Alter

by Jeremy Robinson

  A dream, fading in the periphery of my thoughts slips back into my conscious mind. I was in my parents’ living room, laughing with family, headed for the kitchen. The décor was bright, orange and yellow and brown. Turkeys, red berries, fall leaves. A fire was lit, crackling as a rotisserie turkey rotated over a blue burning Duraflame log.

  That’s…different.

  Then I’m in the kitchen, standing behind Gwen, hand-cranking cranberries in an old-fashioned counter-mounted meat grinder, the red mash dropping in clumps. The smell is tart and familiar. When I was ten, my mother taught me how to use the grinder to make cranberry sauce. It had been my Thanksgiving job until I met Gwen and she did it better. My mouth waters, but not for the sauce being made. My wife dances to music—tribal drums—shifting her hips back and forth.

  I slip up behind her, hands reaching for her waist.

  My fingers work their way beneath the apron, to the soft shirt hugging her slender midriff. She doesn’t react to my presence until my arms are around her and I’m pressed against her back. That’s when she pushes her ass into me and continues her dance.

  I lean into her, slipping my head around her straight black hair.

  Straight black hair?

  I kiss her tan skin, following the line of her strong jaw, searching for her lips.

  She turns to face me, deep brown eyes burrowing into mine, thick lips spreading to receive mine.

  “Ashan…”

  I wake with a start, having slipped fully into the dream again. This time, I open my eyes and try to push myself up. My body aches, everywhere. All I manage to move is my head.

  Take it slow, I think. I’m lucky to be alive. Recovering is going to take a few days.

  If I even have a few days. Mapinguari might know a way across. The jungle is dangerous enough on its own. I’m lucky something hungry didn’t stumble across me while I laid unconscious on the ground.

  My stomach growls as my nose flares. My hunger is being stoked by the smell of roasting meat, and it’s not a lingering dream element. Smoke sifts through the air above me.

  I reach for the machete. It’s missing from my hip. The satchel is gone, too.

  “Welcome back, snake killer.”

  The voice is feminine, tough, and not speaking English.

  My body’s pain isn’t enough to keep me down. I rise with a grunt and find Ashan, alive and well, casually squatting by a fire, where a portion of the anaconda is being roasted.

  She didn’t drown. Given her unruffled demeanor, I don’t think she was even close to drowning. She must have reached the far shore before I started looking for her. Feeling like a fool, I decide not to ask.

  “Good dream?” she asks with a mischievous grin. I’m not sure what she finds funny until she glances down with unabashed interest. I follow her eyes and find myself in the throes of what modern man calls ‘morning wood.’ I’m not sure what Ashan’s people call the phenomenon, and I’m not about to ask.

  I shift my scant garment over myself, and cough-laugh my embarrassment away.

  But she’s not done with me. Not even close.

  Lacking the shame that forces me to cover myself, Ashan waggles her body back and forth like she’s riding me. “Ashan,” she says, impersonating me. “Oh, Ashan.”

  The combination of her sultry movements and my abject horror keep my jaw from closing. “I didn’t…”

  She laughs and rotates the snake, wiping a finger through the juices dripping from its body and licking it off, all without breaking eye contact. “Ashan…more…yes, yes!”

  When I feel like I’m about to pass out from embarrassment, she falls back laughing.

  While Ashan enjoys herself at my expense, I take stock of my body. There’s some bruising, pulled muscles, and the lingering tightness of day-old muscle strain, but everything moves. No bones are broken. I take a deep breath and feel no pain. As far as close encounters with an apex predator go, I fared pretty well.

  The scent of cooking meat sets my stomach growling again. “Is it good?” The question is genuine, but I also hope it will redirect Ashan away from my dreams and their effect on the real world.

  “You’ll have to wait and see,” she says, a wicked smile leaving me to wonder whether or not she’s talking about the snake. My consternation deflates her amusement. “Why are you not happy?”

  “What is there to be happy about?”

  “You’re serious?”

  My silence says I am, but I’m already coming around to her point of view.

