Omar gestured for me to hand him back the stalks. Holding the plain one at arm’s length, he neatly chopped off the top and took a long, slow drink from the natural wooden cup, then handed it to me, nodding. Not taking my eyes off his, I tipped the stalk to my lips and took a sip. It was warm but fresh tasting, like diluted green tea. He took it from me, tore off a giant rubbery leaf from a low plant, and poured the rest of the liquid into the leaf for Perla, who lapped it up with enthusiasm, farting and snorting, the supplies clanking together on her back.
He held up the striated one and—lopping off the top—poured the liquid out onto the leaf litter beneath our feet.
“But I’m still thirsty.”
“No you aren’t,” he said, shaking his head. “Why? Because this one? The one with the gold lines? That one will kill you in half an hour. And you don’t have to drink much, maybe a couple of swallows. It tastes the same, but it’ll burn out your insides until you’re hollow as the plant, understand?”
I nodded.
“So now you go, Lily, with your machete, and you cut down the good kind and bring it to me. Like you’re alone and need to survive, okay? We’ll be here, waiting. There’s no rush.”
“Yes, Miss Lily, we will be here wanting to know your decision, over,” For God’s Sake said.
The bamboo garden bathed me in golden green light. The stalks seemed to vibrate as I studied them. Standing vertically as they were, it was impossible for me to see the striations—were they there or not?
I took a whack at a stalk. Like trying to break a stone. I put my shoulder into it. Finally, I freed up a two-foot-long segment. Holding it inches from my eyes under the dim patch of light, I turned it, searching for the glittering strings of gold. But there was nothing. Just smooth, green flesh.
“I think this is the good kind.”
“Okay,” Omar said, walking toward me. He took the section of bamboo, held it in front of his face, gave it a quick turn, and handed it back. “Go ahead. Drink it.”
After cutting off the top as he had, I brought the strange container to my lips. Hesitated. “Are you sure?” He hadn’t really looked at it in the light, as far as I could tell.
“No. That’s not going to work. Are you sure? I’m not here, okay? For God’s Sake isn’t here. You’re all alone. Only you and the jungle. And you’re very thirsty, you’ve been walking for miles, you’re dying, and you must drink. Show me what you do.”
I walked around with the stalk, in a strange, dull panic, my heart beating fast and light. I held it up in every kind of light I could find, which wasn’t much: a little dim, dimmer, full shadow. I saw no glittering gold stripes, but still . . .
“What do you think? Is it the good kind?” he said.
I nodded, suddenly nauseous with fear.
“Then drink.”
I glared at him, my lover, the dearest person in the world to me, my only real connection to this foreign wilderness. What if I was wrong? Why didn’t he look at it in the light and make sure? What game was this, really? But, good Lord, I needed water, even my cells were thirsty.
I held the hard, smooth plant to my lips and drank every last drop.
TWENTY-ONE
“She wouldn’t go by ‘Francie,’ ” FrannyB said. The big woman gestured at the gaunt figure of FrannyA, who sat bent over her intricate task, squinting through smudged granny glasses. “Way too stubborn for that.”
At an antique children’s chair and desk joined by rusted metal workings, FrannyA stitched the words to a psalm into a burlap place mat. Thin gray wisps escaped her tight, small bun and stuck to her damp neck. The palm thatch chapel where she sat was open to the jungle on three sides; a crotched sapling supporting its eave pole, from which FrannyA’s wooden Christ statue hung motionless. A black chalkboard made up its one wall, the alphabet neatly written across the top in capital letters, small ones just below. Another half dozen torn-up chairs and desks faced the board. Perched on a lectern, a two-foot-tall parrot missing most of the feathers on its chest clutched a six-volt battery in one talon, its gray, trapezoidal tongue nudging off the white corrosive powder as it tried to take a bite out of the silver metal.
“But we couldn’t both be Frances. Lord knows these Indians are confused enough.”
Seated high on a tall stool that looked too spidery for her weight, FrannyB tapped off a thick length of cigar ash before drawing and holding in another lungful. A few more cigars, courtesy of For God’s Sake, poked out of her shirt pocket. Her pale green eyes squinted, assessing me.
