Night of the Jaguar (10 page)

They exchanged pleasantries, and then Calderón told him about the events of the last few days, stressing especially the knowledge of the Puxto business shown by the maniac in Antonio Fuentes’s office.

“So the reason I’m calling,” he went on, “is to check out whether the leak came from your end.”

“That’s impossible,” said Hurtado. “My people know how to keep their mouths shut.” This was said with a certainty that could not be doubted, although Calderón’s mind did not long settle upon what made for such certainty. He said, “Of course. What I meant is the possibility that someone down there wants to make trouble for us, for you, in some way. A rival. Someone who thinks he didn’t get enough of a…consideration, a commission, whatever.”

A pause on the line. “I’ll look into it. There was some crazy priest down there in San Pedro who was threatening to make a stink, but he’s out of the picture. Meanwhile, you got some
cabrón
wandering around Miami with information he’s not supposed to have. What’re we going to do about that, Yoiyo?”

“I’ll handle it at this end,” said Calderón.

“You may need some help.”

“I’m fine, Gabriel. I was just checking with you.”

“That’s good, but I want you to remember that I have commitments on this thing, to people down here. I’m talking about significant people. So it can’t go sour on us. You’re clear on that, yes?”

“Yes. Absolutely.”

“Fine. Your family okay? Olivia and Victoria and Jonni?”

“Everybody’s great,” said Calderón.

“Good. You’ll keep me informed, yes?” The connection broke before Calderón could respond. It was not really a question anyway. Calderón was now trying to recall whether, in the course of their extensive business relationship, he had ever mentioned his family to Hurtado. It would not be a thing he routinely did. He had the old-fashioned Cubano sense of strict separation between the world of affairs and the interior world of the home. He was, however, absolutely sure that Hurtado had never asked about them by name before. Suddenly he discovered that he wanted to leave the office and have a strong drink of scotch.

Moie watches the world float by from the windows of the
wai’ichura
canoe that floats on dry ground. He says the name
car
in his head and is grateful to the Firehair Woman for having given it to him. It is always good to have the names of things. He is happy to have met Cooksey and to have received answers to many of the questions that troubled him. He now understands that the
wai’ichuranan
cannot change the stars in the sky, and also that they didn’t know they were dead at all, but thought they were living life. He thinks of the stars again, that they are not always the same in the sky but like trees along a path, and that as you move a long way across the earth they change in the same way. This is a wonder to him and makes him a little sad.

The car turns and enters a compound of several buildings and they dismount from it, all three of them. There are other dead people there, including the Monkey Boy, who looks a curse at Moie, which he averts with some words in the holy tongue. There is an angry woman who speaks too much and too loud and one man with a beard who speaks
slowly and is the chief of this place, and another man who has a hairy face but does not speak much. They chatter in their monkey talk but also to him in Spanish, and when he does not understand, Cooksey says in Runisi what they have said.

They sit at a table, and the Firehair Woman brings food that tastes like clay and hot brown water. He is not hungry at all but takes a little so that the gods of this place are not offended. The Angry Woman talks about the death of the man of the Consuela whom the Monkey Boy screamed at the day before in the house the size of a mountain that you go to in a little hut with no windows that hums in a way you can feel in the belly. The Monkey Boy is happy he is dead, but the others are confused. Who has killed him? they wonder. Moie says in his own language that it is Jaguar, and they all look at him strangely. They are silent for a moment. Then Cooksey asks, “Moie, did you kill this man yourself?” And Moie answers, “Perhaps I would have, if he came to my country, but here I have no power. No, it was Jaguar alone who did this. He is angry at the men who want to destroy his country, and if they don’t say they will stop, I think he will kill others, too.” He sees that they are amazed, but they say nothing more about it at this time.

T
he wailing dragged Paz out of the dream, brought him onto his feet stumbling as the dream paralysis passed from his limbs. He struggled into a robe. His wife, now awakened herself, cried, “What is it?”

“Amy’s having a nightmare.”

“Oh, Christ, not again! What time is it?”

