by Tom Epperson
They’re about three quarters of the way across the field when their long shadows appear on the road as a flashlight hits them in the back, and then bullets start kicking up the dirt around their feet. Roberto shoves Daniel into the sugarcane and dives in after him. The field’s planted in closely packed rows and they go off down one of them. They disturb some rats, which squeak and scatter. Now they stop and listen. They hear voices, getting louder, moving up the road.
“Let’s go that way,” Roberto whispers, pointing in the direction of the jungle. “We’re nearly there. Maybe a hundred meters.”
Daniel nods. They push through the stalks of sugarcane into the next row, then into the next. Roberto hears shooting, then shouts, then more shooting—they must be randomly firing into the field or else at the ghosts of the people they slaughtered last week. It won’t be easy for them to find him and Daniel in a sugarcane field at night. They keep cutting across the rows, there’s only so many of them, soon there won’t be any, and the jungle will begin.
Something black hurtles past Roberto, and then something actually runs into his legs, knocking him off his feet. It snorts and squeals, it’s a wild pig. The pigs make their escape through the sugarcane as a Kalashnikov opens up. Daniel joins Roberto on the ground and they both lie flat and listen to the bullets passing above them.
“Over here!” they hear someone yell. “We’ve found them!”
Other weapons start to fire. The stalks of sugarcane jerk and tremble as the bullets slice through them; one falls almost on top of Roberto.
“Cease fire,” yells someone, “cease fire!
The fusillade stops. Roberto’s not sure what to do: get up and run or stay put and hide? But then he sees a flashlight probing the field not far from them and realizes it’s too late to run.
“Roberto,” Daniel whispers.
Roberto can barely see him in the darkness. Just the glistening of his eyes and of the pistol in his hand.
“Listen,” he says. “I won’t let them take me prisoner. I won’t let myself be tortured again. Do you understand?”
After a moment’s pause, Roberto whispers, “Yes.”
“But don’t worry, Roberto, I’ll shoot you first.”
“What? No! Are you crazy?”
“Trust me, it’s the right thing—”
“You’re not shooting anybody yet. We’re getting out of this.”
“You’re the one who’s crazy.”
The flashlight’s getting closer.
“Shut up,” Roberto whispers.
He can see him now, or at least glimpses of him through the sugarcane. He’s moving down the row next to them, in one hand the flashlight and in the other a pistol. And now Roberto sees at least two more Black Jaguars are behind him. Their movements are slow and stealthy, the movements of hunters, hunters of men. The flashlight slides to the left and the right.
They’re only meters away. The sweat’s pouring off Roberto, a drop stings his eye. Some many-legged something is crawling across his arm. His heart’s thudding against the ground and he’s shivering as if cold. He doesn’t dare look at Daniel but knows he’s clutching the pistol and is about to shoot somebody: whether Roberto, himself, or a Black Jaguar, he has no idea.
An assault rifle rattles in the dark, and then Roberto hears voices: “We’ve got them! They’re here! This way! Hurry!”
“Let’s go!” says the guy with the flashlight, and he and his two comrades crash off through the sugarcane. Roberto hears more shooting, probably at the pigs. He grabs Daniel’s arm and pulls him up.
“Come on, Daniel, here’s our chance!”
He and Daniel run, stumble, stagger, fall, tumble, and crawl through row after row of sugarcane. They’re not trying to be quiet anymore, all they want is to reach the jungle.
They stop where the sugarcane stops. Beyond an open area of about twenty-five meters, they see the trees. Roberto cautiously sticks out his head and looks both ways. No one’s in sight. Behind them the shooting continues as the Black Jaguars close in on the pigs. They start running again. They splash through a shallow drainage ditch filled with slime-covered water, and then the jungle takes them.
* * *
Daniel has a flashlight, but they don’t use it at first. They’re afraid the paramilitaries are pursuing and might see it. But the trees keep crowding closer together and blocking out whatever light comes from the stars and moon. Finally they come to a stop and just stand there, looking around at a smothering blackness.
