the face of David having brought food. He’s just come back from getting cheese and crackers, decorating his round silver plate by arranging them in a happy face. The cubed buttery–hued cheeses are stacked up in two square pyramids for eyes. The square saltine crackers are lined at the edge of his plate in a curved smile.
“God your insatiable,” David puts it nicely. Not sure if he’s calling Baba god again or using the title senselessly.
Baba tells Leonid never to withhold cognizance from him. Then makes it clear he’s saying it aloud so that everyone present knows not to be so foolish. He then sends everyone out into the Dome of the Plebeian. As I step out of the office, behind the others, he asks me to stay. I oblige.
Baba warns me that I mustn’t tell anyone I saw prisoner 1313 fly. Should I decide to talk, he’d know. It sounded like a threat without baggage. He aimed for it to sound like an afterthought. Even so, my ears caught the weighty nuance. He ends the cautionary advice with a wink and a cheeky grin. I wander off, catching up with the others.
We exited the country cottage through a white wood door. It’s composed of black metal on the side facing out. I look to the one–story cottage with what looks like a fat chimney on its roof belonging to a separate house. Perhaps Goliath’s. It’s the Caesar’s office, clearly distinct as it’s the only unevenly taller section of the cottage. From outside, I’d never guess the cottage to be so quaint. It’s of the same stone bricks that compose the outer castle walls with a more washed–out gray color. Approximate to a dolphin’s dry skin after hours bathing in the sun.
The cottage is centered in an overgrown Aegean blue grassy square. Massive white empire columns line the square. Across from the cottage’s front porch is the health farm. Its gripping stained–glass windows are visible past a row of the Olympian white stone columns. Two whitewashed wood rocking chairs attest to the only furniture in the square. What little lush vegetation this square has is to the right of the cottage’s black metal door. Bright blue boy cornflowers rise above the soothing faded blue grass.
“Nice touch, this painted grass.” I look about the square in approval of its artistic design, deserted by all but a few geese.
“That’s no paint,” Zorian casually states.
Before he can say more, David gives him a nasty glower. His unsavory reputation for a bigmouth precedes him. Leonid tells him to move along and to go give the dragon head to his father. I felt as though Zorian was in the midst of telling me what it was that’s made this grass blue. If not paint, what more? A fiddle, a banjo, a harmonica? The makeup of classic American roots music.
“Baba wants me to stay here and eat. We all have delicate matters to attend to—together.” Zorian is emphatic his place is here with us. He firmly takes a hold of my hand, certain I’ll embrace. Without delay, I instinctively slid my hand right out from his grip, turning it into a fist. “We’re brothers. All four of us now.” Zorian attempts to grab hold of my hand once more. I combatively bounce back, compulsively turning my other hand into a fist.
“He hasn’t even accepted the bid yet git,” Leonid sternly reminds Zorian.
“A bid? If it means finding my friends, I’ll accept willingly. The plight of them surviving in the wild gives me notice that…I don’t even know if they’re alive anymore,” I state anxiously. With a doleful look I bite my thumbnail. I assume Lucas is ok, but Ramze is a different story. I left him out there bleeding.
“God will find your friends. Don’t worry.” Leonid tries to calm me. He nearly places a hand on my shoulder, but I dodge it histrionically like a 100 mph foul ball.
“When? We’re wasting time!” I shout frantically.
“Calm yourself. Breathe. You’re the one who drove a truck off a cliff putting your friends’ lives in danger Kamikaze. Zorian’s drones are probing the rainforest for them as we speak.” David gives me a nickname and a reality check, at the same time wrapped in ridicule.
God I’m embarrassed and saddened. What happened to me in that truck? It wasn’t me. Well, it was but it wasn’t. The third grader in me is telling myself to take responsibility for my actions. The fifth grader in me is saying fuck that. It wasn’t me! I know how bad this looks. For now, I can’t prove my innocence nor explain what went down in that vehicle. I swallow my pride and apologize for getting frenzied.
“I regret what happened. I’ll stop asking for everyone to mention my mistakes,” I sigh, defeated. I don’t want to be remembered as a screwball. Imagine having to deal with people who think you’re nuts. Having to get strangers to do what I want is difficult enough. Meeting Kapish was a regrettable short encounter. There’re far worse encounters to come. Some jaguars will want to use me. The lie that I’m associated with a bad guy, a jailbird of all things, has hammered in this idea they’ll get rewarded.
I’m no lead. Not even close. To help catch this super boy they’re after I’m going to need more than just the promise of my friends back. Chiefly because if Baba’s firm in his belief that boy’s a lethal weapon, I’m no buckler. And I won’t be a decoy duck. Some jaguars will befriend me for being a daredevil. All naive. Trusting this fraternity in helping my situation might haunt me. But until there’s a more attractive offer on the table, I’ll stick with them.
