Savage (Daughters of the Jaguar) (21 page)

Inside the house Anna was at the stove as I entered. She put a big pot of water on the stove and turned it on. Then she looked up and stared at me and her husband with a scared expression.

“John!” she yelled and threw away the spoon she had in her hand so it landed in the sink. “What are you doing?”

John pushed me into the living room so I knocked into the dining table. “I’d like to know what you are doing,” he said to Anna. He walked towards her with menace. She backed up, just as the daughter showed up in the room.

“Lillian, get out of here,” John yelled.

But she didn't leave. She stayed and watched as her dad took a plate and threw it against the wall, then he grabbed her mother by the hair and dragged her towards me while the daughter screamed at him—the very same scream that had tormented me so many times. He lifted Anna's head up and made her stare at me. “Who is this?” he asked.

She stuttered. “I-I don’t know who he is.”

“Then tell me why I hear from my colleagues that they saw you with this guy in front of the grocery store the other day, and again today at the beach where you were sitting in his car. Tell me why I saw him parked outside our house yesterday and then again I see him when I got home from work today? Tell me why?”

John hit Anna in the face and the daughter gasped while crying. “I don’t know why he is there,” Anna yelled. “He has been following me, us, and I wanted to know why. That’s why I confronted him today. That's why I was in his car. I thought you had sent him to spy on me or something.”

“Spy on you? Now why would I do that? Because you’re an unfaithful little shit? And do you really think I would use someone who was just a kid and whose face everybody in town would recognize? Someone whose face had been in all the newspapers?”

John loosened his grip on Anna and she raised her head.

“I knew I had seen him somewhere,” she said.  “You’re that kid that was attacked by the alligators in the swamps. I remember you from the hospital. I nursed you when you just got there. I am a nurse at that hospital.”

 John laughed out loud. I was getting more and more confused, but I felt relieved to know that there was an actually connection between this woman and I. She hadn’t been just a random person whose future I had held in my hand. She had touched me and been around me for several days.

“Yeah," John said. "He's that kid. That stupid kid that went into the river naked and was attacked by two alligators. The kid that had an article in the newspaper the other day about what happened. Remember, I showed it to you?” he said.

 Anna looked at me. “Yeah I recognize you from the photo now. What the hell are you doing here anyway? Have you completely lost your mind?"

“Are you cheating on me with this guy?” John asked. “Did you hook up with him when he was in the hospital?”

 Anna shook her head. “No. Are you kidding me? He is a lunatic. Says he wants to save us from some sort of accident. I say he is crazy.”

As they were agreeing I was a madman and were laughing at me instead of fighting each other, I turned my head and my eyes fixated on the clock on the microwave. It read 8:29. I sighed with relief as I stared at the stove where the pot of boiling water still stood untouched. That was the number from my dream. That was what it had looked like. And today was the twenty-ninth of august. 8-29. I fully believed that this was the moment that the accident was meant to have happened, but somehow I had managed to change it. I looked at the daughter who now rolled her eyes at the whole scene, then turned and walked up the stairs with heavy feet not knowing how lucky she really was.

I started laughing. At myself, at the absurdity of the situation, at the fact that no one would ever believe me if I told them about this, except for Aiyana of course, but maybe that didn’t matter one bit. It didn’t matter what anyone thought. I had changed the destiny of this family in my own clumsy way, and most important of all, I had saved that girl’s life. I could never prove to anyone that I had, but I knew it myself. That was enough.

“I told you he was crazy,” Anna said when they heard my laughter.

Then John grabbed me by my collar and carried me out of the house. “And never show your ugly face here again, you hear me?” he yelled as I walked towards my car. “I know who you are and I know your car anywhere,” he continued. “Stay away from my wife!”

I waved at him as he slammed the front door. Then I sneaked back towards the house and cut off the power to the house, just in case. Water wouldn’t boil without electricity.

Chapter 25

I was going wild in the car on my way back. I turned up the radio and started singing and tapping on the steering wheel. I felt such a sense of purpose and direction in my life. It all made sense in a weird way. The voices, the images, the craziness.

When I drove back to my own street, I passed the Kirk’s house and went directly to Aiyana’s. I even parked the car in front of her house not caring what Heather or anyone else would think.

It was the grandmother who opened the door. Aiyana wasn’t home, she said. I laughed and then I grabbed the supposedly old woman who looked like she was in her late twenties and lifted her in the air. She laughed with me as I spun us both around.

“Tell her I did it,” I said when I put the grandmother down again. “Just tell her I saved the girl.”

“I will,” the grandmother said.

When she spoke I could tell that she was a lot older than she looked. Her voice was rough and experienced. It belonged to someone who had seen it all.

Back in the house, I grabbed my dinner after heating it and brought it to my room. Dr. Kirk had been gone all day at the clinic and later he went to visit Mrs. Kirk in the hospital, so Heather and I were alone and luckily she was nowhere to be seen. I turned on the TV in my room while I ate and started flipping through the pages in the books Jim had sent me. Pictures of internal organs and surgical procedures grossed me out. It was like I could no longer look at these pictures, as if it had started to appall me.

