HOUSE OF JAGUAR

by Mike Bond

  They swam through the warm salty froth beyond the waves, down to kelp raising willowy arms like drowned men, the water turbid, colder. In the shallows the waves washed cool silk between them, lightening and lubricating, welding them to each other and to the soft sea, the sand, the sun.

  “We should be more careful,” she said. “It’s here the choppers drop lots of bodies.”

  “They won’t bother us.”

  “It’s the sharks. They’ve learned a taste for human flesh.”

  Carrying their clothes they walked naked, the breeze like warm water against their salty skin. Terns dived crying over feeding mackerel. Along the water’s shifting edge, countless millions of tiny embryonic creatures wriggled up the damp sand, battling the swell, trying to reach dry beach, most already dead, here and there one succeeding till the next wave bashed it down, the universe crammed with worlds hungry for life; from time to time, he thought, one survived, but not for long.

  They grew thirsty and went back to the huts, sat with bottles of mineral water at a rough-sawn table. The sun had sunk past the thatched veranda that a pig was shaking as she rubbed her pink flank against a corner post. Loose fronds of thatch tossed in the breeze like a woman’s long blonde hair.

  Beyond the hump of beach they could not see the shore, only the sea rising and sinking like a sleeping woman’s breast, the casual rumble of each wave drowning the chatter of Radio Tropicana from a portable radio that hung on a beam. He realized he could see the earth’s curve in the wide arc between sea and sky, thought how small the earth was, and how many people were on it. “Hay qué vivir,” sang a Mexican love song, “Vivir el momento...”

  The sun sank round and scarlet into a sea of blood. A fisherman was mending a net, a web of gold that shimmered as his fingers moved across it. The sun’s last blaze ignited a strip of red plastic half buried in the sand, the scuttling shreds of paper, strands of thatch, the riffled dunes. Gulls slid by; the sky thinned, magenta to crimson, violet to emerald, to manganese, to the copper-gray of ashes thrown on snow. Between their toes the sand was rivuleted by infinite tiny capillaries of sea, as if they flew at a great height over a land of many rivers.

  The man, Felipe, brought them morrachos grilled with lime over palm fronds, rice with chiles, raw white cabbage with tomatoes in salt and lime, tortillas, and El Gallo beer. The morrachos had transparent needle bones. “They’re from the river,” Felipe said, pointing to the estuary. “Now it’s sweet water, but at midnight, when the tide comes, it’s salty.”

  The woman, Carlita, sat with another by the fire; children swung in a fishnet hammock hung between two beams. Felipe chopped green coconuts with a machete and tossed the chips to the grunting butting pigs. Murphy borrowed Felipe’s cracked Mexican guitar and played, and the children came closer. After a while he could feel the music start to go out of him, out of his heart and down his arms through this beaten old guitar to the end of the night where all music goes.

  “Jesus, that’s beautiful,” she said. “Where did you learn that?”

  “It’s just the blues.”

  “Do again that part that goes down and then way up.”

  “It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do, this,” he said. “Sit on the beach with you and play the guitar.”

  “Your fingers move so fast! Madre, it is beautiful!”

  “You should hear the good ones. The ones who know how to play.”

  “I am getting drunk with your music and your beer.”

  “We’re going in the hut to make love.”

  “I won’t let it happen yet. First I am going to drive you crazy.”

  “You already drive me crazy.”

  “We are going to get drunk and crazy. We are going to be like normal people, with all the time in the world.”

  The slim moon had risen, silvering a great dark cloud that lay far over the sea, low in the middle and raised on each end, that looked like the crouched form of Chacmool, the Mayan messenger between the worlds who, holding his tribute of fresh human hearts, ferries his burden of poor human souls across the great divide.

  In the main hut a candle flickered against the thatch and beams. They went into their hut and hooked the string of the door behind them and took off their clothes, his jacket folded for a pillow with Dona’s .357 beneath it.

