* * *
It was dawn when I finally descended the hill to our hut. Soon after FrannyB had sewn her up, FrannyA had gotten hold of my hand and wouldn’t let go, so I stayed with her while she slept. Bleary-eyed, I peered into my oven, despairing over how to get it lit. The night’s drenching rain had seeped into the main compartment, soaking the coals. I pushed the sodden burnt wood out the back, sweeping the damp inner walls as dry as I could with a straw broom.
Out of the corner of my eye, Doña Antonia appeared on the hill. I watched her side-to-side, bowlegged gait as she made her way—I realized with a sigh—in my direction. She carried something with both hands. Smoke escaped from its center. All I could think was, What fresh hell is this? I wanted to run away, but she had already seen me, and there was, of course, nowhere to run.
“Buenos días,” she said, two words she’d never before uttered to me. Still, she didn’t meet my eye.
“Hola,” I said, pushing myself to my feet.
“This is for you.” With great ceremony, she placed a shallow stone bowl filled with red embers on the flat oven top.
“Thanks,” I said. “My fire was out.”
She finally looked at me, her expression set, determined, but I also caught a trace of fear. “You know what this is—the jenecheru? Do you understand what I’m giving you?”
“Fire?”
“The fire of the hearth. The jenecheru. It’s something offered to a new family member,” she said, kneeling, her face hidden now as she scraped out with my broom what wet wood remained from the belly of the oven. “It’s sacred.”
“I’ve lived here six months. What took you so long?”
“You speak to Beya. She does what you ask. I don’t know why.”
“She does what she wants.”
She pushed herself to her feet with a groan and faced me. “You don’t know what she’s capable of. The men have never been gone this long. The women are afraid she’s done something. Will you protect us from her?”
“What . . . would she do?” I touched my belly protectively, instinctively.
“You think she’s so kind, always there to help. You weren’t here years ago when she let babies die, babies we needed her powers to save, or when she cursed the river. For months, no one caught a fish.”
We stared at each other for several moments until she broke away and poked at the fire; the coals sputtered the dry wood alive. “So don’t forget, you’re with us now, okay? You are Ayacheran. And you can never let this fire go out, understand? It lasts your whole life.”
“Then you’ll have to help me fix the cracks in the top of this thing. Otherwise”—I shrugged—“the sacred fire will go out the next time it rains.”
She cocked her head at me as if to say, Are you fucking with me?, then bent down and peered at the slab of clay as she ran her rough brown hands along it, frowning at the cracks and chips. With a grunt, she lifted off the heavy top, tucked it under one arm, and started up the hill. “Come on,” she called back. “I’ll show you how to fix it.”
Weeks later, my fire still burned, as if Doña Antonia’s assignation of its sacredness were real and the coals would burn for Omar and me forever.
THIRTY
The next day, I sat with Doña Antonia, Paco, Anna, Claudia and her new baby sister, and a few of the other women at the shore, preparing a dozen small piranha for dinner. The amount of meat was tiny and a lot of work to get to, but it was a delicious fish. Alberto, a sweet, quiet twelve-year-old—too young to go hunting with the men and never happy about it—had taken his small dugout to the Tortoise Beach that morning and speared a big catfish along with the piranha. We’d completely run out of peccary, even smoked meat, so everyone was grateful. FrannyA remained in the clinic, sleeping, FrannyB at her side. She’d been in pain when she awoke, but Beya had left her a small dose of the toxin and that seemed to help and set her back to dozing.
Sultry waves of ever-hotter air swept in that afternoon; even the animals and insects stayed eerily quiet, and there was a feeling of anticipation in every breath we took. The children entertained themselves somberly at the bank, the boys playing a desultory game of soccer with a deflated rubber ball, the girls quietly building little huts for their rag dolls with clay and palm fronds. No one talked about the hunters, as if to talk about their absence would extend it even further. We were a village of women and children who watched; watched for the men to come sweeping around the bend, watched the banks of the river for jaguar tracks, watched the food supplies dwindle, the balance of everything off at a profound level.
