Michael Gruber: Night of the Jaguar

After more days, there was another great city and then the palm lands turned to swamp and the river divided itself into narrower streams. He let Jaguar guide his direction and one day he dipped his hand into the river and drank and found the water was salt. He had heard from Father Perrin that the sea was salt, and had not really believed it, but now he knew it was so.

He passed mangrove forests and mud flats and ahead lay a flat sheet of water and in the far horizon a brown smudge that he thought must be Miami America. He tied his canoe to a mangrove root and, taking his blowgun, he waded along the edge of the sea. Before long he came to a shallow bay full of feeding flamingos and other seabirds. He shot two flamingos. On the beach he built a big fire and dismembered the birds and scorched their feathers off and then wrapped the meat in palm leaves and mud and buried them in the hot coals. He ate the stringy flesh and drank water from his skin. Then he headed his canoe out into the gently rolling waves.

It took him all day to cross the ocean, and when he got to the other shore, he was mildly surprised to see that America looked very much like San Pedro Casivare. Father Perrin had told him many stories about his home and it was not like this: only a shambling wooden dock, some low shacks among the palm and pepper trees, and black-skinned people going about their business. He dragged his canoe to the sands and went ashore, properly dressed in his feathered shoulder cape and quetzal-feather hat, for he wanted these people to know he was a jampiri and so to be respected. There were some black people standing and sitting in front of a small building and he went up to them and in Spanish said, “Pardon, sirs and madams, is this Miami America?”

They gaped at him. He asked the question again, but they just chattered in a strange tongue and their children surrounded him, staring. A woman ran off down the street and returned with an old yellowish man. This person spoke Spanish. He asked Moie where he came from. From Home, said Moie, and I want to know, is this Miami America, for I have crossed the sea after traveling on many rivers and I have heard it is on the other side of the sea.

The man said, no, it was not Miami, it was the town of Fernandino on the island of Trinidad, and he also said you have not crossed the sea at all, but only the Gulf of Paria. He explained that the sea was much, much bigger and that one could not cross it in a canoe. And would the gentleman like something to drink?

So they sat on chairs in the shade and drank a kind of chicha from bottles, which Moie had not done since he was a boy, and the man, Ezra, told him that he had at one time traveled the whole world, working on the white man’s ships, which were canoes as large as hills, and he knew both Spanish and English, the language they spoke in America, although in Miami they spoke Spanish, too. And he said that if the gentleman wanted to go to Miami, he should go to Port of Spain, north of here, and find a ship and get aboard it secretly at night and hide and it would carry him to Miami. Ezra told him many things about how to do this, and the many dangers involved, for in the old days when he was a sailor he had in this way helped many people go to America, to become rich, as he had become rich working for the ships.

Then Ezra called out, and a woman brought a thing, and Ezra put another shining thing on his face that made his eyes look like a fish’s eyes and studied the thing the woman had brought, which was white as a cloud and rustled like leaves and was covered with little black marks, like dead ants. Moie had seen Father Perrin do the same with the thing he called Bible, which was how he spoke to the dead of his people. Moie waited respectfully while Ezra spoke to the dead and then Ezra smiled and said that the freighter Guyana Castle would leave for Miami in two days with a load of sawn timber. He knew this ship and described it, so that Moie would know it, even at night. Moie thanked him, and Ezra said that it was he that should be grateful, for Moie was the most interesting thing that had happened in Fernandino since the last hurricane. He also said, when you get to Miami, you should get you some clothes, because they would arrest you looking like that. And he explained whatar rest was.

Two nights later, Moie was in his canoe looking up at the rusting black hull of the Guyana Castle. The ship was tied to a long street that went out into the water, and this street was lit with wai’ichura lights that were brighter than the moon at the full, and there were men there standing in front of a small street that led upward into the ship. But Moie was on the other side, on the black, oily water, nearly invisible in the shade of the ship itself. Five lengths of men above him there was a low place on the ship’s side, where he had to climb. No man could climb up that sheer wall, so Moie mixed some powders together from small skin sacks he took from his net bag, and sucked the powders through a tube into his nostrils, and began a low chant. While he chanted he wrapped everything he wanted to take with him in a rope and placed the end of the rope in his mouth. Now his senses changed, expanded, while the part of him that was Moie shrank away. He smelled and heard things humans could not sense. Through different eyes he stared up at the rail far above. A tension built in his hind limbs. There was a fading sensation of rising through the air before he quite vanished to himself.

When he discovered he was Moie once more, he was in darkness deep in the belly of the ship, surrounded by the stink of oil and steam and the more familiar smell of cut wood. Hard shapes pressed against his back and the ship was no longer docked, but moving, her engines a constant throb in his ears and through his whole body. He was exhausted as he always was by such experiences, but he remembered to keep well hidden, and he had the suitcase and his other possessions at hand. After drinking some water from his water skin, he made himself as comfortable as he could amid the pallets of lumber and ate the herbs and started the ritual that would slow his body’s functions down to a level near to death, although he knew his spirit would keep lively enough in a different world.

Silence awakened him, and the absence of motion. He opened his eyes to dim light. They had broken open the hatches at the bow of the ship, and shafts of sunlight made bright pillars there. Moie moved farther astern and lower down, so that the stacked boards were like a dark cliff above him. Machinery clanked and groaned and Moie waited for the night, as Ezra had advised. He was extremely hungry.

The sunlight faded, the noises of unloading ceased, and the only sounds he heard were the fugitive rumbles and clankings of wai’ichura machines. Moie prised a two-by-twelve mahogany plank from its pallet and dragged it behind him as he climbed a ladder. His case was secured to his body with the rope. There was no one on deck. As in Trinidad, the ship was tied lengthwise to a dock, and the way off led past a guard. Moie moved silently to the other side, dropped the plank, and followed it into the warm water. He slid belly-first onto the plank and paddled away toward the lights of the city to the west.

The night was perfectly clear and only a light sea breeze ruffled the surface of the bay. Above in the cloudless black sky Jaguar was waxing, returning from his voyage to Rain. Moie studied the sky and felt his heart seize in his breast. The friendly stars of his home were all gone. The Old Woman, the Otter, the Dolphin, the Snake, all vanished and replaced by a meaningless jumble. It was only with difficulty and the help of Jaguar that he suppressed his panic. The machines of the wai’ichuranan must be mighty indeed if they could rearrange the stars. Still, Jaguar ruled the night, even here, and that was something. He calmed himself and paddled to shore, heading for what looked like a small piece of forest embedded in the great cliff houses of the dead.