The Jaguar Hunter Read online

  The decade of the eighties has become a Golden Age for the imaginative short story. In recent years distinguished collections have appeared from Michael Bishop, Connie Willis, Greg Bear, Tanith Lee, Kim Stanley Robinson, Nancy Kress, and William Gibson, to enumerate only representative writers from the younger generation. Even amidst this era of auctorial largess, however, Lucius Shepard has emerged as a phenomenon, one of the most astonishing new talents ever to grace the genre of imaginative fiction.

  Described by the Washington Post as “the most exciting new story writer of them all,” Shepard made his literary debut in the 1983 edition of Universe and since then has dazzled the field with superbly crafted tales of futuristic war, menacing wind elementals, parallel worlds, interstellar incursions, a six-thousand-foot dragon, and, in the ironically entitled “R&R,” a Central American sojourn that is one of the most sheerly harrowing stories ever conceived by an American author. Acclaimed as a masterpiece immediately upon publication, “R&R” lies at the heart of the Shepard oeuvre, a work of such searing intensity as to convey the reader beyond the merely speculative into the starkly tragic.

  Throughout the stories in this collection—so varied in their geographical settings, so manifold in portraying the richness of human experience—Shepard makes recurrent allusion to something beyond the pale of diurnal reality. “It is dreams which make us live, and mystery,” explains a character in the author’s novel Green Eyes. Neither a strict realist nor a genre fantasist, Shepard typically employs this visionary realm as an extension, an intensifier, of the world we know; at his best, Lucius Shepard gives us a glimpse of the central mystery that is life itself.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  “Black Coral,” copyright © 1984 by Terry Carr for Universe 14.

  “The End of Life As We Know It,” copyright © 1984 by Davis Publications, Inc., for Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, January 1985.

  “How the Wind Spoke at Madaket,” copyright © 1985 by Davis Publications, Inc., for Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, April 1985.

  “The Jaguar Hunter,” copyright © 1985 by Mercury Press, Inc., for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May 1985.

  “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule,” copyright © 1984 by Mercury Press, Inc., for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 1984.

  “Mengele,” copyright © 1985 by Terry Carr for Universe 15.

  “The Night of White Bhairab,” copyright © 1984 by Mercury Press, Inc., for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, October 1984.

  “R&R,” copyright © 1986 by Davis Publications, Inc., for Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, April 1986.

  “Salvador,” copyright © 1984 by Mercury Press, Inc., for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1984.

  “A Spanish Lesson,” copyright © 1985 by Mercury Press, Inc., for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 1985.

  “A Traveler’s Tale,” copyright © 1984 by Davis Publications, Inc., for Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, July 1984.

  “Foreword,” copyright © 1987 by Michael Bishop.

  Copyright ©1987 by Lucius Shepard

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the permission of Arkham House Publishers, Inc., Sauk City, Wisconsin.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Shepard, Lucius.

  The jaguar hunter.

  1. Fantastic fiction, American. I. Title.

  PS3569.H3939J3 1987 813'.54 86-22282

  ISBN 0-87054-154-4 (alk. paper)

  Printed in the United States of America

  Second Printing

  FOR GULLIVAR

  FOREWORD

  THE JAGUAR HUNTER

  THE NIGHT OF WHITE BHAIRAB

  SALVADOR

  HOW THE WIND SPOKE AT MADAKET

  BLACK CORAL

  R&R

  THE END OF LIFE AS WE KNOW IT

  A TRAVELER’S TALE

  MENGELE

  THE MAN WHO PAINTED

  THE DRAGON GRIAULE

  A SPANISH LESSON

  SELDOM DO NEW WRITERS arrive on the scene—whether amid the Scotch and evening-wear ads in The New Yorker or in the grainy double columns of Fantasy and Science Fiction—with a convincing command of language, a deft display of storytelling techniques, and an authoritative auctorial presence. Attention-grabbing newcomers may write like seraphs in disguise. Or they may expertly set you up for stinger endings that you never once expect. Or (the least likely of these three scenarios) they may show you a hard-won compassion or a with-it worldliness narrowly compensating for their deficiencies as either stylists or spellbinders.

