Allie wiped her forehead, pulled hair from her eyes. "Okay, but you rest first. We don't need any more close calls with mules."
"He was in the road."
"He was eating grass on the shoulder, Jay."
The capital city of Quito was nine thousand feet above sea level. But that was at 4:00 P.M.; at 5:30 and en route to the outskirts of the Amazon rainforest, we were only six thousand feet above and swiftly declining, circling and dropping, curving and descending to a never-ending, tirewearing bout of counterclockwise rotation.
"I think I see Brazil in the distance."
"That would be Peru, Jay."
"I meant Peru."
The Andes are steep and treacherous for motorized passage; I couldn't fathom that people actually lived on them. Yet across the steepness and beyond the valley were countless fields in bold, patchwork patterns; rich farmland cut in huge, colorful squares of soft gold, reddish brown, olive green and umber, saffron and chestnut and bronze.
It looked as though someone had loaded the blades of a mower with dye and proceeded to color the mountainside in broad swaths of every earth tone that side of the equator. Even more striking was the angle of the patchwork; a farmer would need great balance to plow such acreage, and surely a dropped tomato would roll off the mountain and into the roiling river canyon.
In the distance, behind the patchwork, the top of a volcano jutted through cloud cover, the white tip frosted, as if dipped in coconut. "That one is over fifteen thousand feet at the peak," Allie said, honking thrice at a tourist bus.
"My camera is in my bag."
"Take pictures with your eyeballs," she replied, accelerating down and around the endless curve, this curve of dreams, one ceaseless spiral of downward momentum. Craggy rock jutted out from the overhang, and as we zoomed past I glimpsed the mother lode of moss clinging like barnacles to the mountain wall.
"Hold on," she said, and a thick splash of water wet our windshield.
My right arm was soaked. "You drove us through a waterfall?"
"That's a small one."
With one crank of the handle, I rolled my window all the way down for one long, curious sniff-and she was right, Latino air did tickle.
"What did Darcy think about you coming to see me?" Allie asked, honking her intention to a loitering Jeep.
A little voice whispered to fib, but I could not. "Well, Darcy doesn't really know about this."
She swerved left around the jeep, then back right. "But I thought you said she and Steve drove you to the airport."
"Yeah, but I was wearing all black."
"I don't understand."
"When I left South Carolina, I was wearing-"
`Jay, you didn't."
"I did."
She shook her head and slapped the dash. "That's hysterical."
We continued our descent, passing a tourist bus, a rock quarry, and a kid on a single-speed bike who was ascending slowly in a determined effort at mountain biking. Beside him, on the outer shoulder, small white crosses protruded from the earth.
"No guardrails on these roads," said Allie, a firm grip on the wheel. "You go over, and you're a goner."
"No beach patrol, eh?"
"Yeah," she said, shifting gears. "No beach patrol."
On the inner half of the spiraling highway, a short, black-hatted man was pushing a cart filled with fruit. He had grapefruits and mangos and bananas and a scribbled sign I could not read. I asked Allie to pull over. She braked hard, gravel screeching at the rear tire. "All the men are short here, Jay ... compared to Americans."
"What's with the hats?" I asked. "Everyone wears the same dusty hat."
"They're called derbies. Made of felt. Everyone from the highlands has one."
The cart man saw us looking and pulled his rickety cart around, guiding it downhill to meet us. He looked hopeful. Out of the truck now, I watched his lumbering approach but again felt unprepared. I stuck my head back in the window for an inquiry.
"Captain Kyle, is one U.S. dollar enough for a grapefruit and banana?"
"A whole dollar?" she replied, fiddling with the parking brake. "A whole dollar for two pieces of fruit and he might kiss you on the lips."
I stood on the graveled shoulder and looked past the river canyon and across steep farmland to a sky backlit and brilliant, fading to pastel in the distance, then to a gray-blue haze where the horizon exhausted my vision. The air was still thin but finding its appetite. I felt the intense rays from a sun that seemed to have lost its filter. There is no subtlety to an Ecuadorian sun.
