by Joan Thomas
There is a kind of gas that pools in earthen cellars. You breathe it, this air from the subterranean reaches of your own home, and it smothers you. The woman, whose name was Nora Prescott, had never heard of such a thing before it took her entire family.
She sits very still, aware of Barbara Youderian motionless beside her. Barb’s skin is warm against Marj’s arm, but instead of moving away, Marj leans a little closer. No one would dream of digging a cellar in the tropics, she thinks. In the tropics, you build on stilts. Flooding is the main concern, and, of course, termites. Everyone said Nate was crazy to build their house in Shell Mera out of wood beams and planks, but they couldn’t afford cement blocks at the time. So Nate bought dishpans and set the foot of each wooden stilt in one of them. He filled the pans with kerosene, which he faithfully tops up every few months so termites can’t get to the house.
Nate. In every corner of this house you see his loving care for his little family. The Christmas tree he made of balsa wood and painted green. “Joy to the World,” they sang in the lounge after they put it up. In English, because you have to have some little thing for yourselves. Marj had managed to dig out the Advent calendar her mother sent a few years ago. The candies were long gone, but there was a tiny picture under each flap, the star, the shepherd’s crook, the donkey. The children leaned against their dad, lifting one flap after another, studying the pictures. Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. Four fair heads bent close together, working out the story—and recalling that moment now, every fibre of Marj’s body thrills to a truth so vast and so rich she can hardly take it in. Debbie, the serious sweetness of her six-year-old face, delighted to have Nate’s full attention for the moment. Benjy, with his hand in unthinking affection on his baby brother’s shoulder. Nate, glancing up at her: his trust in her, his energy, the quicksilver springs that feed their life together. It is absolutely enough, she thinks. That moment is enough to sustain me forever. And yet there is more. That’s the thing about God, that’s what He’s telling her. If you belong to me, this joy will never end. Other people perish, but you will not.
Locations
19
OLIVE PHONES, AND IT’S A huge relief to hear her calm and mild voice. She says, “I talked to Abby last night.”
“She called you?”
“No, I called her.”
“She’s not picking up when I call.”
“I know. But she asked me to let you know she’s fine.”
“Olive, how are we supposed to sort things out if she won’t talk to me?”
“She said she’d get in touch with you soon.”
“Where is she?”
“She’s in California. I didn’t get the exact place.”
“I’m supposed to leave for Ecuador tomorrow. I can’t go without knowing where she is.”
“I know. I think she’ll be at Isabel’s.” Isabel is one of Olive’s old friends.
“Did she say that?”
“Not exactly. But I said, ‘If you’re going to be in the LA area for a few days, why don’t you stay with Isabel?’ And she said, ‘That’s a great idea.’ So you have to stop worrying, David. She is fine.”
They hang up and David sticks his Cheerios bowl in the dishwasher and glances at the clock on the stove. He’s got a million things to do and Sean wants to Skype at ten o’clock. If it weren’t for worrying about his daughter, he’d be feeling pretty excited. De parte de Jehová es esto: Es maravilla en nuestros ojos. It’s fun to be easing himself back into Spanish. This will be a much-needed spiritual reboot. He can’t help but think that faith is less complicated in South America. If you ever said that out loud, people would accuse you of calling Ecuadoreans simple. And it’s true he’s been away for a long time, but from all he hears, Ecuador is still a society of old-fashioned sins. Purse snatching. Teen pregnancy. Public drunkenness. Not the moral atrocities bubbling up in America, not giving hormones to children to block their puberty so doctors can surgically alter their sex, not the churches. Sadly, that’s what comes to mind as he tramps down the stairs in search of his big suitcase: the drive-in services where desperate people sit weeping alone in their Lexuses, the preachers with their sordid hookups in public toilets, the congregations who’ve sold their souls to vulgar politicians, the hucksters on TV selling survival products for the apocalypse, cancers you’d have to call them, noxious outgrowths of your very own cells, so that even straightforward utterances of the gospel are so tainted by association that you stand at a microphone in front of a huge congregation and are seized by the feeling that you should just—
Shut up, Pastor Dave.
