Jaguar (2 page)

In his dreams the sidewalk and the road tilted up to become a wall. The wall split apart and concrete chunks rained down; the crack that was left opened to another world a long way off, like a tunnel. Eddie saw light through it, blue light, and another face looking back at him.

The boy at the end of the tunnel was more a shadow than a boy, but Eddie felt like this was his friend, his best friend, something he’d never had before. In the dreams, when he tried to get a look at the boy, the shadow always turned away, but not without a hesitation, and a glance back over his shoulder.

“What’s your name?” Eddie hollered through the crack in one dream, but it came out a dry croak that woke him up, and he didn’t catch the answer.

Reality can destroy the dream, why shouldn’t the dream destroy reality?

—George Moore, from
Silver Departures

The girl Afriqua Lee washed clothes in the ritual manner with her mother downstream from the Roam’s summer camp. They washed ceremonial clothes at streamside four times a year, the way their ancestors had done for four thousand years. She had washed only five garments, and already her back hurt.

“It’s a reminder of the old days, before machines,” her mother said. “You’ll see, it can be fun.”

They called it “staking tent,” a part of the stake-down ritual, and this began Afriqua Lee’s first year on the stream. She listened to the chatting women and their political speculation that would govern the kumpania for the next three months.

This was Afriqua Lee’s sixth spring, and she was mindful of the honor because staking tent was for eight-year-olds. Her mother was so pregnant that the bending over, even for ritual, was impossible, so they let Afriqua Lee come to the streamside early. The baby was due tonight, with the moon.

“Prikasha,” her mother said. “Bad luck. Prikasha and mirame.”

Her mother let her scrub clothes across the face of her favorite flat rock, a white one. Beside her, draped across the bank, a man’s shirt, pants and socks dried in the unforgiving sun. They had belonged to her father. Something had happened to him to make the whole kumpania sad, and her mother said he was gone to the highlands forever.

Afriqua Lee pushed her thick black hair out of her eyes and wished that she’d tied it back like Old Cristina had told her.

“Mama? What’s ‘mirame?’“

“Unclean. The way that blonde gaji stepped over the shadow of your uncle in the city.”

Her mother pulled out her blouse and spat on one of her breasts when she said, “gaji.” This was her greatest display of disgust.

“That outsider woman will be bad luck for your uncle, for the familiyi, for the kumpania and probably even bad luck for the gaji. Bah. A woman should know better than to lift her skirts over a man.”

Again she spat, this time into the stream. Afriqua Lee shook out one of her mother’s red and blue dresses, the one with the quetzal birds in the hem, and handed it back to her. A few big splatters of rain battered the leaves, then quit. Then their little stream moved.

Afriqua Lee pushed out her hands to catch her balance and fell face-first into the shallows. Her wrist hurt but she had to push her face out of the water that slammed up her nose and gagged her.

She tried to stand and fell again, this time across the white rock of the streambed, which was empty of its stream, and crumbling. She heard her mother’s heavy grunt as she hit the rocks beside her.

In that instant the streambed beneath them ripped open lengthwise, and Afriqua Lee hung on to keep from falling through. The smooth wet rocks slid out of her grip and the sides caved in towards her faster than she could scramble out.

“Mama!”

She slipped halfway over the lip of the ravine and stopped in a heartbeat. When she looked down, she didn’t see more rock and mud. When she looked down, she saw a face.

Looking back at her in the sudden silence was a dark-haired, brown-eyed girl. Behind the girl, spread out in white trays, lay a feast of meats and greens.

“Afriqua Lee!”

Someone grabbed her wrist and pulled her back over the lip of the terrible hole.

“Afriqua Lee!”

Old Cristina, had her wrist and yanked her to safety, away from the brown-eyed girl and the incredible feast at the bottom of the world.

“Your mother . . . ,” Cristina gasped, “she’s hurt. Are you all right, girl?”

“Yes, Romni. . . .”

Afriqua Lee saw her mother across the rip in the earth’s hide, across what used to be the creek bed that had torn apart clear to the skirt of the sky.

She remembered thinking that none of this could be so.

Mama!

A scream snapped Afriqua Lee back to the present. Her mother screamed again, and it ended in the kind of frightened cry she’d never heard in a grownup before.

