The Jaguar Man. Lara Naughton
my first trip to Belize, I returned to Los Angeles to a swarm of bees that had invaded my bedroom. I never saw them alive. By the time I found them, they were already decomposing, hundreds of bees along the windowsill, piles dead on the floor. I have an elementary knowledge of physics, enough to understand if a butterfly flaps its wings in Belize it can cause a storm in Los Angeles, all things connected. As I stepped onto the coarse sand for the first time in Belize, is it possible the energy of my life changed, reverberated in a storm of bees in my bedroom countries away? The bees stained the curtains; they hung by their delicate wings, sticky from the brown sap of their bodies. The bees clung to the walls I’d painted the color of dried palm. Their thick dead smell stung my nose and eyes. Were the bees a signal—beware?
Even though I’m a woman who looks for signs, I sometimes ignore the ones I don’t want to see. I swept up the tiny bodies and wings, scrubbed the walls and windows with an organic cleanser, and called an exterminator who wore a full protective suit and fumigated behind the wall with toxins.
I don’t think about the bees as I sit on the beach with my feet in the Caribbean Sea. The sky hums, darkens, the wind hits my right side and trails across my body, my hair blows into my face no matter how I try to hold it back. I notice how quickly a storm enters the sky here, huge black clouds, plump like a belly, a womb not ready to release. The sea changes from teal to emerald, the waves bigger, capped in white. I don’t know it yet, but the angry man is nearby under this same sky. Rage is building in him, dark like the turning clouds, sharp as a jaguar’s teeth. In a few hours the angry man will unleash his violence on me. It doesn’t occur to me to be afraid in this beautiful place, and if I sense a ripple of the angry man’s life spiraling toward me out of control, I simply accept it as part of the natural landscape, wind and wave.
MYTH. The angry man slides his hand under a waitress’s dress, feels her thick thigh, leans in to breathe her musk. She slaps him and he laughs. Earlier he sat in a room with his ex-wife and her parents, and no one spoke. At the end of the visit he smacked his wife’s ass and left. He loves the smell of a woman. He loves the smell of a woman.
Under the blackening sky, I pray the same prayer I’ve been praying for months: for an experience of love so big I’ll have to change my life to comprehend it. This is a new way of praying for me. I was raised on Catholic prayers, recited them like lists. When I was little, my favorite bedtime prayer was naming the apostles: Peter, Andrew, James, John, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Thomas, James, Simon, Judas the brother of James, and Judas the Traitor. I zipped through the list every night, so proud to have come up with this prayer myself. As an adult, I drifted away from religion. I’m still not in sync with the Catholic Church, but in recent months I’ve been feeling pulled back and found a progressive church with a progressive priest I’m trying to learn from, not about ritual, but about a real relationship with love. This is new for me, too. Growing up, the nuns at school terrified me with the threat of God’s love, how it could take me out of the blue the way it had taken them. “I never thought I’d be a nun. Then one day, I got the calling. You have to be ready, girls. The calling could happen to you.” For years I added to my nightly prayers: Please God, please, please, don’t make me get the calling.
Now I pray for an experience of love so big I’ll have to change my life to comprehend it. I mean romance. I mean with the diver. I ask love to break me open the way I expect the clouds to break open and pour out rain.
Tomorrow the diver plans to take me in a boat to his private caye, a tiny island along the coral reef. I think I’ll snorkel off the edge of the sand and listen for the pirate ghosts he says haunt his island. Belize has a long history of pirates: Peter Wallace, Captain Henry Morgan, Blackbeard, and Jean Lafitte. Armed attackers still ransack tiny islands, so when the diver goes to his caye he shoots a gun at random intervals to warn away the would-be pirates. This appeals to my imagination, and I let myself build it up, wanting and not wanting to feel scared.
I think the diver will return tonight from work and tell me more stories about the corals and sharks. His favorites are the whale sharks, the biggest and friendliest fish in the sea. They grow to sixty feet long and have three hundred rows of tiny teeth inside their cavernous mouths. They could swallow him whole yet if he forced his way through a whale shark’s mouth, the shark would turn its stomach inside out to expel him. Instead, they feed on the tiniest plankton traveling the sea’s currents. The diver wonders if whale sharks take advantage of their colossal size against the microscopic plankton, but he figures whatever created them must have designed them this way on purpose. He’s dived with thousands of whale sharks and knows some of them personally by marks on their bodies, missing dorsal fins, propeller scars from big ships, and tags from researchers. I think he’s like a whale shark, big and playful and gentle.
Imagine breathing underwater, the diver says. That’s a lovely thing.
I never learned to scuba dive. I enjoy hearing about the world that exists below, but I have no desire to strap a tank on my back and dive deep. Even snorkeling gives me pause. I’m a strong swimmer and amazed by the corals, but it makes me uneasy to see all those fish up close, so many of them, and some are big, swimming right next to me. I can’t explain my resistance to fish, but I’ve had it all my life. My grandfather used to take me fishing, and I was always relieved when no fish bit my line. I didn’t want to reel one in, touch it, and see it squirm on the hook. I don’t even eat fish or seafood—the taste, the texture, the smell—no, not for me. I have a private theory that I’m deathly allergic to some type of fish so my body revolts at the mere thought of consuming any. Even so, it’s an awkward theory when I’m dating a man of the sea who lives in a Central American village along the Caribbean coast. I don’t admit this to the diver, but I prefer to swim oblivious to whatever I’m joining in the sea.
Diving is not something anybody should be forced to do, the diver says. It should be something you want to do. You should do it because you feel the urge.
MYTH. The angry man’s mother was from a border town. His father was a Guatemalan cowboy. His abuela washed clothes against a stone in the lake. When he was a child, he helped her some Sundays when most of the other women attended church and the men played soccer. He wanted Abu to himself. He wanted to grow up and escape.
MYTH. The angry man wears a jaguar tooth necklace so that some of the jaguar’s power will rest on 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