Jennifer Simpson awoke early to birdsong, a mockingbird trilling in the garden and the finches in their wickerwork cage on the patio of the big house. The mockingbird finished a long phrase and then began to imitate the finches. She slipped from the bed and stood naked in the doorway of her cottage, a rangy, high-breasted girl with a mass of thick red-gold hair down to the small of her back, and covered from head to toe with pale freckles. Her face was oval, finely featured, with pale blue eyes as blank and open as a child’s. (An observer, and there was one, thought “Botticelli,” not for the first time.) The air was as cool as it would get today, and every surface of leaf and stem in the garden was covered with glistening dew. It was her favorite time of day, because although she didn’t mind communal living, she harbored a lust for privacy. She took a mask and snorkel from a hook on the porch post, retrieved a rolled-up waxed paper bag from a niche in the rough stone wall, slipped her feet into rubber flip-flops, and started down the coral-gravel path. After a few yards she encountered an enormous spiderweb laid across it, occupied by one of those spiders with a spiky body that looked like it was made of highly colored plastic. She reached for the name of it and came up empty. Scotty was always telling her the names of things, but it was hard to keep them all in her mind. Nature Boy, Kevin called him, but privately, and also The Hobbit.
From the terrace of the house Shirley let out a scream and then yelled“Come and get it!” three times. Jenny stopped and looked back over her shoulder, waiting to see if the noise had roused Kevin. No, and she was glad of it, because although she loved him and all, he had a way of hovering, and she wanted this time to herself. She knelt and eased herself under the web, shuddering a little when it caught on her back. The rule was nothing was killed in the garden, everything lived in balance, no pesticides, no fertilizers, the way nature intended. Jenny was down with that, and Scotty seemed to make it work.
The pool had been dug out of living coral rock, and the spoil from the dig had been used to build a little hill on which grew dozens of different kinds of bromeliads and orchids. From near its crest a good-size waterfall, driven by a solar pump, burbled merrily down into the pool. The water was clear as air. Scotty had arranged for it to feed the garden sprinklers, from which it seeped back through the porous soil to return to its source, just as nature intended water to do. The rain made up for any loss. She spat into the mask, rinsed it out, slipped it on, and lay down upon the rippling surface.
It had been designed to imitate a natural pond in Amazonia, and it was big, a half-acre of surface and forty feet deep at the deepest. Rupert, the owner, had been to Amazonia a number of times and had built the pool with that in mind, although he had never got it to balance right until he found Scotty. Scotty was a genius at practical ecology, so said Rupert. Everyone had a genius, that was Rupert’s idea, and given the right social conditions, it would flourish. Jenny had not until now received any evidence of her own genius, but Rupert said she was only nineteen and should give it a chance. When Jenny was seven, one of her foster parents had taken her to a dentist in Sioux Falls, and in the waiting room there had been a large tank full of tropical fish, brilliant, darting things full of light and life, and there was a tiny statue of a mermaid in it that seemed to open a little pirate chest at intervals, when a mass of bubbles would emerge and go glittering to the surface. Jenny had been transfixed and had thought at the time that no heavenly joy promised by the Disciples of Christ Sunday school could match actuallybeing that little mermaid, spending the hours opening the pirate chest, surrounded by brilliant fish. And now here she was.
She took a breath, jackknifed her long body, and plunged downward into the deep. The fish scattered before her, hundreds of fish, she had no idea how many. Scotty knew; he kept careful records of birth, growth, and death, part of the ecological balance. Jenny had little interest in that part of it, although she knew the names of the main kinds: discus, like enameled dinner plates, a dozen varieties of cichlids with bright flowing fins, clusters of solemn angelfish, headstanders streaked with crimson, clouds of tiny jewel-like killifish, golden dorados, the jagged metal flash of hatchetfish: and also, swimming slowly in a tight group, looking like thugs outside a candy store, a substantial school of red-bellied piranhas. These were Rupert’s special pets, which Jenny thought was a little weird. They were also the only beings in the compound that got red meat, for Rupert would go out at dusk every day when he was in residence and fling bits of dripping offal to them from the crest of the waterfall hill and watch the water boil as they thrashed in their blood frenzy. Scotty said they were perfectly harmless unless you were bleeding or moving in an erratic fashion, although what a piranha would think erratic was something she did not know, nor did she believe that anyone else knew. She tried to avoid them on her swims, for she didn’t trust them nor the look in their beady little eyes. She’d known guys with that look.
Still, here she was in the better-than-heaven, the little mermaid in the clear water, far from Iowa, in Miami, with plenty of sex and food and a place to stay where they didn’t hassle you, and something important to do in life. The Earthly Paradise: one of Rupert’s phrases, and it was true.
