HOUSE OF JAGUAR

by Mike Bond

  “I don’t need to know where, Howie. Just don’t be visible.”

  “You can’t even see me in the jungle. Long as I don’t smile.”

  “You’re never happy enough to smile. Just get this pilot.”

  Lyman shook his fourth Marlboro of the day from its pack. “I’m nobody’s keeper, Curt. Not even yours.”

  CONSUELA mixed the corn flour with lime and water and broke the dough into chunks she flattened between her palms, flipping one piece at a time on to a flat tin sheet on the coals. The tortillas as they cooked smelled like cornbread and caramel; he sat beside her, watching the pale yellow turn brown, swallowing saliva and clenching his hands.

  When the first four were done she shoved them at him and started four more. He gave her two back. “If I weren’t here,” he said, “you could eat them all.”

  The hot rich tortilla flavor choked him. Unable to stop he swallowed the second, tried to stand but the room spun, making him sick.

  She finished the new ones and gave him two. “We’ll save the rest for tonight.”

  Clutching the two new tortillas he stooped under the lintel and went down to drink from the Río. A girl was gutting catfish to hang over a rack of saplings. “Hola! − it’s you, Guapo?”

  He grinned. “Don’t call me Guapo.”

  “But you are!”

  “How can you tell?” he teased.

  She felt in her basket for another catfish, slit its belly and pulled out its blue-red intestines. “Besides, Consuela calls you that.”

  “How’d you know it was me?”

  “You walk like a tapir − thump, thump, thump.”

  “It’s just the new sandals Danielo made me. They’re loose.”

  The tortillas were warm in his hand. I need them, he thought. Every family got the same. “Did you get corn, Epifanía?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you make tortillas?

  “My little brother’s sick. We’re saving it for him.”

  “You’ll get sick, too, if you don’t eat.”

  She smiled. “There’s the fish.”

  “That’s Jesús’s catch from yesterday − it’s for the whole village.” The two tortillas were beautiful in his hand; never had there been anything so complete. Her face came up, lips parting as she smelled them.

  “Here,” he said, “I can’t eat more.” She took them, fingers running over their edges, ate one and tucked the other into her dress. “Is that for later?” he said, thinking maybe she wasn’t hungry − he could have it back.

  “It’s for my little brother.”

  “We’ve kept out some of the corn, to plant tomorrow.”

  “Soon as it’s tall I’ll be able to see again.”

  “Don’t joke, Epifanía!”

  “I will! I haven’t always been blind. Only since the corn died.”

  BENEATH THE HUEY’S open cargo door the jungle seemed to roll to the ends of the earth, the river down its middle like a great silver tree of many branches. Even at three thousand feet the smells of jungle growth and decay and wet heat were stifling. Sun glittered on the treetops that each seemed to cup a sparkling bead of water in every leaf. A string of diamonds broke from the river and Lyman saw it was a flock of white birds the chopper had scared up.

  The chopper’s chattering thud thud thud thud shivered its bent, stained khaki aluminum against its missing rivets. Beside his hand on the door frame was an ancient yellow decal: “Do Not Mount Machine Gun This Side”. Overhead the rotor shaft shimmied and wailed against the Jesus nut bolting it to the engine housing − you could go crazy waiting for that bolt to snap − how many had popped in Nam? When the rotors suddenly flew off and the ship dropped like a stone. Funny if that happened to him now, after all these years...

  Steep palisades jutted black and treeless from the green jungle. Maybe they’d put the dam here – find the place with the biggest topographic drop, the Army Corps of Engineers had said, with the biggest potential head. No, AID had told them, put it where it floods the most, to drive these people out.

  Vodega was crouched like a bat in the side door, bony shoulders tensed up around his neck, the machine gunner in a black T-shirt standing over him like a bulldog on a chain. Five soldiers sat in a clump on the vibrating cargo deck, one chewing on an unlit cigarette. Sunlight through the rotor blades fluttered on their blunt, impassive faces.

  DONA VILLALOBOS shook herself awake, leaned over the dugout’s side to wash her face. Rémito gunned the motor and ran the dugout up the bank. She found the gringo sleeping when she reached Consuela’s hut. Such innocent faces they had, these gringos. She shook him. “Time to go!”

