Jaguar

by Bill Ransom

  “Prikasha,” her mother said. “Bad luck. Prikasha and mirame.”

  Her mother let her scrub clothes across the face of her favorite flat rock, a white one. Beside her, draped across the bank, a man’s shirt, pants and socks dried in the unforgiving sun. They had belonged to her father. Something had happened to him to make the whole kumpania sad, and her mother said he was gone to the highlands forever.

  Afriqua Lee pushed her thick black hair out of her eyes and wished that she’d tied it back like Old Cristina had told her.

  “Mama? What’s ‘mirame?’“

  “Unclean. The way that blonde gaji stepped over the shadow of your uncle in the city.”

  Her mother pulled out her blouse and spat on one of her breasts when she said, “gaji.” This was her greatest display of disgust.

  “That outsider woman will be bad luck for your uncle, for the familiyi, for the kumpania and probably even bad luck for the gaji. Bah. A woman should know better than to lift her skirts over a man.”

  Again she spat, this time into the stream. Afriqua Lee shook out one of her mother’s red and blue dresses, the one with the quetzal birds in the hem, and handed it back to her. A few big splatters of rain battered the leaves, then quit. Then their little stream moved.

  Afriqua Lee pushed out her hands to catch her balance and fell face-first into the shallows. Her wrist hurt but she had to push her face out of the water that slammed up her nose and gagged her.

  She tried to stand and fell again, this time across the white rock of the streambed, which was empty of its stream, and crumbling. She heard her mother’s heavy grunt as she hit the rocks beside her.

  In that instant the streambed beneath them ripped open lengthwise, and Afriqua Lee hung on to keep from falling through. The smooth wet rocks slid out of her grip and the sides caved in towards her faster than she could scramble out.

  “Mama!”

  She slipped halfway over the lip of the ravine and stopped in a heartbeat. When she looked down, she didn’t see more rock and mud. When she looked down, she saw a face.

  Looking back at her in the sudden silence was a dark-haired, brown-eyed girl. Behind the girl, spread out in white trays, lay a feast of meats and greens.

  “Afriqua Lee!”

  Someone grabbed her wrist and pulled her back over the lip of the terrible hole.

  “Afriqua Lee!”

  Old Cristina, had her wrist and yanked her to safety, away from the brown-eyed girl and the incredible feast at the bottom of the world.

  “Your mother . . . ,” Cristina gasped, “she’s hurt. Are you all right, girl?”

  “Yes, Romni. . . .”

  Afriqua Lee saw her mother across the rip in the earth’s hide, across what used to be the creek bed that had torn apart clear to the skirt of the sky.

  She remembered thinking that none of this could be so.

  Mama!

  A scream snapped Afriqua Lee back to the present. Her mother screamed again, and it ended in the kind of frightened cry she’d never heard in a grownup before.

  Her mother’s left arm twisted around behind her, the elbow bent backwards. Something pink, like a piece of kindling, poked through a bloody slit. She lay on her back, half covered with wet stones. Her belly rose and fell quickly, and convulsed even after she coughed.

  “Holy Martyr,” Cristina whispered, and made the sign of the noose behind her back with her thumb and forefinger. That was when Afriqua Lee became afraid. Old Cristina didn’t swear lightly, and the girl had never seen her making the sign of the noose. That was something for the other old women, the ignorant ones, or for the men who blamed luck for what Cristina called lazy bones.

  “Jump to your mother and turn her on her side,” the old woman said. “I’ll get help. We don’t want her stuck there if the water comes back.”

  Afriqua Lee closed her eyes, breathed hard a couple of times, and made the jump. She cradled her mother’s head in her arms. Her mother breathed very fast, and though she was dark-skinned, like Afriqua Lee, her lips seemed unnaturally pale. Afriqua Lee got her hands under her mother’s shoulders to turn her, and her mother cried out in pain. Blood crept out the crevasses of the streambed beneath her feet.

  “They’re coming,” she told her mother. “Romni Cristina is getting help from the men.”

  Getting help from the men.

