by Heidi King
New Pet
By Steve Banks
Hey Patti Cakes,
Not much news.
Gabriel is carrying the rocks back up the hill. I don’t know what’s eating him… looked kind of frustrated. Must have thought Manual Labor was the Panamanian president.
Good news about the zip-line. The male backpackers (seem to be less of them every day) are paying a not paying attention tax to help us save for the zip line. Very few guys complain.
Heard you tried to call yet again. Fuck what is it with you? Try calling Sunday.
Started the garden up again, with marijuana this time. Had a hard time buying seeds, so I gave out stacks of Lost and Found business cards. Finally got seeds and better yet, lots of customers lined up.
Your mother was a hamster and your father smelled of elderberries.
P.S. Rocky looked kind of unhappy. Don’t worry, we solved the problem. We died him green with Kool Aid. This will help him stay camouflaged in the jungle so the dogs that have been coming around for scraps have a harder time catching him. Oh, also, his name now is Kermit. And now he likes Red Bull and Vodka. Can you cover his bar tab when you get back?
Foosball Not Fun
By Steve Banks
Hey Buddy,
Bought me suspenders to wear with my Panama Hat.
Dude, last night’s topless ladies night was a disaster. So many double chins I thought I was staring at pancakes. We lost the foosball in one chick’s belly button. Didn’t really smell too bad though after… nor she. Anyway, don’t want that to happen again so we built the door to the bar so no fat girls can get in.
Patrick doesn’t seem to understand about this guy/girl ratio… keeps talking about stupid stuff like profit. He has a PBS brain in an MTV world.
Steve
P.S. I would fuck her under any condition you could think of and I would eat the roots of her hair until she was bald.
Response:
Hey Steve,
Don’t worry about Patrick and all his MBA talk of profit. He talks too much and is possessed by a retarded ghost.
Andrew
P.S. And you know what hair follicles taste like?
Yesterdays on the Road
By Matt Hope
There are no yesterdays on the road.
When you travel you can be free to reinvent yourself. Steve tells people he is a brain surgeon and even writes this on his departure and arrival cards at airports – unless he writes ‘prince.’ You can take all that is you, dust it off and paint over the ugly parts.
Unless … somebody finds your diary. No one should have to face the temptation of stumbling on a diary. María and I had been sharing a room at The Lost and Found and one night, when she was out on the night safari with Gabriel, I was chasing a gecko out of the room. I was moving her bag and a book fell out. It was leather bound with no title, and when I picked it up, my picture, the Facebook picture I saw in Panama City, fell out. Stop fucking looking at me like that and just read!
I flipped through the pages trying to find where to put the photo back, and discovered an eclectic mix of English and Spanish ramblings, photos of places (not many people) and sketches of weird esoteric symbols and graphic sex. Some things kind of rang a bell for me, like a picture of a bald man that looked like one of the cross bearers at the pilgrimage of the Black Christ. The sketch looks like a self-portrait where María has her lucid dream symbol on her hands, but in the sketch they are bleeding.
Not long after Dr. Mike taught us about lucid dreaming, he led us on what he called shamanic journeys. Most recently we travelled to the “underworld” where we searched for our power animal – a kind of spiritual soul mate. When our power animal came to us, we started something Dr. Mike calls ‘dynamic meditation.’ For me, it was all just a kind of let’s pretend playtime, but the dynamic meditation was kind of cathartic. Anyway, not the waste of time I thought it would be. Dynamic meditation is the opposite of the Buddhist meditations where you slow your mental projections. Instead you exhaust yourself until your mind is no longer cluttered. No secret really. It’s like runner’s high. We jumped up and down with our hands stretched up and then exhaled violently until dizzy. (Or in a state of ecstasy if you are so inclined to believe) Then we let loose, shouting. Usnavy cried and María shouted violent obscenities. Then we danced with our power animals to some tribal drumming Dr. Mike had on his iPod. I didn’t take it seriously, but I pretended to find an owl as my power animal. They have been on my mind lately because of the owl at The Lost and Found that startled me. An automatic light on the back path to bathrooms clicked on and an owl turned his head. We had a solid five second moment before he swooped off.