“But really, I ask you, what are the chances? Two missionaries named Frances, one from Massachusetts, one from Georgia—that would be me, as if you couldn’t tell—” She poured on an extra syrupy drawl here. “Both decide to spread the Lord’s word in the middle of this godforsaken devil’s workshop—this end-of-the-world snake pit . . .” She gestured at their tiny homestead, the spare church, the vines I could almost watch growing around Christ’s scrawny hips.
“Think on it: two puny one-engine Cessnas flying low over the jungle, going on twelve years ago now, on the very same week, both of us spreading the word of God over a loudspeaker from our planes, as if they could understand us! Both of us dropping gifts from the sky—mirrors, silverware, and so on—on the heads of these heathen Tatinga . . .” She shook her head and spat out a piece of tobacco, grinning at some being just beyond my head, as if to meet my eye would have admitted some small defeat. “I have to laugh sometimes at the mysterious ways He works. And to think we—she mostly—refused to meet at first, both of us being so dang bullheaded. Like there weren’t enough godless ones to spread the word of God to. Like there wasn’t enough of God’s work for a hundred of us—for thousands! We had to crash into each other, isn’t that right, A?”
FrannyA ignored her, sweating over her task, fingers shaking with effort at the detailed work. I noticed a faint trail of scars on the back of her neck near the trace bumps of her spine, and wondered. FrannyB let out a belly laugh. “Did I ever tell you about that crash, For God’s Sake?”
He laughed in a mirthless way. “A few times, over,” he said, busying himself with the task of unstrapping the heavy bags from Perla’s back; she shuddered with relief and flicked her rough tail as the weight fell off her. He and Omar lugged the supplies to the door of a small brick house, a perfect replica of a two-story New England home, except the windows were just empty squares, the roof toggled together with baked clay tile, and the shutters—for effect only—cut from stained balsa wood. At only about seven feet tall, it wasn’t big enough for two floors. It gave off the feel of a creepy dollhouse, where giant dolls lived. The Frannies’ simple camp was a brief, oblong area of cleared jungle a couple of hundred feet above sea level, the highest land for miles.
FrannyB continued, “Her pilot was high on ayahuasca. He slammed into us at a thousand feet. Clipped a wingtip clean off. We both lived, as you can see, only my pilot didn’t. Didn’t get out of the plane in time . . .” She shook her head, remembering. “But hers? Walked out of the wreck just fine. Wandered around talking about some dragon lifting us into the serpent’s mouth to the star of the beginning, some hooey like that. A, you remember that, right?”
No answer.
“You alive over there, A?”
“It’s not something I dwell on, B. More pleasant thoughts fill my mind.”
FrannyB guffawed. “Pleasant thoughts! Well, let’s not interrupt those, right, For God’s Sake? And speaking of pleasant thoughts, did you happen to remember—” Without making eye contact, he handed her a slim bottle of rum before returning to his work. “Oh, bless you,” she said with a satisfied sigh, as she dragged two chairs close to a clay oven and gestured for me to join her.
“Looks like you’ve been suffering some of the jungle’s delights,” she said, gesturing at me.
“What do you mean?”
“Your skin. All those bites. Hold on.” She disappeared into her strange home, then reappeared with a small glass bottle. “Iodine. I
t’ll set you straight.”
“Thanks,” I said, accepting the bottle and a plastic pouch of cotton. “So how did you come to live out here?”
“Just trying to be closer to the Tatinga. But once a week or so, me and A come down to Ayachero to teach and preach, as we call it, sew up whoever needs to be sewn up, help with the babies, whatever’s needed, so count on us, okay? I’m a physician, she’s a trauma nurse. For God’s Sake here keeps us flush with supplies.”
With an affectionate slap on Omar’s back as he walked by with a sack of yucca, FrannyB continued, “So this man was practically Tatinga when I knew him. Spent more time with the savages than he did with the Ayacherans. Jaguar hunting with Splitfoot and so on.” She gestured at me with the sloshing bottle. “But you, my new friend. What are you, twenty-two?”