  He sat up instantly. “Where?”

  “Mexico. The Army’s looking for you, checking the villages.” She gripped his hand. “Press my palm with one finger at a time; I want to see how strong you are.”

  Her hand was hard and smooth, cool. He pressed as strongly as he could, pleased when she winced. “I can hide in the jungle,” he said.

  “Too dangerous.” Quickly she unwrapped the splint, peeled back the dressings. “It’s amazing, how you don’t infect.” From a US Special Forces pack she took a pair of scissor forceps, cut the black stitches sprouting like thick hairs from the bullet wound, and pulled them out of the pink, mottled flesh. “If they find you they’ll kill everybody. What’s your word for it – counterinsurgency? − for shooting the men and women and driving the kids and old people off to the camps?”

  “That’s not my word.”

  “What is your word for it, then? What your country does to mine?”

  “I don’t give a damn about words! You’re fools, all of you! On either side. On any side.” He stood up, wanting to cut off the aching arm, lose it forever. “It’s all the same, can’t you see? Nobody’s noble, least of all you.”

  “You don’t believe in war?”

  “No.”

  “Where did you get them, then, the shrapnel wounds? From loving peace?”

  “You don’t have...”

  “I couldn’t help seeing them. I was healing you, remember?”

  “And I’ll always be grateful to you.” The sun brightening her black hair made his heart plunge. Didn’t she see she’d die too? And how senseless that was? Already he could see right through her thin envelope of skin, the nerves pulsing red and green tracers round the armature of her skull. “I was a helicopter pilot, in Vietnam. I took out the dead and wounded. And brought the new ones in.”

  “To do your killing for you.”

  “A lot of them came right back, dead.”

  “I was sure you’d die. I don’t know why I gave you bactrin, it was a lost cause.”

  “Some way I’ll repay you.”

  “I had no choice. I’m not allowed to turn you down.”

  “By whose law?” He stepped into the warm breeze off the river. See everything in light of the eternal. Egret winging upriver above its own reflection, white cumulus in blue sky over green jungle, the light through strands of her black hair. What a jaguar must see, stalking through tall grass. She was so small and light-limbed, animated by a strange consistency. He could see through her, how no one can be replaced, should ever be forgotten.

  “Is that what God is, for you?” he asked. “The one who can’t forget?”

  “Someone’s coming for you. In two days you’ll be past Sayaxché, in three days in Mexico. If you’re caught you’ll be tortured unspeakably, and when you tell them about this village everyone here will be killed, and everyone else who’s helped you. When you cross the Usumacinta have this cast changed and the wound checked at Bonampak. The clinic there is used to Guatemalan wounds.”

  “If I get caught I’ll make something up, how I lived in the jungle.”

  “They’ll want to know who made this cast.”

  “I did. I was a medevac.”

  “Eventually you’ll tell the truth. They always know. It’s then they kill you.”

&n
bsp; “It’s crazy, what you do. You just make things worse.”

  “For you?”

  “No! For you, and everyone else.”

  “Don’t you see it’s not enough, just to live your own life?” Strangely, she took his hand. “Once I wanted to be a brain surgeon. I wanted to understand the mystery of thought, the genesis of life. And I wanted to live a good life. But soon I realized too many people were in pain or dying for the lack of the simplest medical necessities. That I couldn’t turn my back on them. That living a good life means doing as much good as you can.”

  “We all have altruistic reasons for what we do.”

  “What are the altruistic reasons for what you do?” She stepped into the dugout, yanked the cord; the motor stuttered and caught. The man with the scarred forehead came down the bank, slipped his rifle over one shoulder and climbed into the bow. She revved the motor and the dugout pulled away, its wake still lapping at the mangrove roots after its noise faded round a bend in the river.

  Conchita, Placido’s granddaughter, was scrubbing clothes against the river stones and hanging them like multicolored parrots on the streamside branches. “She says you are better, Guapo? The doctora?”

  “She’s angry I’m getting better.”

  “Don’t mind her. It makes her sad so many people have been killed.”

