THIRTY-FOUR
The night falls very fast, the last birds scolding the day. We sleep in the canoe, his body wrapped around mine, the velvet sky beating with stars, constellations doubling in the river. My eardrums vibrate with stuttering volleys and cries too deranged to sort out. Bird? Mammal? Insect? Unknowable. Rough cawing, angry barks, the stone-on-stone grind of cicadas. Millions of mist particles sparkle in the light of our torch lashed to the prow of the canoe. Bats swoop from their roosts, haunting the faint light left in the sky. Hawk moths bigger than my hand skim the water, hunting for insects and small fish.
All around us, in the darkness, caiman watch from the shore or the water, their eyes red orbs. Omar tells me that every animal’s eye-shine in the night is different: cats’ eyes—jaguars’—are bluish green when a light is shone on them. Fish eyes glow orange or silver, neon green for snakes, and they never blink. Spiders’ eyes flash as they skitter across the water, tiny white orbs. Nestled in the branches above, three owl monkeys observe us with orange eye-shine; I can make out their round bodies, white-and-gray faces, all hugging one another, bushy tails intertwined, a family.
Omar tells me that in the jungle you need to be in a state of chronic watchfulness as well as readiness. Both are necessary to stay alive. Every tribe has their own word for how the jungle can mesmerize, or put you in a trance of watchfulness only, a dangerous state. In Tatinga, the word is umahtar, pronounced oo-mah-tahr. It’s easy for the jungle to umahtar you into a state of watchfulness only, forgetting readiness.
The moon’s face looks down on us, dour, asks why we are there. I stare at my hands: otherworldly white, wrinkled skin that never seems to dry. My back aches with the weight of the baby. Omar covers me the best he can with what mosquito netting we have, but mosquitos land and bite anyway. All around us the river curls and rumbles, wrapping itself around the boat, pulling, eager to wear away the lianas that tether us to an overhanging branch. When full dark hits, Omar leaves me and stands at the prow, watching for snakes, listening for jaguars huffing at the bank. Because he sits in readiness, I let myself doze, holding every detail of his graceful form in my mind’s eye.
THIRTY-FIVE
The next morning, Omar hid the boat, disappearing it completely along the bank under vegetation that he marked with a few subtly crossed branches. He stepped into dense forest with no hesitation. Turning back to me, he offered his outstretched hand, whatever anxieties he felt hidden behind a determined expression. Behind us, the splash of a fish left a soft scar on the water. My baby kicked up under my rib cage, more interested in living than I was at that point. Finally, I took Omar’s hand and pushed myself through the pulsing, ticking green.
We walked for hours, stopping only to drink from plants or vines. Even though he made a few forays to search out my favorite fruit, a kind of apple called annona, by the time he was done cutting and peeling some sweet sections, I had no appetite, for that or for the dried tapir meat. I told him I craved peppermint, so he climbed a small tree that bent with his weight and broke off some leaves that tasted strongly of mint. Though dizzy with the stabbing pain in my skin, I hadn’t let myself look at the lesions that morning: it would have given the microscopic demons more power. Instead, I chewed leaf after leaf, breathing peppermint air as I trailed just behind him, his lean back shining with sweat as he hacked through the vines, machete flashing in the wan light.
Early afternoon, after we crossed a stream by way of a massive downed tree, Omar stopped short and raised a hand for silence. He pointed at the ground; to my eyes only the usual snarl of vines, tangled roots, and leaf litter. The air shuddered with the call of parakeets.
He picked up a sapling that had been bent into an L shape and laid across the path. “They know we’re here.”
“It’s just a—”
Again he silenced me. Why that branch looked special to him, among all the other bent branches, remains a mystery to me. I tried to read his face; I saw no fear, but knew how well he masked his own trepidation, knowing if I saw a shred of it, I would be too terrified to go on. We walked another couple of hours through claustrophobic tunnels of towering saw grass and hanging vines, through the constant twilight.
At the foot of a rubber tree, he turned and held his finger to his lips—even though I hadn’t uttered a word for hours—held his other hand out to stop me, then pointed up. Just above his head, a tapir skull—two feet long, black with age, molars yellow—sat wedged in the crotch of a tree. A column of black ants trekked along its cranium, vanishing in the hollow of a gaping eye.
