Undergrowth

by Nancy Burke

  “How are things back there?” Jorge called.

  “Some of the bags slid around,” Larry called back.

  “Don’t worry,” said Jorge. “It happens. When we stop, we’ll fix it.”

  The airport outside Itatuba was a dirt runway and an old shack. When they landed, Jorge took a ring of keys from his pocket and motioned for Martina to walk with him. Larry was struck by his having a key for the padlock on the shack’s door; he imagined him walking quietly through the Mercado Modelo in Santarem, stopping to pick out oranges while the ring on his belt contained keys for all the secret, deserted shacks in the farthest corners of the jungle. Jorge and Martina came back carrying boxes of cooking pots and tools and medicines left over, Joaquim explained, from an aborted attempt to contact a tribe 90 miles to the south. With Larry looking on, Jorge loaded them in the back of the plane and began to move them around with the other baggage. This time, he pulled rubber cords from the sides of the cabin and fastened them in place. “Now you don’t have to worry,” he said as he cleaned his glasses, in a voice that mingled the smallest measure of sympathy with a larger portion of disdain.

  Larry looked at the glasses in Jorge’s hand and, without intending to retaliate, asked, “Do they let you fly with glasses?”

  Jorge let out a laugh that was almost a smirk. “This isn’t the U-nited States of America,” he said.

  Joaquim pushed Larry into the front seat and got in back with Martina. When the plane started up again, Larry felt the same sensations as before, but because now he was sitting beside Jorge and could tie specific sounds to specific movements of Jorge’s hands, and because he could see out the windows, it was as if he were at last being offered an explanation for things that had frightened him with their indeterminacy before. Jorge taxied to the end of the runway and then turned around so that they could take off in the opposite direction.

  When the plane lifted off, its wheels seemed to graze the uppermost tips of the branches. Then they were airborne, and more and more appeared, as though a curtain were being pulled aside in stages to reveal the breadth of the world. What had been individual trees became threads in a carpet of finer and finer weave. On this carpet lay, at rest, a translucent snake whose scales, blue and silver, flashed when they caught the sun. All was quiet, Larry sensed, in that world beyond the crackling of the radio and the grind of the propellers. The horizon turned so gracefully as they turned, and the soft green surface rose and fell, in the measured rhythm of breathing. Only once, when Larry looked down, did he see a blemish on that perfect body, a bald and ashen wound through which the dark blood oozed. It disappeared from view as the plane turned again and headed due west.

  From such a great height, it was possible to see and to think. The four of them sat absorbed in private thoughts they could never say out loud. Jorge stared straight ahead, as though he had their destination already fixed in his view, but Larry continued to look down. He imagined them flying higher and higher, until it was impossible to tell which was smaller and more fragile, them or the earth. Then the plane began to slow and sink, lowering itself by inches towards the land, caressing the mottled textures with its shadow. In an instant, the pulse of time began to race, the trees became single again and flew by, and the wheels hit a hard ribbon of gravel and dirt. They bounced and rattled to a stop at the end of an overgrown runway, a stone’s throw from the river, beside a few old rowboats that lay lodged in the sand like decomposing fish.

  XXX

  JORGE WAS THE sort of person who liked to do only one thing at a time. Martina knew better than to talk to him when he was working on his plane, or when he was thinking, and kept a book with her, not so much to read as to reassure him that he was safe from the possibility of her interrupting. She sat off to the side while he carried their packs and duffel bags from the plane to the boat, arranging and balancing them as he had in the hold. Joaquim and Larry were given the job of dumping the boxes to check them for insects and lizards and then loading them back onto the plane, a task that largely kept them out of Jorge’s field of vision. Thus, when Jorge recognized the old familiar tightening of the muscles in his stomach that he associated with being interrupted and looked around to see the others silently occupied, he had to acknowledge that the disruptions he felt were only in his mind.