Her mother’s left arm twisted around behind her, the elbow bent backwards. Something pink, like a piece of kindling, poked through a bloody slit. She lay on her back, half covered with wet stones. Her belly rose and fell quickly, and convulsed even after she coughed.

“Holy Martyr,” Cristina whispered, and made the sign of the noose behind her back with her thumb and forefinger. That was when Afriqua Lee became afraid. Old Cristina didn’t swear lightly, and the girl had never seen her making the sign of the noose. That was something for the other old women, the ignorant ones, or for the men who blamed luck for what Cristina called lazy bones.

“Jump to your mother and turn her on her side,” the old woman said. “I’ll get help. We don’t want her stuck there if the water comes back.”

Afriqua Lee closed her eyes, breathed hard a couple of times, and made the jump. She cradled her mother’s head in her arms. Her mother breathed very fast, and though she was dark-skinned, like Afriqua Lee, her lips seemed unnaturally pale. Afriqua Lee got her hands under her mother’s shoulders to turn her, and her mother cried out in pain. Blood crept out the crevasses of the streambed beneath her feet.

“They’re coming,” she told her mother. “Romni Cristina is getting help from the men.”

Getting help from the men.

To ask help of a man was to incur a debt to a man, and no woman of the Roam would allow such a thing, this the girl well knew.

Poor Mama
, she thought,
she must be hurt so bad
. . . .

She stroked her mother’s hair back from her forehead and her hand came back bloody. She had nowhere else to wipe her hand so she used her skirt. Shouts now from the camp, and cries of pain from there, too. She glanced up, towards the camp, and saw the first of the wings hatch out of the old streambed.

Each creature crawled to a rock, stretched out its set of long, delicate wings and walked in a circle until it dried. Then they all rattled skyward and settled into the bushes and trees. By the time the wide-eyed men arrived to carry her mother back to camp, Afriqua Lee could see very little green in the trees. The whole landscape was a seethe of bronze. Though the bugs didn’t attack her, something about the sound that the mass of them made frightened her more than the earthquake and the rip in the earth.

The wide-eyed men swatted the bugs and cursed them. Hundreds of bugs died under their feet by the time they made the trek from streambed to camp. The camp, too, swarmed with bugs. People struggled to right their tipped vans or their collapsed trailers. Martin had been building the stake-down bonfire and fell into it. Hysteria in the camp already shifted its focus to the bugs.

“The Romni Bari’s tent,” one of the men carrying her mother grunted. “The women can care for her there.”

None of them had spoken after seeing her mother, and Afriqua knew this was a very bad sign. Old Cristina held open the door herself, and brushed everyone who entered with cedar branches. The bugs grabbed onto the branches and Afriqua Lee saw them eat the greenery as fast as their strange mouths could work.

Like every mobile residence of the Roam, the old woman’s van was called a tent. Cristina’s was the biggest van, fitted with the glittery electronics that was testimony to her people’s genius, guardian of their wanderings through these dangerous times.

A dozen guests could sleep comfortably in the Romni Bari’s tent, though these days it was home to only three—Cristina, Delphi and her daughter, Afriqua Lee. Only the single men of the Roam still slept in real tents, like the old days, and this only if they were still unmarried at eighteen.

“Show Martita the coffee-maker, girl,” Old Cristina said, and closed off the bedroom where they had taken her mother.

“The women will care for your mama,” little Martita said. “You and I must make coffee and pray.”

Martita, at forty, stood only a head taller than Afriqua Lee, and the girl, like others of the Roam, thought of her as a child, or as a doll that walked and talked. She pulled a step-stool up to the counter as the men clumped to the door.

“Jaguar priests aren’t curse enough,” one of them grumbled.

“Now we have these damned bugs. City supplies will be wiped out, they won’t have nothing to trade us. . . .”

“Maybe we can start a burn, between the stream and the bluff. . . .”

“Look,” said another, “Rachel’s goats eat them. . . .”

But it wasn’t true. The goats only ate the brittle wings. They left the bug bodies writhing to death on the ground. The five goats, pets of the crazy woman, jumped and frisked around the camp, trying to shake off the crawly things.