“What does it mean?” I whispered.
“It’s a sign. It means go away.”
“They’re going to kill us, aren’t they?”
“They would have done it by now.”
He slapped a hand over my mouth just as a cry escaped my throat. My cheeks burned under his cool, dry fingers. Even now his face read blank to me; could it be he felt this insane plan might work? I had no such confidence. I blinked tears out of my eyes, dropped my head back in his arms, sent prayers to the impenetrable canopy as he slowly, carefully took his hand away. A leaf dripped its sweat onto my forehead.
“We have to go back, Omar, please, what good is it—”
“Come on.” He disappeared into a thicket of tree ferns dozens of feet tall. I followed the hard whack of his machete as he slashed our way to a small clearing, where a stream burbled among the immense roots of a ficus tree. White, disc-like fungus, like plates, clutched at various intervals at the base and lower branches. On one of them something steamed with a corporal energy. A pile of entrails had been placed neatly in its center.
“Another sign?”
He motioned for me to be quiet. The shrieks of spider monkeys shattered the silence. I looked up. The trees hung with a terrible stillness.
“Where are the monkeys?” I whispered.
“Those aren’t monkeys.”
The calls grew louder, closer. Directly overhead, all around us. A shrill note of fear in them now. I turned in a circle, peering up, hugging my filthy burlap dress to my ravaged skin. Nothing but the canopy, unmoving.
“The Tatinga are mimicking the monkeys. They’re hunting them. Making the calls of distressed infants. Come on, we can’t stop here.”
High-pitched chittering cries grew piercingly loud until dozens of monkeys exploded into view, swinging and leaping over our heads, slender branches bending and swaying, some snapping under their weight. Small fruits and nuts rained down. Screaming in panic as they searched for their imperiled infants, they vaulted from perch to perch above us, long muscular torsos stretched out in the air, faces distorted with terror. Just under their calls, a subtler sound, like puffs of air. A dozen two-foot-long blowgun darts shot up into the canopy; the monkeys screeched and soared in search of cover. One of them catapulted over us, acrobatic, its tail twice, three times as long as its body, an arrow impaled just at the center of its taut red chest; yet it kept flying, arms still reaching for a branch it would never grasp—so graceful I thought it might outwit its own death—until gravity caught it and sent it crashing to the forest floor. The sounds of the monkeys echoed beyond us now, retreating.
A rustling just beyond where we stood. A presence. Omar clutched my arm with a death grip.
I gazed into the green puzzle before me. Patterns of colors: bright orange, yellow, black. I don’t know how long I stared before I finally understood that I was looking at a human face.
THIRTY-SIX
Six men, none over five feet tall, melted into view all around us. Blowguns—held ramrod straight and perfectly still by their sides—towered a foot or more above each of their heads. Bright red tattooed lines zigzagged from mouths to earlobes; six-inch porcupine quills bristled on either side of their full lips; macaw-feather earrings dashed back from stretched earlobes. Six flat, wide, staring faces scanned us from head to toe, blue-black bowl-cut hair stark against the gleaming foliage behind them. They were naked except for braided fibers wrapped around th
eir waist.
The first impression was of sinewy muscle tensed and ready, of violence only casually held back, perhaps by curiosity alone.
One of them stepped forward. A squat man with a powerful head and jaw, his calves bulging from the strain of the ligatures of palm fiber tied just under his knees. Twin quivers holding smaller blowgun darts crossed his chest. Over his shoulder, the slain spider monkey hung limp, its hands and feet already trussed. Another man—slightly taller than the rest—carried a giant tortoise on his back, held in place by a leather strap across his forehead, its prehistoric head and neck stretching down past his knees.
They gaped at us, at me especially, with an unguarded mix of fascination, lust, and revulsion. A wave of language rippled through the group.
Face lit by an eerie column of yellowish-green light that seeped through the canopy, the squat man took another step toward Omar, chest puffed out, tightly sprung. A bone curled through his septum; in his left earlobe he wore a 35mm film canister. Fierce brown eyes peered out from under a heavy brow. In the middle of his forehead was a depression as big as a small saucer, as if someone or something had bashed in his skull and he had lived.