  He had worked hard to convince himself that this particular mission was routine, and had given no conscious thought at all to Lamurii. His blindness might have been predictable, given the tendency of things one wishes for or dreads over long periods of time to recede in importance compared to the wishing or dreading itself. But Jorge had not only minimized the trip’s importance but forgotten about it altogether. He found himself listing the errands he needed to do when he got home from Paruqu, envisioning his own front door, his kitchen, rather than the straw huts and stubble of the open field at Lamurii he had seen from the air. But like all floundering swimmers, things that are forgotten in that way tend to grasp out for other things, pulling them beneath the surface in an effort to save themselves. Thus, Jorge realized, a half an hour down river, that he had left the second of his two small canvas travel bags on the floor beside his seat on the plane, and despite the fact that there was nothing in them that he needed, felt compelled to ask them to turn back to retrieve it.

  XXXI

  MEMORY RETURNED TO Larry, along with the tingling sensation of circulation returning to a limb, as they stepped out of the boat at Paruqu. There was the rickety old dock, still balancing uncertainly on its thin, wayward legs, and the open shack that served as a bar, and the tiny houses crouching together on streets that barely got started before they contracted to a trickle like drying rivers. The same slat-walled shop marked the center of the town, and the hotel, which was not a hotel at all, but the Prefect’s house, still wore its drooping jacaranda robe askew, not having bothered, in all those years, to straighten it. Larry left the others with the boat and made the climb from the riverbank alone. To be the one to lead the approach was a role for which he was completely unsuited, but he knew he needed to prove himself, especially to Jorge. Pushing against his nature, he forced himself up to the threshold of Sr. Catalpa’s door, where he hesitated for a minute with his hand on the knocker, listening to his heartbeat in his ears.

  The door was opened by the Prefect himself, whom he immediately recognized by his bald head and his cartoonishly ingratiating manner. Sr. Catalpa looked over Larry’s shoulder to each side, and only after finding no one else behind him, welcomed him in with exaggerated warmth.

  “Could you be Larry?” he said in what sounded like mock disbelief.

  Larry nodded and stepped past him into the large foyer with its faded flocked wallpaper and its worn Persian rugs. He remembered how on his previous visit he had found the interior of the house to be not just welcoming but almost magical, in that it contained all the elements, save a working bathroom, which at the age of eleven he had assumed a proper mansion would have, a chandelier and paintings in gilt frames and floors of marble rather than wood. Now, looking around, it was precisely the house’s European pretension that unsettled him, as though its owner had been one of the many madmen consumed by the need to erect, in the heart of the jungle, an Alpine village, a grand theater, an American suburb, against the humbling press of the forest. He stopped short of associating such colonial delusions with his own efforts, which bore no obvious trace of the sort of bravado that would lead to the erection of an ornately paneled library and the hanging of damask curtains in a place in which mildew would inevitably gain the upper hand.

  “Come in, come in! You’re late!” said Sr. Catalpa, gesturing toward a clutch of overstuffed chairs. “I was beginning to wonder whether you were coming. Is James down with the boat?”

  Larry’s palms began to sweat. He suddenly felt woozy and overheated. “No, he isn’t. He died on the 23rd, and I’m here with a few of his friends.”

  Sr. Catalpa sat heavily into the nearest of the chairs, and Larry, in reflexive sympathy, sat down heavil
y across from him. “It couldn’t be! I have a letter dated less than a month ago! He said he was feeling better!” He started to rise from his chair as though to find the letter and prove Larry wrong, but seemed to realize the futility of the effort and sank back into the chair again, lowering his face into his hands. The top of his bald head floated like the moon in the room’s semi-darkness, glowing and silent and inert. Then, with resolve, the moon shot up as the Senor straightened suddenly and strode over to Larry’s chair. “Will you all stay a while?”

  “We’d like to stay overnight, and hike in a bit to spread some of James’s ashes. Then we’re going to head out to Lamurii. And then, if it’s okay, I was planning to come back soon to work on James’s research.”

