Five Wives

by Joan Thomas

  “So I hear. How you getting to Quito?”

  “I’m running the Nissan back.” David added that he’d be staying overnight in Quito. Just one night because he was eager to get home and see his daughter.

  He stood on the gravel, his back to the mountain. This road—the old hospital where he was born was just around the next turn. He’d like to tell Fidel that story, the way his mother surprised the family by walking home from the hospital with him in her arms. He wanted to lean on the car beside Fidel, but he felt reticent. He was six inches taller, but he felt insubstantial beside him. People who knew the truth and rejected it had a strange power. There was nothing you could say to them.

  “I wish you and I’d had more time to talk this week,” he said.

  Fidel didn’t respond.

  “I don’t know if you realize, but my wife was Sharon Elliot, you know, the little girl who was taken into Tiwaeno by Betty and Rachel. I know there have been struggles and difficulties there. I wish . . .”

  Fidel listened with his usual self-contained expression. He didn’t help David out.

  “I’ve been wanting to say to you, I see the essence of the gospel in what those women did. Their courage in going in, and their grace in forgiving the men who had murdered their loved ones. And to their credit, your people responded to the gospel of peace.”

  Fidel shrugged. “We took them in,” he said. “My people have always been kind to female refugees.”

  The glory of God and the darkness of the world—it seemed there was no navigable passage between them. David had never been equal to the mission, that’s what it boiled down to.

  The trucks rolling up the road had switched their headlights on. Behind the house his father built, night birds were starting to call.

  “Everybody back home is going to want to know about the movie,” Fidel said.

  “I guess they will.”

  “You going to tell them about the angels?”

  His tone suggested it was all a big joke.

  “You assume the age of miracles is over,” David said.

  Fidel laughed.

  But what David was hoping for (he realizes now) was a miracle of a different kind—that God would fill him with the faith he’d need to stand at his pulpit and look out over his people and say, Something truly amazing happened in Ecuador. We never knew this before, we just found out. There were angels in the sky the day my father died. God sent angels to carry my father home.

  He turns his eyes back to the restaurant window. Quito stretches below El Panecillo and above it, its lights are muddled and fading. He finishes his drink and feels a subtle shift, like an automatic transmission changing gears; he feels himself move to a new and more distant relationship with the scene. He should order dinner, but he can’t summon up the will to open the menu. He lifts an index finger and the waiter sees him and starts up the aisle. The waiter’s name—he’s lost it already.

  “I need to eat something,” David says, and then realizes he’s speaking English. “Tráigame algo para comer, por favor.”

  Whatever you like. I don’t really care. Bring me whatever you think is best.

  Immortal, Invisible

  30

  THE MORNING ABBY PICKED UP her phone and learned that Sean Youderian was making a movie about Operation Auca and that her dad was going to help with it, she flopped down on the bed in the motel room and cried. With disappointment, but mostly at her endless talent for gaslighting herself. Anybody else would have known Sean was behind this film the instant Walter Varga called. Anybody else would at least have checked it out.

  After a while she wiped her face on the pillowcase and got up. She went to the door and opened it. It had rained again in the night and the cars in the parking lot glistened with silver drops. The motel was right on the edge of a little valley, and the air was filled with lemony light. So. She was on her own. She wasn’t going to Ecuador, and she wasn’t going to have Walter Varga and a cast of Waorani actors to help her figure things out. She stood gazing at a row of cypress trees on the other side of the valley, and then she walked across to the motel office and booked herself in for another night.

  IT’S POSSIBLE TO take up permanent residence in a hotel or motel. There are people who do—rich old women in New York, who treat the bellboys like nephews and leave fortunes to them in their wills. Or that guy whose father wrote a Christmas jingle that paid out royalties every time it was played, so the guy never had to work in his life. This was in a movie, or it’s actually true, or maybe both.