Anna and Doña Antonia looked up from their work, eyes widening. Then I heard it, too. Metal on rusted metal; the grind of a motor close by. The stench of diesel. A dredge chugged around the bend in the river, the Mad-Max-on-the-Amazon contraption that was Fat Carlos’s boat. It swung wide, carving a perfect V in the thick brown water of its wake. Seven men draped themselves at various aspects of the boat. Three hunched over the side, carbines held loosely in their arms. On the roof, two men leaned against a ragtag stovepipe, ratty baseball hats pulled low over their eyes. At the bow, Fat Carlos and Dutchie sat side by side in lawn chairs wired to the cabin, stogies in one hand, flasks in the other.
I’d barely rinsed the scales off my hands when the clanking rig rammed aground, motor running full speed into the red clay bank, the thick mud churning. I gathered up a few pieces of fish with a banana leaf and handed it to Paco. “Why don’t you take this up, throw these on the fire for the Frannies. I bet they could use some lunch.” Clutching the leaf, he reluctantly made his way up the hill.
The women swiftly gathered their own children, ordering them to drop their toys and stop their games, and herded them up the hill toward the longhouse.
The men grinned, clearly amused at the reaction their arrival had caused. The ones on the roof dropped down to the deck, eyeing the women as they lifted their skirts above their knees to move faster up the bank. Muscles pumped from working the logging camps, they shared a squinty-eyed malignance, like a pack of dogs goaded by cane alcohol. All except Fat Carlos and Dutchie leapt onto the damp sand. They swaggered up the hill toward the longhouse, their attitudes relaxed, celebratory, dangerous; their acrid sweat filling my nose as they passed by.
Doña Antonia pushed herself to her feet, hands trembling slightly as she pushed her braids back. Alberto stood his ground next to us, doing his best to push out his bony chest.
From his lawn-chair post, Carlos tipped the brim of his disintegrating sisal hat, its vestiges held tight to one of his chins by a rawhide strap. “Ladies. Gentlemen. How are you this fine afternoon?”
No one said a word.
“Pretty well, pretty well, thanks for asking,” Fat Carlos said, leaning forward in his creaking chair. “But I have to tell you, since you’re so curious, that today, well, today I woke up tired. You see, I spent the night dreaming of mahogany trees. Acres and acres of them. And in my dream, I laughed!—did you know you can laugh in a dream? I can. I was laughing because I was wandering around in pure cash. I could smell it. I could taste it. But the bummer was, I didn’t know where the fuck I was, so I woke up just plain tuckered out, and frankly, a little frustrated.”
He paused to puff on his cigar, popping out a few smoke rings in the still air. “Ever feel that way, like maybe you’re just working, working, all the time working, never getting ahead? Just treading water to pay the bills?”
Doña Antonia shifted slightly, her hand gravitating toward the flensing knife she wore tucked in the folds of her skirt.
“Maybe it’s just me, but I’m tired of working so hard just to keep these men fed, their families fed, tromping around in these godforsaken forests killing anything we can get our hands on, getting bitten and dirty and sick, when just the simplest little bit of information would set us all straight. We’d never have to hunt again, isn’t that right, Dutch?”
The skinny man howled and stomped his foot and cried, “No-wheeeee!!! We’d be all set, right, Carlos
? All done with this place.”
His friend smiled. “We could just sit around and drink all day. Someplace posh, like New York or Paris. Dutchie here could get fat, I could get even fatter. Buy us summa the finest poon-tang on God’s green earth.”
“Dis-ease free!”
“You’re readin’ me, Dutch.” He stubbed out his cigar under a rubber boot. “You are reading me. Now, young miss Lily, why don’t you tell me where your husband’s hiding, so we can settle this?”
“All the men are hunting,” Doña Antonia said. “There’s nothing for you here.”
“Been gone awhile, have they? Tough stuff. Maybe that’s why you’re cooking up all that trash fish, is that right?” He levered his girth off the sagging seat and climbed down the rusty ladder to the bank, canteen, sunglasses, bullet pouch, and hunting knife swinging and clanking from the loops on his belt. Dutchie followed, cinching his own belt tighter on his emaciated frame.
