Little Deaths, page 17
‘Oh yes,’ she said, imagining Cleis lying face down in front of her, moonlight on her buttocks. ‘Oh yes.’
She crouched down, crooning, leaning over the post, palms resting on the bunk, feet braced on the cool dirt floor. She began to lower herself.
The door creaked open. Jane froze. Something behind her coughed the tight throaty cough of a jaguar; another drop of milky juice ran down her thigh. The animal behind her rumbled deep in its chest. Jane did not dare turn around. It rumbled again: Don’t stop. Her vulva was hot and slick and her heart thundered. The cough behind her was closer, tighter, threatening: Do it now.
Jane licked her lips, felt the golden eyes travelling up her achilles, her calves; the back of her knees, the tendons in her thighs, the cheeks of her bottom. She dare not turn, and she dare not disobey, nor did she want to.
‘Ah,’ she said softly and laid her cheek on the sheet. Between Cleis’s shoulder blades. Touched the rumpled blanket above her head. Cleis’s rough curls. And lowered herself onto the beautifully smooth oh so lovely rounded and rich wood. The swell and heat of Cleis. She moved gently. ‘Oh, I love you.’ And she felt breath on her own clenching bottom, the close attention of whatever was behind her, and suddenly she knew who, what, was behind her and loved her, it. ‘Yes, I love you,’ she said, but it was a gasp as she felt the wood round and slick between her legs slide up and down and her breath caught and ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘ah,’ and she was grunting, and then she felt a sharp cool pressure against her shoulder where claws unsheathed and rested, possessive, dimpling the skin, and she was pulling herself up and over that wooden corner, Cleis’s soft plump slippery-now cheek, her face tight with effort, and her breasts flattened on the bed as she thrust and her chin strained forward and the muscles under her skin pumped and relaxed and sweat ran down her legs and the room was full of a rumbling purr. Fur brushed her back and she was pressed into the bed by an enormous weight, a weight with careful claws, and the heat between her and the wood was bubbling up in her bones and ‘Ah!’ she shouted, ‘ah!’ hardly able to breathe, and could not stop, not now not now, and she humped and rocked and grunted until she shuddered and screamed and opened and pushed and came, curling around the bunk, around Cleis, like a fist. Sweat ran from her in rivers; a pulse in her temple thumped.
Claws slid back into their sheaths, the heat and weight withdrew. A throaty rumble: Don’t move. And then it was gone.
Jane buried her face in the damp sheets that smelled of Cleis, that smelled of her and Cleis, and cried. I don’t know where I’ve been, Cleis had said, when I change back, I remember very little.
When Jane woke up, Cleis was fast asleep in her bunk.
The mid-morning sun poured like buttermilk over Jane where she knelt on the turf before the glyph wall.
What is happening to me?
She rested her fingertips on the glyphs. ‘What do you really say?’ she whispered.
She was alone. Cleis had gone into the forest that morning, saying she wanted to examine the area for evidence of fruit tree cultivation.
She found herself standing by the fall, staring into the sheeting water, mind empty.
Wake up! she told herself fiercely. Think. Don’t let this just happen to you … She jumped fully clothed into the water.
She bobbed back to the surface, gasping. It was cold. Good. She swam back to the bank, climbed out just long enough to strip off her sodden clothes.
She did not even think about whether or not anyone might be watching.
She dived back in and swam in a fast crawl to the waterfall, let it thunder on her head for a moment; swam again.
This is real, she told herself. This: sun, water, air. Not dreams, not Cleis’s delusions.
She swam until she was exhausted, then climbed out onto the bank and lay in the sun. She fell asleep.
When she woke, the memory of the dream, the soreness between her legs, was still vivid. She sighed. Her rational mind told her one thing,’ all my needs, all the evidence, told her another. Which did she want to be real? She did not know.
Her clothes had dried in a wrinkled pile. Jane shook them out one by one and put them back on.
The inside of the shack was hotter than the outside. Cleis had been cooking.
