SIX
– MAY –
Passport in hand, my nose to the floor-to-ceiling windows of the Cochabamba airport terminal, I stood watching planes take off for La Paz or Santa Cruz, where passengers could connect to US flights; any of them could have taken me back home, or at least out of South America. Mentally I tried it: I flew back to Boston—to no place to live; to no one waiting for me; to a gray, rainy spring day; to rivers of pavement through forests of looming buildings; to everything good I had sabotaged.
An enormous canvas bag weighing one shoulder down, Omar stood at the far end of the terminal in a massive cargo door entryway, his lean body framed by the blue-eyed sky beyond him. He head-tilted for me to join him. That’s all it took.
I followed him outside under a blazing sun to a distant corner of the tarmac, where we came to a rusted collection of metal scraps in the shape of a bush plane—the main cabin no bigger than the inside of a small car. It shuddered on the rutted tar, diesel sputtering, a farting, ancient beast. The propeller took its time to rotate, mulling flight with minimal enthusiasm. From the pilot’s window, a tan arm in a torn sleeve rested across the metal edge, cigarette dangling.
I can leave, I thought. I don’t have to do this. This is possibly a very bad idea.
Omar turned to me, read me, said, “It’s okay, Lily. You’ll be okay. I’ve done this many times before.”
All of me wanted to believe him, even as pangs of fear and doubt sprung up in my gut. But it didn’t matter; I was all in. Fear and doubt were old friends; ignoring them had served me pretty well so far, or at least that’s what I believed. Besides, just beyond the cool glass wall, the waiting room bustled with strangers from around the world, with people who didn’t give a shit about me, people busy heading to their own Omars, their own places they called home.
We walked together to the plane. After instructing me to sit next to the pilot, Omar disappeared in the back of the cramped four-seater. As he rearranged our small pile of belongings, I settled on the sun-bleached leather seat and strapped myself in, nodding at the little bush pilot: a ropey man in a T-shirt featuring a teenage Britney Spears in full pout, a Chicago Bears baseball cap worn backward, board shorts, and no shoes. He looked at me with no expression, then back out at the horizon. Behind me, I heard the sound of someone spitting.
I glanced in the narrow rearview mirror, spider veined with cracks. A hunched figure rooted around in a canvas sack. Panchito tucked his bag in the narrow aisle, turned, and planted himself in the small bucket seat next to Omar’s. He arranged his leg, sat up, grinned and said hola. His cheeks bulged as he chewed coca leaf, the occasional shred falling from his mouth, his teeth stained faintly green. He tilted a flask in my direction; I nodded yes and knocked back a few burning gulps of strong pisco before handing it back to him.
The 1950s-era amphibious Cessna whined like a lawn mower as we wobbled and jounced across the rutted tarmac; every rock and stone under the wheels jangled us. The stiff breeze that swept down from the mountains tipped the wings up and down. Even strapped in, we helplessly rolled in our seats as the plane gathered speed.
The moment we ran out of runway we lifted off, something heavy and metal slamming in the hold with a thunderous boom as we did so, the tail dropping sickeningly before we took on any real altitude, finally gaining a delicate equilibrium, some primitive compromise of wind and metal and basic aerodynamics.
I gripped my armrests, leaned forward, face close to the pocked windshield. It felt like my prayers alone kept us aloft. My terror reflected back at me in the pilot’s mirror shades; he smirked, his gold incisor flashing. Later I would learn that the banging noise had been improperly secured gasoline canisters in the cargo hold—the extra fuel the only way the plane could return from our destination to Cochabamba or anywhere else, for that matter. We had nine hours of fuel and a four-hour journey. Not a lot of play. The pilot slipped on his headphones and switched on or off a series of dials and knobs, ignoring all of us.
Below, the city’s bright puzzle of streets under a greenish yellow bowl of pollution swiftly fell away. Molly, Britta, the Versailles; all literally now in the rearview mirror. The plane struggled to rise above the first snow-crested mountain ridge. I craned my neck skyward, as if to achieve altitude with my will. We chugged over the first craggy peak—ponds beneath us glittered like dropped jewels—then the crests stretched out endlessly before us, valleys dropping into unspeakable shadow.
A meaty thump behind me. Panchito had crumpled to the floor of the plane. Rumbling around on the ripped canvas in search of comfort, he pillowed his arms under his head, false leg resting at an odd angle, the gears and straps loosened. In seconds he was snoring.
“Is he okay?” I called back.
“He’s fine,” Omar said, chewing on a toothpick as he watched the mountains parade beneath us.
A flush of something like shame washed over me, I wasn’t sure why. How little I knew this man, really. “How did he lose his leg?”
Omar slipped the toothpick out the cracked open window; the wind snapped it away. He leaned toward me so I could hear him over the engine. “He was young. Twelve, maybe. He went off to hunt by himself. Stupid plan. You never go into the jungle by yourself. Never, okay? You’re with me or someone who knows what they’re doing. Understand?” His voice rose a little as if I’d already made such a featherbrained mistake.
I nodded tightly, still clutching my armrests, shoulders tensed.
“Anyway, he was drunk, I’m pretty sure. Chicha. Like a corn beer. He had a fight with our father. My dad hated him. I don’t know why. It’s like he had to pick one of us, and he chose Panchito. He beat him, told him he’d never be a hunter, which is like saying he’d never be a man. So Panchito ran off to hunt. He was determined to come back with something. I know he had his heart set on a big anta, a male tapir. They can get to four, five hundred pounds. Feed the village for a couple weeks. One had been seen near the village, but no one had been able to track it down.” Omar shook his head. “I should have gone with him.”
“Why did Panchito come to tell us about what happened to Benicio? Why didn’t Franz do it?”
“Franz is a good man, but he has a lot of fears. One of them is flying.”