The important thing was saving the tropical rain forests, which was why Rupert had gathered them all together in his house, so they could all live in an ecologically sensitive way, giving an example to the world, and forging a political movement. Jenny did not see that they were doing much forging. The community spent a lot of time-the Professor excepted-sitting around naked or half-naked, smoking superior marijuana and discussing what it was okay to eat or use, depending on whether the product was ecological or not, and they spent a lot of time recycling; the total trash produced by the six of them, plus guests, didn’t fill a shoe box a week. The forging part was mainly her and Evangelina Vargos, who lived off the property, going out nearly every day in the brightly painted VW bus, setting up a table in some public place, and trying to get people to take folders and sign petitions and contribute to the Forest Planet Alliance.
Jenny’s secret was that she snuck food to the fish, disturbing the ecological balance Scotty so diligently (and irritatingly) sought. The fish were allowed to eat only plant and animal matter derived from the garden plot fertilized by water and sludge sucked up by the solar pump. What she fed them was thus beyond un-kosher-bread balls made from toxic loaves purchased on the sly from the Winn-Dixie and secreted in various hidey-holes around the property. Now she hung in the crystal water with her arm extended to a cloud of living jewels that pecked with delicate mouths at her fingers and the dissolving bread. It was so cool, the absolutely coolest thing in her life so far, better than dope, quite often better than sex with Kevin, and she wished very much for someone she could share it with. Then the food was gone except for tiny flecks, each surrounded by a little mob of fish, and then even that was gone and the fish dispersed into their normal flowing patterns.
She surfaced, blowing, and lay on her back, her young breasts bobbling prettily above the water. Her nipples were stiffened from the slight chill of the lower levels, and this produced a pleasant tingling in her groin, and she thought that if Kevin were still in bed she might slide in there and get him to give her a good one, as she often did after these expeditions. Then she spied Rupert walking down the path to the pool, naked, old, and terribly hairy. She sighed. The sight of Rupert Zenger naked always had a peculiar detumescent effect on her, for which she felt a passing shame. He could not after all help being fifty, and the body, of course, was a healthy thing, as he himself often said, but she wished he wouldn’t shove it in all their faces so often. He was a solidly built, exceptionally hairy man, with a Brilloesque beard down to his chest and a full head of hair of the same consistency sticking straight out eight or so inches all around his long skull. He had a bony face, ugly in the honest Lincoln style, and large mild brown eyes that reminded Jenny of one of the Amazonian mammals in the Forest Planet brochures, a brocket deer or a tapir. She watched him approach and kicked herself to the shallows. As always her eye was drawn, if briefly, to his crotch. He certainly had a big one, truly the largest she had seen, and it was both funny and a little scary the way it swung like a clock pendulum as he walked. The Tripod, Kevin called him, nor did she appreciate the boyfriend’s sly suggestions that she and Scotty’s girlfriend, Luna, were angling to get a piece of it, and she always having to tell him that she wasn’t interested, and she didn’t think Luna was either, and that his was perfectly big enough and fine. Zenger paused and selected a towel from the large plywood box full of them on the pool margin.
She hoisted herself up onto the smoothed coral slab that ran along the near edge of the pool, removed her mask, and wrung the water out of her hair. Zenger came up behind her and said, “Good morning, Jennifer. Had your swim?”
She turned a little, and unfortunately there It was a couple of feet in front of her face. She made herself look up at his face.
“Yeah, it’s great. It looks like another nice day.”
“Indeed. There are croissants for breakfast. And the Heidi mangoes.”
This was his way of giving the order, a little annoying, too, he never actually asked for anything or treated anyone like a servant, but Jenny made breakfast for him and the whole group every morning. The expectation was there, although she could not recall when it had been decided that this was part of her function. Shirley screamed again, which was certainly part ofher function. Rupert walked slowly down the gentle slope into the water.
