Night of the Jaguar (38 page)

Paz felt his voice get thick. “Yes, they do.”

She said, “If you want, I could drive her back to her place on Ingraham—”

Paz flung his arms around his wife and hugged her. They stayed that way for a long time, so long that both of them felt a little strange, felt that they had fallen marginally out of ordinary time, and that as long as they stayed this way, nothing could harm them.

A call from the back of the house broke in—their daughter: “Hey you guys, the food is ready.”

“Oh, hell, let her stay the night,” said Paz, pulling away with some reluctance. There was a damp patch on his cheek where her flesh had rested. “I’ll get out my gun.”

They ate: sausages and chicken, banana chips and dirty rice. The adults drank California jug red. Paz kept Jenny’s glass full, turned on the charm, and without seeming to, got Jenny to tell the story of her life, or at least those parts suitable for a child’s ears. Lola was no mean interrogator herself, and she found in this subtle pumping yet another thing to admire and deplore about her husband.

Then it was dark, in the sudden light-switched way of tropical climes. Lola brought out the candles; Paz carried the wiped-out Amelia to bed. The conversation continued as it had but uncensored now, all the horrible tales of the fostered child. Jenny had never been the center of attention in an adult gathering before, no one but Cooksey had ever focused on her in this way, and she did not want it ever to stop, she sucked their attention in, spongelike, tubules long dry expanded, softened. Cooksey’s attention had been this intense, but that was about discipline, turning her into an instrument she could use in his service. She mentioned this, half embarrassed, and the conversation turned to Cooksey himself; all that she knew of his background, his tragedies, emerged into the candlelit air.

The wine slowed her speech at last, then stopped it; her head
nodded. Lola took her to the daybed in the home office. The girl was instantly asleep. Lola laid a light blanket over her and went back to the patio.

Paz was in a chaise with a glass of wine. She slid in next to him, the wineglass was drained, now a little postmarital necking, too long absent, they both thought.

When breathing resumed, Lola said, “Poor kid! What a miserable life!”

“Yeah, but there’s something intact in there. Somehow she learned how to protect herself. I mean, why isn’t she a crack whore? She’d at least have an excuse.”

“One of the great mysteries, like you and me. I couldn’t help noticing you kept steering her back to this Cooksey. Why the interest?”

“Because, aside from our mystical Indian, he’s the most interesting character in this whole strange tale.”

“How so? The way she described him he seemed like just another sad refugee who washed up in Miami and couldn’t get it together to return to civilization. Not unlike myself.”

“I beg to differ. Miami is the center of civilization. It’s the only place that has Cuban food, cheap cigars,
and
electricity twenty-four hours a day. Anyway, Professor Cooksey. Sad, all right, but not a refugee. He could work anywhere, but he’s here, operating out of a minor environmental group-slash-commune, whose other members seem slightly nuts, or at any rate a little low-end. Why?”

“To forget his sad past?”

“No, Cooksey is not a forgetter. He’s a rememberer. Look, you’re from another planet, you’re walking on a deserted beach on a desert island and you find a watch. What does that tell you?”

“The time?”

He punched her gently in the ribs. “No, you know what I mean. It implies a watchmaker. So put together the story this kid just told us, all the stuff she’s picked up from Cooksey and this Moie character, plus the strange events of the last months, the mysterious killings and so on. Somehow a priest in the middle of the jungle knows the names of the
people who’re behind the Consuela deal. How? Somehow just that priest who knows these names also has a faithful Indian companion, a kind of Stone Age guided missile, who flies to Miami in his little canoe and starts knocking off those very names. And somehow a Colombian
guapo
gangster is also involved in this timber-cutting scheme, and he gets called to Miami and comes, and now his boys are getting knocked off, too. What’s so important about chopping down trees that would make a Colombian drug baron leave his safe haven and travel to the U.S.? Okay, he’s laundering money through the Consuela company, we know that, but why the personal involvement? It suggests there’s something bigger going on than trees and money laundries. And in the middle of all this is the professor, who just happens to have a background in clandestine warfare. Who lost his wife because someone was illegally cutting down rain forests, indirectly, true, but maybe he doesn’t see it that way. Maybe, somehow, he
made
all this happen….”

Lola snuggled closer and kissed his neck. She slid her hand under his shirt. “That’s another reason why I love you. Your vivid imagination.”

“You don’t buy it?”

“There’s nothing to buy, dear. You’re just like Amy and her fish and Bob Zwick. Things happen, and other things happen as a consequence. If you try to find patterns in it you’ll go crazy. In fact, that’s one sure sign of crazy—finding patterns where there are none.”

