Tía Claudia said that I was who I claimed to be and argued that I was a threat to him. I understood that she was really concerned with my threat to her influence over Meachem, but I was so distressed by the lapsing of the machine’s power that I didn’t care what they did to me. Bathed in the silvery light, stars shining around their heads, they seemed emblematic of something—perhaps of all humanity—this ludicrous old pirate in his ruffled shirt, and, shaking her knobbly finger at him, the manipulative witch who wanted to be his master.
After that night, Meachem took me under his wing. I learned that he was an exile, outlawed by the English and obsessed with the idea of returning home, and I think he was happy to have met someone even more displaced than he. Occasionally he’d invite me to his house, a gabled building of pitch-coated boards that clung to a strip of iron shore east of Sandy Bay. He’d sit me down in his study and read to me for hours from his journals; he thought that—being a member of an advanced civilization—I’d have the wit to appreciate his intellect. The study was a room that reflected his obsession with England, its walls covered with Union Jacks, a riot of scarlet and blue. Sometimes, watching the flies crusting the lip of his pewter mug, his sagging face looming above them, the colors on the wall appearing to drip in the unsteady glare of the oil lamp…sometimes it seemed a more nightmarish environment than the Caribe’s circle of fires. He’d pore over the pages, now and again saying, “Ah, here’s one you’ll like,” and would quote the passage.
“‘Wars,’” he read to me once, “‘are the solstices of the human spirit, ushering in winter to a young man’s thought and rekindling the spring of an old man’s anger.’”
Every page was filled with aphorisms like that—high-sounding, yet empty of meaning except as regarded his own nature. He was the cruelest man I’ve ever known. A wife-beater, a tyrant to his slaves and children. Some nights he would have himself borne down to the beach, order torches lit, and watch as those who had offended him were flogged—often to the death—with stalks of withe. After witnessing one of the floggings, I considered killing him, even though such an act would have been in violation of everything I believed.
Then one night he brought another woman to the Burying Ground, a young mulatto girl named Nora Mullins.
“She be weak-minded like Ezekiel,” said Meachem. “She’ll make you a perfect wife.”
She would have run, but his slaves herded her forward. Her eyes darted left and right, her hands fidgeted with the folds of her skirt.
“I don’t need a wife,” I said.
“Don’t you now? Here’s a chance to create your own lineage, to escape that infernal contraption of yours. Nora’ll bear you a child, and if blood holds true, it’ll be as witless as its parents. After Ezekiel’s gone, you can take up residence in your heir.” His laugh disintegrated into a hacking cough.
The idea had logic behind it, but the thought of being intimate with a member of another species, especially one whose sex might be said to approximate my own, repelled me. Further, I didn’t trust his motives. “Why are you doing this?” I asked.
“I’m dyin’.” The old monster worked up a tear over the prospect. “Nora’s my legacy to you. I’ve always thought it a vast irony that a high-flyin’ soul such as yourself should have been brought so low. It’ll please me to think of you marooned among generations of idiots while I’m wingin’ off to my reward.”
“This island is your reward,” I said. “Even the soul dies.”
“You know that for a fact?” He was worried.
“No,” I said, relenting. “No one knows that.”
“Well, then I’ll come back to haunt you.”
But he never did.
I had intended to send Nora away after he left, but Ezekiel—though too timid to approach her sexually—found her attractive, and I didn’t want to deprive him of her companionship. In addition, I began to realize how lonely I had been myself. The idea of keeping her with me and fathering a child seemed more and more appealing, and a week later, using Ezekiel’s memories to rouse lust, I set out to become a family man.
What a strange union that was! The moon sailing overhead, chased by ragged blue clouds; the wind and insects and frogs combining into a primitive music. Nora was terrified. She whimpered and rolled her eyes and halfheartedly tried to fight me off. I don’t believe she was clear as to what was happening, but eventually her instincts took control. It would be hard to imagine two more inept virgins. I had a logical understanding of the act, at least one superior to Nora’s; but this was counterbalanced by her sluggish coordination and my revulsion. Somehow we managed. I think it was mainly due to the fact that she sensed I was like her, female in a way that transcended anatomy, and this helped us to employ tenderness with one another. Over the succeeding nights an honest affection developed between us; though her speech was limited to strangled cries, we learned to communicate after a fashion, and our lovemaking grew more expert, more genuine.
