When they were on the street again, Paz called the restaurant and asked Yolanda to fall by the Grove and give them a lift home. The lunch rush would be over by now. He rarely exercised his feudal powers in this way, but he felt it was a special circumstance, his daughter being pursued by a…whatever, and besides Yolanda was always ready to do anything for Jimmy. More shameless manipulation added to Paz’s heavy score.
Yolanda arrived in her battered white Toyota pickup truck. They all squeezed into the front seat, and Paz was glad that he had Amelia as flesh insulation between his thigh and Yolanda’s lush brown one, bared by her pink shorts. Yolanda was a reformed bad girl, a mélange of the races and the heartthrob of all the younger waiters and staff, although she had eyes only for the unobtainable Jimmy. This often happened in the restaurant business, and many other sorts of business as well; Paz didn’t take it personally. He flirted but did not (despite his tales to his wife) actually grab ass. They talked restaurant on the way home, with Amelia uncharacteristically silent. When they reached the house in South Miami, the girl darted from the truck and into the house without a good-bye.
“Something wrong?” asked Yolanda.
Paz shrugged. “Just growing pains. I’ll see you at the place later this week, I guess.”
“They caught that guy already? I mean the one that…”
“They think so,” Paz said, and with a wave turned up the walk to his house.
Entering his bedroom, he was relieved to observe signs of life in his spouse. She blinked, rubbed her eyes, her face, stretched, said, “Oh, God. I fell asleep. What time is it?”
“A little past four.”
She struggled into a sitting position against the headboard. “I should call the hospital, see if I still have a job.”
“You’re cool. I talked to Kemmelman. Apparently it happens all the time. I mean people in the ER losing it. It’s no biggie.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You talked to Kemmelman aboutme? When was this?”
“I don’t know-yesterday morning, I think.”
“Yesterday morning? Jimmy, what’re you talking about?”
“Lola, it’s a little past four onWednesday. You’ve been out for over forty-eight hours.”
The suspicion on her face turned to stunned astonishment. “That’s impossible.”
“But true. Did you have any dreams?”
Her eyes flicked away from his. He moved his head to catch them again. “No,” she said, “not that I can recall.”
“Good. But you were having dreams before, weren’t you?”
“I guess. What does this have to do-”
“No, not ‘I guess,’ Lola. You were having nightmares every night, just like me and just like Amy. You couldn’t sleep at all, and it made you crazy. Now, let me use my magic powers to tell you what your dreams were about. I don’t know the details, but they were all about Amelia. A big jaguar was going to eat her, and even though you wanted to stop it, it made sense that she was going to get eaten, you thought it was a good thing. That’s what made it so horrible. Same dream every night, night after night.”
He watched her closely, her mouth working, her eyes darting around. “Am I right?” he demanded.
A nod. “I thought I was going crazy.”
“Not crazy, no,” he said and sat on the bed, enfolding her in his arms. “Look, I know you don’t buy this stuff, but here it is. These are the observable facts. One: three members of this family were having nightmares on the same subject. Two: a couple of rich Cubans, including my father, have been murdered, and the killer seems to be a very large cat-”
“What? You know this? The police think…?”
“I know it. The police just want it to be a regular revenge killing. Let me finish. Three: there’s a South American Indian in town, who claims to be able to turn himself into a jaguar. This Indian has been stalking Amelia. I mean physically. I’ve observed this myself on one occasion, at the beach, and he’s been hanging out in the big tree at her school. She was talking to him and passing him Fritos. Four: at my mother’silé, hersantero predicted that Amy would be in danger from a big animal of some kind.”
“Jimmy, this is crazy-”
“Shh! I know. The last thing is that the jaguar dreams of all three of us have stopped, because I got my mom to crank out some protective charms,enkangues. One of them’s under Amy’s bed, one of them’s around my neck, and the other is under here.” He patted the bed.
She pulled away from him and stared. She looked like she was about to cry. “I can’t believe that. There’s some other explanation.”
“You keep saying that. I tell you what, in the interests of science, we’ll take theenkangue away and see if you have the dream again. It’s only fair to advise you, though, that Eleggua won’t like it when you reject his gift. He’s the guardian of the ways between this world and the dream world. So it might not work again. Want to try?”
Now she let out a sigh, as if rationality were a gas leaking from a puncture somewhere deep inside her, and fell away from him down to the pillows. She pulled the light blanket up over her face. “What I want is for this not to be happening,” she said.
He tugged the hem of the blanket down so he could see her eyes. “Can’t do that, babe. But I think that if we play this right we can get out from under.”
“Butwhy?” she wailed. “Why is this Indian after Amy? She hasn’t done anything to him, she’s achild, for God’s sake.”
“Yeah, Amelia and me were discussing that just the other day. Isaac was innocent, too, so why did God want to kill him? Innocents die every day, without any ceremony at all. It’s something about the way the world works, patterns of fate we can’t understand. That’s why we have Santería and the rest of all that. And science, of course. But scientific civilization doesn’t seem to be any better at stopping the slaughter of the innocents than voodoo. Probably does worse, when you think about it. There are forces. You can ignore them, pretend they don’t exist, try to control them, or appease them, and hope they won’t notice you. We’re all hobbits, Amelia says. Meanwhile, more to the immediate point, a four-hundred-pound magic jaguar wants to eat our kid.”
“Oh, stop it! You’re scaring me.” She shivered despite herself, despite the coziness of the room.
“Oh, you thinkyou’re scared? I’m fucking petrified.”
“What should we do?” Her voice had gone high, like a child’s, and there was a look on her face that he hadn’t seen there before. What we look like when the patina of materialism cracks and we behold the immemorial terror; he’d been there himself. He grasped her hand and replied, “I’ve been thinking about that. Obviously, my mom is the key player. We’ll get her Santería people in on this and see what they recommend. Until then, I want to stick close to Amelia, so she’s going to have to skip school for a while. The other thing I want to do is talk with Bob Zwick. In fact, I believe I’ll invite him out on the boat tomorrow, with Amelia along, too. We’ll fish.”
“Why Zwick?”
“Because he’s smart and because I want to take one last crack at convincing myself this is all bullshit.”
Cooksey waited until dark and then, with a small khaki bag on his shoulder, he walked down Ingraham to the Providence School. The moon had not risen and it was perfectly black in the shade of the giant fig. Feeling his way, stumbling over roots, he reached the gray column of the main trunk, and cupping his hands around his mouth, he imitated the vocalizations of the hoatzin. Shortly, he heard the cry repeated from above and then a faint rustling sound. Then Moie was standing in front of him, although quite invisible in the utter darkness.
“That was a very good hoatzin, Cooksey,” said Moie. “For a moment, I thought I was dreaming, or that I had flown back to my home.”
“Thank you. I thought I might be a little out of practice. I’m happy to see that the police have not caught you yet.”