  “Ah, the elusive research. Are you going to be as secretive as James was?”

  “I guess so,” said Larry.

  “Of course you remember our little altercation last time? I didn’t like it then, and I like it even less now, in view of your current situation.”

  Larry couldn’t afford to know to which current situation the Prefect was referring, and had no recollection of an argument. He did remember, if indistinctly, the odd wallpaper in the foyer, and the patterns in the mosaic on the floor, and a smell that he could now identify as mold. He stood up and followed Sr. Catalpa out the door, into the bright sunlight and down the gravel path to the river.

  As they approached, Larry could see Joaquim and Jorge sitting side-by-side on the dock, looking down into the water as Martina, to Jorge’s right, surveyed the far shore. The two men were clearly engrossed in a conversation to which Martina was indifferent; Larry wondered the extent to which he was the subject of it. He strained to listen as he and Sr. Catalpa came up from behind, but the thick air absorbed sound like a sponge so that even their footsteps made only muted, indefinite thuds.

  “Ah!” said Sr. Catalpa, forcefully enough to penetrate the air, when he caught sight of Joaquim. Joaquim and Jorge stood up and turned to face him, but neither stepped forward.

  “Welcome,” Sr. Catalpa said pointedly to Joaquim, walking towards him with his hand outstretched.

  “Yes,” Joaquim said, with a nod of his head. He shook Sr. Catalpa’s hand and turned to survey the river. “I’ve been looking forward to seeing you again.”

  “I’m Jorge Moretti,” said Jorge loudly. “And this is Martina Berand.”

  “Welcome, welcome,” said Sr. Catalpa, also loudly, extending his hand to Martina and bowing slightly. “What can I carry?” he said nervously, looking over at Joaquim. “Should I send Gabriel?”

  “Is that too heavy?” said Jorge, jumping down into the boat and handing up a pack. He sounded irritated, and threw Larry’s pack up to him with more force than was needed.

  Sr. Catalpa caught the pack with a grunt and shouldered it with difficulty. “Shall we?” he said, again addressing himself to Joaquim.

  They turned and walked silently up the bluff with Larry, who was to have led them, bringing up the rear. He could tell from the way Sr. Catalpa raised his eyes now and again to look at Joaquim that however sincere his grief at the loss of James might have been, it was also fickle, its intensity rechanneled now into an anxious wish to win Joaquim’s favor. And he could tell, from the easy way he swung his arms as he balanced the weight of his pack, that Joaquim was enjoying immensely, with a kind of understated bravado, the prospect that their encounter would play itself out like an extended practical joke. Larry couldn’t afford the thought that the person he had no choice but to trust more than any other might act cruelly, even in jest, so he held back, allowing a buffer to emerge between himself and the two older men. Instead, he tried to move closer to Jorge and Martina, to highlight their kinship as outsiders to this unexpected drama, consoling himself with the thought that he would soon be on his own, in the company of creatures who were more akin to his nature.

  When they reached the Prefect’s house, they set their packs in a pile on the verandah and went inside. They were too coarse and sweaty for their surroundings, trampling with their big unwieldy boots across the inlaid floor. Sr. Catalpa motioned for them to sit. He pulled in a chair from the dining room for himself and stood behind it, surveying his guests, wearing a nervous smile that made it difficult to tell whether he was intentionally allowing them to get their bearings or had rather forgotten his lines. In the awkward silence before he spoke, the roar of a generator swelled in for a minute as it started up and then receded while the electric lights, made necessary by the overgrowth and the dark curtains that partially covered the windows, flickered like the candle flames they were molded to resemble.

  “What can I get you all to drink?” said Sr. Catalpa, as though the generator had suddenly started him up too.

  Larry leaned forward, trying not to get his sweat on the back of his chair.

  “Is Lucia with you here?” Joaquim asked, looking around.

  “I guess James hadn’t mentioned it. She’s been gone almost three years now.”

  “He hadn’t,” said Joaquim. “I’m sorry. So who is still living with you?”