Under the basement stairs, a trash heap of paint-splattered groundsheets and a broken ladder and extension cords. His stationary bike, a bad idea from the beginning. The basement. Always finds it a little creepy. People die from gas that collects in their basements. His mother actually knew a family. Sharon used to laugh when he pounded back up the stairs to the kitchen. Thank God you made it back.
David hauls his big suitcase out of the heap and bats the dust off it. He’d prefer to travel light, but he’ll be dealing with two different climates in Ecuador. Inside it is the film camera in its battered brown leather case. It was a gift from the old photographer. He died not long ago, around the same time as Marj. David’s brother Ben saw a notice online and forwarded it. This camera was a gift to Sharon.
David remembers everything about the night Cornell Capa gave it to her. It was before Abby was born, over twenty years ago. Betty was speaking at a missionary conference in New York and David and Sharon were home on furlough. They met up with her afterwards and walked across the park in the dark. This was before Betty and Stan were married. Betty had just given a terrific address to a packed auditorium, and she was in fine form, striding along in a houndstooth jacket. She knew the way to Cornell’s apartment, a brownstone on the Upper West Side. Cornell was mostly retired, but his wife, Edith, still worked as an editor. She had dyed brown hair and she wore a wool dress the red of ripe berries. David remembers her serving them date loaf and soft cheese. Their place was crammed with books and magazines and records and photographs and art, all their interests and ideas carried into that apartment and never carried out.
They sat and reminisced about Cornell’s visit to the Waorani settlement, his second time in Ecuador. A hellish trek in, Cornell said, and the first thing his eyes lit on at the end of the trail was this little blond girl in a gang of other kids, all of them naked as the day they were born. Of course, you couldn’t exactly phone ahead to announce a visit, so it was a wonderful surprise. He arrived bearing rare treats. Camembert in cans. Chocolate bars. Everything a melted mess, but they ate it all anyway. He had dragged in absurd piles of gear (well, his porters had), and he taught Betty to use a camera. They did a book together, a beautiful book that sold hundreds of thousands of copies. The American woman’s story of living with her husband’s Stone Age killers, and Cornell’s photos. The little girl was at the centre of it.
“Do you still speak the language?” Cornell asked.
Sharon shook her head. “Sadly, no. I wish I did. It would be a big help in our work right now.”
“But she’s got a big streak of Wao in her,” Betty said. “You cross her and she puts her hand on her hip and gives you this exasperated look—that’s the Wao.”
Cornell was gazing at Sharon with great fondness. Of course, her fair hair was a gift, he said, visually speaking. It made the story more moving to their readers, who wanted to see Americans as agents of light to benighted peoples. “I conspired with Elisabeth to tell the story that suited her purposes,” he said.
He sat with his feet up on a settee and held forth in his deep, rumbling voice. They were under the spell of that voice, of Cornell’s Hungarian accent and the pleasure he took in his words, and the spell of that cozy room, and of Manhattan, its silver pillars of light in the narrow opening of the drapes. He called the Waorani the People in a way that made you hear the
capital letter. “I have never lived in a more peaceful community,” he said. “Or among more resourceful individuals. The People were technicians par excellence. The blowguns alone. And in such splendid physical condition. I was a joke in the jungle. I was useless—worse than useless, because I ate so much. Rachel made a big deal of the fact that I’m Jewish. She kept saying to the People, ‘Cornell is from Jesus’s clan.’ I could see them looking sideways at my belly and my big flat feet. The People are revolted by body hair, they pluck it all out—and look at me! I set your ministry back by years.”
Betty laughed and laughed. He was not a Christian, but he was the man God had sent, and it seemed he could get away with saying anything. For hours that night they sat warming their hands on the embers of his dazzling story.
SEAN AND THE locations manager are sitting by a tiny pool against a backdrop of green foothills. At David’s suggestion, they’re working out of a hotel close to the airport at Shell Mera. On Skype they look conspicuously alike. The sunglasses, the baseball caps.
“I just read your father’s biography,” the locations manager says to David. “Oh, man. Man.”
“Ah, that’s great. And how’s everything going with you guys?”
