Ruthless River

by Holly Fitzgerald

  The bees imprisoned us, flying against the netting all morning. “Let’s hope this is just a stopover for them,” Fitz said, and rubbed his thin beard. “They weren’t here before. Maybe they’re heading north.”

  Just then I heard a plane. Without a word, we struggled onto our knees and out of the tent. The bees immediately swarmed us again, but Fitz grabbed the SOS sign. Standing, we held it as high as we could, bees stinging us at every movement.

  The small plane was flying low over the trees at the horizon, coming our way. It bounced toward us and looked like it would be here in a minute. “They’ve got to see us!” Fitz cried.

  The plane flew near us, to the right. “Help! Help!” we screamed.

  Surely it would spot us. Perhaps it was looking for us. By this time, the aduana must have figured out that we were missing. Maybe our parents had called my mother’s childhood friend, the American ambassador to Peru, and he’d sent the plane to find us.

  I jiggled the sign. “They’ll see us!”

  “It’s got to be!” Fitz held his end high, as excited as I was. Bees clung to us, bands around our necks and arms, covering every inch of exposed skin.

  The plane flew over the channel so close to us, perhaps fifty yards away. It flew off above the trees, almost touching them, before vanishing into the cloud bank. We stood motionless, watching, continuing to hold up the sign as the bees traveled up and down our bodies.

  “It’ll turn back,” Fitz said quietly, an echo of ten days ago. I saw that he was having trouble standing, so I leaned into him like a prop.

  The jungle closed in on itself as if the plane had never come.

  Slowly we dropped the SOS sign, trying not to agitate the bees. Planes were our only visible connection to the outside world, our best chance of being found. This one had come so close. How could the pilot not have seen us? My emotions yo-yoed between hope and despondency. We were a flicker away from salvation and then it was gone. I noticed the birds hadn’t eaten the berries we’d left out on the raft. The berries no longer looked like berries but were shriveled to nothing.

  Slipping into the water, we momentarily banished the bees. I had some optimism every day, but it was always snatched from me. It was ever harder to believe that we would survive. That yo-yo of hope and despair was squeezing us like a vise. Don’t think this way! I scolded myself.

  Don’t let your mouth quiver. Don’t look at Fitz until you’re okay. He’s depending on you. If you fall apart, he might, too. I wondered if he fought off thoughts like mine, trying to protect me.

  My arms were trembling from raising the sign for those few minutes—they’d been so strong from swimming only four days ago. It doesn’t take long for the body to deteriorate, I thought grimly.

  Fitz and I struggled to pull ourselves out of the water and then panted as we sat down on the raft. I watched water trickling down Fitz’s face as the bees hovered nearby.

  “How come they’re not landing on us?”

  Fitz looked at his wet arms and legs. “Maybe it is the sweat they like,” he replied.

  “We should dump water over our heads while we’re out here then make sure we get under the mosquitero before we start sweating again.”

  We sat listening for planes while searching for minnows, using the tin cup to pour water over us every few minutes. The sun burned into my scalp so I leaned over the side of the raft and dunked my head.

  When I sat up, Fitz was smiling. He could make a fish net out of his white nylon shirt. We could catch a minnow, or maybe more, he said, his new idea energizing him.

  He started walking toward the tent, but his leg flew out from under him so fast that he slammed hard onto the raft. He was all right, but we decided from now on it was safer always to crawl across the slippery logs where there wasn’t a post to lean on. We’d both begun to fall often.

  Fitz’s body looked skeletal as he crawled slowly inside the tent to find his white shirt. I could hear him rummaging through his bag.

  “Here it is!” he called out as he returned, trying to hold the shirt and scissors and crawl at the same time.

  Sunlight shone on his intent face. He wobbled, tipping to one side, then sat beside me to cut the polyester into a two-foot triangle.

  I realized I could help by sewing the sides to form a cone, and said I’d get my sewing kit.