  She finds that it’s not such a bad lifestyle, except for the way her bank balance dwindles. Her room seemed impersonal when she checked in, but it quickly starts to feel like home. The water stain in the ceiling over the bathtub is a turtle with a cow’s tail, like the Mock Turtle in Alice in Wonderland. There’s a new chrome shower head, big and flat, with a transparent sticker on it saying, Experience the rainforest. So in the morning, while doors slam on either side and diesel trucks start up, Abby does just that, singing to herself as warm water patters gently onto her shoulders. She gets fresh towels whenever she needs them, and she has a working remote, courtesy of a cleaner named Natalia. Not that she watches much TV. She walks a lot, and when she’s not walking, she reads.

  The book with the cover photo of children climbing a palm tree in the Amazon: it’s not about her family—they’re just mentioned in the preface, as one of the external forces that worked to efface Waorani culture. She gets past that and into the discussion of Waorani life. In parts she feels moved with recognition, and in other passages she thinks, My brain is not wired to understand this. She learns about the individual hearths in the communal longhouses. The sturdy little kids who hunt alone with their own miniature blowguns. The hunting taboos that protect certain animals. The songs celebrating the bounty of the forest. The way individuals from clans far away are recognized by their footprints in river clay. The warfare rituals, the sharing rituals.

  She spends an hour in the Amazon rainforest and then lifts her eyes to discover an American motel room strewn with clothes and makeup and her curling iron and books and electronics. A Waorani could walk in here and figure out a lot about her by her artifacts. How different it was for a US fieldworker to step into an old Waorani settlement. Most of what the people treasured was intangible. The elaborate lineages, the history written in every tree. The skills and knowledge, the protocols, the songs, the stories. None of that was visible. You could look at the Waorani and think they had nothing.

  THE THIRD DAY, she’s restless and she leaves the motel and starts driving. She turns when an intersection appeals to her, tending north and west, and then gets the idea of heading for the coast. Billboards say MENDOCINO, and she opens a window and smells salt water. She finds a parking spot along the road and gets out. She stands for a long time looking at the Pacific, a thrilling sight, the white, white surf topping teal-blue waves. Everything in motion, the ocean tossing itself around and clouds sliding loose and gulls fighting the wind as they try to circle the cliffs.

  There is no easy way down to the shore. She walks up the road and spies an embankment where a stream enters the ocean through a culvert. There she climbs over the guardrail and inches and gouges her way down. She fights through some prickly shrubs and lands on the beach. A narrow beach, dangerously narrow; if the tide is coming in, Abby is screwed.

  She finds a sheltered spot up against the cliff and sits cross-legged on her jacket. The sand is dark grey and damp. She clasps her ankles and settles back to watch the ocean. Everything in the scene is designed to hypnotize. The gulls tilting their outstretched wings, so you can almost see the planes of air they’re riding. The waves chasing in at her and drawing back, over and over. She stares and stares, trying to see a pattern in the shifting bands of colour, the luminous scarves stitched carelessly together, constantly the same and constantly different, the waves small and then huge, flinging themselves open or racing into shore. The longer she stares, the less sense it makes. It’s
like she’s never seen it before. She can’t even understand its surface, never mind the secrets hidden in its depths.

  It’s starting to freak her out, this heaving, disorganized, watery beast that prowls from here to Japan, and she gets up and pulls her jacket on and walks, picking her way through the detritus the beast has coughed up. Kelp. Plastic cups. The wind bites at her. She finds a huge rock with a little alcove in it. It’s not in the sun, but it’s strangely warm. She leans against it and pulls out her phone: 17 percent. She forgot to charge it last night. She presses Olive’s number. Olive picks up on the second ring. They talk for a while about Olive’s cat, who is behaving badly, but Abby doesn’t want to waste her call talking about the cat. “I’ve been reading,” she says. “I read a book about the Waorani. A field study, by an anthropologist.”

  “Oh,” Olive says, clearly surprised.

  “I’ll tell you the coolest thing I learned. Apparently they believe that, over time, a human being can literally become a different person. You change in little ways, one tiny thing after another, and at a certain point a critical mass is reached. It’s not just a personality change. They believe that you are literally someone else.”

