The Jaguar (30 page)

This
corrido
is going on forever, she thought. Maybe not the greatest
narcorrido
ever written, just the longest!

Then the music stopped. Erin was left standing in silence before the wall clock.

Ten-forty.

“You are hearing music,” said Father Ciel.

He was so close behind her, she felt his breath on her neck and she wheeled and stepped away from him, her heart racing.

“I was trying to. Why are you here?”

“My key to your room is missing. I have not told Benjamin. Did you take it?”

“How could I take it? I can’t leave my room. Now it’s gone? Who else might be sneaking up on me in my own room?”

He looked down on her. The cold blue light was gone from his eyes and in its place was a moist pity. She smelled his vanilla smell and she thought of what he was doing to the novitiates and she felt revulsion.

“I suspect Saturnino took the key. He is becoming increasingly active. I have come to warn you. You are perspiring and you look alarmed.”

“You scare me.”

He smiled and nodded as if her confession permitted him something. Then he unbuttoned his coat and let it fall open and reached out with his thin pale hands as if to accept her in an embrace. Erin’s eyes were drawn to the revolver in the waistband of his trousers and his bulge. She saw the lights reflected off his glasses and the air-conditioning moved his wisps of thin tan hair.

“Come, my child.”

“Do not touch me.”

His smile was dry and dreamy. “Who told you that you were naked? The serpent?”

“Don’t use those words on me.”

“Have you spoken to Owens?”

“She told me everything about you.”

“She can so easily beguile. An actor’s art. But she did not tell you the truth.”

“You should be ashamed.”

“You have listened to the serpent. Take my hands and let us pray.”

“Never.”

“Great men can be brought down by the lies of small people. Owens imagines that her sins are mine. She cannot comprehend that a man may devote himself to the Lord. This is common among the unfaithful. Here—take my hands.”

“Go to hell.”

“I know that Benjamin has given your husband one more day to deliver the money.”

“Why are you here?”

“To give you another day beyond that. And another and another. I can save you if you love me as I love you. In Christ. A holy secret between us. We will celebrate the Lord’s love and the flesh that he has given us to celebrate Him. Take my hands.”

“I’m not thirteen years old. I’m not overwhelmed by you or what you pretend to stand for. Get out of this room before I scream.”

“These rooms are soundproof. Who would hear you?”

“You’re worse than the devil. The devil is honest compared to you.”

He stared down on her for a long moment. She could not quite see his eyes, only the reflection of the lights off his glasses. A drop of sweat ran from his temple to his chin then hit the floor with a tap.

“Because you have listened to the serpent your child shall be born misshapen and an abomination.”

“And you’ll burn in the hell you frighten children with.”

“I can do no more for you.”

“You haven’t done one thing for me, ever.”

Ciel patiently buttoned his coat while he stared down at her. He was sweating hard now. She saw the waver of his chin and the tremble of his hands on the buttons. When she finally got a look at his eyes he seemed to be focused on something beyond her. Then he turned and walked quietly across the tracking room past the booths and the Yamaha and pushed his way through the door.

She watched him cross the mixing room and vanish into the lobby. She waited a few moments, then sunk to her knees and put her forehead to the carpet and hugged her middle and told the little life inside her to hold on. Hold on, she thought. We’re almost free. Please hold on, Baby McKenna.

She knelt there for some time, rocking side to side, listening to the whoosh of blood in her ears and the thump of her heart and the strange infinite silence of the studio, which was not silence at all. It was the sound of nothing. What a beautiful sound, she thought. What could be more pure?

Help us.

Help us.

Help us.

She rose and composed. First at the piano. Then with the Hummingbird in one of the instrument rooms. Finally just sprawled on a couch in the mixing room with the notepad and pen and the air-conditioner breeze drying the sweat on her face and neck.

