HOUSE OF JAGUAR

by Mike Bond

  After perhaps an hour he began to walk. The road traversed a small town where a few dogs barked disconsolately, then climbed into bowl-shaped hills where huge stumps of recent rainforest jutted up like menhirs. There were no birds, no snakes, no insects, only silence and the shuffle of his feet under the wheeling stars.

  Toward dawn a narrow moon rose over a distant ridge capped by a dark pyramid he thought might be Xunantunich, where Mayan astronomers once calculated the exact trajectories of the stars. After sunrise a rancher let him ride in the back of his pickup to San Ignacio, then gave him a Belizean quarter, “for a roll, cup coffee” at a sidewalk vendor’s. The hot jolt of black coffee and the sweetness of the roll made only this seem real, the rest seem a dream. So let it be a dream, he thought.

  Beyond San Ignacio he washed his face in a ditch where gaily garbed women were cupping water into plastic buckets. He rode an empty cane truck to the outskirts of Belize City, then caught a lift north with a grass farmer in a new Bronco with quad speakers and fat steel tube bumpers for deliveries to the States. A warm breeze through the Bronco’s window ruffled his beard and blew wisps of hair across his eyes. The farmer gave him a fragrant banana; he tossed the peel out the window and in the side mirror saw it alight birdlike in the grass. The farmer lit a joint and passed it to him; the rich sweet smoke filled his lungs; he could taste the air, see every emerald cell of every leaf of the hunched jungle and spiky bunchgrass, the algal pools and stooping egrets, the flysore Brahma cattle with their concave white flanks, the bleached towering skeletons of mahogany trees tied by green lianas to the chipped and chalky soil. The Bronco hit a hummingbird that exploded in a rainbow of feathers and blood against the windshield.

  At Orange Walk’s rotting Victorian square the Bronco turned east, and Murphy walked uphill through shady rubber trees till he caught a ride on a flatbed where strips of mahogany bark writhed like bandages in the wind. He sat on the back beside a broken-toothed Mayan who shared a handful of pumpkin seeds, their legs dangling over the end as they spat the pumpkin shells on to the road rolling away beneath them. “I just came from Guatemala,” Murphy said.

  The Mayan licked a white flake of pumpkin seed from his lip. “Guatemala? What is that?”

  He got off the truck at Corozal Town and walked east along a dirt road fringing the Bay to a jungled spit with a white house in a grove of bananas and limes. A man was husking coconuts with a machete on a mahogany stump. “Hey! Lovejoy!” Murphy called, not wanting to startle him.

  The man looked at him a moment, buried the machete in the stump. “What the fock happened you?”

  “They killed my friends, burned my plane.” Tears shot into his eyes. “Killed a whole village −”

  “Who, mon, who?

  “The Guatemalans, Americans.”

  Lovejoy grabbed his shoulder, walking him toward the house. “Let’s get inside, get you a drink!”

  “I don’t need a drink. I want food, some time to think.” They went into the cool, thatched, sea-scented shadows of the house. “I’m a little stoned, actually.”

  “I believe it.”

  “Had a few hits off a guy gave me a lift.” He found a chair and sat. Safe now, he thought. Over. But she’s still there. Going through it every day.

  24

  LYMAN CAUGHT a limo from National, tense to be home, hating and wanting Nancy. Languidly the lampposts sauntered past, the sleeping suburbs where once there had been farms and before that forest. Clumps of dead leaves were frozen to the streets; against the lights the trees lunged, black and spidery. “Been gone long, sir?” the driver asked, but Lyman didn’t answer.

  They passed a restaurant, a man and woman walking on the sidewalk, his hand on her shoulder, then another couple arm in arm. The walking wounded, Lyman thought, hobbling from the battlefield of life. He let the metaphor grow in his mind − as we get older, wiser, there’s no more of this silly cuddling. We’re the survivors, have learned that he who fights best fights alone.

  His house seemed caught out by the limo’s headlights, the Norway firs on each side of the door leaning away, hungry to escape, the lava chunks of the front walk loud like dry bread crunching under his shoes, the dry bread the children left but the birds ate it, and the children never found their way home. The doorbell rang in the distance, as if new walls had come between it and him.

