The Jaguar Hunter

by The Jaguar Hunter (v5. 5) (epub)

  Of course, some things beggared explanation.

  He bent down and adjusted the survival knife in his boot so the hilt would not rub against his calf. From his coat pocket he withdrew the two ampules he had secreted in his helmet that long-ago night in the cloud forest. As the neon explosion flashed once more, glimmers of gold coursed along their shiny surfaces. He did not think he would need them; his hand was steady, and his purpose was clear. But to be on the safe side, he popped them both.

  I

  SOFTLY AT DAWN, rustling dead leaves in the roof gutters, ticking the wires of the television antenna against the shingled wall, seething through the beach grasses, shifting the bare twigs of a hawthorn to claw at the toolshed door, playfully flipping a peg off the clothesline, snuffling the garbage and tattering the plastic bags, creating a thousand nervous flutters, a thousand more shivery whispers, then building, keening in the window cracks and rattling the panes, smacking down a sheet of plyboard that has been leaning against the woodpile, swelling to a pour off the open sea, its howl articulated by throats of narrow streets and teeth of vacant houses, until you begin to imagine a huge invisible animal throwing back its head and roaring, and the cottage is creaking like the timbers of an old ship…

  II

  Waking at first light, Peter Ramey lay abed awhile and listened to the wind; then, steeling himself against the cold, he threw off the covers, hurriedly pulled on jeans, tennis shoes, and a flannel shirt, and went into the front room to kindle a fire in the wood stove. Outside, the trees were silhouetted by a backdrop of slate clouds, but the sky wasn’t yet bright enough to cast the shadow of the window frame across the picnic-style table beneath it; the other furniture—three chewed-up wicker chairs and a sofa bunk—hunched in their dark corners. The tinder caught, and soon the fire was snapping inside the stove. Still cold, Peter beat his arms against his shoulders and hopped from one foot to another, setting dishes and drawers to rattling. He was a pale, heavyset man of thirty-three, with ragged black hair and beard, so tall that he had to duck through the doors of the cottage; and because of his size he had never really settled into the place: he felt like a tramp who had appropriated a child’s abandoned treehouse in which to spend the winter.

  The kitchen was an alcove off the front room, and after easing the chill, his face stinging with heat, he lit the gas stove and started breakfast. He cut a hole in a slice of bread, laid it in the frying pan, then cracked an egg and poured it into the hole (usually he just opened cans and cereal boxes or heated frozen food, but Sara Tappinger, his current lover, had taught him to fix eggs this way, and it made him feel like a competent bachelor to keep up the practice). He shoveled down the egg and bread standing at the kitchen window, watching the gray-shingled houses across the street melt from the darkness, shadowy clumps resolving into thickets of bayberry and sheep laurel, a picket line of Japanese pines beyond them. The wind had dropped and it looked as if the clouds were going to hang around, which was fine by Peter. Since renting the cottage in Madaket eight months before, he had learned that he thrived on bleakness, that the blustery, overcast days nourished his imagination. He had finished one novel here, and he planned to stay until the second was done. And maybe a third. What the hell? There wasn’t much point in returning to California. He turned on the water to do the dishes, but the thought of LA had soured him on being competent. Screw it! Let the roaches breed. He pulled on a sweater, stuffed a notebook in his pocket, and stepped out into the cold.

  As if it had been waiting for him, a blast of wind came swerving around the corner of the cottage and numbed his face. He tucked his chin onto his chest and set out walking, turning left on Tennessee Avenue and heading toward Smith Point, past more gray-shingled houses with quarterboards bearing cutesy names above their doors: names like Sea Shanty and Tooth Acres (the vacation home of a New Jersey dentist). When he had arrived on Nantucket he’d been amused by the fact that almost every structure on the island, even the Sears, Roebuck store, had gray shingles, and he had written his ex-wife a long humorous let’s-be-friends letter telling about the shingles, about all the odd characters and quirkiness of the place. His ex-wife had not answered, and Peter couldn’t blame her, not after what he had done. Solitude was the reason he gave for having moved to Madaket, but while this was superficially true, it would have been more accurate to say that he had been fleeing the ruins of his life. He had been idling along, content with his marriage, churning out scripts for a PBS children’s show, when he had fallen obsessively in love with another woman, herself married. Plans and promises had been made, as a result of which he had left his wife; but then, in a sudden reversal of form, the woman—who had never expressed any sentiment other than boredom and resentment concerning her husband—had decided to honor her vows, leaving Peter alone and feeling both a damned fool and a villain. Desperate, he had fought for her, failed, tried to hate her, failed, and finally, hoping a change of geography would provoke a change of heart—hers or his—he had come to Madaket. That had been in September, directly after the exodus of the summer tourists; it was now May, and though the cold weather still lingered, the tourists were beginning to filter back. But no hearts had changed.

