Don't Look Back (15 page)

Eve took a moment to catch her breath. Leaves trickled constantly from the canopy, pinwheeling down.
“What else is dangerous? Jaguars?”

“Only if you get between a mother and her young.”
He rose from his squat before her.
“Do you want to see something dangerous? Here
.” He indicated a green plant with spiky, dark green leaves covered in white dots.
“See the tiny stinging hairs? The leaves will stick to you, make a burning rash. Then your skin turns purple. Know what it is called?
Mala mujer.
”
A boyish smile. “Bad woman.”

It struck her now, removed from the group and the comfy ecolodge and the ATVs, how truly
wild
these mountains were. She pictured Will on his own, navigating through this landscape with all its hidden threats, tromping toward that ramshackle house in the canyon in which an even greater danger waited. An image sailed in—Will last night, leaning back, his hands around her waist, lifting her, guiding her, his grip firm but not too firm. As distant now as a remembered dream. She took a lonely beat to wish him every ounce of luck in finding Jay, then pushed him from her thoughts.

Her focus now had to be on getting from A to B and then home to her son. Anything else was a distraction.

Fortunato had been studying her.
“These mountains, they contain more than danger. They provide for everything.
”

His earnestness was refreshing, and she felt a pull to match it. As unsettling as the ordeal was, it had peeled back the layers, one after another, to the heart of matters.

“The forest is a sponge. Look.”
He snapped a frond off the trumpet tree, tilted it to her lips for a few fresh, crisp sips of gathered dew. As opposed to the humble peon role he played at the lodge, he was sure-handed here in his element, a young man rather than a teenager.
“And here.”
He twisted a
piña
from an agave plant and snapped off its spiky top hat. Inside, orange worms squirmed.

Eve took a moment to find the word.
“Protein,”
she said.

“Yes
.
Though they taste better roasted.”
He set down the husk.
“As indios, we know how to live off the entire jungle. To … cultivate? Yes, cultivate it from the roots up. The Spaniards, when they arrived, saw only forest, and they cut it down to try to plant crops. They were dying of hunger in a garden.”

He leaned to the side, peering up through a gap in the leaves. The blood-colored sun had fought its way through a billowy sheet of gray. She stared in awe.

“We must go,”
Fortunato said.
“The ring around the sun? It shows there will soon be rain.”

They kept on, hiking until Eve’s sneakers rubbed her heels raw. They came to a plateau where a rickety wooden scaffolding had been erected around a mighty white cedar. Shielding her eyes against falling leaves, Eve looked up to where a bird-watching platform, clumped with moss, encircled the trunk just below the canopy. The view from there must have been spectacular. But moisture from the sodden ground had crept up the ladder, rotting the lower rungs. Just past the tree, the trail split, and Fortunato nodded to the east and said,
“Almost there.”

Soon enough the trail opened into a dirt path, which veered through a small garden patch where bean vines climbed around stalks of maize. They continued past a pen holding two pigs and a single gaunt cow, arriving finally at a tiny house slanted so severely it was unclear how the walls supported the roof. She hadn’t expected anything civilized, certainly, but she had expected more than this.

Eve looked around.
“
This
is Santo Domingo Tocolochutla?”

Fortunato shrugged.
“More or less.”

They stopped before the porch, chickens zigzagging around their ankles. On the top step, a young boy sat next to a younger girl who was as dark as a tribal African. Siblings? Between them a bottle of cooking oil.

Through a crooked window, Eve made out a stretch of the single big room that constituted the interior. Most of the items inside seemed to be floating: fruit hanging from wall pegs, hammocks dangling from posts, the rafters supporting sacks of grain, rice, sugar.

Fortunato and the boy engaged in a brief exchange that had the tenor of a failed negotiation, and then the boy ran inside.

“What’d he say?”
Eve asked.

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean?”

“He speaks only Zapoteco de la Sierra Sur. I have Valley Zapotec.”

“How many dialects are there on this mountain?”

