Slipping off the logjam into the current, I let my body float with one arm over my log, my eyes fixed on Fitz close beside me. I didn’t cry anymore. I just wanted him to be all right.
Within fifteen minutes we could see the pink-and-blue plastic tent awaiting our return.
—
Back on the Pink Palace we fell onto the tent floor.
“We tried everything,” I said, trying to console myself as much as Fitz. “We had no choice but to turn back.”
Fitz smoothed my tangled hair. “I’ve always admired you more than anyone I’ve ever known. Now I admire you even more.”
Those were the most precious words I’d ever heard. I realized that we finally had to let go of the dream to reach the river.
—
Fitz and I talked quietly into the evening, setting our sights on new goals of catching fish, looking for planes, and making a kite with a message on it. Darkness wrapped herself around us as the jungle resumed its incessant nighttime noise. We would wait until tomorrow to get started on our new plans. We curled into balls beneath the mosquito netting. Despite the haunting fear that this was it for us, my heart clung to the possibility that we might still get out alive.
Chapter 26
Desire
FEBRUARY 27
Nine days trapped in the swamp, yet I awoke happy to be alive, inspired by our plans for finding food. I wrote a line in my budget notebook, now serving as a personal journal, “We have found in each other and perhaps in ourselves more strength, courage, and faith than we realized was there—and a great desire to live.”
Fitz and I watched the sun glide up the plastic siding as we talked of our new focus. We would take the little raft along the small area of trees and logs in our bay of the swamp and find something to use for bait. Algae didn’t work. There must be something big enough to stay on the hook, a snail or grub perhaps, anything that a fish would bite. Despite conversing, we lay listless. I had to force myself even to sip water.
The tent soon turned into a sauna. Pulling myself up, I suggested coffee to get us going.
“Make it iced coffee.”
Fitz rubbed my shoulder tenderly, which made my skin tingle. His fingers attempted to smooth the snarled hair that fell down my naked back. I couldn’t resist. I lay down with my head in the crook of Fitz’s thinning neck, his collarbone digging into my cheek. We were both sticky, but I didn’t care. The smell of Fitz’s sweat was an aphrodisiac that made me want to linger for just a little longer. This languid mind-set was seducing us into not moving at all.
“Come on, Fitz, we’ve got to get up. I’d much rather lie here with you, but a fish isn’t going to jump into our laps.” I pushed myself onto my haunches. “We have to get out there.” Kissing him I reached for my shirt and jeans.
Fitz boiled the water. After we’d drunk the bitter, twiggy brew, we climbed onto the small raft and set out to search for anything edible. Paddling through the swamp, we studied the two-foot-high, half-inch-wide yellow and chartreuse grasses for bugs, ants, snails, or anything that might be nestled along their spines.
“I wonder if we can eat any of these leaves?” I asked, my stomach driving hammers into my core. “Do you think they have any nutrition?”
“Hol, let’s focus on the bait. If we get a fish, we’ll be all set. We don’t know anything about these plants. They could be poisonous.” Fitz waved his hand over his head to brush away mosquitoes. They were especially bad today since there was no breeze. “Damn these things and damn this jungle!”
My mouth opened and shut, chewing nothing as we searched the hundreds of lily pads surrounding the raft. “You’re right about not eating the plants. But there must be frogs or something we can use for bait around here,” I said.
We stared at bark on the trees that reached up through the water, hoping to find a lizard or a sleeping bat lolling in the dappled shade of the feathery, fernlike leaves.
“A fish might eat a bat,” I whispered, trying to say it quietly so as not to disturb anything catchable. “It would be chunky on the line.”
“Ugh,” Fitz grimaced. “If we’re lucky enough to get one, we’ll try it.”
Everything was deathly still. I squinted into the shadows at the trunk of a tree, looking for the slightest movement.
“What about a bird?” Fitz peered into a hole in a long log in the water then shoved his paddle handle into it.
“What if something aggressive jumps out?” I held my paddle defensively although it would be useless against anything big.
“Nothing there.” Fitz shook his head, sweat rolling down his cheeks.
