by Audrey Braun
Benicio removes my sneaker and I dip my leg, slowly, into the water. The corkscrew current is so painful I pull my leg back out.
“Here.” He wedges a log between two rocks and makes a small eddy. The water still spirals but without the speed and strength of the rapid.
I grit my teeth and lower my leg, determined to leave it submerged. After a few minutes the cold slips inside and chills the red-hot nerves. I finally feel some relief.
Dragonflies zip across the river. The humidity is thick without the ocean breeze. My skin is covered in layers of sweat and dust and bug bites. The dime-store repellant is no match for insects of the jungle.
Benicio rummages through the bag of food. He cuts salami into small pieces and stuffs them between chunks of torn bread. He hands the makeshift sandwich to me.
He tears small pieces of bread and chews them with an open mouth so he can breathe. A crooked bump at the center of his nose appears bigger in the sunlight. Some version of it will probably be there forever. Every time he looks in the mirror, every time someone asks where it came from, he’ll think of me. And every time I swipe a razor down my calf, I’ll think of him. We’ve made a mark on one another, scars like tattoos, bearing one another’s names.
“Wouldn’t it have been a lot easier for you to just join the family business?” I ask. “I mean, here you are running for your life in the jungle with a broken nose instead of kicking back in your estate on the beach.”
He lets go a small laugh and nods but says nothing.
My leg is slightly numb. The codeine and cold are finally kicking in.
We eat in silence, keeping one eye upstream, the other on the trees behind us. We’re open targets for someone coming from either direction. The rushing water makes it nearly impossible to hear approaching feet.
“We better hurry,” I say, even as my words begin to gel in my mouth. Relax, my body begs. Hush.
Benicio takes off his shirt. The carve of his muscles beneath his smooth dark skin is so beautiful against the rocks and sun, the white foam whirling behind him, that I forget to chew the food in my mouth. My heart thumps, and then a piercing dart when I think of lying with him on the bed.
He stands and drops his shorts.
My face flushes.
“I promise I’ll be fast,” he says.
It’s only now that I remember to chew. He maneuvers across the large rocks like a crab, the muscles in his arms and legs twist and flex under his weight. He drops feet first into the river behind a clump of rocks that keep him from being swept away. He tilts his head back to wet his hair and swipes the dried blood from his face and neck.
Codeine is a beautiful thing. It’s easy to imagine the two of us here under different circumstances. Lovers taking a dip in paradise. My lids open and close like a camera’s aperture, capturing the moment forever.
Benicio rises from the water and scoops his clothes from the rock. I hold up a hand to stop him from getting dressed. I’ve drifted away from the pain in my leg, away from my rage, my inhibitions and fears. I’m a kite cut loose from the life I’ve been tied to.
“Come here,” I say, scooting behind the partial wall of brush. I lift my blouse over my head and undo my bra.
Benicio unravels his clothes across the ground for me to lie on. He moves beside me, quickly aroused.
“This is crazy,” he says.
“I know.”
“The codeine?”
“Maybe.”
I can feel Benicio’s body fill with urgency.
I push my shorts down and take him into my hands in the same moment his fingers slip between my legs. The ground beneath us doesn’t seem strong enough, and I half-expect to crash through the earth and disappear.
This is a different kind of quick than the one I experienced with Jonathon. I’m so ready for him, and he’s about to explode in my hands. It isn’t out of habit, routine, and efficiency. I’m swept inside a current. There’s nothing to ground me, nothing to grab onto, nothing to keep from being pulled farther and farther away.
I moan. Claw fingernails into dirt. Sweat stings my eyes, drips to the ground, pools with Benicio’s. The pain pulses deep inside my leg, and yet I’ve never felt so euphoric, my core so unmoored in all my life. Gone are the agony and loneliness and lies. Gone the rage. I’ve punched my way through to happiness.
I want to make it last. I ease off on the pressure, turn my lips away, but our bodies are so far gone, so irretrievably lost inside a force so powerful, that in my hesitation only seconds are spared.