  It took me much longer to crawl in and out of the tent than it had yesterday, and yesterday I’d been slower than the day before. Black spots began to whirl in front of my eyes again. I couldn’t feel the skin on my palms and knees, only my bones knocking against the hard, curved logs. I was twenty-seven, yet I moved with the slow deliberateness of my great-aunt Nancy Hale. At eighty-six she was still walking around Back Bay without a cane.

  When I returned to the deck, I carried a needle and a spool of thread, afraid to drop them through the cracks between the logs. Settling next to Fitz, time and again I attempted to poke the wobbly thread through the eye of the glinting needle. Each time the thread collapsed. Like us, it had no muscle. I licked the thread and tried again. Finally, my eyes and shaky fingers coordinated enough to push the thread through.

  I began to sew the shirt around a thin, supple branch Fitz had bent into a hoop. He’d panted from the effort of holding the branch in a circle while I’d tied the ends with a vine. The project fostered a soft exuberance between us. We were doing something positive.

  It was slow-motion sewing. My breath felt constricted. I couldn’t push the needle through the polyester. How can I be this feeble? I poked the needle between the threads of the cloth, eventually jabbing it through to the other side, then back again. For over two hours, with the sun burning slowly across the sky, and with bees crawling on every part of my skin, I attached the two edges of the cloth all the way down to form a net.

  Fitz and I carefully slid into the water to ditch the bees. They swarmed as a cloud above us. Ignoring them, we climbed back onto the balsa and leaned over the side. Holding the rim of the net, we pushed the cloth below the surface, certain that a wriggling minnow would soon come by.

  —

  Taking turns to pour swamp water over each other, Fitz and I held the net for hours. Small fish were close but didn’t swim into the net. Did they see the shadows of our hands? We were thirsty and gulped water, but even with the steady irritation of the bees we didn’t dare dunk into the swamp to cool off for fear of scaring fish away.

  My vision had begun to blur. As I leaned over the channel, holding the net, I lost my balance. When I hit the water it felt sublime. Getting out was becoming more difficult.

  Fitz held me under my armpits as I pulled myself up. “If we add a pole to the net we won’t have to hang over the water to hold it,” he said, his chest heaving. He wiped his brow with his forearm. “I wish I could do it now, but I’ve got to lie down.”

  Despite yearning for nourishment, we couldn’t do any more. I knew that getting me out of the water was the last physical exertion for both of us today. We wanted to attach the net to a pole to fish. We could visualize it. We were so close, but we were too weary to try.

  Somehow we managed to get back under the mosquitero without the bees. The air inside the tent was stifling, so we left the plastic flap open. Within minutes the bees were buzzing around the netting, but we were too tired to care, protected in our cocoon, secured by a perimeter of paperbacks.

  Chapter 30

  What I Want

  A couple of weeks trapped in a jungle swamp, alone, without food, skews perspective. Suddenly we became the impoverished urban children staring at the gringos through the restaurant windows, not able to get anyone to give us a bite to eat. We just wanted one diner to wave us inside for a bowl of spaghetti. Hunger pangs begin like puppy-teeth bites then morph into starvation until you see everything through only a thin vertical space, like slats in a fence, big enough only for thoughts of food. Then comes a feeling of hollow transcendence filled with “if only” and “how different the future will be.” You continually thi
nk you’re dreaming until you realize that your present is horribly real and your future is the dream. Soon come thoughts of all the ways to cook a hamburger, followed by the vow never to be anywhere without a Snickers handy, followed by “What’s wrong with God?”—just before the list of things we did not do to deserve this. I tried to imagine if I’d ever done anything that might have changed another life for the better. If you didn’t count Fitz, some friends and family, and perhaps the clients I counseled as a therapist, all I could come up with were the black Baptist kids in New Haven.

  Walking past the church one day, I'd noticed a sign offering summer camp. On impulse I ran up to the door and knocked. Did they need a volunteer teacher? Yes, they could use all the help I could give them. It didn’t matter, apparently, that I was white and not a Baptist. It was 1968, an extremely hot summer in the city, with fears fanned by New Haven’s very assertive Black Panthers.

