“It wasn’t you, was it, you nasty old witch?” He gave her a swift kick in the gut. She didn’t move. “You’re not trying to fool old Carlos, are you?” He gave her one more vicious kick and strolled toward the bar.
Never taking my eyes from the scene beneath me, I reached for Beya’s string bag. With badly shaking fingers, I wriggled the first dart out of the quiver and placed it—in total darkness—as I had been taught, alongside the soft kapok fluff inside the gun. Beneath me, the big poacher’s hat bobbed as he took a long drink, settled himself down again among half a dozen of the men who had gathered for their meal—it looked as if they were eating in shifts in order to keep guard on the villagers. Carlos accepted a plate of food from one of the men, laughing at something I couldn’t hear. His shoulder was in my sights, and on this windless night, was perhaps beefy enough that I could hit it, even from thirty feet away.
The men spoke in low tones, clearly sobered by the incident. They gathered around plates of roasted plantains. A large slab of tapir cooked on a wide metal grill over a fire.
I looked for the stillness inside myself, for hope and confidence, for the opposite of everything that I had ever felt. I let out all the air from my lungs till I thought I would pass out, drew in a long, silent breath, and blew.
Nothing.
His big shoulder shone with sweat by the firelight, flexed as he kept on eating, chatting with the men.
The dart landed a good five feet behind him, quite close to the forest wall; it looked like a stiff blade of black grass in the dirt, not remarkable at all unless you were looking for it. I crawled across the platform to the other side, just five feet from where I shot the first dart, before loading the second one. Drew my long, slow inhale.
The moment I let it go, Carlos reached out to accept a tapir shank offered to him; the dart landed exactly where his shoulder had been, sticking out of the ground just where the leg of the bar was stuck into the dirt. Fuck.
Sweat dripped into my hands as I held my head, trying to hold back a flood of dread. My pelvis pounded, screaming at me to stop, rest. Could not. Would not. Three more darts.
Anything, everything could go wrong.
Hands slippery and trembling, I quickly loaded the third dart. Blew it out of the gun without taking the time to completely fill my lungs. God knows where that one landed. A completely useless panic shot. Heads down into their meals, the men spoke in tones too low for me to hear, snorting at their own jokes and wiping greasy fingers on their many-pocketed pants.
Chastising myself, I slowly, methodically began to load the fourth dart, breathing little prayers into the hollow tube. The baby stirred on my back. Just the smallest, smallest movement. It might have even been a little hiccup. My hands froze in place, one finger on the soft kapok, the other making sure the business end of the dart faced downward and away. With terrible slowness, I set the blowgun down on the thin, uneven planks. I closed my eyes and took shallow breaths, my body tense as wood, a lightning rod, listening, blanking out pain so I could feel for any movement or sound.
For long seconds he stayed where he was; I exhaled—it had been a burp, or some dream. Good boy, Omar, I thought, good boy. The moment I reached for the blowgun, his little knee jammed into my spine. I felt him struggling to turn, tiny fingers grappling for purchase against my back. Thankful for the radio, I pushed myself from my stomach to hands and knees to a seated position, got my legs under me, and—every movement considered—slipped the strap of the string bag off one shoulder as Omar squirmed.
I lifted him off my back and tucked him in my lap. His little blanket fell open. With one hand I stroked his head and chest, he felt slightly feverish, his skin like silk. I felt my way down from his shoulder to the crook of his left elbow, to the place that still held the indentation from my first injection. He panted into my fingers, his lips mouthing my flesh as he sought to suckle, limbs moving slowly as if he were treading water.
Holding him still, I felt my way past the kapok fluff and withdrew the dart. I dabbed the very tip of the poison dart in the still open wound, all the time telling myself it could not have been more than one drop seeping into him, likely much less. His head dropped back in the crook of my elbow and his little arms and legs fell open and back. Stifling a cry that had leapt up into my throat, I rocked him in my arms, shining to him, “I’M SORRY, I’M SORRY.” I wrapped his slack body in the blanket, tucked him carefully back in the bag, and looped the straps back over my shoulders.
