Night of the Jaguar

by Michael Gruber

  The important thing was saving the tropical rain forests, which was why Rupert had gathered them all together in his house, so they could all live in an ecologically sensitive way, giving an example to the world, and forging a political movement. Jenny did not see that they were doing much forging. The community spent a lot of time—the Professor excepted—sitting around naked or half-naked, smoking superior marijuana and discussing what it was okay to eat or use, depending on whether the product was ecological or not, and they spent a lot of time recycling; the total trash produced by the six of them, plus guests, didn’t fill a shoe box a week. The forging part was mainly her and Evangelina Vargos, who lived off the property, going out nearly every day in the brightly painted VW bus, setting up a table in some public place, and trying to get people to take folders and sign petitions and contribute to the Forest Planet Alliance.

  Jenny’s secret was that she snuck food to the fish, disturbing the ecological balance Scotty so diligently (and irritatingly) sought. The fish were allowed to eat only plant and animal matter derived from the garden plot fertilized by water and sludge sucked up by the solar pump. What she fed them was thus beyond un-kosher—bread balls made from toxic loaves purchased on the sly from the Winn-Dixie and secreted in various hidey-holes around the property. Now she hung in the crystal water with her arm extended to a cloud of living jewels that pecked with delicate mouths at her fingers and the dissolving bread. It was so cool, the absolutely coolest thing in her life so far, better than dope, quite often better than sex with Kevin, and she wished very much for someone she could share it with. Then the food was gone except for tiny flecks, each surrounded by a little mob of fish, and then even that was gone and the fish dispersed into their normal flowing patterns.

  She surfaced, blowing, and lay on her back, her young breasts bobbling prettily above the water. Her nipples were stiffened from the slight chill of the lower levels, and this produced a pleasant tingling in her groin, and she thought that if Kevin were still in bed she might slide in there and get him to give her a good one, as she often did after these expeditions. Then she spied Rupert walking down the path to the pool, naked, old, and terribly hairy. She sighed. The sight of Rupert Zenger naked always had a peculiar detumescent effect on her, for which she felt a passing shame. He could not after all help being fifty, and the body, of course, was a healthy thing, as he himself often said, but she wished he wouldn’t shove it in all their faces so often. He was a solidly built, exceptionally hairy man, with a Brilloesque beard down to his chest and a full head of hair of the same consistency sticking straight out eight or so inches all around his long skull. He had a bony face, ugly in the honest Lincoln style, and large mild brown eyes that reminded Jenny of one of the Amazonian mammals in the Forest Planet brochures, a brocket deer or a tapir. She watched him approach and kicked herself to the shallows. As always her eye was drawn, if briefly, to his crotch. He certainly had a big one, truly the largest she had seen, and it was both funny and a little scary the way it swung like a clock pendulum as he walked. The Tripod, Kevin called him, nor did she appreciate the boyfriend’s sly suggestions that she and Scotty’s girlfriend, Luna, were angling to get a piece of it, and she always having to tell him that she wasn’t interested, and she didn’t think Luna was either, and that his was perfectly big enough and fine. Zenger paused and selected a towel from the large plywood box full of them on the pool margin.

  She hoisted herself up onto the smoothed coral slab that ran along the near edge of the pool, removed her mask, and wrung the water out of her hair. Zenger came up behind her and said, “Good morning, Jennifer. Had your swim?”

  She turned a little, and unfortunately there It was a couple of feet in front of her face. She made herself look up at his face.

  “Yeah, it’s great. It looks like another nice day.”

  “Indeed. There are croissants for breakfast. And the Heidi mangoes.”

  This was his way of giving the order, a little annoying, too, he never actually asked for anything or treated anyone like a servant, but Jenny made breakfast for him and the whole group every morning. The expectation was there, although she could not recall when it had been decided that this was part of her function. Shirley screamed again, which was certainly part of her function. Rupert walked slowly down the gentle slope into the water.

