HOUSE OF JAGUAR

by Mike Bond

  A macaw shrilled, dipping its scarlet tail for balance and peering at him sideways as it jounced in the unscarred top branches of the yucca under which Ofélia once had played with Manolo’s goat in the yellow flor de muerte. Stand this, he told himself, and nothing can ever touch you. A flock of blue-crowned parrots argued, shaking the branches of a ceiba beyond the ruined corn where the soldiers had shot Conchita down, her red cloak flying in the choppers’ wake.

  As he poled the dugout from shore a buck broke from the brush and bounded high-antlered into the jungle. The sun sank below the tallest western trees, casting shadows across the water, lagoons of coolness where flycatchers swooped after the first mosquitoes of evening.

  Night fell with the malevolent yowl of howlers from the lowering hills, the slap of fish tails against the steely water, and encroaching mist from which herons glided like heralds of an afterlife, the rabid chortle of spider monkeys, the lament of wood owls, the dipping chittering whirr of bats, the surprised snarl of an ocelot fishing belly-deep in the shallows. Trees merged into fog, only the horizon of their peaks still visible, then all was black.

  He switched gas tanks and traveled all night, till a chill downriver breeze cleared the fog, the vast star-blazing river sinking northward toward the Great Bear, a violet stain widening in the east.

  The banks steepened, closer. Under widespread bolocante boughs was the mouth of the narrow creek where he’d left Jesús with the old man, and where round-faced Pollo with the dead monkey had come to take him upriver to Dona for the last time. He cut the motor and poled up the creek, its leaves lashing his face. At the place the old man had tied up his canoe the root was still velvet green where the rope had abraded it.

  He followed the path through the bracken and up the mountainside. It led to a corn and bean patch with a thatch hut where, in its shade, a woman was weaving at a stick loom.

  “I’m looking for la doctora.”

  She smiled. “Está bueno.”

  “She’s well?”

  “Está bueno.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Está bueno.”

  He spoke louder. “Do you know Spanish?”

  “Tixtxol castiy,” she smiled.

  “You could learn Kekchi.” Behind him a woman, pointing a rifle. M-1. Young, Indian, short-haired, jeans and sandals.

  “Don’t shoot! I haven’t done anything!”

  “That won’t keep you from getting shot.”

  “I was at San Tomás, brought the boy here, Jesús.”

  “Why are you back?”

  “The doctora –”

  “You don’t belong here.”

  “She’s OK?”

  “I have no idea.” She shouldered her gun and led him round the corn and bean patch up into the jungle and a steepening valley walled by reddish cliffs, her feet rising steadily before his eyes, clods of dirt and leaves breaking under her sandals and skidding past his wrists down past his feet. She laughed when he rubbed mosquitoes from his face. “Too much meat you’re eating! It attracts them!”

  “Please tell me how she is!”

  “Where we’re going someone might know.”

  The valley peaked in a wide saddle of sparse tall trees. She led him across the saddle and turned down another canyon of rumbling wind and water, down between dark escarpments to a spattering stream of gloomy tall trunks. Three men in bandoliers nodded as they ascended the trail; wood smoke came up from below. Trogons were gathering in the high leaves, croaking and scolding. By a fire pit a camouflage tarp linked three trees, with four bodies on raised stretchers beneath it; beside it stood a woven sapling table with instruments on a white cloth. A stone scuffled, a small thin woman coming up the trail.

  “You!” he said, seeing the joy and pain in her face at seeing him. And seeing it was love.

  STUCK IN TRAFFIC, Lyman drummed fingers on the steering wheel, punched the Platters into the CD player and popped them out again. Couldn’t be worse to have a cigarette than breathe this shit.

  He reached for a Marlboro but his pocket was empty. Seven days without nicotine. Forty days in the desert. My bound and bloody wrists. At five hundred and eighty thousand dollars Nancy was calling the McCormacks’ house a good deal, sure to appreciate. Getting it from them at a loss. What Nancy knew about white people and about money could be put in a very small space.

