Jennifer sat on the floor of the fishpond just deep enough to allow her snorkel to clear the surface, with a coral rock on her lap to counter buoyancy. She had never thought about drowning herself before, but now, after what had happened, she let the idea linger in her mind. She wondered whether it would hurt a lot, whether it was fast, and realized that this was one more thing she didn’t know. Because she was stupid,hopelessly stupid, according to Luna during the tirade she had delivered after the discovery that Moie had vanished yet again. Like she could watch him every single fucking minute! And then Luna had told Rupert, practically ordered him, to get rid of her, and Rupert, instead of his usual mild peacemaking, had looked at Jenny with an expression on his face like that of a spoiled baby who’d just been denied a treat (and Jenny knew that look as well as anything), and he’d said, well, maybe, considering all this, it might be best if you started looking for another living arrangement. But really the worst thing was later when she was alone with Kevin, crying her eyes out, and he’d said, oh well, tough shit, babe, let me know where you end up. And when she said, I thought we were together I thought you loved me, he’d said, oh, yeah, I do, sure, we could still see each other and all. So then she had taken her sleeping bag and moved into Moie’s old shed and had slept there last night.
She held out her hand and fed bread filaments to a horde of jewel-like tetras and cichlids. She would miss this at least; maybe the fish would miss her, too. Did fish miss? Yet another bit of knowledge her stupid head did not contain. The bread gone, the tetras dispersed like flung sequins, and Jenny’s attention was drawn to a large oscar moving slowly in midwater in an erratic manner, like a plate stood on edge and wobbling. It had hurt itself, a common problem in the pool, for the fish were not accustomed to the razor-sharp edges of the coral rock from which the pool was made, coming as they did from an environment where nearly every solid object was coated with mud or soft algae. This Scotty had told her with some irritation, as it was the one feature of the pond he could not control. They sometimes moved quickly in their various mating rivalries and collided with coral and ripped their scales off. He said they should drain the thing and put in a soft porous liner, but this Rupert was unwilling to do, being a cheap bastard, according to Scotty. The oscar turned clumsily, and she saw that it had a red gash behind its little arm fin. She considered emerging and finding Scotty. He had a forty-gallon hospital tank for such cases, but before she could put this thought into action, the red-bellied piranha struck and ripped a ragged chunk out of the wounded fish, and then in an instant there were ten more piranha writhing in a cloud of blood and tissue. Then the piranha were gone, as was the oscar, except for some tiny specks, the center of a cloud of killifishes and tetras, cleaning up the scant remains.
Jenny was out of the water almost before she knew it, standing on the edge of the pool and shivering, although the sun was out already and warm. She stripped off her mask and wrapped a towel around her body. Well, that was out, no drowning, not in that pool, silly really, because what did you care if you were dead, but on the other hand, maybe they wouldknow you were trying to kill yourself, the struggling and all, and what if they decided to eat you while you were still alive? She shuddered, not from the air temperature, and almost ran to the green-roofed shed.
Professor Cooksey was there, rubbing his chin and staring at the ground. Jenny was not pleased to see him. He had offered no support during her condemnation, had looked at her in his usual blank manner, as if she were one of his bugs. But automatically, her gaze followed his to the ground.
“What’re you looking for?” she asked.
“Hm? Oh, nothing. But observe that footprint. Doesn’t it seem odd to you?”
She looked. The floor of the shed was soft earth, from the fall of years of potting soil and humus, and took prints well. This one was human, of a smallish bare foot, the toe and heel marks well defined. It was the only barefoot print on view, the others being shoe prints, either the lugged soles of Scotty’s Merrell shoes, her own cheap flip-flops, or Cooksey’s leather sandals.
“It’s Moie’s probably,” she said. “What’s wrong with it?”
He looked at her briefly and knelt to point. “Why, don’t you see? It’s much too deep. It’s deeper than Scotty’s here and far deeper than yours or mine, although I would have said that you and Moie were of a size. How much do you weigh?”
“I don’t know. About one twenty, one twenty-five.”
“Hm, and this print is yours, I take it, conveniently close by. Let’s see what we can make of this.” Cooksey took a small brass ruler from his shirt pocket, measured the depth of both prints, stood up, took a small leather-bound notebook from his pocket, and made some calculations. He frowned, mumbled, “No, no, you idiot, that can’t be right!” and resumed his scribbling. After some minutes he sighed and said, “Impossible, but there it is. According to these figures, Moie weighs two hundred and six kilos.”
“Is that a lot?”
“I should say so! It’s over four hundred and fifty pounds.”
Jenny said, “But he could have been carrying something heavy. Wouldn’t that make the dirt squash down more?”
Cooksey stared at her, and then a look appeared upon his face that she had never seen bestowed upon her in her life, a look of delight that had nothing whatever to do with her physical appearance. “By God, of course! What an imbecile I am! That’s what comes from doing this just for animals, who rarely haul any baggage. Well, my dear, you have just accomplished an act of scientific reasoning. Good for you!”