  Rarely, though, will you find yourself reading a newcomer whose work manages to combine all three of these virtues. The reason is simple. Except for a few literary prodigies who take to it like termites to timber, writing requires blood, sweat, and tears. It wants not only a developable talent but also a fingers-to-the-nub apprenticeship that may occasionally prove more humbling than uplifting. Because most writers begin to sell their work in their late teens or early twenties, they do part of their apprenticeship in public, keyboarding marginally salable work while struggling to improve their craft and to grow as persons. Little wonder, then, that neophyte writers produce a catch-as-catch-can commodity, now singing exquisite arias, now crudely caterwauling—but even in moments of full-throated triumph betraying more tonsil than tone, more raw power than rigor.

  All of which I note by way of introducing, roundabout, Lucius Shepard—who, like Athena stepping magnificently entire from the forehead of Zeus, arrived on the fantasy and science-fiction scene a fully formed talent. (On the other hand, how long did Athena gestate before inflicting her daddy’s migraine?) His first stories—“The Taylorsville Reconstruction” from Terry Carr’s Universe 13 and “Solitario’s Eyes” from Fantasy and Science Fiction—appeared in 1983; they showed him to be both an accomplished and a versatile storyteller. In 1984, at least seven more tales (short stories, novelettes, novellas) bearing the Shepard byline cropped up in the field’s best magazines and anthologies. These tales displayed a range of experience, and a mature insight into the complexities of human behavior, astonishing in a “beginner.” In May 1984, his novel Green Eyes appeared as the second title in the revived Ace Science Fiction Special series; and in 1985, at the World Science Fiction Convention in Melbourne, Australia, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer went to Lucius Shepard—with total and therefore gratifying justice.

  Okay. Who is this guy? I’ve never met him, but I have read nearly everything he has published to date. Moreover, letters have been exchanged. (I wrote him one, and he wrote me back.) Beyond these glancing run-ins, I’ve talked to Lucius Shepard twice, long distance, on the telephone; and all my not-quite-close encounters with the man have probably given me the mistaken impression that I know something vital about the person behind the name, when what I chiefly know is really only what you are going to discover when you begin reading this collection of stories—namely, that Lucius Shepard field-marshals the language with the best of them, that he knows not just the tricks but also some of the deeper mysteries of the trade, and that he has lived long enough and intensely enough to have acquired a gut feel for the best ways to use his knowledge of both people and craft to transfigure honest entertainment into unpretentious art. All the stories in The Jaguar Hunter are fun to read, but several of them—maybe as many as half—rise toward the Keatsian beauty and truth of the long-enduring.

  How so? Well, Shepard came somewhat tardily to writing (i.e., in his mid- to late-thirties), after a worldly apprenticeship that included an enforced introduction to the English classics a
t the hands of his father; a teenage rebellion against institutionalized learning; expatriate sojourns in Europe, the Middle East, India, and Afghanistan, among other exotic places; an intermittent but serious commitment to rock ’n’ roll with bands such as The Monsters, Mister Right, Cult Heroes, The Average Joes, Alpha Ratz, and Villain (“We Have Ways of Making You Rock”); occasional trips to Latin America, where he has granted Most Favored Hideaway status to an island off the coast of Honduras; marriage, fatherhood, and divorce; and some stints both employed and unemployed that he may one day decide to narrate in his autobiography but that I know too little about even to mention in passing. Total immersion in the Clarion workshop for budding fantasy and science-fiction writers in the summer of ’80 led him to begin testing his talents, and not too long thereafter his first stories achieved print. In short, Lucius Shepard is so far from a novice—although he may yet qualify as a Young Turk—that even middle-aged professionals with more than a book or two behind them have to acknowledge him as a peer. Indeed, he has already shown signs of outright mastery that both humble and enormously cheer all of us who believe in the power of imaginative fiction to speak to the human heart.