“Four-thirty. Go back to sleep,” said Paz, walking quickly from the room. Entering his daughter’s bedroom, he saw by the glow of the Tweety Bird night-light that Amelia was sitting up in bed weeping and clutching her old pink blanket to her face. She stretched out her arms to him, and he sat on the side of the bed and held her to his body, cooing and stroking her hair. This was the fourth one in the last couple of weeks.

“What was it, baby, did you have a bad dream? Tell Daddy, what was it? Did you see a monster?”

Gasping, the child said, “It was a aminal.”

“An animal, huh? What kind of animal?”

“I don’t know. It was yellow and it had big teeth and it was going to eat me all up.”

At this, Paz felt a shock of fear shoot through him. It was at this moment that he understood that he had come to the end of the seven years of peace. What he always referred to as “weird shit” had now officially
returned. He wanted to join Amelia in tears but instead took a deep steadying breath and asked hopefully, “You mean like a dog?”

“No, it was a little like a dinosaur and a little like a kitty cat.”

“Boy, that sounds scary,” Paz said, terrified himself. “But it’s all gone now. It can’t get you, okay? Dreams are just in your head, you know? Animals in dreams can’t really bite and scratch you. We talked about this before, you remember.”

“Yes, but, Daddy, I waked up…I waked up and the aminal was still here. I was all waked up and it was still here.”

She had slipped a little back into her baby talk, not a good sign. He said, “I don’t know, baby, sometimes it’s hard to tell exactly when you’re all waked up, especially if you’re having a bad nightmare. Anyway, it was just a dream. It wasn’t real.”

“Abuela says dreams
are
real.”

Paz took a deep breath and uttered an inward malediction. “I don’t think that’s what Abuela meant, baby. I think she meant that sometimes dreams tell us things about ourselves that might be hard to find out otherwise.”

“Uh-
uh
! She says
brujos
can send you bad dreams and they can choke you for
real
.”

“But the dream you had wasn’t like that,” said Paz with authority. “It was just a dream. Now, it’s the middle of the night and I want you to try to get back to sleep.”

“I want to read first.”

“Oh, honey, it’s the middle of the night…,” he whined, but the child had already leaped light as a fairy to her bookcase and brought back a large-format volume called
Animals Everywhere,
and Paz had to leaf from Aardvark through the beasts of field and forest, ocean and stream, one for each letter, reading each caption, and not missing out on a word, for the child had the whole thing nearly by heart.

“That’s the animal that was in my bad dream,” she declared, pointing her small finger at the page.

“Uh-huh,” said Paz nonchalantly. The smart move here was not to get excited and move on quickly to the harmless Kangaroo. She was out by the Opossum. He shelved the book, tucked her in with a kiss, and left, but not back to bed.

In the kitchen, he found his wife wrapped in a pink chenille robe, in the act of placing a large, blackened, hourglass espresso maker on the burner.

“How is she?”

Paz said, “Fine, just a dream. You’re going to stay up.” He gestured to the coffeepot and took a seat at the counter.

“Yeah, I have some case notes I have to write up that I fell asleep over last night.”

“It’s still last night now.”

“Yeah, right. And before I forget, speaking about tonight, I mean twelve hours from now, don’t forget the food for Bob Zwick and whoever.”

“That’s tonight?”

“I knew you’d forget.”

“I’m a bad husband. Can’t I talk you back into bed? We could fool around.”

She looked at him, eyebrows up, a half smile on her lips. She was still a handsome woman, he thought, pushing forty and seven years into a pretty good marriage. She’d stopped obsessing about her weight and was a little lusher than she had been, but she carried it well on her substantial frame. A Marilyn type, blond, generously breasted and hipped, although the face did not go with the 1950s pinup body, being sharp-featured and intelligent, sometimes neurotically so. She had been Lorna Wise, Ph.D., when wed, and was now Lola C. Wise Paz, M.D., Ph.D.; like her name, a handful.

“You tempt me, but I really have to get those notes done, or I’ll be fucked all day.”

“Choosing the figurative over the literal, so to speak.”

She laughed. “Guilty.”

“That being the case, since you’re being so professional, can I have a consult?”