  To ask help of a man was to incur a debt to a man, and no woman of the Roam would allow such a thing, this the girl well knew.

  Poor Mama, she thought, she must be hurt so bad. . . .

  She stroked her mother’s hair back from her forehead and her hand came back bloody. She had nowhere else to wipe her hand so she used her skirt. Shouts now from the camp, and cries of pain from there, too. She glanced up, towards the camp, and saw the first of the wings hatch out of the old streambed.

  Each creature crawled to a rock, stretched out its set of long, delicate wings and walked in a circle until it dried. Then they all rattled skyward and settled into the bushes and trees. By the time the wide-eyed men arrived to carry her mother back to camp, Afriqua Lee could see very little green in the trees. The whole landscape was a seethe of bronze. Though the bugs didn’t attack her, something about the sound that the mass of them made frightened her more than the earthquake and the rip in the earth.

  The wide-eyed men swatted the bugs and cursed them. Hundreds of bugs died under their feet by the time they made the trek from streambed to camp. The camp, too, swarmed with bugs. People struggled to right their tipped vans or their collapsed trailers. Martin had been building the stake-down bonfire and fell into it. Hysteria in the camp already shifted its focus to the bugs.

  “The Romni Bari’s tent,” one of the men carrying her mother grunted. “The women can care for her there.”

  None of them had spoken after seeing her mother, and Afriqua knew this was a very bad sign. Old Cristina held open the door herself, and brushed everyone who entered with cedar branches. The bugs grabbed onto the branches and Afriqua Lee saw them eat the greenery as fast as their strange mouths could work.

  Like every mobile residence of the Roam, the old woman’s van was called a tent. Cristina’s was the biggest van, fitted with the glittery electronics that was testimony to her people’s genius, guardian of their wanderings through these dangerous times.

  A dozen guests could sleep comfortably in the Romni Bari’s tent, though these days it was home to only three—Cristina, Delphi and her daughter, Afriqua Lee. Only the single men of the Roam still slept in real tents, like the old days, and this only if they were still unmarried at eighteen.

  “Show Martita the coffee-maker, girl,” Old Cristina said, and closed off the bedroom where they had taken her mother.

  “The women will care for your mama,” little Martita said. “You and I must make coffee and pray.”

  Martita, at forty, stood only a head taller than Afriqua Lee, and the girl, like others of the Roam, thought of her as a child, or as a doll that walked and talked. She pulled a step-stool up to the counter as the men clumped to the door.

  “Jaguar priests aren’t curse enough,” one of them grumbled.

  “Now we have these damned bugs. City supplies will be wiped out, they won’t have nothing to trade us. . . .”

  “Maybe we can start a burn, between the stream and the bluff. . . .”

  “Look,” said another, “Rachel’s goats eat them. . . .”

  But it wasn’t true. The goats only ate the brittle wings. They left the bug bodies writhing to death on the ground. The five goats, pets of the crazy woman, jumped and frisked around the camp, trying to shake off the crawly things.

  Her mother shrieked from behind the door, then shrieked again, weaker. Little Martita guided Afriqua Lee towards the stove with a gentle hand at her back.

  The coffee didn’t help. The baby came out with the cord wrapped twice around his neck and died. Her mother had already lost too much blood, she died, too. Afriqua Lee did not understand this until much later. She
did understand that her mother and the brother she’d never seen went somewhere in the highlands to be with her father. She couldn’t understand why they all left her behind.

  By the time Afriqua Lee and Old Cristina stepped out into the new morning sun, the landscape had changed beyond recognition.

  “Holy Martyr!” Old Cristina whispered.

  The trees stood bare as winter, even the evergreens. The onslaught of the bugs had been too fast and there had been far too many of them. The men tried lighting a few fires, but it didn’t do much good. The trees were stripped anyway, and for every bug they killed a hundred took its place. Today, the surviving kumpania sat around the smoldering stake-down fire in a shocked and uncharacteristic silence.

  Fitting tradition, and following the Romni Bari’s instructions, the girl Afriqua Lee approached the fire with her mother’s favorite veil. She threw it about her shoulders in the same careless manner that her mother used.

