The Jaguar's Children by John Vaillant Read Free Book Online

the first I saw with a roof on it. We have gods for corn and rain and clouds and lightning, and we have Jesus and Mary in all her manifestations, but Michael Jordan is our patron saint of basketballs. That picture of him leaping—it is painted on every backboard in the Sierra como un retablo, and we know it like the cross. Most of us boys worshiped at that altar every day, and some girls also. When I turned fifteen, my tío sent me a Bulls jacket from L.A., and I wore it all the time until it was stolen.
    But besides these things and the giant statue of Benito, Guelatao is only another pueblo. In the people’s yards there is still corn and beans and calla lilies growing, a couple guayaba and nispero trees, always some chickens and maybe a pair of oxen or an old Vocho. In the mountains all around is the same forest with the same orchids and bromeliads growing in the trees, and by the streams and roadsides the same butterflies in every color you can imagine—some with wings like silver coins and others clear as glass so you can see right through. It is here I met César Ramírez when I was fourteen years old.
    Everyone called him Cheche and the first time I saw him he was floating in the air. Even the kids with no English knew what hangtime was, but César was the only one of us who had any. The girls noticed this and some of them would come down to the court and watch, not only because he was handsome but because it is something different to see a person fly. I watched him too, and it was a couple of days before I was brave enough to play. César was eighteen then so already he was taking exams for the university. Many students go to the church to pray for this—to pray they will pass, and César did this also, but not in the church. He went outside town to a shrine for Juquila built into a cliff by the road where the roots of an old oak tree made a little cave. It is normal for students to leave offerings of money or Pepsi or mezcal along with a note and a candle, but César left his prayers to Juquila under a little pile of corn that was all the colors of the rainbow. Back then I thought he did it because he was so poor and had nothing else to offer, but I was wrong. He did it because corn is the center of everything in the Sierra, and he is its apostle.
    Everyone in Guelatao knows how César’s exam scores were the highest ever for our school and that he won scholarships to UABJO in Oaxaca and then UNAM in D.F. where he took a job in a big lab to study the corn. César is a bit famous in the Sierra now—not just because he is so smart, but because he made it in Mexico and that is hard for an indio to do.
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    The school in Guelatao is small so everyone knows everyone, and César and me both studied English and liked to read so he would talk to me sometimes, even though I was four years younger. He said I was the only chico he knew who had heard of Charles Dickens or Roberto Bolaño, and I felt proud when he noticed me. César had the first copy of
The Savage Detectives
in Guelatao. He let me borrow it and I kept that book because what he had I wanted also. “We should move up to D.F.,” he said when he gave it to me, “because no one around here is getting conchita like those guys are.” He was laughing and I tried to laugh also, but it was hard because my voice was barely changed and I’d never had a girlfriend. Another time we talked about Borges—there was a teacher at the school who loved him and who read to all of us “The Writing of the God.” We were talking about it after and I said, “I think the priest is going crazy after all that time in the cell, and that’s why he thinks he can read the spots on the jaguar,” but César said, “No, it’s because all that time alone cleared his mind so he can understand the older language. The patterns on the jaguar, on the wings of the butterfly, in the kernels of the