  Twenty minutes of brisk walking brought him to the top of a dune overlooking Smith Point, a jut of sand extending a hundred yards or so into the water, with three small islands strung out beyond it; the nearest of these had been separated from the Point during a hurricane, and had the island still been attached, it—in conjunction with Eel Point, some three-quarters of a mile distant—would have given the western end of the land mass the shape of a crab’s claw. Far out at sea a ray of sunlight pierced the overcast and dazzled the water beneath to such brilliance that it looked like a laving of fresh white paint. Seagulls made curving flights overhead, hovered and dropped scallops onto the gravelly shingle to break the shells, then swooped down to pluck the meat. Sad-voweled gusts of wind sprayed a fine grit through the air.

  Peter sat in the lee of a dune, choosing a spot from which he could see the ocean between stalks of the pale green beach grass, and opened his notebook. The words HOW THE WIND SPOKE AT MADAKET were printed on the inside cover. He had no illusions that the publishers would keep the title; they would change it to The Keening or The Huffing and Puffing, package it with a garish cover, and stick it next to Love’s Tormenting Itch by Wanda LaFontaine on the grocery store racks. But none of that mattered as long as the words were good, and they were, though it hadn’t gone well at first, not until he had started walking each morning to Smith Point and writing longhand. Then everything had snapped into focus. He had realized that it was his story he wanted to tell—the woman, his loneliness, his psychic flashes, the resolution of his character—all wrapped in the eerie metaphor of the wind; the writing had flowed so easily that it seemed the wind was collaborating on the book, whispering in his ear and guiding his hand across the page. He flipped the pages and noticed a paragraph that was a bit too formal, that he should break up and seed throughout the story:

  Sadler had spent much of his life in Los Angeles, where the sounds of nature were obscured, and to his mind the constancy of the wind was Nantucket’s most remarkable feature. Morning, noon, and night it flowed across the island, giving him a sense of being a bottom-dweller in an ocean of air, buffeted by currents that sprang from exotic quarters of the globe. He was a lonely soul, and the wind served to articulate his loneliness, to point up the immensity of the world in which he had become isolated; over the months he had come to feel an affinity with it, to consider it a fellow-traveler through emptiness and time. He half believed its vague speechlike utterances to be exactly that—an oracular voice whose powers of speech were not yet fully developed—and from listening to them he derived an impression of impending strangeness. He did not discount the impression, because as far back as he could recall he had received similar ones, and most had been borne out by reality. It was no great prophetic gift, no foreshadowings of earthquakes or assassinations; rather, it was a low-grad
e psychic ability: flashes of vision often accompanied by queasiness and headaches. Sometimes he could touch an object and know something about its owner, sometimes he would glimpse the shape of an upcoming event. But these premonitions were never clear enough to do him any good, to prevent broken arms or—as he had lately discovered—emotional disaster. Still, he hearkened to them. And now he thought the wind might actually be trying to tell him something of his future, of a new factor about to complicate his existence, for whenever he staked himself out on the dune at Smith Point he would feel…

  Gooseflesh pebbling his skin, nausea, an eddying sensation behind his forehead as if his thoughts were spinning out of control. Peter rested his head on his knees and took deep breaths until the spell had abated. It was happening more and more often, and while it was most likely a product of suggestibility, a side effect of writing such a personal story, he couldn’t shake the notion that he had become involved in some Twilight Zone irony, that the story was coming true as he wrote it. He hoped not: it wasn’t going to be a very pleasant story. When the last of his nausea had passed, he took out a blue felt-tip, turned to a clean page, and began to detail the unpleasantness.