  The cars ahead inched toward red and blue flashing lights. He glanced across the road, thinking of going back, but there was too much traffic the other way and no way to turn. The accident grew closer, its boxy ambulance and massive fire truck like two animals feasting on a third, a baby-blue Thunderbird upside down in the ditch, a blanket-covered body on the grass, a Raggedy Ann doll flump-flump under his tires. No seat belt − how could anybody be that dumb? He would not think of Joshua’s red frothy pool under the cement truck. He would not think of it, clenching hard fingers on the leather wheel, thinking of a cigarette, of Nancy in Kit’s arms, her coming twice, one right after the other, when with him she never came more than once. Or did she come at all? Was that a lie too?

  The accident eased past, the traffic took a breath and hurried onwards, back to business. Lyman punched in the CD

  heavenly shades of night are falling,

  it’s twilight time,

  deep from the dark your voice is calling

  He should have been a singer, riding up and down the harmonies like this. He could sing as good as these guys. Why hadn’t he?

  “YOU CAN’T just walk right in and kill him,” Principio said to Murphy. “There’s a thousand soldiers around him all the time.”

  “And when he goes to his hacienda, like Dona said, down on the coast?”

  “You’ll never get close, not even then.”

  “Even with a helicopter?”

  “What helicopter?”

  “The one I steal and fly in there.”

  “It’s been years since you flew one,” Dona said.

  “I can fly it in my sleep.”

  Principio scratched at mosquito bites on his ankle. “And you would do all this, probably get killed, just for Arena?”

  “It’s not just for Arena. It’s for the people who’ve been hunting me. Here and in the States. This Syndic... Anyway,” Murphy pulled back, not wanting to push, “there’s no need to get killed. With the chopper we’ll be out of there before they know what’s happened.”

  “It’s not your battle.”

  “It was my village. When I was nearly dead in the jungle they saved me. You don’t think we owe debts like that?”

  Principio recoiled; Murphy sensed he’d wounded him, that Principio thought of almost nothing except what he owed to those who’d died. Principio smiled, and Murphy saw his upper front teeth were gone.

  “Also the reporter in San Francisco,” Murphy said. “The Syndic killed her.”

  “Over a hundred journalists have been killed in Guatemala in the last five years,” Guadalupe said. “She was just doing her job.”

  “And my friends who were killed when my plane was burned, to you they’re nothing because they were drug dealers. But to me they were good people. And one was a friend.”

  “To avenge the murders of all the good people in the world you would be very busy,” Principio answered. “You would have to be God.”

  Murphy leaned across the fire, brushed a coal from his knee. “These were my people.”

  “You mean if you’d never come down here they’d all still be alive?”

  “That too. That most of all.”

  “After Vietnam,” Principio said, “what did you do?”

  “Took all my pay and sat in the Sonora desert for six months.”

  “That is where you learned such good Spanish? Then what?”

  “When the money was gone I went back north and worked on a cattle ranch in Montana. For a couple of years the oil thing was good and I worked on drilling rigs in Oklahoma. When that gave out I drove trucks, Sa
lt Lake, Boise, Billings, went to San Francisco and worked − how do you call it, ‘jackhammer’ in English − the thing that breaks up stone?”

  “Uno martillo.”

  “I went back to Mexico, down the coast. One day I started flying again. San Francisco was wide open − I flew weed out of Mexico, Belize, made good money...”

  “It’s a crazy scheme,” Principio said.

  50

  HOW THEY irritated Murphy, her patients. Craving, in pain, dying, taking up her time, leaving none of her for him. Boys spilling out their guts, women with breech births, babies slated to die under a chopper’s guns in the middle of the river. Couldn’t she see sooner or later they’d all die?

  She came back, putting on her camouflage jacket against the night’s chill. “How are they?” he said.

  “One will die but the others are getting better.”

  “That’s good.”

