Don't Look Back (4 page)

He enfolded her arm. Like a chicken bone in his grasp. He could clench and it would turn to powder. Her scream lifted hidden birds from the boughs.

“You will learn respect,”
he told her.

The ground yielded beneath his palms. A bird-size butterfly danced jaggedly in a patch of nearby light. One of the dead fish came free from the string as it dragged back and forth in the dirt.

“‘Please will you teach me a lesson?’”
he said for her.

“… Please … teach me … lesson…”

“Good.”

After, he crouched and adjusted the sarong to cover her caked knees. He helped her to her feet. She drew a knuckle beneath each eye, leaving smears of dirt. Her elbows were bloody.

He rolled the twig from one side of his mouth to the other.
“Let this guide you.”

She bent robotically and began gathering her fallen clothes. Her shoulders trembled. She breathed wetly.

He put his back to her, threaded the loose fish onto the line with the others. The game trail made for easier going. He hastened his step.

With any luck he’d be home for evening prayers.

Chapter 5

The raft shot through two boulders, Neto screaming,
“Down! Down!”
from the bow. Eve tucked her paddle and slid off her perch on the side tube, dropping into the center with the others as stone scraped the tough vinyl and froth arced overhead. The raft undulated, then fell away, and they all caught a few seconds of suspended air before the self-bailing floor rushed up and caught them again. They pulled themselves back up to their spots, laughing and high-fiving with their paddles. The raft slipped between the foundations of the narrow bridge she remembered being driven across just this morning. How different to see it now from
this
perspective, not as a tenderfoot tourist peering through the window of a tour van but as a jungle adventurer drifting along, part of the river itself. They coasted sideways, easing into a stretch of wide, lazy water.

There was no mystery why this finger of river was called Sangre del Sol; with its winks of gold and copper, the gleaming stream seemed bled from the sun itself. Leaning on the stern, Eve looked across as Claire freed her foot from its wedge beneath one of the thwarts and adjusted her life jacket. Though she’d left her braces back in the Jeep, she seemed to manage without them.

Claire clicked the side of her dive watch, freezing a timer. “How ’bout you let us take a turn up front?” she called out.

“It takes
more muscle
to steer up here,” Neto said. “Gives us better control of the boat.”

“How do you know
we
don’t have more muscle?” Claire asked.

In the section in front of them, Gay Jay popped a biceps, and Will shook his head. “You’re
such
a fag.”

“Ya
think
?” Jay pulled off his Mariners cap, dipped it overboard, and clamped it back atop the blue bandanna fastened over his scalp. He swiped the oar through the water a few times, propelling them in lurches.

“We can steer,” Claire persisted. She glanced at Eve for solidarity. It
did
look more fun up there. “Don’t you want to ride closer to the bow?”

Eve felt all seven sets of eyes settle on her and focused more than necessary on wiping drops from her Ray-Bans. “I’m okay.”

“That’s not what I asked,” Claire said.

But the others had already moved on, rowing and chatting, and Eve felt a burn in her face, the shame of having failed some test she hadn’t signed up to take.
You’re a grown woman. You can’t ask for a damn seat you want
?

Claire held a contemptuous stare on Eve. “Why don’t you speak up?”

I’m trying.

“I do,” Eve said.

Her face still hot, she considered herself with frustration. When had her voice—her
real
voice—maddeningly faded? She remembered it when she was a girl, braying laughter and sitting side by side with her father at the listing upright Yamaha, his callused hands raspy over hers, guiding her to the right keys, making her fingers sing. And when she was a teenager, sticky with sweat on the soccer field, stretching or running bleachers with her teammates, chatty and uncensored, sharing wisps of gossip, half-formed theories on boys, lurid rock-song lyrics, her mouth barely pausing to catch a breath. Where had it gone? Into the void her father left when she came home from junior finals to find the mint green Tercel hatchback gone for good and her mother sitting on the porch in her bathrobe, smoking one of her hidden cigarettes in the flagrant open? Or had it gone underground later, after she’d tucked safely into her life with Rick? No, she’d still had it then, and then. Or at least
some
of it; she could still hear her own music, give it expression. It had never vanished, but the volume knob had been adjusted down ever so slightly, by indiscernible degrees, the invisible drift of twilight into darkness.

