When We Were Ghouls

by Amy E. Wallen

  I slip-slided down the big staircase, rounding the corners like a race car on just one wheel. At the bottom, he squeezed me tight and let me stand next to him at the bar.

  A loneliness permeates my memories of Peru. My drafty family who was neither here nor there. They were lost to me not just in the physical sense but in an even harder to understand way. They were gone, but not forgotten. They were there, then they weren’t. We were not the people we once were. None of us knew our way, so we made it up as we went along. Like the deer in the headlights, when I thought I saw something move I’d run right toward it.

  In August 2016 I’m attracted by a headline in The New Yorker, “An Isolated Tribe Emerges from the Rain Forest.” In the first paragraph it references where my dad worked, “Madre de Dios—a vast jungle surrounded by an even vaster wilderness, frequented by illegal loggers, miners, narco-traffickers and a few adventurers.” The article mentions other minerals, not oil, but I know it’s part of the referenced desecration. But the piece is about the mysterious people called the Mashco Pico who live in this jungle, one of about one hundred isolated indigenous peoples. When a farmer and river guide was tending his vegetable patch and a bamboo arrow flew out of the forest and pierced his heart, “the incident generated lurid news stories about savage natives attacking peaceable settlers.” This happened in 2015.

  I pick up the phone and call my dad. It’s happening all over again—a story I know from the seventies revisiting me in the here and now.

  “Do you remember the guy who was shot with an arrow in the Amazon?” I ask.

  “Oh yeah,” my dad veers off. “Those natives hunted naked. There were four or five tribes who had never had contact with civilization before. They couldn’t swim, so they never crossed the river.” His details are repeated in the article. I want him to tell me the story he’s told so many times before about his oil company crew member shot by an arrow, a barbed arrow, so that where it pierced the man in the shoulder the only way to remove it was to pull it the rest of the way through. They cut both ends off the arrow, carried the man miles back to where they’d left the “chopper,” and helicoptered him back to get medical attention. Probably to Puerto Maldonado, also mentioned in the article as the town founded in 1902 by Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald, immortalized as the Rubber King made famous by Werner Herzog’s film, Fitzcarraldo. “[T]he rubber barons [were] the equivalent . . . of modern-day narco-traffickers.”

  “Puerto Maldonado,” my dad says, “was a little village, but the locals were finding gold in the river, panning at the water’s edge. I met a fellow in a saloon who had nuggets the size of my knuckles. I told him, go up the mountain, find sandstone, you’ll find a vein, and you can mine it and have all the gold you want.” My dad, the geologist.

  Jon Lee Anderson, the New Yorker author, writes, “Eight decades after Fitzcarrald’s rampage, I took another trip, on the Madre de Dios, where a gold boom had recently begun.” This would have been 1974, which was when my dad would have been there too.

  I struggle to reconcile the stories, the adventures, the tales I both witnessed firsthand and was also so close to—am a direct descendant of—with the reality of why we were even there. I read, “Opening up the jungle has made Peru one of the world’s largest exporters of gold (as well as the second-largest producer of cocaine)” and “Alan Garcia, [Peruvian] President from 2006 to 2011, insisted the isolated tribes were a fantasy devised by environmentalists to stop development; an official in the state oil company compared them to the Loch Ness monster.”

  The Loch Ness monster, I think, that’s what I feel is the response when I tell our stories. But it’s the reconciling with why we were there that makes me hesitate to believe my own memories. Or want to believe. Or is it? I hold back because I feel a sense of this, “I have this great story to tell you, so incredible you won’t believe it.” But the response from my listeners is not one of disbelief, but instead, “Why were you even there?” Because we were hideous people, is what I want to say. As though we killed the Loch Ness monster and are proudly displaying her scaly skin on our wall, her head mounted and hanging in our entry.

  “Did you find oil?” I ask my dad.

  “It wouldn’t have been worth it,” my dad replies. “The Peruvian government wanted us to partner with a communist oil company. So we left.”

