Five Wives

by Joan Thomas

  After she hears David leave for the men’s fellowship, she goes to the basement and digs a pizza out of the freezer. Gizmo is alert to her every move. “In your dreams, Dogma,” she says as she slides it into the oven. While it bakes, she goes to the living room and picks up the channel changer, but before she can switch on the TV, the land line rings. A male voice asks if this is the Saint residence and whether he can speak to Abigail. He says his name is Walter Varga and that he’s a film director. A prank call, obviously—but he goes on to say, “We’re working on a film about American missionaries in Ecuador, and there’s something I’d like to talk over with you. Do you have a few minutes?”

  Well, she does.

  He says the movie in question is based specifically on Operation Auca. It’s a dramatic feature being made by a company called Veritas, and it’s destined for wide international release.

  He says that in his view the meaning of those 1956 events has never been fully probed, and it’s a story the world is ready for. Their goal is to do it right, to give due attention to the cultural context. They have a prominent anthropologist on board, a guy who’s been working with the Waorani to produce a book of oral histories. He’s going to be consulting on the film.

  “How did you get my name?” Abby asks.

  “Somebody saw you at a conference in Sacramento a while back—you were on a panel about Operation Auca, right? I’ve got the program right here, and, well, we managed to track you down. I understand you’re in a unique position. Both your families were part of this story?”

  “Nate Saint and Jim Elliot were my grandfathers.”

  “Wow. Let me ask—do you have any professional experience?”

  “What?”

  “Have you ever acted?”

  “Like, outside daily life?”

  He laughs as though he’s starting to like Abby. “It’s not a deal-breaker,” he says. “We’ll be casting a lot of non-professionals, certainly in the minor roles. The Waorani will all be played by individuals from the tribal community. I’m, well, personally, I’ve been hooked on the Italian Neorealists since college, and I think we’re better off with people who bring their life experience to a role.” He pauses dramatically. “So. What does your week look like? Could you drop everything and come to LA?”

  “You’re asking me to audition?”

  “Yes.”

  “For a minor role?”

  “Actually, we’d like you to read for one of the missionary wives.”

  “Seriously.”

  “Seriously. I’ve got your photo here and I think you’d be a good fit.”

  “For which wife?”

  “We’ll have to see how you read.” Another pause. “I understand you’re twenty-four?”

  “I will be soon enough.”

  He laughs again. He gives her his phone number and the address of an agency called Breakwater Talent in Beverly Hills. He asks her to grab her smartphone and look it up while he waits. “Click on satellite. Zoom in, zoom in. You see that rooftop with the lime-green patio umbrellas? That’s us, right under there, third floor. Put a pin in it.”

  He pauses then, thinking. “Obviously you don’t have an agent.”

  “Uh, no.”

  “I’m just thinking, you know, if you were my daughter, I wouldn’t want you running down to LA on your own to meet a strange man.” Clearly he knows she is nowhere near twenty-four. “I wonder if I should have a word with—”

  “No. No, no, no, no.”

  “Well, why don’t you bring a friend along, just so you’re more comfortable? And you should know that three of our team will be present for the audition, including a woman named June Shapiro.” He says they’re moving at warp speed and he wants Abby—well, tonight if he could get her! They settle on Thursday morning. They say goodbye.

  What do you do after a call like that? “What?” she shrieks at Gizmo, and he yips his excitement back and they do a dance around the coffee table. The oven timer is pinging. Abby goes to the kitchen and slides the pizza onto the big cutting board and, too agitated to sit at the table, carries it into the living room, where she sinks onto the carpet, her back against the couch. She’ll call Ashley. She’ll call Bethany. Will. No. Sean, she thinks.

  Oh, poor Sean. Sean is desperate to get ahead in film. He was involved in one of the sequels of Left Behind and he claims to be best buds with Nicolas Cage. He dreamed constantly about making a movie about Operation Auca—he wanted to cash in on his heritage. But cash was exactly the problem, and she thinks how pissed off he’s going to be at being scooped. Whereas Abby—nothing like this ever once crossed her mind. And if she ends up landing a role, she’ll make a pile of money. Enough to pay for university.

