“You can’t do it. Even now.” She threw another piece of fruit at him; it smashed wetly on his shoulder; pulp rolled down his back. He didn’t react, only stayed where he was, head down. She huffed a shotgun higher up on her shoulder. Disappeared from view.
Franz jumped down, ran a short distance away, and vomited. Omar ran to put his arm around his brother; they went into a huddle. Soon the crowd lost interest in the drama and picked up the pace; the dancing, bragging, laughing, and betting all started up again. Doña Antonia, obviously enjoying her aguardiente, gave me the slightest half smile as she passed by with a large plate of grilled meat.
* * *
The hardest part about climbing the thirty-foot rope ladder was the way it kept swaying with my weight. I found Anna crouched on the far side of the platform, pointing her gun down into a nest of leaves.
“He’s afraid of heights,” she said. “And of planes—flying, I mean. That’s why he didn’t go to Cochabamba to find Omar.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Panchito had to do it,” she continued. “And then I had to worry if he was just going to stay in the city and drink and chase women and never come back.” She dropped her head in her hands. “Sometimes I wish I could be Angelina. Just go crazy and run off naked into the forest—” She paused, wiping her reddened eyes. “I mean, why not, you know? Why not go crazy? What a relief it would be. Wouldn’t we all love to go crazy? But I couldn’t do that to Franz, or Claudia, or this baby.”
She looked at me, considered me, her face still lovely, even puffy and tearstained. “What’s it like, being the only white woman here?” Legs dangling over the side of the platform, she stroked her voluminous belly. “You must miss all your big cars and houses, your pretty clothes and diamonds.”
“I never had those things.”
She squinted at me like I was lying. “You’ve lost your gringa treasures. I’m sorry for you.”
I shrugged.
“We all thought you’d leave after the first week. But you didn’t. Doesn’t your family in America miss you?”
“Omar is my only family.”
“I wish you’d met Benicio. You would have loved him. He was such a funny kid. Always making everyone laugh, always a smile on his face. Always bringing me little presents. He must have been so terrified. I can’t sleep thinking about it. I can’t eat, nothing.”
All I could think was, What have I lost? At that moment my sorrows felt like nothing compared to Anna’s.
“I think Beya called down the jaguar.” She paused to wipe the tears from her face. “Or if she didn’t, she could have kept him away. She could do that for us, if she wanted to.”
“Doesn’t she help people here, cure them with plants?”
“She helped deliver Benicio and Claudia, with FrannyB. Lots of other babies, too. But we haven’t been very nice to her. So we always wonder. Maybe she cures people when she feels like it, you know?” She shrugged. “And besides, she’s Tatinga.”
“What do you mean?”
A sigh of frustration. “You’ve seen them. They think flashlights are captured moonbeams. That radios have little people inside of them. That the big airplanes flying high up are carrying the spirits of their ancestors to the land of the dead on invisible roads in the sky. And the small ones that drop supplies? They think they’re alive, that they’re big birds taking shits.”
“But if you’ve never seen a machine, how would you know it wasn’t alive?”
“Because I would just know such a thing,” she said dismissively.
“Do you want to go to America someday?”
“It would scare me too much to go to a place without a jungle. San Solidad is bad enough. I went there once. It’s filthy and full of factories that poison the air. I miss the days when more people lived here in Ayachero, you know? When we had enough men to scare off the poachers. Nobody got in each other’s way. Plenty of game for everyone. Hunts were one, two days. Now we’re alone too much, all of us. The men are, too, out there for days without a kill. Us back here, waiting, worrying.”
“Have you ever killed a jaguar?”
“No, but I’ve seen a puma. A huge one. Sleeping in a tree down by the Tortoise Beach, back when I was a little girl.”
“Were you scared?”
She laughed. “Well, I didn’t wait around till he woke up. But he was really passed out, he had a bellyful of tortoise eggs, so I just snuck away.”
“What are puma like?”
“Puma smell you and circle around behind you, and you’re dead. They’ll kill you just to kill you. Jaguars don’t make the effort unless they’re hungry. But the one that took my boy is different. This one is angry.” She wiped her eyes and squinted into the velvet, wet darkness. “This one’s going to come back.”