“Turn your flashlight on,” says Roberto.
It’s small, hardly bigger than a big cigar. Daniel moves around its thin, weak beam. Roberto sees the trunks of trees, dangling vines. He doesn’t hear shooting anymore. Just frogs, and the buzz of mosquitoes in his ear. The air’s warm and damp and still and rotten-smelling. The enormity of their situation hits him. They’re utterly alone in the jungle at night. When day comes, merciless men will enter the jungle and try to kill them.
Daniel is obviously thinking along the same lines.
“Jesus Christ,” he says in an awestruck whisper. “What are we going to do?”
“Keep moving. Get as far away from El Encanto as we can. Head for Diego’s.”
“We’ll never make it by ourselves.”
“We have to.”
“We need Roque.”
“We don’t know where he is. We don’t even know if he’s still alive.”
“Maybe he’s close. Maybe he’s trying to find us.”
“We can’t just stand here and wait for him.”
“Okay, Roberto. So which way is Diego?”
Roberto takes the flashlight from Daniel and shines it around, as if he might discover a sign in the shape of an arrow that says, “Diego.”
“This way,” he says, pointing in the direction he thinks is away from the river.
They start walking again. Soon the ground under its covering of dead leaves and twigs begins to get mushy, and puddles of water appear.
“Shit,” Daniel says, “are we walking into a swamp?”
Within a dozen steps their boots are sinking into the muck.
“I’m not going any further, Roberto! If we get lost in a swamp we’ll never get out.”
Roberto directs the dim beam of the flashlight to the left and the right.
“Maybe we can go around it.”
“I think we should go back the way we came.”
“Toward El Encanto? Right into the arms of the Black Jaguars?”
“Maybe we can sneak down to the river. Steal a boat.”
“The river’s crawling with soldiers and paramilitaries. We’ll never get out that way.”
“And we’ll never get out trying to cross the jungle! It’s crazy to think we can! There’s a hundred different ways for us to die here! Maybe we’ll run into those Indians that kill white people on sight, they’ll chase us down and spear us like pigs!”
Roberto swings the flashlight to the left. “I think it looks a little better that way.”
The mud pulls at his boots as he walks.
“I’m not going with you!” says Daniel.
“Fine. Stay here.”
“Then leave me my flashlight!”
But Roberto just keeps walking. Daniel curses at him and hurries to catch up. They haven’t gone far when Roberto hears splashing noises off to their right. He moves the flashlight and sees a black expanse of water with trees sticking out of it. Seven or eight pairs of luminous eyes are looking back at him. Two of the eyes are gliding along slowly and he can see they’re affixed to a long dark body.
“Jesus,” says Daniel.
Suddenly one of the caimans lunges at something, sending up a sheet of water. Both Roberto and Daniel take a startled step back.
“This is fucked up!” says Daniel.
“Yeah.”
They stand there and stare into the swamp.
“You have any water?” says Roberto.
Daniel nods. He takes a plastic bottle out of one of his vest
pockets, drinks from it, then passes it to Roberto. He drinks the rest of it.
“Is this it?”
“Yes.”
Roberto tosses the empty bottle on the ground. Something about the eyes of the monstrous creatures in the dark water makes him fear this is the end. Daniel is right; it’s crazy to think they can traverse the jungle to Diego’s by themselves.
He moves the light around, trying to determine where to go, and there it is: the gigantic trunk of a tree with tall, twisted roots. It’s not ten meters away. He walks over to it, cranes his neck and points the flashlight up. The tree disappears into the darkness; it could reach the sky, for all he can see.
“Daniel, do you remember Roque hitting a tree with his machete? It was a ceiba tree. Like this one.”
“Yeah? What about it?”
“Do you remember how loud the sound was? Roque said if you’re ever lost in the jungle and you want someone to find you, you should hit this tree!”
Daniel comes over to the tree. Puts his hand on the trunk, and rubs it. There’s a glimmer of hope in his eyes.
