and stopped to watch. I had just arrived on the island and was snarled in red tape over the leasing of land, aggravated by dealing with a lawyer who insisted on practicing his broken English when explaining things, driven to distraction by the incompetent drunks who were building my house, transforming my neat blueprints into the reality of a Cubist nightmare. I welcomed Ray’s companionship as a respite. Over a span of four months we met two or three times a week for drinks at the Salón de Carmín—a ramshackle bar collapsing on its pilings above the polluted shallows of the harbor. To avoid the noise and frequent brawls, we would sit out back on the walkway from which the proprietress tossed her slops.
We did not dig into each other’s souls, Ray and I; we told stories. Mine described the vicissitudes of Washington life, while his were exotic accounts of chicleros and cursed Mayan jade; how he had sailed to Guayaquil on a rock star’s yacht or paddled alone up the Río de la Pasión to the unexcava
ted ruin of Yaxchilán; a meeting with guerrillas in Salvador. Quite simply, he was the finest storyteller I have ever known. A real spellbinder. Each of his stories had obviously been worked and reworked until the emotional valence of their events had been woven into clear, colorful prose; yet they maintained a casual edge, and when listening to him it was easy to believe that they had sprung full-blown from his imagination. They were, he told me, his stock-in-trade. Whenever times were lean, he would find a rich American and manage to weasel a few dollars by sharing his past.
Knowing he considered me rich, I glanced at him suspiciously; but he laughed and reminded me that he had bought the last two rounds.
Though he was always the protagonist of his stories, I realized that some of them must have been secondhand, otherwise he would have been a much older, much unhealthier man; but despite this I came to understand that secondhand or not, they were his, that they had become part of his substance in the way a poster glued to a wall eventually merges with the surface beneath through a process of the weather. In between the stories I learned that he had grown up in Sacramento and had briefly attended Cal Tech, majoring in astronomy; but thereafter the thread of his life story unraveled into a welter of anecdote. From various sources I heard that he had rented a shanty near Punta Palmetto, sharing it with a Danish girl named Rigmor and several others, and that the police had been nosing around in response to reports of nudity and drugs; yet I never impinged on this area of his life. We were drinking companions, nothing more, and only once did I catch a glimpse of the soul buried beneath his placid exterior.
We were sitting as usual with our feet propped on the walkway railing, taking shelter in the night from the discordant reggae band inside and gazing out at the heat lightning that flashed orange above the Honduran coast. Moths batted at the necklace of light bulbs strung over the door, and the black water was lacquered with reflection. On either side, rows of yellow-lit windows marked the shanties that followed the sweep of the harbor. We had been discussing women—in particular a local woman whose husband appeared to be more concerned with holding on to her than curbing her infidelities.
“Being cuckolded seems the official penalty for marriage down here,” I said. “It’s as if they’re paying the man back for being fool enough to marry them.”
“Women are funny,” said Ray; he laughed, realizing the inadequacy of the cliché. “They’re into sacrifice,” he said. “They’ll break your heart and mean well by it.” He made a gesture of frustration, unable to express what he intended, and stared gloomily down at his hands.
I had never before seen such an intense expression on his face; it was clear that he was not talking about women in the abstract. “Having trouble with Rigmor?” I asked.
“Rigmor?” He looked confused, then laughed again. “No, that’s just fun and games.” He went back to staring at his hands.
I was curious; I had a feeling that I had glimpsed beneath his surface, that the puzzle he presented—a bright young man wasting himself in endless wandering—might have a simple solution. I phrased my next words carefully, hoping to draw him out.
“I suppose most men have a woman in their past,” I said, “one who failed to recognize the mutuality of a relationship.”
Ray glanced at me sharply, but made no comment.
“Sometimes,” I continued, “we use those women as justifications for our success or failure, and I guess they do deserve partial credit or blame. After all, they do sink their claws in us…but we let them.”
He opened his mouth, and I believe he was about to tell me a story, the one story of real moment in his life; but just then old Spurgeon James, drunk, clad in tattered shirt and shorts, the tangle of his once-white beard stained a motley color by nicotine and rum, staggered out of the bar and began to urinate into the shallows. “Oh, mon!” he said. “Dis night wild!” He reeled against the wall, half-turning, the arc of his urine glistening in the yellow light and splashing near Ray’s feet. When he had finished, he tried to extort money from us by relating the story that had gained him notoriety the week before—he claimed to have seen flying saucers hanging over Flowers’s Bay. Anxious to hear Ray’s story, I thrust a lempira note at Spurgeon to get rid of him; but by the time he had gone back in, Ray had lost the impulse to talk about his past and was off instead on the subject of Spurgeon’s UFOs.
