Keeper (7 page)

‘Now,’ the Keeper said softly.

From off to our right there came the slightest of sounds, a whisper of leaves moving against other leaves. Then a tiny disturbance in the undergrowth. I could just make out a pale shape, and then, concentrating, I saw the head and shoulders of some sort of animal. It moved, anxious and alert, into the clearing. I knew what it was, even though I had never seen one before. A small deer, not much bigger than a large dog, with a narrow, intelligent head, big ears, and a long, slender neck. Uncle Feliciano called these deer ‘little ghosts,’ partly because they were pale, partly because they were hardly ever seen. I had seen their droppings, like little black beans, but never the animals themselves. They were intensely shy and cautious. Some power greater than its own nature must have brought this one here, to where something terrible was waiting. It hurt my heart, knowing what was going to happen.

The jaguar had moved. She was now flat to the ground, facing the clearing. Her ears were down on her skull. Her great haunches were the highest part of her body, ready to propel her forward. The shadows of the leaves blended with her markings to make her almost invisible.

The deer was now clear of the trees. He moved, stopped, listened, moved again. His forelegs were very thin and delicate, although the knees were large knobs of bone. All his strength seemed to be gathered in his hind legs and haunches, which looked as though they belonged to a much larger animal. As I watched, his thin tongue slid out of his mouth and into his left, and then his right, nostril. Then he lifted his nose and tasted the air.

He was clearly nervous and confused to find himself in an open green space; such a thing was not part of his experience. He lowered his head to nibble at the turf, then lifted it again, quickly. He moved in little jerky paces farther into the open. Then he seemed to hear something, and turned, head high and ears swiveling. His eyes were big, and moist as if with tears.

As soon as the deer turned, the jaguar came along the shadow line, fast. She carried herself low to the ground, so low that I could not see her feet move beneath her. As soon as the deer moved again, the jaguar froze, blending into the dappled light beneath the trees. I glanced sideways at the Keeper. He too was watching this dance of death, but there was no expression in his shaded face.

It took about five minutes. Each time the anxious deer moved and turned, the jaguar rippled along the ground. And as soon as the deer lifted his head to smell the wind and search the shadows, she flattened herself and became invisible. I realized what she was doing: she was positioning herself so that the deer would eventually be caught between her and the goal. The goal and its net were the trap; that was where she would make the kill. But the cat had to time it very carefully, because the breeze would carry her scent to the deer at the very moment she reached her perfect position.

It happened suddenly. The deer was thirty yards from the goal, facing it, perhaps trying to puzzle out what this strange thing was. The jaguar came into the open behind him, belly touching the grass, tail snaking from side to side. She covered twenty yards, and then went into a crouch, her shoulders shoved forward. The huge muscles of her hind legs tensed for the spring; I could see them shifting beneath her skin. The deer had only to turn his head to see her, but the sharp, fierce stink of the cat reached him first. He took off in a vertical leap, all four hooves clear of the ground, and spun around — all in one frantic movement. Before he touched the grass again, the cat had completed her first enormous bound, and her hind legs were swinging forward to launch her into the next. The deer twisted and leaped again, in high wild arcs toward the goalmouth. And then he seemed to understand what the net was, and that he had to escape it. He leaned to change the direction of his next leap, but the jaguar was almost upon him now, and she had known that he would do this. She made her final spring. I could see clearly what was going to happen: the arc of the jaguar and the arc of the deer would meet; she would take him in mid-flight.

But then the deer did something incredible. He turned, in the air, onto his back, and arched himself, switching the direction of his flight, and for just a fraction of a second he was clear of the cat, and she was passing beneath him. What happened next took place in the flicker of an eye, but I saw it in dreamy slow motion. The jaguar seemed to hang in the air, as if gravity had stopped working on her. She rolled, and turned her head and shoulders back so that she was bent almost double. Her heavy right paw swung up at the deer. And she reached him, just. Her claws snagged and tore the muscle of the deer’s hind leg. I saw blood in the air, droplets of blood like a string of red beads.