And after what seemed like hours she finally took a deep breath and copied the song out in its entirety, neatly and clearly, in her best cursive handwriting. She set the time signature and wrote in the chords and the notes of some of the fills and tried to make some help
suggestions as to tone and phrasing. She knew that
corridos
rarely began with guitar intros but she was a
gringa
rocker so she wrote out the notes to one anyway, figuring that Armenta’s guitarist would likely ignore it. “City of Gold.” It was different from the Jaguars’
corridos
, not so much accordion, less of a polka, more stately and restrained. It had a little Carribean in it, too, a little ska. It sounded more like biography than legend, which is what she wanted. There was something almost mournful about it, up-tempo though it was. The melody built slowly and the narrative built slowly too but when she ran through it on the guitar, Erin thought she heard something big and compelling and lushly unpredictable in it. Something aimed at the heart. Something about a man alone. Something about the way things used to be in this world, and still are, and always will be. It took up twelve of the notebook pages, double-spaced, and she estimated it would run about seven minutes if you kept it up-tempo and nixed all solos, the guitar intro and the end fade. Or you could relax it, let the artists strut their stuff, and you’d have nine or ten minutes. She liked that idea. Why did a
corrido
have to sound like a polka on meth? And also: what did it matter? Who was going to hear it? Who was going to play it? In a moment of desperate optimism she wrote out her wish-list of musicians to perform the song.

It was two o’clock when she set the notebook square in the middle of the Yamaha keyboard, the pen inserted at the song so Armenta couldn’t miss it.

Siesta.

A few minutes later Owens came from the lobby into the mixing room and they looked at each other through the soundproof glass.

S
HE SHOWERED AND PUT ON
a pair of lightweight hiking shorts and athletic shoes and an oversized tee with sequined butterflies on it. Again she had the feeling that someone had been in her room but there was no evidence of this. She pulled the Cowboy Defender from inside the toilet tank and dried it over the sink with a hand towel and she hefted it and wondered exactly why she had been unable to use it. She had clearly seen her reasons and opportunities, but she had not been able to even draw the weapon. She dropped it into one of the flapped front pockets and slid the folded fifty-dollar bills into another. Then on hands and knees she reached her hand far under the mattress and came up with the silk swatch containing the map and her instructions. She looked at them one more time to be sure, then she folded and stuffed it into still another pocket of the shorts.

Next she slipped into the loose white leper’s dress that Owens had brought her. In front of the mirror she lifted the white rebozo and settled it over her head and shoulders. She arranged the garments to best hide her hair and face.

At the door she stopped and straightened and took three deep breaths. She remembered her father’s wry cool and tried to harness the grogginess of her fear, to turn it into calm and clarity.

Come to me by moonlight, sugar, she thought. No, come to me by sunshine. Come to me any way you can get here. Any way you can.

She pushed the card into the lock and heard the deadbolt disengage. Buzz, hum, clunk. Music to her ears now. She held the door open with her toe while she reached up under the dress and slid the card key into a pocket of the shorts.

The door shut behind her and made its final sounds. She walked down the hallway purposefully but not quickly. She pushed the button for the elevator and waited, praying that no one would be moving about in the heat of afternoon siesta. Four floors, she thought—just a straight shot for four floors and I can get outside, where the lepers come and go without drawing much attention.

The elevator door opened on two of the black housekeepers, who stopped talking to stare at her wide-eyed. Erin saw the worry in their faces and she saw that they wanted to get away from her, but didn’t know how, so she bowed her head humbly and stepped aside. The two women bustled past her into the vestibule, then the hallway, hurrying down it, then turning for a quick look back at her before turning the first corner.

Once inside the car she considered the maddeningly unlabeled buttons. Six of them, for either four or five stories—no one would clarify which, not even Owens, who had pushed the wrong ones more than once. Erin was fairly sure that the third highest button was for the first floor, not the second highest button, which would logically service the ground floor, allowing for the basement. Owens’s rooms were on the first floor. She went with her memory.

The car was slow as always but it didn’t stop at the second floor and the next thing Erin knew the door had slid open to frame the entryway of the Castle, its grand foyer and majestic iron doors. Sunshine fell from the skylights in the ceiling and dappled the floor around the swordlike shadows of the palms. A small monkey sat on the curtain rod above a casement window, eating sunflower seeds and looking down at her with a frankly doubtful expression.

She strode down the hallway, away from the foyer, and when she came to Owens’s suite she fished the card key from her shorts, looked up and down the hall, then slid it under the door.

