by Tom Epperson
“I’m familiar with your work,” she says.
“Yeah?”
“Some of it’s not too bad.”
“Thanks.”
The light above the sink comes on. Roberto can hear the children cheering the return of power to the house.
He takes a good look at Lina. She’s a small-boned girl of average height or maybe a little less. Smooth dark skin, thick eyebrows over large brown eyes, angular cheeks, a smallish nose and a wide mouth. Her teeth are white and even except for a chipped one at the front. Roberto and Daniel aren’t the only ones that have changed clothes. Lina’s now wearing boots and khaki cargo pants and a gray T-shirt under an unbuttoned green military-style shirt. As she starts returning things to the medicine cabinet, Roberto detects under the green shirt the gleam of a gun.
“You look different than in the bar,” he says.
“That was my ‘normal girl’ disguise. I can’t go marching around town looking like a militant, can I? Tarapacá is full of spies.”
He thanks Lina for tending to him then goes back to the bedroom. He decides at the last minute not to take his billfold. There won’t be a need for any credit cards where he’s going, and if he’s unfortunate enough to find himself in a situation where he’s being asked for his ID, he’d probably be better off saying a robber took his billfold or he lost it when he fell in a river. He can make up some name and plausible-sounding story about his presence in Tulcán and maybe at least buy himself a little time. He takes the cash out of his billfold and stuffs it in a pocket and puts the billfold in the hidden compartment in his suitcase where he has his passport.
Roberto and Daniel pick up their backpacks and head out of the house. In the living room, the kids are clustered around their resurrected television, watching an American criminal investigation show dubbed into Spanish. Roberto notices one of Yadier’s daughters has purple polish on her fingernails.
“Do you like the Happy Boys?” he asks her.
The girl grins. “Yes!”
“Which one’s your favorite?”
“Tico!”
* * *
It turns out the Corolla belongs to Yadier. He drives them all down to the river, with Ernesto in the back seat squeezed in between Roberto and Daniel. They pass by the Park of the Parakeets. Not a soul can be seen. Roberto thinks about the thousands of parakeets sleeping in the dark, dripping trees, imagines their clamorous leave-taking tomorrow at dawn as they return to the jungle, the jungle where he’ll already be.
Yadier parks above the river. It’s not raining at all anymore, though the sky is still cloudy. Roberto and Daniel take their backpacks out of the trunk, and Yadier shakes hands with everyone. “Good luck. And tell Diego to give Princesa a kiss for me.”
Lina smiles. “I’ll do that.”
Roberto and Daniel shoulder their packs, and follow Lina and Ernesto on a path that leads down a muddy slope to the river.
“Who’s Diego?” says Roberto.
“We’re going to his house,” says Lina. “We’ll be there tomorrow,” and then she adds, “Be careful, it’s very slippery.”
This is the cue for Daniel’s feet to fly out from under him. He lands hard on his butt and his elbows. Roberto hurries to help him. “Hey man, you all right?” he says, but Daniel pushes him away.
“Leave me alone, I’m fine.”
They start down the slope again. Roberto’s walking behind Daniel, and he can’t help but laugh.
“I’m sorry, Daniel, it’s just that you’re covered with mud.”
“Yes, I can see how funny this is.”
They reach the river. There are lots of boats there, pulled up on the bank or tied to docks. A bedraggled dog wanders around, looking for someone or something. They walk along the mucky bank to a dock that has a precariously narrow plank walkway leading out to it. On the dock is a young guy with a flashlight. He shines it on the walkway and Ernesto and Lina cross it quickly, even though it’s bending under their weight and water sloshes over it. Daniel acts like he’s stepping onto a tightrope, but he manages to wobble across it without falling in, and then, pretending he’s strolling down a sidewalk in broad daylight, Roberto walks steadily across it to the dock.
“This is Roque,” Lina says of the young guy. “Roque, this is Roberto and Daniel.”
“How are you?” Roque says, shaking their hands. He’s not very tall, but is broad-shouldered and sturdily built. He has a handsome open face and a big smile. A machete in a leather sheath hangs from his belt.