  Ten minutes later, dressed in a Forest Planet T-shirt and white shorts, with her hair in a damp braid, Jenny stood in the huge, cool, and elaborately equipped kitchen, cutting mangoes into slices and arranging them in parenthetical rows on a blue glazed platter. She had ground the organic shade-grown fair-trade coffee and placed it in the drip machine and had the croissants warming in the oven. No carcinogenic microwaves here. The mangoes done, she set a white camellia at the edge of the plate and brought it out to the patio. The table was set for six with colorful native ceramics from Latin America and the Caribbean and tablecloth and napkins made of hemp fibers by indigenous craftspeople. She went back into the kitchen, poured the coffee into a thermos flask, and used a powerful Oster juicer to extract the juice from a dozen and a half organic oranges. While she was doing this, Scotty came in and, as he did every morning, arranged in a tall crystal vase the flowers he had just picked from the garden: yellow orchids, frangipani, a branch of wildly violet bougainvillea. Jenny looked up from her machine to watch him do it. Scotty said flower arrangement was a high art in Japan, and that samurai had competed to be the best at it. Jenny didn’t know if this was more of Scotty’s weirdness or really true, but she did see that there was something about the way the flowers looked when Scotty did them that was different, that made them look like they had grown that way, and that she never quite got when she tried it herself with the pickle jar in her cottage.

  The Hobbit. As usual when Kevin supplied a name, Jenny felt her mind locked into seeing the person that way. Scotty was quite short, inches shorter than Jenny herself, and built like a barrel, with a head that looked a little big for his body, and he was extremely hairy, bearded, and with his dark hair drawn back into a ponytail. But unlike the hobbits in the movies (and Jenny had seen all of them, all more than once), Scotty’s face, which was actually pretty handsome in a rough way, she thought, had on it a forbidding expression, almost a scowl, as if life had petulantly refused him something he thought he deserved. His eyes were tired blue, startling against the deep tan of his face. He was only a little over thirty but looked older: Jenny thought of him as an old guy, in the same class as Rupert and the Professor.

  He finished his flowers and brought the vase out to the table, all this without a word or a glance at Jenny. She was used to this and not offended. People had their peculiarities, this she had learned early in a series of foster homes, and her position was that you minded your business and they minded theirs and everyone got along. Scotty was a bear in the morning; Rupert wanted things but never asked you up front; Kevin was almost always stoned; Luna was picky and tight-assed in a variety of ways; the Professor never got naked in public and he talked funny, being English. All bearable faults. As for Jenny herself: not the sharpest knife in the drawer, an expression she had overheard Luna using in reference to her in a conversation with Rupert, which she wasn’t really hanging out under a window to listen in on, but happened to hear anyway. It had hurt her at the time, but she had after all heard something like it many times before, and anyway so fucking what, there were other things in life besides big brains, and those that had them, in her experience, didn’t seem any happier than the rest of the stupid world.

  Breakfast at La Casita (for so the house was named, and the name displayed on a hand-painted ceramic plaque affixed to one of the squat coral pillars at the gate) was where the Forest Planet Alliance gathered each morning to discuss the tasks of the day. All other meals were either informal or by invitation. Rupert often dined out or else entertained important people in the large, airy dining room. On those occasions, Jenny found herself serving and busing, while Scotty and Luna cooked, and Kevin washed up. Th
ey received no pay for this, for technically they were employees of the Forest Planet Alliance Foundation and were paid to serve the interests of this 501 (c) nonprofit corporation rather than soup, but this was what they did, more or less in return for their food and rent-free accommodations. Jenny thought it was the greatest deal she had ever heard about, and Kevin thought it was a rip-off, but she didn’t see him doing anything to change it anytime soon.