  She digs into the pizza, peeling off pieces of pepperoni for Gizmo. Are you going to film in Ecuador? she had asked, and Walter Varga said yes, absolutely. He described the source material as galvanizing. To which Abby replied, “Well, it’s a really dark story. Although I guess that depends on when you think it starts and when you think it ends.” This observation was not original to her, but it seemed to impress Walter Varga, who used it to wrap things up. “That’s why we need you, Abigail. You carry this history in your bones.”

  A terrifying thing to say, when you think about it. She drops a pizza crust onto the board and gets to her feet, and then happiness wallops her like a tsunami. Perfection—it fills the house with its dazzling light. How absolutely brilliant: fun, and glamour, and hard, thrilling work. All the people who are so disappointed in her—she’ll totally fulfill their hopes and expectations, she’ll spectacularly transcend them, everyone weeping to see her in one of those roles, her friends and critics alike. Her own personal trailer, with her name on the door. The friendly, flattering makeup artist (Your skin is perfect, my God, do you even have pores?). The costume trailer, the racks of clothes. It will be a period piece, the Mad Men era. She may have to cut her hair, she may have to get a perm. Wear one of those pointy bras. But still, she thinks.

  They’ll cast the women as younger than they actually were, and as prettier. They always do.

  In the kitchen, she catches her reflection on the microwave and lifts her chin. Fine. She can make that cut.

  Olive Opens the Door

  5

  “JUST HAVE YOUR LESSON BEFORE Nate gets here,” Peter said as he poured her a mug of coffee. “You don’t want to let Panka down.” Panka was their language informant and they paid her ten sucre per session.

  So that’s what Olive did after breakfast, she went to see Panka, and spent the morning sitting on a stump in front of a palm-plank house, rubbing at invisible flies biting her ankles and expanding her Quichua list of household items, because she hadn’t mastered the techniques for extracting any words but nouns. Panka’s baby tottered over to her, and Olive picked her up, and Panka tilted her lovely face and said a long phrase with the word baby (llullucu) in the middle of it. She repeated it several times, but Olive didn’t write it down because some of its sounds eluded her and because she had no idea what it meant. You’re bouncing my sweet brown-eyed baby on your knee. My baby usually makes strange, but she seems to love you. My baby’s chigger bites are infected again. It could even have been a question: Where is your baby?

  Then she went back and climbed the steps to their tiny bamboo house and cobbled some lunch together and she and Peter walked through the settlement to the airstrip. They went plenty early so they could scour the surface, looking for protruding roots that would snag the landing gear of the plane, or a rut a wheel might fall into. The airstrip ran from one river to the next, from the Jatun Yaku to the Talac, and the Talac end was new, they had built it after the flood. That part was especially dangerous because roots the men had failed to dig out would rot and the surface might cave in at those points. Peter took the new part, stomping on any stretch that troubled him, and Olive walked the old. It all looked fine. So, standing in the sun with their duffle bag at her feet, she had time to tackle the passion fruit she was carrying in he
r pocket. She notched it all around with her thumbnail until it came apart in halves to reveal a mess of luscious frogs’ eggs in grey sacs, waiting to be slurped. But just as she lifted one of these cups to her mouth, a gang of children raced across the playing field and danced out onto the airstrip, dogs barking, and a minute later Nate Saint’s little yellow Piper dropped over the trees like a raptor. Helplessly, Olive bent for the duffle bag, passing the open cups of passion fruit to a small girl named Urpi, who took them with a quiver of delight. Nate taxied towards them, and then his arm darted out and he tossed a handful of hard candies as far as he could hurl them, his method for clearing the runway, and in a flash Urpi had dropped the passion fruit in the dirt and dashed into the fray with the boys.

  “Jim already there?” Pete called, running down the airstrip.

  “Yup,” Nate shouted. “He came straight from the men’s retreat.” He pushed his cap back and grinned at Olive. “Got your toothbrush?”

  “But Betty?” Olive said, glancing over her shoulder in the direction of Jim and Betty’s house on the ridge. “Isn’t Betty coming?”