They follow Roque down the dock to a long weathered yellow wooden boat, powered by a small outboard motor. A green plastic roof covers the middle of the boat. Roberto and Daniel climb in, stepping over nets and fishing gear, and sit down under the roof on a bench seat. Lina sits down in front of them. Roque goes to the back of the boat and Ernesto unties the rope, steps into the front, and pushes the boat away from the dock. Roque yanks a cord three times and the motor comes to life, and the boat putters down an inlet and then out upon the broad black river.
Roberto looks back at the lights of Tarapacá, town of criminals and spies. Ahead is a bridge, where the road they drove in on crosses the river and continues on into Tulcán. The bridge is lit up with floodlights, and Roberto can see men who look like soldiers checking vehicles at both ends.
“Is that the Army?” he says.
“No,” says Lina, “the National Police.”
The National Police wear uniforms and carry weapons that basically make them indistinguishable from the military. They’re also like the military in their propensity for violence.
“They’re in on it too, huh?”
“Everyone’s in on it,” says Lina, turning around on her seat to face him. “Everyone’s doing their part to crush Tulcán.”
“Tell me what’s going on there.”
“The people are being attacked and they’re trying to flee. They’re hiding in the forest, or they’re coming this way into Chimoyo, or they’re heading north and trying to make it to San Miguel.” San Miguel is the capital of Tulcán, and at around sixty thousand, the only town of any size. “They’ve been pouring into Red Cross camps and they have terrible stories to tell. Shootings, rapes, burnings, beheadings.”
“Who’s doing this? The Army? The paramilitaries?”
“Yes, both. They’re working hand in glove.”
“Javier told me the Black Jaguars have been involved in a massacre at a ranch called El Encanto.”
“That’s right. He said that’s where you want to go.”
“Lina,” says Ernesto, “look.”
He’s pointing at the bridge. A column of Army vehicles has begun to rumble across it, heading north. Roberto can see cargo trucks, armored personnel carriers, Humvees, all painted in camouflage colors, and then two flatbeds carrying tanks. Lina seems excited.
“Do you see, Ernesto? Do you see the tanks?”
Ernesto nods. Daniel has his camera out. He moves up and crouches behind Ernesto and starts taking pictures.
“Be careful, Daniel,” Lina says, “don’t let them see you,” and then to Roberto, “I think those are Leclerc tanks. The Army bought forty of them last year from France. They’ve never had anything this good.”
“Why are they important?”
“Tanks are useless in the jungle. If they’re going to Tulcán, that must mean the Army intends to assault San Miguel. They’ll find a pretext, they always do. They’ll say the terrorists have taken refuge there and they need to root them out. Cleanse the city of them.”
Roberto has his notebook out now and is writing all this down. The boat goes under the bridge. Daniel stumbles the length of the boat to the back where Roque is and takes more pictures. Roberto looks at Lina gazing up at the column that continues to pass.
“How does it make you feel?” says Roberto. “To see something like that?”
“How do I feel? Like a terrorist. Because if you take up arms in this country and defend yourself from being murdered, that’s what you
are.”
Roque throttles up the motor, the boat goes round a bend in the river, and the bridge and the town are gone. Roberto knows the Gualala River flows northeast, eventually emptying into the sea. He also knows that at some point, it will meander into Tulcán. But beyond that, he doesn’t have the slightest idea where he’s going.
“How exactly will we get there?” he says. “To El Encanto.”
“We’ll go down the river all night,” says Lina. “Tomorrow, we’ll come to another river called the Maniqui. We’ll travel up the Maniqui a couple of hours to Diego’s house. From there, we’ll walk west into the jungle, until we reach the Otavalo River. That’s where El Encanto is. We should reach it before nightfall.”
“And there’s some people there I’ll be able to talk to, right? Who survived the massacre?”
“I hope so. Who knows? The situation’s very chaotic.”
“Have you been there before? To El Encanto?”
“Several times.”
“Javier said it was very special.”
Lina smiles, looks out at the river. “It was. It was the kind of place that, when you went there, you wanted to never leave.” Now she looks back at Roberto. “Javier said you won’t be able to stay long.”
“No, I have to be back in Tarapacá by Saturday. On Sunday, I’m catching a plane out of the country.”