“Okay,” he says. “So let’s bang the shit out of this motherfucker!”
They don’t have a machete or anything else to hit it with, so they look around for something. Lots of limbs and branches are lying on the ground, but things rot fast in the jungle and they’d probably shatter with the first blow.
“What about this?” says Daniel.
He’s holding up a sturdy-looking piece of wood about a meter and a half long. Roberto takes it from him, and hefts it. It seems like it might do the trick.
“Let’s try it,” he says, and hands the flashlight to Daniel.
“So what if someone shows up,” Daniel says, “and it’s not Roque?”
“I guess you better make sure your gun’s loaded.”
Roberto swings the wood and strikes the trunk. The sound produced is nowhere near as loud as what Roque made.
“Harder, Roberto,” says Daniel. “You have to hit it harder.”
He swings again, as hard as he can, and the results are better this time. And now he gets in a rhythm, swinging every couple of seconds. Soon he’s dripping with sweat and gasping for air. Daniel asks him if he wants him to take over but Roberto shakes his head, it feels impossible to stop until Roque shows up or he drops dead from exhaustion. But after a while he forgets all about Roque, it’s just him in the jungle with his piece of wood, it’s like he’s summoning some spirit or primeval being that’s been living here since the beginning, and who knows what it will want to do with him when it arrives?
“Roberto!” he hears Daniel say, but he keeps hitting the ceiba tree. “Roberto! Stop!”
He looks over at Daniel. Standing next to him is Roque. He’s a matterof-fact presence in his Chicago Bulls baseball cap, holding his machete and a flashlight.
“Where are the others?” he says.
“They’re dead, Roque,” says Roberto.
Roque looks stunned.
“Dead?”
“I’m sorry, Roque,” Daniel says, putting his hand on Roque’s shoulder. He nods vaguely.
“We should go,” he says. “They’re nearby.”
But there’s something Roberto needs to do first. He drops the piece of wood and takes Daniel’s flashlight. He shines it around till it picks up the dull gleam of the empty water bottle. He walks over to it and picks it up. Lina would not have wanted him to leave it as trash in the forest.
One day until the day Roberto is to die
Pale moths float by, like ghosts that need to be gone before the sunrise. He hears dripping water, then realizes it’s an oropendola. Other birds, bestirred by the dawn, begin to sing their songs and utter their cries.
Roque walks ahead of him with his machete, while Daniel is dragging along behind him. They have not stopped walking all night. Hardly a word’s been said. The closest thing to a conversation was when Roberto heard a growling in the darkness and asked Roque if it was a jaguar, and he replied no, it was a monkey pretending to be a jaguar to keep the jaguars away.
They go down a slope into a hollow filled with thick white mist. Their legs below their knees disappear as they walk through it. Roberto looks at Roque eerily drifting over the mist and wonders if his spirit girl that lives in the trees helped him out last night.
Roberto’s passed into some state beyond exhaustion. It’s like he’s lost the last shred of himself and has become an automaton programmed to go forward, only forward. As the night fades from the jungle, he feels no pleasure that it’s gone, just a dull wonder that he’s still alive.
In a small clearing on a little hill, Roque calls a halt, and they all sit down. Roque has water and food in his pack. Roberto and Daniel tear open cellophane packages of raisins and nuts, while Roque eats a tin of sardines.
“How much longer to Diego’s?” asks Daniel.
Roque shrugs. “Two hours?”
Roberto knows Roque has a slippery sense of time, and things usually take “two hours” with him.
“What happened to your finger?” he says to Roberto.
Roberto tells him about Colonel Luna, and he nods.
“He was tall and had very light skin, yes?”
Roberto’s surprised. “You saw him?”
And now Roque tells him what happened after Roberto and Lina left the house at El Encanto.