‘Here,’ she said, and handed Jane a tin plate. ‘Beans and tortillas and fresh com. Let’s eat outside.’
Jane wondered where the food had come from, but obeyed silently. Cleis seemed different. Cheerful. Jane wondered if it was anything to do with last night, felt the world spin a little. A dream. It had been a dream.
They sat very close together on the step, arms brushing against each other as they ate. Jane watched the small muscles along Cleis’s forearm ripple as she chased beans with her fork, wiped at the juice with her tortilla. Her arms seemed thicker, the muscles more solid than they had been. Jane wondered if that was a result of pregnancy. Women plumped out a little, didn’t they? She studied Cleis. Not long ago her muscles had been long and flat, face hollow as-though the intensity of her concentration burned away all subcutaneous fat. Her eyes had peered bright from dark hollows. Now she seemed squarer, stronger, more lithe.
‘I’d like to take more pictures of you.’
‘You already have all the pictures you’ll need for that article.’
Jane had almost forgotten the reason she had come to Belize. She felt as though she had always been here, always eaten from tin plates and drunk rum with Cleis. ‘I didn’t mean that. I mean of you, as you … as your pregnancy develops. I want to document your changes.’
Changes. The word hung in the air between them.
‘Ow!’ A sharp pain shot through Jane’s left breast. ‘Christ!’ Another shooting pain jerked her arm, sending the tin plate flying, beans spattering on Cleis’s shorts. Cleis jumped to her feet. Jane clapped a hand to the fire in her breast.
‘Move your hand.’ All Jane could do was gasp. ‘Move your hand, Jane. I need to see.’
But Jane was scared. She did not know what was happening, was afraid to see. ‘It hurts!’
‘Move your hand.’ This time Jane let Cleis move her hand away, did not protest as she unbuttoned her shirt. She turned her head away as Cleis sucked in her breath.
‘What is it?’
‘Botfly. It’s eating its way out of your breast.’
‘Get it out! Get it out!’ Jane wanted to rip at her breast, at the thing that was eating her flesh, but Cleis was holding her hands.
‘Listen to me. Fasten up your shirt again. It’s not big. There won’t be any permanent damage, but I have to go get something. Can you do that?’
Jane nodded, thinking Cleis meant to get something from the shack. But Cleis set off down the track that led to the village. ‘Wait!’
‘I won’t be long. Be brave, bonita.’
Jane sat with her breast cupped in her hand. Bonita.
It must have been from that mosquito bite she got the day Cleis had broken her arm. The egg of a botfly had hatched on her skin and burrowed its way down into her breast. Now it was big enough to need food. It would stay in her breast, feeding on her flesh, breathing through the hole it would chew through her skin, until it was large enough to hatch into the botfly. Unless they could get it out. The pain was excruciating.
Bonita.
Cleis returned, slightly out of breath and slick with sweat.
‘Chew this.’ She held out a large dried leaf.
‘Where did you get it?’ Cleis just looked at her. Ixbalum, of course. ‘What is it?’
‘Tobacco.’
‘Tobacco? What good will that do? That won’t take away the pain!’
‘It’s not for the pain. Just chew it.’ Cleis tore off a piece, held it out. Jane took it, reluctantly, put it in her mouth, chewed gingerly.’
‘Tastes terrible.’
‘Just chew. Don’t swallow. No, chew some more.’ Cleis put down the rest of the leaf and started to unbutton Jane’s shirt again. Jane watched her, saw the way the skin around her eyes was wrinkled in concentration, saw the faint sparkle of perspiration on her lip. Jane wondered how those long brown hands would feel wrapped around her breasts. She could feel her colour rising. She was afraid that her nipples would harden. She cleared her throat. ‘How does it look?’
‘See for yourself.’
Jane, still chewing, looked. There was a hole, no bigger than the knob on her watch, about three inches right of her nipple. So small for so much pain.
