“That must have been when Elizabeth’s old boyfriend was giving us some trouble,” I said. “We had to lie low for a while.”
“I guess so.” Ray reached for a pack that was propped against the wall and extracted a sheaf of 8" by 11" photographs; they appeared to consist chiefly of smudges and crooked lines. “I began digging through the old sites, especially here—this is the only place I found pottery with these particular designs…”
From this point on I had difficulty keeping a straight face. Have you ever had a friend tell you something unbelievable, something they believed in so strongly that for you to discredit it would cause them pain? Perhaps it was a story about a transcendent drug experience or their conversion to Christianity. And did they stare at you earnestly as they spoke, watching your reactions? I mumbled affirmatively and nodded and avoided Ray’s eyes. Compared to Ray’s thesis, Erich von Däniken’s ravings were a model of academic discipline. From the coincidental pattern of the signal fires, the incident of Meachem’s UFO and some drunken tales he had solicited, from these smudges and lines that—if you exerted your imagination—bore a vague resemblance to bipeds wearing fishbowls on their heads, Ray had concocted an intricate scenario of alien visitation. It was essentially the same story as von Däniken’s—the ancient star-seeding race. But where Ray’s account differed was in his insistence that the aliens had had a special relationship with the Caribe, that the Caribe could call them down by lighting their fires. The landing Meachem had witnessed had been one of the last, because with the arrival of the English the Caribe had gradually retreated from the island, and the aliens no longer had a reason for visiting. Ray meant to lure them back by means of a laser display that would cast a brighter image of Cassiopeia than the Caribe could have managed; and when the aliens returned, he would entreat them to save our foundering civilization.
He had sold the idea of the colony by organizing a society to study the possibility of extraterrestrial life; he had presented slides and lectured on the Guanojan Outer Space Connection. I did not doubt his ability to make such a presentation, but I was amazed that educated people had swallowed it. He told me that his group included a doctor, an engineer, and sundry Ph.D.s, and that they all had some college background. And yet perhaps it was not so amazing. Even today there must be in America, as there were when I left it, a great many aimless and exhausted people like Ray and his friends, people damaged by some powerful trouble in their past and searching for an acceptable madness.
When Ray had finished, he looked at me soberly and said, “You think we’re nuts, don’t you?”
“No,” I said; but I did not meet his eyes.
“We’re not,” he said.
“It’s not important.” I tried to pass it off as a joke. “Not down here, anyway.”
“It’s not just the evidence that convinced me,” he said. “I knew it the first time I came to the Burying Ground. I could feel it.”
“Do you remember what else we talked about the night I showed you Meachem’s journal?” I am not sure why I wanted to challenge him; perhaps it was simply curiosity, a desire to know how fragile his calm mask really was.
“No,” he said, and smiled. “We talked about a lot of things.”
“We were talking about women, and then Spurgeon James interrupted us. But I think you were on the verge of telling me about a woman who had hurt you. Badly. Is all that behind you now?”
His smile dissolved, and the expression that flared briefly in its place was terrible to see—grieving, and baffled by the grief. This time it was his eyes that drifted away from mine. “You’re wrong about me, Frank,” he said. “Port Ezekiel is going to be something very special.”
Shortly thereafter I made my excuses, and he walked me down to the dory. I invited him to visit me and have a meal, but I knew he would not come. I had threatened his beliefs, the beliefs he thought would shore him up, save him, and there was now a tangible barrier between us.
“Come back anytime,” he called as I rowed away.
He stood watching me, not moving at all, an insignificant figure being merged by distance into the dark green gnarl of the mangrove; even when I could barely see him, he continued to stand there, as ritually attendant as his mythical Caribe hosts might have been while watching the departure of their alien guests.
