“Your father is lazy,” Mom said one day. She had just served Dad a gourd of fish stew without any salt in it. “His sister lives with the oil company, but he doesn’t even want to walk there.”
I didn’t understand.
“Your Aunt Nantoke can get anything she wants from the oil company. Salt, sugar, soap . . . your dad just needs to visit her.”
“Is that where the vrrrr comes from?” I asked. “Where Aunt Nantoke lives?”
“Yes.”
I had met a girl my age in church who had perfect white teeth. She came from Tiguino, on the oil road.
“Everyone in Tiguino has new teeth,” she said. “The company does it.”
Now I slipped my tongue between the gap in my front teeth. My mind raced. What if I asked Dad to take me to visit his sister? Would the company fix my teeth too, while I was there? But that was dangerous, because the company was just as likely to put Dad in a helicopter and fly him away. And these oil wells, could they attack us? It would be a perilous trip. But when Stephanie finally came back, she would see my white, shiny teeth.
The next evening, once I had put my baby sister, Ana, down to sleep, I knelt at the foot of Dad’s hammock and cut his toenails with a red pocket-knife that God’s tourists had left behind.
“Dad . . . will you take me to visit your sister where the oil well goes vrrrrrr?”
I was whispering because I didn’t want Mom to hear me. I knew she wouldn’t let me go. She had recently let Ñamé and Opi go back to our old village, Toñampare, so that they could go to school. I had asked to go too but the answer was no. Mom wanted me at home, taking care of the little ones and helping her in the garden.
“It’s too far for you,” Dad said.
“But Dad,” I was massaging his hard, calloused feet now with great tenderness, “I have never been anywhere outside the forest. I want to see what the company looks like!”
“You won’t like anything they eat there. Along the oil road, they only eat the food of the cowori.”
I said quickly: “I don’t care. And I can help you carry the salt and the sugar.”
Dad paused. He was thinking. Finally, he sighed.
“I haven’t seen my sister in a very long time.”
We set out on the river at dawn. Mom watched from the banks. You could tell just by looking at her that she thought I should not be going with Dad.
“Tiri,” she said, “don’t let Nemonte out of your sight. She is almost a young woman. The boys along the oil roads are like animals.”
Standing at the front of the canoe, holding a wooden pole that was twice my size, I didn’t know what she meant and I didn’t care. I was twelve years old and just excited to be going on an adventure with Dad.
We drifted down the river. I held my head high, scanning the water for sandbars and snags, looking to the banks for fresh animal tracks and to the trees for wild turkeys and toucans and howler monkeys.
Dad stood in the back, silently poling us downriver. We had barely brought anything with us, just a machete, a spear, a blowgun, a handful of chigra bags, and two empty baskets.
“Downriver, does the forest stop?” I asked. Neither of us had spoken all morning. The silence had been peaceful.
Dad looked surprised. “No! Downriver, the forest goes on forever. There’s no end.”
“Aren’t we going to walk out of the forest?”
“No,” he said, sitting on the edge of the canoe and resting his pole on his lap. “The company makes the oil wells inside our forest.”
“But . . . I thought we were going to Civilization.”
Dad gazed into the depths of the forest but said nothing.
Another question: “Is a road like a trail?”
“Roads are the trails of the white people. They don’t know how to walk well. They drive in cars and trucks.”
At night, we made a leaf-roof camp and a small fire and slept on the sand beneath the stars. The droning of the oil well was much louder than at home.
“Why does your sister live next to such a noise?” I asked.
Dad was silent for a while. The fire crackled in the wind, blowing sparks down the beach.
“Because her daughter married the son of Babë and Babë lives with the oil company.”
Dad yawned. There were frogs croaking in the swamp across the river. “Listen, they are telling us that it is going to rain tonight.” He blew on the fire and rolled onto his side.