The big poacher peered in all directions, his bushy mustache twitching, then fired his gun into the trees. A family of vultures burst like demons into the sultry blue sky.
“Where is Omar!” he shouted to the shuddering forest. He whipped around to face us. “You know, I’ve known him since he was a boy. I’m not going to hurt him if I don’t have to. I’m not like that.”
“You can see the boats are gone,” I said.
“Indeed they are.” The men’s boots clomped up the stairs of the longhouse. Doors banged open; rifle butts pounded on wood. The men leaned over the railing on the deck, shook their heads.
“Fine,” he said petulantly, turning in a slow circle as he gazed up at the answerless sky. “Fine. Then we need that lame Tatinga river driver. For Shit’s Sake. For Fuck’s Sake. Whatever he’s called. When’s he coming?”
Our shoulders sagged.
“You just missed him,” Doña Antonia said. “We won’t see him for weeks now.”
“I see. Well, that leaves that witch, I’m afraid. Now where does Beya keep herself?”
Doña Antonia glanced at me; I looked away, my mind buzzing.
He wiped his brow with a filthy rag, then pointed his gun first at young Alberto. “You know, I’m in no mood. So someone”—then at Doña Antonia—“someone is going to tell me.” He swung the gun toward me. “In fact, someone’s going to escort me there. Now.”
He shot at the dirt at Alberto’s feet. A crater bloomed in the bank. Like a spring, the young boy leapt in the air and tore up the hillside.
“Anybody?” he said. Seconds passed; nobody moved. “No? Then this won’t end well.” He trained his gun on Anna’s mother halfway up the hill, who, mostly deaf, bent over her oven tending her vegetables, oblivious. The oven exploded in a cloud of red clay. One of the shards impaled her calf, she limped up the hill, screaming.
“I’ll take you there,” I said.
Carlos glared at me with red-rimmed eyes. “So the gringa and the shaman are besties, huh? I bet that’s not going over very well here.” Not waiting for a word from me, he whistled to his men. Ragged, shuffling limbs gone clumsy with booze, they made their way toward us.
His face gone sour, Dutchie turned with a huff and climbed up the ladder to the boat. He planted himself back down in his lawn chair, dropping his mirror shades down over his eyes.
Carlos took a slow turn toward him. “What’s the matter, Dutch, forget your tampons?”
The blond man folded thin arms over his birdcage of a chest. “Fuck you. I don’t play with no witches.”
“Get down here.”
“You got enough guys. You don’t need me.”
“We’re a team. Get your fuckin’ ass—”
“No way. No way!” He got up and paced the tiny bow of the boat. “I do everything. I cook. I clean. I handle the men when they get fucked-up. All the shit work. Since the beginning I been with you, Carlos, since Panama, man. Twenty years! Never mind all the times I saved your skin. Never mind you pay me the same as every other asshole, even if they been with you five minutes. All I’ve ever asked for is one thing. No witches No shamans.”
The entire crew held its breath, waiting for the fallout. Carlos took stock of his gathered men, red eyed, raw skinned, waiting. “Get your wimpy white ass off the boat.”
Dutchie looked near tears. His voice thickened. “It’s like this, I don’t know. What am I to you, man? Friend, business partner, both, neither, what?” He turned in a tense arc, hands on narrow hips. “Fuck, I could never be like you; you’re this poet. The way you talk. People are like, drugged when they listen to you, they do whatever you say. Any crazy, mean, piece-of-shit thing you ask them to do, they don’t think twice, they just do it—”
Fat Carlos shot the tip of Dutchie’s left ear off. He dropped to his knees, clutching his head and howling, blood spurting through his fingers. Carlos holstered his gun and said, “My apologies for the domestic disturbance. Men! Get him cleaned up. We’re going to see the witch.”
* * *
Carlos, Dutchie, and their posse at my heels, I tried to shine to Beya as I walked past the huts, along the manioc fields, past the barn, all the time warning her, pleading with her to listen. There was no response.
