“Okay, Teacher, but I think I’m doing all the work here, and you just sit back and laugh at my English.”
“I don’t do that—” I burst out, until I saw he was kidding.
“Just trying to even things up. For every assignment I do, you tell me a Lily secret. About your American life.”
“When’s that due?”
“Now,” he said with a laugh. “Come on. You owe me.”
“All right,” I said, his hand warm and alive in mine. “When I was a kid, I used to go through all the clothes that came into the shop to be dry-cleaned, and I would keep everything I found in the pockets. All the money, jewelry, buttons, anything. If anyone asked, I swore I never found anything. It got me used to this idea that stealing was kind of okay. Weird, right?”
“What’s dry cleaning?”
“It’s—” I had to laugh. “It’s this way of cleaning fabric with chemicals.”
“What’s wrong with soap?”
“Nothing. It’s—oh, never mind.” Grinning at each other, we climbed the stairs of the longhouse. Before we entered the main room, every corner cheerfully lit by gas lamps, I pulled him around to face me. “When will you leave?”
“In a few days. As soon as we finish the platform.”
“Okay,” I said, pulling him toward me, trying in vain to ward off the chill that flooded me when I thought of myself alone in this place. “Okay.”
THIRTEEN
In the daytime, the main room of the longhouse was a lively gathering place, with a busy kitchen and dining area, foodstuffs kept in the series of four storerooms—each with real walls, a ceiling, and a door—on the far east end of the structure. At night, it became a crash pad for the dispossessed: Paco, families in the midst of rebuilding their huts, single men, visitors from other villages passing through, anyone temporarily or even permanently homeless.
The night of the funeral, Paco slept in a hammock between Omar and me, a heavy little teardrop shape. In the corner of the room, the woman who had been nursing the piglet slept curled up with it on the floor, both of them snoring, while I lay awake. Her skirt was hitched up. I could see she wore no underwear; this made me sad and afraid, though no one else seemed to have noticed. After a time, I couldn’t bear it and got up and tiptoed over to her, gently pulling her skirt down to cover her. She didn’t budge.
Rain began again with no delicate warning; a crashing deluge that pounded every leaf and branch, muting the night jungle sounds. The canopy lit up like stained glass with every boom of thunder and flash of lightning. Swept in by the rain, coal-black bats swarmed over our heads, flapping and gathering in the rafters in a smutty cloud. They hung from the wooden struts, two-foot-long draculas languidly opening and closing their wings as if to dry them.
One of the bats dropped from the ceiling to the floor just a yard away. Gleaming black against the blond balsa wood, its veined wings shuddered as the small grappling hooks at its wingtips scrabbled at the air. As if it knew it was dying, it grew calm, gazing at me peacefully with ball bearing eyes.
* * *
I woke with a mesh imprint of hemp hammock pressed deep in my cheek, shocked that I had fallen asleep at all. The hammocks were empty, the smell of fried eggs in the air. Dishes teetered in piles next to smoking ovens. The place was deserted; even the bat was gone. My mosquito netting had come loose around my head and shoulders; a cloud of them took advantage, swarming so thickly I breathed in a fistful. Coughing and waving my arms, I twisted myself into my hammock like a straitjacket until I finally got free and dropped to the floor on my elbow and hip. Embarrassed, I was relieved to see that I was alone, until I heard someone laughing shamelessly and loudly, but also very strangely. Someone’s pet parrot perched swaying on Paco’s deserted hammock, cackling its blue head off. I despaired of ever getting used to the crazy randomness of this place, this collision of exotica and humanity of which I was now a part.
The parrot continued to guffaw at me as I dove into my backpack and pulled out my sadly almost empty can of bug spray, in desperation blitzing the cloud of mosquitos still on the attack. I ran down the stairs—like running helped—all the way to the beach, where the women were gathered near a fire that burned under an immense metal pot. Only the three long canoes knocked gently against the dock; the poachers were gone.
“Time to go to work, Princess America who sleeps all day,” Doña Antonia said. “We have to feed the dogs.”
