Nightlife (32 page)

When he first awoke, Justin didn’t know where he was. There came the heart-prickling attack of nerves, the confusion of an unfamiliar ceiling. Then he remembered.
Motel.
It all came back.

After their swamp excursion, they had driven back into Tampa. Crossed west to the airport and abandoned the telltale black Fiero in the long-term lot and rented a Dodge Aries. Very bland, the milk toast of cars. But with room aplenty for three humans and their sundry luggage. They then set off for north Tampa again, a refuge to hole up, after getting a cash advance from an automated teller machine to avoid signing in under genuine names. They settled into a quiet motel off Busch Boulevard, six-lane mecca of more motels and fast food, billboards and tourist traps. Busch Gardens was less than a mile east. Tony might very well think to look for them in this transient part of town, but barring miracles, had little hope of finding them.

Justin rubbed his eyes, found himself alone in bed. The low roar of the air conditioner was all he could hear. He sat up, saw Kerebawa on the floor, sleeping in a corner beneath a blanket. They had rented a two-bed double, but he apparently wanted nothing to do with the other. To each his own.

April was already up, seated at the round table near the curtained window. Sipping from a Styrofoam cup. Another sat capped on the table. Doughnuts too. Glazed.

“I found free coffee in the office.” She tipped up the cup. “Want some?”

More acid on top of last night’s Jack Daniel’s deluge? No thanks. He shook his head. “Maybe just a doughnut.”

“In that case you’ll still want the coffee. It’s the only way to soften them up.”

He got out of bed, underwear only, and joined her at the tiny table. Kissed her, hugged her. She held him too long, too fervently, to pretend this was a typical good-morning greeting. The desperation seeped through. She was nailing up a good front though.

Justin realized she was wearing one of his shirts, untucked and rumpled over shorts. No bra. He’d always found it mysterious, this proclivity of women to wear their men’s shirts in the morning. An instinct, perhaps, stemming from the male’s tendency to shield himself from the female’s penetration. If she can’t get into his soul, then his shirt is the next best thing.

Coffee, doughnuts, and handguns. Just your average morning. She’d been right about the doughnuts. He got one down with the coffee’s help, looked at the remaining one sitting on a napkin.

“Better save one for Bomba the Jungle Boy.” He hitched his thumb toward the corner.

“Justin,” she said, disapproving, “don’t be a weenie.”

He smiled. Oh, they were meant for one another, had to be. How many times had he seen the pairing, Mister Rude and Miss Manners? Yin and yang, one an antidote counterbalancing the other.

He pushed aside the curtain to peer outside. A scattering of cars in the parking lot; the Aries blended nicely. The day looked gray, dark, the sun hidden by swollen clouds. Be a nice cozy day, were the air not thick enough to wring water.

He let the curtain fall when he saw a maid’s cart a couple of doors down.

“Is the do-not-disturb sign still out?”

April nodded. “I know better than that.”

She scooted down in the chair, propped her feet in his lap. He absently massaged the soles, silently played This Little Piggie with her toes. Wondering how long DO NOT DISTURB would need to hang from the doorknob. They weren’t about to willingly let a maid in to poke around.

At least, not while the ice bucket was in use. Packed in cubes from the ice machine was the severed hand. They were keeping it in the bathroom, beneath, appropriately enough, a hand towel.

He finished his coffee along with April, bilious sludge that it was. Decided it was worth it when he felt the caffeine kick in. He slipped into a pair of gym shorts to make himself half decent.

Kerebawa awoke soon after. He’d slept in his pants and appeared to suffer the same disorientation that had plagued Justin upon awakening; then the recognition, the remembering. At first, when the vulnerabilities of life and circumstances were stamped plainly across his face, Kerebawa showed little of the resolute fierceness he had periodically exhibited last night. He looked frightened. Worse, he looked sick. Overtired, underfed.

And all we’ve got to offer him is a stale doughnut.

Greetings were exchanged; grunted, really. And slowly the fire seemed to reignite in his eyes. He ate the doughnut without complaint, and April got him a glass of water from the bathroom.

“We need to talk,” she finally said to Kerebawa. “More than we did last night.”

Made a lot more sense than kicking back for Sunday-morning cartoons. So many questions. Last night’s postshooting cleanup had hardly been the ideal time. And once they had arrived here at the motel, it was nearly four in the morning; they’d all been dead on their feet. Justin had managed to sleep soundly for the first time in quite a while.

“So far,” April continued, “we don’t understand any of this, why Tony Mendoza wanted us killed. Just that it probably has something to do with this new drug he’s turned up with. Whatever
it
is.” She was keeping her voice steady, cool, rock solid. “I shot someone last night. And I want to know
why.
And what you’re doing all the way up here looking for the stuff.”

Kerebawa turned away long enough to retrieve his grubby cloth roll and bring it back. He set it on their bed, sat beside it. He unrolled it, removed a smaller cloth roll. It might have been an ancient handkerchief, or bandanna. This he treated with special reverence, and opened it. Inside, cupped within a secondary layer formed from a leathery leaf, was a stash of powder. Green, familiar.

Kerebawa looked to Justin first.

“This is what I told you of last night. This is
ebene.”
Justin stared, his hand tensed on April’s foot. “And this is what Mendoza has?”

“No. Oh, no.” He carefully rolled it back up to put it away, hands moving with the care one might see lavished on a religious icon. When his humble cache of belongings was intact, he appeared to grapple with words. Searching for precisely the right ones.

“Ebene . . .
opens doors for us. As you would walk from this room to that”—his finger traced a path to the bathroom —“so
ebene
is for our spirits. We see a—a wider world when we use it. Sometimes it allows us to meet our
hekura.
Personal demons is what you would call them. Sometimes they come to live in our chests. The missionaries all hate
ebene.
Except for one, and he came even to use it himself.”