  “They’re all gone,” said Sr. Catalpa. “My three moved out in April. They’re living with Marta and Carlos in Brasilia; Jose, my youngest, is starting high school in the fall. I’m actually going to follow him there in December, as soon as I get things squared away here.”

  “Very good,” said Joaquim, nodding, and Sr. Catalpa’s shoulders seemed to ease at the neck, as though he had taken Joaquim’s comment as a general assessment of his competence.

  “Let me get you a drink,” said the Senor, pulling on his fingers, backing out through the far doorway.

  An old woman entered and placed a tray on the table in front of them. With hands covered in dark freckles, she rearranged the bottles and the glasses several times over, as though playing a slow but complicated shell game. Then she receded and Sr. Catalpa entered again.

  “Help yourselves to whatever you like,” he said.

  “I see you’re still not hurting for the finer things,” said Joaquim, raising a bottle of whiskey to the thin strip of light between the curtains.

  “Not in that sense, no,” said Sr. Catalpa, pouring himself a drink from the bottle when Joaquim put it down. “So what are your plans?” he said, looking back and forth between them.

  “We’re just here for the night, getting Larry’s feet wet in that river out there,” said Joaquim between sips of his drink. “We’ll go in the morning.”

  After dinner, Sr. Catalpa led them through the empty rooms upstairs, but Jorge and Joaquim slipped away to string up their hammocks between the columns on the porch. Jorge motioned to Martina for hers, and tied it next to his with the same precision he had used for parcels in the hold of his plane. Larry watched them for a minute and then pulled out his own hammock, stringing it between the wall and the column closest to his pack.

  The verandah was somehow more reassuring than the rooms inside had been. A wisp of a breeze caressed the overhanging vines and brushed the moisture from the air, infusing them with the jungle’s nocturnal perfume. All around them, the atmosphere brimmed with obscure activity; insect noises, and the calls of mysterious creatures rousing themselves for the night, and the violent thrashing sounds of the branches those creatures released as they sprang from their beds. The world Larry saw as he looked back in through the window, a room overflowing with yellow light and heavy furniture, from which he was separated by that rarest of forest phenomena, a metal window screen, and in which Sr. Catalpa and the old woman darted back and forth like fish in an aquarium, bore no relation at all to the dark, raucous, forbidding world on the threshold of which he stood. As he hung his hammock from the metal hooks on the wall and on the column across from it, he nearly displaced an elegantly painted, thin-legged spider the size of his hand, who had intended to string her own hammock from the same rampart. He avoided her web as he followed Joaquim and Jorge out to the edge of the trees to relieve himself, but his face was brushed several times by other webs he co
uldn’t see.

  Finally, as the four of them lay cocooned in their netting, the lights that spilled over them from inside the house went out and they were left together in darkness. Joaquim and Jorge talked in low voices, their silences filled by the forest, and Larry remembered clearly how happy he had been on those nights in the forest with James, when they had strung the feet of their hammocks together from the same sturdy bough, and had talked until at some point, often in mid-sentence, James let out a snort to mark the boundary between waking and sleep. Even his secret fear of jaguars would diminish then, drowned out by the magically reassuring protective force of James’s noisy presence. Larry felt the same contentment as he lay in the dark between Jorge and Joaquim, but his calm was disrupted, at intervals, by a flash of terror at the realization of what it meant to be alone.

  “He hasn’t changed a bit,” said Joaquim, not so much interrupting the swell of Larry’s fear as creating another track in his awareness alongside it.

  “How do you know him?” asked a tiny corner of Larry, shaking itself free of the grip of his thoughts.

  “I fired him,” said Joaquim with a laugh. “We used to call him The Chihuahua.” The obvious contempt Joaquim seemed to have for Sr. Catalpa’s histrionic temperament made Larry feel even more isolated in his fear.

  “You don’t seem to like him,” he said.

  “Never trust anyone who can be swayed by a nice pat.”