State of Wonder

by Ann Patchett

  Marina, in her Lakashi dress, put her arm around the woman’s waist so that her own red seed bracelet would show in the picture.

  Easter went and stood beside one of the men with a tall kettle drum and put his hands on either side of the base. After a minute he began to nod his head in time. A boy came out with a three-toed sloth and hung it around a tourist’s neck and the animal, barely awake, tilted back its head and seemed to smile at her. The sloth, for posing in pictures, was an even bigger hit than Marina. A heavyset woman in a dirty T-shirt and cutoff jeans then arrived with a struggling fifty pound capybara in her arms. She held it on its back the way one would a baby, possibly thinking the large rodent would take a nice picture as well, but the animal squealed and writhed and then finally bit her so that she was forced to drop it and watch it sprint away into the undergrowth, shrieking in fear. That was when two very old men in enormous feathered headdresses came skipping slowly out of a thatched hut shaking rain sticks, and the dancing children fell into a line behind them. The elder of the two men, the one with no teeth, stopped and took Marina’s hand, tugging at her gently.

  “You’re supposed to dance,” Nancy said.

  “I can’t do this,” Marina said.

  “I don’t think there’s any choice.”

  Marina looked at the crowd and then at the Indians and the message on every face was exactly the same: no choice. And so she took the chief’s hand which he then held high above his head, about the level of Marina’s cheekbone, and together they did the slow skip forward while the men beat their drums and the tourists took their pictures and the children followed with their dances, their snake and their sloth. In this group Marina danced with the people who were not white while the white people watched them. It would never have been her preference to be part of a tourist attraction. One of the children handed her the sloth and she took it. She hung it around her neck and continued her dance, feeling the soft, warm hair against her skin. Had anyone given her a choice, she would have chosen instead to be back on the porch behind the storage shed beneath her mosquito netting reading Little Dorrit. Still, she knew it was somehow less humiliating, less disrespectful, to dance with the natives than it was to simply stand there watching them.

  Dollars accumulated in a woven basket, offerings to the gods. The letters were given to the tourists’ guide, who said he had two hours off in Manaus the next day and would mail them himself. Benoit had been talking to the man the entire time and receiving strong advice on the importance of English and German. He should speak Spanish as well. Portuguese was nothing more than a baseline accomplishment.

  On their way back from the trading post, Marina and the Saturns gave Benoit all of their attention. They looked at every bird and monkey he pointed to and when he found the correlating picture in the book they told him how to pronounce the words in English, spot-billed toucanet. Alan had brought binoculars and showed Benoit how to use them. Perhaps the tourists had rubbed off on them because they behaved as tourists now. They kept their collective gaze focused on the water and the leaves and the sky and scarcely looked at one another at all. They caught a glimpse of pink dolphins and discussed birds. They took a few unnecessary turns up very small tributaries because Benoit pointed them out to Easter and Easter, being free of all agenda, was happy to oblige. Marina and the Saturns had burned through so much emotion earlier in the day that now they all felt remarkably placid, or perhaps only exhausted. They had not passed another living soul since they left the Jintas and the world seemed something silent and wide, belonging only to them. On the left there was what appeared to be a crisp field of floating green lettuce. Benoit tapped at Easter’s arm and the boy turned the wheel and took them in.

  Beneath the sounds of bird calls there was the most delicate sound of crunching, as if the boat were making its way through a lightly frozen pond in December and the ice, half the thickness of a window pane, was breaking apart to let them pass. Marina leaned over the front of the boat and watched the lettuce compact beneath the pontoons while behind them the plants knitted themselves back together, smoothing over the path they had made without so much as a damaged leaf. We are here, Marina thought, and we were never here. It was a green so much brighter, so much fresher than anything she’d seen in the jungle. Long toed birds strolled across the delicate meadow with such confidence it was tempting to think those tiny floating plants might hold the weight of a single pharmacologist. The question then was whether the water was a foot deep or twenty feet deep. Benoit smacked at Easter again and held up his hand and Easter stopped the boat. Benoit lay down on his belly then, his head and shoulders over the side. He had seen something. The Saturns came and leaned over him, Marina leaned over him. “Is it a fish?” Nancy said. “Peixe?”