“You don’t believe him, do you?” I said. “Once Spurgeon gets a load on, he’s liable to see the Pope driving a dune buggy.”
“No,” said Ray. “But I wish I could believe him. Back at Cal Tech I’d planned on joining one of the projects that were searching for extraterrestrial life.”
“Well then,” I said, fumbling out my wallet, “you’d probably be interested to know that there’s been a more reliable sighting on the island. That is, if you consider a pirate reliable. Henry Meachem saw a UFO back in the 1700s—1793, I think.” I pulled out a folded square of paper and handed it to Ray. “It’s an excerpt from the old boy’s journal. I had the clerk at the Historical Society run me off a Xerox. My youngest girl reads science fiction, and I thought she might get a laugh out of it.”
Ray unfolded the paper and read the excerpt, which I reproduce below.
May 7th, 1793. I had just gone below to my Cabin after negotiating the Reef, when I heard divers Cries of astonishment and panic echoing down the Companion-way. I return’d to the Fore-Deck and there found most of the Crew gather’d along the Port-Rail, many of them pointing to the Heavens. Almost directly overhead and at an unguessable Distance, I espi’d an Object of supernal red brilliance, round, no larger than a Ha’penny. The brightness of the Object was most curious, and perhaps brightness is not the proper Term to describe its Effect. While it was, indeed, bright, it was not sufficiently so to cause me to shield my Eyes; and yet whenever I attempt’d to direct my Gaze upon it, I experienc’d a sensation of Vertigo and so was forc’d to view it obliquely. I call’d for my Glass, but before it could be bro’t there was a Windy Noise—yet not a whit more Wind—and the Object began to expand, all the while maintaining its circular Forme. Initially, I thought it to be falling towards us, as did the Crew, and several Men flung themselves into the Sea to escape immolation. However, I soon realis’d that it was merely growing larger, as tho’ a Hole were being burned thro’ the Sky to reveal the flame-lash’d Sky of Hell behind. Suddenly a Beam of Light, so distinct as to appear a reddish-gold Wire strung between Sky and Sea, lanc’d down from the Thing and struck the Waters inside the Reef. There was no Splash, but a great hissing and venting of Steam, and after this had subsided, the Windy Noise also began to subside, and the fiery Circle above dwindled to a point and vanish’d. I consider’d putting forth a Long-Boat to discover what had fall’n, but I was loathe to waste the Southerly Wind. I mark’d the position of the Fall—a scant 3 miles from our Camp at Sandy Bay—and upon our Return there will be ample Opportunity to explore the Phenomenon…
As I recall, Ray was impressed by the excerpt, saying that he had never read of a sighting quite like this one. Our conversation meandered over the topics of space colonies, quasars, and UFO nuts—whom he deprecated as having given extraterrestrial research a bad name—and though I tried to resurrect the topic of women, I never succeeded.
At the time I was frantically busy with supervising the building of my house, maneuvering along the path of bribery and collusion that would lead to my obtaining final residence papers, and I took for granted these meetings at the Salón de Carmín. If I had been asked my opinion of Ray in those days, I would have said that he was a pleasant-enough sort but rather shallow. I never considered him my friend; in fact, I looked on our relationship as being free from the responsibilities of friendship, as a safe harbor from the storms of social convention—new friends, new neighbors, new woman—that were blowing around me. And so, when he finally left the island after four months of such conversations, I was surprised to find that I missed him.
Islands are places of mystery. Washed by the greater mysteries of wi
nd and sea, swept over by tides of human event, they accumulate eerie magnetisms that attract the lawless, the eccentric, and—it is said—the supernatural; they shelter oddments of civilization that evolve into involute societies, and their histories are less likely to reflect orderly patterns of culture than mosaics of bizarre circumstance. Guanoja’s embodiment of the mystery had fascinated me from the beginning. It had originally been home to Caribe Indians, who had moved on when Henry Meachem’s crews and their slaves established their colonies—their black descendants still spoke an English dotted with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colloquialisms. Rum-running, gun-smuggling, and revolution had all had their moment in the island’s tradition; but the largest part of this tradition involved the spirit world. Duppies (a word used to cover a variety of unusual manifestations, but generally referring to ghosts, both human and animal); the mystical rumors associated with the smoking of black coral; and then there was the idea that some of the spirits dwelling there were not the shades of dead men and women, but ancient and magical creatures, demigods left over from the days of the Caribe. John Anderson McCrae, the patriarch of the island’s storytellers, once put it to me this way:
“Dis island may look like a chewed-up bone some dog have dropped in a puddle, and de soil may be no good for plantains, no good for corn. But when it come to de breedin’ of spirits, dere ain’t no soil better.”
The Jaguar Hunter Page 35