Cleis held out her hand. ‘Spit it out.’ Jane did, feeling a little self-conscious. Cleis pinched off a tiny clump of soggy pulp and rolled it between the strong fingers of her right hand. ‘This might hurt.’ She put her left hand on Jane’s breast, one finger on each side of the hole, then spread them slightly, so that the pink under her nails turned white and the larva’s breathing hole stretched open. Her fingers were very gentle, very precise. Very human. Cleis plugged the hole neatly with the tobacco. ‘Very brave, bonita. The nicotine will kill it. Then we’ll pull it out with a pin.’ They watched each other’s faces as Cleis began to fasten Jane’s shirt again, then hesitated. Cleis’s eyes were very dark, and a vein in her throat pulsed.
Jane panicked. ‘The food was nice. Thank you.’
Cleis studied her a moment, then half turned away. ‘Don’t thank me, thank our mysterious benefactor. When I got back this afternoon, I found a little pile of stuff, tortillas, com, fresh fruit for later, on the doorstep.’
Jane closed her eyes against sudden nausea as the real world threatened to come unglued.
Cleis, still not looking at her, did not notice. ‘They’ve probably finally figured out we’re not burning-eyed fanatics clutching bowdlerized Bibles in one hand and McDonald’s franchises in the other.’
Jane nodded, as though she agreed, but she knew the food was a gift, to their new god.
Every afternoon when they got back from the site there was something: sometimes fruit, or a plucked chicken; eggs; once a clay pot full of some sticky alcoholic beverage. They drank that on the night Cleis used a pin to pull the plug of tobacco, black now, from Jane’s breast, and then teased out the botfly larva. Jane held the pin with the skewered larva over the gas ring until it was ashes. She had bad dreams that night, dreams of being eaten alive by wriggling maggots, but when she woke up, Cleis was there. ‘You killed it Jane. It’s dead.’
Most nights, Jane woke up to find Cleis gone. She did not speak of it. Don’t reinforce the madness, she told herself, but sometimes she wondered whose madness. She felt as though she were being sucked into an increasingly angled world, where the beliefs of Cleis and Ixbalum and the villagers, the evidence of forest and ruin, all made sense, if only she would let go of everything that made her sane. Everything that made her human.
The forest is a siren, Cleis had said, and Jane could hear it singing, day and night.
Cleis was changing, spending more and more time in her own world, content to drowse on the warm, sunlit terraces, or stare off into the distance while Jane worked.
Perhaps it was her pregnancy. Jane did not know much about the process, but Cleis grew visibly more pregnant every day, which she did not think was normal.
‘We should take you to Benque Viejo for a check-up,’ she said one afternoon when Cleis was waking from a nap. ‘You’re too big for four months.’
Cleis shrugged. ‘The process is being accelerated. Jaguar gestation is only three months.’
For the first time in her life, Jane deliberately broke an expensive piece of equipment: she threw the camera she was using against a rock and did not bother to pick up the pieces.
Now when Jane woke up in the mornings she could taste the damp in the air, a different damp, cold, spelling the end of their time here.
Cleis seemed to smell it too. She became restless, always moving about, standing up two minutes after she sat down. She was eating less and less, and barely bothered to listen when Jane told her she should eat, for her own health and her child’s. Sometimes Jane would come back from the site and find Cleis staring at something—a pen, the stove—as though it were utterly alien.
Cleis began to stay away for longer stretches: all night, then twenty-four hours.
‘Why?’ Jane wanted to know. ‘Why are you doing this?’
‘I can’t help it. It … Everything is so simple out there. I don’t need to worry about always having to be better than everyone else just to stay in place. I smell the green and it’s like opium. It makes me forget.’
And Jane knew she was losing her.
Four days later, Cleis disappeared.
She did not come home one night, or the next day. One night stretched to two, then a week. Jane thought she would go mad. She searched the jungle by day, left messages on rocks and carved words on trees with a knife. She cooked every night, hoping the smell of food would draw Cleis back.
