by Nancy Burke
CXLI
JOAQUIM WAS UP before all but the river. As the sun ignited the water’s far extremity, he watched as a cloud of light roared silently toward him down the length of the river’s satin fuse. In the face of it, he stood his ground, holding his compass out like an offering, his map like a shield. Behind him, the sand exhaled drifts of steam; the whole inlet swirled and glowed pink, glossy as pearl. Were he not chained to the mast of his own determination, even this old adventurer might have been seduced to stay, to unpack his clothes and wash them in the river, to set up his makeshift hut and drop his line in among the schools that hovered, with the lucidity of dreams, on transparent currents. Joaquim was well acquainted with the dangers of beauty, however, and roused himself, moving from hammock to hammock, gently nudging his companions awake.
“The news is, we’re almost there,” he said as he lit a fire and measured out the coffee into their dented tin pot. “Maybe a day, maybe less. We seem to have stumbled into a shortcut. Turns out, this tributary isn’t on my map.” He knew that if he hadn’t some assurance to offer, Sam, for one, was poised to give up and insist on turning back, running off hysterically, endangering them all. But their night by the river had refreshed them. Even Sam took a dip before breakfast; even Jorge and Martina consented to be photographed, together, drying on the rocks in coincidentally identical oxford cloth shirts. As they set off into the cool, humid dark, following Joaquim through undergrowth so dense he had, at one point, to unsheathe his scythe and hack a series of doorways for his companions to step through, they were aware despite these obstacles of the resurgence of collective hope, of a hunger whose object now seemed tantalizingly near. When they came upon the outermost marker, standing rigid and dispassionate as a beefeater, they fell against it, and ran their hands across its heft without regard for splinters or insect stings. In the solidity of the trunk, which was too hard to allow intruders of any kind a foothold, they found reassurance that they had arrived at their destination, and that despite the delay of years, they were in time.
“Let’s set up,” said Joaquim, lowering his pack.
“Here?” said Jorge, “We can’t stop now! Let’s at least find Larry. I thought we were going to get in and get out.”
“You think we can treat this contact as any different from the others, just because of Larry? We need them on our side, and we’re going to collect the evidence we came for, and we’re going to do this one right.”
“What? Make a drop-off and the whole thing?”
“The whole thing,” said Joaquim, beginning to set up the first of their two tents. “Though I guess we have some clues already. I guess they don’t need axes,” he said, admiring the smooth, sharp point of the fallen tree, like a sharpened pencil balancing on the even sharper point of another.
“So who’s going with me?” he said when they had finished erecting their city, and had sponged down their dinner dishes, and had cleared a small plaza between the tents, demarcated by strings on which lanterns were hung. “Jorge? Up for a stroll?” said Joaquim nonchalantly, sticking his head into the larger of the tents as Jorge began to unfurl his bedroll inside it. Jorge looked up in disbelief, but obeyed. As Joaquim scratched out a note on a piece of paper torn from a miniature spiral notebook, folded it, and pushed it into his front pocket, Jorge filled the smallest of his shoulder bags with a sample of the usual offerings—twine and a hunting knife, and a tiny bag of glass beads, a handful of matchboxes—and set off behind Joaquim’s lantern, bowing slightly to Martina as he left. Sam, suddenly panic-stricken, began to protest, calling after them into the darker darkness that signified nightfall. Martina hushed him, pushing him quickly in front of her into the tent and zipping up the opening behind them.
“Wait here a minute,” she whispered to him, stroking his arm like a mother, or an aunt, and then unzipping the opening again, facing him as she backed out to keep him from following. She knew what comforts the illusion of shelter afforded and the terror that ensued when that bubble of illusion was ruptured.
“Where are you going?” said Sam, a grown man, now clutching his bedroll to his chest like a child. “Are you coming back?”