Ten minutes later, dressed in a Forest Planet T-shirt and white shorts, with her hair in a damp braid, Jenny stood in the huge, cool, and elaborately equipped kitchen, cutting mangoes into slices and arranging them in parenthetical rows on a blue glazed platter. She had ground the organic shade-grown fair-trade coffee and placed it in the drip machine and had the croissants warming in the oven. No carcinogenic microwaves here. The mangoes done, she set a white camellia at the edge of the plate and brought it out to the patio. The table was set for six with colorful native ceramics from Latin America and the Caribbean and tablecloth and napkins made of hemp fibers by indigenous craftspeople. She went back into the kitchen, poured the coffee into a thermos flask, and used a powerful Oster juicer to extract the juice from a dozen and a half organic oranges. While she was doing this, Scotty came in and, as he did every morning, arranged in a tall crystal vase the flowers he had just picked from the garden: yellow orchids, frangipani, a branch of wildly violet bougainvillea. Jenny looked up from her machine to watch him do it. Scotty said flower arrangement was a high art in Japan, and that samurai had competed to be the best at it. Jenny didn’t know if this was more of Scotty’s weirdness or really true, but she did see that there was something about the way the flowers looked when Scotty did them that was different, that made them look like they had grown that way, and that she never quite got when she tried it herself with the pickle jar in her cottage.
The Hobbit. As usual when Kevin supplied a name, Jenny felt her mind locked into seeing the person that way. Scotty was quite short, inches shorter than Jenny herself, and built like a barrel, with a head that looked a little big for his body, and hewas extremely hairy, bearded, and with his dark hair drawn back into a ponytail. But unlike the hobbits in the movies (and Jenny had seen all of them, all more than once), Scotty’s face, which was actually pretty handsome in a rough way, she thought, had on it a forbidding expression, almost a scowl, as if life had petulantly refused him something he thought he deserved. His eyes were tired blue, startling against the deep tan of his face. He was only a little over thirty but looked older: Jenny thought of him as an old guy, in the same class as Rupert and the Professor.
He finished his flowers and brought the vase out to the table, all this without a word or a glance at Jenny. She was used to this and not offended. People had their peculiarities, this she had learned early in a series of foster homes, and her position was that you minded your business and they minded theirs and everyone got along. Scotty was a bear in the morning; Rupert wanted things but never asked you up front; Kevin was almost always stoned; Luna was picky and tight-assed in a variety of ways; the Professor never got naked in public and he talked funny, being English. All bearable faults. As for Jenny herself: not the sharpest knife in the drawer, an expression she had overheard Luna using in reference to her in a conversation with Rupert, which she wasn’t really hanging out under a window to listen in on, but happened to hear anyway. It had hurt her at the time, but she had after all heard something like it many times before, and anyway so fucking what, there were other things in life besides big brains, and those that had them, in her experience, didn’t seem any happier than the rest of the stupid world.
Breakfast at La Casita (for so the house was named, and the name displayed on a hand-painted ceramic plaque affixed to one of the squat coral pillars at the gate) was where the Forest Planet Alliance gathered each morning to discuss the tasks of the day. All other meals were either informal or by invitation. Rupert often dined out or else entertained important people in the large, airy dining room. On those occasions, Jenny found herself serving and busing, while Scotty and Luna cooked, and Kevin washed up. They received no pay for this, for technically they were employees of the Forest Planet Alliance Foundation and were paid to serve the interests of this 501 (c) nonprofit corporation rather than soup, but this was what they did, more or less in return for their food and rent-free accommodations. Jenny thought it was the greatest deal she had ever heard about, and Kevin thought it was a rip-off, but she didn’t see him doing anything to change it anytime soon.
At breakfast, meanwhile, everyone sat democratically at the same table, which showed, Jenny thought, that they were not servants after all. The table was located in the center of a patio floored with worn, blood-colored tiles, and the house rose around it on four sides, a single story in golden coral stone, roofed in red Spanish tiling, except for the east side, which was two stories and called “the tower.” This was where Rupert had his bedroom. The Professor, Nigel Cooksey, had the room below this, but Cooksey had not yet arrived when Kevin drifted in, dressed in cutoff jeans shorts and a blue work shirt with no sleeves, looking angelic and fresh, darling golden dreadlocks and little fringe of beard, sleepy hazel eyes, she always got a little thrill when she saw him first thing in the morning, how lucky she was to have him. When they’d first met, in a squat in Cedar Rapids, he’d had fairly short hair and just one earring and hadn’t been on the road that long, so she knew more about how to get by than he had. She thought that was why he’d hit on her, that and the sex, and she figured he’d drift away like the others when he found out about her problem. And she had actually gone to the club behind the rail yard with him, where they had strobes, and sure enough she’d had a full-blown seizure, and come out of it on the sticky floor, with the other people pretending that nothing had happened, and the music blasting, but he had stayed with her, to her immense surprise and gratitude. She still got a little flash of that moment, him looking down at her with a look in his face that was not oh-what-a-freak-show, but human, a concerned-human-being kind of look. And she recalled that moment whenever he acted shitty. Although now he gave her a grin and a little secret squeeze and slurped up a piece of mango, and then went to the little Mexican cart where the coffee carafe was and poured himself a cup.