Jenny felt herself blushing from her breast to her hairline, smiling hard enough to make her mouth feel funny. Cooksey added, “Still, if we assume he’s around your size, and even accounting for the extra upper-body strength of men, that’s quite a load, well over three hundred pounds. And what could it have been? A boulder? An anvil? And look here, you can see it’s a normal walking footprint, the ball and toes digging into the earth more firmly than the heel. He’s not standing here heaving something up like a weight lifter. I ask you, could you or I snatch up three hundred pounds and trot off with it as if it were a parcel from the shop? No, and therein lies the mystery. In any case, you may wish to inquire why I was visiting here in the first place.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, I am, ah, aware of your difficulties-I mean, being asked to leave-and I feel responsible in a way.” And here he related Moie’s problems with mass media, and what had transpired thereafter. “But if you really wish to stay here, I believe I can arrange something. I require an assistant. My specimens are an absolute brothel, and I barely have room to turn around in, as you may have observed. Um, and there’ll be a modest stipend from my grant, of course.”
Jenny did not know what a modest stipend was but did not admit it. “Yeah, but what about Rupert and Luna?”
“Jennifer, not to blow my trumpet, but I draw a great deal more water in this organization than our Luna. A word with Rupert and the thing is done. What do you say, then?”
“But…I mean, I don’tknow anything.”
“Yes. And therefore there is nothing to interfere with learning. I have my little ways, and the average graduate student is ordinarily not disposed to learn them. So-are we agreed?”
Nor are they as decorative, nor as full of fine animal spirits, he thought, but declined to say as she flung her arms around him and pressed her damp and marvelous body to his.
During the following week Jennifer found to her great surprise that the skills required of a research assistant were very like those she had learned in the succession of Iowa farmhouses and homes where she had been fostered. These included: moving heavy or bulky objects without getting hurt; not spilling things, or if you did by accident, cleaning them up quickly and efficiently; scrubbing walls, floors, and windows; putting things in stacks of the same kind and storing them in places where you could find them again; and doing everything you were told to do in a cheerful manner. Professor Cooksey was a good deal nicer than many of the foster moms and dads she had endured, always patient with her mistakes and never treating her like the retard she was. When the work was done, all the specimen boxes were neatly arranged on shelves (which Jennifer had put together with Scotty’s help), the scattered papers were put away in files, the journals were racked in green cardboard journal boxes with neat machine-printed labels on them, and an entire room, a former laundry, once filled with cartons, had been cleared, cleaned, and painted. The place now smelled of furniture polish more than tobacco smoke or formalin, and Jennifer was absurdly proud of it.
One morning when Cooksey was meeting with Rupert on the terrace, and she was mopping the floor, Kevin came and had a look and commented that she had finally found her place in life as a janitor. He meant the remark as one of his casual put-downs, but rather to her surprise Jenny felt no sting. “It’s honest work,” she said. “You should try it sometime. It might do you good.”
She turned away from him and continued mopping, and waited for a nasty comeback, which failed to come. Instead, Kevin said, “So what’s the situation, babe? When’re you coming back to the cabin?”
“I don’t know, Kevin”-still mopping-“do you want me back?”
“Well, shit, yeah! What do you think?”
She stopped her work and faced him. “What do you think I should think? When they kicked me out, you were, like, totally cool with me taking off. So, what, you changed your mind?”
“Hey, I’m sorry, all right? I was wrong, okay? You don’t have to get all bitchy about it.”
She leaned on her mop and stared at him, as all the good energy she had enjoyed over the past few days seemed to drain out of her. For the first time she noticed something blurry in his face, and she realized that it had to do with all the time she’d been spending with Cooksey. The professor’s face was solid in a way, a reflection of what was really going on in his head, while Kevin’s was always waiting to see which expression was right for getting him what he wanted, like now, he was giving her the melting, yearning look, slightly hurt, and despite herself it was starting to work. She really did love him, even when he was a total piece of shit, and she knew he really loved her, or would someday if she just kept at him, if she could find a way of making him more like Cooksey. But not just now, just at the moment she had no patience for his tricks. She said, “Well, if I’m bitchy, you don’t have to hang around, do you?”
“I didn’t mean it like that. Come on, babe, be nice.” The fetching smile, and now he took a step onto the freshly mopped floor. “Out!” she said. “I got work to do.”
And he slammed out, muttering curses, leaving her shaken and amazed at herself. This argument had proceeded at a peculiar low volume, for Rupert was out on the terrace and Rupert required at least the appearance of harmony. Luna was the only resident allowed to give vent at full voice. Later that day, Jennifer removed the backpack that held all her chattels from the cottage she had shared with Kevin and parked it in the former laundry room, together with her sleeping bag and air mattress. The little room was floored and walled with Mexican tiles, like the kitchen, except for the places where the old sinks had been removed, which were patched with rough concrete. There was a small window and a separate door to the outside. As she surveyed it, she wondered at her own presumption. She seemed to be changing in a way she had never expected.
Cooksey appeared at her elbow. “Moving in, are you?”
“Only if it’s all right.”
“Not to worry, my dear. You created the space, and may claim it. Although I’d appreciate it if your domestic affairs did not interfere with our work, hm?”
“No. And thanks.”