Sean closes his eyes and swivels his head. This looks like a no, but it means No words. They met their Waorani language interpreter this morning, a woman named Carmela. As soon as they can book a plane, they’re planning to fly into Tiwaeno, the settlement where Rachel and Betty lived. Three of the men involved in the massacre are still alive, and live there.
The locations manager says, “I’m trying to decide whether to go too. What would you think of Tiwaeno as a location? Could we use it as the site where the killers lived pre-contact, where Nate did the airdrops?”
“No,” David says. “Out of the question. It’s nothing like a pre-contact settlement. Why would you make the effort to haul a crew all the way in there?”
Sean says, “I’ve been hoping we can use the actual beach on the Curaray for the massacre. I’m going to find a pilot to take me in.”
“There’s no way. There’s nothing there. It washed away a few years back.”
“It was good when we went down for the baptisms.”
“Yeah, well, that was years ago. I’ve talked to people about it recently. That playa’s gone. The ironwood tree where they built the tree house is gone.”
“There’s other rivers and other beaches,” the locations manager says.
“As for the Waorani settlement,” David says, “you’re going to have to find some old people who know how to build the traditional longhouses. You need a certain kind of palm, but it’s everywhere.”
“None of the Waorani still live in longhouses?”
“Well, the Tagaeri and the Taromenane likely do, up in Yasuní, but no one knows their exact location.”
Sean stirs. “There are still uncontacted Auca?”
David can see this news spark between him and the locations manager.
“There are clans living close to the Peruvian border. Los Pueblos en Aislamiento Voluntario. It’s against the law to approach them. The people have absolutely no immunity to outside diseases. The government has established what they call an intangible zone. Don’t even think about it.” He tries to change the subject. “You couldn’t send me a copy of the script, could you?”
But a few issues have been identified with the script and it’s in rewrites. David would be better off waiting for the new draft. If he wants something to read in the meantime, Sean suggests he pick up a copy of the bible. Not the Bible, but a screenwriting book that spells out what a movie has to do scene by scene. It’s based on the elements of the hero myth, and the archetypal hero, of course, is Jesus, with His death and resurrection. “It’s extremely cool,” Sean says. “You use this formula and you’re giving people the gospel message, whether they realize it or not.”
“Is Rachel going to be in this film?”
“Rachel?”
“My aunt. Rachel Saint.”
“Yeah, that’s one of the things we’re still talking about.”
After they sign off, David wanders into the living room. The dog is curled up in the leather recliner and he doesn’t have the heart to throw him off. Poor little guy. It’s off to the kennel for Gizmo.
His phone pings. It’s a text from Abby.
Dad, how do you translate this sentence? Tus abuelos le dispararon a mi tío.
Your grandfathers shot my uncle. He sinks onto the couch.
Cornell in the Jungle
20
THE TRAVEL GIRL AT LIFE, whose name was Gloria, whose first language was Spanish, who had pretty ears with pretty rhinestone earrings in them and a photograph of Bernie Schwartz (a.k.a. Tony Curtis) on her desk, told him he would need a pilot to take him to the little town where the group’s headquarters were. “I’ll be on the phone tomorrow while you’re on your flight to Ecuador,” she said. “The minute you land in Quito, give me a call and I’ll let you know what I’ve arranged. Here’s a list of my contacts and their numbers. Here’s some cash to get you started. Their currency is the sucre, these are hundred-sucre notes, and each one is worth about seven US dollars. Here’s your ticket to Quito. You’re flying Delta through Houston. The car to La Guardia is going to be outside your building at 6 a.m. sharp.” Don’t sleep in, Cornell, her look added.
“You are an angel,” he said, folding the worn bills and sticking them in his back pocket. “Isn’t that what Gloria means? Angel?”
“No. It means glory.”
“Oh, well, same thing, huh.”
Time to go home, Cornell.