I took out the fifth and final dart, loaded it, got back down on my stomach and leaned over the edge. Numerous bare male shoulders gleamed up at me from below.
Giving up on Fat Carlos, I aimed at the poacher directly beneath me, took the deepest breath of my life, and blew, imagining Omar’s steadying hand on my shoulder.
He leapt to his feet, food flipped over, screaming as he wrenched the dart out of the meat of his shoulder. “Something hit me! Fuck!” He hurled the dart to the ground, took a few stumbling steps, then swung his gun toward the platform.
Quickly, I pushed myself to my knees and stood, the plywood groaning under my feet. Struggling for balance, arms out, I backed up to the tree and—in total blackness—turned and wrapped my arms around the smooth bark. There was just enough space for my feet on the tiny lip of wood that—doughnut-like—encircled the far side of the tree. A few drops of blood dripped down my inner thigh; I squeezed my sweating eyelids shut as I pictured what the odor might attract, as I imagined my baby dangling helplessly in the string bag on my back among the coiling vines and creepers. An insect walked across my forearm; I let it. Another clicked and snapped near my ear. I didn’t move.
Fat Carlos jumped to his feet, threw down his food and barked, “Turn off the fucking radio!”
The far end of the platform—the precise spot where I’d been lying seconds ago—disintegrated as bullets blasted up through the thin wood into the branches above. Methodically, shot after shot obliterated bits of the scaffold, shards of wood flying out to all sides, the air sawdust. In seconds there was nothing left to the structure except for the narrow, back-facing rim I stood on and the ladder attached to one of the stronger tree branches.
The radio clicked off.
Animated with fury, Carlos strutted around to Beya. He bent down, picked her up by the shoulders, and shook her viciously; she hung loose as a rag doll. “You called them, didn’t you?” he spat in her ear. “If I didn’t need you, I’d kill you now, so slowly you’d beg for me to hurry the fuck up.”
The men, losing their nerve, fired off their guns haphazardly into the jungle, their unseen enemy more terrible by the second.
Carlos dropped Beya and slammed the butt of his gun down on the bar. “Everybody calm down. Calm the fuck down. Somebody’s up there, but they’re not Tatinga. We’d all be dead by now.”
The man who’d been hit by my dart staggered off, fell to his knees and vomited repeatedly, pushed himself to his feet, then lurched into the shadows and threw up again.
“You.” He gestured at one of the men. “Get up there. Now.”
One arm still hugging the tree, I loosened Beya’s string pouch and withdrew the tube of ants. Directly beneath me, the man who’d been given the order leapt onto the ladder, climbing two, three rungs at a time. Bit by bit, I eased myself down to a squatting position, a fantastically painful maneuver.
I lay the tube just where the ladder met the edge of the platform, only a foot from me, and flipped off the rubber cap. It fell silently into a mat of leaves below.
Dozens of ants exploded out of it, most of them crawling down the ladder, but three or four made their way onto my sandal and up my leg. I straightened, flicking them off with my free hand, dancing on them, crushing them, as the man flew up the ladder like a monkey.
In seconds he began to howl. At twenty feet up the ladder, he launched himself off it, falling to the hard ground, where he cried out, rolling to one side as he favored what might have been a broken arm.
“Men!” F
at Carlos’s voice boomed. “Pick up the witch and get on the boat. We’re leaving.”
Chatter, whoops, scattered nervous laughter as the poachers mustered themselves, the one hit by the dart clasping his arm and staggering along with them. Balancing on my narrow foothold, still hugging the tree, I waited for my heart to stop slamming its way out of my chest. Bit by bit I squatted, squinting at the first few rungs of the ladder, searching out any black ants that remained on the white sisal rope.
Seeing none, I started my descent, stopping at three or four rungs down. My view was the entire village lit by scattered fires and torchlight, even as far as the beach and the roiling black river. For the first time that night I saw Franz. Crouching on the dock, he uncoiled the last ropes that tethered the poachers’ barge, vanishing for a moment as he dropped down into the shallows, head bobbing as he pushed the monstrosity into the current. In seconds, the river took it. How had he escaped the poachers? Had he hidden himself before I arrived on the scene?