“I thought that was the basis of scientific discovery.”

“The beginning maybe, but not the end. That’s why we have statistical models, to distinguish the causal from the merely contingent. I notice that you didn’t include your mystic Indian’s interest in Amy in your conspiracy theory.”

“No. I have no idea how that fits in.”

“Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe there’s no pattern at all, except in your head. Maybe it’s all just unconnected events pieced together by a former brilliant detective who’s bored stiff with being a cook. In any case, just now I don’t want to hear any more about it. It’s boring.” Now Lola shed her shirt, and her bra, and presented her fine breasts for his attention, which was given, after which more clothing fell to the patio paving. The candles gave their last light.

“This is a good way to shut down my brain,” said Paz. “If that’s what was intended.”

“To an extent,” said his wife, and so he let her, and she let him, but in the midst of this mindless exertion, Paz found that he could not stop thinking about Gabriel Hurtado and why he was in Miami. It was nearly as puzzling as the impossible jaguar.

T
he next day, Paz stayed late in bed, drifting in and out of a hypnopompic sleep in whose vapors lurked worry and discontent. Awake at last, he lay with his arms behind his head staring at the white ceiling, counting out the reasons why this should be so. Colombian
pistoleros
? Check. Huge magical jaguar after his little girl? Check. Oddly enough, he decided that these worries, however grim they might seem to an ordinary man, did not constitute the basis of his unease. It was deeper than that, existentially deep. Neither he nor his family had been troubled by nightmares since he’d brought back the Santería charms from the little
botánica.
Which, despite the bravado he’d shown in dealing with his wife’s disbelief, he knew was impossible. Little bags of whatever should not have had any effect on their dreams, but they had, even though Amelia was a kid and Lola was a total skeptic. He no longer knew what he believed anymore, but he understood that this amphibian life he had been leading with respect to Santería was breaking down; he would have to go in one direction or the other, toward the sunlit uplands of rationality inhabited by Bob Zwick, his wife, and all their pals, or down, into the soup, with Mom.

And since his social world was composed of people who were either believers or skeptics, there was no one who could give him any
meaningful advice, or…as this thought crossed his mind he recalled that there was at least one other person who’d been in precisely the same bind, who had in fact introduced him to the possibility that there was in fact an unseen world. He reached for the bedside telephone and his address book and dialed an unlisted number with a Long Island area code.

A woman answered.

“Jane?” he said. “This is Jimmy Paz.”

A pause on the line. “From Miami?”

“Among your many Jimmy Pazes, I am in fact the one from Miami. How’re you doing, Jane? What is it, eight or nine years?”

“About that. Gosh, let me sit down. Well, this is a blast from the past.”

Some small talk here, which Paz encouraged, being a little nervous about broaching the point of this call. He learned how she was—daughter Luz, twelve and flourishing, Jane teaching anthropology at Columbia and running her family’s foundation. He told her about his own family.

“You’re still with the cops, I take it.”

“No, I’m running the restaurant with my mom. Why do you take it?”

“Oh, nothing…just that we had an intense twenty-four hours eight years ago but not what you could call a relationship, and suddenly you call. I assumed it was police business.”

“Actually, I guess you could call it that. Look, I’m in a…I don’t know what you’d call it, a kind of existential bind…”

She laughed, a deep chuckle that sent him back over that span of years. He brought her face up out of memory: Jane Doe, a handsome fine-boned woman with cropped yellow hair and a mad look in her pale eyes. Jane Doe from the famous Voodoo murders, a woman with whom he had shared the single most frightening experience of his life, actual zombies walking the streets of Miami and the gods of Africa breaking through to warp time and matter.

“Those’re the worst kind,” she said. “What’s the problem? More
voudon
?”

“Not really. Do you know anything about shape-shifting?”

“A little. Are we talking imitative, pseudomorphic, or physical?”

“What’s the difference?”

“It’s complicated.”

“If you have the time, I do.”

He heard her take a deep breath.

“Well, in general humans tend to be uncomfortable locked in the prison of the self. Our own identification with nations and sports teams is probably a relic of that, and on a higher level there’s religion, of course. Traditional peoples often identify with animals, and from this we get imitative magic. The shaman allows the spirit of the totemic animal to occupy his psyche. He becomes the animal, and not in a merely symbolic way. To him and the people participating he
is
the bison, or whatever. They see a bison.”

“You mean they hallucinate it.”