He was just back from a trip to DC and he’d need different gear for this one. In his apartment he dumped the dirty laundry from his suitcase onto the floor and then repacked into his duffle: extra chinos, two shirts, socks, shorts, his shaving kit. A cap, a rain jacket. He located his old flask in a drawer and filled it with Canadian. How many cigarettes? He conjured up his brother, Endre, an old pro at this sort of thing, saw him standing by the bed drawing on a butt so short he had to pinch it between his thumb and forefinger. Ten packs, Endre said. You never know if you’ll see a store and besides, they’re great currency. And ten rolls of thirty-five-millimetre. Dig out those waterproof pouches. This is the jungle.
The windows were dark, but it was only seven o’clock. He lay face down on the bed and woke up at ten, hungry as a bear. He went to the bathroom and splashed water at his bleary eyes, fingering the crease where he’d lain on the strap of his duffle bag. There was nothing in the place to eat, so he went out and walked three blocks up Sixty-Third to Pogo’s, where they served something called “hot pot” at all hours. It could have been goulash if only the cook understood paprika. He gave his order to the bartender and was making his way to a table when he spied one of Endre’s old girlfriends dancing on the square of red linoleum beside the jukebox. Her name was Edith. He had run into her maybe twice since Endre died, the last time with a tall art director he vaguely knew, a misanthrope who affected a plaid waistcoat. But there she was with a couple of tourists, Midwesterners Cornell judged them to be. Bill Haley was playing and they were passing her back and forth, her hair and her skirt flying like a teenager’s.
He veered over towards the dance floor and snagged her with one hand. She was startled, but he saw in her eyes that she was glad and she tripped after him, laughing.
“Where is Mr. Fear and Trembling?” he asked when they got to the table he had his eye on.
“He drowned in the East River,” she said. She wasn’t drunk after all. Over her shoulder he could see the bolo ties making rude gestures in their direction, and she turned halfway and screwed up her face at them.
“What are you drinking?”
“Don’t you have a wife yet, Cornell?”
“Not that I recall.”
Oh, Edith! The way she put her hand on your arm—there’s still love in the world, you think. It was a decade now since she and his brother were together. She
was Cornell’s age, five years younger than Endre. Cornell adored her back then and he trusted that Endre did too. By then his brother was no longer Endre Friedmann, he had reinvented himself as Robert Capa, and he was in Europe for a long time during the war. So Cornell would arrange to meet Edith at the movies, where he would sit with one arm around her shoulders in brotherly affection, strands of their cigarette smoke drifting up into the projection beam. One day the movie was Gaslight, and as they gazed for two hours at Ingrid Bergman’s luminous face, he sensed a tightness growing in Edith. It turned out that Endre had photographed Ingrid Bergman when she was in Germany to tour the troops, and Edith knew it. When he got back to New York, he made light of it, said Bergman was a big baby. But then, a month or two later, he was moving to Hollywood. He could be a real asshole when it came to women, but Cornell was not inclined to judge him too harshly for that one. Although, honestly, on the merits, it would be hard to choose. Edith had this lovely warmth that rose like colour in her face, and a way of resting her eyes on you while you talked, and those pleasant breasts. You could picture her living in a house in Yonkers, walking her children to school. But it was strange, she’d devoted her life to bringing a bit of happiness to lost poets and filmmakers on Eighth Street. Though when Ingrid Bergman threw Endre out, Edith wouldn’t take him back. He ended up moving in with—who? That girl who tried so hard to be sophisticated (Cornell could picture her perfectly, a sour smile, her short hair dyed red as if she were imitating Gerda Taro from Endre’s Paris days). The sour girl and Endre broke up shortly before Endre was killed, and it must have been a nasty breakup, because even Endre’s violent death didn’t satisfy her; she slammed the phone down when Cornell called and she didn’t come to the funeral.
And so. Endre saunters into Cornell’s thoughts for ten seconds, and he’s worked his way through four lovers.
Cornell caught the waiter’s eye and signalled another round for Edith. Feeling tremendous relief to be in her company, to know that the same thing was in both their minds. It wasn’t even that he missed his brother, whose involvement in his daily life these last years had been mainly to exasperate him. It was more, when he had a day or two of respite from thinking about him, that he was nagged by the sense that he was neglecting something at his peril. There is still work to do here. Maybe Edith felt the same way, because from the minute she raised her eyes on the dance floor, he knew she was eager to talk.