As I made my way to her, I could feel the eyes of the women watching from the bank. Most stood around the pot, tossing pieces of something into it; the others stirred its contents with a blackened tin ladle or washed off their hands in the river. Mangy-looking dogs—I counted a dozen, one with just three legs that moved with astounding agility—circled the pot, snarling and nipping at each other’s heels. Doña Antonia smacked them on their asses, pushing them away from the blistering hot metal.
She motioned me over to two dead pirarucu, which meant “red fish,” that had been laid out on the shore. Shaped more like some prehistoric eel than a fish, they must have weighed over two hundred pounds, each as long as a man. She handed me a serrated knife with a sharp point and gestured at the fish. “You cut out their stomachs now, okay? Cut off their heads and put them in the pot.”
I looked around for Anna, for any friendly face at all. No luck. Omar was a tiny figure in the distance, busy sawing wood with the other men for the jaguar hunting platform to be installed in a tree whose massive limbs hung over the Anaconda Bar.
As I stalled, the women whispered to one another, shifting from foot to foot but making no move to help me. Even the dogs eyed my every move, panting and whining in the growing heat, their tails thumping with impatience on the hard earth. Only later did I learn that FrannyB treated more dogs than she did people, since so many of them were ravaged during the hunts and had to be sewn back together.
Sunlight had broken through a thick blanket of clouds, spiking the heat. The air boiled with humidity; water left my body at every surface, even my elbows and fingers. Heavy knife hanging from one sweaty hand, I approached one of the fish; the women parted to let me by. Its scales alternated gray and bright red; the rest of it a decaying sort of blue, the eye a hollow moon with a black center. Its square jaw drooped open in its flat triangular head; rows of pointy teeth looked ready to bite off a finger, even in death.
I dropped to my knees with the knife. I had never cut any sort of animal before, alive or dead. It’s dead already, I thought. You’re not killing anything. Just do it. Unable to stand the suspense, one of the dogs got up on its hind legs and lunged at another’s throat; one of the women yelled and jerked him back by a rope. I hadn’t realized they were all tied together.
Unfamiliar fruits from an unknown tree, orange and hairy, plunked down on the ground beside me, rolling to a stop nearby. I felt the women approach in a group, a dark wall behind me, closer and closer, each with their own knife.
I plunged my knife into the tender gills of the fish, ripping it across a line of pasty-white belly scales. As if it’d been under pressure, the flesh made a ripping sound as a mass of blue and red entrails burst out in a hot wave. Behind the guts, the big red heart still pulsed and quivered, shocking me. It kept on pumping for several seconds before sputtering to stillness. I stumbled to my feet, gagging, the loudest sound in an unearthly silence that had settled over everything. I spun around, searching the faces of the women for some shred of kindness, of pity, even humor, just: something. But I saw only hatred, or what I took as hatred, or gloating, or worst of all: apathy. I felt desperate to run, but knew that would seal something I couldn’t unseal. And where in fuck would I go? I refused to run to Omar like a child. I straightened my shoulders, blinked the sweat out of my eyes. A strange lull followed the appalling silence, before another round of guts glugged out by my feet.
Doña Antonia stepped forward and handed me a calabash.
I took it but stood frozen as the dogs strained at their leashes and snapped at the entrails.
Suddenly I became aware of the women yelling something at me: Come on, pick them up! I scooted the ladle under the quivering pile and heaved scoop after scoop into the boiling pot, wondering how anything could be hotter than the punishing air.
It was only then that something broke among the women. Murmuring, they withdrew their own knives from the folds of their skirts and stepped around to the other gigantic fish. Each dropped to her knees. One by one, they expertly drove the blades deep in, holding an empty calabash against the inevitable flow of guts, or sawing at a gigantic head. Cutting and scooping, cutting and scooping, we began to fill the pot.
Though the women worked in silence, efficiently, a few slipped me an encouraging nod or smile. The vat of boiling guts belched giant taut bubbles into the blistering morning air. At one point, Doña Antonia left the group, disappearing up the hill for several minutes. Huffing, she returned dragging a woven basket of bananas—her height—that had turned black and soft. Countless flies and gnats flocked to the stench. A few women ran up to help her, peeling and throwing the rotted fruit in the pot, now a thick gluey stew.
Doña Antonia tossed a dozen shallow clay bowls at a good distance from each other near the pot, then handed me the ladle. “Fill them,” she grunted.