Afterward Benicio lies back and laughs at the sky. He seems to be reading my mind. Yes, it’s ridiculous. All of it. Our pasts, the way we found each other, the fact that the two of us should meet now when we might not live to see another day. It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to us on the worst day of our lives.
Benicio closes his eyes and I sit up, my body swaying with tipsy contentment. I’m punch-drunk, naked, covered in sand, a pink chicken rolled in Shake ’n Bake.
I jostle Benicio’s shoulder.
He opens his eyes with a start.
“Do you know what Shake ’n Bake is?”
He sits up and looks around.
“It’s Shake ’n Bake, and we helped!”
Benicio pulls on his shirt, clearly not knowing what he’s laughing at, other than me.
“Didn’t you have those commercials when you were a kid?” I ask.
“No.”
“There were these two kids.” I stop. “Are there wild dogs out here?” I hear a bark. Not the kind that comes from a squirrel or a monkey. The kind that comes from a barrel-chested dog.
I turn my ear to the jungle. There it is again.
Benicio yanks on his shorts and shoes.
I dress quickly.
“Get behind the big tree,” he says.
I’m already moving, looking to see what I should grab. The tree’s at least twenty yards away.
“I’ll get the stuff, just go,” he says.
I slide the gun into my shorts and hobble behind the tree, grunting and cursing beneath my breath as the pain, the memory of the bullet, comes grinding back.
Benicio’s no more than fifteen feet behind me, out in the wide open with the bag of food when the dog barks again. It’s close. Very close. Benicio runs, ducks, and scrambles across the ground.
Then the loud crack of gunshot. Another. I look in the direction it seems to be coming from. The dog barks nonstop, a desperate refrain.
Branches above me quake and flop; small, long-legged monkeys leap from tree to tree, croaking and twittering in panic.
When I turn back I expect to see Benicio behind me, his amber eyes and cracked nose, my shoulder bracing for the touch of his hand, the breeze lifting a trace of river water from his skin. But there’s no one. Benicio hasn’t come any closer. He lies facedown in the grass. His arms and legs splayed open as if he’s embracing the earth. No matter how long I stare he just lies there, still as a corpse.
16
First my father. Then my mother.
“She’s gone,” the nurse said to me.
But I already knew. My mother’s withered hand beneath mine was cool and light as a dead baby bird. We were alone in the hospital room when I whispered, “It’s all right, Mom. You can go now.” I didn’t mean this. There was nothing all right about my mother leaving me, and I wanted to take it back. But the wispy sound of her final breath was unmistakable. The absence of her spirit had deadened the air in its wake.
Something black and wretched took hold of me. I drifted wordless past the nurse. Outside the sun hovered in a flawless sky. Men and women ducked in and out of shops and cafés. Children cried, then laughed. The trolley wheels slogged metal on metal. Somehow life managed to go on. But nothing looked the same through the waxy lens of grief.
For weeks I walked by the hospital half-expecting the sliding doors to jerk open and my mother to step out laughing, telling me how it was all just a silly mistake. A blunder, a goof, a screwy
mishap. Oh, Cee-Cee, you won’t believe it! Weeks turned to months. I got married as if through a screen, a gauzy veil allowing only the tiniest things to sift through. I kept waiting for the grief to go away. For something to take its place.
I fumble the safety off the gun. There’s movement in the brush. A German shepherd lunging on its leash, a man in a gray T-shirt and khaki shorts—leash in one hand, gun in the other.
My sights race between the man and Benicio on the ground. Somewhere in the back of my mind I believe Benicio won’t allow himself to die. I believe he can control such a thing. It’s idiotic. It’s foolish and childish and insane, and yet the idea that Benicio won’t leave me no matter what slows my wild pulse and makes sense of the chaos in my head.
From where I stand I don’t think the man can see Benicio in the grass. I don’t think he knows I’m behind the tree. But the dog knows. He smells the way, lunging straight for Benicio. Within seconds he’ll be on us both.