  Two hours and fifteen pages later, hands stiff with cold, he heard a voice hailing him. Sara Tappinger was struggling up the side of the dune from the blacktop, slipping in the soft sand. She was, he thought with a degree of self-satisfaction, a damned pretty woman. Thirtyish; long auburn hair and nice cheekbones; endowed with what one of Peter’s islander acquaintances called “big chest problems.” That same acquaintance had congratulated him for having scored with Sara, saying that she’d blue-balled half the men on the island after her divorce, and wasn’t he the lucky son of a bitch. Peter supposed he was: Sara was witty, bright, independent (she ran the local Montessori school), and they were compatible in every way. Yet it was not a towering passion. It was friendly, comfortable, and this Peter found alarming. Although being with her only glossed over his loneliness, he had come to depend on the relationship, and he was concerned that this signaled an overall reduction of his expectations, and that this in turn signaled the onset of middle age, a state for which he was unprepared.

  “Hi,” she said, flinging herself down beside him and planting a kiss on his cheek. “Wanna play?”

  “Why aren’t you in school?”

  “It’s Friday. I told you, remember? Parent-teacher conferences.” She took his hand. “You’re cold as ice! How long have you been here?”

  “Couple of hours.”

  “You’re insane.” She laughed, delighted by his insanity. “I was watching you for a bit before I called. With your hair flying about, you looked like a mad Bolshevik hatching a plot.”

  “Actually,” he said, adopting a Russian accent, “I come here to make contact with our submarines.”

  “Oh? What’s up? An invasion?”

  “Not exactly. You see, in Russia we have many shortages. Grain, high technology, blue jeans. But the Russian soul can fly above such hardships. There is, however, a shortage of one commodity that we must solve immediately, and this is why I have lured you here.”

  She pretended bewilderment. “You need school administrators?”

  “No, no. It is more serious. I believe the American word for it is…” He caught her by the shoulders and pushed her down on the sand, pinning her beneath him. “Poontang. We cannot do without.”

  Her smile faltered, then faded to a look of rapt anticipation. He kissed her. Through her coat he felt the softness of her breasts. The wind ruffled his hair, and he had the idea that it was leaning over his shoulder, spying on them; he broke off the kiss. He was queasy again. Dizzy.

  “You’re sweating,” she said, dabbing at his brow with a gloved hand. “Is this one of those spells?”

  He nodded and lay back against the dune.

  “What do you see?” She continued to pat his brow dry, a concerned frown etching delicate lines at the corners of her mouth.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  But he did see something. Something glinting behind a cloudy surface. Something that attracted him yet frightened him at the same time. Something he knew would soon fall to his hand.

  Though nobody realized it at the time, the first sign of trouble was the disappearance of Ellen Borchard, age thirteen, on the evening of Tuesday, May 19—an event Peter had written into his book just prior to Sara’s visit on Friday morning; but it didn’t really begin for him until Friday night while drinking at the Atlantic Cafe in the village of Nantucket. He had gone there with Sara for dinner, and since the restaurant section was filled to capacity, they had opted for drinks and sandwiches at the bar. They had hardly settled on their stools when Jerry Highsmith—a blond young man who conducted bicycle tours of the island (“…the self-proclaimed Hunk of Hunks,” was Sara’s description of him)—latched onto Peter; he was a regular at the cafe and an aspiring writer, and he took every opportunity to get Peter’s advice. As always, Peter offered encouragement, but he secretly felt that anyone who liked to do their drinking at the Atlantic could have little to say to the reading public: it was a typical New England tourist trap, decorated with brass barometers and old life preservers, and it catered to the young summer crowd, many of whom—evident by their Bahama tans—were packed around the bar. Soon Jerry moved off in pursuit of a redhead with a honeysuckle drawl, a member of his latest tour group, and his stool was taken by Mills Lindstrom, a retired fisherman and a neighbor of Peter’s.

  “Damn wind out there’s sharp enough to carve bone,” said Mills by way of a greeting, and ordered a whiskey. He was a big red-faced man stuffed into overalls and a Levi’s jacket; white curls spilled from under his cap, and a lacing of broken blood vessels webbed his cheeks. The lacing was more prominent than usual, because Mills had a load on.

  “What are you doing here?” Peter was surprised that Mills would set foot in the cafe; it was his conviction that tourism was a deadly pollution, and places like the Atlantic were its mutant growths.

