The Jaguar: A Charlie Hood Novel Part 23

"Why are you here?"

"To give you another day beyond that. And another and another. I can save you if you love me as I love you. In Christ. A holy secret between us. We will celebrate the Lord's love and the flesh that he has given us to celebrate Him. Take my hands."

"I'm not thirteen years old. I'm not overwhelmed by you or what you pretend to stand for. Get out of this room before I scream."

"These rooms are soundproof. Who would hear you?"

"You're worse than the devil. The devil is honest compared to you."

He stared down on her for a long moment. She could not quite see his eyes, only the reflection of the lights off his gla.s.ses. A drop of sweat ran from his temple to his chin then hit the floor with a tap.

"Because you have listened to the serpent your child shall be born misshapen and an abomination."

"And you'll burn in the h.e.l.l you frighten children with."

"I can do no more for you."

"You haven't done one thing for me, ever."

Ciel patiently b.u.t.toned his coat while he stared down at her. He was sweating hard now. She saw the waver of his chin and the tremble of his hands on the b.u.t.tons. When she finally got a look at his eyes he seemed to be focused on something beyond her. Then he turned and walked quietly across the tracking room past the booths and the Yamaha and pushed his way through the door.

She watched him cross the mixing room and vanish into the lobby. She waited a few moments, then sunk to her knees and put her forehead to the carpet and hugged her middle and told the little life inside her to hold on. Hold on, she thought. We're almost free. Please hold on, Baby McKenna.

She knelt there for some time, rocking side to side, listening to the whoosh of blood in her ears and the thump of her heart and the strange infinite silence of the studio, which was not silence at all. It was the sound of nothing. What a beautiful sound, she thought. What could be more pure?

Help us.

Help us.

Help us.

She rose and composed. First at the piano. Then with the Hummingbird in one of the instrument rooms. Finally just sprawled on a couch in the mixing room with the notepad and pen and the air-conditioner breeze drying the sweat on her face and neck.

And after what seemed like hours she finally took a deep breath and copied the song out in its entirety, neatly and clearly, in her best cursive handwriting. She set the time signature and wrote in the chords and the notes of some of the fills and tried to make some help suggestions as to tone and phrasing. She knew that corridos rarely began with guitar intros but she was a gringa rocker so she wrote out the notes to one anyway, figuring that Armenta's guitarist would likely ignore it. "City of Gold." It was different from the Jaguars' corridos, not so much accordion, less of a polka, more stately and restrained. It had a little Carribean in it, too, a little ska. It sounded more like biography than legend, which is what she wanted. There was something almost mournful about it, up-tempo though it was. The melody built slowly and the narrative built slowly too but when she ran through it on the guitar, Erin thought she heard something big and compelling and lushly unpredictable in it. Something aimed at the heart. Something about a man alone. Something about the way things used to be in this world, and still are, and always will be. It took up twelve of the notebook pages, double-s.p.a.ced, and she estimated it would run about seven minutes if you kept it up-tempo and nixed all solos, the guitar intro and the end fade. Or you could relax it, let the artists strut their stuff, and you'd have nine or ten minutes. She liked that idea. Why did a corrido have to sound like a polka on meth? And also: what did it matter? Who was going to hear it? Who was going to play it? In a moment of desperate optimism she wrote out her wish-list of musicians to perform the song.

It was two o'clock when she set the notebook square in the middle of the Yamaha keyboard, the pen inserted at the song so Armenta couldn't miss it.

Siesta.

A few minutes later Owens came from the lobby into the mixing room and they looked at each other through the soundproof gla.s.s.

30.

SHE SHOWERED AND PUT ON a pair of lightweight hiking shorts and athletic shoes and an oversized tee with sequined b.u.t.terflies on it. Again she had the feeling that someone had been in her room but there was no evidence of this. She pulled the Cowboy Defender from inside the toilet tank and dried it over the sink with a hand towel and she hefted it and wondered exactly why she had been unable to use it. She had clearly seen her reasons and opportunities, but she had not been able to even draw the weapon. She dropped it into one of the flapped front pockets and slid the folded fifty-dollar bills into another. Then on hands and knees she reached her hand far under the mattress and came up with the silk swatch containing the map and her instructions. She looked at them one more time to be sure, then she folded and stuffed it into still another pocket of the shorts.

Next she slipped into the loose white leper's dress that Owens had brought her. In front of the mirror she lifted the white rebozo and settled it over her head and shoulders. She arranged the garments to best hide her hair and face.

At the door she stopped and straightened and took three deep breaths. She remembered her father's wry cool and tried to harness the grogginess of her fear, to turn it into calm and clarity.

Come to me by moonlight, sugar, she thought. No, come to me by suns.h.i.+ne. Come to me any way you can get here. Any way you can.