So there in María’s diary was my power animal, the owl, but beside it a threesome. I have never had a threesome. Nor has María, for that matter. There was Steve’s power animal, the snake, but with someone that looked like it might be Steve tied to it.
After the dynamic meditation, when most of us were dancing with our power animals, María slipped away. She muttered something about her power animal not coming and looked upset. I am not the type to chase after girls, especially strong willed girls like María, and especially when I am not the cause of her frustration. I admit I had a sleepless night when she didn’t return. I didn’t know if she went to sleep in the volunteer dorm or took off to Boquete or something. She came back the next morning and shocked us all – cut up, bleeding from her forehead again and covered in bug bites. But she smiled and announced that she found her power animal. It came to her in the forest, literally. Her spiritual guide was a jaguar.
She had a sketch with the naked body of a woman and the head of jaguar, and a girl lying naked with something coming out of her vagina. Half the page was torn off. It was good work. I had no idea that María was such a talented artist.
Gabriel, the local nature expert, was surprised that she saw the jaguar and I don’t really think he believed her. During all of his years living in the area, he has only seen paw prints. Maria said she fell asleep on a rock in the river they call Fornication Point, and woke up in the dark. Somehow she ended up on the other side of the river, thinking she was on the same side as the lodge. She ended up at a cave.
“The cave of the hermit woman,” Gabriel said. It seems that years ago people lived deeper inside the reserve. The hydro dam displaced them and many of them moved to a spot along a new road being built to access the dam. That town is Valle de la Mina and apparently the hermit woman still lived there. Her name was Tuna. María insisted on meeting this hermit woman who had lived in the cave and begged Gabriel to take her.
I felt a little like a third wheel tagging along, but Maria did invite me. We walked down to Valle de la Mina, a cute little town that sees no tourists. Although María is Colombian, she might as well have been from Neptune - it was clear that she is not from around those parts. Children scurried behind long skirts and men stared at her.
Ten minutes down a gravel road no car could pass, was a tiny, leaning shack of a house smothered with beautiful crimson bougainvillea. María knocked on the door without hesitation. When there was no answer, she cupped her face and peered into the glass. Gabriel fidgeted with his nose, a peculiar mannerism that I had already learned meant that he was nervous. I felt like we should follow his lead to avoid trampling the local cultural norms, but María edged open the unlocked door. The little place was quiet. María slipped inside, and Gabriel waited behind for an invitation.
Gabriel and I sat on some rocks a few yards away for several minutes before María reappeared and waved us in. Tuna was seated facing the door in worn old wooden armchair surrounded by sagging, dusty furniture. She was breathing hard and sweating. I thought the poor woman was having a heart attack. Gabriel said she was in her eighties, and she looked very frail. She was hard to look at – like she was barely clinging to life, a spirit trapped in a corpse that had already begun
to rot.
“Pensé que nunca vendrías,” she whispered, her wide eyes fixed on María. I thought you would never come.
“Mi nombre es María pero no soy la madre de Jesús,” María replied. I am not the mother of Jesus.
It seemed that Tuna had not been feeling well. As much as María tried to convince her otherwise, she thought María had come to take her to heaven. She was startled, but not afraid. She was ready. Gabriel asked if she wanted us to leave, and she protested, trying to rise from her chair. She insisted on making us coffee in a kitchen just off to the side of the living room. We urged her to sit back down, but she wouldn’t calm down until Gabriel went and made the coffee himself.
María told her story about getting lost in the forest near the Río del Oro and how she had found the cave. She told her that she had spent the night in the cave and that when she had woken the next morning, she came face to face with the jaguar.
There was a long pause. The woman stared ahead as though she could see nothing but the images in her mind.
“She is old now,” she said of the jaguar. “How does she look?”
“Strong,” María said.
“The first time we met she was tearing apart the flesh of a sloth.”
Tuna lived in that cave, that much was true, and she lived there alone for a time. But she was not a hermit and she did not live in the cave forever. She built a house nearby that has since been reclaimed by the jungle. She moved before the dam company forced people to leave the area.
“We moved because of the gold,” she hissed with spite. “The cursed gold.”
Her husband never told anyone, including her, where he found the gold, but everyone assumed it was not far from where they relocated and where she was living when we visited her. Her husband pulled out a nugget of gold every time he needed money it seemed, and showed it to everyone who wanted to see. Everyone assumed it came from the long lost Spanish gold mine from whence the town got its name- Valley of the Mine.