“You’re fleeing too. Like the people in Tulcán.”
“Yes. I suppose.”
“We’re glad you’ve come, Roberto. I want you to know we’ll do anything to help you.”
Now she rises, and moves to the front to talk to Ernesto.
Daniel sits down heavily beside Roberto. He checks out some of the pictures he just took on the LCD screen, shakes his head and mutters “Too dark,” then puts the camera in the bag. He sighs, and lights a cigarette.
“It’s going to be a long fucking night.”
“Yeah.”
The jungle is a black ragged silhouette on both sides of the river. There’s no moon or stars. No lights from other boats. The five of them on the boat seem utterly alone. Moving steadily over the face of some featureless dark immensity.
The river is smooth and slow-flowing. Roberto trails his hand in the warm water.
He takes a flashlight out of his backpack and by its light starts writing in his notebook. He makes notes about what he saw on the bridge, his conversation with Lina, Yadier’s house and the Happy Boys posters and the purple nail polish, Napo’s sinister good luck charm, Panther and Parrot. When Roque steers the boat a little closer to one bank, a large white bird perched on a stump sticking out of the water is disturbed; it rises slow as a ghost and flaps toward the forest, and Roberto makes a note about that.
* * *
It’s silent except for the drone of the outboard motor. Daniel and Lina are both asleep, curled up in the bottom of the boat, but Roberto isn’t sleepy. He wishes he was. He’s badly in need of sleep. Lack of sleep makes him less efficient, more prone to screw up, and he can’t afford to screw up for the next three days. But wishing for sleep only keeps it away.
Ernesto’s not asleep either. He sits at the front, keeping an eye out for logs or debris or other boats. He turns on his flashlight if he sees something and communicates to Roque with hand signals, left, right, slower, faster. But once, the boat runs afoul of nets set out by a fisherman, and Roque has to kill the motor and raise the propeller out of the water to get it disentangled.
Lina was right, it’s getting cold on the river, with the breeze blowing endlessly in his face. He wonders how she came to be in a fanatical outfit like the TARV. She’s certainly an interesting girl, with her intensity and good looks and the gun tucked in her belt. She’ll make a great character in his story.
He looks across the water to the jungle and he figures that by now he’s probably entered Tulcán. Suddenly fear clenches inside Roberto like a giant fist and he can hardly breathe. What if the dark, savage country he’s traveling into has a bit of land that for all eternity has been waiting to welcome his bones, or a turbid river whose task it is to carry his bloated body away?
* * *
The drone of the motor begins to change. It seems to get louder and to relocate itself from the back of the boat to inside Roberto’s own head, and then fades away to nearly nothing. Faint voices drift across a black void. Screams come next, but not fearful screams, he seems to be on some kind of amusement park ride, and then his chin jerks up off his chest and his eyes open and he looks around at the river and the jungle.
He climbs over the seat and lies down next to Daniel. He’s using his backpack as a pillow and Roberto does the same. Some dirty water’s sloshing around in the bottom of the boat, but the wood flooring above it is dry. He squirms around and tries to get comfortable, then seconds later, he’s asleep.
It’s a long night, as Daniel said it would be. Once Roberto’s awakened by rain rattling on the plastic roof. He raises himself up and sees lightning flash and hears thunder, and he wonders if a violent storm is about to catch them on the river, but then the rain stops and he goes back to sleep. He wakes up later to the sound of religious music: some woman is singing with a sob in her voice about how Jesus gave his life to save us from our sins. At first he thinks somebody in the boat must be playing it, but then he realizes it’s coming from out on the river. He peers over the side and sees a long barge sliding by, piled high with the trunks of great rain forest trees. The beam of a spotlight probes the dark water. Two guys are standing in the wheelhouse, that’s where the music’s coming from. A dog walks out of the wheelhouse and sees their boat and barks. Roberto lays his head back down on his pack, and the boat begins to rock as it’s hit by swells from the barge. When he awakes again, he’s very thirsty and very cold. He takes a bottle of water out of his pack and drinks some. Daniel is snoring softly. Roberto can make out the dim shape of Lina’s shoulder where she lies sleeping. And then he looks at Ernesto in the front and Roque in the back and finds something calm and reassuring about their presence. He feels as trusting as a child, they’ll stay up all night and make sure nothing bad will happen to him, and then he goes back to sleep and he has a dream.