  She stokes the fire, sending the flames higher to lick against the serpent’s skin, charring it. Then she stands, with a fire of her own, burning in her eyes. “You survived Mapinguari. And stood defiant before him.” She raises her middle finger as I did in the river. “Fuck you, asshole!”

  I can’t help but smile. She knows the words, understands their meaning, and enjoys using them, but her thick accent, unlike any I’ve heard before, makes them sound more adorable than offensive.

  “You see?” she says at my smile. “You fought the snake and didn’t just survive, you killed it! I have never seen such things. No one in all the tribes has witnessed such things.”

  “People don’t defy Mapinguari?” I ask, my mood lifting.

  “And live?” She lets the question answer mine.

  “Well, it is an asshole.”

  Ashan covers her mouth, stifling uproarious laughter. I can’t help but join her.

  “And now it knows your strength,” she says, and she grows suddenly serious. “Why did you remain in the water?”

  I sit in silence, not wanting to answer.

  “I heard you shout my name. By the time I arrived, you were severing the snake’s head. Throwing it at Mapinguari was…foolish, but I enjoyed it. But why risk your life against the snake when you were already exhausted?”

  She settles in to wait for an answer when it becomes clear I don’t want to give her one.

  “You will not eat until you tell me,” she says.

  “Can’t we just enjoy the rest of today?”

  “You will enjoy very little,” she says, “unless you speak.”

  “For fuck’s sake. Ugh. I…I thought you were drowning. I thought you were under the water. When I killed the snake, when I threw its head, I wasn’t being defiant. I was enraged.”

  “Because I was dead.”

  I nod.

  Her smile fades. Using my machete, she cuts off a strip of meat and carries it over to me. She squats down, steaming meat skin-side down on the dirty blade. “Scrape it over your teeth and the meat will come free.”

  I do as instructed, filling my mouth with warm meat. It has the consistency of dark chicken, slightly greasy, and tastes like very mild fish. Almost flavorless, which is far more pleasant than I was expecting. “Good,” I say, pleasing her.

  We spend the next half hour devouring the small portion of the snake that tried to make a meal of me. When our bellies are full, we lean back to enjoy what remains of the day.

  “Mapinguari won’t find us here?” I ask.

  She shrugs. “Eventually. But not today. Not tomorrow.”

  “It can’t swim?”

  Another shrug. “It avoids water. That is all I know. The nearest crossing is several days travel.”

  “You don’t seem afraid anymore,” I note.

  “I have you,” she says, reaching her hand out. I take it without thought, squeezing my fingers around hers.

  The motion makes me wince.

  “You’re in pain?” she says.

  “Nothing some drugs couldn’t take care of,” I complain.

  “What is drugs?”

  “They’re…” My eyes rise on my forehead. “Where is my satchel?”

  Ashan reaches behind her, pulling out the satchel. I empty its contents, laying them near the fire to dry. I pause when I remove the bagged cellphone. The insides are still dry, but the device and the images it holds have little effect on me. I know what I’m after. The saturated notebook full o
f writing I can’t read, and a single page scrawled with my desperate prayer comes next. I open the book, tear out a blank page, and hand it to Ashan. “Dry this by the fire.”

  As she holds the sheet up, letting the heat wick the moisture away, I pull out the plastic-wrapped brick of marijuana and inspect it. The contents are dry.

  I pry open the wrap, and scrape out a few ounces of dry buds.

  “And now?” Ashan asks, holding up the dried page.

  I take it from her, tear a rough rectangle and roll a joint so thick it looks like a slug. “Now,” I say with a grin, recalling the expression my college roommate used, “we’re going to get high as balls.”

  25

  “I told him, you can’t force monkeys to have sex.” Ashan takes a long drag and holds the smoke in her lungs like a pro. She might be new to marijuana, but this isn’t the first time she’s smoked something. She lets it out slow, through smiling teeth. “But then he keeps cramming them together like things will just slip into place.” She acts out the scene with her hands, holding invisible monkeys, letting loose with a deep belly laugh.

  “The best part is that they were both males.” Her laugh rises a few octaves and the creatures above us react with hoots of their own—a jungle laugh track.

