by Tom Epperson
“Vera and Dolly.” Two sisters that lived down the street when Roberto was a kid.
“We met them last week,” says Daniel. “At a bar. They were on vacation. They’re nurses.”
“We bought them dinner,” says Roberto, “and they invited us to visit.”
The sergeant looks at them impassively through his sunglasses—and then he smiles, and hands them back their IDs.
“You should be in for a good time. Nurses are very wild, in my experience. They’ve seen everything, they know all about the human body, and they have absolutely no inhibitions.”
“I hope you’re right,” says Roberto.
The sergeant laughs. “About women, I’m always right,” and Roberto and Daniel laugh along with him. Now he gives the top of the car a slap and steps back from it.
“Get that alarm fixed. My men are very jumpy, they’ve been seeing a lot of action against the terrorists. It wouldn’t have been their fault if something bad had happened.”
“I’ll get it fixed in the next town,” says Daniel.
“Thanks a lot, sergeant,” says Roberto.
“Have fun with the nurses,” says the sergeant. “And be careful in Tarapacá. It’s crawling with criminals.”
Soon they come to San Lorenzo, a dismal little sugarcane town built along the toxic trickle of a nearly dried-up river. They pass by smoke arising from a pit of burning trash, kids kicking around a soccer ball made out of plastic and string, a begrimed white statue of the Virgin Mary in front of a decrepit church. On the banks of the river is a low brick building with ten or twelve vultures and about the same number of very poor-looking people waiting around outside. Roberto wonders what kind of place this is then sees a man leading a big pink pig on a rope toward the building and realizes this is the local slaughterhouse. The pig’s tail is wagging like a dog’s, it’s oblivious of its fate.
Daniel pulls up to the pumps of an Esso station. A grinning, grease-covered boy who looks about twelve or thirteen puts gas in the car. Daniel asks him if there’s somebody here that can disconnect his car alarm.
“Sure,” said the boy, “I can do that. No problem.”
Daniel looks dubious. “Somebody told me car alarms are kind of complicated.”
“It’s not complicated. I just need to find the control box. It should be under the dashboard somewhere.”
“How long will it take?”
The boy shrugs. “Twenty minutes?”
Daniel drives the car into the garage, and the boy, whose name is Pablo, gets to work. Daniel lights a cigarette and wanders off with his camera, while Roberto goes in the office. A middle-aged man stands at a counter reading a newspaper. Behind him, pretty girls in bathing suits walk up and down a stage on a muted TV, and an oscillating fan stirs up the hot air. He’s wearing a gray shirt with the name “Gaspar” embroidered on it in red.
Gaspar looks up from his paper at Roberto. He seems a little astonished, as if Roberto had walked through the door naked, but that’s because he has abnormally protruding eyes.
“What can I do for you?” he says.
Roberto explains about the car alarm, and asks him if Pablo really knows how to fix it. Gaspar smiles.
“That boy’s a wonder. He came out of his mother’s belly knowing everything about cars.”
“Is he your son?”
Gaspar beams. “Five daughters and then Pablo. But he was worth the wait.”
He speaks the lazy, mellifluent Spanish of the coast, and Roberto asks him if that’s where he’s from.
“Yes. I shouldn’t have ever left, but a young man wants to see things. I still don’t know how I wound up in a crappy place like San Lorenzo. Oh, wait, I remember, I met my wife here,” and he laughs.
Roberto likes Gaspar. He tells him how the alarm almost got them killed at the checkpoint, and Gaspar laughs so long and hard he has to wipe a tear away from one of his popping eyes.
“There’s many different ways to die,” he says, “but I’ve never heard of that one.”
“So what’s the Army doing outside of town?”
“There’s a lot of guerrillas in the area. There have been for many years, they’re always trying to stir up trouble with the sugarcane workers. Not that I blame them, the owners treat the workers like shit. But the guerrillas can be very cruel. They killed the son of a friend of mine just last year.”
“What happened?”
“Well, it’s like this,” says Gaspar, and he leans forward with his elbows on the counter and Roberto senses he’s about to hear a good story. “The son of my friend was named Juan, but nobody called him that. Everybody called him Panther.”