  54

  HE WAS TRAVELING through rough country and kept looking for water but all the streams were dry. Even the cactus were dead; he pushed one and it snapped and crashed to the ground. It wasn’t the cactus banging but guns; he snatched the Magnum and shoved Dona to the floor; someone scrambled over the wall and he fired, the sound enormous in the tiny dark room; a cat snarled and rushed away; there was another boom and a rattle of guns; he yanked open the door and sprinted for the beach pushing her before him; they dived into the dunes as another string of shots erupted and he saw across the lagoon that it was fireworks, their bright cinders twirling down.

  “Good God we’re stupid.” She stood brushing sand from her stomach. “The Night of the Dead − that’s all it is.”

  “I shot at that poor cat.”

  “Perhaps the shot just scared him.”

  Inside the hut he lit the candle and found the burnt hole of the bullet high up in the thatched wall, went outside but could see no blood. “Felipe, he’s going to be pissed.”

  “He doesn’t care. We’ll tell him we brought our own fireworks.”

  “We have no dead to feed tonight.”

  A curlew called, morose from sleep. A baby cried; the sea rose up and slapped the beach, recoiled, rose up and fell again. The moon strode glittering over the waves. He re-tied the door string and put the gun back under their heads.

  When she slept he held his hand warm on her warm cheek, feeling the soft skin. How magnificent life. How can it die?

  How deep love, how absolute. Her skin so smooth, her forehead clear, how soft the fine hair of her eyebrows − all so holy, pure, and death so present, the awfulness of it when there’s so much to lose.

  He’d never thought of it when it had seemed far away, death. But it was never far away − it’s always here; we’re always dying. It isn’t going to happen some day; it’s happening now.

  You could see the skull beneath the smooth soft skin, the sockets behind sleeping eyes, the gaping jaw within the lovely lips moving so gently now in a dream. The awful aching endless silence of death.

  Her coppery face seemed loving, without care. The peace that passes all understanding. Oh Lord make me understand, he prayed. Do this and I will love you always. Give me a chance to understand. One hand beneath his head, his wrist against rushes and hemp, the other arm round her shoulders, he watched the hewn rafters and their burden of crossed saplings and thatch, each frond lashed to each alternate sapling in the simple harmony of Indian handiwork. Each of us contributing his or her handiwork to the structure of infinity. Harrowing a meaning, order and pattern, a shelter for the future, for others and ourselves.

  THERE WAS COFFEE on the rough-sawn table in the cool morning breeze off the sea. Up and down the beach, forever, the hot sand and wet waves. El Gallo in the evenings, too many, laughter coming out too easily from under the stone of his heart, while he knew he couldn’t afford to laugh and told himself not to care. When she laughed her small nose wrinkled and the sides of her eyes crinkled, her laugh both deep and high as if two bells rang at once. To make her laugh he told her stories of Texas rabbits big as coyotes, drunken hookers in the Oklahoma oilfields, forty-five below in April on the Montana Highline, carrying newborn calves into the ranch house to warm in the bathtub, all the truck stops to get sick at between Elko and Salt Lake. Deliberately exaggerating, he played the joker, anything to see her smile, hear her laughter as he’d always heard it down inside a part of himself that had been deaf and dumb.

  She told him about bringing the goats up to pasture in the early mornings with Venus going down over the Sierra Madre, the cold spring between ancient carved pillars where
a black jaguar sometimes slept on the low broad branch of a chicozapote tree with a deer carcass beside him, the magic plants the old women used to heal the ill, liven the spirit, and even, in the case of some, look forward into time.

  “Did you ever do it, take them?”

  “I tried the mushrooms, when I was fourteen.”

  “And?”

  “After all the laughter and fun I suddenly realized I was able to look into my own brain. How it worked and where the pieces are. In medical school, years later, when I finally opened one, it was exactly as I had seen, way back then.”

  THE PRIEST had an odor of old cloth and tobacco. The veins on the backs of his hands were distended and blue. Although his left hand was still, his right kept twitching, as if beckoning Murphy closer. “Come back in an hour,” he said. “Bring Felipe and Carlita.”