  “I told her to stop fighting.”

  “She doesn’t fight, that one. Anyway, it doesn’t matter whether you fight or not. The Army still kills you.”

  He sat next to Conchita beside the clear, soft-rustling water. What could he really do? If he was tortured, what could he forget? The Río rolled past on its way to the sea, and he saw how the rain made it and it made the sea and the sea made the rain, and they were all the same, each a symbol for everything, and how to harm one was to harm all. The many-fingered leaves of the quiebrahacha drew their mantilla of shadows across his shoulders; a fish leaped, momentarily mirrored.

  A change in the wind brought village smells, smoldering fires, drying thatch, ordure, mud. He thought he heard a chopper and tensed to grab Conchita, but it was a bee, bumbling in a flower. He remembered cars, noise, buildings, money, television, city crowds. How could I live like that, he wondered.

  Conchita finished her clothes and walked up to the village. Jesús the son of the widow Sonora came down, took a piece of dried catfish, and crumbled it into a bottle. He waded into the Río, filled the bottle with water, and laid it on the bottom. Minnows crowded the bottle’s mouth, darting one by one inside where they twirled among sparkling catfish scales. Against the far shore a heron flapped upriver, wingtipping the water. A flock of snowy egrets settled in the shore branches, their white reflections rippling among white water lilies. Jesús took the bottle full of minnows and set it upright in his mother’s canoe and poled out beyond the shallows, a dark form against the river’s verdant sheen as he baited hooks with the minnows and cast them out. A kingfisher cried as it skimmed the surface and looped up into the cobalt sky. Jesús tugged a line and drew in a bright, writhing fish.

  8

  FOG, alone and complete, from the edge of his skin to the ends of the world, cool damp encompassing fog.

  In the center it grew darker. A shape, a lancha, the pillar of a man with a pole. Gold against the gray as the fog thinned.

  The lancha slid into shore and the man drove it high up the bank with a final thrust of his pole. A hawk-eagle cried, and Murphy wondered what it must be seeing, high over the gray jungle and the fog thick down the low broad belly of the river. The man stowed his pole, shouldered a small pack and stepped onto the bank. “So,” he said in English, “you’re already waiting for me.”

  “Como?” Murphy stood, thinking should I run back through the village, he’ll have no angle to shoot, don’t run along the river, there must be others, where are they? “No entiendo –”

  “You speak Spanish?” The man stuck out a hand. “I’m Father Miguel. The one taking you downriver.”

  “Now?”

  “No, no,” the priest chuckled. “After dark.” He leaned back, hands in his pockets. “So you’re the guy who crossed a hundred kilometers of impossible jungle, barefoot, with a broken arm.”

  “Seems long ago.”

  “What did you think of? What kept you going?”

  “Nothing. It sounds funny, but nothing kept me going.”

  “Nothing doesn’t exist.” Ofélia came running to him and the priest swung her into his arms. “How is my florita de Pascua?” he laughed, bundling her against his shoulder. “By its name,” he said to Murphy, “nothing cannot exist.”

  The fog was thinning. “The Army’s coming,” Murphy said.

  “That’s why we wait till dark.”

  “I won’t have you risk it, just for me.”

  “I’m not.” The priest swung Ofélia onto his shoulders and walked up into the village, the children flocking round his legs, the women running to hug and kiss him.

  Dusk fell. Clouds of swallows skimmed the river; voices and fire-glimmer reflected over its sleek darkening surface. Monkeys hooted; doves chanted and nighthawks cried.

  Murphy climbed the bank and wandered through San Tomás, trying to see it all for the last time, the huts with fires glowing now through cracks in their thatch, the chatter of children inside, the odors of corn flour, tortillas, chilies, squash, dried fish, rotten vegetation, mud, the crouching jungle, the dirt between his toes.

  Ofélia’s father Manolo sat by the door of his hut cleaning a black-powder shotgun, a gourd drum on the ground beside him. “It’s a shame you’re going, yanqui. I’d have taken you hunting tonight for el tigre!”

  “What good am I with one arm, hunting for el tigre?”