  Ashan is a lot of things: fierce, strong, mysterious. She’s compelling, like a good novel. And she’s not hard on the eyes. But chatty? I wouldn’t have guessed it. But all it took to get her talking was three puffs of king joint, which we’ve whittled down to a roach the size of a cigar’s width.

  She’s been telling me stories of her youth. Growing up among the Dalandala doesn’t sound like it was easy from a modern world perspective, but she speaks fondly of even the most challenging events, and every member of her large, now-deceased family. Her younger brother is the central character in most of her stories. He was half her age, full of mischief and grand schemes.

  The pot hits my tired body a bit differently than it does Ashan, easing my pain and loosening my mind. I’m slack on the ground, back propped up on a fallen tree, arms spread wide, head tilted back. The leaves above me look like spilled puzzle pieces, revealing gaps of blue table cloth. I reach for the pieces, hoping to rearrange them. But they’re out of reach. Even if I could reach them, they look too similar. I could never finish the puzzle.

  “I didn’t know how to tell him,” Ashan says. “He wanted to raise monkeys. Wanted to train them from birth. Everyone knows that to train a monkey, you need to capture it young. Pluck it from its dead mother’s arms. If you’re lucky enough to have given birth recently, you can suckle it yourself. That works best. Makes the bond permanent.”

  “Did you have one?” I ask. “A monkey?”

  “Kaxuyana.”

  “Kaxuy-what-what?”

  Something about her giggle fills me with affection. I adore this woman. Lacking any sense of shame, my eyes follow a lazy path around her body. The mud covering has been gone since our dip in the river, and as usual, she does little to cover herself.

  How do the men here handle the constant nudity? How do the teenaged boys? A bumpy car ride was enough to set me off, never mind a tribe full of naked women.

  “Kaxuyana,” Ashan says again. “My monkey.”

  “How long did you have it?”

  “Have her,” she says. “I still do.”

  Has there been a monkey with us this whole time that I didn’t see? Ho-lee shit! With wide eyes, I search the area looking for signs of a monkey. “Kaaaxu,” I call with a sing-song voice that sets Ashan laughing even harder.

  “She isn’t with us,” Ashan says. “I lost her when…” Her smile falters. “She was fast. Smart. She would have fled to the trees. She’ll find me again. In time.”

  “What about your brother?” I ask. “What’s his name?”

  “Yabuti.”

  A snort of a laugh scratches from my nose.

  Ashan’s brow furrows. I love how it looks. That serious gaze.

  “Your laugh mocks his name?”

  I shake my head, sucking in another drag and laughing the smoke back out. I pass the roach to Ashan, who accepts it and fills her lungs. “In my language, it sounds like ‘Ya booty.’ Booty is slang.” I roll over and slap my ass cheek. “For ass.”

  Ashan coughs a series of staggering laughs. “Yabuti’s name translates to ‘your ass’ in your language?” She’s barely holding it together, struggling through the words.

  When I nod, she unleashes a series of hiccup laughs that dwindle down to, “Ohh, ohh. He would have liked that.”

  “What kid wouldn’t?”

  “I would have hated it. I was…embarrassed. A lot. All the time.”

  Picturing Ashan as anything other than bold and confident is impossible.

  “I was…” she pats her slender belly. “Fat.” She puffs her cheeks out. “Lazy, too.” A shrug. “I liked to eat. Didn’t like to work.”

  I pluck the dwindling joint from Ashan’s fingers and take a drag. “What changed? What made you into…this?” I motion to her body with both hands, making an hour glass shape. It’s not a precise depiction of her body. Her hips aren’t particularly wide, nor her breasts all that voluptuous, but she understands the motion, and the implication behind it—that I find her attractive.

  “I met a jaguar,” she says. “Who also liked to eat.”

  “What happened?” I ask, passing the meager joint back.

  She turns around, showing me four two-inch-long scars. I’d noticed them before, but never asked where they’d come from. “The jaguar pinned me to the ground. It was casual. Slow. I couldn’t fight. Couldn’t move. An easy meal. I felt its breath on my neck. It was warm. Smelled like rotten monkey. All it had to do was bite.”