After one of her husband’s unexplained departures, Tuna woke one morning and found him stretched out before her front doorstep, dead. His clothes were wet and his lungs were full of water. The police said he must have drowned, and that someone dragged his corpse there. But the mysterious second party, whether he was Tuna’s husband’s murderer or accomplice, was never discovered. The villagers surmised that he drowned in the very mine where he found the gold, and that whoever he was working with didn’t speak up for fear of having to give up the secret of the gold’s location.
“But the truth is,” the old woman related to María, “There never was a mine. My husband never said so, but I knew there was never a mine.” She clutched María’s arm and pulled her closer. “My husband was a grave robber,” she whispered.
The woman closed her eyes and began to cough quietly, but I could tell her lungs couldn’t take much. She rocked back and forth, as if continuing the conversation was greatly straining her.
With my weak Spanish, I couldn’t really capture much of the exchange between María and Tuna. But according to what María later summarized for me, they spoke of black deeds and ancient Indian magic. The imposing and impassive slopes of Volcán Barú dominate the Chiriquí landscape. From its base in the town of Boquete, it doesn’t look much like a volcano. But take a step back and travel across the highlands to The Lost and Found, and you will see postcard perfect panoramic views of the mountain, set in breath-taking contrast to the hills and rugged mountain terrain surrounding it. The volcano now sleeps, but thousands of years ago it erupted and spat out massive boulders, scattering them for dozens of miles around the Chiriquí landscape. Hidden in the rivers and fields along the road between Boquete and The Lost and Found, and even more so on the road to Bocas, ancient symbols called petroglyphs can be found carved into the black stone of these volcanic rocks. One of the more well-known petroglyph sites is part of a tour The Lost and Found runs to hot springs near the town of Caldera. The boulder there is called The Elephant Stone, because of its resemblance to a sleeping elephant. Most archeologists believe that pre-Columbian Indians carved the symbols into the stone, and that the boulders served as kind of an ancient altar, adorned with the images of the spirits that the Indians worshipped and feared. But no one really knows their meaning.
“Or, at least…” Tuna coughed, turning to look at Gabriel. “They are forgetting their meaning.”
Our expert guide Gabriel is a Ngäbe Indian, the predominate indigenous group in western Panama. But his parents were killed when he was a child, and he was raised by Latinos. The other Ngäbe, his brothers, seem completely subjugated to me. One of the volunteers at the Lost and Found, Nico, is somewhat more generous in his assessment than I and prefers to describe them as, “cautious and reserved.” Of course, he worked with the Ngäbe during his time in the Peace Corps and may have gone a little native.
“The Ngäbe know,” Tuna said, staring at Gabriel. “But they are either afraid or they choose to forget.” Gabriel fidgeted again with his nose, although I am not really sure he knew what Tuna was talking about.
According to Tuna, below the ancient altar of symbols existed the huacas, tombs of Indian nobles accompanied by gold idols depicting their deities. The idols were buried to protect them from the invading Spaniards. But the gold was protected in other ways as well. Powerful sukias, shamans renowned for magic powers and abilities to communicate with the spirits, bewitched the tombs and burial grounds of their chiefs and kings, invoking the vengeance of the most malevolent of the spirits. The spirits enchant the huacas, and none of the Indians would dare desecrate the altar of their gods. But there would come a day, the legends say, when white foreigners who do not believe in the gods could resist their protective curse. When they shake the earth and light fires, the stones will rise, so the legend says.
“My husband tried to dig around the curse, but the spirits struck him dead.” Tuna began to raise her voice and tears flowed. “He did not find a mine. There is no mine.”
I have no idea if the story she told was true or if this was her first confession. But the old lady trembled and stared into María’s eyes. María walked over and hugged Tuna, who began to weep to so piteously that Gabriel and I looked at each other, wondering whether we should leave. But María leaned close and whispered something into her ear. Tuna’s demeanor changed dramatically. She stopped shaking and looked at María, repeating, “Gracias, gracias, Madre, gracias.”
It was dark by the time we left the village of Valle de la Mina. Gabriel left us for his home, and we walked along the highway in silence. I don’t know what was bothering María, but she seemed on edge. The exchange with Tuna had affected her.