  Murphy took the dugout back to the sand spit. In the hut Dona was brushing the salt out of her hair; it hung way down her back. “Do I look all right?” she said.

  He could not speak. It came upon him now, the wonder that she would be his wife and this lasted forever, because it is part of the Mass, the Sacrament. And the Sacrament is that which cannot be undone.

  “Carlita says that after we have children we must come back here so that they can grow up in the countryside.”

  “Felipe told me the same thing.”

  “It is kind of them to do this, they don’t know us.”

  “It does them no harm, a quick trip to church.”

  WITH Carlite and Felipe they took the dugout across the lagoon. The priest threw open the church’s eroded plank door. Inside was musty and chilled, dead fragrances, incense, and candle wax. “You have the rings?”

  “Jesus,” Murphy said. “I never thought −”

  “I will not do it without them. Quickly, go see the old man, Pepe Domingo, in the last street by the dock. I hope he’s there.”

  He ran through town to the last street, sweating in the sudden sun. Pepe Domingo had a purple snake tattooed round his neck. He lived in a hut whose rush walls had been coated with clay and whitewashed. He had a window but it had no glass. He made Murphy wait in the path then called him inside. He had seven rings in a rusty tin can. Fresh dirt clung to the can. On the wall behind him a Day-Glo Saint Michael, face full of hatred, was spearing a dragon.

  “Con prisa!” Murphy said. “Hurry! I’m getting married!”

  “No need to rush.”

  He tried on the biggest. It pinched but he could wear it. He picked another smaller one. “How much these two?”

  “They are gold, very expensive gold.”

  “How much? How much!”

  “Well, that one it is white gold, the most expensive. Twenty-two thousand. And the other, well, it is fine gold, but, well, eighteen thousand.”

  He put them in his pocket and ran back through town, dust flying under his feet. The church door was open but no one was inside.

  He ran out into bright sun. “The falcons took them,” said a woman in a tienda across the dirt street.

  “The what?”

  “The death squad. Your woman and Felipe and Carlita and the Father. In a black Jeep with a Guatemala City license.” She was weeping. “What are we going to do,” she said, “without a priest?”

  He fell on his knees, looked up at the sky, the yellow tower of the church. Somewhere birds were singing.

  “You should never have bought rings from Pepe,” the woman said. “He gets them from the cemetery. From the dead.”

  55

  HE RAN to the car but had left the keys back at the hut. He ran to the boy’s dugout and poled to the sand spit, smashed down the hut door, grabbed the keys, their things, raced back across the lagoon. “Which way?” he screamed at the old woman.

  “Toward San José. But you won’t catch them now.”

  He drove like a madman, dust, rocks, trash and coconuts flying from his path, turned toward San José, down the middle of the road as fast as the Nissan could go, other cars and trucks screaming at him as they dodged out of the way.

  “No,” said the advance guard at the San José Paratroop Base. He looked nervously back at his comrades in their machine gun nests on both sides of the road. “I haven’t seen a black Jeep coming in here.”

  “You’re sure?” Murphy grabbed money from his pocket. “Here, I’ll give you fifty thousand − anything − you tell me −”

  “Sorry, Señor. I cannot take your money. And I haven’t seen a black Jeep.”

  “Panchito!” somebody called from the machine guns.

  “I got to go now, Señor. You too, or we have to shoot you.”

  He stopped only for gas, at Escuintal, making the four-hour trip to Guatemala City in an hour and forty minutes. Before the towering stone gates of the Army Headquarters four soldiers with Uzis manned the barrier, machine guns to each side. He parked halfway down the street and shoved the Magnum under the seat.

  “No,” said the first man with an Uzi. “You can’t go in there.”

  “I have an appointment, with General Arena.”

  The soldier had a dark face with flat cheekbones and black eyes under heavy brows. His finger caressed the trigger. Murphy thought of the heavy bullets, how they smash through you. Happening to her now. He jammed his hands into his pockets to keep from grabbing the Uzi.

