Inside the hut was a plank floor, a thin mattress on a low platform under mosquito netting, and nothing else. I wondered why no one was living there, but couldn’t bring myself to ask; I didn’t know where to begin. This is the life I chose, I thought—so far, Omar had described it perfectly. Already I missed Britta’s sarcasm, Molly’s big laugh, the bustle of the markets at Cochabamba, the purr of the motorcycles thumping over cobblestones, even our hideous bunk room at the Versailles. Had that been my real home and I was too stupid to know it? Here were jaguars that slaughtered children, snakes so poisonous you could die in minutes. Where am I? And how in fuck could I get out of here if I decided to?
Through the window—just a square cut out of the bamboo, no screen or glass—I watched the plane stutter to life on the river, its engine catching and grinding as it scuttled a tight U-turn and raced across the water, lifting up to the waiting sky. The silence afterward roared into my skull, louder than any motor, as I wondered when or if I would ever see a plane again.
EIGHT
We made love right away in the little hut, just dropped right down on that filthy mattress and fell into each other; his hands and mouth loving me as if after some tortured absence, like he was sealing me to this new place, wedding me to it. Even as I felt myself swell and open as we kissed, my thoughts raced: There is nothing safe about this place. But for those few moments I tamped down my terror and confusion, ignored the raucous chorus of frogs outside, the memory of the plane disappearing into low-hanging clouds. I abandoned myself to pleasure, felt him chemically change me into someone else, someone who would do anything to be near him, someone who would follow him into any jungle on earth. Afterward, staring up at the square of pulsating green outside the window—my own heavenly jail—I wondered, What have I done?
Hours later, we lay in spectral darkness as cicadas ground away at time, like metal scraping across stone, endlessly. Omar wrapped himself around me, his hand cupping my breast, listening to the blood rush through the chambers of my heart. I faced away from him, night blind. All I could see in my mind’s eye was him holding the knife to the pilot’s throat.
“Have you ever killed anyone, Omar?”
He rearranged himself, took his hand off me. I shuddered with its absence. “Where did that come from?”
“The pilot, you almost—”
“I wasn’t going to hurt him.”
“It sure looked that way.”
He sat up, pulled the stub of a cigarette from his shorts and lit it, its sizzling glow the only light in the hut. Then he slipped on his glasses, though there was nothing to see.
“He was going to take us back to Cocha. That or crash the plane.”
“But you were going to—”
“He’s fine, Lily. He’s already back in the city, drinking his paycheck.”
I sat up, put on my clothes. “You still haven’t answered my question.”
“I’ve said all you need to know.”
“Need to know?” I hooked my backpack over my shoulders, slipped on my sneakers, and got to my feet. “That’s just bullshit. You owe me the truth, Ohms.”
“Where are you going?”
Good question. I glanced at the blackness outside our window. Couldn’t take off this time, couldn’t hop a bus, flag a cab, run away, nothing. My breathing came ragged in my throat. He took me by the hand and I let him gently pull me down next to him.
“Why did we land on the water? Why is there no airstrip?”
“The people let it grow over. It doesn’t take long. It’s a good idea.”
“But wouldn’t it have been safer to land—”
“If we have a real airstrip, the loggers would come, the narcos, the men of opportunity, remember them? Poachers would be everywhere, big machines, too. Now they have to come by river, which takes gas, but by plane it’s too dangerous, since there’s no estirón. You know what that is?”
I shook my head.
“It’s slang for a stretch of straight water—with no turns—long enough for a plane to land on safely. Ayachero’s on a series of bends. That’s why the pilot was shitting himself, that’s why I had to pay him so much.”
“So even those men of opportunity think it’s too dangerous to fly here.”
He shrugged. “They come by boat, or through the jungle.”
“But we did it.”
“I did what I had to do. We did what we had to do. There was no time to fly to San Solidad. It has a small airport, but Ayachero’s five days by boat from there. The funeral is tomorrow. The jaguar is out there, with the taste of human flesh in its mouth.”
