“Course I do. But I want you safe and happy more.”
“I’m safe and happy with you. Only with you.”
He put the bottle down and rubbed his eyes. “You’d go to the jungle with some grease jockey you’ve known for two months?”
I nodded. “You love the jungle. Every day you tell me that. You want to try to save it. Why can’t I be a part of where you love, if you love me?”
He stared at me for several seconds, as if seeing me clearly for the first time. His face softened. “Will you take the time to learn about my home? Will you be patient? It’s hard physical work, lots of cooking and hauling water and working in the fields.”
“Please. You know the hours I put in at the Versailles. I’ve had a job since I was twelve.”
“Will you do everything I tell you to do if we go to Ayachero? Every last thing?”
“Yes.”
“It’s life or death, this promise you’re making. Your life or death. These aren’t just words. Don’t just say them to please me.”
“I’m not. I promise to do everything you tell me to do.”
He nodded, and I went to him; he held me like family. “We won’t stay there forever. I need to make sure everyone is safe,” he mumbled into my hair. “Then we can move on.” He took me by the hand and led me to his bed; we sat down side by side. He watched me for a long minute, then reached over and took my hand.
“Lily, what’s your biggest sorrow?”
No one had ever asked me anything like that before. The question felt so personal and painful I tried to pull my hand away, but he wouldn’t let me. “Why don’t you tell me yours?”
He looked at me as if to ask, Do you really want to know? I put my hand over his to show I did. “The loss of my good feeling. The loss of my jungle life. Leaving my family, especially as the oldest son. Everything that I’ve killed inside myself to live here. This big, dirty city. There’s something else, I don’t have the words for what it is. Maybe the loss of Pachamama, what’s that in English? She’s a goddess of fertility, but it means Mother Earth, trees, water, animals, rain, plants. I thought I was done with that somehow, didn’t need it anymore. Crazy.”
“I think I know what you mean.”
“Really? Do you?” His eyes glittered with tears. “It’s good to talk to you, Liliana.” We lay down on his creaking bed on our sides, facing each other. His small buzzy lamp bathed us in a warm orange glow.
“Omar, that first time we went out, how did you know I was lying about Boston and my parents being doctors and all that?”
He stroked my face with his rough hand. “I’ve never seen anyone eat like you before.”
Shame flooded me. “What’s wrong with the way I eat?”
“You don’t eat much, but you eat so fast, like you’ve never seen food before. No one has ever told you?”
“No.”
“And the way you wrap your arm around your plate, like someone’s going to take it from you. You’re not a regular spoiled American chica.”
I pouted a little. “Speaking of that, why not go with some rich American chica?”
He sputtered out a laugh. “To them I’m just a dirty bike mechanic. I don’t even speak English. They look down at me. You’ve never done that. Why should I care about them?”
“So you don’t wish I were like them?”
“Lily Bushwold, don’t you see your own loveliness?” He stroked my hair, my cheek. “And you loved that sloth, didn’t you? We’re more the same than you think. You in your jungle, me in mine.”
* * *
I kissed him then, as long as I wanted to, touched him where I wanted to. I felt him watching me so closely, waiting for us to be in sync, as if he refused to go one step past me on the path, determined to ride the sweet wave together.
This felt like love to me, the closest I had ever come, like something I would do anything not to lose. Omar slept turned away from me with his arms around his pillow, one knee drawn up as he dreamed his jungle dreams. I stroked his shining black hair, pulled my body close to his. Why couldn’t we always stay like this, cocooned, motionless?
I lay there dreaming, wide awake, enjoying the peace before the tinny radios, the screaming babies, the clang and bluster of the market below his window, right up until the moment the night sky in the window blushed pink, soft and delicate, and I couldn’t help but feel a flicker of hope for the world.
Omar was my home. I had no other.