He, Daniel, Quique, and Ernesto rested. After about twenty minutes, he heard what he was certain was a gunshot. The others were dozing and didn’t hear it, but everyone trusted Roque’s ears. They all jumped up and grabbed their packs and also Roberto’s and Lina’s and took off for the lake. Halfway there they ran into Jota. After Jota’s encounter with Roberto and Lina in the library, for the fun of it he’d followed them to the lake. He was spying on them from the trees as Roberto danced with Lina on the pavilion, and then he saw the arrival of the Black Jaguars and Roberto struggling with Lina over her gun and the gun going off. At that point, he turned and ran back toward the house to warn the others. They got to the lake just in time to see Roberto and Lina being led away as prisoners. They followed at a distance and saw them entering the guesthouse along with their five guards.
Quique called his superiors in the TARV on Lina’s sat phone. He was hoping they could send help, but he was told they were on their own, and they were ordered to attempt a rescue under cover of darkness. When night fell, Jota sneaked up to the guesthouse and looked through a window and saw Roberto sitting in a chair and Lina on the couch.
“Wait a second,” says Roberto. “Jota was looking at us through a window?”
Daniel laughs. “Yeah, does that kid have balls or what? He said all your guards were sitting around drinking and watching television.”
“I’m surprised they let you come,” Roberto says to Daniel.
Daniel pops some peanuts into his mouth. “Well, they didn’t want to.”
“Daniel told them to fuck themselves, he was coming,” Roque says.
“We were going toward the guesthouse,” Daniel says, “and we heard a scream and we thought it was Lina. There was a guard outside. Quique killed him with a knife. But we were too late for Lina.”
“What happened to Lina?” says Roque.
Roberto tells him.
“And what happened to Ernesto and Quique?”
Roberto tells him that too. His eyes well up, and he is silent. Roberto asks him what happened at the lake.
He says shortly after Daniel and Ernesto and Quique left, he heard voices and saw a flashlight. He managed to carry all the packs into the trees and hide there, and then five or six Black Jaguars walked up. They were drunk and talking loud and laughing. They went out on the pavilion, and then Roque heard gunfire. It got louder and Roque could see the flashes of it through the trees. He kept expecting Ernesto, Quique, and Daniel to return with Roberto and Lina, but no one came. The gunfire passed the lake and moved toward the pasture, and Roque followed in the darkness. He crossed the pasture and then heard gunfire coming from
the sugarcane field. He saw the Black Jaguars were searching the field. He was hoping that at least some of the five others had been able to escape into the jungle. He entered the sugarcane and came out the other side. He went into the jungle and tried to find them or at least some trace of them but there was nothing and he was afraid they were all dead, and then he heard the banging on the ceiba tree. He hoped to find all of them there, but he was glad the mother tree had saved at least Daniel and Roberto.
Daniel lights a cigarette. Monkeys move in the treetops. Daniel takes one of his cameras out of the bag, aims it upwards.
“Thank god we still have this,” says Roberto, indicating the camera.
Daniel lowers the camera and looks at it. “That’s right, Roberto. We still have what we came for.”
“But I’ve lost my notebook. And my voice recorder. I got some great interviews yesterday, and now they’re gone.”
“So how bad is it you don’t have them?”
Roberto shrugs. “I can still write my story. It just won’t be as good.”
Roque goes into his pack, pulls out Roberto’s blue spiral notebook and the ziplock bag containing both his cellphone and his voice recorder. He hands them to Roberto.
Roberto looks at them. He fights the urge to burst into tears. Three people have died for this.
“Thank you, Roque,” is all he says.
* * *
They’re walking through the swampy area near Diego’s house. Roque points out some vertical grooves on the trunk of a tree.
“A jaguar was sharpening his claws,” he says.
“Was it recent?” asks Roberto.
He touches the grooves. “Yes. The scratch marks haven’t dried out yet.”
Roberto looks around. He hasn’t given up hope of seeing a jaguar. He wonders if it’s watching him now with its savage golden eyes.
“Do you smell that?” asks Roque.
“What?” says Daniel.
“Smoke.”
Neither Daniel nor Roberto does. They continue through the forest, under the great, still trees, past the gleaming pools of water, across the planks and the slippery logs. And now Roberto smells it too.