Over time I learned that we had to cook the dogs’ food because eating raw flesh was a death sentence for them. Like the jaguars, once the dogs learned the taste of raw meat, they acquired a blood thirst they never forgot. Instead of circling and cornering prey so the hunters could close in, they would attack, getting themselves gored by the tusks of the wild pigs the men were trying to capture. Here, dogs weren’t kept to be petted, bathed, and adored, they were kept to hunt peccary or tapir; to sniff out shyer game like tortoises and armadillos, alert families to snakes that sometimes snuck in the village at night. To show them affection was considered lunacy.
* * *
When I was done ladling, Doña Antonia macheted the liana that held the dogs. Wild-eyed, they raced for their meal, yelping and nipping at one another, each of them—in an attempt to steal the other dogs’ share—wolfing their food so fast they barely swallowed their own portion. One runty mongrel with sweet brown eyes and a skunkish white stripe down her back ate far too slowly and was soon nudged aside. Whimpering, she tried her luck at the other bowls, but the three-legged dog—the most vicious of the bunch—bared her teeth in a snarl, scaring the sweet mutt witless. There wasn’t a scrap of food left.
“This one, Mariposa, she pees when she sees a jaguar skin.” Doña Antonia eyed the dog as it scampered up the hill, tail between her legs. “We should get rid of her.”
Several of the women murmured in agreement as they collected the bowls and ambled down to the water to rinse them out. The rest of them sprinted off to corral the dogs; many had finished with their meals and had begun to wander off to find a place to shit or sleep off their full bellies. Freed from my duties for the moment, I started up the hill to find Omar. As I threaded among the huts, it hit me who Doña Antonia reminded me of—her behavior, not her appearance. A group-home manager all us kids professed to hate—we saw her as blunt, strict, a total bitch. On the other hand, we were a feral, out-of-control bunch. Maybe, like Doña Antonia hazing me and getting the dogs fed at the same time, all she was trying to do was get through the day without anybody hurt or hungry or in jail; in our beds every night, safe.
FOURTEEN
– JUNE –
Just after sunrise one morning, Omar and I sat high up on the platform that towered over the Anaconda Bar. Sounds were even louder in the matted tangle of the mid-story—the metallic rasp of insects, the screech of spider monkeys, birds whooping. Secured to a thick branch, a rope ladder dangled thirty feet to the ground below, the last rungs obscured by a cloud that dozed on the forest floor. It was thrilling to be able to see the entire village as well as most of the Tortoise Beach laid out before us, but sobering to realize how vulnerable we were. The village was only a tiny slice of cleared land in an unfathomably enormous and complex jungle. Ramshackle huts perched on spindly crane legs. I could barely imagine the rainy season, a few short months away. The river rising thirty feet, erasing the earth beneath us. Hills morphing to islands, clearings to lakes. Villagers traveling only by boat, fishing from their windows while pink dolphins swam among the trees.
“What’s it like to hunt from up here?” I asked, hoping nothing would crawl or jump on the platform.
“It’s really pretty boring,” Omar said, lying down on his stomach and gazing out. “The hardest part about this is staying awake.”
I had to admit, it all sounded so sexy: jaguar hunting, and yet, all we could really do, all any of us could do—at least in the village itself—was jaguar waiting. Anybody who could shoot a gun, blowgun, arrow, or slingshot was to take two-hour turns at dusk and dawn guarding Ayachero from the platform.
“Tell me what it’s like to see a jaguar.”
He smiled, the memory lighting his face. “When they think they’re not being watched, they just stumble around, like they’re drunk. Three-hundred-and-fifty-pound cats. They just go here and there, they stretch and sharpen their claws on a trunk, yawn, sniff around, but the second they get a sense you’re there, even if you make the smallest sound—boom!—it’s electric the way they come to life. There’s so much power in that instant.”
“But then you have to kill them.”
He stroked my hair. “Then I have to kill them. I imagine the face of the person they’ve killed, or the damage they’ve done to our animals, or what they might do to one of us, and I shoot.”
We watched the men gather at the beach, loading the boats for the hunt. He pulled me toward him, kissed me quickly, chastely. “I’d better go, Lily.”
I sat up, hoping to stall him. “Read me your assignment first.”