In seconds, my elation—as well as pride in what Franz had done, however he’d done it!—turned to horror. A gruff panting sound from near the longhouse. A flash of yellow and black, a liquid movement. I forced back a scream as my hands whitened on the rope. The men hadn’t seen it yet, but an enormous jaguar was circling the pile of innards in the middle of the village. Ears back, her gold-and-onyx patterned coat rippled as she walked, all power and grace, her mouth open as she huffed every living thing in miles, including me, a dangling sack of flesh on a rope. Briefly she lay next to the pile of guts, tail languidly switching back and forth, sending up little puffs of earth at every slap.
The man who’d been hit by my dart was in the lead, walking in the direction of the beach, but faced back toward his friends, making fun of himself, laughing as he mimicked his own puking. Mouth stretched open wide, far exceeding the width of the man’s head, the jaguar left the ground as if gravity did not concern her. Her yellow fangs gleamed as she flew toward the man’s bare neck. He must have died instantly, he made no noise. His limbs flopped back and forth as the animal shook him like a toy, not pausing before dragging him toward the jungle.
All the men raised their weapons at once—even the man who carried Beya let her roll out of his arms as he snatched at his gun and trained it at the quickly disappearing beast.
But none of the men got to have their shot. One by one, their bodies stiffened and froze, guns tumbled out of their hands. They fell forward onto their knees as one, two, and in some cases half a dozen yard-long blowdarts porcupined their chests, as an army of Tatinga men stepped out of the forest from the dark perimeter of the village.
Fat Carlos turned in a slow beat, watching the last man fall, before raising up his hand as if beseeching the stars and sharp sickle moon to stop the swift dart from flying through his trembling throat.
FORTY-FIVE
On my last night in Ayachero, just one week later, the rain fell in torrents, beating down the banana leaves that draped themselves over the railing of the longhouse. No more fifteen-minute downpours; men’s rain now lasted hours at a time. The river rose daily by half a foot or more, steadily erasing the beach.
Enveloped by the familiar smells of grilling meat and boiled yucca, the air clouded with tobacco, I watched electric-blue lightning flash in the canopy, obliterating for seconds at a time the darkness that reigned in the understory. I lay in a hammock listening to For God’s Sake spin tales about his month away. He’d come back just in time, bringing, among other things, antibiotics that FrannyA desperately needed to beat back a secondary infection.
He sat on a stool next to me, wringing his hands as he gazed at the glowing coals in the oven. “My wife was very sick, you know, and I couldn’t leave her. My three children had no one to take care of them and so I became the mother, you know?” he said with a little laugh. “I put on an apron like a woman and cooked the meals and washed the clothes and took them to school so she could rest, and I see, wow, this being a mother is very hard work, and I look at my wife with new eyes now, over.”
Grinning as he listened, Franz crouched on a section of palm-thatch roofing he was repairing. “Sounds like they miss you a lot back home.”
“Yes, or I should probably say, maybe. I know that when I’m gone my wife is so happy because I’m not there talking to her nonstop all day long and getting in the way. But I am happy to be back. I miss my important job here. I miss the river and I miss being the best river driver and supplier for Ayachero. It is my destiny, over.”
Under his continual chatter, I heard some other truth, something I was too tired that night to really get at. Nestled in the crook of my elbow, my baby boy slept, his hot, dense warmth fitting to my side, key to a lock. I drew back a thin cloth to look at him; he wore a little shawl and a cotton diaper knotted at his tiny hips. Anna had let me borrow a dress I’d sewn for her, the one she loved best, with the pattern of smiling, dancing coffee beans in little black and red hats. I peeled back the fabric from my arm, forcing myself to look at my skin. Even by flickering torchlight, it was clear the lesions had shrunk to less than half their original size, retreating like islands being devoured by the rising tide of healthy skin around them. The last bag of poultice—Panchito had retrieved it for me—sat at my feet.