In the hanging green darkness, something shrieked at the top of its lungs, followed by a mewling, disintegrating sound.
I got up and stood close to the window. “Omar, what the hell—”
“That’s a mono de noche, a night monkey,” he whispered. “He has huge pink eyes, but can’t see color.”
Another scream, heartbreaking. I took a step back; my heel kicked the mattress.
“Something got him,” he whispered. “Something’s eating him now.”
A menacing growl, a deep-throated thud-thud-thud.
“A crested owl, a búho, has his claws in his throat.”
I looked down at him, this Tarzan in glasses. “How do you know?”
He laughed. “Because I know.”
Something barked like a dog, but not a dog . . .
“What’s that?”
“Bamboo rat. Very ugly. Nose like a tumor. They’re in the cane, in the manioc fields.”
The sounds continued, rustling, cackling volleys back and forth; snorting grunts, low trills, moans, hoots, then a rhythmic cawing that momentarily silenced everything—before the deranged symphony started up again. This was the jungle at night, a major freak show.
“It’s like a kill party,” he said. “Everything hunting everything, stalking each other. Or like a fucking party, you know? Everything looking for its lover or something to eat. It’s like a story, too. If you listen long enough, you know who’s talking.”
I reached out into the darkness and found his shoulder, then eased down next to him.
“All the animals are looking for food and trying not to be the food. But on a full moon, a bright moon, it’s so quiet and you think, Where is everything? The whole jungle shuts down because night creatures are made to see in the dark. A bright night is like day for them. We’ll walk in the jungle under a full moon together, I’ll show you.”
As I imagined a full moon shining down with its blue glow, showing everything as it was, I hugged myself and rocked a bit, a habit an old group-home friend had once said made me look crazy. I forced myself to stop. “I’m scared to death of this place.”
He laughed softly. “It’s just life, Lily. You can’t be afraid of life.”
“Sure I can.”
He pulled me to him. “Something you need to know. Whatever you’re most afraid of in the jungle comes to you, you understand? Spiders, snakes, tapir, jaguars, monkeys, poison ants. They sense that you’re afraid, so they come to scare you away, because you don’t belong in a place where you’re afraid. But if you don’t have that fear, then the jungle becomes a caretaker. It teaches you. It cares for you.”
“I’m having trouble with this jungle-is-magic stuff.”
“Fine, but you’re not in Cochabamba anymore. You’re not in America, land of Ronald McDonald.”
I pictured that horrific clown, the shit-food mascot of millions, and part of me was strangely ecstatic to be where I was.
“The jungle is something to learn,” Omar said. “The death of your birth mother, the death of your foster mother, your life in those homes, those were lessons. And lessons never stop. You can learn to be here, Lily.”
NINE
It was by chance I learned that the lepers bathed very early in the morning, before everyone else. Bladder bursting, I left Omar sleeping in the hut as I headed down to the far side of the beach where a rough-hewn shelter with three sides m
ade of thatch covered a deep hole in the mud. In the bottom of the pit, dung beetles consumed all that came their way. Omar had laughingly assured me that in the jungle, nothing is wasted. Still, even with all the sketchy places I’d relieved myself in my life, I had to close my eyes as I squatted, blocking out the clicking sounds the insects made from deep inside the hole.
At the time, I didn’t know the word for what afflicted this family; but they were a part of Ayachero no one seemed to talk about. On the sandbar, a young mother lifted a girl of about seven, her stick legs bent under her like a deer, off her back and laid her down in a shallow area, scooping river water over her head with a calabash and washing her hair with a slab of yellow soap. The girl’s face, though terribly scarred, was joyous and open; she didn’t take her eyes from her mother’s. A teenage boy, legless, hand-walked into the water, his penis arcing against the muddy bank. He propelled himself into the water with his strong arms, flipping and landing on his back before wriggling his torso and backstroking himself deeper. A man with shriveled hands, the fingers mostly stubs, kicked off his leather sandals and strolled into the water, the mist rising around his waist as he lifted his face to the morning sun.
