Ararah. Arararararh.
As if it were a signal, Paz felt something move inside his head at the sound, felt his limbs moving to the urging of the Other within, felt the tension of the bow in his hands, the feather against his cheek, felt the twang of the release in his shoulder and his spine.
Jaguar opened his jaws above the child just before the arrow struck him behind his foreleg.
Paz tried to keep his eyes open, but an agency deep in his midbrain forced them shut to avoid registering events that evolution did not permit his brain to process. He recorded a wind and an unidentifiable noise, though, and when he could see again, he saw chaos on the pool deck. A small brown man with a bowl haircut was lying in a pool of blood, coughing blood, with Paz’s long arrow stuck in his side. Zwick was kneeling by his side, rallying long-dormant medical instincts. He took a moment to yell, “Jesus, Paz, why the hell did you do that!”
Lola meanwhile was attending Jenny, who had seized dramatically just as the arrow struck. She frothed at the mouth, her naked body bent into a paraboloid, with only the crown of her head and her heels touching the ground. Paz found himself with an armful of Amelia, who was shrieking and shaking as if she had absolutely rolled in sand spurs. The others were standing around the stricken pair, trying to make themselves useful. Paz carried his girl away to the patio, where he sat down in a chair and held the small body to him, kissing her damp hair and murmuring reassurances. The cries eventually subsided to whooping gasps and then one last sigh, and she said, sobbing still, “I was scared, Daddy.”
“Of course you were. It was very scary. I was scared, too.”
“It was going to eat me up, for real!”
“Yes, it was.”
“Part of me wanted to get eated up and part of me was so scared.”
“Yes, that was your bad dream, wasn’t it? But now it’s over. It can’t hurt you anymore.”
“And it turned into Moie,” she said. “I saw it! Everything in the air was allghizzhy.” She waved her fingers and twisted them around themselves to illustrate just howghizzhy. “And Moie got shot with a arrow.”
“That’s right,” said Paz.
“But he won’t die because he’s good, like Frodo. He gotwounded, didn’t he?”
“Yes. I hope he’ll be all right.”
“And Jenny was being weird and shaking. That was really scary, too. Why was she doing that?”
“She has a sickness that makes her do that. But don’t worry, your mom will take good care of her.”
They sat for a while, Paz’s mind a perfect blank. Then Amelia said, “Could we look at the parrot? And I want a Coke.”
They looked at the parrot. A Coke was found. After some period of innocent fun, which Paz was content to let last for a week, they found a lounger and lay down upon it. All his bones ached. Then Dr. Wise arrived to check on her family. After determining that her daughter was fine, she stood over her husband and said, “You want to tell me what the hell that was all about? Why did you shoot that poor little man?”
“Because what I saw was a very large jaguar just about to bite our daughter’s head off. What did you see?”
“What did I…? Jimmy, I saw what wasthere. We were all sitting around, relaxed after swimming, and this guy strolls out from the dark and Jenny goes over and talks to him like she knew him and the next thing I know, I heard the bow and the guy was lying down with an arrow through him.”
“How is he, by the way?”
“Oh, he’ll probably survive-you seem to have missed the heart. He’s got a sucking chest wound. We clipped the arrow, but they’ll have to extract it in an OR. The ambulance is on the way. Christ, how the hell are we going to explain what happened?”
“Asshole fooling with bow and arrow accidentally shoots friendly visitor from foreign land,” said Paz. “The Miami cops deal with shit like that all the time. I’ll plead guilty, suspended sentence. How’s the redhead?”
“She’s out of seizure and in her bed in the house. I had some Soma in my bag and fed her a couple of caps, and some Xanax. She’ll be down for hours.”
“Good,” said Paz, “and so once again pharmaceuticals solve the problem. You know, Amelia saw the jaguar, too.”
She didn’t quite roll her eyes. “Jimmy, she’s achild. What I don’t like is that you had a hallucination so strong that you nearly killed a human being. Can you understand that? It means you’re notsafe. ”
“Sit down, Lola,” said Paz gently, and she found herself complying. She placed herself at the foot end of the lounger, not touching him. There was something in his eyes, a kind of presence, that she did not recall seeing there before.
He said, “I’ve been racking my brains on this. Why did he want Amelia? Why was she the sacrifice? And why did he think a sacrifice was necessary? And what was the meaning of what he did and what I did?”
“Shooting the Indian?”
“No, I mean my whole involvement in this, becoming made to the orishas, the whole string of events and coincidences that put me in a particular place at a particular time. And, once again, it wasn’t an Indian. It was Jaguar. It was a god or a demigod-a spirit inside an impossible animal. And I see from the look on your face that you’ve completely forgotten the dreams, how you were weeping like a baby because you couldn’t sleep, because Jaguar was in your head telling you stories about howright it was to give your daughter to him, and your whole shelf of drugs couldn’t help you, but a little bag of magic made by an old Cuban lady fixed you up just fine.”
She felt sweat pop out on her forehead and the hair stood stiff on the backs of her arms and on her neck.
“Yeah,” he said, searching her eyes, “nowyou remember. If you want, I’ll take you into the bushes around the pool and you can see the tracks of a huge cat, fresh tracks, and you’ll have to cook up a reasonable explanation forthat, too.”
She said, “So what’syour explanation? Assuming I buy the story.”
“I don’t have one. That’s mypoint. Look, the difference between us is that you think that at the fucking absolute innermost heart of the universe there’s an explanation, a calculation, a formula. I don’t. I think that at the fucking absolute innermost heart of the universe there’s a mystery. And we just saw, at the pool just now, and in this whole thing with Moie, an edge of it we don’t usually see, the stuff we’re not usuallyallowed to see. You’re going to rationalize it away, which is fine, it’s who you are, but I can’t do that. I have to treat it with reverence and look at it with awe. All I can say is, it was a good day. The maiden was saved, and the beast was defeated. Another time it might go the wrong way and I’ll treat that with reverence and awe, too. So are you sorry you married me now? Speaking of the inexplicable.”
“No,” she said, “I’m not. But could you be likein charge of all that stuff? So I don’t have to ever, ever think about it?”
He laughed. “Like taking out the garbage.”
“In a manner of speaking.”
Sirens ensued then, succeeded by paramedics. They whisked Moie off, attended by Lola. After that, the rest of the party, save Cooksey, who had elected to sit with Jenny, drifted back to the patio, where they all had a round of stiff drinks.
“Well, Paz,” said Zwick, “you really know how to throw a party.”
Paz looked around the group. “No one noticed anything strange?” he asked. “Everyone just saw me shoot a harmless Indian?”
“What else were we supposed to see?” asked Beth Morgensen.
Paz ignored her. He was looking at Scotty, who had the appearance of a man recently kicked in the groin. He wouldn’t meet Paz’s gaze. Another one who saw the impossible and wanted to forget it as soon as he could. The other adults had all been scientifically trained to observe only objectively verifiable phenomena.