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.
Three
In the lobby of the office building, Kevin looked at the list of tenants spread under glass before the guard’s station and was conscious of the guard looking at him. He found a hopeful line on the board and said to his companion, “You have those guys’ names, right?” Blank look. Oh, yeah, Spanish.
“¿Quienes los hombres de Consuela?”More blank. He cursed, and the guard looked at him a little more sharply. “No, ah-¿Como se llaman los hombres malos, los jefes de laConsuela Holdings?”
The brown face registered comprehension and the Indian took from his bag a piece of knotted fiber. As he untied each knot he said a name: Fuentes, Calderón, Garza, Ibanez. Kevin looked at the board. “Okay, there’s an Antonio Fuentes here. Let’s go make some trouble, Tonto.”
They rode up in the elevator to the twenty-third floor. The Indian was very still. Kevin was dancing on the balls of his feet and making a tuneless breathy whistle. When the car stopped, they got out and walked down the hall, looking at doors until they found one that readCONSUELA HOLDINGS,LLC in raised gilded letters. Inside, Kevin looked around and was disappointed in the amenities. His familiarity with world-bestriding firms was limited to what he’d observed in the movies. This place looked cheesier than his father’s office at the bank: a small carpeted area faced by a reception counter. A pretty Cuban secretary with long lavender nails was on the phone when they entered. She looked up and said something into the phone and pressed a button.
“Can I help you?”
“Yeah,” said Kevin, “we want to see Fuentes.” And then the usual business about appointments, and then some shouting and nasty language from Kevin and the threat to call security, and then Kevin grabbed the Indian and went through a door while the receptionist frantically punched numbers into her phone. There was a little hall and at the end of the corridor another door and behind that a large corner office with a view of Biscayne Bay through windows on two sides and a large mahogany desk, behind which sat a small, dark man with dense silver hair and thick horn-rimmed glasses. Kevin got in this man’s face and said what he had come to say, about how they knew what they were doing down in the rain forest, how they were illegally logging the Puxto Reserve, and they were going to let everyone know and make them stop it, and that this man (here he gestured toward the silent Indian) was the proof, he knew all about the illegal logging and they would go to the UN if they had to, they’d boycott, they’d demonstrate…
After three minutes of this, which included a lesson on why people and the fate of the planet were more important than corporate profits, Kevin ran down. The man had not said a word; he just looked at the two of them expressionlessly, his dark eyes showing nothing but a faint ennui, as if he were waiting for a train. Then three big men in blue-gray uniforms came into the office and said they had to leave. Kevin said he wouldn’t leave without a written guarantee that all illegal operations on the Puxto would cease as of this moment, at which point one of the guards grabbed his right elbow and wrist and did something that caused Kevin so much pain that he sank to his knees and had to concentrate to keep from wetting himself. None of the guards touched the Indian, who meekly allowed himself to be led away, while just in front of him, Kevin howled and threatened a host of violent retributions, all of which were beyond his power to accomplish.
He drove back to Coconut Grove in a good deal of pain. His wrist ached, and one of the guards had given him a couple of shots to the kidney in the elevator. Still, he felt good in a way he hadn’t in a long while. The fascists had shown their true colors at last, he had been met with the violence and brutality he had expected, justifying his own fantasies of violence. He observed his wrist on the steering wheel and was gratified to see it red and swelling slightly; he only regretted that no blood had been shed, as he thought there was nothing like a bashed face to elicit the sympathy he considered the key to real political action. As he drove, his clever mind reassembled the events of the recent past into a pattern more favorable to him. He summoned up fear in the face of Fuentes where there had been only contemptuous boredom. In his mind’s ear he heard the man trying to justify his crimes in a whining voice. These Kevin had destroyed in a series of brilliant retorts, which he now composed and polished. The guards had tried to subdue him, but he had used martial arts to send them sprawling; oh, yeah, and the Indian, they had tried to mess with the Indian andhe had avoided their fascistic grasp by means of strange jungle moves, and they had strolled out of there heads high, like a couple of action heroes. He glanced over at the small man sitting silent next to him. That was a problem, if he brought him back to the property they would talk to him, Luna knew Spanish and so did the Professor, which might screw things up. But why bring him back? Who knew what an Indian would do?
Kevin turned off Bayshore onto McFarlane, and almost as soon as he did so, he saw that the display and the rest of the FPA stuff was gone from in front of the library. Clearly the girls had called Scotty, and he’d come by with the truck. He parked anyway and got out of the van. To the Indian he said, “Vámanos, tenemos buscar las mujeres.” He went around and opened the passenger door.
“Come on, man,vamos, you go around that side.Busca allí. ” He gestured so the stupid Indian would know to go around the east side of the library. When he was gone, Kevin went inside the building and looked around for about thirty seconds. Then he got back in the van. Shit, I don’t know where he is, he explained to the people in his head, I went back to the library and you guys were gone and we looked and looked and then he was nowhere, man. He just disappeared. Kevin started the truck and drove off.
They all came running out to meet him when he pulled into the property, although his reception was considerably dampened when they discovered he had lost the Indian. Nor were they much impressed by his story. Luna was especially furious, and she had a mouth on her, too, to which she did not ordinarily give full vent when Rupert was around, but now let fly. He was an irresponsible moron, a lazy, lying, hopeless, sub-asshole piece of shit, who had just wasted practically the best piece of luck they had ever had, an actual witness from the rain forest, someone they could have written articles about, someone who could have appeared with them ontelevision, for God’s sake, a man travels three thousand miles, most of it in a canoe, to save his forest and his people, avoiding untold dangers and who should he run into but the fuckup of the Western world! Thus it went on for what seemed like a long time, with Rupert trying to get a word in edgewise, and Kevin screaming back mindless obscenities, and Scotty looking contemptuous and self-satisfied, and the Professor looking stunned, and the tears running slowly down Jenny’s face until he couldn’t stand it anymore and threw a flowerpot against the wall. In the stunned silence following this act he stomped back to their cottage cursing. Then the sound of the slammed door.