  “What happened?” I ask again, sitting up straighter.

  “My father saved me.” The remains of her smile fades away. Tears roll down her cheeks. The marijuana is opening her up, letting buried emotions surface. The roach flares orange as she sucks in all that remains. She doesn’t flinch when the hot ash slips through her fingers. She just pinches it between her fingers, crumbling it up. She watches her exhaled smoke rise into the jungle.

  “I have more.” I pat the plastic-wrapped brick. “A lot more.”

  She wipes the tears from her eyes and stands. “Not strong enough.” She retrieves her blowgun and steps away.

  I struggle to stand, pain blossoming through the marijuana.

  She puts a hand on my shoulder, holding me down. “You stay. I won’t be long.” Then she kisses my forehead, and slips away into the jungle without a sound.

  After a few minutes alone with the unsolvable puzzle foliage, I decide that rolling and smoking another joint is a good idea. I set myself to the task with the gusto of a hungry pizza chef.

  “Damn, I want a pizza.”

  The joint is smaller than the first, and sloppy. It’s closer to a tilde than a straight line.

  “Looks like you’re all bent out of shape,” I tell it, chuckling. “Looks like you could use a toke.”

  A few flicks of the lighter and I’m puffing on a fresh fatty, while saying, “Fatty,” over and over. It’s a funny word when you say it over and over. “Fatty. Fffffatty. Ffffatatay. Fatata. Fajita.”

  Damnit. I’ve got the munchies, which is also a funny word. “Mmmmunchieees.”

  I take a fresh drag and am hit doubly hard by it, maybe because I’m a little more relaxed without Ashan and her nakedness here, or maybe because all that pot I already smoked is still working its way through my veins.

  I smile at the image of little THC characters—they look like the letters—floating in a small boat, like the opening sequence of the old Land of the Lost TV series, except the river is blood flowing through my veins. A dinosaur rises from the red river. “Aww, shit!” I laugh long and hard.

  Inspired by the T, H, and C now running for their lives through the arteries of my drug-fueled imagination, I belt out, “Run to the hills,” doing a damn fine rendition of Iron Maiden’s lead
singer, Bruce Dickinson.

  Air guitar follows, the chords hummed through my puckered lips, flinging notes and spittle into the air.

  The music in my head and from my lips pauses while I hit the joint. Then I start at the beginning, singing all the stanzas, telling the story of white men crossing the sea, killing tribes, and pillaging the land. By the end, I’m no longer singing though.

  The full weight of the song’s meaning descends on me for the first time. I was something of a metalhead when I was a teenager. Had long hair for two years. Liked to thrash it around. Pretend I was awesome. Then I moved on. During that time, I never really thought about what any of the songs were about. I just liked that they made my parents angry.

  Run to the Hills is about the invasion of white men from Europe, attacking the Cree Indians, taking their land, killing the men, raping the women. White men have murdered and stolen from Indians since their first encounters.

  “Oh man,” I say, slouching. “Oh damn. Is that what I’m doing?”

  I’ve stolen.

  I’ve killed.

  I’ve…well, I haven’t raped anyone, but maybe I’m stealing Ashan away from some young native.

  I shake my head. They would kill her. They would have raped her.

  But I’m still a white man changing the world around him, fucking with the status quo that has remained unaffected by the outside world for untold generations. What gives me the right?

  “Hey,” Ashan says, startling me. When I flinch out of my deep thoughts, she laughs at me. She says nothing else, but goes to work on some fresh-picked herbs, plucking the leaves away. I watch her through a stupor, Iron Maiden still running through my head and to the hills. There’s a flash of orange in her hands, some furious rubbing, and then rolling between her fingers.

  I take a long drag and let it out slowly, entranced by her work, and by her body, the way her back muscles dance when she’s just moving her arms. Then she stops, turns to face me, and holds out a green nugget of rolled plant-stuff.

  “What is it?” I ask, though I really don’t care.

  “Eat it,” she says, plucking the joint from my fingers and putting it to her lips. “It’s better than this.”