I had been awake for a few minutes contemplating a dilemma: I had to pee. The outhouse was down a long, dark path through the jungle brush. Finally my bladder had reached a point where I needed to ask for help.
“Mommy,” I whispered. Her bunk was next to mine. Nothing. “Mommy,” I tried again.
“What is it, Amy?” Suzanne, on my other side, asked, sounding groggy.
“I have to go to the bathroom.”
“Now?” she asked.
“What’s the matter?” Mom woke up.
“I have to go,” I said. I had waited until I was desperate, and now I needed to hurry.
“Are you sure?” she asked, her voice thick with sleep. I heard Suzanne’s sheet rustle as she turned over to go back to sleep.
“Mom, I really gotta go.”
With her flashlight, Mom and I made our way outside to the other side of the bunk hut, then to a smaller hut where inside two toilets sat on a raised platform. An outhouse of the regal sort.
Holding my breath from the stench, I hesitated when I reached the throne. Marty had told me snakes lived in the toilets.
“You go first, Mommy,” I said. Why not sacrifice my mother before risking my own life?
“I don’t need to go, Amy.” She wiggled her flashlight beam over the wooden seat to the detritus below.
“How will I know if there are snakes or not?” I stayed a safe distance away, but my bladder did not like this new plan, so I hopped on alternating feet in my flip-flops.
“Here, I’ll shine the flashlight on the toilet. Snakes don’t like light, so they’ll stay away.” She waved her flashlight around.
“What if the snake is inside the toilet?”
“I’ll look first.” She leaned over and shone her beam directly into the stinky filth. A little green frog no bigger than my thumbnail jumped out from behind the seat, and we both let out little screams.
“There are no snakes, Amy.” Her tone was now irritated. But I still didn’t feel right about sitting on that dark cavity.
“Are you sure?”
“I thought you had to go, Amy?” The beam of her flashlight dipped.
“I do! I’m just ascared of snakes, that’s all.” I tried to convince myself. I knew I couldn’t go back to bed, I’d wet the mattress if I fell asleep, and I could hardly hold it in any longer. I thought I might wet my pants right there.
“I’m losing my patience,” Mom said. “I’m going to go back to our hut.” She pointed her light toward the door and made to leave.
“NO! Wait. I’ll go now. I think it’s okay.” I wiggled my panties down.
She shone the flashlight for me. I tinkled as fast as I could, considering I was so clenched for fear a snake would bite me midstream. Finally I finished, hopped off the seat, and pulled up my panties.
I tugged my nightgown back over my bum, and we stepped off the platform and back into the sweet, fresh air of the jungle. The sounds around us had died down. We stepped out into silence. Then to my right, a sound like a flutter of wings broke the quiet like quills clacking together or a maybe a low purr.
We stopped dead still. “What is it?” I whispered to Mom, but she didn’t answer. My ears piqued. The jungle moisture dripped around us but otherwise, silence still.
Then, invisible in the dark, it hummed close enough we could reach out and touch it. This time it was clear the sound was not a low purr, but a guttural growl. I thought I next would feel the warmth of its breath. I waited for Mom to shine her flashlight in its eyes or try to freeze the animal in the beam. Instead, she leaned into me, pushing against my shoulder, trying to get closer.
I wanted to whisper “Mom” again, to get direction, to be reassured. I wanted her to snatch my hand, irritated I was so unnecessarily scared. I wanted her to walk me back to the bunk. But I got nothing except heavy breathing on my earlobe. “Do something!” I wanted to scream. This was not the time to be making loud noises that might startle jungle animals, I surmised.
The click click and growl, like a gas burner catching flame, came again, and now I was certain it was in the underbrush next to the doorway to the outhouse. My heart beat inside my eardrums. My mom’s weight leaned harder. The growl, long, low, and ceaseless.
Self-preservation is instinctual, but shrewdness and whom to trust is learned. There is no real protection, my dad had said. I didn’t have time to wait or to think about what we should do. I just did it. I grabbed Mom’s hand, and with a little tug to get her to budge, we ran.