“I’m nineteen.”
“Hoo, Omar! Got yourself a young one, didn’t ya!” He ignored her.
She offered me the bottle. I took a good swig.
“Tell me your story. You’re American?”
“Yes.”
“And . . . that’s it? Omar bought you in a market in La Paz?” She chuckled at her own joke. “How’d you end up here?” She eyed me like no matter what I said, she’d guess the truth.
“I was living in Cochabamba and met Omar, and we fell in love.”
She burped softly. “ ‘Fell in love’? Haven’t heard that expression in quite some time.”
“Stop your nosiness, B,” FrannyA said.
FrannyB ignored her. “Why didn’t you stay in Cocha? It’s a nice town. There’s electricity, roads, civilization. In a manner of speaking. What’s here for you, in this . . . this accursed paradise?”
“Omar.”
She leaned forward in her chair, jabbing at the air near me with her cigar. “Lily, do you have any idea where you are?” She glanced around like there was someone else listening to us besides the men and possibly FrannyA. “You’re in the land of Satan, that’s where you are.”
“What are you talking about?”
She got up and paced around her chair. “Have a look around, Lily. God is here—He’s everywhere—but especially here, the highest point for miles and that much closer to Him, but so is the devil.” She shook the bottle at me, her eyes watery and red. “I’ve seen him here more than anywhere. It’s the shamans. They’ve got a direct line to Lucifer himself, almost like I do to God. And these wild ones, these Indians running around naked and fornicating with their brothers and sisters and shooting their curare arrows and eating their dead—yes, they do that, as a matter of respect, if you can imagine—these Tatinga are turned to the dark side, even though they’ll show up for a sermon and a free cooking pot and a bag of salt. After a dozen years, we still don’t have them.” She leaned in to me, offered me another drink; I took it.
“Do you know, we’re not even the first to try to spread the word of God here? There was a man before us. Pastor from Nashville. Came by himself. He showed them a photo of a peccary. They’d never seen a photo in their lives. Turned it over, no peccary. So they called him a devil, can you imagine? Eight spears through his heart. He’s buried behind the chapel here. For them it’s all about their shamans and their dark work. And you know, wherever you put your energy, to the dark or to the light, that’s what grows. I’m telling you, the things I’ve seen . . .” She shook her head, reminiscing with an awestruck horror not devoid of rapture. “They would scare you to death.”
“What have you seen?” I flashed to the Tatinga men emerging from the forest at Benicio’s funeral, the snake heads hanging down from beneath Beya’s hut, the poison frog battling in its tiny cage—all frightening things on the surface, but each so much more than what they seemed. I wondered what FrannyB really wanted from me.
She got up and rummaged around in one of the bags, poured some rice into a pot full of water and placed it on an iron grate over smoking coals. “Their animism, their devil worshipping—”
Omar broke in, to my relief. “I wanted to make you an offer on your sewing machine.”
FrannyB busied herself with the rice. “What are you talking about, young man?”
“Lily’s a seamstress. She can sew anything. She can be a real help in the village. She’ll sew anything you need, for either of you. Right, Lily?”
A sewing machine! Something to do besides wash clothes and feed chickens and grate yucca. “Of course. Whatever you need.”
FrannyB wiped the sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand. “Problem is, Omar, you’ve got nothing to give me for it, am I right?”
“What do you want?”
“That you could give me?” She shook her head.
“I can bring you guns.”
“We’ve got guns.”
“What about game? Smoked fish?”
FrannyB reached into a little sack of salt, tossed some in the boiling water. “You really like this girl, don’t you?”
Omar’s face hardened. “Franz and Panchito and me cleared this land. We built this camp, this house, to remind FrannyA of hers in America. Isn’t that worth something?”
“Then you left us. Just like that.” She snapped her fingers. “You started the whole thing, leaving Ayachero. Gave people ideas. All the sudden everybody needed Nike shoes, TVs, computers. Poachers got bolder. Tatinga retreated. You know the rest.”