  “Well, we believe in being born again,” Olive says.

  “Hmm,” Abby says, thinking. Finally she says, “They have this deep respect for the individual. They think it’s very bad to impose your will on another person, even on a child. They never had chiefs. They really value autonomy, but at the same time they are very close. They live so intimately together that they almost see themselves as one flesh. If someone is sick and can’t eat, the whole longhouse fasts.”

  “Oh my,” Olive says. “I can’t see the practical good of that.”

  “There are lots of intriguing contradictions in the culture. Like how peacefully the Waorani live together, and yet how frequently they killed. It would take me a long time to understand it. Well, I guess I never really would. Anyway, this book was written by a European anthropologist, and what I would really like to read is their story. What it was like for the people when the missionaries came. Well, everything. Dayuma’s story—wouldn’t it be amazing to hear that?”

  “It would,” Olive says. “But I believe she’s passed away, and I don’t think she ever wrote. You could go to Ecuador. Do you think you’d like that? To work with the people yourself ?”

  “Why would they want me?” Abby lifts her eyes to the restless water. “Olive, I actually called to ask you a question. Do you remember, just before my mom died, when Rachel brought two Waorani men to the US on a tour?”

  “I remember that tour, but I was in Hawaii with Ruby at the time.”

  “Well, one of the men was pretty old—he and Mom actually knew each other when they were children. After the meeting, I had a chance to talk to him. My Spanish wasn’t very good back then, but I had planned out some questions. I said, ‘Do you remember the attack on the missionaries?’ He did remember. He said, ‘Por supuesto. Tus abuelos le dispararon a mi tío.’”

  Olive makes a little sound of distress.

  “But I didn’t really get it,” Abby says. “I knew that por supuesto meant ‘of course.’ I knew that tus abuelos meant ‘your grandparents’ and mi tío meant ‘my uncle.’ But I didn’t know the verb disparar and I never looked it up. Isn’t that crazy? Instead, I decided that it meant ‘disappeared.’ So, I thought, well, Enkidi’s uncle disappeared, he fled deeper into the forest after the Americans showed up. All the time I was studying Spanish, I would sit in class reading passages in which the word disparar clearly meant ‘to shoot,’ and I would just think, Oh, disparar has more than one meaning.”

  “Did you not realize the men had guns?”

  “Yes, of course. But everybody talks about how they had sworn not to use them. How they would die themselves before they would kill anybody who wasn’t ready to meet God. But that’s not what happened, apparently. So, does everybody know this but me? Did you know?”

  “I’ve heard a bit about it,” Olive says in a thin voice.

  “Do you know which of the men fired the gun?”

  “I think it might have been Nate. You realize, of course, that it didn’t come out for a long time. Because the people didn’t feel comfortable talking to Betty and Rachel about the killings. But eventually someone said that Dayuma’s brother was shot, and he didn’t die right away, and it might actually have been an anaconda that killed him. And someone said that, during the attack, Nate picked up his gun to shoot into the air, and one of the Waorani came and grabbed his arm, so the shot went where he never intended it to go.”

  “Yeah, right, of course,” Abby says. There’s a crackling sound, and she thinks the call has dropped out. But she says anyway, “Wouldn’t it be better if they admitted what really happened?”

  Olive is still there. “You know, Abby, it was a very long time ago, and people thought differently then.”

  “Olive, they think just the same way now!”

  Then the call really is gone. She drops her phone into her pocket and leans back against the rock. I said they, she thinks. Not we.

  A sailboat crosses her line of vision, moving parallel to the shore. It strikes her as a rough day for setting off in a sailboat, but from this distance it looks as though the sailor is gliding along a smooth silvery band and doing fine.

  She starts to walk again. The tide is going out, it’s finally obvious. She won’t need to be rescued from the rocks after all.

