The Best of Lucius Shepard (16 page)

   
  After a while, he unwrapped the bundle of newspapers and drew out a
thin-bladed machete of the sort used to chop banana stalks, but which he used
to kill jaguars. Just holding it renewed his confidence and gave him a feeling
of strength. It had been four years since he had hunted, yet he knew he had not
lost the skill. Once he had been proclaimed the greatest hunter in the province
of Nueva Esperanza, as had his father before him, and he had not retired from
hunting because of age or infirmity, but because the jaguars were beautiful,
and their beauty had begun to outweigh the reasons he had for killing them. He
had no better reason to kill the jaguar of Barrio Carolina. It menaced no one other
than those who hunted it, who sought to invade its territory, and its death
would profit only a dishonorable man and a shrewish wife, and would spread the
contamination of Puerto Morada. And besides, it was a black jaguar.

     
“Black jaguars,” his father had told him, “are creatures of the moon. They have
other forms and magical purposes with which we must not interfere. Never hunt
them!”

     
His father had not said that the black jaguars lived on the moon, simply that
they utilized its power; but as a child, Esteban had dreamed about a moon of
ivory forests and silver meadows through which the jaguars flowed as swiftly as
black water; and when he had told his father of the dreams, his father had said
that such dreams were representations of a truth, and that sooner or later he
would discover the truth underlying them. Esteban had never stopped believing
in the dreams, not even in face of the rocky, airless place depicted by the
science programs on Encarnación’s television: That moon, its mystery explained,
was merely a less enlightening kind of dream, a statement of fact that reduced
reality to the knowable.

     
But as he thought this, Esteban suddenly realized that killing the jaguar might
be the solution to his problems, that by going against his father’s teaching,
that by killing his dreams, his Indian conception of the world, he might be
able to find accord with his wife’s; he had been standing halfway between the two
conceptions for too long, and it was time for him to choose. And there was no
real choice. It was this world he inhabited, not that of the jaguars; if it
took the death of a magical creature to permit him to embrace as joys the
television and trips to the movies and a stucco house in Barrio Clarín, well,
he had faith in this method. He swung the machete, slicing the dark air, and
laughed. Encarnación’s frivolousness, his skill at hunting, Onofrio’s greed,
the jaguar, the television ... all these things were neatly woven together like
the elements of a spell, one whose products would be a denial of magic and a
furthering of the unmagical doctrines that had corrupted Puerto Morada. He
laughed again, but a second later he chided himself: It was exactly this sort
of thinking he was preparing to root out.

* * * *

     
Esteban waked Encarnación early the next morning and forced her to accompany
him to the appliance store. His machete swung by his side in a leather sheath,
and he carried a burlap sack containing food and the herbs he would need for
the hunt. Encarnación trotted along beside him, silent, her face hidden by a
shawl. When they reached the store, Esteban had Onofrio stamp the bill PAID IN
FULL, then he handed the bill and the money to Encarnación.

     
“If I kill the jaguar or if it kills me,” he said harshly, “this will be yours.
Should I fail to return within a week, you may assume that I will never
return.”

     
She retreated a step, her face registering alarm, as if she had seen him in a
new light and understood the consequences of her actions; but she made no move
to stop him as he walked out the door.

     
Across the street, Raimundo Esteves was leaning against the wall of the Cantina
Atómica, talking to two girls wearing jeans and frilly blouses; the girls were
fluttering their hands and dancing to the music that issued from the cantina,
and to Esteban they seemed more alien than the creature he was to hunt.
Raimundo spotted him and whispered to the girls; they peeked over their shoulders
and laughed. Already angry at Encarnación, Esteban was washed over by a cold
fury. He crossed the street to them, rested his hand on the hilt of the
machete, and stared at Raimundo; he had never before noticed how soft he was,
how empty of presence. A crop of pimples straggled along his jaw, the flesh
beneath his eyes was pocked by tiny indentations like those made by a
silversmith’s hammer, and, unequal to the stare, his eyes darted back and forth
between the two girls.

     
Esteban’s anger dissolved into revulsion. “I am Esteban Caax,” he said. “I have
built my own house, tilled my soil, and brought four children into the world.
This day I am going to hunt the jaguar of Barrio Carolina in order to make you
and your father even fatter than you are.” He ran his gaze up and down
Raimundo’s body, and, letting his voice fill with disgust, he asked, “Who are
you?”

     
Raimundo’s puffy face cinched in a knot of hatred, but he offered no response.
The girls tittered and skipped through the door of the cantina; Esteban could
hear them describing the incident, laughter, and he continued to stare at
Raimundo. Several other girls poked their heads out the door, giggling and
whispering. After a moment Esteban spun on his heel and walked away. Behind him
there was a chorus of unrestrained laughter, and a girl’s voice called
mockingly, “Raimundo! Who are you?” Other voices joined in, and it soon became
a chant.

* * * *

     
Barrio Carolina was not truly a barrio of Puerto Morada; it lay beyond Punta
Manabique, the southernmost enclosure of the bay, and was fronted by a palm
hammock and the loveliest stretch of beach in all the province, a curving slice
of white sand giving way to jade-green shallows. Forty years before, it had
been the headquarters of the fruit company’s experimental farm, a project of
such vast scope that a small town had been built on the site: rows of white
frame houses with shingle roofs and screen porches, the kind you might see in a
magazine illustration of rural America. The company had touted the project as
being the keystone of the country’s future and had promised to develop
high-yield crops that would banish starvation; but in 1947 a cholera epidemic
had ravaged the coast, and the town had been abandoned. By the time the cholera
scare had died down, the company had become well entrenched in national
politics and no longer needed to maintain a benevolent image; the project had
been dropped and the property abandoned until -- in the same year that Esteban
had retired from hunting -- developers had bought it, planning to build a major
resort. It was then the jaguar had appeared. Though it had not killed any of
the workmen, it had terrorized them to the point that they had refused to begin
the job. Hunters had been sent, and these the jaguar had killed.