“How would we catch a bird?” I asked, hoisting up my jeans, which were loose around my hips. When we’re back at the Pink Palace I’ll tie my purple sash through the jean loops, I thought. “Maybe there’s a nest of eggs,” I continued, lifting a low branch. “I’d feel bad, but we need to eat.”
I’d always been excited to find a nest of eggs, or baby birds, but hunger was twisting my thoughts beyond the beauty of nature. The thought of food was haunting me.
“I’d feel bad, too,” Fitz sighed, shaking his head. The neck hole of his shirt fell over his right shoulder, and shadows now filled the inlets in his cheeks.
We kept watch in silence, but my mind raced with possibilities. What if we saw a snake swimming by us? How would we know if it was edible? In my hunger, my mind jumped from thinking about a snake as bait to eating it. What if we found berries, or frogs, or grasshoppers, or dragonflies? We had no idea which ones were poisonous. I remembered from National Geographic that dangerous things often had bright colors.
I was startled by a green frog. “Look, Fitz!”
It stared at us from a log. He was just like the frog I’d seen the first morning here, when I wasn’t thinking of food but enjoying the virgin jungle kingdom. I reached for it, but it was gone in an instant, leaving swirling circles on the swamp’s surface. “Oh, gosh! He could have been lunch.”
“We’re not going to catch a frog that easily. At least you spotted something big enough to eat.” Fitz smiled at me. “If there’s one frog out there, then there’s got to be more.”
We hardly made a sound as we paddled among the skillet-sized lily pads, broken branches, and downed dead trees. Soft gulps and glugs came from the swamp every now and then, while mosquitoes and other bugs hummed through the air. I heard scampering over lily pads, but when I turned to look all I could see were quivering lily pads.
Fitz finally spotted a gelatinous-looking glistening thing attached to a log. It looked slimy, like a slug. He pulled it off the log and plopped it into a tin can. “It’ll make good bait.” He was almost jubilant.
We called it a slug although it squirmed like a worm.
“We’ll catch a fish!” I grinned.
The sun was casting shadows across the water. “We better hurry back and try it on the hook,” Fitz said, his face pinched as he saw the day was ending with only one small slug in the can and no dinner yet.
While we paddled back to the Pink Palace, louder sounds erupted from the jungle creatures that were preparing for night. Rustling, chirping, and cackling ascended into the trees as animals and birds sought their places. A croaking chorus emerged from the grasses. Soon the demonic howl began. With our legs and hips submerged in the water, we were even more vulnerable on the little raft than on the Pink Palace.
“It’s so menacing,” I stuttered.
“Let’s hurry. It started early today,” Fitz said, urgency in his voice.
There was nowhere to hide from the ghostly sound. We paddled fast, bumping into logs, catching on underwater plants. My heart thumped against my chest so hard I thought it would jump out of my body. When we clambered onto the Pink Palace, Fitz was still determined to catch a fish. Despite the heinous roar that ended in a growl, he picked up the fish line and tried to steady it in his trembling hand. He struggled to push the squirming grub onto the end of the large hook that was hanging off the fish line, which he’d att
ached to a stick. When the point went through its soft flesh, the grub curled into a ball. Fitz flicked the line out a few feet. A fish splashed but didn’t nibble.
After a few minutes, he pulled in the line to discover the bait had fallen off. The hook was just too big. With only a half hour before nightfall, our stomachs hollow, we became desperate to find more bait. We made ourselves get back on the little raft. Fitz undid the rope and we paddled out, hearts hammering. The source of the roar hadn’t revealed itself in all the time we’d been here.
On this search we found a few minuscule, wriggling, wormlike things lying on a log. The frightening sound petered out, as if it were creeping back into the earth. We quietly returned to the Pink Palace.
Fitz pushed the tiny worms onto the hook, but they disappeared without a fish even tugging at the line. I sat gazing at the empty hook. After a whole afternoon of work, we had not even a morsel to eat.
A honking noise reverberated above me as a fat, gooselike bird flew into the trees. Dusk teased us with so many birds. Longing was in my belly as I watched them skimming across the swamp, playful, oblivious to us.