Over five weeks passed before I again gave much thought to Ray and Port Ezekiel. (Port Ezekiel! That name as much as anything had persuaded me of Ray’s insanity, smacking as it did of Biblical smugness, a common shelter for the deluded.) This was a studied lack of concern on my part. I felt he was lost and wanted no involvement with his tragedy. And besides, though the colony remained newsworthy, other events came to supersede it. The shrimp fleet struck against its parent American company, and riots broke out in the streets of Spanish Harbor. The old talk of independence was revived in the bars—idle talk, but it stirred the coals of anti-Americanism. Normally smiling faces frowned at me, the prices went up when I shopped in town, and once a child yelled at me, “Get off de island!” Small things, but they shook me. And since the establishment of Port Ezekiel had been prelude to these events, I could not help feeling that Ray was somehow to blame for this peculiarly American darkness now shadowing my home.
Despite my attempt to ignore Ray’s presence, I did have news of him. I heard that he had paid Hatfield in full and that Jimmy Mullins was on the warpath. Three thousand lempira must have seemed a king’s ransom to him; he lived in a tiny shanty with his wife Hettie and two underfed children, and he had not worked for over a year. I also heard that the shipments of modern conveniences intended for Port Ezekiel had been waylaid by customs—someone overlooked in the chain of bribery, no doubt—and that the colonists had moved into the Burying Ground and were living in brushwood shacks. And then, over a span of a couple of weeks, I learned that they were deserting the colony. Groups of them turned up daily in Meachem’s Landing, complaining that Ray had misled them. Two came to our door one evening, a young man and woman, both delirious, sick with dysentery and covered with infected mosquito bites. They were too wasted to tell us much, but after we had bedded them down I asked the woman what was happening at the colony.
“It was awful,” she said, twisting her hand in the blanket and shivering. “Bugs and snakes…and…” Her eyes squeezed shut. “He just sits there with the snakes.”
“You mean Ray?”
“I don’t know,” she said, her voice cracking into hysteria. “I don’t know.”
Then, one night as Elizabeth and I were sitting on the porch, I saw a flashlight beam weaving toward us along the beach. By the way the light wavered, swooping up to illuminate the palm crowns, down to shine upon a stoved-in dory, I could tell the bearer was very drunk. Elizabeth leaned forward, peering into the dark. “Oh, Lord,” she said, holding her bathrobe closed. “It dat damn Jimmy Mullins.” She rose and went into the house, pausing at the door to add, “If he after foolin’ with me, you tell him I’m goin’ to speak with my uncle ’bout him.”
Mullins stopped at the margin of the porch light to urinate, then he staggered up onto the steps; he dropped his flashlight, and it rolled over beside my machete, which was propped by the door. He was wearing his town clothes—a white rayon shirt with the silk-screened photo of a soccer star on the back, and brown slacks spattered with urine. Threads of saliva hung from his chin.
“Mr. Frank, sir,” he said with great effort. His eyes rolled up, and for a moment I thought he was going to pass out; but he pulled himself together, shook his head to clear the fog, and said, “De mon have got to pay me.”
I wanted no part of his feud with Hatfield. “Why don’t I give you a ride home?” I said. “Hettie’ll be worried.”
Blearily, he focused on me, clinging to a support post. “Dat boog Yankee clot have cheated me,” he said. “You talk to him, Mr. Frank. You tell him he got to pay.”
“Ray Milliken? He doesn’t owe you anything.”
“Somebody owe me!” Mullins flailed his arm
at the night. “And I ain’t got de force to war with Hatfield.” He adopted a clownish expression of sadness. “I born in de summer and never get no bigger den what you seein’ now.”
So, sucked along by the feeble tide of anti-Americanism, Mullins had given up on Hatfield and shifted his aim to a more vulnerable target. I told him that Ray was crazy and would likely not respond to either threats or logic; but Mullins insisted that Ray should have checked Hatfield’s claim before paying him. Finally I agreed to speak to Ray on his behalf and—somewhat mollified—he grew silent. He clung to the post, pouting; I settled back in my chair. It was a beautiful night, the phosphorescent manes of the breakers tossing high above the reef, and I wished he would leave us alone to the view.
“Damn boog Yankee!” He reeled away from the post and careened against the doorframe; his hand fell upon my machete. Before I could react, he picked it up and slashed at the air. “I cut dat bastard down to de deck!” he shouted, glaring at me.
