by Lydia Millet
The white lines spread behind the boat, further and further apart, disappearing into the gray of the deeper water as they grew separate.
His mother had loved him a long time ago, he thought. He squinted, trying to discern the precise moment when
the frothy lines of white were subsumed by the background of gray.
A long time past she had known him.
That was over. But it would be all right. Once the work of love had been hers, and she had done it. Now she was unable. It was not a turning, it was a simple erosion—what happened when the self fell away. It floated and sank, joined a deep well of souls, spreading. Where are you, rest of me? Fumble and glimpse but no worry; there was nothing to be done once it left. Child child, there there. And now I let you go.
It did not need to see itself anymore or be conscious of its boundaries. Vigilance fled in old age and man was like the other animals then, who science said could not see themselves. Here man was fully animal again, but he was still tender … you never lost what you were, never lost it fully. There was always the suspicion of a past life that faded and returned.
And you did not have to know yourself to be fully human. There were always those who did not, and no one said they were beasts.
•
Most of the roads were washed out so they traveled by water. From dock to dock, the open ocean to the wide mud-brown delta: and two days after the hurricane he lay back in a long, low boat moving slowly upriver.
There was a canvas shelter on the boat and the guide was quiet at the wheel. The two of them spoke rarely, so that birds would not startle. The guide, Delonn, was a gruff and modest old man, grizzled and heavyset with dark skin and a
light gray beard. He had worked for the national parks and attended a program for foreign students at Cambridge University; he spoke English with a clipped British accent. He had a vast knowledge of the rainforest, knew the common and the Latin names of plants and animals, the history of foods and medicines and poisons that came from the fruits and the bark and the leaves. He had reference to a long catalog of oddities and hazards.
They drank beers from a cooler. On the overhanging trees large green iguanas crawled lazily; on the bank stood a gray stork, and on a log sticking out of the water small bats were clustered sleeping. The water was torpid. When they came to a bend in the river, where the river’s elbow reached out and flattened into a calm, sunny pool, Delonn encouraged him to jump from the boat and swim.
He shook his head.
“The crocodiles are very small,” said Delonn, smiling.
T. stuck his foot up against the edge of the bench and pulled up his pant leg.
“I see you already know them!” said Delonn, and chuckled. “I thought you were a city boy.”
“I am,” began T., but the guide’s smile fell and he leaned forward slightly, holding his arm.
“What’s wrong?” asked T. “Are you OK?”
“A little heartburn,” he said. T. waited while he breathed slowly for a few seconds and then smiled again. “You realize, Thomas, what the chances are of seeing a jaguar in the jaguar preserve?”
“Low,” said T.
“Seventeen thousand to one. Approximately.”
“It’s OK,” said T. “I just want to be where they live. I want to be in the theater. You know? But I don’t expect them to give me a show.”
There were a number of final animals here—crocodiles, parrots, turtles and anteaters. He knew he might not see any of them. He had mostly wanted to get away.
They jumped out of the boat around midday to walk through a forest thick with stands of bamboo, where T. stooped to inspect what Delonn said was a jaguar print. These were what most people saw of the jaguars, said the guide, and even then only in the rainy season. Black howler monkeys swung in the trees but were also difficult to see, fuzzy shapes in the canopy. At night they slept on the benches of the boat underneath the shelter, and T. listened to the whine of mosquitoes outside the net.
Mornings Delonn radioed back to his contact in the town, checking in; they drank bitter coffee and ate bananas and bread. They would only take the boat as far as the falls, after which they would travel by foot, leaving the beer and the ice behind in the boat and taking only what they needed. They would be carrying heavy packs, T. sixty pounds and Delonn eighty. He claimed to be accustomed.
After that they would wash off by splashing themselves from shallow creeks; they would eat mostly nuts and dried food and filter stream water to drink. This early leg of the trip was a pleasure cruise, said Delonn: T. should drink up.
The river narrowed and moved more quickly as they traveled; a light rain fell and pricked the water. When it let up the guide pointed out birds—a white-collared manakin made a clicking sound like two stones banged together and a bird called an oropendola screeched and rocked back and forth on its branch. There were tanagers and flycatchers and bat falcons; T. saw them fleetingly. It left him disoriented, all of them in the trees, so many.
Then the heat and the humidity. It laid him out.
He drank the last warm beer and fell asleep on his bench, the motion of the boat steady beneath him.
When he woke next Delonn was tying the boat to a strangler fig. Upriver was a series of white cascades, a fringe of thin streams threading their way down a pale gray escarpment. He watched as the guide prepared their backpacks, locked down the food hampers against scavenging animals, folded the shelter and tarped the boat. Then they swung their packs over the side and jumped down. His pack was heavy but this did not bother him; doggedly they tramped up a narrow, muddy trail away from the river, upward through dense foliage.
“Rain coming,” said the guide. “I want to get to the campsite in time to set up beforehand.”
Presently they stopped at a rocky outcrop, still in the shadow of trees. Up through the leaves he could barely see sky. It was late afternoon and the air felt thick. Delonn strung up the tarps overhead, tying complex knots with quick efficiency.