  Living at home two summers after graduation, each morning I drove to New Haven to greet ten lively boys and girls, six to ten years old. No one provided a curriculum, and that was fine with me. I designed a program that gently steered away from the Bible, leaving that to others. I wanted the kids to discover their own city through field trips to places they’d never imagined visiting. At the Peabody Museum of Archaeology, they stared in awe at dinosaur skeletons and at gems and artifacts from the Lost City of the Incas. In class we discussed art along with how we would act on a field trip to the Yale art museum to explore realistic and impressionist paintings. They painted their own pictures in class, and once we trekked to the studio of a bookbinder/artist friend. She set up paper and glue, needle and thread, and taught us all how to make books we could take home. Another day we returned to design batik book covers from cloth, dyes, and wax. The children worked with great concentration; not a single boy or girl was disruptive. We walked to the Yale Co-op, where I worked in the afternoon in the children’s book department. The kids had eagerly chosen books I could buy for them with my 40 percent employee discount. Together we discovered the public library.

  Sometimes I’d borrow a car and corral a friend with another car for excursions to places we couldn’t reach by foot or bus. We drove to my friend’s parents’ summer home at the shore. The kids made sand castles and bounded into the water, some for the first time in their lives. We visited my family home. The kids played dress-up from a trunk of silk costumes and straw hats, then had ice cream and cake in the courtyard. Beneath the weeping cherry trees, I read aloud limericks my dad had composed for me when I was a baby. Then, clothes on, we all jumped into the garden’s reflecting pool. “What will we do tomorrow?” they asked as we left. Not one child ever missed a day.

  That had to count for something, I hoped, in totting up my score toward getting out of here or into eternal life.

  By contrast, Fitz had missed as many school days as possible. He’d cut class the first day of first grade, and he’d never forgotten the girl who ratted him out. Youngest in his class, he quickly became the clown. By third grade, he’d done time stuffed into the kneehole of the teacher’s desk. Sister Frances would then scoot her chair in as far as she could, the smell of wool and her black polished boots vivid in his memory along with the clack of her oversize crucifix and rosary beads. In his Brooklyn high school, he devised a way to beat the attendance system, spending whole days at the public library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cloisters, or anywhere interesting and open for free. Fitz was fifteen when he was caught. Knowing there would be hell to pay, he and a buddy began to hitchhike to California. They ran out of money in Tennessee. So they hitched back home after ten days to face their parents.

  —

  Besides his family and me, the love of Fitz’s life was children. He couldn’t see one on a bus without trying to play peekaboo. I had relished the joy of being with my Baptist kids. At our last class they surprised me with handmade thank-yous that I proudly tacked to a beam in my bedroom. Now, aching with hunger, I barely noticed the hard boards against my spine. I knew, at last, what I wanted.

  If it wasn’t too late.

  Chapter 31

  Epiphany

  MARCH 4

  Fourteenth day trapped

  I want to have a baby! This was my first thought as I woke. I listened to small bird sounds outside the tent and inhaled dank, tropical air, so uplifted I forgot to worry about dying. I didn’t feel nauseated anymore. My stomach didn’t churn, and my head wasn’t dizzy. I felt attuned to myself as I imagined my belly swelling with pregnancy sometime in the future, because we were going to have a future. I touched Fitz’s cheek. In a moment he stirred and opened his eyes.

  “Morning. It’s a beautiful day.”

  He rubbed his eyes, and his brows moved together as if he thought I was nuts. “Really?”

  “I want to have a child with you.” I looked deeply into his eyes.

  His brows relaxed as he pushed his arm under my shoulders then moved his face toward mine. “Oh, Hol, that would be wonderful.”

  I wanted to do something purposeful with my life, and I wanted to share it in the most loving way: by creating new life.

  I was filled with contentment visualizing three or four children underfoot. Little babies, curly haired, like Fitz, or not. It didn’t matter. We’d love them all. I couldn’t see them clearly, but I envisioned them toddling after Zelda down a sandy lane by a beach, so intrigued with a pebble, a leaf picked up and studied.