“Damn. I wish the hell I’d bought a gun,” Fitz yelled. “I could have shot that bird with my eyes closed.”
Marksmanship and jump school were the only army classes Fitz hadn’t slept through. He’d shot “expert” with each type of rifle. In Vietnam he would sleep with his boots on, rifle strap wrapped around one arm, ready to respond to any sudden noise. He’d fought in a unit whose soldiers were dropped by helicopter into enemy zones. On Thanksgiving Day, 1968, an artillery round had ripped open Fitz’s shoulder before landing at his feet in a foxhole. The shell, which would have vaporized him, failed to explode. Three months later he was hit by shrapnel while on patrol, just seriously enough to be evacuated for stitches and a couple days of rest. After that, Fitz had a reputation among his buddies for being lucky. His best friend, a Cuban named Sugar Suarez, would stay as close to Fitz as possible, sometimes rubbing his curls for luck.
Fitz had been in enough firefights, lost enough friends, to drain all the glory from war.
Even as he was about to board “the freedom bird” to return home, the enemy had begun shelling the airstrip. He’d spent his last moments in Vietnam huddled inside a sandbag bunker with mortars exploding around him. When he’d scrambled onto the plane he’d prayed it wouldn’t be blown from the sky.
Fitz made it home, but Vietnam never really left him.
“Once you’ve spent time in the field, you never get out,” he would explain. “You’re in the field forever.”
—
I watched another large bird fly overhead. I could almost taste it. My mother had roasted a goose for Easter when I was twelve. It was so plump it had taken two of us to plop it into the pan. Over the next few hours, Mom had siphoned off a quart of fat, and still it kept rising up the sides of the pan. “Never again,” she’d said about cooking a goose. But in the end, when Dad brought it to the table on a gleaming silver platter, the goose was a masterpiece: perfectly golden brown, moist and tender, its cavity stuffed with apples and onions.
Wistfully, I watched the swamp birds. If we could only catch one, I’d sear off its feathers then rip and gnaw every last piece of meat and gristle off its bones. This jungle must be full of food. We just had to find a way to get it.
Chapter 27
Butterflies
MARCH 1
Eleventh day trapped
Fitz was sitting on the stern of the Pink Palace when a butterfly landed on his shin. How pretty, I thought, mesmerized by its violet wings that opened and closed as it rested. Fitz instantly pressed his hand over it, hard.
“Oh!” I gasped.
When he opened his hand, the butterfly lay still, its wings crumpled. Fitz picked up the hook and poked it through the small green body. “Let’s hope this works.”
Two more butterflies flew in. One settled on my arm. I waited a few seconds before I brought my hand down, cupping it over the butterfly. I felt the wings flutter against my palm before I squashed it.
A dozen butterflies landed on the raft. Beautiful, iridescent in the sun. We killed them all.
—
Fitz fished all morning off the little raft using butterflies for bait. He was hunched over, sagging beneath the burning sun.
“Please come in, Fitz. It’s too hot.”
But he stayed out there, my hat on his head, his eyes boring into the murky water, as if he were willing a fish to bite. When no bait remained, he slowly paddled in and tied up to the Pink Palace. “The butterflies just disintegrate or get nibbled away,” he complained. “I can’t see what’s happening in the water. I wish we had something bigger for the hook.”
I reached for his arm to help steady him as he climbed onto the raft. “If it were bigger we’d eat it!” I tried to be light but I meant it. I thought of the green frog I’d seen yesterday. “Look, I found a slug on one of the logs.”
It was only the size of a finger knuckle, curved like a fat quarter moon. Sticky to the touch. A grub, a slug? It could be poison or protein. The thought of putting it in my mouth was sickening, but I hoped a fish would want it.
Fitz dropped it into my small aluminum pot. “It’s something, and we’ve got the afternoon to find more.”
It was midday. The sun seemed to focus all its rays on us. Black dots swirled in front of me. “I feel woozy.” I took a swig of water then grabbed Fitz’s arm for balance. “We’re crazy to be out here at this time of day. We can search for bait when it cools down a little.”