“I was only a Boy Scout for three weeks,” said T. apologetically, watching. “They kicked me out for trying to sell merit badges on the black market. So I didn’t have time to learn knots.”
Just as Delonn tossed the sleeping pads through the open flaps of their one-man tents the rain started. T., watching from a perch a few feet away, brought the hood of his slicker up over his head. The wood in the forest was too wet to serve as fuel, Delonn said, so they would have no campfire. But he cooked for them over a small stove; he stirred soup and set it out in metal bowls. He poured whiskey into metal cups and they drank it under their vinyl roof, listening to the rain.
T. thought how comfortable he was in the company of Delonn, who was easy to be silent with. The guide spread his presence over them both, as much an umbrella as the tarpaulin. Falling asleep in his tent, stomach full of soup and bread and whiskey, he was glad to be where he was—in the midst of a thick field of sound with a thin, taut barrier between himself and the falling water.
He woke and realized the rain had stopped. He knelt and unzipped the door flap and got out; the guide’s door was still zipped. He did not want to wake him so he scrawled a note and set off for a short walk up the trail.
Everywhere there were dripping leaves in a uniform shade of bright green. His shoulders and arms brushed wet branches and soaked his shirt instantly. He walked on, liking the feeling of being wet. He was wet all the time since he came to the tropics; he was never dry. He was steeping. The soil of the trail was so slick that he slipped and fell and soon his knees were pads of drying mud. Toes splayed on a tree was a bright orange frog; he almost stepped on a slug that was as long as his foot. He heard the sharp cries of something overhead and wondered if it was a bird or a monkey.
On his own he was barely equipped. To know that an animal was a last animal he needed other people, foresight and planning, research. He could not know it alone. He relied on data gathered by others; without the guide along he had none. For all he knew the frog was a last frog: b
ut all he knew was nothing. When you knew the name of something that meant it was part of your life already. But here there were things he had never known. It was a new place and frightening, but it made him younger. The lightness was a boon, partly.
One frog—a golden frog was what he remembered, or maybe a golden toad—had lived in a misty cloud forest not too far from here. It had vanished only last year, or maybe the year before.
After an hour he turned back toward the small camp. The guide was still in his tent. T. consulted his watch: nine o’clock. He ate a granola bar and coughed loudly. Finally he walked up to the tent and spoke.
“Delonn? I think you might want to get started in there.” No reply.
“Delonn?”
He knelt and unzipped the flap. Delonn lay on his side, a sheet wrapped around his legs. T. reached out and touched a leg through the sheet; no movement, so finally he grabbed the sheet away. On the kneecap he noticed deep old scars, shining.
“Delonn! Delonn! You there?” But Delonn was inert.
He climbed through the tent opening, up over the guide’s prone body. He put his fingers against his neck, where he thought the pulse should be, but found none. Chest pains, he thought. Delonn had felt chest pains. He checked and rechecked, but still no pulse. He felt wired and nervy with alarm; his unfitness nagged at him. He was unqualified.
“Delonn. Come on. Don’t be …”
He was playing a joke, possibly. At the expense of the rookie.
“Really. Not funny.”
He shook Delonn’s leg, then his arm, then rolled him onto his back and squatted beside him, looking down. The eyes were closed; the guide could still be sleeping. It was when the eyes were wide open and dull that you knew they
were dead. His fear for himself warred with disbelief … he had never been by himself. Not like this. With Beth at least there had been others there, the steady hand of the institutions.
He was lost. Nothing else had ever happened to him. This was it.
For a time he lay in his tent, staring up at the orange and blue of the roof; several times, in a half-hearted gesture, he called out the guide’s name. The silence confirmed him, but it was still not enough. Then he was suffocating; the tent oppressed. He went out.
He could not carry Delonn on his back, he knew that much for certain. It was at least five miles back down to the riverbank, five miles in slick mud, in dense foliage.
He would have to drag him.
He checked again and then again for signs of breath: could Delonn be in a coma? But the lips were drying. There was a dryness on the lips. He tried to pull Delonn into a sitting position; lamely, he tried CPR, vaguely recalling kneeling over his mother. He tried to press the feel of the dead lips away from him. He should have done this when he first found him. Now it was too late; it was sickening.
After several false starts he collapsed Delonn’s yellow tent around the body and bundled it up. This tent, he noticed, was older and cheaper than his own, patched and taped at the seams. Delonn had let his client sleep in the good tent … he couldn’t cover the face, for what if Delonn was not dead after all? What if the tent material blocked his mouth?
He cut a hole for the face.
He would pay them for the tent, he thought. Who was them? He saw Marlo’s family. He would pay them for everything. He would cover them in money.
On Delonn’s stomach he set down the second pack. He would need it, he thought. His own pack contained water and
food, maps in a plastic casing, a flashlight and a mosquito net. He found a bungee cord, which he attached to the package; then he tried pulling it over the ground. It was slow going, and the tent ripped and had to be retied and jerry-rigged frequently. Delonn must weigh more than two hundred pounds. The ground was slick in places, wet in others, then dry and crumbly. Wet was too wet: the package sank and got mired. Dry was too dry: the package snagged and bumped. Slick was good.