Will stood, wobbly in the raft, bringing Eve back to the present and the Great Seating Debate. “I’ll switch with you, Claire,” he said. “Who’ll give up their spot for Eve?”

An awkward silence. Finally Sue said, “I don’t care
where
I sit.”

“The only thing worse than a controlling person,” Claire said, just loud enough to be overheard, “is a controlling person pretending to be flexible.”

Harry gave a wobbly look to his wife and then rose in her place, relinquishing his seat instead, and Eve and Claire moved up toward the bow. Lulu rode in the very front with Neto, displaying skill controlling the raft. Her hair was taken up in a ponytail, revealing a
CARPE DIEM
tattoo across the base of her neck. Clearly she was more than the princess Eve had first pegged her for.

The shoreline scrolled by, buttress roots that would dwarf a human, elephant ear fronds nodding, white ceiba trees thrusting above the dense canopy, spreading fans of branches. A great blue heron
whoomped
overhead, its wingspan so vast it looked aeronautical. The sweet smell of organic rot crept beneath the fragranced air.

Eve raised a hand against the glare, and Jay said, “The Mexican sun’s gonna have its way with that milky-white skin, girlfriend.” He pulled off his baseball cap and flipped it to her. “Take this. I got my do-rag.”

She pulled on the hat. “My milky-white skin thanks you.”

They drifted around a bend, and a cluster of
indígenos
came into view. Women with plastic laundry baskets on their heads. Others bent to the river, cracking ear-shaped pods from the guanacaste tree and raking the pulpy flesh over wet clothes, releasing suds to the current. A sinewy older man wearing nothing but his
chones
stood thigh-deep, eyeing the water and readying a sharpened car antenna as a harpoon. He paused to offer a single-toothed smile. Sue gasped with delight and fumbled for her waterproof camera. She had shapeless arms, bones loose in wattles of flesh, and a horseshoe of perspiration darkened the back of her shirt. It took steel for a woman of her shape and age to ride the river, and yet she manned her paddle without complaint.

“These people here are Zapotecas,” Neto said, waving. “He is spearing
chacales
—freshwater … um, like the lobster?”

“Crayfish,” Lulu said.

They paddled over, and Neto negotiated with the man, trading pesos for a basket brimming with life.

As they pushed off, Will said, “I could get used to that. Living by the rhythm of the day. Wake up, spear some
chacales
, wash out my underwear in the process.”

The raft coasted around the next turn, and it was again as if they were the last seven people on earth. The river carried them on. Eve trailed her fingertips through the glassy surface, leaving tiny wakes. Five or fifteen feet below, black tadpoles sat on mossy brown rocks, tails oscillating in the invisible current.

“I wish I’d done more of that when I was younger,” Harry said.

“Spear
chacales
in my underwear?” Will said.

Harry waved him off. “You know what I mean. To not be busy being busy. I remember putting my tax files up in the attic this April, realizing that another year had whipped by.” Sue reached across, took his hand, and Eve felt a twinge at the sweet, instinctive gesture. Harry smiled dryly. “It just goes faster, you know.”

“Stupid march of time,” Jay said.

“It’s good to get out here,” Sue said. “Try to find … I don’t know,
focus.
”

The passing shore showed a dense rise of jaw-dropping lushness. Strangler figs wormed through tree trunks, weaving them together. Lilac-crowned parrots sparred, flitting among branches, purple heads pronounced against vibrant green feathers. The sunlight pulsed, redolent of orchids.

“I know what you mean,” Will said. “I took a trip to Prague last year, and I was going through the pictures on iPhoto. Turns into a chore, right? I realized I barely remember the trip itself ’cuz I was so busy recording it. It’s like we’re more interested in documenting our lives than
living
them. We run around archiving everything. For what?”

“How ’bout in theaters now?” Sue said. “The instant a movie ends, you see everyone lighting up their smartphones. Have to be reachable
every second.
”

“I tried to fast-forward a live TV show last week,” Eve confessed.

Will laughed. “I saw a commercial the other day, some guy invented a brush that sticks to the shower floor so you don’t have to bend over to wash your feet. Are we really
that
busy? That we can’t bend over to wash our own feet?”

“It’s important to remember what matters,” Harry said. “To do what you want to do and not waste any time about it. You’ll be sitting here at my age in the blink of an eye.”