“As soon as you tell me a secret about yourself.”
I sighed, having momentarily forgotten our deal. “When I was living with Tia, she’d buy this cheap gallon block of ice cream, always vanilla, not because we liked vanilla so much, but because we could never all agree on a flavor. She’d cut it up in eight equal sections when she got it home. We’d sit around and watch her cut it like little wolves. If I wasn’t home, one of the other kids would grab my share, and I’d come home to this empty box of ice cream on the counter. I’d open it up all the way and lick it clean. Even now when I get the chance, I eat so much ice cream I make myself sick. Okay? Is that a good enough secret?”
“Thank you,” he said in English as he pulled out a ratty piece of paper.
“ ‘Tatinga,’ ” he began solemnly. “ ‘Tatinga people are a tribe that is the kind that live in one place. They do not move their houses. They make a place on the land for vegetables, for fruits, for yucca. When rubber traders come, a long time ago, they use the people as slaves, even rape, even murder them, anything to bleed rubber from the trees for American tires. Many make themselves dead to escape. The ones who live, run deep into the jungle to survive. They move and move. Now, men of opportunity come and poison rivers for gold, or kill too much game, or wrong game, or make roads to get mahogany. And game never crosses a road. So now Tatinga and other tribes are no-mad-ic.’ ” He looked up at me for confirmation of the word. “ ‘They move but do not like it. Who likes to move all the time? Tatinga know how to love the jungle, so the jungle is not afraid and gives back game, fruits, plants. They do not take too many tortoise eggs, for then how are there more tortoises? They do not cut down ironwood trees, where do mother macaw put her babies then?
“ ‘My father and I hunt with Tatinga when I am young. Then, we have the same problem with jaguars, but Ayachero works with Tatinga, like friends. We say to each other, who has seen the jaguar that steals the chickens? How to track so no one is killed? Where is the best place to build a platform? Who mans the platform, and when? The jaguar does not care if he eats an Ayachero man or a Tatinga man. Both taste delicious to him.
“ ‘Tatinga do not name a baby for o
ne year. They do not want to love a baby if they think it dies. Tatinga love their ancestors. The ones who die are burned. Mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers. Their bones are crushed and put in a drink and everybody drinks it every day until all is gone. Tatinga are fierce, and they kill you if they are angry and you never see them. You are just dead. They do not hate you. They want to live. They want to be alone in the jungle, but there are men of opportunity. There are Frannies. There are ribereños, river people, other villages like Ayachero. Everybody has an empty stomach.’ ” He stopped. “That’s all, Lily.”
My heart was close to bursting with how much I loved the way he saw the jungle and everyone in it, but I just said, “Very good, my favorite student,” and kissed him slowly.
A high-pitched whine sounded from upriver. In minutes, a longboat outfitted with a cheap motor (called a peke peke because of the sound it made) buzzed around a turn and headed straight toward us, the face of its driver hidden under a filthy golf cap. The sound heartened me with its whiff of civilization, a reminder of the outside world. We scrambled down the rope ladder and made our way to the shore.
I forgot the mosquitos droning in my ears as we watched the boat carve across clay-colored currents, its rear hull freighted with rubberized bags and wooden crates. The lip of the gunwale hovered just inches from the water as the boat putt-putted toward us, only the thrust from its egg-beater motor keeping the whole works from taking on water.
The driver lifted his face out from the shadow of his hat, which read, US OPEN, 1974, and smiled. His face was immediately appealing: a strong jaw, bright eyes, short hair slicked back with lots of tonka-seed oil. He wore red gym shorts and a faded Hawaiian shirt open to reveal a big tin cross on a leather cord. He was bulky in the shoulders and chest, but one of his legs looked thin and weak.
Waving and calling to Omar, he drove the boat right up onto the shore before cutting the motor. With the use of a twisted cane, he pushed himself up to his full height and stepped out of the boat. Unlike most villagers, who went around barefoot or wore cheap flip-flops, he sported plastic Colombia-made loafers with bright, gold-painted buckles, and seemed conscientious about keeping them as dry and mud-free as possible. Omar ran down to greet him, lifting him up into the air with a joyful embrace before setting him back down on the spit of sand.
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