Night of the Jaguar

 

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To Valentina Barbara Pearl,

luz de mi vida, reina de mi corazón,

and

to the people of Nicaragua, who deserve so much more

 

CONTENTS

 

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Copyright

 

Disdaining kings, we give ourselves our laws to the sound of cannons and of bugle calls. And now, on the sinister behalf of black kings, each Judas is a friend of every Cain.

—Rubén Darío, “To Columbus”

 

PROLOGUE—THE JAGUAR

June 21, 1986

“Say the first part.”

Enrique Cuadra smiles in the dark. He turns his balding head—gleaming under the full moon—and studies his cousin's profile. The hawkish nose and high cheekbones—
El Indio
. Epimenio can barely write his own name, but he never tires of the poems, and asks to hear them each night once they make camp. The three days they've spent tracking the jaguar have taken them high into the selva, the mountain forest that runs from southern Mexico, through their home in Nicaragua, and all the way south to Peru. They've only covered ten miles as the crow flies from Enrique's farm, and then circled, looking for a sign. Any further out and they might run into the Contra. Enrique knows a lot of the hungry, hard-eyed young men who have joined the counterrevolution. They are led by some of the old dictator's Guardia, but the foot soldiers are local boys mostly. He should be in no danger from them. But they would take his shotguns.

Three days away from the coffee finca is more holiday than Enrique's had in years, and he enjoys Epimenio's company. There is an ease between them that is rare between padron and peasant, even when they are related. They spend most of the daylight tracking in companionable silence, then make a small fire, warm a few of the tamales Enrique's young wife prepared, and enjoy the first hours of night talking quietly, like this. Epimenio is fascinated by the notion that he could walk this mountain chain all the way north through Central America and Mexico, America, Canada, and on to the top of the world. He marvels that there are Americans even there, in Alaska. Enrique explained that Americans have a powerful hunger to be in many places, some of them far from home.

“Say it, Enrique.”

“You know it as well as I do,” Enrique says.

“Only the words, you know how to, you know…”

“Recite it.”

“Yes!”

Enrique sits up. “‘Rain, the first creature, even older than the stars, said, “Let there be moss aware of life.” And this was jaguar's skin. But lightning struck its flint, and said, “Add sharp claws.” And a soft tongue licked the cruelty sheathed in its paws.'”

Epimenio Putoy lies on his back in the cool mountain air and smiles. He looks straight at a moon so full his cousin could read the poem from a book—if he needed a page clearer than his memory. It is Epimenio's favorite passage. He has heard it many times on the porch back at Enrique's farm. But out here, high in the Segovias, the two middle-aged men stretched out on horse blankets, the fire just dying embers, their shotguns near to hand, the very creature itself somewhere out there in the Nicaraguan night, Epimenio feels a thrill that the poem never brought before.

“Do you think that's true, Enrique? Can you make skin out of moss?”

“You can if you're a god.”

“But there's just one God.”

“One God with many names, many gods with one Name. We can't know.”

“Father Jerome wouldn't like that.”

“Father Jerome knows what he knows, and we know what we know.”

“And the jaguar knows what she knows.”

“And the jaguar knows what she knows. But you're sure it's a she?”

“She walks a little crooked when nursing. Her paw fits into the closed hand.” Epimenio makes a fist. “The male's fits into the open hand.” He spreads his fingers. “But either way, it's true. The claws are cruel.”

“Cruel to the cow when she killed it. But she doesn't kill out of cruelty. She's nursing little ones of her own, verdad?”

“True. Now say the next part.”

“‘Then the wind, blowing its flute, said, “I give you the rhythmic movements of the breeze.” And it rose and walked like harmony. And jaguar ruled the kingdom of death, undiscerning and blind.'”

Epimenio looks at the moon; he mouths the last lines to himself. “What does that mean, ‘undiscerning'?”

“It means indiscriminate. But in the poem, it means not to care what you hurt.”

“But you said she's not cruel.”

“Not the animal we hunt. The jaguar in the poem is a symbol for powerful things. Kings, dictators, emperors. Those who do not care what they hurt, they…”

Epimenio springs up, flicks his blanket over the embers to smother them, and crouches stock-still. Enrique rolls onto his belly, silently lifts his shotgun. He snaps the safety off; the usually small metallic click is like a thunderclap in the silence. Enrique peers into the dark. The waxy leaves of the dense selva reflect only the moon's silvery sheen. The clearing seems to be an island of light in a doomsday-black sea. He feels exposed, as if caught in a searchlight. Enrique belly-slides next to his cousin, holds his hand up like a claw.
Jaguar
?

Epimenio wags his index finger, points his thumb at his heart, and wiggles two fingers like legs.
No. Men.