My flashlight beam bounced around on the path’s dark loam in front of us. Tiny, silent frogs hopped out of our way. The path narrowed, and I let Mom run in front. I held her hand tight, her knuckles crunching against mine like she did when scared. I pushed against her lower back with my palm to rush her. Faster, I wanted to tell her, but was afraid to make a noise more than the padding of our feet. She picked up the pace but seemed drugged or in a trance. I pushed harder. I would catch her if she fell, I thought. I was there for her. I pushed and pushed. Neither of us looked back. We just ran, and we didn’t stop until we’d passed through the entrance to the bunkhouse.
“Was it a lion?” I asked as we stepped inside the door.
“I don’t know,” Mom whispered, breathing heavy, “but it was awfully close.” She still held my hand, tightly. I walked her to her bunk. I wiped the chill off my back.
As we passed my dad’s bed, in a hushed voice because the rest of the gringos were sleeping, he asked why we were out of breath.
“We heard a lion roar near the potties,” I said.
“There aren’t any lions in the South American jungle,” he said.
“Whatever it was,” my mother said to my dad, “it was close, and it sounded hungry.”
“If it were going to make you its dinner, it wouldn’t have announced its arrival,” my dad replied.
“It was scary, Daddy!” I scream-whispered to him, because he clearly didn’t understand.
“Maybe it was a jaguar or a puma,” he said, sitting up.
“Do jaguars come out at night?” I asked. I had to speak in voz alta, because I was back at my own bunk, climbing in, and he was two bunks away. The rest of the room stirred.
“Yes,” my father said, falling into his didactic role. “They sleep in the daytime and come out at night to hunt.”
“Quit talking, Amy,” Mom said, although it was pretty clear she meant both me and Dad. “You need to get back to sleep before morning.”
“I can’t sleep if a jaguar is outside.” Really? Could anyone?
“They don’t like the taste of little girls who eat Froot Loops,” Marty said. Now we were all awake. The other tourists must have hated my chatty family.
“Well, everyone else is trying to sleep,” Mom snapped. I would suffer the consequences if I said one more word.
I tucked in my mosquito netting all around me. The growl we’d heard still rattled in my head, along with Mom hiding behind me. I wondered what would have happened if I had waited for her to make up her mind on what to do? I lay down, my head on the tiny pillow, staring through the opaque netting at the dark ceiling where other creatures lurked. I could hear everyone else’s throaty breathing, and I knew I would not fall asleep.
Passing the time, I considered all the different ways I could have died between the bunkhouse and the toilets. What if the jaguar did eat everyone but left me? I’d have to go live with my grandmother in Texas, and that made me start to cry because there was nothing on her TV except As the World Turns. At least, that’s what she’d told me.
“Did you really see a jaguar?” my mom asks me on the phone from Texas.
“No,” I tell her. Because I never did see it. Neither of us did.
I google Yagua and find they are the experts and artists of the blowgun. They invented the poison curare made from a strychnine plant and venom. I read about how they are losing their language and culture because of the encroachment of the white man. I picture the blowgun that now hangs over the basement window in Texas
as a curtain rod.
My dad bought the blowgun that he was unable to lift to his mouth, along with a quiver of darts and a nutshell of poison. A dollar bill goes a long way in making up for humiliating moments, the gringo recovery method.
Mom turned to him and said, “I don’t know where you think you’re going to put that thing.”
So he handed it to my brother and made him carry it.
A jaguar pelt with a bullet hole in the rump hangs on the wall opposite the blowgun.
We had hunted crocodile with flashlights but weren’t the gringos who hunted the Amazon black caiman to near extinction. Is that just because we didn’t live a lifestyle that included crocodile boots and purses? Or had we just not been handed that opportunity as we had the Chancay pots?
I ask my dad if he hunted the jaguar that hung in the basement. Did he shoot it? He had been a hunter when we lived in the States, a deer every winter for our freezer. Javelina, pheasant, quail, he was a good shot.
“It was a gift,” he says. “The jaguar came into our camp. Would have eaten one of us. One of my men shot it. He had the skin tanned and presented it to me, el jefe, the next time I went to the jungle.”