  “My mother and my brother have wed the holy martyr,” she recited. “Help me to celebrate their fortune. Who brings a goat to the feast?”

  Tomas stood and dusted off his black work pants.

  “I will bring two goats. With twice the dancing, we will have twice the hunger, no?”

  A few of the blank faces stirred with smiles, and in moments the evening’s wake was planned. The Roam’s way was to celebrate, not to mourn.

  Old Cristina, the Romni Bari, spoke the morning prayer of joy. The children were dismissed from the assembly to their chores, except for Afriqua Lee. Now that she was alone she was an adult of the kumpania. She would settle into a tent with others and accept the ritual that governed her position. In her sixth year she was now her own familia and entitled to a vote in assembly. Her tent would be difficult to earn. She tried to listen, but the talk in her head drowned out the talk around the fire.

  “Amate, what does your radio tell us?”

  “Rumor, like we hear among ourselves. But some facts, too. The bugs are everywhere, they eat everything that grows. So far, they do not eat animals but maybe they will when they run out of everything else. There are no males or females. Either they are a hybrid, manufactured to destroy crops, or they have another form. . . .”

  “You know they are manufactured!” Tomas spat out the large word in bitter syllables. “We all know the Jaguar does this, rips the fabric of the world and shovels in garbage to torment us. . . .”

  Afriqua watched the firelight, nearly invisible against the morning. The flame-dance that dissolved the log in front of her lulled her into the dream-world. In the dream she conjured the same face she’d seen inside the rip in the earth. This dark-eyed girl was someone she had glimpsed before in her dreams. She saw the girl’s father in a dream once, and wasn’t surprised that he had her own father’s face.

  When Afriqua Lee tried to dream her own father, she replayed the day that Amate brought the news that he had darted the archbivy of the jaguar priests. His skull would fry before sunup, of this the adults were certain. Zachary Lee had set out to stop the Jaguar at all cost. He had paid the cost.

  She cried out in her dream and woke herself. Someone had carried her to a bed in Old Cristina’s tent. The click and hum of magnetic servos lulled her back to slumber.

  Afriqua Lee was too exhausted to get out of her clothes before sleep caught her. She tried to dream the dark-eyed girl, but that pathway would not open. Instead, she dreamed that the Jaguar’s men came to the Roam and branded the grownups, Tomas and Maryka, and the child Nicola on the back of their right hands. Afriqua Lee felt the pain herself, as each one of them was marked. She would never forget the pain, the stench of their skin as the butterfly sign hissed into the backs of their hands. She saved herself in this dream when she made the branding-iron melt before it touched her own skin. It formed a beautiful silver glove nearly too bright to behold.

  Now I have them by the dreams, a voice echoed in her head.

  Afriqua Lee whimpered in her sleep, and woke herself. For a minute she didn’t know where she was. She recognized the Romni Bari’s tent, and lay back on her pillow.

  She was frightened that a voice came into her dream without a face on it. As she slipped back to sleep, she felt Cristina’s hand on her brow and heard her whisper, “It’s just a dream, little one. Old Cristina won’t let nothing get you.”

  The rain can make all places strange, even the place where you live.

  —Ernest Hemingway, “The Porter”

  Maryellen Thompkins met her father a week after the earthquake churned the valley, the day he came home from the army. Her first memory was the strength of his hands as he picked her up and hugged her to him. He held her much too tight but he was her father and she didn’t know what she was supposed to say so she hugged him like her mother told her and he set her down.

  “You’re a strong little muffin,” he said, ruffling her hair.

  “My name’s Maryellen.”

  “So it is.”

  His eyes were a deep brown, like her own, his breath smelled like cigarettes and the whiskey that her grandfather drank.

  Her father opened one of his drab canvas dufflebags and pulled out a pink silk robe with red birds and blue dragons all over it. On the left side in the front, stitched in small green letters, it said, Maryln.

  “Do you like it?”

  He sort of giggled and that surprised her. He was nervous, too.