“Why Panther?”
“I don’t know, that was just his name. Panther had a friend named Críspulo, they had been best friends ever since they were little kids. But nobody called him Críspulo, they called him Parrot. And they had tattoos on their arms, of a panther and a parrot. But . . . what’s your name, my friend?”
“Roberto.”
“But Roberto, here’s the thing. Panther had the parrot tattoo, and Parrot had the panther tattoo. Some people thought they were homosexuals, but it wasn’t like that, they both liked girls. It’s just that those two boys loved each other like nothing I’ve ever seen. They did everything together, they were never apart. They worked construction, and nobody would even think of trying to hire one without the other.
“Panther had a kid brother named Chepe. Chepe was only eighteen, and he was very naïve and easy to talk into things. Panther found out the guerrillas were trying to talk Chepe into joining them. Panther was very angry, and went to the guerrillas and told them to leave his brother alone. Nobody knows exactly what happened, but Panther had a very bad temper and he must have really pissed the guerrillas off because they wound up shooting him. They dumped his body by the side of the road. The police were there when Parrot showed up, he grabbed Panther’s body and screamed and cried and the police had to put poor Parrot in handcuffs so they could take the body away.”
Suddenly Roberto hears the haunting cries of seagulls. It’s the ringtone of Gaspar’s cellphone, which makes sense considering where he’s from. He picks up the phone and tells someone he’ll call them back.
“So what happened to Parrot?” Roberto asks.
Gaspar shakes his head. “Nothing good, I’m sorry to say. Even though they were so close, Panther and Parrot were very different. Panther was very strong and forceful, but Parrot was more the mild, dreamy type. He just couldn’t withstand the shock of Panther’s death. For a while he went completely crazy. He would babble things that made no sense. He had trouble walking because he thought his feet had become his hands and his hands his feet. Then after a few weeks he seemed to be much better. He even went back to work. Like I said, he worked construction. One day, it was time to have lunch, but Parrot said he wasn’t hungry and was going to keep working. When the other guys came back, they found Parrot lying on the floor, dead. They couldn’t figure out what had happened at first, but then they saw his head was a little bloody—he’d shot himself with a nail gun. Some people thought it was an accident, but I’m sure it was suicide. I think he just couldn’t stand the thought that for the rest of his life he’d be working without Panther at his side.”
Gaspar gets Cokes for each of them out of a cooler and because Roberto’s a good listener tells him all about his life. Pablo takes only fifteen minutes to disconnect the alarm. Roberto pays Gaspar and says good-bye and then goes out. He looks around for Daniel. He doesn’t see him anywhere. He feels a flash of panic and imagines Daniel kidnapped by the guerrillas, then he spots him in a vacant, litter-strewn lot on the other side of the road, talking to some tough-looking young guys drinking beer. They’re all laughing at something Daniel has said. He has a way of becoming instant friends with almost anyone he meets. That is, if he doesn’t make them so mad they want to kill him. Daniel starts taking pictures of a shaven-headed guy bare to the waist and covered with tattoos. The guy turns around, and Roberto s
ees he has two eyes tattooed on the back of his head. Daniel takes another picture, and then Roberto calls to him, “Daniel! Let’s go!”
Daniel fist-bumps all the guys and then walks back across the road.
“Look,” he says, showing Roberto the picture in the LCD screen. “He says the eyes are so nobody can sneak up behind him.”
“Maybe that’s what we need.”
Roberto hears above them, getting louder, a whup-whup-whup.
Six Army helicopters pass overhead. They’re big American-made Chinooks, olive-green, tandem rotors, made to carry troops and equipment. Daniel points his camera at them. Roberto wonders if they’re heading for Tulcán.
* * *
They reach Tarapacá as the sun is going down. It is like a great ulcerous sore growing on the jungle next to the river. Motorcycles and three-wheeled motortaxis buzzing ceaselessly up and down the streets. Trash in the gutters. Skinny dogs trotting along and then waiting like people on corners for the traffic to go by. The broken sidewalks crowded with people moving past the shabby shops and stores. Though Roberto does see one place that seems strangely pristine, glowing with many colors. It sells athletic shoes, Adidas, Nike, whatever you want.