Then the laws of gravity and normal time were switched back on. The stricken deer fell, landing on his side, legs flailing. The jaguar landed on her feet two paces from her prey. There seemed no time at all between her landing and her going in for the kill; the actions flowed together.

I steeled myself to watch. I expected ripping and tearing, but it didn’t happen. The jaguar pressed one heavy foreleg across the struggling deer and, almost gently, took his throat in her jaws and clamped them shut, closing his windpipe. She throttled him. When the wild jerking of his legs stopped, she released his throat and lowered herself onto the grass. She lay there, panting, for a minute, then walked cautiously around the corpse. Twice, she pulled and poked at it with a forepaw. Eventually, she took the deer’s neck in her mouth and dragged the corpse beyond the ancient goalmouth into the darkness of the forest.

The Keeper did not speak, so after some moments I turned to look at him.

‘So,’ I said, ‘what am I? The jaguar or the deer?’

It was meant to be a joke — the kind of joke seriously nervous people make. The Keeper gave no sign that he had heard me.

‘Did you see what I wanted you to see?’ he asked me.

‘I think so,’ I said. ‘But I could not do what she did. I am human. It is not possible.’

The Keeper walked a few paces from me, faced me, and said, ‘Are you saying that it is
im
possible?’

I chose to say nothing.

He said, ‘You are still very young. What do you know about what is possible or impossible? I tell you this: you will do things that now seem impossible. They seem impossible now only because you cannot imagine them. Because you do not believe in them. But you will do them, and afterward you will be amazed that you ever doubted yourself. Now, let me ask
you
that question. Which are you? Are you the jaguar or the deer?’

‘The jaguar,’ I said. What else could I say?”

“I
HAD MY
fifteenth birthday two weeks before Easter, and when the holiday came, I left school and did not go back. A week after the fiesta, while the little kids were still finding burnt-out rockets from the fireworks display, I climbed into the back of a pickup truck with my father and other men and went to work. It was raining, and we all wrapped ourselves in black waterproof ponchos. The road was cut into deep ruts by the heavy tractors, and the truck slid and lurched. In the back, we constantly fell against each other, and there was a great deal of cursing, which distressed my father because I was with him.

I asked him how long it would take us to get where we were going. I was ashamed of myself, realizing that I did not know even this basic detail of my father’s daily life.

‘In this weather,’ he said, ‘almost an hour.’ From the way he said it, he seemed to expect me to be impressed. In fact, I was dismayed.

‘You know,’ my father said, ‘when I started logging, it took maybe fifteen minutes to get to where we were cutting. Every year it takes longer. It’s amazing how much of the forest we have cleared.’

And as we traveled, the forest began to show its scars. On both sides of the road there appeared vast areas from which every tall tree had vanished. What grew instead was a thin green skin of scrub and creeper. Above these shaven landscapes the gray sky was suddenly huge.

Farther on, the forest showed its open wounds. It had been scalped. Vast hillsides had been reduced to red mud and blackened stumps. Here and there, low cliffs of rock poked through the soil like naked bone. I simply stared at all this, too dazed to speak.

We arrived at last at what Father called ‘the camp.’ The rain had stopped, but the air was still wet and heavy, and getting hot. Steam rose from the soaked earth and from puddles the color of tea. I threw off the heavy poncho and jumped out of the truck to stretch my aching legs. I looked around and saw that I had been brought to a place where a terrible battle had been fought. Looking around at where I might spend the rest of my working life, I felt as though my heart were dying.

Our truck was one of many parked at the edge of an area of leveled gravel about the size of a big city plaza. Along one side of this space there were several metal sheds, blue or yellow, all blistered and streaked with rust. They had numbers painted on them, but the numbers were not in any particular order. Some of the sheds had great openings in their sides that could be closed with heavy roller blinds made of steel strips. Each shed like this had a huge workbench in front of it rigged up out of scaffolding poles, timber, and sheets of steel. These benches had roofs made of filthy, heavy plastic sheets bolted onto scaffolding.

