Omar, in fact, stood a few inches taller than me, but was even more powerfully built than he had seemed from my chair. “I’m glad you decided to give me a few minutes,” he said, his face blooming with a smile that lit small fires in his eyes.
I followed his shirt, which glowed white in the dimness down the three stairs from the stone patio to a shadowy stretch of high grass, stopping near the delicate branches of a eucalyptus tree. A soft night wind rustled the silver leaves as a full moon watched from behind feathery clouds.
He pointed into the nest of branches. “See? It’s looking right at you.”
I peered but saw nothing. Just fluttering leaves. As I inhaled the clean, bright smell of the tree my heart sped up—Is this a trick? I took a step closer and stopped short. Three feet from my face, a creature with thickly furred arms and legs hung suspended like a slack green hammock from a branch, five-inch curved claws locking it in place, its bandit-eyed face staring out at me. A much smaller, fluffier version, kitten-sized, peered from its hideaway on its mother’s stomach; same eyes, low forehead, rubbery grin. A mother sloth and her baby, something I’d seen only in photos before that moment.
I took a step backward.
“Don’t worry, they’re slow. They sleep all their life, sometimes they die in their sleep. That’s why algae grows in their fur, see the green? But watch out for their hands, their claws. Never let them get you in their grip, they’ll rip you up.” Magnified by the lenses, his eyes examined me. “Are you afraid?”
“No.” But I was, a little.
“Good.” He grinned. “They’re not very smart.”
As if to prove him right, the sloth lifted up one heavy arm—ever so slowly—toward a branch so slender it wouldn’t have supported her infant, curled her black claws around it, and tried to swing. She came crashing down with a thump; the infant rolled away down a short hill in a terrified ball of fur. Blinking, her eerie smile stretching wider across her face, the mother sloth lifted her head from the earth and swung it side to side with a soft bleating sound. She pushed herself to her belly, dragging her torso along like a creature not meant to be on the ground, slowly swimming herself among the long grasses toward her mewling infant.
Omar sprinted down the hill, scooped up the ball of fluff, and ran back to me. “Open your hands,” he said.
Insanely soft, the baby sloth rolled into my cupped hands. Its tiny eyes blinked against the light, its arms falling back as in a silent fit of laughter before curling forward in a ball. It breathed hotly into my palm before drifting back asleep as if drugged. Maybe even snored there. Omar took it from me and ran to the mother, who had only moved a yard or so, her version of top speed, unbearably clumsy as she scrabbled forward with outstretched arms. He placed the baby sloth in the grass next to her. With infinite tenderness, she found her infant, nudging her snub-nosed snout into its fur. The baby sloth woke and crawl-rolled, whimpering and snuffling, onto her back.
“Was I right? Are you amazed?” Omar said.
“I am.”
“You have a boyfriend, Lily?”
We stood too close to each other for me to breathe. The trees shadowed then revealed his face as the winds gently moved the leaves. “I don’t want a boyfriend,” I choked out.
He nodded and smiled. “How do you speak Spanish so well?”
“Studied it in school.”
“What do you think about teaching me English? Are you an English teacher here?”
I shrugged, reddening as I recalled my shame at the airport when I realized no one was going to meet me and sweep me away to some fabulous teaching job. “Sometimes. Nothing steady.”
The sloth had made it a yard or so up the trunk of the tree to the lowest branch; she swung from one arm and one leg, smiling her enigmatic sloth smile under her low forehead, her twin in miniature clinging to her chest.
“Let’s start tomorrow. Okay, Lily?”
I laughed and looked at him. Who was this guy? What did he really want? Then again, couldn’t he actually be who he appeared to be—somebody decent? Britta and Molly singsonged my name, motioning for me to return to our table. I didn’t wave back.
“What’s your number?” He reached in his shirt pocket and took out a book of matches and a stubby little pencil.
“I don’t have a phone.”
“Where do you live? I’ll be there at two o’clock sharp.”
I finally met his eye. “I don’t want to teach you English.”
