By the time we reached the entrance to my place, the afternoon light was fading fast. As we approached two towering bald cypress trees that some believed where at least four hundred years old, I directed Luz to steer in between them. Through this entrance, we slipped onto a short channel of still water that led us through some giant ferns and leather-wood shrubs until the water opened up to reveal my shack.
Built in the early 1900s, the structure is a small, eighteen-foot cube with a spiked roof that sits up in the air on four sturdy pilings. The water surrounds but never touches the “house.” We maneuvered up to the small dock and once I had a strong hand on the deck, Luz expertly balanced herself on one foot on the centerline of the hull, rose, and stepped out. I lashed the boat to the dock. Then without a word of instruction, Luz began accepting the supplies as I handed them up out of the boat.
When we were set, I looked carefully at the weatherworn steps of my staircase. Out here in the swamplike humidity, anyone using the steps would leave a visible footprint behind, like a sunrise golfer on a dewy morning. Yes, the rain might wash away the markings, but I still used the early warning system as a way to tell if I’d had visitors. Today it looked clean, so I picked up some of the bags and headed up. At the top, while I keyed the padlock on the front door, I pointed out the oak barrel and nozzle that I used for a shower.
“A rain barrel shower is something you’ll never forget if you’re a city kid,” I said to Luz, who had gathered her own bag and followed me up.
“I remember,” she said, looking up at the contraption, which was little more than a short length of hose leading from a gasketed hole in the bottom of the barrel. Only one of the four roof gutters fed water into the open top, but it was always enough.
It’s a crude device, and rare. But when I looked at Luz Carmen to explain her comment about recollecting such a thing, she turned without offering more. I didn’t probe. I reminded myself that I knew very little of this woman and her life, both past and present. If she was going to open up, she’d do it on her time.
When I pushed the door open and stepped into my shack, I was met by the odor of must and mildew, inescapable in this environment. I dropped the bags and immediately went to the windows, opening the sashes one at a time for air flow and pushing open the Bahama shutters to let in the remaining light outside. Then I lit the kerosene lantern and placed it in the middle of the big, door-size table that dominated the middle of the room. The light spread a coppery glow throughout the place.
Luz was still standing just inside the door, her bag in her hand.
I nodded toward the bunk beds against the opposite wall.
“If you don’t mind, I like the lower one,” I said. When Sherry had come out, we put both mattresses together on the floor and dealt with the gap in the middle. That was obviously not in the plan this time.
Saying nothing, Luz deftly swung her bag in an arc up onto the top bunk. Again, I was surprised by her athleticism. Then she did a sweep of the place: the two mismatched pine armoires where my clothing and books were stored; the row of cupboards; the butcher block countertop; a pre-electric ice box at one end, and slop sink at the other; and the walled-off corner where the chemical toilet would be kept. I didn’t have to explain that it wasn’t much.
“It was originally built by a visiting industrialist from the northeast who used it for hunting and fishing trips,” I said, feeling a need to say something in the cabin’s defense. “Then in the 1950s, it was used by scientists who were studying the Everglades, mapping the moving water and doing marine population surveys.”
Luz nodded her head as if it made perfect sense.
“Billy either bought it or accepted it in payment from some client. I rent it from him.”
Again, she barely acknowledged me. I was starting to feel like a babbling idiot. I went back out and brought up the rest of the supplies.
When everything was put away, I rekindled the fire in the potbellied stove, scooped out coffee from a three-pound can into my old metal pot, and waited for the boil. Luz had taken a seat in one of two straight-backed chairs that flanked the table and was seemingly watching the flame of the kerosene lantern that I’d set in front of her. The shadows played on her face, creating an even deeper sense of sadness, if that were possible after losing a brother and blaming yourself for his death.
I sat down on the opposite side of the table and determined that I would not say “so how are you holding up” or some other inane comment.
Outside the night buzz had begun, with myriad insects, lizards, and bats doing the whole nocturnal dance of “eat and be eaten.” When I first moved out here from Philadelphia, I thought the sounds would drive me crazy. My urban ear was in tune, or able to tune out, the constant sound of cars and horns, yelps and sirens, late-night television through an open window and predawn garbage trucks in nearby alleys. I thought I could sleep through anything. But the sound of nature in its nighttime chaos was so unsettling it took me months to rejigger my brain.
“You get used to it,” I said, making a passing comment on what I was listening to without thought of what Luz was tragically carrying in her own head. She cut her eyes up into mine. And if she’d said “fuck you” to my face, she would have been justified. “The night sounds, I mean,” I said quickly, trying to cover.
Her face relaxed, but only a bit.
“I have heard it before, when I was a girl. We would visit with my aunt in Rurrenabaque, where the jungles are thick and the animal life is abundant.”
“In Bolivia?”
“Yes. My parents lived just outside La Paz. But my mother’s people came from the area to the north on the Rio Beni, which is very junglelike.”
“And that’s where you learned to use a canoe paddle?” I said, grateful that she was even speaking.
“Yes, in dugouts. My many cousins taught me. It was the way they traveled to most places. And they fished at night, spearing the ranas , uh, frogs.”
“Ahh, frogs’ legs,” I said with an honest appreciation of the delicacy I had out in the Glades with my old friend Nate Brown after a night of spotting them with bright lights, and then spearing them with barbed spears. Maybe Luz saw my own slight smile; a pleasant twitch played at the corner of her mouth, remembering.
“Yes. We would cook them over the open fire in the night with the sparks flying up into the stars.” She was staring into the flame now, seeing her past.
“And gator tail?” I said, trying to string some conversation together.
“No. No alligator,” she said. “I saw your alligator on the way in, a small one, up on the bank.”
She had a sharp eye. I had missed seeing any of the many gators that live along the river.
“We have caimans in Rurrenabaque-dark and nasty. We were always afraid of them as children. They were much too ugly and dangerous, or so we thought. But we have freshwater dolphins there. When they are young, they have very pink skin-very pretty, prettier than your gray ones.”
She was reaching for more pleasant memories, a good sign, I thought.
“Did you and your brother see them together? The pink dolphins, I mean?”
“A few times, when he was young; then our parents moved closer to the city and worked all the time. But the neighborhoods in La Paz are not that different from parts of Miami. I went to school and Andres went to the streets, to his friends and their street ways. It was after I came here and had a job that I brought him to live in America.”
To save him, I thought, but didn’t go there.