She pushed the card into the lock and heard the deadbolt disengage. Buzz, hum, clunk. Music to her ears now. She held the door open with her toe while she reached up under the dress and slid the card key into a pocket of the shorts.

The door shut behind her and made its final sounds. She walked down the hallway purposefully but not quickly. She pushed the b.u.t.ton for the elevator and waited, praying that no one would be moving about in the heat of afternoon siesta. Four floors, she thought-just a straight shot for four floors and I can get outside, where the lepers come and go without drawing much attention.

The elevator door opened on two of the black housekeepers, who stopped talking to stare at her wide-eyed. Erin saw the worry in their faces and she saw that they wanted to get away from her, but didn't know how, so she bowed her head humbly and stepped aside. The two women bustled past her into the vestibule, then the hallway, hurrying down it, then turning for a quick look back at her before turning the first corner.

Once inside the car she considered the maddeningly unlabeled b.u.t.tons. Six of them, for either four or five stories-no one would clarify which, not even Owens, who had pushed the wrong ones more than once. Erin was fairly sure that the third highest b.u.t.ton was for the first floor, not the second highest b.u.t.ton, which would logically service the ground floor, allowing for the bas.e.m.e.nt. Owens's rooms were on the first floor. She went with her memory.

The car was slow as always but it didn't stop at the second floor and the next thing Erin knew the door had slid open to frame the entryway of the Castle, its grand foyer and majestic iron doors. Suns.h.i.+ne fell from the skylights in the ceiling and dappled the floor around the swordlike shadows of the palms. A small monkey sat on the curtain rod above a cas.e.m.e.nt window, eating sunflower seeds and looking down at her with a frankly doubtful expression.

She strode down the hallway, away from the foyer, and when she came to Owens's suite she fished the card key from her shorts, looked up and down the hall, then slid it under the door.

Back in the entryway she walked across the tile and pushed against the ma.s.sive right-side door. The birds shuffled from on high and a monkey screeched softly. The door was heavier than she had imagined and at first she thought it might be locked. But it finally gave, as if in surrender, and she put her shoulder to it and pushed harder. The door swung and gained momentum, towing Erin into the withering Yucatecan heat.

She stopped in the shade of the loggia, stunned by the brightness that lay beyond. She had never felt so conspicuous in her life, even on a stage with a spotlight blinding her. She pulled the rebozo forward over her head. There was an expanse of gravel between the Castle and the jungle and this gravel was raked several times daily by the groundskeepers and as Erin stepped onto it she saw no footprints coming or going, not even the neat tracks of the crabs or lizards that left their trails everywhere, but were almost never seen.

She came to the jungle and stepped right in. Once inside the shade of the trees she stopped and glanced back at the Castle looming in the midday heat. She saw two lepers, women, coming slowly down the outdoor stairway from the third story. A good thing, she thought. She felt like a character in the Old Testament fleeing some cursed place, surrounded by enemies and observed by a jealous and hot-tempered G.o.d. A pillar of salt, she thought. Demoniacs. b.l.o.o.d.y altars. Dear Lord, get me out of here. Dear duplicitous Bradley, please be waiting.

She turned and ran. She'd forgotten what a pleasure it could be, heat or not, pregnant or not. But what a wild, dislocated feeling it was to be embarking on the most important journey of her life with nothing but the clothes on her back, a leper's shawl, five-hundred dollars and a gun. Save some energy, she thought. She slowed to a trot, then a fast stride.

The trail was narrow but clear. Tree roots grew the thickness of human arms and they were raised across the path and worn smooth by walkers. The trunks of the ficus trees grew up close to the pa.s.sageway and the Carrizo cane grew in high walls and choked out the sunlight and the breeze. Erin could hear her shoes crunching on the sand and the roots but she heard no birds or monkeys or even insects, just the gradually fading sound of the Castle's generators running the siesta air conditioners. She walked fast with long steps, then ran again a short distance, then slowed once more to a walk. For a few strides she held her belly in both hands and talked to her charge: hang in there, hang in there, little baby. You are one tough little guy.

She followed the trail she had taken with Armenta. She recognized a very narrow fork that led right and one that led left and she congratulated herself for keeping to the true path. The pa.s.sageway got narrower and the roots were raised and knotted higher but she labored over them, holding to the cane stalks for balance and careful not to turn an ankle. Something black and low scurried ahead of her, no more than a blur.

A moment later she stopped and turned and listened. She took a few more steps and stopped again. That feeling of being watched, she thought. She'd had it a million times as a girl, watched or not. She heard a bird twitter and a faint breeze stir the foliage.

She continued. Suddenly she came to a fork that she did not remember. She stopped again. These paths were not minor offshoots but an almost perfect wishbone-two trails just as wide and well worn as the one she was on, each leading away at equally obtuse angles.