  Mr. Anderson finishes his article with a description of flying out of Puerto Maldonado. “As the airplane banked over the jungle, I could see the great river, looping like liquid silver below. Then, for several long minutes, the jungle disappeared, replaced by an expanse of giant craters. The scale of destruction was breathtaking: it was reminiscent of aerial photographs of North Vietnam after it was carpet-bombed by B-52s. I realized that I was looking at the goldfields of Madre de Dios.”

  And another memory pops into my head of watching a National Geographic documentary on TV with my dad a few years ago. As an aerial view of the Nazca Lines, geoglyphs from 500 BC to 500 AD in southern Peru, came on the screen, the narrator mentioned how the narco-traffickers had caused destruction in certain areas where they had driven their vehicles across the UNESCO World Heritage site. From his recliner, my dad proclaimed, “It wasn’t the drug dealers, it was our crews.”

  I have Loch Ness monster blood on my hands.

  It was during this time that the trip to Ancon, the pre-Colombian necropolis grave digging occurred. Our house on Avenida del Prado filled with the pots and telas, when the curse was brought home. And in our pantry, our very large pantry, sat the prince’s skull eye level with me.

  Black Magic and a Guitar Solo

  Three chords and the truth. . . .

  —Harlan Howard, musician

  The seed chart fiasco over, I now had to worry about the new assignment: building a musical instrument. When Miss Hamlin had described the assignment, she said we could either build and invent our own instrument or bring something from home if we couldn’t create our own. I didn’t trust that and knew I had to make up for the seed chart. She said we’d have a band made up of our classmates, and we’d play our instruments. This, I knew, would be when I’d be made a fool again, and I was determined not to let it happen. Hope!

  Dad was home from the jungle and sat at the head of the table, Mom and I on either side of him. When he was gone, which was most of the time, we ate at the booth in the kitchen, and Juana ate with us. I much preferred it when Dad was home. We would spend the whole evening filling Dad in on all the latest goings-on in our lives.

  “I have to make an instrument for school,” I said, cutting into the boiled potatoes and smearing the smoky papas ala huancaina sauce around my plate.

  “What kind of instrument?” he asked, serving up a big dollop on his fork. We both loved that creamy sauce on starchy potatoes.

  “Her teacher is always giving these impossible assignments,” Mom said. That felt like Mom was on my side, that Miss Hamlin really was as mean as I thought.

  “I want to make a really good instrument, something better than everybody else’s,” I said to my father. This time, Miss Hamlin be damned, I would get it right.

  He looked at the ceiling for a moment, exaggeratedly thinking, teasing me. “Name any musical instrument you want, and we’ll make it.”

  That seemed ludicrous. You can’t just make anything at all. But I went for it. “A piano!” When we had lived in Nevada, my mom refinished an old piano, and it sat on our front porch. Suzanne had taken lessons, and I wished I could have too, but we moved before I was old enough.

  “Maybe something a little more portable,” my father said. He put another forkful of the yellow potato in his mouth. I had to pause to think of another instrument I loved as much as the piano.

  That’s when my mother took the opportunity to bring up what she wanted to talk about.

  “Do you know how intelligent Juana is?” my mother said. We both looked at her wondering where this was going. “She knows nine languages. She says she’s learned them all just from the families she’s wo
rked with. She picks them up that easily. German; Italian; Spanish, of course; English; Quechua, her native tongue; and even some Arabic.”

  That was only seven languages. I wanted to point out Juana was lying. But it wouldn’t do me any good. To say anything derogatory or against Juana meant I would get the evil eye from Mom, an indication she was disappointed in my attitude.

  “I’m going to help her get to the nine states,” Mom was telling Dad.

  I had been hearing about Juana’s desire to move to the United States for months. Everyone wanted to move to the United States. What made her any different? It’s not that great, I wanted to tell her. Everything’s expensive. And everyone’s arrogant.

  Dad listened, at least partly, but I could tell he was confused. He looked at me and raised his eyebrows as though we were in cahoots. I was trying to come up with a more portable instrument.

  “Nine states?” Dad ate the eggplant served with the aji de gallina. I hated eggplant. Mushy and seedy and stringy. Mom cooked. Juana didn’t cook. It was never clear what Juana did.