The coffeepot hissed, and she attended to it, pouring herself a large cup of tarry black, offering by gesture the pot to him. He shook his head. “No, I’m going to try to get a couple more hours.”

She sat across from him, took a couple of sips. He’d addicted her to this kind of coffee early in their relationship, and it had helped carry
her through what she always referred to as medical-motherhood school. “So consult. The doctor is in.”

“Okay, just before Amy started yelling I was having a dream, vivid, clear, like I don’t usually have anymore. I’m sitting in our living room, but instead of our couch I’m leaning against a kind of fur wall, like a leopard skin fur wall, and I’m waiting for something, I forget what, just a sense of anticipation. And then I realize that the fur is moving in and out, and that it’s a living animal. I’m actually leaning against an animal, yellow with those little circular black dots on it, like a leopard. This is all incredibly clear. It’s a leopard the size of a horse, huge, maybe bigger than a horse. And I’m not scared or anything, it just seems natural, and then we have this weird conversation. It says something like, ‘You know the world is dying,’ and I say, ‘Oh, right, war, pollution, global warming,’ all that shit, and it says, I don’t know, ‘You could stop it if you wanted to,’ and I get all pumped up, I’m like, ‘I’ll do anything, whatever you say,’ and it says, ‘You have to let me eat your daughter.’”

“Good God, Jimmy!”

“Yeah, but in the dream it made perfect sense, and what I was thinking about then, was how would I explain it to you, why it made sense, you know? That crazy dream logic? And the leopard gets up and stretches, and it’s like something on a flag, you know…from mythology? And I want to fall down and worship it, even though it’s going to eat Amy. So I hear her crying, and I want to say to her, hey, it’s okay, it won’t hurt, it’s part of what has to happen to save the world, but then it penetrates that she really
is
crying and I wake up.”

“That’s quite a dream. Try half a milligram of Xanax before retiring.”

“But what does it
mean,
Doc?”

“It means there’s static in there during REM sleep while your brain transfers material from short-term into long-term memory and your cortex interprets the static into factitious incident. It’s like hearing music in the hum of a fan or seeing pictures in clouds. The brain is a pattern-making organ. The patterns don’t have to have any meaning.”

“I know, that’s what you always say, but get this: okay, I go to see what’s up with Amy. She tells me she had a nightmare about an animal trying to eat her, the bad kind where you think you woke up but you’re
still in the dream. So I calm her down a little and she goes for her animal book and makes me read it to her and she picks out the animal. From her dream.”

“You’re going to say it was a leopard, right?”

“A jaguar. What do you think of that?”

“A coincidence.”

“That’s your professional medical opinion? A coincidence?”

Lola did a little eye rolling here. “Yes, of course! What else could it be, mind travel?”

“Or something. I always forget you have this weirdness-deficit thing.”

“It’s called reason, Jimmy. The rational faculty of mankind. What are you doing?”

“Interfering with you. Running my hands inside your pathetic stained chenille bathrobe. Checking to see if it’s still there. Oh, yes. What do you think of that, Doctor?”

Lola closed her eyes and sagged against him. She said, “This is so mean of you when I have to work.”

“A quickie. Get up on the counter.”

“What about Amy?”

“I gave her powerful drugs,” he said, “barbiturates, brown heroin,” and lifted her onto the Formica.

She said, “This is what I get for marrying a Cuban.”

“What, Jews don’t fuck on the kitchen counter?”

“I don’t know, but I’ll ask around,” she said as his mouth closed down on hers. For a while she forgot about her pile of work, and he forgot about dreams.

