by Nancy Burke
“No, no!” said Sr. Catalpa with a shudder.
“Do you want me to sit up with him, sir?” Gabriel asked doubtfully.
“That would be perfect, Gabriel. Come for me when he wakes up,” said the Senor, turning from him to the folder of correspondence, which was now slightly sticky from the spilled whiskey.
LXXI
KAKAP WAS SO short and thin that from a distance, he gave the impression less of a person than of a short, gnarled tree. His hands, especially, were oddly knotted, with long, tapering fingers, one of which was missing a tip. He had a strange way of holding them, splayed apart like claws. Larry’s first thought when he met him was that he had been chosen to gather medicines because he was too eccentric or too delicate to be sent with the other men to hunt. For that reason, Larry sensed a distasteful kinship between the two of them, and imagined they’d be regarded derisively, all the more so by association, like the queer kids at school. He stood with Anok off to the side while Kakap darted back and forth across the hut, rifling through his rows of clay pots, throwing up dried leaves in bursts as though his fingers were mice. “Pararan!” he called out, holding up a specimen. “Tatar!” “JaXaca!” From time to time, one of his daughters would wander in and he would test her, barking out a name and then jerking his head up and down impatiently as he listened to the story she sang. When she finished, a smile would spread across his face, slowly drawing back his lips to reveal an outcropping of teeth as wayward as his fingers.
“I can’t remember all that,” Larry whispered to Anok when Kakap turned his back to speak to one of his children.
“You’ll be very good,” said Anok, touching him on the arm. Before he could protest, she nodded to Kakap and backed off through the chajan, leaving them alone. When she had gone, Kakap turned to study him, seeming taller and more formidable as he approached. The yellow of his eyes and teeth deepened, and became more prominent in his face.
“We’ll go tomorrow, huh?” he said in a low voice, as though it were a confidence between them. He leaned forward and studied Larry’s face, reaching up without warning with his index finger to brush the hair from Larry’s brow. Larry froze for a minute, horrified, and then shuddered and stepped backwards into one of the diagonal beams that held up the roof. It hit him on the shoulder blade and he jumped forward, grimacing, while the baskets that hung from the crossbeams danced on their strings.
“Where will we go?” Larry managed to choke out.
“Out,” said Kakap, “for two days.”
“I can’t,” said Larry, backing toward the door.
“No?” said Kakap, looking puzzled. “Are you working on the skins?”
“I might be,” said Larry, trying to turn away.
“They’re not doing the skins for another hand of days,” said Kakap, amused at his own trick.
Larry ran all the way to Anok’s, swearing loudly in English as he went. When he came upon her sitting on her kaawa, he nearly broke into a sob, but choked it down.
“You don’t think you can do it?” said Anok, looking up from what had apparently been an afternoon nap. For as long as Larry had known her, she never slept during the day. “You’re sick again?” she asked, rubbing her eyes and then looking at him more closely.
“I am,” said Larry, putting his hands over his temples. He waited until they were sitting side by side on the log in front of the lean-to to try to speak to her.
“Is Kakap a …” he started in, reaching wildly in front of him for the right word, finding nothing but emptiness. At last, he resorted to the English word, as though, through force of desperation, he could make her understand: “Ebo Kakap … a pervert?”
Anok looked at him, puzzled, repeating the unfamiliar word.
“Does he …” he trailed off again, realizing he knew no Pahqua word of any sort that had to do with sex.
“Does he … try to make a baby with a man?” he choked out, turning his head away.
Anok shook her head and moved closer to him on the log. Without thinking, he leaned away and turned his back to her.
“Did I make a mistake?” she said in a serious tone, moving away again. “I thought you would want him to pajaX”—the word was unfamiliar to him—“but James must have done it already.”
Larry tried not to listen, but the strange sound rang in his head. The thought behind it sickened him. He leaned down over his knees.
“So James already did it?” she said, more insistent.
“Um,” he said, still horrified at whatever it was.
“That’s good,” said Anok, standing up. “I’ll tell Kakap, and you’ll go with him in the morning.”
“Um,” he said again, standing up because she did. His head swam, and he rocked a bit on his legs.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know,” she said again, touching his arm.
When they parted at the head of the path, before she went off to the left to speak again to Kakap, and before he continued on up the rise to Dabimi’s, she turned back and called to him, reaching out with her hand for his arm.
“Don’t be afraid,” she said, as though he were a child. “You’ll be very good. He’ll come for you tomorrow.”
LXXII
MARTINA HAD SLIPPED into that state of timelessness which the wheel offered, and didn’t hear the creak of the heavy glass front door. Jorge found her bent over, singing to herself, unaware of him as she reached out without raising her head for her stick and sponge. He stood as still as the shelves behind him, as still as the bench, inhumanly still for a long time, and then he cleared his throat.
Martina looked up but didn’t respond. She cut off the bowl with a wire and lifted it onto a wooden slab covered with cheesecloth. Then she threw another ball of clay onto the wheel with a heavy slap.
“So, how are you?” said Jorge.