  When she didn’t move to take the robe, he draped it over her shoulder and ruffled her hair again. Her mother took two glasses down from the cupboard and said to Maryellen, “Why don’t you take it into the bedroom and try it on, honey? It’s late and you should be getting to bed pretty quick.”

  Maryellen parted the blanket that separated the kitchen from their bedroom. Just then her mother slammed the cupboard door with a bang and screamed, “Oh God!”

  Her father started at her scream and he hit Maryellen with his elbow as he jumped to help her mother. Her nose started bleeding and a couple of spots got on her pink nightie, but she moved the robe in time to save it. The blood in her nose had a funny, salty smell.

  “What?” her father asked, “What is it?”

  His face had paled and his eyes were strangely wild. He jerked the cupboard door open and glared inside.

  Her mother leaned back against the wall with her hand to her chest and started to laugh.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It was something . . . we have mice. It was a mouse or something, it jumped right at me. Maryellen, are you all right?”

  Maryellen looked up from the linoleum floor and the tears from the sting in her nose made everything swim in haloes from the bright bulb over the sink. Her light mother, laughing against the wall, reached out a hand to her dark father, beginning a laugh. He put his arm around her mother and held her tight to him. She remembered that she was afraid but she didn’t want to say so.

  Her mother wet a dishrag and cleaned up the little dribble of blood from her nose and her best nightie. Maryellen picked up her new robe and took it to the bedroom to try it on.

  When she saw the new bed that her mother put up, and the blanket that hung between the beds, she realized that she would not be sleeping with her mother.

  Maryellen listened as she undressed to the clink of ice in glasses and the low drone of this stranger that was her father talking quietly in the kitchen. Sometimes a laugh barked out, or an equally disruptive silence. She slipped the robe on over the pink nightie with the blood spots then sat on the edge of her mother’s bed listening as the low drone grew to long explosions of laughter.

  Her mother laughed her tiny laugh with him and Maryellen felt for the first time that this room, that the little kitchen and even the bathroom were not hers and she felt for the first time that she didn’t belong where she was but she had nowhere else to go.

  The laughter in the kitchen stopped. Just the occasional running of water and clink clink of the ice in their drinks broke the quiet. Maryellen laid down on her mother’s bed and was just beginning
to drift off to dream when her father sat heavily and suddenly beside her, startling her awake. As he leaned down to kiss her forehead she smelled the sweet taste of whiskey on his breath, the same taste that her grandpa had when he kissed her goodnight.

  “You look pretty in that robe,” he said. His strong hand stroked her hair.

  “Thank you. It feels nice.”

  “Were you afraid of that mouse in the cupboard? When I looked, there was nothing there.”

  “No.”

  She shook her head and wanted to sit up, but she didn’t want to stop his hand that brushed at her forehead and her hair.

  “We have mice all the time,” she said, “but not usually in the cupboard. Usually they’re under the sink.”

  His eyes were brown, like her grandfather’s, like her own. His weren’t open very wide, and the white parts around the brown center looked red and sore. Those sore eyes looked straight into her own and he asked, “Are you afraid of me?”

  Maryellen glanced down at her small hands, dark, twisting her new robe into knots. She didn’t know what to tell him. No one that she’d been afraid of had ever asked her that before.

  “Well,” he said, “join the club—.”

  He caught himself with a breathtaking reflex as he nearly fell off the edge of the bed. She recognized that giggle of his, then, because they were doing it together.

  “I don’t want you to be afraid of me.”

  She couldn’t think of anything to say, and she couldn’t meet his eyes yet.

  “Those teeth are coming in . . . look.”

  He fished in a shirt pocket and held out one of her front teeth in his palm.

  “Your mother sent this to me, it nearly chewed its way out of the envelope.”

  “I thought the tooth fairy had it. She left me a quarter.”

  “Well,” he chuckled, “wasn’t it great that the tooth fairy gave it to your mom to send to me? Looks like you’ve got another one ready to go.”

  He picked up her chin with one finger and wiggled a tooth with another. His finger smelled like cigarettes, too, and was kind of yellow. She pulled away.