Nearby, an old woman stood watching the family bathe. She was bent over in a C shape, leaning on a bamboo cane for support. A waist-length gray braid hung down the back of a shapeless dress that grazed her ankles above bare feet. As if sensing me watching her, she turned, holding me fast in her gaze for several seconds. My heart thrummed as I took her in; a thousand wrinkles mapped her expressive face on which lines—like cat whiskers—had been drawn or tattooed. Jewel-colored feathers winged back from holes in her ears. A wildness emanated from her. I looked away, then started back to the hut.
The rest of the village had begun to wake; smoke rose from the ovens and twisted into the cloud-hung sky. A few of the women, scraping coal dust out the back of their ovens, eyed me warily as I walked past. To each of them I smiled and said hola, but mostly I got stares or narrowed eyes or shaking heads. They grabbed the hands of their swollen-bellied babies and led them away from this red-haired alien, a few barking something back at me I didn’t catch. A dozen or so macaws—a family of split-tailed rainbows—perched in the trees over the longhouse. Some communal decision sent them flapping up into the sky, where they crossed the river in twos, wing-to-wing, cawing like madwomen.
The smells of cooking surrounded me—fish, meat, something toasty and sweet-smelling, like yams laced with cinnamon. Suddenly light-headed, feeling the cut of hunger, I stumbled up the hill to our hut. Smiling, Omar handed me a ceramic bowl of something hot; the source of that sweet yam smell. I climbed up the short flight of wooden steps, falling on my food like a starved cur, no doubt eating in the manner Omar had once described.
Through the open door, I watched Paco running with the other children, chasing the half dozen tiny piglets that had lost their mother the night before. He slowed each time he passed, smiling and waving up at me, until he gave up the game entirely and stood squarely in view, watching me eat. Behind him, the other children continued to scream and play, the baby pigs squealing and skidding on the muddy ground.
“Good morning, Miss Lily,” Paco said softly.
I smiled. “Good morning.”
Omar—shirtless, barefoot—sharpened a machete on a round stone on the ground. “You never told me what I was eating,” I called out to him.
“Plaintain and yucca, some ground rice, some molasses sugar. Do you like it?”
“It’s the best thing I ever tasted. It’s like heaven in a bowl, it’s—” A furry black tarantula as big as my hand dropped down from the ceiling into my bowl, dark and hairy and scrabbling. Screaming, I hurled the bowl of hot mash away from me. The spider leapt, turning in midair before launching itself toward the wall of the hut, where it hung on briefly before skittering down to the floor and out the door. Like a gymnast, it whirled down the stairs, leaping and spinning as if I was the most frightening thing it had ever seen.
Paco stayed where he was as Omar burst past him, leaping up the stairs and into the hut. All I could do was point, before another hairy beast dropped to my shoulder with an actual thudding weight, crawled down my arm, and jumped to the thin plywood floor. I rocketed down the stairs, skipping the last three as I leapt onto the hard ground. I rolled over and looked up. Spider after spider dropped down, a dozen or more, the whole brood skittering and crossing over one another. Omar shooed them out of the hut, cursing. They trapezed down the stairs, scattering in every direction.
“Omar, what the fuck!”
“Calm down, Lily, they’re only spiders.”
“Only spiders! How can you say that? They’re fucking giant tarantulas falling all over me!” I almost added, Get me out of here, but I was too stubborn—determined to not have his words, “you’d be begging me to leave in a week,” come true. Still, I sputtered and cursed, replaying the thud of them on my back and shoulders, the feel of their scratchy fur as they leapt off me. I turned in a small, tight circle, bruised knees throbbing from my rough landing. I was so hungry. I pictured my breakfast smashed against the wall.
“Were those in the ceiling all night?”
“In the walls, more likely,” he said, gently kicking the rest of them out the door.
“I am never going in that hut again.”
Three more dropped down behind him like special ops fighters. They skittered off into the shadows of the hut. Next to me, Paco squatted in the dirt, his slight bony back glowing bronze in the sunshine. With a short stick, he poked at the air above one of the spiders, which had stopped short in front of him. It opened and closed its hairy mandibles in a vain attempt to hook onto the stick, as two of its furred, segmented limbs lifted in exploration. Finally it caught hold of one end, and Paco lifted it, laughing as he swayed the leggy creature back and forth in the heavy morning air. A few of the children running by saw the game and started to gather their own sticks.
