“Is it true you have a bullet in your thigh?” Beth blurted, somewhat fanatically.
Miguel nodded. “My partner was not so lucky,” he said.
From across the aisle, Beth heard what sounded like a deliberate sniff from Paul. Perhaps it was warranted. But she was mesmerized by Miguel’s offhand manner, his apparent obliviousness to his own glaring, gaudy contradictions.
She wondered where Miguel was now, envisioned him paddling valiantly, hopelessly through the unthinkable sludge his river had become. Or maybe not. Instead: in a hotel room in town, his head between the legs of one of the other “uninhibited” citizens of El Oriente. The women of Lago Agrio had been as colorful and intent as the jungle birds; their tight green leggings, pink stilettos, and bands of quivering exposed flesh spoke mostly of joy and heat.
Paul was speaking to her, saying something about the political situation in South America. “It was Occidental, Beth. You know, the one they’ve been protesting for years. Here, then, is irony. Finally, they get them to admit their free trade has been anything but. They manage to oust them from the land, to reclaim what is theirs. And then, this. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the Man simply asserting his dominance. Oops, spilled some oil in your fresh, piranha-infested, life-giving waters. Sorry about that, but you shouldn’t have asked us to leave so rudely. We were, after all, your guests. And were we not gracious? Did we not give your people training and jobs? Oh, we know. The rule of law. But what about the rule of the jungle?” Paul was clicking around the website as he spoke, searching madly for clues.
She still could not quite grasp what he had shown her. There were ramifications, she knew, delicate ecosystems, butterflies on one side of the world flapping their diaphanous blue wings, while on the other side lucky humans sampled sushi; everything explained by a near-invisible knotted string you could follow back to a few greedy men with polished scalps and eyes like hunks of coal dreaming of the ninth hole and profit charts that explained their own lives to them in triplicate.
And then panic pushed like a spring shoot through the loam of her thoughts. She remembered Miguel, as she had been remembering him suddenly and without apparent justification, since she returned to her house on Willard Avenue with her husband of thirteen years, in the west end of Toronto, here amidst some tall buildings, next to a river and a lake, where she lived and would maybe die. Since childhood she had pinned herself to this map. It reassured her to know the order of her own locale. She knew the earth did not belong to her but to her grandchildren, and perhaps not even to them. But what if there were no children, no grandchildren, and the generational link was lost? One day she would be old, bereft, still angry... The image of that other equatorial river she had also begun to call her own, lying like a dark, drugged serpent, flashed into her mind. She turned to Paul. “I’m going to the river.”
“I’ll follow,” he said, with a knowing, almost servile condescension.
She shrugged, thought for a moment about what she might need, then shrugged again. She took Colbeck Street over to Jane, held out her hand at the crosswalk, then marched across like a trusting fool. From there it was a short hike down to the entrance of the park, and down the short steep hill at Humberview Road, and the longer sloping hill of Old Mill Drive. She reached the parking lot running, had to stop and crouch to catch her breath. The day was overcast and humid; she could feel the threat of rain in her sinuses. The scattered copses of trees and fertile patches beneath the bridges had the look of hiding places for humans. It was the sort of day bad men chose to bury body parts.
Paul caught up with her. She turned for a moment to look into his familiar, fretful face. He was stuttering out facts like a telegraph machine: “You know, it’s Petro-Ecuador now. The Ecuadoreans managed to wrest back control, but only after a long and underhanded battle. It was the Americans first. Occidental. They were the ones who invaded what was essentially forbidden territory. And then they did sneaky things like sell part of their shares to EnCana, a Canadian company, Beth, who then sold to the Chinese. If you think we are blameless in all of this you are wrong. We Canadians drift in on the Americans’ wake. Oil or diamonds — it doesn’t matter, we’ll take their sloppy seconds with our shadowy lesser dollar.”
She scrambled her way down the concrete wall that had been built to counter flooding, found a log designed for sitting, and looked toward the stone bridge, the site of the Old Mill, its ruins pressed up against a new spa and condos. A fisherman was standing under the bridge, his hip waders making him large and mournful. He baited his hook, cast into the deeper waters downstream, and hooked a salmon while Beth watched. In the fall, the salmon would be running thick through these waters, leaping with every ounce of their life force to clear the man-made steps that had been installed to control the flow of the river. Their connection to their home, to their little patch of earth and rock and water, was that compelling, that terrifying and true.
The water was higher than it had been for weeks; there had been fierce, unseasonal rains while they were away, then in late July the sun had come out and the river had receded, but the most recent downpour had lifted it once again. Above them, a subway train went rumbling by. Out of the corner of her eye, Beth saw a small black airborne shape, a scrap of red. And there it was: familiar, dogged by its Ecuadorean shadow, its strange tropical double. Here — a red-winged blackbird darting out. And there — a toucan decimating a small hard fruit with its unlikely beak. Here — a pair of squirrels trapezing through the low branches of a maple. There — a monkey grooming his mate, bold and fastidious, perched on his very own Amazonian awning.
Paul tapped her shoulder. “Let’s not stay here, Beth.”
He didn’t appreciate the river the way Beth did. Six months ago, four boys had mugged him and two of his friends on a Saturday night as they strolled and took turns toking like teenagers. The boys held a long serrated knife to Paul’s throat; they fancied themselves gangsters. Later, close to dawn, the police found three of the four hiding in a gully. They were peppered with red ant bites, their pockets clanking with change.
“Beth, I’m taking you home. You’re in no condition to be traipsing around down here like some goddamned explorer of yore.” He grabbed her arm.
Beth shook free, but could not remain sitting. She got up and swatted at the seat of her pants, but nothing was clinging there. She had to cut back up to the main path before she could make it down to the beaten sandy trail next to the water again. Paul zigzagged behind her, panting and driven by loyalty. On the far shore, a night heron was picking through pebbles and bits of trash. The bird stepped carefully over a soda can. Beth stopped to trail her hand in the water. At the edges, the river was lukewarm, but in the center, in the depths, it would be cold. A man had drowned here, having jumped in after his dog. The dog survived.
That first night in the jungle, she and Paul had huddled close on their mattress, flicking the flashlight on and off like schoolchildren, peering out through the mosquito netting at the matte surface of the night and the six other gauzy, tented sleeping areas.
“They’re like bridal beds, aren’t they?” Beth said.
“Or ghost ships,” Paul replied, and Beth turned to him, surprised. They kissed then, softly shocked kisses that helped them both to sleep, despite the rustlings, the constant exchange of information and emotion under the canopy, despite the scurrying geckos and dazed spiders Miguel had warned them might come tumbling from the rafters. Despite their recent history and despite themselves, they kissed and slept like gentle dragons, until the clear commands of the camp cook woke them.