On the workbenches were lumps of engine guts, dismantled chain saws, the broken arms of machinery. Already, men were working at these benches, wrestling with screaming power drills that hung from chains, welding in storms of brilliant sparks, bent over lathes cooled by jets of dirty water.

On the opposite side of the camp stood a row of huge, damaged machines smeared with red mud. Many had terrible weapons attached to their snouts: thick, gleaming spikes of steel, pairs of jaws fed by rubber hoses, scoop-shaped blades. Some had had wheels amputated. Their stumps were propped on wooden blocks, bleeding oil. They all looked like casualties of a disastrous war. Men in orange overalls climbed over and wriggled under these wounded machines, reaching into their innards. I remembered animal corpses I had seen in the forest, and the ants and maggots that were working on them.

Of the forest, here, there was no trace. No, that’s not quite true: I was standing in its ruin. Beyond the camp, in every direction, there was a wasteland: stumps whose roots groped the air, shattered branches rotting in puddles of brown water, torn bark all over the place. The remains of fires smoked the air, which was dense with the stink of sour ashes and diesel oil.

My father and another man were unloading crates of bottled water and big plastic canisters of fuel from the back of the truck.

‘Where are the trees, Father?’ I asked him.

He looked around at me, smiling blankly. ‘What trees?’

‘The trees, Father. The forest. Where is it? Aren’t we there yet?’

‘You mean where we are cutting? That way. About a mile.’ He gestured.

I peered into the smoking distance and could just make out a low, dark, ragged line between the gray haze and the gray sky.

My father looked at his watch. ‘Ten minutes before I have to go,’ he said. ‘Come and meet your boss.’”

“My father had managed to get me a job in the tool shop. He was very pleased that he had done this because it showed that he was respected. Most boys, he said, had to start with the cutting crews. They began as what he called ‘saw-monkeys.’ Saw-monkeys had to dash from place to place carrying chain saws that were still running, because the cutters lost time if they had to start up the saws in every new place. Saw-monkeys were always the first to be sent in to where a tree had fallen — and everyone knew that it was a good idea to wait for a while after a tree had fallen. That is because not everything that had lived on or near the tree vanished into the forest right away. Snakes, in particular, were very stubborn and would often hide close to the fallen tree. Many saw-monkeys were bitten by snakes.

Saw-monkeys had to carry heavy steel cables to the fallen tree and lock them on, so that the big dragging machines could tear the tree out of the forest. And if the cutting was on a slope, and if there had been rain, the logs were sometimes pulled down on top of the saw-monkeys, and they would be crushed to death. Sometimes, not often, but sometimes, a cable would snap and whip back; in the past couple of years, three saw-monkeys had been killed by broken cables. One had been cut in half at the waist like a piece of cheese sliced by a wire. The captain of that crew had told my father that the top half of the saw-monkey’s body had landed on the ground while the bottom half was still standing on its legs.

So my father was pleased that he had wrangled me a safe job at the camp. The pay was better, too.

The problem was, Paul,” said El Gato, “that I was now, in my mind and in my heart and in my soul, a soccer player. When my father first came home and told us that he had secured this job for me in the tool shop, he was very proud. My mother thanked God and hugged me. I am ashamed to say that I felt no gratitude, or even any interest. And I know this hurt my father, although he did not show it. I did not even bother to ask him what the tool shop was. So on that first day, when he led me across the camp toward the drilling and the hammering and the workbenches, I had no idea what to expect.

My father led me to the door of one of the blue-painted metal sheds. We went inside, and he took off his cap and knocked at a door to our left. No one answered. He knocked again, louder. We heard shouting approach the door. It was pulled open by a short, stocky man who was yelling into a two-way radiophone. He was completely, shiningly bald. He hardly looked at us, just jerked his head to tell us to enter. He stalked across to an open window and stuck the upper half of his body out of it, still yelling into the phone. Father and I stood awkwardly in the middle of the office, staring at the man’s backside.

‘How the hell am I supposed to do that?’ The boss spoke with some foreign accent that made him sound angrier than he already was.

We could not hear the reply through the hiss and crackle that came from the phone.