He raised an eyebrow and laughed. “No? Then maybe we’ll just take a motorcycle ride. Have a picnic in the Beni.”
“No way will I get on one of those things.”
He looked confused, borderline hurt. Two parallel scars just above his right eye deepened momentarily. “I’m the best driver out there, the safest in Bolivia, like a magic carpet ride. You’ll be fine, I swear. I won’t let anything bad happen to you.”
I thought about what Molly had said when I’d remarked that all the guys drove their bikes like maniacs through the streets of Cochabamba. She’d brushed that away. Those jungle guys, they can ride a motorcycle in their sleep. They’re hard-core. Even Molly had to grant Bolivian men this much grace. But more than that, the man had offered to take me on a picnic! Had any man ever proposed such a romantic and gentlemanly date? So a few beds would be left unmade at the Versailles. Fuck it. What did I have to lose?
“Lily,” he said, like he knew me, all my disappointments, my desperate longings. Then he said it again. In his throat, the word thrummed down my spine, jellied my legs. “How can you be scared? That’s not possible. It’s my life, my motorcycle. It’s my horse, my city horse.” He handed me the matchbook. “Write down your address. Two o’clock.”
I wrote the address and handed it to him, thinking, Well, this is humiliating. I’ll never see this guy again. But I was dead wrong. Those few words and numbers scribbled on a scrap of matchbook cover changed my life forever.
THREE
At two o’clock the next day, Omar walked through the doors of the Versailles and to the front desk where I sat with Britta. Just a simple promise kept, but it gleamed and sparkled on the trash heap of broken promises that seemed to have made up my life thus far.
It took only minutes to leave the stink and noise of the city behind. We buzzed through the hill towns of the Beni, a heaven of green valleys and low, wide, sleepy rivers, of endless farmland nestled in a shallow bowl wrapped in the arms of the Andes. It was like Shangri-La. And I wasn’t scared for one second. I felt liberated. I hugged him from behind, his scent of tobacco, machine oil, and sweat blowing back at me.
At a village market, we bought fruit and enchiladas for our picnic lunch. On a windswept plain near a stream, cows grazing nearby, we settled on a soft woven blanket, drinking sugary wine. He asked me question after question about myself. All the while, my anxiety grew. I thought, The minute I give him a hint of how lost I am, he’ll just take the fuck off . . .
“Back home I go to Harvard,” I lied breezily. “It’s a university in Cambridge, in Massachusetts.”
He lay back, resting on one elbow, watching me. “That’s where you learned Spanish?”
I sat up straight and reached for the wine. “Yes, but I’m thinking about veterinary school. Maybe becoming a large-animal vet.”
“What’s that?”
“You, you know, work with horses and cows and stuff. There’s a big demand for it now in the States.”
He looked at me with intentionality, a focus. “Why are you here if you need to study?”
“I’m taking a year off to travel. Just to clear my head.” I reddened. Sweat bloomed on my brow. Usually I was so much better at this. Problem was, most people I lied to didn’t seem so vested in the truth.
“Do you have any brothers or sisters?”
“Just me. I grew up in this big old house on the ocean with four fireplaces.”
“Is that a lot of fireplaces for houses in America?”
“More than a lot of people have.” I r
eached for a piece of cheese, stuffed it in my mouth. It was like he was looking through me. I bumbled on. “My parents, they’re both doctors, both surgeons. They’re really amazing people; they’re really worried about me coming down here by myself and all; they call me constantly and I tell them I’m fine—”
“But you don’t have a phone.”
I gulped the wine and shrugged my shoulders. “I tossed it. Sick of dealing with them all the time.” With what I hoped was an appealing sort of spunkiness, I tucked my hair behind my ears and met his eye. “So much for me. What about you?”
He held out one hand, then turned it. “I fix motorcycles.” His fingernails were ringed with black. Permanent-looking oil stains mapped the lines in his palm, his knuckles. “Show me any bike, and I can take it apart and put it back together, fix any sort of motor. Most cars, too. For ten years—since I was seventeen—I’ve worked in a repair shop, just around the corner from the Versailles. I used to think that was all I wanted to do.”