Then Rupert and Luna came out of the office, which was a big room in the corner of the house, and was where Luna spent most of her time. Luna had on what she always did, a crisp white short-sleeved shirt and baggy khaki shorts. She was a slim hard-bodied woman of around thirty who seemed to be constructed of piano wire and space-age substances, even her hair, which was dark and shiny, short, and held up on one side with an amber barrette; it seemed made of one piece of prestressed plastic, like the fender of a Corvette. She wore round steel-rimmed glasses on her sharp little nose. Jenny would have figured her for a sexless virgin type, but she knew for a fact that Scotty got to her frequently; the property was small enough and so quiet at night that the sex life of each inhabitant was common knowledge, at least in the audio channel. Jenny and Kevin could hear them almost as well as if they were in the same room, and Luna’s rising shriek of pleasure, Scotty’s satisfied groan, were frequent accompaniments to the mockingbird’s evensong. Jenny had not been much of a noisemaker in that regard before arriving at La Casita but now felt compelled to join the night sounds with whoops of her own, often genuine. Kevin seemed to find it amusing.
Shirley screamed from her cage as she always did when she saw Rupert. Luna told her to shut up, and she fell silent. Like the other local denizens, the big hyacinth macaw almost always did what Luna said. Scotty arrived and sat down next to Luna. He had his social face on now, he made light remarks about the weather, about pruning the fruit trees, received the usual compliment from Rupert about the flowers, and the breakfast got under way, with everyone telling everyone else what they were going to do with their day. Rupert and Luna spoke about a mailing, and the purchase of mailing lists from other enviro organizations, and then some computer stuff she couldn’t follow. There was an environmentalist letter-writing campaign about the S-9 pumping station up north that was pumping polluted water into the Everglades and killing all the wildlife. Scotty talked about the rototiller being out of whack and other repair and plumbing stuff and then they got into a little argument about what was compostable and wasn’t. Jenny let the talk slide past her ears, letting it blend in with the whisper of the light breeze in the slender palms that rose above the courtyard and the sound of the waterfall. She nodded and smiled when Luna addressed her. Ms. Robotica, as Kevin called her, had arranged permission from the Coconut Grove library to set up a display and table on the little plaza in front of their building. Evangelina Vargos would meet her there and Kevin would drive the VW van. Jenny glanced at Kevin, who rolled his eyes.
“Unless you’d like to help Scotty with the rototiller,” Luna added pointedly.
“Oh, no, ma’am,” Kevin replied, “driving’s just fine with me. I always hoped that when I grew up I would get to drive people so they could hand out little brochures. Chopping down trees to make paper to stop people from chopping down other trees. Makes perfect sense to me.”
“The brochures are printed on recycled paper,” said Luna with her typical exasperated sigh.
“I know it, Luna. And that’s good. I’m sure our recycling program throws terror into the hearts of the fucking corporate bastards and the lumber barons that’re killing the rain forest. They’re shaking in their boots.”
“Then what would you like us to do, Kevin?” asked Luna. “Blow up the Panamerica Bancorp Building?”
“That’d be a start,” snapped Kevin.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Kevin, grow the fuck up!” said Luna.
There was a silence around the table, as there always was when Kevin gave vent, which Rupert broke by saying in his calm, slow voice, “Jennifer, if you’d be so kind: could you check on what’s keeping Nigel?”
Jenny rose at once and left, happy to go, disturbed by the friction that had marred the lovely morning and their breakfast. There was something going on that she didn’t understand and didn’t like, that was not just Kevin being silly. A look had passed between Luna and Kevin, as if even though they were in opposition, there was something going on between them, like they were pumping each other up in some way, each getting some kind of sick energy from the other. This was just a feeling; she could not put it into words.
Nigel Cooksey occupied the whole southeast corner of the house, a small bedroom and bath and the larger room adjoining the Alliance offices that he used as a study-cum-depository. He was a professor and knew everything about the rain forest and had lived down there for many years: this much Jenny knew, and also that Rupert and Scotty treated him with the greatest respect. Kevin called him Professor Stork and thought that all this studying the problem was a waste of time, because what was the point of knowing every goddamn thing about the forest when by the time he got it all down and published, there wouldn’t be tree left standing. Cooksey kept to himself, or spent hours with Rupert discussing Alliance strategy. A couple of old faggots, had been Kevin’s take on the two of them when he and Jenny had arrived at the property the year before, but the vibes had been wrong for that, and when she voiced this opinion Kevin had scoffed (oh, you and your vibes!), but she’d been right. Rupert might be a little weird but was perfectly heterosexual, there were a couple of women he entertained regularly in his bedroom in the tower of the house, and clearly, from the sounds floating out of the garden on those nights, he knew well enough how to wield his spectacular unit.
