by Joe Gannon
“You are my favorite.”
“I was a rook you carved from a sapling so you could bash the other pieces on the board. But life is not a game, you’re not a grand master. We’re not pieces for you to play with. We are flesh and bone and heart. And we do not go quietly off the board. We bleed and weep as we die.”
As she died.
His blade quivered in his hand as if begging to do its work. Horacio was as still as the dolls in his glass cabinet. Ajax could see the fear—the old man was finally afraid. Finally not sure what his creature would do.
“I am going to get Gladys and if I see anyone in my rearview mirror, I will kill them and come back and peel you like the rotted fruit you are. Say ‘I understand.’”
“I understand.”
With his free hand, Ajax hurled the cane into the garden. He slid the Python down the small of his back, slipped the Makarov into his pocket and the travel bag with Salazar’s money over a shoulder. No, he thought. It’s Gladys’s money now.
Ajax turned the knife so the blade slid away from Horacio’s neck. He pressed the point under his chin until the old man’s head arched backward until it could bend no more.
“What was the last thought in her mind before they killed her?”
“Gladys isn’t…”
“Not Gladys.”
“Amel…”
“Don’t say her name.” He pushed the knife point into his chin, not quite breaking the skin. “Did she think her American passport would save her? Did she think I would?”
“I don’t know.”
“Neither do I.”
He walked away.
“You’re going to die, Ajax. Is that it? A suicide at last? Like Fortunado Gavilan? That’s why you’ve never been happy, never fit in. You’re in love with death! You’re not going to get Gladys, you just want to go back to the mountains where you think life is simple! ‘Live to die, die to live.’ You love the simplicity of war. That’s why you’re a killer. It’s not injustice you hate, it’s the gray of reality, the fog of life that you can’t make your way through.” He struggled to his feet, his age showing, and reached out for Ajax. “You’re going to die up there with Gladys!”
Ajax stopped and considered that last line. He ran the plan through his mind. Not in his mind, but in his gut. “You’re wrong. I’ll get her. I’ll save her.”
Ajax left and quietly closed the door behind him. He stood near the street in a rosy dawn, and waited. If there were any more surprises, if Horacio wanted to shoot him in the back, he would wait one last minute. The barrio was mostly quiet. Somewhere nearby a bus rolled down the road; the Soviet fuel tanker had come again. He smelled wood smoke. His eyes burned and he realized there were tears. He exhaled long and slow and went to the Jeep, where one final surprise waited.
The ghost of the boy with the long eyelashes sat in the front seat. Very still he sat, looking straight ahead.
Ajax was relieved to see him. He even felt a little giddy and giggled when he muttered, “Well, at least you’re not in the driver’s seat.”
He slid behind the wheel. The Python in the small of his back raised that pain in his ass. He looked sideways at the boy, who looked straight ahead, as if unaware of his killer’s presence. Ajax put the Jeep in gear and drove away.
In no time they were on the Carretera Norte, passing the airport toward the Sebaco Valley and the mountains. As the miles unraveled beneath them, as the hum of the wheels soothed him, it was as if Ajax rose higher and higher into the air until the world looked to him as it did on Horacio’s map. He looked down and he and the ghost were just specks lost in the green immensity of their homeland. And from this place, he felt he understood at last. The ghost had not come to haunt him. Nor to persecute him. Not even to save him. What the boy had come to give him was absolution, pardon, clemency. He had come to tell Ajax he was forgiven.
At least for all he had done.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This is a work of fiction, not history. Events and people from the real Nicaragua of the 1980s have been altered or invented to meet the needs of the story. Only the glory of Somoza’s overthrow and the terrible costs of the Contra War are real.
I must effusively thank Matt Rigney, whose keen eye read every word, whose singular mind pulled more out of my fuzzy head than I thought was there, and whose stellar friendship kept me going. I owe a great debt to Sterling Watson, author, friend, mentor—il maestro di tutti maestri—who taught me to kill my darlings, and without whose help and encouragement this novel would never have seen the light of day. Thanks to all of Mrs. Pine’s Kids—the students, faculty, and staff of the Solstice MFA program.
I am grateful for the works of nonfiction I relied on to jog my memory, especially Omar Cabezas’s Fire from the Mountain; as well as Stephen Kinzer’s Blood of Brothers; Christopher Dickey’s With the Contras; Forrest D. Colburn’s My Car in Managua; and Gioconda Belli’s The Country Under My Skin.
I am most deeply indebted to the poetry of Pablo Antonio Cuadra and the immortal Rubén Darío, which was the first inspiration so many years ago.
Thanks also to the Smith College art library, which let me have a carrel of my own. And finally, thanks to MN, who helped me through from red to blue.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JOE GANNON, writer and spoken-word artist, was a freelance journalist in Nicaragua during the Sandinista revolution, writing for the Christian Science Monitor and the Toronto Globe and Mail, among other publications. He spent three years in the army, graduated from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and earned his MFA from Pine Manor College. After a stint teaching high school in Abu Dhabi, he is now working on his second novel.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
NIGHT OF THE JAGUAR. Copyright © 2014 by Joe Gannon. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.minotaurbooks.com
Cover design and digital image manipulation by David Baldeosingh Rotstein
Cover photograph by Josiah Townsend
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The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-04802-8 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4668-4831-3 (e-book)
e-ISBN 9781466848313
First Edition: September 2014
