“Pay me my money, bastard!”
“I’ll pay you!” I said out of desperation.
It might have been a magic spell that I had pronounced. He quit dragging me; I clung to his leg with one hand, and with the other I wiped a crust of mucky sand from my mouth.
“You goin’ to pay me three thousand lemps?” he said in a tone of disbelief.
It occurred to me that he had not expected the entire amount, that he had only been hoping for a nuisance payment. But I was committed. Fifteen hundred dollars was no trifle to me, but I might be able to recoup it from Ray, and if not, well, I could make it up by foregoing my Christmas trip to the States. I pulled out my wallet and handed Mullins all the bills, about fifty or sixty lempira.
“That’s all I’ve got now,” I said, “but I’ll get the rest in the morning. Just leave Milliken alone.”
Mullins stared at the money in his hand, his little snappish eyes blinking rapidly, speechless. I stared out to sea, searching for a sign of Cassiopeia, but found none. Not at first. Then I spotted her, a slim, pale figure standing atop a coral head about fifteen yards from shore. Without taking a running start, she leaped—at that distance she looked like a white splinter being blown through the night—and landed upon another coral head some twenty, twenty-five feet away. Before I could absorb the improbability of the leap, she dived and vanished into the water beyond the reef.
“I be at your house nine o’clock sharp,” said Mullins joyfully. “And we go to de bank together. You not goin’ to be havin’ no more strife with dis negro!”
But Mullins did not show up the next morning, not at nine o’clock or ten or eleven. I asked around and heard that he had been drinking in Spanish Harbor; he had probably forgotten the appointment and passed out beneath some shanty. I drove to the bank, withdrew the money, and returned home. Still no Mullins. I wandered the beach, hoping to find him, and around three o’clock I ran into Hettie at Sarah’s Store.
“Jimmy he never home of a Saturday,” she told me ruefully.
I considered giving her the money, but I suspected that she would not tell Mullins, would use it for the children, and though this would be an admirable use, I doubted that it would please Mullins. Twilight fell, and my patience was exhausted. I left a message for Mullins with Elizabeth, stashed the money in a trunk, and headed for the Burying Ground.
After mooring the dory, I switched on the recorder and secreted it in my pack. My investigative zeal of the previous day had been reborn, and not even the desolation of Port Ezekiel could dim my spirits. I had solved the ultimate problem of the retiree; I had come up with a project that was not only time-consuming but perhaps had some importance. And now that Mullins had been taken care of, nothing would interfere.
Cassiopeia was sitting beneath the shelter when I reached the clearing, a silvery star of moonlight shifting across her face from a ragged hole in the thatch. She pointed to my pack and asked, “What’s that?”
“The pack?” I said innocently.
“Inside it.”
I knew she meant the recorder. I showed it to her and said, “I want to document your story.”
She snatched it from me and slung it into the bushes.
“You’re a stupid man, Frank,” she said. “What do you suppose would happen if you played a recording of me for someone? They’d say it was an interesting form of insanity, and if they could profit, or if they were driven by misguided compassion, they’d send me away for treatment. And that would be that.”
For a long while afterward she would not talk to me. Clouds were passing across the moon, gradually thinning, so that each time the light brightened it was brighter than the time before, as if the clearing were being dipped repeatedly into a stream and washed free of a grimy film. Cassiopeia sat brooding over her gameboard. Having grown somewhat accustomed to her, to that strong female presence, I was beginning to be able to detect her changes in mood. And they were rapid changes, fluctuating every few seconds between hostility and sadness. I recalled her telling me that she was probably mad; I had taken the statement to be an expression of gloom, but now I wondered if any creature whose moods shifted with such rapidity could be judged sane. Nonetheless, I was about to ask her to continue her story when I heard an outboard motor, and, moments after it had been shut off, a man’s voice shouting, “Mr. Milliken!”
It was Jimmy Mullins.
A woman’s voice shrilled, unintelligible, and there was a crash as if someone had fallen; a second later Mullins pushed into the clearing. Hettie was clinging to his arm, restraining him; but on seeing us, he cuffed her to the ground and staggered forward. His town clothes were matted with filth and damp. Two other men crowded up behind Hettie. They were both younger than Mullins, slouching, dressed in rags and sporting natty dreads. One held a rum bottle, and the second, the taller, carried a machete.