  “Took the boat out today. First time in two months.” Mills knocked back half his whiskey. “Thought I might set a few lines, but then I run into that thing off Smith Point. Didn’t feel like fishin’ anymore.” He emptied his glass and signaled for a refill. “Carl Keating told me it was formin’ out there a while back. Guess it slipped my mind.”

  “What thing?” asked Peter.

  Mills sipped at his second whiskey. “Offshore pollution aggregate,” he said grimly. “That’s the fancy name, but basically it’s a garbage dump. Must be pretty near a kilometer square of water covered in garbage. Oil slick, plastic bottles, driftwood. They collect at slack points in the tides, but not usually so close to land. This one ain’t more’n fifteen miles off the Point.”

  Peter was intrigued. “You’re talking about something like the Sargasso Sea, right?”

  “’Spose so. ’Cept these ain’t so big and there ain’t no seaweed.”

  “Are they permanent?”

  “This one’s new, the one off Smith Point. But there’s one about thirty miles off the Vineyard that’s been there for some years. Big storm’ll break it up, but it’ll always come back.” Mills patted his pockets, trying unsuccessfully to find his pipe. “Ocean’s gettin’ like a stagnant pond. Gettin’ to where a man throws in a line and more’n likely he’ll come up with an ol’ boot ’stead of a fish. I ’member twenty years ago when the mackerel was runnin’, there’d be so many fish the water would look black for miles. Now you spot a patch of dark water and you know some damn tanker’s taken a shit!”

  Sara, who had been talking to a friend, put her arm around Peter’s shoulder and asked what was up; after Peter had explained, she gave a dramatic shudder and said, “It sounds spooky to me.” She affected a sepulchral tone. “Strange magnetic zones that lure sailors to their dooms.”

  “Spooky!” Mills scoffed. “You got better sense than that, Sara. Spooky!” The more he considered the comment, the madder he became. He stood and made a flailing gesture that
spilled the drink of a tanned college-age kid behind him; he ignored the kid’s complaint and glared at Sara. “Maybe you think this place is spooky. It’s the same damn thing! A garbage dump! ’Cept here the garbage walks and talks”—he turned his glare on the kid—“and thinks it owns the goddamn world!”

  “Shit,” said Peter, watching Mills shoulder his way through the crowd. “I was going to ask him to take me to see it.”

  “Ask him tomorrow,” said Sara. “Though I don’t know why you’d want to see it.” She grinned and held up her hands to ward off his explanation. “Sorry. I should realize that anyone who’ll spend all day staring at seagulls would find a square kilometer of garbage downright erotic.”

  He made a grab for her breasts. “I’ll show you erotic!”

  She laughed and caught his hand and—her mood suddenly altered—brushed the knuckles against her lips. “Show me later,” she said.

  They had a few more drinks, talked about Peter’s work, about Sara’s, and discussed the idea of taking a weekend together in New York. Peter began to acquire a glow. It was partly the drinks, yet he realized that Sara, too, was responsible. Though there had been other women since he had left his wife, he had scarcely noticed them; he had tried to be honest with them, had explained that he was in love with someone else, but he had learned that this was simply a sly form of dishonesty, that when you went to bed with someone—no matter how frank you had been as to your emotional state—they would refuse to believe there was any impediment to commitment that their love could not overcome; and so, in effect, he had used those women. But he did notice Sara, he did appreciate her, and he had not told her about the woman back in LA: once he had thought this a lie, but now he was beginning to suspect it was a sign that the passion was over. He had been in love for such a long time with a woman absent from him that perhaps he had grown to believe absence was a precondition for intensity, and perhaps it was causing him to overlook the birth of a far more realistic yet equally intense passion closer at hand. He studied Sara’s face as she rambled on about New York. Beautiful. The kind of beauty that sneaks up on you, that you assumed was mere prettiness. But then, noticing her mouth was a bit too full, you decided that she was interestingly pretty; and then, noticing the energy of the face, how her eyes widened when she talked, how expressive her mouth was, you were led feature by feature to a perception of her beauty. Oh, he noticed her all right. The trouble was that during those months of loneliness (Months? Christ, it had been over a year!) he had become distanced from his emotions; he had set up surveillance systems inside his soul, and every time he started to twitch one way or the other, instead of completing the action he analyzed it and thus aborted it. He doubted he would ever be able to lose himself again.