“I’m just going to pee. A minute. No more,” she whispered, stepping out and zipping the tent flap behind her. As she squatted at the far edge of their camp, a single word came to her: exile. It had been possible to lose Jorge without even a minute of regret in the context of her studio, when it had been her choice to push him out, but now, perhaps incited by Sam’s panic or by something more remote and personal, she saw clearly that the loss was not bearable. She interrogated herself: Why this sudden weakness? It wasn’t exactly protection for which she depended on Jorge, or on Joaquim, for that matter; if the last week had convinced her of anything, it was of her own competence in the forest, her capacity to lead, and to protect herself, perhaps not so much because of her marksmanship as because of her willingness to fire in her own defense. It might simply have been the sight of Sam’s quivering lip, or the vision of Jorge’s back receding into the darkness, jostling a vision she had pushed away, into a corner of her mind far more dense with undergrowth and menace than the forest at night, of her father’s back receding into a roil of suitcases and dark overcoats beside a snorting, shrieking train.
“Marty?” Sam called pitifully. She knew to expect him to treat her coolly tomorrow, out of shame at what he was tonight.
As she returned to the tent and slid into her bedroll, Sam pushed up against her and clung on, grasping her in his hairy, heavy arms and pulling her in to him. At first, she started and pulled away, but then she relaxed and allowed herself to be held, as though by a child or a father, while the world whirred and screeched like an enormous engine starting up around them. It was nearly dawn, and Sam had long ago released her, when Jorge slipped in beside her and she rolled over, clinging to him with the same intensity with which Sam had held her earlier.
“We made a lean-to, and placed it all,” whispered Jorge, as though to postpone the need to address her embrace of him. “And we hid, and we saw one of them take everything, and he didn’t even look for us. He just left,” whispered Jorge, at last pulling his arm from his bedroll and laying it against hers. “But someone else is here too—you’ll never guess. We’re both sure we saw him.”
“You saw Larry?”
“No. Someone we didn’t want to see.”
“Sodeis?”
She felt Jorge nod. “What are we going to do?”
“Get some sleep,” said Jorge. “With our pistols under our pillows.”
CXLII
IT WAS RIGHT for Kakap to die as he did, clutching his daughter’s arm with one hand and a piece of Saptir with the other. As a comfort to him, Panar added crushed Saptir to the mix with which he was filled, so that there would be no pain on his journey, and he would encounter no delay in finding his father’s house. The death and the wailing and the burning and the grief and the absence went by in a blur, as though to Larry, time had become a train that went storming past him before he could even make out the passengers leaning their heads out of the open windows, let alone the darker faces pressed against the glass. As Aran worked, the paint climbed the two legs of Kakap’s chajan like water rising in the river, and the river filled its banks and overflowed like the paint along the mantle overhead. The house was disassembled and left behind, two bare chajan legs against the backdrop of the living village, and no new one was built, as Pitar had been sent out on his ritaX and all Kakap’s other children were settled and there was no kaag living to provide for. Larry and Aran and Oji carried the baskets of gourds and maatas and rough stones for grating to their own hut, where a ledge had been constructed beside the mixing ledge to hold them.
Because Larry was now Ak, he was entitled, as Panar had schooled his nieces, to one or two persons to whom he could teach the songs and the plants and the ways of preparing them. He had hoped that Oji or Iri could go with him, but last boy of the last boys, Iri was still not ready for an age group, and
Oji was more preoccupied with hunting than with gathering, and was preparing to ritaX. Rather than choose the son of Kakap’s daughter from the far village, whom he barely knew, he decided to go out on his own, as Kakap had done, until Pitar had returned and was ready to go with him, leaving a place for Iri to join them later. Larry prepared the songs and the bowls and the yoke as before, but a sense of dread overtook him as he packed the wax and the cutting stones, for the void where Kakap had been had cut so deep in him that it penetrated all the layers of his life in Pahquel, and reached down into his memory of James’s death, and grafted itself to that still-growing vine. At that moment, what terrified him most was not the danger of the forest itself, for which he had been prepared through years of tutelage by Kakap, but rather the impending sense that alone in the forest’s intense darkness, he would have no one solid to hold onto. That night, although Aran was restless with excitement because Oji had brought a woman to the house at last, he curled up beside her on the ledge, and was jostled as she tossed in her sleep. At dawn, he stood in the doorway and watched her, the way her breasts fell away from her chest to either side, and how the strands of white hair flowed out over the small dark agouti pelt beneath her head, and he was suddenly filled with a fear that she too would be gone when he returned.