“You owe me three thousand lemps!” said Mullins to Cassiopeia; his head lolled back, and silver dots of moonlight flared in his eyes.
“Sick of dis Yankee domination,” said the taller man; he giggled. “Ain’t dat right, Jimmy?”
“Jimmy,” I said. “We had a bargain.”
Mullins said nothing, his face a mask of sodden fury; he teetered on the edge of the trench, unaware of the snakes.
“Tired of dis exploitation,” said the man, and his friend, who had been taking a pull from the bottle, elbowed him gleefully and said, “Dat pretty slick, mon! Listen up.” He snapped his fingers in a reggae tempo and sang in a sweet, tremulous voice:
“Sick of dis Yankee domination,
Oh yea—aa-ay,
Tired of dis exploitation…”
The scenario was clear—these two had encountered the drunken Mullins in a bar, listened to the story of his windfall, and, thinking that he was being had, hoping to gain by it, they had egged him into this confrontation.
“Dis my land, and you ain’t legal on it,” said Mullins.
“What about our bargain, Jimmy?” I asked. “The money’s back at the house.”
He was tempted, but drunkenness and politics had infected his pride. “I ain’t no beggar,” he said. “I wants what’s mine, and dis mon’s money mine.” He bent down and picked up one of the conch shells that were lying about; he curled his fingers around the inner curve of the shell—it fit over his hand like the spiked glove of a gladiator. He took a vicious swipe in our direction, and it whooshed through the air.
Cassiopeia let out a hissing breath.
It was very tense in the clearing. The two men were watching Mullins with new respect, new alertness, no longer joking. Even in the hands of a fool, conch shells were serious business; they had a ritual potency. Cassiopeia was deadpan, measuring Mullins. Her anger washed over me—I gauged it to be less anger than a cold disapproval, the caliber of emotion one experiences in reaction to a nasty child. But I was ready to intervene if her mood should escalate. Mullins was a coward at heart, and I thought that he would go to the brink but no further. I edged forward, halfway between them. My mouth was dry.
“I goin’ to bash you simple, and you not pay me,” said Mullins, crossing over the trench.
“Listen, Jimmy…” I said, raising the voice of reason.
Cassiopeia lunged for him. I threw my arms around her, and Mullins, panicked, seeing her disadvantage, swung the shell. She heaved me aside with a shrug and tried to slip the punch. But I had hampered her just enough. The shell glanced off her shoulder. She gave a cawing guttural screech that scraped a nail down the slate of my spine, and clutched at the wound.
“See dere,” said Mullins to his friends, triumphant. “Dis negro take care of he own.” He went reeling back over the trench, nearly tripping, and in righting himself, he caught sight of the snakes. It would have been impossible not to see them—they were thrusting frenziedly at the wire. Mullins’s jaw fell, and he backed away. One of the rocks was dislodged from the screen. The snakes began to slither out, writing rippling black figures on the dirt and vanishing into the litter,
rustling the dead fronds.
“Oh, Jimmy!” Hettie held out a hand to him. “Have a care!”
Cassiopeia gave another of those chilling screeches and lowered into a crouch. Her torso swaying, her hands hooked. The flesh of her left shoulder was torn, and blood webbed her arm, dripping from her fingertips, giving them the look of claws. She stepped across the trench after Mullins. Without warning, the taller of the two men sprinted toward her, his machete raised. Cassiopeia caught his wrist and flipped him one-handed into the trench as easily as she might have tossed away an empty bottle.
There were still snakes in the trench.
They struck at his arms, his legs, and he thrashed about wildly, crying out; but one must have hit a vein, for the cry was sheared off. His limbs beat a tattoo against the dirt, his eyes rolled up. Slivers of iris peeped beneath the lids. A tiny coralito hung like a tassel from his cheek, and a yellowjaw was coiling around his throat; its flat head poked from the spikes of his hair. I heard a squawk, a sharp crack, and looked to the center of the clearing. The second man was crumpled at Cassiopeia’s feet, his neck broken. Dark blood poured from his mouth, puddling under his jaw.