  The light flicked on. He felt thin and childish in its glare, holding his bulletproof attaché case like a door-to-door salesman, his duffel over one shoulder like an unexpected and unwanted visitor. Nancy’s eye in the safety lens was huge and rotund. He held his breath, standing straight.

  “Well, hi!” Frowsy and sleep-fragrant, her hair rumpled, her silk nightgown warm with slumber, she reached into his arms and he felt how slim and light she was, how evil it would be to hurt her, feeling also as always the need to be cool, steady, almost devoid of emotion because she seemed to prefer it. Who are you, anyway, he thought, to trot out your feelings?

  “Why don’t you ever call!” she said. “We’ve missed you.”

  “I’ve thought about you all the time.” Almost all the time, he corrected himself.

  She was rubbing her eyes and trying to wake up and he tossed his coat on a chair, took off his shoes and held her, her perfume irritating his throat, her hair tickling his unshaven chin, her lips against his neck. She pulled back. “Want something to eat?”

  “No.” He went into the bedrooms and hugged each sleeping child, the girl mumbling a dream, the boy waking instantly and holding him tight in his arms and not letting go till finally Lyman made him lie down, go back to sleep.

  He padded in stockinged feet across the broad living room carpet, past the black stack of stereo equipment, the bookcase shelves of CDs in gleaming array, the leather couches, the marble side tables, the French watercolors and tall tapering plants; they seemed all to belong to someone else whose taste was good but excessive. He undressed in the bathroom, laid his clothes on his dresser.

  “Just toss them in the hamper,” she said.

  “Not the suit.”

  “So how’d it go?”

  “Standard stuff. Inspection, drills, exercises, troop reviews ad nauseam. Lots of nights to read and stare at the barracks’ walls.”

  “What’d you read?”

  “Oh, nothing. You know, magazines, that rot.” The waterbed sank under his knee. “Detective novels, thrillers.”

  “Any good ones?”

  “Not really. In one mind and out the other.”

  She smiled. “You really could’ve called.”

  “That’s just it, Nan. I couldn’t. Same old drill.”

  “Same old drill.”

  He lay down punching up his pillow. She held herself along him, and he wanted her badly, thinking you shouldn’t, she probably doesn’t want to, she’s not awake, not expecting this, but he couldn’t help himself, and she raised her hip so he could slide up her nightgown. She turned her face from his breath as he shoved into her, recoiling then trying not to show it, and he thought the pain of it, the pain of it for them, while in him the fire was building, the gorgeous explosion, and she got up and went to the bathroom and he felt rotten and empty, as if he’d just spilt the last five weeks.

  “You must be sleepy,” she said, getting back in bed.

  He held her. “Not at all.” Pretend she’s a stranger, he told himself, tracing with a fingertip the line of her brow. Black hair, brown skin. “One bad thing −”

  The muscles of her neck stiffened; she made herself relax. “What’s that?”

  “Kit.”

  She raised up, pulling free. “What?”

  “He’s dead.”

  She spun away and sat. Her claw came out and raked his face. “You bastard. You waited to tell me! Bastard!” She dashed out, nightgown sailing round her knees.

  He followed her into the living room. She sat on the couch with her face in her hands. He wiped blood from his cheek and stared at it in
the palm of his hand. “Are you sure?” she said.

  “I saw him.”

  “Who did it? Which of you bastards is responsible?”

  “He was killed by a drug smuggler, Nan. I’m not supposed to tell you that...”

  “I don’t care what you’re supposed to tell! You and your goddamn silly rules!”

  “The reason I was down there so long was to try and get the one who killed him.”

  “Which you failed to do!”

  “It’s not that easy, Nan.”

  “I don’t care if it’s not easy. I don’t care anything about you!”

  He looked down, realized he was naked. “I’ve done a lot you never see. I’m a lot more than you think.”

  She did not answer and he realized she was crying, quietly, into her hands. He felt cold and went back into the bedroom and climbed into bed.