The way in was treacherous; he wasn’t used to leading. His call to the plants had a plaintive, desperate air, and in hearing it, they cowered and hid. He had only seven to gather, but after three days, he had collected only two, and felt himself sinking into a nearly forgotten despair as he lay curled in his hammock with his knees folded into his chest. It was his fate to discover again and again that he was unprepared, to ready himself and then to fall back, yearning for and fearing the forces that always appeared at those moments to lead him on. His own eyes, accustomed to seeking out these forces, were not so sensitive to the stillness of roots and leaves as Kakap’s had been. He would come upon a curtain of brambles in the dim half-light and his attention would be drawn to whatever moved the fastest, so that he would miss the silent Tapiri watching him with its hundred knots like eyes from beneath a decomposing log, or the Laar that trembled only very slightly in its gown of overlapping leaves precise as fish-scales. Thus, as he turned in his hammock, he saw only what was fleeting, Kakap in retreat, and Anok and James, pummeling across the dark cranium of the sky like comets, blinding him to the stillness of the roots and low branches, to the thought of how solid and heavy Aran had felt in his arms.
If Kakap had been there, he would have sung of the constancy of the ancestors, of how rhythmically they trod in their smoke to the plants and entered them; of how surely they became their sap. But these were not Larry’s ancestors, despite the story Kakap had made up to cover him; they did not want to hear him sing their songs. His ancestors were an undifferentiated clan of Scotch-Irish on his father’s side and Polish on his mother’s, who had as little interest in him as he had shown in them. They had taught him nothing about how to rely on them, or how to shoulder the burdens of a line. In Pahquel, he had been schooled for years in the songs and the stories, and had learned to distinguish between an untold number of plants, but he did not know how to trust in their guidance, or how to earn their trust. He thought of turning back, of walking all night to the kaawa of one of Kakap’s daughters, who had grown up hearing about TaroX and Mita and Ker, and might be willing to teach him, or to take his place, but he knew that such disgrace would reflect poorly on Oji, and especially on Iri, who, like himself, had never been secure in his place. Instead, he stayed out for two days longer than he planned, and forced himself to scan the tree bark for the tiny bromeliads with the purple cores whose spiked leaves contained the elixir Xit, and to dig for the brown mushroom caps that, when fried with coconut, strengthened old men’s joints. He screamed at the rain when he thought it would break him, and on his last day out, after spotting the Kipa and filling the final basket, he turned back for home without even stopping to eat. As he reached the garden plots of the far village, a sense of elation overtook him and swept him with a longing to show Kakap he hadn’t failed. Panar sensed his growing excitement as he revealed the contents of the gourds, and had his wife feed him pancake and greens, and directed him to Irapat’s hut, where Aran was painting for the naming of a child. Aran’s joy in seeing him caught him up short, and as they walked home arm in arm, he skipped up and down at her side, knocking against her like Iri would, forcing her to put aside her usual reserve and laugh from embarrassment and relief. They stood on their kaawa with their arms around each other’s waists while Oji and Katari were busy together in the hut, and Larry told her how Kakap had guided him to the Kipa by pointing to it with the bent Para stalks. In the clearing in front of them, there were people strolling and talking, and fires appearing out on the kaawas, and the smells of smoking meat and frying dough. There were the grunts and snorts from their hut, where their one son was copulating with a young girl, still only single-breasted, who would soon become his wife, and there were the cries from the field where their older son was playing Kara, and there was the brown-and-soft-green scrub, across which Dabimi suddenly darted on his way from Atira’s hut to Piri’s. On impulse, still in the grip of his elation, Larry called out to him, and he stopped and nodded curtly in Larry’s direction, so that as he turned, the fire caught a glimpse of his right arm, upon which a gold and silver wristwatch gleamed like a jeweled armband, encircling the soft matte darkness of his skin.