The men paused at the entrance to the Anaconda Path, grumbling about entering the jungle or really just where I was taking them like: Is this a setup? Dutchie, bleeding through his bandages, leaned on his gun, rage and sorrow plain on his ravaged face. I stole those few seconds as they debated, closed my eyes and sent her a mental picture: Fat Carlos and Dutchie, guns in hand.
* * *
She was squatting on the large flat stone in the center of her homestead, bare feet splayed, calmly smoking a bamboo pipe. Behind her, water boiled vigorously in an iron pot over her fire. Carlos, Dutchie, and the men stumbled out from behind me into the clearing, a little at a loss, turning and squinting into the green-tinted air, sensing something they maybe shouldn’t fuck with. A few whispered to each other in Portuguese; others spat, adjusted their weapons on their belts. One wandered off to take a piss.
“Wow,” Carlos said. “Looks like they don’t want much to do with you in the village, you living way out here.”
“I live where I wish to live,” she said coolly.
“Still, it must be lonely, living far away from your people and all.”
She tapped out some ashes from her pipe. “What do you want?”
“Oh, I think you know. How many years we’ve been playing this game? A dozen? I need that grove. Now.”
“This knowledge is sacred to the people of the forest. It cannot be shared.”
Carlos unhooked his gun from his holster. “Fuck your sacred nonsense.” He cocked the gun and pointed it at her head. “You, you crazy old bat, are going to take us to the grove. Now get up.”
Beya pushed herself off the stone and rose to her full crooked height. She raised her face to him, the tattooed whiskers blacker and deeper in the rich afternoon light. She opened her mouth and let loose an unearthly cry of desolation and loneliness, like a creature calling for the last of its kind in a final bid for companionship.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Carlos said, stealing glances at the shimmering green and black of the forest. “Knock it off.”
She staggered backward slightly with her efforts, but regained her balance fast.
“I told you,” Dutchie muttered. “She’s—”
“Shut up.”
The man who was taking a piss hurriedly zipped up; otherwise no one moved.
She filled her lungs and unleashed the same heart-wrenching call; her head fell back as if to make room for the otherworldly sound.
Above us, an identical cry rang out; an answering call, followed by a rush of wind as the biggest eagle I’d ever seen barreled down through the canopy, claws open and hurtling down at the big poacher’s face, its red-rimmed eyes enraged. Yelping, Carlos disappeared under an eight-foot wingspan of furious raptor, an explosion of black-and-white feathers obscuring his prone body. The men grappled for their we
apons but didn’t shoot.
A ripping sound, of tendon from bone. An agonized shriek under the powerful shoulders of the bird. With two or three powerful flaps of its massive wings, the harpy eagle lifted itself off the poacher, one of his blue eyes and part of his cheek in its talons. It thumped and heaved itself through the cleared circle skyward, stringy red and yellow pieces of flesh hanging down, headed—I imagined—straight toward its canopy-top nest, where its naked, screeching young demanded to be fed.
Beya and I were forgotten as the men circled the howling, sobbing Fat Carlos. They lifted and carried him away. By nighttime, their boat was gone. I thought, Ayachero is safe, the grove is safe. I will never see these men again.
How wrong I was.
THIRTY-ONE
– NOVEMBER –
The voices of the hunters woke me at dawn, Omar’s among them. I threw aside my mosquito netting and sat up, listening for a while, letting myself cry with relief.
After nearly three weeks, Omar and the men had come home.
From the top of the stairs, I watched the entire population of the village pour from their huts and gather at the beach. Under a sky laden with clouds, the last two boats swung around the elbow of the river, jutting into the soft sand. The hunters and their helpers leapt from the boats, hurrying into their families’ embrace.
A massive bull tapir weighed down the center of one of the boats; it looked to be two or even three hundred pounds. It was flanked by a couple of brocket deer: small, delicate-boned Bambis that to me seemed the strangest animal of all to call the jungle home: What defense did they have except perhaps speed? Trussed to a bamboo carrying pole by its giant ham hocks, the tapir took four men, including Omar, to lift onto shore and carry up the bank.
Into the Jungle Page 22