“Good. As to that, work I mean, I believe we are ready to begin.”
“I thought Iwas working.”
“No, no, I meanwork. Scientific work. Surely you didn’t think I required a mere slavey? A char?”
Jennifer didn’t recognize the words but she understood what he meant, and had thought it.
“What kind of work?” she said suspiciously.
“Evolutionary biology. That’s what I do, you see. In addition to my work for the Alliance, I have to maintain scientific respectability by doing research and publishing papers, or else no one will take me seriously when I speak out about the destruction of rain forest habitat and so on. Now, the cryptic species of fig-pollinating wasps are an important area of study in evolutionary biology. The trees can’t reproduce without the wasps, you see, and the wasps can’t live without the trees. Moreover, each species of tree has one and only one species of wasp that can pollinate it, so we have an example of coevolution. We think; the issue of one-to-one specificity is much discussed now in Agaonid circles, and that’s what I’m working on. Have I lost you?”
“Uh-huh. Professor, I dropped out of school in seventh grade.”
“Yes, quite, but perhaps not entirely a disadvantage. Taxonomy is one of the few scholarly fields in which original contributions can still be made by people with no education whatever. You’ll call me Cooksey, by the way, except if we’re ever on a campus where I’m actually professing.”
He led her over to his desk, now uncluttered, and sat her down in the leather chair he used for reading. He sat behind his desk.
“Now, what do you know about evolution?” he asked.
She thought; a scene from a movie crossed her mind. She said, “Monkeys turned into people?”
“Just so, very good. But a great deal happened before that. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth and the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. We have that part down, or at least the scientific version of it, and now after billions of years we observe millions of different sorts of creatures, plant and animal and neither, and how did they all come about is the question, and we think that the answer is that they changed over time. They started out simple and evolved, they changed form. Now look at the two of us. We eat steak, potatoes, and beans, let us say, or tofu, potatoes, and beans as long as we live here, but we remain Nigel and Jennifer: we don’t become cows or vegetables or tofu. We take things in, air and water and food, and things come out of us, but we remain identifiable bodies. Why is that?”
Jennifer didn’t know and said so. In fact, the question had never vexed her mind.
“I’ll tell you, then,” he said. “The cells of our body contain a chemical code that causes our bodies to make us and nothing else, out of food and water and air. And we reproduce, don’t we? But, of course, not exactly. Nigel and Jennifer, let us say, have a baby, but the baby is neither Nigel nor Jennifer. Reproduction is a shake of the dice, not even considering the little changes that creep in from errors of various sorts during reproduction. Most errors are bad for baby, but some few are good. The baby might be even more beautiful than Nigel, even more brilliant than Jennifer.”
A small blush covered Jennifer’s cheeks at this. He didn’t seem to notice but went on. “Now, it’s a fact of nature that there is never enough to go around. Every creature needs a place to live and the means of life, food, and so on, and these are always in short supply; so what may we expect, given any population of creatures?”
It was not a rhetorical question. Jennifer realized he was waiting for her answer, and that a shrug and an “I don’t know” were not adequate. It was a kind of game he was playing, in which he really believed that answers would somehow spring into her mind if she thought about them. It was a little frightening, but exciting, too. She reached into what she had always thought was an empty bag and to her surprise came up with “Some of them die? Because I was in this home once, and they were real poor, and the mom, Mrs. McGrath, liked one of the kids the best and fed her the most food, and the others didn’t get hardly anything. The state closed her down, though.”
“Very good. Mrs. McGrath was practicing artificial selection. Charles Darwin made a similar observation, and that’s how he came to invent the whole idea. But in nature there’s no state to close her down. So we have both a struggle for existence and small variations among creatures from the same parent, and what follows?”
A shorter pause this time. Jennifer thought about foster-care families, and horrible low-end day care centers, and nasty fights over bits of food. “Some will do okay and some won’t, so that after a while there’ll be more of the better ones.”
“Because…?”
“They’ll have more babies, and the babies will be like them. How they changed.”
“Very good. A near perfect statement of the theory of evolution by natural selection. But as they say, God is in the details. Or the devil. It’s all very well to think great thoughts about the origin of all things, but let’s see if we can figure out how tiny pieces of it actually evolve, a test, as it were, of the theory. Here we are fortunate in the fig wasp and the fig. You recall what I told you about the life of the Agaoniids? It was the day you found Moie in the Gardens.”
“No,” she said.
“Really? I thought I was being perfectly lucid.”
She had to look away. “I kind of tuned all that out. I’m sorry.”
After a moment, he said brightly, “Well, never mind. I’m sure you’ll absorb it, by and by. For the moment we have to get you keying out specimens. That means telling one tiny bug from another one that looks almost the same. She might evenbe the same to the eye but have important differences in her genes. You see, in these little wasps we have the opportunity-the privilege, I should say-of observing the generation of new species. Their mode of life is so tightly constrained, the evolutionaryniche, as we call it, is so small, that evolution itself is, one might say, squirted out so that we can observe it in a short human life span. Are you game?”