FrannyA looked up from her mat and turned, as bantam and sinewy as FrannyB was towering and blocky. “It’s half mine, you know, B.”
“So sell him your half,” FrannyB snapped as she stirred the rice with a tin spoon. “You’re the one who uses it, A. I’m just looking out for you.”
“She can have it, as far as I’m concerned.”
FrannyB shook out her shoulders and fed thick fingers through her hair. “Well, all right, then. But we could really use some more game up here, Omar, some dried fish. Some tapir if you can get it, paca, even, whatever you can manage. But on a regular basis. Fat Carlos, Dutchie, they’re looting all our traps, or the game has moved on. That’s possible, that’s what everyone’s saying. Anyway. Sick to death of living on fruit and starch.”
“It’s no problem,” Omar said.
“I can bring you meat,” For God’s Sake said. “Every trip I will bring you whatever we can spare. I will make sure, over.”
FrannyB shrugged and looked me in the eye. “Well, come on, then. I’ll give you the nickel tour, and you can have the beast, if you can carry it home.”
An old-fashioned sewing machine, the kind attached to a desk and operated by a foot pedal, sat just inside their door. Rag in hand, FrannyB squeezed herself between the desk and chair. She wiped off the greenish coat of dust and mold, revealing the shining black metal, then spent the next ten minutes proudly demonstrating the basics of the 1908 Singer machine; how to load the thread and bobbin, where and how often to oil it, its quirks and foibles. I fell in love with the thing right away.
Tucked next to a shortwave radio was a tiny alcove housing a set of spindly bookshelves. A little library. Piles of books, mostly atlases, dictionaries, and Bibles, but also rows of National Geographics, hundreds of them dating back to the ’70s, all in clear plastic bags. Even so, they were termite-eaten, the color drained right out of them. Still, I wanted to pore over each of them. I did my best to act casual.
“I’ve got some novels, too, if you’re bored,” she said with a little smile, pushing herself free of the sewing machine table and sorting through the stacks. “The classics, mostly.”
I nearly grabbed the books out of her hands—my attempt at indifference a failure. Actual novels! Who cared which ones? I was dying for any sort of distraction from Ayachero, if only for a few hours. She handed me Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Mansfield Park by Jane Austen.
“A’s a big fan of that Victorian stuff. A bunch of twaddle, if you ask me,” FrannyB said, not meeting my eye. “But she’s a bit of a romantic, so . . .” She thoughtfully turned the books over, smo
othing them in their plastic wrappers as she skimmed the back cover copy. “Guess it breaks up translating the Old Testament into Tatinga.”
“Would she mind if I borrowed them? I’m a fast reader, I’ll return them—”
She waved me away. “You kidding? She’s got ’em memorized. Guess we all need our vices.”
“Have you read them?”
“Sure. Just to see where her head’s at. The woman barely speaks, I’m sure you’ve noticed that much.” She gathered the books in a little stack, a quizzical look on her face as she handed them over. “So, you’re pretty good at languages? Pick them up pretty fast?”
“I’m okay, I guess.”
“What about Portuguese?”
I shook my head.
“Quechua? Tatinga? Anything?”
“Just Spanish. English. That’s it.”
“Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior?”
I swallowed hard, wondering if my answer would cost me the sewing machine, maybe the books and magazines, too. I clutched the little pile on my lap, my palms sticking to the plastic as I stole a glance through the open window. FrannyA knelt at the periphery of the campsite. She seemed to be working something free from a trap—I couldn’t see much more than that. With an earsplitting squawk, the parrot hopped onto Jesus’s shoulder, lifted its scarlet-and-turquoise fanned tail, and let loose a white stream down his back.
“No.”
FrannyB turned her head, adjusting her neck with a dull snap. She puffed herself out, then sighed mightily, touching the cigars in her shirt pocket as if counting the few pleasures that awaited her. “Well then, we have work to do, which is okay, it’s just fine,” she said, adding a Bible to my stack. “For God’s Sake was lost, too, when I first met him, an unbeliever for sure, but he’s come around to be my right-hand man, going on eleven years now, isn’t that right, my friend?” she called through the open window.
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