CXLIII
AT THE PROSPECT of his next trip out, Larry had expected to feel less dread than at the first one, but was surprised to find the same sickening sense rising in his throat as he readied his gourds and his baskets. The hut was already empty behind him as he stepped through his chajan, threshold of time, and launched out into the teeming forest. His task, he knew, was to try his hardest to see as Kakap had seen, to hone his vision in order to be able to detect simultaneously what was great and what was small, what was moving and what was at rest, and to inform any of those ancestors who somehow hadn’t smelled the smoke from Kakap’s fire of his imminent presence among them. The task entailed his constant singing as he went, his announcement to all who had been alive, and thus were still living, of the fire and the loss and the reappearance of Kakap in the very rumbling and humming of the forest. It was after only half a day’s walking that he heard an odd snap, a breach in the pattern of vibrations that held Kakap and the world, and turned on his heel to confront Dabimi, who now stood before him in his penis-sheath and wrist watch and arrow-case, carrying a basket that betrayed, by its labored swinging, some heavy object within it.
“My kinsman,” said Dabimi, bowing.
“I see your hunt has been blessed, as usual,” said Larry, gesturing with his head towards Dabimi’s basket.
Dabimi opened the basket to reveal a ball of twine, a hunting knife, and a silver hip-flask, filled to the top with cachaca. “These are from your person,” he said, gesturing deeper into the forest.
“What do you mean, my person?” said Larry, suddenly gasping as though he’d been punched by something he thought he had evaded simply by turning from it in his mind: That the watch Dabimi was wearing was not something that had been given to him by James in the past, nor was it something he had taken from Larry’s pack during the time Larry had lived in his hut, but was in fact an irrefutable sign of contact with a world he had allowed himself to believe had ceased to exist, except within his own memory and longing.
“Where did you get those things?” he demanded, panic-stricken.
“Do you want me to take you there?” said Dabimi, with a sense of triumph in his voice at Larry’s visible terror. “They are from my friend,” he said haughtily, clearly enjoying the idea that he had the upper hand even with Larry’s own kind. “I have had many friends like that, many, in more than two hands of moons.” After standing for a moment, relishing the power he wielded, he added, “In fact, this friend says he knows you, and has asked me to bring you to him, you and other persons who are Ak, w
ho will talk to him and see what he has for us. So you go home. Go home and get Panar and the others, and I will tell him you’re coming, and I will come for you.” He walked up to Larry as though to embrace him, in a mood of great expansiveness, but instead, turned away and disappeared into the forest.
As Larry ran home, his mind reeled with possibilities. At first, he imagined it was James who had come for him, and had to remind himself forcibly that James was dead. Only then did it occur to him that it was likely that the person Dabimi had encountered would prove to be a stranger, his kind only on the basis of their skin or dress or speech, that the person had asked only to see leaders, and not him by name. The only thing he was clear on was that this stranger was an intruder, threatening the life that, by sheer, fragile chance, he had managed to find for himself, the only life that was possible for him. The man might be a logger, he told himself, in search of easy Indians to woo for rights; he might be part of a team of installers of telephone lines, or, worst of all, a scout for a mining company, whose rape of the land would inevitably leave indelible, toxic scars. As he tried one possibility after another in his mind, SPI and Sr. Catalpa and even Jorge, who, he told himself, would never betray him, and at one point, crazily, his parents, he noticed that he was panting as he ran, shaking uncontrollably, so that his gait became uneven, causing him to weave. He burst into the village gasping and ran blindly to Kakap’s hut, only remembering when he had reached that bare chajan that Kakap was gone. He turned on his heel and headed for Panar’s, fearing in his confusion, that he would find in his house too, merely the leavings of the last of his Fathers, the clean, white skeleton of his past.