  “That’s good? The one who lies dying there, he’s an engineer. A chemical engineer! What happens to a country that kills its best?”

  “It’s something we all do. I don’t understand why.”

  “And now you want to kill some more.”

  “Only one.”

  “You don’t think others will die when you go for him?”

  “I’d kill any of the soldiers who attacked my village. You wouldn’t?”

  She crouched beside him at the fire; he sensed she saw more clearly than he ever would. “Most of those soldiers are farm kids.” She squeezed his wrist. “Like the boy from Texas who went to Vietnam.”

  He took her hand; her fingers laced quickly into his. “I don’t ever want to cause another death,” she said. “I told Principio I’m against your idea.”

  “I don’t want you in it.”

  Her two hands came up his ankles, warming her fingers. “I’d go away with you right now. No killing, nothing. Just go.”

  “Going away with you is all I’ve dreamed of. For weeks.” He eased his fingers back through her hair, massaging her neck, felt the muscles soften and bend. “And now I see we can’t.”

  “I don’t care they’re after you.” She smiled. “I’m used to being hunted by the Americans.”

  He sensed her naked, skin to skin, her lips opening, he could taste her, breathe her in. She drew back, reading his eyes, his face. “We’re going where I can be a doctor and you can do whatever you want.”

  “I have enough money. You don’t ever have to do anything.”

  “I’m a doctor. It’s my life.”

  “We’re not going anywhere.”

  “I’ve already told Principio.” She held his face in her small, chilled fingers. “I can’t do it anymore. Even without you, I’d go.”

  She returned to her patients; he could see her moving like a doe among them; one raised his hand briefly to her and it seemed a benediction.

  Before dawn the chemical engineer died, he who had raised his hand; the others slept. She lay beside him in the hammock, silent, curved within his arms. He felt strangled by a horrified joy, that of a man who thinks everyone in his family dead in an accident, then finds one is still alive.

  The stars were fading through the distant canopy. Three times she had been up to check the wounded; each time he’d gone with her. Sleepless, he dreamed of the past, seeing the young bodies tossed into his chopper, bodies that had laughed and hoped just hours before, boys who last night had sung “Blowing in the Wind” to a cheap Taiwan guitar and had smoked too much grass and drunk too much Jack Daniels, who wore peace signs on their dog tag chains, but when you yanked off the dog tag the peace sign fell lost into the mud and blood; battle-spent boys who didn’t know why they were there, who’d just written home, “Don’t worry, I’m not seeing any action.”

  LYMAN rose stealthily so as not to wake Nancy, got dressed and went outside into the new snow. It caped the Norway firs and lay on the maple branches and twigs and halfway down their trunks. It squeaked softly underfoot, like mice. He shook it from his loafers, went back into the kitchen and took five slices of bread outside, tore them up and tossed them on the snow, but no birds came.

  DONA came upstream with two men carrying shovels. They carried the chemical engineer’s stretcher up through the trees to a flat place with seven mounds. The two men dug and when one was tired he gave Murphy his shovel. The soil was soft and damp but corded with roots that were difficult to slice. Sweat ran down his chest, attracting the mosquitoes. His arm ached too badly and he gave the shovel back. When the hole was three feet deep they took the tarp off the chemical engineer and laid him in the hole. He wore a white T-shirt and his chest bandages were soaked with blood. His eyes had turned up into his head and his mouth was open, showing a silver filling. There was a wedding ring on his finger and a cross around his neck. More compañeros came and one read from Ecclesiastes: “‘For in much wisdom is much grief, and he that increases knowledge increases sorrow.’”

  Dirt pattered like rain on the body. Going back to camp one of the men took a banana from his shirt and gave it to a wounded compañero.

  “IT’S STUPID to risk good people to kill Arena,” Principio said. “When Arena’s dead there’ll only be another.”

  “But it’s justice. If you won’t help me, I’ll do it alone.”