Fourteen years we were together. She bore me three children, two stillborn, but the third a slow-witted boy whom we named Carl—it was a name that Nora could almost pronounce. By day she and Ezekiel were brother and sister, and by night she and I were husband and wife. Carl needed things the land couldn’t provide, milk, vegetables, and these were given us by William Brooks; but when he died several years after Carl’s birth, taking with him the secret of my identity, Nora began going into Sandy Bay to beg—or so I thought until I was visited by her brother Robert. I knew something must be wrong. We were the shame of the family; they had never acknowledged us in any way.
“Nora she dead,” he told me. “Murdered.”
He explained that two of her customers had been fighting over her, and that when she had tried to leave, one—a man named Halsey Brooks—had slit her throat. I didn’t understand. Customers? Nothing Mullins said made sense.
“Don’t you know she been whorin’?” he said. “Mon, you a worse fool dan I think. She been whorin’ dese six, seven years.”
“Carl,” I said. “Where is he?”
“My woman takin’ charge of him,” he said. “I come for to bring you to dis Brooks. If you ain’t mon enough, den I handle it myself. Family’s family, no matter how crooked de tie.”
What I felt then was purely human—loss, rage, guilt over the fact that Nora had been driven to such straits. “Show him to me,” I said.
Hearing the murderousness in my voice, Robert Mullins smiled.
Halsey Brooks was drinking in a shanty bar, a single room lit by oil lamps whose glass tops were so sooty that the light penetrated them as baleful orange gleams. The rickety tables looked like black spiders standing at attention. Brooks was sitting against the rear wall, a big slack-bellied man with skin the color of sunbaked mud, wearing a shirt and trousers of sailcloth. Mullins stationed himself out of sight at the door, his machete at the ready in case I failed, and I went inside.
Catching sight of me, Brooks grinned and drew a knife from his boot. “Dat little squint of yours be missin’ you down in hell,” he said, and threw the knife.
I twisted aside, and the knife struck the wall. Brooks’s eyes widened. He got to his feet, wary; the other customers headed for the door, knocking over chairs in their haste.
“You a quick little nigger,” said Brooks, advancing on me. “But quick won’t help you now.”
He would have been no match for me; but confronted by the actual task of shedding blood, I found that I couldn’t go through with it. I was nauseated by the thought that I had even considered it. I backed away, tripped over a chair, and went sprawling in the corner.
“Dat de best you got to offer?” said Brooks, chuckling.
As he reached for me, Mullins slipped up behind and slashed him across the neck and back. Brooks screamed—an incredibly girlish sound for a man so large—and sank to his knees beside me, trying to pinch together the lips of his wounds. He held a hand to his face, seemingly amazed by the redness. Then he pitched forward on top of me. The reek of his blood and sweat, jus
t the feel of him in my hands as I started to push him away, all that drove me into a fury. One of his eyes was an inch from mine, half-closed and clouding over. He was dying, but I wanted to dig the last flicker of life out of him. I tore at his cheek with my teeth. The eye snapped open, I heard the beginning of his scream, and I remember nothing more until I threw him aside. His face was flayed to the muscle-strings, his nose was pulped, and there were brimming dark-red craters where his eyes had been.
“My God!” said Mullins, staring at the ruin of Brooks’s head; he turned to me. “Go home! De thing more dan settled.”
All my rage had drained and been replaced by self-loathing. Home! I was home. The island had eroded my spirit, transformed me into one of its violent creatures.
“Don’t come ’round no more,” said Mullins, wiping his blade on Brooks’s trousers; he gave me a final look of disgust. “Get back to de damn Buryin’ Ground where you belong.”