     
The last party of hunters had been equipped with automatic rifles, all manner
of technological aids; but the jaguar had picked them off one by one, and this
project, too, had been abandoned. Rumor had it that the land had recently been
resold (now Esteban knew to whom), and that the idea of a resort was once more
under consideration.

     
The walk from Puerto Morada was hot and tiring, and upon arrival Esteban sat
beneath a palm and ate a lunch of cold banana fritters. Combers as white as
toothpaste broke on the shore, and there was no human litter, just dead fronds
and driftwood and coconuts. All but four of the houses had been swallowed by
the jungle, and only sections of those four remained visible, embedded like
moldering gates in a blackish green wall of vegetation. Even under the bright
sunlight, they were haunted looking: their screens ripped, boards weathered
gray, vines cascading over their façades. A mango tree had sprouted from one of
the porches, and wild parrots were eating its fruit. He had not visited the
barrio since childhood: The ruins had frightened him then, but now he found
them appealing, testifying to the dominion of natural law. It distressed him
that he would help transform it all into a place where the parrots would be
chained to perches and the jaguars would be designs on tablecloths, a place of
swimming pools and tourists sipping from coconut shells.

  
   Nonetheless, after he had finished lunch, he set out to
explore the jungle and soon discovered a trail used by the jaguar: a narrow
path that wound between the vine-matted shells of the houses for about a half
mile and ended at the Río Dulce. The river was a murkier green than the sea,
curving away through the jungle walls; the jaguar’s tracks were everywhere
along the bank, especially thick upon a tussocky rise some five or six feet
above the water. This baffled Esteban. The jaguar could not drink from the
rise, and it certainly would not sleep there. He puzzled over it awhile, but
eventually shrugged it off, returned to the beach, and, because he planned to
keep watch that night, took a nap beneath the palms.

     
Some hours later, around midafternoon, he was started from his nap by a voice
hailing him. A tall, slim, copper-skinned woman was walking toward him, wearing
a dress of dark green -- almost the exact color of the jungle walls -- that
exposed the swell of her breasts. As she drew near, he saw that though her
features had a Patucan cast, they were of a lapidary fineness uncommon to the
tribe; it was as if they had been refined into a lovely mask: cheeks planed
into subtle hollows, lips sculpted full, stylized feathers of ebony inlaid for
eyebrows, eyes of jet and white onyx, and all this given a human gloss. A sheen
of sweat covered her breasts, and a single curl of black hair lay over her
collarbone, so artful-seeming it appeared to have been placed there by design.
She knelt beside him, gazing at him impassively, and Esteban was flustered by
her heated air of sensuality. The sea breeze bore her scent to him, a sweet
musk that reminded him of mangoes left ripening in the sun.

     
“My name is Esteban Caax,” he said, painfully aware of his own sweaty odor.

     
“I have heard of you,” she said. “The jaguar hunter. Have you come to kill the
jaguar of the barrio?”

     
“Yes,” he said, and felt shame at admitting it.

     
She picked up a handful of sand and watched it sift through her fingers.

     
“What is your name?” he asked.

     
“If we become friends, I will tell you my name,” she said. “Why must you kill
the jaguar?”

     
He told her about the television set, and then, to his surprise, he found
himself describing his problems with Encarnación, explaining how he intended to
adapt to her ways. These were not proper subjects to discuss with a stranger,
yet he was lured to intimacy; he thought he sensed an affinity between them,
and that prompted him to portray his marriage as more dismal than it was, for
though he had never once been unfaithful to Encarnación, he would have welcomed
the chance to do so now.

     
“This is a black jaguar,” she said. “Surely you know they are not ordinary
animals, that they have purposes with which we must not interfere?”

     
Esteban was startled to hear his father’s words from her mouth, but he
dismissed it as coincidence and replied, “Perhaps. But they are not mine.”

     
“Truly, they are,” she said. “You have simply chosen to ignore them.” She
scooped up another handful of sand. “How will you do it? You have no gun. Only
a machete.”

     
“I have this as well,” he said, and from his sack he pulled out a small parcel
of herbs and handed it to her.

     
She opened it and sniffed the contents. “Herbs? Ah! You plan to drug the
jaguar.”

     
“Not the jaguar. Myself.” He took back the parcel. “The herbs slow the heart
and give the body a semblance of death. They induce a trance, but one that can
be thrown off at a moment’s notice. After I chew them, I will lie down in a
place that the jaguar must pass on its nightly hunt. It will think I am dead,
but it will not feed unless it is sure that the spirit has left the flesh, and
to determine this, it will sit on the body so it can feel the spirit rise up.
As soon as it starts to settle, I will throw off the trance and stab it between
the ribs. If my hand is steady, it will die instantly.”

     
“And if your hand is unsteady?”

     
“I have killed nearly fifty jaguars,” he said. “I no longer fear unsteadiness.
The method comes down through my family from the Old Patuca, and it has never
failed, to my knowledge.”

     
“But a black jaguar...”