He pushed himself up to a seated position, slapped the crumbs off his hands, fixed me with his intense gaze. “I grew up in the jungle, a few hundred kilometers from here, in a village called Ayachero, along a branch of the Amazon. It’s five days by water from the closest village, no roads, the last outpost before the jungle. My two brothers—Panchito and Franz—they still live there, so does my mother.
“I miss it, Lily. I miss everything about it—my family, hunting, the animals, the air, the sounds. I’m seventh-generation Amazonian. My father and grandfather were famous jaguar hunters.”
“Jaguar hunters?” Holy crap—was there really such a thing? If so, I wanted to know everything . . . then again, was he bullshitting me now?
He shrugged. “Sure, I didn’t like killing them, but we had to sometimes. Once a jaguar comes and kills one of our cows or pigs, it won’t stop. They’ve got the taste in their mouth; they remember where their last meal came from. And they’ll keep coming back until they take everything—chickens, dogs—so we have to take them out. It’s us or them. Understand?”
I nodded. I understood us or them perfectly.
“So, Lily, listen. What I really want now is to be a jungle guide. This British guy came into the shop a few months ago—I fixed his bike—he’s got a lodge near Iquitos, in Peru. He told me, if you know the jungle like you say you do, just learn English. You’ll have a job with me.”
“You can get in touch with him?”
“I kept his card. And I have friends who do it. They’ve all learned English; they make a good living. So what do you think, Lily, will you give me an assignment so I can get started?”
I laughed. “You’re really serious about this.”
“Absolutely.”
“Okay . . . all right. Your first assignment is to write about why you want to be a jungle guide.”
He perked up, eyes blazing. “When’s it due?”
I laughed again. “Whenever you—”
“I can have it for you by the end of the week.” He picked up a short-handled knife and began to peel a brilliant red aguaje, slicing me a section of mustard-yellow fruit. The taste was subtle—a tart saffron. I wanted more.
“So that’s how I know how to live: motorcycles, or the jungle life, hunting tapir for food and fighting jaguars.” Sad and serious, his face in partial shadow from a passing cloud, he took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “This is who I am. The truth, okay? What about you? The truth.”
My stomach tightened down. I wasn’t roaming the Boston streets with my backpack, blowing off school and feeling sorry for myself. I was facing a grown man who had taken the time to tell me about himself, to be respectful, to show a genuine interest in me. Plus, he was beautiful.
Panic. “What do you mean?”
“The truth. About you.”
I flushed, a headache surging in, the wine buzz already turning. “I already told you.”
“Yes, the big house. The surgeons. Harvard.”
I found my sweatshirt and put it on. I wasn’t cold, just stalling. “There’s nothing else to tell.”
He smiled, and I crumpled inside.
Why am I such an ass?
He took my hand and held it between his warm ones. “Come on, Lily, it’s all right. I’m not going to run away.”
I took my hand back, swirled the sugary wine in my tin cup. “I don’t get it, Omar. My girlfriends are pretty. Why’d you choose me?”
He cupped my face gently in his hands, did his laser-focus thing on me until I almost couldn’t bear the sweetness of it. Before that moment, I was convinced that lust was something I was already done with. I’d had my share of encounters, at least the kind where you look up at the zitty high school boy sweating above you and leave your body. Sex was nothing, or it was a violence, a currency; love a ruse. My heart—a flinty thing, bloodless, shriveled up—was stored in a tiny box in a locked room for which I believed there was no key. But it was my own dead heart, and I guarded it fiercely.
He said, “I was behind you when you three were walking through the market. I saw you stop and watch the shaman. Your friends didn’t. You want to know about magic, about the jungle, don’t you?”
I shivered with pleasure, with the thrill of being seen, observed, appreciated; especially since the best pickup lines from the Patagonia-clad boy trekkers had been no better than, “So, you’re American?” or, “When’s breakfast?”