By his watch it was only eleven when he left the camp pulling Delonn, back down the narrow path the way they had come.
Once or twice, exhausted, he found himself weeping, though he did not feel grief. It was more like fear, fear and confusion. He had liked the guide but had no time to get attached; yet there was a shock to it unlike any he knew. Even with Beth it had not been like this: she had been contained by an institution, both of them had. Walls around them, walls humming with energy. In this he was abandoned. His limbs and nerves jangled with it, chaos under the skin.
He had never steered a boat before, never even pulled the cord on an outboard motor. He had watched it done but he had never done it. He did not know boats and he did not know rivers. He did not know corpses.
It took him a long time. He stopped for lunch, a chocolate bar he ate sitting on the ground, turned away from the guide’s body. The afternoon wore on and his progress was painstaking; his palms were blistered from dragging and his fingers burned. His feet ached. The package was mud-splattered and torn. But he soldiered on with a lasting sense of incredulousness. It kept him separate from real things.
By night he would still be able to walk, he thought, but the flashlight batteries might not last. He recognized a stand of bamboo, the angle of a broken branch behind a black stump. A brown and blue butterfly flitted at the periphery of his sight. He was almost there. He thought of the skin of Delonn’s back and the back of his head and shuddered— they must be ripped open, gaping. If the guide had not been dead when they started, by now he had murdered him. Maybe he should have left the body, spared him the brutal abrasion; maybe he should have run down to the boat alone, sped down the river and brought rescuers back with him. But there were carnivores in the forest.
Then he saw the boat through the trees, floating in the water. He was pacified; he was rewarded.
By the time he had taken the tarp off, erected the shelter and drunk fresh water it was getting dark. The boat had no spotlights. It had no light at all, only an electrical lantern Delonn had hung off the shelter to read by. In any case he was chilled at the thought of heading downriver by night. He would wait. With some difficulty he propped the package against the hull and then heaved it over the side onto one of the cushioned benches. He thought it was balanced but under his feet the boat rocked and it rolled off and fell heavily. He pulled it to the back of the boat and left it there.
He tried to honor it with a thought but was dull with fatigue. No strength left to hang the tarp or the mosquito net, so he wrapped the net around his head and torso and lay down, breathing thickly through it, on the bench he had slept on in better times. He and Delonn were both cocooned.
He had to shift his arms often to hold the netting away from his skin, for the mosquitoes landed on it directly; and trying to fall asleep in this awkward defensive posture he saw
poor Delonn waking, screaming suddenly at the recognition of his flayed back and ragged scalp. He lay on his thin bench in constant terror that Delonn might not be entirely gone from his ripped body, that by accident or laziness he had half-butchered him. It was a fear that he was lacking a center, or he was a murderer.
He got up finally and pulled out one of his hairs. With the flashlight he found the guide’s lips, now blue; over them, with great care so as not to touch them, he placed the hair. In the morning he would be sure … but almost touching the lips he feared he might also be dead, that deadness enfolded both of them.
How could it not? They were so close.
With the first light he woke, nervous and shivering though it was far from cold. Already the air was humid and he saw flies buzzing over the package. Their presence actually reassured him.
He had relaxed his hold on the netting during the night and been bitten on his arms and his face. He itched from the swellings, compelled to scratch at them right away.
The river was lovelier than he had seen it before, its water slow and gold with a blue haze over the surface. Trees hemmed the sky and made it small but there were pink clouds over the tree line to the east. Around him on the still boa
t were the sounds of crickets and birds; the water rippled and sucked at the underside of the hull.
He was starved.
He drank water straight from a jug and found a small can of black beans with a pull-tab, which he tipped into his mouth and guzzled. Quickly it was over; his stomach was heavy; he put the can in a plastic bag and looked at the tent-wrapped package with its oval of face showing. He checked
the hair on the mouth, which was still perfect. The hair and the flies: he had not been wrong.
There was a gap between the lips, however, as though they were beginning to pull back off the teeth. The sight of it jarred him. He pulled the fabric sharply to one side so that the face was covered. He was almost antagonistic toward Delonn now, or at least Delonn’s body. It had become an opponent, and a stubborn one.
He took a deep breath to steady himself. He tried the radio, though he was not convinced he was operating it correctly. He heard only static. Then he climbed off the boat again, jumping down onto the muddy bank, and untied the ropes from the strangler fig, fumbling with the guide’s expert knots. Back on the boat, feet braced and arms trembling, he jerked twice on the cord and the motor started with a violent spit.
He exhaled shakily, grabbed hold of the wheel with wet palms and steered away from the bank.
Stay a course down the middle, he told himself, fewer snags there and greater depth. He did not want to let go of the wheel to grab the water jug or dig food out of the sacks; he did not want to cut the motor. So he stayed at the wheel steadily, wiping the metal with his shirt sleeve where his hands sweated, urinating once off the side of the boat. He was almost dozing at the wheel, his eyelids heavy in the heat of rising noon, when he heard something scrape loudly and the motor whined. The boat lost speed.