  “I need somebody to play this drum, to make el tigre come, while I sit in a tree to shoot him.” Manolo held the gourd in his lap, the deerskin cover facing up, reached inside it and pulled his pinched fingers down a plaited twine of burro hair which, covered with beeswax, made a deep, reverberating growl. “See, it is something you can do one-handed.”

  “And that makes the jaguar come?”

  “When he hears this growling sound, he is very angry and comes to see what new jaguar is roaring in his jungle.”

  “And in the dark you shoot him.”

  “Claro que sí!”

  “And if you miss he eats me?”

  “Powder’s too dear. I can’t afford to miss.”

  “And then you sell him?”

  “I sell his skin in Sayaxché. The yanqui tourists in Tikal will always buy it.”

  “They’re not all gone, los tigres?”

  “For two years I do not see a track. Then since you came this one’s been near. He’s very rare, a black one. Like you, out of the east. Last night he slept in an aguada, a mangrove swamp where last year I kill a tapir. Tonight after the ceremony I go and call him. Then we’ll have money for more seeds – black skins are the most valuable.”

  “How do you know he’s black?”

  “Black jaguars leave black hairs. Did you ever see one, when you were wandering in the jungle?”

  “I saw nothing.” Murphy’s arm was hurting, and he stood, to move around. “It’s dirty, your gun.”

  “I keep it buried, like the Bible, so the soldiers don’t find it. Wrapped in deer hide, with a plug of coconut in the muzzle.”

  “They could come tonight, the soldiers.”

  Manolo glanced out at the fog coating the river and slinking up between the huts. “They come only in clear weather.”

  Murphy massaged his arm above the wound, driving the ache back down. “What does the Army care about the Bible?”

  “You see that yellow flower? In our language it is estapu – very pretty. But in Spanish it is flor de muerte. Christ says to love and help each other. Why would the Army want us to do that?”

  THE AMPHIBIOUS BOAT crossed the Río toward Sayaxché, its front ramp throwing up a broad wake that sparkled in the town’s
lights. The ramp dropped with a muddy splash and two columns of men jogged up the bank, guns and packs clanking. Lyman’s palms itched; pulse darted down his wrists like lightning. “Usted!” he shouted, grabbing a soldier.

  “Sí!” the soldier yelled, startled, saluting. He peered at Lyman out of the dark. “Sí, Coronel!”

  Lyman snatched the man’s Galil. “Where’s your goddamned bayonet?”

  “Here, sir!” The man slapped his belt.

  “Mount it!”

  “Now, sir?”

  “Goddammit it, yes! We’re going into battle!” He spun round, glared at the others. “All of you, mount bayonets!”

  “There’s still the flight upriver,” Vodega said.

  Lyman glanced toward the voice, saw Vodega’s slender form on the dark side, by some upturned lanchas. He wondered what Vodega had been doing there. “The men should be pumped. I want them hungry!”

  “In your ardor, Colonel, don’t forget they aren’t your men, they’re mine.”

  “I pay for them. I pay for you too.”

  “I pay my own way. Guatemala pays its own way.”

  “By cornering the weed market? That’s how your Army pays its way?”

  “That’s why Gallagher was here. And that’s what got him into trouble, isn’t it? Lieutenant!” Vodega called. “Tell the men to dismount bayonets.” His voice swung back to Lyman. “I don’t want bayonets mounted in my helicopters.”

  “Your helicopters? Shit!” Lyman turned away, boots slithering in the riverside crud.

  EPIFANIA’S FATHER José had set up an altar of lashed saplings at one end of his palm-thatched shed that stood between the village and the Río. On the altar an earthen bowl sat between two candles on a white cloth; in the bowl were three tortillas. Stars gleamed through slits in the palm fronds. “We’re here to celebrate the life of he who was willing to give what is complete in him,” said Father Miguel, “for what is missing in us.”

  Some of the people murmured; a sense of agreement seemed to ripple through them. “You have been gifted by a visitor to whom you gave the gift of life. Now he leaves but you live within him as he in you, although you may both forget this. Just as when he traveled injured through the jungle he says that nothing was with him, and does not remember. This is true of us all: we do not remember the gift of life.”