“What is the name of your village?” she asked.
“Boston.”
“Are you the only shaman in Boston?”
I laughed. “I’m not a shaman.”
Her face remained expressionless. “But you heard me speak in the old language. Why didn’t you answer me?”
“You mean, speak to you in your head? I can’t do that.”
“Of course you can. You can hear me, right?”
“Yes.”
“So, it’s not so hard. Just shine back to me.”
I had to laugh. “Boston shamans can’t shine.”
She gestured to a small thatched stool next to her potions. “Maybe you’re tired. Sit. Rest. Eat.” She set out a bowl of roasted plantains and a clay pot of dark honey warmed over the fire. After settling herself back on her rock, she watched with strangely hungry, impatient eyes as I dipped the pieces of plantain in the honey with my fingers; never had anything tasted so delicious.
“Now. Try,” she said, and closed her eyes.
The forest ticked, looming. I closed my eyes and thought the words, “MY NAME IS LILY. I’M FROM BOSTON, AND I’M NOT A SHAMAN. I WISH I WERE.”
She opened one eye. “I don’t hear you. Why are you playing this game with me?”
I squeezed my eyes shut, doubled down, and shouted the words in my head. “I’M NOT A SHAMAN AND I NEVER WILL BE! I’M JUST A DUMB AMERICAN KID.”
We breathed together under the dripping trees. A little black capuchin monkey with a white face swung down from a lower branch and landed on her shoulder, one arm wrapped around her forehead, a look of she is mine in his eyes. Beya got to her feet, shooing away her pet, who chittered up the stairs and into the hut.
“Are you afraid I will steal your spells, your secrets?” She turned to look at me. “I have my own. I don’t need your Boston spells.”
“I’m trying, I swear. It’s just—”
“Were your potions in the bag the howler monkey stole?”
“No, that was just underwear and stuff.”
She lifted one gnarled finger. “You’re very young. And thin. Your nerves are high. Still, you’re hiding your powers from me. You are like the pygmy marmoset, see?” She pointed up to a nearby tree. A squirrel-sized creature with a ruff around its neck like a lion sat at the entrance to a dark hole in the bark, its small hands rubbing nervously together. “He has his own home in the tree, but he never relaxes in his hole. He’s always facing out, ready to react to a predator.”
“Maybe that’s a good idea.”
“He never uses the forest to help him. He’s always afraid. He will always be afraid.”
I squinted up at the nervous little creature at the mouth of his hole. “Aren’t you afraid of jaguars out here by yourself?”
She sneered at my question, the macaw feathers in her ears shuddering in the ethereal light. “The poachers took the jaguar, so the jaguar took the child. The jaguar knows I do not hunt him. He leaves me alone. So tell me, when will you die?”
“How would I know that?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Every shaman knows the year of their death. I am sixty-five. I will die at age eighty-three.”
“I’m not a shaman.”
She waved me away in disgust. “You ask about fear. My only fear is that I will die here, alone in this place. Not with my people. I think you are a message from Boston that this will not come to pass.”
“I wish that were true.”
“If I show you some of my secrets, will you show me some of yours from the forest of Boston?”
“Yes,” I said, wondering what in the world I could show her, and what she would do to me if I showed her nothing.
“Come with me,” she said. I followed her down a narrow track of cleared land behind her hut before plunging into the pathless green. I had to run to catch up with her. C shaped, eighty pounds tops—still, she was fast and strong and I had to work to keep her in sight. She stopped short in front of a young ficus tree. A termite nest as big as a duffel bag hung off it like a tumor.
“If you are hungry, you can always eat the queen termite,” she said. “These nests are everywhere.” With her machete she chopped open the blackened crust; thousands of glittering termites flooded out in panic, soldiers scrambling at the damage. Workers poured down the sides of the tree and circled it in a wave, immediately swarming back up. She held out the machete and pointed at the four-inch-long, white, segmented queen, temporarily abandoned by her workers. “You can eat it raw, or cook it. A few of these will give you strength if you are lost.”
