“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’sile, her santero 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 the enkangue 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.”
“But why?” she wailed. “Why is this Indian after Amy? She hasn’t done anything to him, she’s a child, 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 Santeria 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 think you’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 Santeria 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.”
“No. A man climbed this tree today. He found my hammock and Father Tim’s bag and took them. I was very close to this man but I made him not look at me. the wai’ichuranan are such bad hunters that it’s a good thing for them that their food comes from machines. Two of them are approaching the tree right now. I think they will catch you.”
“I believe you’re right, but that doesn’t matter. I doubt that they’ll catch you, however. Listen, Moie, thechinitxi have killed the Monkey Boy and have stolen the Firehair Woman. Can you find them and bring her back to me?”
“I can find them, yes. They are south of here and not far. Perhaps I can free her, too. But where she goes after that, I can’t say. She is on her own path, that one.”
“That’s true. Well, go now and do the best you can. And I thank you.”
Cooksey felt the air move against his face and he knew he was alone again in the dark. He removed a flashlight and some equipment from his bag and set to work. Within minutes strong beams of light penetrated the root forest, and Cooksey found himself grabbed, braced against the tree trunk, and frisked by two strong policemen.
“Where’s the Indian?” one demanded.
“I didn’t see any Indian,” said Cooksey, with perfect honesty.
“What are you doing here, then?” the cop asked.
“I am collecting nocturnal insects. This is a fig tree, and I study fig wasps.” Cooksey knew he was a bad liar and so tried always to tell nothing but the truth, although quite often not the entire truth.
Moie has a map in his head showing where to go, but it was not an ordinary map, not a picture of the earth’s surface seen from above, drawn to scale. This map he had made at night, while he flew through the dreams of the dead people. Its landmarks were dread and desire, lust and hatred, love and harmony, and while it is difficult to do, he can generate within his own being a concordance between this world and the streets and buildings where the wai’ichuranan dwell. He trots south at a steady pace along the delightfully smooth rock paths they have in this land. He is naked except for his loincloth, dream pouch, and woven bag. People see him pass down U.S. 1, but when they look to confirm this surprising sight, he is always gone. I thought I saw an Indian running down the highway, they may remark to one another, if there is another, but the second one never saw what the first one had; and if someone alone catches sight of Moie, they tend to forget it very quickly. Every cop in Miami is on the lookout for a lone Indian, but not one of the several officers he passes on his way south pursues him or calls in the sighting.
He finds the building then, with little trouble. Two of the chinitxi are inside it and one is standing in front, in the shadows of a doorway, smoking a cigar and looking around. Moie can also feel the girl within the building. He slips around the back to see if there is a way in.
At the back of the building there is a door that will not open. Moie has observed this of the doors in this land. Sometimes they open and sometimes not, and he has wondered why this is so. It may be, he thinks, that the wai’ichuranan are as bad at making doors as they are at hunting. Near the door are heaps of useful things that the wai’ichuranan have left out for anyone to take: metal, glass, paper, and high stacks of tires. Moie has observed that