  Benoit shook his head.

  “I don’t see anything,” her husband said.

  Easter kept his eyes on Benoit, who, without looking at his captain again, pointed his hand to the left, to the right, and then a little back. Easter held the throttle low and scooted the big boat around in the smallest possible increments until Benoit, every ounce of his attention fixed into the sweet spring of lettuce, abruptly raised his hand and Easter killed the engine altogether. The silence was startling. The budding naturalist, still flat on his stomach, then dove that same hand down through the leaves and began to pull the colossus of all snakes into the boat.

  Human instinct dictated first that the snake must be kept away from the face, and so Benoit straightened his arm to rigid as if wishing to cast it away from his body while holding on too tight for the snake’s comfort. The reptile’s long, recurved teeth snapped ferociously into the air, diving towards Benoit’s wrist while Benoit whipped the head from side to side, buying time until he could close the distance between hand and head. He rolled onto his side and then his back, managing somehow to pull the first half of the reptile on board while it flailed like a downed electrical wire. At its neck the snake was as big around as Benoit’s wrist, and from there its body, smooth scales of darkest green with black blotches on the back and then creamy light underneath, swelled into a size more in keeping with his thigh. The snake kept pulling up and pulling up, more and more of itself slithering up and onto the deck in thick, muscular rolls where it sought to make its way onto Benoit’s body, extending out against him, kneading him, while Benoit struggled mightily to keep their two faces apart. Do not let the faces touch.

  “Put it back!” Nancy screamed in English, the language that stood between Benoit and his dream of being a tour guide. “Drop it!”

  “Fuck!” Alan Saturn said, and then repeated the word endlessly for good measure.

  He had caught it sure enough but he hadn’t caught it close enough to the head. There was too much available snake above Benoit’s hand, and the snake’s enormous gaping mouth sought purchase, its jaws opening wider than such a little head should reasonably dictate. In a flash there was evidence of many rows of smaller teeth lined up and waiting to clamp into skin. Only by swinging it wildly did he keep the snake from sinking into his wrist. Benoit seemed fixated only on the six inches of the snake between the top of his fist and the tip of its tongue while completely ignoring the enormous body that was working its way heavily onto his own body now, and Benoit, who was wet with sweat and the water the snake brought on board, was laughing. There on his back pinned like a wrestler in an unsporting match, he roared with a powerful joy while he tried to work the one hand upwards with the assistance of the other hand. Easter, ever helpful, grabbed onto the lower half of their guest and tried to pry it off of his friend. There was too much coiling and uncoiling for an accurate measurement but the snake appeared to be fifteen feet long, eighteen when it stretched. Benoit appeared to be five feet, five inches, and he was outweighed by as much as fifty pounds. The three doctors pressed away, screaming various invectives in an unhelpful language. Marina wanted to jump in the water and to run across the lettuce with the long toed birds, but who could say
the snake didn’t have a family down there? There was an odor none of them recognized, the smell of a furious reptile, an oily stench of putrid rage that sunk into the membranes of their nostrils as if it planned to stay there forever. The back half of the snake whipped up and made itself a knot around Easter’s slender waist and wrapped and wrapped and at the moment its head swung past, Easter reached into the air, his hand a quarter second faster than the snake, and grabbed its throat just below the head, well above Benoit’s fist. Easter had caught the snake that Benoit had caught.

  Oh, the whooping! The triumph and revelry! They shook the jungle with their screams, Benoit and Easter, for sure enough Easter was screaming, and the sound was so piercing, so much like the agony of death, that all three doctors were sure the boy was bitten and they lunged forward with the instinct of human decency to save his life. But Easter was grinning madly as he gripped the snake while Benoit, who was considerably stronger, held fast below. They looked into the creature’s mouth now like a carnival attraction while the tongue, a silvered spark of light, licked towards them.