Jennifer nodded. “Uh-huh.” He smiled, showing his yellow teeth. “Splendid! If you’ll step over here…” He left his desk and went to a long wooden table on the other side of the room, where stood a binocular teaching microscope with two sets of eyepieces, along with racks and racks of shallow specimen drawers. From a shelf he reached down a plastic-covered chart, dull with age and use, and set it up before her. They sat on lab stools. “Today we have naming of parts. ‘Japonica glistens like coral in all the neighboring gardens, and today we have naming of parts.’”
“Say what?”
“A poem, but never mind that. I meant that you have to learn the parts of the bug before you can use the keys. Now, this long thing is the antenna. The tip is called the radicle. Say it!”
She did.
“Next the pedicle. Say ‘pedicle’! Good. Next the annelli.”
And so on, she repeating the meaningless words as he proceeded from the antenna to the head itself, the wings, with their diagnostic patterns of veins, to the thorax, the legs and the gaster, ending with the long ovipositor, all the little shields, knobs, and spikes with which taxonomists classify the insect world. This took half an hour. Then Cooksey pointed with the tip of his pencil to the tip of the model’s antenna. “What is this, please?” he asked.
She didn’t know. The pencil twitched down the hair-thin appendage. Blank. Blank again.
“I can’t do it!” she wailed.
“Nonsense! Of course you can. You’re resisting because you associate learning with pain. You must relax and let the names flow into you. We are made for memory, my dear, and there is a fruitful plain in your head that just needs some water and some seed.”
“I’m too stupid.” She was about to break down sobbing, and she bit her lip hard to stop it.
“No, you’re not. If you were stupid you’d be dead, or a drug addict, or a prostitute, or have three children. Think about it!”
Jennifer did, and it was true. She had thought it was just dumb luck. Something popped in her head, like snorting a long, long line of cocaine. The world looked different, and she knew that, unlike a drug rush, it was a difference from which she would not come down.
“In any case,” Cooksey continued, “some of the stupidest people I know are invertebrate systematists with international reputations. Now, from the beginning. This is the radicle. Say…”
“Radicle,” she said. “Radicle.”
On the evening after Paz brought Amelia to theilé, he and Lola had fought a major fight, and Paz hoped that it had been the main battle and not a mere carpet-bombing prelude to further assaults. Although it was a family principle to settle such things before retiring for the night, Lola had fled the field and locked herself in the bedroom she used as an office, whence he could hear the sound of weeping, of cursing, of small missiles being flung. An overreaction, he thought, and said so through the door, but received no intelligible response. This in itself was unusual and worrying. Lola was not one to avoid discussion about emotional states; to the contrary, she doted upon them, long explorations into their separate and conjoined-in-marriage psyches until sometimes Paz felt like a specimen on a slide. He bore up, however, this being a part of his beloved, and thought himself a better husband for it.
Maybe that was part of the problem, he mused as he sat in the early-morning garden with a cup of Cuban coffee in his hand: maybe he had been a littletoo accommodating. He considered the house itself, their home. Her house originally, a typical Florida ranch house in South Miami, made of white-painted stuccoed concrete block with a gray tile roof and aqua-blue-painted steel hurricane awnings. Charmless as architecture, it was, however, old enough to be surrounded with well-grown foliage: a huge bougainvillea covered one side wall and part of the roof with purple blossoms, and the backyard was shaded by a large mango, beyond which was a good assortment of fruit trees-lime, orange, grapefruit, guava, avocado. Inside she had furnished it with spare Scandinavian wood and leather, fanciful or abstract pictures in mirror-steel frames, and rya rugs. Not his taste; he preferred old stuff, eccentric junk, theLast Supper on velvet-no, not really, but that was occasionally implied by the wife. His mother claimed the house looked like a doctor’s office.
Yes, the mother-that had come up, too, big-time. Paz reviewed what he could recall of the charges and countercharges while he waited for the coffee to kick in. He had come home drunk, had endangered the life of their precious by driving drunk. How could he? Well, first of all, four beers did not make drunk. Then the lecture from the doctor on alcohol impairment. Okay, guilty, never again, at which point the kid pipes up with guess where we were today, and tells all, the voodoo ceremony, the yams, the stinky smoke, worshipping at false idols,plus the visit to the ladies who kiss boys for money and Daddy was talking to that lady who came to dinner. Easily explained, of course, although not the card from Morgensen. Paz had idly tossed it out onto his dresser, and when the wife, that skilled researcher, had discovered it lying there it proved to have on its reverse a set of lips imprinted in red lipstick. That Beth! What a kidder! And so the story of Beth and Jimmy way back when had to be told, or wrenched out, each perfectly honest statement out of Paz’s mouth sounding like a philanderer’s evasion. Paz was in the peculiar position of having done nothing wrong with Beth Morgensen but also secretly knowing he had wanted to,still wanted to, if it came to that, butwouldn’t, being an honest guy, butmight if this kind of shit went on much longer, and who could blame him?
Not a profitable line of thought. He was squelching it when Lola emerged from the house, dressed in her usual T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers and carrying a canvas bag with her work clothes in it. She shot him a venomous look and strode on through the patio and out to the shed in the yard where she stored her bike.