In the morning, our clothes damp from the dawn rain, we set off towards the village of Tiguino. Soon the sun was high overhead and the wind swept through the forest and I was very thirsty. Suddenly, Dad stopped and knelt on the ground. A branch was bent across the trail. And a red toucan feather and a poison-tipped blow dart dangled from a liana.
“About one moon ago,” Dad said, “the uncontacted passed through here.”
I shivered.
“Why did they leave the feather and the blow dart?”
“It’s how they talk to us. They are saying: ‘This is our territory.’ The red feather means that they are angry.”
I looked around. “What if they are here now?”
“Then I will tell them that I am the son of Piyemo, grandson of the great warrior Nenkemo, and that even though we wear clothes, we are still their family.”
“What if they spear us?”
Dad spun the red toucan feather on the vine.
“The creek is still far away,” he said. “I will show you how to drink water like our ancestors.”
Dad walked off the trail, silently, and disappeared from sight. I touched the toucan feather, holding it to the sunlight. Then I moved off the trail and stood against a tree. In case they were watching me. Until now, the Tagëiri and Taromenane people had been, for me, ghosts in a story, like dead ancestors who only surfaced by the fire at night. I had never seen signs of them in the woods. Now I took off my boot and stepped into one of their footprints. The big toe jutted out sideways.
Dad reappeared with a cluster of small, brownish-white coconuts. The coconut water tasted sweet and musky.
Dad said: “Let’s keep going, because it’s still a long way.”
Just before dusk, we crossed a muddy creek and stood at the edge of the forest looking at a wide, hard, open trail. I knew this must be a road. My legs and feet were aching. From somewhere nearby came a rhythmic clanking sound and a menacing purr.
“Is this Civilization?”
Dad said sharply: “Stand back!”
I jumped into the dense, itchy thicket of forest that lined the road and stood still as a deer. A monstrous, hulking metal object roared past us, crunching rocks and spitting dust in its wake. I felt frightened. It was moving in the direction of a bright orange flame, like a gigantic candle, which flickered in the distance.
“Truck,” Dad said.
I watched it disappear around a bend. The air was dry and dusty and smelled like the generator that used to rumble in the evenings outside the Saints’ house.
“Tiri! Tiri the Puma!”
A man was shouting from across the road, as if he had emerged from the dust storm. His face was long, his nose like a tapir’s, his teeth bright white. He wore boots, clothes, and a hat that were the color of the forest at night, dark-green and black shadows.
“Babë” Dad said, smiling. “I have come with my daughter to visit my sister. We ran out of salt.”
The man called Babë held a shotgun and a machete over his shoulder and he looked at me with a piercing, humorous grin that made me feel naked.
“Oh, I love those jungle eyes!” He was talking to Dad but still looking at me. “Your daughter is fresh out of the forest!”
My dad nodded meekly.
“I heard the missionaries have abandoned you all!” He was laughing. He was making the sound of a plane with his big lips: Brrrrr.
Dad didn’t say anything. He just looked at the ground.
“Don’t you worry, Puma!” Babë guffawed. “The oil company has more money than Wengongi. I can get you more salt than you could ever want!”
I wanted to disappear back into the forest. What was this place? A white truck, smaller than before but just as noisy, roared up the road towards us.
“Watch this,” Babë said, lifting up his hand aggressively at the truck. It stopped and Babë leaned into the window, confidently, punching the man playfully in the shoulder. The man wore dark glasses across his eyes. I did not understand what Babë said, although I knew he was speaking in Spanish.
The driver handed Babë a bag of bread and then roared off down the road, creating a mountain of dust.
“You see!” Babë said, slapping my dad on the back. “When has Wengongi ever given you bread, just like that? Keuuuuuuu!”
“Dad . . . was that man from the Land of Rachel?” I asked.
“No,” Dad said. “Ecuatoriano.”
“What’s that?” My eyes and throat were tingling. Babë was laughing at me, shaking his head in amusement.
“Puma, you and your daughter will stay with me tonight,” he said forcefully.