"Hello ... I mean, hola, senor."
"Hola," he said, stopping his cart at the front bumper. Thigh muscles bulged through his pants. With a crumpled dollar in my pocket, I reached first for a mango, then for an orphaned banana. I handed him the dollar.
Cart Man reached in his dusty pants for change, but I waved him off.
He didn't smile, only muttered, "Gracias."
Sensing opportunity, he held up a fat mango for Allie's inspection. "Senorita?"
She shook her head no.
My fruit smelled of rainforest, damp and earthy and humid. People will tell you a banana is just a banana, but until you've eaten one fresh from the picking, peeled one on the side of an Andes mountain with the sunlit fields of patchwork in the distance below a frosted volcano and the wind in your hair while a missionary girl does eighty around a curving highway with no guardrails ... you haven't lived.
"How long can you really stay?" Allie asked, downshifting now, grinding the gears.
"Four days, maybe five. It was all I could squeeze out of my new bossto-be in New York. He's a bit ornery."
She pointed a finger at me. "Those flashing numbers will wait. You should plan on two whole weeks.... You'll need it to experience the enormity of this place."
My banana peel slid to the floorboard. "I'll go without sleep then. Explore the jungle at midnight. And if you're nice, I might fly you up to Manhattan after the New Year."
She remained silent, ignoring my offer, as if totally uninterested in big cities.
"Okay, Allie, when's the last time you nailed Maurice with a Fig Newton?"
I couldn't tell if she was blushing or if it was simply the heat.
"About a month before you moved to South Carolina," she said, trying her best to steer and grin at the same time. "He made faces at me when I was in kindergarten; now, twenty years later, he can't stop. It's stimulus response."
Near the base of the Andes she pulled over to let me drive again. We stopped in tall grass, and she slid behind me on the bench seat, me at the wheel, she sitting neither close nor far but in the neutral zone; in the neutral zone she sat, this magnetic missionary, and as I pulled back onto the single-lane highway with the overlapping parachutes of rainforest now huge below the mountains, I silently thanked God that I'd met her, that she'd hit me with a roasted marshmallow and carved poems in sandbars and woke embarrassed but innocent on Litchfield Beach with her sandy, matted hair and the slightest hint of compromise, then shrugged it off because God knew nothing happened.
I was sure God knew nothing happened.
Don't you, God?
Before cranking the engine, I turned sideways in my seat to try and read her toweled verse.
"Figured out what it says yet?" she asked, removing the cap from a water bottle.
I was sitting on Jehovah, but loopy, red cielo stumped me. "One hint, please."
"Heaven, as in `my help comes from God, who made the heavens and the earth."'
And my Spanish lessons had commenced, courtesy of an Ecuadorian beach towel.
I felt like my lungs could hold twice the air now. I wanted to back us up and fly down the mountain again, do eighty one more time on that curve of dreams with its white crosses high above the river canyon. But the spiral did end, the descent did cease, and the patchwork fields were now a photograph on my eyelid.
The road became dirt, packed brown and potholed, though we were surrounded by endless vegetation and t
he wildest of flora; lush, limber plants rambling about as if preparing to swallow us whole.
"Welcome to the Amazon Basin," she said, gesturing like Vanna.
I was awestruck and did not notice the bright blue insect perched on my shirtsleeve-until it began crawling up my right shoulder. I raised my hand to slap it but hesitated.
"Ouch!"
Allie had crushed the critter with my banana peel, turning a bright blue insect into a very primitive, smeary blue goo.
"That happens a lot here, don't it?"
"Hourly," she said.
Deeper into jungle, I stopped the truck, grappling for words as I felt enveloped, caped in the greenery of this vast new world. Sunlight could not penetrate the cover, and from the ground, thick vines intersected each other like wooden noodles, weaving through tree limbs stiff and angular, a tented sanctuary to any bird, bug, or beast.
I had never smelled such abundance; never had my nostrils been such aliens to their duty. Warm scents of renegade moss, earth, and vegetation hovered over and around each other, a myriad of jungle aromas competing with an orchestra of birds to dominate my senses.