  At breakfast, meanwhile, everyone sat democratically at the same table, which showed, Jenny thought, that they were not servants after all. The table was located in the center of a patio floored with worn, blood-colored tiles, and the house rose around it on four sides, a single story in golden coral stone, roofed in red Spanish tiling, except for the east side, which was two stories and called “the tower.” This was where Rupert had his bedroom. The Professor, Nigel Cooksey, had the room below this, but Cooksey had not yet arrived when Kevin drifted in, dressed in cutoff jeans shorts and a blue work shirt with no sleeves, looking angelic and fresh, darling golden dreadlocks and little fringe of beard, sleepy hazel eyes, she always got a little thrill when she saw him first thing in the morning, how lucky she was to have him. When they’d first met, in a squat in Cedar Rapids, he’d had fairly short hair and just one earring and hadn’t been on the road that long, so she knew more about how to get by than he had. She thought that was why he’d hit on her, that and the sex, and she figured he’d drift away like the others when he found out about her problem. And she had actually gone to the club behind the rail yard with him, where they had strobes, and sure enough she’d had a full-blown seizure, and come out of it on the sticky floor, with the other people pretending that nothing had happened, and the music blasting, but he had stayed with her, to her immense surprise and gratitude. She still got a little flash of that moment, him looking down at her with a look in his face that was not oh-what-a-freak-show, but human, a concerned-human-being kind of look. And she recalled that moment whenever he acted shitty. Although now he gave her a grin and a little secret squeeze and slurped up a piece of mango, and then went to the little Mexican cart where the coffee carafe was and poured himself a cup.

  Then Rupert and Luna came out of the office, which was a big room in the corner of the house, and was where Luna spent most of her time. Luna had on what she always did, a crisp white short-sleeved shirt and baggy khaki shorts. She was a slim hard-bodied woman of around thirty who seemed to be constructed of piano wire and space-age substances, even her hair, which was dark and shiny, short, and held up on one side with an amber barrette; it seemed made of one piece of prestressed plastic, like the fender of a Corvette. She wore round steel-rimmed glasses on her sharp little nose. Jenny would have figured her for a sexless virgin type, but she knew for a fact that Scotty got to her frequently; the property was small enough and so quiet at night that the sex life of each inhabitant was common knowledge, at least in the audio channel. Jenny and Kevin could hear them almost as well as if they were in the same room, and Luna’s rising shriek of pleasure, Scotty’s satisfied groan, were frequent accompaniments to the mockingbird’s evensong. Jenny had not been much of a noisemaker in that regard before arriving at La Casita but now felt compelled to join the night sounds with whoops of her own, often genuine. Kevin seemed to find it amusing.

  Shirley screamed from her cage as she always did when she saw Rupert. Luna told her to shut up, and she fell silent. Like the other local denizens, the big hyacinth macaw almost always did what Luna said. Scotty arrived and sat down next to Luna. He had his social face on now, he made light remarks about the weather, about pruning the fruit trees, received the usual compliment from Rupert about the flowers, and the breakfast got under way, with everyone telling everyone else what they were going to do with their day. Rupert and Luna spoke about a mailing, and the purchase of mailing lists from other enviro organizations, and then some computer stuff she couldn’t follow. There was an environmentalist letter-writing campaign about the S-9 pumping station up north that was pumping polluted water into the Everglades and killing all the wildlife. Scotty talked about the rototiller being out of whack and other repair and plumbing stuff and then they got into a little argument about what was compostable and wasn’t. Jenny let the talk slide past her ears, letting it blend in with the whisper of the light breeze in the slender palms that rose above the courtyard and the sound of the waterfall. She nodded and smiled when Luna addressed her. Ms. Robotica, as Kevin called her, had arranged permission from the Coconut Grove library to set up a display and table on the little plaza in front of their building. Evangelina Vargos would meet her there and Kevin would drive the VW van. Jenny glanced at Kevin, who rolled his eyes.

  “Unless you’d like to help Scotty with the rototiller,” Luna added pointedly.

  “Oh, no, ma’am,” Kevin replied, “driving’s just fine with me. I always hoped that when I grew up I would get to drive people so they could hand out little brochures. Chopping down trees to make paper to stop people from chopping down other trees. Makes perfect sense to me.”

  “The brochures are printed on recycled paper,” said Luna with her typical exasperated sigh.

  “I know it, Luna. And that’s good. I’m sure our recycling program throws terror into the hearts of the fucking corporate bastards and the lumber barons that’re killing the rain forest. They’re shaking in their boots.”