“You’re kidding, right? You know that Moretti? He’s a real joker,” she said with her heavy accent, turning back to the wheel.
“I didn’t realize until recently that you were so given to mockery and insult!” Jorge said tensely, “But now I’m finding out that those are your specialties.”
“I have never insulted you and you know it,” said Martina forcefully, stopping to look up at him. “I suppose I should wonder what’s gotten into you, but I’m out of curiosity right now. I’m having a good time working, and I’m having a bad time talking to you, so why don’t I get back to what I was doing?” The act of kicking was not that much different from the act of running. The stone made a scraping sound as it moved the wheel.
The trick was, as usual, to be able to tell where a thought came from, whether in through the senses or up from some dark underground abyss. “So now you’ve found out what you were getting into with me,” Jorge started, “and it’s not what you expected, so you’re not even going to bother to show me the door. I’m just supposed to infer that I’m not what you had in mind.”
“Where did you get that from?”
“And you just get out of my car and don’t even say goodbye!” It was true that she had done that when he had driven her home from the hangar, but it was what she always did.
“I’m working now,” she said. “I don’t consider this a conversation.” She turned back to her lump of clay, which had grown dry from too much spinning without purpose.
Jorge watched her for a minute and then turned and walked out. To say that she was right, even to himself, would have been far too painful, particularly at a time when his disappointment in himself was like a lead cape compressing his shoulders and his chest. He stood for a minute on her doorstep and then set out, knowing only that what had happened was gratuitous, and not at all what he had intended, and that it meant his life.
LXXIII
THERE ARE NIGHTS when the trees and the sky and the sounds of the forest draw around, cocoon-like, lying easy on the skin, and others when the forest offers only a rough cloak of brambles, a hammock of thorns, a damp, infested blanket against the creeping chill. The stars had collected in one cor
ner of the sky and glowed softly like a snow bank in the moonlight; the moss that draped the rocks by the edge of the small lake worked like a baffle to soften the harsher sounds. There was Kakap’s breathing, wispier than James’s, but reassuring still, predictable and steady like the pace of walking, and the occasional soft snap of an ember from the fire. Their baskets, which hung like orioles’ nests from a branch alongside them, conveyed a human presence in the darkness, eight thick bodies standing by, heavy with tubers, crowned with reeds and ivy sprigs for hair. Larry couldn’t see their eyes, but knew that they were made of soft red berries and shiny pakara nuts. They twitched with interest when they heard a splash in the water, or the crack of a branch underfoot, or the creaking of Larry’s hammock as he turned onto his side, trying to convince himself that he was safe enough to sleep.
The two stories of Larry’s life, the one of the night and the one of the day, seemed to portray two different people from two estranged, if neighboring, lands. The book that was opened to him now, as he curled himself around it in the darkness, was the night book, whose chapters told of his years in his bedroom growing up, the night terrors and the reading under the covers with the flashlight, and his months with James, being lulled by his snoring and his ease. So many of the nights were haunted; the ones at Sara’s, the ones by the river, or at Dabimi’s, and worst of all, there was the first night with Kakap, in which the forest, with the darkest of intentions, reached in through the spaces in his netting from every direction to smooth his hair and stroke his skin. All night, he sat crouched in his hammock with the netting pulled taut around his shoulders, his hands clutching penlight and penknife, drawing his jacket around his knees. Kakap’s inert body beside him barely stirred. When at last he caught sight of dawn shimmering in the distance between the treetops, he ran to her and wept, and she closed the night book gently, and hid him for an hour in her skirts. His gratitude was boundless, extending even to Kakap, who suddenly opened his eyes and looked at him, unfurling his ragged smile.
“Did you sleep well?” he asked in a kind voice as he rolled his mat and stowed it in his basket.
“Well,” Larry said, feeling, in his rush of exuberance, a sudden urge to embrace him, struck by how small he was, fragile as a bird.
There had been other chapters since then, each shorter than the last, describing the shrinking interval between wakefulness and sleep. Some contained unexpected moments of contentment, when the chirrups and breathing and trickling water all came together in the darkness and soothed him, and made sense. Were an editor to read the book of night, Larry knew, he would no doubt look with disapproval on its extremes of tone and atmosphere, on its inexplicable disruptions of plot. He showed it to no one, however, and let it fall slowly from his hands onto his chest in the dark.
LXXIV
SARA SWITCHED ON the light by her bed and reached for her book, pulling herself up by the elbows. She never would have turned on a light in the middle of the night when Marietto was alive; he was one of those urban-light sleepers who relied upon the hum of the forest to lull them, and regarded mechanical noises and electric lights as sources of tension and foreboding. Such were the fruits of loss; without Marietto, she was free to turn the lights on and off dozens of times in a single night. Indeed, without James, she was freed from the haunting thought that if she had only chosen differently at the outset, Jorge might have grown up with a father at his side, resulting in a very different outcome. Without Jorge, she need not limit her time at the office so as to be at home when he stopped by on his way to and from the airport to take out or repay the one cruzero loan. In fact, she need not act like a mother at all, and could even resort, during one particularly challenging evening, to dining at midnight on beans, served straight from a can. She didn’t need her son to remind her of the ways in which loss resembled a form of flying, of transcending all that was familiar on the way to the breathtaking emptiness above.