She stared, disbelieving. As she scrolled through the memory of her walk to the cenote with Armenta, she had that sinking, breath-robbing realization that she couldn't remember this place at all. She could remember the silver plate she had carried, and the hard lump of the Cowboy Defender in the pocket of her dress, and the patches of his hair that Armenta had tried to tame with gel, and the silver jewel-studded candlestick he had carried, but she could not remember this junction, this grand and dramatic fork that they had most a.s.suredly negotiated.

She placed both hands over her womb. She was breathing quickly but not deeply and she was light-headed in the breezeless heat. Panic kills. Dad.

She stared at the two paths. The roots of the left path were worn as smoothly as the roots of the right. The right path had a thin layer of white sand, as did the left. Both were of equal width. Both led through thickets of almost indistinguishable trees and plants. They looked like twins staring back at her. Then she thought she saw something. She knelt down slowly to one knee, balancing herself on her fingertips. This made her dizzier, so she took deeper breaths, and faster. She blinked to clear the sweat from her eyes. In the filtered light she saw the footprint on the right path. It was just a small crescent shape, a partial heel, maybe, with the faint zigzag of a sole pattern within it. In front of it was a larger mark, once an oval, perhaps, marked with the same pattern. Going in her direction, she thought.

She stood and fought off the dizziness with deep fast breaths. She felt a fresh eruption of sweat on her face. Who are you? When were you here? Minutes ago? Days? Were you going to the cenote or somewhere else?

She had heard that there were villages in this direction, east, and a hotel, and a marina. She didn't know the names of them or even what country they might be in. She looked straight up as if the sun could give her some clue but it wasn't visible through the thick copse overhead.

Traveled or less traveled. Frost. All the difference. Some help that is, in the middle of a jungle.

So now what? She had to decide and she knew this, but how? On the basis of what? On the basis of who she was and what she was. What else was there to reckon by? Erin had always believed that human nature and human beings were fundamentally good. Not always but usually. Thus she now told herself that another human being might be some kind of help to her, or at least not a hindrance or a threat. In her life she had seen generosity and selflessness, and sacrifice and goodwill. She had seen their opposites too, but if she had to choose right now, she would choose to believe that people, given a chance, would do the right thing. Mostly.

She stepped over the footprint and followed it down the fork leading to her right. What a strange feeling to have lost the known and then to follow what she only believed. Soon she was halfway there, she thought, based on memory. But how good was it? She looked for more shoe prints and she saw a few but these were yards apart, as if the walker were a giant striding through high gra.s.s.

Finally she saw something she recognized, a lightning-blasted fig tree, blown to splinters by the bolt, the splinters black and upraised in the green density around them. She had seen this with Armenta and now it seemed a sign that she was going to find the cenote and Bradley, and in a few short hours they would be in the airport in Chetumal, boarding a plane to home and freedom.

Closer to the cenote the trail widened and she remembered this place, too, where Armenta had said that the trees grew taller and more fully because they were drawing on the same ground water as the cenote. She broke into a trot and allowed hope to spark inside her like the beginning of a fire. Then she had to slow again, short of breath and her legs getting heavy.

Through the trees ahead she saw the first glimmers of the pool. The water was fired with suns.h.i.+ne this time of day and the surface looked flat as a golden mirror. When she came to the last heavy stand of trees she stopped and stepped inside them and waited for her heart to settle. She could only see a small part of the cenote from here and she knew that Bradley would be hidden, but she was disappointed that he was not the first thing she saw, that he didn't just step from the foliage into a column of sunlight and smile at her. Was this another lie of his? Another betrayal?

When her breath finally slowed she approached the pool, staying along the rim of the trees. Closer the cenote looked perfectly round, as if it had been drilled from solid gray rock. From here, with the sun at her back, she could see the last lip of rock before the water, and it was worn smooth by hundreds of years of people swimming and drinking and filling their vessels with the cold, clean water that was always here. There were crude stone benches set back from the pool, ancient gray-black slabs balanced upon others, and even these were polished smooth by centuries of human touch.

She saw the place where she had stood when she threw the plate into the pool. She imagined the treasures piled up somewhere down in the black water-the Mayan gold and silver, their statues and calendars, the gems and jewelry and valuables plucked from ancient history right up to the Corvette and the musical instruments-and the bones of the sacrificed spiking it all. Nothing ever moves down there, she thought. No flow. No current. No tides. Just stillness forever, amen.

She scanned the far side for signs of her husband but saw nothing. So she stepped out into the open and walked toward the water. When she got up nearly to the edge of it she could see the whole lovely pool. The treetops rimmed the perimeter but directly over the water the sky was clear, and behind her, to the west, the sun angled its rays onto the surface and turned the water to gold. In this gold the reflected trees stood upside down, their trunks rooted to their sponsors at the waterline.