Lola Wise Paz was at this period a resident in neuropsychiatry at South Miami Hospital, a short bicycle ride from her home. She’d owned a doctorate in clinical psychology when she and Jimmy Paz hooked up, and she’d borne the child, and then, in something of a panic about time’s wingéd chariot hurrying near, she had decided to go to medical school at age thirty-four. Paz had backed her play in this, and the two of them had worked like cart horses to make a living, clear time for study, and do the endless tasks of parenthood, helped in this last by the
mighty Margarita Paz, the Abuela of Doom. Now, as on most mornings, after Lola had pedaled off, Paz got the kid dressed and fed, delivered her to the first grade at Providence Day School, went to the restaurant, prepped lunch, and cooked much of it. Meanwhile, the Abuela picked up Amelia and brought her to the restaurant Guantanamera. Grandmotherly affections, it appeared, proved even stronger than the desire to exert total control over her restaurant during every single minute it was open. When the lunch rush had declined to a trickle of orders, Paz found his offspring trying on a cook’s apron that the grandmother had apparently altered to fit her. Paz looked the tiny prep cook over with a professional eye. To his mother he said, “She looks good. Why don’t we let her handle the lunch tomorrow? We wouldn’t have to pay her because she’s just a little kid.”

“I do too get paid!” Amelia protested. “Abuela gave me a dollar.”

“Okay, but lay off the booze and cigarettes unless you want to be three feet tall your whole life. And ticklish.”

After the shrieks had subsided, Paz set her up with a pan of radishes to be carved into roses. When she was settled, he went to talk to his mother. Margarita Paz was a black peasant from Guantánamo and still bore as she closed in on sixty the marks of that origin: strong arms, wide hips, a bosom like a shelf, and a hard, calculating stare. She dressed in bright colors and lipsticks and nail polishes that set off her shiny chocolate skin; a turban was often on her head, as now. Paz had always been a little afraid of her; he knew no one who was not, except his daughter.

“The produce was garbage today,” she said when he came into her little box of an office. “Talk to Moreno, and tell him we’re definitely going to switch to Torres Brothers if it happens again. Tell him his father never treated us like Americans.”

“I’ll take care of it, Mamí,” said Paz, although the produce was prime as always. Complaining and snapping orders was her way of showing affection. “Look, I wanted to ask you…Amelia’s been having nightmares, and she wakes up screaming at night, and when I tell her not to worry, that the monsters in the dreams aren’t real, what do I get? Abuela says they
are
real. I wish you wouldn’t tell her stuff like that, okay?”

“You want me to lie to my granddaughter?”

“It upsets her. She’s too young to be worrying about all that.”

“And what about you? Are you also too young?”

Paz took a deep breath. “I don’t want to start with this now, Mamí. Santería is your thing, we’re not going to get involved in it. Not me, and definitely not Amelia.”

“What kind of dreams?” asked his mother, ignoring this last, as she did any statement she chose not to hear.

“That’s not important. We don’t want you telling her stuff like that.”

She shot him a sharp look; it was that “we.” Mrs. Paz had always imagined that when her son finally brought home a daughter-in-law, she would be a girl amenable to direction, as was only right. Instead, she got an American doctor with insane ideas about child rearing. A doctor! The
man
should be the doctor, and the woman should take care of the children, emphasis on the plural, and listen to her
suegra
with respect, or else how was society to continue? But this daughter-in-law had been so bold as to state, on more than one occasion, that if Margarita insisted on inducting the girl into “your cult” she would have to reconsider letting her spend so much time with her grandmother, and all because a few little charms, an
ide
for her small wrist, the sacrifice of a few birds in order to cast the child’s future and protect her from danger…absurd, and especially after all she had done for them. It did not occur to her to wonder why her son had chosen a woman precisely as stubborn and hardheaded as his mother.

She sighed dramatically and threw up her hands. “All right! What can I do, I’m just an old woman, it’s perfectly all right to ignore me. I never expected after the life I’ve lived, to end up being despised like this, but let it be! I won’t say another word to the child, ever. Take her away!” Here she removed a bright silk hankie from her sleeve and dabbed at her eyes.

“Come on, Mamí, don’t make me crazy. It’s not like that and you know it….”

“But,” she said, and now fixed him with her terrible eye, “but there is something.” Here a gesture, hands like birds, conjuring the unseen.

“What something?”

“Something”—darkly—“there is something moving in the
orun,
I don’t know what it is, but something very powerful, and it has to do with you, my son, and with her. Yes, you think I’m stupid, but I know what I know.”

There seemed to be nothing to say to that, so Paz kissed his mother on the cheek and went out.