T. Parker: The Jaguar

First there was the white sand road, then a stretch of freshly paved asphalt. The road wound through the jungle away from the lagoon. She tried to reckon directions by the sun but it was straight overhead and defiantly still. There were few road signs and these were hand-painted and announced small hotels or cabanas for rent, eco-tours, fishing charters, ruins. The man drove fast and he gave no quarter to the other vehicles on the narrow road. Erin watched for a state or highway sign. Quintana Roo. Good. Good for what? She turned and saw that the silver Denali and the black Tahoe that had started the drive with them were still in place behind. Soon the signs vanished and there was nothing but the hunched shoulders of the jungle and the curve of road.

Heriberto turned and looked at her. “You will see that there is almost no wind now. This means a hurricane is coming. On the news they say in four days. There will be much rain.”

“Good thing I packed the serape.”

“Don’t be afraid.”

“Why would I be afraid? Because you invaded my home and beat my husband and want to skin me? Because of your guns and the smell of your dead men? No fears here, none at all.”

“It is good that you fight fear with anger. Anger is like lifting a blanket from your eyes.”

“What shit.”

“Now you are begin to see the real world.”

They turned off the highway and onto a smaller asphalt road that brought them to a guard gate manned by soldiers in green camo. They were young and their weapons were strapped to their shoulders and two of them approached as Heriberto rolled to a stop and lowered his window. Erin saw a large stone-and-brass sign announcing the RESERVA DE LA BIOSFERA DE KOHUNLICH and the yellow-and-black striped barrier across the road. Heriberto and the young soldier talked for a moment, then the barrier lifted and they drove through. Erin turned and saw the vehicles behind them stopped at the gate, the arm lowered again.

Later they turned off onto a white-sand trail and when they came to a streambed the Suburban passed through it easily with the water swooshing up into the wheel wells. Just past the stream was a gate that Heriberto unlocked with a key and relocked after the Suburban and the two other vehicles had passed through. After that the road became wider and the land more hilly and they passed four more locked gates. Not a single vehicle came or passed them. Heriberto made a call on a satellite phone each time they went through a gate. Erin couldn’t hear what he said. She saw an iguana napping on a log and a monkey striding upon the high branches of a tree and a small wild pig watching them from the jungle shade. She wiped away the tears running from her eyes but she did not make a sound.

They pulled up one last steep grade and at the top was another gate and three armed men standing outside a guardhouse. They wore the same varied clothing and body armor that her captors wore but no helmets or face coverings. The front windows went down and the three men took turns chattering away with Heriberto and poking their faces in to look back at her.

They rode up a long rise overhung with foliage to a level place and stopped. Through the windshield a structure rose, grand, immense, and disheveled. She stepped out of the SUV into the heat and looked up at it. It was a Mexican-Caribbean-Asian mongrel with curving red Chinese roof beams and turquoise Jamaican storm shutters and many balconies. The balconies had elaborate wrought-iron railings and they slouched, overladen with bright ceramic pots that sprouted flowers. Some of the walls were painted white and fingerprinted by vines long gone, although one entire level was festive yellow and another was lime green. The edifice was loosely v-shaped, with the two wings facing each other to form a colonnaded loggia and courtyard below. It seemed to have grown out of the steep green hills and it looked random and out of plumb, which made its stories hard to count: she saw four then five then four again. It seemed important to get that much right, but she could not. Thirty rooms, she wondered. Fifty? The plaster was ancient and spotty and portions of it were crumbling away. The roof was overgrown with trumpet vines and mandevilla and honeysuckle busy with birds that trilled and flitted anxiously.

Erin listened to the crazy notes of the songbirds and wished she was one of them and could fly away. She watched as two women came down a stairway from the third level and walked a path into the jungle. They wore long, loose white dresses and white rebozos that covered their shoulders and heads. One turned to Erin as they walked but her face was lost within the folds of the shawl.

Heriberto appeared beside her and together they looked up at the madly colored extravagance.

“Does it have a name?” she asked.

“El Castillo.”

“The Castle.”

“One of the homes of Benjamin Armenta.”

They walked across the courtyard and up the limestone steps to the porch and faced the massive copper entry doors. Heriberto stepped around her to mutter something into a speaker built into the wall. The doors swung slowly in with a low groan and the hiss of grinding sand.

Inside, the air was cool and smelled of stone, a lavender-scented cleanser, and mildew. They stood in a tall atrium and Erin looked up through four or five stories of layered shadows at the distant ceiling. A black woman in a gray dress and a gray turban pushed a mop across the floor tiles, then stopped to watch her. Erin tried to look her in the eye but could not.

Heriberto barked something at the cleaning woman and Erin heard the backslap of his voice carom upward through the air from wall to wall. Heriberto’s sneakers squeaked and Erin’s bare heels clunked softly on the stone floor.

They climbed the stairs, past the parrots and macaws and toucans perched on the banisters, and the small monkeys clinging to the curtain rods high up, eyeing her widely and dropping seed shells, which floated down to the second-story landing. Here another black woman in gray swept the hulls into a long-handled dustpan and still another mopped up after the animals with the lavender concoction.

On the second-floor landing Erin froze when she saw the black jaguar napping on the shadowed tile. She had never seen a black jaguar and never known they got this big. The chain of its steel collar was staked to a ring in the stone wall but it seemed to her that the cat could pull it out.

“Everyone is afraid of him,” said Heriberto.

“Why? Inside, I mean…why keep him inside?”

“It is a decoration. Benjamin loves all of nature. He gives the cats to friends. Some he sells for profit. This one was captured not too far from here. Sometimes it is useful.”

“Useful for what?”

“Up. Climb, please. Apurate! ”

But Erin stood still, pulling the serape tight around her, looking at the cat’s black flanks moving in the rhythm of sleep. She saw a litter box the size of a small garden, made of gleaming hardwood and filled with beach sand, waiting back in the shadows. The cat suddenly lifted its big sleek head and looked at her with green eyes, then just as quickly dropped back into sleep.

“We can go,” she said.

They climbed to the fourth floor.

“Why is there no landing for the third floor?”

“Because there is no reason to go there.”

“Two women in white dresses came from the third floor outside.”

“So it is.”

He led her halfway down one of three broad hallways and opened a door with a plastic card as in a hotel. She stepped in and without a word he closed the door behind her and she heard the electric lock buzz and hum and clunk. When she yanked on the lever handle it did not move even a fraction of an inch.