Her mother shrieked from behind the door, then shrieked again, weaker. Little Martita guided Afriqua Lee towards the stove with a gentle hand at her back.

The coffee didn’t help. The baby came out with the cord wrapped twice around his neck and died. Her mother had already lost too much blood, she died, too. Afriqua Lee did not understand this until much later. She did understand that her mother and the brother she’d never seen went somewhere in the highlands to be with her father. She couldn’t understand why they all left her behind.

By the time Afriqua Lee and Old Cristina stepped out into the new morning sun, the landscape had changed beyond recognition.

“Holy Martyr!” Old Cristina whispered.

The trees stood bare as winter, even the evergreens. The onslaught of the bugs had been too fast and there had been far too many of them. The men tried lighting a few fires, but it didn’t do much good. The trees were stripped anyway, and for every bug they killed a hundred took its place. Today, the surviving kumpania sat around the smoldering stake-down fire in a shocked and uncharacteristic silence.

Fitting tradition, and following the Romni Bari’s instructions, the girl Afriqua Lee approached the fire with her mother’s favorite veil. She threw it about her shoulders in the same careless manner that her mother used.

“My mother and my brother have wed the holy martyr,” she recited. “Help me to celebrate their fortune. Who brings a goat to the feast?”

Tomas stood and dusted off his black work pants.

“I will bring two goats. With twice the dancing, we will have twice the hunger, no?”

A few of the blank faces stirred with smiles, and in moments the evening’s wake was planned. The Roam’s way was to celebrate, not to mourn.

Old Cristina, the Romni Bari, spoke the morning prayer of joy. The children were dismissed from the assembly to their chores, except for Afriqua Lee. Now that she was alone she was an adult of the kumpania. She would settle into a tent with others and accept the ritual that governed her position. In her sixth year she was now her own familia and entitled to a vote in assembly. Her tent would be difficult to earn. She tried to listen, but the talk in her head drowned out the talk around the fire.

“Amate, what does your radio tell us?”

“Rumor, like we hear among ourselves. But some facts, too. The bugs are everywhere, they eat everything that grows. So far, they do not eat animals but maybe they will when they run out of everything else. There are no males or females. Either they are a hybrid, manufactured to destroy crops, or they have another form. . . .”

“You know they are
manufactured!
” Tomas spat out the large word in bitter syllables. “We all know the Jaguar does this, rips the fabric of the world and shovels in garbage to torment us. . . .”

Afriqua watched the firelight, nearly invisible against the morning. The flame-dance that dissolved the log in front of her lulled her into the dream-world. In the dream she conjured the same face she’d seen inside the rip in the earth. This dark-eyed girl was someone she had glimpsed before in her dreams. She saw the girl’s father in a dream once, and wasn’t surprised that he had her own father’s face.

When Afriqua Lee tried to dream her own father, she replayed the day that Amate brought the news that he had darted the archbivy of the jaguar priests. His skull would fry before sunup, of this the adults were certain. Zachary Lee had set out to stop the Jaguar at all cost. He had paid the cost.

She cried out in her dream and woke herself. Someone had carried her to a bed in Old Cristina’s tent. The click and hum of magnetic servos lulled her back to slumber.

Afriqua Lee was too exhausted to get out of her clothes before sleep caught her. She tried to dream the dark-eyed girl, but that pathway would not open. Instead, she dreamed that the Jaguar’s men came to the Roam and branded the grownups, Tomas and Maryka, and the child Nicola on the back of their right hands. Afriqua Lee felt the pain herself, as each one of them was marked. She would never forget the pain, the stench of their skin as the butterfly sign hissed into the backs of their hands. She saved herself in this dream when she made the branding-iron melt before it touched her own skin. It formed a beautiful silver glove nearly too bright to behold.

Now I have them by the dreams,
a voice echoed in her head.

Afriqua Lee whimpered in her sleep, and woke herself. For a minute she didn’t know where she was. She recognized the Romni Bari’s tent, and lay back on her pillow.

She was frightened that a voice came into her dream without a face on it. As she slipped back to sleep, she felt Cristina’s hand on her brow and heard her whisper, “It’s just a dream, little one. Old Cristina won’t let nothing get you.”