“Good morning!” Paz called. No answer. She got the bike and was wheeling it to the driveway when Paz got up and intercepted her.
“Are you ever going to talk to me again?” he asked, grasping the handlebars.
“I’m still too angry. Let go of the bike, please.”
“No. Not until we talk.”
“I have to get to work,” she said, struggling to free the handlebars. “I have patients…”
“Let them die,” said Paz. “This is more important.” At this, she sighed ostentatiously and folded her hands across her breasts. “Okay, have it your way. Talk.”
“Okay, we had a fight, I apologized, and now it’s over. You forgive me and we move on, just like always.”
“It’s not as simple as that.”
“Explain the complexity.”
“I feel totally betrayed. I don’t know if I can trust you now.”
“What, because I had a couple of beers?”
“Don’t be smart! I still can’t believe that you took our daughter to a voodoo ceremony, fortune-telling and blood sacrifices and…and yams. Without even the courtesy of discussing it with me. Filling her head with frightening toxic nonsense. How could you!”
“It’s not voodoo, Lola, as you know. I wish you’d stop calling Santería voodoo. It’s insulting.”
“It’s the same thing.”
“Right, like Catholic and Jewish is the same because they both come from Palestine. I explained all this to you last night. It’s not a conspiracy. It was spur of the moment. Margarita was there, and Amy asked me, and I didn’t see the harm in-”
“It’s ridiculous barbaric nonsense. You don’t evenbelieve in it!”
“Maybe that’s true, but my mother does, and I have to respect that. And Amy only has the one grandmother, and they love each other, and I’m not going to stand up and tell her her grandmother is full of shit because she follows thesantos. It’s part of her culture, just like science, just like medicine.”
“Except medicine is real. That’s a slight difference. Medicine doesn’t cause nightmares in little girls.”
Something in her tone, a higher pitch, a shake in the voice, made Paz stop and examine his wife more closely. This stridency was not like her at all; a joke, a light mockery, was more in her line when discussing the peculiarities of his culture.
“What’s going on, Lola? This can’t just be about Santería. We been married seven years, and you never went nuts about it before.”
Therewas something wrong. She was not meeting his eye, and Lola was ordinarily a major fan of eye contact. “Maybe,” he added lightly, “you should’ve married a Jewish doctor after all.”
“Oh, and a little sneaky anti-Semitism added to the mix now? Look, I absolutely have to leave now or I’ll be late for rounds.”
Somewhat stunned at this last interchange, Paz lifted his hands. She jumped up on the bike and rolled clicking down the shell driveway.
Later that morning, Paz was at work in the restaurant, having deposited his daughter at school without incident and without discussion of any bad dreams. She had summoned him (he lying awake alone in the marriage bed) with a shrill cry in the night, and he had arrived at her side to find her still in a sense asleep, but whimpering and shaking, eyes open but unseeing-terrifying. Paz had neglected to mention this episode to the resident psychiatrist: Lola had (mercifully) slept through the whole thing. Nor did he intend to.
Paz was preparing yuca, a tedious task, which he now welcomed. The yuca is a pillar of Cuban cuisine, but it is a tricky tuber, devious like life itself, Paz was now thinking. It has an ugly rough bark, which must be removed, and then the toxic green underskin must be carefully stripped off, without losing too much yuca. It bleeds a white liquid while this is happening. The core must also be removed, as it is inedible. Paz, too, felt stripped and bleeding, and he knew there was something poisonous at his own core. He laughed out loud.The Yuca Way to Personal Growth, a book he might write:A Cuban Line-Cook’s Guide to Enlightenment.
He prepped a bushel of yuca and then ran it through a food processor. The sludge would be the basis of Guantanamera’s famous conch ’n’ crab fritters and also a new dish Paz was trying out, deep-fried prawns in yuca batter mixed with rum. He made a handful of these, adjusted the flavorings, shared samples with the rest of the kitchen crew, took counsel, and then played with seasonings and the temperature of the deep fryer. By eleven he’d decided it was good enough to serve as a special with a raw jicama salad, and so informed the waitstaff. His mother was absent, so there were no arguments that yuca tempura prawns had not been thought of in Cuba in 1956 and hence were not to be served in her restaurant. But where was she? She’d gone to pick up Amelia at the usual time. A little tick of concern started, which was quickly submerged in the violent amnesia of the lunch rush.
Surfacing around half past two, Paz looked down to see his little girl soliciting his attention. She was dressed in an ankle-length armless sheath of yellow silk patterned with large green tropical leaves, and tiny white strapped sandals with a modest heel. Her hair was braided and arranged in a shining crown around her head set off by a white gardenia behind her ear. Around her neck was a necklace of green and yellow glass beads.
“That’s quite an outfit. Been shopping with Abuela?”
“Yes. We went to a special store.” She fingered the necklace. “These beads are blessed. It’s not just a regular necklace, Daddy.”
“I bet. How’s the room? Everybody enjoying?”
“Yes. There’re millions of Japanese people all dressed the same. Why do they do that?”
“I don’t know. It’s a custom, I guess.”
“Anyway, the because I came in is there’s a man outside who wants to see you. He knew you were my daddy. Table three.”