I put the book down and pushed my plate aside on the table. I had lost my appetite.  Tomorrow afternoon Jim was going to come and begin the tutoring. I dreaded it. I leaned back in my chair and almost dozed off when something interesting appeared on the TV screen. I turned up the volume. It was a historic program about the Timucua Indians of Florida. I sat on my bed and started watching it. They began by showing on a map where the Timucua had lived in the North Central part of Florida and Southeast Georgia. They were “the largest indigenous group in that area and consisted of about thirty-five
 
chiefdoms,” the narrator said. “When the European
 
first made contact, speakers of Timucuan dialects occupied about nineteen thousand two hundred square miles, and was home to between fifty thousand and two hundred thousand Timucuan.
 T
hey had no immunity to the Eurasian infectious diseases, that the Spaniards brought with them and it killed thousands and thousands. By 1595, their population was estimated to have been reduced from two hundred thousand to fifty thousand. By 1700, the population of the tribe had been reduced to one thousand. Then the war followed. The English colonists along with their native allies completed the Timucuan extinction as a tribe soon after the turn of the nineteenth century.  When the United States acquired Florida in 1821, only five or fewer Timucua remained. They became extinct as a people. Their language is now also extinct. A population that we know inhabited the Florida peninsula for thousands of years was gone in a few years. Twelve thousands years of human history has completely vanished. ”

I leaned back on my bed shocked at what had happened to these people. But I was also wondering. If they were extinct how come Aiyana kept talking about herself and her family as direct descendants of the Timucua Indians? They couldn’t be. Only five or fewer were left when Florida became a part of the United States and eventually they became extinct.

My eyes grew heavy with sleep as I watched the rest of the show about Florida’s first people. I began to dream and in my dream I was with Aiyana. We made heavy and passionate love in the clearing at the Twelve Mile Swamps. We were alone at first, but soon I realized we were being watched by eyes between the trees. Flocks of Native American Indians were hiding in there watching us. They were tall, wearing their hair in a bun on top of their heads, making them look even taller. They wore linen clothes of animal skin and had tattoos all over their bodies. The tattoos were gained by their deeds and social class, I somehow knew. I was filled with an anxiety as I realized they had come to take her away from me.  They were calling for her. “The one to save them all,” they yelled as they came closer while dancing and humming in a threatening way, like they were trying to scare me away from her. Meanwhile, Aiyana was laughing her childlike laughter, and as I turned my head to look at her her light brown eyes turned yellow. They were glowing in the moonlit night like my jaguar’s eyes had done.

 Needless to say, I woke with a start. I was screaming from the top of my lungs and hyperventilating. My body was sweaty and had left the sheet on my bed soaked. Realizing it had all just been a dream, I lifted my curtain and saw that night had become day. I stepped on Jim’s books as I stumbled into the bathroom. I wanted to take a shower but decided to go in the pool instead. The house was empty, I realized with relief as I walked down the stairs. Only Maria was humming in the kitchen. Heather had already taken off for her classes.  

I dived in and swam a couple of laps, trying to wash out the dream and cool myself down. I felt like my entire body was still shivering. It had been nothing but a dream, I thought as I tried to calm myself. It was my fear of losing her; I didn’t need any psychologist or dream interpreter to tell me that. I had never loved anyone like I loved Aiyana so it was only natural that I was afraid of losing her.  Maybe I was even afraid of losing the jaguar, as well. My fear that Jim would one day succeed in his quest had scared me. Of course it had.

It was only a dream.

I took a couple of laps more and when I stuck my head out of the water my eyes gazed upon the most breathtaking sight—Aiyana. She stood at the edge of the pool, smiling at me.

“Hi gorgeous,” I said.

She laughed. Her laughter was clear as a bell. Enchanting as ever. I climbed out of the pool and took her in my arms. I hugged her and held her body close to mine.

“Christian. You’re making me wet,” she said.

“I know. I just needed to hear your heartbeat again. I needed to feel you close to me.”

“That’s sweet,” she said gently.

I let go of her and grabbed a towel. She laughed at my hair when I wiped it and said it looked like a lion’s mane. Only blond. I combed it back with my hand and tried to straighten it a bit. She grabbed my hand.

“Don’t,” she said. “I like it wild.”

I grabbed her around the waist and lifted her in the air. “I know you do,” I said. Then I kissed her, intensely. I smelled her and drank from her lips. Then I kissed her again like I was afraid that this would be the last time. I held her tightly, maybe too tightly, because she suddenly pulled away from me. She smiled gently. “Take it easy, Christian.” She caught a curly hair in front of my face and put it behind my ear. I wanted to kiss her again but she put her hand over my mouth. It filled me with frustration. I didn’t want to hold back. I wanted her. I was aroused, I was panting, I had to have her, here right now and the fact that she was asking me to hold back made me even more aroused. I grabbed her neck and forced her lips on mine. I forced my tongue in her mouth. Again she pulled away. She was teasing me, I thought. She wanted to be the one in control. It made me desperate. I wanted to be the one to take what I wanted, when I wanted it. I was the man, she was mine, I needed her. Why was she pulling away? Couldn’t she tell I needed her to love me, I needed her to make love to me right here right now? I grabbed her again by the shoulders and pulled her towards me. I was so hard now I was almost bursting. I put her hand on my crouch on my shorts. I started moaning, panting heavily.

She pulled away again. “Not now, Christian. Not like this.”

I could see her breasts through the dress, those wonderfully sculptured, fleshy breasts. I wanted to touch them, hold them in my hands and she saw it in my eyes. She put a finger under my chin and lifted my face till I looked into her eyes. “I have to go now, Christian,” she said. “My family is waiting for me. I’ll see you later?”

I nodded as she leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. I felt so devastated, so defeated. It was an unusual situation for me. Normally girls were throwing themselves at me, they were the ones who wanted me to be their boyfriend while I was trying to escape them. What was this? I thought as she started walking towards the fence.

“I only came to ask you if you’d sing my song for me this afternoon?” she yelled while smiling mischievously.

“I am being tutored, but maybe after?” I said. My voice was trembling and I sounded like a child who just realized he wasn’t going to get what he wanted for Christmas.

She waved as she leaped over the fence and I went back into the house to get dressed and have breakfast.