I held Omar’s gaze. “Are they the same thing?”
“Sometimes.”
“Have you ever met a real shaman?” I wanted to ask, Could one cure me of myself?
“There was one in Ayachero while I was growing up. She was called Beya.”
“Tell me about her.”
“A shaman’s bag is sacred, like all their tools. She used to carry this little cloth one that was always moving. She kept it filled with scorpions and small, poisonous snakes.”
“Jesus, why?”
“Nobody was really sure. Maybe to scare us away. Maybe she used them somehow.”
“For what?”
He smiled again, and I almost wept with desire. “I’ve said enough about her, and about me. It’s your turn.”
Those eyes, those words, anyone would have broken down and talked, even me. So I spilled about being a foster kid with seven others in a tiny house in Western Massachusetts, where I really had learned Spanish. About how I loved Tia, my Bolivian foster mom who worked in a dry cleaning store as a seamstress, how she taught me to sew, how I adored her even though she was tough, how at twelve I took care of the other kids while she was dying. How for years after her death I bounced from group home to group home, convinced there was no such thing as family for me ever again.
* * *
Evening came on fast, and we packed up to leave. As I wrapped my arms around him on the motorcycle, shame and embarrassment about my lies mixed with exhilaration at telling the truth, or as much of it as I could bear. I shivered in the chill breeze whisking down from the mountains, but soon my skin warmed, amber from the sunset’s glow, my bare thighs tight against his.
We tooted along the outskirts of a dusty town, the last before the city’s glowing lights. Suddenly he braked hard, fishtailing in a circle and dragging his sandaled foot in the dirt. We putt-putted toward a cluster of adobe homes, smoke rising from outdoor ovens. He got off the bike, the front of my body cold where he had been, a lick of fear trembling my hands that clutched my knees.
“What are you doing?”
He ignored the question as he rooted around in one of his saddlebags, pulling out a ball of twine. “Stay on the bike.”
A scatter of chickens pecked at the dust, their heads jerking as they hunted down stray nubs of corn. A rooster stood chained by one leg with a wire tight to the base of a twisted palm, no lead at all, not one inch to move around, his ball-bearing eyes bugging and half-mad. Omar crouched down and snatched it up, binding its regal red comb under one arm, so with all its yowling and kicking it couldn’t peck at him. He unwound t
he wire from the rooster’s leg where it had worn away rubbery flesh to gristly bone. Still holding him fast, he wrapped a length of twine loosely but firmly around the bird’s other leg, then tied it to the same tree, this time allowing it a generous lead.
Head drooping, the rooster haltingly lifted its formerly chained leg, stopping short in midair as if expecting the usual agony, then—quivering—extended the ravaged limb and took a step, then another, and another, before running around the full length of its lead, flapping its bright orange wings. Red wattles shaking in joy, it strutted and crowed at the top of its lungs.
Looking back, that was the moment when the door opened for me. My dried-up heart took on warmth, acknowledged this flash of sunshine and expanded, as much as I tried to stuff it back and away. The thing I swore I would never let happen was happening, had happened. I was a goner. My mouth was dry. I hugged myself warm again; I couldn’t look away.
He wrapped the spare twine back into a ball as he smiled at me. He knew.
He circled the tree the rooster was tied to, his fingers lightly tracing the bark. “Poor thing. Look at this.” A cement cistern had been cruelly dug deep into the tree’s root system. Dead leaves curled along its withered branches.
He cast a wary glance at the shack just yards from us; its door hanging off its hinges, a feed sack for a curtain billowing in the one small window. “You can know a person by how they love their trees. Their animals.”
I was only half listening to his words, because he sounded like a kind of music.
I had no idea who he was yet, really, even this side of him, the sweet side. All I could do then was spend every waking moment with him—and every sleeping one—in his tiny flat near the clock tower in the main square, on the second floor over a store that sold cheap plastic shoes. From then on, I would associate the reek of rubber and glue with sexual ecstasy, with longing, with the abject terror of letting go.
Into the Jungle Page 3