“Mr. Milliken,” said Mullins, backing, his bravado gone. “I goin’ to make things right. Hettie she fix dat little scrape…”
He stumbled, and as he flung out an arm for balance, Cassiopeia leaped toward him, going impossibly high. It was a gorgeous movement, as smooth as the arc of a diver but more complex. She maintained a crouch in midair, and passing close to Mullins, she plucked the conch shell from his waving hand, fitted it to her own, and spun round to face him—all before she had landed.
Hettie began to scream. Short, piercing shrieks, as if she were being stabbed over and over.
Mullins ran for the brush, but Cassiopeia darted ahead of him and blocked his path. She was smiling. Again Mullins ran, and again she cut him off, keeping low, flowing across the ground. Again and again she let him run, offering him hope and dashing it, harrying him this way and that. The wind had increased, and clouds were racing overhead, strobing the moonlight; the clearing seemed to be spinning, a carousel of glare and shadow, and Hettie’s screams were keeping time with the spin. Mullins’s legs grew rubbery, he weaved back and forth, his arms windmilling, and at last he collapsed in a heap of fronds. Almost instantly he scrambled to his knees, yelling and tearing loose a snake that had been hanging from his wrist.
A coralito, I think.
“Ah!” he said. “Ah…ah!”
His stare lanced into my eyes, freezing me with its hopelessness; a slant of light grazed his forehead, shining his sweat to silver beads.
Cassiopeia walked over and grabbed a handful of his shirt-front, hoisting him up until his feet were dangling. He kicked feebly and made a piteous bubbling noise. Then she drove the conch shell into his face. Once. Twice. Three times. Each blow splintered bone and sent a spray of blood flying. Hettie’s scream became a wail. After the final blow, a spasm passed through Mullins’s body—it looked too inconsequential to be death.
I was dimly aware that Hettie had stopped screaming, that the outboard motor had been started, but I was transfixed. Cassiopeia was still holding Mullins aloft, as if admiring her handiwork. His head glistened black in the moonlight, featureless and oddly misshapen. At least a minute went by before she dropped him. The thump of the body broke the spell that the scene had cast. I eased toward the brush.
“You can leave, Frank,” she said. “I won’t kill you.”
I was giddy with fear, and I almost laughed. She did not turn but cocked an eye at me over her shoulder—a menacing posture. I was afraid that if I tried to leave she would hunt me through the brush.
“I won’t kill you,” she said again. She lowered her head, and I could feel her despair, her shame; it acted to lessen my fear.
“The soldiers will be coming,” I said.
She was silent, motionless.
“You should make the exchange with Ray.”
I was horrified by what she had done, but I wanted her to live. Insane or not, she was too rare to lose—a voice of mystery in all this ordinary matter.
“No more.” She said it in a grim whisper. “I know it’s much to ask, Frank, but will you keep me company?”
“What are you going to do?”
“Nothing. Wait for the soldiers.” She inspected her wound; the blood had quit flowing. “And if they don’t come before dawn, I’ll watch the sunrise. I’ve always been curious about it.”
She scarcely said a word the rest of the night. We went down to the shore and sat beside a tangle of mangrove. I tried to convince her to survive, but she warded off every argument with a slashing gesture. Toward dawn, as the first gray appeared in the east, she had a convulsion, a brief flailing of the limbs that stretched her out flat. Dawn comes swiftly on the water, and by the time she had regained consciousness, pink streaks were infiltrating the gray.
“Make the exchange,” I urged her. “It’s not too late, is it?”
She ignored me. Her eyes were fixed on the horizon, where the rim of the solar disc was edging up; the sea reflected a rippling path of crimson and purple leading away from it, and the bottoms of the clouds were dyed these same colors.
Ten minutes later she had a more severe convulsion. This one left a froth of bloody bubbles rimming her nostrils. She groped for my hand, and as she squeezed it, I felt my bones grinding together. My emotions were grinding together as well; my situation—like Henry Meachem’s—was so similar to hers. Aliens and strangers, all of us, unable to come to grips with this melancholy island.
Shortly after her third convulsion, I heard an outboard motor. A dory was cutting toward us from the reef wall; it was not a large enough craft to be the militia, and as it drew near, I recognized Hatfield Brooks by his silhouette hunched over the tiller, his natty dreads. He switched off the motor and let the dory drift until he was about fifty feet away; then he dropped the anchor and picked up a rifle that had been leaning against the front seat. He set the stock to his shoulder.