“No, I don’t mean that at all. ‘Hallucination’ is not a useful term in this kind of anthropology. It’s a mistake to assume that the psyches of traditional people are the same as ours. You might just as well say that the particle physicist hallucinates his data in accordance with a ritual called science. Anyway, that’s imitative shape-shifting, well established in anthro literature. In pseudomorphic shape-shifts, the shaman creates or summons a spiritual being which then has an observable reality. The observer hears scratching, sees a shape, smells the creature, and so on. Traditional people are mainly substance dualists, of course. The spirit is completely separate from the flesh, and the body it happens to occupy at the moment is not the only body it can occupy. Anthro tends to draw the line here because we don’t understand how it’s possible to do that, since we’re all supposed to be good little materialist monists. I’ve had personal experience with both types, if that helps.”

“What about physical shape-shifting?”

Another chuckle. “Oh, that. Ah, Jimmy, would you care to tell me what this is all about?”

He told her the whole thing: murders, evidence, dreams, the
enkangues,
the Indian, his conversations with Zwick. And the business with Amelia.

“So what do you think, Jane?” he asked at the end of it. “Hoax or what?”

“It sounds like you think it’s real.”

“I don’t know what to think. That’s why I’m talking to you.”

“Okay, then: physical shifting. I’ve never seen it, but there’s a lot of anecdotal evidence. There’s a whole book on it called
Human Animals
by a guy named Hamel. Makes interesting reading. Obviously, if factual, just like your smart friend says, we have no idea of how it’s done. Had I not seen what you and I saw that time, I’d be prepared to discount it, too, but having seen it, I conclude that the world is not what it appears to the senses and is wider than what can fit in a lab. Why do you think it’s after your kid?”

“I have no idea. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Not to you, maybe, but traditional people think on wavelengths that are closed to us high-tech folks. Your mom still around?”

“Yeah, she is. Why?”

“What does she think of all this?”

“I haven’t filled her in.”

“Why not?”

“I was hoping you’d say I should load with silver bullets and it’d be cool. Or garlic.”

“Yeah, well, a being who can manipulate the fabric of space and matter is unlikely to be swattable by a bullet made of any particular element. You’re still afraid to take the plunge, aren’t you? I recall you were reluctant to go the whole way back then. Your precious ontological cherry.”

A nervous laugh from Paz. It was cool in the bedroom, but he felt the sweat start on his forehead and flanks. “Guilty. I’m not designed for this shit. I just want everything to be regular, as my kid says. Why me? I whine.”

“Yeah, the great question. You’re not religious, are you?”

“Not if I can help it. Why?”

“Because it answers the ‘why me’ question pretty good. And the religious can pray their way past a lot of this unseen-world stuff. My advice is, talk to your mom.”

“Yeah, I’m on that already, as a matter of fact.”

“And…?”

“I don’t know, Jane. I guess I’m…I guess I’ve been unwilling to totally, you know, accept the reality of…”

“You’re scared shitless.”

He could not restrain a laugh but was successful in keeping it from blossoming into full hysterics. “Yeah, you could put it like that.”

“That’s good, actually,” Jane said. “If you weren’t frightened, you’d be fucking doomed. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”

“But we’re not talking about God here, are we?”

“Aren’t we? It’s always a mistake to try to put him in a box and say this is holy and this is not. As soon as we worship any good thing that’s not ourselves we’re worshipping him. You and I are on what they used to call the left-hand path. We have the illusion we know where we’re going, and how proud we are of our navigational skills. And then, well, what do you know! We end up in this tight little place with no way out except for one little tiny crack, but we can’t pass through it unless we admit we’re not God Almighty and in total control. That’s when we experience that ripping existential terror. If I were you I would visit the bathroom frequently.”

“Oh, thanks, Jane, speaking of tight little places—I feel so much better. Listen, you wouldn’t consider coming down here and holding my hand, you being so experienced in this kind of shit?”

She hooted. “Oh, no, thank you! After what happened that time, I think I can say that my zombie jamboree days are over: this rough magic I here abjure. I’m a proper Catholic lady now, I take my kid and my dad to mass every Sunday, and I even have a little hat. Oh, and you’ll find this amusing. The church we go to is called Mary Star of the Sea—you remember the way you were chanting that when the witching hour hit…?”

“Yes, despite trying to forget,” said Paz quickly.

“Yeah, me, too. Anyway, you can tell your mom that every week, in a church consecrated to her, I light a candle to Yemaya. And, Jimmy? When the time comes, just let it all go, let it bore right down to the deepest level. Love is magic, too. She’s not going to let anything bad happen to you.”

