Night of the Jaguar (5 page)

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 nice 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?”

“Oh, not at all, no, I was in a kind of brown study.”

Well,
yeah,
thought Jenny, with all the smoke. Cooksey was the only smoker (of tobacco) on the property, and the white walls of the workroom had acquired an amber glaze. He was staring at her in a way he often stared, as if she were a creature he was observing from concealment. His eyes were gray, deep-set, and sad. He said, “‘Never shall a young man, thrown into despair by those great honey-colored ramparts at your ear, love you for yourself alone and not your yellow hair.’ Yeats.”

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing, my dear. Musing is all. Well, I must stir myself.” He placed the cast on the desk.

“What is that thing, a foot?”

“Yes. Of a tapir,
Tapirus terrestris.
You can learn a lot about the larger mammals by their footprints. Weight, of course, and sometimes sex and age. This is a male, perhaps two years old.”

“How do you know?”

“How? Why, it’s written here on the base of the cast.” He laughed, a dry chuckle, and after a slight pause, Jenny laughed, too.

“Gosh, and I thought science was hard.”

“If it were, I couldn’t do it, slug that I am. Seriously: you observe the animals, you see, and then when they’ve left, you scuttle out and pour plaster into the prints, and then there’s a little gadget with a spring that you press into the soil near the print, until it’s as deep as the print was, and it gives you the weight, or rather you calculate the weight from the readings. And if you do that for a few years, you get a sense of how the animals grow and survive. Every creature has a unique print.”

“Like fingerprints.”

“Just so. I have a large collection of them, all the mammalia, of course, and the larger lizards and crocodilia, and the gallinaceous birds.” He stood and gestured to the door. He was tall and very thin and dressed always in faded khaki shirts and shorts.

“After you, my dear.”

That was one reason she liked the professor.
After you, my dear!
It was like being in an old movie on TV.

Kevin was not in that good a mood as they drove up Main Highway to the Grove, and Jenny was all tensed up, waiting to see if he would take it out on her. Sometimes he would shoot questions at her, or talk about things she couldn’t follow and then get all sarcastic about it, or else he would get her to talk about stuff that happened to her while she was growing up, school or the foster homes or the strange kids that she’d shared them with or the foster parents. She had quite a few stories saved up, some of them pretty sad, and just when she thought she was sharing stuff that she didn’t ordinarily like to share, he would yank his attention away, like Lucy with Charlie Brown’s football, and she’d feel like a jerk for going on about old shit. Or he’d actually say, after listening to her talk for half an hour or so, Why do you keep
talking about old shit like that? So she felt stupid
again,
and wanted to bawl.

Kevin himself never talked much about his own past. She knew he’d been to a prep school. She was not sure what a prep school was, exactly, although she knew you had to pay money to go, probably a lot more than the $16.83 per month that the state of Iowa had paid her foster parents for her upkeep in the year before she split, and also she had the adjective “preppy,” which meant expensive clothes from Abercrombie’s in the mall, and she imagined a place with lots of grass and white people in baggy clothes playing around and looking cool. He had been to college, too, but dropped out because of all the bullshit you had to take from the teachers, and how bourgeois it was, and it was better to be a revolutionary, which he was. Being a revolutionary was all about smoking a lot of dope and spray-painting walls and keying expensive cars, or so she imagined from observing Kevin, and this would eventually bring down the capitalist infrastructure that was destroying the planet, although she was not nearly smart enough to see how this would happen.

She was relieved to find that Kevin was not going to get on her today just yet, but was venting his rage about the fucking Forest Planet Ass-holes who didn’t know how to do anything but bullshit all day, focusing particularly on Luna the stuck-up bitch, who didn’t know half the stuff he did and was a complete phony poseur bourgeois besides. Kevin was smoking a fat number right now, which Jenny didn’t like much, not that she had any objection to it as such, but not while driving down Main Highway in the van. She was afraid of getting pulled over, although the one time she’d mentioned this Kevin had come down hard on her for being a totally useless scaredy-cat piece of shit, although as far as she knew he had never been inside a jail, while she had (for possession of a controlled substance) in Cedar Rapids and did not want to repeat the experience. He offered the dope to her but she declined, although she was getting quite the buzz from just being in the van.