"It's lusher than lush."
And those were the only words I could muster.
We remained parked beneath the wildness, and time seemed to linger again. Allie was wearing a string of exotic-looking beads around her neck: round, wooden, and staggered in the earth tones of patchworked farmland.
Big, wooden jungle beads-not my first choice of souvenir. At least not for Manhattan.
After slipping them from her neck, she leaned over and draped me with the beads, then decided they looked awful with my shirt. I handed them back. She left them in her lap and pointed to a dense tangle of vines and limbs.
"See them yet?" she asked.
"See what?"
"Keep looking. They're small and hyper."
"I still don't see 'em. Wait, yeah, I see 'em."
"They're called howler monkeys."
I wouldn't have known a monkey from a chimp, though the little guys were howling and swinging, jumping and arguing, baring teeth and making outrageous leaps: leaps of abandon, leaps of faith, leaps that defied common sense, but then I had left common sense in the men's room back in Charlotte, so why should I have expected more from mere monkeys.
We watched them for several minutes, and as the sun set behind us, tinges of deep red glowed in strands of her hair. She knew I was staring. "Want the bad news?" she asked, looking up through the windshield.
"We got a flat?"
"Nope. We still have three hours to go."
"I want a pet monkey."
She rolled her eyes. "I'll steer us home from here, Jay. You're really not supposed to be driving."
"All yours, Captain." And she slid behind me on the seat again.
At nightfall we passed through the edge of Coca, a gritty little town that, according to my guide, served as a launch site for Ecuadorian jungle tours and river excursions. I dozed off once, then twice again, each time potholed from slumber.
We arrived shortly after 11:00 P.M.
In the headlights of the truck, I saw a well-kept village-dirt paths lined with rocks, and the main road also dirt but flanked by two torches rising from thick stalks of bamboo.
The bamboo was high, the flames low, and a row of tiny houses-more like wooden huts crafted by amateur carpenters-occupied each side of the road. They sat atop skinny stilts a few feet off the ground, and what looked like a pvc water line paralleled an outer wall. We parked next to a hut. She cut the headlights.
"Is there electricity?" I asked.
She smiled briefly and said, "Two generators. We use them sparingly."
"Running water?"
"Only the cold kind."
"Men on one side of the road, women on the other?"
"For the most part."
I opened my door, and a raucous symphony of bugs rung out at decibel levels that would put American bugs to shame. American bugs are wimps. These Amazon bugs should've been Pentecostal pastors; the sounds were piercing, and I detected alto bugs, bass bugs, soprano bugs, and one unmistakable tenor bug.
"Music to doze with, I assume?"
"Every night," she said, placing the keys under the mat.
"Appreciate the driving. If you sit still, I'll get your door for ya."
"I would," she said, releasing her seat belt, "but that's not a custom here. Thanks, anyway."
I grabbed my duffel from the rear of the truck, then reached back in the front seat to retrieve my mango. "What about the baritone bugs?"
She peeled her towel from the seat. "You're staying in that one," she said, pointing into darkness.
I clicked on my flashlight. "G'night."
"Keep the light to the ground. And we rise early." She turned and walked the opposite way. "Oh, and Jay ..."
"Yes, Allie?" I could barely see her in the dark.
"We used to own a small water heater, for once-a-week hot showers. It sorta got broke."
"Well, is it sorta or is it permanent?"
"I ran over it with the truck."
With the light to the ground, I hauled my duffel up four stairs and into a plywood-walled, wooden-floored room. There were two single beds, split by a grass rug, and a male body lay sleeping in the one to my right. Screens covered the two windows but no glass.
I collapsed on the bed and watched a stream of moonlight grace the far wall.
I did not fight sleep. I ushered it in and served it drinks.
I woke in a narrow bed, unaccustomed to such balmy air at such an early hour. Greeted in broken English by my slender roommate, a young man named Juan, I was dazzled by the simplicity of our hut. No outlets. No pictures. Just the grass rug between us and a small stack of letters in Juan's windowsill. He sat on the edge of his bed in mismatched colors-brown shorts and red soccer jersey-then reached over, shook my hand, and said, "You duty of trash."