I steady my hand around the gun. There shouldn’t be any question. No moral dilemma. His life or mine. Even so, the fact that I’m about to kill another human being tugs the gag reflex in my throat. I lower the gun. A collage of images flash before me. Oliver’s tiny body running into the street. Benicio facedown in the grass. Jonathon’s smile, that smile, and then his voice like a steady whistle in my ear, in my head, a piercing that will not go away. Please pinpoint what it is and I will try and make it better.
I raise the gun and cock the hammer near my cheek.
The dog lunges. The man pulls back on the leash and crouches into the edge of the clearing. He calls Benicio’s name. He yells in Spanish while I hold my breath, lining up the rear and front sights, taking aim.
I glance once more at Benicio. His gun is just out of reach of his hand. I will him to feel me there, to make a sign to let me know he hasn’t left me. Not yet. Not here. Not today.
The man takes another step. “Benicio!” he shouts.
And then I see Benicio’s fingers curl into a fist. He unfurls his forefinger and thumb until his hand takes the shape of a gun. He pulls an imaginary trigger.
I aim at the man’s chest. The heart? The head? My God, I think, my God, and pull the trigger.
What happens next happens inside a bubble of eerie, high-pitched silence. Senses shut down. No sight, no sound, nothing to feel or smell. The pain in my leg is gone. Fear is gone. Time and place cease to exist. I disappear.
Then the blast of my own gun suddenly rushes my ears long after I’ve pulled the trigger. The man has disappeared into the grass, and the dog is charging Benicio.
Time resumes, along with fear and pain and the horror of what’s happening.
Benicio jumps for his pistol, turns, and fires two rounds. The dog yelps and twists sideways, flipping in the air. He yelps once more, then stops.
I drop the gun as if it’s seared my hand. I hobble out to Benicio. He meets me halfway and wraps his arms around me. I can barely breathe. The man I shot is sprawled on the ground not far from where we stand. I turn away, but not before seeing his blood-soaked body from his neck to his belt, a black hole gaping at the base of his throat, his eyes open and dead to the sun.
I lean to the side and throw up.
“Roberto,” Benicio says. “Fucking Roberto.” He paces the grass near the man’s body. He looks to be crying. He mumbles in Spanish.
I throw up again, sure I’m going to pass out. I stumble back to the tree. I can’t erase the bullet hole from my eyes.
When nothing is left in my stomach, I spit my mouth clean and press my hand against the tree. “We need to get out of here,” I say. “They could have heard those shots.” But in my mind all I can think is Roberto was someone’s son, brother, husband, father. He drove the agua truck for his father on the days when his mother needed cancer treatments.
Benicio nods at the ground.
I accidentally lean on my bad leg, and an explosion of pain erupts all the way into my jaw. We’re stuck here for the night. I cannot, will not move another inch.
I pick up the gun and click the safety. “It was either him or us,” I say, with a coldness that surprises me. After that it’s as if a heavy drape is pulled over my eyes. Light evaporates. The entire day fades away.
17
Scraping. Something digging in dirt. I open my eyes to see Benicio at the edge of the clearing, thirty feet away. He’s shirtless beneath a ray of sunlight slanting through the trees. For a moment I float in ignorance, thinking I’m at the pool and Benicio is working in the garden. I savor the cut of his shoulders, the curve of his back. Then I remember how intimately I know his hands. His mouth. His body inside me.
Then the memory of Roberto floods in. I ache everywhere. My muscles are wet rags wringing beneath my skin. I don’t even try to move.
Benicio is digging a grave with a large branch. The ground appears stiff, dry from the winter months. He chops at it like a farmer with a pickax. How long have I been out? How long has he been digging? The sun sits lower in the sky. It appears as if Benicio has managed nothing more than a shallow rut in the ground.
I make an effort to sit, but the side of my head feels as if it’s been slammed with a cinderblock. I must’ve whacked it on the ground when I fainted. I unclench my fists and lay my head back onto the bag of clothes Benicio has slipped beneath me.
I watch as he tosses the branch to the side and empties Roberto’s pockets of a cell phone and cash. He stuffs them into his own pockets, and then he wipes his forehead across the back of his forearm and drags Roberto by his wrists into the shallow hole. He rolls the dog next to him, and then he covers them both with dirt and vines, branches and leaves, creating a mound that animals are sure to tear apart in the night.