The moment seemed endless, as if the flow of time had snagged on the point of the machete. Drunk, he might do anything. I felt weak and helpless, my stomach knotted by a chill. The blade looked to have the same drunken glitter as his eyes. God knows what might have happened, but at that moment Elizabeth—her robe belling open, eyes gleaming crazily—sneaked up behind him and smacked him on the neck with an ax handle. Her first blow sent him tottering forward, the machete still raised in a parody of attack; and the second drove him off the porch to sprawl facedown in the sand.
Later, after John James and Hettie had dragged Mullins home, as Elizabeth and I lay in bed, I confessed that I had been too afraid to move during the confrontation. “Don’t vex yourself, Frank,” she said. “Dere’s enough trouble on de island dat sooner or later you be takin’ care of some of mine.” And after we had made love, she curled against me, tucked under my arm, and told me of a dream that had frightened her the previous night. I knew what she was doing—nothing about her was mysterious—and yet, as with every woman I have known, I could not escape the feeling that a stranger lay beside me, someone whose soul had been molded by a stronger gravity and under a hotter star.
I spent the next morning patching things up with Mullins, making him a gift of vegetable seeds and listening to his complaints, and I did not leave for the Burying Ground until midafternoon. It had rained earlier, and gray clouds were still passing overhead, hazy fans of sunlight breaking through now and again. The chop of the water pulled against me, and it was getting on toward sunset by the time I arrived—out on the horizon the sea and sky were blending in lines of blackish squalls. I hurried through the brush, intending to convey my warning as quickly as possible and be home before the winds; but when I reached the first clearing, I stopped short.
The thatch and poles of the brushwood huts were strewn over the dirt, torn apart, mixed in with charred tin cans, food wrappers, the craters of old cooking fires, broken tools, mildewed paperbacks, and dozens of conch shells, each with their whorled tops sliced off—that must have been a staple of their diet. I called Ray’s name, and the only answer was an intensification in the buzzing of the flies. It was like the aftermath of a measly war, stinking and silent. I picked my way across the litter to the second clearing and again was brought up short. An identical mess carpeted the dirt and Ray’s shelter remained intact, the fringe of rotting snakeskins still hanging from the roofpoles—but that was not what had drawn my attention.
A trench had been dug in front of the shelter and covered with a sheet of wire mesh; large rocks held the wire in place. Within the trench were forty or fifty snakes. Coralitos, yellowjaws, Tom Goffs, cottonmouths. Their slithering, their noses scraping against the wire as they tried to escape, created a sibilance that tuned my nerves a notch higher. As I stepped over the trench and into the shelter, several of them struck at me; patches of the mesh glistened with their venom. Ray’s hammock was balled up in a corner, and the ground over which it had swung had been excavated; the hole was nearly full of murky water—groundwater by the briny smell. I poked a stick into it and encountered something hard at a depth of about three feet. A boulder, probably. Aside from Ray’s pack, the only other sign of habitation was a circular area of dirt that had been patted smooth; dozens of bits of oyster shell were scattered across it, all worked into geometric shapes—stars, hexagons, squares, and so forth. A primitive gameboard. I did not know what exactly to make of these things, but I knew they were the trappings of madness. There was an air of savagery about them, of a mind as tattered as its surroundings, shriveled to the simplest of considerations; and I did not believe that the man who lived here would understand any warning I might convey. Suddenly afraid, I turned to leave and was given such a shock that I nearly fell back into the water-filled pit.
Ray was standing an arm’s length away, watching me. His hair was ragged, shoulder-length, and bound by a cottonmouth-skin band; his shorts were holed and filth-encrusted. The dirt smeared on his cheeks and forehead made his eyes appear round and staring. Mosquito bites speckled his chest—though not as many as had afflicted the colonists I had treated. In his right hand he carried a long stick with a twine noose at one end, and in his left hand was a burlap sack whose bottom humped and writhed.
“Ray,” I said, sidling away from him.
I expected a croak or a scream of rage for an answer, but when he spoke it was in his usual voice. “I’m glad you’re here,” he said. He dropped the sack—it was tied at the top—beside the trench and leaned his stick against the wall of the shelter.