Not waiting for comment, she kept walking. We stepped into an opening where a mammoth tree had fallen, taking down half a dozen other behemoths with it. They lay broken across one another in different stages of decay, carpets of verdigris moss melting over hills and valleys of bark and branch. Hundreds of purple butterflies burst from a rotted trunk as we passed, swirling in a violet funnel over our heads. A yards-long spiderweb that draped like lace from branch to branch above us was clotted with the purple wings; a fist-sized spider huddled in a dark corner, waiting.
“I never capture the butterflies, because then the spirit leaves them.” She stepped over a few logs, stopping at one as tall on its side as she was standing. Big black ants swarmed a rubber tree sapling that had sprouted up through the rotting log, exposing a V where an abandoned bees’ nest still glistened with honey. “But when I see them, I know I’m near my nest of bullet ants. The isula. You know this ant?”
I shook my head. I’d never heard of it, but knew that—in this place—if an insect had a name, it was best to stay away from it.
“The bite of this ant is like a bullet. For a whole day, your enemy will be in terrible pain.”
She took out a short bamboo tube, flipping the rubber cap free with her tobacco-stained thumb. With a stick, she dabbed honey in the bottom, then lay the tube next to the ants. Dozens crawled in before she kicked the container a short distance away, rolled it under her sandaled foot—crushing the ants that remained on the outside—before snatching it up, snapping the rubber stopper back on, and slipping the tube in her string bag.
“Come on.” She led me past the graveyard of fallen giants to one that stood tall, its roots like flying buttresses soaring up and out of sight, its base as wide as a city bus. “This is the lupuna tree. They are sacred. One must never relieve oneself near here. This is where I can hide my soul and keep it safe if some brujo or bruja is coming after me. Now, look closely here, in these plants that grow near the roots. This is where the poison frogs like to live. See?”
Four jewel-toned orange-and-blue-spotted frogs, each as big as a thumb, hid in bright green nests, bulbous toes gripping the leaves. Black eyes watched our approach; each blink revealing brilliant yellow eyelids. Throat sacs pulsed, skin glistened.
“This one makes poison through the skin, do you see it? How it is shining like that? This one makes enough poison to kill ten men, fifteen men. We use these frogs for arrows, and for darts for the blowguns, to kill. Or we can use a little to make pain go away, to numb. A drop under the skin makes a baby sleep for hours. Four will kill it.”
She reached in her string bag and pulled out a small, woven palm box. A frog’s little fingers scrabbled at the slits between the fronds. “See? Very useful.” She straightened up with a groan. “Do you have these frogs in Boston?”
“No.”
“Do you have isula ants? Lupuna trees?”
“No.”
She shrugged. “How can that be? It must be a very sad place.”
“It is.”
“Why are you here? Maybe you have insulted your tribe? Have they sent you away, like mine has sent me here?”
“No, and listen, I’m not a shaman—”
Her eyes burned into mine, spirited and alive in her brown, lined face. “No one has heard me speak the old language since I was a young girl. Do you know what that means?” She put a hand on the small of her back, as if it pained her. Her string bag jostle
d at her waist, the little frog jumping at its cage. “Something is very old in you, a forest spirit, a spirit that can hear. You have traveled from your village, from far, far away, with no weapons, yet you live. You stand here in front of me. How is that? Don’t you wonder? Maybe you are a young, silly shaman who doesn’t know anything yet, but that is what you are.”
I stood in my sack dress in the green bath of jungle light, wanting to cry. “If you’re right, how can I be less silly, be more like what you say I am?”
“Come and visit me when you’re ready to share your Boston secrets. Keep calling me with your mind.”
“I will,” I said.
“Now leave me,” she said gruffly, turning back to her camp, our visit obviously over.
My mind roiled as I set foot on the path toward Ayachero. I had no Boston secrets—but clearly she thought I was holding back from her. What did she really want from me? What if I could never speak to her as she assumed I could? What would be the price of that? No more warnings about electric eels or other deadly creatures? Or maybe she’d conjure something much more subtle and menacing, something I would never see coming.