Through the mesh of greenery, the tips of three more arrows emerged, pointing from various angles toward us. Three more men stepped out from the vegetation.
The hunter opened his mouth to speak to Omar; I tried not to gasp. Each of his teeth had been sharpened to a point; several were pitch-black, others a dark yellow. Out came a blur of language, highly articulated, completely incomprehensible to my ears. Omar answered slowly, repeating his own name a few times. The men visibly recoiled to hear their language coming from this non-Tatinga, his enormously pregnant gringa at his side. As he spoke, Omar made eye contact with each man, before at last turning back to their leader.
“Pacchu,” the man said. The whites of his eyes shown as they widened in their background of black-and-red-stained skin.
“It means ‘Possum Face,’ ” Omar said. “My Tatinga name.” The men flashed each other angry looks, pointing at my belly, my hair. “Lily, this is MiddleEye, Splitfoot’s son. I won’t say his Tatinga name, understand?”
I nodded, not a drop of saliva in my mouth available to speak.
MiddleEye scowled, barked some sort of joke at the men; they laughed and took a step forward, shoulders relaxed, emboldened, many of them gesturing at me.
“They think you’re a missionary. They’re asking for gifts,” Omar said, never taking his eyes off the men. Black blood dripped from the spider monkey onto a wide, waxy leaf beneath him.
The taller hunter with the tortoise pointed at Omar’s machete and smirked, inspiring another escalating volley of Tatinga before Omar handed it over, along with his gun and another knife. They took turns running their fingers along the machete’s blade, nodding appreciatively before turning to me.
The chirring of insects throbbed in my ears; my arms trembled at my sides. I could feel myself being chewed away from the inside. The eyes of the men bored through me.
“Do you have anything?” Omar said.
“My knife, that’s all.”
“Give it to me.”
“But it’s—”
“Give me the goddamned knife.”
My hands shook so hard I almost couldn’t free my switchblade from my belt. Never thought I’d feel nostalgia for a knife, but it was one of the few things I’d managed to hold on to, and by then I’d skinned and cleaned countless animals with it and never went anywhere without it. The last weapon between us, gone.
MiddleEye accepted the present from Omar, turned it over a few times, sneered, and handed it back to one of the men, who took it and tucked it in his liana belt. He took a step toward me; his rank breath steaming up at me, a smell of rancid fat emanating from him, pointy teeth glimmering obsidian in the weak light. He reached up seemingly to touch my hair; I bent my head slightly so he could do it and be done with it.
He touched it gently at first, then grabbed a handful and yanked hard, pulling out a few long scraggly red hairs and holding them up like a prize. Omar took a step forward but didn’t stop him. Sweat pouring down his chest, he stood close, his eyes begging me to keep my wits about me. The men laughed, relaxing now as they threw strands of my hair up into the tea-colored light, warming to the afternoon’s entertainment. Smirking, MiddleEye put his hand flat on my belly and said something I sensed wasn’t a compliment. Omar stiffened, took another step, almost between us now, but the hunter grinned with his row of cat teeth and moved his hand, slowly, tauntingly, up toward my breast. Omar smacked his hand away. A moment later; a solid thud. An arrow pierced the top of Omar’s foot, pinning him to the ground, the shaft humming in the dim light.
He howled, dropping to the earth in a crouch just as the hunter who’d shot him dropped noiselessly from the trees above us, landing with another arrow already drawn and trained at Omar’s heart.
I knelt down beside him, my face inches from his. In his, agony, but also a command: Do not fall apart. Keep your cool.
Omar snapped the arrow close to the top of his foot and tossed away the shaft. Lifting his foot from the ground, he reached under it and pulled out the arrow from the other side, then threw it at the men’s feet. Something about this seemed to change the power dynamic among the men. A smaller hunter with close-set eyes and a shaved head began to argue with MiddleEye, jabbing his finger in the air at me, then Omar, then me again. MiddleEye bickered back at him, but it seemed like a draw, and in moments they turned, vanishing in an ocean of waving ferns.