“Thank you. What does he look like?”
She thought for a moment. “Like a football player, but bald, too.”
“Right. Tell him I’ll be out as soon as I finish these orders.”
Police Major Douglas Oliphant did look like a football player and had actually been one in college, a linebacker for Michigan. He was dark brown in color and calm in mien, and Paz liked him as well as any man he had ever worked for. Oliphant ran, among other things, the homicide and domestic violence unit of the Miami Police Department. He looked up from his nearly empty plate and nodded at Paz, indicating the seat opposite.
Paz sat and said, “You had the prawns.”
“I did. I’m almost ready to say you’re more valuable to humanity and the city cooking this stuff than you are catching murderers. Terrific food, Jimmy.”
“Thank you. The answer is still no.”
“You don’t know the question yet.”
“I bet I do. Tito was by the other day. You want me to advise on this big shot who got eaten up by the invisible voodoo tiger.”
A tight smile from Oliphant. “That would be nice. It would be a civic gesture and appreciated by all your friends in the Cuban community, especially in light of recent events.”
“Such as?”
“Last night the home of a man named Cayo D. Garza, a Cuban-American banker, was vandalized. His front door was clawed to ribbons and deposits of feces were left on his front walk. On examination, these feces proved to be that of a jaguar. According to the zoo. Our crime scene people don’t have much expertise with jaguar shit. It’s not something that comes up a lot. We took a look around his yard, and we found big-cat paw prints, not unlike the paw prints found at Fuentes’s place.”
“The partially devoured Fuentes.”
“Him. So we’re now real interested, and when Tito looks at the known associates of Mr. Garza, what does he find? The late Antonio Fuentes. And upon further investigation of the K.A.s of Fuentes and Garza, we find Felipe Ibanez, an import-export fellow, and guess what? He had exactly the same vandalism two nights ago, although he thought so little of it that he declined to report it to the police. He was having someone replace his door when the Miami Beach cops showed up, and he’d already flushed the jaguar poo-poo, but we found paw prints there, too. They’re both out on Fisher Island, big estate-type places. Now, it seems that Fuentes, Garza, and Ibanez were partners in a venture, because when we ran their names through county business records, we found a little d.b.a. they set up last year called Consuela Holdings, LLC. Four equal partners. The fourth guy is Juan X. Calderón. You know him?”
“Why would you think that?”
“Because when I said his name, your face jumped.”
Paz shrugged. “He’s a mover and shaker in the Cuban community. Yoiyo Calderón. Everyone knows who he is.”
“What’s he like?”
“Ask Tito. He’s Cuban, too.”
“I’m asking you.”
“I’m the wrong guy. People like Yoiyo don’t associate with people like me.”
“He never eats here?”
“Never.”
“That was a very definite statement. You know what he looks like, then?”
Paz was about to say something angry but checked himself and grinned at his former boss. “Hey, that was pretty good. Interrogated in my own restaurant. Very classy, Major. Maybe we’ll put it on the menu.”
Oliphant allowed himself a tight grin. “Just a couple of old comrades shooting the shit.” He popped a yuca chip into his mouth and crunched. “Come on, Jimmy. Help me out here. These are big shots we’re talking about, and I’m getting incredible pressure from the pols on this Fuentes thing. If it’s some kind of Cubano vendetta I need to know about it. Especially the weird aspects…”
“Uh-uh. What, you suddenly have a dearth of Cubans in the P.D.? I’m the only one you can think of to ask?”
“I did ask. I’m getting mixed messages, shifty looks. Everybody’s got a second cousin works for these guys, and I get the feeling the Consuela trio are all informed about the investigation before I am. Which is why I came to see you. And I’m still getting shifty looks.”
Paz help up his arm and pulled back the sleeve of his tunic. “Look, man, you see the color of my skin? The kind of Cubans we’re talking about only want to see that color in the kitchen, or carrying a plate. They don’t hang with me or mine and tell me their secrets.”
“But you know Calderón.”
“To look at. I wouldn’t say I know him.”
“But he doesn’t eat here. I thought this was the best Cuban restaurant in Miami. What, he doesn’t eat out? He only likes Chinese?”
“Him and my mom had business dealings years ago. They had a falling-out. That’s the story.”
“What kind of dealings?”
“I don’t know the details. You could ask her.”
“Uh-huh. So what’s the book on Mr. Calderón? The reason I’m asking is we got a murder and two acts of what you have to call threatening vandalism against three out of four partners in a venture, of which Calderón is number four. We had someone call at the Calderón place. He claims he had no scratches, no cat prints, no jaguar shit, although his home sports a brand-new front door. I have to think it’s connected, a business thing. So…Juan Calderón. Good guy, bad guy, maybe capable of violence…?”
“Okay, Major, since you press me: he’s a typicalgusano piece of shit. Him and his father came over with a pile of cash in the first wave and bought into a lot of businesses, and made another shitload putting money out on the street to Cuban entrepreneurs. Then he got into development and made a third shitload, which is what he does now. Capable of violence? Probably, as long as it wasn’t traceable back to him, or if he had a bad day he might kick a servant. But if you asked me would he murder his partner and eat a couple of chunks off him, or order it done, I’d say no. It’s not their style.”