  MURPHY WAS WADING through a field of yellow flowers with a woman and a child. They were one flesh; he could feel what they felt and see with their eyes.

  He was being hunted down a long hallway. He hid in the second story of a warehouse stacked with cases of canned sodas; he took a can. “Watch out!” Lovejoy yelled. “It’s explosives!” He laughed and tossed it over a wall; it banged loudly, waking him up. Those flowers, he thought, they must be flor de muerte.

  Breeze stirred in the white muslin curtains; through the window came the cries of gulls and mumble of bees. The room smelled of lime flowers, jasmine, and sea. The beeswaxed pine floor squeaked under his soles. He walked out to the veranda and a flock of sparrows burst chittering from the eaves. He went back into the kitchen, drank fresh orange juice till the jug was empty then squeezed more juice and drank it. There was bacon laid out on the counter and he fried it with six eggs and ate them with lime pie. He mixed a big cup of Mexican instant coffee and sat out on the shaded terrace in the warm wind off the sea.

  Lovejoy came and leaned his yellow bicycle against the terrace wall. He carried a plastic bag of red meat into the kitchen. The refrigerator door opened and shut. “You get enough to eat?”

  “Just barely.”

  Lovejoy came out with four Tecates and sat. He popped one can and squeezed lime into it. “You slep’ more, las’ three days, than you used to in a month.”

  Murphy stretched his right arm over his head, testing it. “Feels good.”

  “Goin’ stay a while?”

  Murphy patted Lovejoy’s shoulder, let his hand rest there. “Can’t.”

  “I think you oughta wait, find another cargo, drive it up.”

  “Can’t.”

  “You los’ your plane, mon. How you going to earn a livin’? Better you let me front you a load, I’ll buy you a van, you drive it up. Then you got money to buy another plane. Simple as thet.”

  “Don’t need to earn a living any more, Love.” Murphy’s head hurt and he wanted to get out of the sun, realized he wasn’t in the sun.

  “Get yourself a camper,” Lovejoy said, as if he hadn’t heard. “Tie in with one o’ them American groups thet drives their campers through Mexico together, the Wally Byams, thet what they called? American Legion, or some kinda religious group, Protestants − thet kinda thing. Go through the border with them, you be home free...”

  Murphy opened another beer and squeezed lime into it. “I need you to front me a ticket and a driver’s license so I can go home.”

  “Home don’t sound like no safe place to be right now.”

  “They can’t trace my plane, can’t trace me anywhere.”

  “And what you goin’ do when you git home?”

  “Sort things out, maybe come back down.”

  “Revenge don’t work, mon. It jes take you with it.”

  “I want to know why they hit my plane, killed Johnny and the others.”

  “You never will know.”

  “She said they’re hitting other planes, even people who’ve paid protection. This General Arena’s going to be head of the Armed Forces.”

  “That’s his job, wipe out the others, keep it fo’ hisself. He be doin’ a good job at thet.”

  “And I want to know why that American officer was there, and why they killed him.”

  “You’s too curious by far.”

  “Too curious by far!” Lovejoy’s parrot repeated from its perch under a banana tree.

  “If you fell for some woman like Dona,” Murphy said, “you’d leave her?”

  “Forget thet woman, mon. She not ever going to live for you.”

  “And the people who burned my village? You’d let that be?”

  “Like thet woman say, the best way to fix thet is talk about it in the States. But the moment you do thet you blow your cover and these people goin’ come looking for you. Now what’s the good o’ thet?”

  25

  “THEY’S A LITTLE too big for you, mon.”

  Murphy looked down at Lovejoy’s flowered shirt huge in the shoulders and the purple trousers rolled up at the cuffs. “Your mother fed you too much.”

  “They’ll do till I pop over to Chetumal, get you some right ones. Shoes, too. Today we takin’ you into town, fo’ a shave’n haircut.”

  “I’ll keep it like this. Covers up the scar.”

  Lovejoy shook his head. “One more inch to the right and you was gone.”

  “Never hurt at the time. Only after...”

  “Always meanin’ to asks you, where you git thet star?”