They have a couple of hours to kill before they meet Chano at Juanito’s at eight. Daniel parks his Twingo across the street from a park. They get out and walk around. Roberto sees a lot of families strolling together, enjoying the slow cessation of the heat as the day draws to a close. An ice cream vendor’s pushing a cart with a tinkling bell. A taxi driver stands on the hood of his taxi and picks a mango from a tree. Mango trees, with their bright round balls of fruit, have always reminded Roberto of Christmas trees.
He pauses at the bird-shit-bespattered statue of some long-dead general, and reads aloud a quote from him on a bronze plaque: “‘Everything for the country, and above the country, only God!’” He becomes aware of a sound, a high-pitched chittering that seems to be coming from all over. He looks up and sees small birds with long tails flying around, landing in the treetops. They’re coming into the park from all directions, in groups of four or six or eight. Roberto and Daniel watch wonderingly as dozens become hundreds and then thousands. Roberto asks a neatly dressed older gentleman with a gray moustache what’s going on. He laughs and says, “Welcome to the Park of the Parakeets. They come in from the jungle to spend the night. Why? I don’t know, you should ask them. They begin to arrive precisely at six, you can set your watch to it.”
Daniel, trying to take pictures of the parakeets, is cursing the fading light, but Roberto can barely hear him over the tumultuous din they make. They cluster in the branches above them and block out the evening sky, and more and more are coming, zooming in over trees and buildings, it’s not as if they’re fleeing the jungle but it’s like multitudinous bits of the jungle are coming to Tarapacá.
* * *
“I wonder how my fish are doing,” Daniel says. “The clown triggerfish still wasn’t eating before I left.”
“Who’s taking care of them?”
“This teenage girl that lives on my floor. She seems responsible, but you never know. How do I know she’s not in my apartment right now with some crazy boyfriend? They could be having sex everywhere and doing drugs. Maybe the boyfriend has totally lost his mind, he’s pouring vodka into the tank or even peeing in it.”
“Relax, that’s not happening. Your fish are fine.”
Night has fallen. They’re sitting in a restaurant at a table with a plastic tablecloth that has a pattern of red and green slices of watermelon. The walls are covered with paintings in a primitive style of jaguars, monkeys, parrots, anacondas, and Indians, including a dusky Virgin Mary and baby Jesus. There’s a very weird painting of a pink river dolphin with an enormous penis standing on a riverbank. Mounted above the bar is a monstrous-looking fish about two meters long with a gaping mouth and teeth like a crocodile. According to the waitress, the fish comes from the Gualala River and has a long unpronounceable Indian name and it’s what they’re having for dinner. It’s the best fish Roberto’s ever tasted.
“Another beer?” asks the waitress, and Roberto says no and Daniel says yes.
“Take it easy on the drinking,” says Roberto.
“Stop talking to me like you’re my mother, or I’m going to go home and check on my fish.”
“Daniel, you have to stop threatening to go home every time I say something you don’t like.”
“The only thing I have to do,” he says, raising his camera and looking through the viewfinder, “is take her picture.”
A stunning mestizo girl of eighteen or so is sitting a few tables away. She walked in with her family not long after Roberto and Daniel arrived. She is tall and leggy and copper-colored and isn’t wearing much at all, just little shorts and a sleeveless top.
Daniel is good at taking somebody’s picture without them knowing about it. Now he lowers his camera and takes a drink of his beer and gazes at the girl.
“Look how unhappy she is,” he says, and he’s right: her parents and siblings are laughing and talking around her but she sits sullen and inattentive. “She knows she’s far too tall and beautiful to be stuck in a shitty place like this.”
It’s as if the girl is hearing Daniel somehow. She bares her teeth as she bites into her food, and has the look of an angry animal.
“You’re a photographer,” Roberto says, “why don’t you discover her? Maybe she could become a supermodel, and she’d owe everything to you.”