  “That’s what she calls it,” Mom said, “The United States. The Nine States. Isn’t that cute?”

  “Maybe she needs to learn how to say it before she can go there.” Dad turned his gaze to his plate.

  He and I laughed a little, but not so much that Mom would do any more than look at me sideways. She ate slower than any of us and still had her whole first serving left on her plate, while Dad and I had almost finished.

  “She wants to go so badly. She almost had a visa with the last family she worked for, but it didn’t go through at the last minute, and they had to move so she was left behind. I’m going to help her.” Mom spoke fast now. Maybe she didn’t want the story’s holes to be too visible. Her tone said she would be going through with this, even if my father wouldn’t agree to it.

  My dad, like me, didn’t ever want to cross Mom, but he would try. “Mart, do you know how hard it is to get a Peruvian to the United States? The paperwork involved? She has to have a sponsor.”

  This was when her speech turned prepared, as though she had anticipated my dad’s retort. “We can sponsor her,” Mom said.

  My father took another big bite of the chicken. “We can’t sponsor her; we don’t live in the States.”

  On the other hand, I thought, if she found a way to the States, then she’d leave and go live with another family. I’d like that.

  “I’ll find someone who will be her sponsor, then we can adopt her when we move back.” Mom was whispering now.

  Adopt her! Like, as in, her photo would hang on the staircase wall in line with Suzanne and Marty and me?

  “Why are you whispering?” Dad asked Mom.

  “I don’t want her feelings to be hurt.” Mom motioned toward the swinging door between the kitchen and the dining room. No doubt Juana had her ear to the other side of the door listening to every word.

  “Who would you get to sponsor her?” Dad asked. I was rooting for him to win, although he rarely did in conversations like this.

  “I’ll find someone. I was thinking maybe the Conrads in Nevada.” She cut into her slice of eggplant with the side of her fork, struggling with the tough skin.

  “No one in Ely is going to want a maid.”

  “She’s smarter than a maid,” Mom said. “She could settle in with maybe a nice Mormon family in Salt Lake.”

  “She’s not that smart,” my dad said.

  I was keeping score and my father just got a point, at least on my scoreboard.

  Mom chewed her eggplant slowly, staring at her plate, thinking of what she could say that would convince my father. I tried to conceal the smile on my face.

  “Fine,” Mom declared, her fork clattering against the china plate. “I’ll do it myself. I’ll go to the embassy.” And she rose from the table and took her full plate into the kitchen to eat with Juana.

  “I think we made her mad,” my father said. I knew whose side I needed to take. Dad would go back to the jungle, but I’d still be here with Mom and Juana. I would be better off not disagreeing with Mom. So I changed the subject back to me.

  “How about a guitar?” I asked. Guitar was my second favorite instrument after piano. Mom kept buying me reed pan flutes at the market, but I didn’t have the lung capacity.

  “That sounds like it could work.” He seemed happy to change the subject.

  “How can we make a guitar?” I said. Strips of aji de gallina, spicy hen, hung from my fork. I didn’t want to get my hopes up until I knew for certain that I could have an instrument as cool as a guitar.

  “Come on,” Dad said. “Let’s get started.”

  As we passed through the warm kitchen, Juana stood next to the sink with a dishtowel in her hand pretending to wash the dishes. Mom stood next to her, a dishrag in her hand, scrubbing her plate in the sink. They had been talking but went silent the moment we appeared.

  The big old houses in Lima had two kitchens. The warm kitchen was just off the atrium, and sun came in and kept the space warm. The oven sat here, across from the kitchenette sitting area. The second kitchen, really just an extension of the warm one, had a separate set of water faucets, no windows, and led to the shaded patio and into a dark series of rooms. We headed past the cold kitchen to the farthermost back pantry, like a dungeon.

  Mom didn’t look at us, but after my dad passed, Juana gave me a glare that sent a chill through me, a chill colder than the cold kitchen. I hurried to catch up to Dad.