I tugged at Dad’s shirt, shaking my head. I wanted to see my aunt. I didn’t want to go to Babë’s house.
“Do you speak any Spanish?” Babë asked me in Wao Tededo as we walked along a damp trail off the road. His accent was the strangest I had ever heard. He spoke fast, each word full of his own tongue and spit.
I shook my head, silently.
“Oh, I see,” he said to Dad. “No school for this one! A chicha-maker! A child-raiser. A true Waorani jungle girl! Perfect for my grandson! Keuuuuuu!”
I felt a whip of fever run up my neck. What was he talking about? And why was Dad so quiet?
Babë’s house was made of something hard and gray, like rock. It wasn’t made of wood from the forest. He had tables and chairs and a television and also many things that I had never seen before, which were littered across the floor, hanging from wires, piled in corners. I sat against the wall with my boots on. His daughter was on the couch, looking into a mirror, painting black lines above her eyes. Her teeth were perfectly straight and shiny white. Are they real teeth? I wondered. Or did the company give them to her?
Babë’s grandson walked through the back door with a macaw perched on his forearm and stared at me. He looked hungry. A capuchin monkey was tied up in the corner of the house, flailing and squeaking unhappily.
“Woman,” Babë said to his wife, “they have come from inside the jungle; they do not want the same old jungle food. Serve them some cocoa with leche.” His wife reached into a black bin, overflowing with plastic bags and cockroaches.
The girl on the couch signaled to me. Her eyebrows were high on her forehead, which made her look like a curassow bird.
“My brother says that girls with big spaces between their teeth like to have sex a lot,” she said, giggling.
I froze inside.
The mother handed me a metallic gourd of a muddy brown liquid. Outside, the oil wells rumbled. A truck roared down the road. I walked into the yard and poured the chocolate milk onto the ground. The dogs lapped it up at my feet.
In the morning, Babë showed my father the glinting, curved blade of a knife that the oil company had given him.
“Tell Manuela to make me a chambira hammock,” Babë said, “and I will have the company give you a knife just like this.”
Dad nodded.
“My grandson is a good shot with a rifle,” Babë continued, winking at me and patting Dad on the back as we ducked under clotheslines and stepped over rusted pots in the yard. “Soon, the company will teach him how to drive a truck and he will be roaring up and down these roads like the cowori!”
I walked fast in front of my father down the trail away from the house. I could feel the grandson’s eyes on me. He was sitting on a yellow hard hat in the middle of the yard, sharpening a machete, surrounded by chickens, ducks, and dogs.
“Remember,” Babë shouted, “no need to live out in the middle of the jungle anymore, Tiri!”
“Uuuu,” said Dad quietly.
“A two-day walk to get salt and sugar!” Babë hooted, his voice muffled now by the leaves and shadows of the trail that led back to the oil road. “I am the boss of the company. Bring your family here to live and I will have them make you a cement house, like mine!”
The sun was low and blistering in the sky. Dad and I walked, in silence, along the side of the dirt road, towards the rumbling and the clanking. It was very loud now.
“Where does Aunt Nantoke live?” I asked. Babë had given us two bags of salt in exchange for a woven-palm chigra. Maybe we could go home now?
Dad said: “She lives past the platform.”
In the distance, a group of men wearing white boots, blue clothes, and yellow hats were crouched over, swiping machetes back and forth along the side of the road.
“What is that?”
“Oleoducto. A pipeline.”
As we got closer, I could hear the whining and humming of the brownish-orange tubes. Were they alive? We were close now to the flame I had seen in the distance. It roared. It was a giant. A tower of black smoke. Vultures circled above. A metal fence cast strange shadows across the road.
“What is it?” I asked, frightened.
“That’s the oil well.”
I had expected it to be a hole in the ground, but it wasn’t. It had a long neck and a bird’s head. Craning up and down, up and down.
“What is it doing?”
“It’s sucking up oil from under the ground.”
“Why?”