She still went to the site to take pictures. There were probably a hundred thousand glyphs, some of which would not survive another rainy season. And there was always wildlife to photograph. If she just kept taking pictures, Cleis would come back. She would. They would go back to New Mexico together, and Jane would alternately help Cleis put together her notes and visual evidence, and work on a book of photographs of Belize. Everything would turn out all right. She just had to make sure she had everything done for when Cleis returned, before the rains.
One day, walking through the trees with her camera in search of a purple-throated hummingbird, Jane heard a strange noise. A pattering. Something cold hit her face, then her leg, her shoulder. All around her leaves started to bounce, and the stem of a bromeliad trembled as it filled. The patter became a rush.
Rain.
Rivulets of the stuff began to run down the trunk at her back and the rush became a hiss. There was too much water for the forest to absorb and within seconds there was a muddy brown stream running past her feet. A leaf floated past, with a spider balanced on it, as though it were a life raft.
One week became two, then three. Jane wandered in the rain, imagining Cleis as a jaguar, drinking from the new pools, licking rain drops from her whiskers. Jane no longer left written messages, only her scent, and still Cleis did not come.
One night, something woke Jane. She sat up, listened: the rain had stopped. She got up, went outside. All around the shack there were jaguar tracks pressed into the mud.
‘Cleis?’ But she whispered, afraid. The windows of her shack were screen, and the door flimsy. There were many jaguars in the forest.
When she woke again in the morning, the rain was thrumming steadily on the tin roof. She sighed, pulled on a long shirt and opened the door to take a look at the world.
There, curled in the mud, naked and still, was Cleis. Jane stood in the open doorway, unable to move, throat tight. Then she ran down the steps and knelt beside her. Cleis’s hair was reddish brown with mud and a large scratch stretched over her ribs. She looked nine months pregnant.
‘Cleis?’ Jane touched her, hesitantly, then jerked back when she felt cold flesh. But Cleis opened her eyes.
Getting her up the steps and into the shack was harder than dragging her down the trail, but Jane managed, eventually. She stripped the covers from Cleis’s bunk so they would not get wet, sat her down. ‘Now you keep still while I put a kettle on.’
Cleis sat like a cold soapstone carving while Jane rubbed her down with a towel and talked about the rain, the hot tea she would make, the photographs she had been taking. After a few minutes, Cleis began to tremble. Jane kept rubbing.
‘That’s right. You’re home now. You’re safe with me.’ The trembling became great rolling shudders. Jane wrapped a clean dry towel around her. ‘You don’t have to worry about anything. I’ll take care of you.’ She stroked Cleis’s hair. ‘While you’ve been gone I’ve been at the site every day, taking pictures. It’s changed with the rains, got more lush.’ Cleis’s eyes were still blank, uncomprehending. ‘The waterfall used to be so clear but now it’s muddy. The other day I saw a turtle sunning itself on the bank …’ She talked on and on, about everything and nothing, until she felt a hot tear on her shoulder. Then she made the tea, guided Cleis’s hand to the cup. Watched until she was sure Cleis would hold the tea without burning herself.
‘Good. Now you drink that all up while I put a fresh sheet on this bunk, and then we’ll get you tucked in nice and cosy and you can sleep for a while.’ Cleis watched her while she made the bed. Her eyes were deep sunk, surrounded by grainy brown circles the colour of tannin. ‘There. Everything will look better after some sleep.’
In sleep, Cleis looked fragile. Her eyelids were delicate with purples: lavender, indigo, violet. Her face was drawn, leached of colour; a kind of dirty tan. She had kicked the sheet down to her waist and Jane could see that her breasts were a different shape.
She would give birth soon.
But that’s impossible.
Jane sighed. She no longer knew what was possible and what was not. All that mattered was that Cleis had come back. She stroked the lean hand lying on top of the sheet. The fingernails were filthy now, and ragged, but Jane saw only the way that hand had opened her shirt, weeks ago, had gently moved away her own hand, had made her feel better.
She lifted the hand and kissed it. ‘Oh, I have missed you.’ Cleis slept on. ‘As soon as you’re well enough, we’ll leave this place.’