  As we entered the first section of pantry we had to pass the prince’s skull. The same skull that had been tossed out of the grave. He sat eye level to me, so I rarely went back there alone. He’d been stuck in the way back, practically forgotten except by me. The patina silver band encrusted around his forehead, his long hair wrapped around his jawbone, and his big, empty-socket stare resembled Juana’s gaunt face, which sent me lockstep in behind my dad.

  We walked past the canned goods, farther into the depths of the pantry, to a second and darker, danker room, the room inside the room that stayed cold all year. Before refrigeration this pantry system kept perishables fresh. Now Dad kept his tools back there, out of sight. I never ventured into the farthest rooms alone because there was only one line of escape, and it was past the skull. My father yanked the string to turn on the overhead bulb, casting a dull yellow light.

  “How do we make a guitar?” I asked again. Bewildered, I thought he might be teasing me that he wasn’t really going to make a guitar, but something of a lesser quality, and then I’d have to play it so I didn’t hurt his feelings and endure further abasement from my classmates and Mrs. Hamlin. Please, I wished silently, don’t let this be the seed chart all over again.

  My dad filled my arms with a few pieces of plywood, a hammer, and his reel of fishing line. He grabbed a few more items off the top shelf, and we headed back out. As we passed the skull again, I ran ahead so I wouldn’t be behind my father and out of his sight. Back in the daylight of the main kitchen, we piled the supplies on the cold kitchen’s round table. The skull sat just around the corner, one empty eye socket still on us. I scooted around the table out of its sight.

  I watched my father pull out a one-foot scrap of a two-by-four. With wood glue he attached a small, thin shim as a fret, then another at the other end. Then with tiny nails hammered into the flat top end of the wood, he tied the fishing line into tiny slipknots. He spun a helix around his finger, then with a slip and a twist of the transparent line, he slid the viniculum over each nail head. He nailed in an equal number of tiny nails on the opposite end of the wood, then stretched the fishing line tight across the plank, letting it rest on each shim, and tied another braided slipknot.

  “How do you know how to do that?” I asked. I’d never seen complicated ties like that.

  “Learned all my knots from being an Eagle Scout,” my father said as I knelt in the chair next to him and leaned over to watch every braid being stitched. Maybe I should have stayed in Brownies, I thought. “Here
.” He showed me how to wrap my finger, then contort the ligament into a yoke.

  I started to see a guitar of sorts come to life. Now that I knew how to tie a slipknot, I could much more easily get it over the nail head with my smaller fingers, but I couldn’t pull the rosette as tight as he could, so he would do the final tug, then trim the excess fishing line. Together we strung the guitar with four strings.

  Juana stepped out and watched what we were doing, then pretended she wasn’t interested. I ignored her. The skull watched with pity at our mortal tasks.

  “As soon as the glue dries, you have a guitar.” He handed me the two-by-four. “What colors are you going to paint it?”

  Paint it? I hadn’t thought that far. I held it in one hand and plunked at the strings, but the positioning was awkward, and I couldn’t get a good grasp with my little hand. “It’s not working,” I said. “I can’t hold it.” The verge of a whine eked its way up from my throat.

  “It’s a steel guitar,” he said, taking it. “You hold it in your lap like this.” And he placed the board across his knees, plunked at the strings. He plunked out a few more notes, closed his eyes and had “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” or some semblance of its rhythm floating in the air.

  “I want to do it!” I took it back and tried. But all I got was dead notes.

  “Think about the song, sing it in your head, and thrum the strings along with the words.”

  I was intimidated knowing Juana was watching over my shoulder. I tried. I even closed my eyes and swayed as he was doing. Like the hippies in the airport in Rome did when they sat against the wall and played their real guitars. When I got only plonk plonks, I opened my eyes and looked up at my dad.

  “You’ll get it,” he said. “You just have to practice. Now go get your paints, so we can finish.”

  With my watercolors, I painted the wood red and the frets green. A little too Christmassy, I realized, after the paint had dried. Watercolors left the hues muted and more of a stain. But Dad smiled and nodded his head with approval.