I figured out that he was the groundskeeper and coached soccer. He told me I could be the assistant groundskeeper and coach baseball.
He was not kidding.
"Pick up trash?" I asked, threading my leather belt through the last loop of my shorts.
"Si. You duty of trash," he said, stretching his arms to touch our low ceiling.
Outside the hut, I took inventory of my jungled surroundings-thick trees moldy and damp, skinny vines random and green, and that filterless sensation of life at the equator.
I walked a few yards of the rock-lined path, then turned in a slow circle to view this remotest suburbia. Juan stood next to me a moment, then said, "No compare?"
"Yeah, Juan ... no neon, no billboards."
He allowed ten more seconds before handing me the broom handle.
And at 7:20 A.M. on the second Wednesday of November, I found myself in a village of the Ecuadorian rainforest, a burlap sack flung over one shoulder, my hand gripping the sawed-off broom handle with its protruding nail-the official uniform of the assistant groundskeeper.
"Work both sides of the road?" I asked, glad that there was not much litter around.
"Si. Amigas, then amigos," he said, pointing at the two bamboo torches now smoldering against the sunrise.
A red macaw sat atop what I believed to be the village kitchen. Curious but guarded, it watched me like a feathered sentry, its beak half smile, half snarl.
If there was a fight, he would win.
Along the road, remnants of little visitors had peppered the dirt, the token tracks of animals small and rummaging. The tracks were bigger than a mouse but smaller than a deer. I followed them in a zigzag until they disappeared into the boundless undergrowth of Ecuador.
Behind the huts, a hodgepodge of vegetables grew over and around each other as if the seeds, like confetti, had been scattered at random. Tomatoes were having a good year; cucumbers were a bit scrawny. Long vines of thick red berries twisted grotesquely behind the huts, winding onward and upward, trying to grasp and strangle the skinny stilts.
While spe
aring bits of paper amid the dew, I spotted Allie strolling the road, past the torches, with over a dozen children in tow.
She leaned down to the children. "Say hello to Mr. Jarvis."
"Hola, Senor Yarvees," they said, at once giggling and blushing. They all had straight, dark hair and grab-bag shorts and shirts, slightly soiled but tucked in and without wrinkles.
"We're on our way to breakfast," Allie said, holding little bronze hands in each of hers. "We'll save you some fruit."
"So, Miss Kyle ... when do I get the private jungle tour?"
They walked on, and she spoke over her shoulder. "Patience, Americano."
And that was the extent of our morning visit.
Juan claimed twenty years of age, and with his lean, athletic build, he looked it. He had never heard of eBay or Yahoo, did not understand stock quotes or initial public offerings, but offered me everything I needed. Which wasn't much. I just needed some food.
We enjoyed a jungle muffin and two bananas each on the steps of our hut. Juan's grasp of English was shaky but no tougher to understand than some South Carolinians I'd met. Told me he'd almost made the national soccer team at age seventeen, though down here, "almost" seemed to come with less padding.
"You miss a trash," he said, pointing under the next hut.
"Si."And I speared the wayward scrap. He asked about jobs in America, then shook his head as I related the lifestyle of the middle class. I explained a currency conversion and found out that, converted to U.S. currency, Juan's paycheck was the equivalent of thirty dollars a month.
"Thirty?" he asked, still not sure of the comparison.
"Only thirty, Juany."
He rubbed his foot on a tree root, then looked up and grinned. "If employ, you make twenty a month." And there was satisfaction in his voice.
At noon, Juan asked me to please stop trying to feed an earthworm to the macaw. With no trash left to spear, I had spent a half hour tossing the worm underhanded up near the kitchen roof, only to have the bird constantly reject my offering. Juan motioned for me to come along, so I left my burlap and broom handle resting against a thick, yellow-green plant. The plant extended well over my head, and by the time we returned, I assumed it would have eaten my toolage.
Flabbergasted: A Novel Page 25