“If you say so. Well, Jane, thanks for the advice. Maybe our paths will cross again, in this world or the next.”

A low laugh. “I bet we will. And good luck. I’ll pray for you.”

Paz said good-bye and broke the connection and thought about boring down to the deepest level. Without replacing the receiver he rang his sister at home and had a short and somewhat technical conversation with her, after which he was pretty sure that he knew why Gabriel Hurtado was in Miami. So, one problem solved. He dropped the phone into its cradle and was not extremely surprised when the phone rang ten seconds later and his mother’s voice came over the line. She got right to the point.

“It’s time for you to be
asiento,
” she said. “You have to start tonight.”

Paz took in a breath to say no to this proposal.
Asiento,
the ritual that prepared a person to act as a “seat” for a god.

Mrs. Paz said, “It’s necessary if you want to protect Amelia. The
santeros
have met, and they all agree. You have to be made to the saints. Soon. Now.”

He spoke then and heard his voice expressing consent. This did not surprise him either.

“I’ll come by in an hour,” she said.

“What should I bring?”

“Nothing,” she said. “It’s not a vacation.”

His wife was the surprised one when he informed her that he would be out of reach for a full week.

They were out on the back patio when he told her, having cleverly delayed the moment until she was about to leave for work. Just beyond them arose squeals of delight and the sound of splashing water. Jenny had set up the inflatable pool and was entertaining Amelia.

“That’s crazy,” said the wife.

“Are you speaking as a psychiatrist or was that a figure of speech?”

“Jimmy, you don’t even believe in that stuff.” Here a sharp look. “Or do you?”

“Let’s say my beliefs are in flux. I know you’ve forgotten the way you were a little while ago, and about what stopped it, which is real convenient for you, but I seem to be engaged in something here and I can’t let it go so easy.”

“And what about Amy? I can’t take a week off work so you can ‘engage’ in some ritual to make your mother happy.”

“You won’t have to. Jenny will take care of her. See, it’s all been mystically arranged.” He gave her a big smile, which she did not return.

“Don’t be ridiculous! That girl can barely take care of herself. What if she seizes again?”

“I thought we were supposed to hire the handicapped.”

“And the Colombians?”

“You’re covered there. I’ll have Tito put a patrol car out on the street twenty-four/seven while I’m away. And if you’re uncomfortable with that, I’m sure my mom would volunteer to move in for the week.”

She could not keep the look of horror from her face. “We’ll talk about this later,” she said and climbed onto her bicycle. As he watched her depart Paz could not help chuckling. Manipulative swine that he was, he understood that Lola would give her daughter to a brain-dead quadriplegic before she’d let Margarita Paz move in for a week. He walked back to where the girls were sporting.

“That looks like fun,” he said.

“It is,” said Amelia. “Are you going to come in the water with us?” Paz glanced at Jenny, who was wearing an electric-blue thong bikini of Lola’s that Lola herself had not dared in years, exhibiting as much youthful scrumptiousness as anyone could desire. For about twelve seconds Paz contemplated what would happen, all unwillingly, should he roll about in the tiny pool in contact with
that.
Not.

“I don’t think so, baby,” he said. “Maybe later. Jenny, could I talk to you for a second?”

She jumped up, jiggling exquisitely; he led her a few paces away. She was perfectly amenable to the plan, seemed almost to have anticipated the request. She had, of course, a vast experience minding young children, often under difficult circumstances. The money he offered was fine. Her medical condition would not be a problem, she said.

“You’re on medication, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

This was a lie, he detected, but he let it pass. When Amelia was informed of the arrangement, she howled and leaped for joy.

Paz returned to his lounger on the patio, sipped his cooling coffee and read the newspaper without much interest. The lead story concerned the destruction of the S-9, a pumping station north of Miami, by a powerful bomb. An organization that called itself the Earth People’s Army had claimed credit, although this was not entirely accepted by the authorities. An editorial suggested the fell hand of Al Qaeda or even more shadowy groups, striking at American prosperity by flooding prime Florida real estate. In a statement published in the paper, this putative organization threatened to bring down industrial society unless the Everglades was restored to its pristine condition and a host of other environmental cures instantly adopted. Wishing the evil ones the best of luck, he tossed the paper aside and drifted into the Florida room, where he watched a golf tournament, an old sitcom, a shopping show, a county commission meeting, and a tour of the French wine country by balloon, each for around two minutes, after which he muted the sound and put in a call to Tito Morales.