  I wondered if it made sense that I was so happy at a time when we were starving. Were our bodies entering a euphoric phase of starvation? I’d read that Buddha had sought enlightenment through fasting, but he’d had to moderate his approach when he realized fasting was killing him. He chose to fast; then he chose to stop fasting. We couldn’t choose. Fitz and I weren’t seeking a spiritual high or aiming for Nirvana. We just wanted to be two regular honeymooners on a grand Amazonian adventure.

  Despite my physical debilitation, my mind had achieved a heightened clarity. My vision of life was now stripped to the bone. As starvation consumed my body, its effects also trimmed the fat and gristle from my thoughts. Things were no longer complicated. I could see my place in the grand scheme—I would be a mother. Fitz and I would have a family and help each other and our children and our community and maybe in that way help the world. What more important job could there be? I saw holiness in the body, creating flesh and blood, nurturing children to become the best they could be. Motherhood itself was holy, beautiful, fulfilling. I craved it all: creating life, carrying life, bringing little ones into the family of man. I wasn’t ready for death.

  I’d come all this way to this hole in the wild to discover myself. No matter what happened, I knew who I was.

  Hunger had brought me like a fasting monk into an almost blissful realm I’d never before experienced. Pressed against unblinking fate, I looked death in the eyes. Cold, merciless, the end was no longer a “someday” hypothetical.

  Yet I could taste survival again.

  If we were to have our baby, I had to ignore my spinning head and crawl outside in search of food, bees or no bees. We would endure their stings. We had to catch a fish.

  “Come on, Fitz, we have to do this. We can do it.”

  “Gotcha, I gotcha.” He began to rise.

  Recharged by fantasy, we struggled to our knees and slowly made our way out. We were dripping in sweat. The bees covered us within seconds. Without a word we both slid into the water. We watched the bees hover over us for a few minutes before we climbed back onto the raft. As before, the bees stayed away until we began to sweat again.

  Fitz attached a long stick to the net. “Maybe we’ll catch some piranha or even a bocochita.” He plunged the net below the water’s surface.

  My heart leapt with his enthusiasm. My mouth watered. I told him I could smell the fish cooking; even a raw fish would be delicious.

  —

  We sat all afternoon under the hot sun, periodically dipping into the water to escape the bees. Fitz’s arms
were drooping, but he wouldn’t let me take the net. Instead, I took the small balsa twenty feet up the cove and fished with the line and the small bait of butterflies and tiny worms that kept falling off the hook.

  Eventually, the net and Fitz’s patience worked and he caught three minnows. They weren’t big enough to attach to our fishhook to use as bait, so we decided to eat them: two for Fitz, one for me. We dropped them down our throats in one gulp, not touching them with our teeth. They were the first food we’d caught in two weeks. It gave us hope that we would do even better tomorrow.

  I tried to ignore my intense nausea and light-headedness, but the awesome power of starvation was all too clear. Inside me was a pack of famished, frothing dogs, sharp teeth tearing at the lining of my stomach. Gulping dirty river water didn’t calm them. The teensy fish didn’t either. Fitz cutting open the tube of toothpaste to lick its insides clean did not deceive those wild, howling hounds.

  My hunger made me think of a strange couple who’d rented my parents’ lake cottage. They took off for a week, leaving four dogs in the house without food. Neighbors finally broke in after hearing their high-pitched, desperate whines. They found one dog dead, one dying, and the other two so ravenous they’d begun to feed on the carcass.

  I understood, now, how organs turn on themselves near the end. Starvation had consumed our body fat then started on our muscle, eating our strength. Lethargic, we looked at our watery world through rapacious eyes. The sight of fish swimming in the swamp was relentlessly teasing.

  We had to stay positive, to set goals, and to keep talking about family. Dreaming of our future was a new weapon to help keep us alive. The slightest task required enormous effort. Death was knocking loudly at our door. We were determined not to answer.