What Cooksey was she had not figured out yet, maybe hewas gay, but he didn’t seem to do anything about it, maybe not all that interested in sex, although when she entertained that idea her mind skidded a little. Sometimes she thought there was something, like,wrong with him because he was the only one of the inhabitants who did not bathe nude in the pool, and so no one there had seen his equipment. It was huge, purple, with spikes and blades on it, like they drew on demons in underground comix, so said Kevin, but Jenny thought he was just lonely, and she always made an effort to be nice to him. She liked his voice, too, it was like on the TV, as when she switched it on sometimes and found it was tuned to the public TV channel and before switching to her show she would listen to that accent, those people talking like they never had a care in the world and no one could ever be mean to them.
She knocked on Cooksey’s bedroom door and, receiving no response, went to the next room on the hall, his study, where she poked her head in. Cartons, crates, barrels, teetering piles of books on the floor, bookcases almost to the ceiling, stuffed animals and mounted skeletons of animals atop these, a row of filing cabinets of different sizes and vintages, a wicker fan in slow rotation above, light from the windows greened by passage through the mango orchard illuminating the dusty air, and in the center, Nigel Cooksey leaning back in a wooden swivel chair, sandaled feet and thin knotty legs up on the cluttered worktable, arranged carefully among half a dozen soiled tea mugs and a stuffed hoatzin on a stand. The room had a peculiar, penetrant odor compounded of old paper, bachelor, formalin, whiskey, and incompletely preserved organic materials.
Jenny cleared her throat, coughed, said, “Um, Professor…?” At which the legs shot up, the chair crashed against a wooden crate and spun on its axis, its occupant confronting her with a gaping look, like one of the stuffed jungle creatures that decorated the high shelf. A small white object went clattering across the tile. Jenny stooped to retrieve it. It was a plaster cast of an animal’s foot. She handed it to him.
“Rupert said he wanted to meet with you?”
“Oh, dear! It can’t be nine already!”
There was a wooden clock on a bookcase shelf, whose face was nearly obscured by stacked journal reprints. Jenny moved these and said, “It’s half-past. Did you fall asleep?”
“Oh, not at all, no, I was in a kind of brown study.”
Well,yeah, thought Jenny, with all the smoke. Cooksey was the only smoker (of tobacco) on the property, and the white walls of the workroom had acquired an amber glaze. He was staring at her in a way he often stared, as if she were a creature he was observing from concealment. His eyes were gray, deep-set, and sad. He said, “‘Never shall a young man, thrown into despair by those great honey-colored ramparts at your ear, love you for yourself alone and not your yellow hair.’ Yeats.”
“Excuse me?”
“Nothing, my dear. Musing is all. Well, I must stir myself.” He placed the cast on the desk.
“What is that thing, a foot?”
“Yes. Of a tapir,Tapirus terrestris. You can learn a lot about the larger mammals by their footprints. Weight, of course, and sometimes sex and age. This is a male, perhaps two years old.”
“How do you know?”
“How? Why, it’s written here on the base of the cast.” He laughed, a dry chuckle, and after a slight pause, Jenny laughed, too.
“Gosh, and I thought science was hard.”
“If it were, I couldn’t do it, slug that I am. Seriously: you observe the animals, you see, and then when they’ve left, you scuttle out and pour plaster into the prints, and then there’s a little gadget with a spring that you press into the soil near the print, until it’s as deep as the print was, and it gives you the weight, or rather you calculate the weight from the readings. And if you do that for a few years, you get a sense of how the animals grow and survive. Every creature has a unique print.”
“Like fingerprints.”
“Just so. I have a large collection of them, all the mammalia, of course, and the larger lizards and crocodilia, and the gallinaceous birds.” He stood and gestured to the door. He was tall and very thin and dressed always in faded khaki shirts and shorts.
“After you, my dear.”
That was one reason she liked the professor.After you, my dear! It was like being in an old movie on TV.
Kevin was not in that good a mood as they drove up Main Highway to the Grove, and Jenny was all tensed up, waiting to see if he would take it out on her. Sometimes he would shoot questions at her, or talk about things she couldn’t follow and then get all sarcastic about it, or else he would get her to talk about stuff that happened to her while she was growing up, school or the foster homes or the strange kids that she’d shared them with or the foster parents. She had quite a few stories saved up, some of them pretty sad, and just when she thought she was sharing stuff that she didn’t ordinarily like to share, he would yank his attention away, like Lucy with Charlie Brown’s football, and she’d feel like a jerk for going on about old shit. Or he’d actually say, after listening to her talk for half an hour or so, Why do you keep talking about old shit like that? So she felt stupidagain, and wanted to bawl.