TWENTY
“You never told me you were a shaman,” Omar said, grinning. Taped-together glasses halfway down his nose, he sat cross-legged between the grain sacks on the shelf in the storeroom, his Spanish-to-English workbook open on his lap, the baby macaws snuffling and chirping in their burlap bed. After sleeping in neighboring hammocks in the longhouse the last several nights, we’d agreed the storeroom was the best place—temporarily—to have privacy together.
I sat across from him on a bag of rice, the morning sun already baking us through the open window. “You never asked.”
“Okay, what am I thinking?” Still smiling, he closed his eyes.
“Knock it off, Ohms.”
His eyes popped open. “I was thinking how much I missed you out there. How much you would have loved it. Parts of it, anyway.”
“You don’t believe me. About Beya.”
He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, looked out the window. “First of all, Lily, I’m trying not to be furious that you went in the jungle by yourself. You promised me you’d never—”
“Sorry. I wanted to thank her, and I could hear her donkey braying, and smell her sage burning and her cooking fire—”
He held up one hand. “So I’m going to ask you again. I don’t care how bored you get. How badly you want something out there. Will you please, God, never, never—”
I got up and paced the room. “Okay, all right.” Charlotte opened one eye and got up to trail my every step, clomping along behind me on the creaking plywood floor. She’d already grown out of the piglet stage: I fed her well.
“And second of all, sure, I believe Beya spoke inside your mind. It’s called shining. It’s the vieja lengua, the old language. You’ve got a dozen tribes in a twenty-kilometer range, all speaking different languages. So that’s how they communicated, sometimes just with images—about predators, poachers, what fruits are in bloom and where, everything. Now only a shaman can do it, but not every shaman remembers. Lily, it’s an honor.”
“Why me, though?”
“Maybe she’s lonely. She doesn’t want anything to do with us anymore. We’ve all let her down. Her brother, Splitfoot, let her down. You were open to it, somehow. Anything is possible in this place.”
I pictured Beya stewing over my holding back all my “Boston secrets” and shivered. Was I letting her down, too? “So, why is her brother called Splitfoot?”
“Fishing accident when he was a kid. He got too relaxed with a big pirarucu he caught, just threw it in the bottom of the boat. Bad idea. They have teeth. Look, Lily, you have to promise me—”
“What now?”
“You have to keep this to yourself.” He closed the workbook, the only other book besides my dictionary we’d had the forethought to bring to the jungle. “You’re having a hard enough time with these women, some of them. They can be tough. You don’t need to be making anyone jealous, or concerned.”
“I don’t know who I would tell. Anna, maybe—”
“Nobody except me. You can tell me anything. I can tell you anything. That’s how it is. That’s how we are. And you must honor Beya. She’s the soul of the Tatinga. Splitfoot was never as powerful as his sister. I think it drives
him crazy.” He gazed out the window as the sun sizzled the morning dew off waxy green leaves.
With a sigh, I went to sit with him; his closeness put my body and mind at peace.
He put his arm around me. “Listen, For God’s Sake got here late last night. He’s going to take us to the Frannies. I’ve got a surprise for you there.”
“What is it? How do you see through these lenses?” Taking his glasses, I busied myself trying to clean them on the hem of my none-too-clean dress.
He smiled. “Lily Bushwold, you have no—”
“Patience, okay, okay. A surprise, I’m psyched.” I carefully slid the glasses back on his face.
“The catch is, you need to give me my next assignment.”
I sat back against the wall and gazed at the trees out the window. “Tell me all about the mahogany grove. It sounds like a sacred place.”
There wasn’t much logic in this, but just the words mahogany grove called up the image of where Tia’s ashes were buried: an elegant grove of white birches that overlooked the Quabbin Reservoir; to her that was a holy place, and I could feel her there every time I wandered among those trees.
“When’s it due?” His eyes magnified behind his lenses, he lifted his pencil over his workbook. I adored him more than I could bear.
“As soon as possible.”
“Thank you. I love the homework,” he said in English. He shut the notebook and slipped off the shelf to his feet. “Now, show me where the monkey took your backpack.”