* * *
By the end of the week, we had sorted through everything we owned—a task that took minutes for me, a day for him—to fit in the small bush plane we would fly to Ayachero. We bought cheap tin “wedding” rings at the market; he’d convinced me it was best to be considered a married couple where we were going. He sweetly explained all this to me, slipping my ring on my finger with words of love and commitment made up on the fly next to a stall where whole chickens roasted on a spit. I didn’t explain that I couldn’t care less about marriage—at the time I saw it as some bizarre ritual actual adults took part in, in lives marked by college degrees, full-time jobs, health insurance, and other foreign concepts. The approximation of a vow felt familiar and comfortable to me; perhaps at some profound level I felt I didn’t deserve the real thing. But none of that mattered to me then. If I needed a ring to smooth things over in his hometown, so be it.
* * *
I rushed to meet Molly and Britta for a goodbye beer at our favorite place, the restaurant where Omar had sent the little boy to tempt me with a bouquet of flowers a couple of months previous.
Molly sat by herself, wrapped in a ratty sweater and smoking a home-rolled cigarette to the nub, her crossed leg swinging nervously back and forth at the knee. She looked exhausted.
“Where’s Britta?” I asked.
“She had to work.”
“Seriously? She couldn’t even come to say goodbye—”
“She had a fucking date, okay?”
I felt sucker punched. My worthlessness reinforced in a way I never felt with Omar.
Molly wrapped her hands around her sweating beer and gave me her sternest look. “You don’t have to do this, Lily. Who is this guy, anyway, some motorcycle repair dude who can’t even speak English? And what the fuck is this Ayachero place? I’ve asked around. Nobody’s heard of it; it’s not on any maps.”
“It’s where he’s from. It must exist.”
“But I mean, come on, Lily, the jungle? Really? What do you know about living in the jungle?” She shook her head, knowing it was useless, I could see it on her face. And I hadn’t even told her about the jaguar. “You’re fucking nuts, okay, you’re fucking crazy,” she said quite seriously.
Even though a niggling part of me agreed with her, all I could do was smile.
“You can still change your mind, you know. He’ll get over it. You’re just another girl to him. Just walk away, come back to the Versailles.”
I pictured the South American–sized roaches scuttling in the sink; my hands chafed and bleeding from cooking and cleaning; my terrible loneliness, even with my friends. Omar was a new planet in my orbit, changing my gravitational pull.
Molly knocked back the dregs of her warm beer. “Can’t you just fuck him and leave it at that?”
“I love him, Molly.”
“Oh, please.” She rolled her eyes. “That is some shit I don’t want to hear about right now.”
I struggled to answer; Mark had broken up with her the minute they returned from their week away together. I sat up straight. “Sorry if you don’t understand.”
She picked at the label with her ragged fingernail. “Okay, I get it,” she sighed. “You found real love, and fuck me, maybe that’s just not going to happen for me.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
She waved me away. “Just remember, that top bunk will always have your name on it.” She got up and hugged me hard but fast. “Good luck.”
I started down the steps toward the street. Her face stayed hard and uns
miling as I turned to wave goodbye, but my joy could not, would not be diminished. No force on earth could have kept me from going to Omar on that sunny, windswept afternoon.
The jagged line of mountains that encircled me seemed to murmur, Yes, he is your life; the broken cobblestones under my feet whispered, This is your future; the laughing grandmas at the tamale stands nodded, Yes, go to him.
In return, everyone I passed got a smile from the mad-in-love teenage gringa on her way to her lover.
I never saw Molly or Britta again.
SIX
– MAY –
Passport in hand, my nose to the floor-to-ceiling windows of the Cochabamba airport terminal, I stood watching planes take off for La Paz or Santa Cruz, where passengers could connect to US flights; any of them could have taken me back home, or at least out of South America. Mentally I tried it: I flew back to Boston—to no place to live; to no one waiting for me; to a gray, rainy spring day; to rivers of pavement through forests of looming buildings; to everything good I had sabotaged.
An enormous canvas bag weighing one shoulder down, Omar stood at the far end of the terminal in a massive cargo door entryway, his lean body framed by the blue-eyed sky beyond him. He head-tilted for me to join him. That’s all it took.