We shuffled along the logs, reaching for anything to hold on to. The humidity was extremely high, so it felt like we were walking in water. My feet stuck to the logs, my hair to my head, and my clothes to my skin. I tried to inhale but I could barely breathe. I wondered if my eighty-nine-year-old grandmother had felt so weak before she died.
As we took off our clothes inside the tent, I discovered that I didn’t need to unzip my bell-bottom jeans. They dropped right off me. Fitz’s jeans fell off his hips, too. We uncurled our stiff bodies onto the reddish-purple sleeping bag, grateful for the trees swaying in the heavy heat and casting shadows over the plastic tent.
“When we get home we’ll have a separate room for a delicatessen off the kitchen,” Fitz announced, wrapping his arm around me. “We’ll have fresh turkey, beef, and ham behind a glass counter, and I’ll slice it on one of those machines they have at the store. We’ll stock every kind of bread you can think of: rye; pumpernickel; the croissants you love, fresh baked, so we’ll have that wonderful smell all through the house every morning. If we don’t have time to bake ourselves, we’ll have someone come in and do it.”
Fitz had dreamt up his deli in Vietnam, where he’d subsisted on C-rations. He’d told me how cases of canned goods, some in storage for years, had been dropped by helicopter to clearings cut in the jungle by soldiers using machetes.
“Cold scrambled eggs and ham in a can,” Fitz said. “Oh, how I’d welcome you now.”
I turned toward him. “Tell me again how you traded those cans of eggs with the other soldiers to get the canned peaches in heavy syrup, or the canned pound cake.”
“If I had to, to close the deal, I’d even throw in the cigarettes the government sent with the food.” He grinned, going on to explain that he would hoard Chuckles or chocolate Tropical Bars to give to the village children, but also to feed his own sweet tooth.
A smile of ecstasy crossed his face as one hand squeezed my shoulder, his other arm now resting under his head on a lumpy mound of clothes we used for a pillow.
“I can taste the bread, all soft and squishy.” I smiled. “So hot it melts the butter. The croissants will be light and flaky, with almond slivers all over them.” I rubbed my stomach, trying to override its queasy, gnawing ache as my mouth began to water. “While you’re in the deli, can you grab me half a pound of cheddar? I’d like to make a fat grilled-cheese-and-onion sandwich.”
Our food fantasies sooth
ed us, offering us a lifeline to hope as we lay in the blistering heat of the plastic tent. Fitz talked of the mustards and relishes he’d serve, hot with garlic and onion or sweet with honey and dill. “Don’t forget pepper for the New York hard rolls, soft in the center, with real butter, not margarine, of course.”
I closed my eyes and imagined them.
“You won’t have to go out, Hol. We’ll have it all right there in the house.”
“Mmm.” I shifted position on the hard boards. It was such an effort to move our bodies at all now. “I like that idea of the food coming to us.”
Hours passed as we languished in the tent, detailing meals we loved, ones we’d be sure to serve once we got home.
“How ’bout that chateaubriand we had for our anniversary in Cuzco, Peru? It was so rich it made us sick, but boy was it good!” I could feel the smile growing on my face. “I’ll broil a big one just like it.”
We discussed a litany of our favorite foods: asparagus, rare roast beef and Yorkshire pudding at Christmas, roast leg of lamb with mint jelly at Easter, ice cream with chocolate sauce, blue cheese on a crisp salad, avocado, charcoal-broiled burgers with tomato and onions. We relished our memories of food.
Fitz touched my hand. “Remember the onion soup at the elegant French restaurant in Montreal?”
I licked my sunburned lips. “With that crouton baked across the bubbly cheese on top. There were so many onions the spoon stood straight up!”
It had tasted so good that we couldn’t wait to replicate it when we drove back to Eagle Lake. Without a recipe or herbs, we had exuberantly thrown a dozen braised onions into a big pot of water and boiled them. The soup had turned out so watery we threw it out.
Fitz looked regretful. “If I had that onion dishwater now I’d drink every drop.”
I touched his cheek. “Oh, Fitz, we’re going to get home, and when we do, let’s go to Montreal and find that restaurant. I know they’ll give us the recipe. It’ll be the best soup we ever had.”
Ruthless River Page 17