Back in the entryway she walked across the tile and pushed against the massive right-side door. The birds shuffled from on high and a monkey screeched softly. The door was heavier than she had imagined and at first she thought it might be locked. But it finally gave, as if in surrender, and she put her shoulder to it and pushed harder. The door swung and gained momentum, towing Erin into the withering Yucatecan heat.

She stopped in the shade of the loggia, stunned by the brightness that lay beyond. She had never felt so conspicuous in her life, even on a stage with a spotlight blinding her. She pulled the rebozo forward over her head. There was an expanse of gravel between the Castle and the jungle and this gravel was raked several times daily by the groundskeepers and as Erin stepped onto it she saw no footprints coming or going, not even the neat tracks of the crabs or lizards that left their trails everywhere, but were almost never seen.

She came to the jungle and stepped right in. Once inside the shade of the trees she stopped and glanced back at the Castle looming in the midday heat. She saw two lepers, women, coming slowly down the outdoor stairway from the third story. A good thing, she thought. She felt like a character in the Old Testament fleeing some cursed place, surrounded by enemies and observed by a jealous and hot-tempered God. A pillar of salt, she thought. Demoniacs. Bloody altars. Dear Lord, get me out of here. Dear duplicitous Bradley, please be waiting.

She turned and ran. She’d forgotten what a pleasure it could be, heat or not, pregnant or not. But what a wild, dislocated feeling it was to be embarking on the most important journey of her life with nothing but the clothes on her back, a leper’s shawl, five-hundred dollars
and a gun. Save some energy, she thought. She slowed to a trot, then a fast stride.

The trail was narrow but clear. Tree roots grew the thickness of human arms and they were raised across the path and worn smooth by walkers. The trunks of the ficus trees grew up close to the passageway and the Carrizo cane grew in high walls and choked out the sunlight and the breeze. Erin could hear her shoes crunching on the sand and the roots but she heard no birds or monkeys or even insects, just the gradually fading sound of the Castle’s generators running the siesta air conditioners. She walked fast with long steps, then ran again a short distance, then slowed once more to a walk. For a few strides she held her belly in both hands and talked to her charge:
hang in there, hang in there, little baby. You are one tough little guy.

She followed the trail she had taken with Armenta. She recognized a very narrow fork that led right and one that led left and she congratulated herself for keeping to the true path. The passageway got narrower and the roots were raised and knotted higher but she labored over them, holding to the cane stalks for balance and careful not to turn an ankle. Something black and low scurried ahead of her, no more than a blur.

A moment later she stopped and turned and listened. She took a few more steps and stopped again. That feeling of being watched, she thought. She’d had it a million times as a girl, watched or not. She heard a bird twitter and a faint breeze stir the foliage.

She continued. Suddenly she came to a fork that she did not remember. She stopped again. These paths were not minor offshoots but an almost perfect wishbone—two trails just as wide and well worn as the one she was on, each leading away at equally obtuse angles.

She stared, disbelieving. As she scrolled through the memory of her walk to the cenote with Armenta, she had that sinking, breath-robbing
realization that she couldn’t remember this place at all. She could remember the silver plate she had carried, and the hard lump of the Cowboy Defender in the pocket of her dress, and the patches of his hair that Armenta had tried to tame with gel, and the silver jewel-studded candlestick he had carried, but she could not remember this junction, this grand and dramatic fork that they had most assuredly negotiated.

She placed both hands over her womb. She was breathing quickly but not deeply and she was light-headed in the breezeless heat. Panic kills. Dad.

She stared at the two paths. The roots of the left path were worn as smoothly as the roots of the right. The right path had a thin layer of white sand, as did the left. Both were of equal width. Both led through thickets of almost indistinguishable trees and plants. They looked like twins staring back at her. Then she thought she saw something. She knelt down slowly to one knee, balancing herself on her fingertips. This made her dizzier, so she took deeper breaths, and faster. She blinked to clear the sweat from her eyes. In the filtered light she saw the footprint on the right path. It was just a small crescent shape, a partial heel, maybe, with the faint zigzag of a sole pattern within it. In front of it was a larger mark, once an oval, perhaps, marked with the same pattern. Going in her direction, she thought.