Limping, Omar leapt after them. I froze in place, immobile with fear until the tribesman who had shot him through the foot screamed in my ear and I broke into a stumbling run, the hunter on my heels.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Zigzagging behind the hunters, Omar left bloody tracks on a path less than six inches wide. The Tatinga walked in silence, dodging evil pools and stepping over fallen logs swiftly and without pause. Every now and then I caught a glimpse of the spider monkey’s dangling arms bouncing against a slender back, or a warrior’s wide leathery foot padding along, their shoulders and arms just brushing the narrow confines of a path only they knew. Their brown legs were thin but sinewy, their chests concave, shoulder blades wide and sharp, flashing in the many-hued shade. Not a sign of fatigue even from those carrying thirty-, forty-pound animals on their backs. Hesitant light sifted through the understory, sizzling the moisture on the sweating plants.
Pain glowed brightly from deep inside my blighted skin; the suffocating heat of the afternoon intensified. My vision blurred with exhaustion. I wasn’t walking, I was falling forward with each step. We passed a tripped snare, a lethal contraption of fire-hardened bamboo spears balanced under a rock. The hunters paused to free a trapped howler monkey, its neck broken, before tossing the animal across their backs and pushing on.
Glimmers of light poked through the wall of trees in front of us. A clearing. As we approached, I hallucinated an ocean beach opening up before us, choppy blue waves full of sailboats, happy families swimming and picnicking on the sand.
The jungle expelled us onto the cleared area. Instead of dozens of huts and a longhouse, here, a moat of hard mud surrounded one fifty-foot oval roundhouse—I saw no other structures. Palm thatch sun-bleached to a silver gray stretched from the ground all the way to a thirty-foot peak. Full sunlight drenched us before we passed through a low entryway into the huge open plaza in the middle of the structure, the roof cut away from its perimeter to let in the sky. The clearing was littered with small fires, palm-leaf baskets, and a couple of old dugout canoes used as troughs. Young children, naked except for adornments like the red-and-black beaded bracelet Anna had given me, ran through the center, young boys with child-sized versions of their fathers’ bows and arrows or blowguns taking aim at small lizards. Odors of grilling meat, burning cecropia wood, the dense smell of humans in close proximity overwhelmed me. Dogs yelped, pet macaws screeched, a baby sloth wrapped itself around a young
girl who wore it like a shawl as she dropped still-moving larva from a palm leaf into her mouth.
* * *
The hunters dropped their game to the dusty earth; monkeys, the tortoise, a bagful of birds blow-gunned through the eyes. Two prepubescent girls grabbed the howler monkey, which still had life in it and started to claw at them. Without a second’s hesitation—as the smaller girl stood by with a thorn-studded club—the taller of the girls snatched it by its snare-tied legs and swung it hard against a pole that supported the roundhouse until its limbs hung loose. In no time the creature lay facedown over a sizzling grate. So much death, but just as in Ayachero, no one blinked an eye.
As word of our arrival spread, tides of people spilled out from every part of the roundhouse, even from the roof. Small, powerfully built bodies sprinted in our direction before stopping just yards from us, as if this was an agreed-upon distance. Everyone wore the jaguar whiskers: long quills were embedded in the solemn faces of the adults; on children, short palm shoots. Even babies were painted with dark blue lines from their mouths to their ears, exactly like Beya. I wondered if she’d removed her quills in an attempt to conform to Ayacheran life.
Naked except for the occasional red breechcloth and countless strands of black, brown, and red beads around their necks, wrists, and ankles, the women wore their hair long with straight-cut bangs. Cooking pots hung suspended from poles around small fires; other trinkets: small mirrors, flashlights, combs, sunglasses—gifts from the Frannies, I assumed—had been thrown in careless piles in the gloom of the roundhouse.
Everyone began talking at once. MiddleEye, clearly unhinged—even the Tatinga cut him a wide berth—strutted back and forth, jabbering and gesturing back at us, fury animating his movements. At intervals, he took off and swaggered around the entire perimeter, calling to those who remained in the shadows. Most of the men smiled at his ranting, which slightly lessened their threatening look; only on the very young children did the cat quills look innocent.
Into the Jungle Page 24