“It’s funny you should say that. My agent’s been encouraging me to become a fashion photographer. She says the money would be better, and she thinks I’d be really good at it.”
“Taking pictures of beautiful women all day and getting paid for it? You should do it.”
“Right,” Daniel says, forking some fried plantain into his mouth. “I just need to go into the jungle first and takes pictures of piles of dead bodies. Roberto, I’m telling you, if I get skinned alive with a cheese grater, I’ll never forgive you.”
After they left San Lorenzo, Roberto made the mistake of telling Daniel about the ghastly fate that had befallen Juan Carlos Mejía. Now he can’t stop talking about it.
“The odds of that particular thing happening to you or me are very small,” says Roberto. “It’s probably a thousand times more likely we’d be struck by lightning.”
His cellphone rings. He pulls it out of his pocket and looks at it.
“Who is it?” asks Daniel.
“Caroline.” He’s not planning to pick up, but then suddenly “Don’t say anything,” he says to Daniel, and then into the phone: “Caroline?”
He hears Caroline say “Roberto,” but then her voice begins to break up.
“Caroline, hold on, I’m having trouble hearing you, I’m going to go outside.”
He goes out of the restaurant into the humid night.
“Caroline, can you hear me?”
“Yes, Roberto, I can! Are you in Contamana?”
“Yes, I’m here, everything’s fine. I was just having something to eat.”
“I wasn’t expecting to reach you, I was going to leave a message. Because you said cell service is so bad.”
“I guess we just got lucky. What are you doing?”
“Cuddling with the cats. Thinking of you.”
She says something else but the sound’s going in and out.
“Caroline, you’re breaking up again.”
“Can you hear me now?”
“Yes.”
“I just asked you how everything was going so far. Are you getting what you need?”
“Yes, it’s been great.”
“Oh, I’m glad. Your book’s going to be wonderful, I know.”
Roberto stands there smelling the stink of gasoline and sewage from the street. The motorcycles and motortaxis are still buzzing back and forth. It was a mistake to pick up, it’s killing him to hear her voice.
“Do you know how much I love you?” he says.
He waits for a reply but there is none. The connection has been lost.
* * *
They go to a supermarket and buy several six packs of bottled water for the jungle, along with protein bars and nuts and dried fruit for Roberto and candy bars and packs of cigarettes for Daniel. Then they go to the parking lot where Daniel left his car and put the bags in the trunk, and then they start walking toward Juanito’s. They drove by it earlier, it’s only a few blocks away.
Roberto just hopes that Chano’s there. If something’s gone wrong and he’s not, there may not be enough time to implement a plan B or C and get into Tulcán. Roberto can’t just go blundering into the jungle on his own and hope for the best, he’s almost certain to get arrested or worse.
He wonders if the real Chano is going to fit the picture in his head. Lean and sinewy, solid as stone. A swarthy face and a devilish grin. And of course covered with scars, as Javier said.
A cool gust of air blows down the street, scraps of trash tumbling in it. Daniel turns his back to the wind and lights a cigarette. A grimy kid in new-looking orange and blue Nikes appears before him.
“Hey mister,” he says, “can I have a cigarette?”
“You’re too young to smoke,” Daniel says, and then from behind him another grimy kid swoops past, grabbing the camera bag hanging from his shoulder. Roberto lunges at the kid and snags his arm. The first kid kicks Daniel in the shin as the second kid sinks his teeth into Roberto’s forearm and Roberto yells and then he sees a knife in the hand of the first kid. He jabs Roberto’s arm with it and Roberto yells again and lets go of the second kid, and then the two kids are hauling ass across the street, dodging through the traffic.
“My god, Roberto, are you all right?”
Daniel’s staring at him. Roberto’s glad to see he’s still got his camera bag.
“Shit, I guess so.” His heart’s bumping against his ribs as he looks at his arm. “I can’t believe I just got stabbed.”
Now he looks back across the street at the kids. They’re running down the sidewalk, laughing. Theft is a game for them. The one that bit Roberto flips him the fuck you sign and the one that stabbed him blows him a kiss.