  Haunting echoes of the Vietnam conflict reverberate through the distinctive stories “Salvador,” “Mengele,” and “R&R.” Meanwhile, “Black Coral,” “The End of Life As We Know It,” “A Traveler’s Tale,” and “The Jaguar Hunter” illuminate this same lush Latin American landscape in a fashion vaguely suggestive of Graham Greene, Paul Theroux, and Gabriel García Márquez. Nevertheless, Shepard’s voice remains determinedly his own. In both “The Night of White Bhairab” and “How the Wind Spoke at Madaket,” he plays unusual variations on the contemporary horror story. In the latter tale, for instance, he says of the wind, “It was of nature, not of some netherworld. It was ego without thought, power without morality.” And in the novelette “A Spanish Lesson,” Shepard dares to conclude his baroque narrative with a practical moral that “makes the story resonate beyond the measure of the page.” My own favorite in this collection, by the way, is “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule”—a tale that, in the indirect way of a parable, implies a great deal about both love and creativity. Seldom, though, do you find a parable so vivid or so involvingly sustained.

  So pick a story at random, read it, and go helplessly on to all the others at hand. Lucius Shepard has arrived. The Jaguar Hunter beautifully announces this fact.

  Michael Bishop

  iT WAS HIS WIFE’S DEBT to Onofrio Esteves, the appliance dealer, that brought Esteban Caax to town for the first time in almost a year. By nature he was a man who enjoyed the sweetness of the countryside above all else; the placid measures of a farmer’s day invigorated him, and he took great pleasure in nights spent joking and telling stories around a fire, or lying beside his wife, Encarnación. Puerto Morada, with its fruit company imperatives and sullen dogs and cantinas that blared American music, was a place he avoided like the plague: indeed, from his home atop the mountain whose slopes formed the northernmost enclosure of Bahía Onda, the rusted tin roofs ringing the bay resembled a dried crust of blood such as might appear upon the lips of a dying man.

  On this particular morning, however, he had no choice but to visit the town. Encarnación had—without his knowledge—purchased a battery-operated television set on credit from Onofrio, and he was threatening to seize Esteban’s three milk cows in lieu of the eight hundred lempira that was owed; he refused to accept the return of the television, but had sent word that he was willing to discuss an alternate method of payment. Should Esteban lose the cows, his income would drop below a subsistence level and he would be forced to take up his old occupation, an occupation far more onerous than farming.

  As he walked down the mountain, past huts of thatch and brushwood poles identical to his own, following a trail that wound through sun-browned thickets lorded over by banana trees, he was not thinking of Onofrio but of Encarnación. It was in her nature to be frivolous, and he had known this when he had married her; yet the television was emblematic of the differences that had developed between them since their children had reached maturity. She had begun to put on sophisticated airs, to laugh at Esteban’s country ways, and she had become the doyenne of a group of older women, mostly widows, all of whom aspired to sophistication. Each night they would huddle around the television and strive to outdo one another in making sagacious comments about the American detective shows they watched; and each night Esteban would sit outside the hut and gloomily ponder the state of his marriage. He believed Encarnación’s association with the widows was her manner of telling him that she looked forward to adopting the black skirt and shawl, that—having served his purpose as a father—he was now an impediment to her. Though she was only forty-one, younger by three years than Esteban, she was withdrawing from the life of the senses; they rarely made love anymore, and he was certain that this partially embodied her resentment of the fact that the years had been kind to him. He had the look of one of the Old Patuca—tall, with chiseled features and wide-set eyes; his coppery skin was relatively unlined and his hair jet black. Encarnación’s hair was streaked with gray, and the clean beauty of her limbs had dissolved beneath layers of fat. He had not expected her to remain beautiful, and he had tried to assure her that he loved the woman she was and not merely the girl she had been. But that woman was dying, infected by the same disease that had infected Puerto Morada, and perhaps his love for her was dying, too.