Kevin himself never talked much about his own past. She knew he’d been to a prep school. She was not sure what a prep school was, exactly, although she knew you had to pay money to go, probably a lot more than the $16.83 per month that the state of Iowa had paid her foster parents for her upkeep in the year before she split, and also she had the adjective “preppy,” which meant expensive clothes from Abercrombie’s in the mall, and she imagined a place with lots of grass and white people in baggy clothes playing around and looking cool. He had been to college, too, but dropped out because of all the bullshit you had to take from the teachers, and how bourgeois it was, and it was better to be a revolutionary, which he was. Being a revolutionary was all about smoking a lot of dope and spray-painting walls and keying expensive cars, or so she imagined from observing Kevin, and this would eventually bring down the capitalist infrastructure that was destroying the planet, although she was not nearly smart enough to see how this would happen.
She was relieved to find that Kevin was not going to get on her today just yet, but was venting his rage about the fucking Forest Planet Ass-holes who didn’t know how to do anything but bullshit all day, focusing particularly on Luna the stuck-up bitch, who didn’t know half the stuff he did and was a complete phony poseur bourgeois besides. Kevin was smoking a fat number right now, which Jenny didn’t like much, not that she had any objection to it as such, but not while driving down Main Highway in the van. She was afraid of getting pulled over, although the one time she’d mentioned this Kevin had come down hard on her for being a totally useless scaredy-cat piece of shit, although as far as she knew he had never been inside a jail, while she had (for possession of a controlled substance) in Cedar Rapids and did not want to repeat the experience. He offered the dope to her but she declined, although she was getting quite the buzz from just being in the van.
At least he stashed it when they got to the commercial part of the Grove. Kevin backed the VW into the delivery slot in front of the library, and Jenny saw that Evangelina Vargos was waiting on the library steps reading a book. She was a small, lightly built woman, with a charming mop of blond-streaked brown hair, green eyes, skin smooth as ivory and just that color. She wore white jeans, complicated and expensive-looking white sandals, a FPA T-shirt, and a good deal of glittery gold jewelry. Jenny felt a little lift in her heart when she saw her. Geli Vargos was sort of her best friend at this point, she thought, although having moved around a lot as a child and being a foster kid, she did not have much experience with the actuality of best-friendness. Geli listened sympathetically to her hard-luck stories, and she listened to Geli’s, which were all about rich Cubans in her family being mean to one another and to Geli for not getting married to this bozo they wanted her to marry.
Geli saw them, stood up and waved, and then descended to help them unload the display. Greetings: a kiss on the cheek for Jenny, a slightly mocking hail for Kevin, returned with a sarcastic grin. Kevin and Geli did not get along, a phenomenon Jenny had observed in countless television sitcoms (the best friend and the boyfriend trading barbs) and considered normal; in fact, considered it a proof that she was at last living a version of real life. She rejected all advice to stop hanging out with that Cuban bourgeois bitch or dump that phony ass-hole for a decent guy, and was secretly delighted that someone thought enough of her to try to change her life.
They unloaded a long folding table, three folding chairs, and a large four-panel display frame, together with boxes of Forest Planet literature and a miniature stereo-component sound system. Kevin set up the sound system and started a tape of Andean music, breathy bone flutes, ocarinas, and two-headed drums. The women erected the display frame and hung its panels:SAVE THE RAIN FOREST; the FPA logo, a blue-green ball with trees sticking out from its circumference like cloves in a pomander; and large laminated photographs of rain forest plants and creatures and some indigenes in feathered headdresses. Nigel Cooksey had taken these photos during his many trips to the region. The remainder of the display comprised a group of brief text panels describing the flora and fauna, and telling how endangered the region was. There were also smaller photos of a despoiled area, bulldozers knocking over trees, and maps and charts showing the accelerating rate of forest loss.
Luna had made the display herself, occasionally under Jenny’s wondering eye. This was the first time Jenny had ever seen anyone make something original out of nothing before-anything, that is, more complex than fixing a meal, sewing a dress, or pasting pictures in a scrapbook. Luna had thought it up and got the stuff together and used the computer and printer and a laminating machine and ordered the display frame off the Internet and…bang! There it was in real life! How did people justknow stuff like that? Geli knew stuff, too, she was a grad student at the marine lab, was going to be a marine biologist, and knew lots of stories about what fish got up to when they were alone. She was always encouraging Jenny to go back to school and make something of herself, just as if Jenny was as smart as her, which she wasn’t, but it was nice to have someone who thought so. You’re a good observer, she said, you have a feeling for animals. Jenny was not exactly sure what this meant.