  “It’s a fucking anaconda!” Alan said. “He caught an anaconda with his hands!” Alan Saturn seemed to be at the perfect intersection of the thrilling achievement of the Lakashi, the terror of Marina and his wife, and the rage of the snake, whose eyes had focused into two pinpoints of murderous desire.

  Easter coughed.

  Maybe Marina understood before he did but of course that would be impossible to say. In a moment everything was clear to her and she stepped through the wall of her own revulsion and fear and took the tail end of the snake that was pressed into Easter’s hip. Its flesh was at once clammy and dry, cool despite the terrible heat of the day. She had once dissected a snake in a college biology class, a small black garter snake long dead and stinking of formaldehyde. She had cut it down the center and pinned it open on a wax-bottom pan. To the best of her memory that was the only snake she had ever touched. She touched the second one as she worked to pull it from the boy. When she had pried a little of it loose she moved her hands up the body, hand over hand like she was working her way up a rope, except the end of the rope then began to wrap around her wrist. It was a muscle like nothing she had ever encountered. It did not fight against her. It did not notice her. She pulled. Easter coughed again. Benoit could now see the problem as well: his friend was wrapped inside the snake and the snake had figured out a way to loosen the hand that held its neck. Benoit slid his hand up to cover Easter’s hand just as Easter’s hand fell away. Easter tried to work his own small hands between himself and the snake and when he exhaled to get just his fingertips in between them the snake felt the movement of his breath and squeezed. Easter’s eyes shot first to Marina and there she saw the very soul of him in his fear and she pulled and Alan’s hands were by her hands and they were pulling together, all of them, Benoit from the throat while Nancy Saturn cried for a knife, a knife, and then “Jaca!”

  But Benoit could not hear her now. He was frozen to the snake that was in the business of killing his friend who may have been eleven or twelve but was very small for his age.

  “Tell me there is a fucking knife on this boat!” Nancy said. Easter’s lips were turning blue. From either the lack of oxygen or the weight of the snake he went down on his knees. It occurred to Marina that his spine could snap. They all went down to their knees. Marina knew there was a machete strapped to the steering column of the boat, the knife that Easter had used to trim away the branches when he tied the boat to a tree. In an instant she was up. The knife was nearly as long as her arm, as heavy as a tennis racket, and she put the blade just above Benoit’s fist and with a single pass sliced off the head. It would have been the greatest moment of her life had cutting off the head killed the snake but the beheading changed nothing. On the deck the busy head continued to snap its murderous teeth, moving in a slow circle as the jaw opened and closed, while its body went about the business of strangling a boy.

  “Jesus,” she said. She could see the tendons standing out on Benoit’s neck, she could see his crooked bottom teeth, his open jaw jutting forward in the exertion, the blood of the headless snake running down his arm. While Benoit continued to pull the top of the snake, the Saturns continued to pull the bottom, and in the middle Easter continued his death. Marina began to saw into the rolls of headless snake, her hand at Easter’s head and the point of the machete at Easter’s toes. Her objective was to cut through both coils simultaneously as she doubted there would be time to do this twice. At no point did Easter make a sound. He would not use another teaspoon of breath. He stayed stock still inside this jacket and kept his eyes on Marina. First there was a large vertebral column that required Marina to lean in as she sawed, as much as she would have leaned in to saw apart a human wrist with a long knife at a bad angle. She had worried about pressing too hard and cutting into Easter, but Easter was still very far away. She cracked the vertebra in the first coil and then worked the knife from side to side to break the second bend. She then cut through the ribs, the thick muscles that ran down to the belly scute, the cloaca. When she was very close to Easter she put the knife down and ripped the bit of the snake that was left with her hands. The heavy weight of the snake worked in her favor then, tearing itself as it fell to the deck.

  Nancy Saturn picked the boy up, light as air this child, and stretched him out beside his murderer and blew into his mouth and blew, her lips reined in to cover so small a mouth. With one hand behind his neck she tilted back his head and with her other hand she blocked his nose and she blew until she saw his chest rise and none of them could tell whose breath it was. She stopped for a minute. It was his. Shallow and uneven at first but his own. She lifted up his shirt and lightly touched the red welts across his torso and Alan Saturn kneeled beside her and put his ear to Easter’s chest. Benoit crouched away from them, his head against his knees, his back heaving with his breath, while on the other side of the boat Easter’s eyes blinked. Marina sat down beside him then in the widening pool of blood and took his hand.