He’s in the jungle. It’s green and alive and beautiful and he’s not afraid of it, indeed he feels at home. He walks along slowly, looking at things. He hears birds, but doesn’t see any. But then a green hummingbird flies through a shaft of sunlight and stops right in front of him, hovering there, its wings a blur. Roberto holds his hand out, and the hummingbird lights on his finger. Its eyes are green too, they’re like tiny glittering emeralds as they gaze at him . . .
Three days until the day Roberto is to die
When Roberto awakes, there’s a coarse red and black blanket covering him. He sits up, and looks around. In the soft light of dawn, he sees the dark-green jungle, the brownish-green river. He’s the last one up. Daniel’s up front smoking a cigarette and talking to Ernesto, while Lina is sitting with her back to Roberto, talking on a satellite phone. She’s telling someone about the convoy crossing the bridge and the Leclerc tanks. Now as she puts the phone away in her backpack, she sees Roberto’s awake, and smiles.
“Good morning.”
“Good morning,” he says, rubbing his neck. He climbs over the seat and sits down. “Thanks for the blanket.”
“Thank Roque, it belongs to him.”
Roberto turns back to Roque, holds the blanket up. “Hey, Roque, thanks!”
Roque smiles. “You were . . .” he says, and then he hugs himself and pretends to shiver.
Roberto laughs. “Yeah, I was freezing.”
The boat starts rocking a little as Daniel comes back his way. “Hey Roberto, you’ll never guess what Ernesto used to do.”
“What?”
“He was an artificial inseminator on cattle ranches. He’d get semen from the bulls and put it into the cows.”
“So how did the bulls feel about that, Ernesto?” says Roberto.
“It made them sad,” says Ernesto.
“They’d rather put it into the cows themselves.”
Roberto and Daniel laugh, but Lina frowns.
“Cattle ranches. Do you know how destructive they are?”
Daniel yawns and stretches. “I need to piss.”
Roque steers the boat to the bank. Everyone gets out to stretch their legs and relieve themselves. The river’s low; there’s a wide strip of dried mud between it and the edge of the forest. Roberto walks a couple of meters into the trees. As he pees, he sees small dark shapes moving in the treetops.
Roque is near him, peeing too. Roberto points and says, “What kind of monkeys are those?”
Roque smiles. “Squirrel monkeys. They’re waking up. They’re looking for breakfast.”
Roque is wearing a blue baseball cap, a maroon T-shirt, black jeans, and knee-high rubber boots. The cap has the head of a red bull on it, and above that: CHICAGO BULLS. Roberto asks him where he got it.
“From an American. He was a basketball player.”
“On the Chicago Bulls?”
“Yes.”
They both zip up, then head back to the boat.
“How’d you happen to meet him?” says Roberto.
“I was a guide. At this place in the jungle where tourists would come. He was a black man,” and he raises one hand way up. “He was very, very tall. So tall they had to put two beds together for him so he could sleep.”
Roberto laughs. “Yeah?”
“He was very nice. Always making jokes with people. He liked me. He said, ‘Roque, come to Chicago, I’ll buy you a ticket, I’ll show you the city, you can come see me play.’”
“Do you think you’ll ever go?”
“No. Why? I don’t want to leave the jungle.”
* * *
The sun rises over the trees and it becomes hot on the river. Roberto rubs sun block on his face and neck and arms. Daniel takes a cap out of his backpack. It’s a battered stained green thing, with a cloth attached to the sides and back to cover his neck; it’s kind of like what you see the soldiers of the French Foreign Legion wearing in the movies when they’re trekking over the desert. He’s always worn this cap when working out in the sun. Roberto thinks it looks a little ridiculous on him, not that Daniel cares. He feels oddly comforted as he watches Daniel put it on; it suggests that for all his moaning and complaining he’s ready to do the job, and Roberto feels a sudden surge of affection for him. He knows the only reason for Daniel’s presence now on this jungle river is his love for Roberto.