“More than I can count
.
Maybe his father will have the Spanish.”

This was, Eve realized, the
real
Mexico.

The girl swept up the bottle of cooking oil, dabbed some around her ankles and on her neck, then offered the bottle to Fortunato.

Fortunato took the bottle with thanks, applied oil to his own shins, then passed it to Eve, who did the same, catching a whiff of eucalyptus, which must have been added to the liquid. She gleaned that this was a trick the locals used to ward off no-see-ums.

She set down the bottle before the girl and offered a smile. “Hi.”

The girl blinked at her a few times, then pointed to the forest, then to her eyes.
Watch.
She set her elbows on her knees and refocused her attention on the surrounding trees. A scorpion scuttled through the slats and along the edge of the porch toward the girl. She either didn’t notice or didn’t care.

“Watch out,” Eve said, dumbly, in English. She gestured, but the girl kept her eyes trained nervously on the forest.

Eve was about to spring forward when the screen door squeaked open and a broad man appeared on the porch. He noted the nearing scorpion, picked it up, pinched off its head, and threw its body to the chickens, who fought over the still-wriggling corpse.

Eve eased out a breath.

“We don’t worry about the big ones,”
the man said, in passable Spanish.
“Only the little scorpions. If they fall off the ceiling into your cooking pot, don’t bother calling for the Cruz Roja.”
He gave the forest a long, apprehensive glance.
“They are coming.”

“Who are?”
Eve asked.

Rather than answer, he crossed his fingers, kissed them, and touched them to the sacklike hummingbird nests nailed beside the door. Good-luck charms. The girl kept watching the forest, twisting her hands, waiting.

Fortunato cleared his throat.
“Can you tell me who is the
alcalde
?”

The boy ran outside with an empty glass, and the man grabbed his shoulder, checked the tree line, then released him. He gave what sounded like a warning to the boy, who jogged into the pen, filled his glass directly from the cow’s udder, then trotted back into the house. Only then did the man allow his eyes to flit to Fortunato. Still he did not acknowledge Eve, though whether because she was a woman or a
gringa
, she did not know. He pointed back the way they had come.
“Silverio Aachen Aragón.”

Fortunato’s shoulders descended with a sigh, a rare show of disappointment.

Eve imagined Jay, injured in the woods, stumbling from trunk to trunk. Or captive in that creepy little house. Or dead.

She didn’t want to admit it to herself. But there it was. She was risking her life, her son’s future, for a man she’d known only three days. Who could already be dead.

“How far away is Señor Aragón?”
she asked.

Before the man could answer, the girl stood up abruptly.

The man said,
“They are here.”

Eve turned to face the forest’s edge. Nothing.

A deer bounded into view, reared skittishly, then darted past the house. Beyond the vines unseen birds spooked. A horrible crackling sound reached a barely audible pitch.

And then grew louder.

Blades of grass rippled, weeds nodded, and then a black wave emerged from the forest, darkening the earth, sweeping toward the pen. It was a living band, three feet wide, fifty feet across. The cow made a snuffling noise and darted across its pen, stamping its feet, and the pigs leapt and curled like bucking broncos, managing to shake what looked like black dots from their hooves.

Eve swallowed dryly.
“Are those…?”

“Sweeper ants,”
Fortunato said.

The entire family had materialized on the porch, the boy gripping a kitten and his glass of milk, a weary mother cradling an infant and holding up the front hem of her dress, which bulged with items she’d trapped in the fabric. The front door stood ajar. Inside, every cupboard door was open. They descended the steps and readied for the approaching vanguard. The ants must have numbered in the millions.

“Are they gonna attack?”
Eve felt the rise and fall of her chest. Her words had come out breathy.

“No,”
Fortunato said.
“As long as you are careful. Bigger animals like us, we can shake them off. Unless you get trapped in a swarm. Then it is not good.”

Eve watched the approaching tide, her heart quickening. Such a methodical approach, the set lines of a marching army.

“The ants, they are actually very helpful,”
Fortunato said.

