have none. I am the last of my people who can do this, and it would be very strange if you could also do it. If we had many hands of seasons, perhaps I could teach you, but we don’t. My time in the land of the dead is nearly over.”
“Are you going home?”
“I don’t think so. Being with so many dead people is harder than I thought it would be. Father Tim was right-you are as many as the leaves on the trees. If one dies, another takes his place. And I feel myaryu’t draining out, like water from a gourd with the small crack in it. It’s hard to remain a human being without real people around me.”
“You could go home. I bet Cooksey could get you back. You wouldn’t have to paddle your canoe either.”
“I know this. And it would make me happy to go home, as Cooksey has told me, in the flying canoe of the wai’ichuranan. But now I am part, and Jaguar is part of a…a part of a…thing. I could say the word, but even if you knew what it meant, you wouldn’t know, because there is no place to hold it in the minds of the dead people. It is like a place where many, many paths come together, and the choice made there determines what roads we travel and everything that will or won’t happen to us after we take that road. And also for some reason Jaguar wishes to take this girl-that’s part of the…thing. Only this one girl. When I first saw you, I thought that you were the one that was necessary, but it’s not so. Then I thought perhaps because she is the grandchild of the man that Jaguar took, Calderon, but that’s not it, either. I’ve served Jaguar all my life, or nearly all, and I still have no understanding of his ways. Why should I? He’s a god and I’m not. I don’t care about that-this is the life I was chosen for. But I’m curious about what he wants with you.”
“Me, too,” said Jenny, who was not particularly curious. Perhaps that was why Jaguar had chosen her. She had often noticed that most of the people she met had some kind of motor in them or a compass-they knew where they were going or what they wanted, but she thought that she had never had anything like that in her, or not a very strong one, whatever it was. From her first memories she had been an inert being, ready to go along with whatever was happening, learning how to vanish as an individual that anyone else was obliged to consider. She had gone along with the various weirdness or blandness of her foster homes, had been docile at school, had agreed cheerfully with whatever the other kids wanted to do, had participated in sex when it was time for that to happen, had picked up the environmental radical business from Kevin and the science business from Cooksey, although she considered this last to be a little different, because it was a lot closer to having something real, a real talent or desire within her void. Now there was another thing inside her, not at present making any demands, but there; and it had something to do with her disease, if it was a disease at all. Moie certainly didn’t think so.
She found he was looking at her with interest, as if at a newly discovered plant. He rarely smiled but now he did, as at a silly joke. She observed for the first time that his incisors had been filed to sharp points. She wondered what was so funny and was about to ask him when bright light flooded the dim scene and she found she was in the hospital room again.
That doctor, the blond one, was filling her field of vision and she had a finger on Jenny’s eye, as if she had been about to pry an eyelid open. Jenny twisted her face away from the annoyance.
“You’re back with us,” said the doctor. “Do you know where you are?”
“A hospital.”
“Right. South Miami Hospital. Do you know your name?”
“Sure. Jenny Simpson. I had a seizure, right?”
“More than one,” Lola Wise said, and asked a number of other questions pertaining to her condition, after which Jenny asked, “Can I go home now?”
“That’s not a good idea, Jenny. You could seize again. We’d like to keep you under observation for a while, see what drugs work best for you and-”
“I don’t want any drugs. Dilantin makes me sick.”
“There are other drugs besides…”
“No. I want to go home.” She sat up in the bed, clumsy with the residue of the seizure and the dream, if it had been a dream. Things still looked strange, the little speckled lights were still flashing, and the doctor’s face looked transparent-no, not exactly transparent, Jenny thought, but like she could see through the mask that she wore in the way that everyone wore a mask, and see her true feelings. The doctor was frightened, she observed, really scared behind the cool veneer. The man and the little girl were absent.
Jenny looked around the small room. “Can I have my clothes?”
“You don’t have any clothes. You were brought in here completely naked. You’d apparently been walking up Dixie Highway that way.”
“Oh, right. I forgot. Well, could you get me some?” Giving her measurements in a rush. “And some flip-flops? I could pay you back, or somebody…”
“You’d be leaving against medical advice. You’d have to sign a form.”
“That’s cool.”
“And the police would like to talk to you,” said Lola. She felt a certain satisfaction at the look on the silly girl’s face when she said this, and immediately found herself cringing with guilt. It is not pleasant for those in the helping professions to have their help spurned, and more often than is supposed, they get even.
“I’ll get some clothes for you,” said Lola the Sucker, and bustled out.
In the hall she found Tito Morales talking with her husband. “She’s all yours,” Lola said and went to the nurses’ station to sign out for an hour of personal time.
“You want in on this?” asked Morales.
“Would it help?”
“I guess. I don’t know, mano, this fucking case…did I tell you they had to let all the Colombians go?”
“No. How the hell did that happen?”
“Garza and Ibanez. They swore up and down that these bastards were all bona fide Mexican businessmen. They showed good Mexican paper and smiled a lot. Meanwhile the federal judge and the assistant U.S. attorney are both Cubans, Garza and Ibanez are both generous contributors to the party all Cubans love, and the rest is history. We got absolutely nothing to hang a local warrant on, so it’shasta la vista, mis amigos, write when you get back to Cali.”
“What if they’re really businessmen?”
Morales gave him an eye roll. “Oh, right! Listen, you didn’t see any of them. You know how you just know when someone’s wrong? Well, these cabrones were as wrong as it gets. The feds were chewing pencils and running around in little circles.”
“What about Hurtado. Don’t they know what he looks like?”
“Of course, but that’s a whole different game. Everyone knows Hurtado is a drug lord, but no one’s ever been able to pin anything on him. The reward is for information leading to arrest and conviction, but there’s no such info. He’s laundered right up to the nipples. Yet another respectable businessman and our Cubans vouch for him, too. Meanwhile, I’m hoping this girl will help us out on the murder-kidnap.”
This the girl did, to an extent. She did not recognize the photos she was shown of the men arrested on Fisher Island, and her descriptions of the three men who had killed Kevin Voss and kidnapped her did not match anyone in whom the police had a current interest. But she recalled where she had been held and its approximate location.
“How did you escape?” asked Paz after she had explained how she had been bound.
“It was hot in there and the tape around one of my wrists was loose enough so I could drag my hand out and there were some tools I could reach. I used a utility knife to cut through the rest of the tape.”
“What were the kidnappers doing while this was going on?”
“They were…they left for a while,” she lied. Paz saw the lie but declined to call her on it. He left then and hung around with Amelia at the nurses’ station until Lola returned, with a don’t-ask look on her face and a Target shopping bag in her mitt. She vanished into Jenny Simpson’s room. Shortly thereafter, Robert Zwick rolled by in a wheelchair, hoisting a cane.
“Still got the foot, I see,” said Paz. “Are you comfortably medicated?”
“Barely. Are you going to drive me home?”
“It might be a while. I have to check out something to do with a police case. The mystic jaguar we were talking about.”