“Where’s this dome Baba wants us to dine at?” I ask the group.
“You’re standing in it,” Zorian answers with a half–smile.
There’s something strange about the sky. A gloss hails over it. We’re in a fishbowl but the notion I’m trapped just isn’t there. David sits down on a rocking chair and begins picking at the cheese cubes with a toothpick. He offers the guys some. Leonid sits in the rocking chair next to him and gladly helps himself, prodding two cheese cubes on a toothpick. David asks me again if I’d like some cheese and crackers. I deny the offer. He incentivizes me with, “Are you sure? You never know when your next meal will come along.”
I shrug, confused, and grab a toothpick off David’s round plate. I stab a cheese cube and eat it, tasting the sea. The cheese is salty and sharp. Another few minutes go by before the Caesar comes out to the dome. A lot of blather in those brief moments we waited.
I learned that Zorian at age twelve is the youngest member in the Praefectus. A class that’s stagnant on its number of members—eleven. He’s also the youngest member ever to be initiated into the Immortal Jaguars due to what David call’s ‘his savant brain.’ And just for kicks, he’s not a wrestler but tells me that as the night progresses, he won’t be the only guy pretending to be something he’s not.
The conversation takes on a morbid tone when I ask Zorian why his father went into the maze in the first place. Zorian talks despondently of the future. He makes it known his father Bo suffers from brain damage, incoherent speech, paralysis, and delirium. He blames it on his father’s high exposure to inorganic mercury working in a factory below. Located a level under the tunnel system with cave walls. He worries it’s too late for him to recover and mentions it’s his fourth time getting lost this week, every time running into the maze.
I ask him head–on what exactly people are doing working with mercury down there and the safety provisions, if any, that’re taken for precaution. I’m not allowed an answer. Zorian’s speech is nixed by someone else’s ego. The need to make oneself needlessly heard.
Leonid, unmoved by Zorian’s bitter life, moves in, swanking about his hunting past. This recent intrusion by Komodo dragons into a tropical part of the world where they’re no more wanted than snow has allowed him to reignite his passion—hunting. A once notoriously profitable profession. The overweening way he blabbers on and on about how great of a hunter he is, the glut of certitude I have it’s for the fame and bragging rights. I warn him, “You wouldn’t want to go around bragging so hard outside these castle walls. Whether you’re hunting for sport or using it as your main source of income, exotic hunts aren’t something many people take lightly in the Americas.”
He did what he did to survive in Munich. Making just enough to live above the poverty line. When the opportunity presented itself to sell more than pelts on the black market, he snatched it. He’d be compensated for travel and no longer would he have to hunt to eat. Still, he’d have to work above the law.
He began getting a seductive, much more lucrative paycheck as he puts it. The buyer who he indirectly sold to through some shady henchman he wouldn’t know for another ten years. It was none other than Rilextus Sagert or as he went by then and now, Baba Azul. And yes, without any word from me, he tells me forthright that God’s beard was blue then too. “Don’t ask me how or why. That’s none of my business and you’d be wise not to make it yours.”
“Don’t plan on it,” I respond, casually checking for Baba Azul to come out of his dwelling. I ask Leonid how he and Baba Azul met. The short story is he got busted. On an assignment that require he hunt and deliver the buyer’s henchman the head of a fully grown African male lion. The henchman set him up. Leonid had returned to the henchman with his order and was arrested on the spot. Coppers were onto the henchman and had previously settled on a lesser sentence for him if he were to turn in who he was working for and the person providing him with the illegal game.
In a twist of fate, after one hundred days in the clink, Leonid was moved to a different cell. His cellmate, prisoner 1313. An old man by the likes of a cowboy nicknamed Baba Azul. While Baba instantly knew Leonid, he kept his identity a secret, befriending him and telling him he was the buyer a whole month after they met. The revelation incited a brawl as Leonid blamed his entire misfortune on the man who’d hired him. He refused to place any blame on himself.
After that first fight, and it certainly wasn’t their last, Leonid was punished. Put in an inferior cell for three days with far worse living conditions than a prison should call for. A punishment Leonid felt was unjust considering it was a dark hole for criminals that misbehave, committing heinous acts in prison above those they’re convicted for. I trust he wasn’t talking about a literal hole he was put in for three days. I don’t get to hear what happens next, how they escaped from prison, or if they’re both pardoned.
Baba joins us in the dome. A white picnic blanket hangs over his shoulders. It’s embellished with a quilted fog gray elephant silhouette motif. A bulky matte red spiral notebook is suspended on his left pinkie, hooked into the top two binding spirals. He’s ready to discuss the—unknown to me—delicate matters Zorian broached.