A truck rounded the bend. Dad pulled me to the side of the road and covered my eyes with the tough skin of his palm. His eyes were creased against the dust. “The cowori give the oil to the cars and trucks to drink.”
“To drink? But what is it?”
Dad gazed into the distance. The sun glinted off the pipelines, the fence, and the oil well.
“Oil,” he said, “is the blood of our ancestors.”
Dad shifted his spear and blowgun from one shoulder to the other, then he stopped and looked at me. He spoke quietly.
“From the very beginning, all our ancestors, whether they were bitten by snakes or mauled by jaguars or speared by enemies or sickened by sorcery, when they died, their blood pooled in the center of the earth.”
I was mesmerized by the giant, long-necked machine, craning up and down, up and down. So that was what it was sucking up. Our people from long ago, from the beginning. It was sucking up our past.
Walking on, Dad now left the oil road for a narrow trail that passed beneath the pipeline. “My sister lives this way.”
The men with the machetes stopped to watch us.
“Are those Waorani men?” I had thought that they must be cowori, but now, just by the way they stood, the way they held their machetes, I could tell they were my people.
“Uuuu. They work for the company, clearing the weeds from beneath the pipeline.”
“Why?”
“Money.”
“Did you get money when you worked for the company?”
“Sometimes.”
I didn’t like the thought of my father hacking at weeds in the shadows of the pipeline. I veered off the trail into the rocks and weeds. I reached out the palm of my hand and made contact with the pipeline. It was burning hot.
“Don’t touch that!” Dad cried.
The pipeline whistled and hissed.
I clasped my hand. “It burned me! What is inside of there?”
“That’s the oil,” he said, his voice flat. He walked away down the trail towards my aunt’s house.
In a small clearing, just beyond the pipeline, Aunt Nantoke stood barefoot on the scraped red earth of her yard, as if she had been waiting for us. A baby woolly monkey sat on her shoulder, partially hidden by her long black hair. Her shirt hung to her knees and was stained and ripped by life in the forest. She had peach-palm-sized holes in her dangling earlobes. Her eyes were warm and tranquil, just like my father’s.
I felt relieved. She did not live in a cement house like Babë. In fact, her house was just like ours, a leaf-roof hut. A wood fire burned on the ground.
“I knew you were coming, brother,” she said to my father, glancing at a macaw perched on a lodge pole, displaying its bright-blue and yellow feathers. “The macaw told me you would visit.”
“We stayed with Babë last night,” Dad said, taking off his boots.
My aunt looked around cautiously, making sure that no one was listening.
“Babë is dangerous,” she muttered. “Money has made him unwell in the heart.”
Money was a wad of crinkled, moldy paper in the hanging basket of our old house. How could it make a man unwell in the heart or put a bullet in the head of Amo?
“Our relatives left a toucan feather and a blow dart on the trail,” Dad said to his sister, quietly. “I saw their footprints everywhere.”
“Yes, the uncontacted are certainly everywhere,” Nantoke agreed. “They are trapped between the oil roads. There will be problems soon. Our relatives are angry about the noise of the oil wells, the chainsaws.”
That night, I slept in a hammock by the fire. The clanging was loud and ceaseless. But there was another noise as well, a more distant one. A sort of clanking.
“Soldiers,” Nantoke whispered. “They fire their guns at night.”
“Why?” I asked into the darkness.
“The soldiers work for the company. They want to scare us.”
Dad started snoring and that meant still more noise. How could I sleep? I lay in the dark thinking of the uncontacted standing naked in the blackness of the forest, their ears alert to the cracking, popping, clanking, and humming that was everywhere.
“Wengongi,” I prayed, “I don’t know if you understand Wao Tededo yet, but will you protect the uncontacted so that no one kills them? Aunt Nantoke said that they are in danger.”
A truck rumbled down the road.
“Also,” I whispered, “tell Stephanie that I want her to come soon to take me to the Land of Rachel so that I can learn how to speak white-man talk. Maybe then you will answer me?”