LXXV
ON EACH OF the evenings when he was in the village and not out gathering with Kakap, Larry pulled his date book from the pocket of his travel bag and crossed off another day, adding days for his time in the field. In Pahquel, time was marked by the seasons of fruiting and flowering, by the rise and fall of the rivers and the stars, and most of all by the presence of the rains, whose furious blessing was dreaded and awaited during the dry time. The years were recorded on the chajans by the slow creep of color up the thick lintels, but only Larry counted days and parceled them out into weeks; despite himself, he privately commemorated his approximation of the fourth of July and his birthday and even his mother’s birthday with sudden bursts of homesickness. When he had first arrived, the time seemed not to pass at all, and the Xs had inched imperceptibly across the expanse of the stark white grid. Lately, however, the days were passing faster than he could count them, and he carried an image in his head of the calendars in movies whose pages fly off in a stream, leaving a single date exposed. In his version of the movie, the date that held the camera’s focus, surrounded by nothing but stark, blank walls, was the fifteenth of September, when he had, for some forgotten reason, told himself he would set off for Sr. Catalpa’s, for the trek back to what he called in his mind “square one,” rather than “home.” He shut the book and stared into the fire, scarcely blinking when the kaag nearly stepped on his hand as she passed him on her way out the door.
Larry sought in the fire what he suddenly missed most, the chance to ask James what he should do. He called to him silently, in the recliner chair in his parents’ living room, in the seat beside him on the plane, in the small hut they had shared during their first visit together to Pahquel. He called to him in his funeral pyre, and in the enamel box of ashes, and in his hammock in the darkness, from where, although invisible, he could still be heard. He tried to piece together an answer from odd bits of phrases spoken in his head in James’s voice, “atta boy,” and “look at this here!” and “so you can teach an old dog new tricks!” He posed the question over and over again, as though to make it sharper by rubbing it back and forth against a stone in his head, and it glinted in the firelight, revealing no sign of James’s answer. A spider staggered from the edge of a burning log and crept off into the darkness; in the center of the fire, the stones remained steadfast. The night world of the forest overflowed with creatures who said “go,” or “stay,” with those who hurried over fallen tree limbs and those who nested in their hollows, listening every evening to the rhythm of feet overhead.
That night, after the children and the kaag had gone to sleep, Dabimi came and sat with him beside the fire, squatting at an angle so that he could see him without facing him directly.
“You’re good at gathering,” Dabimi said at last, poking at the fire with a stick. “Kakap came up and said so, without my asking.” “Um,” said Larry, suspicious of the compliment. He pushed the embers around with his own stick, startling at one point when it lightly tapped Dabimi’s.
“I hope I’m bringing enough to my line,” he said.
“Of course,” said Dabimi, waving him off with annoyance. “Our troughs are filled with flour.” He paused and cleared his throat before he spoke again. “You’re doing well. You’ll want a kaag, and children,” he said, glancing sideways at Larry. “I know a nice one over in the far village. She is a mother’s niece of Kura”—he nodded towards his kaag in the hut—“and would bring credit to our line.”
“How do you make a claim?” asked Larry, as though he hadn’t heard him.
“Of that woman?”
“Of anyone.” He was careful not to mention Aran’s name.
“Speak to the father first,” he said, standing up and looking down at Larry. “Always, a gift to the father.”
Larry stopped himself from reminding Dabimi of what they both knew, that there was no father to ask. He turned his face to the fire so Dabimi couldn’t see his expression, but his reaction was clear from the way he jabbed at the ashes with his stick. He waited for him to leave, but Dabimi merely stepped back
and stood behind him in the shadows.
“This hand of days was good,” he said at last to Larry’s back. “Four pigs, two for now and two for later. You don’t need to bring in any more.”
“You’re the best of the hunters,” said Larry. “You were better than the other sons even when you were young.”
“Pataja guides my hand,” said Dabimi.
“Even then,” said Larry, “your hand could feel his guidance.”
“Um,” said Dabimi and fell silent, leaving Larry to listen to the night. In the silences, there were always layers of sound, low rumblings and nasal croaks and high-pitched chirps placed like shingles, each overlapping the one below it, from the dirt floor to the ceiling of leaves and stars. Between any two objects in the darkness, there were strands of sound tying them together, and also, in their sheer density, pushing them farther apart.
“Or,” said Dabimi, brushing away the strands like cobwebs, “you could press your claim through pajaX.”
“What do you mean?” said Larry, sickened at the word.
“You understand me,” said Dabimi mockingly, suddenly turning to go.
“Wait!” said Larry, turning to face him.
“I’m tired now,” said Dabimi, still facing the house.
“You don’t like me,” said Larry, unable to stop himself. “You didn’t when we were young, and you still don’t.”
“You are my brother of honor,” Dabimi said stiffly, his voice low and intense.
“What bad thing did I do?” said Larry.
“Don’t make the wrong choice,” said Dabimi, disappearing into the hut.