He sees I’m awake and holds up a finger to say just a second. He jogs to the water and washes his hands. Then jogs to my side.
“How’s your head?” he asks, helping me to sit.
“Fine.” I lie, wondering just how much pain I’d be in if it not for the codeine.
“How about the leg?”
The pain seesaws from moment to moment. I take several deep breaths. “Better. I think.”
He appears skeptical.
“Really,” I say.
He lowers himself beside me. Neither of us mentions what’s happened, and the silence mushrooms between us.
“I’m sorry about Roberto,” I finally say.
“It’s not your fault.” He glances toward the river. Does he finally regret not joining the family business? Anything has to be better than this.
An armadillo saunters through the clearing. Then another. Exclamation points to a life so surreal it’s beyond belief. We’re living on the outside of logic. Anything seems possible.
Benicio takes out Roberto’s cell phone and flips it open. “No coverage up here.” He snaps it shut.
The minute we’re in range I’ll use it to call Oliver. The thought of this fills me with the urge to get up and run.
“When Roberto doesn’t return they’ll come looking for him,” Benicio says. “They’ll figure it out by tonight.”
“What should we do?”
“Not stay here.”
“How far are we from the kiosk?”
“Too far for you to walk. We need to think of something else.”
“What else is there?”
“We could go back down.”
“And walk right into them?”
“Of course not.”
Benicio empties a plastic garbage bag.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going to run ahead and make it to the kiosk. I’ll grab a raft and some supplies and meet you back here.”
Fear rises to my throat. My skin begins to itch. My arms and legs are covered in horrible red bites. Ants? Mosquitoes? What else is there? “How long will you be gone?” I grab the insect repellant and spray myself again. I spray the air and ground, but there isn’t an insect in sight.
“No more than a few hours.”
�
��A few hours?” I can’t imagine the kind of dark that comes to a jungle in the middle of the night. “I’d rather come with you.”
“You know you can’t. You need to stay here and wait.”
He’s right. But still. “What if someone comes?”
“If I don’t spot the kiosk before they close I’ll never find it in the dark.”
I look around, sick with fear, trying my best not to show it.
“Keep your gun close. Here’s an extra just in case.” He hands me Roberto’s gun, a small smear of blood on its side.
I turn away. He places the gun on the ground.
“I want you to wait by the river just after sunset,” he says. “I’m going to tie this garbage bag to a tree so I can spot it on my way down.”
I have little faith that any of this is going to work. It seems far more likely that one of Leon’s men will find me, and even if they don’t something will eat me alive before dawn.
“Where does the river lead?” I ask.
“We won’t take it all the way. We’ll cut across a few miles before the end and follow a trail to Mismaloya.”
Mismaloya. This is the town I read about online when Jonathon showed me Puerto Vallarta. It’s the place where Night of the Iguana with Richard Burton and Ava Gardner was filmed. It looks exactly the way paradise is supposed to look.
“What are we going to do there?” I ask.
“Hide in plain sight.”
“With that face and this leg?”
“Yes.” He loads some things into another bag, explaining how everything will unfold.
“Are you sure about this?”
“You’ll see,” he says, and I sit back, settling into a feeling I can’t name. “I’ll take care of everything,” he says, and I wish he hadn’t said it. It sounds so much like something Jonathon would say that I can’t help recoiling when Benicio leans down and softly kisses my cheek.
He says a few more things about a plan when he returns, and then he’s gone.
18
Exhaustion, like a cast, sets my bones, making it harder and harder to move. Everything I’ve endured over the last few days has collected inside me. I’ve lost track of how much codeine I’ve taken. I drift in and out of a trance, never quite losing my awareness of the mound near the trees. With every rustle of leaves or crackle of branch I’m sure someone or something is unearthing the man I killed. The man I killed. The idea is so unthinkable that I question more than once if Roberto isn’t really alive after all. If perhaps the sounds I hear in the jungle are actually Roberto coming up for air.