Once upon a time there lived a princess whose father, El Jefe, received offerings. Because of these offerings that weren’t always his to take, a curse was placed on this family, and until that curse is broken, the little princess will live all alone.
The Butcher Gets Bigger
History is moving pretty quickly these days, and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts.
—Ian Fleming, author
I don’t know what prompted him this time. I wasn’t probing. I didn’t even bring up South America, or did I? I guess I did inadvertently.
“Use dynamite,” I tell my dad.
“Where am I going to get dynamite?” he asks.
“You used to have it all the time when you worked on the surveying crews. Don’t you have any spare sticks lying around?”
This is what I think prompted him. It was true, what I said. They used dynamite in his job. We had spools of copper wire as big as Quaker Oats canisters in our cabinet over the washing machine, where we kept the gift wrap. The copper wire was used for fuses, but sometimes we used it for ribbon when wrapping presents or for better radio reception on the shortwave. I remember tablets of paper kept by our phones for phone messages, promotional advertising for Austin Powder Co. with its red diamond-shaped logo on the graph paper, supplied to geologists like my dad. We used the pads for notes to others in the household, like, “Gone to the grocery store.” Or “I’ll be home around five.” Or my favorite, “If I’m not home when you get here, aliens kidnapped me.” The latter one—left by my mother—is another story for later.
I have called home, just a regular check-in call. My dad’s retired now, but he doesn’t just sit around watching TV. He is preparing to build a greenhouse.
“Your dad has been reading the instruction book for three days. I don’t know if he’s ever going to build it. I think he’s just going to read the instructions,” my mom said before she put him on the phone.
He bought a kit to build a greenhouse on the back of their property. “Should have built it twenty years ago when I could still bend over,” he jokes. They retired on seven acres in Texas Hill Country, where in the springtime bluebonnets blanket the backyard. The wide, spiny, five-fingered leaves break through rocks and thin layers of topsoil, and the spires of purple flowers whorl upward.
“Just the fact that you’re eighty-three and can still drive the seventy miles to San Antonio to buy the kit is pretty impressive,” I tell him.
His problem, he says, is he can’t find a level place where the construction of the greenhouse would be feasible. “I guess it will go by the fish pond,” he says. He built a fish pond twenty years ago, and a green heron comes regularly and eats all his koi. So he just keeps buying more of the giant goldfish at the pet store. “All the rock keeps me from finding a place level or that can be leveled.” Hill Country sits on a dome of granite. The topsoil is thin, and underneath is solid granite and limestone. This is why nothing grows except sage, cactus, and bluebonnets.
I am joking about the dynamite, but I’d run into a similar problem with how to build greenhouses on hillsides, which made me think of it. About fifteen years ago I worked on a Bolivian maternal and child health program’s garden project for the villages. I tell my dad about the similar problem we had and how the villagers solved it. So I’ve brought up South America, but it is the Latin America of my adulthood, not my childhood. It is he who takes it back to that other time.
I tell him how successful our gardens were in the villages around Cochabamba, the same town we had lived in when I was ten. “In Quillacollo our outdoor gardens grew so successfully we decided to expand to Potosí,” I said. Potosí sits at thirteen thousand feet above sea level. The mountain was at one time the richest mountain in the world. “Made of” silver, the Spaniards said. “One is worth a potosí” means one is worth a million. Many Spanish miners died from the unfit conditions and the extreme plundering of the silver metal, so they used local Incans to do the menial work, until they gradually began to die off too.
When I was a kid, my dad and I had visited a museum in downtown Potosí, a small museum, no bigger than my living room. He would take me to museums and point out things like the mummies in glass cases or in this instance the wooden cart used to transport the dead bodies out from the mines. As an adult working on the projects in Bolivia, I found the facts, the statistics, more bewildering than when I was a kid. Back then the idea of a wooden cart, something to ride around on, intrigued me more. But the importation of slaves, thirty thousand slaves in 1603 from Spain to replenish the depleted human labor, this stabs at my memory now on the phone call, of how the Spaniards then began to import African slaves when the Incans died off. The Africans met with the same fate—the wooden cart as transportation out of the mine.