I followed him outside under a blazing sun to a distant corner of the tarmac, where we came to a rusted collection of metal scraps in the shape of a bush plane—the main cabin no bigger than the inside of a small car. It shuddered on the rutted tar, diesel sputtering, a farting, ancient beast. The propeller took its time to rotate, mulling flight with minimal enthusiasm. From the pilot’s window, a tan arm in a torn sleeve rested across the metal edge, cigarette dangling.
I can leave, I thought. I don’t have to do this. This is possibly a very bad idea.
Omar turned to me, read me, said, “It’s okay, Lily. You’ll be okay. I’ve done this many times before.”
All of me wanted to believe him, even as pangs of fear and doubt sprung up in my gut. But it didn’t matter; I was all in. Fear and doubt were old friends; ignoring them had served me pretty well so far, or at least that’s what I believed. Besides, just beyond the cool glass wall, the waiting room bustled with strangers from around the world, with people who didn’t give a shit about me, people busy heading to their own Omars, their own places they called home.
We walked together to the plane. After instructing me to sit next to the pilot, Omar disappeared in the back of the cramped four-seater. As he rearranged our small pile of belongings, I settled on the sun-bleached leather seat and strapped myself in, nodding at the little bush pilot: a ropey man in a T-shirt featuring a teenage Britney Spears in full pout, a Chicago Bears baseball cap worn backward, board shorts, and no shoes. He looked at me with no expression, then back out at the horizon. Behind me, I heard the sound of someone spitting.
I glanced in the narrow rearview mirror, spider veined with cracks. A hunched figure rooted around in a canvas sack. Panchito tucked his bag in the narrow aisle, turned, and planted himself in the small bucket seat next to Omar’s. He arranged his leg, sat up, grinned, and said hola. His cheeks bulged as he chewed coca leaf, the occasional shred falling from his mouth, his teeth stained faintly green. He tilted a flask in my direction; I nodded yes and knocked back a few burning gulps of strong pisco before handing it back to him.
The 1950s-era amphibious Cessna whined like a lawn mower as we wobbled and jounced across the rutted tarmac; every rock and stone under the wheels jangled us. The stiff breeze that swept down from the mountains tipped the wings up and down. Even strapped in, we helplessly rolled in our seats as the plane gathered speed.
The moment we ran out of runway we lifted off, something heavy and metal slamming in the hold with a thunderous boom as we did so, the tail dropping sickeningly before we took on any real altitude, finally gaining a delicate equilibrium, some primitive compromise of wind and metal and basic aerodynamics.
I gripped my armrests, leaned forward, breath steaming the pocked windshield. It felt like my prayers alone kept us aloft. My terror reflected back at me in the pilot’s mirror shades; he smirked, his gold incisor flashing. Later I would learn that the banging noise had been improperly secured gasoline canisters in the cargo hold—the extra fuel the only way the plane could return from our destination to Cochabamba or anywhere else, for that matter. We had nine hours of fuel and a four-hour journey. Not a lot of play. The pilot slipped on his headphones and switched on or off a series of dials and knobs, ignoring all of us.
Below, the city’s bright puzzle of streets under a greenish-yellow bowl of pollution swiftly fell away. Molly, Britta, the Versailles; all literally now in the rearview mirror. The plane struggled to rise above the first snow-crested mountain ridge. I craned my neck skyward, as if to achieve altitude with my will. We chugged over the first craggy peak—ponds beneath us glittered like dropped jewels—then the crests stretched out endlessly before us, valleys dropping into ominous shadow.
A meaty thump behind me. Panchito had crumpled to the floor of the plane. Rumbling around on the ripped canvas in search of comfort, he pillowed his arms under his head, false leg resting at an odd angle, the gears and straps loosened. In seconds he was snoring.
“Is he okay?” I called back.
“He’s fine,” Omar said, chewing on a toothpick as he watched the mountains parade beneath us.
A flush of something like shame washed over me, I wasn’t sure why. How little I knew this man, really. “How did he lose his leg?”