Oliphant opened his mouth to respond, but at that moment Amelia, a sheaf of menus clutched to her chest, came by with a party of four and seated them at a nearby table. After she was done, she stopped in front of Oliphant.
“Is everything all right, sir?” she asked.
“Everything is just fine, miss,” said Oliphant, with a beaming expression on his face that Paz could not recall seeing there before.
“Except,” said Paz, “I would like a little girl to sit on my lap.”
“Daddy, I’m working,” she said severely. And to Oliphant, “May I send the waiter by with a dessert menu?”
“No, thank you,” said Oliphant. “You know I used to have a little girl who sat onmy lap. It was better than dessert.”
“What happened to her?” asked Amelia.
“She grew up and moved away.”
Amelia took this in without comment, said, “I’ll bring your check,” and departed.
Oliphant laughed and shook his head. “That’s not cute or anything.”
“She’s not bad. I was about that age myself when I started in the business. Probably illegal as hell, but you’re not going to tell the cops. Look, Major…”
“You need to call me Doug. You don’t work for me anymore.”
“Doug. I wish I could help, but, honestly, I’m out of the loop with that crowd.”
“Okay,” said Oliphant. “But if you think of anything, you’ll let someone know, okay?” His tone and expression made it perfectly obvious, in a nice way, that he knew Paz was holding something back.
The three surviving partners of the Consuela company lunched in the Bankers’ Club that day as they did nearly every Wednesday. People expected to see them there, men in fine suits, and a few women stopped to speak, to smile, to touch hands, but it was difficult to tell whether this was a kind of grooming behavior, acknowledging membership in the pack, or the first probing tugs of the jackal at the belly of a dying animal. A little of both, was Yoiyo Calderón’s thought as he smiled back and extended his hand. He did not like the way Ibanez looked: old and tired and frightened. Even Garza, who normally presented the slick and predatory face of a cruising shark to the observing world, appeared pasty, his movements lacking their accustomed vitality. He encouraged them to order a second round of cocktails. The liquor brightened them a little, like a cheap paint job on a clunker car, enough to show the room there was nothing wrong with their affairs. That was sufficient under the circumstances, Calderón thought. In business, especially business in the tightly knit Cuban community, appearance was 90 percent of the battle. The men ordered their usual lunches, too, all large lumps of costly protein, and appeared to eat. The service staff knew how little of it they consumed, but they did not count.
“So when does this start?” Garza asked.
“Today,” said Calderón. “Hurtado moves fast when he wants something done. That’s a good sign, I think.”
“Yes, marvelous,” said Ibanez bitterly. “He’s a credit to the human race. What will this entail, this protection he’s offering?”
“You won’t notice a thing. Some cars on the street, is all. The whole point is to move with discretion and remove whoever’s doing this.”
“I still can’t believe I’m involved in this,” said Ibanez, as if recounting a bad dream. “They came to myhome! The maid found what they’d done when she went to walk the dogs in the morning, the door clawed… She was hysterical, and the stupid bitch went tomy wife. Two hysterical women, Jesus Christ, what was I supposed to say?”
“Yes, Felipe, we’ve heard all about your hysterics,” said Calderón. “But let’s not turn into women ourselves, hey? A few days and all this will be over. They will make some other stupid move and then”-he snapped his fingers-“gone. The Puxto will come through and we’ll be fine.”
“How can you be sure it will be days?” asked Garza. “Why not months?”
Calderón had feared this very question. He cleared his throat and said, “Hurtado thinks the pressure is coming from Colombian interests. He’s put the word out that we are moving up the schedule for the cut, more crews on the road, accelerated delivery of equipment, and so on. They will be, let’s say, stimulated to increase the pressure.”
“You’re using us asbait, ” said Ibanez in an outraged voice, rather higher in volume than was usual in the Bankers’ Club. A party at the next table looked over with interest. Calderón kept his own voice moderate, not without effort; he could feel the veins at the side of his head throb.
“Felipe, use your head. We’re all targets already. We’ve all been hit. Time is of the essence here, as is secrecy. There is a police investigation going on. Whoever these people are, it’s vital that we get them before the police do. Speaking of which, have they learned anything?”
This was directed to Garza, who had a nephew in the Miami P.D. and was their source of information in that quarter. Garza shrugged. “The usual stupidity. They’re planning to check out the local environmentalists, if you can imagine. Obviously, they know we’re all connected in a business way, and they’re curious about why Calderón wasn’t hit like we were. You cleaned up the mess too quickly, Yoiyo. You’re starting to look like their prime suspect.”
Calderón forced himself to laugh at this, and after a moment Garza joined him. Ibanez managed to move his face into a grimace that might have passed for jollity if the look in his eyes were ignored. Calderón felt a little better now. Laughing in the face of danger; it was what was expected of a man, after all. And the show of it had done some good, he thought. A table of Cuban businessmen at their ease and laughing; what could be more normal? They finished their coffee, speaking only of other, less contentious affairs. The waiter brought the check in its leather folder and laid it before Ibanez. Garza, however, reached across for it. “My turn,” he said.