Cassiopeia sprang to her feet and stepped out into the clearing. Her expression was grim, and I was worried that she might have worked herself into a rage by rehashing the killing. But she only walked a few paces away. Silvered by the moonlight, she looked unnaturally slim, and it seemed more than ever that I was seeing an approximation of her original form. The snakes had grown dead-still in the trench.
“You didn’t really kill him,” I said.
“I would have,” she said. “But never again.” She kicked at a pile of conch shells and sent them clattering down.
“What happened then?”
She did not answer for a moment, gazing out toward the sound of the reef. “I was sickened by the changes I’d undergone,” she said. “I became a hermit, and after Ezekiel died I continued my hermitage in Carl’s body. That poor soul!” She walked a little farther away. “I taught him to hide whenever men visited the Burying Ground. He lived like a wild animal, grubbing for roots, fishing with his bare hands. At the time it seemed the kindest thing I could do. I wanted to cleanse him of the taint of humanity. Of course that proved impossible…for both of us.”
“You know,” I said, “with all the technological advances these days, you might be able to contact…”
“Don’t you think I’ve considered my prospects!” she said angrily; and then, in a quieter tone, “I used to hope that human science would permit me to return home someday, but I’m not sure I want to anymore. I’ve been perverted by this culture. I’d be as repulsive to my people as Ezekiel was to Robert Mullins, and I doubt that I’d be comfortable among them myself.”
I should have understood the finality of her loneliness—she had been detailing it in her story. But I understood now. She was a mixture of human and alien, spiritually a half-breed, gone native over a span of two centuries. She had no people, no place except this patch of sand and mangrove, no tradition except the clearing and the snakes and a game made of broken shells. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s not your fault, Frank,” she said, and smiled. “It’s your American heritage that makes you tend to enshrine the obvious.”
“Ray and I aren’t a fair sample,” I said defensively.
“I’ve known other Americans,” she said. “They’ve all had that tendency. Everyone down here thought they were fools when they first came. They seemed totally unaware of the way things worked, and no one understood that their tremendous energy and capacity for deceit would compensate. But they were worse than either the pirates or the Spanish.”
Without another word, she turned and walked toward the brush.
“Wait!” I said. I was eager to hear about her experiences with Americans.
“You can come back tomorrow, Frank,” she said. “Though maybe you shouldn’t.”
“Why not?” Then, thinking that she might have some personal reason for distrusting Americans, I said, “I won’t hurt you. I don’t believe I’m physically capable of it.”
“What a misleading way to measure security,” she said. “In terms of hurt. You avoid using the word ‘kill,’ and yet you kill so readily. It’s as though you’re all pretending it’s a secret.”
She slipped into the brush, moving soundlessly, somehow avoiding the dry branches, the papery fronds.
I drove all over the island the next day, trying to find a tape recorder, eventually borrowing one from a tourist in Meachem’s Landing. Half-baked delusions of grandeur had been roused in me. I would be the Schliemann of extraterrestrial research, uncovering the ruin of an alien beneath the waste of a human being. There would be best-sellers, talk shows, exclamations of academic awe. Of course there was no real proof. A psychiatrist would point out how conveniently pat the story was—the machine that hid itself, the loss of memory, the alien woman conjured up by a man whose disorder stemmed from a disappointment in love. He would say it was the masterwork of a gifted tale-spinner, complete with special effects. Yet I thought that whoever heard it would hear—as I had—the commonplace perfection of truth underlying its exotic detail.
I had forgotten my original purpose for visiting the Burying Ground, but that afternoon Jimmy Mullins turned up at my door, eager to learn if I had news for him. He was only moderately drunk and had his wife Hettie in tow—a slender, mahogany-skinned woman wearing a dirty blue dress. She was careworn, but still prettier than Mullins deserved. I was busy and put him off, telling him that I was exploring something with Ray that could lead to money. And, I realized, I was. Knowing his character, I had assumed Mullins was attempting to swindle Hatfield; but Nora Mullins’s common-law marriage to Ezekiel Brooks gave credence to his claim. I should have explained it to him. As it was, he knew I was just getting rid of him, and Hettie had to pull him down from the porch to cut short his arguments. My news must have given him some heart, though, because a few minutes later Hatfield knocked at the door.