Still afraid, but encouraged by the normalcy of his actions, I said, “What’s going on here?”
He gave me an appraising stare. “You better see her for yourself, Frank. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” He sat cross-legged beside the patch of smoothed dirt and began picking up the shell-bits. The way he picked them up fascinated me—so rapidly, pinching them up between thumb and forefinger, and funneling them back into his palm with the other three fingers, displaying an expert facility. And, I noticed, he was only picking up the hexagons.
“Sit down,” he said. “We’ve got an hour or so to kill.”
I squatted on the opposite side of the gameboard. “You can’t stay here, Ray.”
He finished with the hexagons, set them aside, and started on the squares. “Why not?”
I told him about Mullins, but as I had presumed he was unconcerned. All his money, he said, was tied up in investment funds; he would find a way to deal with Mullins. He was calm in the face of my arguments, and though this calm seemed to reflect a more deep-seated confidence than had been evident on my first visit, I did not trust it. To my mind the barrier between us had hardened, become as tricky to navigate as the reef around the island. I gave up arguing and sat quietly, watching him play with the shells. Night was falling, banks of dark clouds were rushing overhead, and gusts of wind shredded the thatch. Heavy seas would soon be washing over the reef, and it would be beyond my strength to row against them. But I did not want to abandon him. Under the dreary storm-light, the wreckage of Port Ezekiel looked leached of color and vitality, and I had an image of the two of us being survivors of a great disaster, stalemated in debate over the worth of restarting civilization.
“It’s almost time,” he said, breaking the silence. He gazed out to the swaying tops of the bushes that bounded the clearing. “This is so wild, Frank. Sometimes I can’t believe it myself.”
The soft astonishment in his voice brought the pathos of his situation home to me. “Jesus, Ray,” I said. “Come back with me. There’s nothing here.”
“Tell me that when you’ve seen her.” He stood and walked over to the water-filled pit. “You were right, Frank. I was crazy, and maybe I still am. But I was right, too. Just not in the way I expected.”
“Right about what?”
He smiled. “Cassiopeia.” He hunkered down by the pit. “I’ve got to get in the water. There has to be physical contact or else the exchange can’t occur. I’ll be unconscious for a wh
ile, but don’t worry about it. All right?”
Without waiting for my approval, he lowered himself into the water. He seemed to be groping for something, and he shifted about until he had found a suitable position. His shoulders just cleared the surface. Then he bowed his head so that I could no longer see his face.
My thoughts were in turmoil. His references to “her,” his self-baptism, and now the sight of his disembodied head and tendrils of hair floating on the water, all this had rekindled my fear. I decided that the best thing I could do for him, for both of us, would be to knock him out, to haul him back to Sandy Bay for treatment. But as I looked around for a club, I noticed something that rooted me in my tracks. The snakes had grown frantic in their efforts to escape; they were massed at the far side of the trench, pushing at the mesh with such desperation that the rocks holding it down were wobbling. And then, an instant later, I began to sense another presence in the clearing.
How did I sense this? It was similar to the feeling you have when you are alone for the first time with a woman to whom you are attracted, how it seems you could close your eyes and stopper your ears and still be aware of her every shift in position, registering these changes as thrills running along your nerves and muscles. And I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that this presence was female. I whirled around, certain that someone was behind me. Nothing. I turned back to Ray. Tremors were passing through his shoulders, and his breath came in hoarse shudders as if he had been removed from his natural element and were having trouble with the air. Scenes from old horror movies flashed through my brain. The stranger lured to an open grave by an odd noise; the ghoul rising from the swamp, black water dripping from his talons; the maniac with the split-personality, smiling, hiding a bloody knife under his coat. And then I saw, or imagined I saw, movement on the surface of the water; it was bulging—not bubbling, but the entire surface bulging upward as if some force below were building to an explosion. Terrified, I took a backward step, and as my foot nudged the wire screen over the trench, as the snakes struck madly at the mesh, terrified themselves, I broke and ran.
The Jaguar Hunter Page 37