  THERE’S A TATTOO parlour in the strip mall across from her motel and it’s open late into the evening. After she’s bought her supper, Abby stands on the sidewalk and watches through the window. Only one artist is working. The shop is full of motorcycle gang regalia, but he looks like a gentle guy. He’s putting the finishing touches on a huge, beautiful moth on a woman’s back. The moth has eye-spots on its wings, and when the woman sits up clutching her shirt over her breasts and turns her back to the window, the eyes seem to be watching—and so the moth is both gorgeous and threatening.

  The next morning, Abby wakes up feeling strangely clear-headed, as if she’s had a fever and it broke. This may not last, so in its light she needs to make some decisions. She dresses and eats a muffin from her stash. The neon OPEN sign at the tattoo parlour comes on just as she walks up. The artist who did the moth is leaning on the counter. Abby has nothing so spectacular in mind, but he listens with interest, suggests various illustrations, and sketches them for her. No, she says. Just the words. She goes through a book and picks out Leelawadee. It’s described as a Thai font, but it’s totally readable to Americans. He tells her rib cage tattoos are the most painful, and she says, Gotcha.

  She lies on her side, undoes her bra, and pulls up her shirt, flinching at the cold of the antiseptic he rubs along her ribs. The pen sounds like a mosquito. Its sting seems to elevate her, like she’s floating above the table. She’s never even had her ears pierced. You can put a lot of energy into not getting marked in any way. But she is no fool who gives what she cannot keep to gain what she cannot lose.

  The artist notices tears dripping onto the paper sheet. “Go ahead and cry,” he says. She presses her face into her folded arm. She’s thinking of Enkidi, a young boy from the rainforest watching it all, watching his uncle get shot by strangers. An old man now, a long-eared old man, who saw the longhouses broken up, the ancient language forgotten by the young, the stories that died from never being told, the stories displaced by something else. Culture is a delicate porcelain, she thinks, you can smash it just like that. Or, she thinks, feeling a new wave of emotion, your culture is written so deep in your bones you can never hope to resist it. They thought they owned the Waorani, she weeps. They thought they owned me.

  HER DAD’S CAR is in the garage, but the house is dark. Can he possibly have left for Ecuador already? She rings the doorbell and inside a dog goes berserk—not Gizmo, it’s the Doberman on the security tape announcing that the owner of this bungalow is out of town. She’s been nervous all afternoon for not
hing. She fingers her key. The red light of the security alarm box winks at her. He’s changed the code, her instincts tell her. It’s what he does, just to give her grief. If she opens the door, all hell will break lose.

  She walks around to the backyard. It’s still warm out and the air smells green. This is a neighbourhood of ragged old cedars and newish houses. Their house is at the dark end of a dead-end street, tucked in under the freeway ramp. Her dad likes that; it reminds him of the rainforest, where you never saw the sun and didn’t miss it.

  It’s getting dark. She should find a friend to take her in. She wanders over to the picnic table and sits on the bench, scrolling through her contacts, calling up faces in her mind. Bethany. Ashley. Joel.

  Will. She steadies her breathing, readying herself. Possibly his name provides insight into his character. You always have expectations when you run into a woman named Faith, or Hope, or Joy (or Constance, isn’t that a name?). But Will—it’s a little more subtle.

  She presses his number. He picks up. “Hey,” she says. “It’s Abby.”

  “Hey,” he says. “I’ve been wondering where you got to.”

  “I went on a driving trip and stared at the ocean.”

  “Cool. What brought you back?”

  “I have a library book that’s almost due.” A dark shadow moves across the grass towards her. The neighbour’s cat, a known birder. It presses itself against her ankles, and she reaches a hand down to scratch its back. “What are you up to?”

  “Making dinner.”

  “What’re you having?”

  “Pasta alla puttanesca.”

  “Wow. Don’t let me interrupt.”

  “No, I’d like to talk. I haven’t seen you in ages.”

  “So put me on speaker.”

  He does, and she can tell he’s set the phone on the counter.

  “This sounds like a really fancy meal,” she says.

  “It is,” he says from a distance. “I make three dishes, and this is my fanciest.”