  “Nope. She’s looking after Rachel.”

  So Olive crawled alone into the back of the plane. She untangled the leather straps of the shoulder harness and took her time fastening them over her breasts; this was her furtive sign of the cross. Peter buckled himself into the front passenger side and put the extra headphones on. Nate turned the plane around and then they were jouncing back along the airstrip. And then the roar, and the lift, and gravity pressed her hard into the seat and the settlement dropped below, the thatched roofs vanishing first and then the tin, a tiny Quichua settlement hemmed in by two rivers. What a thrill to be scooped up and carried out of it, like a man in a fable being shown another world. Up into the sky, a lovely china blue tending towards violet at its edges. She pressed her face against the plastic window and watched the forest shrink and flatten and transform into a rough green sea, a sea that tilted suddenly, showing its misty edges, because Nate had banked to the northeast.

  Nate. Even the back of his head transmitted efficiency. He did this all day every day except Sunday, flying his plane out of the mission headquarters at Shell Mera as nonchalantly as a delivery man drove a truck. He read the ridges between the jungle stations like road signs; he knew all the rivers that coiled through the forest, some wide, some narrow, although they were all the same colour, a pale milky brown. This was the Jatun Yaku he was following, a.k.a. the Napo. At one of its bends Olive could make out a clearing, the yucca fields of another Quichua settlement. The Quichua lived along the rivers because they hoped to trade—rubber and tapir skins, mostly. They aspired to T-shirts, outboard motors, liquor, rice, guns, kerosene, machetes, Spanish words, and Pepsi. Farther back in the trackless jungle, the savage Auca were rumoured to live, not along the rivers because, unlike the Quichua, they had no desire to trade and did not want to be found. They made everything out of the forest or they got along without it. When Olive was a girl in Seattle, a picture hung above the doorway in the school library: Christopher Columbus arriving on the shores of America and receiving gifts from the Indians. He was holding a wooden cross like a giant staff, and Indians in feather headdresses knelt before him. Now, all these centuries later, she and Pete and the others were at a similar portal of history. Pacha—the Quichua word floated into her mind. Pacha. It meant space, and world, and earth; it was one word that meant all those things. It meant this vast dreamscape, the sky and the whole curving expanse of earth, as featureless and as outside time as the ocean. It meant, Are you even here?

  Peter swivelled his head in the massive headphones. “Machu Picchu,” he shouted, the joke he made every time they flew into Arajuno. Olive angled her neck to see. She tracked the Napo with its brown coils, as stately as a water boa, and then she spied the writhing worm of the Arajuno River, and there, at their intersection, she saw the Arajuno airstrip catching the sun, the only straight line in the whole scene.

  Arajuno, more remote than the Shandia station, and also more civilized. When it was built in 1940, it was going to be Shell Oil’s permanent headquarters. For almost ten years it functioned as a tiny model tropical city, a grid of five or six streets lined with neat American-style bungalows, and a narrow-gauge railway to bring in supplies from Shell Mera, and a hotel and swimming pool and tennis courts. But the oil executives had overlooked one crucial fact when they built it: their prized townsite was on the Auca side of the river. They couldn’t get Ecuadorean crews to go into Auca territory to build roads and lay pipe. And then they lost a bunch of Americans (six, Olive heard, and someone else said fourteen), men who were speared when they ventured into the forest. Suddenly Shell Oil was gone, leaving everything behind—Caterpillar tractors, children’s swings, furniture, drill heads. A windfall for the Quichua in the area, and for the jungle, which gobbled up Arajuno at a speed you could almost track with your eyes. That’s what people said: the first year it was a topiary park, three years later, pretty much invisible.