NINETEEN
On my fifteenth evening alone, I sat in my hiding place in the longhouse: on a low shelf in my favorite storeroom, sandwiched between rubberized sacks of rice and farina, a Spanish-to-English dictionary—the only book I had—cradled in my arms. Next to me, lying on her back, her belly full of grubs, Charlotte snored, snuffling each time I reached down to scratch her shell-pink belly.
I raised my head. A voice, a laugh, a certain kind of music I hadn’t heard in what felt like months came tripping in through the window, just an open square in the wall of thatch. I jumped to my feet, kicking Charlotte awake and sending the book skittering across the sawdust. A rush of nausea, dizziness, as I got my bearings, took a spare second to wonder again what was wrong with me, before shelving that thought and bursting out of the storeroom, flying down the longhouse stairs three at a time. The entire village had turned out down by the shore, surrounding the hunters in a joyous circle. Chests puffed out, the men gestured at the river, the sky, each other, fighting for the chance to spout some choice tale about the hunt to the rapt crowd. The women who had gone with them to skin game and cook were greeted with less fanfare; they dragged the gear off the boats and gathered the dogs, who wandered famished and skittish along the shoreline.
I saw Omar before he saw me. Suspended between his and another man’s shoulder was a thick bamboo pole from which hung a dead juvenile tapir, lashed there by its strange three-toed hooves, head dangling from its broken neck, cropped elephantine nose hanging down. Three four-foot black caiman clamped fierce jaws around the center of the pole as if they were still alive and fighting, but the loose, boneless way their bodies and limbs swayed told a different story. At the end of the pole, just before Omar’s bronze shoulders, hung a couple of dead spider monkeys tied in two furry balls, heads tucked under arms, knees bent and stored up under their chins, tails trussed around them, as if they were sleeping. I wondered: Omar had told me once that Ayacherans never ate monkey—only the tribes “stooped” to that sort of thing—but obviously desperation had come into play. Eyes on the ground and bent under his load, Omar, smiling and joking, carried the game to the already blazing fires near the longhouse.
I ran up to him, tasted the sweetness of his name in my mouth as I said it. He took me in his arms as soon as he was able to lay down his load. I went to kiss him, but he took me firmly by the shoulders, held me away from him, and took a good look at me.
“Why are you wearing that?”
“Someone stole my clothes.” I became conscious of my uncombed hair, my now chronic sense of uncleanliness, hideous sack dress, legs and arms covered with welts. “A monkey stole my backpack.”
His face broke open in a smile. “My poor Lily. The jungle’s treating you badly, I think, because it doesn’t know you yet.” He smoothed my hair from my eyes, kissed me quickly and drily on the lips. “Are you sick, Lily?”
“It’s this food. I can’t get used to it.”
Torchlight leapt up into the evening sky on either end of the Anaconda Bar. A party was revving up on the hill, Bolivian pop tunes blaring. Over the river, remnants of daylight backlit the darkening clouds in brilliant orange, as if a fire burned somewhere beyond the hanging green. Among the trees, light tightened in the way it always did before a jungle night.
His hands dropped from my shoulders; I felt bereft of his touch.
“I brought you a present.” From a leather sack he carefully lifted out two turquoise-and-yellow fist-sized balls of fluff with tiny black beaks and spiky green tails: baby macaws. He tumbled them into my palms. They squawked and blinked and bit at my fingers as I petted them with my thumbs.
His face grew serious. “Fat Carlos and Dutchie and his men. We got to their camp just after they left. They were too lazy to climb the trees, so they cut them down and left the babies to die up by the river cliffs. By the ironwood trees where they nest. We couldn’t save all of them.” He shook his head. “I had to choose. There were yellow ones, green ones, purple, red . . . we got to these before the snakes, or the other birds. But we had to leave most of them.”
“What do they eat?”
“Seeds, nuts, fruits, leaves, things like that. Easy to find.”
The men called to Omar. Held up full glasses of pale yellow liquid. He took me by the elbow. “Come on, let’s get something to eat. Then I have another surprise for you.”