Omar slipped the toothpick out the cracked open window; the wind snapped it away. He leaned toward me so I could hear him over the engine. “He was young. Twelve, maybe. He went off to hunt by himself. Stupid plan. You never go into the jungle by yourself. Never, okay? You’re with me or someone who knows what they’re doing. Understand?” His voice rose a little as if I’d already made such a featherbrained mistake.
I nodded tightly, still clutching my armrests, shoulders tensed.
“Anyway, he was drunk, I’m pretty sure. Chicha. Like a corn beer. He had a fight with our father. My dad hated him. I don’t know why. It’s like he had to pick one of us, and he chose Panchito. He beat him, told him he’d never be a hunter, which is like saying he’d never be a man. So Panchito ran off to hunt. He was determined to come back with something. I know he had his heart set on a big anta, a male tapir. They can get to four, five hundred pounds. Feed the village for a couple weeks. One had been seen near the village, but no one had been able to track it down.” Omar shook his head. “I should have gone with him.”
“Why did Panchito come to tell us about what happened to Benicio? Why didn’t Franz do it?”
“Franz is a good man, but he has a lot of fears. One of them is flying.”
Beneath us, jagged brown peaks rose up, the canyons between gaping into eternity. There were no trees, no roads, just emptiness on a scale I had never before witnessed. Glacial lakes turned dull green, then black, then silver each time the sun broke through the clouds. The immensity of the world, for thousands of miles around, dwarfed us in our tiny, sputtering plane.
“So, he didn’t get the tapir. Instead a shushupe, a pit viper, bit him on the calf. Very, very poisonous. The silent carrier of death, it’s called. You take medicine or you die. You have maybe three minutes. He only had his machete, so he cut off his leg, chopped it off, see? Took off his belt and tied it around his thigh, tight, and crawled three kilometers back to the village.”
I gaped at the jagged scar. Suddenly my childish dustups felt absurd. Would I cut my own leg off if I had to? I prayed I wouldn’t have to find out.
“Maybe sleep a little, Lily. We have four hours, you know.”
A silly proposition considering the rattling plane, diesel reek, and Omar’s story, but also hard to keep talking over the roar of the engine, so I put my head back and closed my eyes and, maybe because he suggested it, fell asleep.
* * *
I woke to the pilot and Omar shouting. We h
ad begun to drop down between mountainsides that felt too massive to be real. Static lightning danced across a bruised sky. Panchito gripped my seat as he maneuvered himself back into his; cursing, he scrambled with one hand to strap his leg back on. Turbulence lifted and slammed us down; our heads smacked on the ceiling as the wings jerked and shuddered. I vowed to be full of joy the next time gravity glued me to the earth; I pinched my eyes shut, picturing my dull routine cleaning toilets and making beds, in an attempt to calm myself with banality. We dropped. My eyes banged open. Some prevailing wind had changed its mind and abandoned us; only to buffet us up again as we soared over the final ridge.
Another sudden plunge—I might have screamed. When we evened out, I opened my eyes as bile rose in my throat.
As we steadily lost altitude, the valleys turned green and the drab, brown landscape of the mountains loomed behind us. Glacial rivers tumbled over rocky escarpments, their waters spiraled by ghostly mist. Sunlight flashed on a hidden stream or pond.
Seconds later, a total whiteout as we flew through low, thick clouds. Omar barked a command to the pilot. We rattled on, flying blind. The cloud smelled like sulfur, spitting on our skin through the broken window; the pilot, bouncing, jabbered on in Portuguese to Omar as he twisted the knobs and smacked at the dash.
In seconds, we broke through the dense wad of cloud. An ocean of green stretched from horizon to horizon beneath us; only the subtle smile of the earth holding it in. Banks of fog drifted among the treetops, evaporating and re-forming according to some unknown purpose or design. Brown, serpentine rivers coiled below, reflecting the light in gold or blue or green, depending on the slant of sun or whim of shadow.
We hurtled at a hundred miles an hour over broccoli treetops, the clouds now skimming the top of the plane. My teeth rattled in my head. The pilot shouted, spitting with panic as he gestured at a stretch of river coiling below, then mopped a sheen of sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand.
Into the Jungle Page 5