  Maybe it was Jim who thought of it first, maybe it was Ed, or Nate: how wonderfully situated that ghost town was for reaching the Auca. At Shandia, the Auca felt so far away—forty miles or so of dangerous jungle trekking. But at Arajuno you were right on the edge of Auca territory; it was almost as if God had used Shell Oil to set that town up. Ed made Shell a ridiculously small offer, he bought a whole town for a few thousand dollars, and Nate flew a work party in. They ripped and hacked their way through the swinging curtains of vines, and Ed and Marilou picked out the house they wanted, a big bungalow on the bank of the Napo, and the men rebuilt it entirely with materials scavenged from the site. Marilou’s kitchen counter was a beautiful slab of redwood that had formerly been the bar in the hotel. She and Ed had a brass headboard for their bed. They had a huge enamel bathtub, although of course they had to fill it by bucket. They lived in a real house, in contrast to the shack on stilts that Olive and Peter called home in Shandia.

  A real house with a screened porch on both the front and the back. The back porch faced the forest, and that’s where they were all sitting when Olive and Peter and Nate walked over from the airstrip. Not all—Nate’s wife, Marj, wasn’t there, she had stayed in Shell Mera with the kids. And Betty was back in Shandia with the thankless job of looking after Nate’s sister Rachel, who had malaria. So just Jim and Ed and Marilou, drinking limeade and eating peanuts. Marilou was in the bamboo rocker, her hair tousled and her face flushed. Pregnant or not, she was still running a school in Arajuno. Every morning she rang a bell, and the Quichua kids splashed across from the other side of the river, and she taught them in Quichua and Spanish while her house girl watched her own little boys.

  “I kept the kids in school until noon,” she was saying in her soft, laughing voice. “They knew what had happened, and they were so wound up they could hardly sit. But I kept them in and I made them practise for the Christmas concert. We’d finish a verse of ‘Noche de Paz’ and they’d burst out, Señora, we will kill him with our blowgun if he comes around again! I had to keep saying, We want the Auca to be our friends. Remember? We want to tell them about Jesus.”

  “I don’t get it,” Peter said. “What happened?”

  “Nate didn’t tell you? Marilou had a visit from the Auca!”

  They finally heard the whole story. Ed had stayed in Punapunga the night before, helping Jim with a men’s retreat, and at dawn, while the kids were still sleeping, Marilou got up to use the toilet, and she happened to glance out the kitchen window and saw a naked man standing motionless at the edge of the forest. She threw her robe on and ran out the back door. The man was just standing there staring at the house. His hair was long, with bangs cut in the front. He had balsa plugs in his earlobes and he was carrying a spear, twice as long as he was tall.

  “Holy cow,” said Pete. “What did you do?”

  “Well, my first thought was to take him a gift. Just to let him know we’re friendly. I looked back at the house and saw a machete leaning agains
t the porch, so I grabbed it and went towards him. I was calling out, ¡Hola! Quiero ser tu amiga. He looked at me for a minute, and then he spun around and took off into the forest.”

  “So Marilou radioed me,” said Nate. “Cool as a cucumber, she says, One of our neighbours just showed up in Centreville.”

  Neighbours. Centreville. That was code. It was designed to keep others in the dark, especially a certain someone who did not have a two-way radio but might get word nonetheless.

  They sat in a circle, gazing at each other with shining eyes.

  “Why was I calling out to him in Spanish?” Marilou whispered. “A pregnant gringa in a yellow bathrobe waving a machete! What could he have thought? I suddenly realized, and I switched to that Auca phrase Jim gave us.” She demonstrated for them: “Biti miti punimupa.” Trying to say the words made her laugh so hard that tears rose in her eyes.

  Everyone jumped in with a different pronunciation, and soon they were all helpless with laughter.

  “I blew it,” Marilou moaned, wiping her eyes. “I had a chance and I blew it.”

  “Oh, baby, you didn’t blow it,” Ed said. He swung his feet in size-thirteen sneakers up onto the railing. “He felt your love.”

  After the man disappeared, Marilou went back into the house to get the pistol, because she had promised Ed she would if something like this ever happened, and she and Fermin (their yardman) and Tica (their house girl) walked cautiously down the path, Marilou with a canvas bag over the hand holding the cocked gun so if the Auca or possibly his friends were still watching, they wouldn’t see it and be frightened. Halfway down the yard, a plank lay over a little ditch and Fermin spied a wet mark on it. They thought it might have been a footprint.