We were walking in awkward silence for a while when a ragged old mutt ran from across the road toward us. María leaned down and petted him, and he trailed behind us as we walked toward The Lost and Found.
Suddenly, around a sharp bend in the highway, an eighteen-wheeler truck roared up from behind us. We turned at the same time as the dog, which stood right in the truck’s path. For a moment it looked like the truck would pass right over the little creature, but then we saw him get smoked by the crankshaft or the center of the rear axle. He bounced more than four feet in the air in the wake of the huge truck. We stepped to the side of the road, and the lights of the semi temporarily blinded us. When we looked back for the dog it had vanished.
We walked to the spot in the road where it should have been -- but nothing. Then suddenly we saw him yelping at the side of the road, running around in circles. He looked at us and then just flopped over onto his side, panting.
I wanted to just move on, but María wanted to help. She cradled the dog in her arms and at first it growled, quietly but deeply. After a moment it went back to panting.
“Do you hear that?” María asked, lifting her head.
I looked around. “What?”
“Someone crying.”
I
listened intently. I heard nothing. Maybe the wind in the trees. Maybe some water running.
I remembered a time when I was younger. I woke up and thought I heard crying, but I wasn’t sure if it was just the sound of the air coming in through my own nose. I walked down to the garage, thinking it might have come from there.
When I opened the garage door, a tom cat hissed and ran out an open door. There, in the corner, was a paper bag with kittens, their throats ripped open, bleeding, dead. For some reason I wanted to tell María about this. To share something real from my past. But I didn’t.
“I wonder if it knows it will die,” María said, looking into its eyes.
“It looks okay to me,” I said.
“It’s hemorrhaging,” she said.
The dog let her stroke the back of its head and whined.
“We always feel most alive moments before death.” And then, suddenly and deliberately, she put a knee on the dog’s chest and snapped his neck with both hands. It made no sound. It just went limp in her arms. I lost my breath, and she could see I had trouble recovering. She caught my gaze and seemed angered at first by my shocked reaction. She let the dog fall from her lap and put her arm on my shoulders and leaned close to me. My heart was pounding. Her long dark hair fell into my face. I could smell the faint scent of lavender soap that has become her smell for me forever. But this gentle closeness, after such brutality, paralyzed me.
“All great things must first wear terrifying monstrous masks,” she whispered and turned back toward The Lost and Found.
At that moment I thought that María might not be traveling. She was running – maybe hiding. There are yesterdays on the road… a little behind you around the bend. And I wanted to know every inch of the road, no matter how uncomfortable.
La, la… la, la,la
By Steve Banks
Patty Poo,
Gabriel carried a rock down the hill before lunch. After lunch his job was to bring it back up. Gabriel asked why he is only carrying rocks up and down the hill. He looked sad. We all laughed. I think on the inside he was laughing. Or maybe later he will laugh.
A thousand apologies again for missing your call. Try Sunday after one P.M. and before two P.M.
More good news about the zip-line. Two quetzals flew in today and lucky me, I had a pellet gun to protect the garden. .. pang!. Made a fucking awesome hat that sold fast on e-Bay. Gabriel will start the zip-line after a few more loads of rocks.
Garden doing great. Thinking about planting coco but not the chocolate kind. Can’t tell you what I mean over email… need to be discreet, ya know. Someone named Capitan Gonzalez dropped by but was disappointed because it looked like the weed didn’t yet have THC in it. He promised to come back though. Funny, I asked about his boat but he said he didn’t have one. Sure would be nice if he had a boat to take this stuff back to the States.
P.S. Kermit (The kinkajou formerly known as Rocky) was biting his fur. Well, he ate a fair chunk of it off. Don’t worry we fixed the problem. The thing is we didn’t use sugar free Kool-Aid to die him green and we all know how much he likes sweet things. He must have been in heaven… like he was tasting cotton candy for the first time. Anyway we solved the problem and used blue sugar free Hawaiian Punch to die him this time around. The kinkajou formerly known as Rocky (whoever named him must have eaten one too many retard sandwiches) who later became Kermit will now be known as Papa Smurf and you shall refer to him as such in all future emails please.
The only one who respects you,
Steve