  It was still daylight when they got back. Alan Saturn was driving the boat and even though a couple dozen Lakashi were waiting on the shore the branches they held in their hands had not been lit. When they saw the boat they stood up to watch but they did not jump or cry out. It could have been because the travelers had only been gone for half a day and it could have been because Dr. Swenson was not among them. Either way, everyone on the boat was relieved, though there was more to celebrate now than there had been in all their lives combined. But when Alan Saturn pulled up next to the little dock and the Lakashi came on board the boat, the calling and crying broke forth in earnest, not the theatrical display of the week before but a deep and abiding joy Marina had not seen. Three men picked up the three large chunks of the snake from the blood-slicked deck and a fourth man picked up the head, the very head Marina had meant to kick into the water though she had been unwilling to touch it again even with her foot. They carried off the pieces of the snake, each as heavy as a small tree, and hoisted them about their heads to show the ebullient crowd. There would be anaconda for dinner tonight. It would be a feast to tell the grandchildren about years from now. So many Lakashi slapped their hands against Benoit they were beating him. They held out their chunks of snake in a rare offer of inclusion towards the Saturns, who leaned into each other fiercely and declined. Easter stood to walk but when he started to sway almost immediately, Benoit lifted him into his arms and the Lakashi cheered for them while the boy cried out in pain. Marina led them back to the porch and had Benoit put Easter in her bed and when Benoit was gone she crawled beneath the net herself to lie beside him. They were alive and together and they reeked of snake.

  It wasn’t long before Dr. Swenson came and found the two of them there in the little bed, shoulder to shoulder holding hands, small Hansel, big Gretel. Easter had fallen asleep taking shallow breaths through his mouth, but Marina’s eyes were open wide. Even after all this time it s
till wasn’t completely dark. “The Saturns told me what happened.” Dr. Swenson reached beneath the net and touched

  his hair.

  “I don’t know what happened,” Marina said, her eyes straight up to the point where the net knotted together. “It doesn’t make any sense. He saw a snake in the water and he pulled it onto the boat? Why would he do that?”

  “Benoit wants to be a tour guide and the stock and trade of an Amazon tour guide is the ability to pick things up—tarantulas, Caiman lizards, all sorts of ridiculous things. Pulling an anaconda into a boat is an extraordinary accomplishment. I’ve never seen anyone manage it, and I’ve seen people try. Had it ended better he probably would have asked you to write a letter to the National Board of Tourism.”

  “It’s a miracle the thing didn’t bite one of them. I’ll be seeing those fangs for the rest of my life.”

  Dr. Swenson shook her head. “Teeth,” she said, “not fangs. I’m told the bite is extremely painful and it’s a monstrous business getting the head disengaged, but it isn’t a poisonous snake. What that snake was doing to Easter was a much more serious business than biting.”

  Marina turned her head to face her mentor. “What about his liver, his spleen? If we were home I could take him for a CT.”

  “If you were home he wouldn’t have been squeezed by an anaconda. He would have been hit by an SUV while riding his bike. His odds were better against the snake.”

  “What?”

  “It’s dangerous here, you don’t need to tell me that, but it’s more dangerous there. This is where he understands things, he knows how to get along. Maybe he’s cracked some ribs, but you watch him, he’ll be fine. Dr. Eckman had ideas about taking Easter home with him. He felt if the hearing loss were nerve-based he might benefit from a cochlear implant, but you can’t change people like that. You can’t make a hearing boy out of a deaf boy, and you can’t turn everyone you meet into an American. Easter isn’t a souvenir anyway, a little something you pocket on your way out to remind you of your time in South America. You kept your head, Dr. Singh, you saved his life. I commend you for this. But if you think the reward for saving the boy’s life is keeping the boy, then I must tell you this is not the case. A simple thank you will have to suffice. He is not available.”