"Bradley?" she asked quietly. Then a little louder, "Brad?"

She watched and waited. A puff of breeze scattered the tree trunks on the water, then they reformed, inverted again. She looked back down the trail and saw just jungle. She started off along the lip of the cenote, walking counterclockwise around it. She saw a pink rubber sandal with a broken thong sitting on the rock. A small ball of foil. A clear plastic bottle cap.

The cenote was not large and in a few minutes she was standing directly across from where she had started. She squinted across the golden surface at the sun-charged jungle.

"Bradley? Brad?"

She walked the rim again. When she was three-quarters of the way around she stopped again and looked around. She felt watched. He wouldn't let her dangle this long, would he? For what possible reason?

Her heart fluttered lightly and she had the terrible notion that he was not here and had never been here and never would be. The idea made her dizzy. Vertigo and nausea. She looked ahead and took a deep breath. Just then a wad of what looked like white printer paper flew from the jungle and landed on the rock, not twenty feet in front of her. She watched it bounce erratically along the rough surface and quickly stop. It almost rolled into the water. She looked into the foliage from where it had come and saw the palm fronds flickering in the breeze.

"Who are you and what do you want?" She waited and heard nothing. She wondered how long it would take to run back around the cenote and down the path and all the way back to the Castle. Because this was clearly not her husband. A child playing a game, maybe. A trickster taunting a leper for the fun of it. "You don't scare me."

With her heart banging against her ribs and her knees wobbling like a stack of empty cans, she lifted the dress and reached into her pocket. She let the dress drop back down, then took her first step toward the round white thing. Halfway there she could see that it was almost certainly a sheet of paper, wadded up tightly. She thought she saw dark markings on the wrinkled facets, letters perhaps or small portions of a larger drawing. But they might be creases. The wad teetered in the breeze.

She stood over it and looked into the jungle, but saw no one. She looked behind her. She looked up into the trees. Then she knelt and with her free hand picked up the paper and stood back up straight. She unfurled it without looking down, alert to the world around her. When it was flat and open she glanced at it and knew what it was.

"Did I do a good drawing of your map?"

She searched for the owner of the voice and it took her a moment to find him. Saturnino stood in the jungle, dressed in camouflage, his face painted like foliage. He stepped into a small clearing and she saw that he had a machete slung over one shoulder and an a.s.sault rifle over the other and a proud smile on his face, teeth yellow and lips red against the face paint.

31.

ERIN'S WORLD WENT ELECTRIC GREEN-the man she was looking at, the trees behind him, the sky behind the trees. All a green mirage, luminescent and flickering like neon losing its charge. She thought she was going to faint. "I knew you'd been in my room."

"As head of security. Yes, of course."

"Where is he?"

"He is not here. Sadly."

"Did you kill him?"

"He did not arrive. I waited and watched. Hour after hour. I brought food and water and cocaine for alertness and rum for to be relaxed. There are rumors of a battle with the Zetas and an arrest by the Army. Gringos are said to be involved. But there are rumors of everything in Mexico. Your husband has failed you again, and this is factual. That's why I am very happy to be seeing you."

Saturnino had powdered his hair green, as well as the bandage at the hairline of his forehead. His blue eyes shone brightly against the makeup. With the weapons and war paint Saturnino looked like some Pacific fighter left behind in World War II, she thought, or an actor in an action movie.

"They said you were damaged," she said. "They said you were behaving strangely and sleeping all the time and speaking some language no one knew but you. They said you didn't recognize anyone."

"But they are superst.i.tious, Mexicans. The flashlight knocked me out. Yes. The craneo is somewhat broken. It still hurts. I hear voices when there are not people. I hear music when there is no music. I have seen eight ghosts, one bruja and one chupacabra. But I still have my very intelligent brain."

"Oh."

Saturnino brushed through the trees and walked around another then onto the wide rock rim of the cenote where Erin stood. She was bad at judging distance but he did not raise his voice when he spoke and she heard him clearly in the jungle stillness.

"You don't look so much like a leper. They wear sandals not the athletic shoes. They look at the ground and walk slow. You are very much more beautiful. The map I found easy. The bed is a popular hiding place. I took a picture of the map and put the map under the bed. So you would not alarm. Then I drew the map on the paper."

"You're a clever one."

"This is a joke of me?"

"Nothing in the world about you is funny, Saturnino."

"What is that in your hand?"

"The map."

"No. The s.h.i.+ning gun. What is this gun?"

"It's the Cowboy Defender."

"Cowboy Defender! Is very deadly?"

"So they say."

"Do you know how to shoot it?"

"I fired it at a paper target."

"Does it recoil very much?"

"Really jumps."

"The bullets are what design?"