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This was directed to Garza, who had a nephew in the Miami P.D. and was their source of information in that quarter. Garza shrugged. “The usual stupidity. They’re pla
Calderón forced himself to laugh at this, and after a moment Garza joined him. Ibanez managed to move his face into a grimace that might have passed for jollity if the look in his eyes were ignored. Calderón felt a little better now. Laughing in the face of danger; it was what was expected of a man, after all. And the show of it had done some good, he thought. A table of Cuban businessmen at their ease and laughing; what could be more normal? They finished their coffee, speaking only of other, less contentious affairs. The waiter brought the check in its leather folder and laid it before Ibanez. Garza, however, reached across for it. “My turn,” he said.
But as his sleeve pulled back, Calderón saw to his shock that above his gold Piaget watch he had a thin bracelet of red and white beads. Like every Cuban, Calderón knew what this meant. It signified that the cool and ruthless Cayo Garza had solicited the protection of Shango,orisha of rage and war, and also that the man was a lot more frightened than he let on. Calderón wondered now if Garza knew something that he didn’t about the source of their troubles. A passing thought, this, serving only to lower his respect for the man and convince him all the more that only he himself was in firm control of the situation.
Now it is night and all these people are asleep: Je
Moie is awake as well, in his hammock high in the boughs of the great ficus tree. He has a plastic bottle of water and a small package of Fritos given to him by the little girl. He has never eaten a Frito before but finds them good and finishes the whole package. He likes the salt and the flavor of the corn. When he is a man he enjoys foods other than meat. There is a remarkable amount of meat on the streets of Miami America, he has found, much more than he expected, considering how many dead people there are. If Miami was full of Runiya, they would long ago have eaten all this meat. He believes that thewai’ichuranan have forgotten how to hunt. This is because they have machines that make food like a bird makes eggs. He has seen this with his own eyes.
Now he removes a clay jar from his net bag and sucks some powder into his nostrils. When he feels theyana arrive, he sings the song that opens the barrier between the worlds. Theyana slides him free of his body, as a knife slides the fillet from a fish, and he floats into the dream world. But before he drifts entirely away he recalls, as he often does at this moment, what happened when he first gave theyana to Father Tim. The priest had laughed and would not stop laughing, and Moie was hard-pressed not to join him, although in all the generations since Jaguar gaveyana to First Man, it was not recorded in the memory of the Runiya that anyone had laughed. Usually they were frightened to death the first time.
So later when they returned from the dream world Moie had asked the priest what was so fu
Then Moie understood the difference between even such awai’ichura as Father Tim and himself. When Moie took theyana, he was Jaguar and Jaguar was him and he was part of the life of everything that was-animals, plants, rocks, sky, stars-but Father Tim could only be so in a flickering sort of way, as in some night when the moon was gone and the fire in the hut had died to coals.Through a glass darkly is how Father Tim described the sight he had of his Jan’ichupitaolik, and he said that he had to wait until he came to the land of the dead before he could be like Moie was. Were you not a heathen, Moie, he often said, you would be a saint.
So now it is Jaguar-in-Moie who travels like a vapor through the dream world of Miami. Distances in the dream world are not as they are in the world under the sun, so he is easily able to find all the people he needs to visit. He visits his allies and gives them dreams of strength and power, readying them for the struggle. To his enemies he gives dreams of dread. There are screams in the night in expensive districts; lights go on, pills are consumed in numbers, as is liquor. This is how battle is waged in Moie’s country.
At last he visits the girl, and the father and the mother. Here he finds something very strange. There is atichiri around the child, and not only that, it is one that he doesn’t recognize, an alien entity, but quite powerful. Moie had not realized that the dead people could calltichiri, but apparently it is so. He wonders if this is the same as his discovery that there are different animals living in the land of the dead, or if it is like his mistake about the stars. He will ask Cooksey about this. Meanwhile, it is hard to enter the dreams of the father, and nearly impossible to enter the girl’s dreams. The mother is no problem at all, so he spends the most time there.
He really has no idea why Jaguar desires that he do this, but the desire is as good as a command. Jaguar does many things Moie ca