I followed him up the hill, carrying the little macaw babies. Thick slabs of freshly butchered tapir dropped fat into the bonfire; nearby, its head boiled in a cauldron to harvest every ounce of meat. A few more fires sprang to life; smoking racks were erected in minutes. The dogs circled them, yipping at one another.
Every seat at the Anaconda Bar was taken, filled with men drinking a sugarcane brandy saved for just this occasion. Some of the bigger kids had started up a betting game with a foot-long bamboo rat they’d caught in the manioc fields. They’d built three tiny little houses out of thatch, each with an opening on one side, each with a different colored splash of paint on its roof, and put the whole miniature village under a big wire cage with a hole on top. People would bet on which color hut the rat would choose, once dropped through the hole: pink, green, or yellow. Soon the adults joined in; losers had to buy the other a drink or cigarettes.
Couples began to dance, throwing themselves around on the hard earth, pressing close to each other, a hundred voices raising up to the night sky, the jungle echoing back its own insanity: shrieks, howls, hoots. But all this joy felt forced and hollow and slightly hysterical. Even as drinks were raised and toasts made, everyone complained that the haul was not enough, the poachers were taking all the game and destroying the forest; the hunters would have to go out again, soon, travel farther, stay away longer, and what sort of life was that?
After nestling the little birds in a bed of corn silk in an old rice sack in the storeroom, I sat on the longhouse stairs near the bar, watching Omar drink with the men, downing my own glass of brandy until it started to taste good and even the fastest conversations translated effortlessly in my mind. Still, the scene felt out of balance, tipped toward mania, dangerous. I got up and made my way through the crowd, looking for something to eat.
Franz ran by me, sweating, frantic looking. “Have you seen Anna?”
“Not since this morning.”
Barely listening, he tore off to the longhouse and up the stairs. I ran between the huts, calling for her, even went down to the beach where the black river rolled by ominously. My heart pounded as I recalled the way Anna had been avoiding everyone, doing her washing or ironing off by herself, then disappearing into her hut, face drawn and closed.
Others took up calling for her, until everyone had set aside their celebrating. The dancing stopped; partners separated, breathless, to watch the show, canned music still jangling up into the night. Beyond the village lights, unseen creat
ures slithered, crept, stalked, fornicated, glowed with chemical life.
Finally I remembered the place she always went when she couldn’t bear it anymore.
“Anna!” Franz’s voice thundered from the longhouse.
I stood at the base of the tree where the jaguar platform shadowed the moonlight from the Anaconda Bar. A sob filtered down from high up in the branches. “Anna!” I called. “Are you okay?”
“No. I’m not okay,” she cried pitifully. “I’m never going to be okay.”
Franz sprinted down the stairs and to the rope ladder. “Anna, come down. Please.”
She stood, smoothing her dress over her body. Lit from beneath by torchlight, her pregnant belly nearly obscured her tearstained face. “No! You come up here.”
The crowd quieted. Waiting. Only the clink of glasses on the bar. Franz looked at the ground, placed one foot on the ladder’s first rung.
“You need to come up here right now,” she said wretchedly. “This is where you should have been for the past two weeks. Hunting the jaguar that killed our child, Franz, our child, do you hear me?” Her voice broke. Someone snapped off the radio. The jungle shuddered and hissed.
“Just come down from there. It’s dangerous, Anna, come on.” His face beet red, never looking back at the ogling crowd, he stayed on the ground.
She threw down a heavy, overripe sugar apple that splatted to bits near his foot. “I will never come down until I kill this thing. Do you understand? Now come up here and help me do it.”
“Anna, you’ve been drinking.”
“Yes, I’ve been drinking—”
“Calm down and get—”
“If you were any sort of man, you’d come up here and get me.”
He put his other foot on the first rung, hauled himself up, and hung there, swinging, head drooping forward. The crowd watched. He took another step up, then one more, heaving his body up as if its weight were unbearable. He stopped at the fifth rung, eight, ten feet in the air, swaying, ropes creaking.
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