  Murphy glanced at the tattoo on his right arm, above the bullet wound Dona had healed. “The Lone Star of Texas. Got it in Hong Kong.”

  “Thet figures.”

  “I was on leave. Rest and Recreation.”

  “Thet’s a trouble bein’ dark black, can’t do tattoos. You kin, but they don’ show.”

  “You ain’t missing much.”

  “Don’t like Hong Kong. Use’ to go there, in the merchan’ marine. Didn’t like it.”

  Murphy went to the refrigerator and came back with more Tecates and another lime. “Pick ‘em off the fuckin trees.”

  “Wha’s thet?”

  “Limes. Sign of civilization. No civilization where you can’t have fresh limes.”

  “Civilization’s where the love’s easy, mon. I thought a lot about it, seen a lot of places, and thet’s the best indication I kin find.”

  “Always thought civilization was sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll. The Holy Trinity.”

  “We’s a lot wiser when we’s young. We sure git stupid, growin’ older.”

  “All those days in that village, lying in that hammock, limes saved my life. Dona told me, said they fight off the infection.”

  “You believe ever’thing she say, this gir’l?”

  The lawn in front of the terrace was fiercely white with sun. Through the beach palms Corozal Bay scintillated with blue fire. “People been dead twenty years, Love, they came back to me, alive like you and me. When I was lying in that hammock.” Murphy stood at the edge of the terrace, the edge of the shade, breathing in the heat. “My two best friends in Nam, they got killed. We’d been living in death, seeing it all around us... there were days I remember seeing fifty dead or more, new ones, every day. But my friends − I would’ve gone crazy if I hadn’t shut it down.”

  “Tha’s the trouble.” Lovejoy put an empty on the floor, opened another. “You shut thet down, pretty soon you’re shutting it all down.”

  “For years I’ve hardly thought of them. Not thinking about what they’ve missed, since then. Every day they could be living, and do they still suffer, and I don’t let it hit me.”

  “You lettin’ it hit, right now.”

  “When I was in that village, my friend Okie who died in Vietnam, he sat on the floor beside the hammock and we talked for hours. I told him I’ve loved him like a brother all these years, down inside my heart. He said I had to pull through, that he had come back mostly for that, to help me. That I mustn’t feel bad because I’d lived and he didn’t.”
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br />   “Yeah?” Lovejoy said.

  “We called him Okie because he came from Oklahoma. He’d been a hippie, with a beard, before he was drafted. He would run right out in mortar fire to drag some guy in... bullets flying all around. He hated war. He just scorned it. So big and strong you almost thought he could take the whole war up in his fists and strangle it. He never let on, but it was eating him alive that his chick back home was screwing another guy. Some guy who was too sensitive to fight, had a family that paid a shrink to write the draft board a letter saying he was crazy.”

  “Then he probably was.”

  “What?”

  “Crazy.”

  “Okie ran into a bunch of Cong on a path, he was going into the woods after a wounded guy screaming for help. He didn’t have a gun or anything. The Cong just ripped him in half. I told him I’d kept thinking of that moment, how he must have felt. He told me it was pure terror when he saw them shoot and knew he was going to die, then being hit, horrible pain, being knocked back and you see everything close up and after your heart stops the brain keeps thinking for a while, sorting things out.”

  “Then what?”

  “He said you can come back to the people who knew you. That you can help them, that the same battle between good and evil that goes on in life goes on afterwards. That evil’s stronger and usually wins, which meant I had to harden my character, become more honest, think more about death and life.”

  “But what he say about him, since then? ‘Bout where he been?”

  “He just said you know what you know.”

  Lovejoy shook his head. “Shit!”

  “He’d never known Clint, my other friend. Clint died before Okie came over. When I was in the hammock Clint didn’t come as much as Okie, but sometimes they’d be there together and the three of us would talk, like sitting around a fire in hunting camp, thinking over past times. They became friends, while the three of us sat round together. Except they were both dead and I was in my hammock and it hurt to move and breathe and hurt even if you didn’t and I was crazy with the pain and fever and they knew it and made allowances, and Clint used to tell me how to fight the pain.”