We were all relieved to learn that Marietta had escaped the poacher by hiding under a pile of empty food sacks in one of the storerooms. Now she sat at the sewing machine, struggling to repair the tiny sleeve of a child’s shirt. Though—in my mind—the machine really belonged to Ayachero, I told her that if she promised to take care of it, she could call herself the village seamstress. She was thrilled with the idea.
“Lily,” she blurted in frustration. “Can you help me with this?”
“Be right there.” Every move a negotiation with my aching body, I swung my legs over the side of the hammock, cradling the baby along one arm.
As I sat at the sewing table, I felt a hand on my back. Anna, her infant tucked in my old backpack, Claudia and Paco by her side, pulled up a bench next to us and sat. She hugged me and said, “So how are you feeling? Are you ready for tomorrow?”
“As ready as I can be, I guess,” I said. “But I can’t tell you how much I’ll miss everyone here.” It was impossible to express my mixture of bottomless grief for Omar, sadness—and relief—about leaving Ayachero, and angst-filled anticipation for a future back home with a newborn, alone. Every time panic overcame me, I conjured Omar telling me there was no problem I couldn’t solve, no jungle so dark and deep and dangerous I couldn’t find my way through.
“No one’s claimed my magazines or books,” I said. “Do you want them, for when you learn English?” My passport, tucked securely in the back pages of Pride and Prejudice these many months, was now in a small pocket I’d sewn into my dress.
“Of course.” She laughed. “Thank you. For now, I’ll enjoy the pictures.”
Paco dragged the heavy leather bag of poultice closer to me. “I can put this mud on you.”
“Will you, Paco? Just here, on the back of my shoulder where I can’t reach.”
Paco scooped up a handful of the green mud, applying it so gently I cried a little bit, thinking of Omar’s touch, something I would never feel again. As he worked on my back, I spread the salve on all the places I could reach; in moments came the familiar stab of healing pain.
“We’ve decided to say yes to your wish,” Anna said, her hand resting on Paco’s shoulder as he did his work. “He’ll live with us. From now on, he’ll be our son.”
I turned to him, scooped him in my arms, and kissed him.
He looked abashed, crestfallen. “I wish you were my mother. I still wish it.”
“You love Anna, I know you do.”
“But I love you best.” He patted his salve-sticky hands at the peach-fuzz growth on my scalp. “I’ll grow to be a great man, and you’ll come back for me.”
“You’ll grow to be a great man, and always keep me in your heart, Paco, promise? Just like you’
ll always be in mine.”
“Okay,” he said, embracing me before returning to the bag of poultice. “Okay.”
* * *
The next morning, as I gathered Omar to bathe him in a freshly boiled and cooled pot of water, Doña Antonia gruffly set down a plate of meat on a stool next to me. She sat on a neighboring one, grimacing as if her joints pained her, shoulders slumped. In the bitter set of her mouth and eyes I read her grief for her favorite son, the one who was supposed to save Ayachero.
“He’s the only one who cared for me, you know. Really cared for me. He always sent me anything he could spare. Money, food, supplies.”
“I’m sorry.”
Omar yawned, never opening his eyes, his tiny toothless mouth pink and sweet.
“You’re going to take my only grandson away to America?”
“Everyone’s been so kind to me here, but my home was with Omar.” The truth of that statement gutted me, as did the irony that I would be taking Omar’s child from his only other family: grandmother, aunt, uncles, cousins.
“People shoot each other for nothing in your country. I’ve heard of great storms that kill thousands. Ice everywhere. I’m afraid he’ll die there.”
“I’ll protect him, I swear. He’ll have the best life I can give him.”
“All right,” she said, giving me a nod. “As long as you can promise me that.” She pushed herself to her feet and cleared away a few empty plates. “Welcome to this loco world, baby Omar.”
She turned away, seemed to struggle with some decision, then pivoted back to me. “I should have been nicer to you. Now it’s too late—”
“It’s okay. I learned a lot from you.”
She pulled her favorite knife from the folds of her apron, blunt handled, chipped and dull. It had seemed part of her hand whenever she used it. “You can use this to clean the animals in Boston, now that you’ve become so good at it, okay?”
Into the Jungle Page 29