Enrique closes his eyes and listens. After a moment he hears something, something mechanical. The faint whine of an engine. A plane? He points to the sky, nods, and points to his ear
: I hear the plane
. Epimenio wags his index finger, points into the darkness, and wiggles his two fingers again:
No. Over there. Men.

Enrique closes his eyes. Listens. Listens. And then, yes, he hears them. Distinctly, but far away: men's voices. Laughing.

 

1

Managua, July 2, 1986

1.

Captain Ajax Montoya had a pain in the ass.

As he drove along the carretera playing Russian roulette with the potholes in the decaying city's streets, it occurred to Ajax that life since he had come down from the mountains was a series of pains in the ass. A chain, a sequence, a succession. He had an abundance of them, a plethora, an actual cornucopia of them.
How doth my ass ache?
—he could shout out the goddamned window of his broke-ass car if the window worked—
Let me count the goddamned ways.

The shrapnel lodged in his tailbone where a mortar round had sown it was the first, original, and perpetual pain, always with him like a schizophrenic conscience that can't stop muttering to itself. That pain was aggravated this morning, like warm breath over hot coals, by the chrome-plated Python holstered down the small of his back. But the aggravation put him in the right frame of mind to deal with the cigarette smugglers. And those sons of bitches had better hope he found them before he smoked his last butt.

He'd had been up for five straight nights reading his thesaurus and smoking one Marlboro Red after another. It was all he had left now—now, nowadays, at the present time, currently. He'd been stone-cold, cold-turkey sober for five days. And that was maybe the biggest pain in the ass he'd had since he was last sober. Four years ago, almost to the day. His impulsive sobriety was accompanied, not surprisingly, by an inability to sleep or to fight off that parched inner voice—demon, fiend!—constantly begging, demanding, imploring
Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! Gimme just the one drink!
Which was why he had taken up reading the goddamned thesaurus all night long in the first place.

He'd begun by reading the dictionary as an antidote—a remedy, a tonic—to that shrill, sleepless voice, but had discovered that he preferred the thesaurus. The dictionary, Ajax found, with its multiple, even contradictory meanings only disoriented him like these Managua streets, which lacked not only identifying street signs, but
names,
and so could only be navigated by landmarks, many of which no longer stood, and so were only known to lifelong residents, one of which he wasn't.

The thesaurus—alternately, conversely, on the other hand, with its long lists of alphabetized synonyms ready to roll off the tongue—the thesaurus seemed more a poem to be recited. He had learned long ago in the mountains that he didn't have to understand a poem to be soothed by it.

Ajax had endured some memorable pains in the ass up in the mountains during the long years of the insurrection: gunshots, jungle rot, malnutrition, malaria. To say nothing of the spies and traitors who had to be endured before they could be found out and executed. Then there had been the loneliness—loneliness as immense and unbroken as the sierra itself. And the boredom, which in the early years had only occasionally been interrupted by bloody, thrilling firefights with the Ogre's Guardia Nacional—and he'd really not cared if he was shooting or being shot at. Then there had been the hours of mind-numbing indoctrination they'd had to absorb and discuss to help forge the New Socialist Men they were supposed to become, in the Worldwide Revolution they were supposed to be part of, even though they'd mostly lived like mice in Cat City.

He'd joined the Frente Sandinista in 1969 when he was only eighteen. That was in what would charitably be called the Sandinistas'
quixotic phase
as they faced off against the longest-ruling dictator and the biggest army in all of Latin America. Ajax had fought alongside them for the next ten ghastly years until the impossible had happened that impossible day in July 1979. Forty-three years of despised, dynastic tyranny fell in a matter of months, and the cruelest army in Central America collapsed into nothingness. General Somoza, the ageless Ogre, was overthrown!

Yet during all those hellish years, no matter how hard the march, how short the rations, how endless the rain, how well-armed the enemy, not once—not once in ten years—had Ajax ever doubted himself, his compañeros, or that he would see Victory or Death. Meaning, no matter what, he had always known what was what. Which was why it troubled him—vexed him, frightened him—that on his third day of sobriety he had begun to lose his mind.

Now, at thirty-six, Life—La Gran Puta of all Putas—presented him with the ultimate dilemma, irony, paradox: remain a drunk and lose his soul, or keep his temperance but lose his mind.

He hit another pothole and the shock shot a needle into his coccyx.
Shit-eating fucking sons of bitches!
This pothole Russian roulette was worse now, in the rainy season. The ruts, plentiful as splinters in the Risen Carpenter's ass, were full of water from last night's tormenta, so he couldn't tell which was a puddle or a pool. His rattletrap Lada magnified the hurt. Its suspensionless frame telegraphed through its springless seat directly to his ass every jolt, pothole, fissure, and bump of the weary city's exhausted streets.