But as his sleeve pulled back, Calderón saw to his shock that above his gold Piaget watch he had a thin bracelet of red and white beads. Like every Cuban, Calderón knew what this meant. It signified that the cool and ruthless Cayo Garza had solicited the protection of Shango,orisha of rage and war, and also that the man was a lot more frightened than he let on. Calderón wondered now if Garza knew something that he didn’t about the source of their troubles. A passing thought, this, serving only to lower his respect for the man and convince him all the more that only he himself was in firm control of the situation.
Now it is night and all these people are asleep: Jennifer and Professor Cooksey, Kevin and Rupert, Paz and his family, the Cuban-American businessmen and their families and friends. Wakeful still is a man named Prudencio Rivera Martínez, together with a number of his colleagues. They wait in vans parked near the houses of the men of the Consuela company. They are from Colombia and are good at this sort of work, patient and relentless. Each van holds three men, one alert, the others dozing on pads in the rear compartment. Prudencio Rivera Martínez is their captain, and he is in a modest rental Taurus, driving from site to site and around the neighborhoods involved, so that he will know them if need arises. At irregular intervals, he checks his men via cell phone, but tonight there are no problems, no disturbances.
Moie is awake as well, in his hammock high in the boughs of the great ficus tree. He has a plastic bottle of water and a small package of Fritos given to him by the little girl. He has never eaten a Frito before but finds them good and finishes the whole package. He likes the salt and the flavor of the corn. When he is a man he enjoys foods other than meat. There is a remarkable amount of meat on the streets of Miami America, he has found, much more than he expected, considering how many dead people there are. If Miami was full of Runiya, they would long ago have eaten all this meat. He believes that thewai’ichuranan have forgotten how to hunt. This is because they have machines that make food like a bird makes eggs. He has seen this with his own eyes.
Now he removes a clay jar from his net bag and sucks some powder into his nostrils. When he feels theyana arrive, he sings the song that opens the barrier between the worlds. Theyana slides him free of his body, as a knife slides the fillet from a fish, and he floats into the dream world. But before he drifts entirely away he recalls, as he often does at this moment, what happened when he first gave theyana to Father Tim. The priest had laughed and would not stop laughing, and Moie was hard-pressed not to join him, although in all the generations since Jaguar gaveyana to First Man, it was not recorded in the memory of the Runiya that anyone had laughed. Usually they were frightened to death the first time.
So later when they returned from the dream world Moie had asked the priest what was so funny, and Father Tim said that theyana gives you the eye of God, and to God everything must be amusing, as we find the stumbles and tantrums of small children amusing. They think it is the end of the world, but we just pick them up and give them food and a hug, knowing that their momentary pain will soon pass. And this is when Moie discovered that Father Tim was able to keep himself separate from the god when he traveled the dream world in theyana trance. This was a wonder to Moie, and the two men talked often after that about what Father Tim calledontology. Long, long ago, said Father Tim, everyone’s thoughts were like water, connected to every thing and part of every thing. There was no difference between people’s thoughts and the rest of the world and the fathers of thewai’ichuranan lived just like the Runiya. Then one of these ancestors had a thought that was made not of water but of iron. And soon many of thewai’ichuranan had such thoughts, and with such thoughts they cut themselves away from the world and began to slice it up into tiny parts. Thus they gained their great powers over the world, and thus also they began to be dead.
Then Moie understood the difference between even such awai’ichura as Father Tim and himself. When Moie took theyana, he was Jaguar and Jaguar was him and he was part of the life of everything that was-animals, plants, rocks, sky, stars-but Father Tim could only be so in a flickering sort of way, as in some night when the moon was gone and the fire in the hut had died to coals.Through a glass darkly is how Father Tim described the sight he had of his Jan’ichupitaolik, and he said that he had to wait until he came to the land of the dead before he could be like Moie was. Were you not a heathen, Moie, he often said, you would be a saint.
So now it is Jaguar-in-Moie who travels like a vapor through the dream world of Miami. Distances in the dream world are not as they are in the world under the sun, so he is easily able to find all the people he needs to visit. He visits his allies and gives them dreams of strength and power, readying them for the struggle. To his enemies he gives dreams of dread. There are screams in the night in expensive districts; lights go on, pills are consumed in numbers, as is liquor. This is how battle is waged in Moie’s country.
At last he visits the girl, and the father and the mother. Here he finds something very strange. There is atichiri around the child, and not only that, it is one that he doesn’t recognize, an alien entity, but quite powerful. Moie had not realized that the dead people could calltichiri, but apparently it is so. He wonders if this is the same as his discovery that there are different animals living in the land of the dead, or if it is like his mistake about the stars. He will ask Cooksey about this. Meanwhile, it is hard to enter the dreams of the father, and nearly impossible to enter the girl’s dreams. The mother is no problem at all, so he spends the most time there.
He really has no idea why Jaguar desires that he do this, but the desire is as good as a command. Jaguar does many things Moie cannot understand, and this is far from the strangest. At some point he will be told. Or not.