* * *
I led him to the towering trees near the bank, their crowns tangling and blocking the sun. Underneath our footsteps, the ground steamed softly, as if cooling on some new primeval morning. A tiny triangle of bright orange canvas glinted like a lone flower in the tapestry of every kind of green; a frayed brown strap hung down, forlorn. My underpants, jeans, and T-shirt were nowhere in sight. Omar cut a length of liana with a swipe of his machete, tied the ends together, and looped the circle of vine around both ankles. His bare feet bound by the coil, he jumped onto the base of the tree that held my bag prisoner. It offered no hand- or toeholds, but the liana created a band of friction from which he stood, nose to bark. Bracing his feet around the tree, he reached up and grabbed at a section a bit higher up, hung on as he jumped and braced himself still higher on the trunk. Like a human inchworm, he lifted his body up and up using the strength of his arms and legs and gut. In under a minute he vanished into the mid-story, around fifteen yards up. I waited, never believing he could climb high enough. Suddenly the orange triangle shuddered, disappeared, then hurtled from the branches. My backpack, empty of my treasures, torn and ragged and howler-monkey shit-stained, but so beautiful to me, came tumbling down at my feet.
He shunted himself down quickly; leaping soundlessly to the hard mud. I thanked him so much he burst out laughing, wrapping his arm around my waist as we walked down to the shore to rinse the bag clean.
* * *
Doña Antonia looped the rope leash Omar had fashioned for Charlotte around the center pole of the longhouse. “You know what they call you in the village? Señora de Cerdo.” The pig lady.
“Fine. They can call me anything they like,” I said. “Will you watch her, please?”
“Of course.”
“Maybe take her down with you when you do the washing, or to the chacra?”
She grunted her assent, already on to some other task. I’d been setting aside a lot of my food for Charlotte, until I figured out she’d eat absolutely anything, any gross thing at all she could root up with her snout: worms, bugs, larva, rotten fruit, frogs, and so on. She even ate some dried pig some kids tossed at her. Still, I left her a bowl of yucca peels just before I left, if only to distract her from my departure and spare myself the resulting hysteria when she realized I was gone.
I ran to the chicken coop, flinging the door wide and throwing down some feed for the birds. The wire door slammed behind me. Feet loose in my decaying sneakers, I hustled to meet Omar and For God’s Sake at the mouth of the Fire Ant Path, our agreed-upon meeting place to bring supplies to the Frannies, a half day’s journey through the jungle.
Omar’s face was serious and purposeful, For God’s Sake smiling as always. “I’ll be in the lead. Then Perla, then you, Lily. For God’s Sake will be last. Lily, don’t fall behind. Don’t speak unless you have to.”
“Why can’t I talk? What if I have a question?”
“Later for questions. Talk if you have an emergency, or if we’ve all decided to stop and talk. I need to listen to the jungle, understand?”
“Whatever.”
“Not ‘whatever,’ Lily. Do you understand or not?”
“Okay. I understand.”
“But if you see something, of course tell us,” For God’s Sake added. “Like a snake, or a snakeskin, over.”
“Why a snakeskin?”
“It’s protein. It gets eaten right away,” Omar said. “If the skin is still there, it means the snake has shed it minutes ago, seconds ago maybe, and it’s still close by, claro?”
I nodded.
“We stay close together when we walk. Tell us if you have to pee. Don’t fall back, don’t wander away, even a little, even to look at something. Don’t lean on anything, don’t touch anything. There are poison ants everywhere, wasps, spiny plants, okay? Do what we tell you,” Omar said sternly before turning and plunging through a mat of hanging vines.
Perla stood planted with her rump toward me, furry triangle ears rotated toward the jungle, her soft nose already snuffling at the subtle parting Omar had left in the curtain of vines. She brayed and stamped, rectangular yellow teeth gnashing, her heartbreakingly bony ribs quaking. Smart girl, she had no interest in entering that place, but For God’s Sake smacked her hard on her fly-bitten flank, and she hazarded a few steps in. Resigned, she dropped her head and kept on walking.