“What you tellin’ Jimmy?” he asked. “He braggin’ dat you got proof de Buryin’ Ground his.”
I denied the charge and told him what I had learned, but not how I had learned it.
“I never mean to cheat Jimmy,” he said, scratching his head. “I just want to make sure he not cheatin’ me. If he got a case…well, miserable as he is, he blood.”
After he left, I had problems. I found I needed new batteries for the recorder and had to drive into Meachem’s Landing; and when I returned home I had an argument with Elizabeth that lasted well past sunset. As a result, I did not start out for the Burying Ground until almost ten o’clock, and while I was stowing my pack in the dory, I saw Cassiopeia walking toward me along the beach.
It was a clear night, the shadows of the palms sharp on the sand, and each time she passed through a shadow, it seemed I was seeing Ray; but then, as she emerged into the light, I would undergo a peculiar dislocation and realize that it was not Ray at all.
“I was on my way out to you,” I said. “You didn’t have to come into town.”
“I gave up being a hermit long ago, Frank,” she said. “I like coming here. Sometimes it jogs my memory to be around so many others, though there’s nothing really familiar about them.”
“What do you remember?”
“Not much. Flashes of scenery, conversations. But once I did remember something concrete. I think it had to do with my work, my profession. I’ll show you.”
She squatted, smoothed a patch of sand, and began tracing a design. As with all her actions, this one was quick and complicated; she used three fingers of each hand, moving them in contrary directions, adding a squiggle here, a straight line there, until the design looked like a cross between a mandala and a printed circuit. Watching it evolve, I was overcome by a feeling of peace, not the drowsiness of hypnotism, but a powerful, enlivening sensation that alerted me to the peacefulness around me. The soughing of the palms, the lapping of the water, the stillness of the reef—it was low tide. This feeling was as potent as the effect of a strong drug, and yet it had none of the fuzziness that I associate with drugs. By the time she had finished, I was so wrapped in contentment that all my curiosity had abate
d—I was not even curious about the design—and I put aside for the moment the idea of recording her. We strolled eastward along the beach without talking, past Sarah’s Store and The Chicken Shack, taking in the sights. The tin roofs of the shanties gleamed under the moonlight, and, their imperfections hidden by the darkness, the shanties themselves looked quaint and cozy. Shadows were dancing behind the curtains, soft reggae drifted on the breeze. Peace. When I finally broke the silence, it was not out of curiosity but in the spirit of that peace, of friendship.
“What about Ray?” I asked. “He was in pretty rough shape when I visited him the other afternoon.”
“He’s better off than he would be elsewhere,” she said. “Calmer, steadier.”
“But he can’t be happy.”
“Maybe not,” she said. “But in a way I’m what he was always seeking, even before he began to deteriorate. He actually thinks of me in romantic terms.” She laughed—a trilling note. “I’m very happy with him myself. I’ve never had a host with so few defects.”
We were drawing near the New Byzantine Church of the Archangel, a small white-frame building set back from the shore. This being Friday, it had been turned into a movie theater. The light above the door illuminated a gaudy poster that had been inserted into the glass case normally displaying the subject of the sermon; the poster showed two bloodstained Chinese men fighting with curved knives. Several teenagers were silhouetted by the light, practicing martial-arts kicks beside the steps—like stick figures come to life—and a group of men was watching them, passing a bottle. One of the men detached himself from the group and headed toward us. Jimmy Mullins.
“Mr. Milliken!” he shouted. “Dis de owner of de Buryin’ Ground wantin’ to speak with you!”
Cassiopeia spun on her heel and went wading out into the water. Infuriated, Mullins ran after her, and—myself infuriated at the interruption, this breach of peace—I stuck out a foot and tripped him. I threw myself on top of him, trying for a pin, but he was stronger than I had supposed. He wrenched an arm loose, stunned me with a blow to the head, and wriggled free. I clamped my arms around his leg, and he dragged me along, yelling at Cassiopeia.
The Jaguar Hunter Page 39