The Jaguar Knight
There’s no benefit to waking up with a foot pressed against one’s face, it’s both intimate and impersonal – not to mention distasteful. And so early in the morning. Whose foot, Uriel Tun Macuahuitl was not sure but its stout, calloused nature was impressive. He backed his head away from the foot and squinted over the hem of his hammock.
The passengers hung from the ferry’s rafters, slung together side by side in sardine-like fashion like sacks that sprouted arms, heads and feet. Each hammock sported quirks of that individual’s personality. Some had the fuss of a guest bedroom. Others were utilitarian and many were ragged, wearing the gunge of men recently liberated from a local gold mine. They swayed in unison with the yaw of the ship, their occupants watching the Amazon rainforest chug past and staying put until nature called or there was actually an honest reason to get up.
Juiced up on cane rum, Uriel and a small knot of miners cackled and groused around a card game the night before until the sun rose. At times the play listed toward a fight but Uriel kept his head and eventually whatever hurled insult or reproach simmered down along with the dregs of their hooch.
Portuguese is a funny language, thought Uriel. It fluted off somewhere between French, Spanish and gibberish although he spoke it almost without an accent. His stomach growled and he looked toward the kitchen.
Motoring on a river ferry through the wilds of Brazil had all the benefits of waking up in a jungle paradise without being lost in it. A cacophony of exotic squawks, warbles and unholy titters layered above the diesel chinked murmur of the ship’s engines.
The river was the Rio Madeira and Uriel boarded the ferry a few days before. He nearly missed it. As it cast off its lines he lofted a gym bag over the rail and hopped aboard. The gym bag was unbalanced, one end heavier than the other and it hit the floorboards with a thunk. He was surprised it wasn’t followed by an errant gun shot. If anyone ever had the cojones to ask him if he had a permit for his gun, he would have said it was tattooed on his fist. But no one would ask, he was sure of that.
In the meantime his gun roamed inside the gym bag stuck in a holster and shoved in a sock amongst a couple t-shirts, an extra pair of jeans, a rolled-up hammock, some toiletries and a small sack of stuff he’d been collecting for the past month.
Also in the bag was a small, dog-eared notebook bound with a rubber band. Listed in tight detail were names, addresses, phone numbers, physical descriptions, makes of cars, daily routines and other things that Uriel found important. Things like an Internet cafe named Fora de Lei in Manaus, Brazil. He ran his hand along the back of his neck where a reddened patch of skin displayed a new set of lines and black ink.
Uriel was older than his brother Mikki by several years and rougher around the edges. His shoulders were thicker. Probably from loading bags of cement onto a truck and his legs were stronger, most likely from pushing wheelbarrows of lime along a scaffold. Where Mikki’s eyes might have drifted off and settled on a distant horizon line, Uriel’s narrowed with purpose. There was no smoldering smile for Uriel, his mouth was set. The brothers took different paths in their lives but both arrived at similar places.
They inherited more than a few characteristics from their ancestors. With a bag of cement over Uriel’s shoulder, he was an Aztec artisan climbing a pyramid to chisel a serpent or head-dressed king into a stone rampart. Another characteristic was his father’s temper which had all the charm of a machete in the freezer. Dust away the lime and noble fury, however, and they were men who found art in their craft and enjoyed a clever rhyme in a stone garden as much as any other Jaguar Knight.
Ask Uriel about a Jaguar Knight and he’d describe a skilled warrior who subdued his antagonists on the battlefield with an ax edged with obsidian. A Jaguar Knight never killed his enemies, he brought them to the temple alive.
Ask Mikki and he’d tell you about a warrior who served the people and priests. He kept the altars alive with the blood that fed the gods who gave them rain that nurtured the crops growing in the fields. But both men would admit that times had changed. One thing Uriel was sure of now, a simple bowl of menudo would cure all that ailed him.
He’d get off in Manaus, a jungle metropolis, the following night. Until then he settled back in his hammock and waited for someone to fire up the galley and make some huevos, rice and beans. Finally he heard the latticed clack of a metal cupboard door as it rolled up off the ship’s kitchen counter. A sleepy cook with a launch of curly black hair bent to light a burner on a propane stove caked with a patina of grease.
He reeled his feet back inside his hammock and wrestled a wave of nausea and nursed a spiking pain in his head. Brazilian gold miners were as tough as a chain-link fence but they stepped lightly around the burly, knuckle-scarred Mexican from Michoacán.
The ache in Uriel’s head eventually receded and he faded toward sleep. A foot hovered just south of his nose, but not the same foot. Underneath him lay the gym bag. Unmolested of course as no one would have dared cross this dozing Jaguar Knight.
The gun lay cold and loaded inside the bag. Beside the gun, a pouch full of roots, eagle claws, lodestones and crystals, babies’ teeth and shriveled pig’s feet steeped in the brume of must and dormant emotion.