T. Parker - The Jaguar

It was two o’clock when she set the notebook square in the middle of the Yamaha keyboard, the pen inserted at the song so Armenta couldn’t miss it.

Siesta.

A few minutes later Owens came from the lobby into the mixing room and they looked at each other through the soundproof glass.

She showered and put on a pair of lightweight hiking shorts and athletic shoes and an oversized tee with sequined butterflies on it. Again she had the feeling that someone had been in her room but there was no evidence of this. She pulled the Cowboy Defender from inside the toilet tank and dried it over the sink with a hand towel and she hefted it and wondered exactly why she had been unable to use it. She had clearly seen her reasons and opportunities, but she had not been able to even draw the weapon. She dropped it into one of the flapped front pockets and slid the folded fifty-dollar bills into another. Then on hands and knees she reached her hand far under the mattress and came up with the silk swatch containing the map and her instructions. She looked at them one more time to be sure, then she folded and stuffed it into still another pocket of the shorts.

Next she slipped into the loose white leper’s dress that Owens had brought her. In front of the mirror she lifted the white rebozo and settled it over her head and shoulders. She arranged the garments to best hide her hair and face.

At the door she stopped and straightened and took three deep breaths. She remembered her father’s wry cool and tried to harness the grogginess of her fear, to turn it into calm and clarity.

Come to me by moonlight, sugar, she thought. No, come to me by sunshine. Come to me any way you can get here. Any way you can.

She pushed the card into the lock and heard the deadbolt disengage. Buzz, hum, clunk. Music to her ears now. She held the door open with her toe while she reached up under the dress and slid the card key into a pocket of the shorts.

The door shut behind her and made its final sounds. She walked down the hallway purposefully but not quickly. She pushed the button for the elevator and waited, praying that no one would be moving about in the heat of afternoon siesta. Four floors, she thought-just a straight shot for four floors and I can get outside, where the lepers come and go without drawing much attention.

The elevator door opened on two of the black housekeepers, who stopped talking to stare at her wide-eyed. Erin saw the worry in their faces and she saw that they wanted to get away from her, but didn’t know how, so she bowed her head humbly and stepped aside. The two women bustled past her into the vestibule, then the hallway, hurrying down it, then turning for a quick look back at her before turning the first corner.

Once inside the car she considered the maddeningly unlabeled buttons. Six of them, for either four or five stories-no one would clarify which, not even Owens, who had pushed the wrong ones more than once. Erin was fairly sure that the third highest button was for the first floor, not the second highest button, which would logically service the ground floor, allowing for the basement. Owens’s rooms were on the first floor. She went with her memory.

The car was slow as always but it didn’t stop at the second floor and the next thing Erin knew the door had slid open to frame the entryway of the Castle, its grand foyer and majestic iron doors. Sunshine fell from the skylights in the ceiling and dappled the floor around the swordlike shadows of the palms. A small monkey sat on the curtain rod above a casement window, eating sunflower seeds and looking down at her with a frankly doubtful expression.

She strode down the hallway, away from the foyer, and when she came to Owens’s suite she fished the card key from her shorts, looked up and down the hall, then slid it under the door.

Back in the entryway she walked across the tile and pushed against the massive right-side door. The birds shuffled from on high and a monkey screeched softly. The door was heavier than she had imagined and at first she thought it might be locked. But it finally gave, as if in surrender, and she put her shoulder to it and pushed harder. The door swung and gained momentum, towing Erin into the withering Yucatecan heat.

She stopped in the shade of the loggia, stunned by the brightness that lay beyond. She had never felt so conspicuous in her life, even on a stage with a spotlight blinding her. She pulled the rebozo forward over her head. There was an expanse of gravel between the Castle and the jungle and this gravel was raked several times daily by the groundskeepers and as Erin stepped onto it she saw no footprints coming or going, not even the neat tracks of the crabs or lizards that left their trails everywhere, but were almost never seen.

She came to the jungle and stepped right in. Once inside the shade of the trees she stopped and glanced back at the Castle looming in the midday heat. She saw two lepers, women, coming slowly down the outdoor stairway from the third story. A good thing, she thought. She felt like a character in the Old Testament fleeing some cursed place, surrounded by enemies and observed by a jealous and hot-tempered God. A pillar of salt, she thought. Demoniacs. Bloody altars. Dear Lord, get me out of here. Dear duplicitous Bradley, please be waiting.

She turned and ran. She’d forgotten what a pleasure it could be, heat or not, pregnant or not. But what a wild, dislocated feeling it was to be embarking on the most important journey of her life with nothing but the clothes on her back, a leper’s shawl, five-hundred dollars and a gun. Save some energy, she thought. She slowed to a trot, then a fast stride.

The trail was narrow but clear. Tree roots grew the thickness of human arms and they were raised across the path and worn smooth by walkers. The trunks of the ficus trees grew up close to the passageway and the Carrizo cane grew in high walls and choked out the sunlight and the breeze. Erin could hear her shoes crunching on the sand and the roots but she heard no birds or monkeys or even insects, just the gradually fading sound of the Castle’s generators running the siesta air conditioners. She walked fast with long steps, then ran again a short distance, then slowed once more to a walk. For a few strides she held her belly in both hands and talked to her charge: hang in there, hang in there, little baby. You are one tough little guy.

She followed the trail she had taken with Armenta. She recognized a very narrow fork that led right and one that led left and she congratulated herself for keeping to the true path. The passageway got narrower and the roots were raised and knotted higher but she labored over them, holding to the cane stalks for balance and careful not to turn an ankle. Something black and low scurried ahead of her, no more than a blur.

A moment later she stopped and turned and listened. She took a few more steps and stopped again. That feeling of being watched, she thought. She’d had it a million times as a girl, watched or not. She heard a bird twitter and a faint breeze stir the foliage.

She continued. Suddenly she came to a fork that she did not remember. She stopped again. These paths were not minor offshoots but an almost perfect wishbone-two trails just as wide and well worn as the one she was on, each leading away at equally obtuse angles.

She stared, disbelieving. As she scrolled through the memory of her walk to the cenote with Armenta, she had that sinking, breath-robbing realization that she couldn’t remember this place at all. She could remember the silver plate she had carried, and the hard lump of the Cowboy Defender in the pocket of her dress, and the patches of his hair that Armenta had tried to tame with gel, and the silver jewel-studded candlestick he had carried, but she could not remember this junction, this grand and dramatic fork that they had most assuredly negotiated.