“What I really want to do,” Jay said, “is
dance.
”

Will knocked him with the handle of a paddle, and Jay had to grab it to keep from going overboard. Everyone laughed except for Claire, who’d withdrawn into herself.

“It’s good advice,” Will said. “Taking stock like that. Think back to when you were a kid. What were you gonna do when you grew up?”

“Astronaut,” Jay said.

“Big-league pitcher,” Harry said.

Sue blushed. “Fashion designer.”

Eve said, “Surgeon.”

There was a moment of silence, and then Neto smiled over at them, dipped his paddle into the water, and swung them for shore. “I’m doing it,” he said.

They sloshed onto a beachy shoal where a hand-dug fire pit indented the scorched sand. Lulu unearthed a cooler from beneath frond cover at the base of a tree and removed pots and cooking utensils. Paper plates and cups came out of a nylon compression dry bag that had been wedged under one of the raft tubes.

“Our famous zip line.” Neto pointed to a taut cable stretching from bank to bank, disappearing into the tree line on either side. “Not for the faint of heart.”

As the others prepped the fire for lunch, Gay Jay ran off toward the line, and seconds later he exploded out of the foliage ten feet above the river, hanging from a hand trolley. He backflipped into the water and reared up, eight-pack flexed, arms spread in Rocky victory. He called them over, and Will and Claire came and gave it a go while the others skewered fish on branches and roasted them over the fire like hot dogs. Lulu put on a pot of river water and boiled the giant brown crayfish until they turned red. Eve noticed Neto kneeling in the moist sand at the river’s edge, watching for bubbles and digging up translucent shrimp. She helped, dropping squirming fistfuls into the pot. Sand chafed her fingers and knees, scales coated her hands, sweat matted her bangs beneath Jay’s cap—she was a comprehensive mess, and yet she couldn’t remember the last time she’d had this much fun. It struck her that for the past few hours she had thought about nothing except precisely what she was doing. She’d been—as the yoga types at her gym called it—
present.
And she felt a stab of gratitude that she’d pushed herself to come here to this hidden place.

They finished prepping and gathered to eat.

“Where should I go to the bathroom?” she asked Neto.

“If you’re a
guy
?” He gestured to the river, the bank, all around, and the men laughed. “For
women
there’s some privacy up there. And a camping toilet. Look for ticks under the lid. This is not your Four Seasons.”

A trail led from the shoal through a rise of orchids with white flowers the size of Frisbees. Eve stepped through into the jungle itself, which breathed around her. Philodendrons climbed toward the canopy. Bromeliads sprayed spikes. Giant tree ferns rose Jurassically. The trail twisted upslope. She ducked beneath a witchy dangle of hanging moss.

A fallen tree had left a hole in the canopy, the resultant halo of sunlight giving rise to a contained world of color. Petite purple daisies and morning glories described a near-perfect circle on the jungle floor in which, centered like a holy relic, sat a stained plastic toilet. She almost laughed at the beatific presentation.

As she moved into the light, a swarm of zebra butterflies stirred from the carpet of blossoms and whirled around her. Enchanted, she lifted her arms, half expecting them to perch as in a cartoon. They seemed to carry her across the clearing. She was captivated, lost to the beauty. She followed them or they her through the fall of warmth to the dark edge where the ground sloped precipitously away.

That was when she heard the thud.

Crunching footsteps.

Another thud.

Man-made sounds.

Tentatively, she drew to where the fallen trunk rimmed the lip before the sharp drop. Through a web of branches and leaves, she could see a dwelling at the base of the small canyon beyond. Truck tires formed a retaining wall, buttressing the humble house against the rise. Vines devoured the slab concrete roof and walls, hacked off over the windows, which seemed to peer out of the hill itself.

Something streaked into sight through the branches, and the thud echoed again through the canyon. A burly, bearded man followed patiently in the hurled object’s wake, his footsteps packing down dead leaves. Eve shifted along the log, straining to see what he was doing as he flickered behind tree trunks. The spot provided an excellent spying vantage down on him and the house. Tracking him, she picked out a rusted Jeep Wrangler languishing beneath a carport rigged up from interwoven fronds inside a copse of close-packed trees. Like the house, the vehicle blended into the jungle.