Beneath us, jagged brown peaks rose up, the canyons between gaping into eternity. There were no trees, no roads, just emptiness on a scale I had never before witnessed. Glacial lakes turned dull green, then black, then silver, depending on the angle of sunlight. The immensity of the world, for thousands of miles around, dwarfed us in our tiny, sputtering plane.
“So, he didn’t get the tapir. Instead a shushupe, a pit viper, bit him on the calf. Very, very poisonous. The silent carrier of death, it’s called. You take medicine or you die. You have one minute. He only had his machete, so he cut off his leg, chopped it off, see? Took off his belt and tied it around his thigh, tight, and crawled three kilometers back to the village.”
I gaped at the jagged scar. Suddenly my childish dustups felt absurd. Would I cut my own leg off if I had to? I prayed I wouldn’t have to find out.
“Maybe sleep a little, Lily. We have three hours, you know.”
A silly proposition considering the rattling plane, diesel reek, and Omar’s story, but also hard to keep talking over the roar of the engine, so I put my head back and closed my eyes and, maybe because he suggested it, fell asleep.
I woke to the pilot and Omar shouting. We had begun to drop down between mountainsides that felt too massive to be real. Static lightning danced across a bruised sky. Panchito gripped my seat as he maneuvered himself back into his; cursing, he scrambled with one hand to strap his leg back on. Turbulence lifted and smacked us down; our heads smacked on the ceiling as the wings jerked and shuddered. I vowed to be full of joy the next time gravity glued me to the earth; I pinched my eyes shut, picturing my dull routine cleaning toilets and making beds, in an attempt to calm myself with banality. We dropped. My eyes banged open. Some prevailing wind had changed its mind and abandoned us; only to buffet us up again as we soared over the final ridge.
Another sudden plunge—I might have screamed. When we evened out, I opened my eyes as bile rose in my throat.
Below, the valleys slowly shaded green and the drab, barren, brown landscape of the mountains fell away behind us as we steadily lost altitude. Glacial rivers tumbled over rocky escarpments, their waters spiraled by ghostly mist. Sunlight flashed on a hidden stream or pond.
Seconds later, a total whiteout as we flew through low, thick clouds. Omar barked a command to the pilot. We rattled on, flying blind. The cloud smelled like sulfur, spitting on our skin through the broken window; the pilot, bouncing, jabbered on in Portuguese to Omar as he twisted the knobs and smacked at the dash.
In seconds, we broke through the dense wad of cloud. An ocean of green stretched from horizon to horizon beneath us; only the subtle smile of the earth holding it in. Banks of fog drifted among the treetops, evaporating and re-forming according to some unknown purpose or design. Brown, serpentine rivers coiled below, reflecting the light in gold or blue or green, depending on the slant of sun or whim of shadow.
We hurtled at a hundred miles an hour over broccoli treetops, the clouds now skimming the top of the plane. My teeth rattled in my head. The pilot shouted, spitting with panic as he gestured at a stretch of river coiling below, then mopped a sheen of sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand.
“What’d he say?”
“He wants to go back!” Omar shouted.
“In one minute, I turn around!” the pilot blurted in Spanish.
Omar gripped his shoulder. “Keep going, we have plenty of gas. Get to the airstrip!”
But the forest was an immense mask, hiding everything that lay beneath. The pilot wordlessly dipped toward an opening in the green where the river was widest.
“There!” Omar barked.
The pilot swooped down deeper into the trench of the river, struggling mightily to keep the wingtips between the branches as they flashed by on both sides. We were so close I could see individual leaves, purple and red bromeliads blooming from the crowns of the trees. We banked as the river turned, the pilot paling at every tight curve. White birds burst from the banks like giant flowers. Beneath us, a small semicircle of cleared land edged the river, just a few dozen huts, a longhouse, everything on stilts.
“Panchito!” Omar leaned forward gripping my seat, his breath heating my bare shoulder. “Where’s the airstrip?”
“Grown over!” Panchito yelled into the noise of the engine. “We have to use the river.”
“No, we’re fucking not,” the pilot said, tendons on his neck standing out in gristly cords as he hauled back on the choke, tearing a stretch of canvas on the floor of the plane. The nose yanked up and we slammed back against our seats; again, the cargo shifted. Pistons ground together, screeching; the air filled with smoke.
Omar looked at me big-eyed, grabbed my arm. “Change places with me!” Not waiting for a response, he yanked me toward him. I rolled onto the floor and looked up at Panchito, his face pale and clammy, fear in his eyes mirroring mine.
“Pull up the wheels!” Omar commanded the pilot, who sat motionless at the controls as we sped farther and farther from the village.
“We go back to Cochabamba!” the little man shouted.
“Pull up the fucking wheels!” Omar held a knife to his throat, nicking him. Fat drops of blood bloomed, painting a red line alongside his bobbing Adam’s apple. “Do it!”
As the pilot struggled to keep us airborne and his throat from the blade, Omar reached past him and turned a metal crank that moaned even louder than the engine. The teeth of the gear caught, grinding and clanking deep in the guts of the machine. “Now turn around and go back to Ayachero, you weak piece of shit.”
We pulled up and zoomed just under the boiling belly of clouds, banking and turning so hard I slammed into Panchito’s gut, pressing against him before the plane swung around again, releasing us from each other. We dipped, leaning again into the slipstream, but for an entire minute, the clearing seemed lost, eaten by the jungle. Just as I dragged myself back into my seat, the village came into view again, announced by a break in the crenellation of treetops. People spilled out of their huts and streamed out onto the bank, waving at us.
“Now!” Omar grunted, the knife still a breath away from the pilot’s throat.
Grim faced, never meeting Omar’s furious stare, he began our descent toward the river.