I followed just behind her. There was so much in front of me, it took a while to see it. Woody vines wound themselves around trees; plants with spines as long as fingers lined the path. Was that a snake looping down? Not this time; just another liana thick as a man’s arm coiling from the dimness, unspooling across our path.
Unseen parrots squawked as they flew above us, battling something out. Tree frogs tocked in ditches, as eerie warbling cries filtered through the green corridors. Boulders emitted a sweetish mildew smell. Mushrooms like champagne flutes brimmed with recent rain. Occasionally a shadow flickered above us, but what sunlight filtered through was tinted an emerald green, as if it came through water.
Perla made a tinkling sound as she ambled along, loaded down as she was with bags of hand mirrors, knives, little flashlights, and other trinkets—gifts the Frannies offered the Tatinga in exchange for their allegiance to Jesus Christ. Other supplies had been strapped to her sides: sacks of yucca, rice, onions; cans of strange things you’d never think of in a can like tins of honey or boiled pickled eggs; rubberized packages of dehydrated potatoes; and several bottles of rum. I felt a growing thirst, but it wasn’t bad enough yet to halt this odd, clanking parade. Ahead of Perla, Omar chopped with loud thwocks at hanging vines that obscured our path.
I found myself not wanting to talk, a rare state for me. A strange, calm alertness buzzed through my limbs; it felt beautiful, grounding. In my nineteen years I had never felt anything like it. I was walking through another world with its own complex systems that had nothing to do with me; it freed me in a way. As brutal as this place was, I didn’t have to cheat or steal or lie or run away to survive. Instead I had to pay attention, learn, shut up, accept, keep going.
An hour drifted by, maybe two. There was nothing to indicate time, no slant of sun, no change of vista, just a chronic twilight, Perla’s shuddering flanks, and the occasional grassy turd escaping between swishes of her tail.
We began to climb. I watched where Perla placed her hooves, and put my feet there, hoping for safety. Sweat erupted from me, copious. I didn’t think it was possible to sweat this much, the rubb
er grip of my machete slippery in my hand. My thirst went from mild to overwhelming—my head pounded with it.
A sudden eruption of rain burst through the canopy without warning, as if someone had overturned a vast bucket. Our daily deluge. So much rain dumped down, and so fast, that a small stream bubbled up next to us in a foot-wide, shallow ditch; in it, button-sized orange frogs leapt up in joy. A slender, yellow-headed snake burst up, its throat distended by a still-live frog, the impression of its three-toed feet clear from inside the thin skin; then the snake flopped down, disappearing into a tangle of black roots.
In seconds, the rain stopped. The jungle steamed with hot fog. My hair was plastered to my head, my dress to my body. Embarrassed, I plucked it away from my skin, but we were all soaked. Perla shook herself, stomped in the muck, snorted.
“Is there any water?” I thought about the rum, but it was water I wanted.
“Water’s everywhere in the jungle, Lily, you just need to get to it,” Omar said. We walked down to a swampy area where a grove of twenty-foot-tall bamboo towered above us. Dozens of segmented stalks shot straight up, perfectly parallel to each other. Arrow-shaped leaves drooped from the prehistoric-looking grasses. Omar lopped off a piece stacked like three tallboy beer cans, then handed the heavy column to me. For God’s Sake nodded sagely, as if he approved of whatever game Omar was playing. He leaned on Perla, took out one of the matchsticks he kept in his shirt pocket, and chewed on it thoughtfully.
Omar cut off another section at the joint and placed it in my other hand. “You look at these. Tell me how they’re different.”
I turned the tubes over in my hands. They both sloshed with liquid; otherwise they looked the same to me. I was hot, mosquito ravaged, miserable, in no mood for lessons.
“I’m not getting what you’re saying to me.”
“Look closer, Lily Bushwold.”
A smattering of light had worked its way through the leaves and shown like lace on the ground. I went to it, holding the two stalks under the delicate rays. I turned them, peering closely. Thin gold striations shone down the sides of one of them, so subtle you couldn’t see them unless you rotated the stalk with great patience; the lines glittered a bit in the light. The other stalk stayed solid green when I turned it. “I see it!” I said. “I see the difference.”
Into the Jungle Page 15