“
Help
ful?”

“They eat everything in their path. Which means they clean out every insect. Gnats, bedbugs, no-see-ums. They come at dusk this time of year. You leave them the house and let them work
.
There is no other choice.
”

Eve risked a quick glance over her shoulder at the hanging food and supplies, the hammocks. Nothing touching the ground. Beside her the kitten meowed in the boy’s arms. She whipped her head back around to face what was coming.

The chickens squawked and fluttered up as if kicked, landing out of harm’s way over by the pen. The ants swept closer still, spread out by a few body lengths except where they clumped, piranha-like, to pick apart wayward slugs in seconds. Even dusk couldn’t mute the maroon tinge of the shiny black exoskeletons. The living stripe neared the base of the house, and one by one the family members bounded across as if jumping a creek. Eve followed their lead, her heart lurching until she was on safe ground looking back.

They all stood on the far side, safe, watching.

The wave crawled the stairs, the fifty-foot band pulling through the open doorway like a blanket gathering through a napkin ring.

The boy took a swig of milk. The mother spread a bedsheet on the ground, unpacked from her dress bits and pieces of their meal, and the family continued eating dinner. Through the open door, Eve watched darkness scale the walls, a rising flood. The crackling sound floated out, the ants devouring their plunder.

Fortunato had to tap her arm to break her out of her trance. He gestured toward the dark road.
“Many kilometers yet to hike.”

Her legs ached. Her blisters throbbed. She pictured Jay’s face, his big laugh, and steeled herself to keep going.

They said their good-byes and left the family picnicking in what passed for their front yard. Even after the house faded from view, Eve could still hear the crackling, millions of mandibles at work in the darkness behind them.

Chapter 22

As they arrived back at the corroding bird-watch tower wrapping the white cedar tree, Eve caught a second wind, no doubt invigorated by the adrenaline boost of the sweeper-ant insurgence. This time Fortunato took the west side of the fork, and they labored on, gaining altitude. After a wordless spell, they walked straight through the remnants of a post-and-rail fence and into a cemetery.

The layout appeared to be entirely haphazard, concrete crypts jutting on top of ancient stone tombs, rusting metal crosses shoved at all angles into the earth, corn sprouting from the graves themselves. Ficuses cloaked many of the headstones, squeezing them in skeletal embrace, and Eve did a double take at the just-legible chiseled dates, some of which reached back over four hundred years. Strangely, many of the family names were German, probably inherited from the founders of the scattered ranches and farms the locals called
fincas.

Cariñitos
littered the plots, small tokens of affection that ranged from chocolates to fruit to long-extinguished candles protected by miniature card-house roofs constructed of bark. A rooster flared up like a specter, crowing and flapping violently, chasing them the length of three graves. When Fortunato turned to kick at it, it beat an angry retreat, eyeing them from a distance.

The brief sprint had been costly on Eve’s tender blisters. She winced, favoring her right foot.

“Let me.”
Fortunato crouched and wiggled off her shoe, then her damp sock. One of her heel blisters had burst, leaving a thumbnail of loose, shiny skin. He handed back her shoe and searched the darkening cemetery, mindful of the rooster standing guard. Finally he bent to pluck several green shoots that had taken hold on a boulder. Squeezing their sap onto his thumb, he applied the cool salve to her heel, leaving a thick layer.

Gingerly, she pulled her sock and sneaker back on and stood. The flesh of her heel tingled pleasantly. She bounced a few times, trying out the foot, then nodded.

A branch of spectacular lightning seized the sky overhead, turning night to day. Her mouth literally fell open. Fortunato reached across and gripped her forearm reassuringly. She gave him an uncertain look an instant before the thunder arrived, louder than any natural noise she’d encountered. The air vibrated with the roar; the earth trembled underfoot. The sensation like standing before a speaker at a rock concert.

She’d forgotten to breathe.

Fortunato released her arm.
“You know what we say about lightning?”

“That the gods are angry?”

“That the Argentineans think it’s God taking their picture.”