  “Even that we oppose. If you are successful it will lead to great reprisals. They’ll kill hundreds of people. Women and children, students, nuns, nurses, catechists, teachers − anyone they have a grudge against.”

  Murphy looked at the dirt he crumbled in his hand, little flecks of mica or quartz in black duff. Again he saw the dirt falling on the chemical engineer’s chest. “That changes everything. I hadn’t thought of it.”

  “Every year for the holidays Arena goes to his family hacienda in the south, near El Salvador. He keeps a chopper there.” Principio turned to two others, Guadalupe and Pablo. “What if you captured him?”

  Guadalupe, tall and slender, with an upturned nose and haughty eyes, was the kind of person, Murphy decided, you instantly don’t like; she had a way of preparing the world for each step she took. She tossed her head to one side, a rejection.

  Pablo was chewing a twig under his mustache. “You think we could get in, and get him?”

  “He goes dove hunting. Out of season. Riding by himself in the brush.”

  “Why not just go in there on foot?” Murphy said. “Why use the chopper at all?”

  “To get him out. Or they’d have us in hours.”

  “To take him where?”

  “A place would be ready,” Principio said. “It’s nine days to the Feast of the Dead. He’ll be there then, Arena, for the Feast. At his hacienda.”

  “How much is he worth?” Murphy said.

  Principio’s delicate fingers slid down his trouser seam, as if the answer could be harried out, like lice. “Hundreds of people.”

  “I’d rather kill him. But seeing that’s impossible, that it would lead to reprisals...”

  “Like your village,” Dona said.

  “. . . then I’d be willing to steal a chopper and fly in there, to get him. To try to get him.”

  “Right now,” Principio stood, “we’re just working with an idea. A lot depends on people elsewhere. If there were an operation and you were in it you’d learn little about it. It’s probably impossible.”

  “If you were tortured,” Guadalupe said to Murphy, “how long could you hold out?”

  “Probably not at all.”

  “If such an operation were done and at any point you might be captured you must kill each other. It’s absolutely standard practice. If, despite that, you are captured, the rule is to hold out forty-eight hours. That gives other compañeros time to realize what’s happened and make adjustments. Under torture, forty-eight hours is an eternity...”

  “And you know all about it?” Murphy said to her.

  “Yes.”

  An animal scurried through the brush. Overhead the leaves lisped; a
spider danced across a web in which a single star was caught.

  THIS NIGHT was colder. The burlap poncho covering them crawled with centipedes and chiggers. He dreamed he was surrounded, put Dona’s rifle to his temple but could not shoot. “Do it!” Guadalupe hissed. “For your own good!”

  The burlap was soaked with dew, the stars sharp as stiletto points between the high tiny leaves, the universe clear and cruel, nourishing some and crushing others.

  A shape moved past and knelt beside another sleeper, who rose, took up his rifle and departed; the first lay down in his place. Another came and changed places with a different sleeper who shouldered her Galil and stepped away.

  A scream made him jump, then he realized it was only a jaguarondi hunting; he thought of Father Miguel perhaps still alive in an Army torture house. If they got Arena, Miguel was one who might go free . . .

  The jaguarondi called further west; it must have crossed the stream. Was it calling for a mate in a world where there are no more jaguarondi? He thought of Epifanía and Jesús walking steadily before him in the shallows of the Río de la Pasión. If he died here trying for Arena he’d never come back for them as he’d promised. Maybe that would be the biggest sin of all?

  Beside him Dona turned onto her shoulder. He had an instant’s repressed vision of her turning in the grave, getting comfortable, laying her face to the earth.

  Between the trees a lighter darkness. There were footfalls, the snapping of twigs, someone blowing on a fire, a bony face tinged by bronze as the coals caught.

  51

  A-37 JETS stood in sun-bright silver rows when Lyman landed at Flores Airbase to catch the Army propjet for Cobán, each plane with twin pods of jellied death beneath its wings. Like the weeds in the fields, Lyman thought. You break them and the seed spreads on the wind.