The tables and chairs arranged, the display displayed, the two women sat on the chairs and awaited the suckers, as Kevin called them. It was a fine October morning in Miami, and the center of Coconut Grove was filling up with tourists and young people there to hang out. Geli and Jenny talked to some tourists, with Jenny focusing on the kids. She had always been good with kids, Kevin often observing it was her childlike mind in play. She talked enthusiastically about the various depicted creatures and their interesting lives. Kevin grew bored, as usual, and said he was going to see what was going on in the park. Several police cars and a brown animal-control van from the county were parked at the edge of the grassy area that led down to the bay, and a small crowd had gathered.
Jenny watched him cross the street and disappear into the crowd, feeling faintly sad and worried that Geli would use this opportunity to run Kevin down again. When she looked up again there was the Indian. He was standing in front of the display staring at the charmingly dim face of a sloth. Dressed in a shabby black suit and a white shirt buttoned up to the neck, he had a small string bag slung over his shoulder and a stained and worn cloth suitcase at his feet. He touched the photograph lightly and then brought his fingertip to his nose.
“That’s a sloth,” Jenny said. “They live in the trees.”
At her words, he turned his head and regarded her. She saw the tattoos on his face, three lines on each cheek and two short vertical marks on his forehead, and their eyes met. Involuntarily, her glance moved to a large photograph of some Yanomami tribesmen, and then back to the Indian. He was still staring at her. A small thrill traveled through her body and she felt the hair stand up on her arms, and she had to drop her eyes. She watched the man move down the display, looking at each photograph in turn. He spent a long time in front of each one, and longest before the picture of a jaguar.
“Geli,” she said in a hushed voice, “check out that guy in the black outfit. He’s just like those guys in our picture.”
Geli glanced up from the petition she had just got some tourists to sign. She looked the man over. “God, I think you’re right. What the hell’s he doing in Miami?”
“You could ask him. I don’t think he speaks any English.”
But the man had left the display and now approached the two women. He said something to them, and it was a moment before Geli understood that the language he was speaking was her cradle tongue. In Spanish she replied, “Forgive me, sir, I didn’t understand you.”
The man said, “I have go to Consuela Holdings. To talk to men. I have say, not…not…” A look of frustration crossed his face, and he went to the display and tapped on the photograph of the logging operation. “Not this in Puxto Reserve.”
“You’re from thePuxto?”
His face brightened and he showed filed teeth. “Yes, Puxto! Consuela not…issiwix to do like this. Forbid.”
“What’s he saying?” asked Jenny.
“I’m not sure. He says he’s from the Puxto Reserve. It’s in Colombia. God, how inhell did he get here? He sounds like he wants us to stop someone logging the Puxto.”
“Well, then he sure came to the right people,” said Jenny confidently.
“Yeah, but, God, this is so weird.” In halting Spanish then she interrogated the man. He said his name was Juan Bautista and he lived in a village near a river Geli had never heard of. They had killed Father Perrin but after he was dead Father Perrin had told him that Consuela Holdings was going to cut all the forest on the Puxto so the dead people could buy many machetes and bottles of pisco. So Jaguar said he must go, and he came down the river to a bigger river in his canoe and thence to the sea, whereGuyana Castle had carried him and Jaguar to Miami America and now the woman must take him to Consuela Holdings because he had the men to talk to tied in a string and would talk and then go back to the Runiya, because being in the land of the dead people was very hard on hissomething.
“I don’t understand that word,” she said.
“Ryuxit,”the Indian repeated. He gestured to the sky, to the earth, and dashed over and tapped on all the pictures of animals and plants, then touched his heart, clenched his fist, and pressed the fist firmly against Jenny’s breastbone. “Like those…all like that,” he said. “Here in Miami not…” He made a flowing motion with his hand.
“What? What’s he saying?” said Jenny. There was a strange feeling in her chest where he had touched her.
“It’s a little vague just now. Wait here for a second, I’m going to check something out.”
With that she dashed up the steps and into the library. Jenny smiled at Juan Bautista, who looked sadly after Geli.
“She’ll be right back. We really, really want to help you, man.” She got up and pointed to the map of Amazonia. “Can you show me where you come from?”