  The dusty street on which the appliance store was situated ran in back of the movie theater and the Hotel Circo del Mar, and from the inland side of the street Esteban could see the bell towers of Santa María del Onda rising above the hotel roof like the horns of a great stone snail. As a young man, obeying his mother’s wish that he become a priest, he had spent three years cloistered beneath those towers, preparing for the seminary under the tutelage of old Father Gonsalvo. It was the part of his life he most regretted, because the academic disciplines he had mastered seemed to have stranded him between the world of the Indian and that of contemporary society; in his heart he held to his father’s teachings—the principles of magic, the history of the tribe, the lore of nature—and yet he could never escape the feeling that such wisdom was either superstitious or simply unimportant. The shadows of the towers lay upon his soul as surely as they did upon the cobbled square in front of the church, and the sight of them caused him to pick up his pace and lower his eyes.

  Farther along the street was the Cantina Atómica, a gathering place for the well-to-do youth of the town, and across from it was the appliance store, a one-story building of yellow stucco with corrugated metal doors that were lowered at night. Its facade was decorated by a mural that supposedly represented the merchandise within: sparkling refrigerators and televisions and washing machines, all given the impression of enormity by the tiny men and women painted below them, their hands upflung in awe. The actual merchandise was much less imposing, consisting mainly of radios and used kitchen equipment. Few people in Puerto Morada could afford more, and those who could generally bought elsewhere. The majority of Onofrio’s clientele were poor, hard-pressed to meet his schedule of payments, and to a large degree his wealth derived from selling repossessed appliances over and over.

  Raimundo Esteves, a pale young man with puffy cheeks and heavily lidded eyes and a petulant mouth, was leaning against the counter when Esteban entered; Raimundo smirked and let out a piercing whistle, and a few seconds later his father emerged from the back room: a huge slug of a man, even paler than Raimundo. Filaments of gray hair were slicked down across his mottled scalp, and his belly stretched the front of a starched guayabera. He beamed and extended a hand.

  “How good to see you,” he said. “Raimundo! Bring us coffee and two chairs.”

  Much as he disliked Onofrio, Esteban was in no position to be uncivil: he accepted the handshake. Raimundo spilled coffee in the saucers and clattered the chairs and glowered, angry at being forced to serve an Indian.

>   “Why will you not let me return the television?” asked Esteban after taking a seat; and then, unable to bite back the words, he added, “Is it no longer your policy to swindle my people?”

  Onofrio sighed, as if it were exhausting to explain things to a fool such as Esteban. “I do not swindle your people. I go beyond the letter of the contracts in allowing them to make returns rather than pursuing matters through the courts. In your case, however, I have devised a way whereby you can keep the television without any further payments and yet settle the account. Is this a swindle?”

  It was pointless to argue with a man whose logic was as facile and self-serving as Onofrio’s. “Tell me what you want,” said Esteban.

  Onofrio wetted his lips, which were the color of raw sausage. “I want you to kill the jaguar of Barrio Carolina.”

  “I no longer hunt,” said Esteban.

  “The Indian is afraid,” said Raimundo, moving up behind Onofrio’s shoulder. “I told you.”

  Onofrio waved him away and said to Esteban, “That is unreasonable. If I take the cows, you will once again be hunting jaguars. But if you do this, you will have to hunt only one jaguar.”

  “One that has killed eight hunters.” Esteban set down his coffee cup and stood. “It is no ordinary jaguar.”

  Raimundo laughed disparagingly, and Esteban skewered him with a stare.

  “Ah!” said Onofrio, smiling a flatterer’s smile. “But none of the eight used your method.”

  “Your pardon, Don Onofrio,” said Esteban with mock formality. “I have other business to attend.”

  “I will pay you five hundred lempira in addition to erasing the debt,” said Onofrio.

  “Why?” asked Esteban. “Forgive me, but I cannot believe it is due to a concern for the public welfare.”

  Onofrio’s fat throat pulsed, his face darkened.

  “Never mind,” said Esteban. “It is not enough.”