“Keep clear of dere, Mr. Winship!” he called. “I can’t vouch for de steadiness of my aim.”
Behind him, shafts of light were spearing up through balconies of cloud—a cathedral of a sky.
“Don’t, Hatfield!” I stepped in front of Cassiopeia, waving my arms. “She’s…he’s dying! There’s no need for it!”
“Keep clear!” he shouted. “De mon have killed Jimmy, and I come for him!”
“Just let him die!”
“He don’t just let Jimmy die! Hettie been sayin’ how dat crazy mon batter him!” He braced himself in the stern and took aim.
With a hoarse sigh, Cassiopeia climbed to her feet. I caught her wrist. Her skin was burning hot, her pulse drummed. Nerves twitched at the corners of her eyes, and one of the pupils was twice the size of the other. It was Ray’s face I was seeing in that dawn light—hollow-cheeked, dirt-smeared, haggard; but even then I saw a sleeker shape beneath. She peeled my fingers off her wrist.
“Goodbye, Frank,” she said; she pushed me away and ran toward Hatfield.
Ran!
The water was waist-deep all the way to the reef, yet she knifed through it as if it were nothing, ploughing a wake like the hull of a speedboat. It was a more disturbing sight than her destruction of Mullins had been. Thoroughly inhuman. Hatfield’s first shot struck her in the chest and barely slowed her. She was twenty feet from the dory when the second shot hit, and that knocked her sideways, clawing at her stomach. The third drilled a jet of blood from her shoulder, driving her back; but she came forward again. One plodding step after another, shaking her head with pain. Four, five, six. Hatfield kept squeezing off the rounds, and I was screaming for him to finish her—each shot was a hammerblow that shivered loose a new scream. An arm’s length from the dory, she sank to her knees and grabbed the keel, rocking it violently. Hatfield bounced side to side, unable to bring the rifle to bear. It discharged twice. Wild misses aimed at the sky, the trees.
/> And then, her head thrown back, arms upflung, Cassiopeia leaped out of the water.
Out of the world.
I am not sure whether she meant to kill Hatfield or if this was just a last expression of physicality—whatever her intent, she went so high that it was more a flight than a leap. Surrounded by a halo of fiery drops, twisting above the dory, her chest striped with blood, she seemed a creation of some visionary’s imagination, bursting from a jeweled egg and being drawn gracefully into the heavens. But at the peak of the leap, she came all disjointed and fell, disappearing in a splash. Moments later, she floated up—face downward—and began to drift away. The sound of the reef faded in a steady, soothing hiss. The body spun slowly on the tide; the patch of water around it was stained gold and purple, as if the wounds were leaking the colors of sunrise.
Hatfield and I stared at each other across the distance. He did not lower the rifle. Strangely enough, I was not afraid. I had come to the same conclusion as Cassiopeia, the knowledge that the years could only decline from this point onward. I felt ready to die. The soft crush of waves building louder and louder on the reef, the body drifting leisurely toward shore, the black snaky-haired figure bobbing in his little boat against the enormous flag of the sunburst—it was a perfect medium for death. The whole world was steeped in it. But Hatfield laid the rifle down. He half raised his hand to me—an aborted salute or farewell—and held the pose a second or two; he must have recognized the futility of any gesture, for he ducked his head then and fired up the motor, leaving me to take charge of the dead.
The authorities were unable to contact Ray’s family. It may be that he had none; he had never spoken of them. The local cemetery refused his remains—too many Brookses and Mullinses under the soil; and so, as was appropriate, he was laid to rest beside Ezekiel and Carl on the Burying Ground. Hatfield fled off-island and worked his passage to Miami; though he is still considered something of a hero, the tide of anti-Americanism ebbed—it was as if Ray had been a surrogate for the mercenaries and development bankers who had raped the island over the years. Once more there were friendly greetings, smiling faces, and contented shrimp-workers. As for me, I married Elizabeth. I have no illusions about the relationship; in retrospect, it seems a self-destructive move. But I was shaken, haunted. If I had not committed my stupidity with the recorder, if I had not thrown my arms around Cassiopeia, would she have been able to control her anger? Would she merely have disarmed Mullins? I needed the bitter enchantment of a marriage to ground myself in the world again, to obscure the answers to these questions, to blur the meaning of these events.
The Jaguar Hunter Page 40