No reaction. Jenny pointed to herself and said, “I’m Jenny. Can you say ‘Jenny’?” A blank look, but Jenny was not discouraged. Many of the foster children she had lived with had been retards, and she’d got along just fine with them. You just had to take it real slow. She pointed to one of the pictures. “This is an orchid. Sayoarrr-kidd!” She gestured to his mouth and made opening and closing motions with her hand. She saw light dawn in his eyes.
“The Little Brother of the Blood,” he said in his own language, and continued, “This is a very useful plant. We grind the tubers and soak the mash in cane alcohol and then boil it down into a syrup. We use it to treat arthritis, diarrhea, headache, temperature, cough, digestion diseases, and to help to heal wounds and boils.”
“Good,” said Jenny with a smile. “And we call it anor-chid. Now this is a monkey. Can you saymon-key?”
He could, and so on through the other pictures. At the jaguar, he said, “You know, that is very dangerous. I don’t think Jaguar would like you capturing his soul like that. A bad thing could happen.” Jenny smiled and nodded. At least he was talking.
Kevin returned looking hectic. “Hey, they found a coon’s head in a tree and blood all around, guts and all. The cops think it was a wild dog pack, that or homeless guys out hunting. Who’s this?” pointing at the Indian.
“His name’s Juan Bautista. He comes from the Amazon, and we’re going to help him keep this company from cutting down his rain forest.”
“You’re shitting me! Where’d you find him?”
“He just showed up. It’s sort of like fate.”
“Oh, right, fate. Did you tell him we don’t do shit?” He addressed the Indian. “Wrongo outfit, man. We no stoppo no cutto down treeso, only talko talko, hando out brochureso.”
“Well, we have a chance, now, Kevin. I don’t see why you have to always be so fucking down on everything. This little guy’s got the name of the company that’s doing it, and he says they’re right here in Miami.”
Geli Vargos returned, her face alight. “I looked it up and it checks out. Thereis a company called Consuela Holdings in Miami, and they have an office on North Miami Avenue, 540 North Miami. And I looked up the Puxto Reserve on the Net. There’s not supposed to be any logging at all there, so it has to be an illegal cut. God, Rupert’s going to go crazy over this.”
“Yeah, he’ll write a letter to the papers, that’s how crazy he’ll get,” Kevin said. “Or maybe if he’s really fired up he’ll try to get an interview on NPR. Hey, I got an idea. Let’s fucking go up there right now. Confront the bastards with what’s-his-face here, the evidence of their crimes. We got the address.”
“I don’t think that’s smart-” said Geli.
“Oh, fuck smart!” He turned to the Indian. “Look, man, we go now, right. To Consuela, tell them no choppo my trees, okay? You come with me now, yes?Pronto, Consuela,con me. ”
“Consuela,pronto, sí, ” said the Indian, making a peculiar twisting motion of his head that seemed to mean affirmation.
Kevin began leading the Indian to the VW. Geli said, “Kevin, come on, don’t be an asshole. We have all this stuff here. How in hell are we supposed to pack it up if you take the truck? And you can’t speak Spanish-you won’t know what’s going on.”
“I had a year of it in school.Hasta la vista, baby!” He placed the Indian in the shotgun seat and jumped behind the wheel.
“Kevin, damn it, hold on!” said Jenny. “This is stupid. We should pack this all up and go together, and like plan it out with Rupert and all.”
Kevin cranked it up hard, sending clouds of acrid smoke into the air. “Girls, now be sure to get those petitions signed,” he crowed, “me and Tonto here gonna whip some ass at the despoilers’ headquarters.¡Viva la revolución! ”
With that he was out in the street and tooling away before they could get out another word.
Moie sits in the van quietly, feeling content. This is the first time he has been in an enclosed motor vehicle, but he is neither frightened nor impressed. He knows thewai’ichura machines are strong and quick, but he thinks they don’t give thewai’ichura much beauty. Jaguar had said he would find allies among the dead people, and allies had been provided. The dead person next to him has his death clasped deep inside him, even though he is very young. Moie senses that he wishes to make each moment dead as well, never still, making monkey noise with his mouth all the time. Now he touches a part of his machine and loud noise fills the inside of it, a painful buzzing with more monkey noises mixed in and also a drum, but the drum isn’t speaking any sense, like the drums his people used. He is a little sorry that the woman is not here, the one with the fire-colored hair, not the one who can talk Spanish, although either of them would have been preferable to this monkey. The Firehair Woman is not entirely dead, a little like Father Tim really, he can almost see the shadow of her death behind her in its usual place, and he wonders what she has done to be even that much alive in the land of the dead.