For the next several minutes, Justin and April sat spellbound as he told them of the life and death of an American missionary named Angus Finnegan. Who eventually became far more like the Yanomamö than they became like him.

“Padre Angus came to believe the things about us that the other missionaries laughed at. Or hated and said were lies. He came to believe in the
noreshi. ”
He touched Justin and April in turn on the arms, then himself. “You—and you—and me, we each have the
noreshi
inside. Our spirit animal. There are times when I must know something and I am not wise enough to see. With
ebene,
my spirit-hawk and I become one. The hawk is wiser and shows to me the answer.”

Justin found himself nodding right along, neither swallowing every line nor disbelieving. Keeping that vital open mind. But this was certainly no more bizarre than the things he
knew
he had seen. Tame stuff, by comparison.

“But your people,” he said, pointing to them both, “don’t remember about the
noreshi.
They never knew. They have forgotten too much.”

This Justin couldn’t deny. When you have the memories of generations woven into your heritage, you know where you stand in the scheme of things. Solidly connected to past and future. Sometimes he felt so rootless. Bereft of an unshakable identity.

The eagle. That was you.
Kerebawa’s words from last night.

Memories of childhood, grade-school Justin. He had doodled a lot, at home and in class. Compelled to keep those little hands busy. He remembered that he had doodled scores of eagles. Legions of them, in flight or perched majestically atop rocky crags. At least to his burgeoning imagination they had looked majestic. He had done some little science project on eagles, magazine pictures cut and pasted into a folder, text carefully hand lettered.

He’d not thought of that fascination for years. Maybe he hadn’t forgotten the
noreshi
completely. Maybe he
had
known in some intuitive way. As a child, who seems to accept the hidden relationships between living things as natural, far more readily than adults.

Maybe you drink to remember.
April, on Davis Island.

Perhaps she had slammed the truth right on its head. He hoped. It would mean that his life wasn’t quite as pointless as he sometimes feared. That he wasn’t as rootless as he thought.

“But even when the
noreshi
is forgotten,” Kerebawa went on, “it still is there, deep inside. Buried. The other green powder ...”

“It digs it out.”

Justin and April looked at each other. Now they were getting down to the real dirty business.

“At home, the shamans of Iyakei-teri cultivated a new kind of
ebene
with their magic. But it was so different, it was not really
ebene
at all. It came to be known as
hekura-teri
— village of demons. It made them very fierce and feared, for they had a weapon none of the other villages possessed. Like before I was born, when men first were given shotguns.”

Justin frowned. “I’m missing something. What’s the difference between
ebene
and the other stuff?”

“It does much more. It takes one back to the days of the first men, before there were such gulfs between men and animals. When there was understanding between both, and spirits freely walked.”

Justin’s imagination swam with images. Trent gone jaguar. A she-wolf, captive, frightened. Human, animal. The gap bridged.

“Some
hekura
—some jungle demons—hunger to eat the souls of men. The new powder allows them to do that for a time, to come inside and eat the
noreshi. Hekura
long to turn men against themselves, so they use the form of a man’s spirit animal against him. They can make a good man evil, and an evil man worse.” Kerebawa looked at them gravely.
“Ebene
shows to you the demons.
Hekura-teri
allows you to become one.”

The rains came later that morning, and Kerebawa walked beneath them. Trees stood behind the motel, a few sad, stunted palms. He longed to feel the water on his body, the air, the natural cool brought by the rains instead of the artificial cool of the room.

It had been good, finally, to sleep around others once more. Even if the surroundings were completely foreign to what he was used to. Good to feel a part of a tribe, if only a tribe of three.

For he trusted them, these two back in the room. He could smell no deceit about them, no treachery other than that born of their own desperate situation.

He felt pangs of cold sadness for Justin, so lost in this world. Kerebawa too was lost in his own way, but at least he knew where he belonged. Not so with Justin. For a time, though, he had seemed on the verge of remembering forgotten relics of his past. The idea of the
noreshi
had not fallen on deaf ears.

Perhaps he was descended from the Yanomamö after all. Kerebawa recalled the legends from the aeons-distant time of the first beings. There had come a devastating flood in those days, during which many Yanomamö drowned. Some escaped by climbing mountains. Others, though, cut down trees and floated on them to save their lives. They floated away to other lands and became foreigners, and their language changed into unintelligible gibberish. Kerebawa thought it likely that Noah, of Angus’s Bible, was one of these.

In the same way, perhaps Justin was descended from one who had floated away. And was unsettled, forever trying to remember Yanomamö roots. Perhaps when there was time, he might help Justin remember.

The woman, April, seemed surer of herself and who she was. Kerebawa had never known a female like her. He’d seen plenty, from his previous trip north with Angus, and along this journey, but he had never come to be around one. So unlike the women of home. She spoke her thoughts, she challenged. At first, last night, Kerebawa had wondered if this boldness didn’t anger Justin, if he would hit her to keep her down.

In a way, Kerebawa- secretly envied Justin for living in a land where he need not feel compelled to beat his woman. Kerebawa tried not to hit his own wife very often, and never very hard, and took no pleasure in it. But it had to be done, it was expected. It was their way. There was no respect for the man who laid no hands upon his wife, only scorn.

He tipped his face to the rain, let it wash down. Refreshing. Not as tasty as the rains of home though. More bitter, sour.

He wondered where this journey would finally end. From Mabori-teri to Esmerelda, then on to Miami. Only to learn that he would have to continue on to this new land, called Tampa. For a time, it had been a bit like home, as he traveled the roads across the northern reaches of what the map called the Everglades.