  The soldier stepped inside the stone gates. The others watched Murphy without interest. Cars and trucks rumbled and banged on the Avenida. A chopper came up from the south and landed inside the Base, rotors clattering. Again he thought of shooting his way through them but there was no way to make it to the machine guns and if he made it to one he’d never get across open ground to the other and even if he did they’d close the gates and shoot him to pieces from the walls. The soldier came back. “You make a big mistake. No General Arena here.”

  “You don’t know where he is?”

  “I don’t know of any general like that. Anyway, you not stay here. Go.”

  “I’m a reporter, American. I need to see the commanding general.”

  “No commanding general. You’re getting in trouble now. Why not just go?”

  “Listen, I have to see him. I have information, on the guerrillas −”

  The man’s head jerked back. “You better go to your own embassy for that. Up the Avenida, to Ocho Calle.”

  “I have to see the CO!”

  The man stepped back, dropped the Uzi. “You’re exactly one meter from death, amigo. Step forward and you get erased.”

  He returned to the car, feeling their gun barrels aimed between his shoulder blades. He drove into the back streets and sat. He could see it all, the guns, the knives, what they were doing to her right now, each second.

  In a corner drugstore he borrowed the phone book and found the Iglesia Congregacionale del Cristo Pentecostal, 112 Avenida las Americas. It was a two-story white building in a palm garden. The ornamental iron fence around it was topped by barbed and electric wires. He rang the bell. “Sí? a woman said through the interphone.

  “I’m Will Daley,” he said in English, “from the Church in Marin.”

  “Marin?”

  “Near San Francisco.”

  “Just a moment.”

  The interphone went silent, then a man’s voice: “Who are you?”

  “You want a conversation on the sidewalk? Open up!”

  A crewcut man in black horn rims opened the door. Inside was a square vestibule with three blank white doors and two television monitors high on the walls. “Explain,” he said.

  “The folks at CCCP in Nicasio sent me down about a flying job.”

  “This is a church, fella. We don’t have flying jobs.”

  “Bullshit. I did two thousand hours in Nam, I’m rated from dusters to jets and I came down here to fly in and out of Petén.”

  “Our office in Marin told you this?”

  “Of course. What’s the hitch?”

  “St
ay here.” The man went through the middle white door and came back three minutes later. “Nobody’s ever heard of you.”

  “I fly all the way down here and now you guys jerk my chain!” Murphy snatched at the door, spun round. “Let me talk to the top guy, we’ll sort it out.”

  “There is no top guy. This’s a church, remember?”

  “I was promised a job! Listen − I flew for Renamo, Angola, what more you want?”

  “Calm down!” The man spoke up into a TV monitor: “I’ll take him uptown.” He led Murphy through the left-hand door and down a white corridor with no windows or doors to the rear of the building. There was a Van Gogh print on one wall, beached boats with an arched stone bridge and women washing clothes. The man took a plastic card from his wallet and slipped it into a slot beside the rear door, punched a code into the keyboard above it. The door opened. They went down the stairs to a walled alley and a white Plymouth Aries with diplomatic plates. “One,” the man told the driver.

  “I’ve got information,” Murphy said, “about the guerrillas.”

  “Kill it,” the man answered, nodding at the driver.

  They went north on las Americas round the Costa Rica oval, crossed Ocho Calle in front of the US Embassy, and pulled into the driveway of a three-story beige building with a forest of antennae on the roof.

  The driveway was guarded by a burly man in a red blazer and an Uzi, and by four Guatemalan soldiers who saluted hurriedly as the car drove down to the basement garage, bulletproof steel doors opening then shutting behind it. In the garage were several new cars with diplomatic plates and three Suburbans with dark windows and Guatemalan plates. They took an elevator to the second floor then down another white empty corridor into a little room with no window. There was a gray steel desk and chair and two gray metal folding chairs before it. A big man with a rectangular red face, his lavender tie undone and his sleeves rolled to his elbows, came in and sat behind the desk. He snuffed out his cigarette in a glass ashtray on the desk. “So what’s up?” he said.