But I digress from the project and how it applies to my dad’s greenhouse conundrum. Because of the cold temperatures at thirteen thousand feet of elevation, when we were setting up the garden project, we realized we would have to turn the gardens into a greenhouse project instead.
“On the mountain, we had the same problem—finding a level spot,” I relay to my dad on the other end of the phone. “But the locals found a solution,” I tell him. “It wasn’t the solution that we encouraged, but it worked.”
“What was that?” he asks, hoping it will help him out in Kerrville, Texas.
“The miners all have access to dynamite,” I say, “so the families who wanted a garden just blew out a big chunk of the mountain behind their houses. We provided the clear plastic tarp, and with some wooden poles, they built their greenhouses right up against the wall of the mountain. Cerro de Potosí.”
The one fact that I remember most of all about Potosí, when I visited it as an adult, was that due to all the mining, all the tunnels built inside, all the heavy metals that have been removed (the silver is depleted, and now just tin is mined there), the mountain is expected to implode eventually. We were told this as we donned those mining caps with headlamps, just before we hiked inside to see the miners’ working conditions. Or maybe the memory that sticks with me more is the little girl, maybe ten years old, who told me she had been into the village of Potosí only once. Her biggest surprise: the cars were so big! From the mountaintop, they look so small, she thought she could hold them in her hand. Her perspective switched when brought down to reality. She had never been down from the mine before that time.
The miners start work at daybreak with no breakfast. They come out about fifteen hours later and have potato soup for dinner. They chew coca leaves to suppress their appetite. This is why we needed to help them get the vitamins from their greenhouse gardens.
“Dynamite, Dad, that’s all you need to build your greenhouse.”
Somehow the conversation shifts. Was it the dynamite? I don’t know, but the conversatio
n shifts to an old memory of his.
“The fellow at the party by the record player, he was changing the record. I remember the record player,” my dad begins. I know the story instantly, because he has told it often. But this time it doesn’t so much change as grow larger.
“I went up to him while he stood at the record player. I put my arm around him to pat him on the back.” I know this part too. He will feel a gun. “My hand felt the holster under his sport coat. He wore a gun, concealed.”
I wonder, didn’t others find this gun when they patted their friend on the back too? But I don’t ask this because it’s the story of my father and the butcher.
“‘Jim,’ he said, ‘we’ll talk later.’ So, I didn’t ask any questions.”
This is when the story starts to not change but fill in. In my mind, Tom Jones is the record on the reel-to-reel tape player. “What’s New Pussycat?” This is my own creation. How I remember their parties. Somewhat lascivious. Husbands in turtlenecks, flirting with other men’s wives. The wives in low-cut, long dresses, wearing thick gold chains around their necks, the gold rope as thick as my #2 pencils at school, with gold Peruvian ten-sole coins as pendants. Green lime daiquiris filled punch bowls, golden scotch swirled in silver-rimmed low-ball glasses. They drank, they danced, and sometimes one of the men would ask ten-year-old me to dance too. We’d shimmy and wiggle on the dance floor, where the coffee table had been scooched out of the way and throw rugs had been rolled up to reveal the slick marble sashaying surface. I would have a sip of daiquiri, and if I were good, I could stay downstairs until the end. Or until I fell asleep on the couch.
“Later,” my dad continues his story, “I was standing across the room, and he crossed over as though he were bringing me a drink.” Was he bringing you a drink? I want to ask. Was he bringing you a drink, but you didn’t need a drink, but he used it as an excuse? “He said, ‘Tomorrow come by my place.’ He was the meat cutter. He had a shop. He and his wife.”
“Sure, I remember,” I say. “He was the butcher we all went to.” His shop was down the street from our house. A small bodega. My mom bought meat from him. All the American wives did. As part of the agrarian reform of the nationalization policies of President Velasco in 1969, meat was sold only two weeks out of every month. We would have to buy enough meat in those two weeks to freeze and keep for the entire month.
When We Were Ghouls Page 21