  “Then what would you like us to do, Kevin?” asked Luna. “Blow up the Panamerica Bancorp Building?”

  “That’d be a start,” snapped Kevin.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Kevin, grow the fuck up!” said Luna.

  There was a silence around the table, as there always was when Kevin gave vent, which Rupert broke by saying in his calm, slow voice, “Jennifer, if you’d be so kind: could you check on what’s keeping Nigel?”

  Jenny rose at once and left, happy to go, disturbed by the friction that had marred the lovely morning and their breakfast. There was something going on that she didn’t understand and didn’t like, that was not just Kevin being silly. A look had passed between Luna and Kevin, as if even though they were in opposition, there was something going on between them, like they were pumping each other up in some way, each getting some kind of sick energy from the other. This was just a feeling; she could not put it into words.

  Nigel Cooksey occupied the whole southeast corner of the house, a small bedroom and bath and the larger room adjoining the Alliance offices that he used as a study-cum-depository. He was a professor and knew everything about the rain forest and had lived down there for many years: this much Jenny knew, and also that Rupert and Scotty treated him with the greatest respect. Kevin called him Professor Stork and thought that all this studying the problem was a waste of time, because what was the point of knowing every goddamn thing about the forest when by the time he got it all down and published, there wouldn’t be tree left standing. Cooksey kept to himself, or spent hours with Rupert discussing Alliance strategy. A couple of old faggots, had been Kevin’s take on the two of them when he and Jenny had arrived at the property the year before, but the vibes had been wrong for that, and when she voiced this opinion Kevin had scoffed (oh, you and your vibes!), but she’d been right. Rupert might be a little weird but was perfectly heterosexual, there were a couple of women he entertained regularly in his bedroom in the tower of the house, and clearly, from the sounds floating out of the garden on those nights, he knew well enough how to wield his spectacular unit.

  What Cooksey was she had not figured out yet, maybe he was gay, but he didn’t seem to do anything about it, maybe not all that interested in sex, although when she entertained that idea her mind skidded a little. Sometimes she thought there was something, like, wrong with him because he was the only one of the inhabitants who did not bathe nude in the pool, and so no one there had seen his equipment. It was huge, purple, with spikes and blades on it, like they drew on demons in underground comix, so said Kevin, but Jenny thought he was just lonely, and she always made an effort to be ni
ce to him. She liked his voice, too, it was like on the TV, as when she switched it on sometimes and found it was tuned to the public TV channel and before switching to her show she would listen to that accent, those people talking like they never had a care in the world and no one could ever be mean to them.

  She knocked on Cooksey’s bedroom door and, receiving no response, went to the next room on the hall, his study, where she poked her head in. Cartons, crates, barrels, teetering piles of books on the floor, bookcases almost to the ceiling, stuffed animals and mounted skeletons of animals atop these, a row of filing cabinets of different sizes and vintages, a wicker fan in slow rotation above, light from the windows greened by passage through the mango orchard illuminating the dusty air, and in the center, Nigel Cooksey leaning back in a wooden swivel chair, sandaled feet and thin knotty legs up on the cluttered worktable, arranged carefully among half a dozen soiled tea mugs and a stuffed hoatzin on a stand. The room had a peculiar, penetrant odor compounded of old paper, bachelor, formalin, whiskey, and incompletely preserved organic materials.

  Jenny cleared her throat, coughed, said, “Um, Professor…?” At which the legs shot up, the chair crashed against a wooden crate and spun on its axis, its occupant confronting her with a gaping look, like one of the stuffed jungle creatures that decorated the high shelf. A small white object went clattering across the tile. Jenny stooped to retrieve it. It was a plaster cast of an animal’s foot. She handed it to him.

  “Rupert said he wanted to meet with you?”

  “Oh, dear! It can’t be nine already!”

  There was a wooden clock on a bookcase shelf, whose face was nearly obscured by stacked journal reprints. Jenny moved these and said, “It’s half-past. Did you fall asleep?”