his chest, as if the energy of the animal can be transferred, like heat to cold.
FACT. This is how heat travels. Warm molecules move faster than cool molecules. Put a warm object on a cool object, and the fast-moving molecules collide with the slow-moving ones, giving up some of their heat to warm the cooler thing.
On the morning of the angry man, I sit on a breathtaking beach while the diver leads a group of tourists underwater. I think I’ll wear my black sundress with pink trim tonight. I think I’ll sit at dinner and tell the diver stories about my life in Los Angeles. The diver likes hearing about the house I recently bought and started renovating. I think I’ll tell him how I keep catching the neighborhood kids peeking into my windows while I’m sanding the wood floors. I’ve been winning the kids over by giving them art supplies to use in the driveway and whispering to the two main culprits that I have a very important job for them: They’re in charge of making sure no one ever, do they understand, never, peeks into my house. Can they handle the job? Yes, yes, they agree, they’re in charge! I think the diver will smile his sweet smile. I think we’ll walk together along the beach. I think I’ll ask the diver about the strange seaweed that reaches out from the water and strangles my feet.
He’ll return tonight, but by the time I see him again: X.
X will mean many things.
X will shift with the shifting tides of the angry man and me.
X will take that horrible turn down the dark dirt road in Maya Beach, and the whole of everything after that will change.
The angry man is somewhere nearby gaining strength and speed, taking on the wild nature of a beast. Soon he will hit me with his full force and break me apart, spin me into a different orbit—parts of me will fall, bit by bit, like broken light tumbling through clouds. Salt burns my chapped lips, but I lick it away unbothered. The palm trees weep, but I can’t hear them. The trees know what is going to happen, and they are bending toward me in sorrow and anticipation. Beside me, the palm trees throw shadows on the sand. Their tears, mixed with the sea’s unhurried salt, fall softly on the chain of events that’s already in motion, nothing to stop what’s coming.
FACT. Adult jaguars are at the top of their food chain. Nothing preys on them in the wild. They’re most active at dusk and dawn. Cubs are born blind. Young cats stay with their mothers up to two years. Afterward, they travel alone.
MYTH. The jaguar got its markings by making paw prints on its skin with the sludge of the earth.
MYTH. Jaguars hold up the sky.
MYTH. The rosettes on a jaguar’s pelt mirror the heavens—rosettes like blooms or broken rings of clouds around stars’ dark eyes. The skin of el jaguar is a blooming sky. The skin is blooming. The skin is the sky, el jaguar, el jaguar.
MYTH. The angry man kicks a grave in the jaguar sanctuary floor, big enough. It’s an early hour when jaguars could be out—there’s only a one-in-seventeen thousand chance he’ll see one—but he keeps a sharp eye for Balam. The man is slow fury as he pushes his things into the handmade pit. First the red woven pouch he stole from the wrinkled Guatemalan lady whose name he can’t remember, memories like money rush out of his life, water at low tide, the pouch empty too long.
He hears frogs from a creek in the sanctuary forest. The frogs make a tremendous noise. He brought his son once to hear these frogs. His son imitated the noise, and the angry man and his son laughed—papa’s big boy—a laugh he hasn’t heard since his boy was taken from home, the government on the angry man’s back. He adds his bandana and T-shirt, drops them in the shallow grave. He is furious with despair in the summer heat. It’s rainy season, more than 60 inches of rain from June to November, sometimes 160. It’s sure to rain today, his body can feel the steam, the rain before it falls. He lays out everything else he brought: a knife, a lighter, the joint he’s about to smoke, a six-pack of Belikin beer, and a rope.
Balam. Jaguar. The ancient Maya worshipped the animal. Their kings were reincarnated as jaguars, and their shamans could transform into the animal, six feet tail to nose, 200 pounds, muscles that run. The angry man is part Maya, part Spanish, part animal, part man, part of his mind, part beyond reason. If he could be anything he’d be Balam—beautiful, rare, worthy of reverence and fear. Desperate, the angry man puts his foot on the rope.
FACT. The jaguar is the third largest cat in the world. The tiger and lion are bigger, but they don’t live in this tropical forest, only the jaguar, along with puma, margay, jaguarundi, and ocelot. Jaguars sometimes use the trails to cross the sanctuary, leaving tracks and scat.
The angry man knows how to spot their tracks, he knows the forest, he’s seen jaguars before, his eyes adjust to them, like elders who see spirits, going beyond sight to see animal mists in the dense green sea.
Balam will appear. The angry man can sense the animal in the basin.
I’m preparing for you, he says. He lets the wind carry the message to Balam.
The angry man sits beneath the tree with his feet in the grave, holds the knife in his right hand, and uncoils the rope with his left. He touches the knife to the rope, like the priest blessing his shoulder when he was a boy, then slides it against the rope lengthwise, as if to sharpen the blade.
He leans back on the thick root of the tree, sticks the tip of his knife in a crack in the root, opens a Belikin, and drinks the lager in several swallows without quenching his thirst. He knows if he harms the forest bad things will happen to him in life and after death; it’s natural law.
Howler monkeys toss nuts from above. The frogs thunder. He finishes the second beer more slowly, tastes it in his throat. The third one is like water, easy, it goes directly to the edge of his rage and dulls it. He squints at the light trying to break through the canopy’s massive ferns and palms. There are powerful things in the forest only wise elders and gods understand. The fourth beer builds his rage back up. He lights the fat joint, inhales deeply, holds the smoke in his mouth. He smokes and drinks until his plan makes sense again.
No more beer, the joint down to a blunt, his mind and heart in sync with disappointment and blame. His ex-wife, the government on his back. They took away his son. If there were a way to capture his boy and cross the Guatemala border he’d do it. His son is his life. They took away his life. The $10,000 fine he was slapped with for holding a joint might as well be $10 million. He won’t go to jail, can’t. He won’t live without his son. He pulls the knife out of the root then plunges the knife in and out of the curve, the foot of the tree, its hard bones.
The canopy shines and shimmers dark to light to dark, plays with his moods. The angry man stumbles to his feet, circles the rope, kicks the empty beer bottles to the grave, and tosses in the lighter. He pulls the knife from the root and stabs the trunk of the tree once, a swift stab to the heart. He leaves the knife there, blade in the meat. He pisses on the side of the tree.
On other visits here, the angry man watched shy heron on the bank of the creek. He drank from the creek and never got sick, his stomach like a riverbed. Snakes, birds, butterflies, and lizards are in the trees and on the ground. The tropical forest is alive, but today he only looks for Balam.
FACT. There are hundreds of species of birds in the basin. Scarlet macaw, king vulture, bat falcon. When the sun blazes the birds rest in the canopy’s shade, tucked among thick layers of leaves.
Carrying