Defeated looking, Omar came down the stairs and put his arms around me. “I’m sorry, Lily. This happens sometimes in huts when the bamboo isn’t split.”
I stepped away from him and planted my hands on my hips. “It does?”
“They like bamboo. It’s hollow, you know—”
“I know bamboo is hollow. I’m not an idiot.”
Cross-legged on the ground, chin wedged under his two fists, Paco listened intently to us argue. He pushed himself to his feet, stood in front of me, and said, “Bamboo is like a little, little house.” He held his hands cupped together as if to demonstrate a little casa for me. “Don’t be mad, Miss Lily. Everybody needs a house, even spiders.”
One of the children, a beautiful little girl who wore her hair in two impossibly thick and shining braids, jerked a bright green cricket—several inches long—tied to a string across the hard earth. It waved its orange filament antennae in alarm, trying to leap away on strong hairpin legs, but she snapped him back each time. One of the spiders reared up, dropped, and charged the insect, but the girl protracted the game, endlessly drawing the cricket away.
I looked around at the other huts. Ours was the only one built with bamboo that was not split, as far as I could tell. The others were thatched palm, tin, or split bamboo; there were even a few rough brick constructions, and a weird one that looked made out of recycled swimming pool tile.
“So, are you going to tell me that the spiders came because I’m afraid of them?”
He fought back a smile and shrugged as he stirred the remaining food in the pot over the fire.
“Fuck this,” I said, sounding like the teenager I was. The children coaxed one of the spiders into a long bamboo tube, then turned it upside down. The spider dropped out, hit the dirt, reared back in defense, and scrambled away, vanishing under a mat of leaf litter.
“This kind of tarantula only eats insects,” Omar said. “They have no interest in us. There’s a kind with yellow on his back you can’t play with like this, it’ll jump up and bite you, it’s very p
oisonous, but this one”—he gestured at the kids—“these are kind of sweet, right? I had one as a pet when I was a boy.”
I started to cry around then. Resting the hot pan on a rock, he put his arms around me. This time I let him. A couple of women walked by loaded down with woven baskets on their backs, leather straps across their foreheads, their faces stoic with the strain. I felt like a total wuss.
“We’ll have to sleep in the longhouse for a while,” he said. “I’ll build us our own hut. You have to be patient with me.”
I wish I’d read him better then, his shame about having to sleep in the spider-filled hut since we had no other, but I was too wrapped up in myself to see it. What little cash he had he’d spent getting us there and paying off the pilot.
I wiped away my tears, pissed at myself that I’d indulged in them at all, and slipped on my backpack, a move that always comforted me. I was in a place where legions of fist-sized tarantulas falling from the ceiling was nothing to get worked up about. Maybe it was time to remember that there were man-eating jaguars out there, bamboo rats as big as dogs in the cane. Long story short: Maybe, Dorothy, you’re not in Kansas anymore, and it might be time to suck it up and learn the jungle ropes.
TEN
I followed Omar as he wove among the huts, the brutal heat of the day like an immense hand pushing me back. A rhythmic whoop sounded near the river, a wild, deranged sound.
“You could have left your bag back by our oven,” Omar said.
I huffed it up higher on my back, clicked the buckle at my waist. “I always have this with me,” I said, in no mood to give an explanation. This backpack was in fact an upgrade; there were years I bounced from group home to group home with my belongings in a garbage bag, but one day, on a fortuitous trip to Goodwill, I’d picked up a ratty but serviceable one for a couple of bucks. I loved that bag, slept with it bundled in my arms. Each time I moved in with a new foster family, I never, ever unpacked what little I owned. It was something nobody could make me do, and besides, I never knew when I was going to have to make a run for it. I learned later that my nickname those early days in Ayachero was Mochila, Spanish for backpack.
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